J.D. Vance is a thoughtful conservative who
grew up in southern Ohio, joined the U.S. Marines, and is now a highly
educated academic. He is the author of Hillbilly
Elegy and has spent a lot of time thinking about the gulf that divides
Americans between where he grew up and the circles he moves in now. In The New York Times this week, he wrote:
The headline from last night’s debate nearly writes itself: A
major party presidential candidate refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2016
election….Yet I found myself wondering, as debate
co-watchers gasped over Mr. Trump’s statements, whether any of the Trump
supporters I know back home will actually care.
The
answer is probably no. At the core of his appeal is a rejection of mainstream
political norms, and this is just another example of Mr. Trump slaughtering a
proverbial sacred cow.
The
question now is …whether the segment of our country that gasps when he
delegitimizes our democratic institutions can ever be reconciled to those who
cheer the same.
I keep coming back to something I wrote earlier: that
for all the racial animus around Barack Obama, what perhaps puts people off
more is the anti-intellectual strain in U.S. politics. There is a strong
tradition of peasants with pitchforks.
American Gothic by Grant Wood (Art Institute of Chicago) |
The country was born in violent revolution,
and split along state lines in the Civil War.
When President Obama, an Ivy League-educated
law professor, lectures the American people, many feel talked down to. They don’t
just hear an African-American man, although that may irritate them even more: they hear
possibly the most infuriating thing in the world, someone making them feel stupid. The fury at a cosmopolitan, highly
educated elite, and the split along levels of education, is at least as much
about this as it is about race or economics.
It may be that this anti-intellectual
uprising is worse than it has been because of the appalling levels of literacy
and reading—not just higher education. In the United States today:
·
14% of adults can’t read.
·
Only 13% of adults can read at a proficient
level.
·
28% of adults didn’t read a book in the last year.
·
50% of adults can’t read a book written at an 8th grade
level.
But it’s not a
new divide. It’s as old as the United
States, which was founded by an intellectual elite. These men had high ideals
for the ability of every man [sic] to read, and thus educate himself, to be a
good citizen and participate in democracy. John Adams, our second president,
said:
“The very Ground of our Liberties, is the
freedom of Elections. Every Man has in Politicks as well as Religion, a Right
to think and speak and Act for himself. No man either King or Subject, Clergyman
or Layman has any Right to dictate to me the Person I shall choose for my
Legislator and Ruler. I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any
Man judge, unless his Mind has been opened and enlarged by Reading."
Now, we all know that the democracy founded
by these male intellectuals had some huge gaps. Some of the founders were slave
owners; none of them recognized the equality of the Native people of North
America; and Abigail Adams had to remind her husband about the women. But that’s
why democracy is a process. It didn’t happen in one revolution or one
presidency. It’s ongoing, and it requires all of our participation.
Which brings me to the bar. I watched the final presidential debate of
the 2016 election in a pub in London. Afterwards, I got talking to a group of
young professionals who live here—no doubt we are the international educated
elite! But none of us started life
that way. There were two Canadian women, one black and one white; an
Asian-American man; and another U.S. citizen who was born in Pakistan. It was
this last man to whom I spoke the most. He reminded me that after September 11,
2001,
all men from certain countries, including him, were required to register with
the U.S. government. Many were deported. (You didn’t know that, did you?)
“It wasn’t a Muslim ban,” he said, “because
it was based on which country we were born in. But of course almost everyone
from Pakistan is Muslim. And it would have been very dangerous for me to be
deported back to Pakistan. I was, and am, very openly gay.”
Homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan, as it
used to be in the States. The reason most Americans now don’t have a problem
with equal rights for gays is that more of us are out now, so most Americans know
an openly gay person, and are fine with that.
But most Americans probably don’t know a
Muslim. My friend in the pub was the first Democrat one of his neighbors in the
U.S. had ever met, never mind Muslim. I believe that most Americans are
good-hearted and don’t mean harm to their fellow citizens, but it’s very
difficult to be reconciled when we don’t even talk to each other. When we have
no idea of each other’s life experience.
Democracy, whether in the U.S., Canada or
elsewhere, is work. As the Pakistani-American’s registration experience shows,
it can suffer setbacks at any time. If we want it to work, we have to
participate.
To quote a great country songwriter, Willie
Nelson: “The world’s getting smaller and everyone in it belongs.”
2 comments:
Very thoughtful--full of troubling insights, but also with a glimmer of hope that we can do the work of democracy: learn to listen to and respect others very different from ourselves.
Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment!
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