The Real America
Tomorrow I’m off to spend Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family in Little Chute, Wisconsin, a small town on the outskirts of that great sprawling metropolis, Appleton (30 miles from Green Bay, for you NFL fans). As someone who lives the typical urban existence most of the time, I find myself looking forward to the break as a welcome departure from the fast-paced routine. My girlfriend’s family are nice folks – middle managers at medium-sized companies, salesmen, school counselors, county workers. Her brother-in-law is the football coach at the local high school. If our visit extended through Sunday, it would include an obligatory visit to church for morning Mass. In short, I’ll be visiting those precincts that propagandists of both political parties laud as “the real America” and that coastal snobs reputedly dismiss as “flyover country.”
The cultural gap between the cosmopolitan urban centers and the rural hinterlands is real, of course – it always has been, in every time and place. The particular conditions of cities force urbanites to confront a much more diverse range of people and views, and deal with more complexity in their day-to-day lives, so they accommodate those experiences into their political views by becoming either more open-minded or more confirmed in their prejudices. People who live in small, homogeneous communities do not have the same pressures. Many experience life as more simple, with less requirement to constantly choose among a range of possibilities. Issues that seem urgently pressing to urbanites simply don’t rank among their priorities.
That’s fine. We live in a big country and there’s room for all kinds of lifestyles and values. In many ways, the differences make it interesting, which is why I’m looking forward to my upcoming trip to Little Chute at least as much as my recent visit to my own family in Philadelphia.
What I don’t understand is why the political debate accords the experience of small-town middle America greater authenticity than the experience of city life on the coasts. Republicans bash away at Democrats as the party of “urban elites,” out of touch with the concerns of “average Americans.” News flash: three quarters of Americans live in urban areas. The so-called urban elites enjoy high educational attainment, important roles in business and professional life, participation in the creation of the entertainment, advertising and technology that shapes the way we view the world, opportunities for travel, and the unique artistic and cultural experiences that only city living can provide. This doesn’t entitle them to anything more than a single vote per person, of course. But it seems perverse to suggest that the broadening qualities of urban life somehow make their views less valid compared to the often-insular experiences of rural and suburban voters.
Yes, any party wants to get as many votes as they can. But when Democrats start carrying high numbers of Main Street shopkeepers or people like my girlfriend’s brother-in-law, they’ll be winning by 80-90%. Republicans exist to represent the views of small town America. That’s their turf, just as rural areas have always been the bedrock of conservative political movements everywhere. But it’s just one constituency in a large, diverse country, with no greater claim to being the “real America” than Park Slope, Mountain View, South Central, Aspen or the barrio of El Paso.
Oh, and, by the way, most of my girlfriend’s family voted for Gore.
8:51:10 AM 
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