Moore condescension

Kevin Drum gets at one of the reasons that people in red states like Iowa vote for Republicans.The Washington Monthly

Now, needless to say, I don't agree with Wolfe that our sense of morality is "twisted," but I do agree that we probably lose a lot of support we don't need to lose because of a very real — and often dripping — condescension toward anyone we consider less enlightened than us.

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In other words, they disagree with us, but not so much that they can't be brought around or persuaded to vote for us based on other issues. Too often, though, a visceral loathing of being lectured at by city folks wins out and they end up marking their ballots for people like George Bush.

There are a lot of Democrats and liberals who seem completely perplexed that lower-income voters vote 'against their self-interest' i.e. for the Republicans. A guy named Thomas Frank has written a book to this effect called What's the Matter with Kansas?. I haven't read it yet. This elitism has a lot to do with it I think.

Michael Moore plays the part of populist, but in fact much of his vitriol is directly or indirectly aimed at lower middle-class people who disagree with him. He condemns corporations, but also the ignorant people ignorant who keep buying their products despite his revelations of their misdeeds. They are the pre-occupied proletariat who can't hear the calls of revolution because they are listening to Britney Spears.

In Bowling for Columbine, for example, the corporate targets are the gun industry, the NRA and K-Mart. The indirect targets are people who own guns and belong to the NRA. These people, through Charlton Heston, are portrayed as callous bastards who have no empathy for young victims of violence. The conventional wisdom is that people who belong to the NRA are the same kinds of people who go to church every Sunday and vote for Republicans. [sidenote: I would like to find some statistics on gun crime among NRA members. If you know where I could find some, do let me know.]

Moore aims to condemn both corporations and their working-class, non-Democratic customers. In the same way, the condescension that Kevin Drum describes is not only aimed at people who eat at McDonald’s and shop at Wal-Mart, but also against those corporations. One of the roots, IMHO, is in academia with everyone from Anthropology to Chemistry departments and students not even bothering to mask their contempt of the Business department and students (There are certain departments like Political Science and occasionally Economics which seem to be slightly more friendly to the Business department.). It is not surprising then, that business people and working-class people find themselves on the same side.

Will Wilkinson, also an Iowa boy, has been intelligently discussing the same thing from a libertarian perspective for the past few days.