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The Myth of the Real Americans.As a pretty non-doctrinal American conservative, there are a great many things that bother me about other conservatives - this is one of those questions where I could probably write 25 different answers. But rather than laundry list things, I’ll try to home in on one in particular - and one that I think is particular to conservatives. One can always go with things like hypocrisy, “bad apples”, tribalism, hate, cognitive dissonance, corruption, ignorance, etc., and there is certainly no shortage of those things on the right. But they’re not exclusive to the right - those sort of things would be true for liberals also, even if the specific examples of those things will be different depending on the party. You’re always going to have ignorant people, hateful people, hypocritical people, ideologically inconsistent people, etc. regardless of where on the ideological spectrum you may fall. That sort of finger-pointing doesn’t interest me much.But as a conservative, one of the things that bothers me most about other conservatives and Republicans - and something that I think is corrosive, condescending, anti-conservative, and very, very prevalent on the right - is the Myth of the Real Americans.The idea that there are “Real Americans” and “everybody else” has always been a sort of animating principle of the right, and you’ll hear it expressed in a lot of different ways. But we all know it. Of course you know it. Go ahead, close your eyes for a minute, and then try to call to mind a “real American.” I'll wait.Chances are, whatever image popped into your brain, that person is white, Christian, rural, heterosexual, middle class or lower, blue collar. That’s the person who is a real American, and if you’re on the right, you likely have a whole host of disqualifiers too - if they’re liberal, if they’re urban, if they’re an ethnic or religious minority (although they might never say that out loud), if they’re highly educated or too far above lower middle class, and many other even more trivial, idiot tokenistic things (which at one point way back when included sideburns and long hair, and later quiche and lattes, I’m not really sure where we are with that now, but it is definitely opposed by NASCAR and country music). Those people, they’ll say, aren’t like the rest of us - they’re not the “real Americans” that make our country great (again?). There are very few on the right who have not used some version of these yardsticks, and even fewer who do not in some way internalize this mythos.In more polite circles, this sometimes comes down to the idea of “flyover” country, those great swaths of middle American full of salt-of-the-earth folk who may not be well educated but whose hardscrabble experience and worldly homespun wisdom give them an “authenticity” and who have some sort of inherent value far above all the rest of us. Reams of opinion pieces have been written fawning over and speculating about these mysterious real Americans, who are the ones who matter and speak most directly to the authentic American experience. It’s the idea you’ll often hear trumpeted by career D.C. columnists like Bill Kristol or Thomas Friedman or political entertainers like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck or politicians like Sarah Palin or Donald Trump - each of whom live their whole lives in bubbles of their own but who try to gain some kind of cheap “real America” street cred by insisting that everyone who lives more than an hour away from a major coastal city is some kind of noble savage but definitely more American than all those insular elitist a-holes everywhere else who, whatever they are, are definitely Not Real Americans.Here’s the thing: that’s all horseshit.Complete. Total. Horseshit.I was born in North Carolina. I went to high school in Topeka, Kansas. I've lived in Iowa, rural Maine, southern Virginia, Vermont, upstate New York. I've also lived in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. And you know what?There's no “special breed” of authentic, down home, salt of the earth folks that people in big cities just can never understand. Topeka, Kansas is no more genuine and certainly not any less insular than Cambridge, Mass. I know as many Trump voters in North Philly as I do Clinton voters in Iowa. This idea that there's some bright line between “coastal elites” and “flyover country” is just flat out wrong, and more than wrong, it's outrageously insulting. Like a second generation Puerto Rican in Bed-Stuy is somehow less American or less valuable or more insular and close-minded than a gas station clerk in Nebraska. Like a programmer in Northern California is somehow out of touch but a farmer in Georgia isn't - more than that, anything the programmer says is by definition elitist and out of touch and anything the farmer says deserves respect because, you know, that's real America.Now, I get where this comes from. You can draw a bright line from Nixon’s silent majority to Reagan-era calls for family values to 9/11 jingoism to today's Pepe idiot trolls. At various times, these demographics swaths have felt (and been) ignored, or condescended to, or faced outright hostility. And in large part the Myth of the Real Americans was a reaction to that. But at some point it ceased to be a positive message, and instead became an “us versus them” mentality - and after that it became an outright desire to de-legitimize everybody else. The pendulum swung the other way, to the point now where it’s not uncommon at all for people to say things like “well if you take out California and New York, Trump did really well in the popular vote…” and mean it as a completely obvious point. Or where conservative news sites scour the country waiting to pounce on some no-name liberal professor somewhere being intolerant or some celebrity being condescending or some offensive Twitter comment from some self-appointed co-director of the Black Lives Matter movement in Albany nine months ago, while basically giving a free pass to, say, questions of whether the President of the United States is advancing conservatism or not, or setting decidedly un-limited government precedents or not, or chipping away at core civil liberties.But what I think many conservatives have not yet woken up to is just how much they have become what they always hated.It's funny, I hear all the time from Republicans how liberals are obsessed with identity politics. It is such a fundamental pillar of conservative angst that it is basically taken as a self-evident truism. And yet, in my experience, absolutely nobody is quicker to try to peg what you “are” - and dismiss you because of it - than a right-wing “populist” conservative. I've posted a fair bit on political topics here, and not a single week goes by where I don't get comments trying to outline my biography (almost always incorrectly) as some kind of a priori argument against me. I’m a liberal, I'm a coastal elite, I'm an atheist, I must not work at a “real” job, and on and on (these things are all wrong about me, not that it matters). The gameplaying of trying to find out which category I might belong to as a way of explaining everything about me - but mostly as a way of explaining how I’m not a real American and thus my opinion doesn't count - is staggering sometimes. Words like “liberal” or “coastal” or “elite” or concepts like education or what industry you’re in are wielded like shibboleths, until such a time as they land on one that finally gives them the out to not have to engage in my ideas but be able to comfortably dismiss me entirely from the American experience.And I AM a white, Christian, rural, straight man! I can’t even imagine what that feels like for more marginalized - or rather less “mainstream American” - people. Literally, whether you have value or “authenticity” as a political citizen of this country, will come down to whether you tick the right demographic boxes. And these are the same people that will cry about identity politics like a six-year-old with a skinned knee when they read the latest Breitbart post about some mom in South Carolina who people were mean to at a school board meeting because she wanted trans kids to have to use bathrooms of their biological gender. That's censorship and identity politics and…oh, you live in California or work in higher ed? Well F you you don't count.It is at the core of so much of what has gone wrong with conservatism in America - what turned a vision of limited, small government to something that seems to be running closer to flat-out white supremacy at the moment, and which moved a party that used to be defined by a clear, rational, articulatable vision for governance in America to abandoning that largely in favor of just pwning liberals and crying foul on whether a political opponent even has a right to an opinion that matters or not. We have gotten to the point where the white, Christian, blue collar, rural experience has not only become (justifiably!) cherished as having value, to it being held up as literally the only one that does! Somehow we started at protecting, skipped normalizing, and went straight to deifying.I can’t tell you how tired I am of this tendency in conservative circles. People who talk about white genocide or the threat of minority censorship unironically, or people whose defensive crouch is always about trying to categorize away people they disagree with. Or people who always talk about playing the victim card and then literally do nothing but perceive and cry foul about threats against them by people that fall into other demographic categories. People who are not animated, particularly, by proactive conservatism, but rather by defensive liberal-hating even at the expense of conservatism. This has been, for far too long, a corrosive, insular impulse in conservativism, but with the whole MAGA movement, it has finally taken center stage. The whole “anti-PC” thing has become just an axe to grind, where it stopped being about EQUALLY valuing all these different identities, and it started being about DE-valuing some chunk of them. And that has left the door open to go from genuine affection for certain stripes of American life, to a nasty kind of borderline white supremacy.So, I am here to tell you that the opinion of an Indian eye doctor in Pasadena has just as much value - and is just as authentically America - as a corn farmer in Iowa. That some hipster white-collar liberal in Brooklyn is every bit as “real” an American as some bible-study-group-attending suburban mother in Tennessee. That some 19-year-old police-protesting undergrad at Berkeley has just as much American “value” as a New Jersey firefighter. The Somali refugee who became naturalized a few years ago and drives a cab in North Philadelphia is every bit as American as the seventh-generation country club Rotarian judge in Indiana. That the white, male, Christian military veteran has no more right to speak for real America than the Jewish female assistant professor teaching courses in feminist theory in Madison, Wisconsin. That the older San Francisco gay couple who sit down and write checks to the ACLU, HRC, and Planned Parenthood every December, have just as much a seat at the table as the Mormon parents-of-nine who volunteer at the Salt Lake soup kitchen every Christmas.And don't let anyone goddamn tell you different.There's no “authentic” people and “elitist” people - there's no big city coastal liberal people and rural flyover people. There’s no “real” Americans and then all the implied “not real” rest of us.There’s just people.And if any conservative is reading this, and you realize you may regularly talk about your fellow American citizens based primarily on what groups they belong to, whether you may use those identities as a kind of shorthand with which to dismiss people, or that you may have some kind of mental hierarchy about which identities matter or are more “authentic” / closer to the American experience than others, take a long hard look at whether you’re part of the solution to PC identity politics, or whether you’re just replacing one set with another.The Myth of Flyover Country’s ‘Real America’Only 20 Percent Of Voters Are ‘Real Americans‘The myth of “real America”I’m a Coastal Elite From the Midwest: The Real Bubble is Rural America

After I retired, I dusted off the flute I had played in high school, and I joined a community band. Then I started taking beginner trumpet lessons. Now, I play flute in Dublin (Ohio) on Mondays, and trumpet in Upper Arlington on Tuesdays, and trumpet in Clintonville on Wednesdays, and trumpet in Hilliard on Thursdays. Today is Saturday, so I will be performing this afternoon in concert in New Albany, on trumpet.I also belong to a history study group. And I go with a group of retired ladies to a different ethnic restaurant every week. This week, it was Ethiopean.I don't know where I found time to work.

As a foreigner student in UW at Laramie Wyoming, I felt warm for people treating me. I was invited to classmate's wedding ceremony. I had a English tutor at Albany county library for a free public service program to help people to improve their English. People invited me to join their bible study group. These memories are vivid to me in my life.