The Rubes and the Elites
Apr 15th, 2008 at 11:25 am by Susie
You know, I was talking about this kind of class snobbery in the Democratic party long before Barack Obama showed up:
Now consider the disturbing way that mainstream progressive thinkers and strategists discuss working-class white voters in terms of demeaning stereotypes. Working-class Catholic voters in the industrial states used to be “hardhats.” Now they are “Archie Bunker voters,” or “Joe Lunchbucket,” or “the beer track voters.” Even worse are the terms used for the Southern white working class. It’s composed of “rednecks” or “Bubbas” or — more recently — “NASCAR man” or even “white trash.”
They are apparently aliens whose behavior is irrational, dangerous and unnerving. Peter Beinart, the former editor of the New Republic and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that liberals must “confront” a “scourge”: “Let’s call him Nascar Man … Nascar Man is the guy liberals need to win, but usually don’t. He loves guns, pickup trucks, chewing tobacco, and church on Sunday. He thinks liberals are high-taxing, culturally libertine, quasi-pacifist wimps. And, once liberals have conjured him up, they no longer say what they really believe — even to one another … Nascar Man inhibits intellectual inquiry. He’s the bully everyone wants to appease.”
With the controversy over Obama’s remarks, the mainstream press and Obama supporters have finally noticed the class divide in Democratic politics. They’ve started to wonder why Mr. and Mrs. NASCAR may not be enthusiastic about the Obama candidacy. A Gallup Poll released on April 9 showed that among non-Hispanic white Democrats, support for Clinton vs. Obama among those with a high school education or less — 61 to 33 — was almost the exact reverse of the pattern among those with a postgraduate education — 32 to 61.
The path of least resistance for liberal journalists and bloggers is to respond to these disturbing numbers by demonizing less-educated white Democrats. That is easier for them than to grasp the idea that these voters might actually like Hillary Clinton. One theory holds that “low information” voters, ignorant of the candidates and the issues, favor Clinton because of name recognition. But contrary to the progressive mythology about “low-information voters,” a March Gallup poll shows that “both Obama and Clinton have near-universal name identification across all educational levels.”
Of course, I know many of you agree with equating working-class voters as ignorant, so those of you whose minds are set rather rigidly in cement will probably skip reading the rest of this article. Too bad.
Peter Beinart’s a progressive?
Fascinating.
I don’t know why I even bother to visit this blog anymore.
so again, you are taking a completely true statement vis a vis wedge issues being used to divide voters and using it as a means to claim that obama is a snob and that he denigrates white working class voters.
you then apply it to all obama supporters and try to claim that no one that is educated sees class or knows about working class issues/concerns/problems/etc.
This is pure BS, and indicative of the desperation of people that are trying to claim a white rich former first lady senator that made 109 million dollars since 2001 is somehow more in touch with the working man.
it’s a joke.
you cannot be serious, and if you are, I again invite you to take a step back and try to regain your critical thinking skills and perspective.
but whatever you do, please keep your well-known streak of working-class optimism going along your bright hopes for the future.
no bitterness at all!
Susie, like you, I have watched Hillary be demonized by shitheads in the GOP and its media. But please note that for the past month, Obama has been demonized too. (They had a delay while they were recalibrating their Smear Templates.) Fuck, the head of the AP just called him “Obama bin Laden.” Ha-ha. Funny mistake if they weren’t being serious about it day after day. And this was the AP — not Fox.
It’s time to recognize that THIS is the future — whomever the Dem nominee will be, s/he will be trashed.
What Obama did, was say the truth. Blue-collar people (and others) are pissed at what has happened to all of us — but primarily non-college educated people since 1973. But, oh God, you cannot say such things in the Village — the Children (you and I, Susie) MIGHT FIND OUT.
That economic thing that keeps you semi-employed and without health care, and having to ask donations to keep your car running — that is the real issue. Not guns, gays, and God. But you can’t say that in America because that is CLASS WARFARE. (Like a reverse-class warfare against the poor and middle class is not always being conducted by the editorial page of the WSJ.)
THAT is why William Kristol attacked Obama and wanted him to declare that he was a Marxist. Or maybe that is why you seem to be buying into the idea that he is elitist.
I’m sorry. But perhaps John McCain — a the man who owns 5 homes — is an elitist. Perhaps Hillary and Bill, who have finally been able to earn big bucks in speaking fees since 2000, are elitist. And perhaps Obama and Michelle are elitists, because they are Harvard and Princeton-educated.
So fucking what? Both Obama and Hillary are better than Bush and McCain, and neither one should be sentenced to a cell in the Hague for war crimes.
Interestingly, I don’t remember ever hearing “Archie Bunker” used as a pejorative for working class democrats until the last few months, around the time of the Geraldine Ferraro gaffe, but Wiki informs me that “Archie Bunker voters” have been referred to since 1972 as a shorthand term for what would later become the “Reagan Democrats.” The name came up most recently because Ferraro quite literally was Archie Bunker’s representative — her district was the one in which the fictional character resided (although, as a sexist, racist Nixon-voter, I doubt Archie Bunker would have actually voted for her).
Although the term “Archie Bunker” is now basically short-hand for “white racist” in some circles, the character was much more nuanced than that. Over the course of the series, the character’s bigotries softened as plot developments forced him to deal with minorities as equals and develop a degree of empathy with them. It was revealed that Archie himself was abused as a child by his father (who he continued to defend for it), that he was a high school drop-out from a very poor background who quit school to make money for his family, and that much of his hostility towards Mike “Meathead” Stivik and other college-educated liberals stemmed from his own insecurities about his education, background and life status.
In short, Archie Bunker is the sort of person who Barack Obama (according to his rhetoric, even if you don’t believe in his sincerity) seeks to win over to the Democratic column by transcending the racist and bigoted viewpoints which Republicans have been using for decades in order to get them to ignore economic issues.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I just happened to look up the character on Wiki (I was 11 when All In The Family went off the air) and was surprised at some of the things I learned about him. Food for thought, perhaps?
The argument runs something like this: So yes, Obama said some embarrassing but ultimately true things about the small-town, low-information voters who aren’t voting for him. For this he should be lauded, not criticized.
The reason his words, and the rationalizations after, angered me is that it sounds exactly the same as the arguments made by the pro-lifers, when they try to pass their laws demanding women have ultrasounds and listen to long lectures before having abortions. The pro-coathanger crowd’s argument is that women don’t have enough information to make an informed choice, and that if they would only listen, of course they would do the right thing (as defined by them). If a woman chooses to have an abortion, then she must be morally or intellectually deficient.
I’m way past tired of having other people tell me about my motivations for doing anything, much less for voting.
After opening a clip from Crooks and Liars I came here and was thus reading the above post while listening to Rachael Maddow argue with Joe Scarborough about the appalling way the right has intentionally misread Obama’s statements to turn them into yet another right-wing caricature of “elite latte-sipping liberals” denigrating the working man when lo and behold progressive Suburban Guerilla parrots the exact same line Scarborough is presently working his way through. The Republicans don’t need Karl Rove anymore: “progressives” are doing his job for him.
I guess McCain is gonna be our next president because Clinton’s supporters have so thoroughly poisoned Obama’s run it would be impossible for them to cast a vote for the man. I mean seriously Susie; if you honestly believe all the negatives you post here how could you conceivably vote for the man who WILL BE the Democratic nominee? If he’s guilty of half of what you claim there is no way in hell you could vote for him.
President John McCain. Get used to the sound of it folks – you’ll be hearing it for the next four years.
Obama might not be denigrating small town low information voters, but his supporters are.
I need health insurance. I need a job that will support me. I don’t want to be rich. I want my daughter to be able to go to college.
Senator Clinton has been talking about these issues for a long, long time. I trust her because of that. I know who she is, and what she has worked for for many, many years. That is why I support her. And this is what should be focused on; issues, not image. History, not histrionics.
And I still disagree with that whole yankee settler geographic thing; the results might follow the prediction, but the foundations of the argument are poop.
These issues are endemic in the Democratic party. The democratic party has lost its footing. The Great Society was a democratic impulse; where is it today? The War on Poverty? Gone. Must not be any more poverty. Now we have the much-derided but unassailable War on Drugs, the drugs that people manufacture or grow to escape from poverty.
The issue isn’t Obama vs. Clinton. The issue is who is speaking out for poor people - not “the Poor,” but people who don’t make that much money? New Orleans, anybody? Who made your remote? Who made the armrest in your car, that piece of plastic that holds the buttons to activate your windows and door locks? There’s a good chance it was made by people 25 miles from here. I know those people. They’re good people. Their starting pay hasn’t increased since I worked in that plant eight years ago. These are the people that fall through the cracks. These are the people that aren’t being talked to or listened to. This absence of attention is there, and either it’s more pronounced or I’m paying much more attention to it this year.
Merciless said:
“low information voters” - talk about looking down on people. Do you really listen to yourself when you speak? Your picture should be in the dictionary next to the word “condescending”.
I rather think that Merciless was being ironic in using the term “low information voters”, not owning it as a real description.
Not that I agree in the least with her post. Obama is now like the pro-lifers?? Riiight. He’s a single issue fanatic, intent upon limiting people’s (or women’s) right to choose?? Riiiight. Ye Gods … he phrases something poorly one time, apologises for it, and suddenly he’s like fanatic anti-abortionists? Get real.
There is such a thing as “low information voters” - in fact it probably describes most of the electorate! In the same way that people were bamboozled into supporting the Iraq war (which most now realize was wrong), people also get bamboozled during election cycles by all sorts of irrelevant ad hominem or “cult of personality” narratives. Like this recent Obama flap. Puhleeeze.
This is electioneering, pure and simple. Hillary talks about po’ folk … well lawdy lawdy! I don’ ‘xpect Barrack never encountered none o’ them at that Rev. Wright’s church. Nossir.
Jesus … first he’s a radical anti-Amerrican, now he’s an elitist wine and cheese lover. Lord, what a bunch of baloney.