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I can only talk about what it means to be my kind of American—a New Yorker; an atheist in the most religious country in the western world; and a writer who has devoted her life to “just words” (an anti-intellectual sneer constantly directed at Barack Obama by the Republican campaign). I feel no sense of identification with significant numbers of my fellow citizens, who consider me un-American because I do not profess belief in Jesus or in the superior wisdom of poorly educated “folks”—and they feel no sense of identification with me. The loss of our common sense of Americanness is arguably the most formidable challenge the next president will face.

Last week, as I waited for a flight in a packed airport bar in Wisconsin, I met a Joe Six-Pack (which he called himself), the political right’s fount of beer-soaked wisdom. Joe, who owned a delicatessen, placed the blame for the deepening financial crisis on low-income Americans, who, chasing the dream of home ownership, took out mortgages, no money down, at variable interest rates. They received a “sweet deal,” he said, because “they got to live in their houses free.”

Of course, nearly all of the owners who lost their homes had been making mortgage payments for years. Wasn’t it possible, I asked Joe, that they lost their jobs or piled up medical bills that bankrupted them (a common occurrence in the U.S.)? “Don’t you believe it,” he replied furiously. “That’s always the excuse with these people. They’re unlucky, they’re victims. I never buy anything I can’t pay for.”

These people. I didn’t have to ask him who they were. “You have a whole group of people who just don’t really want to earn what they have,” he declared. “They want everything right now. These bad home loans, they’re like special treatment for blacks who want to get into the best universities. You want it, you don’t have to work for it, the government will give it to you.”

I doubt that any appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” could shake this man’s invincible ignorance. He made up George W. Bush’s political base, and he will certainly vote for John McCain and his bizarre right-wing running mate, Sarah Palin, who attends a church that preaches belief in witchcraft.

I cannot abide the thought of my country being run for at least four more years by people who regard reason and evidence as “elitist” preoccupations. Are there enough Joe Six-Packs to make that happen? We shall find out on Nov. 4, and meanwhile, what it means to be my kind of American is to live with a combination of hope and fear that keeps me awake far into the night.

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Join the Debate: Read Alan Miller on America's confidence crisis and Ann Treneman on what it means to be an American abroad

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Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason, issued in September by Old Street Publishing Company.