Real Americans

Still, if the basis of authenticity didn't change much, the political exploitation of it did. Seizing on the new blue-collar cohort, Franklin Roosevelt reinvigorated the Jacksonian identification of real Americans with the Democratic Party, in part by responding to their economic grievances but also by labeling Republicans as the party of the wealthy and culturally superior -- that old American raw nerve. (Never mind FDR's actual "to the manner born" identity.)

And that's when it began to get tricky. Having lost the battle for real Americans during the Depression, the Republican Party sought to regain the populist initiative by redefining its opposition as elite. A large part of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's appeal was that he recast the Cold War in cultural terms. On one side were the real Americans -- salt-of-the-earth patriots. And on the other side were the modern equivalents of the once-detested Englishmen -- Ivy League-educated, supercilious mandarins like Alger Hiss who, in this new formulation, preferred European communism to American common sense. In effect, McCarthy re-politicized American identity by not just denying the Americanness of anyone who wasn't working class or rural, but by turning them into traitors, which neither Jackson nor Roosevelt had attempted.

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McCarthy's equation didn't really take hold until the Vietnam War, when opposition itself would be cast as un-American. This was Richard Nixon's major contribution to our political taxonomy. For Nixon, America was cleaved between the vast Silent Majority (real) who agreed with him, supported the war and detested protesters and pointy-headed academics, and those protesters and academics who disagreed with him (unreal).

Republicans have been feasting on this division ever since, and so have the media, most likely because they fear being stigmatized by the same elitism. Everyone wants to be real, even if being real Americans looks suspiciously like being a hidebound conservative.

It is a neat gambit -- to conflate "real" with Republican and "un-American" with Democrats -- neater still when there are fewer and fewer Americans who fit the most colorful aspects of authenticity represented by a Sarah Palin.

If the country keeps clinging to this reductive stereotype despite its absurdity, it may be because we have never quite lost those powerful early American impulses. Our resentments against elitists still burn, our anger against our "betters" is still hot, and our fear of being called a phony still roars. Just ask any Republican.