UniBrow

Blogging for Dummies says I’m supposed to keep my entries short. (“Your readers have lives, too.”) I am doing the very best I can. And I think I can oblige pretty well with Jane Smiley’s Nov. 4, 2004, inspection of John Kerry’s defeat in that year’s presidential election; UniBrow has followed her into these pits before. Jane was asked by Slate in the days immediately following Dubya’s victory to tell its readers ”why Americans don’t vote for Democrats,” and we find her at no loss for words. One of a small number of “wise liberals” (Slate’s phrase) recruited for this purpose, Jane has plenty to tell us. Well, not to tell us, as it turns out. She certainly thinks she’s telling us why Democrats lose, but that’s not what she’s really doing–because she clearly has no idea. What she’s really doing is showing us why people don’t vote for Democrats, and she does that with a signature display of petty scorn, preening self-admiration, and bankrupt reasoning. She does it, as ever, with bigotry, to call it by its right name–the precise kind of bigotry that many voters impute to liberal Democrats. 

“I say forget introspection,” she begins. Introspection–that’s a good one. Appreciate the level-set, Jane, but to tell you the truth soul searching was about the last thing I was expecting from you. I’m surprised she goes to the trouble of mentioning it even in dismissal–but I’m soon over that. There will be no more surprises. Here she comes, in the very next sentence, rounding superbly into form: “It’s time to be honest about our antagonists.” No, we’re not going to waste time talking about ourselves. We have no faults to amend, no new approaches to consider. We’re going to talk about the knuckle-dragging sadists, the salivating vigilantes, the revival-tent zombies–all 58 million of them–who voted for Bush. It’s these ”virtually unteachable” red staters, the morons who simply “do not want to be told what to do,” that we must concentrate on. To that end Jane first consults her personal history.  

I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million–my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.)

Don’t overlook that last parenthetical remark. It’s worth remarking how Jane finds she has to qualify her stark and sweeping indictment the moment she contemplates actual people. But if you think that’s going to slow her down, you must have forgotten that we’ve forgotten introspection. “Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states,” she rebounds, moving from personal history to social history and reducing all of red-state America to the lurid image created by two incidents from the 19th century: Quantrill’s Raid in 1863 and the stealing of the 1856 Kansas territorial election by “red forces from Missouri.” What else do we need to know about the people who voted for Bush?

The rest is all the usual drivel. I would only repeat myself by dwelling on it. But suppose for the moment that there will be no great spike in voter registration or turnout for the 2008 presidential election over the 2004 election, that the universe of voters two years from now will be substantially the same as that of two years ago. That means the Democrats, in order to win in 2008, will have to add a million and a half votes–at least–to their 2004 vote total. And of course this winning margin will have to consist of people who voted for Bush last time. Suppose you’re one of those people: someone who voted for Bush with mixed feelings, someone who isn’t inflexibly opposed to the idea of a Democrat in the White House and who perhaps did vote for Clinton, someone who could go either way–someone, in other words, who doesn’t conform to Jane’s Looney Tunes red-state stereotype. Don’t forget that Jane, co-founder of LitPAC, will be out there in ‘08. You might very well see her on a podium alongside the Democratic candidates she has deemed worthy of her support; she’ll certainly be popping up in print, sad to say, in places like Slate where people in that wavering middle region might read her. Are such voters likely to think better or worse of a candidate favored by someone who sizes up the world like this?

Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are–they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind. …

The architects of [the Republican hegemony of recent decades] knew perfectly well that they were exploiting, among other unsavory qualities, a long American habit of virulent racism, but they did it anyway, and we see the outcome now–Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don’t share those same qualities, don’t know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

It’s not that you can’t isolate grains of truth, or arguable contentions at any rate, within these diatribes. It’s just that they’re smothered to oblivion by the coarse polemics and paranoia that paint everyone who voted for Bush as either incurably stupid or quivering with hatred. Or (more likely) both. Unless of course you’re a member of Jane’s family, in which case you’re just a greedy snob. Associating with this kind of thing doesn’t seem like a winning formula for the Democrats.