ibis:
Americans do accept at face value and regurgitate much of what we're told about how the world works, how the nation works, and how things should be... and a lot of those ideas come just as much or (probably) more from previous generations (parents/grandparents) than from any news media outlet.It's a popular, but I believe false, notion that Joe Q. Public gets his ideas from Fox News and the like... I think JQP is just participating in an unbroken line of family politics.
Agreed. I think FOX and the like succeed precisely because they're reaffirming sentiments and perspectives that many, many Americans already have. I think they then turn around and use the trust that that sort of reciprocal validation establishes to spin events the way Certain Interests would like them to be spun, but ultimately, the FOX news perspective has such purchase in the American psyche because it conforms to the way many Americans see the world already.
I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that conservative Americans are such because they're 1. unworldly, and 2. frightened. ...
Conservative family values means, in part, close (and sometimes quite isolated) nuclear families. Right now I live in Nebraska, and here the (nuclear) family is everything... this is suburban life at its most typical, and the world seems almost literally to revolve around these nuclear family units. Within these units there is a set of common knowledge that everyone agrees on... usually - God is your creator, Jesus died for your sins, Dad earns a living, Mom stays home to raise kids, kids listen to their parents, their parents listen to the church & the government, hard work is the path to success, etc etc. When no one breaks away from these units, those ideas are never questioned, never rejected. It's not really about being a conformist drone who gets his ideas from Bill O'Reilly (O'Reilly's appeal, I think, is that he publicly validates what people already believe to be true)... it's, often in a deeply personal way, about family tradition and being loyal to the ones you know. I know that probably sounds like pure bullshit to a lot of people, but I think that (despite the influence of pop media) a lot of American suburbs are still throwbacks in this way. ...
Americans generally don't travel much, abroad or even within the US (hell, some people never stray far from the city of their birth). It's not just as issue of having passports or being interested in the world... I think it's that a lot of Americans get 2 weeks vacation at the most and live paycheck to paycheck. Because of that, most Americns haven't seen very much of the world. Most typical conservatives I know... don't personally know any immigrants, any Muslims, any homeless people, any gay people, any women who've had abortions (or so they think, I'm sure), or any of these people about whom they tend to have such fixed opinions.
It's worth noting, in support of Ibis' points here, that the United States is huge and most of it is sparsely populated. Most of the cultural diversity and technological development is concentrated in a handful of areas, separated by huge swaths of sparsely populated areas which, despite being deeply embedded in the most powerful country on Earth, are in most ways isolated backwaters.
It may be helpful to compare the US to the UK in this respect. If the entire UK were a US state, it would be only the 12th largest state by area, but the largest by far in terms of population. It has nearly double the population of the most heavily populated US state (California), despite the fact that California is basically the size of the entire UK plus a second England. It has over twice the population of the second-place state (Texas), and Texas is very nearly three times the size of the entire UK. The UK's population density is higher than all but four states, all of which are small northeastern states along the New York-Boston corridor (New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut) and all of which are pretty far outside the political movement represented by Bush.
You could also look at the EU as a whole. The EU taken as a whole has 490 million or so people in about 1.7 million square miles of territory, compared to the 300 million US citizens spread out over 3.7 million square miles.
The UK has an overall population density of 629 people per square mile. The EU has an overall population density of 298 people per square mile. The US has an overall population density of 80 per square mile.
You could also look at distance issues. I live in San Diego, CA, basically at the southwestern tip of the US. I live about 15 miles north of the San Ysidro border crossing with Mexico, and about the same distance from the Pacific Ocean.
I just got back from visiting one of our closest neighbors as far as major US cities goes - Phoenix. Driving there took about 6 hours each way. Las Vegas is a little closer, at 5 hours of solid driving. In both cases, the vast majority of the distance between these points is dominated by sparsely inhabited desert.
The closest major city to San Diego, both geographically and culturally, though, is Los Angeles, and it's so close that our outermost suburbs are basically starting to overlap, and San Diego is sometimes included with Los Angeles as part of a huge sprawling Southern California metro area. Nevertheless, it's still two hours drive away. If I keep going north, I basically have to spend another six hours driving through the San Joaquin Valley (a mostly rural agricultural area) before I start to hit the the next really major metro areas, which are the increasingly overlapping metro areas of Sacramento and the SF Bay Area. It's another four hours or so before I hit the Oregon border, making it about a 12 hour drive to traverse my state, in the course of which I really only pass through two major urbanized belts after leaving my own, along one of the most densely populated and heavily developed coastlines in the US. Getting from San Diego to Seattle (basically, driving the length of the US West Coast) takes about 24 hours of driving, depending on traffic, weather conditions, etc., and all that, and basically you pass through San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle, separated by many hours of empty freeway punctuated periodically by isolated gas stations and roadside fast food restaurants.
Like I said, that's one of the most heavily developed areas of the country. The only area that's really more densely populated is the DC-to-Boston axis, which passes through Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City along the way. Outside of those two belts, and a few isolated pockets of urbanism elsewhere, there's a whole lot of nothing out there. Omaha, Nebraska is out in Ibis' neck of the woods (relatively speaking) and it's roughly equidistant from the major urban areas of Los Angeles, or New York City, or Miami, or Seattle - it's about 20-24 hours nonstop driving to any of them.
From what Google maps is telling me, in a reasonably comparable amount of time, you could drive from Glasgow to Berlin, or from London to Madrid by way of Paris and Barcelona. I'm sure that there are a few big empty stretches in there, but I doubt they're as big or as empty, and even within that range, you're talking about multiple languages, cultures, etc. in a way that you're not in a comparable stretch of the American landscape.
It's also about as much time as it would take me to drive from my apartment in downtown San Diego, a bustling 21st century technology hub, to De Ridder, LA, which is a small rural town in Beauregard Parish, near the Texas border, population 9,808. While I was working with the Red Cross, I met with a family at their home about forty minutes outside downtown De Ridder. They lived in a shack they had constructed out of particle board in a small clearing in the woods, and which they had put up on stilts to protect against flooding and predators. They had a kind of emaciated-looking cow in their front yard, but for the most part they eked out a subsistence living as hunters, killing deer for meat and selling the treated hides and antlers and such for cash which they traded for other necessities. They did have electricity and a toilet connected to a septic system, but they seemed to use kerosene lamps for light and heat more than power from the grid. Since I had to have them fill out paperwork, I can tell you that most of the family were not exactly what you would call literate. At the time I was there, the older kids were preparing for a trip into town, which caused their mother concern since they would have to deal with the complexities of the handful of intersections in De Ridder which had traffic lights, as well as the overall hustle and bustle of a town which boasted a gas station (with an attached convenience store!), as well as a few other shops and a regional hospital.
In my brief interaction with the family in question, I did learn that they were conservative Christians, that they voted Republican and strongly supported George Bush, and that they did so largely on the basis of cultural issues, 2nd Amendment issues, and a general sense of wanting to stand up to evildoers foreign and domestic. Though they did ultimately accept charitable assistance which they planned to use to repair the damage that had been done to their shack in the hurricane, they were initially somewhat resistant, as they saw themselves as hardworking independent people who were living a good honest life, and they were very reluctant to take any form of charity. I can only imagine that they also approved of the Republican party's opposition to large-scale government assistance for the poor. They did not seem to see themselves as being poor, but rather as ordinary working folks trying to get by.
Oh, and when we gave them the debit card containing the financial assistance, we had to explain to them how debit cards worked, because even though they had heard people talking about some kind of plastic money cards, they had never actually seen one before, much less used one themselves.
They really were very nice people, and all their opinions made sense inasmuch as they were basically living a lifestyle which had changed very little in 150 years, and that their only real point of contact with the 21st century was a rural town of less than 10,000 people which was 45 minutes drive away, a town which, frankly, scared and confused them.
Obviously, this is an extreme example, but not by too much. I've visited 29 of the 50 states, and I've driven all the way across (in at least one major direction) all but a few of those, and everywhere it's basically a few islands of high-density living conditions surrounded by veritable oceans of desolate rural areas. The populations of the rural areas tend to be poor, tend to be poorly educated, and don't tend to be familiar with anywhere outside their immediate areas, because, realistically, how could they be? It takes so long and costs so much to go anywhere from where they are, and they generally don't have a lot of money or time. Furthermore, their cultures have been so isolated and so homogenous that the diversity and clamor and all that of 21st century life in a modern metropolitan area tends to be alienating and overwhelming, and as such there's no small amount of hostility involved. It's all flashy consumerism they can't afford to take part in, and crowds full of strange faces, and music they don't like, and languages they don't understand, and people whose values and lifestyles are totally alien and often offensive to them.
The problem, broadly, is that there's a huge gap between largely "blue" urban America and largely "red" rural America. Urban America, in general, understands how the world works and realizes that Bush administration policy is not generally how diplomacy is handled by inhabitants of the developed world. They also understand that most of the rest of the developed world has a different approach towards things like health care and other social services. People in blue America also generally have friends and co-workers whose racial background, national origins, religious beliefs, and sexual orientations differ significantly from their own, and they also live in areas which are handling the economic transitions into a global marketplace and from manufacturing to service/knowledge/whatever as reasonably well as can be expected.
Rural Americans living in red areas are generally isolated physically and culturally from the rest of the world. They live in a world which is much more racially, ethnically, and religiously homogenous, and much more sexually conservative. Moreover, they live in areas which, more often than not, have been devestated by the decline of the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, and as such are not only a lot less sanguine about large-scale societal change, but they're actively hunting for scapegoats.
The problem is compounded by our system of government. California, New York, and Massachusetts together represent about 20% of the US population and have six percent of the representation in the Senate. Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas between them represent 2.5% of the population and 12% of the representation in the Senate. The more liberal and urbanized coastal areas are also too heavily concentrated to be maximally effective in the electoral college.
Alex's Grandma:
If the American government has a far greater influence globally than any of it's rivals, as it does, then so, by definition, does the American voter.
Agreed. However, the portion of the population which is most isolated and has the most limited understanding of the outside world holds is disproportionately powerful in our electoral system, and not only are they powerful enough to have a disproportionately large impact on policy, but they are also powerful enough within our system to block any reforms which would address the imbalance of power.
You can't win a presidential election or get a bill through both houses of Congress without addressing the concerns and demands of the big square states in the middle, and if you alienate them in any significant way, you're through. The problem is that their poverty, their craptacular educational system, and their cultural and geographical isolation combined make them very easy to alienate, and also tend to make their aforementioned concerns and demands largely unrelated to anything we might recognize as reality.
In an era of ubiquitous communications technology, they're afraid little Johnny might read something on the internet which might turn him gay or make him question the tenets of his faith. While the rest of the world is trying to deal with global warming and scientists are busily unravelling the mysteries of the human genome, they believe the Earth is 7000 years old and that Jesus is going to come back and sweep them up to heaven next year, or maybe the year after. As the economic forces unleashed by globalization threaten their way of life with collapse, they're seriously worried about people burning the flag or showing nipples on TV.
They're ignorant, they're afraid, and yet we can't get around them.
symbiosis:
Most of the Real Power in America is held by the aristocracy, and the only way to get into that is to get at least a few hundred thousand dollars.
I am skeptical of any definition of an American aristocracy which defines anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars as an aristocrat, at least as an aristocrat lording it over hir fellow Americans. Sure, obviously, anyone with that much in terms of assets is an aristocrat by global standards, and whether they know it or not they have a lot of power compared, to, say, the average citizen of Latin America, much less Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa. But power inside the American political system? A few hundred thousand dollars? Collectively, maybe, but individually? Are you kidding?
I would agree that a small percentage of the American population is disproportionately wealthy, and that their wealth translates into political power. However, that portion tends to have a significantly higher net worth than what you're talking about here. There is also a group of Americans who are both poor and disproportionately powerful, as I noted above. One might be inclined to argue that the Republican party is dominated by the alliance of those two groups. A popular argument is that the former group (the billionaire aristocracy) is skillfully using their power to push the terms of the political debate in ways that pander to the fears and prejudices of the latter group, basically using access to the media and lobbying/fundraising power to convince the undereducated rural poor to vote for their candidates by focusing the debate on hot-button cultural issues, essentially using their financial power to co-opt the red-staters electoral advantages. |
