who?
september thirty | ten fifteen post meridiem
Even in the 2000 elections, the Republicans were able to take a large part of the white working-class vote away from Gore by appealing to cultural populism - and especially to those opposed to gun control and environmental protection. Despite the real class identity and cultural interests of the Republican elite, they seem able to convince many workers that they are natural allies against the culturally alien and supercilious 'East Coast elites' represented as supporting Gore...
Deprived of much of their financial support and their intellectual backbone, the Democrats could be reduced to a coalition of the declining unionised white working class, blacks and Latinos. And not only do these groups on the whole dislike and distrust each other, but the more the Democrats are seen as minority dominated, the more whites will tend to flee to the Republicans.
I'm starting to get the overwhelming sense that Europeans' (< snide > or are Brits not Europeans? < /snide >) understanding of internal American affairs - in this case, race relations and how they affect political demographics - is nearly as myopic and superficial as Americans are always accused of being when it comes to the world outside their borders. First of all, why the ridiculous separation between "blacks", "Latinos", and the "white working class"? As with the prison population, blacks and Latinos are present in the - often unionized - working class out of all proportion to their presence in the overall population. Separating them, as if organized labor was still some pre-Debs Socialist Party white fantasy, is preposterous.
Secondly, one of the biggest stories surrounding the 2000 campaigns was the Republicans' wooing of the Latino vote. As pathetic as the contrived human rainbow on stage at the Republican convention was, this is entirely logical, not only for strategic reasons (to take advantage of the swelling Latino population), but for more organic cultural reasons as well: many South and Latin American cultures are extraordinarily conservative, even by US standards, and anyone who's spent any time around even the poorest of these immigrant communities can see firsthand how the Republicans' rhetorical emphasis on God, family, etc., is MUCH less alien to many of them, regardless of class differences. Besides, what have the Dems done for them lately?
Finally, and most dangerously, [the American religious right] are conditioned to see themselves as defenders of 'civilisation' against 'savages' - a distinction always perceived on the Christian Right as in the main racially defined. It is no longer possible in America to speak openly in these terms of American blacks, Asians and Latinos - but since 11 September at least, it has been entirely possible to do so about Arabs and Muslims.
It's true that one of the more alarming trends POST 9-11 is the constant appeals to "civilization" and the labeling of both real and perceived enemies as "against civilization", but where do the most vociferous, visible, and powerful proponents of this tactic come from? EUROPE!! Whatever its faults, America hasn't even come close to electing a Le Pen, Haider, or Fortuyn, and while I don't have any figures in front of me at the moment, I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that Muslim immigrants suffer FAR WORSE at the hands of the ignorant fuckheads in their adopted Euro countries than they do here in, ya know, the country that grants naturalization to anyone born on its soil and whose standards for attaining citizenship (whatever their flaws) are ridiculously low compared to most Euro nations, which still regularly deny citizen rights to third generation immigrants. The detainments and unprovoked searches of Muslims in America have been deplorable, but where was the mob violence, the mosque burnings, the virulent hatred everyone predicted for September 12? Especially considering past sins (Japanese internment during WWII, etc.), I thought the response this time was remarkably mild, and actually worthy of - if not praise - then at least acknowledgment. Ironically, the Bush administration has been more vocally supportive of its domestic Muslim population because of their scary wacko religiousness: 9-11 precipitated all sorts of secular attacks on religion and its baneful influence, to the extent where Bush had to speak out simply to defend the integrity of the concept of religion, and its validity as a guiding political philosophy. (Jesus was a pol philosophe!)
I'm sorry to be hatin on all my Euro bruthas n sistras, but I'm increasingly fed up with the constant misapprehension that in order to be a good liberal, you've got to live in Europe; or that the Euro nations are the realization of the secular, humanist, socialist dream that we should all emulate; and that a country which can house a large freaky and completely fucking scary religious population, and yet still maintain abortion rights (as well as more rights and opportunities for women than just about anywhere else in the world - just ask my French and Mexican aunts who emigrated here), extraordinary freedom of speech (even in the wake of the Patriot Act - compare the Canadian government-ordered total media blackout re: the upcoming serial killer trial in Vancouver), and can present itself as a model of decadence and dissolution to the rest of the world, should be automatically dismissed as inherently wrong and evil. Where's the love, I ask you, WHERE'S THA LUVVV??