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Jewish World Review March 21, 2005 / 10 Adar II, 5765 The trustfunder left By Michael Barone
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Examining the political map of America, as I am obliged to do as I write
the chapters of "The Almanac of American Politics 2006" (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.),
reveals a previously unidentified segment of the American electorate,
one which has been growing for some years now but has reached a critical
mass and become a major force in one of our two great political parties:
the trustfunder left.
Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work
for a living, or not to have to work very hard. People who can live more
or less wherever they want. The "nomadic affluent," as demographic
analyst Joel Kotkin calls them.
These people tend to be very liberal politically. Aware that they have
done nothing to earn their money, they feel a certain sense of guilt. At
the elite private or public high schools they attend, and even more at
their colleges and universities, they are propagandized about the evils
of capitalism and globalization, and the virtues of environmentalism and
pacifism. Patriotism is equated with Hiterlism.
Their loyalties, as Samuel Huntington explains in "Who Are We?" (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.),
are not national, but transnational — they are citizens of the world
with contempt for those who feel chills up their spines when they hear
"The Star Spangled Banner." They are taught to have contempt for the
economic contribution they make to their country as investors and to
feel guilty if they make no other contribution. Their penance is that
they must vote left.
Where can you find trustfunders? Not scattered randomly around the
country, but heavily concentrated in certain areas. Places with kicky
restaurants, places tolerant of alternative lifestyles, places with lots
of art galleries and organic food stores and Starbucks competitors. The
heaviest concentration is in the San Francisco Bay area, which, Kotkin
says, has the largest percentage of trustfunders of any major metro area
in the country.
The Bay area stands out in stark relief on the political map. It voted
70 percent to 29 percent for John Kerry in 2004, up from the 64 percent
to 30 percent margin it cast for Al Gore in 2000. Without the Bay area's
1.15 million-vote margin for Kerry, California would have come within
82,000 votes of voting for George W. Bush.
Trustfunders stand out even more vividly when you look at the political
map of the Rocky Mountain states. In Idaho and Wyoming, each state's
wealthiest county was also the only county to vote for John Kerry:
Blaine County, Idaho (Sun Valley), where Kerry stayed at his wife's
imported Cotswold farmhouse on his much photographed skiing and
snowboarding vacation, and Teton County, Wyo. (Jackson Hole), where Dick
Cheney has a house and where Bill Clinton took a pre-election holiday
after his pollster Dick Morris reported that a trip to the mountains
focus-grouped better than Martha's Vineyard.
Speaking of Martha's Vineyard, it voted 73 percent for Kerry, and
nearby Nantucket, where Kerry's wife has another house, voted 63 percent
for him — indeed, Nantucket was one of only three of the nation's 100
fastest-growing counties that did not vote for George W. Bush.
Massachusetts Catholics gave their fellow Massachusetts Catholic Kerry
only 51 percent of their votes, but he won 77 percent in Boston, 85
percent in Cambridge, and 69 percent and 73 percent in trustfunder-heavy
Hampshire and Berkshire Counties in the western mountains.
Where Democrats had a good year in 2004 they owed much to trustfunders.
In Colorado, they captured a Senate and a House seat and both houses of
the legislature. Their political base in that state is increasingly not
the oppressed proletariat of Denver, but the trustfunder-heavy counties
that contain Aspen (68 percent for Kerry), Telluride (72 percent) and
Boulder (66 percent).
You can see the trustfunders' imprint as well in New York. In 56 of the
state's 62 counties, the Republican popular vote margin increased or the
Democratic margin fell between 2000 and 2004. Five of the six counties
that moved away from George W. Bush are trustfunder havens: New York
(Manhattan), Ulster (Woodstock), Columbia (trendy Hudson River country),
Otsego (Cooperstown) and Tompkins (Cornell University).
The political map shows the trustfunders' impact. So, I suspect, would
an analysis of the sources of the vast amounts of money that flowed in
through the Internet first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry and to
outfits like moveon.org.
The good news for Democrats is that they have found a new source of
votes and money. The bad news is that an important part of their core
constituency has the characteristic that the British Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin ascribed to the press, "power without responsibility,
the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."
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