What's the Matter with Liberals?

What's the Matter with Liberals?

Donkey Rising highlighted this from the New York Times Review of Books. It dares to mention the C word: class. Only class in increasingly defined in cultural, not economic, terms. The Democrat's inability to deal with this is exceeded only by the GOP's shameless exploitation.

The whole things is a must read, here's a taste:

"The NRA came up with an image that brilliantly encapsulated the whole thing: an elaborately clipped French poodle in a pink bow and a Kerry-for-president sweater over the slogan 'That dog don't hunt.'

And now it was the drawling son of 1992's aristocrat who was drawing the adoring throngs in the shuttered mill towns and coal-mining regions. It was the committed enemy of organized labor whose prayerful public performances persuaded so many that he 'shares our values.' It was the man who had slashed taxes on inherited fortunes and dividends who was said to be, in the election's most telling refrain, 'one of us.'

George W. Bush was authentic; John Forbes Kerry, like all liberals, was an affected toff, a Boston Brahmin who knew nothing of the struggles of average folks. Again and again, in the course of the electoral battle, I heard striking tales of this tragically inverted form of class consciousness: of a cleaning lady who voted for Bush because she could never support a rich man for president. Of the numerous people who lost their cable TV because of nonpayment but who nevertheless sported Bush stickers on their cars.

The most poignant, though, was one I saw with my own eyes: the state of West Virginia, one of the poorest in the nation, in the process of transforming itself into a conservative redoubt. This is a place where the largest private-sector employer is Wal-Mart and where decades of bloody fights between workers and mine owners gave rise to a particularly stubborn form of class consciousness. It does not stand to gain much from Bush's tax cuts and his crackdown on labor unions. But if class is a matter of cultural authenticity rather than material interests, John Kerry stood about as much of a chance there as the NRA's poodle did of retrieving a downed duck. As I toured the state's valleys and isolated mining towns, I spotted Bush posters adorning even the humblest of dwellings and mobile homes."

What's the answer? How do you win these folks back without selling out on substance? Are their against-self-interest votes based on the actual substance of God, guns and guts, or is it the cultural symbolism that does it?

Politics