After a week of mostly substance-free analysis of the Reagan era, plus some offline discussions with Cocokat about contemporary religion, I was struck by this book review, which articulates something I've always suspected about our national so-called "cultural divide:"
Although not terribly successful at explaining the cultural divide, it manages to exemplify it perfectly in its condescension toward people who don't vote as [Thomas] Frank thinks they should. ...
A large number of the Democratic faithful view the Midwest and evangelical Christians as socially backward, politically amusing and religiously nutty -- and the objects of this disdain are sick of it. The more than 65 million Midwesterners are sick of being considered ''flyover country'' -- that vast, flat, brown area glimpsed by people looking out of their airplane windows as they head from one coast to the other (perhaps with a stop in Frank's adopted hometown of Chicago). The estimated 70 million evangelical Americans are sick of being called wing nuts or Jesus freaks. And the socially conservative are sick of being derided as Neanderthals.
The Republicans saw this and catered to it. Whatever the effects of their economic policy, they treated the concerns of Midwesterners and evangelicals with respect. Of course, Frank is right that the Republicans have not won the culture wars, but they have championed values that many Midwesterners and evangelicals see as their own. It would be odd indeed if they were to turn instead to a party that is often contemptuous of them.
But Frank is unable to take this obvious cultural phenomenon seriously.
This is important, and we miss it. In our urban enclaves, among our liberal friends, in the perennial echo chamber that is the blog world, we miss it, or forget it. And how is it going to be fixed? I don't know the answer.
As my grandmother used to put it, I daresn't say.
Posted at June 14, 2004 09:09 PM