Elitism and faux populism

Slightly off topic, but I couldn't help but to bite on this one.

I lived in NYC through the Giulliani times... An urban populist?? I can't say that he had any special affinity for the working class.

Giulliani was primarily a law-and-order pragmatist authoritarian... he wanted the strip clubs gone from times square? Done!... and established channels of power be damned. He wanted the squeegee men gone? Arrest them! He wanted credit for every single thing? Done!... and police commissioners who created the actual strategies be damned.

But where you find populism in all this, I'm not sure. He wanted to clean up the city so he could make way for more luxury condos and boutique sushi places. A populist NYC mayor would have paid attention to the working class neighborhoods in Queens/Bronx/Brooklyn, where rising prices are currently pushing said middle class farther and farther out of what used to be their home slices of NYC.

Rudy listened to no dissent and never met a problem that couldn't be addressed by more police force. He frequently went overboard.

But he was still somewhat popular because he actually succeeded in (somewhat) cleaning up the city.

And now for something more topical...

but the idea that you could have power over us is not only scary and strange, it's some kind of cosmic misapprehension. it's on its face absurd and incomprehensible. this, boys and girls, is how you keep losing elections, and it's the way you'll chuck this one.

This blog tends to only focus on one side of the coin - the liberals who look at ruralist/traditionalist/conservatives and see the other and can't even contain their loathing and disgust. Yes, I know this story.

But what about the flip side? To a liberal, all we see at events such as the RNC is a party sneering openly in our faces, telling us we are effete unamerican-america haters who have to be kept in their place lest we get our mitts on the levers of power and destroy the country. We see even our own democratic politicians climbing all over each other to seem more "salt of the earth". And when was the last time anyone has seen a major politician extol urban culture or academic achievement or talk about issues that effect the cities?

My point is, lets recognize that both sides see the other in their opponents. And the less we see and acknowledge the real humanity and the honorable intentions of the other side, the less we will get done. I was initially attracted to the crunchy-con circle because I thought that this was one particular place where there is plenty of room for cooperation and even friendship between the left and the right, but this doesn't seem to be bearing out.

As Peggy Noonan recently pointed out... the current internet/media environment is making this fight uglier and more out of control. This is looking to me less like a perpetual stalemate and more like a fight that was seeded with nixon (or hell - you could trace it back to the civil war) and is now starting to spiral and accelerate. Forget about coming together to get things done... all you need to add to this volatile mix is a little pinch of economic collapse (anyone have any idea where that might come from?) and you've got yourself a good old american failed state. Lets not forget - this country does have a history of civil war... and I for one am not so totally sure that that hatchet has been entirely buried.

I think Mike F. has touched on something very important. That is, that culture wars given the right mix of circumstances can become real wars. This may sound alarmist--but history tends to bear this out.

Having been a graduate student at an elite university, which I guess means I am not a populist, I can attest to the fact that the level of distrust and fear that many conservatives feel toward urban liberals is reciprocated.

I remember attending a large seminar which was discussing evangelical women. The discussion was civil and scholarly until one woman blurted out that she was sure that these same women and their male evangelical allies would lock someone like her (a feminist academic with a reputable Ph.D.) in a concentration camp if given the chance. The interesting thing is that no one challenged the comment, but rather nodded in agreement. I could go on to relate other incidents when normally sane and highly educated people became completely unhinged about religious conservatives, President Bush, etc.

My experience tells me that the fear and loathing that we are seeing on both sides of the Palin debate runs very deep. This does not bode well for us as a nation and I am not sure there is a good way to calm things down. We like to blame politicians for being divisive, but it seems to me that we have a divisive politics because we are a divided people.

I am not sure there is any easy solution to this situation given that most of the cultural issues that divide Americans do not lend themselves to compromise. I am especially thinking of abortion and gay rights issues.

The only solution that makes sense, and even here my confidence is rather low that we will follow this path, is a return to federalism on cultural issues. We know that what seems good and right in San Francisco will not be seen as such in Birmingham, Jackson, and Shreveport. Yet, we insist that the only solution to the culture wars is for someone to win nationally. Thus conservatives want to ban gay marriage and abortion through constitutional amendments. Liberals want the Supreme Court to find a right to gay marriage and to use their majority in Congress to pass the Freedom of Choice Act, which overturns all state and federal restrictions on abortion unless they include an elastic health clause.

Barack Obama is right to call for a new kind of politics, but I doubt he would support what that means, i.e. a renewed federalism that allows people at more local levels to decide how these big issues should be settled. Conservative and liberal absolutists will fight this tooth and nail, but it may be one of the only ways that we can step back from the abyss we are heading towards and preserve what's good and right about this country.

Black people can't relate to a woman who dresses a moose. Hispanic people can't relate to a woman who dresses a moose.

Here in rural NC I see black and hispanic deer hunters, I'm assuming they dress their kills, and I've lost count of the hispanics I see raising goats for eventual slaughter, and I know they don't take them to the local butcher for dressing.

We like to blame politicians for being divisive, but it seems to me that we have a divisive politics because we are a divided people.

I couldn't agree more. This leads to a few chicken/egg analogies:

Are our politics so divided because we are a divided people or are we a divided people because our politics is so divided?

Our politics has obviously been getting more divisive. Is this hapenning because the people are growing increasingly apart or are people growing increasingly apart because our politics is getting more divisive?

Obviously, the class/cultural rift in this country is real, and our politics reflects that. However, I would also argue that we are now trapped in a feedback loop - wherein politicians exploit the cultural rift in order to win, but further drive the people apart in the process. And as the people are driven further apart; wedge strategies become ever more effective political weapons, and any politician that forswears "wedge issue weaponry" essentially cedes the field. I think that is why the Obama and Mccain campaigns have both become increasingly nasty, even though I believe it goes against both of the candidate's natures.

It is feedback loops like these that can lead to actual war, and I believe that stopping one is brutally difficult and would have to be a grassroots movement. This is where I fantasize about a crunchy-con and leftist "back to the Earth, Michael Pollan" alliance. But I guess this is naive.

I am not sure there is any easy solution to this situation given that most of the cultural issues that divide Americans do not lend themselves to compromise. I am especially thinking of abortion and gay rights issues... The only solution that makes sense, and even here my confidence is rather low that we will follow this path, is a return to federalism on cultural issues.

My confidence here is also quite low. Imagine what it would take for a traditionalist to be at peace with the idea of a country that in some areas allows abortion/gay marriage. Or vice-versa. They would have to think of it as a different country. My thoughts turn to the EU, where liberal Dutch are perfectly ok with the very conservative Italy because it is a different country, and yet those same Dutch are also ok with being in the EU with Italy. Yet the EU is an extremely loose federation and does not resemble a country in many ways... Is this what we want to revert America to? And I doubt that that would be possible, since all of the states are "purple" and there are no convenient geographic lines to be drawn. Every state in the union contains, to varying degrees, a minituare version of the culture war that is hapenning in the country as a whole.

I remember attending a large seminar which was discussing evangelical women. The discussion was civil and scholarly until one woman blurted out that she was sure that these same women and their male evangelical allies would lock someone like her (a feminist academic with a reputable Ph.D.) in a concentration camp if given the chance. The interesting thing is that no one challenged the comment, but rather nodded in agreement. I could go on to relate other incidents when normally sane and highly educated people became completely unhinged about religious conservatives, President Bush, etc.

I have heard similar in the newsroom, here in Dallas, where you think people would know better, inasmuch as we actually live in the Evangelical capital of North America.

You know, the right blogsphere has been in a froth about Obama for some months now. The left is just making up for a late start. This is what we during election season in the early 21st century -- lose our collective minds. Come Nov. 15 or so, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled grousing about traffic and weather.

"our daughters always have abortions."

Indeed, as cannoneo implies, that's an assertion (an hyperbolic one, to be sure) in search of some supporting data. AFAIK no one, or no agency, tracks abortions by political self-identification of the woman, or her parents.

"Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law."

As opposed to W, who was affirmative action Yale and Harvard Business School? It is a lot less obvious that the Obamas got their elite education by being black than that W got his by being Bush senior's son.

Quinn, do you ever wonder what would happen if the MSM deliberately chose to cover only substantive issues and deliberately ignored the "character issues"?

Wishful thinking certainly. The MSM has been so browbeaten and intimidated by attacks from the Right that it goes out of its way to be "fair and balanced", forgetting that particular phrase has no real meaning without an idea of where the center really is. Instead it lets the loudest mouths decide what's fair.