The sad saga of the rise and perhaps quick demise of our current president brings into sharp relief an older story, one that has been flying just under the national radar for years.
It is the story of two cultures that have ceased to communicate, and have over the years grown to viscerally detest each other.
The story goes back some distance, more recently to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012), Joseph Stiglitz’s The Great Divide (2015) or J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Though, one may go back a bit further.
In the early 1980s, my friend Ed Sadalla, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, conducted a simple. He recruited a socially diverse group of subjects and asked them this question: “Given the two diets below, which one do you prefer:
A health-food diet (lots of fruits and vegetables, grilled or stir-fried fish or chicken, fruit juices or skim milk, whole-wheat bread or brown rice) orAn all-American diet (deep-fried or mashed potatoes, steak, sweet sodas, white bread, fatty milk products)?”Dividing the original group into two sub-groups according to their food preference, my friend then proceeded to ask them their:
Preferred alcoholic-beverage (wine vs. beer); Preferred music (jazz or classical vs. country or pop);Education level (high school diploma or less vs. one or more college degrees); Employment (blue-collar vs. white-collar or upward); andPolitics (liberal vs. conservative).When the responses were analyzed, the results were rather striking. Preference for the all-American diet correlated almost perfectly with less education, blue-collar employment and preference for beer, country music and conservative politics. And the converse went for the health-food diet.
What my friend had demonstrated was the clustering of major features that, to this day, define the two main American subcultures. For his pains, he also received the “Golden Fleece” award from then-Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), bestowed upon the most useless government-funded study of the year.
More than a decade earlier, in 1967, Lila and Henry Gleitman, two psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study about the major dialect boundary in American English (measured by several grammatical features), as correlated to level of education. Their subjects were divided into four groups:
Secretaries; Lower-division undergraduates; Upper-division undergraduates; andGraduate students. The major dividing line, it turned out, grouped the secretaries and lower-division undergraduates on one side, and the upper-division undergraduates and graduate students on the other. The subjects’ education levels, it seemed, correlated with the American dialect they spoke. It took at least two years of college to cross the divide.
Among Democrats, locally and nationally, it has become a favorite pastime to pick the reason for what they see as disastrous results in the last national elections, with much fingerpointing and gnashing of teeth. The various beefs that Democrats have with President Donald Trump’s core constituency (Hillary’s “deplorables,” aka “rednecks”) are, alas, only too familiar.
Having lived among the “rednecks” on and off for 45 years now, I happen – unlike most of my overeducated friends and fellow travelers – to share some of their background. I grew up with back-breaking childhood labor on the farm. I was a high school dropout and did three years of military service. I also love Bob Wills’ fiddle, have a fatal infatuation with firearms and a passion for horses and Stetson hats.
The fact that I spent much of my working life in and out of universities obviously makes a difference. But unlike most “overeducated rednecks” (as my wife is fond of calling me), I have remained bicultural and bilingual, and have retained my sympathy for this shrinking minority who work with their hands, live on the land and drive on the gravel, and have largely been left behind by our complex, fast-moving urban culture and economy. I may not always share their politics, but I still feel their pain.
What is more, I suspect that one of the most decisive reasons why Trump now occupies the White House is the fatal inability of educated, liberal America to understand where our conservative, rural compatriots come from, what ails them, why they voted the way they did and why it is so easy for the rich and powerful – those who own our politicians and rule our lives – to redirect the anger and frustration of working-class America toward educated liberals rather than against the elites.
I am also old enough to remember Germany’s Weimar Republic of 1918–1933, where much of the blame for Hitler’s phenomenal rise can be laid at the feet of the German Socialists and Communists, with their incessant sectarian bickering, their nit-picking Marxist dogmas and their inability – just like ours – to communicate with their “rednecks.”
The urban German left didn’t get the rural German “rednecks,” but Hitler did. He spoke their language, felt their pain.
What we have, like what they had in Weimar, is an acute failure of cross-cultural communication. Rural people don’t understand – and feel put down by – urban dwellers’ language and cultural choices. We don’t understand – and often deride and condescend to – theirs.
You may not recall the old cartoon strip Pogo, but I will always cherish one installment from way, way back. Its caption: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The same idea can be found, in a more gentle form, in both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels: “Remove the beam from between your eyes before you propose to remove a sliver from your friend’s eye.”
Tom Givón ranches near Ignacio. Reach him at tgivon@uoregon.edu.
