Letter from America
Rich liberals in Boston care about everything – except the losers
We’re a college town, home to Harvard, MIT and a very large branch of Whole Foods. We’re one of the most ‘liberal’ cities in the country, and our coffee mugs bear the slogan ‘02138: The World’s Most Opinionated Zip Code’, but all our opinions are the same. Our arguments are really agreements in which we compete to denounce Donald Trump. Apart from that, our aggressions are as passive as the poses and affirmations with which we end our yoga sessions.
In the 2016 election, 94 per cent of Cantabrigians voted for Hillary Clinton. The rest, feeling that she was insufficiently environmental or redistributive, voted green or socialist. In the days after Donald Trump’s election, Signs of the End Times were everywhere. Otherwise sane people insisted to me that Trump’s victory was the result of African-americans having their votes suppressed, that the annulment of Roe vs Wade was imminent, and that It Can’t Happen Here really was happening here, even though no one had actually read it.
After a year of living Trumpily, the sky has not fallen, at least not where I live. Here in West Cambridge, the only thing falling from the sky is money, showering down upon my property-holding, stock-optioning, tech-investing, organiceating, trash-recycling, Democratdonating neighbours.
Property values have risen since the Tweeter-in-chief downsized from Trump Tower to the White House. The Dow Jones is at an historic high. The government still underwrites the health insurance industry which, despite the failure of Obamacare, is now the biggest job creator in Massachusetts. The fund managers still pour money into biotech and software startups. The winners still scramble to cash out into the limited pool of West Cambridge houses.
Americans have always confused money with virtue. Apart from the occasional superannuated Yankee, no one believes that poverty is noble, not even the poor. Having a lot of money is the reward for being a good person. It’s Max Weber by way of Ayn Rand.
America’s divisions of class and money are terrifying. When you visit our rival college town, New Haven, the people at Yale tell you to take a taxi to the station, without saying why. New Haven is part mock-medieval finishing school for the winners of the educational steeplechase, part post-industrial ghetto for the losers of the drug wars and globalisation. When the editor of this magazine tried to walk to the station, one of the locals tried to steal his shoes.
We know we are good people in West Cambridge, and not just because of the money. We care about our children and the environment and the planet. True, we do not care so much about the people in the circles of affiliation that lie between our children and the cosmos. But most of those are Republicans. We don’t want conservatives. They’ve already got the rest of the country. The economy that has enriched us has impoverished them. They are angry, they have no money, and they are behaving badly. It is hard for us not to think of them as bad people.
The other America begins at the Stop & Shop parking lot. From there to San Francisco, it’s a vast desert of unenlightened attitudes and the odd oasis of high-fructose corn syrup.
Watertown is the first stop. Watertown people are of Irish, Italian, Greek and Armenian extraction. They hang the Stars and Stripes from their porches and buy American-made cars.
The cars have bumper stickers reading ‘Watertown Strong’. This is because of the Tsarnaev brothers, who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. In the manhunt after the bombing, the police told everyone to stay indoors. They turned the car park of the Watertown Mall into their centre of operations. It had plenty of parking space, and a wenever-close branch of Dunkin’ Donuts.
The police ran the Tsarnaevs to ground in Watertown and shot them both, one being killed and the other badly wounded. Hence ‘Watertown Strong’. But here’s the thing, as the locals say: the Tsarnaevs were from Cambridge. Not West Cambridge, of course. Our homegrown terrorists lived in one of the imperfectly gentrified neighbourhoods near Central Square, the frontier between Harvard Land and the ethnic badlands of East Cambridge. Still, apart from the Affleck brothers, the Tsarnaev brothers are Cambridge’s most famous sons.
We try to keep thoughts like that out of our bubble. We have the right, because we’ve paid for it, though many of us quietly inherited it, too. But we are less and less comfortable in it. We know that the country is on the wrong track, and that while we have got richer in the past year, the other America has not.
But we can’t bring ourselves to push the country onto a different track. The good times are still rolling, and when we voted for Hillary, not Bernie, we voted to keep them rolling. We lie awake at night, worrying about our children’s future and the fate of the republic.
Dr Dominic Green teaches politics at Boston College, Massachusetts