By JAMES TARANTO
April 14, 2008What do Barack Obama and Ayn Rand have in common?
We’ll get to the answer a little later. In the meantime, you have almost certainly heard by now what the Democratic front-runner said last Sunday–reported Friday–in a speech to wealthy donors in San Francisco:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
On Saturday in Indiana, Obama revised his remarks:
People end up–they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.
This second formulation is somewhat less arrogant than the first, in that it credits voters with acting rationally rather than emotionally: Instead of asserting that they are “bitter,” as he did in San Francisco, Obama said in Indiana, “They don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He went on to explain that they should vote for him because if elected, unlike all previous presidents of either party, he will improve their material well-being.
Obama’s promise rests on a false premise: that it is within the power of the president to restore the Rust Belt’s luster. Every incumbent president in living memory has sought at least one additional term, and the Keystone State has for decades been a key electoral battleground, both large and closely contested. If presidents had the power to make Pennsylvania’s declining towns wealthy, don’t you think one of them would have done so by now?
In truth, the decline of industries is simply a fact of life, like old age, sickness and death. Yet just as new generations supersede the old, a free economy produces innovation that gives rise to new industries. And while some places have declined, the nationwide economy has grown impressively for most of the past quarter-century.
Now consider the issues to which Obama claims these Pennsylvanians “cling” instead of economic ones. One of them, trade, is in fact an economic issue. It’s odd that Obama would criticize Pennsylvanians for “antitrade sentiment,” given that pandering to such sentiment has been a central feature of his campaign. You voters are idiots, and I promise to give you what you want!
Obama’s reference to “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”–which he notably did not repeat in Indiana–seems just a cheap shot, an appeal to his San Francisco audience’s antipathy toward people who aren’t like them. Or perhaps it is evidence that he was listening more attentively than he has admitted to the sermons of his “spiritual mentor” about the “U.S. of KKK A.”
The other subjects Obama cites–guns, same-sex marriage, “religion” (which presumably includes a variety of policy matters, such as abortion, school prayer and religious displays on public property)–are cultural or moral in nature. “Anti-immigrant sentiment” is partly about economics, inasmuch as it implicates labor markets and demand for government services, but our sense is that its emotional appeal rests mostly on anxiety about foreign cultures and languages.
Obama’s critique of culturally conservative voters is far from original. Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” laid out the case, and, as we noted in 2005, Wisconsin’s Sen. Russ Feingold struck a similar theme in an op-ed piece about a visit to Alabama:
I can only wonder how many more generations of central Alabamians will say “yes” when the increasingly powerful Republican Party asks them to be concerned about homosexuality but not about the security of their own health, about abortion but not about the economic futures of their own children.
Underlying this criticism is a curious normative premise: that the nonaffluent ought to prioritize their material interests over moral and cultural concerns. “Workers of the world, unite!” meets “The Virtue of Selfishness.”
Unlike Ayn Rand, Feingold and Obama see selfishness as a virtue only for bitter-off cultural conservatives. The well-heeled San Francisco Democrats Obama addressed last week stand to pay much higher taxes if he is elected. Many of them no doubt back Obama because they like his liberal positions on subjects like guns, abortion and same-sex marriage. If you think Obama criticized their priorities, we’ve got some change you can believe in. In Barack Obama’s America, rich people who vote on cultural issues rather than economic self-interest are principled and self-sacrificing. People of more modest means who do so are credulous and bitter.
When Feingold and Obama refer dismissively to cultural and moral issues, it is not because they do not take those issues seriously. It is because they would rather not take seriously the arguments on the other side. It is much less intellectually demanding, as well as flattering to oneself and those San Francisco Democrats, to caricature opposing positions as the products of poverty, ignorance and bitterness.
But is there even a correlation between the lack of wealth and cultural conservatism? True, there are culturally conservative pockets of economic distress, and some liberal cities–San Francisco, to take one random example–have great concentrations of riches. But polls consistently show that higher income is associated with voting Republican, as is educational attainment (except that holders of advanced degrees, a group that includes unionized teachers, tend to vote Democratic).
Slower-growing states also tend to vote Democratic–including Pennsylvania, which no Republican presidential candidate has carried since 1988. Between 2000 and 2004, the “red” states picked up seven net electoral votes because of population growth in the 1990s. Bitterness is hard to measure, but the evidence weighs strongly against the stereotype that cultural conservatives are poor and uneducated.
Last Sunday was not the first time during the campaign that Obama has spoken of bitterness. This is an excerpt from his big “race” speech last month:
Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear.
The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
Here Obama, clinging to his own religion, uses “bitterness and bias” to explain away the truly stupid and ugly views of his “spiritual mentor”–views to which Obama chooses to expose his own young daughters.
Obama’s mentor does indeed display shocking ignorance when he describes the Sept. 11 attacks as “America’s chickens . . . coming home to roost” and claims that AIDS is the product of a U.S. government conspiracy. But does Obama really believe that support for the Second Amendment or opposition to same-sex marriage is no more respectable than the mad ravings of Jeremiah Wright?
Little else can be added to that.
