THE RISE OF THE LATTE TOWN

In a normal city, cars roll through these situations; if they see an opening, they take it. But this is Burlington, one of the most socially enlightened cities in America, and drivers here are aware that America has degenerated into a car-obsessed culture, where developers pave over paradise to put up parking lots; where driving threatens to crush the natural rhythms of foot traffic and face-to-face community with superhighways and arid suburbia; where fossil-fuel-burning machines choke the air and displace the renewable energy sources of human locomotion. This driver knows that while sitting behind the wheel, he is ethically inferior to a pedestrian like me. And to demonstrate his civic ideals, he is going to make damn sure that I get the right of way. No matter how long it takes.

Finally, he honks politely, and I wake up from my reverie and belatedly cross the street. But by the time I reach the next corner, I’m lost in my thoughts again and, seeing a car coming, I stop. This car stops too. And waits. I have to go through this ritual about a dozen times before I finally adapt to local mores and trudge straight into the intersections. In Burlington, pedestrians have inherited the earth. Social enlightenment rules.

Burlington is a Latte Town.

Latte Towns — the term is Alan Ehrenhalt’s — are upscale liberal communities, often in magnificent natural settings, often university-based, that have become the gestation centers for America’s new upscale culture. They are the birthplaces of the coffee shops, gourmet bread stores, micro- breweries, organic grocery stores, and the rest of the sensibility-drenched enterprises that marry natural goodness, high craftsmanship, cosmopolitan taste, social concern, and inflated prices to create a 1990s version of genteel culture. Boulder, Colorado, is a Latte Town, as are Madison, Wisconsin; Napa, California; Northampton, Massachusetts; Missoula, Montana; Wilmington, North Carolina; Ithaca, New York; and on and on. You know you’re in a Latte Town when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name that must have the word “Grounds” in it, before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop.

The ideal Latte Town has a Swedish-style government, German-style pedestrian malls, Victorian houses, Native American crafts, Berkeley human- rights groups, and Beverly Hills income levels. There should be some abandoned industrial mills that can be converted into lofts, software startups, and organic-brownie factories. The Latte Town in Utopia would have Rocky Mountain views to the west, Redwood forests downtown, a New England lake along the waterfront, and a major city with a really good alternative weekly within a few hours’ drive.

For most of this century, writers on the left have portrayed small cities as stifling enclaves of Babbittry and reaction, but today they are seen as refreshing oases from commercialized mass society — potential centers of community and local activism. For years, progressives have condemned white flight, but now they’ve created Liberal Flight, in which socially concerned families and individuals leave the urban world for pastoral, predominantly white communities (in Burlington, minorities make up only 2.6 percent of the work force) that feature low crime rates, low illegitimacy rates, high educational levels, and phenomenally low unemployment rates. In these places they can enjoy the beauties of nature and thriving local artistic communities, all in a setting that’s on a human scale.

To take a stroll down the pedestrian mall in Burlington, for example, you start at Leunig’s, the indoor/outdoor bistro where some of the local businessmen gather for breakfast each morning in their Timberland shoes, collarless shirts, and jeans. An executive with flowing gray hair is chatting amiably with another who sports a Jerry Garcia beard, their cell phones tucked into their black canvas briefcases. The Birkenstock sandal store around the corner has a sign in the window pointing out that its wares make nice corporate gifts.

As you stroll up the street, you see young parents pushing the all-terrain baby carriages popular with the outdoors set (Outside magazine rated Burlington its Dream Town, while Zero Population Growth, the Nation, and the Utne Reader rated it among the best American communities). Ann Taylor is cheek by jowl with the Peace and Justice Store, a perfect example of how affluent fashion now cohabits effortlessly with hippie enterprise. The pedestrian mall is lined with upscale candy, muffin, and ice-cream stores; the locals don’t go in for big luxury items, but they consider little luxuries essential to the art of living. There are any number of stores with playful names like Madhatter and Muddy Waters. Ironic allusions and ostentatious wordplay are key ingredients to the Latte Town sensibility, where people are not shy about showing off their cultural literacy (the University of Vermont sits on the hill in Burlington, looking down on the commercial center and Lake Champlain beyond).

The furniture, fashion, and furnishings stores are confronted by a common problem: How to manufacture and sell superficial items for consumers who want everyone to know about their psychological and spiritual depth? Wind chimes and Inuit art seem popular. At Burlington’s many high-minded toy stores — Discovery Toys, Learning Materials Workshop, Timeless Toys, Toys by Nature, Learning Quest — you can stock up on children’s playthings that are developmental, whimsical, and nonviolent all at the same time. And if you walk into one of the many home-furnishing stores, you see that the Latte Town elite has transformed the old Protestant elite’s animal motifs. Artwork featuring hunting-related creatures like stags, hounds, and ducks is out; artwork featuring non-threatening animals like cats, frogs, and small birds is in. Cows, which are fashionably unglamorous and also pacifist, are quite chic, having been adopted as the corporate symbol not only by Burlington’s hometown company, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, but also by lowkey, homey companies nationwide, like Gateway 2000 Computers.

Latte Towns have developed their own sumptuary code, which is now spreading to all the places in America with high NPR listenerships. The code is based on a distinction between needs and wants. Needs are things we must have to survive, like shelter, food, clothing, and exercise. Wants are those things we desire to make us feel superior to others. The genius of the code of Financial Correctness that prevails in Latte Towns is that you can spend as much as you want on needs, so long as you are not ostentatious when you spend on wants. Thus, you can shell out $ 50,000 on your kitchen and 25 grand on each of your bathrooms, because these are associated with absolute physical needs, but it would be vulgar to spend even $ 5,000 on an in-home media center, because that is a mere want. You can drop $ 4,400 on a Merlin Extralite road bike at the local cycle shop, because man must exercise, but it would be vulgar to have a powerboat, because while man needs to move around, he doesn’t need motors to propel him. The entire rural population of America can be divided between those who are Motor (powerboats, motorcycles, snowmobiles) and those who are Non-motor (canoes, mountain bikes, cross- country skis). Latte Town people are Non-motor.

There are a number of fine bookstores in Burlington, of course. You can’t get the New Republic at any of them (THE WEEKLY STANDARD would be unthinkable), but you can browse through Curve, a wonderfully rifled lesbian magazine, or any number of French glamour journals while listening to World Music or New Age disks like “Wolf Solitudes” on headphones provided by the store to sell CDs. The sections right at the front, which presumably do the most business, are Sex, Psychology, Food, Ethnic Studies (which is mostly books about women), and Alternative Lifestyles (80 percent about gay issues). And this does seem to be a pretty accurate reflection of local priorities.

One of the striking things about Burlington is that it is relatively apolitical. The bookstores carry some titles on politics, but the current- affairs sections tend to be tucked away in the back. I saw but three political bumper stickers during the week I was there, two that read “Bernie” for the local socialist congressman, Bernie Sanders, and one, on a pickup truck on the out-skirts of town, that read “Rush.” Bulletin boards are everywhere, but most of the fliers advertise rock bands, not rallies. One of the books featured in the most fashionable of the local bookstores was called Fifty-four Ways to Help the Homeless. Only one of them is government- related — No. 52, “Write your congressperson” — while the rest are various forms of local and direct action individuals can take, such as volunteering at soup kitchens.

In this sense, Latte Towns represent a fundamental transformation in the American Left, the shift from the adversary culture to the alternative culture. Through most of the century, left-wing intellectuals have focused their energies on urban and national politics that supported macropolitical changes: the New Deal, the antiwar movement, the Great Society, the civil- rights movement, and the other grand aspirations. But it’s tough to be a white liberal in city politics in the age of Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Marion Barry, and Maxine Waters. It’s tough for highbrows to form an alliance with the proletariat if highbrow heroes are Anita Hill and Robert Mapplethorpe while the working class worships Mike Ditka, Garth Brooks, and Pat Buchanan. It’s tough to rest your liberal hopes on Washington when you’ve got Newt Gingrich’s Republicans at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and a spineless centrist like Bill Clinton at the other.

So these upscale liberals have retreated from national and urban politics and instead concentrated their energies on the local politics and small-scale activism to be found in the Latte Towns. No longer do highbrow lefties place much emphasis on grand confrontations like strikes (there are no major blue- collar employers in places like Burlington), or rallies against the establishment (in Burlington, the establishment is socialist), or ideological combat (there are virtually no conservatives in Burlington to rally against). Instead, the Latte Towns represent an archipelago of progressivism that doesn’t seek to confront or transform national politics, just to offer an alternative to it. Progressives can escape to a place where the mayors and town councilmen are progressive, where gay and feminist concerns are at the top of everyone’s agenda, where liberalism is a dominant lifestyle as well as the unchallenged ideology, and where social concern takes the form of concrete activism. So maybe the great American culture war doesn’t end with a big showdown, just with people sorting themselves out geographically and settling down to their own communities (while smugly condescending towards all the others).

Burlington does boast a phenomenally busy public square — arts councils, school-to-work collaboratives, environmental groups, preservation groups, community-supported agriculture, anti-development groups, and ad-hoc activist groups (currently, the local bookstores are gathering petitions to keep a Borders bookstore from moving in). The result is an interesting mixture of liberal social concern and paleoconservative effort to ward off encroaching modernism. Like the paleocons, the Latte Town elites seek to preserve old buildings and old communities and reduce the creative destruction of capitalism. Ithaca has even devised a form of local protectionism. It is called Ithaca Hours, a separate currency that is valid only within a 20-mile radius of downtown. In theory, the currency is redeemable in volunteer time, but the 20-mile limit helps protect local stores from out-of-town competition.

The busy public square is one of the features that draw people. A Latte Townie would rather spend less time in the private sphere of his home and one- acre yard and more time in the common areas. If you compare Latte Towns with the towns featured in, say, Money magazine’s “Best Places to Live” issue, you notice that Latte Townies devote more time to community activism, while the Money magazine towns are much more oriented toward family. Latte Towns are more likely to have large gay populations, childless people who can spend more time outside the home. And they are awash with recent college graduates, who seem to float from Latte Town to Latte Town — Burlington in the summer, Boulder in the winter — waitressing and bartending as they go, and happily hanging out in their spare time in the common areas. And while everyone is pro-family these days, there is a coherent case to be made that a suburban life of isolated domesticity over-burdens the family, and that an active public square allows people to get out more, thus depressurizing families and making them more stable.

But the most striking thing about Latte Towns is that, left-wing havens though they are, they are also fantastic places to do business. Towns like Napa are wine centers, Oregon and Washington state have software, university towns have everything from biotech to carpentry, and Burlington is a thriving commercial hub. Ben & Jerry’s, the most famous company in town, is not even among Burlington’s 20 largest employers. IBM has a facility here, as do General Dynamics, GE, Bank of Vermont, and Blodgett Holdings. And business is chic in Burlington. There are four local business publications that heavily cover the town. Sometimes you can read two or three sentences in a row in these publications before some executive says something about the need for businesses to practice socially responsible investing.

I was sitting at an outside table at Leunig’s one day, eating lunch, counting the total number of earrings my waitress had on her ears, nose, lips, and bellybutton (19, I think), and trying to read Thoreau’s Walden on the “when in Rome” principle. But I kept getting distracted by an aging hippie at the next table who would not shut up about zero-based budgeting and the differences between preferred and common stock. Gray-pony-tailed and scruffy, he was lecturing like a professor at the Harvard Business School to a young Woodstock wannabe in granny glasses and a peasant dress. She was taking notes on a yellow legal pad, and intermittently they would digress and talk about some bookkeeping practice or management technique they could adopt at their own company. And it has to be said that the aging hippie knew what he was talking about: His description of the capital markets was precise, dear, and knowledgeable.

It occurred to me as I was bouncing back between Thoreau and this conversation that Walden is, in its own way, a business book. Thoreau is constantly tallying up his expenses, and when he can turn his frugality into a profit, he’s not shy about boasting of his accomplishment. So maybe it’s not surprising that the 1960s-era rebels who once lived on communes named Walden would, in the fullness of time, discover that business can be converted into a spiritually satisfying lifestyle. (In the final tally on the 1960s, Marx and Marcuse are losers; Thoreau, Robert Nisbet, and Jane Jacobs are winners.) Even the recluse of Walden Pond would be a bit taken aback by how avidly the tree-hugging set has gone for the corporate culture.

Just as conservatives are sensitive about being called greedy, liberals are sensitive about being called mushy. Becoming a businessman is one way for a liberal to show he is actually a hard-headed, practical person, not just a mung-bean-eating dreamer. So the aging hippies throw around business terms with a frisson of stir-gratification.

To be a Burlington mogul, you’ve got to remember that business is not about making money; it’s about doing something you love. Life should be an extended hobby. (This is true for most highly educated Americans, but if you are in Burlington, you have to keep reminding everybody of this fact.) Moreover, business, which was once considered soul-destroying, can actually be quite enriching if you turn your profession into a craft with natural products like, say, apples and transform them through old-fashioned artisanship into wholesome products like cider. In your packaging you can exercise high aesthetic judgment, employing cutting-edge graphic design to give your product a cosmopolitan feel. If you own a restaurant or an inn or a cafe, you can transform your business into a node of civil society, a meeting place with books and magazines and toys, where people can come to form a community.

Many of the inhabitants of Burlington probably suffer from Sixties Amnesia; they have repressed the memory of exactly how radical they were in 1968. But even many who less up to their youthful infatuation with Mao are now discovering that the collectivist and holistic ideas that seemed so anti- capitalist in the sixties actually jibe with current management theory. The Burlington mogul seeks to flatten hierarchies within his company, reduce bureaucracy, upend technocratic thinking, empower workers up and down the line, foster teamwork, call frequent meetings at which employees from top to bottom are asked for their ideas and input, and generally reduce social distinctions between bosses and workers. This is exactly what High Republican businessmen are trying to do these days. Emma Goldman would have made a great corporate vice president.

The Couple’s Business Guide, a featured book at the Burlington bookstores, features 10 pairs who gave up careers in places like New York and Boston and moved up to Vermont and started making and selling things like Positively Peach Fruit Sauce, Summer Glory Vinegar, and Putney Pasta. These are Horatio Alger stories for the Alger Hiss set. The typical case study in this book starts out with a highly educated twosome disenchanted with their fast-lane urban lifestyle. They have a dream — to make the best jasmine bread in the world — so they move up to the Green Mountains and work slavishly to perfect their recipe. Then they discover how hard it is to market their product. But after five years of toil and tribulation, they have revenues of $ 5 million a year. Now they can rest on the veranda of their refurbished Victorian cottage with their lovely children, Dylan and Joplin, and savor the turning of the seasons.

George McGovern himself bought a New England Bed and Breakfast after giving up on politics, so perhaps it’s inevitable that up here the man in the gray flannel suit should be replaced by the man in the weather-beaten clogs. Ben and Jerry, the ice-cream mavens, represent the quintessence of Latte Town capitalism, and you can’t go anywhere in Burlington without seeing an image of their two faces staring down at you, like a couple of scruffy Big Brothers. They’ve got a new book out, Ben & Jerry’s Double Dip: Lead with Your Values and Make Money, Too, and like everything else associated with them, it is being flogged voraciously. In the book, they reveal themselves to be as sincere and playful, and as insufferably self-righteous and smug, as most people suspect. Like many members of their generation, they seem to think they invented everything. Companies have been mixing capitalism with a strong sense of social mission for centuries, but ignorant of all that, Ben and Jerry consider themselves the pioneers of this idea. And they are remarkably easy on themselves; they never seem to ask themselves sternly what gets lost when you wear compassion on your sleeve and turn it into a marketing gimmick. They never seem to wonder why a company that preaches collectivism and teamwork has a marketing strategy based on the glorification of its two Maximum Leaders.

Nonetheless, they do qualify as paradigm-shifting pioneers in one sense. They were among those who made a crucial discovery, a discovery that is at the heart of the Latte Town success: They discovered that the anti-capitalist ethos of the 1960s can be converted into an efficient capitalist ethos for the 1990s and beyond.

The trick of capitalism is that you’ve got to induce people to work hard and take financial risks, yet also restrain themselves so the wealth that flows from all this work doesn’t make them self-indulgent and decadent. The Protestant work ethic famously achieved this, encouraging people to become wealthy yet deterring them from enjoying their wealth so much as to become corrupt and flabby. The 17th-century Dutch piled up mounds of gold, but were relatively self-restrained, and always on the lookout for signs that they were becoming overly sensuous and immoral. In this country, everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Sam Walton has practiced a similar balancing act between enterprise and self-restraint. But the Protestant ethic has been in decline for at least a century and was finished off in many places by the sixties radicals who now live in Burlington.

In his 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell foresaw a world in which self-restraint had become extinct. He located two primary culprits: first the culture of modernism, which sought to destroy order, convention, and tradition for the sake of sensation and liberation; and second, capitalism’s need to stoke ever greater levels of consumption. Once you had massive consumer credit without shame, then people discovered that consuming was more fun than self-restraint, and so they would more and more live for the pleasures of the moment. Hedonism trumps frugality, display replaces modesty. “The culture was no longer concerned with how to work and achieve, but with how to spend and enjoy,” Bell wrote. In the 1970s, Bell saw antinomianism all around him, and his thesis struck a chord with many.

Well, antinomianism never hit many places in America, like the evangelical Christian communities. But even where it was strongest, among people who now live in Burlington, it hasn’t in fact led to perpetual rebellion against order, unabashed hedonism, or unrestrained self-expression. On the contrary, the denizens of the Latte Towns are remarkably restrained and have become hard-working capitalists oriented toward the long term. Ken Kesey hedonism is gone and forgotten; Ben & Jerry’s capitalism is what you see on the streets of Burlington these days.

The locals are not much restrained by the old puritanical or Protestant code. Instead, they have constructed their own ethos of environmentalism, healthism, and egalitarianism that makes it bad form to spend money lavishly or live ostentatiously. If they believe in nothing else, they believe that you shouldn’t damage your own body, which means that drinking, drugs, and carousing are out. Coffee shops replace bars. Self-disciplined activities like jogging and cycling are in; by working out, these people have reduced even leisure to a form of self-control.

They also believe in living modestly with nature. Their homes may be expensive, but they are not lavish. They still think of themselves as avant- garde and still cling to the trappings of radicalism — tie-dyed shirts, long hair — but these days, the avant-garde artist is living a stable, almost bourgeois, life. He may think left, but he lives right. The Latte Liberals emphasize quietude and living in harmony with the environment, not the grandiose or Faustian or Dionysian passions. And though they are wealthy, they still associate elitism and affluence with immorality, so the richest of them dress in cheap T-shirts and jeans. If you go through the local clothing stores, you notice that all the fashionable colors are faded browns and faded greens and faded blues, as if even vibrant coloration would be decadent. Even as their incomes shoot up, their radically egalitarian sensibilities remain in place. The Latte Towns have resolved the cultural contradictions of capitalism.

The 1960s unleashed wild liberationist forces into American society, but the liberationist antinomianism has faded away and the quiet communitarian side of the 1960s is now dominant. Free love is gone, but whole-grain pizza is still around. And the rise of Latte Town businesses has relegitimized capitalism among the very people who were its most ardent (and last remaining) critics. It has also moderated the Left’s political radicalism. If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, an independent is a former leftist who’s been hit by a workplace-discrimination suit.

Latte Towns may in the end be too insular and uninspiring for most people, and too squishy in their politics and too romantic in their view of human nature. But they have created an ethos that provides at least one solution to the perpetual American dilemma: How to be good while also being rich, how to be virtuous while being ambitious. Any local culture that can do that will thrive, and spread.

David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.