Why am I supposed to dislike Webb?

The culture so dramatically symbolized by the Southern redneck [is] the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether.
From the perspective of the activist Left, [rednecks] are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness. And for the last fifty years the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America's future growth.
--from Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,
by James Webb (2004)

Yowie. We don't often hear rude talk like that up here in Arlington, Virginia, straight across the river from Washington, D.C. Here the leafy, winding streets are lined with Priuses and Volvos and the bumper stickers say "Visualize World Peace" and "Goddess Power." We especially don't hear such rude talk during Sunday afternoon house parties like the one Pat Langley hosted two weeks ago. Mrs. Langley is a Democratic party activist in this most liberal of suburbs in this most conservative of states. She'd invited friends, fellow activists, and neighbors over for punch and coffee and finger food. She wanted them to watch a campaign video and listen to a conference call over a speaker phone, and then give as much money as they could to her favorite candidate, James Webb.

That's the same James Webb--the staunch defender of the right to bear arms who's warned his countrymen about collectivist taming by the Left, its war on salt-of-the-earth "Joe Sixpack" through such programs as affirmative action, also known (to Webb, among others) as "state-sponsored racism." The same Jim Webb whose war novels bristle with contempt for the professional liberals, mollycoddlers, and antimilitary cultural Marxists who constitute society's decadent elite and who have made their home in the Democratic party ever since their treacherous betrayal of our fighting men in Vietnam.

It also underlies the economic populism that allows Webb to slide edgewise into the mainstream of today's Democratic party. He says he was moved to run for the Senate when he saw "the breakdown in our society along economic lines." He has come to rescue his people--the poor whites who (along with poor blacks) have been the chief victims of globalized turbocapitalism. In every speech he cites the same statistics: "Ten percent of Fortune 500 companies pay zero corporate income taxes," he says. "When I was 24, the average CEO earned 20 times what the average wage-earner did. Today my son is 24, and the average CEO earns 200 times what the average wage-earner does." He is vaguer on the subject of how to fix this unhappy state of affairs. He supports a higher minimum wage and an end to "corporate tax breaks which cost American jobs." At the same time, though, he says he supports a cut in the capital gains tax, in case a redneck wants to sell his stocks.

The vagueness doesn't bother his supporters, because the war is the true rationale for his campaign. And here too he has worked an amazing inversion--one that also could have been predicted from his books, particularly the impressive string of military novels that have made him well known. Webb is not only a gifted novelist but something rarer: a novelist of ideas. And all his ideas are reactionary.