Here is Victor Davis Hanson in yet another penetrating column, Trump and the American Divide:
Is there something about the land itself that promotes conservatism? The answer is as old as Western civilization. For the classical Greeks, the asteios (“astute”; astu: city) was the sophisticated “city-like” man, while the agroikos(“agrarian”; agros: farm/field) was synonymous with roughness. And yet there was ambiguity as well in the Greek city/country dichotomy: city folk were also laughed at in the comedies of Aristophanes as too impractical and too clever for their own good, while the unpolished often displayed a more grounded sensibility. In the Roman world, the urbanus (“urbane”; urbs: city) was sometimes too sophisticated, while the rusticus (“rustic”; rus: countryside) was often balanced and pragmatic.
The maverick ideal as I envisage it is to be able to relate both to the urbanites and to the 'deplorable' rustics, rough, blunt, and practical among the latter, sophisticated and refined among the former. Among the urbanites, but not among the rustics, I might justify the maverick ideal by invoking Terence. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me."
Among the rusticos and urban blue-collar types any show of learning will often be taken as 'putting on airs.' And any display of refinement will often be read as preciosity, not that the workers will know this word. The word has an interesting property: it often applies to those who know it. A good maxim is to tailor one's discourse and comportment to one's audience, being vulgar among the vulgar and refined among the refined.
Hanson's piece is just jam-packed with insight:
Language is also different in the countryside. Rural speech serves, by its very brevity and directness, as an enhancement to action. Verbosity and rhetoric, associated with urbanites, were always rural targets in classical literature, precisely because they were seen as ways to disguise reality so as to advance impractical or subversive political agendas. Thucydides, nearly 2,500 years before George Orwell’s warnings about linguistic distortion, feared how, in times of strife, words changed their meanings, with the more polished and urbane subverting the truth by masking it in rhetoric that didn’t reflect reality. In the countryside, by contrast, crops either grow or wither; olive trees either yield or remain barren; rain either arrives or is scarce. Words can’t change these existential facts, upon which living even one more day often depends. For the rural mind, language must convey what is seen and heard; it is less likely to indulge adornment.
Things haven't changed. Leftists are masters of linguistic distortion as I have been pointing out since 2004 in these pages.
To the rural mind, verbal gymnastics reveal dishonest politicians, biased journalists, and conniving bureaucrats, who must hide what they really do and who they really are. Think of the arrogant condescension of Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the disastrous Obamacare law, who admitted that the bill was written deliberately in a “tortured way” to mislead the “stupid” American voter. To paraphrase Cicero on his preference for the direct Plato over the obscure Pythagoreans, rural Americans would have preferred to be wrong with the blunt-talking Trump than to be right with the mush-mouthed Hillary Clinton. One reason that Trump may have outperformed both McCain and Romney with minority voters was that they appreciated how much the way he spoke rankled condescending white urban liberals.
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