Glenden Brown“Primal scream from the right”
H/t to Kos.
The New York Times produced a map after the election showing which counties voted more Republican and which more Democratic in 2008 compared to 2004. That map showed a swath of red counties in the highland south voting more Republican than four years ago - just about the only counties that did nationwide.
That red spot in Colorado? El Paso County - home to James Dobson’s Focus on the Anus Family. John Podhoretz:
The repudiation of the GOP is unambiguous. John McCain led a party whose hold on the nation shrank dramatically during George W. Bush’s second term. In 2004, 37 percent of voters said they were Republicans; in 2008, that number declined to 32 percent, a vertiginous drop in so-called “party identification” on a scale not seen since the post-Watergate election of 1974.
McCain failed to win eight states that Bush had won in 2004—including Indiana, a Republican stronghold in the last ten presidential elections. McCain also failed to take a single state in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, or the Pacific West. Barack Obama won states in every region of the country.
What we’re hearing from the American right amounts to a primal scream. Consider this
insightful article:
. . . across large areas of the south, particularly in Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, the national swing to the Democrats was actually reversed.
In contrast to the rest of the US, Republicans made big gains in counties that were disproportionately white and poor. Fewer than one in three southern whites voted for Mr Obama, compared with 43 per cent of whites nationwide.
Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racial violence, said: “I think the very idea of a black man being elected to the White House is shocking to some subset of the American white population.”
It’s a mistake to underestimate the right’s depth of anger. Right wing anger - much of inchoate, apparently unassuagable and irrational - drove huge chunks of American politics in the 90s, leading right up to the theatre of the absurd of the Clinton impeachment. At FrameShop, Jeffrey Feldman describes it as hard-right nationalism:
While the 2008 election finished with a great celebration at the victory of Barack Obama, it also dragged a grisly hard-right nationalism into the bright light of American politics. The GOP had flirted with nationalism in the 1992 and 1996 Presidential bids of Pat Buchanan, but this time, the hard-right rhetoric of the McCain-Palin campaign shot through the Republican base with such an intensity that the Secret Service expressed concern . . .
The McCain-Palin campaign succeeded at a level beyond Buchanan’s wildest dreams by including several elements that took Buchanan’s racist, sexist and protectionist nationalism and replaced it with a logic of political violence.
Where Buchanan argued that American was under social and cultural threat, McCain and Palin argued that their opponent presented a physical threat to every American’s property and life. They did this in two ways: (1) by accusing Barack Obama of being a ‘terrorist’ and (2) by accusing Barack Obama of being a communist.
The result was startlingly effective.
In 1992 and 1996, the most devoted followers of Pat Buchanan had deep concerns about the Democratic Party and Republican Party candidates who did not stand up for ‘conservative values.’ In 2008, by contrast, the most devoted followers of John McCain and Sarah Palin had more than deep concerns about ideology–they were deathly afraid of Barack Obama himself.
McCain-Palin tapped into something profound in the psyches of millions of Americans - not just a dislike of the other but a profound fear of otherness itself. Throughout the campaign, commentators noted again and again that in contrast to the sea of white faces at McCain rallies, Obama rallies were exemplars of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial America. One need look no further than the election night images from Chicago and Phoenix to see the difference. That multi-racial sea in Chicago on November 4 scares the bejesus out of some Americans. Again, Feldman:
Rather than try to pin hard-right nationalism down to a list of salient features, as is often the case, a better way to define it would be to express it as a sentence that tells a big story–a story that is never overtly spoken, but which is known and believed to be true by every hard-right nationalist:
America is under siege from the outside and the inside by foreigners who seek to take control of our property, end our way of life, and destroy us.
For that subset of white America that is shocked a black man could become President, that final sentence is true, they know it the depths of themselves in a way that defies logic and rationality. The danger now is that these Americans will isolate themselves from all but like-minded people. Feeding on fear of the other, on the very palpable fear that an Obama presidency means the end of America as they know, these hard right nationalists have the potential to become a threat to domestic tranquility. They will - already are - spinning a narrative in which “real” America and “real” Americans are a besieged and embattled minority in their own nation, in which a distrusted polyglot of ethnicities and traitors are undermining America. The recipe for violence is all there - all it needs is a spark and that spark will come in some form the rest of us would never see. It could be something as simple as a traffic stop or as large as an ATF raid on a white supremacist compound. Whether that spark leads to an explosion depends on the rest of us - will we not permit the hard right nationalists to retreat but will we keep them involved in the conversation.
In the face of the right’s primal scream, it’s soul deep shriek of horror and shock, we need to see not hatred but grief. Republicans have believed for decades that American is a right wing nation, that conservative ideas are not only broadly accepted but radically popular. The actual failure of conservative policies and the rejection of a conservative party has come as a shock. The fact that a candidate who was portrayed as a liberal, even a socialist, and who a majority of Americans understood to be a liberal, won the presidency has shocked them to the core. For many conservatives, waking up November 4 felt like waking up in a nation they no longer know, a nation in which they are strangers in a strange land. That their loss was unambiguous only makes it worse and alienated and fearful, they will struggle to find some story that make sense. It’s our job to make sure that story isn’t about alienation, isolation and fear. We have our work cut out for us but we can’t start until they stop screaming.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
An extremely well-thought out analysis, Glendon. I know plenty of people myself who fall into that shocked and scared category. A couple of them visit us here in the Comments, of course.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Where’s the other map, Glendon? The one which shows which precincts/counties voted for McCain vs. Obama. I fear that you’ll find that map distressingly red. A frightening confirmation that most of America hasn’t rejected conservative ideas, just the conservatives that they think have failed them.
Keep in mind that while Bush’s approval ratings are at/sub 25%, those of Congress are even lower (and they’re still falling even after a Dem win in 2006).
I’m just trying to balance the argument. It’s become increasingly evident that most of the top posters on OneUtah live in a liberal echo chamber.
As a side note, look for the rise of “individual against the corrupt system” movies like the ones that were so popular in the ’70s. 3 Days of the Condor, Convoy, Smokey and the Bandit…
Americans are in a funk and blame it on the System - the Republicans just happen to be the System right now.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
This is my favorite election map. You like? Source: Wikipedia.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
jd:
Here is the map you refer: http://images.newsmax.com/misc/2008_Election_Map.jpg
But let’s not be comparing apples to oranges. The map in the top post measures a trend and the map you refer is a snapshot in time. Regardless of the red color of the snapshot map, conservatives were soundly trounced in the election. I guess the snapshot map is deceiving, eh??
November 17th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
How about this map, it shows county by county.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Bob S.– You’re right, even the blue states are red except where most of the people are. Good thing jackrabbits can’t vote. Glenden noted last week that Salt Lake County almost went blue this election– the county where more than a third of all Utahns live.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Personally, I encourage all Republicans to look only at the very red versions of the map and ignore the blue trend map. Perfectly fine with me if they look only at what they won and not at the ground slipping away–the narrowing of the gap.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I understand that Glendon was trying to illustrate a trend - I was trying to counter his illustration with the admonition that the trend is temporary.
And yes, conservatives were beaten like a red-headed step child this election. I think that Larry’s right. Must have been voter fraud…..
November 17th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
JD - two issues.
As has been pointed out, the first map shows movement - i.e. which counties voted more Democratic and which more Republican. The republican voting counties are in a conspicuous swath through the Southern Highlands - such a pattern is suggestive and unmistakable but doesn’t tell us who won which counties.
Looking at the county by county map in terms of who won each county is misleading because population is unevenly distributed. For example, there were 3.63 million votes cast in New Jersey - more than the combined totals of three midwestern states - Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. The state of Connecticut cast 203,000 more votes than the states of Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota combined. It takes seven McCain states to equal the population of two Obama states. Utah and Idaho together cast about 1.5 million votes - almost 100,000 fewer votes than were cost for Obama in Maryland alone. Our population in the US tends to be concentrated in relatively compact areas with vast sparsely populated stretches in between. We don’t elect people to represent acres we elect them to represent people - so a population adjusted map such as Richard posted is far more instructive of who won than is a county by county map that doesn’t adjust for population. IOW, McCain may have won the a swath of the US from the Texas coast to the Canadian border, but most of those states are empty compared to the industrial north won by Obama.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
That’s great, Glendon. It shows that the Electoral College works.
Lots of folks living in those “empty” states think them plenty crowded, too.
Finally, your assertion that:
is an opinion. I was attempting to point out some things that you may not have noticed (being in the echo chamber). The Nation isn’t necessarily trending left - voters just rejected the current crop of conservatives.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Uh, er, hmmm …. Okay, if you say so.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
The red spot in Colorado isn’t accurate, the map has been updated since originally being published. And it isn’t El Paso County either, it is Saguache county.
November 17th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Let me present my map…
NO! Let me present my map!
PRICELESS!
November 17th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
jdberger:
Trolls live under a bridge. You don’t have that stature. You presented me with a document that, unintentionally, proved my point about the theft of the 2000 election. Do you want me to reprint it?
November 18th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I do, Larry.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Me too.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Here you go.
November 18th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
uh huh…and when the networks and the news agencies did the recount after the SCOTUS decision, they found that any way you cut it, under Bush’s scenario or under Gore’s, Bush won.
Your point, not proven. Your tinfoilhattedness, proven.
November 18th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Larry - you’re getting more like Richard every day. I noticed that you didn’t manage to mention that the Volusia County error was corrected.
The Report did. Did you miss it?
November 18th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
You got it exactly backwards. When all the votes were counted by the media organizations, Gore won. Sorry.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:35 am
and where is your proof of this statement, Larry?
November 19th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
None of this is really going to matter when the Nation is broke as a joke.
That is when you will really see “inchoate anger” from all elements of America. By then the rather foolish social issues will be a happy memory of better times when we worried about things in what used to be our rich and abundant free time.
November 19th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Dow at 5000? Could be only 2 months away.