James Baird:
> Well, if the white males I work with every day are any
> indication, it has to do with their simplistic
> economic notions (and I do mean simplistic; it always
> astonishes me that people who are so hostile to
> taxation usually don't even know how the graduated tax
> brackets work) combined with a frightening racism that
> manifests itself as an obsession with "law and order".
>
> Since most any political discussion I have at work
> consists of "me against the room", I'm actually
> surprised Gore even got that 35%. Once I get out
> beyond the SF-Berkeley oasis, I pretty much assume
> until proven otherwise that any random white guy I
> meet is a rabid right-winger. Economically, white
> women are usually the same, with maybe a bit more
> compassion mixed in. I think if it wasn't for
> abortion keeping the white women on their side, the
> Dems would be completly sunk.
If people are so stupid, it behooves those who still believe in soc-dem and electoral politics to ask why they couldn't have been manipulated in favor of that enterprise instead of its competitors'. One may say with Disraeli that all stupid people are conservative, but after the New Deal and World War II, soc-dem lite and major Federal intervention in public life had become the normal, "conservative" thing. The public has in fact continued to hold on to public schools and Social Security rather bravely in spite of the dithering and betrayals of its leaders.
I was thinking about this in regard to the Floridians who voted for Bush because he wouldn't take their guns away and wouldn't allow homosexuals to get married. These seem like very silly things to say, unless, as fetishes (symbols) they represent something else which may be more reasonable, such as resistance to intrusions into private life and personal autonomy. I don't know what these things are, but I suspect they're there, and that neither the Left nor the fans of Soft Cop are going to make very much progress among such people until they figure out what the things are and why people are so concerned about them -- as a procedure of science, not an exercise in self-serving literary and culture criticism, which even I could provide you with right now.