DAILY EXPRESS
Polls Apart
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 11.08.04
The day after the election, a friend--okay, my father--phoned to let me know me he was packing his bags for Australia. The very thought of enduring four more years of George W. Bush was too much for him to contemplate. And so it went last week, as a parade of friends and relatives, knowing full well that I supported Bush, phoned and emailed to deplore the country's ignorance. Echoing a question posed by Slate, they asked: Why do so many Americans hate Democrats? Maybe, just maybe, the answer has something to do with the fact that so many Democrats seem to hate them.
Novelist Jane Smiley's contribution to the Slate symposium is instructive: "The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. ... Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. ... The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America." Nor have such expressions of contempt been confined to fiction writers. The ever-reliable New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opined that "Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, minority rights)" while across the page Gary Wills likened Bush voters to Al Qaeda operatives and Saddam loyalists. "Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity?" he wondered.
None of this, to be sure, comes as anything new. In 1972 film critic Pauline Kael famously said: "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him." Over a decade later, E.L. Doctorow observed of Reagan-era America that "something poisonous has been set loose in the last several years ... something that is really rotten in America right now." During the 1990s, it was the Republicans' turn, as commentators on the right bemoaned the moral failings of an America that refused to demand the ouster of its philandering president. There is a word for this sort of condescension, and it isn't fear, concern, or anxiety about the impulses of Middle America. It is anti-Americanism.
The concept, Paul Hollander writes in his encyclopedic 1992 survey of anti-Americanism, "implies more than a critical disposition: it refers to critiques which are less than fully rational and not necessarily well founded." Critics of red America, needless to say, fancy themselves defenders of rationality. Or as Nation writer Eric Alterman puts it on his Altercation blog: "The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Neatly summarizing the views of this "reality-based community," Kerry volunteer Jessica Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts told The Boston Globe: "Many Americans have nothing between their ears. Americans are fat, lazy, and stupid. I don't like this country anymore."
If this is what passes for rational discourse on the left--and for too many liberals these days, it is--then just who is it that belongs to the "reality-based community" and just who is it that suffers under the weight of what the left used to call "false consciousness"? The question merits an answer, since Wills and otherwise sensible voices on the left--such as The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, who professes himself "alarmed that so many of our fellow citizens could look the other way and not hold Bush accountable for utter incompetence in Iraq" and "amazed that a majority was not concerned about heaping a huge debt burden on our children just to give large tax breaks to the rich"--see their task as raising the level of consciousness of Americans out of step with reality. But what if their own estrangement leads not to insight, but rather to blindness and, more important, to separation from the very Americans they mean to influence?
To be alienated these days, after all, is what Todd Gitlin once described as "a rock-bottom prerequisite for membership" in an establishment of its own. That establishment, comprising much of the media, academia, the punditocracy, and indeed entire swaths of blue America, forms a cohesive community--with its own rewards, norms, and favorite enemies. And as the post-election commentary has revealed, one of those enemies happens to be mainstream America. The conceit, of course, is that none of its residents are listening when the likes of Smiley craps all over them. But they are, and have been all along. Moreover, as nearly every election going back to 1968 shows, the more liberals become estranged from Middle America, the more Middle America becomes estranged from them. The latter reaction, needless to say, generates far more votes. So long as the "reality-based community" denigrates the heartland's supposed ignorance, reality-based America will respond in kind.
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at The New Republic.
