Louisville, and large swaths of the state are considered, in modern political parlance, a deep shade of red.
I first traveled through southern Illinois in 1997. It was the summer after my first term in the Illinois legislature, and Michelle and I were not yet parents. With session adjourned, no law school classes to teach, and Michelle busy with work of her own, I convinced my legislative aide, Dan Shomon, to toss a map and some golf clubs in the car and tool around the state for a week. Dan had been both a UPI reporter and a field coordinator for several downstate campaigns, so he knew the territory pretty well. But as the date of our departure approached, it became apparent that he wasn’t quite sure how I would be received in the counties we were planning to visit. Four times he reminded me how to pack—just khakis and polo shirts, he said; no fancy linen trousers or silk shirts. I assured him that I didn’t own any linens or silks. On the drive down, we stopped at a TGI Friday’s and I ordered a cheeseburger. When the waitress brought the food I asked her if she had any Dijon mustard. Dan shook his head.
“He doesn’t want Dijon,” he insisted, waving the waitress off. “Here”—he shoved a yellow bottle of French’s mustard in my direction—“here’s some mustard right here.”
The waitress looked confused. “We got Dijon if you want it,” she said to me.
I smiled. “That would be great, thanks.” As the waitress walked away, I leaned over to Dan and whispered that I didn’t think there were any photographers around.
And so we traveled, stopping once a day to play a round of golf in the sweltering heat, driving past miles of cornfields and thick forests of ash trees and oak trees and shimmering lakes lined with stumps and reeds, through big towns like Carbondale and Mount Vernon, replete with strip malls and Wal-Marts, and tiny towns like Sparta and Pinckneyville, many of them with brick courthouses at the center of town, their main streets barely hanging on with every other store closed, the occasional roadside vendors selling fresh peaches or corn, or in the case of one couple I saw, “Good Deals on Guns and Swords.”
We stopped in a coffee shop to eat pie and swap jokes with the mayor of Chester. We posed in front of the fifteen-foot-tall statue of Superman at the center of Metropolis. We heard about all the young people who were moving to the big cities because manufacturing and coal-mining jobs were disappearing. We learned about the local high school football teams’ prospects for the coming season, and the vast distances veterans had to drive in order to reach the closest VA facility. We met women who had been missionaries in Kenya and greeted me in Swahili, and farmers who tracked the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal before setting out on their tractors. Several times a day, I pointed out to Dan the number of men we met sporting white linen slacks or silk Hawaiian shirts. In the small dining room of a Democratic party official in Du Quoin, I asked the local state’s attorney about crime trends in his largely rural, almost uniformly white county, expecting him to mention joy-riding sprees or folks hunting out of season.
“The Gangster Disciples,” he said, munching on a carrot. “We’ve got an all-white branch down here—kids without jobs, selling dope and speed.”
By the end of the week, I was sorry to leave. Not simply because I had made so many new friends, but because in the faces of all the men and women I’d met I had recognized pieces of myself. In them I saw my grandfather’s openness, my grandmother’s matter-of-factness, my mother’s kindness. The fried chicken, the potato salad, the grape halves in the Jell-O mold—all of it felt familiar.
It’s that sense of familiarity that strikes me wherever I travel across Illinois. I feel it when I’m sitting down at a diner on Chicago’s West Side. I feel it as I watch Latino men play soccer while their families cheer them on in a park in Pilsen. I feel it when I’m attending an Indian wedding in one of Chicago’s northern suburbs.
Not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike.
I don’t mean to exaggerate here, to suggest that the pollsters are wrong and that our differences—racial, religious, regional, or economic—are somehow trivial. In Illinois, as is true everywhere, abortion vexes. In certain parts of the state, the mention of gun control constitutes sacrilege. Attitudes about everything from the income tax to sex on TV diverge wildly from place to place.
It is to insist that across Illinois, and across America, a constant cross-pollination is occurring, a not entirely orderly but generally peaceful collision among people and cultures. Identities are scrambling, and then cohering in new ways. Beliefs keep slipping through the noose of predictability. Facile expectations and simple explanations are being constantly upended. Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discover that most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows. Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.
All of which raises the question: What are the core values that we, as Americans, hold in common? That’s not how we usually frame the issue, of course; our political culture fixates on where our values clash. In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, for example, a major national exit poll was published in which voters ranked “moral values” as having determined how they cast their ballot. Commentators fastened on the data to argue that the most controversial social issues in the election—particularly gay marriage—had swung a number of states. Conservatives heralded the numbers, convinced that they proved the Christian right’s growing power.
When these polls were later analyzed, it turned out that the pundits and prognosticators had overstated their case a bit. In fact, voters had considered national security as the election’s most important issue, and although large numbers of voters did consider “moral values” an important factor in the way they voted, the meaning of the term was so vague as to include everything from abortion to corporate malfeasance. Immediately, some Democrats could be heard breathing a sigh of relief, as if a diminu tion in the “values factor” served the liberal cause; as if a discussion of values was a dangerous, unnecessary distraction from those material concerns that characterized the Democratic Party platform.
I think Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values, as wrong as those conservatives who see values only as a wedge to pry loose working-class voters from the Democratic base. It is the language of values that people use to map their world. It is what can inspire them to take action, and move them beyond their isolation. The postelection polls may have been poorly composed, but the broader question of shared values—the standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important in their lives, and in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics, the cornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and policies.
“WE HOLD THESE truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration—that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands. It orients us, sets our course, each and every day.
Indeed, the value of individual freedom is so deeply ingrained in us that
