AuntiE Loc: 45th Least Free State

America’s Coastal Royalty
The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states.
By Victor Davis Hanson

The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America’s big decisions are made.

They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and everything else in between. Those in Boston, New York, and Washington determine how our government works; what sort of news, books, art, and fashion we should consume; and whether our money and investments are worth anything.

The Pacific corridor is just as influential, but in a hipper, cooler fashion. Whether America suffers through another zombie film or one more Lady Gaga video or Kanye West’s latest soft-porn rhyme is determined by Hollywood — mostly by executives who live in the la-la land of the thin Pacific strip from Malibu to Palos Verdes.

The next smart phone or search engine 5.0 will arise from the minds of tech geeks who pay $2,000 a month for studio apartments and drive BMWs in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, or Mountain View.

The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege.

Fly over or drive across the United States, and the spatial absurdity of this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty empty. The nation’s muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals, and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled fly-over expanse.

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel, and power. They expect service in elevators and limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don’t really know — other than to influence through a cable-news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate, or more phone apps.

In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters is all determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources for granted. Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people and culture that made them.

In Kansas or Utah, people do not pay $1,000 per square foot for their homes as they do on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They do not gossip with the people who write their tax laws, as is common in the Georgetown area of Washington. Those in the empty northern third of California do not see Facebook or Oracle founders at the local Starbucks any more than they bump into the Kardashians at a hip bistro.

The problem is not just that the coasts determine how everyone else is to lead their lives, but that those living in our elite corridors have no idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior — much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic ideology on the distant, less influential majority.

In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Mo. That t***sfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.

I would t***sfer the United Nations to Salt Lake City, where foreign diplomats would live in a different sort of cocoon.

I would ask billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Koch Brothers to endow with their riches a few Midwestern or Southern universities. Perhaps we could create a new Ivy League in the nation’s center.

I would suggest to Facebook and Apple that they relocate operations to North Dakota to expose their geeky entrepreneurs to those who drive trucks and plow snow. Who knows — they might be able to afford a house, get married before 35, and have three rather than zero kids.

America is said to be divided by red and blue states, rich and poor, white and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, old and new.

I think the real divide is between those who make our decisions on the coasts and the anonymous others who live with the consequences somewhere else.


— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

I am constantly amazed by the polls that purport to show what I think/want. There is little doubt that the same 10 people in New Jersey are answering for the entire country. It's kind of like the neilson rating for TV. I don't like those people, they cancel shows I like and put BS in it's place. It is unfortunate that, in this age of instant worldwide communication, opinions are only requested from a few in a small area.

Unclet Loc: Amarillo, Tx

The only change I would make to your suggestions: Move the United Nations to - anywhere, but here. Turn the building into a homeless shelter, or amusement park, anything would be more useful that what it is presently being used for.

ibKelly

With Texas being a RED state, in a few short years, it will fast becoming a BLUE state..... mainly cause the majority of the people in that state are mexicans and they v**e democatic.

alex Loc: michigan now imperial beach californa

do you mean democratic as democrat or democratic as c*******t?

USpatriot77 Loc: USA

Thank you for this. It does make relevant the theme I too have seen living in rural Oregon that the main population centers of a region dictate what the rural areas can/can't do or say. Portland, Oregon controls what the entire State does. For years in this State there has been a call to secede from Oregon(the southern part of the state) and create another separate State. This has gone nowhere, but it continues to come up from time to time. The "voice of the people" no longer exists as a viable entity to force political change. However, it would if it was big/loud enough to really ruffle some political feathers in Washington. Thanks again for this."Si vis pakem, para bellum!"
Pray for peace, prepare for war!

ibKelly

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Most i******s ... not all... v**e like the b****s to.. which ever party will give the the most in freebies.. that's who they will v**e for. Why do you think Obama got all those v**es the second time... He gave them cell phones.. longer 'out of a job' money... he knew where to go for v**es... and he did it well. But you see.. he USED TAXPAYERS money.. if it had come out of HIS pocket... it would have been pennies. Look at that WHITE woman who won several million and never told the people at the welfare she won it and still collected her food stamps till they caught her.. Look at that BLACK woman who v**ed for Obama 6 times... and never got caught till she mentioned some time later what she did... Then the Democrats gripe about the Repubs... who want stricter laws when v****g... I could tell you stories about people who c***t the v****g system.