In the early '60s, I dated a girl named Jane; she used to mock her name --you know, "Plain Jane," and that sort of thing. It was the era when folk singers were reaching tha national stage after generations in the dusty background, when Folkways Records became prominent. Jane's father once told me, in discussing the craze for folk music, "we used to think about this music, 'well, let the poor people have their fun.'" His was a wry comment, recognizing at once his generation's being sort of bemused by the current fad as well as being, in some fashion, passé.
Nowadays, this same reaction could be applied to a certain strain of political opinion --I almost said "politcal thought," but that would be to misuse a good English noun. We have a subspecies of Americana which is reaping the rewards of generations of deliberate dumbing-down, which all groups have enthusiastically supported. This is the animus of what my brother calls "flyover country," the places that don't count in our political culture, no matter how they are patronizingly enthused about in the social culture.
I mean the "Don't mess with Texas" syndrome, the aggrieved reaction of rural and less-cosmopolitan places against the perceived (and real) cultural ethos of a bicoastal elite. On one hand, we have celebrities appearing at NASCAR events, to show their genuine American-ness. On the other, we have the ridicule --let's face it, that's what it is-- of rural and small-town values and cultural ignorance, which has been met with defiant acceptance, if I can call it that: "Yes, we're ignorant, and we're proud of it, because we are real people, and you are phonies interested in proving your superiority."
I don't know how this cultural split will end. There was a time when it was not irreversible, when people in the provinces aspired to sophistication. The radio exposed them not just ot the Farm Report before morning chores ("Chicago hogs, forty-seven and three-eighths"), but to Don MacNeil's Breakfast Club, from "high atop the Allerton Hotel in Chicago." My granparents drove to Chicago for the '33 World's Fair, loved it, and returned to their peaceful Kansas town gratefully: Chicago was all right for the people who lived there, and fun to visit; but they didn't know how good we have it here in the country. I think that was a healthy attitude. City mouse and Country mouse had something to offer one another, and, more or less, each one recognized it.
Skip ahead three generations or so. Now we have aggressive Know-Nothingism on one side, and on the other, well, let's be honest: those of us in the Big Blue places think of those rural provinces with pity, when we are being kind, and derision when we are not. No matter that they get the same global CNN that we do; that they can watch, if they choose, Al Jazeera USA just like we can; that the New York Times and the Huffington Post are just as available to them as, every morning in Chicago, they are to me. We look down on them. Maybe at first it was only a slight; we didn't really think about it.
But they felt it, more and more. We didn't just disregard them, we despised them, in some ways. they didn't know how to ride a subway; didn't have panhandlers or traffic jams. They didn't, in some fundamental way, understand the world. Although we could find nobility in villagers in Africa --no matter that they practiced female genital mutilation-- we found villagers in the US, who had cable TV and encouraged education in their children even as they mourned their departure to the big city, pathetic because they sang old Lawrence Welk songs for fun.
And reconstruction didn't end in the 1880s; it just took a break; it came back in the 1960s with a bang, disrupting ways of life and trampling on commonly-held assumptions. No matter that those ways and those assumptions needed updating; the process was seriously disruptive, and it was resented.
So the villagers struck back; and because of the unique characteristics of our polity, they found powerful adherents, organizations who could encourage their sense of marginalization and mobilize it for political purposes. We may only have 3 million people in Oklahoma, but we have as many votes as New York in the United States Senate.
Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" catered openly to racial resentment. Its adherents mobilized a constellation of views: the South's tradition of militarism, glorified by the Civil War (which, for reasons unclear to me, is still called, in those places, "the War Between the States") and all the more powerful a metaphor because of the devastating loss, like the Serbian reverence for a 13th century battle that they lost. But also the notion, generated by Reconstruction, of a purified time and place --mostly a place-- being defiled by the impositions of outsiders from an inferior, but inexplicably more powerful, place. It is the resentment generated by this, I think, that is most in play today.
But the Civil War was over 150 years ago; resentments need fresh fuel. And so those who saw a political opportunity invented some: let's emphasize and assert, aggressively, our differences: we have religious purity, while you are godless, symbolized by the cultural issues of abortion, gay marriage, and the like. Cultural domination, in the all-knowingness of the "east coast liberals" and the big-city sophisticates. As a defensive measure, being unsophisticated became a sort of a badge of honor, and that had become the supreme test of political virtue: being just a simple guy, not a Washington insider, and so forth. "Common Sense" has become a badge: the less you actually know about something, the greater your virtue, and the more your opinion is "genuine." And this has spread, dangerously, to a world view that despises all experts, be they diplomats or scientists. Resentment has changed into self-righteousness; and the righteous, we know, cannot be wrong whatever they do, or how they do it.
So here we are. We choose our views based on who else holds them. This has reached its apeothesis in the hatred of a black President, who, let's tell the truth here, because he is black, cannot be a legitimate president; and the things he says or does, regardless of whether they are identical to the sayings or doings of his immediate predecessor ("God in the White House," as GWB was styled in some quarters, as he led us into two endless wars), are to be bitterly opposed. And so a fairly conservative president, whose signature accomplishment has been to enable the adoption of a program designed by the Heritage Foundation and previewed by a Republican governor in a northern state, is considered a tyrant who should be assassinated. The faint echoes of the poisoned views, published in Texas in November 1963, of a previous northern democrat in the White House, are hard to overlook.
Well, the poor people are having their fun; it's fun, after all, to be united in a desperate fight against --well, against anything, right? especially if we are doomed to defeat, and unfairly because we are in the Right. This worldview has been encouraged during the entire Obama administration by the Republican Party, which now finds itself out of control and in danger of ceasing to be a national party, to the detriment of us all.
Fun's fun; but we need some responsible leadership on the Right. And it will have to start with telling the truth to the troops. That's going to be hard, because the potential leaders long ago stopped telling themselves the truth. And the Truth is, no one has a trademark on virtue, or on being right, or on patriotism or good sense. And sometimes we have to do what's best for us all, even if it may not, today, be best for me.
