Every day in the conservative media, I read the phrase “coastal elites” — in some non-conservative media, too. It is lazy, reflexive Marx-talk. (Alas, popular, too.) It’s the kind of thing I used to hear from the Left, every day. Now I hear it mainly from the Right.
Is that because I listen to the Right, more than I do the other side (much more)? Possibly.
Needless to say, different regions have different characteristics, broadly speaking. Rural Utah is different from Marin County, California. But, in my experience, you find a variety of people pretty much wherever you look: good ones, bad ones; smart ones, dumb ones; mean ones, nice ones; conservative ones, liberal ones.
I hate to sound like Dr. Seuss, but this is indeed elementary.
Not long ago, I was at a large conservative gathering in the Midwest where speakers trumpeted “Midwestern values,” “heartland values,” “Real America values.” By the evidence, humility isn’t a Midwestern value because Midwesterners are always beating their chest and bragging about how virtuous they are.
I grew up in the Midwest. If I did a head count, I would probably find that most of the people I know, and have ever known, are Midwesterners. And there are some good, bedrock people among them (us). The salt of the earth. Also liars, adulterers, drunkards, criminals — you know, people.
Like anywhere else.
Someone said to me, “Hope you keep your Midwestern values!” I smiled and thought, “Screw that. My values are universal ones, nurtured in such places as Canaan” — not Vermont — “and Nazareth.”
The populist playbook has always said, “Small towns, good; big cities bad. Rural areas, very good; bankers very bad.” Etc. So you get boobish language like “our Great Patriot Farmers,” which sounds like Soviet propaganda.
Obviously, none of us can speak without generalizing. We need our broad categories, even lazy ones. Otherwise, we are hamstrung (or tongue-tied). But, in my experience, and maybe in yours, people are individuals. I never liked an insistence on collectivism. That’s one reason — a big reason — I embraced conservatism in the first place.
I love a story that Ward Connerly tells. As I remember, his granddaughter came to him in tears, confused about her identity (racial and ethnic). He said to her, “Honey, you are an individual, first and foremost.”
It was WFB, more than anybody else, who drummed out of me this coasts-versus-heartland stuff, this politics of grievance and resentment. Class warfare, in essence. But now this kind of politics is the everyday patois of the Right, I find.
By the way, I think of Bill’s limo. When he published his memoir Overdrive — one of his two memoirs dealing with a week in his life — his critics focused on one thing, above all: the limo. Later, Bill wrote about this, searchingly and entertainingly.
You know how Norman Podhoretz started his review? “The first thing to say about Overdrive is that it is a dazzling book. The second thing to say is that it has generally been greeted with extreme hostility.”
Yup — right on both counts.
A question (mischievous): Do the residents of Wilmington, N.C., qualify as “coastal elites”? What about financiers in Chicago? They’re on Lake Michigan, after all, the rapacious bastards!
I say, make all the arguments you want, about public policy, personal and societal morality, and all the rest. But spare me the Marx-style categories and epithets such as “coastal elites.” There is a whiff of “kulak” about such talk. Conservatives, especially, should know better.