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Jefferson lives (alas)

By Jack M. Balkin

A story in Wednesday's NYTimes about the debate over the "elitism" of Barack Obama includes the following:

?It seems he?s kind of ripping on small towns, and I?m a small town girl,? said Becki Farmer, 32, who lives in Rochester, Pa., another Ohio River town hit hard by the closed steel mills. ?That?s where your good morals and good judgment come from, growing up in small towns.?

This is, of course, pernicious nonsense, though it has a deep American pedigree. Thomas Jefferson, too, believed that farmers were the repositories of republican virtue and cities a cesspool of vice. This is the most fundamental "elitism" in American political ideology, the smug self-satisfaction of small-town Americans who truly believe that they have "good morals and good judgment" absent in the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens who had the misfortune to grow up in cities. It is, incidentally, this ideology that sometimes leads otherwise sensible people to defend as desirable, and not simply the historical residue of a regretable, albeit politically necessarily, compromise--the ridiculous overrepresentation of small states in the Senate. Perhaps they equally lament the overthrow by the Supreme Court of pro-rural legislative districting under the rubric of one-person/one-vote because the unusually virtuous farmers and small-town residents surely deserve extra representation.

By the way, anyone tempted to disagree with me should know that I grew up in a small North Carolina town of 6,000 people, so not only my morals, but also my judgment is impeccable. Just ask Thomas Jefferson and Becki Farmer. (Or did I lose my judgment once I left Hendersonville?)

Full post as published by Balkinization on April 16, 2008 (boomark / email).