The Greater New England theory, then, explains Obama's white primary victories better than Sirota's racial-chasm theory. The decades-old regular-reformer, or Truman-Stevenson, split within the Democratic Party pretty much explains everything else, with no need to posit racist voting by Clinton supporters, or imaginary race baiting by the Clinton campaign.
Indeed, while many liberal pundits assume that white Americans who do not go to college are xenophobic bigots, there is no evidence that less-educated white Democrats are significantly more racist than the college-educated. Gallup notes: "A December 2007 Gallup Poll, however, showed only a slight difference by education in the stated acceptance of a black candidate for president. Ninety-seven percent of those with college degrees said they would vote for a "generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be black," compared to 91 percent of those with a high school education or less. This lack of objection to a black candidate across the educational spectrum would not seem to support a theory that racism is at the base of the educational differences [in voting]."
In his remarks to the rich donors in San Francisco, Obama himself rejected the idea that white opposition to his candidacy is racially based: "The people are mis-appre ... they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy. That's ... there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today -- kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing."
The problem instead, according to Obama in the sound bites that may keep him out of the White House, is the justified bitterness of the people in "these small towns." In his clarification Saturday, he said, "There are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter. They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they're going through. So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country."
To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.
In the words of Todd Gitlin, Obama "did indeed fall into the Tom Frank vulgar Marxist trap of seeming to say that love of guns or religion (or antipathy, even) is merely derivative, not fundamental." The attempt by eminent figures on the left to belittle traditional values by reducing them to personal pathology dates back at least to 1950, when the German Marxist émigré Theodore Adorno, in "The Authoritarian Personality," attempted to explain fascism (and by implication American McCarthyism) in terms of repressed individuals who take out their psychic frustrations on minorities. Similarly, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset explained the Goldwater-Reagan conservative movement as the product of "status anxiety" on the part of socially insecure Americans. This line of thinking, inspired by absurd comparisons between Weimar Germany and post-1945 America and between libertarian conservatism and Hitlerian totalitarianism, has been discredited by scholars like Lisa McGirr, who shows in her 2001 book, "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right," that Goldwater-Reagan activists tended to be successful, educated people for whom conservative ideology was not a mask for something else but a coherent belief system. Nevertheless, the cliché that working-class and even middle-class social traditionalists, when they are not simply ignorant, "low information" hicks, are maladjusted misfits whose political views are nothing more than feeble gestures of misdirected rage, persists as an article of faith among many progressives, who then wonder why the Democrats cannot win over more of the voters they despise.
Between now and June 3, Democrats will express their candidate preferences in eight more states and two more U.S. possessions. There is a possibility that Hillary Clinton will win as many as half of those contests, including primaries in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana. Rather than diagnosing the supposed rage disorder of blue-collar voters in those states to explain their aberrant behavior, consider the fact that they don't live in Greater New England and are drawn to the veteran party regular who focuses on bread-and-butter issues.
In 1992, with the help of Ross Perot's independent candidacy, these bread-and-butter issues, and some of these very voters, sent Bill Clinton to the White House. Bill Clinton won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia in 1992 and again four years later. Is it at all surprising that these very same voters, facing a recession, would choose another Democrat with the last name Clinton? Only "low information" elitists from the Urban Archipelago would find that preference remarkable or sinister.
Whether the "bitter" controversy helps Hillary Clinton win enough votes in the final primaries to beat the odds and win the Democratic nomination remains to be seen. At press time, she was surging in the polls. One thing is certain: In the fall election, John McCain, whoever his Democratic opponent might be, will portray himself as the candidate who defends the dignity and pride of working-class and lower-middle-class Americans of all races against the disdain of elite liberals. Unfortunately, many progressives will make that task much easier by repeating the litany of contempt: Rubes. Rednecks. Retro.
About the writer
Michael Lind is the Whitehead senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life.
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