I come up here to Stanford two or three days per week from rural central California. And I’m amazed at the de facto segregation of elite Obama country in Menlo Park and Palo Alto versus the barrio in nearby Redwood City. I think I have finally figured out the modus operandi. Everyone here is “progressive”. That means, you hire Hilda to watch your kid, Juanito to mow your lawn, or Hillario to wash your dishes at the local restaurant.

You deplore racism, or even the mere suggestion that cultures are not all inherently equal. But under no circumstances do you buy a home in Redwood City (far cheaper in fact). Nor do you put your child in any school district that draws in the Redwood City children of illegal aliens. So it is a sort of alternate universe here. From 8Am to 8PM we have an integrated world where service workers attend to the mundane needs of the Silicon Valley and Stanford elite-before going home to Redwood City and San Jose where they live and school their children out of sight, out of mind.

My gut feeling is that integration, intermarriage, and assimilation even may be going on far more slowly in progressive Palo Alto than is true of more conservative Selma and Fresno. I’m sure the sophisticated exec here can make the argument that “I’m not social engineering with my children!”, but there is something nonetheless odd about hyper-liberalism in the abstract, and 1950s segregation in the concrete.