Bobos in Paradise
By Martin Harris

If the editor uses my headline suggestion for this column, it will read "Bobos in Paradise". Even though I actually had a little hot-lead experience, sitting at the multiple keyboards of a Linotype-machine a very long time ago, I’m not a highly skilled journalism professional, but even I was able to comprehend that my preferred headline "Nobody Here But Us Authentic Vermonters, and We Wouldn’t Patronize No Starbucks" probably wouldn’t fit into the assigned space. 

Therefore, I used the short phrase, invented by author David Brooks, seven years ago, in his book describing upper-middle-class "bourgeois bohemians" whom I have, in these same columns, frequently described as the "gentry-left". These are the folks who, among their many and varied other attributes and accomplishments, have vaulted top-end coffee retailer Starbucks to unique levels of nationwide cachet, prominence and profitability. They’ve come to Vermont with sufficient funds and in sufficient numbers to be able to own and operate most of it, and have been using their very considerable political and economic skills to change the governance template, the basic economy, the tax structure, the sociological climate, even the demographic structure, in ways which they are quite confident will keep the State the paradise they migrated into in order to selflessly protect and defend it from every sort of modernity except painless dentistry and the monthly passive-income trust-funder or retiree paycheck. 

The phenomenon of high socio-economic-status young adults fleeing major metropolitan areas for exurban and rural digs is a relatively new one: the acronym YUPPY (Young Urban Professional) or its more recent refinement YUSPY (Young Urban Single Professional ) both reflect what Bobo’s used to be –geographically urban(e)-- more than what they now choose to be: play-actor ruralites who "farm" with exotic animals, organic greens, or designer cheeses, or run little niche-market stores for a few years, but derive their real incomes from the urban information economy, government or quasi-governmental jobs, or inherited wealth. Vermont income statistics for the last dozen years show a pattern of 500-percent gains in various categories of passive income, compared to near-stagnation (adjusted for inflation) for active, earned, income, and a 1/3 decline (adjusted for inflation) in real farm income. 

Bobo preferences in various political and economic sectors are fairly predictable: they’re against nuclear power and for mass transit; against big-box retail and for mom-n-pop stores; against McMansions and for "smart growth"; against domestic oil-drilling and for (safely distant) windmill-generators; against tire burns and for re-cycling, against modern agriculture and for the 20-cow-wood-barn type frequently illustrated in Vermont Life, and so on. In beverage choice they’re typically against Coca-Cola and for designer water, preferably imported from the Alps (Evian) with the bottle label highly visible; against cheap domestic wines and, usually, for the 12-ounce café-lattes which, at nearly five bucks a cup, Starbucks has promoted into a symbol of yuppiedom, or Bobo-ness, if you prefer. 

Now, however, there’s trouble in paradise. Middlebury’s elites –the ones who usually claim the right, based on superior knowledge and understanding, to decide whether "their" town needs a larger office supply store or another food supermarket, another motel or subsidized low-income housing-- have pronounced against Starbucks coming to town. And it’s not even a big-box store, the usual target of gentry-left opposition. 

Why would the folks most identifiable with such affectations as the café-latte object to its NASDAQ-traded corporate vendor setting up in Middlebury? Maybe because they want to be perceived as real Vermont farmers; taciturn and frugal (don’t laugh), and not the sort of recently-arrived brie-and-chablis urbanites who consider such beverage amenities as essential as the trust-fund check. I’m told, by people knowledgeable in such matters, that the modern class of VPR-listening REPpies (ruralized ex-urban professionals) prefers Carhart overalls to the cheaper ones from WalMart, such as the natives hereabouts are more likely to wear, (much as an earlier generation preferred old Volvo’s to Chevy pick-ups) but maybe that too will change if it becomes an unwelcome socio-economic identifier like the Starbucks café-latte. 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights