All culture wars are about definitions and who gets to make them. All arguments about anything related to gender transition are nothing but who gets to define each gender. This presidential election has featured, among entirely-too-many dead animals, a discussion about who gets to decide what race Kamala Harris is. As always, we’re fighting over who is a ‘real’ American and who just lives here.
Before I get to my bigger point, let me state that sometimes authenticity really matters. A lawyer who presents a document in court has to Authenticate it. Anyone selling a piece of art or an antique has to be able to prove that it is authentic — that is, that the object is what the seller represents it as being. Membership in an Indian tribe Has a specific definition and anyone who claims to be a member has to prove sufficient family lineage.1 Affirmative Action programs require proof that a person is actually a member of a particular group. I can summarize all of this by saying that authenticity matters if someone is obtaining actual money based on a representation. Don’t lie about something if you’re asking someone to pay for it.
What about questions of identity that DON’T involve cash, or where the benefit is les directly tangible? The current presidential race has a number of questions that amount to ‘who gets to make this definition?’ The Republican candidate for Vice President, J D Vance, became a public figure by selling his Identity as an authentic hick to people who’s only connection to the rural landscape is buying produce. Vance went to Yale Law School and became part of the Peter Thiel Extended Universe as a venture capitalist, then a US Senator. His Democratic opponent, was born in West Point, Nebraska, attended Chadron State College and, later, Minnesota State University, Mankato.
That brings me to this quote:
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Yeah. It’s very confused. What they like about Tim Walz isn’t that he represents the Midwest, it’s that he’s a caricature of their idea of the Midwest that they think-
Walter Kirn: Dude, he is-
Matt Taibbi: He’s an assuager.
Walter Kirn: He’s a white, rural Uncle Tom to me. I mean, I’m just talking turkey. When I see that guy having grown up in the rural Midwest and the state that he is governor of, I go, “How dare you put on this checked shirt, and so on, and go out and sell us out to the rest of the country as people who don’t like anybody going to Yale, and eat Doritos and crap like that?” I don’t want to see your white face act that’s supposed to bring in a few extra votes in Western Pennsylvania.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It’s revolting. And that piece is particularly bad. And this is who we are now …
Kirn is accusing Tim Walz of pretending to be a hick, of playing a minstrel show version of rural America, apparently because Walz is a liberal and, as Kirn, Princeton graduate and acquaintance of George Clooney, clearly knows, nobody who lives in small towns can ever be a Democrat. If there was ever a perfect illustration of Ivy League condescension, that quote is it.
Kirn arrogates — that’s a really big word for a hick who grew up in Commerce, Texas, and I want the world to know I learned it. —the right to define ‘rural’ to himself despite not having lived among rural people at any point in his life. He’s a rich tourist.
If being ‘rural’ means anything, it’s growing up and living in places far from urban centers. My hometown, Commerce, Texas, was 70 miles from Dallas. We definitely felt separated from the Big City and the Big City definitely let us know that. Walz’s hometown, West Point, Nebraska, has a population of 3,500. It’s hardly Manhattan, even the one in Kansas. He went to college in small state schools. He taught in Mankato, Minnesota. This is not the biography of a ‘coastal elite,’ and yet the Princetonian son of a patent lawyer2thinks Walz is doing a minstrel show caricature of a hick.
So, which person is a better judge of the qualifications for being ‘rural,’ the Ivy League rich kid who lived in Manhattan and wrote novels, or the high school principal from the town of 3,500 people?
It should be noted that what constitutes a ‘tribe’ is not actually an easy question. See “Lumbee” for a really interesting historical survey: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumbee
Patent attorneys have a highly specialized and lucrative practice even among regular lawyers. Admission to the US Patent Court system requires passing the US Patent and Trademark Office bar exam as well as their own state bar. They have to have expertise in the technical area in which they practice which usually means having an undergraduate degree in engineering or some closely related applied science. There aren’t many of these people so they command very large fees. Given the difficulty of obtaining the necessary qualifications to do this for a living, the people who have this qualification are mostly drawn from at least the upper middle class.