Real Americans

As Sarah Palin "aw-shucks-ed" her way through Thursday's debate, she repeatedly played the one card that has become her stock in trade: She is a real American. Her rural roots, her lack of sophistication and worldliness, her bare bones education, her plain-spokenness, her moose hunting -- all of these seemed to brand her as a typical American, one of us. She has even taken to calling herself Jane Sixpack.

This characterization, ludicrous as it may be in a country as diverse as ours, is more than a matter of political aesthetics. One of the most important components of our recent presidential elections is the redefinition -- actually the narrowing of the definition -- of what constitutes an American. Since 2000 at least, we've been asking ourselves which candidate is the one we'd rather belly up to the bar with for a beer. Never mind George W. Bush's Brahmin pedigree and Yale education; he reinvented himself as a cowboy. By comparison, Al Gore was ridiculed as a Harvard stiff and John Kerry as Frenchified. Now Barack Obama is being subjected to the same mockery.

It is tempting to attribute this sort of demagoguery entirely to Republican calculation. By constantly promoting the notion that Republicans are just a bunch of NASCAR fans and that Democrats are effete, the GOP has successfully divided the country not between red and blue politics but between one version of America and another, between the allegedly authentic and the allegedly inauthentic. But in reality, Republicans have only been exploiting a vein deep within the American consciousness. And who can blame them? What Republicans realize is that most Americans always have been desperately afraid of being seen as phony, and they are actively hostile toward anyone with airs. In fact, liberty is only one foundation of America. The nation rests just as securely on fear and resentment.

In the beginning, that resentment was understandably directed against the British. American rebels needed a strong sense of identity, something that would anoint them as unique and fill them with pride. And although the founding fathers may have embraced elitism and looked askance on true democracy, ordinary Americans nurtured a particular vision of themselves as homespun, pragmatic and lacking the affectations of Europe. In short, real.