Tribes

I read this piece by Judith Warner this morning, and it's been floating around in my head ever since. Specifically, the line I keep returning to is this one, a statement made by a mother in a crowd with regard to the liberal bias of some children: “So often these kids that are so incredibly full of themselves, I find their parents are Democrats. The Democrats, they hate ‘us,’ the United States, but they love ‘me,’ that is, themselves.”

I am unsettled by this sentiment. One expects that people who strongly identify with different political parties are going to have different ideas on a range of issues, but this woman's hatred and identification of Democrats as being outside her conception of true Americans suggests a dangerous tribalization.

Again, political rallies are probably a pretty good place to look for partisan extremists, but this hatred is what is allowing McPalin to run a campaign based on increasingly lengthy series of statements which are now universally acknowledged to be lies. I will not use the many more polite terms others have been using. They are not exaggerations, or misstatements, or elasticities of truth. They are statements depicting a reality diametrically opposed to actual events ("I said no thanks...") and repeated for weeks in the face of clear and contrary evidence.

And it doesn't seem to matter. McPalin continue to climb in the polls. Their small lead on the RCP average board has lasted long enough to move past being convention bounce or daily irregularity. The lead, if commentary is to be believed, comes from predominately blue collar voters who seem to prefer "the composite image of the candidate" to their policies.

I don't know what income bracket that mom quoted above finds herself in, but nothing in her statements suggests that she was there hoping to preserve Bush's tax cuts. We do a very poor job of dealing with class in American public discourse, largely because 80% of us identify as "middle class," rendering the effort to address meaningful demographic probabilities useless. But far fewer Americans have the kind of income mobility they like to imagine they do. There are real demographic indicators that indicate your strong probability of living in poverty and with limited hope of improving your lot, or the prospects for your children. Pretending these indicators don't exist, or could never apply to me, doesn't make them go away. Identifying with the Republican party not only casts blue collar support behind a party that has demonstrated repeatedly that it really isn't interested in doing very much to redress that lack of opportunity, but in fact prefers to work to increase the already yawning chasm between upper and middle income brackets. Obama is eloquent enough to seek out the language to attack that very illogical support structure, and he should try to do so. It shouldn't be so hard to get people to vote in their own self interest.