The ugly need to have some group we can look down upon may be a part of the human condition. In the South I grew up in, when two white men unknown to each other met, one of the most common ways of bonding was through a racial joke. Since those years African-Americans have developed social and financial power, and while prejudice is far from gone, its public expression carries risk. Witness the fate of the small town West Virginia official who made racist comments about Michelle Obama.
Many of us became ashamed of some of the old standards and we changed. When Barrack Obama ran for President people who knew little of politics, who couldn’t articulate in any substantive way the difference between one party platform and the other, voted for him in the hope that if they could vote for a black man for President they could finally put to rest any lingering doubt about their own prejudice.
Sometime in the late twentieth century our ideas of democracy shifted. We still believed in democracy, but were we really sure we wanted a mechanic who wore overalls with a white oval patch bearing his name to have the same voice in determining our future as a university professor in political science. In a fast changing demographic, many of us were ashamed of our working class roots. Jokes about Bubba helped cement any doubts about our perceived distance from these people. We were proud we didn’t know about NASCAR or pig roasts. Michael Moore assured us that as a class the white conservative voter over thirty-five had lost their teeth. President Obama described them as clinging to their guns and religion. In such esteemed company, how could we be wrong?
A car trip into a rural area became an expedition, fraught with danger. Headed to a gathering in rural Botetourt County, Virginia at the home of two professors teaching at Hollins University, I offered a ride to a young temporary Classics lecturer. When we left the Roanoke City limit, he tensed. He’d traveled the world, but not so much the rural South. “Rednecks with guns are out here,” he said.
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Sometime earlier, visiting my sister in Philadelphia, she introduced me to the painter hired to do her portrait. Assuming his interest in art, I showed him my brother-in-law’s Purdy, which I had out to clean, a handmade English shotgun from before World War II. I thought the artist might appreciate the wood to metal fit, the tasteful English scrollwork.
He didn’t want to touch the Purdy almost freezing at its presence in the room. In the most subdued voice, meant to confirm something, but fearful of offending he asked, “Are you NRA?”
He knew about the NRA from the New York Times. He didn’t know there was a nickel’s worth of difference between it and the Klan.
Dislike of the people of the rural South and West is nothing new. George Washington hated them, said they beat up and robbed his good troops, and when it came to a stand up fight against the British regulars they ran. But using their own tactics, they won when he couldn’t. In the aftermath of the war with George III they found representatives in Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe who wielded considerable power in how the new government was formed.
A wounded Democratic party howls that the grandsons of these men, the same Scots-Irish who only wanted to be left alone by the government, have elected a Nazi.
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Descendants of these men fought in every engagement the country has seen. At Bastonge in World War II a lightly armed paratroop division held the same German juggernaut that had rolled over the combined French and English armies, which in 1940 were larger and better equipped than the Germans. In France in ‘44 these Americans killed Germans at a rate of five to one against the same German Army who killed fifteen Russians for every man lost. The men from this tradition may not be the ones you might want to choose for your enemy. In some ways they’ve changed. Brown v. The Board of Education, 1957 did not survive due to the physical power of a handful of Federal Marshals. It survived because as a people we looked to our injustices and were ashamed. A belief that a powerful Federal government and a new economic globalism can bring the people of our great and as yet untapped interior to heel is strategic error. The British, the Japanese, and the Nazis took their turn and failed. Do you really imagine a powerful centralized American government fueled by the best of liberal thought can match their brutality? The way we change may be slower than you’d like, but it’ll come much sooner if you can learn to respect the good things in our heritage.
A wounded Democratic party howls that the grandsons of these men, the same Scots-Irish who only wanted to be left alone by the government, have elected a Nazi.
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I offer no apologies for the loyalty my family has shown the Democratic Party. No one who supported Hillary Clinton did what we did. We were there for them when the Democratic Taney Court ruled Dred Scott could not argue for his freedom because as property he had no standing in front of the court. We were there when in Cruickshank v. Louisiana, the same Taney Court ruled that no violation of the 14th Amendment occurred when two hundred black men were murdered. We fought a war for the Democratic Party. We were there for the Democrats when Virginia fought Brown v. The Board of Education, 1957 with its Massive Resistance policy. But somewhere along the way we lost faith that any one political party had all the answers, all the good. We don’t like everything the Republicans are going to try to accomplish. We wouldn’t have liked everything Hillary Clinton would have attempted either. Whether we like the results of an individual election or not, we’ll hunker down, endure and survive. You might learn something from that.
It may be time to take a harder look at those working men once considered a marginalized and defeated enemy of no longer any political consequence. Their power is undeniable. The last election proved that. It could be time to peer past the façade of the latest Bubba joke. It may even be that we could realize that education and value is not to be exclusively had from a university background. Could it be something universal and worthwhile might be learned from crafting metal or wood?
To create a coalition and win an election, a certain degree of hyperbole is necessary. It may be time to step back from the howled charges of Fascism to examine the people who won. If we don’t, the next few years are going to be much harder and more fearful than they need be. However, hard these next few years will be, one truism is absolute. The political pendulum will swing back the other way. It always does.
It’s only natural that an educated Bostonian might look at the role of government differently from a rural Virginia farmer, but we’ve worked it out peacefully before. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fought each other throughout their political careers, but they knew each other in a way we don’t know our political opposites today. In their declining years something softened, and they corresponded daily. On Adams’ deathbed he said, “Jefferson lives.” But he was wrong. Jefferson had died that morning.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
There seems to be a global devolving of objective discernment, in being able to relate the past to present and extrapolate present to future. Without the ability to assess quality from rubbish, or even determine that two piles may be made of the same excrement, it’s not looking good for government guidance.
Dear Mr. Jennings, I’m a privileged, white, educated, intellectual, Jewish cosmopolitan type from Chicago. I was raised with precisely the sorts of prejudices against rural white people and blue collar culture you describe. I was raised to associate the drawl or twang of a southern accent (even what I now know is a prestigious, genteel version) with stupidity, ignorance, political conservatism, homophobia, antisemitism, racism, religious fundamentalism, and all sorts of nasty things. Then, I attended college in a small mideesfern town. Everything changed. I’ve repented of my ways, having seen the simplicity and virtue and frankly, cultural complexity and beauty… Read more »