BLUE in a RED State Learning to Live in an Us vs. Them Country

There’s a quote—now considered apocryphal—from legendary film critic Pauline Kael that for years stood as damning evidence of the extent to which people could exist in their own cultural and social bubbles. Kael, the story went, couldn’t accept the election of Richard Nixon in 1972 because she didn’t know a single person who had voted for him. This was, after all, an election where Nixon had won 49 states and by 20 percentage points. The truth was Kael never uttered those exact words, but what she is reported to have said is no less striking. “I live in a rather special world,” she is quoted as saying in The New Yorker . “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

Replace “Nixon” with “Donald Trump,” and you’d likely find no shortage of artists who would express a similar skin-crawling disdain for anyone who would consider