February 29, 2012
Compounding the problem is the fact that the white working classes have lost many of their old-fashioned American virtues. Charles Murray documents this in his latest book, and it’s fairly obvious when I visit my hometown on holidays.
It is inarguable that latter-day progressive ideas are partially responsible for this. They think that single motherhood is a respectable profession which should be state-subsidized. This may seem like a clever idea to folks who don’t have to put up with the consequences. But watching the fruit of this “alternative family arrangement” steal your car and knock up your daughter might cause the most vacuous of hayseeds to have a few abstract thoughts on the subject. Members of the latte tribe may think religion is evil and should be abolished, but religion keeps many of the working folks happy and relatively virtuous. While collegiate leftists may enjoy recreational drug use, “youthful experimentation” doesn’t go so well when it becomes a Cheech and Chong lifestyle for townies with no future. Palefaced proletarians lack the kind of education it takes to make up elaborate excuses for this sort of thing. They notice whose fancy-pants cultural Marxist ideas turned their friends and family into degenerates.
Your average member of the lunchpailetariat is acutely aware that those who are presently in charge of the Democratic Party hate him. Rednecks are villainized in the media, in academia, and in the private lives of folks who think they know better because of their sociology class. Many of the problems minorities experience in American society are laid at the feet of working-class white people. The irony is that these pallid scapegoats are politically powerless, unlike the latte tribe that demonizes them. Hating rednecks is the anti-Semitism of Democratic asses.
On the rare occasion when Democrats attempt to communicate with their white Neanderthal brethren, it is broadcast on a carrier wave of pure condescension. The left has a sort of collective Tourette syndrome involving frequent mention of sexism, racism, and gay rights. These subjects are meaningless to hourly laborers who lack the leisure time to nurse nihilistic resentments against Western Civilization.
The corporate oligarchs and neocon goons who control the Republican Party obviously have financial and political interests which are not aligned with those of the white working classes. But they also do not demonize or condescend to peckerwoods who drive pickups and go fishing. It isn’t that Republican ideas are great for the lunchpailetariat or anyone else, but their lack of seething hostility makes them preferable to Democrats.
Lefties should only be confused about the white proles who still vote for them. The left’s “Why don’t you loooove me anymore?” routine with the white working class reminds me of a friend’s crazy-ex-girlfriend story. She cheated on him, lit his car on fire, and gave him the clap. She used to get drunk and scream into his answering machine at 4AM. Then she wondered why he never called back.
