And no wonder, by Christ.

(h/t Simon Dedalus)

Posted at September 4, 2008 11:26 PM in response to "McCain's Hero Aura Inoculates Him Against Critics"

Here's a prediction: after November 4, first you will be very angry, and then quite sad; then, a little later, fearful.

Posted at September 4, 2008 4:13 PM in response to Polls Show No Convention Bounce Yet For McCain

Here's a prediction: after November 4, you're going to be quite angry at first, and then very sad; and then a little later, fearful.

Posted at September 4, 2008 4:00 PM in response to Polls Show No Convention Bounce Yet For McCain

Here's a prediction: after November 4, you're going to be very angry at first, and then sad, and then a little later, fearful.

Posted at September 4, 2008 3:54 PM in response to Polls Show No Convention Bounce Yet For McCain

Uh, that's "wreaked".

Posted at September 4, 2008 3:36 PM in response to Polls Show No Convention Bounce Yet For McCain

Hey...I have a real question.

I just read over Palin's speech instead of listening to it, and there's something weird.

She has a line about having more nuclear energy, and the word is spelled out like this: "new-clear".

Was that a joke by somebody at TPM, or was that a real attempt to get her not to say "noo-kyoo-ler"?
Because if you just say new and then clear, you're close to the right pronunciation.

I thought Republicans LIKED "noo-kyuh-lur". Go figure.

Posted at September 3, 2008 10:58 PM in response to Rudy's Speech Goes Long, Forces Cancellation Of Palin Introductory Video

Dear Bill,

Hope that head cold goes away soon ("described to be...").

Thanks for confirming the cluelessness of American social science by exhibiting some of its waste products.

Posted at July 26, 2008 9:22 AM in response to They are our enemies. We marry them.

OK, so, I'll respond to Mr. Bishop's post. At the paper where you once worked, there are now reporters who "blog". But it seems that someone warned them about the fever swamp and all that, because they all have these restrictive guidelines up. Nobody is allowed, for example, to call Dudley Webb a fish-footed cocksucker on (this one reporter's) blog!

As you see, they don't have that kind of function here (at least not yet). Maybe you are used to it.

You've turned back from anecdote to American social science. Probably the best. Nonetheless, this post could be subtitled, "Guess what? Stereotypes are true! (and they're what's for dinner!)"

I hate to deconstruct your me-hip-too use of "shacking" (I think they just call it "living" now). But the idea that the Dem side of the big sort can be reliably associated with unmarried cohabitation is weak, precisely because we all know that in red states there are more divorces, more wives beaten, more abortions, more high school dropouts, and on and on.

It is extraordinarily imprudent to resurrect any but the most thoroughly discussed sociology from the 1970s (for God's sake).

First off, the US population has doubled since then, skewing South, and a lot of people during that time have not grown up in relative security.

Your "culture shift" paragraph sounds like pure hippyism. Did you use the phrase "rolled their own spiritual lives" in that sense? Eek.

I don't think people lost trust in all institutions. I don't understand what you mean about people in cities ceasing to obey centralized authorities. We still bought our bus passes, didn't we? American culture came alive in cities beginning in the 1920s, and this movement continued up into the 1960s, where I think we would want to say a page turned. The authorities you claim were abandoned simply became able to take culture off life support. The US had a wave of affluence, sure.

But I think you'll get a tsunami's worth of argument from blue-staters if you keep suggesting, for example, that they spend less time with their children. Creativity and inquiry were promoted as values in the East earlier than in the South because the schools were better sooner. Easterners knew that success wasn't just a matter of obedience, and they focused earlier on child development.

I also think it is highly questionable to say that Southerners and the like value good manners more than Easterners. I think a lot of Easterners would say that a lot of Southerners don't know what good manners really are, that Southern manners are a mere simulacrum of the social graces that once constituted the soul of education.

This part of your post:

"...succeeding generations growing up in relative abundance are increasingly aligned with post materialist notions of environmental protection, gay rights, individual freedom and racial and ethnic diversity. Democrats, meanwhile, should realize that post materialists are also distrustful of all large institutions, including government."

...is just confusing.

Look, there are red staters and blue staters, red counties and blue, in which succeeding generations grow up in relative affluence. Some of them are aligned with environmental protection, gay rights, and diversity, etc. Some of them are not. This just doesn't appear to cut either way. No point is being made. (Not surprising you refer to Walker Smith just about here.)

I think the real problem here is your assumption about affluence. If red state Americans could be wooed by marketers forever, if they never ran out of disposable income, they'd eventually all turn into Stepford people, "clap louder" people. And if the same were true about blue staters, they'd probably eventually end up with less population and more science knowledge than the South, and they'd exploit that gap all over again. But it isn't going to happen that way. There is going to be pressure to re-industrialize the South in order to produce for export. It looks like global capitalists will get a big wage squeeze in America, and they'll move to exploit that. Foreign companies will copy Toyota and move into more sectors, organizing and training Americans, including more and more Hispanics.

I understand that Red China actually owns about a trillion dollars worth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Wouldn't it be funny if they just all came over here and took their debt out in kind?

I'm sorry, but the introduction of "post-materialism" into the conceptual mix at this point just makes hash of the whole thing. Materialism has changed, but Americans on both sides of the big sort are materialistic.

The phenomenon you have been trying to describe appears to me to be rather an epiphenomenon. It is not an operation or development of culture, but a movement away from culture, toward a sort of maximum of commercial de-culturalization. Resistance to this is not exclusively "urban". I imagine it has something to do with Eastern traditions and the connection to Europe. In the West, this is represented by the Asian and Hispanic influence. These are cultural matrices that resist commercial reinterpretation.

Immigration and economic depression (or recession if you like) will undo the big sort. The model of Republican politics since Nixon will fall apart. But the Great Society will not return. In effect, the result of such a long time spent acting as if other countries had no real power over us, will be a period during which they will have a lot of very public power over us.

When Communism fell, the life expectancy for men in some Eastern European countries dropped below 60. How much of this was due to the switch from believing that your country was part of a powerful bloc, I don't know.

It is as if this redstate ubermensch were composed almost exclusively of commercial products. As we begin to remove them one by one, the "sorted" individual disappears. First we take away the SUV; the red-sort has to stand next to people on public transportation. Then we take away the suburban home; certain apartment complexes restrict gun ownership or require gun locks, and the red-sort loses some of the props of his posse comitatus fantasy. Next to go, the credit card: the banking crisis and credit crunch will soon encompass a rise in charge-offs, and that will lead to higher fees, lower limits, and cancellation of some cards (and of course some banks will fail). The red-sort individual must negotiate personally, give his word, enter into more complicated ethical transactions, like Arabs do when they borrow money on a handshake.

The ultimate prop of "sorted" society might be insurance. I say this because insurance in almost every aspect of the American economy seems to be in crisis. Health insurance has become a contradictory concept, since insurance companies try to prevent sick people from being insured. Global warming has battered fire and casualty insurance so hard via disasters that it has become prohibitively expensive in many areas. To complete the picture, the credit-default swaps that many mutual funds require as a hedge against the default of certain bond obligations today appear worthless because of the massive under-capitalization of the monoline insurers, the "re-insurers." At this point the very concept of insurance is close to collapse.

And at this point we perhaps begin to see just how much of the big sort depends upon the illusion of controlling one's destiny - or in a blue-state mode, the illusion that science can solve the country's problems if we can just get the cast of Deliverance out of the way (ups to Ellen!)

I hate stereotypes, but I think the reason why we keep running up against stereotypical interpretations of a period of American history is because we are stuck with them. We cannot change them. Americans went through a period where they did not encounter any resistance. It didn't matter if red-staters were indoctrinated with ludicrous caricatures of the truth regarding foreign countries, etc., because those countries were powerless to threaten America in anyway. It didn't matter if red-staters fell more and more captive to a caricature of Christianity, because God didn't seem to have any big projects for them; manifest destiny had no visible frontier left. And it didn't matter if the native industry and thrift of red-staters was undermined by imports and HELOCs, because imported goods would always get cheaper and house prices would always go up.

If you take juvenile behavior into account, then the big sort begins to look like a continuum. I guess the key to this observation is that "shacking" isn't, I don't believe, as blue-statish as you think. A lot of red state people have sex for the first time at church camp. You take a red state teenager. If he is affluent, then he probably listens to rap music. The more solidly entrenched in his society he is, the more likely it is that he walks around with his pants sagging, etc.

The cutting edge in all this is job availability and salary. Year after year, the attraction of a good job and a good salary cause the majority of young people to cut, so to speak, their hair.

The big sort can be seen as a temporary adaptation, characterized moreover by the subtraction of part of the dominant population from "blue" areas, such that the barrier to be crossed separated rural and suburban areas from urban areas. Rural and suburban areas tended to become "red"; urban areas allowed higher percentages of racial minorities and Hispanics to occupy neighborhoods that were once white.

But all this new development requires now more people in order for it to acquire more than a Potemkin culture based on acquisition of certain possessions. The United States' population needs to grow so that its economy can grow, and so that its culture can grow (in a quite other sense of growth).

Posted at July 23, 2008 11:42 PM in response to The Silent Revolution

btw, I totally endorse the project of torching the Electoral College in terms of small red state Senators. But it might be better to just capture and hold them. I think that's the whole reason why Markos has this obsession with Montana. The ad budgets are so cheap. You should be able to conquer these states, you just have to turn libertarianism into progressivism (a nice trick)

Posted at July 23, 2008 10:26 PM in response to The Silent Revolution

Heh, he said "nurturant".

Posted at July 23, 2008 10:23 PM in response to The Silent Revolution