Your editor linked Nathan Osborne to this recent piece in New York Review of Books detailing a liberal local journalist’s experience in an upstate New York town full of Trump fans. Osborne replied as follows…
Thanks for sharing that piece by Jim Schultz. It was a lot more instructive than those flyover “Reports from the Heartland” from the Times, etc. The folks Schultz writes about are his neighbors–and it shows. Regardless of other reporter’s good intentions, they often pop in for only a few days, and then attempt to summarize a town. The residents often come out as zoological curiosities.
I’m curious though about how impactful the dialogues he’s fostering will turn out to be. From experience, these things are a bit like street brawls. Two macho dudes whoop each others ass. Afterwards due to some quirk in male bonding they’re best friends. But that homology doesn’t seem to compute at the ballot box. I’m not sure each guy’s newfound respect for the other changes their polarized views. Maybe those new emotions, though not immediately consequential, will help ward off horrors that might result from extreme divisions in the future.
The piece reminded me (by contrast) of a recent interaction I had at work. A veterinarian and his wife came in to have some real estate paperwork notarized. They had an air of well-traveled importance about them. They had little “Impeach” buttons on their designer jackets. “I like your button,” I said. “Thanks,” said the vet, as appreciatively as a grimace could possibly be. We were going through the complicated paperwork when he mentioned a certain signature “superseded” the necessity for more witnesses. I felt the electric thrill I get when I hear a word spoken out loud that I’ve only read in toney journals. “Superseded?–” I stuttered out in a kind of dumb abandon. I immediately kicked myself–remembering that I do in fact know what that word means. “Yes–superseded,” he said with a sort of gotcha grin, “the act of taking precedence over another thing.” My excitement vanished, and we finished the paperwork with empty politeness.
As a leftist in MAGA-land, I’m hungry for political dialogue with people where I’m not constantly starting at square one. However, I can do without the sour contempt of libs like that veterinarian and his wife. In hindsight, their “Impeach” buttons seem like little more than face-masks. That upstate journalist Schultz’s struggle might be Sisyphean, but he’s made friends, and I don’t see many better alternatives. Let’s hope efforts like his can, uh, supersede a liberal smugness that’s bound to lose.