What Palin tells us about ‘Red America’
I’m not a Deepak Chopra fan, but Actress Buddy sent me his spot-on psycho-social analysis of what he calls the “Palin Effect,” arguing in effect:
“Palin’s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper. She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and turning negativity into a cause for pride. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.”
If you’re lazy and prolix intolerant, Deepak succinctly lays out the what Barak’s shadow stands for:
- Small town values — a nostaligic return to simpler times disguises a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
- Ignorance of world affairs — a repudiation of the need to repair America’s image abroad.
- Family values — a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don’t need to be needed.
- Rigid stands on guns and abortion — a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
- Patriotism — the usual fallback in a failed war.
- â€Reform†— an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn’t fit your ideology.
By this analysis, Shrubya ’00 and ’04 was no accident, and Palin is Shrubya V3 – articulate, pretty, slightly smarter, more ideological and less cosmopolitan than Shrubya 2.0.
He really hit the nail on the head of what’s been bothering me for years now, and why the hairs stood up on the back of my neck when I was watching Palin’s nomination acceptance speech.
Edwards was right, there are two Americas. Let’s call them ‘Top America’ and ‘Bottom America.’  Bottom America isn’t filled with struggling, hard-working folks that want to better themselves and their families, that respect education, progress and hard work.
Bottom America relies on a mix of bad wages and handouts from Top America and bitterly resents Top America. Bottom America is full of the drop-outs and failures of the educational system, and despises Top America for its book-learning, science and knowledge of current affairs. Bottom America is aware that the Bottom is steadily sinking, but Bottom America blames Top America, immigrants, foreigners, homosexuals, the government and pretty much anybody but themselves for this sinking. They even have a code word for this – “San Francisco,” the embodiment of Top America.
Now the Repugs ‘get’ Bottom America – they know how to and exploit Bottom America, they understand how to pander and cajole, how to use the politics of hate through code-words, and code-messages.  The Dems don’t ‘get’ Bottom American, and as the party of diversity and tolerance, are incapable of riding the rabble steer using the saddle of divisiveness and the reins of hate-mongering.
But on the flip side, after being the target of increasingly shrill and hateful anti-Top America invective, Top America is learning to hate Bottom America. The reactionary leaders are playing an extremely dangerous game, in effect ripping America apart for short term economic and political gain.
As a Top American (a San Franciscan, at that!), it’s hard to stay objective – I have come to hate Bottom America every bit as much as they hate me.  Where else could this dangerous game ultimately lead us but to ‘sectarian strife’ every bit as nasty as what we see in the provinces of Iraq?
The current pols indicate that two Americas really don’t want ‘change’ and ‘hope’ any more than the Iraqi Shi’ites and Sunnis want ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’ – this is a battle between Top America and the reactionary leaders cynically exploiting Bottom America, and it’s a battle Top America appears to be losing.
*Update* Needlenose regular CMike responds with an alternative point of view in the comments section. He takes issue with the characterization of all the reactionaries as lower class, pointing out quite rightly that many of the nasty ideologues aren’t so badly off materially. I credit the point – I’ve met many ‘well off’ reactionaries that support what Palin stands for (as outlined by Deepak).
Stumble it!
Tags: hate-mongering, palin effect, politics of divisiveness, red america
September 15th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
“… Cut the . . . country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”
– Patrick Buchanan, 1971, in a memo to Richard Nixon discussing how to exploit cultural resentments for political gain
Great post.
September 15th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
A hat tip to Sarah Palin for her insight into the current Wall Street
financial crisis. Sarah Palin and John “I was a P.O.W.” McCain are going to (are ready for this?)
REFORM the way Wall Street does business and stop multi-million dollar payouts and golden parachutes to CEOs who break the public trust just like John McCain was going to
reform the .
the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings.
You can’t find a novel that’s as nutty and scary as this pair and their keepers
.
September 15th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Paul Krugman (4/18/08) writes:
****************
Mr. Obama, in later clarifying remarks, declared that the people he’s talking about “don’t vote on economic issues,†and are motivated instead by things like guns and gay marriage.
That’s a political theory made famous by Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?†According to this theory, “values†issues lead working-class Americans to act against their own interests by voting Republican. Mr. Obama seemed to suggest that’s also why they support Hillary Clinton.
I was impressed by Mr. Frank’s book when it came out. But my Princeton colleague Larry Bartels, who had an Op-Ed in The Times on Thursday, convinced me that Mr. Frank was mostly wrong.
In his Op-Ed, Mr. Bartels cited data showing that small-town, working-class Americans are actually less likely than affluent metropolitan residents to vote on the basis of religion and social values. Nor have working-class voters trended Republican over time; on the contrary, Democrats do better with these voters now than they did in the 1960s.
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Larry Bartels (4/17/08) writes:
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Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.†He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.â€
This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.
Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.
************
September 15th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Interesting as always, CMike. The analysis would then indicate that the passionate reactionary isn’t one of the mobile home set, but rather better off, with their ideological heads stuck up their asses. Kind of like the Saudi nut jobs who crash planes into buildings to make their point – driven not by some sort of material desperation, but rather by some sort of inner desperation turned into an extroverted suicide.
Actually the truth is probably some combination of the two situations. As I reflect on the reactionaries I’ve met, I’ve certainly encountered many types. I’ve met nasty hillbilly types who (if they bother to vote at all) would vote for McCain/Palin just to screw the ‘liberals.’ However, in the Fresno Country Club I’ve met well-to-do farmer reactionaries that hate the government primarily because it keeps them from doing whatever antisocial thing they want (like treat farm labor as chattel, burn stuff, waste water, use nasty pesticides and herbicides, etc) and buy into the old Liberal=Big Government=Taxes+Constraints.
However, to Deepak’s point (rather than my additional editorializing), they share petty, small-minded parochialism, tribalism, unwillingness to compromise, and an uber-nationalism very much out of step since the days of ‘Manifest Destiny.’
September 15th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
greenboy, you have called it loud and clear; I follow politics fairly closely, but I’m sad to say that your post has utterly destroyed the last shred of hope that I had.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Yes – the various parts of the ideas are “out there”, but your post (at least for me) synthesized it into its full ugliness. I think this could get very much uglier than it is now. The GOP keeps saying “don’t make this about class! . .. . Shame for stirring up class warfare!” – in their age-old way of accusing the other side of what they themselves are doing, as a misdirection tactic.
What worries me is that with an Obama win the current momentum of into-bottom-of-barrel-nosedive will carry us a long way down before the turnaround. Very likely longer than 4 years. And the GOP press-buddies will be standing at the sidelines pointing and shouting “See?!?!? See what Democrats have done?” And the sheeple will buy it. Again. Still.
September 16th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Here’s a 43 page pdf posted by Larry Bartels. Take a look at the graphs on pdf pages 41 through 43, Figures 1 – 6.
Anglachel (7/1/08) writes:
***************
[O]verall trends were consistent – the working class and poor were strong Clinton [i.e. Truman rank-and- file] Democrats and the Stevensonians clung to Obama. Look at the makeup of the Clinton Democrats – working class, especially the working poor, the elderly, less than college graduates, women and non-whites voted for Hillary.
The missing constituency in this coalition was African American voters, for whom racial identification was a greater determining factor than any other. As I have said repeatedly, while an unfortunate electoral turn of events for Hillary and the only reason Obama won his large states, I see nothing pernicious in this fact, nor does anyone have to invoke racism on either side to explain the phenomenon.
[snip]
Symptomatic of the deep problem of the party as a whole is the turn by the leadership towards privatization of social risk. Health insurance is not a mandate, and thus a right, but a choice to be exercised if desired. This ignores power, especially the power of the state to defend the citizen against the encroachment of moneyed interests.
The well-off Stevensonians are no longer interested in defending the material needs of those who are not a part of Whole Foods Nation, and they hide their abandonment under the guise of rejecting racism. If the problem is the state of your soul and not the condition of your medical care, then you must heal yourself, and they can smugly pat themselves on the back for having defended the right moral stance.
Obama appears to think of himself as a world-historic actor called upon to guide the people through the moral crises of the nation. This is the common intellectual deformation of a Stevensonian, imagining that social problems are simply a matter of will and right thinking. It’s a love affair with the beauty of the forms and contempt for an imperfect world, and its usual mode is a hunt for intellectual inconsistency cast as political hypocrisy.
[snip]
One looks at Obama and there is no political substance. Nothing. There is no issue, no cause, no certain pledge that says he and his faction intend to do anything for the working class or any interest that might involve true political contestation. This is what Krugman has pointed out from the start. Everything is on the table to be negotiated away for the sake of “unifying the nation.†When pushed, there will be no shove back. He has nowhere he wants to go.
Bill Clinton, for all his faults, had a cause when he entered the White House, which was utterly political – it was to undo the self-inflicted damage of the party since Johnson and make liberalism credible again to the millions of ordinary citizens who had given up on it. He meant to be, and be seen to be, on the side of people who “worked hard and played by the rules.â€
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September 16th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Here’s
Palinbamboozling the crowd about her alleged “reform” on Wall Street.
Cheers!