BY WILL GLOVINSKY

In print | Published October 23, 2008

Every presidential election that I can remember has been progressively more important, or so I’ve been primed to believe. And that’s probably true. But with that growing significance, greater negative perceptions and fear of the other side arise. Indeed, when I reflect on what Edward Said’s concept of the “Other” means for today’s voters, it is certainly not the foreign Oriental, the Communist, or the Islamic extremist. It is the American Other.

In contemporary politics, the American Other is not the result of racial strife or anti-immigrant frenzy (although such problems do create divisions of their own). It is the product of rampant distrust, misunderstanding and hatred of the opposite end of the political spectrum. As a New York liberal coming of age in the Bush years, for example, I identified myself by cordoning off a huge piece of America and defining myself against it. Just as Said wrote that the Occidental West created and required the Oriental Other to reaffirm and solidify its identity, liberals and conservatives in the United States thrive on mutual fear and disassociation. It energizes them and lends purpose to their cause. By believing in the logical superiority of one’s beliefs, the political Other is reduced to an ideological barbarian: irrational, blind to facts, and acting on ugly, ulterior motives.

This is the crux of our polarization problem right now. Rather than accepting that political positions are based on the values we grow up with, we cling to the assumption that every opinion we hold follows logically from some philosophical platform of undeniable truth. On the left, the correlation between liberal values and an individual’s education level is often cited to reinforce this belief. We are civilized; the American Other is red, white and blue chaos.

This view betrays the mantle of logical legitimacy to which both sides lay claim. Values — the platform beliefs on which we build our political positions through logical consistency — are not universal. They are, like everything else, products of time, place and necessity. A person’s values are predicted pretty well by the population density of her community, i.e. urban, suburban, or rural. Just look at a 2004 presidential election map broken down by county. Seas of red rural areas with blue urban islands.

Looking at this issue geographically and sociologically helps to explain where these values come from. Disagreement over the proper role and size of government, the central division between liberalism and conservatism, becomes more understandable when viewed (in the admittedly non-scientific analysis below) as a product of place.

With little to gain financially by voting for Democrats, affluent city dwellers believe in big government because of the close contact between rich and poor. Cycles of poverty make sense when you can see them, and this understanding leads to a moral imperative to help the needy. Further, urbanites can feel the presence of government; centers of power are located in cities and citizens have tangible evidence of where their tax dollars go.

In rural areas, values shift because the living is different. This summer I worked on a family farm in Downeast, Maine. These farmers (both of whom went to college) work long, hard days and there is no such thing as a weekend or vacation. Whenever the conversation turned to taxes, they always remarked that scraping out a living is hard enough without the government taking a percentage to give to people who don’t work. Their culture of work includes a rugged individualism that is diametrically opposed to the concept of government assistance. (And yes, they did receive two thousand dollars in subsidies in 2006 — about the price of one cow.)

You don’t have to agree with either set of values described here; the problem we face isn’t about disagreement. It’s about misunderstanding and distrust. When we question the motives of those with whom we disagree, we neglect the likelihood that we’re coming from different places. Liberals and conservatives surely don’t have to agree with each other (and I am not suggesting political animosity or misunderstanding is anything new), but it is dangerous to assume that anyone who disagrees with you is irrational, misguided, or deluded. Instead, try to remember your own biases and the forces that make you think the way you do. In a community like Swarthmore, where we are wont to constantly reaffirm our own political opinions, let’s remember that the conception of the American Other is like any Other: largely a work of our imaginations that tells us more about ourselves than it does about anybody else.

Will is a first-year. He can be reached at wglovin1@swarthmore.edu.

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