Steve Sailer on hipster localism, a la Brooklyn:

The economics of all this are wildly implausible, of course. But, still … We’re talking about a change of heart, one that has been going on for some time.

The main engine is, of course, a new wrinkle in status-seeking. That localism emerged first in the San Francisco Bay Area has much to do with the fact the Bay Area is, as ex-sailor Richard Henry Dana explained to Americans in his 1840 bestseller Two Years before the Mast, just about the most favored locale for human habitation on Earth. It’s not surprising that Northern Californians are building barricades of local solidarity against the rest of the world.

Similarly, the popular buzzphrase “sustainable” is deployed today to justify various silly undertakings, but it, in essence, reflects a deeply conservative impulse.

Perhaps the future won’t be contested between Left and Right but between globalist dynamists and localist sustainablists: The Economist v. Tolkien.

It may be that in the future the true divisions will be not between Right and Left but between two kinds of Right; between people on the Right whose binding belief is their contempt for Leftists, who hate liberals more than they love liberty, and others who love liberty more than they fear liberals; between nationalists and patriots; between those who believe that America’s destiny is to rule the world and others who do not believe that; between those who trust technology and machines and others who trust tradition and old human decencies; between those who support ‘development’ and others who wish to protect the conservation of land — in sum, between those who do not question Progress and others who do.