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In much of his writing Michael Lind generally makes a very good point: focusing on economic populism is both the smart thing, and the right thing for Democrats to do. Sometimes this leads him to surprisingly insightful critiques--as it did in parts of his article critiquing Obama's neoliberalism that I wrote about last weekend. But other times this leads him to neglect--or worse yet, severely misrepresent--the opposing forces that stand in the way. Last weekend, I criticized him for misrepresenting the role of racism during the New Deal, but it was only a minor point with respect to the main thrust of that argument. This week, Lind's mis-apprehension of racism emerged full-blown as the center-piece of a truly delusional attack on "liberals".
Before turning to the issue of how Lind mis-represents liberals in my next diary (a task I already introduced in my earlier diary, "Going After Michael Lind With Occam's Razor"), I want to clearly show how Lind mis-represents those he claims to champion, and how confused he is more generally about issues of race, class and regional identity. As I've noted in the past, the South really is different, and I'm down with Tom Schaller on his "Whistling Part Dixie" thesis--not that the South can go to hell, but that Dems should stop trying win back the South on terms set by White Southerners.
Here is how Lind's article concluded:
o be expected that people, black and white, who have been deprived of adequate education will be more likely than educated people to believe in nonsense like Birther conspiracy theories and AIDS conspiracy theories. And it is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been frozen out of politics by oligarchic elites will turn to flamboyant populist tribunes as their leaders, including theatrical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and Jerry Falwell.
The traditional liberal solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less power than those who lampoon them.
Lind's attempt to equate Sharpton and Wright with Robertson and Falwell is an insult I'll return to in a later diary, along with his attempt to equate the Birther conspiracy theory with AIDs conspiracy theories. What I want to focus on here is Lind's wholly unfounded assumption that it is poor, uneducated White Southerners who are the core demographic who buy into this nonsense. Of course, Lind isn't the only one who makes this mistake. But he is, after all, the one who pretends to be both holier-than-thou and more knowledgeable-than-thou. And so it must be forcefully recalled that (a) the Birther belief is concentrated among White Southern Republicans, and (b) White Southern Republicans skew wealthy, not poor. On the first point,
PPP's North Carolina poll (pdf) had Republicans saying Obama wasn't born in America by almost 2-1 (47-24, with 29% unsure) while Democrats saying he was born in America by over 6-1 (75-12 with 13% unsure). On the second point, the following table, based on ANES data, is particularly clear:
(It should be noted that the sub-sample for the top income group is particularly small, especially for this decade, and thus the data is noisier and less reliable.)
Ever since the 1950s, the wealthiest Southern Whites have been more Republican than the poorest Southern Whites--indeed, the entire top third was more Republican than the bottom third. The last two decades, the relationship has been perfectly monotonic--every income group is more Republican than the group just below it--and the 2000s were more markedly so than the 1990s. Whatever may have been true in the past, the picture that Lind has in his head is 100% the opposite of what the NES data tells us.
On the flip, more tables to put the trend among White Southerners into context.
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