The War on Bad Philosophy continues.
I’m still working today, so I can’t give this the depth it deserves, but I want to point folks to an article on Free Speech and Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks, a Randian liberal arts professor, and commentary on the article by Arthur Silber on his blog Voice of Reason. (link originally via Instapundit)
First, I’m not a big fan of Rand and Randians. As a group, they tend to exhibit the confusion between logic and reason that many bright teenagers display (I should know, I’ve got two…). But while there is a framework in both articles I’d take some exception to (and will when I get a moment), there are a couple of 18kt gems worth pulling out and handing around. From Hicks:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.
If we adopt the first statement, then the solution is going to be some form of enforced altruism, under which we redistribute speech in order to protect the harmed, weaker groups. If the stronger, white males have speech tools they can use to the detriment of the other groups, then don’t let them use those speech tools. Generate a list of denigrating words that harm members of the other groups and prohibit members of the powerful groups from using them. Don’t let them use the words that reinforce their own racism and sexism, and don’t let them use words that make members of other groups feel threatened. Eliminating those speech advantages will reconstruct our social reality—which is the same goal as affirmative action.
A striking consequence of this analysis is that the toleration of “anything goes” in speech becomes censorship. The postmodern argument implies that if anything goes, then that gives permission to the dominant groups to keep on saying the things that keep the subordinate groups in their place. Liberalism thus means helping to silence the subordinate groups and letting only the dominant groups have effective speech. Postmodern speech codes, therefore, are not censorship but a form of liberation – they liberate the subordinated groups from the punishing and silencing effects of the powerful groups’ speech, and they provide an atmosphere in which the previously subordinated groups can express themselves. Speech codes equalize the playing field.

I haven’t read a better description of the postmodernist take on speech and power.
I believe Hicks to be off base in his explanation of the root of this construction; he explains it as a political tactic adopted as the previous tactic – affirmative action – began to fail. He’s wrong; this is a manifestation of the underlying philosophy behind affirmative action – the primacy of group identification, and the construction of politics as conflicts between identified groups.
I’d suggest going back to Marcuse’s ‘Repressive Tolerance’ for a historic touchstone.
A bit more bloggage then back to work…

…as Trent Lott gives back the advances the GOP has made in the last few years. In today’s washingtonpost.com, via the entire freaking blogpverse.

Speaking Thursday at a 100th birthday party and retirement celebration for Sen. Thurmond (R-S.C.) in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, was the presidential nominee of the breakaway Dixiecrat Party in 1948. He carried Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and his home state. He declared during his campaign against Democrat Harry S. Truman, who supported civil rights legislation, and Republican Thomas Dewey: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches.”
On July 17, 1948, delegates from 13 southern states gathered in Birmingham to nominate Thurmond and adopt a platform that said in part, “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.”

Being a racist in 1948 was evil.
Suggesting in 2002 that that was a good thing is amazingly stupid and evil.
In case all my GOP commenters wonder why I haven’t switched parties…

I was just planning to excoriate William Burton (I’m in that kind of mood; even my friends better watch their asses…) for this post:

I would first point out that the traditional Democratic donor groups don’t scare me, nor do they scare most people likely to vote Democratic. The unions, trial lawyers, environmental groups, abortion rights groups, and socially liberal Hollywood types are the most solidly Democratic donor constituencies. Try as they might, the Republicans have never gotten significant numbers of people to vote against the Democrats because of who gives money to them (people may vote pro-life, but they’re not changing their votes if the Democrats stop taking money from NARAL). These traditional Democratic donor groups line up pretty closely with good Democratic policies.

The problems occur when Democrats start relying on money from traditionally Republican groups. When Democrats start depending on money from banks, from insurance companies, from the investor class, and from big business in general, then they find themselves in an untenable position. To keep these donors happy, they must abandon traditional Democratic policies and the political advantages that come from representing the majority of the American people against those with outsized power and influence.

He’s wrong in more than a couple of ways here…
…but because I’m so effing backlogged, I didn’t get around to it until he’d posted this:

I believe that FDR’s appeal was not to minorities, the poor, and to union members just because they belonged to those groups (even in the 30’s that wasn’t enough to win elections). I believe that his appeal to them was part of his greater appeal to huge chunks of the American electorate. That appeal was more psychological than based on race or other identity. FDR spoke to and for what America as a whole was feeling during the 30’s and 40’s, and that is still applicable today.

I’d say that FDR had two basic constituencies, with a great deal of overlap: the anxious and the powerless. Speak to those constituencies today and you win elections (a great deal of Reagan’s popularity was his appeal to those who felt anxious about the future and those who felt powerless in the face of government).

Whatever the drawbacks (and they’re too many to list) of the era, there was a lot less anxiety in the 50’s and early 60’s than there is now. If you had a job assembling cars, you could be pretty sure that the job would stick around and that you’d be able to support your family with it. If you had a job in middle management at GM or at a bank, you could be pretty sure that job would be there your whole life. If your kids were in college, then you could be pretty sure that good jobs would be waiting for them when they graduated. Things were more predictable, and that made people less anxious.

Compare that to the 30’s and 40’s, in which the Great Depression and war made everyone anxious. You couldn’t be sure that your job would be there in a year. You couldn’t be sure your son would be alive in a year. You couldn’t even be sure that your way of life would be around much longer. FDR dealt with this anxiety by letting people know that we were all in this together, and by using the government to actively make things better. He knew that when things are bad, people don’t want the government to simply step out of the way and let nature take its course (the Hoover approach); they want the government to step in and make things better.

This activist approach to government is very popular and should be just as big selling point for the Democrats now as it was then. While social dislocation and unemployment is nothing close to what it was in the 30’s and the War on Some Terror Funded by Some People (none of whom happen to be Saudi) pales in comparison to WWII, the public today is still quite anxious. A factory employee, a middle manager, even a professional doesn’t know for sure that his job will be there in a year. If it’s not, he doesn’t know for sure he’ll be able to replace it. He doesn’t know if his kids will find good jobs when they graduate college; nor does he know what the world will be like in even a few years. This leads to a lot of anxiety, and elections will go to those who act to calm it and are willing to take steps to make things better.

Damn.
How can I criticize someone who’s so perfectly right?? I’m gonna go home and kick the cats instead.

I’’m under the weather and under water at the same time right now, so didn’’t realize until just now that Instapundit and Jeff Cooper both linked to me, so thanks guys!

To Glenn, I’’ll comment that while my posts are pretty critical of the DNC establishment, they are critical with an eye toward creating an unassailable Democratic hegemony… – so watch out!!

Jeff went back and looked at my post on patriotism and his response, and he came up with a very smart thing which I hadn’’t completely thought through, which was to disassociate patriotism as ‘love of country’ from patriotism as ‘supporting a strong national defense’.

He’s absolutely right, but reading him sent me off on a tangent (exhaustion does that), so let me suggest something slightly different to go along with his point.

I know two really bad parents. One is a couple that simply refuses to control their children; they love them totally, and so, they explain, they love everything they do. Unsurprisingly, they are raising two little monsters. The other is a single mother who explains that everything bad in her life is the fault of her child, and that everything he does is wrong.

Unsurprisingly, her child is depressed, withdrawn and equally badly damaged.

I’’ll define patriotism as “love of country”. Both the parents above (all three of them, actually) claim to ‘love’ their children. But to blindly smile and clean up when your child smashes plates on the floor is not an act of love. And blindly smiling and waving flags when your country does something wrong is not an act of patriotism.

But – …there is a point where criticism, even offered in the guise of love, moves past the point of correction and to the point of destruction. It’s a subtle line, but it exists. And my friend (who is less of a friend because I can’’t begin to deal with her fundamentally abusive parenting) is destroying her child. And there are liberals who have adopted an uncritically critical view of America. Who believe it to have been founded in genocide and theft, made wealthy on slave labor and mercantilist expropriation, to be a destroyer of minorities, women, the environment and ultimately they argue, itself.

I’’m sorry but their profession of love for America is as hollow to me as that mother’s profession of love for her son. Are those things true? As facts, they are an incomplete account of this country’’s history. As a worldview, they are destructive and self-consuming.
I believe in progress and change. A long time ago, when discussing those convicted of Central Park Jogger assault and rape, I said:

My reaction is actually surprisingly different. I’’m thrilled. And excited. And proud. I feel bad for the youths wrongly convicted (although my bad feelings are somewhat offset by the admitted fact that they had been wilding – …randomly assaulting innocent people in the park…). I’’m bothered by the fact that poor kids of color get worse legal representation than rich white guys like Skakel.

But none of this changes the fact that I’’m proud because we live in a society where we are willing to face up to and admit our mistakes. To correct them where possible. No politically connected prosecutor was able to bury the confession or prevent the DNA testing that ultimately appears to have exonerated them. I’’m thrilled that we have been able to take the fruits of our technology and apply them, fairly and objectively to support the interests of people who would normally be beneath consideration. I’’m excited because I believe that these tools… – the technology and the open legal system – …that are the product of this society will be used in the future to prevent bad things from happening – …like convicting the wrong people of horrible crimes.

I’’m interested in why our three reactions are so disparate, and it cuts to one of my significant core issues, the alienation of many of us from our society and the overt disgust with all the instruments of government. In other words, the collapse of legitimacy.

I’’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism… – the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people’s lives… – comes from a belief in progress.

It’s a difference of worldview, folks, a difference of philosophy. A dash of hope to offset the bitterness of history, that’s what I believe it takes to love one’s country.

So thanks, Jeff, for making me think about it (and damn you for taking me away from my pressing work!!).

(edited for punctuation and grammar)

We’ve moved toward being not only an economy of ideas and information, but a society of ideas and information. Not only has the intellectual/managerial class managed to position itself well toward the top of the economic food chain, but it is in pretty complete control of the “idea factories” of television, film, music, and print.
Where once socialization was done through more direct contact with one’s community, mass society depends largely on mass culture…and we get mass culture from our exposure to these idea factories, which are controlled by the folks who live in the little blue pockets.
The reality is that the intellectual/managerial class is (relatively…!) homogenous in values, culture, and outlook. There are camps, eddies, and outliers, but culturally, I’d wager that Matthew has more in common with me and with any one of the authors of Samizdata then he does with the machinist who just redid the cylinder head on my race bike.
So we’re on one side of the line, and lots of other folks…folks who live and work far from the idea factories, who don’t anticipate moving to Cambridge or summering at Sea Ranch…are on the other. We have megaphones: jobs at think tanks, or in the media, friends in elected office. They don’t. And yes, we not only challenge their core beliefs, we sometimes burn down their homes and kill them (as a liberal who is also a supporter of law enforcement, I was horrified at both the Weaver debacle and Waco; my respect for Clinton and for Janet Reno never really recovered).
A big part of the divide is the perception … which I share … that the Blue Team not only disagrees with Red Team’s values, but uses its bully pulpit to actively stamp them out. Fair being fair, I have to note that during the 50’s the Red team controlled the media feed and aggressively attacked the values of folks who were the antecedents of the Blue Team today.
From the Atlantic:

Some Americans have an abiding need, it seems, for a cultural and political heart of darkness that can easily be circled on a map. Since the days of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, who defined sophistication for would-be cosmopolitan readers negatively, by drawing a satirical perimeter around the Midwest, the coastal smart set has relied on the idea of a landlocked dumb set to emphasize its own alleged refinement. Mencken’s boob-oisie and Lewis’s Babbitts lived out there somewhere, in the weedy prairies far beyond the city gates. These homegrown barbarians fit a profile that is recognizable to this day: pious, suspicious, eminently dupable, and given to joining lodges, clubs, and klaverns. For progressive urbanites, nothing raised morale like the notion of being surrounded by ill-bred dolts. Thus it was that Manhattan invented Main Street.
The new geography of fear persists. The anthrax panic was only a few days old when some in the national press advanced the theory that the culprit was an anti-government hermit holed up in a shack among the pines. The speculative stories about this shared a somewhat wishful tone; linking a novel terror to old villains made the threat familiar, comprehensible. When a New York Times reporter visited a Utah gun show and found a man selling handbooks on homemade bio-weapons (information that is available on the Internet), this was major news. Why? Because it fit a story line dear and comforting to urbanite hearts. When a Times reader sees the words “gun show” in a story, he knows he’s in for another dispatch from the vast moral wasteland that is America beyond the Hudson, and he settles right in.
Never mind the interior’s progressive history as a stronghold of organized labor, women’s rights, and environmentalism—the notion that flyover country is harsh and backward lives on because folks who aren’t from there want it to. In this model not just a few but all Idaho cabin dwellers—perhaps because they’re relatively poor—are reflexively suspected of being racial “separatists,” whereas those who dwell in Caucasian coastal enclaves such as, say, Newport, Rhode Island, and Kennebunkport, Maine, suffer no such taint. There may be a certain romance to the thought. The deskbound have always loved their cowboys, whether those cowboys’ hats are white or black.

And the original Red/Blue article, from USA today:

The culture gap
The cultural differences between Gore’s voters and Bush’s, as illuminated by exit polls, were striking. Bush attracted people who go to church more than once a week, who think it’s more important that the president be a moral leader than a good government manager, who oppose stricter gun laws and who believe that if a school is failing, the government should pay for private school. Honesty is the quality they value most in a leader, followed by leadership and likability.
Gore drew heavy majorities of gay and Jewish voters, those who rarely or never attend church, who support stricter gun laws and who say a school should be fixed if it is failing. Their paramount value is experience, followed by competence to handle complex issues and caring about ”people like me.”
In a sense, Bush exploited the cultural polarization by making the election a referendum on character. But in another way, he tried to bridge many of the differences. He rarely mentioned abortion, gays or guns. Instead, he focused on education, health and ”compassionate conservatism.” His photo ops almost invariably involved black or Hispanic children. And yet nine in 10 blacks still voted for Gore.
Bill Clinton and the question of character shadowed the election, to Bush’s benefit. More than two-thirds of the electorate said Clinton would be remembered not for his leadership but for his scandals. Nearly half — 44% — said the scandal was very or somewhat important in determining their vote, and three-quarters of them voted for Bush.

Go back and read the whole thing.

I’ve been chewing on Matthew Yglesias’ comment about ‘the heartland’ for a while.
Here’s Matthew:

I think it’s fine that salt of the earth types often feel put off and excluded by the elitism of some highbrow liberals, but does anyone in Middle America need to put up with this sort of direct abuse from the top leaders of the Democratic Party? Of course not. And we on the coasts get it all the time, from Bush’s cracks about “sucking salt air” and “swilling white wine on Martha’s Vineyard” on down. Frankly, I’m getting a bit sick and tired of it. We’re Americans just like everyone else. We work, we pay the bulk of the taxes that support the government’s generous subsidization of rural life, we obey the law, we’re good citizens, what’s the problem? I can’t help but feel that there’s a hint of racism in the sentiment that the “real” America is the part least reflective of our nation’s grand diversity, and there’s far more than a hint of truly asinine anti-intellectualism in it.

Now as I read this, Matthew is simply suggesting that the coastal elites…and make no mistake, they are elites, based on income, wealth, and influence…just be considered one voice in the pluralist choir of American politics.
Now the reality is that Trent Lott is just as much a member of the coastal elite as anyone. When he retires from the Senate, he will most likely, as do most Washington officials, keep a house in Mississippi, but make his home in New York or Washington where he can capitalize on his connections.
But he (Lott) is trying to appeal to the interests of the non-“coastal elite” folks, who for the most part feel not only excluded from the majority of the national dialog, but explicitly threatened by the economic and social policies promoted by the coastal elites.
The leading policy issues here are globalization and immigration. Now before you accuse me of becoming Pat Buchanan (ack!), I’m not necessarily against either one. I personally benefit from both. But that’s tempered in me by the knowledge that the people who are hammered hard by both of those are the people in the red states, the blue- and pink- collar people, the people who I always believed the Democratic party stood for.
Look, I know that as a society, we’re better off if we can buy our jeans for $3.00 less. And poorer people benefit disproportionately. And that even if I didn’t believe this, that there is nothing you can really do about it; we can’t saw our economy off from the rest of the world. So instead we push the folks standing on the edge off, and explain to them that they are now in competition with not only Mexico, but with China.
Take a look at this article from the L.A. Times magazine this weekend.

The plant was shut in June, one of six Levi plant closures that left the San Francisco apparel giant with just a tiny U.S. manufacturing presence–a plant in San Antonio, Texas, devoted to quick turn-around products that have deadlines overseas plants can’t meet. At the end, the Blue Ridge workers stood in small knots, tossed about by a maelstrom of emotions. Some were in shock. Some muttered that they would never again wear Levi clothing. Most worried about the future. Brenda Pope was one of those.
Blue Ridge is a town of nearly 2,000 in north Georgia, just south of the Tennessee and North Carolina lines. Blue-green hills rise sharply a few miles south of town and provide a gateway to the Appalachians, gaining loveliness as they gain height. Residents are mostly Scots-Irish, descendants of the hard-edged people who broke the Cherokees, and then broke the soil. Today, many here, like Pope, are working poor.
Measured against what most of us feel we need, the 44-year-old single mother asked little. She wanted to live among familiar pines and trustworthy people, create value with her hands and raise her child in the old ways. She did not think she needed a college degree to do these things. She was right, until she made the mistake of pricing herself out of the labor market–a feat accomplished by earning $14 per hour putting zippers in Levi’s famous blue jeans.
When Levi moved Pope’s job out of the country, she became one of hundreds of thousands of American workers who have lost jobs during the past six decades as the garment industry seeks lower wages in underdeveloped countries. In that context, the decision to close the Blue Ridge plant was hardly unusual. Levi had clung to its last U.S. manufacturing plants long after most of its competitors had fled.

Sure, the economists can explain, we can migrate the workforce to higher-wage, higher-skill jobs…like computer programming.
Except that I’m working today on a project where the vendor has a staff of 15 (entirely Indian immigrants) here, and a staff of 45 in Calcutta. There are five management personnel working with the vendor. So we five are gonna be OK. It’s the programmers and system analysts who thought they had the world knocked up who suddenly have to look over their shoulders the way the Brenda Popes of the country do.
Look, it’s simple. The income gap is real, and is caused by two things: a decline on the middle and bottom caused by both the rising productivity of the automated manufacturing and service economy (we used to talk about this in the 50’s and 60’s, remember?) and the increasing irrelevance of distance as communication and transportation make everywhere in the world close to everywhere else. And an increase on the top as the miracle of compound interest adds to the wealth of those who have investable assets (yes, even after the crash).
And what that means is simple. We will have five managers, who all get to be in the top 5% on the income spectrum, and we will manage folks who now have to compete with Bangalore, Kowloon, and Manila, as well as with North Carolina and Texas. And we’ll wait our turn to face that fierce competition as the top .5%, who control the organizations we all work for, increasingly try and find ways to cut costs (they have no choice, as Levi’s had no choice).
Others can talk with greater exactitude about the long-term economic effects of this.
But what I can point to is a collective feeling of anxiety, of irrelevance, sometimes of naked fear that reaches from the top of the working class to the bottom. I see it in my friends. Sometimes I feel it myself.
Neither the Republicans or the Democrats have any meaningful policy response to it. Each party is so deeply in hock to the .5% that any policy that would challenge the “markets” would never get out of the conference room where it was proposed. And the reality is that we can’t fight the markets.
But we on the coasts…we folks who make their living creating and managing intellectual and financial capital…get the benefits of low prices and have less to fear.
We get the low-wage nannies that let us work and raise our kids, and the cheap jeans that let us fashionably clothe them, and the low-wage help that lets us get inexpensive dinners when we take the family out.
The folks in the hinterlands…in the 909 here in Southern California…just would rather have a chance to be more than nannies and servers. They’re trying to climb a wage and class ladder that’s sinking underneath them.
Now the Republicans can get all Nativist, and appeal to patriotic symbols, and to social issues (about which more later), and stand on their belief in a strong defense and low taxes. And the Folks (Kevin Starr calls the Midwestern immigrants to California ‘the Folks’) like strong defense and low taxes (someone needs to point out that they aren’t necessarily getting the benefit of the low taxes…but that’s just me channeling Ann Salisbury).
What have the Democrats got?

Kevin Phillips, author if one of my favorite books, Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustration of American Politics, has a great column in the L.A. Times Opinion section today, on the dilemma faced by the Democrats. He says: “Greed Is Putting Party in Peril” (intrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’).

If the Democratic Party’s recent midterm election campaign was weak and shallow, the same can be said of its November post-midterm-election debate over whether to move left or right. Bluntly put, the party of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman has been selling its soul to fill its campaign wallet and is now in big trouble, especially among three key longtime constituencies: blacks, Latinos and lower-income Southern whites.
This, in turn, has become a threat to the balance of power in Washington and to the policymaking process. The “opposition” party is verging on incapacity. Its old faces are beyond Botox or relevant speech therapy. Few new ones are in sight.
Not that forthright ideology is the cure — moving leftward under Nancy Pelosi, the new Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, or rightward under the aegis of the Washington-based Democratic Leadership Council. However, there is some basic philosophy involved, and if the Democrats cannot comprehend this, they face considerable peril.
…
The weakening economy and skewed wealth distribution were obvious rallying points, yet Democratic leaders, despite having the freedom that comes from being out of power nationally, abandoned them, save for cliches about protecting Social Security and providing prescription drugs.
While hardly new, this marked an escalation in the national party’s willingness to discard old beliefs and the interests of ordinary citizens in order to woo big-contributor money that has captured the center of U.S. politics — the new “venal center.”
It is a critical and depressing transformation. Fifty years ago, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. identified a “vital center” in American politics, crediting Democrats with building a new and constructive moderate coalition under Roosevelt and Truman. But they lost their dominance and vitality some 30 years ago. Then, over the last 10 years, especially under Bill Clinton during the money-culture days of the stock market bubble, the Democratic Party joined in making venality bipartisan.
This is a losing politics, because the dominance of venality automatically favors the Republicans. Innately on the side of money, many, if not most, Republicans are philosophically committed to upholding its principles and some of its excesses. By contrast, the worthy history of the Democratic Party, especially during its periods of dominance, has been to question those principles and to indict related excesses. When abuses mount and Democrats remain mute, they lose both constituency appeal and their historical raison d’etre.
Regaining this balance is not turning left, an implausible description for the great Democrats from Jefferson to Truman. What it has involved is correcting the excesses of plutophile conservatives from Alexander Hamilton through the 20th century and down to the present day. Under current circumstances, it would take years for any such correction to be leftish.
…
(A.L.: emphasis mine)

I couldn’t agree more.
Until the Democratic Party can wean itself from the golden teat of large donors (primarily from lawyers, labor, technology, and media), they will be transparently captive to their investors’ interests.
Having given away the social and cultural grounds that tied them to working Americans, they then gave away the economic ones, and wonder why they are left standing at the altar.
Doesn’t surprise me.
[Update: Calpundit disagrees (note that his permalinks are wonky right now, just look for “venality”), and says that “I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but it sure doesn’t seem to provide any concrete suggestions. I mean, the “old Jackson-FDR constituencies”? In the year 2002, just what is that supposed to mean?” Well, from my point of view the ties than bind the Dems to the “political investor” class are pretty clear and well-drawn; those ties put the party firmly on the side of capital, as opposed to labor, and mean that the folks with cash pretty much dominated both sides of the political discussion over the last fifteen years. That needs to be balanced, and no one is doing it right now (with the exception, in a fragmented and relatively unproiductive way, of the Greens).]

My referrer logs are showing a bunch of traffic via the old blogspot url (http://armedliberal.blogspot.com); if you go there you get a message redirecting you here (for some reason I can’t get a redirect script to consistently work there).
If you’re one of those people, would you comment below and tell me who referred you there?? I’ll go get them to change their link…
Thanks!!

I’ve been thinking about the whole “coast” “heartland” thing, as noted by Yglesias and others, and had a hard time finding a way into the issue until last night.
We were driving home from the movies, Tenacious G, Middle Guy and I (we saw 8 Mile again, because the two of them wanted to), and I was punching the buttons on the stereo in the Mighty Odyssey Minivan when a discussion broke out.
The top 3 buttons on the stereo are taken up by the three major stations that TG and MG listen to (I tend to listen to the CD’s in the changer because I hate commercials).
KCRW, the local NPR station; KZLA, the local corporate-owned country station; and KROQ, the local corporate-owned alternative rock station.
The voting politics are complex. I’m totally fickle. I’ll mostly turn things off; KCRW when it gets too sanctimonious or the World Music interludes become intolerable; KROQ when the grindcore songs come on; KZLA when really bad country-pop gets played. TG likes KCRW and KZLA. MG hates KZLA.
So when we got into the car, some awful Incubus song came on, and I punched KZLA, which was playing a current country hit called “The Good Stuff”. In case you don’t listen, here’s a typical lyric:

Not a soul around but the old bar keep,
Down at the end an’ looking half asleep.
An he walked up, an’ said : “What’ll it be?”
I said: “The good stuff.”
He didn’t reach around for the whiskey;
He didn’t pour me a beer.
His blue eyes kinda went misty,
He said: “You can’t find that here.
“‘Cos it’s the first long kiss on a second date.
“Momma’s all worried when you get home late.
“And droppin’ the ring in the spaghetti plate,
“‘Cos your hands are shakin’ so much.
“An’ it’s the way that she looks with the rice in her hair.
“Eatin’ burnt suppers the whole first year
“An’ askin’ for seconds to keep her from tearin’ up.
“Yeah, man, that’s the good stuff.”

And Middle Guy looked disgusted and asked me “Why the hell do you listen to that stuff, anyway? How can you like the Vines and this?” That answer’s another issue…
But what I told him was that I liked the sound of good country music, and then started talking about the changes in country since I’d started listening to it, and that today it was almost the last music about love, fidelity, loss and hope, and that I liked that.
And that one thing that I missed from rock was the hope and yearning that used to be a part of it back when I was Middle Guy’s age.
And, as these kind of talks tend to do, they got me thinking.
I’d been thinking a lot about the Great Cultural Divide…the whole red/blue thing, and I had a brief moment of clarity.
It’s all about country music.
Or, rather, it’s all about the worldview that country music encapsulates.
Here’s a counterpoint. My subscription to Harper’s hasn’t run out yet, although I won’t be renewing it in spite of the flood of imploring letters and postcards I’ve received from their subscription service, and in this month’s is a classic explanation of why (not available on the web):

‘Comfort Cult’
On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor’s world
By Francine Prose
…
If part of what we seek from art is solace and consolation, an interlude of distraction, a brief escape from our daily cares, even a glimpse of happiness – and who, in these disturbing times does not, or should not want all of that and more? – it is simple enough to understand why the products of what we might call Comfort Culture should dramatically outperform a writer like William Trevor in the marketplace of analgesic entertainment. The Lovely Bones is narrated from heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped and brutally murdered by a neighbor (think Our Town with dismemberment) and who receives as compensation for her earthly travails, an afterlife that includes a nice apartment, plenty of teen-girl magazines, a paradisical version of high school, and a front-row seat from which to observe the folks back home coping with their grief and puzzling over her killer’s identity. No such comforts are provided the unfortunate young women dispatched by Hilditch, the creepy serial killer in Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey; indeed it is characteristic of Trevor’s bravery as a writer, and of his passionate sympathy for even the most loathsome outsiders and misfits, that a good part of the book is written from the point of view of the demented and delusional Hilditch himself.
…
(emphasis added)

First, I can’t help myself, but the idea of a literary critic with the name ‘Prose’ does give me the giggles…
…but to get back to culture; while I can see a sensitive reading of Felicity’s Journey and a sympathetic nod to the loathsome outsider as a steady part of the programming on KCRW, and a speed-metal version on KROQ (in fact the song probably already exists), there is no way that sympathy would be found on KZLA. No contemporary country song would celebrate that kind of brutality and despair. We’re talking about a fundamental difference of worldview and taste, and this issue ought to serve as a pathway into understanding the gap between the worlds.
In the next part, I’ll talk a bit about the social and economic realities behind the gap.
(added emphasis)

Bob Morris links me over to this article by Patrick Seale on the roots of terrorism.

One strong possibility is that the “enemy” is not just a terrorist network but a broad, militant, grassroots rebellion against American military and political interventions in the Arab and Muslim world, against Western arrogance, racism and bullying.
For decades now, but especially under the Bush administration, America’s triumphalism, its contempt for the views and interests of others, its boastful displays of military power, its refusal to recognize and address the “roots of terror,” its apparent indifference to international law, its economic supremacy all these have created a worldwide backlash which has put Americans at risk in many countries. History suggests that any power which dominates others will inevitably create violent opposition to it. If this is true, then what we are witnessing is nothing less than an anti-imperialist movement of the 21st century.
Although often expressed in Islamic terms, the movement of rebellion is essentially political. It aims to liberate the Arab and Muslim world from the suffocating embrace of the West and above all from American neo-imperialism and its Zionist handmaiden. Future historians might well judge Osama bin Laden, for example, not as the outrageous pariah he now seems, but as only the latest in a long line of Islamic activists who include such well-known figures of the past as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Hassan al-Banna, Said Qutb, Musa Sadr, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and even Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Many separate streams feed the river of rebellion. There is no doubt that the epidemic of anti-American sentiment raging from Morocco to Indonesia is fed by American support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. This is the main spring of the rebellion. But there are many others. Israel’s repeated aggressions against Lebanon, as well as its 22-year occupation of the South supported by the US have bred an army of bitter opponents. The 12-year sanctions against Iraq the worst inflicted on any country in history have mobilized opinion powerfully against America and Britain, as has the obsessive threat of war against Baghdad repeated almost every time Bush or Prime Minister Tony Blair open their mouths.
Quite apart from its irresponsibility, there is something incomprehensible and irrational about America’s fixation with Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. As the distinguished American columnist William Pfaff wrote the other day, “There is, to the best of specialist opinion, no scenario by which the American public is threatened by nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of Iraqi origin.” In other words, there is no credible Iraqi threat to the United States. Why then is America making more enemies for itself? Is it because hard-line Zionists, anxious to ensure Israel”s regional supremacy, have captured American foreign policy? The well-founded suspicion that this is the case is yet another source of anti-US rage.

Well, while I see the world pretty damn differently from this author, I do agree that the actors are part of a more diffuse set of organizations than we are assuming, and that simply decapitating these organizations will not make the problems go away.
He and I part company here: Where to place the responsibility for resolving these issues? While I think that the US and the West have to reach out, it’s equally clear to me that the other side…the Muslim and developing world’s responsible actors…need to reach out as well. Why?
Because if there is no one on the other end of the phone, we in the West will do what it takes to protect ourselves.
I commented earlier:

I don’t want to be a part of a society that eradicated another culture; I don’t want to commit genocide.
I don’t want to be put in a position where genocide is either a reasonable option, or where my fellow citizens are so enraged that they are willing to commit it, and my opposition will be washed away in a tide of rage.
I want a calm, prosperous Middle East, and believe that the Palestinian Arabs who have been royally screwed by everyone…by the Europeans and Americans who established Israel without planning or compensation; by their leaders who have led them into several suicidal wars; by the leaders of the other Arab states who use them as cheap labor, exploit them economically, and exploit them politically…deserve decent lives.
They won’t get them following the path they are on.

Neither will the ‘enraged’ Arabs, who will simply add to the world’s toll of sorrow until we get tired enough of paying it.
That’s a sad truth.