Atrios has written a post about our new obsession with the voting irregularities and as a member of the reality based community he is rightly concerned that we not make assumptions without actual proof.
I’ve been grappling with how to handle this story as well. I’ve not been flogging it mostly because I think that the electoral college is a crock and that the popular vote should determine who wins elections. Since Bush won by three million or so, it’s hard for me not to see him as legitimate. I haven’t seen any voting anomolies on that kind of scale. If I’m judging by whether the will of the people was observed, then I think it’s likely that more people truly wanted Bush than wanted Kerry. To me, that is the spirit of Democracy and I can’t discount that reality.
On the other hand, the exit poll question is a real one. The explanations by Mitofsky and company are simply not adequate — that Kerry voters were so much more anxious to talk to the pollsters that they actively sought them out. Nonsense. Something else happened here and they need to figure out what it was. If vote fraud on a scale large enough to encompass millions and millions of votes took place then we are deep, deep shit. Unfortunately, I’ve seen nothing that could account for that except an extremely broad conspiracy in many states with different kinds of voting machines and there is no proof of that. (Yes, I know about the states with paper ballot vs electronic machines study, but it doesn’t prove anything, either.)
Do I think the vote in Ohio might have been manipulated? Sure. But as Atrios says, we haven’t yet seen any evidence of large scale fraud, although there is a lot of evidence that our voting systems are terribly fucked up. I have no doubt that the vote could have been fixed in the state with a partisan in charge who wanted to disallow registrations because of the paper stock they were printed on and a vote machine mamufacturer who promised to deliver the state for Republicans. But proof of a conspiracy has not emerged, nor have the numbers in any way added up to the numbers that might have changed the election. There could have been fraud, the lines were absurdly long, intimidation and vote suppression certainly took place on some level. And until we fix these problems with our voting system we will always wonder from now on if elections are rigged.
This is where the real problem is and why I’ve been reluctant to push this story. Many Democrats are coming close to believing that our elections are broadly illegitimate. Except for Florida in 2000 I have not yet seen proof of that although I’m certainly suspicious. What I fear is that if we continue down this path of doubting election results — as opposed to mounting a serious effort to revamp voting procedures in order to ensure fairness — then I think we will begin to lose voters. People have to believe their vote counts in order to participate. If we push this illegitimacy issue beyond situations like Florida in 2000, where the machinations are proven and observable, I think it will hurt us in the long run.
I am absolutely in favor of insisting on an audit trail for vote counts. (And it seems to me that as with any accounting procedure we should audit some portion of the vote on a regular basis to make sure that hanky panky isn’t happening.) If we don’t, then stealing millions of votes really will no longer require a vast right wing conspiracy but merely Roger Stone and a laptop. But, I think we need to be careful to frame this issue in a way that doesn’t give people the excuse to drop out because they “know” the vote is rigged. Once that happens, it might as well be.
Update: I don’t mean in any way to demean those who are pursuing this story. I think it’s vital to find out what happened and pursue remedies. I hope the Democratic party makes it a top priority. It’s clear that our voting system is unreliable. But, I haven’t yet seen evidence that would overturn these election results, so I’m not prepared at this point to say it was stolen. I’m worried that doing that might just make it harder for us in the future.
Update II: A commenter makes the good point that the blogs are the very vehicle by which this story should be flogged, just as talk radio flogged Vince Foster and the like. To be clear, I have no real moral or ethical problem with pushing this story. Idon’t see much evidence that Bush didn’t win the popular vote, but after watching the GOP operate these last dozen years, I have absolutely no loyalty to those sort of lofty ideals anymore. If the vote was stolen in Ohio or Florida, then the election was stolen, period.
But, as I said, my problem with flogging the idea that the election was stolen on the basis of what we know now is that I think it might end up lowering voter participation on our side if people feel the system is rigged and we can’t prove it. I just don’t think it works in our favor to push this kind of electoral impotence two elections in a row. If we keep our powder dry proof may emerge and maybe we can make a serious case to the public. Otherwise, I think it’s best to frame this not as a stolen election but rather as a hideously run election system that must be fixed or we may be cutting off our nose to spite our face.
For the best round-up of these election stories, I would recommend the Sideshow and Bradblog. They have the most comprehensive overviews of all the stories and analysis that I’ve seen.
The Progress Report asked readers to tell them what they thought the Party should do now in light of this loss. They had thousands of responses and picked forty of them to post.
It’s quite and interesting array of ideas. Sadly, nobody sent in my idea that we desperately need to put on a better “campaign show” with solid gold dancers, sky divers and lion tamers (metaphrically speaking) in order to get people’s attention in this raucous, disjointed post modern world. We are such an earnest bunch. Oh well. Maybe somebody will at least think to hire away Bush’s sound guy. The sound compression on the cheers at his rallies was masterful.
And, nobody recognized that negative, ugly, hateful campaigning was what worked. It seems that we all feel that if we had just reached out and touched people we could have made a difference. We don’t “connect,” which may be true, but let’s face facts — Bush doesn’t “connect” with people’s better natures, he “connects” directly to their id. And, I’m afraid that the id trumps finer feelings in many, many people. Yet a large number of these suggestions have to do with sincere appeals to try harder to empathise and relate to those who didn’t vote for us. Hey, maybe it’ll work. We are the “nurturant parent,” after all.
On a practical level, I have no problem with voting for southerners or westerners, never have. Contrary to the new myth emerging about the godless heathens on the coasts, we elitists have quite happily voted for Texans and southern, gospel preaching Democrats quite often in the last 40 years. The fact that we voted in huge numbers for Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Gore would seem to put the lie to this belief that we hold southerners in contempt, but what do I know? It certainly does appear that we heathen blue staters quite willingly vote for people outside of our alleged latte-liberal bicoastal culture, yet those heartland middle American red states who are complaining about our condescension refuse to ever vote for someone outside their own region. (Except, of course, those rock-ribbed Hollywood movie stars.) Just who holds who in contempt again?
Anyway, read all the suggestions. They are all good hearted and sincere and many contain good ideas. Only cynics like me subscribe to the dazzle ’em with bullshit school and that’s probably a good thing.
Ronnie, Junior and Arnie tell me that it’s not about anything more than a certain macho style that gets these people. None of those guys have the remotest relationship to salt of the earth middle America, but they play the archetypal leadership role of All American manly man very well.
Xan over at corrente has a very interesting post up about “The Prosperity Project.” I wrote a long piece about it last year and blogger ate it (before I learned to save my posts.) I didn’t have the heart to re-write it and the moment passed.
But, Xan has researched this very interesting and (so far) underreported story of a soft intimidation project on the part of Republican businessmen.This is a very sophisticated operation under the auspices of BIPAC, a long time Republican business organization. I don’t know how many of you have had a boss who was a vociferous Republican, but I have. They couldn’t tell me for whom to vote, but they sure made it clear that if I spoke out it wouldn’t be looked upon kindly. And plenty of others, who normally wouldn’t care a bit about politics, suddenly found that they were favored employees by going out of their way to push the bosses political agenda. This Prosperity Project works on the assumption that managers will perform to their bosses orders and recommended Prosperity Project materials (particularly its marvelously misleading web site) to “educate” workers on issues of concern to them. It looks like they pulled out the stops in this election:
Managers at more than 50,000 companies in Ohio urged employees to vote, while trying to coax them in e-mails to look at customized internal Web sites rating politicians’ votes on business issues, a project leader said. One rating gave Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry a zero last year on votes affecting manufacturers.
Greg Casey, a former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms who headed what he calls business’ “below-the-radar” national effort, said it resulted in 30 million electronic contacts with workers, about 700,000 the day before the election.
Casey believes that the “Prosperity Project” had a big impact in Ohio, citing research suggesting that for every 10 employees who scanned company Web sites, one was motivated to vote. He said Ohio companies made 1.3 million employee contacts, more than nine times Bush’s 136,483-vote victory margin in the state.
Prosperity Project officials, however, say they are “respectful” to employees and merely offer them access to information affecting their companies’ prospects in a tough global economy.
I think that we are beginning to get the outlines of an election that had a number of under the radar GOP “grassroots” campaigns with little overt national direction. The Republicans seem to have been successful by presenting a candidate who wasn’t specific, but rather presented an image of leadership that people felt comfortable with. Various groups then ran a series of campaigns aimed at specific constituencies that applied their particular policy preference to this vague agenda.
But the untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign. The White House struggled to stay abreast of the Christian right and consulted with the movement’s leaders in weekly conference calls. But in many respects, Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon.
This was particularly true of the same-sex marriage issue. One of the most successful tactics of social conservatives — the ballot referendums against same-sex marriage in 13 states — bubbled up from below and initially met resistance from White House aides, Christian leaders said.
In dozens of interviews since the election, grass-roots activists in Ohio, Michigan and Florida credited President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, with setting a clear goal that became a mantra among conservatives: To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power.
This is interesting because it’s exactly what the Democrats have been criticized for all these years — being a coalition of single issue consituencies developing their own agendas, not working well with others and creating havoc on the ability to govern when the party is in power. When each group thinks they are the single reason the party won an election, they tend to think they have priority and it’s a big headache. The Republicans have been pretty good at keeping their coalition together with appeals to patriotism and fear of the other. We’ll see how long that works for them. Trying to keep the New Deal coalition together was very difficult — and that was with a very impressive record of achievement that materially changed peoples lives and brought the country through a depression and WWII to a period of unprecedented prosperity.
Meanwhile, for the first time in memory, the Democrats put away their differences and worked together. And much to my surprise and delight, I’m not seeing the circular firing squad nearly as vicious as it usually is after a loss. Perhaps we can hang tough long enough for the Republicans to get a taste of governing with single issue constituencies for a while. Good luck with that.
May I just point out that if you are not reading James Wolcott every day you are missing out on life. Today, he takes Lil’ Andy to task for his strange appearance on Bill Maher in which he seemed terribly confused about who he is now that he’s voted for a losing Democrat in a time of right wing ascendancy. It’s not easy being a conservative gay catholic in this big old Red State monolith.
Wolcott says:
Like an infant banging his spoon on the high-chair tray, Sullivan threw quite a tantrum last night after Maher had the GALL to interview Noam Chomsky. Sullivan sputtered that Chomsky made “millions” going around the world telling audiences America was “evil.” Now I don’t pretend to have read or heard all of the millions of words Chomsky has written and spoken, but “evil” doesn’t seem to be a prominent word in his vocabulary, being so theological; he tends to talk in terms of brutal realpolitick and self-interest. And it’s highly unlikely he’s raking in “millions”–if he is, he isn’t splurging on wardrobe and pimpmobiles.
Since every war criminal in the current Bush administration will be able to command huge honoraria on the lecture circuit and lucrative positions on corporate boards once they leave the bloodshed behind, working up ire over a professor’s speaking fees seems a bit much.
Unable to impart the red depths of Chomsky’s villainy to host and panel, Sullivan attacked Chomsky for being symptomatic of an America-hating elitist left. “That’s why you lost this week!” Sullivan said.*
“You said you voted for Kerry!” Maher shot back. “You lost too!”
As Wolcott says, Maher was particularly good this show. (Last week’s freakish appearance by what seemed to be a brain damaged Kevin Costner still hasn’t quite worked its way through my system yet.) Andrew Sullivan’s outburst about Chomsky was uncomfortably out of sync with what Chomsky had said. I’m no particular fan (or student) of Chomsky, but his actual influence on lives here and around the world is somewhat less real and palpable than that of the people who just voted to enshrine Sullivan’s second class citizen status into their state constitutions. I can’t help but feel that this enraged reaction may have been just a bit of desperate psychological misdirection — not a pretty thing to watch on a Friday night with a couple of glasses of wine in you. Ugh.
Wolcott also noted the strange fact that Sullivan turned his back to the audience and gave himself a thorough butt massage right on camera at the end of the show. I noticed it, but I chalked it up to the wine and the long sleepless week I’d just had. Now I’m really freaked out.
Atrios mentioned last week that interesting things are going to happen here in the blogosphere and I have heard some of the same rumblings. I don’t know how it will shake out, but it’s clear that the nascent media infrastructure that we see is not going to fold tent but rather be expanded and grow, both from individual effort and institutional support.
This election was a heartbreaker, and the country is in for a very bumpy four years I’m afraid. But I don’t get the sense that Democrats are seriously thinking of dropping out or folding up tent. Indeed, I see the opposite.
One of the great lessons of history is that magnanimity in victory is a much wiser path to peace than rubbing the losers nose in their defeat. From what I’m seeing and hearing, some people haven’t learned that lesson very well. I suspect they will come to regret it.
I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called ‘red states’ — a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree — which here means, literally, middle America.Tom Wolfe
This is certainly true. But, that resentment wasn’t created by Michael Moore or Hillary Clinton or Tom DeLay and Pat Robertson.
I was being facetious in the post below, but I do think that it’s important to recognise something about the phony debate that’s taking place right now about the liberal bi-coastal elites and how they allegedly force their lack of morality on the heartland.
Before I get into it, this map, which I’m sure you have all seen by now, is a good place to start this discussion.
Why do I bring this up? Because it’s important to remember that one of the main reasons for the civil war was that the southerners believed that the north was trying to impose their “values” upon them and they deeply resented it.
From the earliest days of the republic this was a problem. A different culture grew up around slavery in the south as did the tension surrounding the issue. The mere act of rejecting it was cause for insult and the south withdrew into a cultural identity based largely upon its difference from the north. Indeed, this was one of the defining rationales for slavery — the exceptionalism of the southern culture.
The north did condescend. Many believed that slavery was a barbaric and primitive institution and that those who condoned it were, therefore, primitive and barbaric. They did not keep their opinions to themselves. From the very beginning this tension created a huge amount of resentment among southerners.
The resentment didn’t come from political powerlessness or disenfranchisement. During the first 70 years of the country, the south dominated the national government. It didn’t help.
From a speech given at the centennial of the civil war by historian Stephen Z. Starr
…it is tragic to think that for two generations, the mental energies of the South were devoted to elaborating justifications of slavery – perhaps to appease its own feelings of guilt – to the exclusion of every other form of cultural activity.
[…]
The second basic issue between the sections lay in the area of politics; necessarily so, for it was in the political arena that the problems between the sections were fought out until the South decided that political solutions, reached by a process of give and take, were no longer adequate to protect its “honor and self-respect.”
Bear in mind that middle and upper class Southerners were politicians by birthright. Active participation in politics was, in the South, a way of life. One would expect, therefore, to find a much greater degree of political skill and acumen there than in the North. What one finds there instead is demagogy, bombast, irresponsibility, incompetence, a childish refusal to come to grips with realities, and a habitual substitution of slogans, symbols and bogeymen for facts. These are strong statements, but hardly strong enough to fit the situation.
The South had an almost unbroken control of the Federal Government from 1789 until secession. The presidents were either Southerners., or Northerners like Pierce and Buchanan, who were mere puppets in the hands of Southern senators and cabinet members. For seventy years, the Supreme Court had a majority of Southern justices. With the aid of its Northern allies and the three-fifths rule, the South controlled one or both houses of Congress. The fifteen Slave States, with a white population of not quite eight million, had 30 senators, 90 representatives, and 120 electoral votes, whereas the State of New York, with a population of four million had two senators, 33 representatives, and 35 electoral votes. Even the election of 1860 left the South in control of both houses of Congress, and until at least 1863, Lincoln and the Republicans would have been powerless to pass legislation hostile to the South, and through its control of the Senate, the South could have blocked the confirmation of every Lincoln appointee whom it considered unfriendly. In spite of this, and notwithstanding Lincoln’s repeated assurances that he would not, directly or indirectly, interfere with slavery where it already existed, the South chose to secede.
Starr goes on to show that this irrational behavior was not due to the south not getting most of the the legislation it wanted, because it did. But it became an emotional issue in which it was important to “crack the whip over the heads of the northern men” and they began to make enemies of their allies in the territories. As Starr says, “this tale of political ineptitude, the habitual misreading of the minds of opponents, the misjudging of the practical possibilities of a given situation, the purposeless striving for effect, the substitution of arrogance and threats for rational discussion, could be expanded many fold.”
Oh my.
Starr’s view is that the south behaved irrationally prior to the civil war because of it’s defensiveness about its culture of slavery. He grants that there other differences, some exaggerated and some quite real, but notes that most people of both regions were farmers and had more in common than not. The record suggests one very important difference, however, and that was that the south had a much inferior educational system,
…in 1850, 20.3% of white Southerners over the age of twenty were illiterate, as against less than one-half of one percent of New Englanders.
But it is important to point out that lack of educational opportunities was a significant factor in preventing the rise of a class of intelligent, educated farmers and artisans in the South. Only two Southern states, North Carolina and Kentucky, had respectable public school systems before 1860, and this had much to do with the failure of Southern whites to understand that their “peculiar institution” was out of tune with the moral, social, and even economic sentiment of the times, and with their readiness to follow the Pied Pipers who thought that a nation and a state could be founded on the enslavement of four million human beings. These are among the dangers of a closed society and of an iron curtain.
Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling, by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason. And this was the refuge of the South. For ten years before secession, Northerners were commonly referred to as “mongrels and hirelings.” The North was described as “a conglomeration of greasy mechanics filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists … hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman’s body servant.” And, most fatal delusion of all, Southerners began to credit themselves with fighting ability equal to that of nine, five, or more conservatively, three Northerners. Once a nation or a section begins to speak and think in such terms, reason has gone out the window and emotion has taken over. This is precisely what happened in the South, and this is why the Cotton States seceded before Lincoln was even inaugurated and before his administration had committed, or had a chance to commit, any act of egression against them. Such behavior is fundamentally irrational, and cannot be explained in rational terms.
Interesting, yes?
The civil war, of course, made everything worse. Reconstruction was a nightmare and the north never had even the slightest idea what to do about the race problem once they dealt with the slavery problem. (Indeed, when it comes to racism, the north shared most of the same beliefs. They just didn’t live among many blacks so they didn’t have to deal with those problems until much later.) But, the ignominy of reconstruction gave birth to the Lost Cause mythology and that only reinforced the already outsized sense of wounded pride.
The south today has forty percent that votes with the blue states in national elections. They are white progressive modern people who share the southern cultural identity but have avoided the 200 year old baggage that makes it impossible to identify with people not of their own tribe and african-americans who were excluded except as scapegoats and second class citizens. (I’m sure nonetheless that some of what I’ve written sticks in the craw of many of you and you may feel that old resentment. It appears to me as if this is an ingrained reaction to discussions of this sort. It certainly has been around forever.)
I’m not going to take a stand against “heartland values” or “southern culture” whatever it’s defined as this week. It seems to me that it would be worthless, because this battle is obviously tribal, not specific to any particular issue. Slavery and Jim Crow are long gone. Now it’s religion and gays. The lines are drawn as they’ve always been and there will be no reconciliation through politics. Even a bloody civil war couldn’t do that.
History suggests that the southern culture has always been as defined by it’s resentment toward the rest of the country as much as anything else. The so-called bi-coastal liberal elites certainly don’t think of themselves as having a lot in common with each other, other than being Americans. People from Los Angeles and Vermont call themselves Californians and New Englanders, respectively. I don’t think they believe they share a “culture.” People in Seattle call themselves pacific northwesterners. People in New York call themselves New Yorkers — Chicagoans midwesterners. They identify themselves by their specific region and a broader identity as Americans, not by this alleged Bi-coastal cultural alliance. This notion of two easily identifiable cultures is only held by the people who used to call themselves the confederacy and now call themselves “the heartland.” That alone should be reason to stop and question what is really going on here.
One thing this little historical trip should show everyone is that it is nonsense to think that this cultural resentment and cultural contempt was created by Hollywood movie stars and limosine liberals from New York City. Indeed, this has been a problem since the dawn of the republic. And it isn’t a problem that will be solved by the Red States gaining and maintaining power. They have held power many times throughout our history and they were still filled with resentment toward “the north” (now “the liberal elites.”) And, it won’t be solved by adopting different stances on “moral issues,” or telling the current Democratic southern constituencies to suck it up. Maybe it’s time we looked a little bit deeper and realized that this tribal problem isn’t going to be solved by politics at all.
The “liberal elites” will no doubt be making more compromises in the direction of heartland values for pragmatic reasons. But, judging by history, it won’t change a thing. Neither will Republican political dominance. So, maybe it’s time for the heartland to take a good hard look at itself and ask when they are going to adopt the culture of responsibility they profess with such fervor. It sure looks to me as if they’ve been nursing a case of historical pique for more than 200 years and that resentment no longer has any more meaning than a somewhat self-destructive insistence on maintaining a cultural identity that’s really defined by it’s anger toward the rest of the country. They are talking themselves into a theocratic police state in order to “crack the whip over the heads of the northern men” and it’s not likely to work out for them any better this time than it did the first time. The real elites in the church, the government and the corporations will take them down right along with us when that comes to pass.
Note: Of you don’t believe me, check out this excerpt from Michael Graham’s strange Redneck Nation. According to him, everything’s changed. The south is more cultured, the north is more coarse, the south is smarter, the north is stupider. The stereotypes have been turned on their head. At the end of the day, however, the grievance is always there no matter the circumstances. The south still gets no respect.
As moderates from the heartland, like Tom Daschle, are picked off by the Republicans, the party’s image risks being defined even more by bicoastal, tree-hugging, gun-banning, French-speaking, Bordeaux-sipping, Times-toting liberals, whose solution is to veer left and galvanize the base. But firing up the base means turning off swing voters. Gov. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican, told me that each time Michael Moore spoke up for John Kerry, Mr. Kerry’s support in Nebraska took a dive.
Mobilizing the base would mean nominating Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008 and losing yet again.
The last thing we want is the support of the base. They, after all, are the problem. We need Americans, my friends. Rock ribbed, Real Americans, not a bunch of latte swilling bicoastals (even the ones in San Antonio and Minneapolis.) Thankfully, I hear they are all moving to Canada or France where they belong.
He says that we need to support faith based programs, tell blacks in the south that the confederate flag is their problem, forget guns (I thought we had) and help George W. Bush advance his agenda as much as possible.
He’s right, but it’s not enough. After all, we’ve already capitulated entirely on the death penalty, welfare and gun control issues and we put thousands of cops on the street, balanced the budget and told both blacks and gays in the military to zip their lips since ’92, but those were obviously not adequate to prove that we are Real Americans. (How could we have thought that killing one retarded black man or a whole passle of Vietnamese would compete with George W. Bush’s 158 confirmed kills?) There is much more “compromising” to do before anyone will believe that we mean it.
Some Democrats are way behind the curve by inching to the conclusion that ditching Roe vs. Wade is the way to go. That’s a big duh. Of course we will. And everyone agrees that it’s ixnay on the gay arriagemay. We won’t be making that mistake again.
Public money for religious education is obviously on the agenda and we can easily embrace it with everything we’ve got. I don’t think that endorsing faith based programs is enough. All secular social programs should immediately be outsourced to Charles Colson and Jerry Falwell with Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton’s blessing. But, even with all that I just have a sneaking suspicion that it might not be enough to persuade Real Americans to let us back into the country in 2008. It’s going to take something much bolder than that — and rightly so because they did, after all, win 51% of the vote.
Therefore, I propose that after we outlaw abortion, turn over huge amounts of public money to evangelical churches and enshrine discrimination against gays into the US Constitution, we fully and publicly endorse creationism. This is an issue that hasn’t worked its way up to the forefront of a national election yet and we could actually outflank the Republicans if we get on the bandwagon right now. This could be our issue in 2008.
First though, we have to put a muzzle on people who write things likethis. Michael Kinsley strikes exactly the right apologetic tone, but still fails to realize that the very point of his article is exactly the kind of liberal elitism that is oppressing the heartland:
So yes, OK, fine. I’m a terrible person — barely a person at all, really, and certainly not a real American — because I voted for the losing candidate on Tuesday. If you insist — and you do — I will rethink my fundamental beliefs from scratch because they are shared by only 47% of the electorate.
And please let me, or any other liberal, know if there is anything else we can do to abase ourselves. Abandon our core values? Pander to yours? Not a problem. Happy to do it. Anything, anything at all, to stop this shower of helpful advice.
There’s just one little request I have. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?
I mean, look at it this way. (If you don’t mind, that is.) It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?
We on my side of the great divide don’t, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don’t claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?
As many conservative voices have noted, American society suffers from a cult of grievance. To put it crudely, everyone wants some of the things blacks got from the civil rights movement: sympathy, publicity, occasional preferential treatment and a general ability to put everybody else on the defensive. No doubt liberals are responsible for this deplorable situation, and I apologize. Again. As a softheaded liberal, I even like the idea that our competitive culture has a built-in consolation prize.
But be fair! (A liberal whine, I know. Sorry.) Conservatives shouldn’t assert the prerogatives of victory and then claim the compensations of defeat as well. You can’t oppress us and simultaneously complain that we are oppressing you.
Well, of course you can do this, if you want. Who’s to stop you? I just kinda wish you wouldn’t. If you don’t mind my asking. Thanks. Sorry.
Sorry. There is no reason for Real Americans to listen to this until we have proved to them and to the wholesome heartland media voices of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh that we are worthy of making such a request.
Getting out in front on the creationism issue is the perfect way to make these people see that we understand them. And jettisoning our outmoded fealty to reason and science will have the salutory effect of freeing us from all sorts of other inconvenient moral issues like tolerance, fairness and equality. This is how we will convince Real Americans that we are the kind of principled people they can respect.
Update: I see that the “New”James Wolcott agrees with me.
Wolcott says:
Democrats could campaign to rescind the Martin Luther King holiday, but I fear this would backfire, since everyone likes an excuse to take a day off from work and would resent having to drag themselves that particularly Monday.
No, something ballsier is needed for a turnaround in perception. A taboo or two needs to be smashed.
Therefore I am proposing that the official Democratic slogan for 2008 be “Shoot a Fag for Jesus.”
It’s a simple, catchy slogan that will look good on a bumperstickers, yet carry a multilateral strike: pro-guns, anti-gay, and unashamedly Christian.
Since abortion is so problematic for Democrats, “Shoot a Babykiller for Jesus” might do the trick in some of the battleground states as a supplemental bumpersticker.
Obviously this is all still in the brainstorming stage, and will need to be focus-grouped, but I believe it nudges us further along the path to success gently lit by Kristof’s lamp of wisdom.
I like it. With a pro-creationism candidate, I think we might just pull it off. Maybe. If not, there’s always mandatory church attendance and rolling back the right to vote for women and blacks. We’ve got plenty of cards left to play. We’ll get there.
Much has been made of the fact that “moral values” topped the list of voters’ concerns, mentioned by more than a fifth (22 percent) of all exit-poll respondents as the “most important issue” of the election. It’s true that by four percentage points, people in states where gay marriage was on the ballot were more likely than people elsewhere to mention moral issues as a top priority (25.0 vs. 20.9 percent). But again, the causality is unclear. Did people in these states mention moral issues because gay marriage was on the ballot? Or was it on the ballot in places where people were already more likely to be concerned about morality?
More to the point, the morality gap didn’t decide the election. Voters who cited moral issues as most important did give their votes overwhelmingly to Bush (80 percent to 18 percent), and states where voters saw moral issues as important were more likely to be red ones. But these differences were no greater in 2004 than in 2000. If you’re trying to explain why the president’s vote share in 2004 is bigger than his vote share in 2000, values don’t help.
If the morality gap doesn’t explain Bush’s re-election, what does? A good part of the answer lies in the terrorism gap. Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him. Terrorism was cited by 19 percent of voters as the most important issue, and these citizens gave their votes to the president by an even larger margin than morality voters: 86 percent for Bush, 14 percent for Kerry.
These differences hold up at the state level even when each state’s past Bush vote is taken into account. When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.
I had always had my suspicions that the real problem for us was the terrorism issue. Kerry’s anti-war past and the mere fact that he was a Democrat fit into an image of weakness that is almost impossible to break. That’s why he rightly emphasized his war hero status and why Rove called in the swift boat liars to tear it down. What they wanted to do was get that image of Kerry the hero out of people’s minds and the image of Kerry the effete liberal planted firmly in its place.
Kerry did a better job of overcoming that obstacle, and the more intractable obstacle of being a Democrat during a national security crisis, than anyone had a right to expect. He almost pulled it off. If he had he would have been able to banish the image of the Democratic weakling as effectively as Clinton banished the fiscal irresponsibility label. Too bad.
On the other hand, as Tom Schaller points out in this post on Daily Kos, there is a silver lining:
[Ralph]Reed, you see, wanted to not merely deliver the social conservatives’ “values” votes this year, but to ensure that their pivotal role be made noted and respected — broadcast and trumpeted, loudly and quite publicly. They didn’t want to just win; they want credit and plaudits for scoring the decisive touchdown.
Awesome. The fact that this election – the first post-9/11 election, with a war in Iraq abroad and a changing economic situation at home – will be remembered by the we-need-it-simplified media as the “values” election, is Reed’s great gift to us.
Why? Because I suspect that right now that the Wall Street wing, and the small business wing, and the defense industry wing, and the tax reform wings of the party are shuddering at the thought that Americans are being told that Bush got to 51 percent based on “values” voting. Would not the better “take-away” storyline from this election be that Bush won because the nation believes in Republicans’ fiscal and defense policies, their steadfastness and leadership abilities? I’m meeting a lot Republicans (both conservatives and moderates) who do not want this election to be framed as the Ralph Reed Rout.
[…]
And thus, the biggest silver lining of this election is how the GOP’s victory is thus far being claimed, framed and explained. To that I say, “Let us join that chorus.” And we should do so now, because there is immediacy in the post-election window of opportunity.
I think this may be right. We should spread it far and wide that this election was won by fringe fundamentalist first time voters who now feel empowered to force their views on everyone else, including mainstream Christians. It looks like Bush owes this small bloc of religious extremists big time. Gay marriage is just the beginning. Abortion, birth control, women’s rights the whole enchilada is now up for grabs.
That has to freak out the money and military types who are the real backbone of the party. After all, Bush didn’t run on “values,” he ran on being Commander Codpiece. This thing could be a boogeyman around their neck.
Kevin Drum thinks that if Democrats dial back the liberal hectoring, we will get more votes from Middle Americans who aren’t extremists but who feel that we are too extreme:
They’re the ones who are uncomfortable with homosexuality, but understand that a steadily increasing acceptance of gay rights is probably inevitable. They don’t want to ban abortion, but feel like it’s common sense to require parental notification. And they’re ready to agree that we need to do something about global warming, but that doesn’t mean they take kindly to thinly veiled accusations that they’re personally responsible for it just because they drive an SUV or eat a Big Mac.
I can’t help but point out that the president just ran an entire campaign portraying Massachusetts as being some kind of foreign country so perhaps this cultural discomfort might be laid at the feet of the Republicans as much as the Democrats. I’m not exactly feeling the love from people who insist that Democrats aren’t Americans or that we are all traitors or that we are now “neutered” by this election and should be a lot more docile, like farm animals. That stuff isn’t coming from religious extremists, it’s coming from the mainstream leadership of the Republican party.
I’m not sure who these hectoring liberals are who get under the heartland’s skin with accusations about Big Macs, but I don’t think it was John Kerry. John Kerry didn’t run on disallowing parental notification laws or gay marriage. In fact, he specifically endorsed the former and ruled out the latter. He jettisoned gun control from the debate altogether. He went to church, talked about faith, and from all acounts he really is a sincere Catholic. The party had long since abandoned prison rehabilitation, the death penalty and welfare. Partial birth abortion has been outlawed. I’m not sure where we can go with this global warming issue if people aren’t willing to hear that driving an SUV is contributing to the problem unless we can talk about international agreements, which seems to be out also. Maybe the Dems should just let that one go too.
Be that as it may, the Republicans just won 51% and they say it’s because they don’t like our values, so we have no choice but to recognise that and talk about it. It’s not the first time. This is what the DLC acknowledged back in the 1980’s and changing position on the death penalty and welfare is what helped get Clinton elected (with a big assist from Ross Perot and a painful recession.)
Unfortunately, Clinton never got 50% in either election. And once in office he was tortured endlessly by the GOP, and lost the congress long before Monica bared her thong. He was an effective president anyway and I don’t quarrel with his legacy. His political skills, however, didn’t have as much to do with his ability to attract a majority, which he never did, but rather his ability to survive a constant political assault once in office.
This values debate has shown itself to be extremely useful to the GOP for decades and they are very adept at moving the goalposts when it’s necessary. (Remember, they were the ones who kept saying “you can’t legislate morality” during the civil rights era.) No matter how much we move to the right or adapt our positions on things like parental notification and gay marriage and the rest, there will always be another wedge issue there to exploit and convince the heartland that we liberals are trying to shove our immorality into their lives against their will. And that’s because it isn’t about values at all. It’s about politics. The Republicans have identified themselves as the party of the heartland tribe very effectively by pitting themselves against the enemy tribe —the Democratic liberal elite, as they define it. And they have a very effective machine that spreads that word.
Last time Gore allegedly lost because he was in the pocket of the liberal elites in the cities who want to ban guns. This time Kerry spent half the campaign toting a shotgun and allegedly lost because the liberal elite wants to legalize gay marriage. In years gone by it was gays in the millitary or welfare queens or draft dodgers or bra burners or whatever. It’s always something. Always.
The reason the heartland rejected John Kerry has absolutely nothing to do with what he actually believed or said. He could have adopted George W. Bush’s platform in its entirety and he would have been portrayed and believed to be some kind of an alien being descending upon the heartland like an invader from an enemy land. This has been one of the great successes of a 30 year political realignment that is settling into what can only be seen as a cold civil war. We won’t resolve it by continually trying to adjust piecemeal on values issues. We aren’t winning by doing that any more than we were winning by running on social issues or the nuclear freeze in the 1980’s.
That has been tried. We need a new, more modern approach altogether.
I might suggest that one of the things we begin to do is expose the hypocrisies of the Republican party. These decent, reasonable heartlanders might not be able to see liberals as being decent and reasonable but perhaps they could have their eyes opened by the cosmopolitan decadence of their own political leaders. Sometimes people have to be shaken out of their secure assumptions about their own tribe before they can see the merits of another.
Instead of running lukewarm values campaigns within their frame of social conservatism, perhaps we could run competing values campaigns on all-American libertarian beliefs like “mind your own business” and aim it at government, corporations and religious fanatics alike. Maybe we could shake free some of those western states from their coalition. Talk up the environment as stewardship of the land for hunting and fishing as well as conservation for the future.
But, frankly I believe that the problem will be solved through something much different. The world has changed even if the political bludgeon of values hasn’t. I really think politics has morphed into a post modern epistomological relativism that can only be dealt with through sensation and spectacle, not reason — the subject of many future posts, I imagine.
Update: Here’s an interesting article from the Texas Observer about Lakoff and Luntz that touches on what I wrote in the last paragraph:
As long as liberals and progressives insist that having the facts on their side is all that matters, they are doomed to impotence. The next move for the left in the frame war is to accept that it’s okay to cherry-pick reality as long as it conforms to a frame that’s morally acceptable. According to Lakoff, we already do it every day.
Blog commenter Thumb has decided to make the switch to the Republican Party and he’d like to share with you his reasons. I find them very convincing and I will be joining him. My life’s about to become a whole lot easier:
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
So the people voting for Bush told exit pollers that moral values are their #1 issue.
Because the Republicans are obviously superior in both numbers and cause, and their values oriented agenda should no doubt be a boon to human kind, there’s obviously only one thing left to do at this point. Convert. Therefor, in an act of supreme solidarity to our new national conservative alliance and their emphasis on values, I would just like to say, they’re right. I’m ready to sign up.
But first I need to declare that I too no longer care about losing millions of American jobs. I too no longer care about health care. Or social security. I also no longer care about education. I no longer care what happens to the poor, the elderly or the millions of American children growing up in poverty, despair and hopelessness. I no longer care that the US ranks a lowly 41st in infant mortality. I no longer care that the gap between rich and poor is approaching third world levels. I no longer care that Fortune 500 corporations can avoid paying taxes by opening an offshore mailbox and I no longer care that the working class will be forced pick up the difference. I no longer care that we’ve taken a record fiscal surplus and in three years turned it into the largest debt in the history of our country or that it will be our children, and their children, that will have to pay it back. I also no longer care how many Americans die at the hands of terrorists (as long as they’re dying over there and not here at home) or how many thousands of foreign civilians die in the course of our projecting American global hegemony. I no longer care what the rest of the world thinks of America, as long as they know to fear us. I no longer care about the science of potential medical breakthroughs nor do I care about slowing the spread of AIDS nor whether we have sufficient supplies of safe vaccines. I no longer care that the number of abortions is on the rise (though I’ll pound my chest and pretend that I do) because I no longer care about birth control, sex education or family planning. I no longer care about our environment and whether we’re allowing industries to poison our water, our air and ultimately our food supply, and I no longer care about the consequences of releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and its likelihood of accelerating global warming. I no longer care that our Bill of Rights, once enshrined to protect our personal freedoms and liberty, is being stripped down or that our 200 year old Constitutional protections are being traded for a false sense of security.
So what do I share with our new majority as my #1 concern? Values. I care about moral values.
Now that I’ve completed the switch to the other side moral values is all that matters to me. Moral values. Yes sir, I care enough that sufficient numbers of people share these moral values to make sure that we elect politicians that will put these moral values into law (even if it takes rigging the new electronic voting machines) and that those politicians in turn appoint judges guaranteed to ensure that everyone else is forced to live by these same moral values. Now some of you remaining Unbelievers may ask, “But if everything you no longer care about isn’t a moral value, what are your moral values?” Easy. The single most important moral value, overriding all other concerns, is that two people of the same sex are blocked from achieving secular legal recognitions that could in any way be similar to that enjoyed by heterosexual couples. Health and survivor benefits? Forget it. Employment protection? Come on. Inheritance rights? No way. Hospital visitation? Get real. Adoption? GOD FORBID!
You few, final remaining Democrats, moderates, greens and libertarians really need to get onboard the bandwagon. This new stripped down moral value is so easy I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself earlier. Effortless morality. That’s the ticket. It’s like a gift from God. Now let’s jam it down everyone’s throat.