The Real...

"Ah, my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic Coast; but those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—those pioneers away out there, rearing their children near to nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their children and churches where they praise their Creator, and the cemeteries where sleep the ashes of their dead—are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak."

---from William Hogeland, The Boston Review.

Much the same from Jonathan Raban and a slightly different angle from Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker. Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions: small-town America against the cosmopolitans.

Anti-elitism. Anti-state: John Birch (great song by Dylan, of course).

Easy to dismiss "them" as simply paranoid, nuts, like all the other right-wingers: Hindu extremists, Muslim fanatics, Israeli settlers, the BNP and other thugs/racists.

Easy, but correct! Their so-called "legitimate grievances" are really, for the most part, just the inability to accept other people and the decline in their own power (Norman Mailer may have been on to something here). If you believe in universalism and are against ignorance you're being elitist! Gawd help us!

And the "real Americans", the "pioneers" were really slaughtering the Red Man, creating a wilderness for him, one that matched the wilderness in their own hearts.

In a similar vein: the nihilism of the Muslim fundamentalists and the degeneracy of the conservatives who support them or turn a blind eye to them.

Once you start talking about the real American, or who's really a muslim, then you set up all sorts of distinctions: the pure and the impure, the true and the untrue.

David Marquand makes the intriguing point in The Decline of the Public...