[lbo-talk] Bush expected to announce candidacy any day now

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Feb 19 08:41:07 PST 2004


Kelley:
> I remember registering people to vote with NYPIRG back during the
Jackson
> campaign. We'd walk the poorest neighborhoods, get people to register,
and
> then listen to them yap about voting republican. They were very
defiant
> about it, 'coz we were, after all, coming off as lib'r00l edjamacated
types!

That reminds me of an article in WSJ (if memory serves) analyzing the voting patterns of those registered under the Motor Voter Act. Contrary to popular expectations, Repugs were big winners of the Act, followed by Independents and then Democrats.

The received wisdom of the liberal/progressive left is that all marginalized poor people are invariably left-leaning and progressive, and thus would invariably vote for a progressive/liberal Democrat (c.f. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward). This is yet another example of the knee-jerk-anti-racism-etc. I was just ranting about in my previous posting - or perhaps a "noble savage" myth of the literati class (often fueled by a guilt trip, as the only "poor and disenfranchised" that many of these luminaries ever encounter face-to-face are campus janitors and cafeteria workers or maids that do their laundry).

A much more realistic position is that the "poor and disenfranchised" are a mirror image of the "better off and enfranchised" segment of the population - some are progressive but the majority are fairly conservative, religious, ethnocentric, or even reactionary.

Wojtek



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