Liberals Need Hank Williams, Jr.

FLIP on the tube at 6 p.m. and you can catch re-runs of "The Beverly Hillbillies," a sit-com about a family of "poor mountaineers" who strike it rich and move to the West Coast. In their Beverly Hills mansion, Granny prepares 'possum for dinner while daughter Ellie Mae plays with her new brassiere, which she thinks is a "double-barreled slingshot."

Or open up the newspaper, and you can read the comic strip "Snuffy Smith," which features a dirty, shiftless mountaineer and his sons "Tater" and "Jughaid."

Why is it so widely acceptable to denigrate rural Americans? The liberal Perspective, which would never apply derogatory labels to ethnic minorities or gays, thought nothing of calling rural Southerners "naive rednecks." It hasn't been that long since the Harvard Lampoon printed a public apology for being racially insensitive, but it has yet to apologize for a cover that depicted lazy, dirty Appalachians under the caption "Inbred and Brain Dead."

My purpose here is not to demand nomenclatural justice for rural Southerners. You don't have to listen to very many Hank Williams Jr. songs ("You can send me to hell or New York City; it would be about the same to me,") to realize that elitists' contempt for country folks is returned in kind.

No, my purpose is to convince Harvard liberals that they can forget about winning any national elections until they change their attitudes about my neighbors.

NOT that I think contempt for rural residents is exclusive to Harvard or to liberals. After all, the similarity of the word "urbane" (meaning "well-bred and courteous") to "urban" is no etymological accident. I'm not even convinced that elitist Harvardians--both liberal and conservative--disdain "rednecks" any more than they disdain the working class in general.

Nevertheless, I can't help but notice the inconsistency of liberals at Harvard who walk on egg shells to avoid offending racial minorities, but think nothing of tossing around slurs about Appalachians.

It was this insensitivity that allowed Harvardians to evade the Vietnam draft with clean consciences and let the "hill-billies" die in their stead (a point made by James M. Fallows '70 in his brilliant essay "What Did You Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?")

It was this insensitivity that allowed one of my Harvard friends to tell me, only half in jest, that "One Jew at Harvard Business school is worth 1000 rednecks on a chain gang."

And it is this insensitivity--not the ignorance of rural voters--that makes the rural South a Republican electoral fiefdom.

IF you don't believe me, think back to the 1988 campaign, when country singer Loretta Lynn told a campaign audience, "I'm for George Bush 'cause he's country."

And she was serious.

Bush's blue-blood ancestry and his Yale education certainly don't qualify him for that praise. And though Gov. Michael S. Dukakis is hardly a farm-boy himself, he comes closer than Bush to matching the class aspirations of most rural Southern voters. Yet they went for Bush in droves.

My liberal friends love to theorize about what "false consciousness" drives rural Southerners to vote in opposition to their class interests. "The Democrats are the party of the common man, right? Why don't those rednecks vote for us? Ah, it must be the racism."

I don't deny that racial politics influence many Southern rural voters--but not that many. Liberals ought to face the facts: Liberal elitism hurts Democrats just as much as Southern racism, if not more.

That elitism is more than just using terms like "hillbilly." Lots of conservatives do that. It is the liberals' contempt for the values of rural Americans--religion, patriotism and law and order--that kills them on election day.

Liberals need not abandon principled stands on flag-burning, school prayer and capital punishment to win these voters. They only have to take rural concerns--and rural voters--seriously. To start, liberals must take a credible stand against crime and abandon their contempt for people who believe that there is honor in serving God and country.

THIS summer, one prominent Harvard liberal extolled to me, over a few beers, the virtues of living in New York City. I told her that I prefer my little home-town in West Virginia, where you can leave your keys in your car, and where no one would think of walking past a starving man on the sidewalk. "Yes," she said, looking at me impatiently, "but what can you do on weekends?"

When I argued that values such as community, charity and respect for the law were more important than the number of night clubs, she stared at me as if I were from Mars.

When I occasionally play Hank Williams, Jr. tunes in my room, my Harvard friends get a pretty good laugh. Hank sings about such ignorant, redneck things, you see. Things like the injustice of killers getting off free; the dignity of gainful labor; fear of violent crime; having respect for the flag. Really stupid stuff.

The Harvard liberals laugh at people like my neighbors who believe in this stuff. And my neighbors vote for Republicans.