Essay by Ed Quillen
Politics – June 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
ONE OF THESE DAYS, I’ll figure out which America I live in.
For most of my life, I thought that this issue had been settled in the spring of 1865, when various Confederate generals surrendered and urged their soldiers to go home and live as law-abiding citizens of the United States.
But ever since the 2000 election, I’ve been reading about the differences between Red America (those states carried by George Bush the Younger) and Blue America (states carried by Democratic candidate Al Gore).
Here in Red America, we all enjoy stable marriages, tote guns, attend church regularly, devour red meat, swill mass-market beer, adore successful NASCAR drivers, drive pickups, and avoid fancy coffees.
Over there in Blue America, they get divorced regularly, pack cell phones in their holsters, read the New York Times on Sunday mornings, delight in tofu, prefer boutique wines to any kind of beer, admire obscure poets, drive Volvos, and know how to order a mocha latte fresh-ground from shade-grown fair-trade beans.
Yes, according to those in the know, America is now Red and Blue. And considering popular descriptions of Red and Blue Americans, lily-White is a given. At least, it’s hard to imagine a group of turban-wearing Sufis or New York Jamaicans hanging out in either America.
But you don’t have to be in a minority group to feel left out. The trouble with this analysis is that it doesn’t fit, at least around here.
The Mountain West is supposed to be solid Red country, yet our region has the lowest rate of church attendance of any region in the country. Our divorce rate is higher than the national average (the state with the lowest rate is Blue Massachusetts, home state of the likely Democratic nominee for president).
On a local level, if I try to figure out where Salida fits into this, I just get frustrated. Name a cultural indicator, from microbrew to pickup-with-gunrack, from avant-garde art to a Wal-Mart Supercenter, and you can find it here — in a relatively isolated town with only 5,500 people. Democrats hold a majority of our county offices, but our state representative and senator are Republicans. I like to think of it as “a good mix,” but that doesn’t fit conveniently in anyone’s political coloring book.
During this presidential election season, we’re likely to be hearing a lot about a new division, proposed by Michael Barone, a pundit who currently writes for U.S. News & World Report. He has just issued a book that has drawn considerable attention: Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future.
Soft America, according to Barone, is the culture of public schools, taken to an extreme. Self-esteem is the most important factor, and nobody ever really fails. Dodge-ball is bad because it’s too competitive. All children are creative and their work is worthy of respect.
Hard America promotes competition and accountability. In Barone’s words, “Hard America plays for keeps. The private sector fires people when profits fall.” It’s the dog-eat-dog corporate world where you have to produce.
THERE IS SOME TRUTH in these observations. I saw it when I taught a few writing classes for Colorado Mountain College. Many of my students seemed astounded when I explained that I got paid to read their work, so it wasn’t enough to impress me. To succeed, they needed to produce work that people would pay to read, and they would have to operate in a world of capricious markets, transient trends and fickle audiences. A school class where you get an A if you just follow the instructions is Soft America; free-lance writing is Hard America, even if we members of the “chattering class” seldom work up a sweat and don’t develop many callouses.
In Soft America, I guess, you’re supposed to develop a good relationship with your computer. In Hard America, the program you wrote either compiles and runs, or it doesn’t.
But this analysis has its limits, especially when tied to politics. George Will, another big-league pundit, put it this way: “Barone’s book is a guide to electoral map reading: the blue and red states have, respectively, softer and harder sensibilities.”
In other words, Republicans support Hard America, and Democrats support Soft America. Red states have a hard culture, blue states a soft one.
GEORGE WILL IS NOT usually known as a humorist, but he must be trying to switch genres. Is there any place with harder competition than Hollywood, where you’re only as good as your last project? Yet it’s a leading industry of Blue California. Our computer industry is based on the Blue West Coast, and it’s also a place of harsh and unremitting competition. Book and magazine publishing, headquartered in Blue New York City, is another industry with brutal competition.
As for big business in general, how many stories have you read about CEOs who insist on “golden parachutes” before they sign on, so that they’re guaranteed millions no matter how well or poorly their company performs. Come what may, they’re not going to miss any meals — and these are the exemplars of “Hard America”?
And if the Republican Party is the party of Hard America, why has the party supported the repeal of the “Death Tax,” which used to be known as the “Estate Tax?” Nothing gives you a softer life than a nice big inheritance. If having to struggle for every meal, every house payment, every college credit makes you a better person, why not provide these moral opportunities to the children of the wealthy, too?
What of education, that bastion of Soft America? From my observations, even if academic standards aren’t what they should be, high schools remain places of brutal competition — in athletics, in social hierarchy, in clothing and style and the like.
Further, those competitions might make more sense in modern America than academic striving; no one ever accused George W. Bush of being a great scholar, but he obviously developed some social skills. If you’re smart, they can ship your job to India, but no one has figured out how to out-source the charming glad-hander.
And if academic standards were more rigorous, and only brilliant, hard-working kids could get into prestigious colleges, wouldn’t down-home Republicans attack that policy as intellectual elitism?
Who can’t remember lackadaisical students who earned excellent grades in difficult academic subjects by playing football, or joining the pep squad — or with just plain, old-fashioned apple-polishing? Yet it sure doesn’t seem like parents in Hard America are any more likely to protest those easy “A”s their kids get than citizens in Soft America.
And if adversity is good for the character, then why was our Republican legislature trying to “protect” right-thinking students from liberal professors?
So are we in Soft America or Hard America here? Well, making a livelihood in Central Colorado is not an easy matter. Our median household incomes are among the lowest in the state, and also below national averages, so surely we’re in Hard America.
Then again, one of our major industries is the construction of luxurious second homes. The actual building process is clearly Hard American: a roof leaks or it doesn’t, a door closes or it doesn’t, the water goes down the drain or it doesn’t, a job you bid on makes money or your company dies. There’s no mushy feel-good stuff in that world; it doesn’t matter how much self-esteem an electrician has if the lights don’t come on.
But the leisure homes themselves? Sounds like Soft America to me, even if the buyers are people who succeeded in Hard America.
See how confusing this analysis can get?
For my part, I’ve lived most of my adult life in Hard America, and there’s a competitive part of me that savors its challenges. But I’m 53 and I don’t have the energy I once did. Yet if I can’t keep producing I have no trust fund, no retirement, no health insurance, no guarantees that could actually pay my way. Damn right I’d like to write a best-seller, invest the income, and move over into Soft America, where a big check arrives every month no matter what I produce or don’t produce.
I SUSPECT THAT there are many other Hard America residents who feel the same way. It reminds me of a story about John F. Kennedy campaigning in West Virginia in 1960. He stood at the entrance to a coal mine, shaking hands with the grimy miners as they came off shift. One miner stared at Kennedy and said “I hear you’ve never worked a day in your life.”
The candidate, who had been born into wealth, nodded and agreed that this was true.
The miner shook his hand and said “Let me tell you something. You haven’t missed a damn thing.”
At any rate, I have to wonder how much progress we’ve made as a country when we consider the words of a founding father, John Adams, second president of the United States:
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
Ten generations later, we’re still studying politics and war. America remains a hard place, even if the founders had other dreams for our country. And if John Adams was a patriot, then it’s certainly patriotic to work to make America a little softer, no matter what the coloring-book commentators say.
–Ed Quillen