Meet The Americans

One of the big problems with the boom in enthusiasm for Jim Webb as a candidate who can appeal to Scotch-Irish Appalachians is that he doesn't appear capable of doing so, as Eve Fairbanks writes:

Thanks to their analogous symbolic roles, Webb and Obama have one more politically important and bizarre similarity: They appeal to the same voters, wine-track Democrats who come out in unprecedented droves to vote for a black man or a hillbilly white because they want their party to be bigger than themselves. While you'd expect Webb to attract poor, rural beer-trackers, in his 2006 Senate race he didn't do any better than the previous Democratic candidate had among Appalachian voters in southwestern Virginia; instead, he was propelled to victory by Northern Virginia suburbanites — Obama's base.

Basically, Webb and Obama despite similar personalities and personae both get the votes you would expect anti-war liberals to get. Possibly related, check out this map (taken from here):

What's that a map of? Well, recently the Census Bureau started asking people about ethnicity and ancestry. So you might say you were "Irish" or "Italian" or "German" or "Chinese" or "Cuban" instead of just white or Asian or whatever. But about seven percent of people identified themselves as "American." And as you can see, that "American" bloc is really concentrated in Appalachia and the southern highlands. Webb's favorite ethnic group, in short, seems to be the ethnic group with the least ethnic consciousness.

Comments

Webb's favorite ethnic group, in short, seems to be the ethnic group with the least ethnic consciousness.

That seems quite wrong. Rather, they have a particular ethnic consciousness that is not attached to a homeland outside of the US.

This sort of white identity is an ethnicity, not a lack thereof.

Posted by DivGuy | June 11, 2008 9:08 AM

DivGuy beat me to it. It doesn't take long talking to one of those types to realize that they've got a mental list of who counts as a "real" american, and who doesn't.

Posted by Patrick | June 11, 2008 9:11 AM

The rest of the post all seems exactly right to me, just picking on that one little thing. I think Jim Webb's appeal has been massively overstated by media elites who love his form of masculinity (Ezra had a great post on this.)

There's really very little evidence that Webb has the appeal he's supposed to have, and my guess is that, at a general level, his sort of masculine self-projection loses as many votes with women as it wins with men.

Posted by DivGuy | June 11, 2008 9:13 AM

I'm just a sneak-beers-in-Central-Park, take-the-family-to-Jones-Beach-on-the-train kind of elitist, but I gotta stick with type and say two things about Obama's ideal Veep nominee:
--He needs to be a "bad cop," willing to throw down some scorched-earth populist anti-GOP markers;
--and, especially because of that first criterion, he would do well to fit the spitting image of the all-American patriotic type.
How does Jim Webb not fit that bill--and, more importantly, who would fit it better? We can haggle over Rovian math all you want, but straight-up semiotics matter, too (oh, there I go again).

Posted by elle loco | June 11, 2008 9:14 AM

That seems quite wrong. Rather, they have a particular ethnic consciousness that is not attached to a homeland outside of the US.

What DivGuy said. The fact that they identify as "American" doesn't mean that they have a peculiarly ethnically inclusive understanding of the term.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | June 11, 2008 9:18 AM

DivGuy, I seriously doubt that Barack Obama is going to have a serious problem with the women's vote this year. Call me a dupe of the secret Scotch-Irish elite....

But, really, it's worth remembering that the major flavor on the ticket is Obama. The Veep is a foil, a booster shot of some kind--and,crucially, a tactical asset.

Posted by elle loco | June 11, 2008 9:19 AM

Also, it's kind of hard to claim your the most Irish-Scot guy ever when you are married to a Vietnamese-American woman. I don't think that should disqualify him (being the child of an interracial marriage myself), but if you are going to pick him explicitly to appeal to the Scots-Irish, that becomes a complication.

Posted by Reality Man | June 11, 2008 9:21 AM

Basically, Webb and Obama despite similar personalities and personae both get the votes you would expect anti-war liberals to get.

First of all, you meant dissimilar, right? And are you saying that Webb and Obama are both anti-war liberals? While anti-Iraq war, I'm not sure it's accurate to characterize Webb as "anti-war" in general, and he's no liberal.

Posted by Bragan | June 11, 2008 9:25 AM

To be fair to the people who answer "American" to the ethnicity question, Appalachian/Southern whites aren't likely to have any recent (past 100 years) immigrants in their family tree.

The most recent immigrant in my family tree (AFAIK) was my great-great-grandmother, who was a German mail-order bride, who came over sometime around the Civil War. And if I didn't have a family member into genealogy, I wouldn't know that.

So cut the fucking condescension, Patrick.

Posted by Brock | June 11, 2008 9:26 AM

Most Applachians/Southerners of Scots-Irish descent (I am one) can trace their roots back to the eighteenth and even seventeenth centuries and so therefore don't identify with Obama's multi-racial, immigrant-inflected narrative. They've quite literally thought of themselves as "American" for hundreds of years now, and the beauty and power of the melting-pot stories of Hawaii or California or New York (with their nineteenth and early twentieth century settings) elude them. Whether Webb can help lower McCain's margins with that demographic in order to tilt the electoral college is Topic A for debate.

It would be profoundly useful for MY and other Beltway Dudes to educate themselves to the history and themes of this significant segment of the American electorate, which can play a major role in shaping election outcomes. I often feel as though Matt and Ezra and Josh and Kevin and the other elites don't budget this segment into their thinking about American politics or culture nearly enough. Hence a romanticization of what Webb would bring to the ticket.

Posted by BryklynLibrul | June 11, 2008 9:28 AM

So, after these people said they were "Americans" by birth, did the Census Bureau go on to ask if they were Southern by the grace of God?

Posted by Delicious Pundit | June 11, 2008 9:28 AM

If I read the map correctly (it's pretty small), it appears that Puerto Ricans like to describe themselves as "American," too. (Or that they just have a lot of county lines in Puerto Rico.)

Posted by allbetsareoff | June 11, 2008 9:29 AM

That map's pretty useless without some sort of legend.

To what value does dark red correspond?

Posted by Jeff H. | June 11, 2008 9:29 AM

This doesn't surprise me much. Much of our labeled ethnic identities have to do with separating ourselves from Others, and when there are no ethnic Others, those labels lose their potency. As a contrapositive, I identify as Irish Catholic even though my ancestry is like 50% old American English and only like 6% Irish, and even though my Catholicism is, shall we say, not very active. My mom raised me Catholic in heavily Protestant Kansas City, and I attended a Catholic grade school with a heavy Italian population. Thus, being an Irish Catholic was a somewhat notable ethnic mark for me.

Conversely, my dad has great trouble when asked what his ethnicity/ancestry are, because his ancestors immigrated to western Virginia nearly 200 years ago and moved to central Missouri about 100 years ago. Near as anyone can tell, there was very little interrelation with other ethnic minorities. Thus, to him, his largely English and slight German ancestry are mostly artifacts without meaning; he's "American." My understanding is the people in that Appalachian belt tend to have similarly old white immigrant stock (Scotch-Irish and English, both being white Anglican English-speakers, could meld into one another pretty quickly in the rural U.S.), and with such a long period absent other immigrant involvement, the need to identify as anything other than "American" seems likely to disappear.

This is a long way of saying, Patrick, that it's not always so mean-spirited as you suggest; it's just a case of other identities lacking any point. Why say "I'm Scotch-Irish" when everyone around you is Scotch-Irish? The interesting thing about Webb's book is its very existence: it remarks on the achievements of a previously unheralded population because of its tendency not to identify itself as itself.

Posted by jhupp | June 11, 2008 9:30 AM

If I read the map correctly (it's pretty small), it appears that Puerto Ricans like to describe themselves as "American," too. (Or that they just have a lot of county lines in Puerto Rico.)

Posted by allbetsareoff | June 11, 2008 9:32 AM

Ugh, white people like that drive me crazy.

I met this one white woman once who identified as such. She wore an American flag sweater in the CA summer and refused, as a matter of principle, to contribute money to any organization that might help people outside the USA. As in, if it did any medical research which succeeded in finding some new treatment for something, and that knowledge could hypothetically be used to help non-US citizens, she would have none of it. Ugh.

It looks like there are a few patches out west of people identifying as "Americans." I wonder if these are areas with reservations.

Posted by rufustfyrfly | June 11, 2008 9:32 AM

That map's pretty useless without some sort of legend.

To what value does dark red correspond?

Posted by Jeff H. | June 11, 2008 9:32 AM

If I read the map correctly (it's pretty small), it appears that Puerto Ricans like to describe themselves as "American," too. Or that they just have a lot of county lines in Puerto Rico.

Posted by allbetsareoff | June 11, 2008 9:35 AM

So cut the fucking condescension, Patrick.

Bah, I've seen enough newsreel on these folks in the primaries (not to mention just spent three years living in an oasis of normality amidst a sea of Appalachia) to know that condescension is in order. My one fervent hope for this election is to prove that it is possible to win the presidency without these yahoos. The last thing I want to see is Democratic leaders whoring for the Appalachian redneck vote. The number of votes at stake don't even approach justifying the degree of compromise that would be required. It's pointless to try selling progress to people stuck 150 years in the past. Fuck 'em.

Posted by J.B. | June 11, 2008 9:40 AM

rufustfyrfly,
Some of us don't have a lot of choice in our ethnic identification. I could either check the boxes for every northern European country as well as American Indian, or just give up and admit I'm "American, otherwise unspecified." And I'm a liberal Vermonter with an advanced degree, probably about as ideologically separated from the type of people your talking about as possible.

I'm actually supprised that New England doesn't have more people identifying themeselves as "Ameican." When I ask people here in Vermont where their families are from, the two most common answers are, "Massachusetts" and "I don't know."

Posted by JK | June 11, 2008 10:04 AM

If people are identifying as ethnic American because they've been in location since forever, then what explains the responses from VT and NH?

Posted by daveNYC | June 11, 2008 10:07 AM

For anybody who is seriously interested in how a Democrat can not only survive but prosper with these folks, study the career of Robert Byrd.

What is needed is old-style New Deal politics. A new TVA; a new REA. It is the absence of such benefits for these folks that has alienated them over the past generation.

Deliver the bacon, and Obama can flourish with a mongoloid Martian as VP.

Maintain a PC posture, which is really a subterfuge for urban, East coast/West Coast, white collar jobs, and the Democrats will get the whipping they would deserve.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | June 11, 2008 10:09 AM

@J.B.

I share the desire to win the White House in the face of people who won't vote for Obama just b/c he's black. If that's what you mean by "these yahoos," fine. But that description doesn't fit all "Appalachian rednecks" - it just doesn't. Meanwhile it does fit (sadly) other people across this great nation who aren't Appalachian. In other words, if that's your implication, you're making an inaccurate (and very ugly) generalization.

One benefit of all the chatter about Jim Webb and the identification of this group will be, I hope, a shift in the conversation such that those who're essentially stereotyping and slurring this group will at least have to admit that they're doing so.

Posted by Donald | June 11, 2008 10:15 AM

Gosh! You mean the Democrats can't win WV or AL's electoral votes merely by putting on on burly white dude in the veep spot? It's almost as if people vote based on their beliefs (however misguided) and not on the basis of transparent cultural symbolism, and Democrats should try, you know, to support candidates in these parts of the country and to persuade these voter that, all things considered, they really should vote for Democrats. But . . . uh . . . that can't be right . . . for some reason.

Posted by Steve M. | June 11, 2008 10:16 AM

Scotch-Irish and English, both being white Anglican English-speakers, could meld into one another pretty quickly in the rural U.S.)

Scotch-Irish were not mostly Anglican - mostly Presbyterian, originally, and now probably mostly Baptist.

I'm actually supprised that New England doesn't have more people identifying themeselves as "Ameican." When I ask people here in Vermont where their families are from, the two most common answers are, "Massachusetts" and "I don't know."

I'd imagine New England yankees tend to pick "English."

Posted by John | June 11, 2008 10:25 AM

So saying that your ethnic background is "American" makes you a jingoistic isolationist and possibly racist jerk? That's good to know. Ethnic identity politics is the only good an wholesome outlook. Who knew?

Here I was thinking that it would be good if people in this country would identify themselves less as Irish or Italian or Mexican or Chinese or African and more as American. I was so naive.

I would have answered "American" on this survey myself because the northern and southern Eurpoean blood in my background is so thoroughly mixed up. Good to know in case this comes up in the future. If I want to be a good-hearted person I must choose an ethnic identity other than "American". Thanks, guys!

Posted by Rob Mac | June 11, 2008 10:39 AM

DivGuy nailed it in the first comment.

There is a sizeable bloc of Americans who are descended exclusively, or almost exclusively, from the original settlers of the American frontier who went through the Cumberland Gap and settled in Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley. I'm one of them, actually. The "Scotch-Irish" are a large subset of this group, but it also included plenty of colonists of English, Welsh, German, Dutch, and Huguenot extraction who all intermarried with each other.

The ones who stayed in these areas, over the course of eight or nine generations, arguably constitute a distinct ethnic group. They identify as "white" and "American" but unless they happen to have a distinctively German, French, or Irish name they have no meaningful cultural ties to modern-day Europe at all. "American" is a perfectly reasonable answer.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 11, 2008 10:50 AM

Gosh! You mean the Democrats can't win WV or AL's electoral votes merely by putting on on burly white dude in the veep spot? It's almost as if people vote based on their beliefs (however misguided) and not on the basis of transparent cultural symbolism, and Democrats should try, you know, to support candidates in these parts of the country and to persuade these voter that, all things considered, they really should vote for Democrats. But . . . uh . . . that can't be right . . . for some reason.

Posted by Steve M. | June 11, 2008 11:04 AM

Nitpicking, but it's probably the case that most of the people in Appalachia are primarily English rather than Scotch-Irish. (This is very clearly seen in Appalachian dialect, which shows much clearer English roots than Scotch-Irish ones.) Their ancestry traces mainly to the English indentured servants who migrated from southern England to the Tidewater in the seventeenth century to work for the Cavalier gentry that had acquired the best land, and who were marginalized by the shift to slave labor after about 1690. They don't really have a strong historical identity; they moved into the mountains to acquire land nobody else wanted and nobody else would try to take from them; they've never had good reason to trust any elite and they don't trust outsiders; they tended to stick with the Union during the Recent Unpleasantness because they had no interest in defending slaveholders' rights; and they want to be left alone. Sadly, their conservatism stems from a deeply rooted distrust of external authority that has been entirely justified.

Posted by DCBob | June 11, 2008 11:13 AM

What I find interesting is that a lot of these explanations (which make sense to me) re. the ethnic identity of "American" vs. Scotch-Irish also apply to African-Americans: most African-Americans are a mix of various African, European and Native ethnicities and roots can largely be untraced.

Yet, many of the African-Americans I know do latch onto what little they know of their distinct ethnic identify other than "American". For instance, my wife is part Cherokee and knows at least some of her ancestry is from the Borderlands (essentially Scotch-Irish, but without the Irish as her family didn't come by way of Ireland) ... so she identifies as "Scottish" and/or "Cherokee" (or Jamaican where her father's "Scottish" family is from) as a matter of ethnicity, but would put "Black/African-American" in terms of race. One of my neighbors similarly identifies himself as "German".

I wonder how my daughter will identify herself: she is biologically the child of a woman of Italian/German ancestry and a man of Dominican ancestry ... and is adopted by the aforementioned Cherokee/Scottish/Jamaican/African woman who is now married to an Ashkenazic man (me) with a typical ancestry of "half of my family comes from Poland/Belorus/Ukraine depending on whom you ask, almost half comes from the Baltics, some of my family dispersed itself throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire and Bavaria before coming here but I think we're originally from Western Austria -- of course, 1000 years ago we were Germans, Turks and Vikings" ... or, to keep it short (c.f. Driving Miss Daisy): "I am of Germanic origins".

Posted by DAS | June 11, 2008 11:20 AM

I often feel as though Matt and Ezra and Josh and Kevin and the other elites don't budget this segment into their thinking about American politics or culture nearly enough. Hence a romanticization of what Webb would bring to the ticket.

Except Matt, Ezra, and Kevin all have recent posts in relation to the Fairbanks article that express, at the least, a great deal of skepticism about Webb as VP. In fact, Matt did so in this very post! His point is essentially the same as yours: that the Appalachian voters Obama has trouble with aren't going to be drawn to a Scotch-Irish candidate because, regardless of where their ancestors came from, they don't see themselves as Scotch-Irish. I think Matt's phrasing (they lack "ethnic consciousness" in general; perhaps it's a poor choice of words, perhaps he doesn't think calling yourself "American" counts as ethnic consciousness) obscures the fact that you are in agreement that they lack the type of "ethnic consciousness" that some ascribe to them. Many of those probably fall under your construct of "elites," but the specific examples don't fit the bill.

Posted by ibid | June 11, 2008 11:26 AM

If someone asked me my ethnicity I would probably respond with American too, because otherwise I donlt have a single ethnicity. My ancestry is mixed German, English, Dutch, Irish, Scottish and a tiny slivver of Native American.

Posted by JonF | June 11, 2008 11:50 AM

_Albion's Seed_ by David Hackett Fischer is excellent on the Scotch-Irish, as well as New Englanders, Tidewater Southerners, and the Middle Colonies/mid-Atlantic melting pot (German, Dutch, English, etc.).

Posted by Ben Cronin | June 11, 2008 12:00 PM

For anybody who is seriously interested in how a Democrat can not only survive but prosper with these folks, study the career of Robert Byrd.

=================================================
You bet - join the Klan

Posted by Campesino | June 11, 2008 12:31 PM

No dispute with the main points here, but a contrarian anecdote...

My late father, a Texas native whose named ancestor arrived in the colonies in the 1600s, always put "American" on the census reports that asked what his race was. But not because he was self-consciously equating whiteness with American-ness. He was an anthropologist, a deep supporter of Civil Rights who heard the I Have a Dream speech live in the 1963 March on Washington, and in his academic discipline came to view "race" as a social construct. "American" was his way of rebelling against that social construct.

Not saying that most who respond this way shared his view of the matter, though...

Posted by DairyStateDad | June 11, 2008 12:43 PM

As someone who grew up in a relatively non-Appalachian portion of Kentucky, and whose mother's maiden name began with "Mc", I have to vouch for the truth of many of the comments on this thread. It was only after I got to college that I realized that most of the white people I had grown up with were ethnically Scots-Irish. But that's not something any of us talked about. In spite of "Scottie Days" in Glasgow, KY, there wasn't any significant sign of a cultivated sub-white ethnic identity.

Instead, there were a couple of important divisions:

1. White vs. black
2. Protestant vs. Catholic

I don't want to overstate the second. It was mainly apparent in geographic boundaries, with one county (Nelson) with a predominantly Catholic population, and the surrounding counties heavily Protestant. With the benefit of some historical understanding, you could tell that many 18th century settlers to the area had brought their religious conflicts with them from the British isles. Nobody talks about it much any more, though.

But white vs. black -- that division didn't take on the tone it still has in the deep South, but it's the vital one. If that had been an option, I'd wager that a very large number of the people who picked "American" would have picked "white." There just hasn't been enough history of recent immigration to the region to make inter-white ethnic distinctions relevant to daily experience.

By the way, I think DCBob is right about the predominantly English heritage of much of Appalachia proper. I heard years ago that the poorest county in the country was also the one with the highest percentage of the population claiming English heritage.

Posted by mrsaturdaypants | June 11, 2008 12:48 PM

In a point of parallelism, it's the Ulster Protestants (the cultural cousins of the Scotch-Irish) who tend to self-identify as 'British', along with ethnic minority first- and second-generation.

LaFollette Progressive identifies the cultural origins of the 'American' Americans, and Duncan Kinder identifies the pitch that appeals to them, i.e. big New Deal projects. (Obama would do well to see if Wendell Berry's open to meet with him, though Berry's agrarianism is distinct from the general desire for torrents of federal dollars.)

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | June 11, 2008 1:08 PM

Basing Webb's demographic appeal on the results of an election against an incumbent racist is stupid.

Without someone race baiting Webb has a much better chance at making his case against racism.

Maybe there are better candidates, but analyzing the 2006 results isn't very helpful in this case.

Posted by crack | June 11, 2008 2:01 PM

Most of my family would check the American box as well and many are darker than Obama. In their case, it is a way to distinguish our family with roots in Spainish California from the arrivistes.

FYI - The majority of racists in America do not live in Appalachia.

Posted by what can brown do for you? | June 11, 2008 2:20 PM

I've noticed several pundits lately who are creeped out by the fact that 7% of Americans identify as "American" -- why, calling yourself "American" without a hyphen is downright Unamerican.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 11, 2008 4:51 PM

OK, it's very clear now that Matt doesn't like Webb because Webb's against the Iran war.

Who cares whether Webb can deliver those states listed? Is he against the Iran war? Make him VP.

If the VP slot is so useless and nobody cares about the VP slot, why is Matt so desperate to kill Web's chances and put Biden in?

One word: Iran.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 11, 2008 5:22 PM

The last of my ancestors to arrive here was during George Washington's presidency. He was born at sea on the journey from Ulster. My deepest roots are Cherokee. Several ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and their descendants in War of 1812, the Civil War, WWI and WWII.

Cherokee, English, Scots, Welsh, Ulster Irish, Bavarian, French Huguenot, Palantine, and African.

How's that for ethnic consciousness?

Posted by An American | June 11, 2008 7:29 PM

Eric Alterman in BloggingheadsTv the other day says that ethnic identifiers aren't useful, that being American is better for sake of common-ground

Posted by Andrew | June 11, 2008 10:28 PM

If I read the map correctly (it's pretty small), it appears that Puerto Ricans like to describe themselves as "American," too. (Or that they just have a lot of county lines in Puerto Rico.)

Those are the borders between municipios in Puerto Rico. The Census Bureau treats municipios like counties, but really they're more like townships. The direct translation, of course, is "municipality."

Posted by Adam Villani | June 12, 2008 2:19 AM

I'm guessing most of the people who identify ethnicly as Cuban can't trace their roots to many indigenous Caribbean islanders. Does that mean they lack "ethnic consciousness"?

Posted by eds | June 12, 2008 8:11 AM