Red State Victory

The Conning Tower ^ | 11-10-04 | Trentino

[Davis]

Red State Victory

There is something pleasantly wacky about the response of Lefty scribblers to the Republican election victory. The obvious reasons therefor, such as the voters' estimate of the trustworthiness of the Republican candidates and of the coherence of their message never occurs to blue-state pundits as they scratch their double-domes in bafflement.

At the end of their cognitive tunnel, a bulb glows dimly. Then, they begin to realize that red-state voters were ignorant dolts, deluded troglodytes, primitives, fanatical Bible-toting NASCAR retards. So intellectually deprived were these plebs that it was a wonder they managed to find their way to the polls at all. Clearly, these knuckle-draggers could not have been acting sensibly when they adjudged the Massachusettarian candidate to be an empty suit who alternated between talking tough and placating the surrender wing of his party.

Is there any explanation for the red-staters' rejection of the Gospel according to Michael Moore other than sublime stupidity?

If the red-staters were capable of sustaining rational thought even briefly, surely they would have recognized the superior intellect of the editors of The Nation who supported Senator Kerry and expected him to promptly withdraw our troops from Iraq and cut our military expenditures substantially and accommodate the nuisance of Islamic terrorism. These are the same folks who never saw the Soviet Union as our adversary and preached unilateral disarmament—ours—as the road to peace.

The best portrait of the indomitable ignorance of red-staters' is provided by Jane Smiley, "who has written many novels and lives in California." Smiley spent her growing-up years in Missouri where members of her family still reside.

Alas, according to novelist Smiley, Missourians, red-staters and Americans generally, are murderous and ignorant by nature. (She exempts from this double-barreled blast her own family: "...my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.")

Smiley's essay is vastly funny, laughable, really. Her picture of America is goofy. Her prescription for beating us, we dissenters from her superior faith is—well, judge for yourself:

Progressives have only one course of action now: React quickly to every outrage——red state types love to cheat and intimidate, so we have to assume the worst and call them on it every time. We have to give them more to think about than they can handle——to always appeal to reason and common sense, and the law, even when they can't understand it and don't respond. They cannot be allowed to keep any secrets. Tens of millions of people didn't vote——they are watching, too, and have to be shown that we are ready and willing to fight, and that the battle is worth fighting. And in addition, we have to remember that threats to democracy from the right always collapse. Whatever their short-term appeal, they are borne (sic) of hubris and hatred, and will destroy their purveyors in the end.

Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? a feverish, foolish book has opined on the op-ed page of Jayson Blair's former employer that the Democrats lost this election on the battlefields of the cultural wars. By this, Frank means all the trivia that occupy the limited attention span of people who would vote their economic self-interest were they not distracted by issues of faith, patriotism, social organization, trustworthiness, all manner of moral issues.

Frank is a faithful Marxist. He believes, that free markets, free trade, and free men are morally abhorrent. Capitalism, he has written, is "borderline criminal."

Not only does Frank believe that Marxism is morally superior to consent-and-exchange as mode of social organization, he also believes it delivers prosperity to ordinary working people. He is a victim, here, of his Marxist faith.

It is an article of Marxist faith that industrialization makes working people poorer as their capitalist masters grow rich on their poverty. It takes faith to believe this because the facts are otherwise, but Frank's ignorance is profound. The red-staters know what Frank will never grasp as long as he remains a prisoner of his Marxist faith—that they are better off spiritually, morally, economically when they shun socialism and embrace freedom.