My advice to coastal liberals, with a tip of the hat to Owen Wister, is “Smile when you say that”.
If you want Trump to win re-election in 2020 and for Republicans to hold the House, keep saying “flyover country” and “deplorables” as often as you can, including in jest.
I am confident the liberal class is utterly incapable of doing anything else
I’ll put this in for those who haven’t yet read Thomas Frank:
Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.
There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.
You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.
I don’t remember hearing a real, live person using the term “flyover country” in person. I think that i must have, but it must be pretty rare. AFAICT is is mostly used by people on the right, and by a small group of liberal writers and actors.
Steve
I’m smack dab in the middle of it, and the term doesn’t hurt my feelings, but it’ll never get my vote.
I’m working class union White. Teamsters spend our dues to send us slick mailers telling us to vote Dem. Dem. candidates call us names. I still listen, but with a very jaundiced ear.
One party tells us we’re on our own, the other says not so, WE care, but they lie. You have to be very young to believe them anymore.
This post is in reaction to its use, obviously in disdain, by a commenter at another blog.
The point is that saying it does progressives no good. It rallies no one to your side who isn’t already on your side.
Right, then Dave. You are a progressive, seeking to fine tune the message. In order to lure voters so the agenda can be implemented. Full Federal control over speech, attitudes, Families, of course guns, but not drugs, Ok go for it, right there in Chicago, if it works, we’ll copy it. But I, for one think it won’t.
Actually, I’m a political moderate—a Democrat who believes in good government. Sometimes good government means more government; sometimes less; sometimes just doing things differently. A lot of the time it means leaving things at the state and local level.
That puts me distinctly out of touch with the left wing of the Democratic Party and the right wing of the Republican Party. Those Democrats are in favor of lots of “free” stuff without any credible plan for paying for them. Those Republicans always believe in lower taxes without being willing to cut anything. I, on the other hand, believe that you’ve got to strike a balance between what you want and what you’re willing to pay. That doesn’t necessarily mean a balanced budget but it does mean some relationship among spending, revenue, and growth.
As I noted in one of my earliest posts here, one of the distinctive qualities of being a moderate is that you can see, sometimes just barely, both extremes from where you stand. The far left of the Democratic Party cannot see the far right at all. They think that those who are closer to the center, in other words most of the American people, are fascists. The far right of the Republican Party think that anyone who doesn’t believe shuttering the federal government or, in Grover Nordquist’s memorable words, making it small enough to drown in the bathtub, is a leftist. Sadly, the extremes are growing in influence and maybe in numbers in both political parties.
Best comment of the week on any blog Dave.
I would add that it’s the extremes that love to use these derisive terms.
It is the extremes and the anonymous. Those who are not talking to each other face to face. As I said, I just don’t hear it much in real life.
Interesting that you claim fascists for one side and leftists for the other. What I usually hear on blogs is socialist or communist.
Steve
“The far left of the Democratic Party cannot see the far right at all. They think that those who are closer to the center, in other words most of the American people, are fascists. “
I think what Dave is saying that anyone, outside of the far left mindset, is considered a “fascist” by the far left. This is why, IMO, <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pjs7uoOkag. this #walkaway utube video is getting so much approval and traction.
walkaway link revised.
Steve:
To my ear quite a few on the right side of the aisle use leftist, socialist, and communist interchangeably. The irony is that there aren’t many communists in the U.S. There are hardly any socialists.
I think that most Democratic politicians are either very soft Fabian socialists, technocrats, or ordinary machine politicians with by far the largest number in the last category. They might pretend to be in one of the other categories.
Andrew Sullivan had a column last week saying that slowing massive demographic change is not fascist–it’s conservative. Anyone who is angrily arguing that Keep America White is simply logical conservatism and not at all fascism is conceding so much ground. This is what has happened with Trump. Every cheap stereotype the left had about white Americans has come true, all without the left the lifting a finger to make it happen. So of course Trump voters are going to be scanning comments on blogs in order to find reasons to vote for Trump. Anything better than the truth!
Reading comments mentioning the “far left” demonstrates even educated people don’t know or understand us. I’m a libertarian socialist; it doesn’t really get further left than that. I don’t consider those who disagree with me to be fascists, and state control over society is antithetical to my beliefs.
Socialism was a strong tradition in the United States until the Wilson Administration, when a liberal President and a liberal establishment used the power of the federal government to crush socialist organizations for opposing the march into WWI. Hundreds were sent to prison for no crime but exercising their first amendment rights. It was only at this point the American political police that we call the FBI was formed to ensure left-organizing could be more reliably disrupted.
The point is liberals are separate from the Left, and even within the Left there is a vast diversity of opinion. It is not a monolith, and our relationship with the liberal wing of the Democrats is at best one of deep distrust. More commonly we see liberals as duplicitous, unprincipled, ignorant and reactionary.
“Where is the politician who has not promised to fight to the death for lower taxes- and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible?â€
Barry Goldwater
Also, there are more of us than you think. We’re just not the raving, murderous lunatics American media have made us out to be.
Goldwater’s answer to his own question, that Reaganites and Clintonites and Trumpites are all socialists, doesn’t really hold up. That they are all capitalists, on the other hand. . .
“Andrew Sullivan had a column last week saying that slowing massive demographic change is not fascist–it’s conservative.”
I wonder what slowing gentrification is then since it is massive demographic change, albeit local.
BTW, I’ve always thought the language we use is too simplistic (and I admit I’m probably as guilty as anyone for using it). Left-Right, Liberal/Conservative, etc. Those terms today are pretty much meaningless without additional context.
Some of my earliest posts were on this subject and I’ve mentioned it occasionally since. Our terminology is rooted in the French Revolution. Our politics has, shall we say, elaborated substantially since then.