What do you mean Sorkin-esque patter doesn't fly in Red States? Haven't these people seen Sports Night?

The most interesting line from Aaron Sorkin's NYT piece:

The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

Too much has already been said about bicoastal elites and the Real Americans who love to hate them, but that's a sentence I want to unpack, partly because I want to offer a helpful answer to an unhelpful question, but also because it breaks my heart to see Sorkin, a man who obviously delights in wordplay, completely write off a subculture so rich in his bread and butter. Never mind Hee Haw and bad puns. Hicks turn phrases.

If it seems like redneck chauvinism to hold up a parade of countrypolitan wordsmiths as evidence that Red Staters are witty, too, it isn't. It has considerable bearing on the question of whether Republicans hate blue elites because they find them smug and contemptuous or whether they resent them because they're just smarter.

I think it would be helpful to put to rest once and for all the idea that Red State conservatives have contempt for book-learning as such. For one thing, they seem to be fine with articulate language as long as it's delivered in a Southern accent. I'm not sure that Freddie could look me in the eye and say that there's not a self-evident love of language and its possibilities on display in lyrics like "I'm the only Hell my momma ever raised" and "She's acting single and I'm drinking doubles." Liberals of a more postmodern bent will appreciate that country music has been self-referential since before Deleuze met Guattari (see "Hank Williams, You Wrote My Life," "Crank the Hank and Crack the Jack," and "Jones on the Jukebox, You on My Mind").

More importantly, let's take some notice of the fact that Mississippi, which ain't no Research Triangle Park, still adores its literary native sons. William Faulkner and Eudora Welty were regarded as eccentrics during their lifetimes, but I'd be surprised to hear a Southerner speak ill of either. NASCAR dads might not get what Faulkner's about, but they respect him. We should also remember that every state in the South broke for Carter four years after they all went for Nixon and four years before every one but Georgia went for Reagan. In the world of fiction, the archetypal "Southern gentleman" is many things; well-spoken is one.

Lastly, I'll bring up a story about Sorkin himself. He's said in interviews that he came up with the idea of doing a sitcom about an ESPN-style sports show because he watched SportsCenter when he was holed up in a hotel writing A Few Good Men, and found himself bowled over by the quality of the show's writing. I'd like to ask Sorkin who he imagined was watching Sports Night (the show within the show, not the two-season sitcom itself); the anchors were Ivy-educated, but it was a sports show.

This is all a moot point insofar as saying that one side hates the other only because they feel hated by them raises the unanswerable question of who shot first. Besides, questions of someone's real psychological motivation are always tough to answer. That aside, I feel confident enough in my psychological reading of the electorate to tell Conor Friedersdorf that he's just wrong when he says that antipathy towards illegal immigrants the political issue of illegal immigration has as much to with the fact that they're illegal as with the fact that they're brown and speak a different language, and I feel just as confident telling Sorkin that he's just wrong when he says that being self-evidently well-educated is a turn-off for the half of the country he disagrees with.