The antistate views found on the right are anchored in rural life. It’s an antigovernment impulse born of skepticism of a state that often feels remote and, when it comes around to collect your taxes or regulate your guns, invasive.

In contrast, the antistate feelings for the next-generation left simmer among educated urbanites. In their case, it seems to be more a matter of being seduced by the idea of competition and the market in this age of globalization, personal brands and thinly regulated, self-organized bed-and-breakfast, car-service and crowdfunding platforms.

Their parents may tell stories about union membership or “freedom rides” to register African-American voters in the South. But the educated young now come of age in an era dominated by business-speak and business thinking. They massage personal brands as though they were the marketing department of Coca-Cola. They wear movement-measuring wristbands and track and improve their performance. They are entrepreneurs, with what a friend of mine calls “side hustles” — selling things on Etsy and renting out spare rooms on Airbnb. Though some may fight it, they cannot, in the main, escape Amazon and its cutthroat brand of capitalism. The stuff is so cheap! And arrives so fast! They have come up during a wave of intensive globalization, and many have resigned themselves to its logic of everything being made in the cheapest place, with the cheapest workers, for the cheapest price.

When they fight against that logic, it tends to be personal, not political: the locally foraged mushrooms on menus in Brooklyn and the Mission District in San Francisco are a small-scale elite secession from the ways of ruthless global trade, not a political resistance of it.

Saru Jayaraman, a labor activist for restaurant workers, has written of urbane consumers in nice restaurants who are more worried about the lives of the animals they eat than of the workers who serve up the animals. “Sustainability,” she has written, “is about contributing to a society that everybody benefits from, not just going organic because you don’t want to die from cancer or have a difficult pregnancy.”