Many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people show a disturbing level of fear, contempt, and anger directed toward Christians, non-college graduates, 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. I’m not a Christian myself, but I’d think that you would be a lot more worried about people who want to cut your head off, blow you up, or at a bare minimum shut down your freedom of speech than about people who want to talk to you about Jesus (or Nascar!)
It seems that there are quite a few people who vote Democratic, even when their domestic and foreign-policy views are not closely aligned with those of the Democratic Party, because they view the Republican Party and its candidates as being dominated by Christians and “rednecks.” The hostility toward Trump is substantially motivated by hostility toward those who are his supporters (or those who are assumed to be his supporters)
What is the origin of this anti-Christian, anti-noncollege, anti-“redneck” feeling? Some have suggested that it’s a matter of oikophobia … the aversion to the familiar, or “the repudiation of inheritance and home,” as philosopher Roger Scruton uses the term. I think this is doubtless true in some cases: the kid who grew up in a rural Christian home and wants to make a clean break with his family heritage, or the individual who grew up in an oppressively conformist Bible Belt community. But I think such cases represent a relatively small part of the category of people I’m talking about here. A fervently anti-Christian, anti-Southern individual who grew up in New York or Boston or San Francisco is unlikely to be motivated by oikophobia. Indeed, far from being excessively familiar, Christians and Southern people are likely as exotic to him as the most remote tribes of New Guinea.
Equally exotic, but much safer to sneer at. And here, I think, we have the explanation for much, though not all, of the anti-Christian, anti-Southern bigotry. It is a safe outlet for the unfortunately-common human tendency to look down on members of an out group. Safer socially than bigotry against Black people or gays or those New Guinea tribesmen; much less likely to earn you the disapproval of authority figures in school or work or of your neighbors. Safer physically than saying anything negative about Muslims, as you’re much less likely to face violent retaliation.
There are some other factors which I think motivate some people toward the anti-Christian anti-Southern mindset. One is the fear that Christians, especially Southern Christians, are anti-science, and that Republican electoral victories will reduce Federal support for science or even lead to restrictions on scientific research. And indeed, some conservatives/Republicans have been known to make some pretty strange statements, such as former Rep. Paul Broun’s assertion, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”
But in realistic terms, there is far more threat to US science from “animal rights” terrorists – the vast majority of whom are politically on the Left – than from anti-evolutionists. And there is even more threat from pressures on allowable and non-allowable topics for university research…pressures which emanate almost exclusively from the “woke” Left. And numerous followers of “progressivism” are believers in various forms of mysticism, such as magical crystals and a conscious Gaia, which are at least as inconsistent with pure scientific materialism as are the Biblical miracles. At the level of practical technology, the irrational hostility toward nuclear power, genetically-modified crops, etc., comes almost entirely from the Left.
Another factor is sex. Many seem to fear that conservatives/Republicans are anti-sex “Puritans” and will force women into metaphorical (or maybe not so metaphorical!) chastity belts. Democratic Party operatives have done their best to conflate opposition to forcing institutions to pay for birth control with opposition to birth control itself. In reality, no serious Republican national-level politician is remotely proposing the banning of birth control or, for that matter, the banning of homosexuality. And, speaking of “Puritanism,” we should note that the anti-male hostility emanating from certain radical feminists, who are almost entirely creatures of the Left, has done much to poison the relationship between the sexes, especially on college campuses.
Yet another factor involved in fear/hostility toward Christians is historical: it is indeed true that Christianity has often been used as an excuse for religious persecutions. Mary Antin, a Jewish immigrant who came to the US from Russia in the early 1900s, wrote that pogroms in her home country had sometimes been led by priests carrying crucifixes and it took her several years to get past an instinctual aversive reaction when passing by a Christian church. (She later became acquainted with several American priests and came to respect them for the work they were doing among the poor.) The Holocaust was perpetrated largely by people who represented themselves as Protestants or Catholics. But in today’s world, hostility toward Israel, which more than increasingly shades off into outright anti-Semitism, is mainly generated by the “progressive” Left. Surely one is far more likely to encounter anti-Semitism among the members of the church that Barack Obama attended for 20 years than among the members of your typical Southern Baptist church or Catholic parish.
It’s important to understand history, but it’s also very dangerous to identify one’s friends and enemies based entirely on historical considerations while ignoring current realities. In the Polish town of Eishyshok at the time of the German invasion in 1941, many of the local Jews viewed the coming of the German troops with equanimity. The town had been occupied during the earlier war, and the German officers and troops of that time had been very well-behaved and even helpful, and those residents who had been POWs in Germany during WWI spoke highly of their good treatment. Too many of the town’s Jews failed to realize that “German soldier” meant something different in 1941 than it had in 1914. Analogously, “Democratic politician” means something very different in 2018 than it did in 1960.
It can be difficult for people to get beyond earlier imprinting, though. See this post by Disaffected about some people he knows:
The older ones are still living mentally in their “glory days” of the 1960s. Many recount the same tales repeatedly of having been young white people who went down South to help black people in the civil rights era. Some of them saw truly disturbing racism, and it imprinted on them. Many are unable to see or understand that the world of their exciting youth isn’t the same anymore. Many people like this told me right at their own dinner tables that the South is still like it was in their youth.
And there is a lot of generalized hostility toward those who once would have been called the common people, or the masses in left-speak, and who are today (again) called the working class. In my post Hate of the Common People, I cited someone in the UK who said: I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether….Idiots and racists shouldn’t be able to ruin the lives of people who do well in life by voting for things they don’t understand. The problem in this country boils down to low information morons having the ability to vote.” (Actually, there are plenty of low-information people who have sterling academic credentials, and sometimes even high IQs, but who have chosen to isolate themselves in information and opinion bubbles)
In an MSNBC show in the US, anchor Chris Hayes and Washington Post writer Dave Weigel avidly agreed with one another about the characteristics of Trump supporters (of whom they did not approve)…men without a college degree who have enough income to buy a boat (Hayes qualifies it as *white* men). Personally, I tend to *admire* people who have managed to do ok or very well for themselves without the benefit of a college credential.
The primary factor behind anti-Christian/anti-“redneck” feelings is, almost certainly, the fact that these groups offer a convenient target for in-group solidarity and feelings of superiority at the expense of the “other.” This is especially visible in the sneering, dismissive tone which is evident in so much media coverage of Trump and the assumptions made about Trump supporters. See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism.
To the extent that people not motivated by this factor are considering a vote for “progressive” Democrats based on concerns about Christians and “rednecks,” they are prioritizing fears which are largely imaginary over dangers which are all too real.
These anti-Christian, anti-“redneck” phobias have been key contributors to the spread of the “progressive” ideology that threatens virtually all aspects of American life, from freedom of speech to national security to economic well-being.
This is an updated version of a post that I published at Chicago Boyz in 2012 and again in 2015 also at Ricochet in 2018. There are good discussion threads at all three of the earlier posts.
I have a daughter who, until she became a mother herself, was pretty far left politically. Fortunately, she is also smart and not crazy. She was upset a few years ago when a school district in Texas allowed the teaching of the Biblical story of creation. It was optional and did not replace Evolution. I had a discussion with her and she acknowledged that some people want that taught and Evolution is still in the science curriculum.
She now has a 5 year old daughter and says it has “changed her life.” She still leans left but, I think, is no longer a Bernie Bro.
Michael K, any comments on the ‘worst 5% of physicians’ link in the Worthwhile Reading post?
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”
Many people who are serious about real science — not the Algore “settled science” version — would say that there are real weaknesses and awkward unanswered questions in the standard stories about evolution and the Big Bang … as well as outright lies on nominally “scientific” topics such as the Global Warming Scam or the Covid Scam. “Lies straight from the pit of hell” may be a rhetorical over-reach, but it is pointing in the right direction.
Some TV pundit once made the observation that most politics is just Junior High behavior. It is mostly in-group self-congratulation about their superiority over the out-group … by people who, to borrow from the late Rush Limbaugh, are too ugly for show business.
Or, to borrow from the late Mao Tse Tung — It is a good thing for us to be hated by our enemies, because it proves we are different from them!
I did a follow-on post to Hate of the Common People…included a report about a lawyer employed by PBS who resigned after being caught saying things like it was “great” that coronavirus cases were spiking in red states because they might infect Trump voters and suggested that Republican voters should have their children put in re-education camps.
The DC-based lawyer also said “Americans are so f–king dumb. You know, most people are dumb,” and “It’s good to live in a place where people are educated and know stuff. Could you imagine if you lived in one of these other towns or states where everybody’s just stupid?”
There seems to be an awful lot of this kind of attitude.
Yes, the South is terrible. Stop moving here.
A college ‘education’ is arguably a demerit, not a benefit. Okay, yes, some degrees are still effective meal tickets, for the moment. But, secondary and tertiary schools have badly damaged curriculum and practices, apparently designed to produce mental cripples and violent idiots. With said poor quality thinkers making the business prospects of the remaining relatively solid programs much worse.
We expanded a lot of access to education. sixty percent American adults Bachelors, thirty percent masters, around two percent PhDs. But, some of that was by cutting standards, and degree counterfeiting programs. The real issue, is that you could sustain a real cult around the ‘value’ of tertiary education, and around tertiary education entitlement to social status.
Less than two percent of the population is faculty. Two percent is the maximum. I just did some crude numbers, and going by BLS, the number might be more like .3%. Faculty, fellow traveler PhDs, grad students, adn undergrads. Some faculty are active Christian, and grounded a bit by the other members of their church. (Or Jews, and synagogue.) However, someone who is trained, but only moderately or mediocrely smart, and does not attend worship, then interacting mostly with undergrads, staff, adn faculty is _not_ gonna result in a very realistic monkeysphere calibration.
And some people outright self select for faculty jobs because they need that sort of imputed status for their ego.
Government has been funding the schools, government has captured the schools, and the results of the schools largely fit the needs of factions in government.
One goes off to university. Depending on how one thinks of oneself, adn the experience, it may become very important psychologically that one has that stamp. In particular, youngsters who weight faculty as massively more important to them than their previous contacts.
To a large extent, faculty write the official written history, and are also contracted to do research to underpin the party truth. A youngster that discards the words of prior contact is ignoring oral hsitory, and sticking to written.
Those of us who went to university, and left, without discarding our contacts and older family? We have the written history, and the oral history, and can combine them.
STEM/humanities isn’t actually the most useful division in the fields here. Behavioralist/machine focused fields seem to potentially have a sharp division in mindset. There may be other fields that fit into third, or fourth categories.
The theory of the behavioralists is very corrupted now, and even saner behavioralists maybe no longer have the theoretical foundation and skill to understand how sketchy the theory of their field may be. Behavioralist fields seem to have critical theory in common, and critical theory basically predicts and encourages war, particularly CRT and race war. Utter confidence in behavioral theories, the theories are nutty, the curated written history… Paranoid expectation of war is about what you would expect from that witch’s brew.
Engineering is what I see as the core of the machinery fields. Competent engineers seem to have a major difference in how they experience the theory of their fields. That they try to see reality for what it is, not a consensus thing of clap your hands if you beleive. Decide what you want to do, use a theory to make a plan, build the machine, then test and see what happens. As part of design, and build, do an analysis using all of the relevant conflicting theories that you know for that type of machine. If the machine does somethign you did not predict, than the theory is wrong, or you used it wrong, or you measured what it is doing wrong. You have to have humility, and you have to watch for being wrong, and figure out what the causes are.
Measuring human behaviors is really hard. It actually is not practical to always figure out where your mistakes are, for a behavioralist. And, if you decide what you will do, try to do it, and choose to see theory instead of reality in evaluating failure? You filter out a lot of the little indicators that the theoretical basis you are working from is crud.
Anyway, education status cult, recruiting power hungry behavioralists with a mystic’s attitude towards trusting consensus theory, and universities having coopted some of the elements of government. (Formal legal system is basically gate kept, and can be very influenced by law faculty.)
There’s anthropology theory of revitalization movements. Stressed cultures doubling down on doing the things that they saw as previously successful. (Ghost dancing is an example) Some years ago, before 2020, there was some speculation about two revitalization movements in the same society. Communists and christians, left and right, Democrats and Republicans. etc. Obviously, after 2020, pretty much everyone is stressed, and a bit more nuts. Well, if you look at what we see now, in the left, or the right, it is maybe what you would predict if a) you assume they are ghostdancing b) you know both factions well, and are correct in your understanding.
Anyway, ghost dancing mystics reading only written history, stressed, this sort of venting is maybe to be predicted.
Anyway, the AGW pushers, which has been pushed for twenty years at least, to my knowledge, have no stones to throw where flat earth, or creation science is concerned. I dislike creation science, but AGW is very compatible with an extremely young earth. Climate science is in theory sampling in time, space, and temperature. Temperature resolution alone raises questions about significant digits of the forecast. There’s also an obvious question about whether the temporal or spatial sampling methods they use are utterly jacked up, or not. Which depends on the modeling assumptions, and on what they are trying to forecast. Naively, electrical engineering says that you sample at twice the frequency you try to collect. The use of data collected over a short time, to forecast a long time, maybe has some careful theoretical justification that would need to be done, and presented.
A ‘progressive’ visits a county fair:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/for_a_democrat_the_american_heartland_s_normalcy_is_a_terrifying_dystopia.html
“The DC-based lawyer also said ‘Americans are so f–king dumb. You know, most people are dumb,’ and ‘It’s good to live in a place where people are educated and know stuff. Could you imagine if you lived in one of these other towns or states where everybody’s just stupid?’
Yet he has everything from his $tarbuck$ to the charge in his iThingy coming from such “dumb” people from far outside the DC bubble.
And doesn’t even realize what he would lose were Flyover Country to decide that his urban enclave had become too crime-infested to safely do business there.
Something I’ve observed:
People can tell the difference between fiction and reality UNLESS they have no familiarity with the reality.
So for example a lot of people believe things about guns because of how they behave in movies and have never actually handled or shot or even been around a real gun.
Same with the Christians and rednecks now. People have had almost no exposure to them any more so they have no idea how the people actually are. So they just believe that these people are what they’re shown in the movies and on TV over and over….
Like the person I saw once who thought the old woman believer in “The Mist” was a realistic portrayal of Christians even though human sacrifice is anathema to Christians – it matched other depictions he had seen in other media and cherry-picked news stories.
Creation theory posits that in the beginning there was nothing and then God started creating things.
Big Bang theory posits that in the beginning there was nothing and then it exploded.
Hate, hubris and cult culture (politics has replaced their religion).
Hubris — In general, liberals have an emotional/psychological need to believe they are morally and intellectually superior. They are morally retarded. This ties into the junior high lunchroom dynamics mentioned above and the fact that Democrats are driven by single women most of whom have acknowledged mental health issues.
Hate — What is so striking to anyone paying attention is how much they hate. Hillary hates. You see it in AOC, Fauxcohontas, Greta, the Colorado lynch mob that continues the jihad against the baker, the attempted lynchings of Thomas and Kavanaugh, and the willingness to believe the most ridiculous and outrageous lies and slanders against Trump or his supporters or conservatives in general. They hate. They genuinely support the abuse of law to destroy opponents. They genuinely believe we are lesser humans. It’s driven by hate.
As Krauthammer noted in 2002, they genuinely believe that people who disagree with them about politics are evil. Not just wrong. Evil.
They don’t care about Laken Riley. They really don’t. They don’t care about the 320,000 children turned over to traffickers. They don’t care about the millions and millions of people around the world who die every year from climate policies. They don’t care about the horrific legal abuses that have become so common as the Democrats trend toward Big Brother.
Cult — What they care about is being in the cult. They will support any abuse resulting from cult politics, including rape and murder, as long as they receive the emotional satisfaction that comes with being secure in the cult. Their greatest fears are to be excommunicated from the cult by their friends.
Liberals can’t disagree with the cult. They have to affirm their belief and acceptance of every aspect of the narrative. All of it. And if the cult changes some part of the narrative, they change immediately just like a school of fish. This is a tell. A huge tell that they are all about the cult.