There has been much talk throughout 2024 about the “two Americas.” On Nov. 5, these two Americas faced off in what many pundits – forgetting, say, the election of 1860 – called the “most divisive election in American history.”
This week I received your classic “holiday letter” from a long-time friend who resides in that other America, the one in which I don’t reside. Before parsing this remarkable letter from Mrs. X, a description of those two Americas might be in order.
Although our understanding of the two Americas has evolved over time, Canadian Michael Ignatieff – writing in Prospect, Britain’s leading current affairs publication – provides a reasonable summary of the post-election status quo as seen from the Left.
In the first America, Ignatieff generalizes, are “younger, city-dwelling, higher income, college-educated men and women, living either on the West or East Coasts.”
He continues, “These people have feasted on the tech and AI boom, profited from the stock market rise and leveraged the credentials they earned in American universities to gain power in American government, media and corporations. These Americans still live the dream.”
The “second America,” Ignatieff writes, is “concentrated among older non-college educated white men living in small towns and rural areas in the south and the Midwest.”
He adds, “It’s an America that worries that its great days are past, that distrusts the elites on both coasts and fears that America’s institutions are irrevocably corrupted.”
Despite living in the Midwest, Mr. and Mrs. X are poster children for the First America. Affluent, well-educated, and well-traveled, they have – like their fellow progressives – “essentially endorsed the changes that have convulsed the country since the Sixties.”
Endorsing those changes, however, has so estranged them from friends in the Second America that they no longer concern themselves with their friends’ feelings. How else to explain a holiday letter to “Friends & Family” that begins as follows.
“Well, damn. I really thought the Holiday Letter in 2016 would be the darkest we would ever have to send. And yet here we are, eight years on, presumably eight years wiser, with eight more years of experience, and our country has gone and done it again. We have elected the rat a second time.”
The rat? How, one wonders, did Mrs. X imagine the supporters of said rat would respond to such a hateful slur? I cannot have been the only rat voter to have received this letter.
Mrs. X continues, “We expect time will offer greater clarity about what happened – and what lies ahead. For now, we are trying to absorb that more than 77 million Americans became convinced to choose this path.”
Ignatieff, writing from his own experience as a leading Canadian Liberal, explains at least part of the lesson Mr. and Mrs. X needs to absorb: “When liberal progressives translated the revolution of inclusion into affirmative action, speech codes, diversity and inclusion bureaucracies, when they sought to entrench the revolution in a bureaucracy of political correctness, the resentment at the inclusion revolution exploded.”
On the personal level, as the holiday letter from Mrs. X reveals, the “inclusion revolution” has led to the exclusion of those who do not share the ever-evolving worldview of the X family.
A one-time moderate and a genuinely decent person, Mrs. X no longer hears what she is saying. She has listened instead to the Siren song of the woke, and followed it unthinkingly onto the shoals of bad ideas and even worse manners.
In my experience, women – especially women of means – have proved particularly vulnerable to this mind-spinning, mass-formation psychosis.
But men are not immune. Mr. X, we are told, ‘worked very hard on the Harris/Walz campaign” and is now “exploring several new avenues to get involved in saving our democracy going forward.”
This effort on the part of Mr. X to save “our democracy” calls to mind a memorable encounter in June 2024 between a hard-core, Second America MAGA couple and a smarmy First America CNN reporter.
The mocking headline sums it up: “These Trump supporters say America isn’t a democracy. And they’re okay with it.” The headline implies that the Trump supporters welcome America’s impending slide to fascism.
What the MAGA people actually – and correctly – said was that America is a republic, not a democracy. On the right this is common knowledge. On CNN, this came as news.
Despite having less formal education than liberals on average, conservatives score better in every political knowledge survey that I have seen.
Were there a humility test, conservatives would score better on that as well. They do not presume others should think – and feel – a certain way, simply because they do.
The truth is there are no two Americas. The holiday letter from Mrs. X shows her to be closer in life-style to those in MAGA America than to those in the alternative world of the woke.
Mrs. X loves her husband of long standing, her two children, and her two grandchildren, and they appear to love her in turn. She is a person of faith and a civic do-gooder.
To understand those other 77 million people with the same dreams and aspirations and ambitions – inside joke – Mrs. X just needs to have her bubble popped.
Happy New Year to all!
