Liberal Elitism? No. Some People Are, Sadly, Stupid
Mike Elk takes "liberal elitism" to task for not taking the Tea Party people seriously, and that that will lead to the election of Sarah Palin and other such ilk.
To quote our vice president, malarkey.
While I have long argued that there is too much elitism on the left for my tastes, there's a wide gulf between holding your nose in the air for no good reason and dumbing yourself down in order to appeal to the lowest common idiotic denominator. Such is the case with the Tea Party group and their leaders like Palin.
Far from the liberals in the '70s who were clearly not responsive enough to the middle class, leading to the rise of Nixon and resentment politics, today's left has gone to great lengths to be a big tent. So much so that some of our biggest fault lines are internal and don't involve the Republicans at all. But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement.
The problem is that the vast majority of the issues brought up by the tea party types and Palin are idiotic. These aren't people with the traditional lower-middle class concerns of Americans (which is my family background) but instead these are people who largely believe the conspiracy du jour, whether that involves secret armies, the president's "true" nationality, or Nancy Pelosi's "death panels" that are set up to pull the plug on Grandma.
While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine.
Liberals have in the past allowed the ivory tower set to exert too much control over the Democratic party. That resulted in a narrow focus and deserved electoral losses. But the idea that the tea party movement represents any sort of rational discourse deserving of recognition and outreach is absurd. These are, by and large, the same band of stupid people we have always had in this country, whether they were in favor of submission to the British empire, secession from the union, alliance with Hitler, or decrying the president a "half breed Muslim terrorist", we owe them no recognition or inclusion in the important discussion about the direction of American society.
Read more from Oliver Willis at OliverWillis.com.
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Actually, Nixon was elected in 1968. Maybe excesses of the 60's?
Bravo!
(And he makes great movies, too!)
What a lovely piece
This is a very wonderful article. Testing
"While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy..."
"...the traditional lower-middle class concerns of Americans..."
The post he is supposedly responding to was about working class people. The poster apparently can't even bring himself to write the words working class let alone think their point of view might be worth considering.
While I agree that we cannot take what the "teabaggers" and their like say seriously, we cannot simply dismiss the anger either. It may be misdirected anger and their sense of entitlement to some former world that never really existed is rather stupid but, that does not mean the root of the anger itself is illegitimate. They may be mistaken about who and what is causing their real income to stagnate or go down but they are not wrong to be angry about it as we do live in a country with every increasing economic disparity. They may be angry at an increasing lack "values" that they wrongly attribute to liberalism but can anyone say we are not a less empathetic, less civil, less conversational, more greedy, more fearful, more self centered country than we were 30 or 40 years ago? All of us have let politicians and corporations frame the questions and create boogymen (ie, "liberals" or "teabaggers") so we fight amongst ourselves rather than the moneyed interests who seek to exploit us at any cost. So the grassroots left needs to stop gloating so much over not being crazy and start being smarter about who and what they are fighting.
The tea baggers have much in common with Al Qaeda. They object vehemently (not yet violently) to modern life. It's complex, techno-driven and confusing, Simple "values" seem missing in a multi-cultural world, especially seen through the gauzy filter of memory. Having been an adult 30-40 years ago I doubt that they're yearning for the virtues of the hippies or the Black Panthers: sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll--I don't think so. I suspect they bought into Reagan's nostalgic rhetoric and lapsed into a dream state from which they have only lately awakened.
Well said. Sometimes I bemoan the fact that people don't see the parallels between the moral/political Islamic fundamentalist movement and some moral/ppolitical movements in US. I call it "American Taliban Radio" and Limbaugh et al. are the Imams. It sounds harsh, but the two overlay each other closely - only the names are changed to protect the belligerent.
However... perception is reality for many, and we've never had this political dynamic along with a large propaganda arm masquerading as news... We should not rely on lessons of the past to fully inform us of the future.
What a comparison! They are going around causing the end of thousands of their fellow americans? Oh the failure of the american education system has been with us for a long time.
Back in 1948 someone came up with a bunch of ideas we seem to have forgotten....curiously many of them contradict and are the opposite of what"tea partiers" stand for, including the ones against health care reform....art. 24 and 25 illustrate that well as do art. 5,6,7, 9....
www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
for some reason the link says that the page does not exist...but it does.
It is the site of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights......
I suspect the tea baggers are a sub-group of Baby Boomers that missed out on the fun of the 60's and 70's. At the end of that tumultuous era they fell under the hypnagogic trance of Reaganism, buying the golden fantasy, but two generations later they sputter in unfocused anger. I recall a 60 something woman at a rally moaning piteously that she wanted her country back. Ditto with a younger woman at a Spector rally (later shown unable to explain herself) demanding that we return to the country of our founders.
Take the country back from what? From whom? What would that look like, a visit to Mayberry? The tragic fact is that these are ignorant people, who can make no sense of the modern world. They tend to be religious, which seems to cripple their analytical ability. Some are true believers of the right wing dogma machine, drawn to the incoherent rants of Glenn Beck by his projection of their emotional turmoil. They rail against a diverse, multi-cultural America. At the end of the day, however, one must ask, "What exactly do they want?" Notwithstanding Bush's near destruction of our economy there is nothing in modern life that's all that scary. Sadly, tThey represent the political manipulation of hysteria for its own sake.
The beauty of the web is that those considered to be nuts by the bien pensant elements on the periphery of what CW calls liberalism already have their own sites to counter the uniformly incorrect opionions of the bien pensant elements of the LINO, Liberals In Name Only. The use of malediction is an American custom but isn't an American Art form.
Thank you, Oliver. I don't know why America has decided that we must race to the bottom in every way...wages, education, bigotry. Sorry, but I don't think it's elitist to expect the average citizen to have at least some critical thinking skills. I'm not sure when we started to hold up blind allegiance to a political ideology that is not in our own best interests as a badge of honor. Let the screaming, racist hordes wear themselves out with their tea-bagging nonsense and lets get back to actually doing something to make us proud to be Americans. Just saying it isn't good enough.
Being white, middle class and educated; I don't see the Teabaggers as fitting into what we perceive as middle class. I see them as a group that falls into the middle to upper lower class segment of the population. White, Fundamentalist, Uneducated, living mostly in the South and rural areas. This is a group of people that have not done well economically and have chosen to blame anyone who is not white, male, Christian, and hetereosexual.
This does not represent the middle class.
Agreed!
100% accurate.
People don;t realize that in the south, the Ku Klux Klan morphed into the conservative movement. Gone with the Wind is not just a book to them. These people are still fighting the Civil War and they do it by oppossing change in any form. The teabaggers may not be educated, but their views are not that different from those that are.
Will the liberals impose their Marxist/Fascist/Socialist/Nazi/Anti-White/God-hating/Abortion and gay-marriage loving agenda on us by sneaking brain-washing moon water into our God-given water supply? These are the frightening questions we Tea Party Patriots must grapple with, and yet no one wants to take us seriously.
OK This is true. So, when do certain factions of the conservative movement get called out by their own party for shamelessly manipulating these people to the detriment of the entire nation?
Worse yet, though--they're now being manipulated and controlled BY those lunatic elements.
Talk about sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. Someone shoulda read their Bible.
They'll find out all about that whirlwind, by way of the next couple of national elections. (I only hope the whirlwind doesn't do much damage to the rest of us... though it feels all-too certain, that it will...)
Maybe the term "conditioned voter" would be the more appropriate and politically correct way to refer to this segment of the American electorate. Of course, under any other name..........
my dear fellow good and well intentioned folks on the left,
we are not as smart as we like to think we are. and the right is not as stupid as we like to think they are.
just because we can point to those for whom we are not as stupid, doesn't mean are not.
just because one is not the stupidest, doesn't prove that one is therefore not stupid.
just because we can point out someone stupid'er, does not prove that we ourselves are free of stupidity.
unfortunately, dear friends, real world politics is not like our college quiz bowl and does not grade on a bell curve.
The people with the most correct ideas should be the ones that we listen to for advice.
That's how science works - and science is, hopefully, the methodology we use in order to select the correct plan of action to get what we want out of our government.
So, yeah, it actually kinda is a bell curve. He who is most correct wins, as it were. Or should win, anyway.
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