Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict: fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v. Wade and evolution in the curriculum. What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception -- generally based on no evidence whatsoever -- that Democrats look down their noses at regular people.
I'm surprised--though I shouldn't be, of course--that any number of liberals who are (presumably) comfortable with concepts like unconscious discrimination and privilege when it comes to race, have not even stopped to consider that the same sort of thing might be operating here.
Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"? And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams? It's okay--there's no one here but us chickens. You don't.
Maybe you don't know you're doing it. But I have quite brilliant friends who grew up in rural areas and went to state schools--not Michigan or UT, but ordinary state schools--who say that, indeed, when they mention where they went to school, there's often a droop in the eyelids, a certain forced quality to the smile. Oh, Arizona State. Great weather out there. Don't I need a drink or something? This person couldn't possibly interest me.
People from a handful of schools, most of them hailing from a handful of major metropolitan areas, dominate academia, journalism, and the entertainment industry. Our subtle (or not-so-subtle) distaste for everything from their entertainment to their decorating choices to the vast swathes of the country in which they choose to live permeate almost everything they read, watch, or hear. Of course we don't hear it--to us, that's simply the way the world is.
In the 1980s, I played on possibly the worst girl's basketball team in the state of New York. Every time another Catholic school kicked our asses (I believe one memorable game ended at 48 to 2) we consoled ourselves by making fun of their big, sprayed, permed hair, and the lavish eye makeup that ran down their faces when they sweated. We didn't know that what divided us from those girls was economic class--they were the children of plumbers and bodega owners, while we were the children of bankers and lawyers and lobbyists. We genuinely believed that we had simply been gifted with a better fashion sense.
But I bet those girls knew exactly what we were saying as we got on the bus. And I'm pretty sure they knew what we were really talking about.
Red America exaggerates the contempt, of course. It's also true that if you're expecting racism and sexism, you'll probably end up misinterpreting perfectly innocent remarks. But the fact that they aren't right in every particular does not mean that, in general, they've got it wrong. For one thing, in both DC and New York I've spent a fair amount of time listening to liberals make jokes about red states that would horrify them if they were told about blacks. But even if that weren't true, I wouldn't be the best person to assess whether there is prejudice or not. I'm so close to it that I can't see it.
I'm surprised--though I shouldn't be, of course--that any number of liberals who are (presumably) comfortable with concepts like unconscious discrimination and privilege when it comes to race, have not even stopped to consider that the same sort of thing might be operating here.
That is a marvelous point. I intend to use it without attribution.
We rednecks don't deny that Ivy League liberals are smarter than we are. We just don't think that they make better decisions.
Having grown up and lived most of my life in a very conservative Christian area, I can also tell you that most of this hostility comes from separation of church and state issues. At my high school, the devout gathered around the flagpole every morning to pray, and used any opportunity or opening to preach that they could. If the teacher gave an open assignment about social issues, you can bet it came back as "let prayer in school" or "ban abortion." (Not to mention the fact that I was harrassed by other kids in elementary school because I was CATHOLIC). It's not about being looked down upon--most of the conservatives I grew up with were richer than us, and their parents started the day with a latte. It's about perceived hostility towards religion. And let me note that I mean RELIGION, and NOT values. This is what a lot of Democrats don't get. Yes, if you removed the names and gave evangelicals the life stories, they would prefer Obama and Biden, family men with no history of adultery and a solid record of churchgoing, over Palin and McCain. But it's not about the values, it's about the religion and saying the right things about it.
Racists often object to being called racists on the grounds that it is their sincere belief that black people really are inferior.
That sounds like the kind of "logic" that only a <irony>dumb inbred hillbilly redneck</irony> would take seriously, until you hear it from somebody who went to a good school. I cheerfully anticipate a wealth of examples in the comments below.
You're as right as rain. Three anecdotes from my life as a Pittsburgher (not a Red-state area but full of "bitter" people) of working-class stock who attended a fancy-pants college and law school:
1. In college, New Yorkers mocked me when I first innocently referred to the "tri-state area" of PA, WV, and OH; apparently theirs was the only real "tri-state area" and the only real "City."
2. Coastal friends have repeatedly suggested that the only reason I enjoyed childhood trips to the beaches at Lake Erie was because I didn't know any better.
3. A friend with a scintillating legal resume chose for family reasons to practice in Erie, PA. Occasionally he gets asked by NYC firms to work as local counsel, and even though they know about his law review service and clerkship they still feel they have to spell everything out for him. ("We'd like you to file a motion for sum-a-ry judg-ment. That is when you ask a judge to dismiss a case without a tri-al ....").
I'm confident enough in my education and life choices to find most of this sort of elitism funny, whether it's from friends or the media. But I know any number of people in these parts who don't. And they are why Obama should worry about PA, MI, OH, and WI.
>>Red America exaggerates the contempt, of course. ... But the fact that they aren't right in every particular does not mean that, in general, they've got it wrong. For one thing, in both DC and New York I've spent a fair amount of time listening to liberals make jokes about red states that would horrify them if they were told about blacks.
But they do have it wrong in general. I live in Houston -- and my city is majority Democratic, and the candidates and politicos here didn't go to Harvard, or Yale, or even NYU, but UT, A&M, and TCU. It's ridiculous to claim that some Starbucks goers in Manhattan or D.C. represent the Democratic establishment. It's just rural/cosmo prejudice-stoking played out as a Republican/Democrat divide. (And I think I should know -- I went to public school in the South and now spend a good about of time with an East Cost, private school-educated cohort.)
Pot, chicken, etc.
And of course, the following rebuttals all apply:
a) Not wanting to hang out with someone who has different value systems is neither out of the ordinary nor unjustified.
b) Conservatives in red states mock liberals in blue states, demean them, attack them, deny their values and morals, FAR more than liberals in blue states do to red states.
c) The idea that the average middle to upper middle class intelligent person (red state) goes to Directional State School is just as absurd as believing the average middle to upper middle class intelligent person (blue state) goes to Williams. The comparison to Eastern Iowa would be CUNY or SUNY-Oneonta, and I think the response is fairly similar.
d) You are confusing differences in culture, values, and class, and therefore your critique is muddled.
e) The holier-than-thou crap is annoying, and from a personal level, I know enough of your social circle here in DC to know that you are completely full of it, and are far more elitest than most of your readership.
I think you're really on to something here. Klingman is moving in the right direction as he mentions religion, but there's more to it than that. It's a deeper difference in values. The jokes about Red State America don't just imply "We're better than you," but "We think that everything you value and hold dear, everything that you have in fact built your life around, is stupid at best and evil at worst."
There are some people that live in flyover states, didn't go to an Ivy, live in a double-wide etc. because they couldn't hack it in the pseudo-meritocracies that are the coastal megalopolises and thus don't enjoy the cultural and financial "benefits" that go along with that world. But there are others deliberately made choices which cost them "success" in certain areas of endeavor--the ones that the coastal elites think are most important--because they wanted other things. Like being close to family, having one of their own, or having the time to know more about their children than their names and ages. These people know quite well what they've given up, but they're deliberate about what's important to them.
Then here comes the DC congresscritter telling them that those choices are hopelessly quaint. You bet your ass that sparks resentment.
Megan you make a very good point, but I tend to think the current public opinion has swung too far in the other direction; i.e. who are you to say that a Harvard Law graduate is smarter than a sports journalism major?
It seems to me this stems from the same source as the current administration's assault on science. I don't agree with your research conclusions, therefore all facts are relative. This is a more dangerous position than supposed elitism.
All in all, I'm from the midwest and embrace the idea that people who didn't go to an Ivy League school can be just as smart, or smarter than those that did. However, I'd like them to prove it.
Alexander said, "if you removed the names and gave evangelicals the life stories, they would prefer Obama and Biden, family men with no history of adultery and a solid record of churchgoing, over Palin and McCain"
Is that so? So you're saying that if we were to review their respective nameless resumes, we'd believe that Obama actually does have exectutive experience, and that Palin does not. Somehow, I just don't believe you.....
Alexander Klingman's comment above is intriguing. Perhaps that is what is really offensive to the Republicans in question - the rejection most Democrats show for their religion and their view on its relationship to public life and government. A lot of things about this 'culture war' and about their electoral choices makes sense in this context. That sort of cultural disdain
On McArdle's post: yes, the people on the coasts make fun of the people within them; so what? Is that really what Republicans are mad about? Don't they make fun of the coasts as well, specifically as being, basically, sissies in every way? Different parts of the country rip on one another, it seems normal and not a big deal; smart people don't overdo it, nor do they take the other side too seriously. Also, are you conflating 'class' with 'region'? I don't think regional rivalries and suspicions rise to the level that those based on class divides can rise to - I think many regional preferences (like NASCAR) cut across class lines, and likewise, class similarities (and the distribution of the cultural variations within classes) cut clean across regions and certainly political affiliations (which for a very large portion of America are not very strong).
Megan, I don't doubt that some people at parties or in schoolyards express prejudices against Southerners and rural people. But in our society it is far, far more common and acceptable to express prejudice against Northerners and city people.
How do I know? One way is that Democratic politicians bend over backward not to criticize Southerners or rural people--and when they accidentally make a comment that could be interpreted as such criticism, they are crucified for it in the media (Obama's "bitter" remark). By contrast, Republican politicians revel in sarcastic, nasty cracks about people from San Francisco, Boston, and New York; people who go to Ivy League schools; people who like arugula and chardonnay, etc. etc. They utter such remarks in their convention speeches and they act very proud of themselves afterward.
So don't expect me to shed any tears about the terrible prejudice Southerners and rural folk are subject to. It doesn't compare to the vitriol directed at us Northern city dwellers.
I don't think that people who have never traveled outside the United States can be any good at foreign policy.
Other people who have never traveled outside the United States may experience this attitude as condescension. Or they may not. I don't really care how they feel about it; it remains true that people who have never traveled outside the United States can't be any good at foreign policy.
People mock the group they're scared of - which is why lower class people mock Mexicans, and why upper class people mock lower class people. Both threaten entrenched advantage.
One has only to peruse liberal pundits this last week to see numerous examples of pretty open contempt for anyone who didn't go to a fancy school.
I don't share the popular awe for fancy schools. Certainly not the way they are run today. Much more important is whether the student really is out to learn something. My best year in high school, the math teacher gave another student and me calculus books and left us alone; we had a great time, and placed out of more than a year of college work.
There are some people that live in flyover states, didn't go to an Ivy, live in a double-wide etc. because they couldn't hack it in the pseudo-meritocracies that are the coastal megalopolises and thus don't enjoy the cultural and financial "benefits" that go along with that world. But there are others deliberately made choices which cost them "success" in certain areas of endeavor--the ones that the coastal elites think are most important--because they wanted other things. Like being close to family, having one of their own, or having the time to know more about their children than their names and ages. These people know quite well what they've given up, but they're deliberate about what's important to them.
Funny, that's what people here in NYC say about investment banking.
People make these kinds of decisions in urban and rural areas, in state schools and the ivies. As much as you imagine it to be so, it's not as simple as a choice between these two worlds.
jwh, you might be right (although i think Obama's creditable experience and leadership qualities wouldn't look as thin as you might think next to Palin's), but Klingman was referring to shared values and personal histories which resonate. I think that's more or less on point, although the difference would not be that large. McCain might have had a spotty section in his life with regard to his divorce etc, but as far as cultural identification goes, his deep committment to the military life early on cancels that out.
Just as an aside, there is no such place as "Eastern Iowa State". The closest institution if higher learning is the University of Iowa which is one of the more liberal public universities in the upper midwest.
I know I'm nitpicking, but there is a clear delineation between Iowans and say... people from Missouri (real rednecks).
See, we're so urbane, we feel comfortable denigrating the lame Show-Me state.
A friend with a scintillating legal resume chose for family reasons to practice in Erie, PA. Occasionally he gets asked by NYC firms to work as local counsel, and even though they know about his law review service and clerkship they still feel they have to spell everything out for him. ("We'd like you to file a motion for sum-a-ry judg-ment. That is when you ask a judge to dismiss a case without a tri-al ....").
That's because NYC attorneys are a**holes to everyone, including other NYC attorneys. Or, like me, they've been burned at least once by assuming local counsel knows what needs to be done and not spelling it out.
This type of behaviour is really very common, and can be found everywhere. It is a result of people taking the view that the entire world revolves around them.
The fact that I don't really enjoy fishing or hunting does not mean I disapprove of others doing it. Decisions I make about my life, where I live, my hobbies and interests, the type of work I do, are only a reflection of what I enjoy.
Anyone who takes my choices as a negative view of their choices needs to remember that what I do has nothing to do with them. Its not you, it is me. I don't dislike your choices, it is just not a choice for me.
I want names. What D.C. Democrat(meaning from the House, Senate or President) puts down "regular" people? I see this meme advanced by pundits and journalists, but I never see it uttered by politicians. In reality, it goes both ways, as commenters here have stated. People in the South are just as dismissive of those in the North and vice versa. After all, NASCAR once banned for life, one of its most famous drivers(Tim Flock) for trying to unionize the drivers. The other problem is that northern liberals often seem to know more about the Bible then those in the so-called Bible Belt.
Flyover territory should remain that--flyover territory.
I only associate with fellow Manhattanites (only if they live south of 96th st.), Bostonians (of the Brahmin variety), San Franciscans (of the Stanford variety), and Los Angelenos (only if they live in Santa Monica or Malibu).
The rest, I ignore.
This is very real. I worked as a waiter in Seattle for about a year. Outside of the city limits, Washington state gets pretty red pretty fast. I remember one of the waitresses came to the waiter station complaining how she got a table of 'rednecks', not a flicker or wince from anyone else listening. You know she would have been berated and possibly fired if she ever complained of getting a table of 'niggers'.
The idea that 'nigger' is offensive and degrading, but 'redneck' is not is only one of many examples of the double standard and general snobbishness of liberals.
I don't hold any particular individual from the conservative voting class in contempt. I make no judgments about their individual personalities, love of country, or personal worth.
As a class, I will admit to being somewhat prejudiced against them. They seem to eat up lies and propaganda and resentment with a voracious appetite, and appear to have little interest in truth or governance. It's discouraging and dismaying, and I can't help how I feel.
MM's discussion is interesting because I just had a conversation with my non-condescending East Coast liberal elite girlfriend in which I felt sorry for people out here precisely because they don't have land grant universities comparable to those west of the Ohio (PSU excepted). So there's all this hyper-competition to get into an expensive prep school to have a shot at getting into an expensive college. What a sad waste of time and money.
Meanwhile I got a practically-free education at a university actually large enough to have a comprehensive engineering school* (Ivies, not so much) and wrote my ticket to the grad schools of my choosing. If I could do it all over again why the hell would I *want* to go to Williams?
*And is tied with Harvard for having the most Fortune 500 CEOs among alumni.
Winston, no doubt what you say is true, and it's a far more complicated world than you seem to have interpreted my comment to imply. But a person in Oklahoma need not necessarily be comparing themselves to someone in Manhattan for what I said to be true. All they need to remember is that they could have made different choices even in Oklahoma (Do I take this job or that one? Do I go to this school or that one? Do I pick this suburb or that one?), but they made the choices they made, and those choices represented deliberate (or not so deliberate) decisions about costs and benefits. Now here comes someone telling them those choices were silly. Still works.
"I don't think that people who have never traveled outside the United States can be any good at foreign policy."
I don't think that is quite true. It is not traveling, it is living in another country that helps. Moreover, not all travel is equal. I am sorry but vacationing in Western Europe really doesn't count as foreign travel. Western Europe is very much like America with better history if you are a tourist. To really understand the world and the different cultures in it, you need to go to a non-western country and spend some time there. It is only when you see a country that really has different values than the US that you really understand and appreciate the US and how it fits in the world.
Further, I don't think vacationing really cuts it no matter where you go. You have to live abroad to really understand it. When I say live, I mean actually live and work there, not just hang out in a university for a semester or two.
In that sense, I think many red staters, because of they are more likely to have served in the military probably understand more about the world than many cosmopolitan blue staters who have not. Going to a place like Iraq or Afghanistan to fight a war, or living in Europe for a three year tour, or spending six months in Kosovo, teaches you more about the world and US foreign policy than the yearly trek to Paris.
As someone who went to a minor directional school and worked closely with those who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and other local schools out here in Colorado for over 25 years, I can promise you that the Ivy Leaguers had nothing over the directional school kids in either brains or curriculum. They almost all had more family money, though.
I've got to admit (and I know that this will piss some people off) but I'll never hire another Princeton grad again. Three of them were more than enough.
Different parts of the country rip on one another, it seems normal and not a big deal; smart people don't overdo it, nor do they take the other side too seriously.
True, sv, but what matters is who has the most power. A lot of wealth is concentrated on the coasts, as is the media, and that gives the coasts a lot of power. If an average Joe from the East Coast expresses disdain for Middle America, who cares? His opinion won't affect them. But if the powerful folks in Hollywood or New York express the same disdain, and if that disdain influences their decisions about who to hire on Wall St or in high profile lawfirms, about what jokes to write and broadcast (and thereby subtly influence millions of people's opinions), or about who to groom for higher office, well, then the resentment is easier to understand.
"b) Conservatives in red states mock liberals in blue states, demean them, attack them, deny their values and morals, FAR more than liberals in blue states do to red states." - Justin
Of course, you have solid numbers to back you up right? Your statement is silly. Both are mocked by the other about the same.
It sounds like you're a liberal, but as a liberal, did you ever consider that you are just more sensitive to perceived mocking of liberals on the right, so think you hear more insults from the right about the left than vice versa? As more of a conservative, I know that I am more sensitive to the insults hurled from the left. I just don't lie to myself thinking the left looks down on the right more than the left looks down on the right.
One has only to peruse liberal pundits this last week to see numerous examples of pretty open contempt for anyone who didn't go to a fancy school.
I have not seen a single instance of this.
Krugman is right. The conservative narrative is a rehash of "Legally Blonde", with "Red-State" substituting for "Blonde". The central fantasy of the film is that, in fact, no one actually thinks blondes are by nature dumb. Nor does anyone really think that sorority girls are by nature dumb. Nor does anyone really think that people from "flyover country" are dumb. Nor has anyone used the term "flyover country", except ironically, since about 1985. This is a classic narrative of ressentiment.
To "dan" @ 1:26 -- Yeah, but y'all still have to come down here to buy decent fireworks. ;^)
"Like being close to family, having one of their own, or having the time to know more about their children than their names and ages."
This comment of Ryan Davidson's is telling. That's bitterness! I mean - what makes you think that people on the coasts don't care to be close to their children, that family doesn't mean anything to them? People to whom family is unimportant are few and far between. Yes, you'll find more of them clustered in cities, and perhaps many of those people are the same ones who make the disparaging comments about 'rednecks', 'flyover states', 'hicks' or 'bible-thumpers' etc that seems to provoke such a hurt response. But I just don't think that's representative of most people in coastal areas, or in urban areas, or blue states, or whatever, having lived in NJ and NY my whole life; to base your sacred vote on something like this instead of on, you know issues, stated positions and qualifications that will affect public policy, is really irrational.
Mike Rowe the host of Dirty Jobs did an interview where he noted that it seemed that people with these jobs were more grounded and self assured than people with the big city management or arts jobs.
I can confirm that from my job as an engineer. For example A coal miner operates in a more egalitarian environment than a big firm lawyer, college prof, or media guy. Yes the corporate types are disliked but the miner is trusted with big dollar equipment, understands the impact of markets on his job and is listened to most of the time.
When the self appointed upper class types look down on these people, their BS detectors go off pretty fast.
A lot of people have pointed out that Red State types like to look down on coastal elites for being general, all-around sissies. That's clearly true. But the difference is that coastal elites control the major institutions of money, power, and prestige in the country while flyover state types generally don't.
And Jordan, you're exhibiting exactly the kind of prejudice that stirs the resentment we're talking about here. "Propaganda"? "Lies"? "Little interest in truth or governance"? What do you think your typical "redneck" thinks they do at DailyKos? Why are Al Franken and Michael Moore supposed to be treated as speaking God's honest truth while Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin are clearly Satan incarnate? Why isn't the opposite true? From where I'm sitting there doesn't seem to be that much difference between any of them, yet partisans on either side simply can't abide the mere thought of the other. And you wonder why they don't like you very much.
I live and work in Washington DC. My family, however, mostly lives in Western Kansas. They are as red as red state gets. When I compare my family to the real Washington Cosmopolitans I know, it strikes me how the Washington types, for all of their pretensions are really hicks. To me a hick is someone who is only comfortable where they grew up and can't adapt to or appreciate any other environment. You can be a hick by being someone who lives in upstate New York and is terrified of the city. There are certainly a lot of those out there. But you can also be a hick by being someone who lives in a large city is afraid or uninterested in anything outside of the urban areas that you know.
I think of Megan talking about how she found staying in the suburbs to be scary and disturbing. No to slam on Megan, but that is really being a hick. For all of Megan's education and open mindedness, she would a lot more uncomfortable in Western Kansas than any of my family ever is in Washington DC. That is not because people would stair at her or make her feel unwelcome. Not in the least. The people there are very friendly. It is a product of her not being open to the experience the way my family is to coming to the big city.
I think a lot of coastal elites for lack of a better term just lack intellectual curiosity. There is a great big interesting country out there. If they would ever take the time to get to know it, they would find that it is nothing like they think it is.
I went to Northeast Missouri State university (now called Truman State). The coastals haven't heard about it--and I've definitely gotten "the look," once quite amusingly at an interview with the Ford Foundation.
I remember when I went to Big Important State School for grad school. The room was full of Stanfords, Harvards, Dukes, Michigans, Berkeleys. And there was me, NEMO State. And there was the look--why is this white guy from a hick school here?
After three years, I can definitely state the following: none of those people who had a degree in my undergraduate discipline had a better understanding of the field coming out of undergraduate studies than I did. It wasn't even close. While I was taking tough courses in dense subdisciplines (and writing serious and original research papers for each) they were taking "Women in Brazilian Politics" and "Postmodernism and Knowing." One of my friends, from Duke, had been allowed to graduate without a course in methods or in theory. She was functionally illiterate in the field and didn't even know it until we got to talking about what I had taken as an undergraduate.
Elite school degrees are indications of elite sorting, not ability and certainly not knowledge.
The coastal elites see Columbia and Harvard Law and think, "Well, he's inexperienced but how could Harvard be wrong...I'm sure he'll be fine." That's mistaking credentials for capacity and I hope the American people have the sense to see through the coastal smog and elect McCain.
The idea that 'nigger' is offensive and degrading, but 'redneck' is not is only one of many examples of the double standard and general snobbishness of liberals.
Redneck is a cultural insult, not a racial insult. Cultural insults are more tolerable because part of culture is behavior, which can be changed.
I'm going to join in on the chorus: Megan what is up with this thin resort to anecdote?
It's amazing how many comments here precisely illustrate the author's point while attempting to refute it.
That is all.
what matters is who has the most power
Indeed, the issue is not contempt, but contempt made flesh in the form of laws which privilege one value or belief system over another. Red staters resent--and not without reason--intrusions into their communities. They resent being unable to pray in a school which is completely filled with Christians because one atheist went to Federal court. They resent Washington DC hassling them over whether or not their gun has a pistol grip. They want to order their lives as they choose, and they don't like it when somebody tries to stop them.
Now, this obviously goes both ways. If SF wants abortion on demand and gay marriage, it obviously irks the residents when somebody from Montana tries to tell them not to. Nobody thinks it strange if a gay man says he won't vote Republican because they have contempt for him. Why should anyone think middle America will do otherwise, especially given that coastal values seem to be doing better, legally, than heartland values?
This also applies to city and state colleges on the coast. As a high schooler and undergrad I attended expensive, ostensibly elite, private schools. My friends are mostly from those past years. However, I am now getting an MBA at CUNY's (City University of New York) Baruch College Zicklin School of Business, a school capable of turning out truly capable, driven business people.
When I talk to friends or new acquaintances in my old circles I get exactly the same response you describe.
I'm not bankrolled and I refuse to take on crippling debt. Apparently if you fit those criteria and aim to to further your education, the coastal establishment will "droop their eyes" at you. "Ahh, Baruch. Great school. Now where's my drink?"
It sounds like you're a liberal, but as a liberal, did you ever consider that you are just more sensitive to perceived mocking of liberals on the right, so think you hear more insults from the right about the left than vice versa? As more of a conservative, I know that I am more sensitive to the insults hurled from the left. I just don't lie to myself thinking the left looks down on the right more than the left looks down on the right.
I think most liberals, when confronted with cracks about latte-sipping or arugula-eating insults, would probably have the reaction "what? I don't eat/drink any of that stuff!" It's the inaccurate nature of the caricature that annoys the most. Is it similar for insults hurled at conservatives?
"It is not traveling, it is living in another country that helps."
John, I agree.
Sarah Palin appears never to have traveled outside the US until she became governor. She has since visited Alaska Nat'l Guard troops stationed in Kuwait and made a stopover in Germany, a trip which required her to get a passport.
This whole "Do the coastal elites condescend to middle America?" nonsense got started when people questioned Sarah Palin's qualifications to serve as President of the United States. Had she spent a tour of duty in the military in Kosovo or Germany, such questions would have been less likely to arise.
My father, a law partner in Manhattan, took me on a fishing trip in the Everglades once. We had a guide take us around to the good fishing spots. Despite my father's best intentions his pale and pudgy countenance did nothing to dissuade this tour guide that my father was just another city slicker.
So, yeah, despite his Ivy League degree and Park Avenue duplex he was treated with contempt.
We all do it. Urban or country.
Great scene in the Sopranos in which Tony is invited to golf with his neighbor, a doctor, and the doctor's white collar friends. They were all talking about a hot stock tip and Tony looked at them from a distance not really knowing what they were talking about. It was only when they started asking him about his affiliations with John Gotti that he understood that his neighbors looked with contempt upon his world.
When in doubt about some sociological aspect of the United States, watch the Sopranos.
Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"?
Yes.
And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams?
Yes.
I'm removing you from my RSS feed, not that I think that's any great harm to you. Cheers.
"What's the Matter with Kansas" for an example of a liberal who wrote an entire book (to much acclaim from other liberals) on the stupid reasons why stupid rednecks in flyover country don't vote for Democrats. See also Obama on bitter clingers of guns and religion.
But of course they don't look down on ordinary people. Noooooo. No evidence out there at all.
Put it this way: I don't go to church, will never own a gun, and don't vote Republican all the time, and I'm miffed by coastal elitism. New Yorkers have a lot more in common than Houstonians than Houstonians do with folks from rural Texas, but you would never know it from talking to a New Yorker.
In high school I turned down Yale for Rice, and from the reactions of my friends you'd have thought I had a death wish. So yeah, if there's that sort of contempt for Rice and Houston--pretty cosmopolitan places in the scheme of things--I can only imagine how people actually from the country feel.
In general, the more a person talks about The People, the less they actually like ordinary people.
I come from a situation that straddles both worlds: growing up in Silicon Valley and a UC Berkeley grad whose extended family is from the TX-OK oil-patch and Texas hill country. So, I see it from both sides, and the contempt is definitely there - although there's some element of it on both ends (you CA weirdos, etc).
It's not wealth or class. GWB is from a wealthy, WASP, East Coast family. Obama was raised in flyover state by a working class family. It's that the GOP has been able to convince working-class voters that the meritocracy (Obama @ Harvard) is actually an aristocracy (Bush @ Yale). For the past few years, I've found myself in many conversations like the ones below, and I refuse to take their bullshit:
HIM: (noticing my obscure, alma mater sweatshirt): What's that?
ME: The college I went to.
HIM (sneering): You're lucky. My parents weren't rich enough to afford college.
ME: Neither could mine. My dad lost his job when I started high school, and told me I'd have to get myself a scholarship. Boy, I remember crying over my chemistry homework at midnight thinking that if I failed, my college chances were over. But you know what I'm talking about, right? What it's like to spend every moment studying your a$$ off?
HIM (chuckling): Well, actually I was a goof-off. I hated school. Just partied and drank a lot of beer/smoked pot behind the bleachers.
ME: So neither of us came from money. The difference is that I worked for it and you didn't. I guess it really IS true what conservatives say - in the end, it's all about personal responsibility, innit?
Yeah. They tend to be really short conversaations.
They resent being unable to pray in a school which is completely filled with Christians because one atheist went to Federal court.
Guess it wasn't completely filled with Christians.
c) The idea that the average middle to upper middle class intelligent person (red state) goes to Directional State School is just as absurd as believing the average middle to upper middle class intelligent person (blue state) goes to Williams.
Absurd? No. The average middle to upper middle class person does go to either the 'State University' or the 'Directional University'. Here in Michigan, for example, there just aren't anywhere near enough slots available in Ann Arbor (a substantial fraction of whose students are out-of-staters), and admission is highly competitive.
So many more middle to upper middle class Michiganians to to Michigan State or regional state schools close to home (Western, Eastern, Central, Grand Valley, Wayne State, etc). And I know it strikes East Coasters as odd -- perhaps even unbelievable -- but really a very small percentage of students here attend private schools (either K-12 or at university level).
"Sarah Palin appears never to have traveled outside the US until she became governor. She has since visited Alaska Nat'l Guard troops stationed in Kuwait and made a stopover in Germany, a trip which required her to get a passport."
That is a fair criticism. But it also applies to Obama. Living in Indonesia as a child isn't much of an experience either. To my knowledge Obama hasn't lived or traveled much out of the US as an adult.
To be fair most people in the US don't. Has Joe Biden done much living out the US? So, it is unlikely that any of our Presidential candidates are going to have that much experience in the area. That is why we have Secretaries of State.
Obama @ Harvard meritocracy?
There's little evidence of that. Obama was at Harvard because the Ivies and other elite-recruiting universities want to inculcate a cadre of new, non-white elites so that the elite class is more representative of the country.
Jordan Weber-Flink said about conservatives:
"They seem to eat up lies and propaganda and resentment with a voracious appetite, and appear to have little interest in truth or governance. It's discouraging and dismaying, and I can't help how I feel."
Coincidentally, many conservatives feel the same way about liberals. It's true, to some extent, in both cases.
sv, no not really. I know perfectly well that there are plenty of people in urban areas and blue states that care about their children. Hell, pretty much everyone cares about their children. But there's a difference between "caring about your children" and "orienting your whole life around your family." What is the mother who has stayed home to raise her six children supposed to think about the career-woman with one child and two nannies who insists that she "cares about her children?" It starts to ring a little hollow. There are plenty of people who have made these kinds of choices, and for the vast majority of them, the kind of choices which enable sexy, media-centric, politically-connected jobs downtown are simply impossible.
I fully recognize that this really isn't an essentially Democrat/Republican difference. But it's worth pointing out that the bulk of the Democrats' support comes from the very rich and the very poor, leaving the bulk of the middle, aka "normal people" who are more likely to have to make the hard choices I'm talking about, to the Republicans.
The coastal elites see Columbia and Harvard Law and think, "Well, he's inexperienced but how could Harvard be wrong...I'm sure he'll be fine." That's mistaking credentials for capacity and I hope the American people have the sense to see through the coastal smog and elect McCain.
You're doing the same thing in reverse. A Harvard degree is not a guarrantee of ability, but it most certainly is not a guarrantee of an absence of it either.
I grew up in the Midwest, one of five kids in a family that attended church more than weekly, and I currently belong to an evangelical congregation.
I also graduated with honors from a top-5 liberal arts college, spent five years as a journalist, and relocated to the bluest of East Coast states. I am the quiet conservative in the corner of the room who hears what my peers have to say and, most of the time, feels no urge to respond.
A few anecdotes:
1. An alumn of my college exclaimed in despair after the 2004 elections: "I just wish I had enough money to buy everyone in the red states a subscription to the Atlantic and the New Yorker."
2. Right before the same election, a coworker told me, with an entirely straight face, that "people who go to church vote exactly the way their ministers tell them to."
Really, don't get me started on the things I've heard said about Christians, evangelicals, Bush voters--you name it. In many cases, there's absolutely no awareness that someone the room might not think exactly the way they do. And why should I burst their bubble?
What has always struck me about the Arugula gaff was how people misinterpreted it. It seems to me that a man, allegedly as smart and hip as Obama, would realize that Iowan farmers are not ones to opine about in terms of the price of an Italian green (One is reminded of a particularly funny scene from MY Blue Heaven ... "It is a veg-et-ab-le."). It has little to do with class, save for the fact that he mentioned the notoriously overpriced Whole Foods (though that detail has been largely omitted from the onus of his remark).
If Obama had been speaking to, say, an assembly of housewives from my old neighborhood (Italian American working class) they would have known exactly what Arugula was. Though, like I said, they most likely purchase it from DePalma Brothers on Tonnelle Boulevard rather than Whole Foods.
This was an example of ignorance and bad PR, not elitism. Obama may not have come from the Eastern Establishment and he may not be a pompous snob, but that doesn't necessarily mean he knows a bunch Arugula from an ear of Corn.
"In high school I turned down Yale for Rice, and from the reactions of my friends you'd have thought I had a death wish. So yeah, if there's that sort of contempt for Rice and Houston--pretty cosmopolitan places in the scheme of things--I can only imagine how people actually from the country feel."
I know several people who went to Rice. It seems to be a fantastic school. My guess is that you got a better education there than you would have at Yale. At Rice, they don't have a ready made reputation and they actually have to worry about teaching their students.
[N]o one actually thinks blondes are by nature dumb. Nor does anyone really think that sorority girls are by nature dumb. Nor does anyone really think that people from "flyover country" are dumb. Nor has anyone used the term "flyover country", except ironically, since about 1985.
Want to provide some evidence, or even reasoning, for this assertion, other than "Paul Krugman told me so"?
Kirsten,
You should see the looks I get from my Bethesda neighbors when they find out I am a veteren. No mind you, they are good people and well meaning. But, they look at me and think that I must have some kind of PTSD and be on the verge of going postal or Rambo or something. They really just have no idea how to act or what it means to be a veteran.
Arrogance. That's what it's all about, on both sides.
This discussion reminds me of the apocryphal story of Pauline Kael not understanding how anyone could vote for Nixon--because she didn't know anyone who would do so.
Or the New Yorker cover in which all land west of the Hudson is seen as exotic and wild.
Megan,
Back in 2004, did you see the ad Club for Growth made to criticize Howard Dean? I suggest you look it up on Youtube. 30 seconds long.
Guess it wasn't completely filled with Christians
1) The atheist needn't have been at the school in question. SCOTUS decisions on the subject are pretty categorical.
2) Assuming atheist in question attends the school in question, expect resentment from the majority whenever a teeny-tiny minority gets to make the decisions for everyone.
You can make all the arguments you want about whose right and whose wrong, but if you're bucking the majority, they're going to dislike you for it.
I live in a very purple city (Houston - as Devo says, majority Dem, but a Dem in Texas is likely a conservative on the east or west coast.) so I've known a lot of coastal elites and as individuals, I've no problem with them.
As a class, I will admit to being somewhat prejudiced against them. They seem to live in an astonishingly small bubble, and they devour all manner of vile propaganda and easily disproven lies with a voracious appetite, and appear to have little real interest in tolerance, diversity, free speech or democracy (they only seem to support democracy when their side wins, which I find weird). It's discouraging and dismaying, and I can't help how I feel.
It doesn't really matter, of course. As long as you smile at them and pretend to be interested in their opinions, they don't whine too much.
Every once in a while, if I'm bored or one of them is getting on my nerves, I just shout out - suddenly, and appropos of nuthin atall - thank you JAYSUS! AMAYUN!
Oooo weee, them pale skinny little things can run boy, I'm tellin ya.
You should see the looks I get from my Bethesda neighbors when they find out I am a veteren. No mind you, they are good people and well meaning. But, they look at me and think that I must have some kind of PTSD and be on the verge of going postal or Rambo or something. They really just have no idea how to act or what it means to be a veteran.
They fail at elitism. They should've asked you if you were enlisted or commissioned first.
Cultural snootiness ("douchebaggery", as I call it) must be only a small slice of even the coastal population. I don't even think there is much of it on the West Coast outside of SF, which has a strong cultural connection to NY. But I spent a summer in Manhattan and I liked the people I met.
Also, people that I have met that are actually rich or successful have not acted any snootier than anyone else. That may be partially because they were in engineering or business. But I always thought looking down on cultural inferiors was the province ambitious/narcissistic types that hadn't made it yet.
I am not aiming any of these comments at anyone here; individuals of course are not accurately captured by off-the-cuff generalizations. Also kids are very different from adults. Looking down on other kids for being out of style or different is common-to-normal at that age.
I'm with Karl Weber on this one. While it's true that people prefer their own values to the values of others (that's what makes them their own values), the political discourse vastly favors expressions of intolerance against urban-dwellers. In the recent Republican Convention, Romney denigrated an entire region of the country. Can you imagine a Democrat declaring his refusal to vote for Southerners?
And as for NASCAR, sure: I don't get what people like about it. Watching people drive tricked out cars around in a circle (ok, oval) for a few hours doesn't really do it for me. But we're not the one's who made it a political identifier. Nor do we think one's choice in coffee is politically relevant (full disclosure: I like my coffee black, no sugar). These are Republican tactics to create in-group/out-group distinctions in order to activate resentment instincts against the perceived "other."
When I go skiing in Park City (yes, I'm a coastal elite) the locals look down on me.
Should I not have contempt for them for their contempt of me? An eye for an eye, right?
(Yes, I'm being somewhat sarcastic here.)
Justin writes: "Conservatives in red states mock liberals in blue states, demean them, attack them, deny their values and morals, FAR more than liberals in blue states do to red states."
Of course. And the red state right injects such crap directly into politics far more often, too, which is why they're always making idiotic jokes about lattes and arugula and whatever tea it was that Obama drinks.
Then there's the unrelenting xenophobia and hypernationalism they exhibit - the hugely moronic Freedom Fries caper is just one good example.
I'm the son of immigrants and I have a working class background and I don't judge people on where they went to college, even if Megan does. My own Ivy League diploma is stuck in a closet somewhere and I haven't seen it for years. None of which means that it's "elitist" to say that creationism is STUPID. People who push it are BEING STUPID. And the same goes for "pray away the gay" or whatever fart-in-a-Jesoid-windstorm Sarah Palin's church is squeezing out this week.
My nephew graduated from Texas A&M, a land grant college, and went on to earn his Master's in Biochemistry at Northwestern. When he got there they told him he'd have a lot of catching up to do.
You do know the difference between a red-neck and a good-ol'-boy, don't you?
Cultural snootiness ("douchebaggery", as I call it) must be only a small slice of even the coastal population. I don't even think there is much of it on the West Coast outside of SF, which has a strong cultural connection to NY. But I spent a summer in Manhattan and I liked the people I met.
Especially since so many people here in NYC were originally from "flyover states" or southern states. The snobbery described isn't nearly as common as being pushed by the Republican campaign.
I live near the coast, work in a fiddly new economy profession, vote Democratic, and drink wine. Megan, you may very well be right that I have unconscious cultural prejudices that cause me to look down on people from the south/rural areas/community colleges/etc.. I don't think I have them but I take your argument is that I don't see the full extent of the prejudices I have.
Point taken. I also know that some people in other parts of the country look down on how I live; I hear it in person and I hear it from the television, radio and internet. Not everyone thinks that, but I know that there is a consistent story repeated in many places that gives relatively little value to the choices I made and contributions I make, compared to that of farmers, soldiers, residents of small-towns and humble church-goers.
However, the Democratic convention, if I recall, had no sense of injustice or anger at this trivial fact that people value most highly the customs and choices they themselves are familiar with, and the convention was in fact very positive and forward thinking. The contrast with the Republican convention was striking.
So my questions are: do you believe that republican-leaning voters face significantly more prejudice in this regard than democratic-leaning voters? And if not, why did the two conventions take such a different tone?
"I don't think that people who have never traveled outside the United States can be any good at foreign policy."
I think that comment does well to reflect the humor I see in the comments as well as other comments posted on the web. Having been born to an upbringing of coastal privilege but having traveled AND lived in the red state areas, I find it very humorous to hear my liberal friends talk about the millions of people living in the middle and southern states,whom they have never met, as being intolerant, bigoted, fanatics. The irony of their own ignorance and bigotry and (often) fanatical belief that Bush is Satan and Obama a savior completely escapes them.
I have to quibble with Megan on one point. Having had the privilege of living amongst the natives, it may well be that they knew what you were talking about - but I doubt they gave it any thought as they would have been too busy laughing at what a bunch of whimps you were and how homely you all looked without makeup.
I think there are two separate issues here.
The first is that America's elite educational institutions have spent too much effort over the past 30 years focusing on their branding, rather than the quality of the product. (Much like many corporations, in a world where branding and marketing are increasingly more important than quality.) This has indeed led to a lot of anecdotal experience of encountering people tagged with elite institutional labels who are not very impressive or substantive. And to a deterioration of educational standards as elite schools try to bag professors who've written hot books, rather than professors with any interest in teaching or building a department.
The second issue, however, is that the GOP has unleashed a deliberate political and cultural war against science and expertise that has resulted in a tremendous degree of political control over previously non-partisan expert institutions. So against my anecdotal experience of encountering a number of people associated with the Harvard School of Public Health who didn't seem to know what they were talking about, I set my experience of encountering a number of people running US governmental public health institutions (Tommy Thompson, Mike Leavitt) who really had no idea what they were talking about. American foreign policy appears to have been run by stupid table-thumping amateurs for several years in the early '00s, and the Justice Department was taken over by people who, despite hailing from red states and attending little-known evangelical schools, were nonetheless very stupid. Or, where not stupid, canny, dishonest and not committed to the fundamental secular ethical principles of the United States. People whose intelligence, that is, was political rather than intellectual. Monica Goodling, say.
In sum, while America's meritocracy is not sufficiently meritocratic and is too much of an in-club sorting mechanism, it's no solution to simply scrap the very concept of merit or qualifications and just vote for whoever seems like the most regular American. We've been trying that approach for the last 8 years.
"Also, people that I have met that are actually rich or successful have not acted any snootier than anyone else."
There is a real divide between people who do things and people who write things or count beans. People who do things, engineers, scientists, military people and such, tend to be too interested in doing things to be too concerned with where someone went to school or where they live. I have had the same experience you have had. I know some very successful people with giant brains who went to big name schools who are anything but snobs.
The snobs I know tend to be journalists and lawyers and people who write as opposed to do. I think the reason why so many people in the red states have such a lousy view of those in the blue states is that most of their experience with them is through the media and the media are a bunch of elitst snobs.
Davidson, I appreciate the response. But again, isn't this more about you valuing your lifestyle choices (ok, maybe not you personally, but 'middle America') over that of the hypothetical working mother you posit - and I allow that this type of person is very common out here on the coasts and nearby suburbs - than it is about a middle-class reaction to certain non-middle-class snobbery or disdain? My point is that you show some of this type of contempt in your own post, i.e. valuing having more children over having less, stay-at-home mom over working mom even though sometimes that's what's required to make things work out here on the obscenely expensive coasts, etc. Perhaps that's a class resentment issue; as a member of the middle class (like me), you don't appreciate hearing condescension for your type of lifestyle, which is probably genuinely more family-centric than that of many in the stratospheric upper class (e.g. top 5% or top 1% by income). I also wonder if it's true that a 'normal' (your quotes) middle-class person will naturally vote republican. based on tax policy? social policy? or perceived class identification?
FYI if it's relevant: I don't identify with either party, although I've tended to vote Dem more than Repub; I'm 28, first-generation (maybe 1.5, came as an infant) from a conservative culture, scholarship-educated in a technical field, male, NJ- and NY-bred. more relevant: I feel that a large proportion of the identity politics and cultural/tribal affiliation politics is BS and subtracts from the significant amount of effort (relative to how much on average we put into it) required to be a responsible voter.
So my questions are: do you believe that republican-leaning voters face significantly more prejudice in this regard than democratic-leaning voters?
I can't speak for our gracious hostess, but I think that "red" voters face more legally-enforced attacks on their way of life--and government enablement of ways of life they consider immoral, foolish, or contemptable--than "blue" voters. That's probably why they get more upset by perceived prejudice.
Fascinating. So, what's really bothering the people who call me and most of the people I know baby-killing, unpatriotic, family-despising heathens is that *I* look down on *them*.
John writes: "You should see the looks I get from my Bethesda neighbors when they find out I am a veteren. No mind you, they are good people and well meaning. But, they look at me and think that I must have some kind of PTSD and be on the verge of going postal or Rambo or something. They really just have no idea how to act or what it means to be a veteran."
Maybe they're just embarrassed at the way the Bush administration treated wounded vets at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is just down the road from you.
And I hope you don't work for the post office, because I'd be worried, too.
"[Conservatives] seem to eat up lies and propaganda and resentment with a voracious appetite, and appear to have little interest in truth or governance."
Jordan, are you honestly unaware that the exact same critique can be leveled - entirely legitimately - against a large cross-section of the liberal voting class? (You don't seriously believe this affliction holds for conservatives only, do you?)
The disinclination towards thinking critically, challenging one's own beliefs, and subordinating point-of-view to truth-seeking is no more a conservative phenomenon than it is a liberal one. It's an unfortunate side-effect to being human, and it plays out in a lot more areas of life than just politics.
After four big city east coastal decades I moved to Kansas a decade and a half ago. Don't tell me easterners don't look down on people in the heartland. When I go back now, which is mercifully rare, if I want to be treated nice I say, "You'll have to forgive me, I'm from Kansas." They get real nice and treat me like I'm mildly retarded. It's a great way to get extra special service.
BTW, now that I'm here, easterners please stay on the coast. We don't want you here.
Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"?
What's a "bible church"? I live in the south, and I don't know anyone who calls their church a "bible church."
Also, northern conservative/libertarians/non-elite whatevers should come up with something other than NASCAR to demonstrate their joe-regular guy street cred. The sport is pretty corporate these days. Bankers and lawyers even watch it. (People from Charlotte will understand the irony here.)
Didn't there used to be some clown who posted under the name LarryMoeandJesus on here? You sure don't see that guy much anymore. I wonder what happened to him.
bcg: "Redneck is a cultural insult, not a racial insult. Cultural insults are more tolerable because part of culture is behavior, which can be changed."
This is a brilliant example of Megan's point. You suppose that it is nasty to insult others based on traits they can't change (like skin color), but perfectly OK to belittle others based on traits they can change.
What on Earth gives you the right to suggest that others should change to fit your preconceptions? Come to think of it, that presumption sounds like a personality quality you can change, and since it offends my delicate-yet-erudite sensibilities, you should!
Q.E.D.
Looking down on middle america, flyover country, red necks, what have you, is institutionalized.
It pervades the media, academia, the punditocracy, and the political class.
Thus, it's much more 'powerful' and noticed than contempt going the other way (real Americans contemptuous of city folk living in their insulated little bubbles and whining when they have it pretty good) even if the contempt is as heartily felt on both sides of the equation.
MM has a very good point: the left is keenly aware of institutionalized injustices in other arenas, why not this one?
But there is a very very key difference. Eeach group prefers its own lifestyle & worldivew and look down on that practiced by the other group.
However, elitist coastal liberals think that if only middle America was smarter or better educated, they'd be 'just like them'. Coastal elitists think they know exactly what motivates middle America and, indeed, knows their self interests and issues better than middle Americans themselves do.
Middle America is under no such delusion concerning east coast elites.
If I'm going to be perfectly honest with myself - which I don't do very often, but y'all don't know me, so what they hell - I look down on ignorant rednecks. Smart rednecks are one thing; dumbass bubbas annoy the hell out of me and believe me, I know dumbass bubbas - my immediate ancestors include people who aspired to redneck status (I'm second generation post-white trash on my daddy's side.)
So part of my contempt at coastal elites' contempt comes from people lumping me in with the dumbass bubbas. It also comes from refusing to fit neatly in a box. It is possible to own guns, attend church, subscribe to the Atlantic, enjoy (and understand) whatever the current trendy NY or LA-based sitcom happens to be, be very informed on foreign affairs, think Bill Engvall is fucking hilarious and not hate black people.
It's not that hard, and it's not that unusual.
Rachel, who are you talking to? Did I say people who live in the red states have never traveled? No. I said someone who has never traveled abroad, much less lived abroad, can't craft good foreign policy. Not in the modern world. I was referring specifically to Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is not qualified to be President. No one is saying that no evangelical Christian woman from a red state is qualified to be President. That would be nonsense. There are lots of extremely qualified evangelical Christian women from red states. There are lots who've traveled all over the place -- Cindy McCain, for one. But Sarah Palin hasn't. Sarah Palin has a dramatically limited experience of the world. If you haven't traveled abroad either that doesn't necessarily mean ANYTHING AT ALL except that I don't consider you qualified to be President of the United States, and I really do not think that constitutes condescension.
What's a "bible church"? I live in the south, and I don't know anyone who calls their church a "bible church."
As opposed to a Unitarian Universalist church.
Okay.
"legally-enforced attacks on their way of life--and government enablement of ways of life they consider immoral, foolish, or contemptable--"
how much of the former do we see, as opposed to the latter? the government sometimes interferes with things like school choice (tendency to discriminate against home-schoolers, enforced taxation for public schools, etc), school prayer (how big of a deal is this anyway?), gun control (something I tend to agree with Repubs on) - those are examples of the former. What about the latter? Why should they object when the govt refuses to get in the way of, for example, homosexuals who want to marry? I can see the point of objections to other things, like abortion or welfare programs funded by taxes they pay, but a major point is that Republicans, especially through their enthusiastic support of federal govt expansion via 'Homeland Security' and in general through their support of ever-increasing get-tough-on-crime and Drug War measures, have just as much of a tendency to favor government intervention in private, victimless matters of choice.
Give. Me. A. Break. So "Red Staters" want to reserve the right to hate "coasters" and mock them openly, but they want those same people to love them at the same time? Which is it?
Grow up. The "Middle America" "Coastal" division isn't even accurate. Look at the 04 county by county voting results. Guess what there were...better sit down, counties that voted democrat in Middle America!! SHOCKING!! It might be more of an urban/ex-urban division, which does entail fundamental differences in culture based on the way people live day to day in those areas.
Great post, Megan.
It's very natural for humans to identify with people who are "like me", and to disdain people who are not. This might even be encoded in our instinctive survival mechanisms. Unfortunately, the visual, physical cues that once allowed tribes to easily identify fellow members have now morphed into resume entries like where you went to school or where you live.
America, through our unprecedented freedoms, has allowed the most thorough stirring of the ethnic pot in history. You can go to nearly any large metropolitan area and find people of all ethnicities, people of all economic circumstances, and people who went to the Ivies or any other university systems. And yet, somehow, people still view others with backgrounds similar to theirs as "good", while others are suspect.
Maybe a few more years of "stirring the pot", and a few more success stories like Gov. Palin's will put this middle school playground game to bed.
John writes: "You sure don't see that guy much anymore. I wonder what happened to him. "
Now I know who John reminds me of - John Banner, who played Sgt. Schultz on "Hogan's Heroes." He sees nothing!
I'll bet he looked just as spiffy in uniform, too.
You lost me at the invocation of Arizona State as the initial school of mockery. The Carey School of Business is one of the Top 25 schools in the U.S. for business academia.
Specifically in the world of Accounting academia (which I am most familiar with), a Ph.D. from ASU is more highly regarded than a Ph.D. or DBA from any of the Ivies other than Wharton.
"government enablement of ways of life they consider immoral, foolish, or contemptable"
Uh, Rob, who was supposed to be looking down on whom, again?
I am a 50-year-old pro-choice atheist who was raised by and among evangelical Christians. I left the church about 25 years ago and have spent the second half of my life among an exclusively liberal, secular culture in urban California. I can honestly say that the people I have met and worked with during the second half of my life are far and away more smug, self-righteous, judgmental, bigoted and parochial than anyone I knew in my old, "bible-thumping" days. In my experience, the only "diversity" that most liberal progressives really value is diversity of skin color (and perhaps sexual appetite). Diversity of thought is anathema to them.
McArdle's post reminds me that I have good reason out here in flyover country not to be too boastful about my Ivy League degrees. I meet a lot of rich and succesful people out here in the Phoenix area, and I can't remember the last one that had an Ivy League degree. I am thinking through a few of them right now -- ASU, ASU, Arizona, Kansas State, Tulane, no college, San Diego State.... Getting uppity about my Harvard MBA around here only leaves me vulnerable to the charge of "Person X went to Montana State and is worth $10 million now -- what the hell have you been doing with that Harvard MBA?" Here in flyover country, college degrees and family pedigree are not really strong predictors of business success.
Rob Lymans: "You can make all the arguments you want about whose right and whose wrong, but if you're bucking the majority, they're going to dislike you for it."
Let me help you with that:
"You can make all the arguments you want about who's right and who's wrong, but if you're bucking the majority, they're going to dislike you for it."
There. Isn't that better?
We elitists have our uses.
And John wrote: "The snobs I know tend to be journalists and lawyers and people who write as opposed to do. "
So writing is an activity that Johnny the non-snob looks down upon. I suppose that's because he doesn't do it very well.
And anti-white rhetoric from black people and black-owned media is much more socially accepted than anti-black rhetoric from white people and white-owned media.
You see, it's not just about expressed dislike; it's also about power. Or at least that's what the theorists say about racism and sexism . . .
Brooksfoe said: This whole "Do the coastal elites condescend to middle America?" nonsense got started when people questioned Sarah Palin's qualifications to serve as President of the United States. Had she spent a tour of duty in the military in Kosovo or Germany, such questions would have been less likely to arise.
Actually, no, it started well before 2000, let alone in the past two weeks. And yes, they do "condescend to middle America" - because middle America doesn't vote Democrat nearly enough, and goes to church, and dozens of other cultural markers that are not shared between the groups.
The idea that being in the military for two to six years would prevent the coastal elites from questioning Presidential qualifications is also laughable - unless the candidate in question is a Democrat, of course.
Republicans, especially through their enthusiastic support of federal govt expansion via 'Homeland Security' and in general through their support of ever-increasing get-tough-on-crime and Drug War measures, have just as much of a tendency to favor government intervention in private, victimless matters of choice.
True, but terrorists, criminals, suspects who turn out to be innocent, and drug users are a pretty small voting demographic without much support even in Dem circles, so Republican victory in those areas doesn't mean much in the culture war.
Getting uppity about my Harvard MBA around here only leaves me vulnerable to the charge of "Person X went to Montana State and is worth $10 million now -- what the hell have you been doing with that Harvard MBA?"
It's like Conan O'Brien (himself a Harvard alum) said "The only thing you have to look foward to as a Harvard grad is hearing 'And you went to Harvard?' over and over again for the rest of your life."
"America, through our unprecedented freedoms, has allowed the most thorough stirring of the ethnic pot in history....And yet, somehow, people still view others with backgrounds similar to theirs as "good", while others are suspect. Maybe a few more years of "stirring the pot", and a few more success stories like Gov. Palin's will put this middle school playground game to bed." - Texas Pete
Yes, Pete, I reel before the ethnic diversity represented by a white evangelical Christian from a small town in Alaska. People inclined to vote for Obama are clearly just afraid or suspicious of the ethnic and cultural diversity represented by McCain and Palin.
Please, go away.
As my handle implies I graduated from the University of Michigan. When I moved to the Boston area and went to work in high tech alongside ivy league and MIT grads, my education and degree were quite openly looked down on. When it comes to east coast and ivy league educational prejudice the quality and reputation of any "state" school immaterial.
brooksfoe,
Can you list the qualifications of foreign experience Barack Obama and Joe Biden have to be in the Executive branch? And please, please tell me you have something more than as a child Obama lived abroad - you don't gain real experience from that as a nine-year old. And for Biden, lets not count senate sponsored trips, as those are hardly the same as living abroad.
And lets remember, she isn't running for President.
Uh, Rob, who was supposed to be looking down on whom, again?
I have never denied that red-staters look down on blue staters to some degree. I am explaining why one form of contempt is more politically salient than another. Liberals can laugh at or ignore conservative contempt, because they win the fight, culturally, legislatively, legally.
Conservatives are pissed off about blue state contempt because they lose more often, even when in the majority.
We elitists have our uses.
I had no idea copyediting was now considered an activity for the elites. But it does explain why some people seem to think that law review time is a qualification for President.
Where is the alleged contempt that rural people have for city people? Have any of the city people who make this charge ever actually been outside of a city? I have lived in a lot of places in this country. I have also worked a fair number of jobs. In my experience at least, you are more likely to run into bigoted jackasses like LarryMoeandJesus in the cities than you are in the country. People who live in rural areas are often city transplants who got tired of living there. The ones who aren't look at people from far away and mysterious places like New York City as exotic fruit more than objects of contempt. I have brought more than a couple big city girlfriends home to the country and none of them ever were greeted with contempt for where they came from. Maybe it is out there, but I sure don't see it.
brooksfoe writes: "People inclined to vote for Obama are clearly just afraid or suspicious of the ethnic and cultural diversity represented by McCain and Palin."
Could be... remember, Ms. Palin boffs a real live Eskimo.
Can you list the qualifications of foreign experience Barack Obama and Joe Biden have to be in the Executive branch? And please, please tell me you have something more than as a child Obama lived abroad - you don't gain real experience from that as a nine-year old. And for Biden, lets not count senate sponsored trips, as those are hardly the same as living abroad.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden AND John McCain all at least have very developed VIEWS on foreign policy at least at the macro level. Sarah Palin doesn't even have opinions on foreign policy. I don't think that's something that you can deny.
And lets remember, she isn't running for President.
This fact isn't important because Palin is the VP candidate, it's important because McCain, knowing the level of foreign policy understanding (no opinion) she has, made his first executive decision to have her as his Presidential backup. It says much more about McCain than it does about Palin herself.
"When it comes to east coast and ivy league educational prejudice the quality and reputation of any "state" school immaterial."
wow. UM is such a hotbed of drooling bible thumping conservatives. And an absolute nowhere school to boot. Never heard of the place have you?
Rob Lymans: "I had no idea copyediting was now considered an activity for the elites. But it does explain why some people seem to think that law review time is a qualification for President."
It seems a hell of a lot more reasonable than how some people think time spent rolling around on the floor speaking in tongues or "praying away the gay" or being a hockey mom are presidential qualifications. But there I go being an elitist again.
And I know it strikes East Coasters as odd -- perhaps even unbelievable -- but really a very small percentage of students here attend private schools (either K-12 or at university level).
What is the mother who has stayed home to raise her six children supposed to think about the career-woman with one child and two nannies who insists that she "cares about her children?"
A large number of my classmates ended up at Rutgers or Penn State or SUNY. A large number of my friends are either stay-at-home moms or working mothers without nannies and au pairs. A large number of the successful businessmen I know are people like me, the first or second person in their family to go to college.
And we're ALL from the NY/NJ area. So please, cut out this idea that we're over here attending Spence alumni gatherings in between jaunts to the Hamptons. It's amazing how we're not supposed to judge "Middle America" by Dobson's Focus on the Family but it's okay to assume everyone east of the Susquehanna comes right out of the Styles section of the Times.
It's really remarkable.
You've got hundreds of comments openly mocking and deriding one culture, on the basis of the idea that that other culture mocks them, and it's wrong to mock other cultures. Look, I can't really find anyone just openly mocking red state people; I find dozens and dozens just openly mocking blue state people. (eg BTW, now that I'm here, easterners please stay on the coast. We don't want you here.) But it's the blue states that get the sanctimony! Incredible.
John writes: "I have brought more than a couple big city girlfriends home to the country and none of them ever were greeted with contempt for where they came from. Maybe it is out there, but I sure don't see it."
That's because you see nothing, Schultzie.
Does the phrase "San Francisco values" sound familiar to you? Ask your fellow hayseeds about that one. Hint: It's been a little buzz-phrase for some wingnut politicians for years now.
One final point:
If Palin had graduated from Harvard, hell, had she graduated from Brown or Middlebury, would she half gotten half of the sh*t she's received in the last fortnight?
No. Way.
"brooksfoe" @2:08 -- "... the GOP has unleashed a deliberate political and cultural war against science and expertise ..."
Man, you said it. They think genetically engineered crops are "Frankenfood," that nuclear power is eeevil, that space exploration takes money away from The Children, and that science itself is an arbitrary construct created by a privileged white male elite.
Oh, wait, that's the left. Never mind.
time spent rolling around on the floor speaking in tongues or "praying away the gay"
Because Obama's church doesn't have any weird quirks.
Law Review is basically copyediting to the 4th or 5th power. I was so bad at it I needed my wife's help. Lucky for me, she can spot italic periods while speed-reading.
"And we're ALL from the NY/NJ area. So please, cut out this idea that we're over here attending Spence alumni gatherings in between jaunts to the Hamptons. It's amazing how we're not supposed to judge "Middle America" by Dobson's Focus on the Family but it's okay to assume everyone east of the Susquehanna comes right out of the Styles section of the Times."
When people say they hate the "East Coast", what they are really saying is they hate the media, academia and Hollywood. You are right, the majority of people on the coasts are perfectly normal. But those are not the ones writing in newspapers and appearing on television.
"Law Review is basically copyediting to the 4th or 5th power. I was so bad at it I needed my wife's help. Lucky for me, she can spot italic periods while speed-reading."
What Rob, you are not facinated by the proper use of commas and large and small caps? I was on law review and frankly it was the most boring waste of time I have ever spent. Moreover, the editor position was entirely political and had nothing whatsoever to do with intellectual or legal ability. Obama may be a really smart guy, but the fact that he was the editor of law review says nothing about that one way or another.
Seems to me that the conflation of elite liberals (as opposed to non-elite liberals) and "coastal" is itself a sign of a certain elitist myopia. What people mean when they say this is "wealthy and upper-upper middle class people between D.C. and Boston and in the L.A. and San Francisco areas." This characterization ignores the existence of the entire east coast south of the Potomac, virtually all of the west coast, and the entire gulf coast.
Why would people criticizing "coastal liberal elites" act as though those places don't exist? Well, because D.C., New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are clearly the only places in America worth going to. The others are so obviously places nobody would ever want to go that they need not be mentioned.
In other words, people who criticize "coastal elites" are really telling us about themselves.
And those views are informed by??? If they haven't traveled extensively or lived abroad as adults, brooksfoe says they can't possible craft good policy. That's his metric, I'm just holding him to it. McCain is the only one of them that meets brooksfoe's criteria that I know of, though I may be wrong.
You are of course so right. Fortunately I'm in Chicago where this kind of credentialism, though prevalent as hell, is correctable with a few good names on your resume. It did me no good to come from the University of Kansas (though Jayhawks are everywhere here) but once I could say I had worked at Leo Burnett, that validated my existence. It would be harder in a more feudal place, like Boston.
Rob Lyman quotes and replies: "time spent rolling around on the floor speaking in tongues or "praying away the gay"
Because Obama's church doesn't have any weird quirks."
I'd be the very last person to argue that belonging to a church is any sort of qualification for office. You'd be lying if you claimed that Palin's fundie status has nothing to do with her appeal to "the base," on the other hand. They really do see it as a qualification, right down to the silly "pray away the gay" bit.
Stick to what I said. You can't make good foreign policy if you haven't traveled abroad at all. You don't have a coherent or deep picture of a world composed of multiple nations and cultures. You don't understand what the world looks like.
Beyond that barrier I make no claims. I don't think living in Indonesia qualifies Obama to be President. But he is not disqualified on grounds of provincialism. Neither is John McCain. (What was troubling in George Bush's case was that he had never traveled except for a brief trip to China while his father was ambassador there, and that given his extremely internationalist family background, that looked like a deliberate disinterest in the rest of the world. And indeed Bush has proven to be a spectacularly, perhaps unprecedentedly bad foreign policy president.)
Joe Biden has been the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since 1997, and chairman from 2001-3 and 2006-present. He is as qualified on the foreign relations front as anyone can be without actually serving in the State Department. It makes no sense to talk about him lacking foreign policy credentials. It would be like saying Condoleezza Rice lacks foreign policy credentials. I don't know whether she's ever lived abroad; it really doesn't matter at this point.
Excellent points. I am from Arkansas and went to school in DC with a bunch of New Yorkers. You would not believe the obnoxious stuff they thought it was totally cool to say about the south (many comments involved inbreeding and lack of shoes. Honestly!). I also had more conversations about the stupid Civil War my freshman year then in the 18 years before that I lived in the south. (including comments like ‘at least we won the war’! from people who’s families were not even in the country at the time of the civil war).
I will say that some of this plays out on a smaller scale, as my classmates and I from Little Rock used to make fun of people from the tiny hick towns. But that was mostly because they were scared of the big city of Little Rock, which we found kind of hilarious.
Mostly the problem is that I feel like people in the south and in small towns appreciate the big cities, while still enjoying their small towns/more rural areas, whereas people in big cities, New York is the absolute worst, by the way, refuse to even open their minds to the idea that some place else might be nice too. That is what is bizarre and irksome.
There is a reason the only democrats to win the presidency in the last however many years have been southern. That attitude from big city/east coast liberals is toxic to their campaigns because we are not as dumb as they think we are.
In my experience (and I've lived all over the US, as well as overseas), coastal urban liberals (loose Venn intersection) and inland small-town conservatives (again, loose Venn intersection) don't understand each other, leading to jokes about the other group.
That's about as even as it gets.
From there, the small-towners look at urban elites and say, "I don't want to live there."
Whereas the urban elites look at the small-towners and say, "Why would *anyone* want to live *there*?!?!"
And the small-towners hear the urban elite socio-political views and respond, "You're wrong for thinking that way."
Whereas the urban elites hear the small-towners' socio-political views and respond with either, "You're too stupid to understand socio-politics" or "You're evil and purposefully backward."
All generally speaking, of course.
Small-towners love Wal-mart because they can get more good stuff since it gives them more choice at reasonable prices. Urban elites see Wal-mart as pure evil, something to be destroyed...even if it makes the small-towners' lives worse.
Democrats claim to be for the middle class, but get frustrated when the middle class still votes in droves for Republicans. The Democrats offer all sorts of vote-buying schemes of pork and vengeance on the rich [oil] corporations, but can't stem the tide of blue-collar workers switching to the GOP. That has caused more than one Democrat politician to imply (not directly say): "Why are you hicks to stupid to vote in your own best interest?!?!"
Get that? There's no possible way that the middle class could have a self-interest that coincides with the GOP, so the only possible explanation is:
1) The Democrats know what is in the middle class' best interest better than they themselves do, and
2) middle class small-towners are stupid. Or, [Obama:]"clinging to religion" or [Dean:] "voting out of hatred of gays", they have have been duped into supporting an unrespectable (at best), evil GOP agenda.
Democrats don't realize that what the middle class really wants is to preserve the open channel of economic/class ascension. The middle class sees that Democrats want us to become like Europe, and adopt European socio-political structures and systems...and see that Europe's classes are calcified: there's almost no chance to ever join the wealthy or political class there unless born to it.
But the US? The reason Palin is so exciting to Red Staters is not because of her gender, but because she embodies the over-arching conservative ideal:
Without being born into, married into, or affirmative-actioned into the upper echelons, she has risen from lower-middle class to Mayor, then Governer, then VP candidate; moreover, she has done this without sacrificing her integrity, her faith, her family, or her humanity. The conservative fantasy is that she rose to prominence *because* she didn't sacrifice her integrity, her faith, her family, or her humanity.
From the small-town perspective, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, et al, all are disqualified from that.
From the small-town perspective:
Hillary Clinton became Senator because of who she was married to.
John Kerry clearly lacked integrity with the way he treated his military service: contempt when politically expedient to do so, then claiming to be a war hero when politically expedient to do so...which was the reason the Swift Boat Vets' claims gained traction.
Nancy Pelosi lacks integrity when she claims to be a Catholic but supports "a woman's right to choose", then claims there is no conflict with the Church over it.
Etc, etc, etc.
Anyone who gets upset when reading any of this does not understand small-town, conservative, Red State voters.
Unfortunately, that includes too many of the Democrat political class for the Democrats to garner the power they crave to remake our nation's social structure.
"If they haven't traveled extensively or lived abroad as adults, brooksfoe says they can't possible craft good policy."
No. That is not what I said. I said if you have never traveled abroad, you cannot make good foreign policy. You're making up your own criteria to disqualify Obama and Biden.
It's amazing that Gov Palin pushes so many buttons. You mean those Christians get off their knees long enough to actually have a life? Mother of...how can she even get her knees together anyway? Went to...well, no school that *I* care about. She looks like...well, not like Bella Abzug. She was a sportscaster? Yeah, so was that other empty-headed GOP fool President. And she was a mayor? Yeah, of Bum-Fornication-Egypt, I bet they don't even have indoor plumbing.
If I weren't already a McCain supporter I'd want to see him win just to see all the Obamabots spontaneously combust on November 5.
And those views are informed by??? If they haven't traveled extensively or lived abroad as adults, brooksfoe says they can't possible craft good policy. That's his metric, I'm just holding him to it. McCain is the only one of them that meets brooksfoe's criteria that I know of, though I may be wrong.
Biden at the very least, having chaired the Senate Foreign Relations commitee and having been a member for decades, has that on which to base his views on foreign policy. I'm guessing the "criteria" of "living aboard as an adult" that you're referring to with John McCain was his "living" 5 years in Vietnam?
I had no idea copyediting was now considered an activity for the elites. But it does explain why some people seem to think that law review time is a qualification for President.
[Joy Voice]Ooh, snayup.[/Joy Voice]
A lot of Coastal Elites and urban sophisticates are transplants from flyover country. They escaped to the Big City and couldn't shed their Middle America mindsets/values/backgrounds what have you fast enough.
Sort of like the Dixie Chicks being ashamed of George Bush coming from Texas. The clinical term is Insecure Liberal Hayseed Overcompensation Syndrome.
I graduated from the University of Michigan. When I moved to the Boston area and went to work in high tech alongside ivy league and MIT grads, my education and degree were quite openly looked down on. When it comes to east coast and ivy league educational prejudice the quality and reputation of any "state" school immaterial.
I went to a small, liberal arts college. I always notice the contempt I get from the Ivy Leaguers I've encountered, excepted when it's overshadowed by the contempt I'm shown from some Division I grads who think that cheering on the hired help at a Bowl game is the ne plus ultra of a college education.
"Maybe they're just embarrassed at the way the Bush administration treated wounded vets at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is just down the road from you."
Maybe you are unaware that Walter Reed was recommended by the Congressional BRAC committee to be closed. I'm sure your attack would have been for wasting money on a facility scheduled to be closed had the administration put more money into it earlier.
Cheap shots are, after all, both easy and cheap.
AlexG:
"Give. Me. A. Break. So "Red Staters" want to reserve the right to hate "coasters" and mock them openly, but they want those same people to love them at the same time? Which is it?"
Having grown up in a "red state" and moved to the East Coast as an adult, this misrepresents the phenomenon Megan is addressing. People in Witchita will freely admit they don't know much about NYC or wine varietals or the internal workings of media conglomerates. And those are the people who have actually visited NY and watch television. Yet there are plenty of people from NY, LA, DC, etc. who can lecture me, with a straight face, about what's wrong with "Middle America" even though the closest they've ever come to experiencing it is ski trips in Aspen. Disdain tends to roll downhill from the haves to the have-nots. Coastal elites have power and privilege. Most people in Witchita do not.
And it keeps rolling, too. I grew up in Colorado, and we spent a lot of time making fun of people from the more rural and less diverse Nebraska.
"Grow up. The "Middle America" "Coastal" division isn't even accurate. Look at the 04 county by county voting results. Guess what there were...better sit down, counties that voted democrat in Middle America!! SHOCKING!!"
Here I completely agree with you. If you look at county by county results, most of America is purple, including the coasts. Young people and those with short memories have expressed shock to me that Colorado is a toss-up this year. That's ridiculous. Colorado voted for Clinton in '92. A lot of Westerners are more libertarian than anything else, so they respond to low taxes but aren't necessarily that interested in overturning Roe v. Wade.
And yet...
A lot of my neighbors here on the East Coast associate Colorado with organizations like Focus on the Family or the conservative Air Force communities around Colorado Springs. Not sure why -- few of them have ever been there. One of the reasons coastal elitism is so infuriating to a so-called "Red Stater" is that a lot of us have pretty sophisticated political views that aren't just parroted from the Sunday sermon.
brooksfoe,
So both Obama and Palin are unfit from a foreign policy perspective.
Both McCain and Biden are fit from a foreign policy perspective.
Is that a fair reading of your posts?
Anybody here ever heard the expression "chip on your shoulder"?
Many New Yorkers do indeed have an oddly solipsistic view of the world and refuse to believe that life elsewhere could be enjoyable.
To my knowledge, neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden has ever lived in New York City. Barack Obama comes from Kansas and Hawaii with a couple of years in Indonesia, and spent his adult years in Chicago. Joe Biden comes from Scranton, Pennsylvania and has spent his adult life in Wilmington, Delaware and Washington, DC.
I am frankly, bluntly and unmistakably what is called a "high-I.Q." person. I'm likely rather smarter than at least 90% of these liberals who like to think of themselves as "smart". I find liberals in general to be so full of crap its a wonder they don't explode. They suffer from extreme solipsism, in which when they see other people, they see mirrors, distorted or otherwise, of themselves. They react positively to good reflections and badly to poor reflections, and conservatives or libertarians make for bad reflections of liberals.
I also have no college degree at all, which will be interesting when I make my first billion dollars and the "smart" liberals are *still* whining about having lost yet another election in 2008.
Some people are just not capable of the basic decency of actually, truly seeing *other* people.
brooksfoe - I'm sorry, I can't agree with that. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
I want someone who recognizes that their first and most important responsibility is a firm grasp on the US national interest.
That doesn't mean he should believe the world ends at our shores; he should understand that there are other cultures and other nation-states and other interests out there, some cooperative with ours and some competitive, some of similar world-view and some largely alien to our perspective (and us to theirs.)
Oh, wait, I forgot -- Obama went to Columbia. Okay, so he lived there during college. Then he went to Chicago.
Nathan Brainfertilizer writes: "The middle class sees that Democrats want us to become like Europe, and adopt European socio-political structures and systems...and see that Europe's classes are calcified: there's almost no chance to ever join the wealthy or political class there unless born to it."
That's simply not true about Europe - just look up the bios of some of their current and recent leaders.
And that Dumbya Bush is a real rags-to-riches story, huh?
So both Obama and Palin are unfit from a foreign policy perspective.
Both McCain and Biden are fit from a foreign policy perspective.
Once again, at least having a view on foreign policy is far more favorable to not even knowing enough to have a view. McCain, Biden, Obama have this, Palin does not. The fact that Palin's presence in this election is the sole responsibility of McCain is a clear undeniable statement on the importance McCain places on foreign policy.
So reading this thread has been fun. I see a few posters, like brooksfoe and justin, who have illustrated Megan's point perfectly, while totally missing the irony of their own statements.
SV, it's quite true that all regions have jokes about other regions. It's part of the American way; those jokes take the place of ethnic and tribal wars. It's one of the things that makes it possible for America to hang together. It's also true that every region has jokes they tell on themselves. Jeff Foxworthy's whole career is based around that.
Here's where I think it's different: I do spend a lot of time interacting with people around the country; in my various jobs I've traveled a lot, and nowdays we have this whole fancy Internet thing which doesn't much care where people physically are. About fifteen years ago, I started to notice something: somehow, the coastal elite's sense of humor got broken. I'm not at all sure what brought this about. But in places like Maryland and Jersey, I started to notice things like this happening:
Coastal Elite, in mixed company: "Hey, did you hear the one about the farmer who fell off his tractor? It ran over him and killed him! HAHAHAHAHAHA!" And the other elites break out in uproarious laughter, while the rest of us play the joke back over and over in our heads, trying in vain to locate the punch line. It didn't used to be that way. In the '70s, the elites had a lot of jokes about Southerners that, even if it was a shot at me, I'd have to admit it was funny. (Such as the one about the farmer and the 10-gallon-bucket method of birth control.) But now that's gone, and the result is, to put it charitably, puzzling. To put it less charitably, it comes across as intentional cruelty.
And then there's the second half of what I said above: the jokes that regions tell on themselves. Every region has them; Wisconsonites intentionally talk through their noses, Kansans make pancake jokes, and Southern pilots talk about painting their airplanes black and putting a big number 3 on the side. But... the coastal elites don't seem to have any jokes that they tell on themselves. Who is their Jeff Foxworthy? There doesn't seem to be any such person. Maybe there is, and I just haven't heard of it. But the impression that comes across to the rest of the country is that the bicoastals take themselves Totally Seriously, and that humor at their expense is not to be permitted. I think that, more than any other factor, is what sets them apart from the rest of the country.
I assume this is a 'Greenwald' err sock-puppet...
I live and work in Washington DC. My family, however, mostly lives in Western Kansas. They are as red as red state gets. When I compare my family to the real Washington Cosmopolitans I know, it strikes me how the Washington types, for all of their pretensions are really hicks. To me a hick is someone who is only comfortable where they grew up and can't adapt to or appreciate any other environment. You can be a hick by being someone who lives in upstate New York and is terrified of the city. There are certainly a lot of those out there. But you can also be a hick by being someone who lives in a large city is afraid or uninterested in anything outside of the urban areas that you know.
As I've said for years, you don't have to go overseas to be an Ugly American.
But... the coastal elites don't seem to have any jokes that they tell on themselves. Who is their Jeff Foxworthy? There doesn't seem to be any such person. Maybe there is, and I just haven't heard of it. But the impression that comes across to the rest of the country is that the bicoastals take themselves Totally Seriously, and that humor at their expense is not to be permitted. I think that, more than any other factor, is what sets them apart from the rest of the country.
Uh...NYC, at the very least, is the topic of quite a bit of comedic material.
Rachel, who are you talking to? Did I say people who live in the red states have never traveled? No. I said someone who has never traveled abroad, much less lived abroad, can't craft good foreign policy
I was talking to the people who were able to keep track of the original point that Megan was making, found it interesting and wanted to explore it further rather than simply use her thoughts as a launching pad to hijack the discussion and spew a few talking points about Obama v/s Palin.
I simply found your thought an interesting segue to get back to the discussion at hand.
Skullberg: no. That is not a fair reading of my posts. I think that someone who has never traveled abroad is not fit to craft foreign policy. That is a disqualifier. Barack Obama lived abroad as a child. He traveled abroad recreationally. He went to Kenya to seek out his family. He has spent a reasonable amount of time traveling abroad as a Senator.
I do not think that more travel = more qualified. I do think that someone who in her 40s has never been outside the country is not qualified. It's a disqualifier. And that one jaunt to Kuwait and Germany just doesn't do it for me. If she now spends the next few years traveling and talking to foreign leaders and trying to master this stuff, with an open and curious mind, then she'll no longer be disqualified. I realize the word "disqualified" is clumsy but I don't have patience to think of a better one -- I'm not having a very eloquent evening.
MarkD writes: "Maybe you are unaware that Walter Reed was recommended by the Congressional BRAC committee to be closed. I'm sure your attack would have been for wasting money on a facility scheduled to be closed had the administration put more money into it earlier.
Cheap shots are, after all, both easy and cheap."
I would never complain about spending a few bucks to avoid having wounded patients lying in rat shit and mold, Marky. Sorry to have upset you by bringing it up. Your beloved administration is doing a heckuva job.
Medals of Freedom for everyone!
Except she's NOT running for president. This meme just isn't going to stick guys.
And Biden's selection shows that Obama places no importance on: corruption, lobbying or 'Change'.
ML&J,
Ah, you are employing an excellent semantic ploy: confusing "necessary condition" with "sufficient condition". You increased the difficulty factor by combining it with a nice little strawman gambit.
Well played, sir, well played.
Cousin Dave,
That is an excellent point. Southerners and midwesterners seem to be able to make fun of themselves quite easily. Easterners used to be able to do that. Go back 40 years and you can find any number of good jokes, mostly relating to ethnic identity, that northeasterners told about themselves. Not so much anymore.
Cousin Dave writes: "But... the coastal elites don't seem to have any jokes that they tell on themselves. Who is their Jeff Foxworthy? There doesn't seem to be any such person. Maybe there is, and I just haven't heard of it."
Yeah, that Seinfeld prick IS really obscure.
Interesting comment threads. A few anecdotes from personal history:
(a) I grew up in small (
(b) Two years' experience as exchange student (both junior years, both in Germany); first time around I went speaking not Word One; second time I pulled the only straight 4.0 semester average I ever got.
(c) NROTC scholarship to Michigan, double major, summa.
(d) After four extraordinarily undistinguished years in the navy, driving one of the most beautiful warships in the fleet, law school at Columbia.
(e) For any number of reasons, back home to practice law, after having spent the better part of 15 years knocking around the world.
The wife is from Los Angeles, large family, all but one of whom still live there. Most are hyper-achievers, most of them make more in a month than I will in two years, some more than I'll make in a decade.
There's a good bit of truth in most of the comments in this thread. In my 'umble experience, Culture and Sophistication are things you make for yourself, and take with you or not. They are utterly independent of where you grew up, where you live, what kind of job you have, the accent you may sport (or not), or what sort of school you attended.
With more specific reference to this topic, I've long had the impression that the divide is more urban-rural than coastal-flyover (did I mention that during the twelve years their sister has lived here, one of my in-laws, once, for two days, has come to visit her here Just Because; it's just assumed, on the other hand, that we can afford five airline tickets to Los Angeles at the drop of a hat), or Dem.-Repub. Places where the dominant cultural traditions are still rural are going to feel different than places where the social center of gravity is urban. They just will. Neither is more complicated than the other, or more lofty, or more virtuous. But they are undeniably different.
Quite a number of the most provincial people I've ever run into were fellow students at Columbia. Ditto on the general bigotry scale (and here let me allow that I've never, ever, run into the kind of ethnic animosity that I've seen in NYC). And one of the broadest-minded people I've ever known was some ol' boy on my ship who was also from a small place like mine, in the South, who never went past high school and had come up through the hawse-pipe. It's pretty damned easy to falsify both propositions: "All or most highly-schooled urbanites are sophisticated, tolerant, open, intellectually curious, and competent to be entrusted with authority to run the joint" and "All or most folks who live out in the country, didn't go to some name-brand school, and speak with an identifiable regional voice are mouth-breathing, booger-eating imbeciles who can look through a keyhole with both eyes . . . at once."
All of which is to say that we all have *exactly* the same failings, irrespective of where we are. We all have the same hard-wired survival mechanism of suspecting That Which is Not Like Us, however we choose to define "like" and "us". Because we live in place in which that impulse has been channelled out of responses like simply slaughtering the Not (let's don't kid ourselves: there are still many places in the world where that isn't the case), all we're left with is contempt in our hearts, ridicule in our mouths, and visceral habits in the polling booth.
The fellow sitting next to me at the demolition derby, and who holds me in contempt for what and how I think, and how I want to live my life and raise my children, doesn't really bother me all that much, because I know that he's never going to walk the halls of power in any capacity other than janitor. My Ivy classmates scare the bejesus out of me, because I know that they and their like do have it within their power to stand my world on its ear and indeed, to wreck it. And view themselves as having a moral entitlement -- a duty, in fact -- to do so, because they're so clever and so well-intentioned (and they *are*; I just don't trust them around the steering wheel).
So I'll just plug along, reading my Kafka in the original at the chitlin supper, and rejoicing that there are places like NYC and LA, because they are wonderful places for people who like places like that. As Lincoln (who never travelled outside the U.S; same with Washington, Wilson (until he went to bugger up the Paris conference), Jackson, and Madison) once observed to someone who sent him a book, hoping for praise, "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."
Come on, Megan. Be fair. Accusing liberals of looking down their noses without inspecting the conservative nostril seems beneath you. There's plenty of better-then-thouisim to go around; Clive's latest diatribe against liberals is a good start.
And I don't see anybody running up to the mic to take responsibility for wedge politics, though liberals are more likely to give in to the tendency then conservatives.
But I'm an elite eastern liberal who reads "The Atlantic," so what would I know?
brooksfoe,
I think this is simply a rationalization on your part - recreational travel and a small handful of senate trips - is some kind of treasure tove of experience. You simply need a reason to say she's close minded, and this works for you. Palin had negotiations with Canadian federal and provincial officials, Canadian companies, and sovereign tribal leaders while Governor of Alaska.
She's not the most qualified by any standard, but once again, she's not running for president. She won't be setting foreign policy, and God forbid something happens, she won't be out on a raft alone. She'll have congressional leadership and the State department with what is possibly the largest foreign policy apparatus ever.
We're simply going to disagree on this point.
brooksfoe
I don't think that people who have never traveled outside the United States can be any good at foreign policy.
If this is merely short vacationing, as in a two week trip to Europe, I would disagree. ADULT experience LIVING overseas is what counts, which pretty much wipes out the Senator from Illinois.
I worked overseas four years, in addition to tourism trips overseas. I found that the “progressive” views I absorbed at university did not accurately describe the world I saw outside the US. My time working outside the us turned me from a progressive of the left into an evil right winger. The US is by no means the Great Sinner that “progressives” consider it to be, from the perspective of overseas.
No. I said someone who has never traveled abroad, much less lived abroad, can't craft good foreign policy. Not in the modern world.
In our respective ADULT lives, I have spent approximately four more years overseas than ∅bama has. My fluency in foreign languages is much better than his. Yet you don’t see me pushing myself for secretary of State. Many tout ∅bama’s two week trip to Europe and the Middle East as “foreign policy experience,” which is a joke.
If ∅bama’s spending 4 years abroad as a child, or his two week trip this year, will mean that he is so good at crafting foreign policy, then what do you have to say about his Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007
Yeah, ∅bama’s really good at crafting foreign policy. REALLY GOOD. Judging by this example, about as good as a third grader in Jakarta, which describes some of his experience abroad."That's simply not true about Europe - just look up the bios of some of their current and recent leaders.
And that Dumbya Bush is a real rags-to-riches story, huh?"
Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus
Oh, everything is political, and politics is everything. I see MLJ drank deeply from that well.
Europe's political leaders may have arisen from relatively humble beginnings, but the point of differentiation between USA and Europe is not the top of the political heap, it's everything in between.
MLJ has not apparently lived in Europe or interacted intensively with a wide array of real, live Europeans. They largely know there is little opportunity for social and commercial mobility, except in London perhaps, so the ambitious ones are all heading for USA, Canada, Australia.
countrylawyer writes: "As Lincoln (who never travelled outside the U.S; same with Washington"
Not accurate - Washington spent a year or so in Barbados as a young man, I believe.
Nice post otherwise. I liked the part about how Ivy Leaguers can be dangerous, though I'm one myself and fairly harmless. Dumbya and Cheney and Rumsfeld, two Yalies and a Princetonian, sure managed to do some damage.
Megan's point is itself a diversion from the topic at hand. The reason anyone is talking about the question of "coastal elites" vs. "flyover country" is Sarah Palin's qualifications. The entire thrust of the discussion represents a distortion of the views of those who think Palin is underqualified as a Vice Presidential nominee. It is certainly true that people tend to assume people who attended "elite" universities with selective admissions are smart, to a greater degree than they do with state schools. That is the meaning of the words "elite" and "selective". It is also true that these kinds of markers are given much more credence than they deserve. Many people who went to elite universities are morons, and many people who went to state schools are brilliant. And it is true that there are New Yorkers who brag about never leaving a roster of certain neighborhoods, though I am no longer sure what those neighborhoods are, due to demographic and real-estate price shifts.
But why are we talking about this? We are talking about this because there is an election on. Otherwise we might as easily be talking about how short people resent tall people and how some tall people wish they were medium.
Finally, there is a simple structural reason why Sarah Palin is underqualified, and that is that Republican governance over the past 8 years has been a miserable and unpopular failure. Every actually existing GOP politician is either unpopular due to their established policies, or has spent the past year squirming and ducking away from their own policies and making themselves into a contemptible laughingstock (Romney). And so a politician had to be selected whom Americans knew nothing about -- a novice. And in response to the charge that she was a novice, Republicans cooked up the argument that Democrats were elitists who disrespected average folk. And here we find ourselves talking about whether Democrats are elitists who disrespect average folk. And the answer is no. Democrats do not believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the United States. The rest, as Hamlet said, is bullshit.
Winston Chang said, "Once again, at least having a view on foreign policy is far more favorable to not even knowing enough to have a view. McCain, Biden, Obama have this, Palin does not." and "Sarah Palin doesn't even have opinions on foreign policy."
So...when, exactly, did you have the first successful test of your mind-reading prototype? Why haven't you used it in the defense of the nation?
Besides the certainty of your knowledge that Palin has no foreign policy opinion whatsoever, are you aware that one Democratic Party criticism of Palin is that she negotiated to have a Canadian firm construct a natural gas pipeline because US companies were dragging down the process?
Isn't that foreign policy experience in action?
...not to mention, you should know that right across the Bering Strait from Alaska is Russia. Certain things like Freedom of Navigation, fishing rights, military routes, etc, may have their policy set by the federal govt, but are enacted/enforced (and even sometimes negotiated at the local level) by state governors. Most state capitals have a "sister" city at various places on the globe. Even Wasilla does. So she had some foreign interaction and foreign policy experience at both Mayor and Governor levels.
(btw, I found that in less than 1 minute, first Google attempt. You should try research to prove/disprove some of your assertions first)
I think she probably has a much more extensive foreign policy experience and opinion than you give her credit for.
brooksfoe,
Barack Obama - Change you can believe in!
Rebecca writes: "MLJ has not apparently lived in Europe or interacted intensively with a wide array of real, live Europeans. They largely know there is little opportunity for social and commercial mobility, except in London perhaps, so the ambitious ones are all heading for USA, Canada, Australia."
I've lived in Ireland, and the ambitious ones are now staying there.
It's purely idiotic to say that "the ambitious ones are all heading" anywhere, particularly when it's so clearly untrue.
More relevant to this thread is that "the ambitious ones" in red state America tend to flock to where "the elites" congregate. Fred Thompson had to buy himself a truck when he decided to run for Senator of Petticoat Junction for a reason.
Except she's NOT running for president. This meme just isn't going to stick guys.
And Biden's selection shows that Obama places no importance on: corruption, lobbying or 'Change'.
And Biden isn't running for president either. Nor is Biden 100% Corrupt, 100% Lobbyist, and 100% anti-Change. Palin, however, IS 100% uninterested in foreign policy. You can't argue this is not the case, and what the choice says about McCain. I don't care how well this argument would do as a campaign tactic, I care about whether it's true. And there's nothing anyone can say that would make it not true.
And in response to the charge that she was a novice, Republicans cooked up the argument that Democrats were elitists who disrespected average folk.
I believed that long before Bush was nominated for the first time.
"I've lived in Ireland, and the ambitious ones are now staying there."
Yes they are because the Irish government cut taxes and regulations and did everything you hate. They are flocking to Ireland from places like Germany and the UK where they do everything you love.
Law Review is basically copyediting to the 4th or 5th power.
I wouldn't say that. I mean, I hated cite-checking as much as the next guy, but our school's law review actually required us to do a fair bit of actual writing.
Nathan writes: "...not to mention, you should know that right across the Bering Strait from Alaska is Russia. Certain things like Freedom of Navigation, fishing rights, military routes, etc, may have their policy set by the federal govt, but are enacted/enforced (and even sometimes negotiated at the local level) by state governors. Most state capitals have a "sister" city at various places on the globe. Even Wasilla does. So she had some foreign interaction and foreign policy experience at both Mayor and Governor levels."
Yeah? Spell it out, man. What interactions?
The sister city argument is the most specious thing I've seen argued on her behalf yet. Whats next, she has a big stamp collection? She had a Guatemalan pen pal when she was 12?
Keep 'em coming!
brooksfoe - ah, getting out the broad tar brush again, I see.
Yes, Bush is unpopular, and the GOP has done itself no favors.
The fact is that Sarah Palin is an 'actually existing GOP politician', an exceptionally popular one at home in Alaska.
She's largely hated by the GOP back home, and fairly well liked by the Democrats, which is producing some interesting hair-tearing among Alaskan Dems torn between someone who's been very good to them and the frantic calls from the DNC and OKO (Oberkommando Obama.)
She's certainly qualified to be VP - that office once referred to as a "cataleptic state". That's not even a question. It gives us a few years to evaluate her suitability for President, and I for one am looking forward to seeing her populist-seasoned libertarianism in the White House.
The question is why did the Dems nominate someone even less qualified - in achievements, in offices held - but who holds a Harvard JD and a gift for oratory - for the top seat?
A couple folks responded to my post, and I wanted to respond in turn.
Yes, I am aware that liberal voters display prejudice. As a high information, centrist/libertarian voter, I go into these things with an open mind. It seems to me that the GOP is objectively worse than the DNC in one key metric: good faith.
My perception is that the GOP strategy is to prey on greed and xenophobia, to lie explicitly and then spin spin spin when they are called on it, often using aggression and intimidation. To me, it seems that the GOP cares more about winning power than using it responsibly. That they will say and do anything to get elected, then do whatever the hell they want once in office, using the same propaganda and "Permanent Campaign" techniques to obfuscate their mistakes, gaffes, and corruption in office.
The DNC, on the other hand, uses spin and propaganda, but holds back from telling outright lies because they fear getting called on them. They don't subscribe to the same kind of fear-mongering and intimidation (global warming being the notable exception, and I must admit I think we have more to fear from GW than from Al Quaeda. One is an existential threat, the other is a severe problem which nevertheless could never destroy our country in any meaningful way).
Moreover, the DNC actually believes in and tries to enact most of the promises they make during their campaigns. They often fail, but at least they try. In contrast the GOP spends years and years in power fighting wars and siphoning money to high finance while ignoring Katrina, trampling on personal freedoms and corrupting government institutions for partisan gain.
It is my opinion that the GOP betrays there constituency far more than the DNC does theirs; additionally, from what I have seen Democrats and liberals are absolutely fine with responsible gun ownership and deep faith. The GOP propagandizes their base not just to think that their adversaries are wrong, but evil and treasonous. In general the DNC merely accuses the GOP of incompetence and cronyism.
Thus, while I agree that both sides are guilty of prejudice, I tend to think that the GOP and their voters are much more in "hate the other" mode than liberals. Additionally, folks like me are willing to admit our own prejudices and endeavor to correct them, while conservatives seem happier to talk about how they love the country and support the troops, rather than admit that both are in trouble.
I know as a fact that any given conservative is not necessarily a rabidly theocratic Christian who believes in supply-side economics, thinks Bush was a great President, and deliberately sends any inconvenient thoughts to the Ministry of Truth. I must say that conservatives (at least the loud ones I hear on tv and the internets) do not seem inclined to offer me the same benefit of the doubt.
All of this seems fairly evident to me, but conservative voters either don't see it or don't care. Hence my predisposition to view them (as a group) in a negative light, and my fight with myself not to thus categorize and dismiss them as individuals. I love this country and sincerely believe that any rational individual must see that Obama, despite his flaws, will lead this country to a better future than McCain. It is a daily struggle to understand how anyone could view the reverse position as true, but I try.
John babbles: "Yes they are because the Irish government cut taxes and regulations and did everything you hate. They are flocking to Ireland from places like Germany and the UK where they do everything you love."
Ireland basically has a cradle-to-grave social safety net that would make you puke, Johnny. Once again you demonstrate your abysmal lack of knowledge and your inability to make your own points cogently.
You crack me up.
Gringo, like you, I speak a lot of languages and have lived overseas for a long time, and like you, I'm not putting myself forward for Sec of State.
I don't think spending four years abroad turns you into Metternich. I do think that a year even as a child in a really non-European country like Indonesia, or a couple of months running around East Africa looking for your family, creates in your mind a sense of extant reality to correspond to the series of funny words you've learned that describe the world outside your own country. It creates a vision of what it means to live in a truly alternate culture and society. This is even true of travel in Western Europe.
There's an expression in West Africa for what happens when you start to get the hang of a new language: it cracks your head open. I don't have a precise distance that your head needs to be cracked open, but I think it needs to be cracked, and yeah, Sarah Palin looks to me like someone whose head is firmly shut.
What concerns me is that even to say such a thing sounds terribly snobbish. Which is stupid. You can get the same respect for alterity by backpacking around Mexico and Honduras. Anyone can do this. It shouldn't sound snobbish, anti-American or elitist; it wouldn't sound that way in France or Israel, and the fact that saying that travel to foreign countries is important sounds snobbish in much of America is itself I think a real problem.
our school's law review actually required us to do a fair bit of actual writing.
Oh, I wrote long, sarcastic memos on the crappy quality of the articles they took, the extensive revisions necessary to make them both readable and interesting, and the general perfidity of the Articles Develoment department for sending us this junk to edit. I think they got as much attention as your average reply brief.
Then then rejected my note (which I would have written anyway), which when published in a lesser journal, earned me a couple grand, a trip to DC, and the warm glow that comes from having someone refer to you as "one commentator."
Pointless waste of time!
Proof for this astounding claim? I can't argue it because you haven't proven it.
Biden is called D-MBNA for a reason - see Democratic Underground here
And a 26 year veteran of the Senate is change like Paul Begala is a Hasidic diamond merchant. He's business as usual, get along to go along, status quo.
ML&J,
Either you consider Canada a State of the Union, or you lack even rudimentary reading comprehension.
Either way, you clearly live to only take cheap shots, rather than actually pay attention to what's being said.
Our interaction is done.
Oh, I wrote long, sarcastic memos on the crappy quality of the articles they took, the extensive revisions necessary to make them both readable and interesting, and the general perfidity of the Articles Develoment department for sending us this junk to edit.
I'm sorry you had a lousy law review experience. Hey, at least you get to put it on your resume, right? That counts for something.
Hey, at least you get to put it on your resume, right? That counts for something.
Yes, it makes me feel like a status-grubbing jackass. But, for reasons which I find mysterious, it impresses employers, which is worth actual cash money.
It's time to abandon the failed experiment of the Union. Let's split into two countries, as we should have nearly 150 years ago. We can each head down our preferred political, cultural, and economic paths.
Coastland can have the welfare state it yearns for, while Flyoverland would increase economic liberty. Flyoverland can sell grain, oil, and materials, while Coastland could export its crappy entertainment products and financial crises.
And, within a decade, Coastland will be importing everything, including irony and pomposity. That's how socialism ends up.
"This whole "Do the coastal elites condescend to middle America?" nonsense got started when people questioned Sarah Palin's qualifications to serve as President of the United States. Had she spent a tour of duty in the military in Kosovo or Germany, such questions would have been less likely to arise.
Posted by brooksfoe | September 9, 2008 1:45 PM "
Flash for you brooksfoe, the condescension by the coastal elites has been going on since long before Mrs Palin was born.
And by the way it isn't condescension, its utter contempt for flyover America. Far more than politicians the contempt comes from the media. Pols are usually way too savvy to get caught openly disparaging flyover-America, they save that stuff for closed meetings in San Francisco.
There have long been two Americas and not the John Edwards kind either. For the most part the coastal wunderkind despise those of us in flyover territory. On the flip side, most of flyover country tries to ignore the idiots on the coasts.
The long and short of it is the "beer factor".
It's not about left/right politics or coastal/flyover country topography or lifestyle. You can find both anywhere in the country.
The main issue here is that some people just do not feel comfortable electing a leader who they wouldn't feel comfortable drinking a beer or eating a big sloppy mess of bbq, boiled crabs or what have you. They want that person to seem like they would be comfortable in their living room or in their backyard drinking a beer and shooting the breeze. They want someone who seems like they are interested in what they have to say and what they want.
If they have a degree in economics or experience in the matter, that is the deal maker.
They feel like those leaders would more likely govern the way that they want them to. Democracy, for, by and of the people. If people wanted some brilliant technocrat with all the right credentials they'd vote them in. But, let's face it, they don't tend to trust those people completely because they have this stupid tendency to talk above their heads or down to them.
It doesn't matter what party they are from. That is the worse thing a politician can do. The worse.
And, yes, the media and hollywood are stock full of people who do that exactly. You can't get past one news organization that doesn't have some mouthy opinionator telling people that their "inexplicable" choices in clothes, food, lifetstyle and politics are "not in their best interests". And, movies are all about appealing to some angst driven "personal journey", "dichotomy" of the human soul movies that have too much "preaching". Which, is pretty funny, when you think about it, because these folks do, too often, express some sort of contempt for your basic Christian faithful who believe they, too, should share their ideas as if that is "extreme".
Whose interests are we voting against?
My complaint remains unanswered:
You've got hundreds of comments openly mocking and deriding one culture, on the basis of the idea that that other culture mocks them, and it's wrong to mock other cultures. Look, I can't really find anyone just openly mocking red state people; I find dozens and dozens just openly mocking blue state people. (eg BTW, now that I'm here, easterners please stay on the coast. We don't want you here.) But it's the blue states that get the sanctimony! Incredible.
Jordan - one more comment here, then I've actually got to get some work done.
What we've seen over the past eight years is an administration that has, incrementally, betrayed core conservative principles. 'Republican' and 'conservative' are not synonymous, certainly Dick Nixon was no conservative, and neither is George W Bush.
What we're offered in this election is a choice.
We are offered a Democrat who wants to take this country back to Carter and maybe to LBJ. He's got no legislative or executive track record, but his writings are coarsely dismissive of everything conservatives regard as the biggest successes of the last half-century. He is an opportunist, not an evil man, but many of his backers are truly the worst this country has to offer. His running mate is a nonentity.
The GOP contender is a man with an impeccable foreign-policy record, a record on domestic issues that conservatives mistrust. He will be an incremental step toward Reagan. His running mate has now been elevated to the status of future standard-bearer for the party. Her record to date is a flavor of pragmatic libertarianism that's perhaps even a step beyond Reagan in that regard, it's the clarity of vision that the GOP has not had in two decades.
If McCain wins it's a 'New Labour' moment for the GOP, you will see on a national scale what's gone on in Alaska, with the grandees diving out the windows. For us crusty old Reagan Republicans, this is hope and change.
Skullberg,
"Barack Obama - Change you can believe in!"
You are correct that the value of an untainted brand in politics is becoming stronger in recent years, and this holds for both parties. In the television/internet age, it may be that established politicians with national careers reaching back decades actually find it impossible to become President.
But Barack Obama was a novice in 2004. That was four years ago. He outfought a much more famous, heavily favored opponent, state by state. If Sarah Palin had just run a successful and bitterly contested 9-month campaign for the VP slot, nobody would be contesting her qualifications. But she didn't. She was plucked out of thin air. There's a reason why the junior player on the court generally has to earn his spot.
people have referenced this but Is the view from 9th ave
You'll note, brooksfoe, this is from before Sarah Palin could vote.
brooksfoe,
When did Barack Obama transition from being a novice? Jan 2007? Jan 2008?
And when does campaigning qualify you for anything other than campaigning? Should David Axelrod be running for President? I think that line of reasoning is specious - he's qualified because he's running, she's not because she just started.
Would Palin suddenly become qualified if she won the election? Having fought it out against more famous and better funded (well, there goes your principles Mr. Obama) opponent?
He's a first term senator with 1 bill of note (that McCain is a co-sponsor of), never held hearings, even for show or to shore up his election credentials. He was a failed school reformer, a failed community organizer, a law lecturer and a state senator with questionable accomplishments.
What are you referring to? The Saul Steinberg cartoon?
So what? What's your point? I think some dude said "All roads lead to Rome" a couple of thousand years ago. Cosmopolitan elitist! The Steinberg cartoon is a self-effacing joke by New Yorkers making fun of themselves for being so self-centered. To hold it up and say "See! New Yorkers look down on everything west of the Hudson! They say so themselves!" is really pretty obnoxious, like taking a Garrison Keillor routine and saying "See! Midwesterners are incredibly boring! They say so themselves!"
"The main issue here is that some people just do not feel comfortable electing a leader who they wouldn't feel comfortable drinking a beer or eating a big sloppy mess of bbq, boiled crabs or what have you. They want that person to seem like they would be comfortable in their living room or in their backyard drinking a beer and shooting the breeze. They want someone who seems like they are interested in what they have to say and what they want."
I think that is true of everyone. The difference is who people feel comfortable having the beer with. Coastal elites look at Obama and see someone who went to the right schools and worked the right jobs and would fit right in with them. They look at Palin and think who is this nobody from the University of Idaho think she is trying to be VP? They wouldn't invite Palin over for dinner and a beer and would Obama. The reverse is true for people from the red states.
If you don't believe me, go over and read the XX factor in Slate. Those women have gone batshit insane over there and it is mostly because Palin is not one of them.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden AND John McCain all at least have very developed VIEWS on foreign policy at least at the macro level. Sarah Palin doesn't even have opinions on foreign policy. I don't think that's something that you can deny.
Oh, wow! Obama has THOUGHT about foreign policy. he has developed views! I'm so impressed!
And of course, you know Palin has no thoughts on foreign policy because...
One funny thing about people living in small towns that I have not seen mentioned is that on a percentage basis, they're more likely to have served in the military. That service offers opportunities to not only meet people from different backgrounds but to live overseas for extended periods. We're not just talking about a couple weeks on a tour but often months to years in foreign countries.
@brooksfoe,
Didn't Obama win unopposed twice when his opponent simply withdrew?
How were those significant victories?
brooksfoe,
I eff'd the link up http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/02/07/72-the-world-as-seen-from-new-yorks-9th-avenue/
.
I know it was a self parody, but it references the same feelings ascribed to NYC'ers by Megan. Those that pre-date Sarah Palin.
Kathy at 2:30 wrote: I am a 50-year-old pro-choice atheist who was raised by and among evangelical Christians. I left the church about 25 years ago and have spent the second half of my life among an exclusively liberal, secular culture in urban California. I can honestly say that the people I have met and worked with during the second half of my life are far and away more smug, self-righteous, judgmental, bigoted and parochial than anyone I knew in my old, "bible-thumping" days. In my experience, the only "diversity" that most liberal progressives really value is diversity of skin color (and perhaps sexual appetite). Diversity of thought is anathema to them.
I have almost the opposite experience with the same result. I was born and lived in urban, secular, liberal California. I have lived on the east Coast and settled in the midwest. And I completely agree with what Kathy has said. When I go home and when I speak to my family I am just amazed at the bigotry and ignorance they express towards middle class America, Christians and simply those "other" people whom they have little contact with. People in the middle really don't think about the coasties as much as you might think, other than to wish they would stop shoving their dysfuntional beliefs and culture down their throat.
It's not really about people who are "good" or "bad" or "better" - people are people everywhere. It's about different cultures and those Aunt Prudence kind of people who like to wag their fingers at others whom they believe lesser than themselves.
East Coast people might find it interesting that liberals on the West Coast actually look down their noses at the elites on the East Coast. In the East, they prides themselves on their degrees, titles, autos and incomes. While those are "notable" on the West Coast, artist and dysfunction rate much higher on the "cool" scale. For example, a guy who is intelligent, interesting, traveled, fun to be around AND who has dropped out and doesn't own a car - is far higher on the cool scale than some poor sap who has to don a suit and trudge to work for a 15 hour a day job, no matter how impressive the credentials may be. On the west, the ultimate cool is someone who has all those degrees and doesn't use or give a damn about them.
Ultimately, what you think and say about others who are unlike you, says far more about you than it ever could about them.
Brooksfoe, two things:
1) The foreign travel thing is a major class marker. By including it, you definitionally exclude anyone who isn't pretty privileged.
2) I dispute that it is any use at crafting foreign policy. I've travelled a fair bit, and lived abroad briefly, and I can't say that I derived any information from that travel that would be of much use in shaping, say, national policy on trade. With the exception of John McCain, none of the candidates have done any of the kind of travel that would actually be useful in this regard: extended trips where you don't travel in a tourist/junket cocoon.
It *might* be a proxy for disinterest in foreign affairs. Of course, it might also be a proxy for the fact that steelworkers with five kids often don't have the kind of money (not to mention the vacation) it takes to travel abroad, especially when they are not equipped, as (presumably) you and (definitely) I are, with a long list of friends from college and beyond who live in various exotic locales.
I went to Trinity College for a year. I know a bit about Ireland. I was there when it was still poor. It got rich by cutting taxes.
Reading this post the phrase that came to mind was "white guilt". Did you all feel good feeling guilty over your supposed abuse against 'rural Americans'? Notice that Megan doesn't identify anything that Obama or anyone else has actually done that's wrong. Yes I guess I can imagine myself jumping to the wrong conclusion upon hearing a southern accent or that a person graduated from a midwestern college...am I supposed to feel guilty for an imaginary misjudgement of imaginary people in someone else's imagination? Can I just concentrate on not misjudging the real people I meet in real life and simply be held accountable for that?
Seriously, I know forming cliques is human nature but that cuts both ways. Don't rural people also sterotype and demean non-rural people? And more importantly why should the election of President turn into some type of American Idol type competition for American culture? (Do we want the next President to be a Sex in the City fan or a Nascar one?).
Another important question, how legitimate is it to impart this cultural divide on the political parties. Seriously, what makes McCain a 'rural American' and Obama not? Being white? Cracking jokes? What makes Palin Mrs. Rural? Somehow I suspect despite her outdoor activities she is as urban as you can get in Alaska
brooksfoe - yes, the junior player has to earn his spot. Obama hasn't.
The difference here is that your team wants the young walk-on to head the squad, ours wants our first-round draft pick to learn from the experienced guy.
Wanna see some good contempt towards the small-town socio-political view? Watch the reaction to this:
People keep talking about "the failed policies" and horrible economy, etc, etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum of the last 8 years. Well, I am actually happy with the way 80% of the last 8 years has gone. In fact, the only things I don't like about Bush's policies were the ones indistinguishable from solid Democrat planks: NCLB and Medicare, soft immigration policy, and the failure to reform Social Security.
What's more there are huge numbers of people who still support and admire President George W. Bush.
In fact, this "horrible economy of Bush's" started exactly when?
Right after Democrats took control of Congress and started threatening both businesses and the middle class (by promising to not extend Bush's tax cuts).
For some reason, the Democrats get a pass for all their foreign and domestic policy failures.
Nathan Brainfertilizer writes: "Either you consider Canada a State of the Union, or you lack even rudimentary reading comprehension.
Either way, you clearly live to only take cheap shots, rather than actually pay attention to what's being said.
Our interaction is done."
Since the post of yours that I responded to mentioned Russia and not Canada, and since you used the entirely silly "sister city" argument, I guess I'm guilty of reading what you wrote and not what you think you wrote.
You're nowhere near as hilarious as John is, but you have potential. Now run along and eat a mooseburger.
Oblomov please...flyover land lives off the federal taxes of the wealth producing coasts.
I remember one of my law school professors (a proud New Yorker who once pontificated on how proud he was that Starbucks had brought civilization to the "red states"), confronted with a Supreme Court case which had been appealed from Mississippi, doing an impression of "a lawyer from Mississippi trying to argue in front of the Supreme Court".
I put down on his course evaluation form that he was a sickening bigot. I expect that probably puzzled him a great deal.
"I didn't dispute your point about the tax rates, Johnny. I merely pointed out that along with that Ireland has the sort of social safety net that makes paleocons like you have nightmares - and it does."
It also has tax rates that would give you nightmares and does give the EU nightmares. Further, a paleocon is someone of the Henry Cabot Lodge 1930s isolationist wing of conservatism, which I am most assuredly not. Try using a dictionary sometime. They are amazing things.
Megan,
As Justin points out (although I don't agree with his tone) things do cut both ways: there is a fair tradition of anti-intellectualism through middle America to complement the arrogance of the coastal elite. At this point, I do see the attitudes of the bi-coastal elite as a greater problem for two reasons: a greater concentration of power and a set of beliefs that is often no better grounded than, say, those of a Midwestern creationist pushing for changes in the school curriculum.
Of course, this is one of those cultural issues that everyone will perceive according to their own prejudices. But that is kind of the point, isn't it? The bi-coastal elite have a set of prejudices that make it very hard for them to establish a real rapport with many of their fellow citizens.
For example, I find the idea of Creationism to be incoherent and unworthy of inclusion in a scientific curriculum - an attitude well in agreement with the vast majority of the bi-coastal elite. In contrast with their horror, however, I see very little real threat there: there just isn't enough of a "cost" to the periodic attempt to get some Midwestern school board to adopt creationism (which always fails in the end anyway) to really spend much time worrying about it. There certainly doesn't seem to be much impact on the pace of new developments in the biosciences. To read the blogs and, in particular, to discuss the matter with liberal friends, however, you would think that Palin's lax attitude about creationism is a sure sign that we've already progressed to Chapter 3 of "The Handmaid's Tale" and were a mere hair's breadth from a full-on theocracy!
Of course, equally incoherent ideas emanating from the Left (e.g. multiculturalism, an irrational fear of nuclear power, etc.) find great support among the Democratic elite and have a very real and quite pernicious effect on policy development; doing far more real-world damage than the occasional Quixotic charge in the name of "Intelligent Design" theory ever does.
So the midwestern working Mom or rust belt Dad sees the money and resources dedicated to the promotion of multiculturalism ("what's wrong with American-culturalism?") and wonders how the hell the bi-coastal elite can be so arrogant and dismissive when they are captured by an ignorance that is, if anything, even worse and more damaging than what you find amongst the people. And it isn't the first time: just think back to the state-sponsored wreckage of 60s era housing projects and 70s era welfare and crime policy. Thus, it is no wonder that the arrogance of the Democratic, bi-coastal elite is such a turn-off to"average" people.
I think that is true of everyone. The difference is who people feel comfortable having the beer with. Coastal elites look at Obama and see someone who went to the right schools and worked the right jobs and would fit right in with them. They look at Palin and think who is this nobody from the University of Idaho think she is trying to be VP? They wouldn't invite Palin over for dinner and a beer and would Obama. The reverse is true for people from the red states.
yes, but I think the over arching issue is the demographics. I don't mean rural v urban v. suburban so much as the middle class, state college, beer drinking, bbq in the back yard folks are a much larger demographic than the "I went to ++ University and have a degree in international affairs with a double minor in 'I know better than you'" folks.
Skullberg, it's not that I dispute that this cultural conflict antedates Sarah Palin. My point is that Sarah Palin is the only reason we're talking about it right now. And rather than talking about what's really an intractable class- and culture-based antipathy endemic to any modern society, it would be more useful to simply talk about the question that has gotten us all up in this subject, which is whether Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President. Because that seems to me to be a simpler discussion about which things can actually be said, whereas the question of whether coastal symbolic-processing professionals look down on midwesterners engaged in retail or primary production professions, or whatever the hell it is we're talking about here, is just not very resolvable or likely to result in much progress.
For what it's worth, I think coastal elite condescension towards the midwest and south peaked at some point in the 1980s and has declined extremely sharply since the advent of kitsch chic in about 1989. In the late 1990s you could still tell the difference between a Williamsburg hipster whose clothes and facial hair merely made him look exactly like a Christian lumberjack from Northern Michigan; by the early 2000s we had Sufjan Stevens who simply is a Williamsburg hipster AND a Christian lumberjack from Northern Michigan, and I think the narratives on which these ideas about condescension are based at this stage are like the stale old stereotypes they use in Warner Bros. cartoons where French people never take showers, scientists are always crazy, etc. They're stereotypes that only refer back to older stereotypes, not to anything that really exists in the real world.
This is the most frustrating and nasty belief making its way as analysis in this (and frankly the last several) election cycle(s).
Just exactly do you think is living in cities on the coasts if not people from all over the country? Yes, people from Iowa and small schools and small towns.
The idea that there is this huge group of secretly sneering elites filling the cafes of the "hip" cities full of hatred for our "fly-over" brethren is nutso.
Yet, what I constantly heard at the Repub convention and among the pundit class of conservatives is that the "real" americans, the "real" values are in the small towns of America.
People living in cities and on the coasts are Americans and have values and beliefs just as worthy of honor as any other American's. The divide that Rove perfected and that Nixon started is a canard and a false flag.
Brooksfoe: one more thing on economic privilege, and just how invisible it is . . . ever noticed how high the average parental wealth is of people you meet doing this? Most college students have to work to help with tuition and so forth over the summer. Most people in their twenties have jobs with two weeks of vacation, and are preparing to get married. Bumming around on the cheap implies a great deal of wealth behind you: no relatives to support, parents who can bail you out if you get hurt or run out of money, and a cushion to live on when you return. Even if you don't ever tap parental wealth, the mere fact of it is what lets you bum around. Nor do people from state colleges have so many opportunities to take jobs abroad. And delayed marriage is a very urban phenomenon, not a standard I think we can hold America to as a mandatory qualification for office.
Mostly, the "travel abroad" criteria feels kind of random--something that excludes Palin, but without stating any particular benefit you think Biden got from going on senatorial junkets. I've been on junkets, and I can't imagine how they would have helped me make foreign policy decisions. His experience on Foreign Relations seems much more relevant.
Wildmonk - the bible-thumpers ain't got nothin' on the global-warming fetishists when it comes to irrational beliefs.
Well, as a "transplant" that lived on the east coast for awhile and met plenty of other transplants who had pretty much determined they would never move back to the mid west. but, as I noted I don't think it is about coast v. flyover. This is about how you live your life influences how you see others who don't and how you see politicians.
While we're at it, can we stop referring to the majority of the west coast and east coast as part of the "coastal elite" I think what most people are talking about is NY and DC snobbery and that certainly doesn't include a majority of the people who live on the coasts. I just never hear on the West Coast people boasting about what school they went to. Especially since we have state schools that are on par with any school in the country, even the vaunted Ivy Leagues. I have a feeling that California is not unique in that it has state schools that offer just as good an education as any Ivy League school.
"(T)he coastal elites don't seem to have any jokes that they tell on themselves. Who is their Jeff Foxworthy?"
I'm from New Jersey. Kevin Smith is my Jeff Foxworthy. Does that count?
Megan McArdle wrote: "The foreign travel thing is a major class marker. By including it, you definitionally exclude anyone who isn't pretty privileged."
No, you don't. Foreign travel for most of my life has been easily affordable for anyone who really wants to do it. Right now may be a low point for it due to the weak dollar and high air fares, but it's still not exactly like buying a Maserati.
Megan, get thyself to a therapist. You don't deserve this level of self-hate.
I can't imagine how they would have helped me make foreign policy decisions.
The one useful thing living abroad taught me was that Bush isn't the reason Europeans hate America. After all, they hated us back when Saint Clinton was in office.
What we're seeing is simply the meta version of that. People are critiquiing the way people discuss whether Sarah Palin is qualified or not. It's not unlike Lakoff's framing arguments.
She has political and executive experience - having run for office against her party, overseen large budgets and managed a diverse and unique state.
She has 'real world' experience - having been a journalist and fisherwomen(?) as well as a mother of 5.
You maintain she is unqualified, but it is still valid to discuss what metric you apply there, and if that metric is valid. As Megan noted, travel while young is a sign of class. So using it as a metric says something else about you and your decision making processes. Not that is is wrong, though.
Megan, get thyself to a therapist. You don't deserve this level of self-hate.
yet nothing from Megan about the absolute disdain the GOP shows for any and all minorities. Republicans look at African-Americans and Latinos like garbage. Don't see any stories in the MSM from that perspective. Instead we all get long drawn-out essays about how bad we are too feel for folks in the red states, their fragile egos and all. How we in the big cities really should reconsider how we approach the red states. How about taking the utter crap from the GOP that minority groups have taken all these decades. How about those racists in the Republican party finally address their utter disregard for people that do not look like them? Or is that just too boring for you guys?
Despite having lived and worked abroad, and having socio-linguistic expertise, I reject the notion that you need some sort of foreign travel to be an effective executive regarding foreign policy.
An executive is a decisionmaker and a generalist. An executive needs to be able to evaluate people to choose good advisors and to understand when their biases influence their reports, needs to be able to quickly sift through and comprehend large amounts of input to find the salient point upon which to make a decision.
There is no way for a President, or even a Governor to be an expert on all the issues they will make decisions on. A good executive is only as good as his advisors, a bad executive either has bad advsiors, or doesn't know how to use the good ones s/he has.
It's one of the reasons Democrats tend to fail as President: they don't delegate as much as Republicans, and consequently waste time on minutiae or make mistakes from normal ignorance.
Shorter version of everyone's comments: "I hate it when my social, political and moral inferiors make fun of me! Especially when all my friends agree they're the ones who suck!"
You're right, they would never promote them to serve in the administration - like Powell, Rice, Gutierrez, Gonzalez, Paige, Alphonso Jackson, and Martinez.
Oh wait, those were all cabinet members, my bad.
"I live in the liberal island in the middle of Missouri (the kind of place Will Wilkinson would describe as "Blue State living at Red State prices), and we get much the same treatment from the "coasts" of Kansas City and St. Louis; provincialism happens everywhere."
Funny, I was driving through Missouri this summer. I told my husband that I feel about Missouri the way the blue staters feel about the country in general. KC and St. L are fine, but the rest of the state is just something to travel through as quickly as possible. :)
Full disclosure, I am a Jayhawk, so my attitude is not unbiased.
people who didn't go to an Ivy League school can be just as smart, or smarter than those that did. However, I'd like them to prove it.
A-fucking-men.
@Samantha,
You mean like all that open contempt from the GOP for Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, and Colin Powell?
You're blowing smoke. You are absolutely wrong, have zero evidence, but it sounds like you believe it like you believe the sun rises in the east.
I pity you.
There are racists in the GOP, just like there are racists in the Democratic Party. The racists are a scant minority in either party, and the racists have zero input into the platform or policies of either party.
Your comment is a perfect example of a liberal ascribing what you don't understand to evil and/or ignorance.
there's book learning and then there is common sense from living. What's nice if you have a lovely convergence of the two. Otherwise, give me common sense over feminine studies of the aborigines anyday
"(T)he coastal elites don't seem to have any jokes that they tell on themselves. Who is their Jeff Foxworthy?"
Jerry Seinfield?
despite the propaganda spewed forth from Lawrence, KS since civil war resentment turned to college rivalry, Columbia, MO is actually pretty great. Just don't wear red and blue or mention K State and you'll be fine.
But yeah, we get the "fly over country" disdain from people in our own state, which is to the disadvantage of lefty organizations in our "coastal" cites, since we're a pretty big liberal enclave with lots of politically motivated people within striking distance of the state capitol.
I count among my friends Ivy grads and individuals who didn't finish high school. I went to a fairly selective music school myself, and among all of my friends (most of whom are liberal) I don't see the sort of educational condescension that you're suggesting. In fact, when educational pedigree is brought up, it's usually by my more conservative friends. Maybe it's a NYC - Boston - DC thing, but I live in a fairly large PA town, and I just don't see what you're describing. I would suggest that the number of liberal snobs you allude to tend to be an extremely vocal minority, no more representative of liberalism than (fill in odious habit of your choice) conservatives are of their orthodoxy.
"White trash," "hick," "Bible-thumper," these are all socially acceptable terms in social circles that would never countenance like vituperation of any other racial, geographic or religious group. On the other hand, rural people don't really have corresponding abusive terms for metropolitan liberals.
It's funny, actually. Liberals can't understand why they lose presidential elections. They think, Here we are offering all sorts of redistributive programs to benefit the inbred imbeciles but the fools are too stupid to vote for our candidates. We're only successful nationally when we put up some trailer trash Southerner like Bill Clinton. Local Democrats can win Congressional races only because they know how to speak their hill-billy language.
Liberals will carry on thinking this way no matter how many elections they lose. Like most prejudiced people, they feel no obligation to try and suppress their reflexive disgust at people who are different from them.
I don't buy "travel is a class marker" either. I managed to go to Europe in high school despite my parents' modest civil service salaries and the cash I'd scraped together by babysitting and my summer job. Hell, I managed to safe enough dough during college and grad school to spend a month overseas after graduation -- admittedly that was in 2000, at the Euro's absolute bottom.
You can do it if you put your mind to it and you're above a minimal economic security threshold and I don't think SP grew up any more broke than I did. Perhaps travel is more of an aspirational marker than an income marker.
Meghan is only reiterating tired stale rightwing propaganda that has been a staple of republican politics since Nixon co-opted George Wallace's "pointed headed intellectuals" schtick. [Schtick is an elitist coastal word but not being Jewish, I think I spelled it wrong]
Conservatives routinely refer to liberals as latte-sipping, San Francisco values, arugula eating, Chardoney drinking elitist. In the case of Kerry add wind surfing French looking guy. And that is why we hate "real Americans" and hate America. (see repub convention and 1000's of other examples)
Can anyone give me an example of ANY Democratic politician deriding mid westerners in such a way?
Thanks in advance.
I don't know about what these hypothetical liberal elites think. But I sure do know that the Republicans loudly and explicitly look down their noses at anyone who lives in a city, organizes a community, or lives on the east coast.
On the one hand, we're talking about hypotheticals, and "let's be honest, coastal folks" statements.
On the other hand, we listen to the Republicans bash these hypothetical "liberal elites" all day, and while they're at it hit about half of America.
So who's the obnoxious a**hole in this equation?
Definitely those hypothetical liberals.
Simple experiment: read these 200+ comments and answer honestly. Who spends more time insulting the other side? The red-staters or the blue staters? Who has contempt for whom, exactly?
zacksback said:
MMMMMkay! Didn't realize that Hawaii was a flyover state and that being vice president of bank was considered working class.
Guess you learn something every day....
Megan:
1) The foreign travel thing is a major class marker. By including it, you definitionally exclude anyone who isn't pretty privileged.
1. It is not expensive to travel to Mexico, Honduras, etc. It is also much less expensive to travel to Europe than to buy a boat. These are "class markers", as you say, because of preference, not because of ability to pay. Leaving aside for a moment your second contention, if you felt that travel abroad were a precondition for setting good foreign policy, then the fact that people from one or another ethnic, religious, or class background are less likely to have it is irrelevant, and argues mainly for more study-abroad programs to give them access to those qualifications, and a more clear cultural emphasis on its importance.
2) I dispute that it is any use at crafting foreign policy. I've travelled a fair bit, and lived abroad briefly, and I can't say that I derived any information from that travel that would be of much use in shaping, say, national policy on trade.
This reminds me very much of the kinds of things people used to say before George W. Bush came into office. First, trade policy is the least likely area of "foreign policy" (not sure it even falls properly under that rubric) to be influenced by having traveled, as it involves a lot of bitter negotiations over whether tariffs on imports of television parts should fall from 22 to 16 per cent in 3 years or 5; yet I think you still underestimate the effects that travel can have. When you say, for example, "intellectual property regimes in SE Asia are laxly enforced," you have a vision from experience of what those streets and those CD shops look like, and what a colossal nightmare the prospect of bringing them under control is. You are less likely to have unrealistic conceptions of how effective third-world governments can be on that front than someone who thinks exclusively in first-world terms based on a formal and well regulated economy. In areas outside trade, such as, oh, the attitude of East Asian countries towards freedom of association, it's extremely useful to have some experience of dealing with a society and culture that has different assumptions about public and private responsibility.
But this is not really what I was saying. What I was saying is that NOT having traveled AT ALL is a disqualifier because it leaves the world outside the US's borders as a vaguely imagined and unreal place. I disagree with you that there is no difference between Sarah Palin, who as far as anyone can tell never left the US's borders until she was 40, and someone like Barack Obama, who spent a year abroad when he was 9 and traveled briefly in Europe and Africa in his youth. I think that makes (and marks) a big difference in attitude, and it's one that is reflected in the way Obama and Palin talk and think. I think it would be strange to argue that Obama's background and early travels did not give him a more internationalist perspective on the world than Palin has. Incidentally, Palin wasn't free to travel in her 20s not because she didn't have the money but because she'd had a baby at 18 and was raising kids. That's fine, that's a choice. It's a choice that makes it difficult to acquire certain kinds of experience that are relevant if you later want to go on to setting foreign policy, such as, say, travel or study abroad.
And last, on the family wealth thing: Ever notice that this is completely not true of Australians? It's a cultural thing. Americans don't travel abroad. Australians do, regardless of class. And it's harder for them to get away than it is for us. The implication in your posts is that it's unrealistic to expect people from working class backgrounds to go abroad because they don't have the money. That's wrong. They have the money; they don't consider it important. Well, I consider it important. So I'll vote for the people who've been abroad.
I am reminded of the idea of a 'purified pleasure ego' in this discussion. If a person in such a state finds displeasure in interaction with another it is put on the other person as their fault. 'My self is associated only with good' is the feeling as it were. The views of the NY Times re: Palin are about the family pregnancies and dissonances between what their ideals should be and the outcomes, whereas stories about Obama never delve into Ayers or the failure of the $160 million Anneburg challenge grant Obama and he directed. All good on the side of the 'respected' insitututions and their chosen. Your mileage is not supposed to vary. Whereas the typical Texas attitude or joke goes, 'Well I've got good news and bad news.' In other words, don't expect me or anything else not to have some challenge. People bridle eventually at the 'purified pleasure egos' because the assumpton of innocence is untrue.
"1) The foreign travel thing is a major class marker. By including it, you definitionally exclude anyone who isn't pretty privileged.
2) I dispute that it is any use at crafting foreign policy. I've travelled a fair bit, and lived abroad briefly, and I can't say that I derived any information from that travel that would be of much use in shaping, say, national policy on trade. With the exception of John McCain, none of the candidates have done any of the kind of travel that would actually be useful in this regard: extended trips where you don't travel in a tourist/junket cocoon."
Since we are arguing by anecdote here...
From about 83 til '94, I was able to travel to Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia and New Zealand...while my mother (the sole earner) made no more than $15K annually as a dance teacher. Family lodging was available everywhere we went, but it was made possible by obsessive-compulsive saving and extremely frugal living.
I spent my first 15 years in a trailer (not even a double-wide! the horrors!), and after that (and after my mother remarried) we became the solid middle-class family to which I wished to belong.
How does this square with your idea of travel being a class marker? Especially when the wealthiest kids who attended my private middle school (scholarships/alms for the poor) largely had never left the country (but daddy could buy them a sprint car) and the wealthy kids at my public high school had been as far as Boca and thought it to be exotic.
How does not traveling prepare one for making foreign-policy decisions? I certainly traveled in the 'family' cocoon and while I wouldn't say that the traveling I did qualified me for any elected office, it certainly did do me good when I studied abroad as a college student (and could refute the dominant image of ignorant American pig traveling the world and oinking at things he/she can't understand) and had to deal with random anti-american uninformed prejudice.
If we think that our own political leaders traffic in patently false truth-claims, one should consider how closely a Putin, Chavez or Saudi sheik hews to the empirically-provable facts when negotiating with us or even talking directly to their own populations.
We shouldn't make special allowances for the consequences of people's personal choices, especially for someone who had the kind of responsibilities that Palin had as a mom, small-town mayor and governor.
Regarding the idea that traveling or living abroad can result in the traveler being good at "crafting foreign policy," refer to my post @ 3:22 p.m, which shows that world traveler ∅bama has already shown himself woefully inept at "crafting foreign policy."
Somebody mentioned "What's the Matter With Kansas", and I expect somebody to bring up Obama's "bitter" comment where he was making essentially the same point as the author of that book.
republicans have been running against "east coast elites" for over 40 years because it works.
example: Many Kentucky and other coal miners vote for politicians who want to reduce mine safety regulations and are opposed to unions and greater access to health-care. Why is that? "Well, that elitist liberal thinks he's better than me and will take my guns and outlaw my religion (lies) and let the gays marry (may or may not be true) and oh yeah abortion. Too bad about that mine disaster though. I guess you can't trust politicians."
O.K that was a bit condescending. True but condescending. Facts have an elitist bias.
"And last, on the family wealth thing: Ever notice that this is completely not true of Australians? It's a cultural thing. Americans don't travel abroad. Australians do, regardless of class. And it's harder for them to get away than it is for us. The implication in your posts is that it's unrealistic to expect people from working class backgrounds to go abroad because they don't have the money. That's wrong. They have the money; they don't consider it important. Well, I consider it important. So I'll vote for the people who've been abroad."
Brooksfoe,
as Verity Burgman so kindly explained to me (years ago), Aussie society is bunched by income in the center (with a now significant blob of wealthy aussies) and there is a fairly strong 'common' culture of consumption specific to geographic regions (i.e. 'Beer' in Victoria means VB...in Queensland it is 4X, etc.) but what seemed universal was the assumption that a 'holiday' meant a quick trip to Bali/Bangkok/Galle.
gocart,
If mine workers choose to value their gun rights and the lives of unborn children over their own lives, who are you to say their relative valuation is wrong?
Ah yes, Gringo, our apologies for having ignored the wisdom of your comment.
The US should get out of Iraq now. We should have gotten out yesterday. Nothing we have done there is worth the $100 billion a year it costs for us to be there. The American people elected the Democrats in 2006 to get the US the hell out of Iraq. The Democrats have failed to do so, but at least Barack Obama gave it a shot. And the colossal blunder of our escapade in Iraq is exactly the kind of thing one would expect from people to whom other countries and other societies do not seem entirely real.
The problem is that most everyone on here takes themselves too seriously.
I think a majority of people make it through the day without thinking about whether x person in NY thinks anything about their life styles.
gocart - ah, yes. The elites must tell the miners what their self-interest is.
They look at mine safety regulations promulgated by lawyers who know nothing about mining, and see mine owners deciding to close up shop.
They see unions spending their money on politicians and perqs for union leadership and producing minimal gain for the membership.
They see illegal immigrants in the cities sucking up all those healthcare benefits the politicians supposedly put in place for the legal working poor.
Not saying that mine safety regulations, or unions, or more extensive health insurance, is a bad thing, just that many of these end up coopted by those factual elitists into things that have less benefit to the guy at the end of the food chain than a stable job and being able to keep the money he makes.
Hmm...so winning in Iraq is a colossal blunder?
Who knew?
Of course, I love the arm chair generals the most.
"If mine workers choose to value their gun rights and the lives of unborn children over their own lives, who are you to say their relative valuation is wrong?"
Rob Lyman, the same constitution that gives them the right to vote for whoever they want also gives me the right to criticize their choice. At least the child of a dead Republican coal minor can say that his daddy helped keep those fags from marrying.
p.s. I am challenging MoelarryandJesus for the title of bluntest A-Hole in all of the Atlantic.
brooksfoe - I've traveled abroad fairly extensively. I speak a couple languages. My foreign policy positions are somewhere to the right of Curtis LeMay. Vote for me.
Brooksfoe said:
And the colossal blunder of our escapade in Iraq is exactly the kind of thing one would expect from people to whom other countries and other societies do not seem entirely real.
You assume.
Once again, instead of trying to understand, or merely just disagreeing, you leap right into the typical "my ideological opponent must be stupid and/or evil" assumption.
This is the difference. Read through just this thread and it's clear: the urban/coastal/liberals (loose venn intersection) can't disagree with someone without impugning intelligence or character.
the same constitution that gives them the right to vote for whoever they want also gives me the right to criticize their choice.
Oh, feel free to criticize away. But does it not occur to you that personifying the arrogant, condescending, out-of-touch liberal elitist under discussion is unlikely to win you either friends or elections?
"Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"? And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams? It's okay--there's no one here but us chickens. You don't."
Hmm, don't have any friends who went to Williams. Do live on the east coast. Do run into alarmingly uneducated assumptions every day. Attribute as you will:
1. Beverage choice theory:
Assumption: I only drink imports because I hate american beers and am an east-coast elite.
Reality: I drink mostly american craft brews because they're inestimably more tasty and interesting than anything bud/coors/miller can offer (and often what Belgium, Germany, UK have to offer)
Attribution: southern college-educated conservatives.
2. National Origin theory:
Assumption: I am from a different country and am excited to relate my story to every questioner i face, tailoring each retelling to the questioner's own biases.
Reality: I grew up 'here' and am unwilling to exoticize myself for the benefit of the questioner.
Attribution: old liberals, old conservatives, young liberals, young conservatives...
Reminds me of the joke about Hyde Parkers(where Obama lives)in Chicago. "We do not care what color, race, or religon sexual orientation you are, as long as you are educated(liberal) and RICH!
Remeber Obama's home was listed at $1.65 million and was being sold by a doctor to a lawyer with a future convicted felon(Tony Rezko) tossed into the mix. Obama himself called it a "bone headed move" especially apparent when he is a Harvard lawyer after all. And he complains about smal towners "who cling to their religon and guns". If that ain't elitest behavior then their truly is no corruption in Illinois.
@Alexander Klingman,
Sarcasm may feel good, but your use of it makes it less persuasive than you might think.
@gocart mozart,
Who said you can't criticize him? The problem is you used terms and tone that alienates them; and then you consider them stupid and/or evil for being alienated (and the Democratic leadership does the exact same thing).
Despite the excellent, reasoned analysis of mrkwong, you jump right to an assumption that the dead coal minor voted Republican only to keep fags from marrying.
That leaves the impression you have no interest in winning support to your view, only in trashing anyone who disagrees. You are engaging in scorched-earth politics with an inherent condescension towards those working-class Republican voters; you clearly display you have zero respect for anyone who has different experiences, needs, or values than you.
That's kind of the basis of the original post in this thread.
"gocart - ah, yes. The elites must tell the miners what their self-interest is."
mrkwong, common folk like the corporations who own the mines and hardscrabble working class guys like George W. Bush and J. Sidney McCain III have their best interests at heart. Point well taken. If we could only get rid of those damned elitist labor unions, and elitist worker safety laws and elitist minimum wage laws they would all be better off.
Curious though, what is your definition of elite? I think it is anyone who doesn't blindly support the best interests of corporations and the salt of the earth top 1%. Am I wrong?
It's good that people finally are seeing what racist, traitorous weasel that scumbag Obama is.
Obama 08 - racist, liar, traitor.
I have been a military service member, and family member since 1979. I left Michigan in '79 and my service has led me to reside in Alabama, Germany, Texas, Florida, California, Hawaii, Washington, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Connecticut, and presently Fairfax, Va. One of the interesting things about being in the military is that you constantly find yourself living and working with diverse groups of people.
What Megan says may ring true - I don't know since I don't tend to run amongst Williams grads. What I have found in my travels is that an ascendant South seems to have created a Super Bubba persona where many people from the South or Rural America are absolutely convinced of their moral superioroty, based on little more than a rural delivery address.
Snobbishness and bigotry comes in all shapes, colors, and sizes. The folks who are so convinced that Sarah Palin is being looked down on because she's from rural America may want to consider that to many American's Sarah Palin started the mud slinging by damning a sizable portion of America in her introductory salvo. Why should I 'get to know' Sarah Palin when she's already presented herself as morally superior to me based on her zip code?
Nathan of Brainfart Fame, I assume by your comment that you have never criticized or denigrated anyone who has ever voted Democratic. If so than you are a better man than me.
I find your tendency to treat mid-western voters like children who are out of the realm of political criticism to be well, ELITIST!!!
Also, I find your criticism of me to be ELITIST!!!
Note to self: avoid use of sarcasm or irony when conversing with conservatives.
Do you even pay attention to what you're saying?
Your initial assumption is that either the mine owners or unions have their best interests at heart. Since you are clear it isn't the owners, it must be the unions. But they stupidly don't vote for union-friendly Democrats.
That about sums it up, right?
Well, try this: Neither one necessarily has the miner's best interests at heart, and certainly neither one certainly has the miner's best interests at heart.
But the miner is capable of using his brain, his value system, his needs to determine which political party most closely represents his interests, and will help bring about or maintain the type of world he wants his kids to grow up in.
Democrats/unions may give him the best chance for cradle-to-grave care, but Republicans/free markets give him and his son the best chance to never work in the mines. Democrats have an entrenched interest to keep people in the mines, so the unions maintain their power, and thus pass political power to the Democrats.
You don't need a college education from a liberal university to value self-reliance, or to look for your long-term good rather than seeking govt handouts.
Democrats' policy is (intentionally or not) designed to minimize risk for the common person; but it is only when you risk much that you can achieve much. By allowing (or forcing) lower and middle class people to avoid risk, they eliminate the chance for income/employment/class mobility.
I assume by your comment that you have never criticized or denigrated anyone who has ever voted Democratic.
I can't speak for Nathan, but I can't recall the last time I criticized someone who voted Democratic as stupidly going against his own interests. I have said they are wrong on the merits, but not that they were too dumb to even understand what's "really" important.
Perhaps my memory is merely faulty.
@gocart mozart,
Did I ever once say, or even imply, that you were stupid, ignorant, or evil?
Nope. I at least show you respect for your opinion, and your right to hold it, even if I disagree with it.
That's the difference between criticism and contempt. You weren't criticizing the hypothetical miner, you were disparaging his value system, character, and/or intelligence.
That's the difference, generally, between liberals and conservatives. And (again), the source of Ms. McArdle's posting.
This thread provides a plethora of examples of the old saying that you can lead a horse to water...
"It's good that people finally are seeing what racist, traitorous weasel that scumbag Obama is.
Obama 08 - racist, liar, traitor.
Posted by jim"
Example of name calling that denigrates a hardworking upper mid-west (Chicago) American. I would call him an ignorant rube, but I wouldn't want to be accused of elitism.
@gocart mozart
Did you ever hear of Ellers Ellison, er, Glenn Greenwald?
He would use the inherent anonymity of comment posting to build false evidence or support for some point he was trying to make.
I'm not saying you did that in this case...but it sure seems interesting that just as you needed an example of name-calling, you get one...one that has no obvious connection with any of the conversations preceding it, naturally.
And I don't see him actually proclaiming any connection with Republicans or the GOP. He might be, or he could be a member of the Green party, criticizing Obama from the left...or even a resentful Hillary Clinton supporter.
But don't let that stop you from using that righteous indignation as justification to continue making ad hominem attacks, m'kay?
I was just thinking about this earlier this afternoon. In California, an older generation of liberals established the University and state colleges precisely to provide upward mobility to the sons and daughters of plumbers. These institutions would be help to eliminate the traditional discrimination and money privilege of private education. It was good enough for baby boomers white, black, and latino. My alma mater produced a number of very important Congressional Representatives. But, these institutions were not good enough for the post baby boomer minorities who wanted to go to college and all the whites who went to them were dopes presumably dopes in their view.
I see these polls were generic Democrats beat generic Republicans. I think these polls are fueled by the older generation of Democrat politicians who did believe in real social mobility and merit as opposed to privilege and affirmative action. They are nostalgic for dead Democrats and when election day comes around and they look at the real deal they have today, they say, "Ugh" and vote for the real Republican.
A few observations would seem in order.
To MLJ Ireland's cradle-to-the-grave support system is a post-Jack Lynch phenomenon, when economic stability was finally achieved and growth produced a surplus. In the 70s and the 80s and the early 90s you couldn't stay home and succeed unless your family could already define that success for you ( inherit the family business or law practice or seat in the Dail),so you went away to do so. Now people can stay home,but now,if you're ambitious,you are on the march again from the Republic.So the wheel has turned.
Notwithstanding junior years abroad and foreign vacations, very few Americans ever think of moving abroad for a year or going to school abroad. Every Australian seems to have had those experiences, and increasingly gap year students in Ireland and the UK are going the other way. As one who did spend five years of undergraduate education in another country, the lack of such experiences does seem to limit very much the knowledge base of Americans, no matter where they come from.
One should also perhaps consider two other points that distinguish the 'acceptable coastals' from the flyover country. One is that they really don't deal in the same economies. The 'acceptable coastals' are really in the idea manipulation businesses and the others are in the productions of things businesses. This does lead to much misunderstanding about how the two worlds are alike and how they are different. It would be intriguing to have data on relative attitudes and opinions from the 50s and the 60s, when both coastal centers were major industrial centers as well as centers of ideas.
And,as a last point,somewhat as a take on the FT column by Clive Crook, there may be some conflation of coastal attitudes with the 'helping professions' domination of the Democratic party. Almost by definition the teachers unions and other unions that depend on public moneys for the work of their members, where through direct government employment or indirect support such as in health care and social service support, have to think that their members are really serving clients in need and unable to really do things for themselves.After all, if people could do things for themselves, why would their members be needed? Exactly how many social service employees did lose their jobs when welfare reform was implemented?
Nathan Brainfertilizer writes: "That's the difference between criticism and contempt. You weren't criticizing the hypothetical miner, you were disparaging his value system, character, and/or intelligence.
That's the difference, generally, between liberals and conservatives. And (again), the source of Ms. McArdle's posting.
This thread provides a plethora of examples of the old saying that you can lead a horse to water..."
But don't be surprised if he leaves some horseshit there. And the notion that conservatives don't disparage the values and character and intelligence of liberals is horseshit. Several years of watching anyone who was against the Iraq War or torturing prisoners get derided as "traitors" and seeing pro-choicers being called "murderers" for decades now have shown me otherwise.
Then there's the phrase "San Francisco values" again, used by all sorts of cons... and the word "effete," used almost exclusively since Agnew's day as a club against the character of non-cons.
I could go on, but I think that's enough to show what Nathan's brainfertilizer is made out of.
Amusingly, I am a graduate of the University of Iowa (not Eastern Iowa State, but close enough since there is no such institution and U of I is the easternmost large state school) and work with a guy who went to Williams. Although you wouldn't think it from Megan's post, we get along well and have a lot in common.
Nathan, I guess what I am saying is that mining corporations certainly don't have their workers best interests at heart but unions albeit imperfect tend to try to help their members.
Rob Lyman believes ALL voters are Always smart. interesting.
Nathan, I am not going to respond to the rest of your comment because it is only silly, rambling right-wing tropes. Perhaps you should invent a time machine and go back to those halcyon days of the 60 hour work week, child labor, and a club in the head for trying to form a union. You know, before the elitists took control.
brooksfoe
And the colossal blunder of our escapade in Iraq is exactly the kind of thing one would expect from people to whom other countries and other societies do not seem entirely real.
I guess that remark rather proves the theme of Meagan’s posting: that many of those who align themselves with the Democratic party look down on those who disagree with them.
So because I supported the war in Iraq- and note that about 70% of the US Senate voted for the Iraq War Resolution - “other countries and other societies do not seem entirely real” to me.
My reply to you is: Si me vas a insultar así no vale la pena de seguir esta conversación.
¿Me entendés vos? ( Translation: if you are going to insult me like this, it is not worth it to continue this conversation. Do you understand me?)
That should be "before the "liberal elites" took control."
The folks who are so convinced that Sarah Palin is being looked down on because she's from rural America may want to consider that to many American's Sarah Palin started the mud slinging by damning a sizable portion of America in her introductory salvo.
By "started the mud slinging" I'm assuming you're referring to the week of predictions that she'd be back hunting moose within a few days meme that populated the blogsphere prior to her speech at the RNC.
Rob Lyman believes ALL voters are Always smart.
No. I believe that insulting them is a counterproductive strategy, not to mention simply rude.
I'm from New Jersey. Kevin Smith is my Jeff Foxworthy. Does that count?
Absolutely. Of course, while NJ is northeastern coastal, we don't typically think of NJ as coastal ELITE. Honest to God, I mean that as a compliment, not as an insult. NJ can laugh at itself. Of course, you've got Jon Bon Jovi hosting 30K per plate fundraisers for Obama. You know, party of the working folk.
Years ago, when his anti-Bush schtick was somewhat fresh, Michael Moore gave a really nasty rant to some student group (I think) saying basically, "Republicans tell you that every kid can grow up to be rich, but you can't. You just can't. You're going to work your ass off all your life, and you'll never get to be rich like them."
Michael. Fucking. Moore. Who, while not coming from quite the hardscrabble working class background he likes to claim, came from decidedly middle class origins and is now rich as shit. And he's telling people that they can't do it themselves. Oh no, coming from humble beginnings and making a buttload of money is a cruel fairy tale told by evil Republicans.
Just like people as rich and pampered and divorced from the cares of everyday life like Sean Penn and nameyourmoviestar can go on and on about the dangers of dissent in George Bush's America.
It's inherently and self-evidently bullshit, as is the claim that the Democratic party cares any more than the GOP about the common folk. I don't think the GOP cares any more than the Dems; but they certainly don't care any less. As the Dems have proven in a spectacularly ugly and ill-advised manner for the past week and a half.
And yes, the fact that it was a Republican who gave us the first black SOS; the first black female SOS; and the first black Supreme Court Justice - you can't ignore that. Yes, they were conservative black people - because a republican president isn't going to nominate a liberal for those positions. Then again, I tend to think that you should be able to choose your own political ideology regardless of what other people who come in your shade of color happen to think.
note: politically, I go both ways. Or I used to, until Bill Clinton left office and the Democratic Party decided to go bugfuck crazy.
I graduated from Duke (big whup) and have taught in a poor, rural, predominantly Republican school district in the Midwest for 15 years. I like smart people from New York and I like people here of all capacities, but in my experience relative to this discussion, there is one critical difference between them. Your liberal elites, when confronted with reality and facts, will lose their biases. There are people here who will simply never, ever believe that Barack Obama is not a muslim.
Nathan that a-hole jim wasn't me. Maybe Meghan can clear this up, m'kay? Maybe you should get your facts straight before making wild accusations. I am sure it was a green party member. You know how much they hate the coloreds.
Now go F yourself.
p.s. Can I use that catch phrase of yours, "m'kay"? I think its kinda cutting edge.
Oh, and I believe that people may have reasons for their choices which are not immediately apparent, so to assume they are simply stupid is not only rude and counterproductive, but quite possibly wrong as well.
brooksfoe needs to check his facts:
It is simply false to say that G. W. Bush "never traveled [before he was president] except for a brief trip to China while his father was ambassador there" (2:49pm). In addition to the list given here, I have a distinct memory from when the subject came up 8 years ago that Bush had traveled to Scotland on six different occasions, some of the trips lasting for many weeks, and a less distinct memory that he had also been to Munich for two different Oktoberfests. Is the evidence for Palin's lack of foreign travel any stronger, or is that also something that "everyone knows" that doesn't happen to be true?
brooksfoe also writes that "Palin wasn't free to travel in her 20s not because she didn't have the money but because she'd had a baby at 18 and was raising kids" (5:27pm). Perhaps he's mixing up Sarah with Bristol. In fact, Sarah Palin, now 44, was ~25 when she had Track, who was born in 1989 and is therefore either 18 or 19.
Others who talk about how cheap and easy it is to visit Europe or Mexico might want to consider where Palin has lived most of her life. There have certainly been cheap flights from the east coast to Europe for most of Palin's life, and cheap flights (and bus rides) from California and Texas to Mexico, but Alaska is a long way from either destination.
Rob Lyman writes: "I believe that people may have reasons for their choices which are not immediately apparent, so to assume they are simply stupid is not only rude and counterproductive, but quite possibly wrong as well."
People who believe that the triceratops was a riding animal qualify for the label stupid. People who believe that Dumbya's minions have only waterboarded 3 people qualify as stupid. It's a useful word and I'm not going to stop using it because you're allergic to it, Rob.
Iowa, according to the 2000 Census, only 2.1% of its population is of African descent, yet the Democrat caucus supported Obama. The line from the elite journalists before the caucus was that Iowa would be racists because it had so few Americans of African descent. (I refuse to use hyphenated American... Does that make me an Iowa racists?)
Here is another reason why I laugh when someone uses the term "dumb hick hayseed farmer".
It's a useful word and I'm not going to stop using it because you're allergic to it, Rob.
This has nothing to do with my allergies. I only have one vote, after all.
I see that there are a lot of comments here. I have a problem with the idea that secular well educated people like me have worse values than the super religious folks that I grew up around. Yes I looked down on them for their anti-gay attitudes their belief in creationism and their belief that climate change is a fraud. I have figured out that otherwise good people can hold these views, but thats the point. They don't have to oontinue to ignore science or to dislike gays. They could become more enlightened. They could reconcile their religious views with what science tells us. Instead too many of them get pissed off as society slowly leaves them behind.
"In the 1980s, I played on possibly the worst girl's basketball team in the state of New York..."
Maybe this has already been covered in the nearly 300 earlier comments (I didn't have time to wade through them all), but doesn't the anecdote that follows conflate coastal vs. inland prejudice, liberal vs. conservative prejudice, and rich vs. non-rich prejudice. The third is the most separate of the three: After all, the girls on the other teams were also East Coasters, and probably most of them vote Democratic today. The working-class East is a state of mind different from both the preppy East AND the South/Midwest. (And conversely, there is probably a preppy South/Midwest as well.)
Cousin Dave: "But... the coastal elites don't seem to have any jokes that they tell on themselves. Who is their Jeff Foxworthy?"
Christian Lander.
"...doesn't the anecdote that follows conflate coastal vs. inland prejudice, liberal vs. conservative prejudice, and rich vs. non-rich prejudice?"
That sentence should have ended in a question mark, and now it does.
"gocart mozart" @6:01 PM: "... the same constitution that gives them the right to vote for whoever they want also gives me the right to criticize their choice."
If you think the Constitution gave anybody those rights, you're beyond help.
"Craig" @7:59 PM: "They could reconcile their religious views with what science tells us. Instead too many of them get pissed off as society slowly leaves them behind."
I concur with the sentiment, but society is not slowly leaving them behind -- more like the opposite, given the huge differential in reproductive rates between liberals and conservatives. Better get cracking on persuading them rather than mocking them, or you'll get left behind.
This has been the only legitimate, honest thing I have read about the difference between red and blue America from part of the mainstream press and a "liberal" writer thus far.
Could sanity (or maybe just reality) be seeping into journalism again?
And Megan, for the record you have it spot on. I went to Catholic school too, grew up in South Jersey, and it all comes down to snobbery. "Red" state Americans hate it, and can smell it miles away.
The whole equivalency thing is silly. Are there coastal elites that make snide comments about red states? Sure. But I must have missed them speaking at the podium during the DNC convention.
Republicans openly attack coastal elites. Rudy mocked Obama for being too "Cosmopolitan." Romney ripped East Coast elites.
Remind me, did Hillary Clinton attack McCain for being to "Rednecky?" Did Bill Clinton mock NASCAR fans for ruining our culture? No you say. Okay then, stop with the equivalency.
The Republicans are openly attacking a part of the US. They hate publicly on "East Coast Elites." Apparently, among Republicans, it's okay to rip New Yorkers, Holllywood denizens, and generally mock Americans that they don't agree with.
The Republicans will once again try to win this race with culture wars. With a war, recession and looming terrorism, I believe all Americans should look down their nose on the folks who fall for it.
Okay Jay Manifold, what's your take, you stupid nitpicker? Was it G*D?!
All humans have the right to due process, free speech and to not experience cruel and unusual punishment such as torture no matter what George Bush, John Yoo or any other Republican says.
Is that what you meant? I have a question for you Jay? Why do Republicans hate GOD?
or maybe you meant I should have said "restricted the violation of" instead of "gave".
Brett, don't you know, the republican party is the party of God, therefore any criticism of Republicans is an attack on God. Does that clear it up for you.
What I don't understand, is if the republicans are the party of Jesus, why must Democrats always "turn the other cheek" and "love our enemies"? Republicans can be as mean as they want with no repercussions, see Coulter et. al. Can anyone answer me that?
This is complete David Brooks style, armchair pseudo-sociology.
But, Republican voters earn higher incomes than Democrat voters. This is well-established (scroll down to Myth #7 to see table. So why is there any justification for leftists to look down on normal people? Leftists, on average, earn less than average.
Was this supposed to be a shocker. Megan has found out that people were prejudiced. I've got anecdotes of all kinds about people being prejudiced against my brother (he's autistic), my mother (she's a southern baptist), my best friend (he's black), my dad (a lawyer), etc.
People are prejudiced, and that will never end.
my wife and i are both psychologists who live in seattle. she is from hawaii and i am from oklahoma. a very common occurence at academic schmooze fests:
when introducing ourselves folks fawn over her birthplace with the obligatory stories about their last visit, how beautiful, the culture, etc., etc. i introduce myself and the reaction is generally some pause with a slight eye twitter. there is usually some comment on how i don't don't sound like i'm from oklahoma (often said as though this is a compliment).
ahh, the microaggressions of everyday life.
Dr. Weevil is right: I appear to be off on GWB's foreign travel. I think I was working off of my memory of the portrait of Bush presented before the 2000 campaign really began, probably in Nicholas Lemann's profile for the New Yorker in '98. In any case, Bush seems to have been considerably better traveled than Palin, having visited Mexico several times as governor, the UK on one of those Young Presidents things, and the Gambia once in 1990 to represent his dad.
Weevil is also right that Palin didn't have Track at 18, she was 25. I must have been reading drunk again. Damn! Anyway, the point was that while Megan calls lack of international travel a class thing, there was really no financial barrier to Sarah Palin taking a year off and going abroad. She comes from a perfectly middle-class family, most people I know who traveled in their teens or early 20s financed it by waiting tables or working construction, and Palin, after kicking around a little in college, graduated and went to work as a sports reporter at an Anchorage TV station. Then she did something else that costs a lot of money: she had a kid. None of this is remarkable; it's entirely normal for Americans to go through their whole early adulthoods without ever leaving the country. And that's a problem. People who aspire to roles of national political leadership need to cultivate some international experience, and living near the Aleutians doesn't do it.
Tood, "leftists" read liberals, are the normal people. Liberals don't look down on "normal" people though they may look down on stupid people such as yourself. It's just republican propaganda. Your little statistic just proves that conservatives are the party of the elite.
My apologies if you are a spoof. It is often hard to tell the difference between jokers and conservatives.
Having been born and raised in the South, I have, to my neverending embarrassment, a rather thick Southern accent. I was raised in an upper middle class family, obtained a BBA in Finance and attended law school. After ascertaining that law school was boring, I accepted a job with a large regional bank and went to work for one of the country's premier Investment Banking Groups.
During my first business trip to New York City, in a cab into the city from LaGuardia, my cabbie (obviously noticing my accent) asked me where I was from and then actually asked me if people in Tennessee wore shoes. After I managed to pick my jaw up from the floor, I slung a foot over the front seat (this was the eighties and before the days of the plexiglass divider), wagged my Ferragmo flat back and forth, and told him that since my Mama had told me the streets of New York were so filthy, I bought my first pair of shoes just for the occassion. He cracked up laughing.
I know of a guy who was born and raised in the South, Arkansas to be exact, and he had a slight southern accent. He was raised in an lower middle class family, was a Rhodes scholar and went to Yale Law School. He graduated with honors I believe. To this day people mockingly call him Bubba and use to make jokes about his home-state in flyover rural America way back when he was running for president.
Do you think there's no basis on which to make a value judgment between the person who spends their surplus cash on NASCAR and the person who spends their money on books and the opera? Or is it all just relative? Time was, going to college (land grant university or Williams, it didn't matter) meant opening your mind to ways of seeing and enjoying the world outside the comfort zone of adolescence. Nowadays, not so much. Much easier, whether you're at Harvard or Iowa State, to look forward to a life of pulling down the bucks (big or small) and living in a state of permanent childhood. That's what the redstate culture of BBQ and NASCAR is all about. No mental or intellectual challenge, just lots of consumption, arrogance, and total lack of curiosity about the non-familiar. Coastal "elites" may look down on NASCAR culture (tell me with a straight face there's a lot to figure out there!) but they're curious about a lot of other things, from art and music to foreign travel (when did Palin get her first passport? oh, right).
By the way Lynne, you left "law school because it was boring" and then went into the more exciting field of banking?!
Lynne, out of curiosity, was your cab driver from Pakistan or Bangladesh? Damned elitists cabbies looking down on American bankers.
You know, of course, that until recently, US citizens could travel to most countries of the Western Hemisphere without needing a passport. And most Alaskans could routinely travel to and from Canada with only a driver's license. I am willing to bet that Sarah Palin, who has spent most of her life in Idaho and Alaska, both of which are adjacent to Canada, has traveled to Canada several times. But I guess that doesn't count since Canada is not really outside the US. I think it is you with the provincial outlook here.
Good point Kevin, what is Sarah Palin's position regarding recent U.S./Canadian international incidents. My vote depends on her answer.
"Coastal "elites" may look down on NASCAR culture (tell me with a straight face there's a lot to figure out there!)"
I won't bother, but maybe one of the PhDs on the engineering staff of one of the NASCAR teams (here's one: http://www.racing.ups.com/racing/team_car/team/ewarren_bio.html ) can dumb it down to a level a liberal arts major can understand while you get them a Venti Latte. Or Whopper Combo.
Still, I can understand your preference - a ticket to the opera is a LOT cheaper than a ticket to a NASCAR race. Check this out too:
http://www.holytaco.com/2008/06/03/the-10-most-worthless-college-majors/
"Canada is not really outside the US"
Many experts contend that Canada is a foreign country.
"Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"? "
Okay, Megan, I will be honest. I'm UC Berkeley, 67, and yes when I meet NASCAR people with Southern Accents I DO THINK "maybe this is a cool person."
Because I've learned.
I am correcting and reposting my prior response.
I was just thinking about this earlier this afternoon. In California, an older generation of liberals established the university and state colleges precisely to provide upward mobility to the sons and daughters of plumbers. These institutions would help to eliminate the traditional discrimination and money privilege of private education. It was good enough for baby boomers white, black, and latino. But, these institutions were not good enough for the post baby boomer minorities who wanted to go to college. By those standards,the whites who went to them were presumably dopes.
I see these polls where generic Democrats beat generic Republicans. I think these polls are fueled by nostalgia for the older generation of Democrat politicians who did believe in real social mobility, colorblind laws, and merit as opposed to privilege and affirmative action. They are nostalgic for dead Democrats and when election day comes around and they look at the real choice they have today, and they say, "Ugh," and vote for the real Republican.
Who calls themselves a Hockey Mom? Do you think many people in the south do? Nope. You know who does? A heck of a lot of Canadian moms where Hockey is a religion (hence its capitalization here). I have no doubt Palin has been to Canada many times. And, having lived in Canada, Palin strikes me as very much a cultural Canadian. She probably even knows the words to "Oh, Canada".
When I go visit the in-laws in rural northern Canada, you know what they talk about ALL DAY LONG? Hunting moose, playing hockey, and riding snowmobiles (no joke. I just talked to one on the phone and ALL three subjects came up). Sound like any VP candidates you know?
Heck, Stephen Harper is holding elections, maybe she should run for office there.
Do Ivy Leaguers look down on ordinary folks? Of course. Why do I believe that? Ever since I left a small town to go to Harvard, all the people around me have behaved exactly that way. They still do. For that matter, I still do. Sometimes I try to justify it by saying thank goodness I prefer opera and books to NASCAR, and there is some validity to that; but I also recognize that a good deal of it is meanspiritedness and bullying on my part (even when my tastes and accomplishments are demonstrably better than theirs) or sheer prejudice (when theirs are actually better than mine).
Why do people (including myself) feel compelled to bully like that? Probably because at age 17 you're scared sh*tless that you're not as impressive as the people who disdain you (in my case, the kinds of people at Harvard that Ross Douthat describes in his book Privilege), and so you find somebody else to disdain. John Kerry and his dandified lifestyle is evidently a case in point. Even though he went to St. Paul's (which, as Paulies like to say, isn't like Andover or Exeter that's after all indistinguishable from a public high school) he evidently wasn't popular at St. Paul's perhaps because he's only a half-blooded Forbes; and, rebuffed and held up disdain from full-blooded Brahmins, he has therefore been driven all his life to come across as the impeccable, quintessential god of prep, too precious for words.
Does this translate from social class to regionalism, politics and religion? Only to some extent, granted, but though there may not be a compelling causal connection, there is undoubtedly a statistical correlation in our own time and place.
Once it was not so. Hamilton thought that the wise, the wealthy, the educated, the cosmopolitan, etc., etc. would naturally and inevitably coalesce as a single elite body around economic, social and political conservatism. That's not the case today, for whatever reason.
But the flyover state posters on this blog have put their finger on the most truly repellant aspect of the limousine liberal of our day, the netroot billionnaire -- the sheer hypocrisy of people who PROFESS to be EGALITARIAN, yet ACT ELITIST. To modify the cliche, "if you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich?" one can ask "if you're an egalitarian, how come you're so SNOBBISH?"
I'd appreciate some justifications of that from our liberal brethren....
One reason for my animus towards Kerry, by the way, is that for all his belief in egalitarianism and progressive taxation, when it actually came to opening his own wallet for charitable relief for the tsunami some years ago, I was astonished to find that he'd donated scarcely a larger proportion of his enormous net worth than I had. Guess you can have a bleeding heart without a bleeding wallet.
LOL, something tells me that you're not really interested in the answer to that question, or to any question about Sarah Palin. You've just decided that she's a hick from the sticks and that is it.
Keep trying harder though, what you folks don't get is that the harder you smear, the votes she gets out of sympathy, if nothing else.
I shudder to think at your headache medicine budget, having two straw men in there, all day, just socking each other incessantly.
I love the anecdotal stuff here from those small town people about mean old New yorkers, but how about some actual "big think" for a second. New Yorkers voted for Bill Clinton twice, right? I guess they can't hate all Southerners or look down on all folks with accents.
How many Southern States voted for Kerry? How many voted for Dukakis? How many will vote for Obama?
I know, you once had a cab driver in NY that was dismissive of your accent. But again, when you watch the GOP, they openly attack the East Coast and West Coast, whereas Democrats do not do the same. And the Northeast is willing to vote for a Southerner, but have yet to see the South do the same. So if you'd drop your anecdotal evidence for a second, it's pretty clear that the bias lies with the South and the GOP, not the other way around. Please resume your anecdotes
JGsez writes: "Iowa, according to the 2000 Census, only 2.1% of its population is of African descent, yet the Democrat caucus supported Obama. The line from the elite journalists before the caucus was that Iowa would be racists because it had so few Americans of African descent."
Iowa has a long and proud history of supporting what some would say are "surprisingly progressive" politicians. Tom Harkin, for example.
There are seeds out there in the heartland of something better than yahoo Republican bullshit, and they've always been there. People who remember poor forgotten Fred Harris of Oklahoma will know what I mean.
Yes, it's primarily an urban/rural culture clash. Look at a U.S. map of the last two elections that has a county-by-county breakdown. Every state, even New York and California, is red. Only the large population centers are blue.
I've lived in a rural area for 45 years and these are my observations:
1. Rural folks are overwhelmingly conservative regardless of party affiliation. Most are registered Republicans.
2. Every rural person I know has been to a big city and most have been to either LA or NYC.
3. Most rural folks have at least one relative or friend who lives in a big city, but otherwise they don't feel they know enough about city dwellers to judge them. Besides, the Bible frowns on things like that.
4. Most rural folks think city folks are too rushed and stressed and that makes them rude.
5. Most have seen Susan Sarandon, Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen and Keith Olberman on TV and think they are arrogant asses for assuming that anyone would care how they'll vote. Most also think they're pretty talented and have some likable
qualities.
6. Rural folks think the Dixie Chicks are pea-brained twits with bad manners for making intemperate comments about the president. They like their music though.
7. Every gathering of rural folks will contain some Republicans and some Democrats, so no one would be rude enough to make a comment that could be considered insulting to the other side.
8. They don't really care who is president as long as he/she leaves them alone.
9. Rural folks occasionally like to laugh at urban folks.
I've lived in an urban area for 10 years and these are my observations:
1. Urban folks are mostly liberal regardless of party affiliation. Most are registered Democrats.
2. Most urban folks have never been to a rural area (places like Aspen, Jackson Hole, Westport and the Hamptons don't count) and they couldn't find Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa on a map if they had to.
3. Most urban folks don't know anyone who lives in a rural area. They probably work with someone who was raised in an rural area, but they don't know anyone who lives there now.
4. Urban folks think there are a lot of cowboys and Indians living on the Great Plains. Between the "Beverly Hillbillies" and redneck jokes, they have a pretty low opinion of rural folks and their politics and values.
5. Most urban folks have never seen a real person from a rural area on TV, unless you count Johnny Carson and Henry Fonda, but they're both dead. And most big city folks didn't watch
anything Carson or Fonda were in when they were alive.
6. Urban folks think the Dixie Chicks are brave, brilliant women who spoke truth to power. They hate their music though.
7. Urban folks tend to associate with and be friends with people who are just like them. They readily make insulting comments about conservatives because they assume everyone there is a liberal Democrat.
8. Urban folks go crazy during an election year and put bumper stickers on their cars. If their guy doesn't win they get depressed and put new bumper stickers on their car that say
"Don't blame me, I didn't vote for him."
9. Urban folks like to laugh a lot at rural folks.
Since JMS is playing deity, let me do it.
1. Most rural folks think "those gays" should shut up and die or go away.
2. Most rural folks think Iraq was hip-deep in the 9/11 attacks.
3. Most rural folks think Tim McVeigh had some good ideas but went just a little too far.
4. Most rural folks think Jesus is coming back real fucking soon and will teach "those gays" and "those liberals" a lesson they'll never forget because they'll be tortured forever in hell.
5. Dick Cheney isn't the Antichrist, but he has 666 tattooed on his left testicle. Fred told me that, and he would know.
The problem that many of us have with ivy class citizens, is that they use their contempt of the proles as justification to rule them. We don't care how the Ivy's live their lives. It only becomes an issue for us when they hold themselves as exemplars to which the rest of us are required to aspire. Then mutual sneering begins. No thank you. You do whatever you want to do over there. Just leave me the devil alone.
I agree with the comment above: We realize that you're smarter than us, we just don't believe that you're smart enough to rule us. No one ever is. The only good ruler is one who leaves his people alone and assures that others do the same.
Or so sayeth Quoth
An earlier poster, Ryan Davidson, captured why there isn't any "equivalency" between the nature of Red State and Blue State critiques and the nature of one trying to meddle in the affairs of others:
he mentions religion, but there's more to it than that. It's a deeper difference in values. The jokes about Red State America don't just imply "We're better than you," but "We think that everything you value and hold dear, everything that you have in fact built your life around, is stupid at best and evil at worst."
The critiques of blue state elites is mainly in being out of touch, not believing in what heartland people believe are the traditional values that served America well for 230 years.
Out of touch, lacking values vs. "ignorant, eeeeviiil!"
And you don't have lawyers from a group of Oklahoma conservatives going to San Francisco seeking to get Courts to outlaw marriage. Or publications from Indiana on every newstand in Boston extolling the Midwest lifestyle and it's people over "backwards coastal people".
But you do have ALCU lawyers from NYC showing up in Kentucky and trying to shove gay marriage down local's throats. And you do have East and West Coast media elites openly tring to "nurture" their cultural values onto the "wasteland folks of middle America".
It is the difference in aggressive meddling that makes the conflict more and more serious. Red Staters seek to be left alone and let the people of their States set policy. Blue Staters believe it is their duty to use courts and the Federal gov't and the media to impose their will on the Red States, for their "best interests".
Thanks, Megan, the poster child for privelege and elistism, for making some of the silliest arguments that have ever appeared 'in print'.
Do I laugh at folks from Eastern Iowa but not at folks from Williams? Hardly. Both football teams are laughable, or would be if Eastern Iowa existed.
That's what represents most 'condescension' in this country - your team sux. Red Sox versus Yankees. Alabama versus Auburn. Or the North sux (from the Southerners) or the South sux (from the Northerners). Or the Chinese team sux because the US had the most total medals. Or sailboats suck (say the jetskiers) while the jetskis suck (say the sailers). Ad infinitum.
It's the freakin' Sharks & Jets all over again, and only the idiots in Group A truly believe that 'the others' in Group B are really as inferior / inbred / incapable / incontinent as the taunting suggests. And vice versa.
But that's okay - you can prattle on while reducing a political campaign to the level of junior high school social cliques. Congratulations !
(Is that condescending enough for you? I hope so.)
Megan's column is a waste. Had to get that out of the way.
Now to my real point. Palin's nomination, as much of a liability it might end up becoming for mccain, has already had its desired effect. As has the standard-by-now, but still surprising language employed at the republican convention.
Think about it. Megan and other bored media types swallowed the bait, and by now hundreds of comments, most indignant and pointless, have been submitted here on what is a non issue, policy wise.
The wedge has been expertly deployed, and the societal cracks are forming. they might just pull it off again, which would be truly amusing.
And the more arrogant of you pricks would never guess my race, religion, or party affiliation.
And you don't have lawyers from a group of Oklahoma conservatives going to San Francisco seeking to get Courts to outlaw marriage.
They don't go to San Francisco; they go to Washington, DC. Federal Defense of Marriage Act. Amending the US Constitution to define marriage as "between a man and a woman".
This is all whining and special pleading. Conservatives have packed the board of PBS to mess with the impartiality of its programming, and they've very nearly succeeded in destroying NPR. Conservatives have spent the last 15 years waging an all-out war to politicize every institution they can, including the Justice Dept., CDC, NIH, the US Air Force, and the Wasilla Public Library, in the belief that it's justified because the liberals started it. When you define the entirety of modernity as "liberal", of course, you can always claim the liberals started it.
I am willing to bet that Sarah Palin, who has spent most of her life in Idaho and Alaska, both of which are adjacent to Canada, has traveled to Canada several times.
Then go ahead and bet it. Sarah Palin is of course welcome to answer media questions one of these days, which might give her an opportunity to make it clear to the world whether or not she has been to Canada.
Once again, instead of trying to understand, or merely just disagreeing, you leap right into the typical "my ideological opponent must be stupid and/or evil" assumption. - Nathan
1. Dude 1 does not appear to have a complex grasp of international affairs. Dude 1 is sometimes ridiculed by Dude 2 for stupidity of approach to international affairs. But Dude 1 wins these arguments and is elected President -- we will leave aside tendentious issues here.
2. Dude 1 then proceeds to actually go ahead and do something unbelievably stupid which he predicts will be a triumph but instead turns into a massive foreign policy disaster, certainly the biggest in 40 years if not longer.
3. Dude 2 says "See? Dude 1's approach to international affairs was stupid!"
4. Nathan says "Dude 2, quit condescending! You should be making an effort to understand Dude 1, or merely disagree with him! Instead you leap to the conclusion that he is stupid or evil! You condescending elitist!"
5. Dude 2 protests that he never said or implied that Dude 1 was evil.
And the more arrogant of you pricks would never guess my race, religion, or party affiliation. - s
Like most Mazdean Inuits, you're probably a Green.
It is amazingly funny watching idiots who think they are intelligent demonstrate their idiocy.
Because it won't do you idiots any good, I'm going to explain to you what you are missing (yes, I know I'm being rude and insulting, and that, as you idiots are emotionally children, that will keep you from believing anything I say. That's fine. If you actually learned from me, you might be able to push your worthless agenda better).
The "coastal elites" do not have a "lock" on enough states in order to push their agenda on their own. As such, if they wish to obtain power, they must convince a significant subset of "flyover country" to give htem power.
The residents of "flyover country" are not going to give power to people who they believe don't respect them.
Therefore, if you "coasties" want power, you're going to have to convince the "flyover" people that you respect them.
Now, if you were significantly more clever than the flyover people, you could lie to them, and con them into believing that you respected them even though you don't. Then the chumps would vote for you, and you could "take care" of them while shoving your agenda down their throats.
Because you idiots believe your own propaganda, you think you actually are bright enough to pull that off. And so you nominate a Kerry, a Dukakis, an Obama. And then you're surprised when the "idiots" in flyover country are "too stupid" to understand that they're better off voting for your candidate.
"What's the Matter With Kansas?" Well, see, they have beliefs, that are just as important to them as your beliefs are to you. So, how many of those beliefs are you willing to respect, in order to get their votes? More than the Republicans are willing to give them to get their votes?
No?
Then why do you expect them to vote for your candidates?
Hey brooksfoe,
How many questions has Obama answered about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge? Do you think Obama would be willing to sit down with Stanley Kurtz of NRO, and answer all his questions about the CAC?
Do you think that NRO is more pro-McCain than MSNBC, or the NYT, is pro-Obama?
How many papers has Obama released from the time he was in the State Senate? You know, like appointment logs, etc?
Has anyone in the MSM looked into how much Biden collects on per-diem with all his traveling between Delaware and DC?
Have any of these thoughts ever occurred to you? Or are you such a mind-locked leftist that you're not capable of thinking beyond your daily talking points?
My background - born and raised in the South, father a postal worker and mother a stay-at-home, public schools, church every Sunday (and sometimes Wednesday, graduated from a local "directional" college.
That said, I could not disagree more with the premise of McArdle's post.
Over the years, I've had the good luck to work with people from all backgrounds, and in almost all cases I have never experienced the "look down your nose" attitude that she describes.
On the other hand, I don't think you'll be the hit of the party if you want to engage people with conversations about video games, astrology or how evolution shouldn't be taught in schools.
I was raised in Kentucky and went to Princeton.
This snooty liberal/East Coast condescension toward the south and Christians and people from "flyover country" is EVERYWHERE. It's not even debatable.
Fortunately, it's why Democrats generally get their asses kicked in presidential elections.
Chester, rise out of your victimhood and revel a bit less in 'your' presidential successes. In other words, get over it.
I was raised in Pennsylvania (coal & steel town) and went to Virginia.
The snooty Southern conservative prep condescension toward the North and working-class people was clear & prevalent, if not pervasive.
The snooty UVA attitude toward Virginia Tech (culture versus agriculture) was pervasive - and fun. It was responded to in kind, especially after football games.
Didn't any conservatives go to Princeton, Chester? Were any of the liberals Christian? Or do you really just want to perpetuate the student council vote mentality: vote for the jocks and vote against those eggheads in the AP classes?
Unfortunately, Megan is right. As a native New Yorker, I can attest to our condescending view of the rest of the country. We make jokes about people in the South and things like guns and god. Sometimes I feel wrong for doing so because I am a populist at heart. I grew up in a middle class family and attended public schools. Sure - I attended NYU and Georgetown, but I've never felt part of the elite crowd. So I partly understand why folks feel this way.
BUT -- that's no excuse for them to continually vote against their interests. The politics of the coastal states is in line with the needs of working people in this country. I understand their pain and can relate to it. Elitism in any form is bad and we need to unite as a nation. But we can't constantly back down from what we believe. Sorry, but gun control and abortion rights are important issues. Not because we are elitists but because we see street violence and teenage mothers struggling around us. That's a fact.
I am soooooo irritated this morning. The cynical politics of the right and how it might work again. I don't have an answer to it. The pig lipstick comment taken out of context.
WAKE UP AMERICA.
When will we hear "we can't be bigots, because the targets of our supposed bigotry are white."?
I ask because the "we're not bigots" folks have yet to use a "we're not bigots because ..." argument that said WNBs didn't reject when it was made by others. However, I haven't seen all of the previously rejected arguments.
Are these arguments valid now because of the targets or the sources? Or, were they always invalid, it's just that "those people" aren't allowed to defend themselves?
James Kabala asks: "And conversely, there is probably a preppy South/Midwest as well."
There is definitely a preppy South. It's pretty small, but it exists. It's centered mainly around private prep boarding high schools (most of them in Tennessee, apparently), and a few old-money schools like the University of the South, Vanderbilt (actually not so much anymore, but it was then), or UNC-Chapel Hill. I know about it because I went to one of those high schools, where I was very much an outcast, and which my parents were only able to afford because of an academic scholarship. The school was full of the kids of families who like to trace their ancestry back to Robert E. Lee (or, better yet, Nathan Bedford Forrest). And yes, a lot of them have the same attitudes towards their less blue-blooded neighbors that we've been discussing here.
The school was all-boys; it had an affiliation with an all-girls school across town, and the main thing I remember about the girls was that they all walked around with pink sweaters tied arond their waists, like a skirt. That's how you spotted them around town. I knew one girl who went there, and when she graduated, I made her swear a vow that she would never tie a sweater around her waist ever again.
Miss McArdle hit a sensitive nerve with this post. We are still talking about the point after over 300 comments!
As a matter of US history, President Jackson campaigned on the hicks' contempt for the coastal elite. He called himself a Democrat. Labels may have changed, but not the blindness of many Americans to the virtues and vices of the citizens they don't talk to.
By accident, I posted this on the open thread when Megan went visiting her old school:
"The theme of Pride and Predjudice is 'See people clearly. They are real, fascinating and often lovable when you do.' A second theme is how conventions (not Party ones) hold society together to the common benefit; but do get in the way of seeing people clearly."
I guess the majority of the commentators on this thread could do with re-reading Jane Austen.
Let's be honest, Megan - when I meet someone who is payed to be ignorant, such as yourself, I wonder what kind of fortune they were born into that allowed them to get to such a comfortable position in life so early, by having to do so little and demonstrate so little competence and ability, while other more able and, frankly, better people have to struggle.
Your writing is mediocre, and your knowledge is limited. I cannot criticize your thinking because you do not think, you take prescribed positions and use the cliches, slogans and intellectually dishonest ideology of others to produce your words. In this respect I do not eny you - you are not free, your mind belongs to other people. So, as someone who has lived on both coasts and the center of the country, that's what I think.
The Third Policeman,
Sadly you are correct. Read Megan's post about global warming today. It confirms everything you say. I am not going to read her anymore. Life is too short.
chris ford writes: "But you do have ALCU lawyers from NYC showing up in Kentucky and trying to shove gay marriage down local's throats. "
Why do cons always use the "down our throats" phrase when talking about homosexuality?
Cracks me up. Silly, silly cons.
And what is this "ALCU"?
As someone born and raised on a family farm in Mid-Missouri, I am sick and tired of elite "Townies" like Sarah Palin thinking that she speaks for those of us who are the REAL salt of the earth.
That goes double for conservitard a-holes like McArdle who feel compelled to smooth us rural folk's hair everytime somebody says something mean about us. You guys demean liberal's condenscencion of blacks, then turn around and do the same thing to rural and small town people. There's more variety there than you think. Some of us are GASP! liberals.
So get a clue idiots, we're capable of defending ourselves.
And no, by defending us you don't become one of us. You're still a bunch of cocktail party-having elitists.
The politics of the coastal states is in line with the needs of working people in this country.
Says you. If they happen to disagree, I fear I must trust their own assessment of their self interest over your assessment of their interests.
gun control and abortion rights are important issues.
Indeed they are. So why is urban "clining" to gun control and abortions righteous, but rural "clinging" to the opposite somehow "against their interests" or the product of bitterness or giving into right wing deception?
I see no reason to believe that rural American is voting against its interests. It just weights the issues differently than you do.
Ok, we get it...you're a snob and a jerk. Why do you assume other people are like you?
Signed,
a Coastal Elite who does not suck.
"Oblomov please...flyover land lives off the federal taxes of the wealth producing coasts."
Perhaps we need to run an experiment ... urban areas quite sending money to the rural areas, and rural areas quit sending food, coal, oil, lumber, water, electricity to the urban areas.
You're making the same mistake as a lot of CEO's ... it isn't corporate HQ that makes the money, it's the manufacturing plant in some small town.
The "Best and the Brightest" are neither.
Some of the crude cultural war insults hurled in each direction can be attributed to simple prejudice against the "Other," or tribalism.
But I think there's an imbalance of contempt or animosity -- "coastal elite" snobs certainly exist, but the cultural war is of greater relevance to the Southern/Rural/Religious conservative, primarily because it derives from:
1) The old Scotch-Irish chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, which is related to, but not exactly the same as
2) The conservative South still bearing a grudge for losing the Civil War, and both of these two factors stem from
A) a pervasive inferiority complex and/or
B) a parochial awareness
And perhaps most importantly, the GOP, since the days of Nixon, have openly fanned the flames of the cultural war in order to reap political gain.
I loathe rich elites who live in Massachusetts and New York! Loathe them! They think they're better than us! Republicans are the SALT OF THE EARTH, people. Salt of the earth.
And perhaps most importantly, the GOP, since the days of Nixon, have openly fanned the flames of the cultural war in order to reap political gain.
People keep saying this. I don't get what it's supposed to mean. The democrats push for gun control and abortion (sometimes using overheated rhetoric about opponents), jump up and down about prayer in schools, and support lawsuits to get gay marriage established by judicial fiat. How is it "fanning the flames" for Republicans to point this out (and do the opposite) but somehow not fanning the flames for Democrats to do it in the first place?
This goes to my evergreen question about "wedge" issues and "divisive" politics. Why is it divisive for Republicans to oppose gun control (for example) but not for Gore to call for licensing and registration of gun owners in his 2000 convention speech? Why is it divisive to pass the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, but not divisive to agitate about protecting a woman's right to choose?
We are divided because we disagree, and we don't disagree because of some GOP mind-control plot. If the GOP were capable of mind control, we would all agree with its platform, making elections much easier for them.
This goes to my evergreen question about "wedge" issues and "divisive" politics. Why is it divisive for Republicans to oppose gun control (for example) but not for Gore to call for licensing and registration of gun owners in his 2000 convention speech? Why is it divisive to pass the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, but not divisive to agitate about protecting a woman's right to choose?
You're misunderstanding the meaning of "wedge issue."
It's NOT divisive to be on different sides of the issues you mention. That's life. What's DIVISIVE about the Rethug strategy is that they push these **relatively minor** issues to the front of every election, because it stirs up their people against those eeeeevil people with Teh Sex and Teh Lattes.
Meanwhile they run off with our Bill of Rights and sell us to China, while everyone's scrapping over my uterus.
Sounds both divisive and condescending, to me. Here, dummies! Fight over this rawhide while the Big Smart Republicans are busy.
"White trash," "hick," "Bible-thumper," these are all socially acceptable terms in social circles that would never countenance like vituperation of any other racial, geographic or religious group. On the other hand, rural people don't really have corresponding abusive terms for metropolitan liberals.
It's funny, actually. Liberals can't understand why they lose presidential elections. They think, Here we are offering all sorts of redistributive programs to benefit the inbred imbeciles but the fools are too stupid to vote for our candidates.
This is a nice example of mau-mauism. No notable liberal actually has used these terms (if the best example you have is Obama's 'bitter' comment, please stop playing now and go home), but since 'some do' all liberals must feel guilty and what ? let McCain put someone like Palin a heartbeat away from the Presidency? Notice how all the examples given exist totally in the imagination. Imagine the poor Iowa State grad. meeting the snobby Harvard grad. OK, I live on the east coast in a pretty decent job market (not NYC though)....I've encountered perhaps a handful of Harvard grads and have never witnessed a meeting of a Ivory League grad. and a midwestern one. Do I think such snobberies happen? Sure....they make up maybe 25 out of the 750 billion interactions between the millions of people who live within a few hundred miles of the coast each year.
Speaking of redistribution, how exactly have liberals victimized the rural communities? OK now and then some conflicts come up over environmental laws....maybe with gun control advocates (although it seems like it is more common for gun supporters to be challenging urban gun laws with the help of rural members of the NRA...). How much does the rural community benefit from crop subsidies, ethanol policy!!!!, token protectionism and yes even pork. Anyone see the picture of Palin supporting the 'bridge to nowhere'? She had a black t-shirt on with the word 'nowhere'.....the message was pretty clear. Rural people were being victimized by 'elites' who had the nerve to say the hundred million dollar bridge to nowhere was going nowhere! The 'elitism' charge seems to be the white rural answer to Al Sharpton.
they push these **relatively minor** issues to the front of every election
If they're so minor, then 1) they shouldn't work to get anyone to vote R, because they're unimportant, and 2) the Democrats should be cheerfully willing to concede them in order to win the votes of the people the R's are selling them to.
But the issues aren't minor to either side (even if they're minor to you, personally). They're important enough that Democrats that they refuse to concede them, even at the expense of their preferred policies in other areas. That doesn't sound like a minor issue to me.
Rob, you're confusing issues common to the "cultural war" -- guns and abortion -- with the political motivation behind the prominence of these issues. I don't consider it "divisive" to oppose gun control or to personally choose not to have an abortion. But in the grand scheme of public policy, these should not figure so prominently. No black helicopters are going to be swooping down into rural America and gun registration or licensing is a far cry from banning all guns. No government official is going to force some woman to have an abortion if for whatever reason, religious or otherwise, she doesn't want to have one. Now, I do consider it a religious imposition to tell a woman that she can't have an abortion.
But god, guns and gays are the fuel that the GOP uses to distract people from the more important issues, such as the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, the failure of our healthcare system, the looming environmental consequences of continuing to be such a wasteful, consumption-based society.
You may believe that the most important issue facing the American public is "the sanctity of marriage," but if so, you're either naive or overly susceptible to the influence of conservative propaganda.
But god, guns and gays are the fuel that the GOP uses to distract people from the more important issues, such as the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, the failure of our healthcare system, the looming environmental consequences of continuing to be such a wasteful, consumption-based society.
Two points:
1) Saying that people are "distracted" from "important" issues is a form of condescension (the subject of this post). Weighting the issues is a personal matter. If Bubba likes the idea of universal health care, but rates gun ownership higher on his personal scale, that's his call. He's not "distracted," he's making a judgment, and to say otherwise is going to offend him and will not help you win his vote.
2) Again: if the issues are so unimportant, why don't the Democrats simply concede on them? If universal health care matters much more to someone than increased gun control, then why not bite the bullet, put out an unambiguous pro-gun statement (not hedged ambiguous crap), and pick up the Bubba votes to let you do what you want in health care? Voila, "distraction from important issues" eliminated. Why don't Democrats do this? Because these supposedly "unimportant" issues apparently rank high enough to be worth losing votes over.
To say someone is distracted, or misinformed, is not necessarily being condescending. If all personal beliefs were equal in legitimacy, then there would be no need for government (hence, anarchy).
And it's not that gun control or the right of women to have an abortion are unimportant -- certainly not, and as a result a true liberal should not concede them. Rather, it is that the GOP, with assistance from the sometimes unwitting conventional media, divert too much attention onto such issues because it benefits them to do so. If there was more media and public attention on the most important issues, George W. Bush would have never spent a day in the White House (other than perhaps when his father was president).
@Bragan,
That is an extremely tautological statement you made.
But you're exactly right: if so many people hadn't voted for him, George Bush would never have been President.
But a majority of voters did care about the issues that favored George Bush, and the newspapers covered those issues because a majority cared about them...
You see how it works?
The entire last half of this comment thread has had the liberals proving the very thing they are trying to deny: Democrats don't understand or respect the values and issues of small-town voters, but rather vilify them. And then don't understand why they lose Presidential elections.
...and probably control of Congress this election, as well.
As someone who went to a state school in an urban, liberal area, I have seen behavior very similar to this to an extent that it astounds me. Some of my very close friends who are liberal still cannot help but assume that "if only the red states knew better, they'd agree with us liberals" and that conservative politicians are either stupid or evil. They won't even consider the idea that people can have legitimate points of view other than their own. Once upon a time, my ultra-liberal boyfriend made a crack about dumb conservative hicks, and that comment was one (of many) reasons that I ended up breaking up with him. Regardless, the attitude is widespread because they are surrounded with people who think like they do, and the people they know are all intelligent, so they assume that all intelligent people think like they do.
Most conservatives I know, by contrast, don't make cracks, though I suspect this has more to do with the fact that they're a minority here than it is a representation of all conservative behavior. (I'm neither liberal nor conservative, or I'm both, depending on how you look at it.)
When it comes down to it, I think both sides do plenty of slinging mud at the other... and it's ridiculous. If you want to reach people, attack their ideas, not their character or intelligence. And doing any of that in a condescending fashion will win you no believers.
Poor Nathan. If only saying it made it true. But the Right is slated to LOSE more than half of all contested seats in Congress this fall. Even if that psychotic douche and his Handmaid's Tale-reject VP do manage to win...they'll face a hostile Congress.
And saying that "your right to own a gun won't matter when you don't have enough money to feed your children" isn't condescending. It's just true. Starving populations are singularly unconcerned with matters of civil justice.
Rather, it is that the GOP, with assistance from the sometimes unwitting conventional media, divert too much attention onto such issues because it benefits them to do so.
I'm still not understanding how it is that you have determined there is some absolute and correct scale of issue importance, and that people who weight them differently from you are provably wrong in their weighting. You may disagree with their weighting--I probably do--but that doesn't mean the GOP is somehow fooling them into doing it "wrong."
To put it in a nutshell, I don't see how abortion is a fundamental constitutional right which must be defended at all costs when Democrats bring it up, but a stupid footling distraction from the important issues when Republicans bring it up.
And saying that "your right to own a gun won't matter when you don't have enough money to feed your children" isn't condescending. It's just true.
How is that true? Of course it will matter, when your starving neighbors come to feast on your flesh.
But in all seriousness, the choice for most voters is not "gun control plus food" or "gun rights plus starvation." Not remotely so.
Rob Lyman wrote:
To put it in a nutshell, I don't see how abortion is a fundamental constitutional right which must be defended at all costs when Democrats bring it up, but a stupid footling distraction from the important issues when Republicans bring it up.
Excellent point, Rob. So excellent I've made it a post on my blog (crediting you, of course).
And saying that "your right to own a gun won't matter when you don't have enough money to feed your children" isn't condescending. It's just true. Starving populations are singularly unconcerned with matters of civil justice.
Not only is it condescending, it's false, and stupid.
My right to own a gun, and hunt, may very well be the difference between my children starving, and not.
My right to own a gun, and shoot anyone who tries to rob me, may be the difference between my food /rent money being stolen, and not.
One of the actions Governor Palin took was to extend the hunting season for returning members of the the Alaska National Guard, so they could get in more hunting time to feed their children.
You really do have to be stupid to be a "liberal", don't you?
crediting you, of course
That's very kind, but in fairness, I may have read that line somewhere else, but I'm not sure.
and probably control of Congress this election, as well.
Nathan, I was just about to type a rebutal to your post when I read this and realized the whole thing was joke.
If you want to reach people, attack their ideas, not their character or intelligence.
Most Democrats and liberals would love it if elections and political discussion was mostly about ideas. Instead, Republicans such as John McCain (and his conservative allies) wage a relentless campaign of lies and character assassination. What policy ideas are McCain and the rest of the GOP going to run on these days? Name one. It's just more the same -- pandering to fear and greed and painting the Democrat as effeminate and "not one of us." The problem for McCain is that fear of the Islamic boogeyman and bogus arguments for Bush's tax cuts for the rich are insufficient in today's environment.
Greg, nobody is trying to deprive you of your hunting rifle. Hell, I don't even want to deprive you of your hand gun if you want to carry it around with you so you can fend off the bad guys like Dirty Harry. But what I would like to do is make it more difficult for the bad guys -- and let's recognize that emotion can very often make a normally "good" person do very bad things -- to possess a hand gun, through licensing, registration and greater penalties for illegal possession (and certainly there is no legitimate justificaiton for owning an assault rifle).
Is this "debate" for real? Oregon is a coastal state and I can tell you as someone whom grew up in rural Oregon as well as the "big" city of Portland, this kind of insecurity from "Red" folks like myself whom attended public schools straight through is just plain dumb. And if you are going to vote based on whom is truer American/Christian/Worker then be prepared to have the Republican's walk all over you and send your kids to war and expect you to smile and applaud along the way.
If you are less privileged you are presumably more hungry and will work harder than folks whom have by birthright or luck stumbled into the "privileged" class. Will you encounter pricks whom think they school they attended is important? Yes of course. But that is life. I know Catholics and Protestants whom like to hold a similar distinction. This is no different than politicians or academics showing off their blue collar cred while being in a position of power and convincing folks of the righteousness of their position.
So if you cannot be secure in who you are then stay at home and out of the world at large. The world is far more complicated and diverse than it was 40 of 50 years ago and this discussion of monolithic culture wars (Red versus Blue) is what will lead the United States down the road of being left behind in this new century. The simple fact is we are a country at war in what is dumb war and it is very likely another Republican president is prepared to seek another front and waste more lives. And in death this kind of worthless debate about NSCAR versus Volvo is meaningless and will bring no redemption for your soul or salvation from the corrupt and immoral path this country is following.
Amy
As someone who went to a state school in an urban, liberal area, I have seen behavior very similar to this to an extent that it astounds me. Some of my very close friends who are liberal still cannot help but assume that "if only the red states knew better, they'd agree with us liberals"
Is this any different from the people in Red States who say "if only they knew better"? Or for that matter is it any different from the griping everyone does about the group called 'they' that they assign blame for all things bad?
A BIG part of resentment comes from the subliminal message that Hollywood sends us that we (white folk) are evil. This is done by always casting white people as the bad guys in all the TV shows and movies. Just check CSI, for an example. In the old days, you could tell the good gys from the bad guys by the color hat they wore, white hats good, black hats bad. In today's TV, it's the color of the skin, white skin bad, black skin good.
After years of this, how could we NOT be resentful? Most people haven't figured out Hollywood's campaign of hate against white people, they just internalize the message and so feel angry and resentful without clearly knowing why. Thanks, Hollyweird!
Where are all the civil rights lawyers when it comes to the monopoly that white actors have in playing the bad guys in Hollywood cinema?
Bragan,
Aren't those "licensing, registration and greater penalties for illegal possession (and certainly there is no legitimate justificaiton for owning an assault rifle)." simply distractions from more important economic matters?
Who cares if who owns a gun if we're starving?
Where are all the civil rights lawyers when it comes to the monopoly that white actors have in playing the bad guys in Hollywood cinema?
I'm a conservative gun-nut wackaloon, and even I think that's silly. There are bad guys of all colors on TV and in movies. Maybe white people are overrepresented, but I don't see how some statistical imbalance amounts to a campaign of hate.
and certainly there is no legitimate justificaiton for owning an assault rifle
Perhaps if you could define "assault rifle" we could have a more productive discussion.
Hey "Rush". Thanks for the material. Your comment was "soooooo" good, I wrote a post on it.
Bragan,
Anyone trying to restrict ammunition sales, or make it more expensive, is attacking my ability to hunt.
Since my hunting rifle is an "assault rifle", your desire to ban those is most certainly a desire to deprive me of my hunting rifle.
But, of course, the core of the matter is this:
But what I would like to do is make it more difficult for the bad guys -- and let's recognize that emotion can very often make a normally "good" person do very bad things -- to possess a hand gun, through licensing, registration and greater penalties for illegal possession
The only rational way to read that is that you want to disarm everyone, since even "normally good people" can be "bad guys", and you want to keep the "bad guys" away from guns.
Note that what you don't want to do is actually punish the bad guys when they commit a crime. Nope, you want to engage in "prior restraint", and keep "them" from having weapons in the first place. (After all, once they do commit a crime, then they're "poor, misunderstood people who aren't responsible for what they've done." Yes, I'm extrapolating that part from other fruitcakes in your left-wing coalition. Deal.)
IOW, no sale.
@Bragan
Um, wrong. It's not clear Democrats would love it if the discussion were only on the issues. Just look at all the "issues" that were discussed regarding Palin...
Rather, Democrats demonstrate that they want to restrict Republicans to only talking about the issues Democrats want on the terms Democrats want, while leaving Democrats free to smear, insult, distort, cast assertions without a shred of support or even decent logic beyond "becuse I say so", and end each statement with a nice cheap shot ad hominem.
Or at the very least, that is what you and your ideological brethren have done throughout this thread.
The most interesting thing? As the percentage of liberals increased, their civility waned.
You tell me: is it because you find yourself unable to discuss concepts intellectually (and so have to turn to invective and cheap shots), or is it because when you feel you outnumber your opponents, you instinctively shift into bullying mode?
Either way, I tell you again: you are doing nothing but proving the original thesis. Nice job.
I have certainly seen my share of "classism" having grown up not priveliged but at least "coastal" and was one of very few people that were accepted and beloved by all of them back when it mattered 20 years ago.
Your article provoked a very long and interesting conversation between myself and a freind of mine
thats had much more life experience than I. He posted about it on my site and I tried to trackback to your post here but it wouldn't work so I thought I'd just post it here so you could see it, I hope you all enjoy it, I know I certainly did.
@ Bragan,
What policy ideas are McCain and the rest of the GOP going to run on these days? Name one.
I'll name several. I have severe doubts you will listen, since you already answered yourself.
Still,
1) a better energy policy: drill now to reduce dependency in the short-term, while bringing nuclear online to fill the mid-term energy need, with alternative (solar, wind, or other) coming online as soon as possible
2) Lower taxes. Make Bush's tax cuts permanent
3) Continue to treat terrorism as an act of war, rather than law enforcement (which Obama said he wanted to do)
4) Appoint justices to the Supreme Court who look to the US Constitution for ruling on laws, rather than European tradition or a "sense of fairness".
There's more, but you only asked for one, and I gave you 4.
@ Well, what?
Poor Nathan. If only saying it made it true. But the Right is slated to LOSE more than half of all contested seats in Congress this fall. Even if that psychotic douche and his Handmaid's Tale-reject VP do manage to win...they'll face a hostile Congress.
...and who is saying the GOP is slated to lose so many seats? Aren't you just repeating it in hopes that's true?
Elections are dynamic, and if you think the GOP will still lose that many seats, you are probably underestimating how excited the moderates are about Sarah Palin.
Still, aside from that, let's face facts:
The economy was doing great from 2002 to 2006. Democrats campaigned on a promise to get us out of Iraq, and took over Congress.
Since then, the economy has struggled (though not as bad as Democrats make it sound...it just grew 3.3% for year to date, IIRC), and Congress failed to get us out of Iraq.
...in fact, it is now crystal clear that they were dead wrong about Iraq.
So let's recap; here's what is clear to voters right now:
1) The Democrats failed miserably in their main 2006 campaign promise
2) It is clear they were wrong to make that promise in the first place
3) The economy tanked after Democrats took over Congress
4) Democrats have now demonstrated very clearly to a flat-out majority demographic that if you don't say and do what they want, they will attempt to destroy your reputation and life.
Now, there are some women so tied to govt-funded abortion-on-demand that they'll let #4 slide right off their back; after all, they are saying and doing what the Democrats want. Just like they ignored Bill Clinton's misogyny.
But 51% (approximately) of the entire US population is huge number, and it isn't the hardcore rightwingers getting upset over Sarah Palin's treatment by the press and Democrats; heck, they're used to that sort of treatment.
But it's an eye-opener for the centrists/moderates.
Which is why the polls have shown in the neighborhood of a 20% swing over the last 10 days or so. And things like "lipstick on a pig" just show Obama's desperation. You can say it's a response, but the polls clearly show that really isn't being swallowed by the non-hardcore Democrats.
With this sort of tectonic shift, Obama is in danger. He can still win, of course, but not with the way he's panicked and gaffed his way through the last week.
So let's say nothing changes from the way it is right now.
McCain wins. And the way he's winning right now, it looks like it could have coattails; voting for McCain isn't because they like his policies a little bit better, but still want their local Democrat. No, all signs point to a deep disgust of how the media and Democratic Party politicians have treated Gov. Palin with an extremely aggressive double standard. If that disgust continues, a widespread rejection of Democrats on all levels is not unreasonable. The GOP only needs a net 2 seat gain to take the Senate, right? And about 16 would do it for the House.
I know what the current projections are, but I'm sensing a groundswell that you aren't. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not just repeating something in hopes that makes it come true.
BTW, here's another prediction for you:
On the issues of abortion, gun rights, school choice, immigration, energy, and taxation, the nation is moving to the right. That won't have an immediate impact on elections, i.e., there will still be solidly liberal cities, states, counties, etc...but Democrats are going to be forced to move right to stay competitive in elections.
If you don't see it, I suggest you look up the political term "coccooning".
Megan,
You don’t seem to understand that the sentiments discussed in your post are not unknown to most liberals. Nothing is more stereotypically liberal than to worry in a wide variety of ways about every aspect of one’s privilege, one’s propensity for cultural imperialism, and the need to understand other cultures and subcultures, including those of conservatives. There’s a reason they say liberals are those who won’t take their own side in an argument. (We do get angry at conservatives too, especially when they treat us as though we don’t belong in the country, as though America is their property and their culture and this judgment is theirs to render. This attitude was not only a cultural and media trope throughout much of the post–9/11 period but essentially a method of DeLay-era governance, as well.)
By contrast with our famous and conscientious ambivalence, when was the last time you heard conservative commentators and voters worrying about the feelings of liberals, or acknowledging the diversity and complexity of either liberal or secular subcultures? How often do they introspect about the propriety of associating with a movement in which Karl Rove plays a prominent role, or about the distribution of purple band-aids at the 2004 Republican convention, or the sneers about arugula or the fact that Hyde Park is a somewhat prosperous neighborhood? How often do they worry about the blatant, vicious culture of sectarian religious harassment that has prevailed in recent years at the Air Force Academy? Or how Mitt Romney felt the need to contort his religious persona to be politically viable?
Not all of what is alleged to be liberal condescension is in fact such, even in your example; one need not despise that which one doesn’t happen to relate to personally. Some apparent liberal snobbery is genuine, and worth working on.
That snobbery is, however, a much more frequent target of cultural critics. Conservative condescension, in general, tends to remain invisible. Your commentary about cultural politics fits this pattern as well. It overlooks roughly half the picture, and thus arguably only deepens polarization.
Addendum: I had forgotten the beginning of your post after reading so many comments. You did indeed acknowledge a liberal disposition toward self-inquiry. I think it’s broader than you do. Tellingly, you did not even address the issue of the reverse circumstance, i.e. conservative attitudes of superiority and awareness of their own stereotyping and other unfair judgments about liberals and our ideals.
I want to go back to the beginning, to the post itself and say that I just don't think the basic premise--that the Williams grad would never say, 'this is an interesting guy' is true. I think it's as stereotypical as any other similar image, and just as much likely to blind us to the messier reality. Maybe it's true that a 22-year old graduate of an elite university will act like a snob. Just like a 22-year old coming from any life experience is reasonably likely to be parochial, small, thoughtless. But life happens to us all, and at least some people, regardless of their training or education, become wiser about what people are and what makes someone "interesting".
It's still true that there are patterns to residential sociology and institutional life that make us more likely to see, relate and connect to some people and not other people. Social class, broadly speaking, exists. But I think if you take a cross-section of forty-somethings rather than 22-year olds, you'll find a much more complicated terrain of conversations, connections and mutual understandings. As well as, frankly, a more complicated terrain of mutual loathing organized less by social hierarchy and more by an appreciation for one's own personality and abilities to get along or not with others.
This particular sketch of elitism strikes me as bargain-basement David Brooks, flip and easy. I think it's just a much more complicated thing the way we live through it, even if there's still some deep thing buried underneath all this that holds some kind of validity.
People are assholes everywhere; it just manifests itself in different ways for different demographics. New Yorkers are pushy and snobby; people from rural Minnesota are irrationally stubborn and passive aggressive; Southerners not from the hills are vicious gossips and cliqueish.
No one has a monopoly on virtue, or vice.
I grew up going to a Bible church, and yeah, there are a lot of cool people there. I also have friends who went to state school, and yep they're pretty cool too.
How's your lawsuit against the Park Police coming?
That abrogation of your right to be a bunch of stupid twatwaffles on Thomas Jefferson's birthday was a travesty, just like the fact that the Atlantic pays you dribble and drool here like an annoying three year old.
I am from Alabama and my husband's father is a Southern Baptist minister and my husband likes NASCAR the only people I ever feel are talking down to me or treating me with contempt are Republicans--because they act as if I must be stupid for believing what they spew. I've NEVER met a Republican who in some way did not act elitist. Either financially or culturally. I can't tell you how many times in Alabama I have heard that the Democrats are the party of poor or black people--That is the very definition of elitism.
The logic here seems to be that because Megan and her upper class friends are snobs incapable of judging people on their merits, that it's okay to be racist.
I guess.
Oh, and that everyone on the east coast is just like Megan and her friends. Or at least the people Megan thinks are worth talking to, except for those best friends of hers who have thick southern accents and attend those bible churches, rather than those Gravity's Rainbow churchs.
(Implicit in this argument, as well, is that the meritocratic, geographically diverse admissions policies that the elite institutions claim are false. Or, at least, the ones from those other places don't really count.)
24 hours have come and gone, and nobody has yet picked up the hot potato of my question why, if liberals are such committed egalitarians, some of them -- of all people -- are so snobbish?
Hint: it may involve Gouldner's distinction between economic capital and personal capital.
So if any of our left-of-center fellow bloggers are up to a bit of New Class analysis, fire away. Assuming you have any idea what I'm referring to.
LMJ, I'd particularly like to see a dispassionate, well reasoned essay from you using the critical-reflexive discourse for which you're celebrated.
(Gouldner's term 'critical-reflexive discourse' is posited on the supposition that 'intellectuals universally agree that their positions be defended by rational arguments and that the status of the individual making the argument should have no bearing on the outcome')
Re: Dems vs. Repubs - Gun Control & Abortion
Here is my issue with regard to the differences in how each party approaches gun control and morality issues like gay marriage and abortion. Now, an individual's decision to place relative importance on these issues is their choice and preventing or promoting gay marriage may be a higher priority than promoting a healthy economy. Their choice. However, it seems to me that the Republicans seem willing to emphasize those morality issues, exploiting the importance of those priorities in order to win office. Once the elections are over, the Republican officials have no desire to continue to pursue many of the morality issues that they promised were so important to the election. How many efforts were made by the past administration to pass legislation or a constitutional amendment preventing gay marriage. Of many of these issues, I can only think of the ban on partial-birth abortions, which no one really fought since the use of partial-birth abortions is never used.
I suppose my point is that it seems that the Republicans provide excellent lip-service to those moral goals and priorities during the elections to whip the voters into a lather, but when the process of governing begins, the need to follow-thru on campaign rhetoric is unnececssary, and the desires of many of the masses can remain in the back seat for another 4 years until they need to be counted on again for more votes.
@Boonton,
No, it's no different. If you read the rest of my post, you might notice I made that very point. :)
Someone needs to start a straw man watch, with a special category for Atlantic commentators. I am that person you describe - Southern, white, rural - in a word redneck. I am a liberal. My friends with similar background are also.
Thanks to Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress I was able to go to college - junior college and state university. Thanks to Republican presidents I am still paying for a master's degree.
Wow.
I went to a school where my classmate's parents were mostly farmers, and wage slave types like "plumbers" and "electricians." I grew up in a rural, NASCAR loving family -- with some members now being strong pro-life evangelicals who vote single issues.
I went to a non-ivy league college, which, apparently, you would turn your nose up at, and then went to a non-ivy league law school. I practiced on the coast, married a Dr. (ivy league (don't worry, I married into it) and, public), and now live in the reddest states in the country.
But both on the coast and now, people that talk to me don't try to make a b-line to the bartenders. On the other hand, I don't really give one flying fuck where someone went to undergrad or graduate school so long as they are interesting and interested.
Maybe the stigmata is just so subtle that I, a product of non-ivy league school could not discern it. You must be able to, what with all the critical thinking you must have obtained worshiping at the high holy alter of sophistication, and book learnin.
Now I wonder why I stopped my subscription to The Atlantic.
P.S. Go Obama/Biden!!!
of course these dichotomies are an insult to our intelligence in the red states and the blue states
Well...Off the top of my head I can think of two instances of liberal, "elite" males from the coast meeting young ladies with backgrounds precisely as you describe from, respectively, rural Iowa and rural Virginia.
In the one case, my buddy and his Iowan wife have been happily married for two years, and the two families and friends have meshed quite well. In the other instance, I'm saving up for a ring.
But, yeah, all us coastal "elites" are, um, elitist. Isn't that a form of prejudice in and of itself? Ah, nevermind, you can't fight stupid.
"Coastal folks"?
Have you ever been to Maine, Ms. McCardle? Seem like a hotbed of elitism to you?
What about the Eastern Shore of Maryland?
The coast of Oregon?
You know, most people in New England didn't go to Williams, or indeed any of the Ivies.
But thanks for working to perpetuate stereotypes.
Do you know that perhaps 1% of the people living in New England get to attend the elite colleges?
And some of us who did attend such elite colleges still managed to come from working class backgrounds, and do not, in fact, hold the unwashed masses in contempt like Ms. McCardle apparently does.
You know, it really is worth mentioning at some point that George W. Bush was born in Connecticut, went to school in New England, and then attened Harvard and Yale. But somehow he never got branded as an "elitist". What's up with that?
I see the Rovarian clones have achieved their goal. They have successfully reinvented a genuine, down and dirty culture war.
Congrats on all who are willing to participate and good luck with the continued horrific government you get out of it.
/walks away shaking hanging head
I live in Los Angeles. My blue-collar family hails from Louisiana and Baltimore and I have a sister in Atlanta and I'm pretty sure I have more ties to "normal folks" than does a writer for the fucking Atlantic Monthly. I have never used or thought the term "Flyover state".
I have to see idiots like Westmoreland from Georgia call Obama (and his wife, to boot!) "uppity", I have to listen to son-of-an-Admiral McCain and his billionaire pals paint him as some kind of "elitist", I have to endure years of Conservative bitching about "political correctness" just because they can't make nigger or fag jokes, and then I get to read idiotic Conservative whining crap like this?
You people are simply astonishing.
Repubs conning working people into supporting their endless assault on working people is maybe the biggest and boldest political scam on the planet. And once again, those "non-elitist" elites like McArdle happily to buy into the Repubs' tried-and-true framing of the Great American Class War:
"Hey, did you readers of my blog ever stop to acknowledge the previously unexplored concept that all you 'coastal elites' are assholes for the way you constantly and unknowingly denigrate everyone else in the country?"
That's ground-breaking stuff, Meagan -- definitely worthy of some serious late-night bull sessions in college dorms across this great land of ours.
I'm a coastal person. By which I mean, I live at most one mile from the actual Atlantic Ocean. Born in NYC, raised in the NY burbs, now residing about 10 miles up the coast from Boston, aka blue state ground zero.
And yes, I'm a hardcore northeast political lefty.
In spite of that affliction, I have no problem with people who go to Bible churches, who go to NASCAR events, or who attend state college. I myself attended a state college, and have spent many a Sunday morning in Bible churches. Personally, I don't know a damned soul who went to Williams. My Congressman went to the state college that's about a mile from my house.
I think you extrapolate from your own experience. Another way to put that is that your head is so far up your butt that you think your own behind is the whole world.
It's not. Kindly refrain from speaking for me in the future. I will thank you for it.
You, Megan McArdle, may be a bitchy snob. If you're not, you certainly play the part quite well in print. Maybe your friends are, too. That doesn't mean the rest of us are. Deal with your own crap, please, and leave the rest of us out of it.
I'm confident enough in my education and life choices to find most of this sort of elitism funny, whether it's from friends or the media. But I know any number of people in these parts who don't. And they are why Obama should worry about PA, MI, OH, and WI.
What the hell does the snobbery of NYC lawyers have to do with Barack Obama? Seriously, WTF?
Thanks -
Megan McArdle wrote:
Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"? And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams? It's okay--there's no one here but us chickens. You don't.
Maybe you don't know you're doing it. But I have quite brilliant friends who grew up in rural areas and went to state schools--not Michigan or UT, but ordinary state schools-