because only the Sith deal in absolutes...

So I went looking for the origins of this split in the party. I found this:

Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.

- Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger

Maybe it's about time we started questioning whether we can truly call ourselves "democratic" if some people are going to decide on behalf of the working classes what the working classes can or can't do, what they should or shouldn't do, what they need or don't need.

We need to question this, because it goes too far.

"The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct...."
Margaret Sanger, A Plan for Peace

We need to question this, because people are still doing it. You cannot excuse Sanger on the grounds that this was a long time ago. We are still operating from the belief that the 'right sort' of person gets to make sweeping political decisions on behalf of the paupers and the illiterates, who get no say in what ought to happen to them because they are not qualified to participate in the discussion. Let the grownups deal with the heavy thinking.

There has always been tension between those who would make the world the way they want it vs. those who are the ones who need to be fixed, corrected, or moved in order to make way for this Utopian vision. It is just plain more fun to be the one who gets to play with the toys than it is to be the toy, and that's especially double-super true when we're playing Scientist and doing experiments. Of course, experiments frequently go wrong - look at housing projects and government cheese. And, thanks to Sanger's once-considered-beautiful vision, our nation now has to confront the reality that we deliberately sterilized people without their consent or even their knowledge. And yet, even today, we mock and ridicule conservatives' fixations with trying to figure out where the line is, or should be, between what we can meddle in vs. what we should just leave alone. (We don't need no stinkin' lines. We'll meddle in anything we goddamned well want to meddle in. Got it? Cuz we is making the world better!)

"Iowa will make the difference," Mrs. Obama said. "If Barack doesn't win Iowa, it is just a dream. If we win Iowa, then we can move to the world as it should be."
- CNN

This election has made me keenly interested in learning more about why conservatives hate - and more importantly fear - liberals. I find I disagree utterly with conservative conclusions - but I sympathize more than I ever thought possible with the anxieties about self-proclaimed Master Planners who want to rearrange the universe to fit their whims. These Master Planners do not acknowledge any need for discussion - they just act as if no discussion is needed, because it's just so obvious that all right-minded people share their vision.

Conflict is part of democracy. Checks and balances are part of democracy. Discussion is part of democracy. You cannot omit these things and still have a democracy.

I have been reading about what science fiction authors apparently call "singularity", a left wing version of the far right's Rapture (and favored by the same "technocrat" class that adores Obama). The Singularity will be a time that will be unimaginably superior to today*, because thanks to the miracles of technology, mortal limits will no longer constrain us. Death and conflict and unhappiness will just be gone. What is unnerving in these utopian visions (available in your local science fiction aisle) is that the vision is of a "post-partisan" world - that is, a world where there is no conflict, because there is no dissent.

No explanation is given as to what will happen to all those who refuse to conform to this vision of the (Unity! Hope! and Change!) future. Will they be brainwashed? Killed? Just decide voluntarily to not breed anymore? Will they see the transcendence and realize the follies of their ways? However it happens, somehow only 'our' kind of people are left, living in a Utopian vision. It's a world created by and for the faithful, only the faith is in the ideals and goals of the science and/or technology, rather than God**.

Or, in some versions (slightly more realistic), conservatives are still around - just reduced to a few wingnuts on the sidewalk with protest signs, there apparently to be laughed at.

Or, in the cheesier science fiction, they're the villain - the final threat to be destroyed before this unspeakably perfect vision can come to pass.

Why is it ok to speak of Republicans in the same threatening tones we dislike when Republicans do it to Democrats? Well, because that's different. They're fascists. They're conservatives. They're Republicans. In one essay, the author said, apparently straight-faced, that there are two kinds of people - those who are guilty of dividing the world into us/them, and Democrats (the good guys). (yes, seriously. This was an essay on why Republicans are bad and Democrats are good.)

They're Sith so we can do "dark side" stuff to them. Really. It does too work that way.

Something to keep in mind the next time you hear Republicans complaining about "liberal elites" (or "liberal fascism"): Barack Obama hangs out with today's radicals who, like Sanger, are willing to rule and rearrange the working class the way Austria once ruled and rearranged Hungary. Ayers was even willing to toss bombs - because he, and he alone, had a better vision, and that jsutified whatever had to be done to the lesser beings.

Perhaps that is why Obama feels he can do a better job describing the working class white man's problems than us working class whites can do.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

(emphasis mine)

When Barack Obama presumes to speak about working class issues, he does not speak to the working class. He speaks about us. He speaks to the affluent - the only audience that matters is the audience that gets to participate in decision-making, those who are actually qualified to understand what is going on.

We are not part of the dialogue, but he appropriates our voice, and he talks about us from a viewpoint that claims authority to revise our reality, based on his superior understanding.

And what is worse: he does not appear to be acting in good faith. Either he really didn't do his homework - or he is in fact using this power to usurp our voice unfairly:

He appropriates the right to insert his assumptions as his 'facts': we think our problem involves affirmative action, but really we just don't understand that our problem is the evils of the capitalist system itself.

He appropriates the right to define our motives: whatever we may say about affirmative action, the "reality" is that we just can't stand to see black people having opportunities while our own dreams are "slipping away".

He appropriates the right to decide which evidence should be exhibited: he describes our supposed reaction to outsourcing as the alleged cause of our 'resentment' over affirmative action.

We deserve better than this. We decide for ourselves what we think our problem is, and we deserve a government that will respond to us, not just talk over our heads to the 'elites'.

We don't need that sort of diagnosis. We neither want nor need rearranging. We just want a fair deal. We want to be listened to. We want the right to input into how we are governed. We feel we are as entitled to dignity - to equality under the law - as any other person.

To high-n-mighty elites, that's called "populism", which is considered a dirty word. It is a word that cannot be said without the obligatory derision, sneering laughter, rude comments based on the too-obvious-to-need-stating assumption that there is something inherently absurd about the unwashed masses thinking they ought to have a right to have their own interests addressed by the government. Ha! (Don't they realize it's just obvious (to all thinking people) that no government could ever care about them, and so asking for pandering is like an exercise in futility?) (I don't even know why they still let those people vote, man. - Oh, I know, more than one person has wished it weren't so....)

When liberal elites speak of the importance of economic policies and regressive taxes and other tools of government for weaning people off their bad habits, they use the same tone and the same attitude farmers take when they discuss managing livestock - it's particularly annoying when they're engaging their right wing equals on how we ought to breed***.

But when it comes time for the liberals to actually do something - what do they do? Not much of what we want. Do they make our lives better? They don't even appear interested in trying****. Apparently it's much easier to just rule from on high about what we shouldn't be doing and how we must be punished for continuing to do it anyway. This sort of judgment - it gives the same "I'm so awesome" high as real governance, only without actually requiring anything. (At least not of them.)

Well, to all you lefty leaning latte liberals of the world, I say go unite someone else - the workers of this world need a better deal than you are offering.
________________________________________
*Maybe the Unity optimists believe that technology will end the struggle for resources?

No wonder they think Obama is the messiah. New kind of politics? Post-partisan? Hope? No need to vote anymore - we just do the Unity thing.

Now all that has to happen is everyone has to wish real hard and then the whole world will agree on the one true right way to allocate goods and services, and the losers will come to accept that they just have to take it in good grace. Sorry. Extinction was always rough, but you know how evolution is. Resistance is futile and all that?

** Funny how a different religion brings about the same end vision of perfection. Only our Kabbalah involves calculus and our priests decipher prophets like Einstein, interpreting His remarks to the rest of us. The point at which it goes too far is when we there's no room for conflict. The original Enlightenment thinkers were the first and fiercest proponents of checks and balances, and, no, that has not been replaced by v.2.0.

Also, who wants to live in a world where everything looks like it did in Star Trek?

*** re: peasant breeding habits - the question appears to be: should we be regulated for the health of the herd or should we be exploited as a source of cheap babies?

**** You shouldn't pander to them, dear - it will make them aggressive.

condescending

Barack Obama graciously allowed that Hillary probably didn't really mean anything by daring to bring up the Kennedy assassination. Of course, we're all going to continue to take it as a given that she should just know not to go around talking about whatever she wants. Anything that could possibly set off Obama's little weakness must be guarded against, because he has a pathological fear of - you know - certain kinds of people. People who are crude and racist and gun-toting and bitter.

Of course, it is understandable that a really fragile person might just assume we're dangerous. We really are that scary, to those who've never seen our kind before.

Bigotry is a problem in this country, all right. Obama is bigoted against white people. And I am bigoted against shrieking, hysterical little men who let their xenophobia rule them.

The problem is, this pathological dread of people who are not like him is just too deep at the heart of the Obama campaign. As Sean Wilentz writes:

The main difference between now and then is the openness of the condescension with which many of Obama's supporters - and, apparently, the candidate himself - hold the crude "low information" types whom they believe dominate the white working class. The sympathetic media coverage of Obama's efforts to explain away his remarks in San Francisco about "bitter," economically-strapped voters who, clinging to their guns, religion, and racism, misdirect their rage and do not see the light, only reinforced his campaign's dismissive attitude. Obama's efforts at rectification were reluctant and half-hearted at best - and he undercut them completely a few days later when he referred derisively, on the stump in Indiana, to a sudden "political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true."

(emphasis mine)

"Everybody" means - well, him.

All of which is just one more way of saying what people have been saying about Obama for some time now: one way or another, anything and everything anyone does, it always ends up being all about him.

Is runaway ruling egocentrism really a quality anyone wants in a President?

zero sum is not a sustainable environmental policy

It wasn't enough to reignite the affirmative action debate. Now Obama wants to start wearing Jimmy Carter's sweater.

Of course Carter did some really good stuff and should get full credit for the work he did to promote solar energy and better windows and so forth. He tried to address an important problem and he had some great ideas about how to fix specific things. But politically he was a nightmare - living proof that handling a situation badly can be worse than not handling it at all. Thanks to that sweater of his, anyone who openly supported alternative energy was heavily stigmatized in the 1980s. The backlash was like a tsunamis.

What Carter failed to appreciate is why so-called tree huggers had come to be so thoroughly hated by the time the 1970s were over. It isn't because people enjoy seeing the environment trashed. It is because the Democratic party has consistently structured the environmental movement as a zero sum game. The hatred springs entirely from approaches that fall most heavily (or entirely) on the working class.

To borrow a phrase, it isn't sustainable.

The conservatives are already having a field day. Notice how this quote zeros in on the zero sum:

And when Obama says, "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," he almost seems to suggest a finite worldview, in which someone's bounty by needs must come at someone else's expense. So our bountiful food means others go without?

I once encountered a situation where people fought the establishment of a nature preserve. The appropriate liberal response is supposed to involve labeling these people - "low information", tree haters, etc. - and then move on, cluck-clucking about how the world would be so much nicer if only people would do what liberals tell them to. I was curious, though. Why would anyone not want a nature preserve? Answer: because their schools are funded by property taxes and their schools are already experiencing economic distress. These people genuinely do believe liberals love trees more than children*.

When the latte crowd wants something, the traditional approach is the lazy one: just say gimme. If that doesn't work, they make their signs bigger. When that doesn't work, they chain themselves to something. (I SAID GIMME.) They do not build alliances. They focus on building their own power - which is to be used to force other people to GIMME GIMME GIMME. When they encounter objections, their response is to simply demonize anything that opposes their desires. Rather like little children. Just like the supporters of Obama's campaign ('if the working class won't vote for the candidate we want, they must be _______').

There are always the same three questions the latte types don't want to face (and never do):

• Does it work? (How is the actual benefit measured?)
  
  
• Unintended consequences? (Is anyone keeping track? Anyone even paying attention?)
  
  
• Who is really paying the cost?
  

This is not the way to "save" the environment.

• Because you can't win that way.
  
  
• Because you do harm that way.
  
  
• Because it creates backlash and that works against the environmental movement.

To cite just one example, instead of waging war on the people who cut down lumber, environmentalists could put that energy into making bamboo a viable alternative for lumber and grass into a viable alternative for paper. But they don't do that because that would be real work. It's easier to just wage war on those evil, naughty lumberjacks. Bad lumberjack!

(And just in case the economic attacks weren't enough, we'll bring The Lorax and his friends right on into the classroom, for the express purpose of shaming the lumberjack's children**.)

If the environmentalists win, the working class tends to lose. That is why the working class backlash is so intense that they will deliberately destroy things that environmentalists worked so hard to save. They have nothing but fury for a movement that cares nothing for poverty or whether schools for poor kids are funded, but who will work this hard for a tree.

Obama does it again when he suggests that high prices are a necessary part of forcing people to cut back on gasoline usage. By the time such an approach even reaches the SUV drivers who waste fuel, the poor will be completely unable to access transportation. So what about them? Oh wait: nobody is going to care about them until their distress suddenly becomes a crisis of the sort that affects those Americans who do matter. (That's official Democratic party policy - right? When Bill Clinton changed all that, the liberals called it "moving to the center".)

The environment does not have to be a zero sum game. The Democratic party has made it that way. Some groups - the ones that are actually dedicated to saving the environment (as opposed to being dedicated to making liberals feel good about themselves at someone elses' expense) are actively seeking ways to make alliances instead of setting up either-or scenarios.

But that isn't how the liberal elite like to look at things. Too lazy to actually think about what it would take to save the world, they like how Democrats reduce things to simple slogans. Put your cans in the bin and the world will be just fine, thanks.

Voluntary sacrifices are ok (when we say so) but real costs get passed on to those who don't have the political power to fight back.

There have even been environmentalists who suggest, straight faced, that the planet is overpopulated so someone has got to go. Of course they do not mean themselves.
________________________
* Of course, they realize liberals love their own children. It's working class children who are disposable - because the working class itself is disposable. At least, that's what working class people think rich liberals believe. There certainly isn't much to contradict that view, anyway.

** Worth asking if this tactic would still be acceptable if it were a cute cartoon creature that "speaks for the unborn babies", instead of one that "speaks for the trees".

p.s. my favorite approach to make grass into a viable alternative for paper? find some way to grow paper-useful high-volume weed grass on landfills or toxic waste sites - places that are no good for anything else and need to be rehabilitated.

My preferred approach to overpopulation? We seriously, seriously need to get out into space. No, I am not kidding. It is the only thing that can relieve overpopulation - frontiers have always been good for economic growth. It is safe to assume that ecological entities follow the same rule that businesses, economies, and biological organisms do: if they are not growing, they are declining.

Oh - and like I said here, the key to the problem of gas overconsumption is not to dump hate on them for what they're doing that you don't like. Actually solving the problem means actually addressing the issue of what exactly they are supposed to be doing instead of driving. What is the alternative?

on failing to dodge the entitlement trap

It is astonishing to me that this year of all years the Republicans could win big. But Republicans are the ones with the general public on their side on the issue that is coming to dominate the narratives - entitlement.

Eugene Robinson* is a perfect argument for entitlement. Reality is racist, and therefore must not be allowed to vote:

As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama, it's a slap in the face to the party's most loyal constituency -- African-Americans -- and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here's what she's really saying to party leaders: There's no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you'll be sorry.

How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America.

By using (wasting) his big guns** on Clinton, there will be nothing left to aim at Republicans if they really do make it all about race. If Obama tries to whine, they'll laugh at him. They're already laughing. To them, the words "swing states" already sounds like a punchline.

But Obama has done more than just waste a weapon - he has handed that weapon to the Republicans:

...because under the politically correct rules of engagement preferred by the Obama camp, only the Illinois senator gets to make ex cathedra observations about such ticklish matters as race and class, which must be treated as infallible. Pundits like Herbert and The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson have been chattering about the so-called “Bradley effect” ever since New Hampshire, but the Clinton camp must not. Why not ? Because contrary to conventional wisdom, it wasn’t the Clintons who “racialized” the campaign at all.

From the same op-ed:

Screaming “racist” at people—I’ve received a grand total of two e-mails from Obama supporters that didn’t—only makes things worse. Real bigots don’t care, while Clinton supporters increasingly resent the accusation. (My skin’s thicker than most. ) Most also think it’s a foolhardy way to avoid discussing the realities of the Electoral College, which is what Clinton was trying to do. Regardless of why working-class white voters don’t support Obama, no Democrat can win without them.

(emphasis mine)

There is one issue that is absolutely nonnegotiable to most working class white voters. That is the issue of whether or not they exist, whether they matter, whether they can or should be written off the map. And Obama has done nothing but insult them. Repeatedly. It's almost as if he is trying to throw the election to the Republicans (and in fact the conspiracy theories have already begun whispering just that).

Instead of seriously considering why the working class dislikes Obama, everyone just keeps screaming racist, racist, racist. Entire states are being thrown out by Democrats making such confused statements about race that I can't tell if they are arguing that Obama must be the nominee because whites aren't really racist, or whether he must be the nominee because whites really are racist. I almost wonder if they are trying to imply that white Democrats are racist but white Republicans won't be?

Whatever it is they are saying, they seem to be falling into the trap liberals always fall into - arguing about the way things should be and forgetting to look at the way things really are.

Consider the reaction to what Pat Buchanan said:

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

It's like watching a magician pull Democratic disunity out of a hat.

Misdirection: Dems fall to arguing about why that is an immoral claim to make, missing the fact that what is really relevant is political, not moral.

Misdirection: Dems react to the exaggerated either-or in that "grievances vs. gratitude". Not fair-minded or gracious enough to acknowledge where credit is due, liberals make the huge strategic blunder of discounting the efforts and sacrifices that have already been made.

This is how Republicans keep control. It's called know your opposition. And Republicans are good at it, but Democrats, as always, are absolutely bewildered at thought processes that fail to conform with how everything should be.

While Democrats are arguing about what people should feel, Republicans are going to use this issue to not only defeat Obama, but also to put to rest (hopefully forever) the very idea of affirmative action, which is going to be in tatters after this***.

And no, I am not saying there is no racism in America anymore. If this were an argument about affirmative action I would say its flaw is that it doesn't work and it has unintended consequences and that it also has ethical problems, in that the whites who are punished are not the same whites who are guilty of the sin. But the real point is, we know that affirmative action is unpopular. That is why Obama started out as a "post-racial" candidate. That is presumably why it was viewed as "playing the race card" for Bill Clinton to mention Jesse Jackson - and incidentally, I think that's a real insult to Jesse Jackson, who unlike Obama has the courage to own what he says and to run on what he really believes.

The Democratic party has not been updating its reality regularly. Their fussbudget hostility toward anything that sounds politically incorrect has made them unable to accept feedback, and now they are living in a world that bears no resemblance to life outside the lilywhite (or its mirror, the antiwhite - both locked in a black-or-white world).

We don't realize how bad this disconnect is because we have fallen into using race words as a code for social class. As in "Stuff White People Like" (a site that really should be labeled "Stuff Upper Middle Class People Like"). Or arguments over whether expecting kids to pull up their pants or speak English are racist demands (even as we blame white parents for not wanting their kids in the same classroom). Both blacks and whites who fail to conform to expectations are banished - blacks are excommunicated from their skin color, while the op-ed writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post erase people using the Orwellian absence of words, freely equating "white" with "rich" until there just aren't any whites outside of the ones you meet at the country club. They use the same strategy Barack Obama lives on: when poorer whites absolutely must exist, it's with loud sniffing noises and in-your-face insults.

It is a perverse sort of logic that says that if Appalachia won't vote for the Democrat, it becomes a top priority to figure out how to win without Appalachia.

Democrats have refused to stand up for principles of equality and it's coming back to them now. I expect certain rich men will whine and sob into their beautifully manicured hands about how nobody likes them because everyone is racist. The truth is, we don't like you because you have treated other people badly, and we do not agree that our white skin makes us dirty enough to justify your bigotry.

Ultimately, the Democratic party will fail because Pat Buchanan has a point: the Democrats have set themselves up as the fair ones - but they have not been fair.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

The important thing to understand here is not that Pat Buchanan is right but that there's no reason why Pat Buchanan should not be allowed to argue his point.

Republicans don't share Democratic party assumptions. The most important assumption that is not shared is the one about personal responsibility. Democrats believe that people are all about being shaped by their environment - but Republicans don't. They believe in choice. They reject entitlement.

On this particular issue, more Americans agree with the Republicans. Democrats are therefore in trouble if Obama gets the nomination - seeing, as we do now, that he is a flawed candidate, but that we must give him the nomination because he is "entitled" to it.
__________________________
*That piece is called, beautifully enough, "Desperate Clinton is Danger to the Party". They did not, however, include the illustration - you know, with the pickaxe. I think the bits of flesh falling from her face might have scared young children or something.

**Another big problem with Robinson's argument: it's demonstrably untrue. Eugene Robinson never believed in a colorblind America and he never believed anyone else did, either.

***Those who still deny that there is something wrong with affirmative action would do well to quit preaching bigotry against poor and conspicuously uneducated white folk & go find out why they're so angry. One issue that could come up might involve how tough it is to get financial aid to finish college - when there isn't enough need-based aid to go around, and minorities get preference.

class hatred is real

Anglachel's Journal has a really excellent post called the Whiteness of the Whale:

The violent rejection of the Clintons on the Left is a rejection of “The South” and the working class by the Stevensonian elite, who see the success of Bill the “Bubba” as both a threat to their power and a repudiation of their policies and actions since 1968. They want to see themselves as simultaneously co-victims with AAs of white supremacy and also as the moral(istic) saviors of the oppressed, redeeming their part of the white population from the sin of racism. (Read the incomparable Bob Somerby’s write up of this phenomenon in his latest post.) Bill Clinton provided a different vision of how to move the party and nation forward, one that refused demonization, and this shook them to their ineffective foundations.

That link (embedded in the quote) has some really good stuff too:

...let’s get clear on what the Times did: They sent a reporter to Tarheel towns to get the views of African-Americans. (Good!) And they sent a reporter to Broad Ripple to get the views of upscale whites. (Good again!) But what did the Gotham paper do to get the views of less affluent whites? Simple! Instead of interviewing such rubes, they simply asked the swells to speak for them! This produced a pleasing second-hand view: Low-income whites, with their racial bad faith, may well be swayed by this story!

This "speaking for me" phenomenon has happened a lot during this campaign. It happened during Obama's beautiful speech, too. He spoke on behalf of working class whites - telling the world something of who we supposedly are and what we supposedly want. He used the opportunity to redefine us, away from the grievances we want heard, such as affirmative action policies that take too much from us and give society too little benefit in return. (If affirmative action really works so well, why is there still poverty today? Why aren't we allowed to ask that question? I have a funny feeling it does not reflect well on Rev. Wright - or his new 10,000sf house.)

In the new, revised view, our grievances are with outsourcing and corporations. We just don't understand the situation fully, is all. (Or so we're told.)

And we aren't qualified to have an opinion because, let's face it, we're uneducated. After decades of scholarships being earmarked for 'need' (meaning 'any color other than white') or 'merit' (meaning 'went to a private day school'), we who are neither black nor rich largely get our education from two-year colleges, vo-tech programs, and especially the military. We are therefore not qualified to have an opinion on anything, but especially not on questions such as whether safety net and poverty prevention programs should or should not be labeled "whites need not apply".

I think most people want to underestimate the contempt middle+ class America has for its working class. I know class is entirely behind my...shall I say bitterness toward Obama - not because he is upper class but because of the attitude he promotes toward working class.

I've said before and will no doubt say again: to claim that middle America hates Democrats because they are smart makes about as much sense (and follows the same logic) as Republicans saying "they hate us for our freedoms".

And that when Obama talks about race, he emphasizes the 'complexity' of the black experience - but he reduces working class whites down into simple, caricatured stereotypes, and so do most of what Anglachel calls "Stevensonian" Democrats. And it is only one of many stereotypes to assume that if we are poor, we must be stupid; 'cream naturally rises to the top', it is said - so even the smartest self-educated person must be inferior to even the lowest, drunkest frat boy.

My family worked to get our kids out of their inner city elementary school into an affluent, upper middle class high school*. I tell you what, I was ASTONISHED the first time the principle mocked me to my face. It was a shock to my belief that educators - or Americans in general - mostly agree with and approve of "all men are created equal", and all students deserve equal rights, equal opportunities - a fair chance. There is no pretending that low income types like me are welcome - or even human. They see us as lesser, and they don't bother to hide it. And the students take the cue from their parents.

And when a wealthy kid misbehaves, it is made out to be some lower income kids' fault, and I see the same logic that is being used in this Obama campaign. It is sort of like normal logic, only - like the Pirates of Penzance - certain assumptions are embedded. Not open to challenge. All Brits love their queen.

Meanwhile, my kids are pressured to conform - and after all, isn't that the point? Admittedly it usually happens at college, not high school - since high school is usually about being with your own kind, and it is the college you go to determines your social grouping.

So I agree wholeheartedly with Anglachel's post. While I am sure there are other things going on in this election, I think it is absolutely true that class and scapegoating is at the root of Clinton hatred. If you are going to stand 'outside' and pretend that YOU are not responsible for America's sins, then who is?
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*interesting side note: that while the inner city school we dealt with was largely all a single minority - with both whites and Latinos taking extraordinary actions to get out of those schools, even though there were rules in place specifically intended to make it difficult for whites to get out of black schools, and easy for blacks to get into white schools.

On the other hand. the affluent white school is not at all pure white. There are a variety of minorities - but not many blacks. The blacks who do get 'in' to a school of this sort are not what Rev. Wright would consider worthy of their blackness.

So, yeah, I think Michelle Obama is right - you do have to choose between your "blackness" and your being accepted by mainstream America. But you do not have to lose your "blackness" (whatever that means) to become wealthy in America, clearly.

It is also worth noting that while "blackness" appears to include some voluntary choice that is made (acceptance of a cultural code), "trashness" in the case of vulgar whites is based on something involuntary - mostly not having enough money to put up a good peacock's tail, to buy the right sort of clothes and car (see Karate Kid, first movie).