The rubes and the elites
By calling small-town Americans "bitter," Obama has deepened a long-standing rift in the Democratic base. The party's success in November depends on healing it.
By Michael Lind
Apr. 15, 2008 | Rubes. Rednecks. Low-information voters. Beer-track voters. NASCAR man. Bubba. Retro America. These terms have all been used by well-known progressive writers and thinkers to describe white working-class Americans. This familiar litany of contempt provides the context for the firestorm that erupted Friday, when Sen. Barack Obama's remarks to a closed-door group of rich donors in San Francisco were made public by a blogger for the Huffington Post.
Referring to "these small towns in Pennsylvania," Obama told his wealthy audience that the views of these voters on a variety of subjects should be understood as responses to decades of economic distress. "It's not surprising," he said, "then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." When both Hillary Clinton and John McCain accused him of condescension toward nonelite voters, Obama, rather than retracting his assertion, simply restated it in somewhat milder terms the following day at a town hall meeting in Muncie, Ind., saying that there had been a "political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true."
The events of the past few days are additional evidence of a profound rift in the Democratic Party, one revealed in the differing constituencies of the two remaining candidates. One story, told by Obama backers and the mainstream media, holds that there is a white racist problem: The Democratic Party is deeply divided between anti-racists (that is, supporters of Barack Obama) and racists (Democratic primary voters who preferred Hillary Clinton or any candidate other than Barack Obama, particularly the working-class white men who are often described, in zoological terms, as "white males"). The other story, which has yet to be told, holds that the difference between the constituencies of Obama and Clinton has little to do with race and reflects instead long-familiar regional and cultural splits among whites in the Democratic electorate. The prospects of the Democratic Party in the fall depend in part on whether these rifts can be healed.
In the act of rushing to Obama's defense, some prominent liberal bloggers reinforced the stereotype of elite liberal snobbery. On Friday, regular DailyKos diarist RKA argued, "This quote and the resulting feeding frenzy are a huge opportunity for Obama to get the attention of low-information small-town voters who are skeptical of him and convince some of them to vote their pocketbooks instead of their culture." On TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin wrote that "Obama spoke artlessly, forgetting that the first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes."
Now there's a campaign slogan. Hey, rubes -- I mean low-information voters -- Vote Your Pocketbook, Not Your Culture!
Should anyone doubt that dissing rather than flattering the "rubes" is an aberration, examples of liberal snobbery are not hard to find in progressive publications. Sometimes it's genteel, sometimes it's raw. In an essay titled "The Urban Archipelago" a few years ago, the editors of Seattle's alt-weekly the Stranger wrote: "It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion -- New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on ... And we are the real Americans. They -- rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs -- are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers ... We can secede emotionally ... by turning our backs on the heartland ... We're everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We'll take Manhattan."
A similarly grotesque and repellent caricature of America is found in the 80-something billionaire John Sperling's self-published book "The Great Divide," in which he argues that "Metro America" should turn its back on "Retro America." As Sperling's coauthor Samuel George explained, "Think of it this way. They have Wal-Mart, we have Neiman Marcus." And a few years back, many liberal bloggers were delighted with a chart, soon exposed as a hoax, that purported to show that IQs were higher in blue states than in red states.
Now consider the disturbing way that mainstream progressive thinkers and strategists discuss working-class white voters in terms of demeaning stereotypes. Working-class Catholic voters in the industrial states used to be "hardhats." Now they are "Archie Bunker voters," or "Joe Lunchbucket," or "the beer track voters." Even worse are the terms used for the Southern white working class. It's composed of "rednecks" or "Bubbas" or -- more recently -- "NASCAR man" or even "white trash."
They are apparently aliens whose behavior is irrational, dangerous and unnerving. Peter Beinart, the former editor of the New Republic and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that liberals must "confront" a "scourge": "Let's call him Nascar Man ... Nascar Man is the guy liberals need to win, but usually don't. He loves guns, pickup trucks, chewing tobacco, and church on Sunday. He thinks liberals are high-taxing, culturally libertine, quasi-pacifist wimps. And, once liberals have conjured him up, they no longer say what they really believe -- even to one another ... Nascar Man inhibits intellectual inquiry. He's the bully everyone wants to appease."
With the controversy over Obama's remarks, the mainstream press and Obama supporters have finally noticed the class divide in Democratic politics. They've started to wonder why Mr. and Mrs. NASCAR may not be enthusiastic about the Obama candidacy. A Gallup Poll released on April 9 showed that among non-Hispanic white Democrats, support for Clinton vs. Obama among those with a high school education or less -- 61 to 33 -- was almost the exact reverse of the pattern among those with a postgraduate education -- 32 to 61.
The path of least resistance for liberal journalists and bloggers is to respond to these disturbing numbers by demonizing less-educated white Democrats. That is easier for them than to grasp the idea that these voters might actually like Hillary Clinton. One theory holds that "low information" voters, ignorant of the candidates and the issues, favor Clinton because of name recognition. But contrary to the progressive mythology about "low-information voters," a March Gallup poll shows that "both Obama and Clinton have near-universal name identification across all educational levels."
Even more common has been the claim by many supporters of Obama that the Clinton campaign, by means of subtle appeals to white racial prejudice, has attracted a large number of bigots who oppose Obama because he is black. The "race baiting" is alleged to have consisted of Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama to Clinton's friend Jesse Jackson, and Hillary Clinton's praise for the civil rights efforts of Lyndon Johnson, which, it was said, denigrated the achievements of Martin Luther King Jr. Since when have white race baiters praised Jesse Jackson and LBJ?
Polling data make it clear that the progressives and journalists who have denounced the Clintons as sinister figures "playing the race card" are in black helicopter/grassy knoll territory. According to Gallup, last August -- months before the mythical race baiting is supposed to have begun -- Clinton led among high-school-educated Democrats and tied Obama among more-educated voters in a multi-candidate race. Since then there has been a growth in Obama's support among educated Democrats, as other candidates have dropped out, but no augmentation of Clinton's support in general. The legions of racist white voters alleged to have been driven by subtle race baiting into the Clinton camp following the early primaries do not exist.
There is yet another problem with explaining pro-Clinton votes, not as positive votes for Clinton by people who support her and her positions, but as nothing more than racist anti-Obama votes. Obama has done well in many states, particularly in the Midwest and upper Plains, with nearly all-white populations. David Sirota, a progressive blogger, has suggested that white racist voting increases with the black proportion of the population of a state -- high in Mississippi, low in Minnesota. Racism is supposed to explain why Obama does poorly with white Catholic voters in big industrial cities, who presumably see themselves as competing for jobs, status and real estate with urban black Americans.
But what about Appalachia? Clinton does very well among the largely Scots-Irish population of the mountainous Appalachian region that runs from Pennsylvania down to northern Georgia and Alabama. Why doesn't this mostly white region vote like mostly white Minnesota and Wisconsin? The white racist theory of the 2008 presidential campaign can only be saved by an ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis -- Appalachian whites are Southerners, and everyone knows that all white Southerners are racists, even the ones without black neighbors.
Remarkably, the Sirota theory also suggests that all white Democrats are at least latent racists -- even those who support Obama. Obama's supporters in Minnesota and Wyoming vote for him only because their latent racism hasn't yet been triggered. If enough blacks moved into their states, then -- bang! -- they'd metamorphose into full-fledged Klansmen and vote for LBJ-praising bigots like the Clintons in a hurry.
To those who know anything about American political history, the Sirota theory is clearly nonsense. The key factor in regional support for Obama among whites is not the number of blacks in a state but the number of Yankee pioneers in the 19th century. As Josh Patashnik in the New Republic (quoting a 2004 essay of mine in the American Prospect) has pointed out, Obama finds his greatest white support in what the historian David Hackett Fischer calls "Greater New England" -- the vast region from New England and the Great Lakes to the upper Plains and Pacific Northwest settled by New England Yankees in the 19th century along with culturally similar Germans and Scandinavians. Another historian, Daniel J. Elazar, identifies this Northern band as the home of the "moralistic" political culture, distinct from the "individualist" political culture of the mid-Atlantic and the "traditionalist" political culture of the South. The political culture of this region, influenced by New England Puritanism and Nordic social democracy, has long been antiwar and pro-education, hostile to big business and in favor of civil rights. The moralists of Greater New England have a deep aversion to political conflict and favor consensus, bipartisanship and harmony. This region was the home, after all, in the early 20th century, of the Nonpartisan League. In the early 21st century, if you throw in a few blue college towns in the red states, it overlaps neatly with the Stranger's "Urban Archipelago."
Since 1992, when Ross Perot's Reform Party did best in Greater New England, this area has hosted the nation's only two independent governors -- Angus King of Maine and Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. Sixteen years later, Obama has won most of the Democratic primaries in the states in which John Anderson (1980), Ross Perot (1992, 1996) and Ralph Nader (2000) did best. All of these candidates, despite their different positions and worldviews, fared best among Greater New England voters, who tend to love third-party candidates. Obama's campaign is an overture synthesizing the greatest hits of Elazar's moralist tradition: It is antiwar and anti-partisan, reformist and inspirational. No wonder that the Northern white Protestants who were attracted to John Anderson, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader adore him. No wonder they love him in Wisconsin.
The question, then, is not why Greater New England progressives would vote for Obama. He presses all their age-old buttons: opposition to war, nonpartisan reform. The question is why anyone would assume that such a candidate would appeal to other Democratic constituencies, other than blacks (voting in this case for the favorite-son candidate).
more at......
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/04/15/elitism/print.html
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