You might have heard that Bill O’Reilly grew up in Levittown, New York, famous for creating the planned subdivision. Designers wanted Levittown to offer returning WWII veterans an affordable entry to the middle class of property-owning professionals. People with no prior experience in ownership could find a home at a low price with often intimidating details like landscaping, appliances and furniture already taken care of. Along with government policies with similar goals like the GI bill, Levittown and the communities that followed it helped to elevate millions of families that would otherwise have had no easy access to the middle class.
More to the point, it elevated white families.
In 1957, when Bill O’Reilly was 8 years old, the developer William Levitt explained [banning black homeowners from Levittown] this way to the New York Times:
The plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. This attitude may be wrong morally, and some day it may change. I hope it will. But as matters now stand, it is unfair to charge an individual with the blame for creating this attitude or saddle him with the sole responsibility for correcting it.
A normal person who grew up in freaking Levittown would see that he might have had some chances in life that his black contemporaries never had. Of course saying that makes me a bad liberal, since the diversity of normal people includes more than the people with whom I hang out. Someone like the folks I know would acknowledge it, sure. To me the mental acrobatics it takes to deny that seem painful and maybe dangerous.
But conservatives are normal too. A lot of people would not at all agree with the fairly obvious point that I just brought up, and I think that this issue gets back to what I see as the deep heart of the liberal-conservative divide. Liberals want people to feel guilty about things and conservatives don’t want to. Some are sociopaths who cannot feel guilt but a lot of them just go a little nuts at the idea that they might in any way be a bad person. They’re not entirely wrong that guilt gets used sometimes recklessly and as a weapon but the absolute refusal to feel any at all has become the poisonous seed of our current national dysfunction.
Start with O’Reilly versus Stewart. Bill O’Reilly lifts his persona straight out of a three year old’s memory of John Wayne. He sees himself as not just a good guy but as some sort of moral achetype, crusading against evil and incapable of sin. Poke his pretensions and O’Reilly goes nuts, over the top, into wackadoo land.
Jon Stewart is not a perfect guy in any respect (e.g., his interviews often kind of suck), but then he doesn’t pretend to be. When he screws up a story he admits the mistake, makes fun of himself a little and moves on. I watched when he demolished Crossfire. Stewart looked the opposite of puffed up. He seemed deflated, like he was ahsamed to even be on the stupid program. In fact that was more or less his point.
The idea that Levittown, O’Reilly’s values factory that made moral paragons like spicy chili makes unappealing hot gas, only gave those fabled values to white people just short circuits O’Reilly’s brain. To process that cognitive dissonance he would have to become a person who can accept a little ‘personal responsibility’ for the unequal opportunities that America faced then and now. In other words he would have to become a little bit liberal. But he can’t, so he won’t.
And Cliven Bundy is still swallowing that damned foot.
