Thursday, August 23, 2012

Guns, Religion, and the Liberals Who Hate Them


 Ok, full disclosure time: I'm liberal, most of my friends are liberal and I'm proud to be a liberal. We liberals like to pride ourselves on our tolerance and respect we have for everyone in society. But you know who we don't always respect? Blue collar white folks.

They frustrate us to no end. In any liberal circle of intellectuals, you'll often hear one or more bemoan the fact that many blue collar whites vote against their economic self interests. "Why oh why do these people hate Barack Obama? Don't they know that Democrats are trying to help them while Republicans are royally screwing them over??"

This wasn't always the case. Working class whites used to be strongly Democratic. They lined up to vote for folks like FDR, Kennedy and even Jimmy Carter. Their bosses at the country club were the ones who voted Republican. Then a curious thing began to happen. Many of these blue collar white folks began to shift to the GOP, in the south especially, but also across the nation. Thus began the rise of the Reagn Democrats. These white voters, who often lived paycheck to paycheck and had little education, suddenly loved Mr. Trickle Down economics. The trend has continued today. Barack Obama improved on John Kerry's 2004 performance almost everywhere in America, except Appalachia, the home base of working class whites. Barack Obama is still so detested in West Virginia that 40 percent of Democrats who voted in their party's primary this year thought a federal inmate would make a better President than the Big O.

Keith Judd: Eyes you can trust, a pony tail you can believe in.

Of course, this is just too much for us liberals. "Can't they see how stupid, ignorant and (dare I say it) racist they are??" And yes, voting in a primary for a federal inmate is stupid. But are liberals making things any better with their constant derision and phony moral outrage?

In fact, no, they're making it worse. The patronizing attitude of well off, well educated liberals in fact does more to turn working class whites away from the Democratic party than anything else. Many liberals feel like they need to inform these poor, misguided voters that they're voting wrong. Because they're obviously too dumb to think for themselves, we liberals apparently need to make their choices for them.  I'm sure if I were a middle aged coal miner or factory worker, nothing would make me happier than to hear a 23 year old Princeton Grad with no job and a nasty sense of entitlement tell me who I should vote for and why.

Party leaders aren't helping the situation much either. President Obama has never fallen back into the good graces of this demographic after he cracked out this little gem back in 2008.
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
This quote perfectly embodies what I hear from liberals all the time. You start off with a genuine sense of concern for struggling people, but in the end it's only a thinly veiled way to explain why they're so ignorant/racist/bigoted. Beyond the controversial comment is a real economic issue that needs to be addressed. Many people are in fact being left behind. As a liberal I think someone like Barack Obama is a better man to help these folks catch up than Mitt Romney would ever be. But the message will always be lost on a group of people when you end up insulting them.

In the end, the message from both parties is economic as well as cultural. Clearly, economic issues aren't always the most important issue for voters. They often will vote for the politician or party that they think understands them best. After so much derision and condescension leveled at them, I don't blame these working class whites one bit for insisting that Obama doesn't "get them".

VP Nominee Paul Ryan gave a speech in Pennsylvania this week where he rehashed Obama's 2008 comment. Speaking to enthusiastic supporters he remarked, "People like to cling to their guns and religion? Hey I'm a Catholic deer hunter. I am happy to be clinging to my guns and my religion!"
The crowd erupted in applause.













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