(Note: There are two links - one related to this article & another about his thoughts on liberalism's moral bankruptcy - at the bottom of this page.)
Not long ago on a farm south of Fresno, I watched a poorly paid mechanic in silence repair a gate’s hydraulic ram as easily and rapidly as if he were Googling on a smartphone. He seemed to me a genius in oily clothes engulfed in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Not long ago on a farm south of Fresno, I watched a poorly paid mechanic in silence repair a gate’s hydraulic ram as easily and rapidly as if he were Googling on a smartphone. He seemed to me a genius in oily clothes engulfed in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Later
that same day, in Palo Alto, I talked to lots of mellifluent and highly
compensated academics theorize about politics. I wondered whether they
could tell hydraulic fluid from the engine oil in their imported cars.
Who is really wise, who not?
A
red/blue political map of the 2016 election reflects these two
antithetical worlds. Eighty-five percent of geographical America voted
for Donald Trump. But more than half the country’s voters living in just
15 percent of its land area went for Hillary Clinton.
How did we split into two countries? Why does rural America vote more conservative than liberal?
Those
in rural and small-town America — who were more likely to pump their
own water, to worry about their septic tank and to fret whether the
weather will allow them to profit or lose money — think, talk and vote
differently from those who expect the tap always to flow, the toilet to
flush regularly and to get paid on time, rain or shine, drought or
flood.
Pragmatic,
autonomous and struggling people of the countryside think about
building new dams and freeways to match population growth; affluent
urbanites and suburbanites, with the greater luxury of second and third
chances, more often dream of stalling or dismantling them to allow the
landscape to return to a pristine paradise.
I
work at Stanford University but live on a farm between Fresno and
Visalia. What one place values does not necessarily mean much in the
other.
Writing
an essay no more impresses my rural neighbors than knowing how to drive
a tractor or use a chainsaw is of interest to my Palo Alto colleagues.
Rural people who mine, log, farm and build hold a tragic view that they
are always but a day away from nature’s revenge — drought, flood or
storm — and that the human experience is always a war of sorts.
But
urbanites are more assured that their degrees, good intention and
sophistication properly bring prosperity and security. They more likely
assume that they can move on to greater things than worrying about where
their food, water and fuel come from.
What
America watches on television and on the silver screen is created
either in Los Angeles or New York. The nation’s world-ranked Ivy League
and West Coast universities are almost all in blue America. Wall Street,
Silicon Valley and the preeminent financial institutions are likewise
centered in urban corridors. The federal government operates in the
progressive culture of Washington, D.C. The reasons for this lopsided
concentration are part historical and part geographical, but not
necessarily a referendum on either contemporary competency or character.
The
result nonetheless is an abyss, in which power brokers who shape the
way America is entertained, educated, financed and governed are often
unaware of how half the country lives — or the effects of their own
tastes and policies upon them. Yet the hinterland is no cul-de-sac, but
rather the proud generator of most of the nation’s fuel, food and
manufactured goods — the traditional stuff of civilization.
The
Trump revolt was also a push back against winner-take-all globalization
that enriched the populated coasts far more than the open spaces in
between — that made London spiritually closer to Manhattan than to
upstate New York, and Tokyo or Bangalore more attuned to the Bay Area
than to the Central Valley a hundred miles away.
People
outside of New York and San Francisco seemed to have the strange idea
that the wheat they grew or the oil they fracked were just as important
to Facebook and Goldman Sachs employees as the latter’s social media
pages and stock portfolios were to farmers and oil drillers.
In
part, the rural backlash was fueled by a sense that half the country —
the quieter and more hidden half — did not like the cultural and
economic trajectories on which the cities were taking the country. It
was not just that they saw a $20 trillion debt, the slowest economic
growth since the Hoover administration, a federal takeover of the health
care system, offshoring, outsourcing and open borders as part of their
plight.
Rather,
they cited these as symptoms of a blinkered elite that had lost its
bearings and was insulated from the reality that governs life elsewhere:
debt really does have to be paid back rather than doubled in eight
years. Something like the Affordable Care Act that is sold as offering
more and costing less simply cannot be true. The cyberworld still does
not bring food to the table, put fuel in the gas tank or produce wood
floors and stainless steel appliances.
Urban
elites seldom experience the full and often negative consequences of
their own ideologies. And identifying people first by race, tribe or
gender — by their allegiance to their appearance rather than to the
content of their characters — has rarely led anywhere but to tribalism
and eventual sectarian violence.
The
result was that when Trump, the outsider without political experience,
appeared as a hammer, rural America apparently was more than happy to
throw him into the glass of the bicoastal establishment, without
worrying too much about the shards that scattered.
There
was one final goad that explains the startling Electoral College defeat
of Clinton. Voters in key swing states got tired of being talked down
to — as if their views on illegal immigration, abortion, identity
politics, fracking, campus speech codes and the environment were the
result of ignorance (or being deplorable and irredeemable) rather than
due to honest differences of opinion and quite different life
experiences from those of big city-dwellers.
Red-state
America felt that those who lectured about the dangers of school choice
often seemed to put their own kids in private academies.
Those
who insisted that open borders were good for the country never seemed
to live in neighborhoods side by side with undocumented immigrants.
Walls on the border were proof of ignorant xenophobia; gates and walls
around private tony residences were logical measures to ensure security.
Those
who praised sanctuary cities certainly would not approve of other
jurisdictions likewise nullifying federal laws that they too found
bothersome, whether federal gun registration requirements or the
Endangered Species Act. Fairly or not, for the hinterland, the election
became a referendum between crude authenticity and polished hypocrisy.
In
the age-old stereotyped divide between city and country — the
caricature of the city slicker versus the hick, the thinker set against
the maker — the urban world during the last 30 years of globalization
became richer, cooler, edgier and more powerful, while its rural
counterpart became poorer, stagnant, more silent and stymied. A divide
widened even as it remained unknown to scientific pollsters and
in-the-know pundits.
In
2016, rural America finally pushed back. And not just its conservatives
and Republicans. Millions of exasperated red-state Democrats, union
members and a displaced middle class sought change through a reckless
and unknown outsider rather than more of the same from their own all too
familiar and predictable insider.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Here is Tucker Carlson's interview of Mr. Hanson on this article.
And here is a 24 minute video of Mr. Hanson on the topic of the moral bankruptcy of liberalism.
And here is a 24 minute video of Mr. Hanson on the topic of the moral bankruptcy of liberalism.
