Discriminations

(You think “Delusional” is too strong? Perhaps you’re right. Substitute “Irrational” or even “Misguided” if you prefer.)

One of the virtues of being late to the feast of devouring Obama’s latest misstep — his condescending dismissal of the rubes in small-town America — is that you all already know what I’m talking about. But just in case you don’t (in case you've been on Mars all weekend or, like me, attending a reunion or something), here’s what the Anointed One said to a group of supporters at a small fundraising gathering in San Francisco, speaking of the frustrated, angry, misguided voters in Pennsylvania (and presumably other) small towns, as reported in a friendly source, The Huffington Post:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Interesting, and less quoted, was the HuffPo reporter’s own take on those remarks:

Obama made a problematic judgment call in trying to explain working class culture to a much wealthier audience. He described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia

Well, yes, since rich Californian’s might indeed regard “antipathy” and “xenophobia,” not to mention God and guns, as “pure negatives,” I suppose it’s fair to say that Obama’s remarks do reflect a “problematic judgment.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that Obama, in addition to being undiplomatically problematic, might have been, not to put to fine a point on it, wrong.

Why, some of you may be asking, do I describe Obama’s snootily superior view of small-town Americans — he knows how they should be voting, even though they don’t; he knows that their values, though real, are illegitimate, nothing more than irrational responses to hard times — as “frank”? Two reasons.

First, because they are what Mickey Kaus has aptly described as a (Michael) Kinsley Gaffe: “the candidate accidentally says what he really thinks.” Proof that he really believes this, if any proof is needed, is that Obama said the same thing before and after these controversial remarks. Before, in The Speech, when in a widely mis-interpreted passage he recognized that “white anger” over affirmative action, welfare, etc., was real. Those whites are angry, he said, because

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.

This anger, Obama recognized, is real, but he did not recognize it as legitimate. It was an expression of false consciousness manipulated by “talk show hosts” and “conservative commentators” to distract the rubes from their real oppressors, “a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

In other words, because these misguided, misled souls in small-town Amercan don’t know what’s bad for them, they don’t know what’s good for them. So, Obama’s recent comments were frank because they were an honest statement of what he truly believes, as he told us only a few weeks ago.

If further proof is needed, Obama has just repeated those views in attempting to explain — or as he might say, “contextualize” — them. As he explained to the Winston-Salem Journal:

Sen. Barack Obama said yesterday that he regrets his choice of words when he recently described economically distressed Americans as people who are “bitter” and who “cling to guns or religion.”

But he defended the underlying content of his remarks, which were the subject of blistering attacks yesterday from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in a phone interview with the Winston-Salem Journal. “But the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”

Well, of course he regrets offending people, but no one took offense because he said the small towners are “frustrated” by “economic distress.” He offended them — and many others — because he said that they “cling” to religion and guns and nativism and opposition to affirmative action and gay marriage, etc., etc., because of their frustration. People without those frustrations, presumably people who had been well taken care of by a benevolent Washington, wouldn’t “cling” to such benighted views. In ObamaLand, which is just a province of LiberalLand, people do not oppose race preferences, illegal immigration, etc., if they are not angry and frustrated because of economic distress.

And here's my second reason for describing Obama’s analysis as frank; it was undiluted, pure Frank with a capital "F." That is, it was almost a perfect rendition of the pervasive liberal attitude put forth several years ago in a highly popular (in certain circles) book by Thomas Frank, What’s The Matter With Kansas.

Here’s Frank himself describing the essence of the Great Backlash of false consciousness conservatism:

“The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off,” Frank wrote. “Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”

And how does Frank explain why conservatives are so dumb? Here’s how a reviewer in the New York Times put it:

Like the most vitriolic of right-wing pundits ... , Thomas Frank has a distinctly Manichean worldview. The political universe, for him, is divided between the good guys and the conservatives. The conservatives are further divided between the fools and the knaves. The fools are “the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what they see as the tyranny of the lawyers, the America-haters at Harvard, the professional politicians in Washington or the eviction of God from public space.” The knaves are “the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions.”

Frank ... devotes his newest work, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” to explaining this red-state cycle of iniquity, using his native Kansas as the exemplar. Conservative leaders, according to Frank, care only about promoting the concerns of big business, which are inimical to those of the average Midwesterner. But those leaders have cynically seized upon and promoted a sense of cultural grievance and victimhood in order to win over the bumpkins and fool them into voting against their true interests.

Frank’s economics are, of course, debatable — his view that capitalism is “borderline criminality” puts him just a touch outside the mainstream (as does his view that the Democratic Leadership Council is a “hothouse of the right”). But what is most odd is Frank’s refusal to consider the idea that there might be such a thing as legitimate cultural grievances. The only legitimate interests, he believes, are material ones. “By all rights,” he tells us, “the people in Wichita and Shawnee and Garden City should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it.” But instead, the poor fools have been led astray.

Frank’s book is remarkable as an anthropological artifact. Although not terribly successful at explaining the cultural divide, it manages to exemplify it perfectly in its condescension toward people who don’t vote as Frank thinks they should....

What this reviewer said about Frank is equally true of Obama, whose name I have substituted below:

Because it is self-evident to [Obama] that people’s true interests are material ones, it is also self-evident to him that conservatives can only be either deluders or deluded, knaves or fools. Good-faith, intelligent disagreement is ruled out from the beginning....

Obama’s comments were truly and deeply offensive not because of how he “worded things” (it’s all about words to him, isn’t it?), but because of the condescending contempt for people whose values he does not share that his words accurately expressed.

ADDENDUM

I wonder if Obama actually knows any small-town Americans.

It’s clear that he’s on friendly, personal terms with a number of leftists, not only his Farrakhanian pastor. He breaks bread and has served on a foundation board with ex-weatherman Bill Ayers. Ayers once tried to set a bomb at the Pentagon. Later he told the New York Times that

I don’t regret setting bombs.... I feel we didn’t do enough.

That article, as John Podhoretz notes, appeared on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Obama has no shortage of friends on the left, in universities (but I repeat myself), in cities, no doubt in suburbs. But leave aside friends; does he even have a passing acquaintance with any “angry” “frustrated” small-town residents who, he tells us, have been duped into opposing race preferences, people who don’t look like them, abortion, gay marriage ... who, in short, irrationally “cling” to religion and guns?

It seems to me that these people are as alien to him as Rev.Wright and his ilk are to them. How can Obama “bring us together” if he is so clueless about so many of the people who must be brought?

Could someone, please, arrange some introductions?