Journalist and social critic David Brooks is trying to figure out what it means to be American.
When he came to Yale to deliver a Poynter Lecture on Oct. 24, Brooks, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, posed the question, Are we really united as one country?
In the wake of Sept. 11, there has been "an explosion of patriotism," he acknowledges, but in fundamental ways, the nation is split into two very different segments that don't know much about one another, he says.
Brooks' interest in this phenomenon was sparked by voting patterns in the last presidential election,
when both the east and west coasts went for the Democratic candidate, depicted in blue on most media maps, and the heartland went Republican, shown in red. He called this the "glacier map" of the country. "If the glaciers melt and the coasts flood, suddenly we're in a Republican country," he quipped.
"I am a resident of 'blue' America, coastal America, although my politics are not necessarily one with them," he said. To get a clearer sense of what blue and red America were like and how they differed, Brooks spent several months going back and forth between suburban Montgomery County, outside Washington, D.C., where he lives, and Franklin County, a rural region in central Pennsylvania. Brooks described Franklin County as "Bush country, Republican, conservative, very religious."
Although it is located only 65 miles from Washington, Franklin County shares more with the deep South and the Midwest than it does with either coast, Brooks found. "There's a joke about Pennsylvania -- that Philadelphia is at one end, Pittsburgh is at the other end, and in the middle, it's Alabama. Franklin County is in the Alabama part of Pennsylvania."
Brooks' travels convinced him that people on the east and west coasts and people in the interior of America live very different lives and hold very different assumptions, the journalist said.
"There's not a Starbucks in the whole of Franklin County. There's no Gap, no Barnes & Noble, no Borders...," said Brooks. "Everything people in my part of the country do without motors, they do with motors. We sail; they powerboat. We cross-country ski; they snowmobile. We hike; they drive ATVs. ... When it comes to yard work, they have tractor mowers; we have illegal aliens."
In "coastal, sophisticated, educated America ... we read more books and know more about the world than heartland America," Brooks continued. "We have alumni tours to Tibet, but we don't actually know anything about heartland America. ... All the things people in one part of America take for granted, people in the other part of America know nothing about."
As examples of significant phenomena that coastal dwellers aren't aware of, Brooks cited "rapture" novelists Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins, whose books about the Second Coming have sold some 40 million copies in the past 5 to 10 years but are virtually unknown outside the heartland. NASCAR, he said, is the single best attended sport in the country, but residents of the coasts don't follow it at all. Nor can they shoot guns, recognize soybeans growing in the fields or explain the difference between Pentecostal and Evangelical Christians, Brooks commented.
In addition to cultural distinctions, the journalist found significant social differences between "blue" and "red" America. Blue America is much more racially diverse, he said, noting, "In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, it's 60% white, 15% black, 12% Hispanic, 11% Asian. Franklin County is 95% white. While we think we are getting a more socially diverse country, in fact, it's diverse only in specific places."
Education is another major distinction, Brooks said. In Montgomery County, 50% of the residents are college graduates, whereas in Franklin County, only 12% completed college. SAT scores show corresponding disparities. In Brooks' local suburban high school, the average verbal SAT score for a graduating senior was 622. In rural Pennsylvania, the average was 408. "That's a big difference, and it means that the children of Bethesda, Montgomery County, are going to have more educational opportunities than the people in rural America. And because education translates into money, that's going to mean they're going to earn more."
The third major distinction between the two worlds is in voting patterns. Brooks's home county voted overwhelmingly Democratic: 63% for Gore, compared to 34% for Bush. "The best predictor of how you're going to vote in this country is not your economic status ... it's church attendance," said Brooks. "People who attended church every week voted for George W. Bush, 60 to 39. People who rarely or seldom attend church favored Gore by a similar percentage."
As he expected, in Franklin County, "Religion is a part of life. Professors at the local college know not to schedule lectures in the middle of the week, because on Wednesday nights, everybody is at prayer meetings," Brooks told his audience.
These observations led the journalist to wonder how the two parts of America feel about each other. "Do they resent or hate one another? Can we still unite as a nation?"
To his surprise, Brooks found that the people of each region consider themselves better off than those who live in the other. Residents of "red" America, despite their relative poverty, feel themselves to be the "haves," and do not envy residents of "blue" America.
"First of all, everything is cheaper in rural America," said Brooks. "People can afford everything around them. There are no luxury stores in Franklin County. ... Where I live, unless you're extremely rich, you're continually surrounded by things you can't afford. That's not the case in Franklin County."
Brooks didn't find cultural resentment in rural America, either. He found that the residents of Franklin County were bolstered by a strong sense of community and civility, and that they preferred the pace of life where they live. "Far from feeling resentment, they have some compassion for the people who have to live in those places. ... There was no sense that people should be harshly judgmental" of others, the journalist said. In fact, there was a reluctance to discuss sensitive issues like abortion or homosexuality.
With all the cultural, social, religious and political differences, Brooks determined that the two Americas "are not fundamentally in conflict. The idea that we have a conflict between red and blue America that is suggested by the election map is based on outdated models of how society is structured," he told his audience.
The model Brooks found that mirrored contemporary American society is the high school cafeteria: "The jocks sit over here, the nerds go there, the theater people go here, the techies go over here," he said. The separate groups know the others exist, but don't intermix or know much about each other. "They all have basic things in common, which they are not aware of or think about," said Brooks. "They are, essentially, one high school. And we are, despite it all, one country."
-- By Gila Reinstein
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