Withering on the Vine: Martha’s Vineyard
Martha’s Vineyard is a resort whose population swells each summer as the wealthy return to their vacation villas. It is a place of yachts and celebrities and fussy topiary, of waterfront mansions and Ivy League professors and closed-off beaches. It is also a place of moral worthiness, as we understand it circa 2016. The people relaxing on the Vineyard’s rarefied sand are not lazy toffs like the billionaires of old; in fact, according to the Washington Post, they have “far higher IQs than the average beachgoer.” It is an island that deserves what it has. Some of its well-scrubbed little towns are decorated in Puritan severity, some in fanciful Victorian curlicues, but always and everywhere they are clad in the unmistakable livery of righteous success.
.. After all, Bill Clinton didn’t need to take a poll to know to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. For a man of his educational and generational background, that was an obvious choice. That was where everybody went. It was the place where the high-achieving, rock ‘n’ rolling generation that Bill led came together with the money people whose wisdom he and his well-graduated cohort had grown to understand.
.. Wolfe doesn’t mention the fantasy of an all-powerful “creative class” or the universal liberal conviction that you must have a degree from a “good school” to make any sort of legitimate claim on the affluent life; those toxic doctrines would take decades to develop.
.. But in some ways the Vineyard idea, as Wolfe sketched it out forty years ago, undergirds them all. The union of money and talent, under a veil of righteousness furnished by the backwash of the sixties counterculture, allowed our left party (such as it is) to walk away from its historic obligations to working people.
Our Martha’s Vineyard Democrats like to talk about inequality. It makes them sad, but it’s also a problem they have almost no desire to tackle. Not only does it not touch them personally, but their instincts, their inclinations, and their deepest unspoken convictions tell them it isn’t a real problem to begin with. People get what they deserve out of life—or, rather, they will get what they deserve once we have ensured everyone’s equal access to the SAT
.. Think about that for a moment: a blue-collar worker who has retired fairly comfortably, despite having spent years confronting his employer on picket lines and in grievance hearings. How is such a thing possible?