The Real Americans
At a time when it seems that one of the major parties could not be more hostile to the country’s interests, it is also curious how securely they assert their American identity.
Those who criticize the President are enemies of America; those who criticize our military decisions disrespect the troops; those who propose even modest increases to our social safety nets are fomenting a communist takeover of our once proud nation; the list goes on ad nauseam and we’re all familiar. The GOP believes it speaks for the “True America.”
Of course, those on the left have fought these characterizations as long as they’ve been put forth. But too many have embraced and internalized the root of these so-called patriots’ self-lionization. We have bought into the idea that conservatives, rural folk, people who speak with Southern twangs or Midwestern lilts and ride tractors, are the “real Americans.”
Every Democratic politician must roll through the Midwest and the rural South and tell them how wonderful they are. Sure, perhaps it’s lip service, or a savvy understanding of the realities of the Electoral College. But if it gets votes, it gets votes for a reason — it works because the American psyche has collectively convinced these people that they are the best of us, and therefore no one will earn their votes without paying proper tribute. The Republican party makes its political living on lionizing rural America. The Democrats, constantly overcompensating for bad-faith criticism casting them as “ivory tower elites,” will munch as many corn dogs and fried twinkies as it takes to show these proud people that underneath the suit and tie beats the heart of a True American that thinks and acts like country folk.
From the left, it seems to be pandering for moderates and swing voters, but that doesn’t explain why the GOP does it. From the right, it seems to be stoking the base, but that doesn’t explain why the Democrats do it. And rural Americans are the only demographic that have their egos stroked quite so vigorously by American politicians on both sides of the aisle: neither Democrats nor Republicans flock to affluent areas of techie cities to wolf down Banh Mis that cost $15 from a food truck and compete about whose organic coffee has more ethical harvesting practices. Neither Democrats nor Republicans visit communities of color and compete to best emulate the various cultures that thrive within them (what they do there is a whole other discussion).
When the GOP loses an election, they do not kick themselves wondering how they could have possibly reached out to the LGBTQ community better, how their rhetoric might have alienated the “real Americans” that live in urban settings and work retail for lower wages than coal miners. Fox News does not run story after story after story of a columnist’s interview with “salt-of-the-earth” gig economy workers over a soy latte at an Austin Starbucks. They take solace in knowing that they won The Real America, and it was only voter fraud or illegal immigration or those damn socialists that ruined everything.
When the Democrats lose, we agonize. We poke, prod, criticize, and interrogate campaigns and politicians that just didn’t seem to kowtow to rural voters quite dramatically enough. Sometimes even in the wake of victory, we force-feed NYT and WaPo readers interviews and thinkpieces about our failures to make rural Americans feel sufficiently admired and respected. Humbled and humiliated, the media drags us into diner after diner to hear a man in a trucker cap speak with authority about what we did wrong. When Democrats lose, it’s because we didn’t visit Sue and Jeff Everyman on Main Street, IA quite as many times as we should have. We didn’t “reach out.” We failed to win the blessing of The Real America.
It doesn’t matter that our vision for the country’s future has held the support of a robust majority of the American public for nearly twenty years straight: as soon as one crass Republican grifts his way into the Oval, we immediately switch to a language of defeat and deference. We quickly cede our leadership in American culture by affixing labels like “Trumplandia” or “Donald Trump’s America.” We lament that we “just don’t recognize this country anymore,” though we are comfortably the political majority within it. We internalize our failure to win the most landmass under an archaic, racist, elitist construct coded into our founding document as if it is a broad-based rejection of our vision by the most people. In doing so we not only sell ourselves short, but we trivialize the heart of the Democratic electorate. We tell communities of color, urban progressives, civil rights activists, and everyone else who aligns with us that we don’t value their support. Until we can get The Real America to sign on, we have nothing to be proud of and should seriously question whether our ideas are worth pursuing at all.
And we wonder why we have a turnout problem.
On top of the demoralizing effect it has on those who agree with us, the constant lionization of rural America feeds the darker impulses of nationalism and white supremacy among those who don’t.
When the idea is ingrained in the minds of the American populace that those who skew conservative are The Real America, it should not shock us when The Real Americans start telling the rest of us that “if you don’t like it, leave,” as if they are Management and we are just rowdy barflies making a fuss. It should not shock us when The Real Americans liken immigration to home invasion, as if this country is their property and it doesn’t matter that other people who live here don’t mind sharing the space. It should not shock us that The Real Americans view their own interests and voices as the only ones that truly matter, regardless of how much blood is spilled, how many families are broken, how many lives are destroyed, how many people are thrown out on the street because they cannot pay their medical bills. It should not shock us that The Real Americans take no issue with a proto-authoritarian leader so long as he caters to their values. It should not shock us that they view their first-glance interpretations of the Constitution as the one truth. It should not shock us that they are comfortable ignoring or flouting it as it suits their desires. It should not shock us that The Real Americans are comfortable being unable to secure the majority of the popular vote for fifteen straight years, without a hint of self-reflection. It should not shock us that The Real Americans would let the rest of the world burn so long as they can keep setting it on fire for a paycheck.
After all, it’s their country. We just live here.
If it’s a new paradigm we’re after, we can start by bringing rural America back down to earth. America became a global superpower and cultural hegemon not just for our manufacturing sector, not just for our gruff oil men, rough-and-tumble cowboys and steadfast farmers. We dominate global culture thanks to centuries of strong investments of capital and effort in art, in music, in film, in media of all stripes. We created a name for ourselves on the world stage (whatever that name is worth now), because we are bright, creative, and ambitious people. We became bright, creative, and ambitious by embracing the value of education. And not just education in how to be a better engineer or CEO, but education in literature, in theater, in musical performance, in philosophy and women’s studies and foreign cultures. We dared to question everything about who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going, even if the answers made us uncomfortable. We should celebrate the heterogeneity of our culture and the chorus of voices in the American opera. Our grand influence on the rest of the planet is due to more than one slice of bucolic, bygone-era Americana. In this grand laboratory of democracy, there was never supposed to be a “Real America.”
So yes, rural America has heart. It has a distinct set of values and traditions that should be respected, learned from, and criticized where necessary, as any culture should. But farmers and industrial workers are not the “Real America” any more than urban professionals are, any more than talking heads or YouTube stars, Instagram influencers, actors or musicians, pro-choice activists or environmentalists or bartenders or baristas are.
America-ness isn’t measurable. There is no Real America. There are just Americans, in all our triumph and shame, in all our success and failure, in all our myriad cultures and faiths and arguments and rhetoric. We are Real, and that should be all that counts.
