What's the Matter With Liberals?

A very interesting article by Frank Rich, entitled What's the Matter with Liberals?

Rich basically makes the point that the election of 2004 was won on the basis of culture wars. That the Republican party has feigned interest in the little guy, not through economic means, but through cultural. Whereas the working class person used to vote in droves for the liberal economic democrat, Republicans have shifted the focus nearly entirely off of those issues and onto the cultural ones: guns, God, and gays.

Rich doesn't let the Republicans have all the glory, however, he places more than enough blame on the Democrats, and especially the K Street lobbyists, whom he blames for allowing Kerry to lose his focus (not necessarily unintentionally) from bread and butter Democrat issues. Rich thinks that Kerry wanted to appeal to the business class, and accept their funds in order to be more competitive with Bush. However, he thinks that doing so was an unmitigable mistake, since liberal economic policy has been the major tenet of every Democrat's election over the past so-many years.

Rich also suggests that Bush's pandering to the working class on culture war issues has clearly been a ploy, as in the immediate days after the election, the focus shifted away from gay marriage and abortion, and onto Social Security and other issues that would not, in any way, help lower- and middle-income workers, but would instead help the Wall Street elite.

Perhaps Bush Co.'s greatest stunt has been the fleecing of the cultural war voters. By focusing so heavily on these issues in the 2004 election, Bush promised them something he knew that he would in no way fulfill. However, with a sinking economy and Mess-o-potamia in Iraq, this focus proved inevitable. A poorly run campaign and a shitty nominee for the Democrats only aided and abetted Bush Co.'s victory, but the voters now have had 100 days to see what they re-elected: a man only interested in lining the pockets of the rich, uninterested in the lower classes, uninterested in protecting the morality of our God-forsaken country, being arrested by the activist judges and gays.

Here are some excerpts from Rich's article, but I recommend reading it:

A newcomer to American politics, after observing this strategy in action in 2004, would have been justified in believing that the Democrats were the party in power, so complacent did they seem and so unwilling were they to criticize the actual occupant of the White House. Republicans, meanwhile, were playing another game entirely. The hallmark of a "backlash conservative" is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it."[3] These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding.

The only centrism to be seen on the Republican side was the parade of GOP moderates across the stage of Madison Square Garden, an exercise clearly intended more to pacify and reassure the press than to win over actual voters. When the cameras were off, it was a completely different affair: what Karl Rove called a "mobilization election" in which victory would go to the party that best rallied its faithful.What this meant in practice was backlash all the way: an appeal to class resentment and cultural dread that was unprecedented in its breadth; ingenious state-level ballot initiatives on "values" questions that would energize voters; massive church-based get-out-the-vote efforts; and paranoid suggestions from all sides inviting voters to believe the worst about those tyrannical liberal snobs.

...

For the conservative rank and file, this election was to be the culture-war Armageddon, and they were battling for the Lord.

...

The backlash narrative is more powerful than mere facts, and according to this central mythology conservatives are always hardworking patriots who love their country and are persecuted for it, while liberals, who are either high-born weaklings or eggheads hypnotized by some fancy idea, are always ready to sell their nation out at a moment's notice.[7]

What makes national security such a winner for Republicans is that is dramatizes the same negative qualities of liberalism that we see in the so-called "values" issues, only much more forcefully. War casts in sharp relief the inauthenticity of the liberals, the insincerity of their patriotism, and their intellectual distance (always trying to "understand" the terrorists' motives) from the raw emotions felt by ordinary Americans—each quality an expression of the deracinated upper-classness that is thought to be the defining characteristic of liberalism.

Every hamlet seemed to have a son or daughter on duty in Iraq, and wartime loyalty to the commander in chief was in the air. Running through each of these issues was the sense that Bush was somehow more authentic than his challenger. In the city of Charleston, West Virginia, I was told by a conservative activist that

when you see those photos of [Bush] on his ranch down in Texas, with jeans and a cowboy hat, that's genuine. I was in Beckley when he was there a couple weeks ago, and that crowd, four thousand people, they loved the man. They loved the man. Personally... You can't manufacture that; you can't fake it. They love him. They connect with him, they think he understands them, and I think he does, too.

West Virginia had been carried by Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis, and almost every other Democratic candidate going back to Franklin Roosevelt, but this time it went Republican by a convincing thirteen percentage points.

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The illusion that George W. Bush "understands" the struggles of working-class people was only made possible by the unintentional assistance of the Democratic campaign. Once again, the "party of the people" chose to sacrifice the liberal economic policies that used to connect them to such voters on the altar of centrism. Advised by a legion of tired consultants, many of whom work as corporate lobbyists in off years, Kerry chose not to make much noise about corruption on Wall Street, or to expose the business practices of Wal-Mart, or to spend a lot of time talking about raising the minimum wage.[12]

...

Then, on the morning after the election, the country's liberals were astonished to hear that, according to exit polls, at least, "moral values" outranked all other issues in determining voters' choices.[16] Later on that same day, the reelected President Bush set out his legislative objectives for his second term. Making America a more moral country was not one of them. Instead, his goals were mainly economic, and they had precious little to do with helping out the working-class people who had stood by them: he would privatize Social Security once and for all and "reform" the federal tax code. "Another Winner Is Big Business," declared a headline in The Wall Street Journal on November 4, as businessmen everywhere celebrated the election results as a thumbs-up on outsourcing and continued deregulation.