Don't Insult Southerners: Hey, Michael Lind Gets it Right on the Left's 'Creepy Bigotry'!

From Michael Lind, at Salon, "Are Liberals Seceding From Sanity? The Left is Crazy to Insult White Southerners as a Group":

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy.

In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in partisan Democratic mythmaking, have established that Goldwater and Reagan Republicans often were highly educated, socially secure individuals who happened not to share the values of liberal professors and journalists. This scholarship has been wasted, to judge by the glee with which the liberal blogosphere, in the aftermath of the ephemeral "Birther" flap, has dusted off the old conservatives-are-crazy meme, and revised it to suggest that all white Southerners are crazy.

In a recent Washington Post column, Kathleen Parker quoted Ohio Sen. George Voinovich's assertion that the Republican Party is "being taken over by Southerners" to suggest that the GOP risks becoming a permanent minority party of the old Confederacy. In itself this is a legitimate point that I and many other critics of Republican conservatism have made for years. However, at Mother Jones, the blogger Kevin Drum used Parker's political argument as an excuse for all-too-typical liberal Southern-bashing. According to Drum: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Southern whites who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Southern white culture is [redacted]. Jim Webb can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Drum did the redacting on his own blog post, explaining he'd blacked out the offending text "on the advice of my frontal lobe".

Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or maybe this: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Jews who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Jewish culture is [redacted]. The late Irving Howe can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]."

Lind goes on about how in recent years California has in fact been more bigoted than Texas, blah, blah ... But his larger point is that, frankly, leftists aren't too smart. They should be appealing to white of lower SES instead of disparaging them as backwater hicks. And THAT'S the thing. As Lind points out:

Liberals should respect and promote the interests of working Americans of all races and regions, including those who despise liberals. They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.

What Lind doesn't do is explain why lefists are hostile to cross-cohort political alliances. There's a number of reasons, but the main thing is that leftist elites don't care about poor minorities or white Southerners. All they care about it political power to ram down their statist program of collectivism on the population. The left's bigtotry runs from blacks to rednecks and beyond. Frankly, folks like Kevin Drum are a dime-a-dozen across the leftosphere. This is what these freaks do.

More at Memorandum. And check the response Amanda Marcotte's response at Pandagon. And look for something at the biggest left-wing racist going, TBogg.