American Carnage and a $3 million Lake House
American Carnage and a $3 million Lake House
What's going to happen to this country when we hit an actual, for-real economic downturn?
1. The Forgotten Man’s Lake House
In New Jersey there are roughly a dozen towns that everyone in the state recognizes as Richie Rich places: Haddonfield, Chatham, Madison, for example. I don’t know if it’s like this in other states, but no matter where you grew up in Jersey, you knew that the people from those towns lived on a different plane of existence.
I live next to one of those towns today and over the weekend I was driving through it, down the main boulevard. The houses on this street? Amazing. On the west side the properties are enormous, expansive affairs with an acre or four each and elaborate outbuildings. Some of them look like boutique hotels.1
The houses on the east side of the street back to a lake.
These lake houses are something else: No cookie-cutter 2010s construction. This is an old-money town and every house is its own thing. These are all custom homes, generations old, with continually renovated interiors.
Many of these lake houses have flagpoles out front. I don’t know why. Something about water makes rich people want to fly flags, I guess. As I was driving down the street this weekend one of these houses was flying a Trump flag.
And let me tell you: This was not your ordinary Trump flag. This thing was the size of a tent. We’re talking about a car-dealership-sized flag.
Because I am a bad person, when I got home I popped onto Zillow. That house is worth $3 million.
It will never cease to amaze me how Trump simultaneously became the savior of America’s undereducated, rural “forgotten” men and women—and also the avenging angel of the upper class.2
If you have theories about the psychology behind this paradox, I’d love to hear them. But I’m serious here. Don’t just dunk. How do you explain it?
It isn’t just the class stuff that mystifies me. It’s the economics.
How does someone listen to Donald Trump describe the American economy as a hellscape and then walk out onto the deck of his $3m lake house and say, “Dammit, Veronica, he’s right. Look at this disaster.”
By the same token, how does anyone look at the real world and not understand how great things are? We just broke all records for air travel in August. This is not a thing you do unless the economy is in good shape.
The reason I keep harping on this stuff is because I see danger ahead. Here is a depressing thought experiment: