11.12.12
Letters from WhiteManistan
Here in the heart of Red America, Beth Cox [of Hendersonville, TN] and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign …
Now, in a single election night, parts of her country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline??? …
Nashville itself had gone for Obama, and 400,000 more people in Tennessee had signed up for food stamps in the last five years to further a culture of dependency. The ACLU had sued her school board for allowing youth pastors to visit middle school cafeterias during lunch. Some of her friends had begun to wonder if the country was lost, and if only God could save it.
From the social conservative point of view, the election results were bad. Really bad. That does not mean bad for social conservatives, though. It means bad for the country …
By far the most problematic result of the election for social conservatives was two states’ legalization of homosexual “marriage??? by popular vote for the first time in our nation’s history. But once again, that is not problematic because of some perceived loss of power or influence with the electorate. The other side’s victories are minute compared to our record on the issue. The problem comes from the pain that inevitably will follow from those states’ decisions.
Forty years ago, from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, after Richard Nixon stomped the South Dakota Democratic senator, George McGovern at the height of the Vietnam War:
Senator McGovern had hoped too that Americans would share his concerns that the Nixon administration was ignoring the interests of the people and consorting only with industrial giants, the special interests of the super rich and generally sacrificing the welfare of the country at large.
Nothing that Mr. McGovern had to say on these questions got through to the people sufficiently to persuade them to vote for him …
[McGovern campaign manager] Frank Mankiewicz and I spent about three hours in a roadside hamburger stand talking about the campaign. Three weeks earlier, just after the election, he had said that three people were responsible for McGovern’s defeat: Tom Eagleton, Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Bremer — but now he seemed more inclined to go along with the New York Times Yankelovich poll, which attributed Nixon’s lopsided victory to a rising tide of right-bent, non-verbalized racism in the American electorate.
Forty years later verbalization of “right-bent racism” became one of the motivational tools in the Romney bid for the White House. More than half turned away.
The WhiteManistan roflbot art is viewable and freely usable in much larger form. It is here.
George Smith said,
November 12, 2012 at 12:28 pm
News item: In the wake of last week’s presidential election, thousands of Americans have signed petitions seeking permission for their states to peacefully secede from the United States. The petitions were filed on We the People, a government website.
States with citizens filing include Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Oddly, folks from Georgia have filed twice. Even stranger, several of the petitions come from states that went for President Barack Obama.
Chuck said,
November 12, 2012 at 2:30 pm
The secession thing is a non-story. There were similar secession petitions during the Dubya administration.
When I look at the map, it seems more like rural-vs-urban voting. Take Oregon, for example. Portland and Eugene metro pretty much did if for the Democrats. Similar patterns emerge for several other states.
The question then is “what is it that urban areas have and appreciate that rural areas don’t?”
George Smith said,
November 12, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Yeah, the news piece noted that secession petitions have become a fad. I neglected to add it, my kind of intentional bad — heh.
Still, it added that if one reaches 25,000 signatures the administration must respond with some manner of statement. A Texas petition had 23,000 signatures. So it’s nuisance symbolism.
And yes, the county map is the best choice, not the state (which is why I chose it), because it shows the urban center voting and high concentration speckles of blue eating into the red voting bloc.
Urban is where diverse America is. Also a measure of job concentration, big business, transportation hubs, settlement patterns. Asians have expanded as a voting bloc and a great many of them are in California, particularly here. For fairly obvious reasons having to do with Pacific migration, the history of the railroad, desired access to quality universities for children, an entrance hub of commerce with China. Of course, there was also the influx from the Vietnam war and its effect on southeast Asia. And most of them — except the old die hard who might have been employed by the CIA — vote D. I doubt they even pay much attention to what the Republican Party, as a whole, does nationally.
I got a kick out of Nashville going blue. It’s the hub of country music but it has a lot in common now with LA in terms of high end pop production and all the support and service industry, including the low wage jobs in catering, hospitality, entertainment and food, for it.
According to the 2010 census, it’s majority percentage of white people is 17 percent lower than the rest of the state, at 60. Black and hispanic amount to 38 percent, and of those who voted I would imagine statistically close to zero went for Romney. So if one third of the white 60 went for Obama, the result’s not hard to figure. .
I think you can do this with every urban center using some common sense and US census data.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/47/4752006.html
But, as we know, the Republicans despise science and hard numbers.
George Smith said,
November 12, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Here’s another example of how the anti-science/anti-data thing exposed the Republicans as stupid. The weekend before election day the Romney campaign sent Paul Ryan to Harrisburg in Pennsylvania. I laughed when I saw the news piece. It was about as good a tactic as hoping to bring the locals in Mecca around to your way of thinking by releasing hogs to run about in the holy places.
http://www.ydr.com/local/ci_21912877/paul-ryan-campaign-saturday-harrisburg-area
They were out of their mind. Harrisburg, as anyone knows who’s lived in the area, is always solid blue. Because of this:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/42/4232800.html
52 percent black to 31 percent white. I suppose they were fooled by the governor, Tea Party Tom Corbett.
Chuck said,
November 12, 2012 at 4:33 pm
The urban-rural split was obvious to me just by personal observation.
Here, in Oregon’s 4th congressional district, Pete Defazio ran against TP Republican Art Robinson (bankrolled by hedge funder Robert Mercer). In town, you’d see Defazio lawn signs; outside of town, it was Robinson. In Oregon, this divide is particularly striking due to land-use laws which set a specific limit to a city’s boundaries.
Frank said,
November 13, 2012 at 12:19 pm
I think some rural voters fancy themselves as Dan’l Boone, who could pick and move when he could see the smoke from a neighbor’s cabin. They live in a fantasy-world where they can grow their own food, make their own soap, and don’t need to be part of civilized society.
Sure, it’s a fantasy, but it’s a strong one and enticing to someone who’s never been lost in the woods in the rain at night.
George Smith said,
November 13, 2012 at 12:39 pm
They also like the angle of turning it into a business. One thing common to the Tea Partiers, and the preppers, everyone from the extreme right, they turn the group activity into a merchandising opportunity, always selling something — training, newsletters, pamphlets, stickers, shirts. Lessons well taken from Glenn Beck and the other celebrities of WhiteManistan.
I agree it also feeds their appetite for the mythic — the belief that as the most self-reliant, most self-responsible of Americans, they will be the survivors when the collapse due to the country going astray inevitably comes. I have to admit that is another especially annoying characteristic of the right wing mind — the utter conviction that unless they have total control the world will fall down. No matter how long it takes, fifteen, twenty, fifty years, the world will fall down and then, boy, will the moochers be sorry.