They are the reason our troops continue to die abroad. They are the reason for the current administration's staggering fiscal problems. They are the reason Bush is able to stack the Supreme Court and overturn crucial worker protections and reproductive rights. America is going to hell in a hand-basket, and it's all the fault of the stupid, backward rednecks in the heartland.

If you're a Democrat, maybe you've thought this way, maybe you've even uttered similar things. I know I have.

The divisive sentiments are understandable. But they're not healthy, as Morgan points out, they solve nothing. I have to talk myself out of vilifying the Right--at least the common people who align themselves with it.

The "liberal" political tradition, at its best, has always fostered an appreciation of complexity. It has encouraged a respectful desire to understand all points of view that bear on a particular situation, even those of people very different from oneself; "good" liberalism even encourages scrutiny of one's own attitudes. The Christian Right has no such tradition of inquiry to point to; time and again, neocons have boiled emotionally charged issues down to inflammatory cliché. There are no "shades of gray" in the rhetoric of George W. Bush; there is only a "right" and a "wrong."

I'd as soon model my own thinking about politics on the best liberal discourse. I recognize that it may be second-nature for some Democrats to do just that. To those of us liberals whose ancestors were brought to America on slave galleons, or whose people fled Russian pogroms or the Khmer Rouge, there's horror at the second Bush term, but also a detachment that comes of a straightforward disavowal: "We never had anything to do with electing this man's likes, in our whole time in America."

To those of us Democrats of "white" ethnicity, whose families have been in the New World many generations, horror at red states is not so simple. I'd wager that the loudest screams at the Bush second term, the screechiest vilification of the religious Right, has indeed come from the mouths and pens of "white" liberals, like me.

My earliest American ancestors on both sides arrived in New England from Britain in the 1700s. Over the next centuries, the two families migrated westward, from Vermont and Massachusetts, to New York, to Ohio, to Illinois, to Iowa and Nebraska, and onwards. The family would stay in one place for as long as a generation, then one son would pick up and moved his own brood to points further west. The basic trajectory of my English/Scots/Scots-Irish/Danish forbears isn't so different, I think, from that in many other North American family histories.

My parents made it clear to California, though neither was born here. They begat me, and I've been here ever since.

What about branches of the family that halted their migration at some point, who "stayed behind," in places like Ohio?

I have a persistent fantasy about the descendent of a remote cousin who did not continue the family's westward trajectory.

She was delighted a few years ago to get out of the trailer park, and into her own tiny brick bungalow on the outskirts of town. She works at Wal-Mart. She smokes Kools and gets all her news from the Fox network. She attends a fundamentalist church. She regularly looks in on her own father and babysits many hours each week for her eldest daughter, a single mom, who is still a bit wild. She and I are two months apart in age. Unbeknownst to either of us, our great-great grandfathers were brothers, one of whom taught the other to shoot, and who sat jointly for a portrait with their young wives.

She voted in the last election for George W. Bush and defends him still.

My Ohio cousin and I share deep common notions of "place" and "tribe." We are both sprung from the very same bedrock white, Protestant strain in American culture that has fomented the neoconservative movement in recent decades. My liberal disappointment in my Ohio kin's "backwardness," then, feels almost personal.

To my disappointment over sharp ideological differences with kin, add the unique "sting" of fate, or happenstance, in regard to my own ideological development.

The American mythology of the coasts and the "fly-over zone" is modern-day manifest destiny. A friend who moved to Bloomington, Indiana from the Bay Area declared, "Anyone interesting who's born here, anyone with any character at all, leaves this place as soon as they can get out. They flee to Boston or to San Francisco." It's popular folklore that the coastal cities select for a certain cut of humanity; people live on the liberal, cosmopolitan edges of the continent because they're "intelligent." People live in the culturally conservative American heartland, because, well, they're "who's left," when the people who are going to leave, go.

Relocating to one coast or the other from the heartland is one spin on the American romance of "picking up and moving somewhere better," a coming-of-age, by dint of personal vision, determination, and courage. It's a myth I have not personally enacted. I was born in California; upon graduation from high school, I moved a short distance to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I have lived ever since. Ending up a Democrat, in one of the most liberal metropolitan areas in America, hasn't felt to me like a choice.

I am a product of my cultural surroundings, as my Ohio cousin is a product of hers. It's only one more straw, being liberal kin to Republicans, and then not being able to take credit for being ideologically "self-made." It's a critical way I cannot distinguish myself. You can see why others in my position are irritated.
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