House prices in Berkeley, California, are rising as fast as they are in London. A small, clapboard San Francisco-style house now costs at least $450,000 - and the university's professoriate struggles to live within cycling distance of its business. The wealth from Silicon Valley that Berkeley and neighboring university Stanford have helped to create is refracting itself in a new and extraordinary prosperity. It will be dented by the coming recession but not stopped completely, for the relationship between ideas and companies, bridged by local venture capitalists, is fast becoming the United State's new new thing.
John Judis, the leading American political commentator, calls it the rise of the 'ideaopolis' - a complex of hi-tech companies and venture capitalists clustered around a university. The firms themselves are much more permeable organizations than firms from the old economy; they live off ideas and experimentation and expect to form alliances with each other to get things done. Their spirit is as much collectivist as individualist - and the men and women who run them would as much think of joining the local country club as flying to the moon.
For this is the rub. Politically they are Democrats, just as are many of the teachers, health workers, technicians and myriad of small service-sector firms that have sprung up to cater to their needs. Nobody sees themselves as born into a career - they choose their jobs and their accompanying lifestyles. They are as impervious to the claims of the US's proselytizing religious sects as you and take racial and sexual equality for granted. As a friend in Marin County, San Francisco, says, it's not just tolerance but a cosmology of tolerance. These 'free workers' look to government to fund their universities, regulate the environment, promote civil rights and underwrite universal health care and pensions. They are as appalled by the Bush administration as any European.
After another embarrassing week of unilateral Bush action, refusing to sign up to the toughened chemical weapons treaty because it would infringe US sovereignty and damage its commercial interests (as the American negotiating team acknowledged), the emergence of the ideaopolis and its accompanying liberal ideology is important. For 30 years American conservatism has been on the march fighting what Newt Gingrich once called a war without blood, and has pulled the whole discourse of American - and British - politics significantly to the Right. In the US this is laced with the conservative view that it is a sacred civilization representing mankind's best hope and that it has a responsibility to God not to get entangled with less blessed foreigners. Hence George W. Bush.
But Bush does not speak for every American. He lost the popular vote in the election by 600,000 and only became President after a partisan and crooked intervention by a conservative dominated Supreme Court. He had to accommodate the emerging dominant culture in the US by talking of 'compassionate conservatism' and committing to the improvement of public education. This may have been forgotten, but it was essential to his marshaling even the minority of votes that he did assemble.
Even that minority is under threat. The rise of American conservatism and its global consequences was built on the economic renaissance of the old conservative confederacy forming an alliance with the western, Rockie Mountain states, and California. The Bible Belt and the anti-gun control part of the US were given new moral legitimacy by Hayekian libertarians, and an economic program by the free market economists of the University of Chicago. The Democrats were forced back into their redoubts in the industrialized north and northeast, and even then had to compromise their liberalism just to hold on.
But a look at the voting patterns shows how the US electoral map is changing. The coalition that Clinton put together has begun to put down roots in individual states and districts. The Democrats held their old redoubts - and made important advances in any district linked to an ideaopolis. North Carolina's research triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, for example, went solidly Democrat.
The other big influence is the rise of the Hispanic and Asian vote in the south and west where the Democrats respectively have an average of 67 and 54 per cent support. With Afro Americans, 90 per cent of whom vote Democrat, these minority voters now account for nearly a fifth of the electorate - and are growing faster than the white population. The reason why the Republicans have lost California irredeemably is not only the botched deregulation of the electricity industry and accompanying power cuts, but also the size of its Hispanic vote.
We shouldn't go overboard; this is the US, after all, which does not even have a social democrat tradition - and the conservative intellectual revolution is going to take decades to reverse. But some of the worst aspects of the American Right, which have been so wholeheartedly imported into Britain - an enthusiasm for tax cuts at any price, a mania for deregulation and privatization and the collapse in support for the public realm - are beginning to be challenged. Part of the reason Bush sounds such a hysterical note of crisis to justify any aspect of his policy - from National Missile Defense to an energy policy to head off a hitherto undetected energy crisis - is that he is operating against an increasingly hostile culture. Crisis is a tool of legitimization.
This has crucial implications for Britain. Blair wants to be America's friend, and as a politician who has been formed in the years of Conservative ascendancy, finds it hard to believe that liberalism or social democracy could be anything other than losing political philosophies. He is wrong. The reason for New Labour winning Guildford at the general election is the same as the Democrats winning three of the five Congressional districts in Rhode Island - a bastion of Republicanism.
The protesters against capitalism at Genoa are not alien beings, as Blair wanted to characterize them; they are the more extreme end of a movement that is happening everywhere - a sense that there is a role for public endeavor and that capitalism should operate within limits. If he and Gordon Brown were to stand up for what the Left believe in - whether over internationalism, regulated capitalism or the legitimacy of organized labour - they would speak not only for a growing constituency in Britain, but one in the US.
The payback, in giving their own Government renewed direction and in speaking up for currently disenfranchised American liberalism, would be immense. They should ponder this over their holiday break.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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