VOTE LIBERAL, LIVE CONSERVATIVE.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme, mostly in the defense of bourgeois norms that the self-styled sophisticates engage in all sorts of circumlocutions to deconstruct, whilst living as if they're June and Ward Cleaver.  In a tribute to Theodore Dalrymple, who has been writing along similar lines for years, City Journal's Robert Henderson summarizes the argument as "The luxury belief class walks the Fifties and talks the Sixties."

The attributes that predict professional success—such as impulse control, academic aptitude, and personal accountability—also predict long-term romantic stability and marital commitment. Those who lack these characteristics require strong social norms and regular reinforcement.

Until relatively recently, those norms provided a framework that encouraged people across all social classes to adopt behaviors conducive to long-term success and community cohesion, which minimized the behavioral gap between those at the bottom and those at the top. People at the bottom used to be far more likely to get and stay married, obey the law, prioritize family stability, and adhere to the broader social norms set by their society’s elites.

But as those elites have become more insular and focused on self-perpetuation, the behavioral gap between them and lower-income groups has widened.

These days, though, you can live like Ward and June but you don't have to shop at Red Owl or mingle at the Big Boy or (gasp) bowl at Red Carpet Lanes or take the kiddos to a local amusement park.

Elites’ unwillingness to publicly model and enforce these norms has contributed to a growing divide in family structure, marriage stability, and social behavior. Elite families thrive thanks to education, stability, and delayed gratification, while those below them struggle to replicate these patterns, leading to deeper social and economic inequality.

There are now bubbles for the well-off to fort up in.

For the elite ideas-festival crowd, every basic human good is to be picked apart or deconstructed with smug condescension. With equal fervor, they rehabilitate vice by asking, “What if this bad thing is actually good?”

Though today’s elites speak the language of 1960s countercultural left politics, their private lives reflect the square 1950s morality their predecessors rejected. Look closely at a liberal Park Slope nuclear family in the U.S. and you’ll see little difference from a mid-century suburban Republican one. Both are deeply committed to stability and achievement, which helps propel their kids toward academic and career success. And both embrace a convenient moral justification for that success: in the 1950s, belief in God and country; today, a commitment to social justice and ethical consumption.

For "ethical consumption," though, read "leaving the big box retailers and the industrial scale eateries to the lumpenproletariat."  And never do the spawn of the upscale self-styled progressives ever work there.