http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1388178/posts?page=108
Posted on 04/21/2005 7:12:43 PM PDT by bitt
For more than thirty-five years, American politics has followed a populist pattern as predictable as a Punch and Judy show and as conducive to enlightened statesmanship as the cycles of a noisy washing machine. The antagonists of this familiar melodrama are instantly recognizable: the average American, humble, long-suffering, working hard, and paying his taxes; and the liberal elite, the know-it-alls of Manhattan and Malibu, sipping their lattes as they lord it over the peasantry with their fancy college degrees and their friends in the judiciary.
Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics—trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, expressing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as culture, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of public discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W. Bush, a class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons. Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its contradictions. It understands itself as an uprising of the little people even when its leaders, in control of all three branches of government, cut taxes on stock dividends and turn the screws on the bankrupt. It mobilizes angry voters by the millions, despite the patent unwinnability of many of its crusades. And from the busing riots of the Seventies to the culture wars of our own time, the backlash has been ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood by liberals.
The 2004 presidential campaign provides a near-perfect demonstration of the persistent power of backlash—as well as another disheartening example of liberalism's continuing inability to confront it in an effective manner.
(Excerpt) Read more at nybooks.com ...
'With his aristocratic manner and his much-remarked personal fortune, the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, made an almost perfect villain for the backlash pantomime. Indeed, he had been one of its targets since his earliest days in politics. In the 1972 proto-backlash manifesto, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Michael Novak interpreted that year's TV showdown between Kerry and his fellow naval officer John O'Neill as a skirmish in this then-novel form of inverted class war. While the two men seemed to be debating issues related to the Vietnam War, and while Kerry was on the left and thus, theoretically at least, an ally of working people, Novak believed he saw the brutal social truth beneath it all:
Comparison was immediately drawn between Kerry's Yale pedigree, good looks, smooth speech, powerful connections, and the limited resources, plainness of manner, ordinariness of O'Neill. Class resentment was tangible.[1] Class resentment was more than just "tangible" in 1972 when Kerry ran for Congress in the area around the crumbling Massachusetts industrial cities of Lowell and Lawrence: the Democrat was snob-baited for days on page one of the local newspaper, mocked for his Yale education, his celebrity supporters, and, of course, his money. An advertisement placed by his Republican opponent asked:
What do Otto Preminger of Hollywood and Louis Biron of Lowell have in common? This year they're influencing a congressional race. Otto Preminger contributed $1,000 to John Forbes Kerry. Louis Biron gave $15 to Paul Cronin.[2] From the dying Massachusetts mill towns of 1972 to the dying Ohio steel towns of 2004, the backlash response to John Kerry would remain remarkably consistent. To judge by the candidate's actions, though, it was as if none of it had ever happened. Kerry had been hounded his entire career for being a snooty, distant aristocrat, but like so many of his Democratic colleagues, he seemed to take little notice.
For the 2004 campaign, Kerry moved to the center, following the well-worn path of the corporate Democrats before him, downplaying any "liberal" economic positions that might cost him among the funders and affirming his support for the Iraq invasion even after the official justifications for that exercise had been utterly discredited. Kerry's pallid strategy offered little to motivate the party's traditional liberal and working-class base, but revulsion against Bush was assumed to be reason enough to get out and vote. And besides, such an approach was supposed to protect the Democrat from the inevitable charges of insufficient toughness.'
snip..
First thought, my answer is "Good question"
Second thought, their mom didnt love them enough...
George W. Bush has given tax cuts to working-class people. He is working toward making social security funds owned by the people who work for them -- so that they can have independent retirements, without being sponges on the government. That's what working people want.
I think Bush gets it. This Liberal elitist clearly does not.
Gore invented the internet, Kerry is a war hero, Clinton did not know BJ's were not sex, and Kennedy is no lifeguard.
Gee I wonder?
Ops4 God Bless America!
most are unhappy with their lives or have mental disorders. Personally I dont know any libs that dont fit either of these two categories.
read later
The "problem with liberals" is they are dominated with shallow thinkers like this, still lying about Kerry. Swifties disproven? Kerry was soft on attacking Bush? Give me a break.
Yawn... style over substance, proving liberalism doesnt get it.
'With his aristocratic manner and his much-remarked personal fortune, the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, made an almost perfect villain for the backlash pantomime. Indeed, he had been one of its targets since his earliest days in politics. In the 1972 proto-backlash manifesto, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Michael Novak interpreted that year's TV showdown between Kerry and his fellow naval officer John O'Neill as a skirmish in this then-novel form of inverted class war."
...yadda, yadda, yadda ...
whatever happened to principles, moral stances, and basic beliefs?
It didn't matter that the accusations angrily advanced by the "Swifties" (as they are fondly known on the right) crumbled under the slightest scrutiny, [they didn't, you know] just as it didn't matter that the principal members of the Bush administration had actively avoided service in Vietnam while Kerry had volunteered for it, [Bush did volunteer - that information was ignored or suppressed] and just as it didn't matter that the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had botched the nation's current military effort and even sent insufficiently armored soldiers into action. [Yeah, botched. That looks sort of silly since the Iraqi elections but some folks just won't admit they were wrong.]
The real difficulty is an inexplicable assumption on the part of the left that they are the rightful defenders of the "little guy" and the rightful recipients of his loyalty. In fact, the author grasps at one instance after another as a matter of deception, a superior salesmanship on the part of the right with nothing of substance behind it. This is, in fact simply another fond illusion.
In fact, "identity" politics such as the Democrats have been employing for some time tend to favor certain interest groups and disfavor the "little guy" unless he or she is a member of those groups. The left has come to regard the "little guy" exclusively as a member of a specific oppressed class and is shocked when little guys who aren't vote Republican.
The problem is that the left can't seem to agree on a definition of class. For some it runs along Marx's lines of strictly economic definition, and it is the poor versus the rich. For others it depends on a power relationship, hence it is the arguably powerless against the powerful. That isn't the same definition, and the classes described have neither the same members nor the same interests. But in either case a wealthy, politically connected, white elitist is hardly likely to be a standard-bearer capable of identifying with the members of the oppressed classes however identified.
This should be significant for the thinking leftist. Class warfare isn't what he or she thinks it is, and because of this politics predicated on it come to grief on a frequent basis. This author would do well to consider the matter in this light.
I still contend that the heartlanders don't like to be talked down to like they are a bunch of stupid children. That is precisely what the Deomcrats have done for the last bit. Worse than that, they promulgate vicious stereotypes about middle America and routinely express disdain for the very citizens whose backs support the outlandish lifestyles of these elitists.
We in Middle America have just as many intelligent people as anywhere else in the country. That's what really bothers them, because the masses now see that the emperor has no clothes. We aren't backing down, and we aren't going anywhere. If Thomas Frank and his ilk resent that, so be it. They don't call it the Heartland for no reason. Without the heart, the body, even that prized brain, will die.
Oh, another thing: If he was a real Kansan, he'd be living in Kansas.
They have no heart, they have no soul, they twist truth to make one believe that black is white, they even try to redefine the meaning of 'is'. Other than that they were a nice bunch of individuals....
You might be a liberal if you need to ask: "What's the matter with Liberals ?"
The author bitt, not you.
"can I git me one of them hunting licences here?"
A very nice, well written piece of fiction..
The universal question.
Frank's article ought to have been called "What's the Matter With Democrats" -- it's a variation on the title of his own anti-Republican book "What's the Matter with Kansas" (a title which itself goes back to William Allen White's editorials a century ago). And the thing with the Democrats is that for one to win at the national level, he or she would have to be a "post-liberal," able to carry liberal constituencies without alienating a large block of working-class or non-liberal Democrats and Independents.
The problem with the Democrats is the same problem the Federalists and Whigs had: you can't put down the average voter and expect to win. Populism in American politics sometimes gets overdone, but it is a sign that in some sense the people do rule here. The problem with Tom Frank is that he's way to tied to the ideology, passions, hopes, and prejudices of his faction. He'd be a better analyst if he weren't a fan and a partisan first and foremost.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1388178/posts?page=108
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