Liberal Arrogance

This article strikes me as true. The basic premise is that many people vote Republican because they resent Liberal self-righteousness, which seems to agree with my personal observations

I have thought for a while that a big reason that people in Utah don't become Democrats is because the Democrats they see are condescending, closed-minded, often anti-Mormon, and frankly extremist in their views. Stereotypes don't start without some grain of truth to make them ring true.

I remember being struck by this when I went to a meeting of the BYU Democrats last year. There were a lot of frankly strange people there – vegans, sentimentalist environmentalists, PETA members, gun-control people, and discontented feminists – basically a room full of stereotypes (BYU Dems - if any of you read this I mean no offence, I wasn't talking about YOU individually, bla bla bla). But setting this aside (any political gathering will tend to attract those who are, as my dorky political science professor probably still says, "a few standard deviations from the mean.") there was a very prevalent sense of victim hood that, "Those idiotic, close-minded Republican Mormon lemmings discriminate against Democrats and question our faith." The mentality that we are not mainstream, even if the most of the Utah Democratic party platform very much reflects public opinion (allowing exceptions for major national trends, like supporting the Iraq war was), is self-propagating. If the Liberals view themselves as the enlightened minority, always ready with a snide comment for "people around here" then, –surprise!– "people around here" will resent that, especially because most of the time they are being misrepresented.

If the Democrats are going to have a potent majority, they need to stop filling people's minds with anecdotes that make manipulative salesmen-blowhards like Hannity resonate with people (I am certainly guilty of this too, and probably more often than I realize).

Another point that is not made so much in the article, is that Liberals, especially at the national level, underestimate how much attacks on "traditional values" offend people. Other than the shocking incompetence of the Republicans as of late, the reason Obama is so much more popular here at BYU than any Democrat in years is because he gets it. But for every Obama, there are hundreds if not thousands of others: college professors, self-appointed public intellectuals, Hollywood liberals, etc. who openly and visibly despise traditional sexual mores, any assertion of default gender roles (even though this, I think, has softened somewhat), patriotism, and religions that actually stand for something.

Soccer-Mom America ideologically never got on to the "sexual revolution" boat (individual shenanigans aside). They don't understand the nuances of energy policy, foreign policy, and economic policy – who has time. But they do understand that marriage between a man and a woman is sacred, and that sex should, as a rule, be about starting a family as much as it is about expression of love between married adults. They don't have time to (or just don't) fact-check every crackpot/deliberately-deceptive claim put forward by the Bush administration, but they are horrified that abortion is legal and widely-practiced as a birth-control method (most agree that health and life exceptions are necessary).

This state of perceived and real Liberal snobbery, political naivete (not unique to self-identified conservatives, despite what some may think), and the prevalence of spin-doctors who know all the right signals to send to manipulate them makes for a more consistently powerful Republican Party than is healthy. Paul Krugman, Bill Moyers and many others believe that the Civil Rights movement is responsible for the shift of power to the Republicans. Republicans certainly have exploited and do exploit racist tendencies for political gain, especially in the South, and no one can argue that the South has not been solidly Republican since LBJ. But I suspect that for every closet racist in the Appalachians, there are many others who at least aren't racist enough for it to meaningfully manifest itself in political trends (I'm being deliberately vague here), but who are angry about perceived and real attacks against their religious beliefs and their way of life.

I think that's enough said for now. Anyway check out the linked article; it's worth thinking about.