Salon.com
Are liberals seceding from sanity?
The left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a
group
By Michael Lind
Aug. 11, 2009 |
Back in the 1960s,
Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal
sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone
could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded
that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly,
of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally
disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote
the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote.
Therefore they had to be crazy.
In the decades since,
far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and
sociology are not exercises in partisan Democratic mythmaking, have
established that Goldwater and Reagan Republicans often were highly
educated, socially secure individuals who happened not to share the
values of liberal professors and journalists. This scholarship has been
wasted, to judge by the glee with which the liberal blogosphere, in the
aftermath of the ephemeral "Birther" flap, has dusted off the old
conservatives-are-crazy meme, and revised it to suggest that all white
Southerners are crazy.
In a recent Washington
Post column, Kathleen Parker quoted Ohio Sen. George Voinovich's
assertion that the Republican Party is "being taken over by
Southerners" to suggest that the GOP risks becoming a permanent
minority party of the old Confederacy. In itself this is a legitimate
point that I and many other critics of Republican conservatism have
made for years. However, at Mother Jones, the blogger Kevin Drum used
Parker's political argument as an excuse for all-too-typical liberal
Southern-bashing. According to Drum: "There are, needless to say,
plenty of individual Southern whites who are wholly admirable. But
taken as a whole, Southern white culture is [redacted]. Jim Webb can
pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Drum did the
redacting on his own blog post, explaining he'd blacked out the
offending text "on the advice of my frontal lobe."
Drum's creepy bigotry
becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless
to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken
as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up
all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or maybe this: "There are,
needless to say, plenty of individual Jews who are wholly admirable.
But taken as a whole, Jewish culture is [redacted]. The late Irving
Howe can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]."
If his Wikipedia entry
is to be believed, Kevin Drum grew up in California, the same
enlightened California that during his childhood and early adulthood
gave our nation Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the tax-revolt
politics of Howard Jarvis. More recently, California voters amended the
state Constitution to outlaw gay marriage. I grew up in Texas, which
gave our nation champions of the New Deal and civil rights like Maury
Maverick, Ralph Yarborough, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Gonzalez, Barbara
Jordan, Lloyd Doggett and Sarah Weddington, who argued Roe v. Wade.
Texas is less progressive than it once was and California is less
conservative than it once was, but someone from the land of Nixon and
Reagan should think twice about lecturing other parts of the country.
Nor are other regions bastions of political virtue. The last two
governors of Illinois are in prison or on the way there, the biggest
political scandal of the moment involves mayors and rabbis in New
Jersey, and the world economy was recently wrecked thanks in large part
to certain investment banks and hedge funds headquartered not in
Mississippi but in Manhattan.
In her Washington Post
essay, Kathleen Parker writes: "Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the
Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But
in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten" --
evidently this is intended to be a strained joke -- "only 47 percent
believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure. Southern
Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity." Kevin Drum thinks
that Parker is too kind and that white Southerners as a group should be
thought of as having "seceded from sanity."
Oh, those dumb white
Southerners! No other group in American society could possibly believe
in preposterous conspiracy theories. Well, maybe one other group, the
most reliably Democratic demographic in the whole U.S. electorate. A 2005 study by RAND and Oregon State University
showed that a majority of blacks believed that a cure for AIDS was
being withheld from the poor; that nearly half believed that AIDS was
man-made, with a quarter believing that it was created in a U.S.
government laboratory and 12 percent naming the CIA as its source.
Black paranoia about AIDS is understandable, given the Tuskegee
experiments. Even so, the theory that AIDS was created by the CIA to
commit genocide against black people is wackier than the craziest
Birther conspiracy theories. Would Kathleen Parker write, or the
Washington Post publish, a column arguing that black Democrats "have
seceded from sanity"? Would Kevin Drum applaud Parker's insult and
extend to it to all African-Americans?
When liberal pundits are
not arguing that white conservatives are insane, they are explaining
conservatism in the patronizing spirit of Lipset and the '60s liberals
as the result, not of ideology or theology, but of the irrational
resentment of the "angry white male." But what about the angry white
female? If white men in the South and elsewhere who do not vote for the
Democrats are by definition hate-filled racists upset by social
progress, then the same must be true of white women who vote the same
way.
By this test, it appears
that there are a lot of angry white women and that they have been angry
for decades. In 2008 white women preferred John McCain to Barack Obama
by 53-47 (compare white men, 57-41). They backed George W. Bush in 2004
by 55-44 percent and in 2000 by a narrow 49-48 percent. A majority of
white women in 1996 split their votes among Dole (43) and Perot (8),
giving Clinton only a minority of their vote at 48 percent. In 1992
white women were even more anti-Clinton, giving Bush (41 percent) and
Perot (18 percent) in combination a majority. White women gave the
first Bush 56 percent of their vote in 1988, and they gave Reagan 62
percent in 1984 and 52 percent in 1980. They preferred Ford to Carter,
52-36. I could go on, but you get the picture. Clearly, to judge from
their unwillingness to support Democratic presidential candidates since
the 1960s, most white women, like most white men, are evil, hate-filled
racist monsters.
Curiously, the
progressive punditariat, so voluble about "angry white men," is silent
about the decades-old Republican bias of white women. Even more curious
is the paradox that liberals routinely denounce white Southern
Protestants for holding the very social views that are held by
majorities or near-majorities of blacks and Latinos who form the
electoral base of the Democratic Party.
Consider gay rights.
According to a Gallup poll in December 2008, only 31 percent of black
Democrats consider homosexuality morally acceptable, compared to 61
percent of non-black Democrats. The proportion of black Democrats who
think that homosexuality is immoral is identical to the proportion of all Republicans who
think so. The double standard of the white liberal left was
evident, when California voters narrowly passed an amendment banning
gay marriage. Here is the AP: "California's black and Latino voters,
who turned out in droves for Barack Obama, also provided key support in
favor of the state's same-sex marriage ban. Seven in 10 black voters
backed a successful ballot measure to overturn the California Supreme
Court's May decision allowing same-sex marriage, according to exit
polls for the Associated Press. More than half of Latino voters
supported Proposition 8, while whites were split." There were lots of
news stories about pro-gay-rights liberals denouncing the Mormon Church
for its role in the campaign. Where were the liberals angrily
denouncing black and Latino voters opposed to gay marriage?
Latinos, like blacks,
are far more likely than whites to oppose abortion. According to a 2007
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center,
nearly half of second-generation Latinos think that abortion should be
illegal, while 65 percent of first-generation Latinos think it should
be outlawed. Indeed, the overall level of Latino opposition to
abortion, 57 percent, is higher than that of any other group. Luis
Lugo, director of the Pew Forum, described Latino immigrants as being
out of the mainstream, saying that second-generation Latinos (the more
"liberal" cohort that is split nearly 50-50!) are "much, much closer to
mainstream American values ... in stark contrast to the first
generation who are much more conservative on this issue." Imagine the
uproar if Rush Limbaugh or Patrick Buchanan said that Latino immigrants
are far from "mainstream American values."
To read progressive
pundits, you'd think that illegal immigration would not be
controversial, were it not for hate-filled Southern rednecks. But according to a 2006 Pew poll, "Both
whites (55 percent) and blacks (54 percent) are more likely than
Hispanics (29 percent) to see immigrants as a burden." In Barack
Obama's Chicago, according to Pew in 2006, "there is a widespread
perception among African Americans that immigrant workers are damaging
local jobs prospects. Fully 41 percent of African Americans say they or
a family member has lost a job, or not gotten a job, because an
employer hired an illegal immigrant instead." A Gallup poll in December
2008 revealed that 47 percent of black Americans thought that illegal
immigrants should be allowed to stay in the U.S., while exactly the
same percentage, 47 percent, thought that illegal immigrants should be
arrested and deported.
Blacks and Latinos, it
appears, are allowed to hold conventionally conservative social views
about gay rights, abortion and (in the case of blacks) immigration
without being mocked and denounced by elite white liberals in the pages
of the Washington Post and Mother Jones, as long as they vote for the
Democratic Party on the basis of other issues. This strategic logic
should lead liberals to seek out and welcome the vote of white social
conservatives in the South and elsewhere, as long as they vote for
Democrats for reasons other than the social issues. Indeed, socially
conservative white voters helped to create and to maintain the new
Democratic majority in Congress. But many liberals, it would appear,
would rather have a smaller Democratic Party than one that includes
more white Southerners with typically "black" or "Latino" views about
sex and reproduction.
Here's how I see it.
Liberals should respect and promote the interests of working Americans
of all races and regions, including those who despise liberals. They
are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.
The majority of
Southerners, white and black, including the black Southern diaspora in
other regions of the country, are victims of the South's historic caste
and class system, just as many Latino immigrants come from families and
regions oppressed by Latin American oligarchies. Needless to say,
Southern blacks suffered far more from slavery, segregation and the
inequality that has persisted even after the abolition of the formal
caste system. But Southern whites reduced to debt peonage after the
Civil War, and the half of the white Southern electorate that
effectively was disfranchised by the Southern elite in the South
between the 1900s and the 1960s, were victims of the oligarchs as well.
It is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been
deprived of adequate education will be more likely than educated people
to believe in nonsense like Birther conspiracy theories and AIDS
conspiracy theories. And it is only to be expected that people, black
and white, who have been frozen out of politics by oligarchic elites
will turn to flamboyant populist tribunes as their leaders, including
theatrical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jeremiah Wright, Al
Sharpton and Jerry Falwell.
The traditional liberal
solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political
empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less
fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly
those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less
power than those who lampoon them.
-- By Michael Lind
