Anthrorusticaphobia

Anthrorusticaphobia

Special Election Blog

Written in the weeks prior to the election, anticipating a Trump win

Anthrorusticaphobia is an extreme, irrational fear of rednecks. Yes, a real word for a real phobia. It’s a fear the United States, particularly its growing urban, coastal, well-heeled populations, needs to confront, a fear that I blame in significant part for what happened yesterday. I’m not a therapist, but I know the first step in confronting a fear is admitting you have one. The second is figuring out where those fears come from and what makes them extreme and irrational. The third is finding a treatment plan that includes “exposure therapy,” or coming to terms with those fears by actually changing your perception of, and interacting with, the cause of them.

I am a bourgeois liberal. That’s not just a political or social label; it’s a way of life. We sociologists have these things we call cultural schema; a kind of measure of belonging to a group. In broad strokes, bourgeois liberals are usually politically liberal or left-wing; even though we often vote Democrat, and the Democratic party actively caters to our interests, many bourgeois liberals would criticize the Democratic party for being not progressive enough. Bourgeois liberals are economically comfortable, but not rich; we have white-collar jobs and may work for the state or nonprofit sector in positions of some authority and prestige. We usually have a mortgage, some retirement savings, and enough money left over to conspicuously enjoy some favorite highbrow activity like recreational travel or fine wine or season tickets to the symphony. We are usually either fully secular or at least religiously unorthodox. We have at least a bachelor’s degree, and often more, which we usually finished as a full-time, traditional student right after graduating from high school. If we don’t live in or near the city, we often wish we did; or at least love the variety and convenience of the city.

We are socially egalitarian in word, claiming to see human beings as equals and bristling at social inequality. In deed we are elitists; looking down on the benighted populations who lack our education and manners and taste. We are also socially cosmopolitan, considering ourselves citizens of the world, even though we are often concentrated in big cities and scenic suburbs along or near coastlines. From those big coastal cities, we are critical of the connection to place, faith, or nation that most other people feel. We are vocally feminist and anti-racist and LGBTQ+ allies in word, if not always in practice. We are pro-science so long as it isn’t something that’s too ideologically inconvenient; we still like our chiropractors and horoscopes and five-dollar organic bananas. We go to therapy and want you to also; to talk about your feelings, be vulnerable; especially if you’re a cisgender heterosexual white guy. We live in a fairly thick bubble where we mostly associate with others like us; and this leads us to mistakenly think a lot of other people think and feel and live like we do, when we are in fact a fragile minority.

We bourgeois liberals are also often tasked with informing the challenging decisions of modern life, from environment to education to public health and more. And however well-intentioned we are (we are, to our credit, almost always well-intentioned) we sometimes get it wrong because we don’t understand our own blind spots well enough to recognize how policies might impact people different from us in ways they really won’t like or want. This leaves us confused when people don’t want what we think they should want; and we might publicly launch into complicated explanations about how people don’t understand their own interests as well as we can understand their interests for them; when after all,  we’re only trying to do is what’s best for them. We might privately (and sometimes not so privately) just call them dumb racists or mouth-breathers or something. Usually this is all happening while we wonder why more people didn’t vote the way we thought they would, given how Very Clearly Awful the other guy was (and he is, in fact, Very Clearly Awful).

I don’t know if I have ever been fully a redneck, so I want to tread lightly in creating a cultural schema, but I certainly spent a lot of time with, and learned a lot from, them. I have fixed my car on the side of the road, resorted to fisticuffs to defend self and honor, spent my last two bucks on beer that was sold in a 40 ounce bottle, worked a job where I routinely got so dirty I had to wash my hands before taking a leak, grumbled about paying taxes and how hard I had to work to pay the government for things that didn’t do a damned thing for me, lived a week on little more than peanut butter and cheap white bread and ramen noodles, shoveled literal and metaphorical shit, worked outside in many a Texas summer, carried a pocket knife, slept outside on the ground, caught and cleaned a lot of fish, learned how to shoot a gun and a bow as a kid, gone outside to watch the tornado touch down, hung out in dive bars, learned the lyrics and guitar chords to outlaw country songs, been to demolition derbies and rodeos; grew up watching monster truck rallies and professional wrestling on TV, have seen Lynrd Skynrd, Willie Nelson, Chris Stapleton, and Hank 3 live (had tickets to see Merle Haggard but he passed away just days before the show), smoked actual cigarettes made of paper and tobacco; spit and cussed and told crude jokes and raised hell. 

I lived far longer in that second world than I have in the first one, but usually feel like I don’t belong to either. Fortunately, I live in the north woods of Minnesota, where many of my students and even my fellow bourgeois liberals camp and hunt and fish and drink beer and chop wood and even work on cars. Even though I’m more of a bourgeois liberal than some of them, it feels more like home, more like the three decades I lived in Texas. Working and living in a city with a big research university on one of the coasts (assuming they would ever have me) would mean I couldn’t really be myself anymore, that I’d always have to be putting on a mask; and I already do enough of that that it’s exhausting. Given that I’m a social scientist, charged with figuring out the social world and addressing its problems, I can see how the blind spots I mentioned having as a bourgeois liberal not only create limitations, but can be downright counterproductive. And the fact that the bubbles are even thicker at the more prestigious institutions which inform policymaking should be even greater cause for concern.

In my fairly extensive experience since I started my first academic job over a decade ago, anthrorusticaphobia is a common ailment among us bourgeois liberals. It leads to a belief, often unexamined, that the one group of people that are safely stereotype-able and dehumanize-able are poor white people, particularly manual laborers, less-educated populations, people who live in the country, and people from the south. These populations are so easily viewed by us well-intentioned, socially conscious egalitarians as parochial, closed-minded, ignorant, racist, sexist, aggressive, fanatical, backward, lacking in self-control. Colonizers and imperialists used alarmingly similar sets of “arguments” to justify subjugating populations in the past. This ought to give my fellow bourgeois liberals some insight as to why So Many of Those People Seem So Angry At Us For Some Reason right now.

I say this at a moment when I hear open-throated declarations that one presidential candidate is a fascist; or would at least govern like one. I’m not trying to excuse his rhetoric because I think it’s inexcusable. From falsely accusing a sitting president, the first African American to hold the office, of not being an American, to falsely claiming the last election was rigged, and of course all the dehumanizing and violent rhetoric that has in fact incited targeted violence against immigrants, minority groups, and other perceived “enemies within”; surely this is at least childish and bad leadership, if not something far worse and deliberate; either way, there’s no excuse. When leaders call for violence, someone somewhere is willing to supply it sooner or later.

The name-calling in the past ten years has clearly and consistently escalated from ridiculing people’s ideas to attacking the people themselves, but it was going on long before that. I study social movements; this is often a prelude to violence. But this hasn’t been monopolized by one side of the aisle, let alone one person. Basket of deplorables, garbage, MAGAt, Trumpanzee, white trash, inbred, and of course stupid racist/sexist/etc. These aren’t just attacks on bad ideas; they are cruel and dehumanizing attacks on human beings. If we are going to be intellectually honest egalitarians, my fellow bourgeois liberals, we need to recognize that the dehumanization is bipartisan, and maybe we didn’t cause it, but we have been complicit.

Like a lot of folks at this point, I do see this election, and whatever chaos that will follow in the coming months, as a referendum on the moral center of this country. It’s too easy to believe that “we” got here because “they” are big stupid meanie-heads (or some variation thereupon). Yes, there are virulently racist, sexist, etc. people who want to see other people disenfranchised, punished, or worse, some of them have found their way to the levers of power lately, and that is a problem. But I want to suggest they are a small minority of the total population on any given day, and here’s why: the confusion stems, I think, from conflating prejudice (or hasty/uninformed negative judgements about a person or group) and discrimination (actively treating others as less-than). As sociologist Robert K. Merton long ago pointed out, a person can do one without the other. This is fortunate, because everyone has prejudices, and as a good bourgeois liberal I think you should examine your prejudices and get educated about where they came from and do better; but prejudicial attitudes alone do not discrimination make. Any good social psychologist knows that beliefs and behaviors are weakly and inconsistently linked to each other. It follows that the amount of “active bigotry” (people who are both openly prejudiced and behave in discriminatory ways) is much smaller than the amount of prejudice might suggest. This gives me hope that all this heated rhetoric will not be nearly as destructive in practice in the coming years.

Of course, you are welcome to disagree with me or accuse me of being a whatever—apologist? Centrist? Fence-sitter? Enabler? Worse? Fine. But I ask you: what alternatives do you suggest? After the results are tallied, what do you actually plan to do, and to what end? Are you willing to treat tens of millions of fellow Americans as an inhuman enemy to be punished until the next election, when maybe the Other Team, But Now Even Angrier, just escalates, trying to do the same to you? And if you are not, why are you still listening to people who are urging you to do just that?

Regardless of who you voted for and who wins, I encourage you to unfollow the propaganda pages, stop listening to the angry talking heads, unplug yourself from your social media cocoon full of stuff taken out of context just to hold your attention; and talk to your family and your friends and your neighbors in real life, especially the ones you don’t agree with politically—touch grass. If the Red Team wins, I’ll owe at least one person a beer; and if the Blue Team wins, they’re buying. Life is too short, and the future of the incomplete project that is America, is too important, to be permanently buried in grievance and resentment. We need boundaries, don’t let people bully and berate you, and keep fighting for your rights (I plan to join you as I am able and insofar as I am welcome). I long ago cut ties with those (and some cut ties with me) who were too wrapped up in partisan hostility to reach. But even if we’re not friends, that doesn’t mean we have to be enemies. It’s ok to dislike people; but you can still treat them as neighbors in the Biblical sense (or, for this secular bourgeois liberal, the Mr. Rogers sense). When did that become controversial?

I don’t think the United States is perfect, or ever will be, but I do think the United States is great, in the sense that we have enshrined in writing some big ideas that we should keep carrying forward to their ever-greater realization. My favorite idea comes from the Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”

Is he problematic? Sure. He literally owned other people when he wrote those words (though he in fact advocated from the earliest meetings with the other founders to free the slaves), was part of a regime that later became cruelly imperialistic and colonial toward the Indigenous inhabitants of this land; and used the word “men” because women weren’t allowed to vote until about a century and a half later. That’s what I mean by incomplete, it’s a project and a promise that still has not been realized; and it is up to all of us to decide whether to build on it or burn it all down. But that ideal will only survive if enough of us at any given time believe it is worth pursuing, and only if that means building and sustaining the kind of society that is at once just enough, open enough, and stable enough to foster these things. What happens next is up to We, the People, not the teams we vote for or don’t vote for. And it starts with rethinking your perception of others, seeing them as fully human, as thoroughly and authentically “created equal.”

Finally, a challenge. I hope to reread this in four years. I hope you will join me, four years from today, to consider in a harsh but luminous nonpartisan daylight of truth, whether the America you find there is stronger or weaker, freer or more repressive, more united or more divided, poorer or more prosperous; whether, how, and why we have moved toward or away from that radical promise. If you are a bourgeois liberal who votes blue like me, I hope you will join me now in recognizing that it’s past time to actively dismantle this anthrorusticaphobia and send it toward the dustbin of history along with the other irrational prejudices we have as a society gradually, imperfectly, and with much noise and struggle, conquered. If you voted red, you now have the stage. It’s up to you to show the rest of us what you think great looks like. Prove your vision isn’t a vapid nostalgia trap, a longing for Good Old Days That Never Were, or a grift to keep a deeply unprincipled man from facing the consequences of his misdeeds. I’ll be waiting in four years to compare notes.

Image Credit: I Googled Redneck. I rest my case…