Sunday, June 04, 2006

 
COMMENT WHORE ALERT an answer to "hey hey" from the comment threads at digby's Hullabaloo

hey hey, maybe we should start promoting the good entertainers who are popular with the crowd you are talking about. Dolly Parton is a good example. While I don't see NASCAR, which as you point out is also very popular in the North, there are people who have shrines in their homes to #6*, people who would be the prime beneficiaries of the left's agenda.

I have always remembered the line in "King Harvest Will Surely Come" "I'm glad to pay those union dues, just don't judge me by my shoes,". That's one of the worst things that some leftists do. And it's not just clothes, it's grammar, spelling (speaking from personal experience) and a host of other things. The underclass in the United States is deprived of job security, a decent income, healthcare, education, a future for its children, etc. . They've got their pride, sometimes by dint of pure stubbornness, the left had better not take that last thing they've got left. The right has no problem with any question of esthetics because they only want to take what these people have left and to use them. The left has got something to offer them but we won't get a chance to give it to them unless we gain their trust and they know we respect them for more than their utility to us.

* I had to look it up and I was wrong. Dale Earnhardt's number apparently was 3.

Comments:
They've got their pride, sometimes by dint of pure stubbornness, the left had better not take that last thing they've got left.

This is an interesting thing to point out.

In spite of the image of the left as opposing traditional morality and the right as supporting it, in many cases it's the other way around. Many of us on the left actually come from a certain kind of old-school morality wherein pride is considered one of the seven deadlies. OTOH, the right not only avoids rhetorically undermining the pride of the working class, they push for the working classes to have more pride! The right says "pride is a good thing" whereas the left says it's a sin.

The upshot is that, by abandoning traditional morality, the right is able to capture a voting bloc whose Republican votes are typically ascribed to the right's support of traditional morality and the left's abandonment of it.

So why didn't Alanis Morrisette sing about this phenomenon in her song about irony?
 
I've always thought that if given the choice and if they understood it most people would choose self-respect over pride. Republicans appeal to people's baser selves in order to win them over, they don't care about the inner lives of the working class and certainly don't care about the classes lower than those.

If the working class people I live with were able to earn enough to feed their families, give them health insurance and a place to live they might start gaining some sense of self-respect. It used to be the core of the left's agenda to provide people with these things, back when we won elections.

I think pride has a sense of competition, of one thing being superior than another in some way. I hope that self-respect is based in someone doing the best they can.

That people in the lower classes have absorbed all the disrespect that they're going to tollerate is clear. The line that it's Democratic elitists that look down on them is just true enough to stick. But it depends on what an elitist is. I'm such an elitist that only everyone being elite will satisfy me. And I don't mean that they're all going to like Eliot Carter's music.

Lord, I did use the first person a lot in this post, didn't I.
 
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