The rubes and the elites

Polling data make it clear that the progressives and journalists who have denounced the Clintons as sinister figures "playing the race card" are in black helicopter/grassy knoll territory. According to Gallup, last August -- months before the mythical race baiting is supposed to have begun -- Clinton led among high-school-educated Democrats and tied Obama among more-educated voters in a multi-candidate race. Since then there has been a growth in Obama's support among educated Democrats, as other candidates have dropped out, but no augmentation of Clinton's support in general. The legions of racist white voters alleged to have been driven by subtle race baiting into the Clinton camp following the early primaries do not exist.

There is yet another problem with explaining pro-Clinton votes, not as positive votes for Clinton by people who support her and her positions, but as nothing more than racist anti-Obama votes. Obama has done well in many states, particularly in the Midwest and upper Plains, with nearly all-white populations. David Sirota, a progressive blogger, has suggested that white racist voting increases with the black proportion of the population of a state -- high in Mississippi, low in Minnesota. Racism is supposed to explain why Obama does poorly with white Catholic voters in big industrial cities, who presumably see themselves as competing for jobs, status and real estate with urban black Americans.

But what about Appalachia? Clinton does very well among the largely Scots-Irish population of the mountainous Appalachian region that runs from Pennsylvania down to northern Georgia and Alabama. Why doesn't this mostly white region vote like mostly white Minnesota and Wisconsin? The white racist theory of the 2008 presidential campaign can only be saved by an ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis -- Appalachian whites are Southerners, and everyone knows that all white Southerners are racists, even the ones without black neighbors.

Remarkably, the Sirota theory also suggests that all white Democrats are at least latent racists -- even those who support Obama. Obama's supporters in Minnesota and Wyoming vote for him only because their latent racism hasn't yet been triggered. If enough blacks moved into their states, then -- bang! -- they'd metamorphose into full-fledged Klansmen and vote for LBJ-praising bigots like the Clintons in a hurry.

To those who know anything about American political history, the Sirota theory is clearly nonsense. The key factor in regional support for Obama among whites is not the number of blacks in a state but the number of Yankee pioneers in the 19th century. As Josh Patashnik in the New Republic (quoting a 2004 essay of mine in the American Prospect) has pointed out, Obama finds his greatest white support in what the historian David Hackett Fischer calls "Greater New England" -- the vast region from New England and the Great Lakes to the upper Plains and Pacific Northwest settled by New England Yankees in the 19th century along with culturally similar Germans and Scandinavians. Another historian, Daniel J. Elazar, identifies this Northern band as the home of the "moralistic" political culture, distinct from the "individualist" political culture of the mid-Atlantic and the "traditionalist" political culture of the South. The political culture of this region, influenced by New England Puritanism and Nordic social democracy, has long been antiwar and pro-education, hostile to big business and in favor of civil rights. The moralists of Greater New England have a deep aversion to political conflict and favor consensus, bipartisanship and harmony. This region was the home, after all, in the early 20th century, of the Nonpartisan League. In the early 21st century, if you throw in a few blue college towns in the red states, it overlaps neatly with the Stranger's "Urban Archipelago."

Since 1992, when Ross Perot's Reform Party did best in Greater New England, this area has hosted the nation's only two independent governors -- Angus King of Maine and Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. Sixteen years later, Obama has won most of the Democratic primaries in the states in which John Anderson (1980), Ross Perot (1992, 1996) and Ralph Nader (2000) did best. All of these candidates, despite their different positions and worldviews, fared best among Greater New England voters, who tend to love third-party candidates. Obama's campaign is an overture synthesizing the greatest hits of Elazar's moralist tradition: It is antiwar and anti-partisan, reformist and inspirational. No wonder that the Northern white Protestants who were attracted to John Anderson, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader adore him. No wonder they love him in Wisconsin.

The question, then, is not why Greater New England progressives would vote for Obama. He presses all their age-old buttons: opposition to war, nonpartisan reform. The question is why anyone would assume that such a candidate would appeal to other Democratic constituencies, other than blacks (voting in this case for the favorite-son candidate).

Indeed, the Greater New England moralist culture has been rejected by practically every other substantial subculture in the United States: Irish-Americans in Northeastern cities, Appalachian white Baptists and now, evidently, Mexican-Americans. And this has always been the case.

As the historian Robert Kelley observed in 1979, "The culturally aggressive Yankees were disliked everywhere outside of New England." The reason was "a continuing sense of cultural superiority. The Yankees were certain that New England's common schools and colleges, its scholarship, its learned Congregational ministry, its libraries and journals demonstrated that they ... provided the nation's intellect." Unsurprisingly, the party dominated by Greater New England elitists -- the Whigs before the Civil War, the Republicans between 1932 and 1968, the Democrats in recent years -- has tended to be the minority party. It is ominous, therefore, that the geographic home base of the Democrats is increasingly that of the doomed Daniel Webster Whigs and the marginal Alf Landon Republicans.

In addition to this regional divide, there is a cultural split among white Democrats. Since the 1950s, there has been a rift between the Harry Truman wing of the Democratic Party and the Adlai Stevenson wing. The Truman wing produced electoral winners in Truman and Lyndon Johnson. The Stevenson wing produced one winner, John Kennedy, who barely squeaked across the finish line in 1960, and a parade of noble losers. Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, despite their diverse origins, were, like Kennedy, Stevensonian patricians in style, as is Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore wanted to be viewed as the next JFK, not the next LBJ, but they were able to win three presidential elections (and the popular vote, in the case of 2000), only because they ran as Truman-style populists. (George McGovern in some ways belonged to the Truman tradition but became the figurehead of a Stevensonian insurgency. And lost.)

On one side of this intra-party divide are the extroverted, populist party regulars like Truman, supported by working-class voters who belong to Elazar's individualist and traditionalist cultures and see politics as a fight against enemies for the spoils of victory. On the other side of the culture gap are the Stevensonian reformers, urbane, ironic, detached, introverted, intellectual and disdainful of petty politics. They appeal to upper-middle-class professionals, as well as to academics and college students, and elite journalists, for whom politics is about inspirational ideals, not material interests.

The only three Democratic presidents to be elected since Kennedy -- Johnson, Carter and Clinton -- were Southerners who won because they were able to win a substantial part of the white working-class populist vote. Hillary Clinton has done well with this constituency because she addresses the issues that are most important to them. In the Ohio exit polls, Clinton voters cared more than Obama voters about the traditional, Truman-esque lunch-pail issues of the economy and healthcare.

Next page: They may not be racists, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests