Democrats: Party of Elites (and Elitists)

From the Wall Street Journal:

Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate in recent history to lose popularity after a defeat, and she seems determined to keep it that way. Speaking in India over the weekend, she blamed Donald Trump’s election on voters who “didn’t like black people getting rights . . . don’t like women, you know, getting jobs . . . don’t wanna, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.” She also claimed that “married white women” supported Mr. Trump in response to “pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son—whoever—believes you should.”

More interesting than this “basket of deplorables” redux, though, was Mrs. Clinton’s commentary on the role of economic concerns in the 2016 contest. “There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won,” she said. “But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.” To scattered applause, she continued: “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

This is an unexpected twist in the debate over Mr. Trump’s rise. Analysts on the center and right have tended to emphasize the economic factors that made Mr. Trump’s victory possible, noting that voters in regions with stagnating incomes and diminishing job opportunities are likelier to be drawn to populism. Many on the left, meanwhile, have argued that economic concerns are simply an excuse for bigotry. “Economic anxiety” is even a running joke on progressive Twitter — a sarcastic response to reports of racism among Republicans.

But now Mrs. Clinton herself has endorsed the “economic anxiety” thesis, albeit in a backhanded way. She sees her electoral disappointment in economically downscale regions not as a political failure but a source of validation—and, apparently, an indication of those voters’ failings. Similarly, last September she told Vox that the Electoral College is “an anachronism” in part because “I won in counties that produce two-thirds of the economic output in the United States.” Should those voters have more of a say?

Since Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party has usually been identified as the party of the “common man,” and its adversaries as defenders of wealth and economic privilege. Jackson earned that reputation for his party by reducing property qualifications for the franchise for white men. But the Democrats’ most recent standard-bearer sounds an awful lot like the 19th-century conservatives who thought political representation should be tied to wealth. This is a significant moment in America’s partisan realignment.

Not merely “significant” but stunning. But not new either. In the 60s, when leftist students and activists were marching against the Vietnam War — indeed, rooting for a communist victory — construction workers were marching in support of the war, and were demeaned as “hardhats” by the left.

And the conflict over social issues like abortion has long been one that pitted affluent liberals against working class conservatives such as the famous “Reagan Democrats.” Thomas Frank’s 2005 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? lamented how working class voters didn’t vote “their own interests,” but voted Republican because of social issues.

Hillary’s snobbish elitism is not new. But it’s not been so blatantly expressed by a presidential candidate until Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” speech. And now she has doubled down.

Political Correctness

Whatever their actual beliefs (and Obama probably pretty much thought the same way) no candidate has so blatantly and overtly embraced political correctness. The essence of political correctness is the view that there is no legitimate disagreement with the standard leftist agenda. Oppose Black Lives Matter and you are a racist. Oppose gay marriage and you are a homophobe. Oppose abortion and you are a sexist. No debate or discussion allowed.

The Reality of Social Class and Politics

The reality, of course, is that Trump voters were not at all the poor white trash that the elitist Democrats make them out to be, as the 2016 Exit Polls show. While Trump did particularly well with whites with no college degree, he carried a plurality of whites with a college degree.

Clinton did carry those with postgraduate degrees (by a 58% to 37% margin), but there is no reason to believe that people with postgraduate degrees are any more “enlightened” than other groups. All graduate education is vocational, and simply socializes students into a particular occupation —  typically one whose interests are served by liberal policies.



As for income, if the richest people are the most productive (a notion that the left traditionally abhorred), then the most productive people split evenly between Trump and Clinton.



Hillary is using something called the “ecological fallacy” — confusing the aggregate characteristics of a unit with the characteristics of the individuals in it. So while affluent areas are indeed the quite liberal, it doesn’t follow that affluent people are. The same goes for education. Put another way, plenty of rich and well-educated conservatives live in those affluent areas, where they are unfortunately outnumbered by the liberals.

But more fundamentally: do you really want to assume that the rich and well-educated are the most enlightened? Or does wealth and education (which is often indoctrination) corrupt?

On that issue, the Democrats have come down on the side of the elitists.

Update

What Hillary actually said is even worse than the journalistic descriptions of it. Watch the entire response to the question below:

Hating Trump / Hating Liberals

From the American Thinker, with the provocative title “Some people hate Trump. More people hate liberals.”

The piece starts with a discussion of the Republican victory in the Georgia Congressional district that Democrats had hoped to pick up, and continues:

In Georgia’s 6th, reality once again intruded on liberals’ fantasies. They once again failed to grasp that some people may hate President Trump. But more people hate them. And unless they can grasp that fundamental point, 2018 will turn into another GOP victory.

The resentment of ordinary Georgia voters begins and ends with the $23 million that poured into the district from Democrat donors across the country – most prominently, from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Handel’s money also came from out of state, but it didn’t come from people who look down their noses at Georgia voters and try to instruct them on what they should think.

That brings us to the national media. More than any other Democrat-allied group, the media promoted the narrative that Trump is so unpopular that a deep red congressional district was almost certainly going to flip.

Of course, the press professed to be neutral, and all those negative stories trying to wrap Trump around Handel’s neck were what people were really thinking.

One tweet last night sort of blows that nonsense out of the water:

This is priceless!#FakeNews #GA06 #Handel #Ossoff pic.twitter.com/Fn1E1KTqbt

— Pamela Moore (@Pamela_Moore13) June 21, 2017

After the initial glum reaction of pundits to Handel’s win came the excuses. It was the weather, it was the big GOP advantage in registration, it was early voting, it was Republican outsiders, it was history, it was counter-historical, Ossoff wasn’t liberal enough, no unions, blacks didn’t turn out, and the most common complaint from the left about ordinary voters...

The people refused to vote “their interests.”

All of those excuses fail to get to the crux of why the left keeps losing. Ordinary Americans simply don’t like leftists very much. And when Hollywood and Silicon Valley unite to tell them they are stupid, are ignorant, are racist, are homophobic, hate Muslims, and shouldn’t love America so much, what do they expect the reaction from ordinary people will be?

Republicans are not representatives of the people any more than Democrats are. But they speak the language of the ordinary voter and usually don’t put them down. The coastal elites who run the Democratic Party and liberal establishment cannot disguise their contempt for ordinary Americans. In Georgia’s 6th District, that smug, self-righteous sense of superiority played about as well as one might expect.

Until the Democrats can learn to mask their hatred of the hoi polloi, ordinary people will hate them more than they hate Trump and the Republicans.

Of course, it would be even better if the Democrats could not merely mask, but actually get over their hatred of the hoi polloi. But that’s not even in the cards. A smug sense of self-righteousness is part of their DNA.

Democrat Identity Politics Backfires

From Reason Magazine, an analysis of the “New Nationalism” from Jonathan Haidt, via the BBC:

Q: And what is it that you think is the outcome of this new division of globalists versus the nationalists because there appears to be not just a sense of acute polarization but actually intolerance on both sides.

Haidt. Yes, I think that there are two disastrous outcomes; two things I am very, very worried about for my country, and for all of the Western democracies; it’s the same thing. One is identity politics on the Left has been brewing for a long time. I’ve been a professor since 1995 at the University of Virginia and now at New York University; so I’ve watched identity politics get stronger and stronger; more focused on matrices of oppression – straight white males this and straight white males that — and after a while, as I forget who pointed out in the current election, if you keep treating white men as an identity group, you keep saying that “they are terrible; they are evil” — eventually they become just like another identity group and they voted their racial interests, in a sense you might say. So identity politics on the Left eventually triggers identity politics on the Right.

Translation: the people whom the elitist liberals despise have revolted.

They resent being called “bitter clingers” or a “basket of deplorables” and they fought back in the one arena were the have the most political power — at the ballot box. This was true of white males (the great villains of identity politics) but also of the women who like their husbands and boyfriends (a majority of married women voted for Trump) and decent people who dislike the racial, gender and sexual hustle.

A Trump vote was a very blunt instrument, since Trump was a deeply flawed candidate, but given the choice between the arrogant elitists and Trump, Americans who were tired of being demeaned, tired of being told they had to accept being victims of discrimination, and tired of being told that they needed to change to be like the elitists, revolted.

The Smug Style of Liberalism

From the left leaning Vox, a perceptive essay about “The smug style in American liberalism.” The author (one Emmett Rensin) seems to be not so much a conservative but an old labor leftist, with a large dollop of populism.

Some choice quotes:

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.

The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt The consequence was a shift in liberalism’s intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.

It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.

And later:

Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. That for every overpowered study finding superior liberal open-mindedness and intellect and knowledge, there is one to suggest that Republicans have the better of these qualities.

Most damning, perhaps, to the fancy liberal self-conception: Republicans score higher in susceptibility to persuasion. They are willing to change their minds more often.

The Republican coalition tends toward the center: educated enough, smart enough, informed enough.

The Democratic coalition in the 21st century is bifurcated: It has the postgraduates, but it has the disenfranchised urban poor as well, a group better defined by race and immigration status than by class. There are more Americans without high school diplomas than in possession of doctoral degrees. The math proceeds from there.

Why does smugness to dominate the liberal culture?

As we have suggested, liberals are better able to cocoon themselves among like-minded people. They likely had liberal high school teachers, but most certainly had overwhelmingly liberal college professors. They self-select into professions defined by strongly (often monolithically) liberal or left politics (academia, journalism, the government regulatory and welfare state). They segregate themselves into ghettos (like Milwaukee’s East Side) and mostly interact with people like themselves. They get their news from liberal outlets.

While conservatives can isolate themselves to a degree, they cannot avoid the liberal indoctrination in college, nor exposure to the liberal media (whether it be the New York Times or the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel). They are more likely to work in settings where politics is a bit peripheral and there is some diversity of opinion.

Thus liberal smugness is not justified by superior knowledge, or superior reasoning ability, or superior open-mindedness. It is simply the result of an intense tribal mentality.

Thus liberals richly deserve to have lost the support of the white working class. But this working class populism can play out in different ways: voting for Reagan or voting for Trump, for example. Not all ways of opposing liberal smugness are equal.

It’s All Your Fault

Democrats Don’t Especially Like America

From the Gallup Organization, the results of a question that asked “How proud are you to be an America — extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, or not proud at all?” Gallup then tabulated the percentages in each group who said “extremely proud.” The results are presented below:

Democrats are 21% less likely to feel “extremely proud” than are Republicans. Gallup did not provide tabulations for liberals and conservatives, but had they done so, the cleavage would doubtless have been wider.

So why are Democrats less patriotic? They would insist they are most sensitive to the social injustice that they consider an endemic part of American life. This is just a rationalization. What liberal Democrats don’t like about America is that they have less power than they think they should. Being elitists, they are resentful that ordinary Americans — people who oppose abortion, gay marriage, gun control and so on — contest with them for power, and on a much more equal basis than they would like.

The classic statement of this elitism came from Barack Obama, who said:

You go into some of 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 it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Yes, these bitter clingers have too much power.

Obama: Hypocrite on Private Schools

This issue is typical of how liberals think. They condemn parents who send their kids to private schools, but send their own kids to private schools (or are ensconced in affluent suburbs were the public schools are quite elite).

They want to force the masses onto public transit, while they feel free to drive their Priuses wherever it’s convenient for them.

A few decades ago, they were supporting the massive busing of school children to achieve racial balance in public schools. But somehow, mostly black kids, and sometimes working class whites got bussed. The white liberals’ kids virtually never did.

They are strong proponents of “social justice” — imposed on other people by people like themselves.

The Cultural Bias Behind Gun Control

From Frontpage Magazine:

But media-stoked irrational hysteria about gun violence isn’t the only reason we are hearing calls for more gun control. Politics is a factor as well. According to the New York Times, while 60% of Republicans have a gun in the house, only 25% of Democrats do. “Whether someone owns a gun,” Nate Silver writes, “is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics.” That’s why Obama used the Newtown killings to bully the Republicans into caving on his demands for higher taxes. Like class warfare, gun control is a reliable issue for Democrats to exploit for political gain no matter how ineffective the resulting policies. Just as the soak-the-rich policies dominating the Democrats’ solutions to the “fiscal cliff” will do nothing to reduce the deficit and control spending, so too more gun control will not stop tragedies like the Newtown massacre.

Gun control laws, then, represent yet another instance of the progressive ideology that distrusts the average person to control his own life, and so demands ever greater regulatory intrusion into private life that necessarily expands the scope and power of the government. Restrictions on guns assume that most people, especially those conservative “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” as Obama called them, are too untrustworthy or incapable or stupid to own and carry a weapon. Such laws are written by elite snobs who think they know how to run your life better than you do, just as progressive economic policy is predicated on the belief that the federal government has a right to confiscate your money because it knows how to spend it more efficiently or justly.

In the end, the progressive point is not to solve problems that history shows big government is usually incapable of doing without extracting prohibitive costs. The point is to expand the leviathan state at the expense of individual freedom and autonomy, based on a contempt for ordinary people whom progressives at heart believe are not as worthy of freedom as they are. The emotional excesses that surround a tragedy like the Newtown massacre are merely the camouflage for advancing this assault on freedom.

Gun, control, in other words is merely a symbolic issue. Liberals want to put people whom they define as “the other” in their place, and symbolicly vindicate their own claimed lifestyle superiority. It fundamentally, deep down, has nothing to do with decreasing gun violence.

Cramping the Style of the Street Car

One of the fiascoes of Milwaukee City government in recent history is a plan to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to build a streetcar line that connects the trendy, affluent east side (where most people have cars, and where bus service is good) to the train station on St. Paul Street.

It will do no good for people who live on the suburbs. It will do no good for black people who live on the city’s North Side. It will do no good for people who live on the South Side. It will do no good for people who live in the Marquette area. It quite clearly reflects, not sober policy analysis, but rather the fetish of certain elites with mass, government planned and run transportation.

The costs of relocating utility lines to make way for the streetcar will be massive, and the City of Milwaukee has been demanding that ratepayers throughout the entire service areas of the affected utilities (the vast majority of whom will get no benefit at all from the project) should be forced to pay these costs.

Now enter the The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which today urged at a public hearing of the Public Service Commission that utilities not be forced to foist on ratepayers the entire relocation costs. According to the Institute:

September 27, 2012, Milwaukee, WI - Brett Healy and his fellow utility ratepayers, represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (“WILL”), scored a significant victory in today’s proceedings before the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. The City of Milwaukee had argued that the construction of its 2.1 mile downtown streetcar project is a proper exercise of its police power to promote the public safety and welfare, and therefore it has the legal right to force the utilities that will be affected by the project (and their ratepayers) to absorb all of the costs for the relocation or reconstruction of their facilities. Those costs have been estimated at more than $50 million. The City, which expects to essentially pay for the $65 million project with federal funds, has no room in its project budget to pay even one dollar of utility relocation costs.

The Commission declined to rule today that the construction of the streetcar project is a proper exercise of the City’s police power, setting that issue for a later hearing. More importantly, however, the Commission held that even if the streetcar project is a proper exercise of the City’s power, the City cannot impose all of the relocation costs on the utilities that will be affected. Only those costs that the Commission finds to be “reasonable” can be shifted to the utilities. The Chairman of the Commission particularly noted that the Commission’s duty is to protect Wisconsin’s utility ratepayers, and expressed serious reservations that it would be appropriate for the City to pass on millions of dollars in costs to Southeastern Wisconsin utility ratepayers who will receive no benefit from the City’s project. The Commission rejected the City’s contention that it had no jurisdiction to decide the cost issue, and said that it would hold a hearing to determine what costs it would permit the City to pass on to the utilities and their ratepayers.

Rick Esenberg, President and General Counsel of WILL, said “this is a clear victory for our clients and for the concept of government accountability. The Public Service Commission has done what we asked it to do, and will take a close look at the City’s decision to impose millions of dollars in costs on ratepayers who do not live in the City. We are confident that the Commission will decide that, if the City wants to move forward with the streetcar project, the City’s taxpayers should pay for it.”

Brett Healy, who originally brought the matter before the Commission, said “it’s clear that the City has no room in its budget for paying any of the utility costs and equally clear that the Commission will not let the City get away with shifting all, or even most, of those costs to utility customers. It’s time for the City to let its taxpayers know that the streetcar project cannot be financed with “free” federal dollars, and that it will likely cost them in substantially increased property taxes at the end of the day.”

This mania for mass transit among liberal elites, as we have noted before, reflects the resentment of these elites at the uppity nature of ordinary Americans. They want to live where they want to live. They want to drive their cars where they want to. They don’t want to have to conform their lifestyles to what urban planners think is best.

And the liberal elites hate that hugely.

Gore Vidal Unhinged

From The Times:

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics.’ In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

So is he just a crotchety old author, venting the sort of crackpot opinions that old curmudgeons are expected to have?

No, this is an extreme outcropping of the general contempt with which the intellectual class (including people who don’t have much intellectual distinction — say, your average academic or average journalist) view this nation.

Few of them would say this so bluntly, but then even in the heyday of racism in America, few Americans would actually lynch a black person. But when that happened, it was an outcropping of widely held racist attitudes.

Liberal Elites and Sarah Palin

Sometimes the most revealing things happen in e-mail exchanges, and this is one we got copied on.

From my good old friend Edd some interesting I’m sure known facts about Ms. Palin

Cousin,

I hope that you are keeping up with the seemingly never ending trail of white trash evidence that we are finding out about Sarah Palin and her family. I sure am. First of all, what would the late great George Carlin have to say about her kids names, Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow and Piper, not to mention the husband, Todd. We all have heard the bit. Some of my favorites from this weeks edition of “Are the Palin’s bigger pieces of White Trash than Lyndi England (you might remember Lyndi from her work stacking naked Iraqi’s into a pyramid and taking a picture giving a thumbs up)” Sarah’s Husband, Todd, not only has 2 DUI’s, races snowmobiles, and was a former member of the Alaskan secessionist party, but he recently referred to himself as “the first dude.” And what can we say about young Bristol? What a peach she is, and she sure knows how to pick ‘em too. Enter Levi Johnston, who describes himself as a “f**king redneck” on his myspace page. The only positive out of this is that if McCain were to be elected and something were to happen to him and he dies, we are now part of our own live version of “King Ralph.”

The friend of ours who forwarded this also forwarded his response:

Incredibly, incredibly judgemental and condescending, coming from someone who obviously considers himself part of the “diversity” crowd. . . . As if George Carlin’s comments or potential comments (were he still alive) are to be gospel for politics or... hmmmmm, let’s say.... religion? A further question--define “white trash” you guys... As opposed to what -- black trash? If you mean uncultured thugs who demean women and see white people as either sources for easy cash or an easy target for their own community’s failures, I would like to see the liberal elite “trash” them equally with hicks and their fellow travelers . . .

I, for one, much prefer the company of simple countryfolk (both black and white)--who at least have viable families and a discernable moral compass--over spoiled whiners who make up much of the voting base of the Democratic Party in places like River West, Shorewood, etc. . . . God f**king forbid that they actually take some responsibility for their actions and do some inner reflection! As opposed to smugly putting down snakehandlers and Alaskan snowmobilers to make themselves feel like part of some select few of Gnostic know-it-alls who can easily dismiss much of America as unworthy simpletons. . . . An overdeveloped guilt complex has proven to be, from what I know of human history, much more socially-constructive than moral relativism and outright hypocrisy in putting down other people’s lifestyles while making no apologies for faults in your own... It at least engenders quite a bit of humillity, while the latter makes one feel entitled to socially engineer to one’s heart’s content (see Wikipedia under “National Socialism” or “Stalinism,” for example)!

I have been involved in politics long enough to get to know people on both sides of the aisle and, I have to admit, the snobbery I’ve heard on the left wing far outshines the judgementalism of most conservatives I know (who often turn out to be a bit Manichean, yes, but at least honest more often than not). . . . On numerous occassions, I have heard liberal politicos and elected officials actually say: “People don’t know what’s good for them.... That’s why they voted for Bush, etc. etc.” People don’t know what’s good for them???? I, along with most of my fellow believers in the inherent value of moral agency in determining communal life, send to such people a well-deserved and long-coming “arm of honor” (as the French say)!!!!! I don’t know what’s good for me??? That’s for me and God to decide, you freaking walking windbag of complexes!

Guys, seriously--I will happily read such comments from serious and well-intentioned liberals that used to make up, say, FDR’s voting base. But outright garbage like this, please don’t send. . . . Mr. Pailin or future son-in-law at least have the gall to admit that they’re “f**king rednecks”... Why don’t Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or the rest of the liberal cognisenti add to their MySpace pages the label: “f**king bleeding heart who knows what’s good for you -- Trust me, I do”?

Probably because they know that most of America retains the common sense God gave us all and upon which the Founding Fathers had such enduring trust that they would run them out of freaking town, much or less elect them to public office! I love you guys, but please don’t push my buttons like this! Serious and honest discourse, as you well I know, I absolutely love, but talking down to my well-intentioned, though sometimes misguided, countrymen frankly pisses me off! Amen!

Elitist UWM Professor: Sneering at Ordinary Americans

Browsing through the letters column of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel sometimes turns up some bizarre items.

This one caught out attention.

What’s attractive?

The xenophobic and jingoist rant against immigration is likely to find itself running out of gas in the foreseeable future. Immigration from variously skilled and resourced nations to the United States is likely to come to a trickle and stop altogether with the existing media infrastructure in sports-concert complexes.

“JumbotroNazism,” my coinage, shows nothing but distasteful images of monstrous, corpulent whiteness, which will repel a physically normal world. No one will want to live in a country of hideous proportions and ungainly movements and behaviors.

Media conspirators will respond by showing hotness, a.k.a. other white women - not! America’s idea of attractiveness is overrated and bankrupt in the global bank of good taste.

K.E. Supriya
Shorewood

Such a wonderful window into the world of elitists who don’t like ordinary, especially working class Americans, who may be overweight and may do silly things when the TV cameras are turned on them at a sports event.

Consider, for example, the phrase “corpulent whiteness.” Ms. Supriya is apparently especially offended by overweight whites, but the reality of obesity is interesting.

In general, the prevalence of overweight and obesity is higher in women who are members of racial and ethnic minority populations than in non-Hispanic white women. Among men, Mexican Americans have a higher prevalence of overweight and obesity than non-Hispanic whites or non-Hispanic blacks. For non-Hispanic men, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among whites is slightly greater than among blacks.

But of course, phrases like “corpulent blackness” or “corpulent brownness” would be politically incorrect.

The real grudge people like Ms. Supriya have against working class Americans is simple: they are uppity. Rather than accepting the tutoring of their betters on how to live, they do things like driving trucks and SUVs, living in the suburbs, shopping at Wal-Mart and voting for Bush.

And they have the quaint notion that they have a right to live their own lives, regardless of what the Supriyas of the world think of it.

Even worse, they have one vote each, which is just as much as Ms. Supriya and her friends have. What a horrid injustice.

Of course, these JumbotroNazis make the United States an evil place, so everybody is going to stop wanting to come to America. But in the real world, vast numbers of people want to come here, oblivious to the elitist standards of “taste” of people like Ms. Supriya.

Now what do you suppose would be Ms. Supriya’s occupation?

A simple Google search shows her to be on the Communications faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee!

And given her name and appearance, she seems to be of Indian descent. But, unlike the vast majority of Indians who migrate to the U.S., she has been thoroughly socialized into academia. So she thinks like a college professor.

Lame Explanation

Obama: Telling Comment

Via John Fund’s colunn in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Obama has a tendency to make such cultural miscues. Speaking to small-town voters in Iowa last year, he asked, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?”