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The American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters. These were people who refused to submit to the established religious authorities. They sought personal relationships with God. They moved to the frontier when life got too confining. They created an American creed, built, as the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it, around liberty, individualism, equal opportunity, populism and laissez-faire.
This creed shaped America and evolved with the decades. Starting in the mid-20th century, there was a Southern and Western version of it, formed by ranching Republicans like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Their version drew on the traditional tenets: ordinary people are capable of greatness; individuals have the power to shape their destinies; they should be given maximum freedom to do so. --David Brooks
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Maybe the fact that the Christian-Caucasian-libertarian-capitalist-nationalist cultural faction has absorbed another bitter political defeat will spark some new dynamic in American life. But I wouldn’t bet on it. An angry, declining minority that believes itself oppressed can be an unstable and dangerous phenomenon. The worst sin of the secular-multicultural-communitarian-internationalist-environmentalist faction (other than all that oaky California chardonnay) is its smugness and superiority, its sense of historical mission and its confidence that it has nothing to learn from its diminished opponents and bears no responsibility for their plight. Pride goeth before the fall, as a text prized by both sides for different reasons puts it. If we can’t find a way to address the American cultural divide, beyond insults and quadrennial beauty contests, it is sure to destroy us. --Andrew O'Hehir
O'Hehir is right: mythos doesn't go down without a fight to logos (i.e., the demographic facts), especially when the mythos in question is that of the hard-bitten individualism of the American frontiersman. This myth has been transposed from the frontier to the business world, and the people who celebrate it now are mostly wealthy white males like Bill O'Reilly or Rick Santini, who think they succeeded entirely on their own.
But as Brooks's column points out, and which Chris Hayes discussed on his show Saturday morning, that myth does not appeal to Asian Americans, who are now the highest earning group in the U.S. and would seem to be a demographic that should vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. They voted instead overwhelmingly for Obama. Why? IMO, because the the frontiersman mythos qua white male fantasy is poorly adapted to the real world in which we now live, and people who are not inheritors of that myth just don't get it.
Even former Romney advisor Avik Roy, a brown Asian American, doesn't get it. In the clip embedded above, It's very interesting to listen to to him defend intellectual conservatism, which seems so reasonable--so logos-centric--while at the same time he is so tone deaf to the mythos that animates it. Ta-Nehesi Coates and the others set him straight on that, but he really seems unable to grasp what Roy's mother can. He talks about how she won't vote for Republicans because in her view people of color have no vital role to play in the Republican mythos.
Dude, listen to your mother: you're just a token brown guy.