Month: November 2004

And yet again, Digby goes and posts something that makes me wonder why I even bother blogging. This time it is a long, excellent look at the rural/urban psychosocial divide in America. He’s covering ground another of my favorite bloggers, Orcinus, covers, and it also ties in with what I taked about in my last post.

Here’s a sample:

We cannot make a populist case to rural America as long as rural America continues to believe, as it has for centuries, that the government only takes their money and gives it to people they don’t like. This belief is why people who should naturally support our programs instead vote for tax cuts. In the past, populists often shrewdly coupled their argument with nativist causes and were able to scapegoat either immigrants or blacks as part of their argument, thus partially nullifying this cultural resistence. Even FDR agreed to set aside the issue of civil rights for the duration. Needless to say, we aren’t going to go down that path.

So, Democrats are left with a difficult problem of how to deal with a region that is in economic distress but whose culture traditionally believes that government only helps people unlike themselves.

[snip]

Yes, if people were rational about these things you could sit down and have a nice discussion with spreadsheets and diagrams showing that the rural red states benefit far more from federal redistributon of wealth than the metropolitan blue states. You could explain that many of the social changes that have happened have benefitted them in their own lives while acknowledging that there has been a cost and that changes of this magnitude can be frightening and destabilizing. You could show that the massive New Deal programs and the post war expansion benefitted primarily the middle class, not the poor. You could rally the people to the side of their own class instead of the corporations who benefit from the policies currently in place.

But, as we’ve seen, people are not rational.

Go read the rest. If Digby’s not in your bookmark list yet, he should be.

DH in MI, one of the Kos bloggers, has an interesting piece on another of the many disconnects between Republicans, Democrats, and the public. Worth a read.

In short, a lot of Democrats are great at creating good policies, but too few of them are good at creating appealing atmospheres. The former is essential to being a good legislator or executive, but you need to latter to get elected.