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And when I ignored the faux-persecution at the other
end of the line, the fatuous e-mails began piling
up. “This is awful…” was the best
a screenwriter friend could muster. “We fuckin’
founded this country, assholes,” was the lame
attempt at pomposity on the website FuckTheSouth.com.
“Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and
on about? … Who do you think those wig-wearing,
lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were
fucking blue-staters, dickhead.”
Well, the last time I checked, George Washington,
James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson were all from
red-state Virginia, but no matter. Still, if you’re
going to start hectoring your countrymen about American
history, it’s advisable to get your own house
in order first.
Appropriately enough, though, syndicated columnist
Ted Rall took his cue from the Founding Fathers, answering
his own rhetorical question: “Why shouldn’t
those of us on the coasts feel superior? We eat better,
travel more, dress better, watch cooler movies, earn
better salaries, meet more interesting people, listen
to better music and know more about what’s going
on in the world.”
Enough already. To the outside world, the plight
of anguished Democrats is just getting embarrassing.
We get it now. People who voted for Kerry live in
posh cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco
— which means de facto that they’re smarter,
funnier, wiser and smell better than people who voted
for Bush. Wealth does funny things like that: that’s
why we try to distribute it fairly.
But if that’s the way you want the Democratic
Party to keep thinking, if that’s how you want
to define liberal American politics in the twenty-first
century, don’t come asking for the spare room
at my mom’s in four years’ time. Because
what’s truly remarkable isn’t the bigoted
ignorance of the Bush voter; it’s the ignorance
of too many Democrats about their own country and
the head-in-the-sand sophistry that leads them time
and again to assume that every Bush voter is a “militant
Christianist [sic] Republican from inland backwaters,”
to borrow Ted Rall’s linguistic fornication
for a second.
That is, I know New Yorkers who would secede from
“flyover country” in a heartbeat but who
haven’t thought for a second about who constructs
the military hardware that protects them, who builds
the airplanes that fly them up to Cape Cod for the
weekend, who drills for the oil that heats their Vermont
log-cabins in winter, who grows the cereal they eat
for breakfast, or who produces the rib-eyes they shovel
down at Peter Luger. And it sure as hell ain’t
semiotics professors in Morningside Heights.
The truth is, were “arrogant liberal elitists”
from New York and Los Angeles, say, to venture inland,
they might actually be alarmed to find some rather
familiar people in the red states — people who
also summer in Tuscany and ski in Gstaad, who also
drink espresso and cabernet, who also shop at Trader
Vic’s and Whole Foods, and who also prefer Brian
Lehrer and PBS to Rush Limbaugh and Fox.
Who knows, they might find some common political
ground there. As Thomas Frank explains in his recent
book, “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”
the Sunflower State was initially settled by eastern
abolitionists and free-soilers who came there to block
Missourians from moving “slave power”
westward, and that the state has a history of leftist
radicalism that dwarfs the champagne socialism of
privileged college kids pretending to “get”
Thorstein Veblen.
Of course, though it’s clear that American
liberalism desperately needs to shed its image of
shallow self-righteousness, it’s equally obvious
that its political factions stopped being relevant
to many of its traditional constituents long ago.
Largely ignored now are socially liberal, blue-collar
workers. Welcomed instead are America’s mighty
corporations, with their lucrative campaign contributions.
“While the Republicans … made their populist
appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving
those same voters — their traditional base —
the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from
positions within the party and consigning their issues,
with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history.
A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would have been
hard to invent,” writes Thomas Frank.
So Ted Rall and the neo-Jeffersonian écriviste
at FuckTheSouth.com can bleat all they like about
the “nice but depressingly closed-minded”
folk in Bush country, but the joke’s on them.
The reality is that the Democratic Party long ago
dropped the language that once defined it and made
it a beacon of hope for struggling workers across
the country, leaving it perilously vulnerable to cultural
wedge issues such as guns, gays and abortion.
Of course, no sooner had the election been called,
did depressingly closed-minded folk in blue states
start slandering people who voted for Bush. How can
I put this simply? Don’t demean people and expect
them to vote for you. These are people who ought to
be part of the Democratic Party’s core constituency.
As Mickey Kaus put it: "To win, then, it sure
looks as if Democrats are going to have to start convincing
some people who are now on the other side.”
Simplifying and patronizing them, though, is just
about the least open-minded and least tolerant approach
to take.
More to the point, in 45 states Bush did better this
year than he did in 2000, including those bastions
of liberal elitism — New York, Connecticut and
Massachusetts. His biggest improvement came from those
who never go to church. Evangelicals, meanwhile, made
up the same share of the electorate this year as they
did four years ago, and there was no increase in the
percentage of voters who are pro-life.
In other words, it’s absurd and utterly self-destructive
to belittle all those who voted for Bush and decry
them simply as the “ignorant bigot vote.”
Instead of asking "What's wrong with these people?"
and telling them to go fuck themselves, American liberals
should instead be asking, "What's wrong with
us?" The sad thing is, for such an enlightened
and educated group of people, such soul-searching
is unlikely to happen.
If there’s any consolation, however, anguished
Democrats might want to think back to 1992, when the
radical British Tory party pipped the liberal Labor
party to the post in the general election, before
disintegrating under the weight of its own hubris
and in-fighting, and receding into the political wilderness
for almost a decade.
Today’s Republican Party is a similar mish-mash
of strange bedfellows – social and economic
conservatives, small-government libertarians and national
security theocrats, and — most notoriously of
all — foreign policy realists and Islamist-battling
neocons. One can only imagine what four more years
in power might do to the ideological fault lines within
the GOP.
In the meantime, though, it behooves all American
liberals to straighten up their own house and re-establish
the core identity of the Democratic Party, so that
the illiberal bigotry of 2004 doesn’t consign
them to another defeat in four year’s time.
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