20 Aug Tim Walz: Nebraska Oikophobe
Today, I want to tell you all about my pal Frank, who has been one of my very best friends for almost 40 years. Like me, Frank was raised in Nebraska and attended Catholic high school. Like me, Frank lived in Lincoln because his father was an academic, a professor at the University of Nebraska. Like me, Frank attended the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska – although he attended them in reverse order from me, going to Nebraska as an undergrad and to KU for graduate school.
Unlike me, Frank was raised a liberal – a leftist, actually. While my dad was a professor of electrical engineering, Frank’s dad was a history professor – and a radical one at that. Frank’s dad, Ralph, was Hispanic – Mexican, technically. Ralph was raised in rural, low-hills Colorado, in a small, Spanish-speaking town, by people who worked very hard but had very little. When he left town to go to college, Ralph became the first-known member of the community to do so. He went to school in California, spent time in the Chicano Workers movement, did his dissertation research on Cesar Chavez – whom he had come to know personally – and was generally embedded in 1960s ethnic radicalism. In 1972, he was hired by the University of Nebraska to be the director of the new Center for Great Plains Studies. Frank is very much his father’s son.
Believe it or not, back in the day, it was possible for people to become friends with one another despite conflicting views on politics. Indeed, I would argue that our respective love of political first principles (as opposed to retail political nonsense) was one of the things that made me and Frank compatible as friends – that and our mutual interest in great books, punk/skate rock, boxing, and Mike Mentzer as an anti-hero and alternative weight-training guru.
I mention all of this today because Frank represents one of the three archetypes of liberals/leftists who live in/come from Nebraska (and one of the two archetypes that are even remotely interesting): the old-school academic/the child of an old-school academic. Frank – like all of his “type” of leftist – came by his leftism naturally. It was in his blood, in a sense, and certainly in how he was raised.
Ironically, today, Frank is politically homeless. He’s certainly not a conservative, but nor does he consider himself a part of the contemporary Left. The Left’s turn toward anti-intellectualism masked as intellectualism, toward anti-science activism masked as pro-science activism, and toward cultural obsessions rather than practical economic concerns has alienated him – just as it did Ralph and countless other old-school Leftists. Nevertheless, Frank (and his brother and his dad) constitute Archetype 1.
Archetype 2 is the uninteresting archetype. Those of you who have never been there and who get your ideas about it from Counting Crows probably don’t realize this, but Omaha is a real city. It is the 40th largest city in the country, bigger than Raleigh, Miami, Oakland, Minneapolis, Tampa, New Orleans, and so on. As a real city, Omaha has real city problems and real city politics and, therefore, produces real city Democrats.
Archetype 3, by contrast, is fascinating. And right now, it is also enormously relevant. The people who fall into Archetype 3 are those who see themselves as smarter, better than their classmates and family growing up: smarter, better, and more “enlightened.” They think their friends contemporaries are narrow-minded and stupid. They think the rest of the folks in their hometowns are ugly, and uncompassionate, and bigoted, and hypocritical. It drives them nuts that the other kids they grow up with would go out drinking in the fields and on the dirt roads and messing around with their girlfriends/boyfriends on Saturday night but get up to go to church on Sunday morning. They hate their “boring” lives and their boring neighbors and can’t wait to get out of their backward towns so that they can be among people who are worthy of them, people who share their interests and tastes, people who aren’t like the rest of them.
Minnesota Governor and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Tim Walz – another of my fellow Nebraskans – fits quite nicely in Archetype 3. Walz is the ultimate Nebraska oikophobe. He really, really detests the people he was raised around. And as such, he is the perfect running mate for Kamala Harris and the perfect embodiment of the contemporary Democratic Party:
Almost everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of people who blame their own country or civilization for everything, who feel embarrassed about their own culture. There is a word for this: “oikophobia,” fear of home, the opposite of xenophobia, fear of foreigners. We see oikophobia when people tear down statues of their nation’s heroes, rename schools named after founding fathers, consider America rooted in racism with few redeeming features, and so on….
By rejecting one’s own culture as backward, an individual can set himself above other, competing interests of that culture. Earlier in the arc of civilizational development, when the state is poorer and individuals more reliant on one another for basic security, cooperation is essential for survival. But as a society becomes more affluent, there is greater opportunity for citizens to criticize their own culture….
As has been the case in other civilizations, oikophobes in the United States dominate in left-wing areas. Non-oikophobes and, in some cases, xenophobes and anti-oikophobic reactionaries dominate in right-wing areas. (For ancient civilizations, of course, the labels “progressive” and “conservative” are more appropriate than “left” and “right.”) Oikophobia has had a debilitating effect on many aspects of our society, its culture, politics, and military. Its result is a nation so fixated on internal squabbles that it is no longer capable of effectively projecting outward as a unified force.
None of this is to say that the contemporary Republican Party is without its faults. Far be it. Nevertheless, those faults do not include hating the people they presumably live to serve. The Democrats prattle on about “democracy” and their desire to preserve it and to “save” it from Donald Trump, yet they can hardly hide their detestation of the “demos.” It is as off-putting and contemptuous as it is bizarre.
Pay attention to Walz. Everything he says about his Republican counterpart JD Vance is, in essence, an attack on the people he grew up with and went to school with in rural Western Nebraska. He doesn’t just oppose Vance. He hates him, just like he hates everybody in Valentine, and Butte and Chadron. Those small-minded jerks never “got” him, and now he’ll show them!
Pay attention to the media as well. They love Walz, largely because he provides them a rural American they don’t have to despise, someone who is from flyover country but agrees with them that flyover country is full of morons and bigots.
This is a weird election, not least because the Democratic Party has finally embraced its oikophobia yet still expects to win. “We hate you! Now vote for us!”
