The “Real” America That Trusts in God but Not in Obama

An Analysis of the People Who Crowd the Tea Party

Tom Henderson is 60 years old and has undergone two bypasses; he works in a factory of plastic tools and walks with a flashy cowboy buckle on his jeans. He fought in Vietnam, has tried every drug possible, then was “reborn” in Christ and has given up the marijuana but not “Jim Beam” bourbon (“God forbids drunkenness, not drinking,” is his creed). In his living room in Winchester, Virginia, the TV is turned on permanently to the Fox News of Rupert Murdoch. On Nov. 2, Tom will probably take part in this: Along with millions of other Americans like him, he will take away the House and Senate from the Democrats in Washington and will leave Barack Obama to fight in the coming years with a Congress controlled by Republicans.

All the other Tom Hendersons, who are usually described as the “real” America, continue to be the nightmare of the other America — that of the intellectuals, of most of the media, of Hollywood and of liberals of every shade. This anxiety emerges also from the 230 pages of the essay by Joe Bageant, “Deer Hunting with Jesus.” Tom is one of the protagonists of the book, the author’s childhood friend in Winchester and, like him, a Vietnam veteran. But like most of his fellow citizens, Tom, over the decades, has shifted to the right, ending up at odds with Bageant, a journalist and blogger (his website, www.JoeBageant.com, has already been visited 30 million times) who now would be categorized as part of the extreme left in the U.S. for his positions and dreams of a Marxist class struggle.

The Winchester microcosm gives Bageant — returned home after decades of traveling — the ability to analyze an America that still remains an enigma to the rest of the country and shocks us Europeans. It is the world of the poor whites, the “rednecks” and the “white trash,” who like rifles and drinking beer from cans, driving beat-up vans with country music at high volume, living in trailers and occasionally having the urge to burn a Quran. It is a working world that, 30 years ago, got tired of a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who accused them and much of the country of being responsible for the crisis of that time period.

Thus were born the so-called Reagan Democrats, capable of pushing into the White House a former actor who spoke of optimism and repeated that the “government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Having in the meantime become evangelical and “reborn” Christians, they mobilized the churches 10 years ago to push George W. Bush to victory. And today, they crowd with folding chairs and baseball caps the meadows of the meetings of the tea party, the conservative movement that gave new life to the Republicans knackered by Obama in 2008.

It’s a people that horrify the editors of newspapers in New York and Los Angeles, unable to decipher them without reducing them to stereotypes and caricatures. This is confirmed by the same Bageant: “As … a New York City book editor told me, ‘It is as if your people were some sort of exotic, as if you were from Yemen or something.’” But Bageant, too, is unable to go further, offering in this way only a complex overview of the “Christian Taliban” radical believers, and interpreting everything as a problem of education. It’s like saying: If they had studied, they would vote for the left.

The reality is more complex, like those Europeans who have gone to the “real” America to study or work also know. If today there were a revolt mounted against Obama after a cautious opening of credit two years ago to the “black president,” it is because there is a large slice of the American electorate that does not want an increase in the presence of the federal government in their lives. They live in conditions that are not really prosperous, perhaps below the poverty line, but they prefer to go it alone with the help of their churches (often bizarre), rather than with the help of federal welfare.

Together with the middle class that lives in the suburbs, they represent a majority in the U.S., and as a middle class, they are absolutely incomprehensible to the dominant culture rooted in the big cities looking out on the two oceans. This is why cinema and literature have been narrating about not only the rednecks but also about the suburban middle class by means of stereotypes only, which have ultimately affected the collective imagination of us Europeans. It’s in this way that the suburban areas, where the majority of Americans live, have become places of anguish, depression and perversions, as in [the films] “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road,” by director Sam Mendes (not by chance, a Briton). Those are suburbs populated by characters that are incomprehensible to, for example, a New Yorker like the one played by Larry David in “Whatever Works,” the latest film by Woody Allen. Or they turn into arid human agglomerations where nothing positive can happen, as in the last novel by Jonathan Franzen, “Freedom.”

It’s the effect of what David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times and author of essays on the American middle class, called “Quiet Desperation dogma”: the pathological state in which, according to the most acclaimed authors, Americans who don’t live in the big cities live. But it is a narrow vision of reality, Brooks warns, an “intellectual cul-de-sac” in which even authors as sensitive as Franzen remain trapped — an approach that cannot go beyond the surface, trying to guess if there is something more profound in the lifestyle of the “real” America.