RICH REPUBLICANS

...Similarly, in Winnetka one is constantly confronted by odd juxtapositions, mingling bourgeois traditionalism with anti-bourgeois radicalism...

...The owners of large properties, the theory went, have a stake in the long-term health of the country, since they hope to pass their lands down through the generations...

...If the New York Times tells them that soft money is hurting democracy, they're for whatever might go by the name of campaign-finance reform...

...Escamilla lost...

...Your kids will grow up without moral instruction and will flounder...

...they don't work up justifications for them...

...Basically, Rich Republicans feel that the problem with their party is that it doesn't have a sufficiently tough membership committee...

...Conservatives say they admire the stolid bourgeois values, but when they actually see them embodied by Rich Republicans, conservatives find them appalling...

...women has been transformed...

...They go in for intellectual combat and confrontation, not compromise and Bismarckian tactical retreat...

...They lack ideological antennae...

...We were always taught that it was this sort of solitude and ennui that leads to feminism...

...The watchword in Winnetka, like that of the whole North Shore, might be 'preservation,'" reads the first sentence of the 1921 report of the Winnetka Planning Commission...

...The renovators appear inside the house every seven years or so like cicadas and install a new refrigerator with even deeper sub-zero capability, a new master-bedroom suite bigger than some zip codes, and maybe new cherry paneling in the rotunda...

...Conservatives argue that the community institutions that Win-netkans enjoy are actually based on certain principles about the different roles of men and women, about the structure of families, and about the application of religious notions to daily life...

...Thorstein Veblen ridiculed the rich...

...But instead of going out and enjoying life, the rabid conservatives treat happiness like it's some sort of calamity...

...They're so caught up in their sense of themselves as countercultural they even wind up in the lap of the tobacco companies...

...The median Winnetka 7th grader scores near the 90th percentile on state and national tests...

...Your family and community life will decay...

...This spreading affluence is a recipe for a nation of Winnetkas, or at least the temporary triumph of Winnetkan cultural hegemony...

...At the World Financial Center in New York, for example, there is a sculpture that shows greedy capitalists in top hats worshiping money, spanking one another, and trampling people into the dirt...

...They tend to value creative destruction and entrepreneurial dynamism more than social stability...

...If a politician comes up with a noble-sounding scheme to redistribute their wealth, they support it...

...They couldn't see a hidden agenda if it hit them in the nose...

...embodies the trend...

...ye shall judge them by their deeds...

...Some are Tudor Revival, others are Prairie School or Queen Anne, but they are all massive and immaculate...

...It used to be liberal intellectuals who longed for the drama and turmoil that put them center stage, but now the habits of the New Class, both good and bad, have migrated rightward...

...Affluence produces moderates who detest the heat and strife of a culture war and like instead the diverse pleasures of multicultural commercialism...

...But then kids started pouring out of the Joseph Sears Elementary School, and mothers popped out of the SUVs in great clusters (you can fit six kibbitzing mothers in one Chevy Suburban...

...When you ask Winnetkans why they are disenchanted with the Republican party, they sometimes go an entire six or seven seconds before they mention the religious Right...

...I've come to Winnetka to investigate the mystery of the Rich Republicans...

...Where that is the prevailing cultural climate, of course, people don't go around launching cultural counteroffensives...

...The high school is growing out of its facilities, and there is a local debate about whether to replace it with one large campus or two...

...And when movement conservatives rail against the Republican middle, they are actually condemning people who lead conservative lives and embody the conservative temperament...

...There are no weeds in Win-netka...

...The elementary schools in Winnetka send most of their kids home for lunch...

...It used to be, if you hated rich people, you became a liberal, but now you can find resentment of the sluggish rich on the right at least as much as on the left...

...Some of the parents have heard, however, that there are some barbaric Republican radicals in Washington who are talking about school choice and vouchers that would endanger the institution that serves them so well...

...For a few minutes it was all happy pandemonium as the kids, carrying their musical instruments, baseball gloves, and collages, found their moms, bounding about with their extraordinarily high cheekbones, thin hips, and running shoes—and after a little dance of greetings and "See what I made?," they all tumbled back into their Range Rovers to go home and snack in their Corian-countered kitchens and frolic on their backyard playsets...

...The Democrats won 25 percent of the rich vote in 1980 and 41 percent in 1996...

...Now on the North Shore, the corporate masters can get their makeover at the Avant Garde Hair Salon...

...The letters-to-the-editor columns are stuffed with proposals, and the packed town meetings are evidence of the townsfolk's passionate attachment to their public-education system...

...Not that anybody's feeling too sorry for them or anything, but where do they go for leadership...

...The American conservative movement has moved a long way from this original conservatism...

...for the wage earner...

...Winnetkans spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking and talking about their schools...

...Affluence produces environmentalists...

...Moderate Republicans may not be as loud as these conservatives—there are no moderate Republican magazines or moderate Republican pundits (at least since Robert Novak and George Gilder went right...

...The homeowners have paid a $100,000 to $150,000 premium to get into this school district, and they are getting their money's worth...

...Right-wingers screech out an endless stream of radical and loopy ideas—destroy the IRS, scrap the tax code, voucherize the schools—though in reality they have no practical knowledge of anything...

...Until this evening, Christendom was merely a concept for me...

...You couldn't get away with an ad like that today...

...The mystery is that, at least on national and ideological issues, they are becoming less and less Republican...

...The country is at peace, the economy is booming, crime rates are dropping, and there is an ever-growing number of excellent family-vacation destinations...

...From the time the Winnetkans wake up in the morning and first set foot on their preheated bathroom floor, to the waning moments of the evening, when they hit the remote to turn off the gas fireplace, they are reminded that life is good, America is just, and nothing should ever change...

...The conservatives make their case, they write their devastating essays, but the Rich Republicans never respond...

...This hunger for political status, conservatives believe, turns the Rich Republicans into perpetual dupes...

...In short, the large property owners are conservative in the old-fashioned sense of the word, treasuring stability more than change, concrete possessions more than abstract notions...

...There was a move recently on the part of the working parents to have lunch facilities put into the schools...

...The National Journal recently reported that the Democratic vote in America's richest 261 towns has risen in every presidential contest over the past two decades...

...From the perspective of the Rich Republicans, the conservatives are addicted to strife...

...He's also pro-choice, rejecting the gag rule that would have banned abortion counseling at federally funded clinics...

...In the 18th and 19th centuries, when the franchise was being extended beyond the propertied classes, the subject was more on people's minds...

...Reading through the responses for the past few decades, you are struck by how hawklike Winnetkans are when it comes to preserving local order...

...If their trophy wives tell them that being pro-choice carries more prestige with the ladies on the exercycles, then they write a check to Planned Parenthood...

...Many of the accouterments of the 1960s, which were invented as an alternative to suburban life, have now been assimilated by the suburbanites and sit cheek by jowl with the traditional objets they were meant to repudiate...

...Or you can rebel against the furniture of the colonialists and ally yourself with the colonial victims...

...You can go to stores like Cassella Interiors that sell African living-room chairs, masks, and wall totems—Frantz Fanon decor for the haute bourgeoisie...

...And if This is where they live: Winnetka, III., 1990...

...Even the garages are spotless inside, with baby joggers hanging neatly from pegs, the Little Tykes kiddie cars arrayed in perfect rows, and the floors swept and mopped...

...If a fashionable play attacks rich suburbanites, they flock to it...

...The avantgarde used to produce terrorists to blow up the capitalist overlords...

...All of this means that Winnetka has retained its archaic formality...

...They saw themselves as the American elite, obligated to serve as the guardians of America's ideology, the instructors to the masses in matters of etiquette and behavior, the leaders and standard-setters in cultural, economic, and political affairs...

...Year after year, the residents call for tighter zoning regulations and stricter enforcement of the current ones...

...But when it comes to the way people actually live, little has changed...

...He tends to support spending cuts but oppose Republican tax cuts...

...There are almost no bumper stickers on the cars, or loose toys or decorations scattered about the lawns...

...Edmund Burke called the owners of great property the "ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth...

...To be elected in Winnetka you have to demonstrate you are on the correct side of the cultural divide that splits the GOP between the sane moderates and the Bible-thumping crazies...

...Rich Republicans are, in the view of right-wingers, narrow, gutless, unimaginative, materialistic, selfish, and bland...

...The Rich Republicans, on the other hand don't fight, they co-opt...

...Up the road, a store called Material Possessions sells a Moroccan bird-house for $295 for your multicultural mantelpiece, and Zig and Tig sells oversized Indian furniture for those who favor the funky château look...

...That leaves the Winnetkans in the position of affluent orphans: Newt Gingrich doesn't speak for them, and neither does Dick Armey or Trent Lott...

...But I saw few nannies here...

...The GOP was trundling along pretty well when suddenly all these people with Democratic parents started pouring out of their oversized churches and think tanks, calling themselves Republicans and screaming for revolution...

...you walk through the residential neighborhoods, every block or so you come across a young mother looking a little bored as her toddler crouches to inspect a pebble...

...But it went nowhere, so some kids brown-bag it, while the others head for Mom's kitchen...

...If there is one constant in all those movies, it is that the adults in affluent suburbs are smug, stupid, cold, and selfish...

...The shallow person wants last cars and glitz, but anyone with a broader worldview longs for the kind of home they have in Winnetka, 1ll...

...and in the Senate race, New Trier voters decisively preferred the Democratic candidate, Dick Durbin, to the conservative Republican, Al Salvi...

...Compared with the right-wingers, who are always quick to detect an assault on their values, the Rich Republicans seem to have developed a bland obliviousness to cultural attack...

...A thousand movies made them villains...

...This year, New Trier High School is sending 8 kids to Stanford, 7 to Johns Hopkins, 10 to Northwestern, 24 to Michigan, and 20 to the Ivy League, out of a graduating class of 765...

...At the end of their meal, Shils commented, "Thank you for this lovely dinner...

...We talk about property rights a lot these days, but we don't often dwell on how possessing property—great gobs of it—influences a person's worldview...

...They are not big spenders: In 1994, 71 percent of the respondents said they were against tax increases, and 64 percent said they'd rather see the library close one day a week than raise property taxes...

...But then if you look at the topics for the discussion groups, you come across "The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness" and "The Creation of the Patriarchy...

...There are almost none of those cutesy suburban flags that hang above the doorways in many suburbs...

...One afternoon, I was walking south from Winnetka into the neighboring town of Kenilworth when I came across a street that had 40 or 50 Range Rover-type vehicles idling along both curbs...

...And thank you for the intellectual profit of it...

...And, one suspects, there is even stricter social pressure to make sure that Winnetka traditions are maintained...

...They claim that fantastic real estate does not guarantee them family happiness, ward off evil, or prevent death, but on the face of the evidence, I'm afraid I find that impossible to believe...

...And to start things off, the officers have included an introductory quotation from a Women's Studies professor at Duke: "We stand at the beginning of a new epoch in the history of humankind's thought, as we recognize that sex is irrelevant to thought, that gender is a social construct . . ." Can it really be possible that those women idling outside the Joseph Sears Elementary School in their Chevy Suburbans are chatting about gender as a social construct...

...But just before Election Day, Schoenberg sent out a mailing accusing Escamilla of accepting money from the conservative United Republican Fund and therefore not being as fervently pro-choice and pro-gun control as she claimed she was...

...The most important symbolic issues in this regard are abortion and gun control...

...It used to be liberals who based their politics on abstract notions more than concrete realities, but now it's conservatives who like to emphasize that ideas have consequences...

...he clearest difference between the preservation-ism of the Rich Republicans and the activist conservatism of the modern American Right is illuminated in the two sides' approach to the culture war...

...I wondered what a bunch of vehicles designed for places that don't have roads were doing in a place that doesn't even have weeds...

...There are strict regulations to ensure that new construction hews to the patterns of the past...

...Don't the corporate bigwigs notice that they are paying for art that depicts them as devils...

...They want to regulate noise, fast food, bars, tree-cutting, multi-family dwellings, store sizes, house additions, and "tear-downs" (someone buys a small house and then tears it down to put up a massive home that takes up the entire lot...

...They are more interested in preserving the won-derfulness of the present than in taking a flier on the future...

...On weekdays, Winnetka is a female-dominated place...

...Shils looked around and said, "I have felt more at home in Africa and India than I do in this restaurant...

...And they've never met a foe they didn't want to appease...

...The stores, cafés, and restaurants are filled with women and their kids, with a sprinkling of male retirees...

...A hundred novelists attacked them...

...He enthusiastically backs federal funding for the arts, gun control, and environmental initiatives (he's been endorsed by the Sierra Club...

...They rant and rave on Crossfire...

...They were conscious of their distinct social role (Michael Knox Beran calls that period the "risorgimento of the well-to-do...

...In 1960, the local Republican party ran an ad just before Election Day that included the instruction, "Ladies, please reserve voting time from 6-9 a.m...

...You become so diverse, non-judgmental, and relativis-tic that you lose your moral bearings...

...We now have a weird situation in which it's the Republican moderates who want to preserve the status quo and the people we call conservative who are hungry for change...

...But at least they are normal human beings...

...Escamilla responded by calling Schoenberg's charges "McCarthyite," but the letter may have had an effect...

...He opposed more of the items in the Contract With America than any other Republican but one...

...But over the past many decades, that aristocratic ethos, that sense of noblesse oblige, has been pounded into dust...

...If you don't defend those principles, but instead blithely dabble in the fashionable ideas of tenured radicals, then your suburban stability will eventually topple...

...There is a tremendous attachment to the past here...

...The North Shore suburbs represent only the uppermost strata of the American income distribution, but if the current political mood signifies anything, it is that the large mass of suburban middle-class Americans for the time being share the propertied and satisfied outlook of the burghers of Winnetka, Wilmette, and Lake Forest...

...Conservatives would say that you can't go on absorbing radical feminism or multiculturalism or New Left egalitarianism for too long without pretty soon seeing your own values co-opted out of existence...

...there's even a store that sells hiking gear for toddlers...

...Since when does Gary Bauer count as a Republican anyway...

...For anybody used to the hodgepodge variety of city life, the atmosphere can be a little intimidating...

...The women, by and large, stay home...

...Real estate matters...

...From 1992 to 1997, federal tax revenues rose at an annual rate of 7.6 percent...

...And Winnetka David Brooks is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...

...In this last election, Bill Clinton carried 13 of the 17 richest congressional districts in the country...

...Winnetka still has a Republican congressman, John Porter, but you wouldn't exactly call him a Gingrich or a Lott or even a Dole Republican...

...It wants to confront radical feminism, multiculturalism, identity politics, "Piss Christ," and all the rest...

...The newsletter of the Women's Exchange features pictures of handsome suburban matrons and the organization's prim slogan, "Self, Skills, Service...

...Just consider the recent films set on Chicago's North Shore—Risky Business, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Home Alone, Ordinary People, The Breakfast Club...

...Most of the homes were built during the first quarter of the century, when a dignified reticence was prized by the upper class, and the houses have kept that spirit even in our more casual age...

...Once, 70 or 100 years ago when the homes in Win-netka were built, the American upper classes did have a fighting faith...

...His voting record makes him an extremist in the pursuit of moderation: He scores about a 50 percent in the liberal/conservative vote ratings year after year...

...These days, movement conservatives rail against elites...

...It used to be liberals who railed against the complacency of the American electorate, but now it's conservatives who long to see a little more mass outrage...

...If a university wants to hire another Queer Theorist, they endow a chair...

...There are now 8.3 million American households with incomes over $100,000...

...If you're looking to fill your ample living room in Winnetka, for example, you can go to the old-fashioned stores with names like Knights-bridge to get traditional English-style furniture, paintings of fox hunts, and clunky silver tea services...

...It seems that in Winnetka, where these mostly college-educated women can afford to—the majority opt to stay home...

...The Winnetkans seem to sense that the way to preserve their beloved community is not to fight hostile ideas, but simply to absorb them and render them anodyne...

...And truth be told, if you had to bet on which branch of the GOP will have more influence on the nation in the coming few years, you would not put your money on the articulate right-wingers...

...There is an active historical society, which publishes guides to local homes and their histories...

...And this work is paid for by the rent collected from Merrill Lynch, American Express, Dow Jones, and Oppenheimer Securities...

...The men go off to Chicago every morning in their white shirts and gray suits on the 7:14 commuter train...

...A few years ago the writer Joseph Epstein took his friend Edward Shils up from Chicago for dinner at the WASPy Winnetka Grill...

...They seem to feel best about themselves when they are antagonizing others, challenging whatever is said, being negative about everything, hating every movie, feeling superior to every trend...

...We're often told that, since the 1960s, individual choice has emerged as the dominant value in American society, but in Winnetka the desire for order often takes precedence, along with that most conservative of values, the urge to make the future more like the past...

...They storm around the country warning about the decline of civilization, gnashing their teeth because Bill Clinton hasn't yet been flayed and quartered, and going into ballistic rages because some polluter somewhere might be over-regulated...

...You can buy Winnetka coloring books that introduce children to local history and architectural styles...

...the consciousness of Republican From the perspective of the conservatives, Rich Republicans get their opinions the way they get their dress shoes: They just go to Saks Fifth Avenue and pick up whatever is fashionable this season...

...Because as the country gets richer, more people start thinking and behaving like the Rich Republicans in Winnetka...

...Whether it's Communists in Russia and China or extortion-practicing activists here at home, moderates think the solution to every dispute is to give money and make nice...

...In 1960, Richard Nixon beat John F Kennedy in New Trier Township—which encompasses Winnetka and several similar North Shore sub-urbs—by 71 percent to 29 percent...

...There is no ideal personality type that rich people are supposed to aspire to these days, except to pretend that they're not rich or at least don't care about money...

...There are more realtors than people on the North Shore, but every storefront that isn't a real-estate agency seems to be a children's clothing store...

...In 1996, Democrat Jeff Schoenberg and Republican Tina Escamilla were running neck and neck in a race for state representative...

...This cultural divide within the GOP is probably unbridgeable, but it is deeply revealing about the mindset of today's rich, and about the character of today's conservatism...

...No wonder they drive away voters...

...They just go on living their lives...

...The Right wants to fight...

...The million-dollar houses stretch for mile upon mile through the North Shore suburbs of Chicago...

...If this isn't the sort of scene Phyllis Schlafly dreams about when she sleeps at night, I don't know what is...

...For example, when you look at the way the two sides in this dispute actually live, you find that the "moderates" often have more conservative lifestyles than the so-called conservatives...

...In those days the upper classes had an ideology inherited from the European elites...

...The Rich Republicans may not always sparkle with idealism or intellectual rigor, but at least they have their feet planted on the ground—as you would too if your particular ground had been so meticulously aerated, weeded, de-thatched, fertilized, and mown...

...It's as if their lifestyles were fashioned by Architectural Digest but their cultural attitudes were crafted by the Nation...

...Every year an organization called the Winnetka Caucus sends out questionnaires to poll the residents on local issues...

...Affluence produces preservationists...

...But they are tough proponents of zoning...

...George Bush captured a remnant of this ethos when he expressed his discomfort with the "vision thing...

...Therefore, they are moved not so much by abstract notions or social theories as by the need to preserve tangible objects and institutions...

...That's at least as true today as it was then, and one might even say that preservation has by now developed into an entire political philosophy...

...It's not really possible to say who wins the argument between the conservatives and the moderates, because the debate is rather one-sided...

...They come to politics with ambitious agendas, not strategies for preserving the status quo...

...All that is hostile can be reconciled by the balm of consumerism...

...In 1996, on the other hand, Bill Clinton edged out Robert Dole in New Trier...

...They go hunting through the backwoods of academia looking for seminars to be outraged by...

...From the perspective of the conservatives, on the other hand, Rich Republicans get their opinions the way they get their dress shoes: They just go to Saks Fifth Avenue and pick up whatever is fashionable this season...

...Each house is surrounded by a huge spread of flawless lawn and masterfully landscaped grounds, with hedges so neatly sculpted they look like they're made of green marble...

...Winnetka is an extraordinarily traditional town...

...Consumer confidence is at a record high...