I’ve written previously about the level of fear, contempt, and anger that many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people demonstrate toward Christians and rural people (especially southerners.) This complex of negative emotions often greatly exceeds anything that these same people feel toward radical Islamists or dangerous rogue-state governments.
A rather classic example of this was recently observed by a commenter at a post by Sarah Hoyt:
One of my relatives posted a snarky meme during the day or two that the Dreamer program being ended was trending showing some hillbilly/redneck types saying they were going to get a tech job now that the Dreamers were out of the way. The meme was presented in a way that you were supposed to say “Ha ha, look at the poor, ugly, unintelligent peasants thinking they can get a tech job”
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That relative was just repeating Her rhetoric:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
9 Sep 2016
CR….which direction does the cause-and-effect run? I suspect Clinton’s rhetoric was driven in large part by the understanding that this kind of hate is common among her base and targeted voters, and she wanted to play to it.
I also suspect that people who have spent many years in educational institutions, but have not achieved much success in life, are heavily over-represented among the bitter individuals who think this way.
Remember back in 2004 John Kerry’s “joke” that joining the military and “getting stuck in Iraq” was what you did if you flunked out of school? They hate rural and small town America, period.
Unfortunately, “they” includes the GOPe.
“I suspect Clinton’s rhetoric was driven in large part by the understanding that this kind of hate is common among her base and targeted voters, and she wanted to play to it.”
In my personal experience, you are correct: That hate is very common among liberals.
Remember back in 2004 John Kerry’s “joke” that joining the military and “getting stuck in Iraq” was what you did if you flunked out of school? They hate rural and small town America, period.
Unfortunately, “they” includes the GOPe.
I keep going back to Codevellea’s “America’s Ruling Class. and it includes both parties.
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.
And that includes Republicans, especially after they have
“grown in office.”
I can remember American films of before and shortly after the war that suggested to me that various large US cities would have their own upper class, which I assume was separate from the contemporary upper class of other cities.
Does Philadelphia have a local upper class today? Detroit? Baltimore? ……
Well, of course the ruling class, and their hangers-on hate the white working class. If I hadn’t known that for about a decade or so, the various comments to news stories about the Sutherland Springs church murders would have clued me in. (Honestly, do these people have any clue as to how hateful they sound, smugly rejoicing over the deaths of Texas Baptists in their church on a Sunday morning? Guess not.)
One thing I find interesting is that not only are both wings of the UniParty incapable of concealing their contempt for those not up to their elite standards [of corruption]; but that they have absolutely no desire to conceal it and take pride in the revelation.
The GOPe literally thinks that all they have to do is defeat Trump and everyone will return to forelock tugging submission and believe the same old lies. They are wrong.
We have the candidates already coming through our county TEA Party meetings before caucuses, conventions, and the primaries. They are all being asked why, since they have lied to us for decades and especially the last 9 years, we should believe them in anything. We have yet to get a cogent answer that does not involve nervous twitches and sweating.
We are going to host two multi-county candidates’ forums before the caucuses, one for governor and senator, one for all other candidates. They are, I suspect, going to be interesting. We require all candidates who appear before us to stand and deliver for questions.
Another thing to watch. Last Tuesday was local elections in Colorado. We had various city offices, and bond issues here. The tax issues got voted on by pretty much everyone who cast a ballot. Those offices with unopposed incumbents were voted upon by about 1/4 of the ballots cast. The one contested office [an at large city council spot] was only voted on by about 1/3 of the ballots cast. ALL the candidates were Republicans. That is a whole lot of Republicans who did not bother to vote for Republican candidates. If they do the same thing for state and national offices in 2018, a lot of those in the GOPe who consider us as Deplorables are going to be out of work.
Oops. Forgot to sign in before hitting “submit comment”. The Anonymous above is me.
Subotai Bahadur
“Does Philadelphia have a local upper class today? Detroit? Baltimore?”
I don’t know about those other cities, but around Chicago they still have cotillion balls with debutantes, presentations, and the whole nine yards. These days the events are mostly connected to some charity or social club. The archdiocese puts on a big one with the local Catholic women’s club. You can still sometimes recognize a few family names, but it isn’t like the old days when they were bona fide celebrities.
The myth that urban concentrations are the best environment for tech jobs was perpetuated by Richard Florida and his theory of the Creative Class. The reality is that big cities are centers of stagnation. The real growth is in the suburbs, increasingly in southeastern states such as Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina where labor laws are business friendly.
The other night in an especially agitprop-y episode of THE SIMPSONS (Kellyanne Conway was called “the female Goebbels”) Cletus the hillbilly and his family were presented as Objectivists, with a prominently displayed copy of THE FOUNTAINHEAD (presumably kept on a stand beside the King James Bible). Because, you know, no group of people are more devoted fans of Ayn Rand than illiterare, inbred hillbillies.
@ Brian,
“Unfortunately, “they” includes the GOPe”
Not really. At least, not from the ones I’ve seen in Illinois. One would need a spine to be capable of hating anyone and in terms of that I would swear that those who run the fortunes of the state GOP are nothing more then a bunch of jellyfish incapable of doing more then taking the easy way out. >_<
Maybe future events will prove me wrong. I hope so.
“around Chicago they still have cotillion balls with debutantes, presentations, and the whole nine yards”: do the youngsters attend local universities and pursue local careers? Or do they trail off to Harvard and find jobs in NYC or DC?
I remember a debutante event at a “gentleman’s farm” in Libertyville about 1958.
My date lost a contact lens in the pasture.
An unforgettable experience looking for a contact in grass fertilized by horses.
@ dearieme – good pickup. I lived in a medium-sized mill city and we had our own upper class, founded partly on wealth but also on “solidity” and family name. It was already eroding and going national in the late 60’s, though it didn’t pick up steam until the 70’s. Only those of us over 60 can still pick out the names on various company and charitable boards and say “Old Manchester.” In my era children were discouraged from going to college out-of-state, and certainly not out of New England. Similarly, young men and women did not chase jobs in other parts of the country unless they were angry, adventurous, or had a specific industry in mind. Even then, they went to New York.
I don’t know what the current ones are planning, but I do know a few women who went through it when young (25 or 30 odd years ago). Yes, they trailed off to the more exclusive charmed circles. That might have been the last gasp of when leaders and executives still lived among the rest of the locals. AVI’s observation seems to be about right. By the 70s or 80s the large family businesses that previously supplied the elite population sold out or rolled over into multinational corporations.
Mike, was that the Cuneo Mansion? It’s wedged between the big shopping mall and a long row of car dealerships.
Peoples stuck in feudalism, like the Slavs, “as well as Basques, Bretons and Scottish Highlanders”, could not progress straight from feudalism to communism. They would have to be exterminated – so as not to keep everyone else back! Watson noted, “They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.”
Socialism’s obsession with race, CAPX, Marian L. Tupy, 10 November 2017
Upper class in places like Philly? Yes, they run the local government as well as educational, local crony capitalist, labor, and other influential NGO institutions. Do they have the trappings of an upper class, not from a social graces point of view. They do have the income and wealth and local power, from whatever sources above or below board.
Death6
Last Spring there was a congressional race here that got a lot of national attention because it was seen as sort of a referendum on Trump. The Democratic candidate was a “liberal” Yuppie, Jon Ossoff. What interested me is that a lot of the Yuppies in my neighborhood had Ossoff posters on the lawns of their McMansions. I posted a half-tongue-in-cheek comment in the pro-freedom blogosphere commentimg on this and wondering if some sort of Yuppie-scum-to-Yuppie-scum respect principle were at work here. A statist troll wrote in asking me if I preferred out-of-work coal miners as neighbors. I’ve never met any coal miners, out of work or otherwise. I suspect neither had he; but it was interesting that this “liberal,” who probably saw himself as an egalitarian, played the Snob Card.
Grurry, I don’t think that was it but it was a nice farm. The barn would make a nice upper middle class home today,
It wasn’t that big. I was not in that class but was going to college in California, which probably gave me a bit more legitimacy,
The girl with the contacts was very pretty and a friend of my sister’s. They lived a few blocks from us in South Shore, then one of the nicest residential areas in the city.
She was so nearsighted that, when they had a peeping tom one time, she went to the window to peer at him.