The Coastal Elites Are Right, Actually

Unfiltered Notes From Life in "Flyover Country"

Last week, I was tagged in a comment on Substack Notes by a subscriber who sought to “summon me” for the purpose of “defending rural America” from Jonathan Cioran when he posted the following:

One of many problems for [the] American Right: Quality of life, on the whole, is still far better in coastal blue metros than anywhere else. Are these expensive? Yes. But they’re expensive for a reason. Traditional conservative policies for the most part don’t actually make life better for most people. Life in Texas is cheaper than California but it’s basically worse by every other metric, etc. American hinterland completely burned out and borderline unlivable pretty much everywhere with the exception of maybe a few tourist towns. If you’re single, you’re better off in a major blue metro; if you have a family, the suburbs of one.

It made a great deal of sense that this reader of mine would tag me in the way he did — I do, after all, run a publication that is at least loosely focused on the subject of rural America. Moreover, though I may have a penchant for writing decidedly somber polemics about America’s hinterlands (and believe I’ve earned my right to do so), my overall tone is essentially celebratory, and my conclusions about the rural US are, at day’s end, at least moderately hopeful. Naturally, then, I’d be a well-qualified “defender of rural America” against anyone who would dare to say that our way of life is stultifying, parochial, boring, or generally inferior to the way of life offered by this country’s Manhattans, Big Surs, Topanga Canyons, Lincoln Parks, Nantuckets, and so on.

One small problem, however: I can’t actually make such a defense.

I can’t actually argue that those who love the world’s most luxurious, left-leaning, moneyed metropoles are wrong in the slightest when they so arrogantly declare (as Mr. Cioran did in another comment) that America’s “interior swamps” and “sweaty dustbowls” aren’t remotely paradisical. To my eye, life actually kinda sucks in the vast majority of the American hinterlands by any universal metric — speaking strictly as a general rule. And though it’s difficult to speak so broadly about such a massive land area, the simple fact is that in most of America’s rural areas, when you’re not sweating, you’re freezing — and unless you’re related to your neighbors, your social life is not liable to be especially titillating. In fact, your social life may or may not exist at all.

The most snide and high-brow commentators at magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic may string words together in a manner that offends many of us ruralites — yet, in a turn that quite frankly agonizes me, I can’t argue they’re wrong. Everywhere I go where I live, people read far less (a majority seem not to read at all), travel less, are less open-minded and curious, are more obese, are generally more clannish and in some cases, are even more consumeristic than those living in the so-called “real places.” The topics of conversation at our local watering holes seem to remain narrowly fixed between the weather, the local drama, The Big Game, and which $40,000+ All-Terrain Vehicle the various patrons are considering going into usurious levels of debt over. Occasionally, too, there are some very frank discussions about “the blacks,” “the welfare mutts,” and “the woke liberals” added in for spice — but this usually feels forced and at this stage, is basically driven by Facebook ‘boomer-slop’ memes.

And frankly, I simply have to say that the social value proposition of being here or anywhere like it is abysmal from 98% of outsiders’ points of view (including my own). That moreover you may be censured, questioned, or held at arms length “because we don’t know you” or because you aren’t cousins with the right fellas makes it worse still. Add in ghastly weather, economic conditions bordering on collapse, high welfare use, drug problems on an incredible scale, dangerously failing infrastructure, mismanaged state resources, soaring median ages, and a general attitude of “managed decline” — yeah, a very large proportion of rural America kinda sucks, and I’m not kidding about that.

Though I’d never deny that there are exceptions to these trends, in general, I know what I am talking about.

Most far-flung locales of this country may be charming to pass through, beautiful to photograph, or are inhabited by fascinating old-timers — none could deny. Yet actually living in these places is hard. After a year or two, these places are overwhelmingly hard to love. So much so, in fact, that there’s a phenomenon around the rural Northeast known as the “two-year wonder.” This is a term somewhat derisively applied to out-of-towners who move here with romantic ambitions but who, after only two winters — move back to Boston, or Sacramento, or wherever they came from because the reality on the ground is simply not tenable for them.

And though many apply the term derisively, the simple fact is that I get it. I know why they come — and I know why they leave. The wisest among them view their two or three years here as a fascinating experiment that did not need to continue; but the most stubborn among them often burn many years here simply to “stick it out,” often bitterly and at the expense of their families and their sanity — and after so long, not a few of these leave after all, too.

Again: I get it.

---

THEN AGAIN, can I really say that the much-vaunted centers of ‘relevance’ and ‘kultur’ are all that and a bag of potato chips? Of course I can — with a massive caveat. The locales I listed above: Manhattan, Big Sur, Topanga Canyon, Lincoln Park, Nantucket — they’re all splendid. I’ve been to all of them, often multiple times. The manner of living in each of these places is (for the blessed few who can afford them) incomparable. To take one’s Cab Franc in Carmel-by-the-Sea as the California sunset sets the beachheads aglow in hues of nuclear neon: there is no comparison. Chelsea’s cobblestone and haut, frank, sexy brilliance — Topanga’s snarling vines and palms and Edenic private estates: these ooze with the essence of a beautiful, rich, romantic life.

Of course, I did say rich. Most of those who speak with intense derision about the American Hinterlands aren’t living in these places — they’re living on their fringes, which often suck just as much as the hinterlands can (albeit in other ways). They live in private-equity-owned buildings, shop in slick, phony-feeling corporate plazas, and pile into fetid train-cars on their commute to the long workdays they slog through in order to pay the punishing rents. It’s all a sacrifice made for PROXIMITY to the Full Monte they can’t actually afford. And so though I acknowledge that the Coastal Elites are right — I can only make such an acknowledgement with a massive caveat: you must be (very) rich, or else their argument essentially does not apply to you.

This is exactly how I arrived back in the Hinterlands myself. For though I’ve had the very weird and unexpected privilege of touring some of America’s poshest quarters (a series of experiences I don’t tend to write about so much) — I really can’t afford them. I have no reason to assume I ever will, either. I acknowledge that if I was rich, Santa Barbara would be obviously attractive; Taos would pique my interest — a private courtyard in Riverdale with Hudson River views might become my beloved nest.

But c’est la vie. I live off Substack donations — not oil dividends.

Interestingly, too, there is no scenario in which, by sheer force of policy alone, the Rest of America achieves anything resembling the quality of life found in these places. Each is a freakish anomaly of geography, climate, and history that cannot be imitated nor forced into existence. While yes, it would be nice if we legalized building “walkable, dense urbanism” (this being the very honorable rallying cry of so many New Urbanists) — the fact is, even if it were legal to build it, it would not replace the Lower East Side. Try as you may to build a carbon copy of LES in Galesburg, Illinois, it’s just not going to have the same je ne se quois as the genuine article for a long list of subtle and mostly esoteric reasons. The reality is: if you’re not rich, you’re not going to get to live on Martha’s Vineyard or Scarsdale — and the coastal views of Marin County are essentially off-limits. Such places are, for better or worse, “geographical luxury products” that cannot be replicated in this country’s “sweaty dustdowls.”

This being what it is, the Hinterlands offer something that the rest of America abjectly lacks: it’s cheap here. Like, really, really, really cheap. I seriously do not think I can spend more than $2k/mo on ALL expenses for a family of three even if I try extremely hard. Most months, we’re actually below $1,000 USD for all that we buy and pay for. This is often far less than expats pay to live overseas in literal third-world countries.

If I insisted upon elbowing my way into the metropole — so that I could pay dearly for the very comforting feeling of being only 30+ subway stops from where the Real Action Happens — I’d be broke, overworked, and essentially unable to write for a living. And so it is that by virtue of my incorrigibly low station in this world, I must confine myself to wherever’s dirt cheap — and that, my friends, is the hinterlands.

It comes at a cost, of course. The isolation is extreme; it’s distressing that 100% of my intellectual life has to happen online. The winters are brutal. Pollen season is a nightmare. The summers are sweaty. My neighbors watch me — they’ll never really accept me even though I grew up just two counties away. We are a long way from Santa Barbara here.

But what makes Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara? What makes a Manhattan? And why will there never be a hub of elite culture in Guymon, Oklahoma?

I suppose I am a bit of a “hard geographical determinist.” It seems to me that, so far as we are speaking broadly and with an eye toward recognizing patterns, there are only a handful of “place genres” out there, and each is generally produced by geography above all. Allow me to get very nerdy for a second and describe these ‘geographical genres’:

1. Areas that are well-positioned with regards to trade and power. That Manhattan Island exists at the mouth of the navigable Hudson (and the lowlands that would eventually connect that river to the American West via the Erie Canal) poised it for massive success. That it was navigationally convenient to Europe by ship, and situated fairly near other burgeoning centers of power, agriculture, and industry nearly predetermined that island to become an immensely powerful place — in spite of hot summers, freezing winters, and other ‘less-than-desirable’ climatic features. Other examples: Singapore, St Petersburg Russia, New Orleans, Tokyo.

2. Areas within “goldilocks zones” — places perfectly suited to human habitation. These kinds of places are generally temperate, sunny with dry weather (but with sufficient water for irrigation), minimal bugs, and anything resembling a Mediteranean climate, usually (but not always) coastal or high elevation. Some are tropical-humid as well. These are the places that, given the choice, a majority of humans would prefer to live simply because they are so extremely pleasant. Examples include coastal California, the South of France, coastal Italy, Santa Fe and Taos New Mexico, Cape Town, the Portuguese Algarve. Note that when such places are also geographically well-sited so far as the interests of power and money are concerned, they become even more important (as with Rome).

   1. Note must be made here regarding seasonality. Many places, such as the Hamptons, Nantucket, or Aspen have attained a strong position amongst elites on a seasonal basis. Though through some portion of the year their climates are non-ideal, during another part of it, conditions are perfect, and many powerful people flock there.

3. Artificial areas. Places that have managed, in spite of any number of unfavorable geographical conditions, to attain a place of relevance and power in the global system, usually by means of technological intervention (e.g, A/C), favorable tax laws, minimal regulation, commercial airline access, or some other factor modifiable by policy or practice. Dubai is the example par excellence here; Switzerland also feels relevant as it’s a landlocked country with rough winters and very little arable land, yet banking and tax laws make it a haven for many of the world’s richest.

4. Rural hinterlands. Rural places that are not only geographically inconvenient to commerce and political power — but also are situated within challenging or unpleasant climates, are isolated from major centers of cultural relevance, and have a natural-resource-based economy (or, in post-industrial nations, an economy that is either in ruins or is based on government and healthcare jobs). Examples include southern West Virginia, rural Moldova, Newfoundland, rural Coahuila, Chubut, rural Angola, deep Upstate New York.

5. Urban hinterlands. Cities with unfavorable climates and substantial (non-commutable) distance from major centers of power and relevance. These are economically-unimportant urban environments where, frankly, little (or nothing) of global relevance takes place. Examples include Nouakchott, Bangor, Utica, Yuhzno-Sakhalinsk, Port Moresby. (Note that some urban hinterlands are actually within type-1 cities: e.g, Canarsie, Brooklyn is within NYC, but is marginal enough to be mostly forgotten and unseen).

6. “Type-1 Nowherevilles” — these are areas just outside of #1-type cities; close enough for regular commutes into the centers of power, but lacking any but the faintest cultural identity with said center of power. Sprawly transition zones, suburbs, strip-mall / subdivision areas, bedroom communities, and places where the central economic interest involves a large proportion of the population commuting to a bastion of real cultural, political, and economic relevance. Examples include Rutherford NJ, Blue Island IL, Koshigaya (near Tokyo), Noisy-le-Grand (near Paris), Ontario CA.

7. “Type-2 Nowherevilles” — same as above, however, the “center” to which residents commute consists not of a #1-type city but of a #5-type “urban hinterland” (or, in some cases, the “center” is actually a Type-1 Nowhereville). This is an especially “American” genre of place. The examples illustrate the genre: Ankeny, IA (outside Des Moines), Overland Park KS (outside KCMO), Santa Teresa (outside El Paso), Johnson City (outside Binghamton) or Rosedale (outside Bakersfield).

This list is, of course, by no means exhaustive. It does not account for regions in transition, truly unique exceptions, nor extreme edge cases. Nevertheless, it provides a useful framework for discerning the relative “value” of places in fairly objective terms. For though I generally write about the sentimental, romantical reasons for why one might love their place — and I absolutely do not think these dimensions should be omitted from discussions on the subject — the fact remains that at the global scale, objective geographical value propositions drive the tone and tenor of how various cities and regions develop. I would argue furthermore that far more of this process now operates in a basically deterministic manner than not — and that that process is only very rarely significantly shaped by ‘softer’ concerns such as love of place, cultural allegiances, and so on.

The first thing you may notice in applying the above list to your own knowledge of geography may be this: most Americans live in the “Nowherevilles” of either type. Probably more live in “Type-1 Nowherevilles” than “Type-2,” to be sure — but if I had to estimate, 50-60% of Americans presently live in places characterized by automotive commutes to economic centers, strip malls, “stroads,” and subdivisions. Most of these have a fairly vague (or entirely absent) sense of local identity; life there is basically a matter of economic convenience. Many of them were built from scratch in the last sixty years. Nevertheless, I highlight this likelihood because whenever the urban-rural divide is discussed, we are not really talking about the lives and places of median Americans. We are instead discussing the fringe ends of a spectrum in which most people live solidly in the middle.

Yet nonetheless, I find that so far as the task at hand is to describe the basic preconditions required for la dolce vita, or “the good life,” only categories #1, #2, and possibly #3 seem capable of delivering — in objective terms. Categories four through seven simply require a subjective adjustment so far as their inhabitants wish to attain some version of “the good life,” and even at that, it will be a self-defined version of a good life far more than it will be the classic and timeless “dolce vita” that has proven so desirable since the dawn of human civilization.

By this I mean, unless you are living in a global center of power or in one of the globally rare climatic zones where things like olives, oranges, and grapes grow with ease — the onus is on you to find a way to engage with a self-created version of “a good life.” Not the good life — a good life. Note, for example, that the inhabitants of the South of France do not tend to have little signs hanging on their walls that say “Bloom Where You’re Planted” — they need no such reminders, for they live in a region in which human flourishing is so obviously natural and native. The only one who needs such a reminder is one who lives in a very ‘hard’ place.

Contrariwise, the Nebraskan housewife must have a reason to deal with the ceaseless cold winds; her environment is frankly unnatural and unpleasant whether she would describe it as such or not. She must be content with what family she has around, for the possibilities of expanding her social network are no doubt very limited. If she has a niche intellectual interest — all the worse; she will find herself in isolation. Then again, if she has one or two great friends, a lovely church, a loving husband, and a natural proclivity towards reading all winter and gardening all summer, why, she may very genuinely love her life in rural Nebraska. Such people tend to be, rather than interchangeable pleasure-seeking cosmopolitans — people of a very special character akin to the cottonwoods in the creeks and the wheat sheaves leaning in the fields.

This is what the “Coastal Elites” often miss. Because the isolation, unfavorable climatic realities, and apparently stultifying social, intellectual, and cultural realities of so-called “flyover country” seem to be such a grueling prospect when examined from a distance — they simply come to conclude that the inhabitants of such places must be stupid, dreary, and stark-raving mad for living there. They cannot empathize; they fail to imagine themselves taking the slow, quiet path one must take if they are to fall in love with rural Nebraska — they are haunted just at the very idea.

This is, frankly, a completely understandable response, even if their subsequent hurling of pointless invectives in the general direction of hinterland residents is boorish, stupid, and totally unbecoming. It actually makes total sense that they don’t get it. Most people actually really would loathe living in Nebraska, or Upstate New York, or rural South Texas — and that’s just fine.

Quite often, the metropolitan types who heap scorn upon the heartland are themselves totally deracinated. That is, they are without roots, they have been severed (or have severed themselves) from their home-place, or they may descend from a long line of geographically unstable people who have chased opportunity around the country or even around the globe. Such people very often cannot even imagine the idea of a large extended family at all, much less a large extended family that all lives in the same small town and has been there since God-knows-when. Such people often do not have families themselves, and may (voluntarily) never have children. They often enough have no religious faith, either, and few quiet hobbies of a type well-suited to long winters. They are not merely living in a different plane on a cultural level — on a psychological level, they are living in a different reality than their ruralite countrymen.

Without even the whisper of any roots (or after a rejection of them), without family (extended or immediate), and without religious faith, they are a people who finds it extraordinarily difficult to imagine living in a “boring and irrelevant” place for very good reason. In lieu of retaining any of the basic tools one must use to make life beautiful in a real hinterland — when rural people say “family is everything,” they often seem to mean it literally — they seek out ‘easier’ places; places that do them a few favors, places that make the days go by a little more nicely. They begin to focus most on enjoying life, and the schema they use to understand that is written in basically objective and universal human terms.

This is where the real conversation about ‘la dolce vita’ begins. When I use this phrase, I hope you know exactly what I mean: sun-drenched terraces by the sea, grapevines swirling around the bases of marble statues — rich wines and cold oysters, cigars and fresh grapefruit juice, long sumptuous days of reading in the leafy courtyard as the fresh air fills the lungs and the skin is burnished golden-brown. A man feels leisure living like this; he is not anxious about what is to come nor is he murmuring about cutting his cordwood nor stocking up his root vegetables for winter. His mind is sprightly, his body is lithe — he is living in a real scene, a cinematic analogue to paradise, basking in the low-level euphoria that only California and Park Avenue and Cape Town can inculcate; the blissful optimism the French Riviera blesses one with — the heavy, smirking fado of the Portuguese Algarve.

He is not fighting back tears as he hangs a “Bloom Where You’re Planted” sign in his drafty, vinyl-sided raised ranch home. The very idea of doing anything of the sort is foreign to him; he is about as far from Kansas as one could spiritually and metaphorically be.

Yet, by my eye, such a life can really only become attractive if one has lost any hope of finding a comfortable nest within the culture of parochial backwaters and Nowherevilles. To say that life in the hinterlands “sucks” is really only to make an admission that you yourself are in rough shape — that your family has cut their roots off, that you may be without faith, that you are in so low a state that you need the land and culture around you to do favors for you, to give you little pick-me-ups, to make life easy and pretty and sunny for you, even if it is mind-numbingly expensive to get there.

One finds people of this disposition constantly in California (or I did anyway); there are those who drifted “west of the West” out of a vague, almost amoeba-like urge toward the sunshine, as if by instinct and for lack of any other tie that binds. Where they are from does not matter; what they do does not really matter. They are simply there, in California, basking in a warm world, removed from the ‘casserole days’ of wherever they might’ve grown up, far from the snowbanks and the corn rows, wandering the palm-lined streets in a deeply American — and incredibly sun-soaked — reverie. No one can blame them; they have drifted westward toward the most incredible place in the world, and what light that place has covered them in does, often enough, lift them up on high, to let them really live — at least in fits and spurts, anyway, and in spite of the egregious rents.

Nevertheless, there is a real connection between ‘la dolce vita’ and the intractable problem of restlessness in one’s soul; there is a real call toward the wine and the sunny beaches and the dry warm winds that leaps out of the heart only when one can stand the casseroles of home no longer — or when they stop being served entirely. When the estate man mops up the last of mom’s belongings, or when the courier brings the divorce papers, or when one’s childhood home is torn down to make way for new condos (or has been totally abandoned) — a very natural yearning begins, and it eventually points toward easier climes, languorous living, and the rich royal beauties of a truly civilized life.

Perhaps this is because civilization produces such yearnful rootlessness as a matter of course. Everywhere, since the dawn of agriculture and cities and armies and written language — upheaval, displacement, and the flood of ennui that courses through the émigré’s wine glass as he wonders at where he’ll belong or how he is to find anything resembling rest. I don’t sneer at those who’ve lived this at all; I understand them in large part because I am them. I feel this way constantly; I feel the magnetic draw of the sun and the marble-columned courtyards, the slumped-over Cathedrals, the paella, the port. What else is there? What else is there but the remains of some timeless, flowering, crumbling framework of a universal home for all civilized men? And where is it but in those lush, sun-soaked places, where the cassocked Priests speed by on their mopeds, and the Mexican boys sell minneolas from their trucks by the palm-lined roadside?

Those who do not feel the urge or who find it foreign are, so far as I can tell, blessed greatly with a world that works. They have their family, most likely; they have a place that is for them. They are blooming where they’re planted — because anything else seems strange, foreign, unnerving. Such people are blessed indeed, for they are removed from the weird and destabilizing ennui that real deracination breeds. They are content to live in our “interior swamps” and “sweaty dust bowls” without complaint, without yearning for some vestigial ruin of bygone luxury and sun-drenched decrepitude — they are strong people who need no great favors from the realms of power, climate, culture, or good wine. And indeed, the hinterlands are theirs, and their resilience is their immense and wonderful power.

Does one need the other? Does the coastal bon vivant need the simple, warm provincial from the seldom-seen interior? Does the faith-and-family country man have any great need for a jet-setter who flits from wine tasting to wine tasting? Do the inhabitants of our sprawly “Nowherevilles” need any of them — and are they needed in turn?

The answer is an emphatic yes.

To embrace only one portion of the full spectrum of the human condition is really to die in exact proportion with the part of the human condition you’ve excised; to deny the humanity of those ‘on the other side’ from you is to tell on yourself as one who has some great gash in his soul or broils with jealous bigotry at what one’s brother has. What works here is not ping-ponging partisan quips across the digital public square, nor lobbing elitist screeds at so-called ‘flyover country’, nor raging against the ‘cosmopolitan elites’ as if they were an alien race of wine-soaked perverts and grifters. What works here is to examine the full spectrum of what mankind lives through, where the human race has been — to look straight at the brilliantly storied geographies and the psychological gardens (and junkyards) they’ve produced in the unending tapestry of human life — and to smile; to say “good God this all is just so much bigger and more beautiful than I ever could know.”

On that score, the so-called “coastal elites” miss the mark just as often as the hinterlanders do. The upright and decent fellow from the Upper West Side is wise to appreciate the earthy beauties of life on the prairie, or in the Louisiana swamps, or in the roughneck quadrants of the Dakotas — for they tell something of his own story, though perhaps removed by a generation or three. And the Budweiser-swilling Wisconsin welder is in kind wise to know that what those ‘nutcases’ in California have found is actually something quite beautiful, something he himself would enjoy — something so lovely his own sons and daughters might one day find themselves chasing it. It won’t be the end of the world if they do; they’d merely be transitioning to a different part of America, and exploring a part of the American story that is at once very ancient and by the same breath, very new.

Perhaps all of this is why, though Mr. Cioran’s comment was of a decidedly political nature — I haven’t gone there yet, even in 4,700+ words of typing. I’m not sure that I need to. For once one examines the geography of rootedness and loss, or the psychologies of deracination and home, it begins to seem as though all of the “political” baggage accompanying the urban-rural divide is, in actuality, not very political. It is instead a kind of vapor rising from two genres of souls that diverge tremendously; it is totally second-order to the realities of geography and the magnetism that different environs have for human souls in their various states and communities in their various stages of flourishing or decay.

For, even if Texas adopted California-esque laws, the soul of Texas would not be “Californiafied,” I think; some portion (probably a large portion) of what Texas is has already been hard-coded by the land itself. Even if enclaves of heterodox cultures establish themselves in Texas, I’m not sure they’d ever really be capable of “taking over” the whole of the land (even if they do take over the state government). Quite the same in reverse. The flim-flamming of the political arena is more or less a disposable thing that will shift and change; it was not so long ago that New York State was conservative and there were startlingly substantial numbers of actual Communists in unexpected states like Alabama and Nebraska.

These things change, they come and go. They are always marketed as dire things on which the fate of the world hinges. Yet there are no bills on the Senate floor, now or ever, that will alter the basic realities of the American psyche’s fascinating taxonomy of expressions; there are no Executive Orders that can radically change the shape of the Oklahoma thunderheads nor the zephyrs rolling into the hills around Sonoma County California. Things of such timeless gravity have already been sorted, really — and the movement of the political world is only a fly on the massive back of a great and powerful animal.

Nevertheless, each ‘genre’ of place seems to be prone to its own eccentricities and even pathologies. The “Nowhereville” type places seem to feed into paranoia and a ghastly obsession with the ugliest notion of “commerce” — the paradisical “goldilocks zone” locales seem to churn out bizarre and experimental luxury ideologies as a matter of course. And (go figure) those hinterlands where, for most residents, “family is everything” seem to occasionally fall prey to a vicious tribalism of sorts; an urge that obviously stems directly from a tenacious obsession with family ties, like-minded kin, and one’s local roots. Viewed in this manner, again, what we lately call “politics” seems to pretty strictly come across as a ‘psycho-geographical phenomenon’ far more than a coherent and well-reasoned series of ideological positions. In actual fact, most “political people” aren’t generally in the habit of deep study of their positions, and mostly cling to them for psycho-social reasons more than durable convictions.

And from there, it appears very easy to accidentally put the horse before the cart and to believe that the politics preceded the rest. In actual fact, I’ve come to believe that it’s the other way around.

All in all, the fact remains that by all objective measures, there are some places that really are better to live in, and most of these are well-known to the self-assured ‘coastal elites’. As for the rest? The extent to which they are nice to live in is subjective — and so frankly, that just makes them that much more fragile. The social ecosystem that valorizes rural or small-town life is wholly dependent not on good weather or beautiful vistas but on the social ties that bind and the collective psychological preconditions that breed optimism and resilience. When changes take place — economic changes, technological changes, religious changes, and so on — that wear that social fabric thin, hinterland-type places suffer and even die rapidly. Though they are durable in practically every other way, this one core weakness is a thing that only those living in the most objectively desirable geographies seem capable of avoiding.

And yet, I repeat, those living the cosmopolitan, footloose luxury lifestyles of the rich and powerful are very often estranged from the same kind of rootedness that gives the hinterlander his power. What they lack in the socio-familial durability so familiar to the ruralite is (at least partially) made up for by their truly excellent way of life. The core threat to them, then, is themselves: when they spur on the political arm of state power towards being not an inert, slow, vaporous thing but a swiftly-moving machine for actually reducing their quality of life — by tolerating crime, increasing taxes to punishing levels, or engaging in perverse open-air social experiments — they find themselves ruining their paradise out of sheer boredom, I suppose. Once this has happened, it seems many of these denizens of places like California finding themselves drifting back towards the vast unfeatured interior, to seek out the earthy rootedness their ancestors once knew. Every time they vote to make life worse in California, then, another crop of “two-year-wonders” comes to places like Vermont and Michigan.

Of course, many will return back home in short order soon after.

If we want the whole country to thrive, it is of the utmost importance that these various wings of the broader culture seek to understand one another, to tolerate one another, and to now and again borrow a few notes from their neighbor. I’m sure that Malibu, Manhattan, and Cambridge could use a few more barn dances and a few more babies — and I’m quite sure that Sioux City and Bangor would do well to trade the Mike’s Hard Lemonade for a nice California Pinot now and again. The guy from Fargo should try out Manhattan, and enjoy it — after all, it’s not gonna hurt anything but his wallet. And no doubt, the high-end crowd in Santa Fe and San Francisco might find Kansas markedly more charming than they’d ever expect.

After all, it’s all America, isn’t it? We are in no kind of race to figure out which place is objectively the best and to then lord it over all the other, totally inferior places on the map; it truly takes all types, and though the Coastal Elites may indeed be right about the coast of California and places like it — let us thank God that there are rugged family-men who much prefer the cattle ranches of Southwestern Nebraska or Central Missouri. If they all took off to Brooklyn or Santa Cruz, we’d have no beef, their story would end, and America would be far worse off for it than many might think.

And so in closing, I raise my glass to the ones who’ve found it within themselves to “bloom where they’re planted.” Though I suspect my own garden might really be a little too far gone for my efforts at that, I commend those who find a way to stick to it. For the rest of us, la dolce vita beckons — whether we’ll ever be able to afford it or not.