Marginalization

I strongly recommend What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives won the Heart of America to anyone who is as confused as I am over how the political situation can be what it is. Today's dose of reading was very explanatory again, and I'm starting to realize that a lot of things have happened domestically while I was gone that were too domestic to get reported elsewhere. Not surprising, in the view of Kosovo and all the following concerns and debates and actions, and the fact that there are terror attacks semi-frequently byt the ETA and the IRA among others. The book is suggesting that the right is using the tactics that the left has traditionally used for getting attention and generating support among the common people, only with economics stripped out, giving the curious result that the working class vote for policies that help the rich. This is a very interesting proposal. However, some of the tactics involve rhetoric that I, unfortunately, recognize.

One of the examples of this inversion of who is trying to gain the support of the common people cited is Johnson County in Kansas City, KS. Everyone's Republican; however, the posh neighborhood where people have Ferarris is the realm of moderate Republicans, and the parts of the county where the pain peels off the houses and there's car wrecks in front yards is the most fanatically (neo)conservative. Frank points out that the moderate republicans fulfil many of the "liberal" (which I know now why it is used in such a strange way now) "evil" stereotypes.

"The Mods are plenty conservative in their economic views, as noted previously. But they also fulfil the liberal-elite stereotype, if all you consider are the cultural attributes of liberaldom made famous by the good-natured loathing of commentators like David Brooks. There are moderate Kansas Republicans who drink chardonnay and who put Martha's Vineyard stickers on their Saabs. There are Mods who insists on European-style coffee and whole-grain breads and high-end chocolates. There are Mods who shop at Restoration Hardware and Whole Foods and who look down on those who shop at Wal-Mart. There are Mods who listen to NPR and who insist on speaking French tot he waitress when at a French restaurant. There are Mods who go to gay-friendly, super-Waspy Episcopal churches and who disapprove of the Patriot Act and who rally in support of immigrant rights. And there are Mods who assume that all working-class whites are racist. But such people aren't liberal. What they are is corporate."

Other than the new use of "mods" (fashion anyone?), what this sort of stereotype tells me personally is that combined with an emphasis on authenticity, I don't exist to the backlashers. My parents have driven a Saab for the past ten or so years. I learnt to drive in the one they still have, which has heated leather seats and a turbo. This is simply because my dad's company had a contract for corporate cars with the local Saab dealer, and it's not an exclusive car in Sweden. It is a car of the people, like American cars here try to make themselves out. (If you're American and hadn't thought this through, your national cars are the imports everywhere else, and buying what to you is a foreign car is the patriotic choice.) Half the freaking country drives a Volvo. I insist on whole-grain bread because European whole-grain bread was what my European mother bought and baked from scratch in Europe. I drink wine because my European parents sat me down when I was maybe 17 and said, 'You need to learn how to drink wine before you move out of home.'

See a pattern here? The stereotype is implying that people who drink lattes and drive foreign cars and drink wine and insist on quality foods lack some magical, essential American authenticity. In other words, it's implying that certain lifestyle traits and political beliefs are incompatible with being one of the people - the true, authentic, American people, because these people have to be putting on airs to live the way they do. I don't think they're putting on airs either, but for me personally, how could I possibly be what they think is authentically American? It's a factual impossibility. It rather implies that I and other Euro-related TCKs or even expats or European immigrants or their children can't be American. (shirou already seems to have been indirectly told so.) It seems rather clear that they have not thought this through in a 'global movement of people' perspective - and again, I don't exist for purposes of political debate, or at the very least I and they way I feel is irrelevant in the wake of some movement that's all about standing up for the people.

The irony is that up to now, I've always had to try to show that I'm one of the People - to the left. But then it wasn't about culture and nationality, it was about economics. So if Frank is right in his analysis, I'm going to get the same crap here for being inauthentic, just on another topic. And again, we return to that essentialist identity constructions really have to go.