>
> On Sep 19, 2009, at 12:12 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> Um, don't rich, over-educated coastal white people run the Republican
>> Party,
>> too?
>>
>
> Name some.
>
> OK, I stand corrected, w/r/t the present - though this is perhaps because
they appear to have no leaders at the moment. I guess my point should have
been that, while the disgustingly successful, populist and racist (hello,
David Brooks are you in there?) Southern strategy of the Republicans
generated greater popular support in the south and mountain west, the
intellectual and financial power behind that strategy were rich,
over-educated coastal white people with greater commitments to neoliberal
economics than to neoconservative culture.
This is NOT to say that the latter hasn't largely come to trump the former in terms of the party's publicly coded discourse... but, given that situation, part of the Repugs' problem - as many here have argued - is that they've lost the intellectual/financial pillar on the coasts that built the New Right in the first place... which is why they are the party of rabid cultural politics, fearmongering and opposition-w/o-vision... however much that is more or less working to stall neoliberal/conservative democratic legislation. This is in part, again as many here have argued, because the Democrats are as blatantly neoliberal as the Repugs these days... which only leaves the Repugs anti-gov't and cultural politics.
In any event, I think your corrective largely indicates that my point about race was right but that I needed to shift the historical register in my critique of Brooks' point about these "Jacksonian" populists to the 80s and 90s - where, if Brooks is right, they should have opposed Reaganism and egghead neoliberalism... but they didn't... its kinda a Thomas Frank-like argument, I'll admit (Thanks, Mart!). Though Frank's point that people are idiots if their cultural beliefs don't trump their economic interests is as problematic as Brooks' stupid-ass claims as well...