Time and Tides

I don’t expect the “Troopergate” report released tonight to make a big difference in the presidential campaign. People who still love the Moosewoman will dismiss it as “political.” People who don’t think much of her will still not think much of her.

More interesting to me is that today McCain supporters booed and jeered at McCain when he said Barack Obama is a “decent person.”

Not Exactly the Better Angels of Our Nature

Headline on the New York Times website: “Global Markets Dive in Relentless Selloff.” A British news site says this is Freefall Friday. By 9:30 this morning the NYSE was down more than 460 points.

On the plus side, nobody’s complaining about the “angry Left” any more.

Adding to the links in the last post — at the Washington Post, Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. write “Anger Is Crowd’s Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally.” Anger my ass; this is white-hot rage. See also “Panic attacks: Voters unload at GOP rallies” by Jonathan Martin and “Is Negative Rhetoric a License to Taunt?” by Russell Goldman.

Steve M asks if the Right really is more deranged than during past elections. In many ways, no. But in some ways, yes.

The difference now is that, in the past, they were winners. This is not just in the sense of winning elections. I believe in recent years they felt some sense of power, of control, especially with George Bush in the White House.

How many times have we observed that the only thing holding the conservative coalition together was resentment — of liberals, of intellectuals, of Europeans, of anything that picked the scab off their inner insecurities? For a time, George Bush gave them the upper hand. He was their middle finger by proxy, extended to the rest of the world.

However, now it’s starting to dawn on them that they are losing. This could get dangerous. Think cornered, wounded animal.

It’s gotten so bad that even David Brooks is beginning to catch on. In the past several years “Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare,” he writes.

And for how many years have we progressives been saying that? But whenever we brought it up, we were told we were the ones trying to play “class warfare.” Brooks continues,

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

The Right has been running against the mythical “liberal elite” for a lot longer than 15 years. You might remember Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, that documents disdain for the educated class as a whole going back to the colonial period. In the early Cold War era — heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy — merely discussing Communism with scholarly objectivity was attacked by the witch-hunters as disloyal.

Now, Brooks notes, the GOP has not only alienated the highly educated regions of the country, it has blown off entire professions.

Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

So now the modern GOP has been stripped down to its core social pathology, its soul laid bear for the world to see. And it ain’t pretty.

See also: