I Know Conservatives Better Than Big City Liberal Elites

Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% off 💙 80% offOne of my uncles was proudly, some might say defiantly, illiterate. He married my aunt when she took a teaching job in Kentucky. Hank never took her lessons all that seriously, much to the irritation of my grandmother who was also a teacher.That relationship didn’t last, unions that are based on mutual spite rarely do. But his family became intertwined with mine. It almost parallels the ongoing battles between the DNC and the GOP. They fought. They mocked each other. They never really tried to make any progress.In the end, the women and children did all the suffering.Hank was always around, and he used to delight in battling my father. My father was a farmer, but he’d been trained as a lawyer. He was good at what’s called “book learning,” and he liked to rub it in Hank’s face. Hank thought himself a master of “common sense,” and he rubbed my father’s face in it ruthlessly.My father made the mistake of believing that somebody who is illiterate is inherently inferior. When you stop and think about it, that’s no different than any other form of dehumanization. But no matter how many times Hank got the better of him, my father would never recognize his personhood.When people maintain an ideology at the expense of facts, they become abusive. Every time.Hank taught me that people who are illiterate become cunning. When I was young, I thought Hank was terrifying. My father traveled through life going from book to book. During the in-between moments, he was barely present. His eyes were glossed over and vague. It was like the real life minutes didn’t count. The only thing that mattered was the dreamy fantasy of literature.Meanwhile, Hank spent his life in the moment. At the dinner table, when the other members of my family drifted off into their thoughts, Hank’s eyes would pierce through you. He had a keen mind, and since it couldn’t extract information from words, he pounced on nuance in the movements of people.He could read you, and he was devastating.Hank could not be beat at checkers. That’s a statement that sometimes makes academics snort. “Well, that’s a child’s game,” they say dismissively. Some of them maintained their delusion by not dignifying their hypothesis with an experiment.Abusive people tend to not give their subordinates the chance to beat them.Others sat with Hank and got obliterated. I played him only once when I was at the age were I’d become decent at checkers. He humbled me, partly because I’d already been subjected to my father’s conditioning that I was somehow “better.” Hank taught me otherwise and I remembered.Much of Hank’s persona was to dominate others. Unlike my father, I began to observe and I noticed he, at least, was smart enough not to get into contests he couldn’t win.He often bested my father in poker too. Hank’s strategy was to never look at his cards. The dealer placed them face down on the table, and Hank never even touched them until it was time to show or the dealer scooped them up again. He read the players with his superior insight that came from not ever being distracted by letters.You shouldn’t dismiss people like that.Once, we went and joined Hank at the races. I lived in the far off country where rowdy men got together, formed a track out of dirt, and behaved recklessly. Everything Hank enjoyed was astonishingly dangerous. We sat in the rickety bleachers that were as likely to collapse as support us. There were no barricades to prevent a thrown tire from slaughtering half of us if it bounced into the spectators.I don’t know why we went there. Perhaps my father felt a need to defeat Hank on his own turf to prove himself. The fact that he needed to prove himself showed that Hank had already won.Before the start of the race, Hank leaned over and pulled my dad’s shirt, “Hey Todd,” he said, “I bet you a dollar number 10 wins.”Right away I knew my dad shouldn’t take the bet. I saw that instinct pass over his features. Then his mind kicked in with the self-defeating justifications and pride. I knew he was done.“Wait a minute,” my father said, “you’re saying that if any other car in the race wins, then I win the bet?”Hank just nodded with a grin on his face.“Okay, I’ll take that bet.”The race started. The engines roared. It was dark and my senses were assailed by the smell of exhaust and the clouds of dust. The race was perhaps five or six laps around a course that was marked by old tires.It didn’t take too long to see that every other car was outclassed by number 10. It was a blue car with white numbers on the door. By the time the checkered flag came out, number 10 had lapped the whole field.My father opened his wallet and handed the dollar to Hank. Hank took it with a smile that reminded me of the devil himself. It wasn’t about the money, it was about the victory and he savored it.On the way back to the parking lot, my father tried to salvage his decision. “When you think about it, I made the right bet.” He said. “I had seven options, he only had won. What if number 10 had gotten a flat tire?”But number 10 didn’t get a flat tire. My father had lost. Even so, he couldn’t see the fact that disproved his mythology of identity. He believed that Hank was “less,” so any victory Hank managed over him was an exception rather than a proof of inadequacy.I didn’t take the same lesson. I saw a proud man who’d just been humiliated who was trying to wriggle out of accountability.“This is Hank’s domain,” I said. “He knew who would win.”“It was a bad bet,” my father insisted.I ran into the same thing when I went to college and I ran into academics who had never gone toe to toe with a guy like Hank. These were proud professors, secure in their authority, who knew they could lecture me when I tried to bring them news about the working of the world.These men and women with too much pride, money, and education don’t understand there are people in the world who are impossible to outmaneuver in checkers.It’s the pride that gets you.Men like Hank trick you into vulnerability, then they exploit it. They read the world like it’s a book, and they have a feral intensity that exists outside the understanding of a college degree.Don’t dismiss them. Don’t allow them to coerce you into playing their game. Don’t surrender before the contest even begins.Elites have been caught in this cycle of defeat for more than ten years. When are they going to recognize the facts that disprove the idealized narrative they’ve told about themselves? When are they going to acknowledge how much they’ve lost?Thanks for your support: 30% off 💙 40% off 💙 50% off 💙 60% off 💙 80% offI'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe