--- Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> The words "elitism" and "elitist," meaningless in
> themselves, have
> long (always) been the watermark of every
> anti-intellectual racist
> demagogue in this benighted country. They should be
> banned from
> civilized discourse, or at least only referred to as
> "the e word," as
> distinctly worse than "the n word" which some
> people, at least, use
> subversively or even affectionately.
>
[WS:] Amen!
Anti-elite demagoguery is perhaps the best explanation of the "bitter yokel" phenomenon. Bitter yokels are not inherently Republican, religious or armed-to-teeth
gun nuts. They are anti-elite, and since they equate elitism with liberalism they embrace the opposite values to those that "elite liberals" do.
Thus:
-they vote Republican because liberal elites vote Democrat;
-they embrace religion, even though they do not care much about church or doctrine - because liberal elites preach godless humanism;
- they support tort reform because "big city liberal lawyers" benefit from it;
- they support gun lobby because "liberal elites" want to take away guns from the people;
- they drive trucks because liberal elites and city slickers drive BMWs and Lexuses;
- they do not care for unions, because liberal labor lawyers make it difciult for American companies to do business in this country and they are forced to move abroad;
- they do not care for the environment, because "liberal elites" ate tree-huggers;
and so on.
Wojtek
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