...living in a lonely world. (©)
In her speech last week – abhorred by some, embraced by others, but watched by all – Sarah Palin managed to leverage her shocking inexperience into an embrace of “small town values,” loosely defined as, Sarah Palin’s values.
By trying to set our towns against our cities, Palin makes the vital mistake of imagining that, despite our differences, we don’t need each other, and the equally dangerous mistake of pigeonholing our towns & cities into pre-determined antagonistic roles. If we’re stuck in a culture war, it’s because people like Palin insist on re-digging our trenches when it’s beneficial to their political career. For shame.
We hear the words “small town” six times in her speech (transcript), and in the course of her paragraphs upon paragraphs devoted to beatifying the small-town life, Palin manages to appropriate everything good about America, and define it as exclusive to her and her way of life. Not content to simply extol the virtues of her hometown and its cousins across America, Palin takes the extra step of turning her praise into a sneering insult to the rest of us: her lofty rhetoric – “[small-towners] love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America” – barely manages to conceal the implied, “unlike the rest of you.” Of course, her disdain leaks through elsewhere: Palin’s slap at community organizers lifts up the rural poor while simultaneously slapping down the urban poor. In Palin’s world, small towns are great… but the rest of America needs work.
Certainly this rhetorical approach succeeds on the electoral front, by using Palin’s “small town” background as a conduit to transmute her dangerous inexperience into (ostensibly) laudable anti-elitism. But it also reveals her lack of perspective. Many Americans’ horizons may end at the borders of their small towns; but the vice president’s horizons must not.
In many ways, we are a “nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos” – or, at least, we tell ourselves we are. But the real picture is significantly more complex, and referring to small towns as the only “American” part of America is just as myopic & dangerous as assuming all small towners are bitter fundamentalists. America needs our cities just as much as it needs our small towns, and to set one against the other for a cheap political thrill ought to be a one-way ticket off the political stage. Our towns give us repose, relaxation, define our free spirits, and power our way of life with grain & steel; our cities bring different views together, and propel our markets & technologies to the top of the world. We need each other, and we can’t always be fighting the culture wars. Some politicians get that; either Palin doesn’t or, like an arms dealer, she hopes to profit more from the war than the peace. Both should disqualify her.
I don’t doubt that Wasilla is great, but small-town life just isn’t for me. Nevertheless, I respect those who think it’s the only way to go, and I’m glad Sarah’s happy there. Just so, maybe she wouldn’t like Manhattan, but I – and a few million others – like it just fine. And if that makes me un-American to her, then Sarah Palin isn’t ready to lead America.
I was on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard a couple of days after Bush beat Kerry in 2004. I overheard a couple locals talking about the election. The comment that stuck?
“How can the rest of the country be so stupid?”
Palin’s comments were a direct response to the ‘experience’ question and a successful attempt to frame small-town values as beneficial. Most of the country likes to think of themselves as ‘small town’ even in a fairly large city. It’s a part of our natinal identity for many, especially here in the South.
I would also tend to disagree with your claim that cities are places of diverse opinions. If they were then there would be a bit more unpredictability in the voting trends of places like NYC, Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago.
Posted by Progressive Conservative | September 8, 2008, 8:40 amDon’t you mean “isn’t ready to lead America”????
Posted by LMLM | September 8, 2008, 9:04 amThanks; spelling fail!
PC, I think the reason that cities tend liberal is because they’re so diverse in life experiences. It’s hard to be homophobic or racist when you live between a gay guy and a Chinese family, for example. Close contact forces re-evaluation of deeply held beliefs and confrontation with prejudice, and makes people trend liberal. I saw this a lot at Rice.
That said, I think it’s wrong to imagine that all cities and everyone who lives there is liberal, and I agree that small towns are part of the national identity. I think claiming them as the ONLY part of the national identity worth having is very, very wrong though.
Posted by Ames | September 8, 2008, 9:44 amSo conservative = ‘homophobic or racist’ ?
Posted by Progressive Conservative | September 8, 2008, 9:59 amI didn’t say that!!! They’re not “liberal” values, though, which is as far as my statement goes.
Posted by Ames | September 8, 2008, 10:17 amI think the reason that cities tend liberal is because they’re so diverse in life experiences. It’s hard to be homophobic or racist when you live between a gay guy and a Chinese family, for example.
If the opposite of liberal is conservative then….
Posted by Progressive Conservative | September 8, 2008, 11:02 am…we ignore the largest self-identified group of people, moderates.
Posted by Ian | September 8, 2008, 11:06 amPoint: Ian! Anyways, PC, I didn’t mean to imply anything other than that a racist/homophobe is “no true
Scotsmanliberal.” I pass no judgment on where else racism may lie, but I obviously know that not all conservatives are racists; I would never even imply to the contrary.
Posted by Ames | September 8, 2008, 11:28 amAfter Noonan’s widely quoted comment, Tom Levenson ran the numbers on town-size distribution and found that — guess what? — we are actually more a nation of Chicagos than Wasillas.
Peggy Noonan did not even do the most cursory fact-checking before concocting an airy platitude that played well to the base despite (because of?) having no basis in objective reality. There seems to be a pattern emerging here.
Posted by jre | September 8, 2008, 11:49 amDid anyone see the Daily Show go around asking people what, “small town values” were? The only thing people could really say was that it meant families where men married women. And were Christians.
Now where the small town thing I think fails for her, is that she has no perspective on national or international affairs. Which I had thought was something McCain’s campaign said is vital for the next 4 years.
One thing about the Ames/PC conversation, I wanted to say something about my experience from moving from a suburb in Texas to New York City. Afterward when I talked politics with my parents I felt like I had a completely different perspective. When they talked about poverty, it was a very hypothetical grasp of poverty. And that concept of “poor” was probably the lower income apartments down the street, and not the homeless shelters and people sleeping in the streets in NYC. Or when my parents talk about race, it’s seen as the one or two minorities that moved into the neighborhood. Or maybe the “bad section” of town.
In NY, you experience whole sections of ethnic and lifestyle groups in neighborhoods, you see things like direct confrontations of white people in African American communities and those interactions, you see homosexual couples going about their lives.
I’m just saying, after I moved here, I felt like I experience and view things a world apart from my parents. And their home, their worldview, is also something which they should vote by and be concerned with. But at the same time, I feel like when I talk about poverty and race issues in America, I’m coming from a different perspective that interacts with the issues on a daily base that’s more than hypothetical.
Posted by Oneiroi | September 8, 2008, 12:10 pmActually, if we’re going to be honest, the large groups of Americans do not live in cities or in rural areas. They live in the suburbs. Most of our great cities (including NYC) are shells of their former selves. 90% of all growth takes place in suburban areas. It’s their views that will drive much of this election. City dwellers will overwhelmingly voted Democratic. Rural folks will mostly vote Republican. All the true swing votes reside in the suburbs.
And so do I…
Posted by Progressive Conservative | September 8, 2008, 12:15 pmInterestingly, many of those studying just this subject see current and future trends going in precisely the opposite direction.
Posted by jre | September 8, 2008, 12:47 pmJR, That’s what I’ve been hearing.
NYC has been booming for quite a while, and was one of the few places that wasn’t badly hit by the housing crisis. Even the old bad neighborhoods (Lower East Side and Williamsburg in Brooklyn), are now expensive and chic. Some say that’s how NYC is a shell of our former cells ha.
In fact the problem we’re having here now is that less and less people can actually afford to live here. New buildings are being made, older tenants being moved out. It’s becoming more and more a place for the affluent to live. Everyone’s being pushed out to the boroughs, I love Brooklyn so I’m fine with that.
Posted by Oneiroi | September 8, 2008, 1:15 pmAgree with oneiroi; it’s definitely morning in manhattan.
Posted by Ames | September 8, 2008, 1:31 pmHousing is just one tiny part of the puzzle. Look at where industries are going. Look at diversity. Look at job creation. It’s not happening in the cities.
I would encourage everyone to read this article which discusses how America’s former boom-towns are in decline:
http://www.joelkotkin.com/Urban_Affairs/DAJOI2_20-33_Kotkin.pdf
“To understand the change from a traditional to a boutique city, it is instructive to look into the evolution of our greatest urban center, New York. For much of its history until the 1950s, New York’s economy, including its manufacturing sector, more than held its own against the rest of country. Although it always had its slums, the city also boasted scores of solidly middle- and working-class neighborhoods. But starting in the mid-1960s, New York’s job engine began to sputter as manufacturing firms and corporate headquarters decamped, and the city failed to find industries of comparable size and quality to replace them. By 2000, the city’s overall employment stood at less than that in 1969 (and this during a period in which the number of positions grew by 61.3 million, an increase of 87 percent). Five years later, despite a much-ballyhooed recovery, yet another 100,000 more private-sector jobs had been lost.
Equally troubling, throughout this period the city’s employment pattern became ever more characterized by a mix of elite and low-wage employment. Since 2002, much job growth has been concentrated in the lower-paying retail and hospitality industries. As a result, median average wages, including for college graduates, have not kept up with inflation. Yet, at the same time, there has been robust income growth, paced by often-spectacular gains at the upper echelons of the financial and business service sectors. There may be as little as a third as many Fortune 500 headquarters in New York today compared with 1955, but those that remain employ a relatively small number of people at rapidly escalating wages. These changes have had a severe impact on New York’s demography. While it is true that the city continues to attract legions of talented people under 35, this inflow is more than balanced by an out-migration of people over that age. Nor does the current “boom” seem to be changing this reality. Since 2000, in New York City and its environs, rates of domestic out-migration, already among the highest nationwide, have actually accelerated.
These developments suggest a tragic conclusion: the decline of New York’s historic role as an incubator of upward mobility. Back in the ’60s, Jane Jacobs could still predict that Latino immigrants to New York, mainly from Puerto Rico, would inevitably make “a fine middle class.” Yet today in the Bronx, the city’s most heavily Latino borough, roughly one in three households live in poverty, the highest rate of any urban county in the nation. At the other extreme, Manhattan, where the rich are concentrated, the disparities between the classes have been rising steadily. In 1980, it ranked seventeenth among the nation’s counties for social inequality; today it ranks first, with the top fifth of wage- earners earning 52 times that of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.”
Posted by Progressive Conservative | September 8, 2008, 2:18 pmYou know, it’s a distribution. There are liberal Democrats in “red states” and there are conservative Republicans in “blue states.” There are also conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans (although less and less as the years pass). And not every conservative will agree 100% with the Republican party platform and every liberal will agree 100% with the Democratic party platform.
Posted by Ian | September 8, 2008, 4:00 pmCross-posted at Daily Kos now… figure it’s a good traffic idea.
Posted by Ames | September 8, 2008, 4:18 pmIt doesn’t really matter how Americans political views actually break down geographically.
What matters here is that Sarah Palin is *deliberately* trying to create/exacerbate divisions in the American people. Americans are already at each others throats — they need someone to unite them, not someone who tries to set them against each other.
Posted by Mark | September 8, 2008, 9:48 pm“If we’re stuck in a culture war, it’s because people like Palin insist on re-digging our trenches when it’s beneficial to their political career. For shame.”
You’re kidding, right?
Paul Krugman, in the “all the news that’s fit to print” NYT, declares that people like me living in the back woods of New Hampshire, “sleep with livestock.” Chris Rock feels completely comfortable joking about how you folks in cities have people for neighbors, while we have cows for neighbors. All this was part of the “culture wars” long before anyone outside of the 687,000 or so Alaskans had ever heard of Sarah Palin – Oh, but she’s responsible for the culture wars?
I’ll confess this much to you – having been as real a New Yorker as it gets, and now living in a town of 20,000 in New Hampshire, and this is from my own actual, empirical experience: Over here, if you break down by the side of the road, the chances of anyone stopping by to give you a hand, is equal to or better than the chances of anyone in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, pulling over to give you two in the chest. Try these small-town values.
But I feel I must thank you: You have provided yet one more excellent argument for keeping the electoral college as is, because otherwise you elitists would roll all over us; and for keeping the NH primaries first, because otherwise none of your messiah-candidates would ever bother campaigning North of Boston.
P.S. If Palin does manage to “outlaw” the forensic kits used to gather evidence from rape victims, then according to Paul Krugman at least, I should vote for McCain/Palin, because that would eliminate the risk of anyone ever finding my DNA in a moose. Hey, he can joke, so can I.
Posted by Curmudgeon | October 3, 2008, 9:22 amCurmudgeon, I’ve never claimed my side is innocent, and I’m happy to throw away liberals who push the culture wars too: I think Bill Maher’s “religulous” is likely going to be in poor taste, and not what America really needs now. The point, though, is that it takes a little something extra to elevate name-calling from the newspaper to the federal government, and taht’s what people like Bush have done, and Palin wants to do. That’s not right.
Having been a real New Yorker, too, along with a real Texan & Georgian, I have to disagree with your characterization of NYCers. People here are polite too, just in a different way: “hey, yo, can I help youz,” instead of, “excuse me sir, are you lost?” etc. Democrats have never put a politician in office who’s said anything but. The Republicans have, and want to do so again.
Posted by Ames | October 3, 2008, 10:06 amAmes,
Thank you for your considered reply. I don’t believe you know what my characterization of New Yorkers is, because in my previous reply, I never characterized them at all. I gave examples of empirical experiences, largely subject to statistical variances. FWIW, I believe for the most part, New Yorkers get a bum rap.
As to “Democrats have never put a politician in place who’s said anything but” – I don’t know how old you are, and it’s none of my business, but if you’re old enough to have been around, back when a supportive heckler interrupted Adlai Stevenson with “every thinking person in America supports you,” and he replied “Yes, but to win I need a majority,” – then I’m sorry, but your memory is short.
You’re also missing the point: Democrats have not often needed to resort to this kind of name-calling, because they are happy to let the cheering media do it for them. True, Barack Obama never, never named Sarah Palin when he made the “lipstick on a pig” comment, never mentioned her, but as the video shows, his crowd erupted in delightful laughter and applause. It should be clear enough to any neutral observer that they knew exactly what he meant, and that he was counting on it: The media did the groundwork for him. I’m not re-hashing this silly distraction just for its own sake, I simply mention it as an example, one of many. Democrats don’t get off the hook for “never saying anything but.” They’ll get off MY hook when they show a backbone, and at the risk of losing popularity, chide the media for distracting Americans with these idiocies. Because it’s a foregone conclusion that when conservatives chide the media, they’re simply angry white whatever.
I believe it is your turn to cite an example of Bush indulging in name-calling. I’m not saying you’re wrong and he never did, just asking. And if what you really meant was, not Bush himself but “people like Bush” – then I beg you to explain what you mean by “people like Bush” and how it would be different from me “characterizing” New Yorkers as “People like Paul Krugman” (which I haven’t).
Posted by Curmudgeon | October 3, 2008, 10:43 amGlad to have the discussion :)
First, at the point where you’re pointing to comments made to a supporter by a Democratic candidate who lost the presidency more than 50 years ago, you’re reaching.
And, of course, you can’t impute the media’s biases to Obama unless you also accept (which you do not, in the last paragraph) imputing the entire Bush ideological complex (Fox, Republican hangers on, etc.) to the Republican party. Besides, apart from some isolated examples (the NY Times occasionally & Fox), the identification of the media as a Democratic surrogate is tired and empirically disproven. The media are out for one thing: money. Obama’s a better story this cycle. But when he messes up, that’s an even better story. They’re opportunists.
For the record, too, Obama has on multiple occasions chided the media for focusing on distractions. When Palin’s “babygate” story broke, Obama called out the blogs/networks that were boosting it and said he’d fire any staffer that used it for political gain. McCain, to his credit, asked conservative groups to stop calling Obama a Muslim – in the primaries. He’s now quite content to let lies spread, especially through his campaign ads, which he angrily defends to an increasingly skeptical press. If you want to talk about distractions, have a look at the ‘sex ed’ ad.
Onto Bush – his presidency was never anything but a culture war flare-up, his entire agenda a way of setting up an us-them dichotomy to his advantage, from gay-baiting to calling anyone who disagrees with him a “traitor.” If you’re honestly going to pretend that Bush, above all the rest of the Republican party, isn’t a preeminent culture warrior… then I don’t know what to say.
Posted by Ames | October 3, 2008, 3:28 pm