"The question is not who they think they are, to be holding us hostage every four years with their presidential primary. Instead, who do we think they are, to let them get away with it, this white, tight and right smidgen of a place, this myth-mongering bastion of no-tax/no-spend conservatives with no minorities to speak of and a total of .43 percent of the American people? As Thomas Jefferson said, after New Hampshire town meetings had attacked his Embargo Act, “The organization of this little selfish minority enabled it to overrule the union.”...
The dream of New England hangs over the New Hampshire hills like an anesthetic gas, easing the pains of New Hampshire’s tackiness, erasing the phone wires, the mini-golf courses, the sense of chronic opportunism that lurks behind the white clapboard purity of all those houses with dates over the doors instead of street numbers. You don’t have to look very hard, though, to see the uneasy compromise of land and people that is New Hampshire...
In 1889 the state’s Department of Agriculture published a booklet entitled “Price List of Abandoned Farms in New Hampshire.” In 1891, a woman named Kate Sanborn wrote a book called “Adopting an Abandoned Farm,” which she followed with an even more successful sequel called “Abandoning an Adopted Farm.”...
The high WASPery of St. Paul’s also evokes what historian John Higham has called “the image of America that Anglo-Saxon intellectuals cherished. The tradition of racial nationalism had always proclaimed orderly self-government as the chief glory of the Anglo-Saxons — an inherited capacity so unique that the future of human freedom surely rested in their hands.” That New Hampshire is 98.8 percent white links it in some minds with the tradition of English freedoms, and resonates in the darkest caverns of an America that still defines moral and political attributes in terms of race or national ancestry."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/new-hampshire-is-a-fraud/2016/02/05/6960855e-cc21-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%202.8.16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All
Interesting - written in 1988, what a different style, what a set of sharp but amorphous observations/critiques. I want to know what is different now, and I want to know how people in New Hampshire answer to these impressions.
