You shouldn’t really go wrong asking Christopher Hitchens to write about Michelle Bachmann. Nevertheless this part of his most recent Slate column is, though reprising a familiar complaint, unusually unreflective:
Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it’s good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on.
Of course it’s silly to suppose that the residents or products of small town American life hold the secrets of the Good Life, far less that they’re unusually qualified to “understand” the trials and travails of “ordinary” people everywhere. Nevertheless, it makes sense for political consultants and strategists to present their candidates in this fashion. Every candidate needs a story and “authenticity” has become an important mark of political distinctiveness. The great thing about authenticity is you can fake it.
Moreover, the voyage from humble beginnings to the White House is as old as the United States itself. Indeed, it’s an idealised, convenient shorthand for the story of America. That’s one reason why, like Main Street, it’s become such a political cliche. It allows the candidate to present themselves as an American example. We may be asked to savour the home-spun pieties of a small town upbringing but we’re also invited to recognise that the candidate, though “rooted” in those “values” is not confined by them. The candidate may be a hick but like Robert Redford inThe Natural they’re ready to play in the Big Leagues. They always were; it was just that the Big Leagues – that is, Washington – didn’t think to look. It’s not a surprise that so many campaign tomes (I use the word advisedly) focus on the “journey” to political prominence, nor that said trip is always deemed improbable.
Then again, it often is improbable. Of the 12 Presidents since FDR only three – JFK and the two Bushes – spring from affluent or privileged stock. To one degree or another the other nine are from rural America or unexceptional backgrounds and frequently both. They have been the sons of salesmen and farmers and teachers. That’s a tribute to one slice of American social mobility but it’s also obvious fodder for a political version of the American Dream. (Usual caveats about small sample size apply; nonetheless that’s the sample we have to work with.)
You can also blame the blasphemous deification of the Presidency. Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln really were rural types who made it big in the capital. In different ways they set the template for what would follow, no matter how debased the currency has subsequently become. Sure, the United States became an urban and then suburban nation but it has not yet produced a truly suburban President.
Nor should one ignore certain biblical parallels that help foster and strengthen the attraction of gilding the time-honoured and solid virtues of a youth spent in some rural arcadia. All campaigns are redemption songs of one kind or another. Every Presidential campaign of modern times begins with the observation that something has gone badly wrong and America has been diverted from its righteous path towards greatness. In this telling, America has sinned and needs to be born again. What better way to do that than to return to first principles? Principles learnt from such ordinary people in such an ordinary town that it was once and can be again an exceptional example of all that is good and noble about the great American experiment? Boosterism is all and there are pleasures in conformity too.
Is this just guff? Perhaps it is but it’s the stuff political campaigns are made of. Barack Obama was an unusually cosmopolitan and metropolitan candidate with an unusual story and background but just as he made capital from that on the campaign trail he also made sure voters understood this exoticism was tempered by the values instilled in him at an early age by his mother’s all-American family in all-American Kansas.
That spoke to the need to reassure as well as the need to excite. And reassurance is one of the thing’s a Presidential needs these days. Without it they cannot expect to be trusted. And so the small town virtues are used to reassure voters that some things remain eternal in a fast changing world. If a candidate doesn’t have these advantages he needs to find them elsewhere: by clearing brush on a Texas ranch if necessary (Bush Jr) or from the military (Kerry, McCain) which acts as a plausible, even more honourable, alternative to humble beginnings. (Even if your father and grandfather were Admirals.)
Finally, for most of the television Presidential age (that is, from 1960) crime was one of the major issues that dominated the political agenda and remapped America in almost equal measure. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s crime was arguably the greatest domestic issue and a symptom of what was perceived to be – and often was – urban decline. The renaissance of the American city is a recent and still uneven phenomenon. For decades the cities were deemed to be failing and their population declines proved the point. They were not the places from which to launch a national campaign. Not when New York City was considered an ungovernable mess or Chicago a racket of corruption and cronyism. In those circumstances too it made sense to build a narrative that was grounded in a smaller, more cohesive, peaceful place.
Of course this doesn’t make the people who really did grow up in small town America any better than those who did not. It merely gave them an appealling “story” to tell that dovetails neatly with many of the stories America tells about itself and that connects, in ways sensible and silly alike, to an idea of America while also acting as a useful shorthand by which a candidate can demonstrate that he (and now she) has not been corrupted by the vice that dominated the big cities the people were fleeing or by, importantly, the temptations of Washington itself.
Who better to lead America back to Eden than a candidate who was born and brought up there themselves? As I say, this may be daft on many levels but the United States is in many ways a very provincial place (that’s not, incidentally, a pejorative term) suspicious of central authority while also liable to swamp the next great huckster with more orders for his snakeoil than even he can process. In those circumstances the certainties and promise of the simple and good life are obviously attractive to politicians, their hack-biographers and the media alike.
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