THE LIBERAL GENTRY

Amsterdam now devotes much of her time to the amateur sport of driving horse-drawn carriages. She owns five horses, one named Bradlee for the former executive editor of the Washington Post. The carriages cost up to $ 20, 000 apiece; one of them was built by an Amish maker. Amsterdam recently flew to Toronto to purchase lamps to go with her turn-of-the-century Stanhope rig, but succeeded only in procuring a 19th-century horse collar on the trip. Her husband, Jonathan Z. Larsen, is independently wealthy; though he edited the Village Voice from 1989 to 1994, he now devotes himself to environmental and charitable causes.

Now, this collection of data puts us at the vortex of many significant cultural trends. In the first place, we have a formerly glitzy magazine superstar forsaking the media monde so she can ride around in a carriage like Jane Austen on a cappuccino buzz. Second, we have the former editor of the Village Voice, a weekly designed to appeal to male and female urbanites with nipple rings, ensconced in some forest, racking up charitable tax deductions while listening to the birds chirp on his nine-and-one-half acre estate.

What we are seeing is the growth of an important class of American society: the Liberal Gentry. The Liberal Gentry is made up of middle-aged baby boomers who have accumulated enough disposable income to reject the mercenary values of unregulated capitalism. Instead, they retreat to privately owned estates in upscale rural America in an effort to simplify their lives, focus on their spiritual needs, and spend more time with their families. They are no longer going to put relentless pressure on themselves to become successful; now they are going to put relentless pressure on their kids to become successful.

The pilgrimage from hectic and distracted city life to languorous and earthy country life is the defining event of their new lives. The move is not only geographical, but from a lower to a higher moral plane, and it demands a wholesale change of wardrobe, furniture, household implements, and other products. So the drive to simplify one’s life involves frantic consumer spending, because the Liberal Gentry must purge the glitz and polish of their former existence and replace it all with the accouterments of simplification – – in the form of real estate (a private mountain), self-actualization equipment (carriages, fly-fishing suits), and household devices suggestive of spiritual growth (French bread ovens, Shaker-inspired computer consoles).

Theirs is an acquisitive spiritualism, because they use the process of shopping as a means to firm up their sensibility. Antique hunting is like an aesthetic Stairmaster session. It is precisely by searching for the perfect African artifact to go on the perfect redwood mantelpiece that sits in the perfectly renovated farmhouse that is situated in the most pristine 20-acre wildlife sanctuary that the Liberal Gentry can refine and demonstrate their taste and discernment.

So you have a class of people who do little work, travel constantly, and shop endlessly for items that will reflect their elevated position in society. In the old days, leftists would have called such people parasites and accused them of sucking off the production of the working class. But now, left-wing activists have a new name for them: donors.

 

Part the Second: Status Inversion

The December 8 issue of the New York Times Magazine published an image that adds to our understanding of the Liberal Gentry. It was a full-page photo of Dr. Paul Ellwood, an earnest Minnesotan who has left his practice and built a $ 2 million home in Jackson Hole, Wyo., whence he has been plotting to overhaul the American health-care system. Covered in denim from head to toe, interrupted only by the gleam of a handcarved belt buckle, Ellwood stands alone in a huge expanse of floor. There is not a stick of furniture, just 200-year-old spruce trunks (they were not cut down; they volunteered) that rise from the foundation to support the exposed wood frame and the ceiling high above. Though the house looks as though it is roughly the size of the Astrodome, it has been designed to evoke a Shinto temple. There is even an Eastern religious artifact on the wall. It appears acceptable to display sacred items in a Liberal Gentry house as long as they are from a religion neither the host nor any of his guests is likely to profess.

In this great open space, practically unadorned, Ellwood has achieved the combination of grandeur and simplicity — Conspicuous Non-consumption — so prized among the Liberal Gentry. Mixing the huge with the modest, he has balanced seeming opposites and so created a Monastic Palace.

The Liberal Gentry are trying to elevate themselves not above those who are economically inferior, but rather above those who are equally rich but morally and aesthetically inferior. When you get to the tippy-top of the status stratosphere, you reach an area in which the only way to go higher still is to go down. This is what is called “status inversion.”

When you have achieved “status inversion,” you have reached a plane so high you begin to see people so important that they do not have a cellular phone. Here, anything meant to convey the impression of wealth directly — European antiques, say — is suddenly unfashionable. The farther you can move away from the obvious detritus of wealth, the more elevated you become, so long as you can display the objects of poverty in a way that makes it clear you are just rolling in dough.

In his book The Refinement of America, Richard L. Bushman describes the invention of gentility in the 18th century. “Creating parlors as a site for a refined life implied spiritual superiority,” he writes. “Parlor people claimed to live in a higher plane than the vulgar and coarse populace.”

The Liberal Gentry are creating a new gentilia, except in a style that directly contradicts their 18th-century forebears. The original gentry covered up exposed beams in the ceiling, favored narrow floorboards as opposed to broad ones, buried the bulky stone chimney in plaster and paint, and tried to make every surface as smooth as possible. The Liberal Gentry accentuates exposed beams, favors broad planks, reconstructs vast stone fireplaces, and relies almost exclusively on rough and natural textures. “I didn’t want any square corners,” Carol Burnett says from her Santa Fe retreat, describing the dented and beat-up look so important to this set.

Now, the duty of all those who make a living by selling goods and services to the Liberal Gentry is to adapt to the reality of status inversion. The Liberal Gentry won’t sip bisque from a soup bowl placed on the smooth surface of a Georgian dining-room table, but they’ll lick quinoa off a battered oak board that once served as a work station in a French peasant’s pig sty — after paying $ 12,500 for the oak board. They won’t hang a Botticelli in their living room, but if you offer them a gnarled trunk recently unearthed from a Japanese bog, they’ll open their checkbook — and pay a premium if there’s still some algae sticking to it to authenticate its chi.

The beauty of the Liberal Gentry aesthetic is that the less you give them, the more they are willing to pay. A finely built Hepplewhite chair is refined and therefore vulgar, but a beat-up milking stool is authentic, rustic, and therefore virtuous and interesting. A hotel room with a television, radio, telephone, iron, and coffee maker goes for $ 75 a night. But a room in a bed- and-breakfast without any such conveniences can be full for months on end at $ 250 a pop. In the design of furniture and clothing, the rules are simple: Fire all your exquisite craftsmen and hire country bumpkins who build things rough and sturdy.

The things most desired by those who practice status inversion are, in the strictest sense of the word, reactionary. The objects may be tall or short, heavy or light, but they are all backward and primitive. The more obsolete something is, the more stylish it becomes. Horse-drawn carriages derive their beauty from the fact that they are not cars.

 

Part the Third: Reactionary Progressives

Richard Moe, a former aide to Walter Mondale who is now head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is another member of the Liberal Gentry — you can read his story in the October 17 Washington Post. He hangs a crude wooden farm implement -it looks like it was used to chase witches in early Massachusetts — over the mantel in his creek-front cabin in Calvert County, Md. Turn-of-the-century carpentry tools are arranged atop the credenza behind his couch. A wind chime made of old forks and spoons hangs under the exposed-beam ceiling. Moe is particularly noteworthy because he has mastered the newly fashionable art of woodpile design. Woodpiles are at once authentic, earthy, primitive, and anti-commercial and thus make an important statement. Moe has arranged his neatly cut beech logs into a tower of pre- modern elegance, which nicely sets off the handmade, unvarnished, unfinished, and unused broom perched decoratively nearby.

The pilgrimage from the city to the private rustic escape is an attempt to escape the tyranny of time. The simplified life must be conducted in an atmosphere of timelessness, so you will rarely see clocks given prominent display in a Liberal Gentry home. But you will see collections of items rendered eternal by their obsolescence — not only the carpentry implements of Richard Moe’s cabin, but also things like old typewriters, whaling equipment, butter churns, oak manure baskets, cans of liniment salve, coffee grinders, ice chippers, and hog scrapers. There is no business that offers higher profit margins than the transformation of useless junk into challenging objets d’art for the carriage crowd.

The greatest challenge for Reactionary Progressives is finding high-tech objects — a necessary element of the Progressive life — that can speak in the idiom of Reactionary Chic. I suspect a company like Bang & Olufsen will soon come out with a line of home stereos whose cabinetry is designed and built by the Amish of Lancaster County, Pa.

The question of how to produce Progressive cuisine in a Reactionary Chic environment has been answered brilliantly by the AGA 59-inch cooker. Patented in 1922, the cooker has an unadorned sturdiness that suggests it was once used to recycle horses into glue, but also features such conveniences as a warming plate, a simmering plate, a baking oven, a roasting oven, and a simmering oven. It uses no direct heat, only radiant surfaces, and thus expresses a genteel philosophy of life. It costs $ 10,000.

Another way the Liberal Gentry can hark back to the timelessness of the pre- capitalist era is to furnish their houses in OC mode (for “Oppressed Cultures” ). One firm already in the game is Sakiestewa Textiles, Ltd., Co. “For more than a millennium,” the company’s publicity explains, “native peoples across the American Southwest have practiced masterful weaving techniques, creating intricately designed textiles at once functional and symbolic.”

You can feel free to mix and match Oppressed Cultures. An African artifact can be positioned next to an Incan artifact or a Samoan artifact or an Amish artifact or an Assyrian artifact, because the only important ingredient in an Oppressed Culture is that it should hark back to an era long ago, a time before the advent of social mobility and the attendant pressures of meritocracy. (Scandinavian artifacts are often included in this community of primitive virtue, though the Nordic peoples are hardly oppressed; perhaps it’s because Swedes and Norwegians spend so much time in the woods, living off welfare checks, eating berries in yogurt, and sullenly drinking themselves into a stupor.)

 

Part the Fourth: Ownership of Nature

The Fall 1996 issue of Contemporary Stone Design magazine reveals that if you are serious about joining the Liberal Gentry, you simply must develop a reverence for rock. All rocks are natural, of course, but some rocks are more natural and thus more virtuous than others. Rough, authentic rocks like limestone, sandstone, granite, and slate are best of all — as long as they are mottled and not polished. Rock conveys the sense of historical permanence so important to all gentry, but especially to the Liberal Gentry, who are keen to demonstrate that their links to their property date back to at least the pre-civilization days of the Pleistocene Era.

The Liberal Gentry are keen to live amid nature. Now, for some naturalists, living amid nature means going out into nature, spending significant time amid nature in an $ 89 tent or a $ 10,000 cabin. But the Liberal Gentry strategy is to bring nature in amongst the more convenient confines of a home with an asking price of $ 2 million. Architect Larry Yaw was mountainbiking near Aspen when he saw a slab of sandstone he admired. So he acquired it and stuck it in the wall of a house he was building at the foot of Mount Hayden. Laura Goomas, a Saddle River, N.J., designer, took some Pennsylvania River Rock fieldstone and implanted it in a country kitchen. Home builder and developer Suzanne Brangham left the hectic life of San Francisco and had her Sonoma Valley house built of rammed earth, in which moist soil is compacted to form thick, sturdy walls. Now she lives surrounded by earth, her walls accentuated by the mesquite closet and bedroom doors, which squeak intentionally when opened.

Living in contact with nature is frequently buggy, cold, and uncomfortable. So bringing nature in and having it live in harmony with you is much nicer. It is far superior to appreciate the natural rhythms of the seasons when those seasons are separated from you by a 200-square-foot plate-glass window.

Given the general effort to obscure the barriers between inside and outside, curtains play a minimal role in the Liberal Gentry aesthetic. Instead, windows in renovated farmhouses are inevitably enlarged to gargantuan sizes to allow full natural vistas. How sweet it is to wake up in a bedroom with one wall made entirely out of glass allowing you to observe the sunrise! (It helps if you own the surrounding 160 acres so there will be no neighbor observing you observing the sunrise.) Nature must be owned and domesticated to make it intimate, which in turn maximizes its purifying effect.

 

Part the Fifth: A Final Vision

The Liberal Gentleman stands atop his private mountain, fuming because the planes far overhead are disturbing his tranquility. He ponders the irony that the Unabomber, who had so many good ideas, nonetheless went astray. The wind comes up, and so, snapping up his all-cotton Labrador Field coat, he bids a silent farewell to the family of moose he has brought in to graze on his northern slope. As he sidles down toward the house, his bandanna-wrapped dog, Rugby, cavorting at his side, he reflects as usual on the links between himself and Tolstoy, who also bonded with nature and was so nice to his serfs.

The sun gleams off the kayak rack on his Land Rover as he walks gingerly around his trees, careful not to compact the soil over their roots. His garden has been subtly terraced, using recycled concrete risers taken from an old slaughterhouse. Rows of wildflowers are meticulously maintained alongside.

A sense of peace and beauty sweeps over him as he sees his wife practicing her flute on an old bench in the wood-sculpture garden. Since she became corresponding secretary of the Montana branch of the Urban League, she’s had little time for self-expansion, and the winter will be busy when the bidding starts for her screenplay on the life of Bill McKibben, the Thoreau de notre temps who somehow manages to collect a living wage from the New Yorker (perhaps his paychecks arrive by oxcart). The Liberal Gentleman thinks it’s good to see his wife getting in some artistic time, and she looks lovely in the oak-framed sunglasses she bought for only $ 135 from the Herrington catalogue.

The Liberal Gentleman ponders what to do with his afternoon. Paint? Prune? Go down to the Inipi? But soon a vague longing overcomes him. For to be an artist of the spirit, as all members of the Liberal Gentry are, is to be perpetually on the watch for ever deeper communion with the essence of Being. Somewhere out there in the infinity of Patagonia, there is a purer piece of wool outerwear, a more organic coffee bean, a more rustic pine table to be had, a more interesting way to recycle 19th-century fish netting into a shower curtain.

Despite the finely honed natural balance the Liberal Gentleman feels on his mountain, there is a gnawing worm of restlessness, an incompleteness that even another trip to the Galapagos will not cure. There is some inner hollowness that cannot be filled even by another objet on the redwood mantelpiece. Truth be told, the Liberal Gentleman will not discover his Holy Grail until his deathbed, when he will rest his pate for the last time on the slate headboard, look up for that final glimpse of the Cherokee-inspired canopy, and whisper with his dying gasp, “Muni bonds,” realizing too late that contentment wasn’t to be found in a mountaintop retreat staring at a Finnish bread oven but rather in a manic brokerage house, hunched over a trading terminal, in a glitzy city amidst all the frantic and kaleidoscopic activity of the real world.

By David Brooks