Longing for community can coexist with an ideology that dismisses all public display

Evidence

Country-westerners wanted to leave references to the wider world behind and just appreciate each other as human beings, pure and simple, in a community of equals, with no one rewarded for having a better job, being richer or smarter or more charitable or more patriotic, nor for having any particular loyalties or attachments, exceptional eloquence, skill, or any exceptional qualities: just people. They wanted to avoid the kind of constraints, judgments, and obligations that theorists describe. They were private people; they believed that what really matters is what is ”inside”; that the tender, flickering ”real self” can almost never be expressed in words, and certainly does not brazenly display itself in group contexts. Their unjudgmental ideal of friendship rested on an anti-institutional and anti-conventional feeling that anything larger than that hidden sliver of real selfhood was less real, and probably tainted, so participants tried to create a sense of etiquette that kept the wider world and its stuffy, confining, annoying, contaminated conventions as far away as possible. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 645

Categorization

• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 645