People Like Us

Throughout “People Like Us,” Brooks uses hyperbolic (highly exaggerated) characterizations of various political and social groups. He writes,

If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she’d look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid’s mouth (Paragraph 2).

The first half of this quote is factual: Great Falls and Bethesda are both upper-middle-class suburbs of Washington, DC, and Bethesda has a higher percentage of Democratic voters, while Great Falls skews Republican. The author uses hyperbole in the second half of the sentence to emphasize this point. It is unlikely that chewing tobacco, gun racks, and large pickup trucks are any more prevalent in Great Falls than in Bethesda, but the hyperbole illustrates the strict divide between even communities with many demographic similarities. It also hints at a point Brooks later makes explicit: This self-segregation breeds ignorance. The resident of Bethesda, Brooks suggests, cannot distinguish between the average Republican in Great Falls and the stereotype of a rural Republican voter.

Hyperbole appears again in the example of Boulder, Colorado.