Conservative Elites Prefer Living in Progressive Elite Cities

Many conservative elites prefer living around liberals to the average conservative voter

Where to live is one of the most critical choices we will make in life. My readership skews conservative. Since I moved from New York City to Carmel, Indiana, you might think that I think all conservatives should leave the cities or move to red states.

But that’s far from the case. For many people, especially those who aspire to succeed at the elite levels, it makes sense to live in big, progressive elite cities - even if you are a conservative.

Vanity Fair just ran a nice and largely favorable profile of the startup community in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles near LAX Airport. I’ve highlighted the scene in “the Gundo” before. It’s a collection of heavily conservative, pro-America, Gen Z, male founders looking to work on defense and other hard tech businesses.

For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real s—t, not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds….When it comes to “The Gundo,” the technological zeitgeist is, like all of these places, fueled by venture capitalists, who have invested more than $100 billion in defense tech companies since 2021, many of which are located in El Segundo.

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The founders in El Segundo have settled on an expansive terrain in which to express sentiments that might chafe otherwise progressive sensibilities. They have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their Lord and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue collar, often wearing blue jeans, clean leather work boots, and dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets. By day, the founders often trek to the Central Valley to launch drones into the airspace. By night, they can be found drinking Singapore slings at the Purple Orchid tiki lounge, or burning pallets at Dockweiler Beach, chewing nicotine pouches, and chugging energy drinks.

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During the three days that I visited companies in The Gundo, I saw three women and spoke to one: the wife of an employee at Valar Atomics who attended the Bible study along with her two young children. She had moved to a house near the beach with her husband three weeks earlier. When I asked if she was meeting many nice people, she laughed and said that she was too busy taking care of her children to leave the house.

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Sometimes it seems that the El Segundo founders are acting out a studied caricature of nostalgic Americana, especially on Twitter, where they frequently post about smoking cigarettes, bench-pressing, and loving their country. At least some part of the scene is pure performance. “It’s totally intentional. You have to make it cool,” says Cameron Schiller, the cofounder and CEO of the aerospace manufacturer Rangeview. “We’re trying to bring more young people into manufacturing.”

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s a fun article.

As I’ve said many times before, I’m bullish on Generation Z. They have a new kind of positive, can-do, let’s start building attitude that you just don’t see in the older generations. The Gundo is a good example of that.

This article is suggestive of a lot of things.

First, I’m seeing these sorts of lifestyle pieces about the Gundo scene. This is important, because people are drawn to a “scene.” So creating and maintaining the idea that you have a scene is important in catalyzing something real.

At the same time, your scene actually has to produce something of real value, whether that’s music or military drones. The Gundo needs to actually produce real companies with real products and real exits. It’s the nature of scenes to be ephemeral, so they don’t have forever to make this to happen.

Secondly, I’m very struck that the epicenter of the young, high talent, conservative, pro-America, pro-Jesus startup community is…..Los Angeles. That is, they are in what’s effectively a neighborhood of an extremely progressive elite coastal city in one of America’s bluest states.

Essentially all cities are blue cities politically and culturally, so to the extent that you are located in one then you are located in a blue area. But Los Angeles is actually an elite center of progressive wealth and culture creation. It’s one of the elite citadels of progressivism.

Now, Los Angeles is a long time hub of aerospace and defense. That’s why SpaceX was based there. So it makes sense for defense oriented companies to choose Los Angeles. But it’s still notable that these conservatives didn’t even choose a red state, much less a less aggressively progressive city.

The Gundo is hardly the only example of this. There’s the “Dimes Square” reactionary culture and politics scene in New York City. To be sure, these folks are not exactly conservative as has been conventionally understood. But it’s still an interesting dissident phenomenon. And again, it’s in New York City, a citadel of the left.

Even within a red state like Texas, we see that a lot of the higher wattage and leading edge conservatives are moving to Austin, the bluest and most progressive city in the state. The most famous is Elon Musk, who just announced he was moving the headquarters of X to that city. Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist and founder of Palantir, also moved to Austin. It’s notable that Bari Weiss and the other dissidents who wanted to create a new free speech university to compete with the incumbents chose Austin to create their University of Austin. There are many, many others.

Interestingly, Austin isn’t even that big a city - its region is about the same size as Indianapolis - and lacks the sort of legacy advantages of New York or Los Angeles. It doesn’t even have a particularly great airport. But a lot of conservative elites are still choosing it. I’m told many of them are in red suburban areas, but they are still in the suburbs of Austin.

The best example here is movement conservatism itself. Conservative elites and their institutions are concentrated in New York and Washington. Even some of the ones that are outside of the Acela corridor are in blue areas, like the Hoover Institution, which is at Stanford University. Most conservative intellectual leaders don’t live in red states or redder areas of blue states.

This shows a couple of things. The first is that elites are drawn to elite cities. If you want to be part of the elite, then you need to be around other elites and where the institutions of elite society are located. That’s the top tier cities, especially the big four of NYC, DC, LA, and SF. If you want to influence the federal government, for example, you basically have to be in Washington.

The second is that conservative elites, including aspiring elites, actually prefer a progressive socio-cultural milieu. They don’t want to live around your average Republican voter. They don’t want to live in a very red voting community. They want to live in or near a nice walkable urban center, with lots of shopping, dining, arts and cultural opportunities, intellectual stimulation, and opportunities for new experiences. That’s a progressive cultural environment.

There’s probably a relationship here to the growth of higher education. IQ is positively correlated with openness. Cities are where newer experiences and fashions are to be found. Add to that the so-called “agglomeration effects” in the economy, in which knowledge industries become more productive in areas where talent is concentrated. These factors draw intelligent and highly educated people to the city.

In the past, when few people when to college and knowledge industries were much smaller, intelligence was more geographically dispersed throughout the country. Since the 1980s at least, we’ve identified intelligent people via SAT tests and routed them to college, where they then get sucked into cities after graduation. This makes many places like small towns even more change averse than they used to be, and thus even less attractive to the highly educated (unless they are somehow demographically transformed through some type of gentrification process).

If conservatism at a basic level is about wanting things to stay the same, that suggests lower openness. So perhaps no surprise that the educated classes in America, who are higher in openness, have been trending left politically.

This is a problem for the average conservative in America. They need elite representation. But to the extent that someone is an elite, he is less likely to share the cultural preferences of the average conservative.

It’s also a challenge for leaders in red states, who would typically be subaltern or lower tier elites. I see big possibilities in Indiana, where I live, for example. But they are unlikely to be realized. The cultural environment here is very low on openness (that is, it is extremely change averse). And high wattage and wealth conservative elites who could do amazing things here are unlikely to be attracted to the state. They are probably moving somewhere like Austin. (Luckily, we in Carmel do get some people who are competitive at the national and global levels).

Texas and Florida are interesting counter-examples. In Texas, they have a very progressive island in Austin that is attractive. And Dallas, which Nate Fischer argues is the natural capital of red America, has attracted a lot of conservative wealth and some elites and institutions. Dallas also has extremely wealthy old money enclave municipalities within the city of Dallas (Highland Park and University Park) that voted for Trump in 2020. It’s one to keep an eye on.

Florida has shifted significantly to the right in recent years. Miami-Dade County voted for DeSantis and Rubio by double digits in the last selection, and the city of Miami has a republican mayor, Francis Suarez. Miami, a type of elite city, may not be a truly red city, but it’s not a conventionally blue one either. I recorded a podcast with Mayor Suarez that will be posting Monday, so look for that.

Nevertheless, it is interesting that there’s such a strong draw of top tier conservative elites to the urban citadels of progressivism. It’s just one of the many cultural contradictions of place.

Speaking of the cultural contradictions of place, I wrote a column about another one, in which the conservative utopia as described on social media actually exists. It’s called Vermont.

I also wrote two recent articles that related to the topic of conservatism and cities. First, I have a piece in American Compass on why conservatives should care about cities.

Cities are a critical venue where society’s true elites live and convene: not the only places, certainly, but clearly important ones. Ironically, we see this most clearly in movement conservatism, where the leading intellectuals and institutions are concentrated in New York and Washington. Cities are disproportionately where the top talent of younger generations moves, for a time at least, after school. After university, the city is the “graduate school” that enculturates them into what it means to lead at the highest levels in the country. To lose the cities is to lose the affection of the elites, including the next generation of them.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I also wrote a column for Governing magazine talking about the Miami success story, both the success of the city and also the success of the Republican party there.

Mayor Francis Suarez is a charismatic Generation X leader who is the child of Cuban refugees and whose father was the mayor of the city in the 1980s. But while his father was a Democrat, Suarez is a Republican, perhaps the most prominent Republican mayor in the country. In the Miami area, which is very urban, dense and diverse, Republicans have done unusually well in recent years, a contrast to their weak performance in cities elsewhere. In 2022, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and GOP Sen. Marco Rubio won Miami-Dade County by double digit percentages.

Suarez describes what might be called the Miami model of urbanism. It’s rooted in a patriotic, optimistic spirit culturally imprinted on the city by those who found refuge there after fleeing communist and other dictatorships. “We feel a sense of debt and gratitude to this country. We are pro-America in every sense of the word,” says Suarez. He thinks this renders the socialist-inflected ideas of the American left less appealing in Miami.

Again, you can click over to read the whole thing. And be sure not to miss my podcast with Suarez coming out on Monday.

And as one further resource for those who really want to understand cities and their importance, this recent Turpentine podcast with Samo Burja of Bismarck Analytics is very good.

Cover image credit: Alek Leckszas, CC BY-SA 4.0