Shadwell wrote:
NeantHumain wrote:
Shadwell wrote:
...but really the arrogance of liberals is when they treat just your average joe with contempt. They treat the tea party base like they're stupid and they don't try to appeal to that base. Some of that base are indeed stupid, white, racist, bigots, but there are those who have been disenfranchised too and the ultra-right capitalizes on that disenfranchisement while tepid liberals do not. The substance of the Tea Party is hateful and idiotic, but I can't help but feel contempt for democrats as well.
The Tea Party is lock, stock, and barrel owned by Fox News, Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and their right-wing propaganda machine. Tea Party activists are not really amenable to progressive ideas. For liberals to reach out to Tea Party activists, they'd have to compromise their agenda beyond recognition. That said, perhaps liberals could do more to reach out to the demographics the Tea Party and Fox News appeal to. In part, it's cultural differences. Liberals tend to be more urban, and conservatives are more rural. In the rural United States, guns, church attendance, and the like are big parts of the culture, and many of the little rural towns are not very diverse. In cities, guns are mostly used in the commission of crime.
It's human nature to belittle the "outsider" group, so liberals take it out on Tea Partiers, who are, after all, their political competition.
It's also author Thomas Frank's argument "What's the Matter with Kansas," Right wingers are able to shift the rural attitudes even more so onto diversionary tactics such as gay marriage, guns, and abortion because the democrats lack the true populism that Kansas once called home. Rural campaigning did manage to get a democrat elected here in Missouri, but she sucks though. Some of those racist and homophobic tendencies are definitely inherent in rural society, but we are dealing with a group of outsiders in their own right. Rural America has been hammered hard.
The Democrats used to be more electable in rural counties and the Deep South. What killed the Democrats for decades in Dixie was the Civil Rights Acts. You couldn't really call these Dixiecrats liberals, though. FDR, Truman,
et al. were able to build a long-lasting Democratic coalition of New Deal liberals; socially conservative Southern Democrats bought into this because some of the public-works projects were of benefit to their constituents too (these people were social conservatives, not necessarily the pro-business free-market conservatives who were always more common in the Republican Party). Democrats in this era were able to reach out to working-class rural Southern white men by being the defenders of trade unions and labor. The cultural changes of the New Left had not yet migrated into the Democratic Party, and the Democrats were able to espouse hard-line anti-Communist Cold War rhetoric as much as the Republicans.
The turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s played a big role in the shift to the current political divide we see today. The Culture Wars were rooted in the social changes resulting from Vietnam War protesters, hippies, the growth of pop music, the sexual revolution, feminism, etc. These trends were originally coupled with the New Left but have since become largely mainstream (except in some rural, conservative parts of the country). At this time, the Left also became infused with more socialist and progressive ideas—but often with a decidedly anarchical and anti-authoritarian streak (this streak remains outside the Democratic mainstream). Social conservatives were revolted by all this. Republicans, at the time dominated by business interests from places like New England, were able to coopt anger at these changes and integrate their free-market, patriotic ideology into a narrative about free-market capitalism being
the American tradition and liberals being in opposition to all that along with all the other radical social changes liberals wanted to foist on the country.
As labor unions lost their power beginning in the Reagan years, they were encouraged to turn to Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity and began to identify more in terms of cultural values rather than socio-economic position. Democrats were unable to deliver a compelling narrative to these frankly bigoted voters back then. The Republican Party became the party of social conservatism, and its power base shifted to the South. Liberals shifted more towards minorities and well-educated, tolerant urban people. Due to the peculiarities of the U.S. system, racking up votes in the cities is not enough to control the Senate or capture enough electoral votes for the Presidency. Democrats have attempted to make new gains in the South and rural areas by softening their stance on guns and other policy issues—at the expense of alienating progressives.
Liberals would do well by emphasizing economic issues and being able to speak up about the value of a social safety net to offset the uncaring nature of the free market. If they could convince social conservatives to live and let live on sexuality, religion, etc., they may find common cause on many economic issues that today Republicans have them indoctrinated on. This isn't likely, though, when they believe disenfranchising gays is a God-ordained duty and that they'd be "bad Christians" to do otherwise.
31 Jul 2010, 9:13 am
