Maybe the Frontier Did Matter

If you think about it, the 2004 election shows that the United States is an oligarchy with a closed political system that offers only a narrow range of choices. Consider-- John Kerry and George Bush are both sons of prominent and wealthy New England families. Both attended Yale. Both are members of the same elite secret society (Skull and Bones).

Yet, for all of that, they seem to be two very different sorts of men. In part, this is a tribute to the infinite variety of the human beast. But if i had to get more specific i'd summarize the difference in one word-- Texas.

Those things that make Bush the anti-Kerry-- from his religiosity to his democratic manner-- come from west Texas, not Boston or New Haven.

For a over a century the Northeast has been caught between powerful gravitational fields. Across the Atlantic was Europe-- refined, intellectual, exquisite Europe. To the west lay, well, the West-- crude, boisterous, and democratic.

During the primary campaign this was thrown into stark relief. Kerry, Dean, et. al. condemned Bush as an out of control cowboy who alienated Europe. Cowboy bad, France good. They thought this was a powerful critique.

Rich, Harvard-educated Theodore Roosevelt went west to the Dakotas as a young, dandified widower. After a stint as a cowboy, lawman, and hunter, he returned to New York as the embryonic TR. It was TR who became a war hero, a beloved president, and finally, a mythic, towering figure. His biographers agree that his later political career would have been impossible but for his time out West.

Henry James took the opposite path. He left America behind to live in England.

Edmund Morris notes that James's "preference for English society and English literature drove Roosevelt to near frenzy." TR considered James a "miserable little snob." He wrote with disdain of "the undersized man of letters, who flees his country because he, with his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness, finds the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw."

James, for his part, judged Roosevelt "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise" and "a dangerous and ominous jingo."

John Kerry had no need to become an expatriate. Over the last century Massachusetts has become very congenial for the sensitive and exquisite. But there is still that patrician disdain for how we do things out here in fly-over country (still so crude and raw). Most of all, there is that craving for European modes and European approval.