Your elitist slip is showing

In an otherwise quite reasonable defense of Cindy Sheehan, Garance Franke-Ruta makes this statement:

Sheehan hails from a part of the country where, when she went looking for answers, the easiest ones to find are the ones that she found. There is no grassroots, accessible organizing by Democratic foreign policy centrists, for example, so when people outside D.C. start looking for answers, all they find is one part of the left spectrum of opinion.

I find it very unusual that someone who blogs would say such a thing. I very much doubt that Sheehan drove to a Berkeley Code Pink potluck for answers to her questions about Iraq. I know she lives in a regional backwater where the folks are all unsophisticated rubes who don’t know nothin’ bout foreign policy like all the smart people in Washington DC do, but I suspect they do have the internet and television. She may have even read a blog called TAPPED.

It’s patronizing to assume that her views are the result of being unable to access the sophisticated thinking in washington DC. I suspect she chose the people who are supporting her today as much as they chose her. After all, two years ago when her son was killed it was pretty hard to find any “sophisticated” liberals in Washington DC who gave a flying fuck. They were still waving flags and talking about kicking ass. It was only the “default leftist” hayseeds out in nowheresville who would give this woman the time of day.

I agree with Franke-Ruta that her power derives from her moral authority as a mother whose child was killed. What else would it be? She’s not a professional politician, analyst or activist. Her political views are secondary. But she isn’t a child, either. Her political views are no more spurious than any other American’s and I would give her more credit than to assume that they stem from an inability to obtain other opinions. If she wanted to read transcripts of Brookings symposiums about Iraq, she certainly could. And she may have for all we know.

Furthermore, as eRobin pointed out on the American Street yesterday, her peacenik beliefs probably stem more from her committed catholicism than anything else. There is a strain of serious lefty catholic politics in this country from long before the Berrigan brothers. Out here in the California boondocks, catholics tend to be very leftwing indeed.

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