The declining political currency of outrage,Part II: Is the media literacy of younger generations obviating the culture wars?

This post proceeds from the spot at which Part I left off. Contrasting his persona and rhetoric with that of President-elect Obama, I characterized Former President Bill Clinton as follows:

Clinton demonized his enemies and inflated the scurrilousness of their charges and tactics, in effect shoring up support from 'his side', but simultaneously enraging and radicalizing his opposition. ... People sided with Clinton because he was needy of our attention and our love; he needed us to prop him up against the mean bullies who were out to get him.

Clinton's presidency coincided with eight years of particularly cacophonous culture-war waging: the far-Right devoted itself to fighting and re-fighting ad nauseum the same perceived 'social'-political battles that were seen to have sprouted during the oh-so-turbulent late 1960's and early 1970's. The battle lines were drawn not around the big issues of the period -- Vietnam, the Draft, the incendiary fretwork of Jerry Garcia -- but around some fairly slight stuff like whether or not the sexual mores portrayed in prime time television programming reflect those of everyday Joes in the Heartland. (A textbook opportunity for Heartland outrage, considering that any such television show enjoys high ratings specifically because millions of viewers in the Heartland tune in week after week, whether they're honest about it or not.) This has been the dominant cultural divide of the past thirty years; not coincidentally, it centers almost exclusively on the opinions, values and resentments of Baby Boomers, in relation to those of other Baby Boomers. The rest of us were mere spectators.

The duration of Clinton's two terms was a period during which the far-Right sated its appetite for pandering to, fueling and masterminding the direction of a host of 'anti-elite' resentments. This masterminding of direction was accomplished not only in the service of galvanizing political support, but in making loads of money. Rush Limbaugh's barely occluded racism, anti-semitism and general bigotry were pilfered from Father Coughlin's bag o' tricks. But what's most shocking of all is the amount of money the fat douche has been able to make by yelling into a microphone at millions of other fat douches.*

William Jefferson Clinton was the perfect focal point for this good-old-boy outrage, in no small part because he already in fact was an outrageous figure, every bit as invested in dusting off and utilizing the codes, metaphors and assumptions of the 1960's culture wars as was Limbaugh. Clinton practiced the politics of division every bit as shrewdly as Karl Rove would do subsequently, especially when he managed to assemble the coalition that handed George W. Bush the second term that he unquestionably didn't deserve. Clinton knew how to rally his coalition to his side; he knew how to draw people in. His travails became ours.

Enter many of the tropes, habits and labels of contemporary campaigning in our heavily (basically: psychotically) mediated lives. Entertainment and news are difficult for the common man (of which there is one somewhere inside all of us, lest you think I'm being elitist [although, I guess I sort of am, but indulge me]) to distinguish from one another.

In Part I, we talked about a form of political theater that uses outrage as its jet fuel: taking umbrage. What a useful tool! We describe the media circus between the Clinton Administration and the Right in terms of lobbing accusations and insults back and forth. But the culture wars wouldn't have gotten under our skin were it simply about slamming the other guy. In contradistinction to the NBA, playing offense is itself not a good enough spectacle. I mean, attacks are exciting, but as they escalate, they become increasingly unmemorable. They blend together. After all, as outrageous as they might be, they're still just words. And if you're going to have a war of words, you may as well have it over policy issues, because words are going to bore people anyway. And debating policy issues is no good for national politics; it turns too many people off.

So it's not about offense but defense. The culture wars of the 1990's got under our skin because we identified with the participants. We took sides. We were divided up into two teams. We lived vicariously through personalities. Bill Clinton was a stand-in for you. He was on your side, advocating for you; honoring your memory and experience, and your belief in the unwavering moral imperatives that your experience taught you to hold dear. On the Right, there were a succession of demagogic good-old-boys to identify with, including politicians like Newt Gingrich and proliferating numbers of ideological profiteers who took a cue from Rush, and began yelling their outrage into microphones for some fast cash.

We observed in Part I that President-elect Barack Obama has a tremendous knack for staring-down and -- in effect -- minimizing ludicrous character attacks. This has the further effect of making the person who utters the attacks look like he is about two feet tall. It's an exhilarating part of Obama's appeal -- and one for which the Zeitgeist could not be more receptive -- that he is an adult. I would add that it is by striking this chord of responsible, intelligent (even cerebral), savvy and -- let's face it -- exceedingly cool adult-ness that Obama stands to unite the country. United in the very real sense that a majority of the country (by a mind-bendingly substantial margin) wants a leader with these very qualities.

I know what you're thinking. What's all this hippie bullshit about 'uniting the country'? You don't actually believe that stuff, do you? The answer is that I do believe it, but maybe not in the way that triggered your incredulity mechanism. What I mean is that when Obama speaks in a language that addresses rhetorically the entire nation, he is in effect -- and to precisely the extent to which his rhetoric is successful at performing this feat of unification -- uniting the country.

By contrast, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- both of them Baby Boomers -- were culture warriors, each of whom therefore (by definition) thrived on a rhetorical model that to a lesser or greater extent, pitted one population against another. It's possible that there'd have been no other way in which a Baby Boomer could govern (or, perhaps: no other way in which a Baby Boomer Democrat could govern and/or win an election). It's even more certain that both men are products of their time: that there's something about their personalities, certain (and contrasting) forms of Doublespeak, certain (and contrasting) forms of smugness that are in part generational timestamps. I guess the word would be immaturity.

Both Clinton and Bush are juvenile figures in exactly the sense that Obama is an adult figure. As we've discussed, as a candidate, Obama stared down the sophomoric slime-balling, whisper campaigns, race-baiting and neo-McCarthyist tactics of the McCain/Palin campaign, making their attacks them look like puny spit-balls, thrown by tiny, desperate and mediocre men. Which is exactly what they were. Both Bush and especially Clinton had talent for doing precisely the opposite: taking small problems and made them big. Each constituency identified with 'his struggle' because each constituency identified with its guy and what he 'stood for'.

Each president's constituency was united more or less by the common experience of having lived through the late 60's/early 70's cultural-political climate; a climate that was mediated in an unprecedented way and to an unprecedented extent. And that period of skyrocketing media- and advertising-saturation was distinguished by -- as much as anything else -- the magnification/amplification of small, inconsequential, abstruse and even fictitious phenomena. And, to an unprecedented extent, instantaneously! This was the period of Bush's and Clinton's halcyon youth. These phenomena are what the culture wars are all about: fashion, lifestyle, taste.

By the way, I'm not saying that this historical fact is good or bad; I'm just drawing our attention to it. I mean, an inarguable example of this explosion of commercial media is also something that is unarguably good: The Beatles, for instance. Its sudden popularity and huge influence hinged entirely on some hype and one appearance on one television show.

Media have changed. We docile consumers have too. Can you even imagine a 2008-equivalent to a phenomenon like The Beatles? Although, I suppose it was equally unimaginable in the early 1960's.

Obama grew up at a time during which people had already become acclimated to television and radio. He is a member of the post-Baby Boomer generations, in which all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, habitually savvy media critics. Watch video footage some time of Tricky Dick Nixon. It's not -- I don't think -- merely the benefit of hindsight that makes him such an obvious phony. It's that we know instinctively how to read media; we're equipped with conceptual tools and interpretive devices that simply could not have been available to the vast majority of Boomers. Is it any surprise that so many people from that generation and older fell for George W. Bush's ludicrous I'm-from-Texas routine? Or that slime ball neocons were able to manufacture a groundswell of support for the Iraq War out of a combination of half-truths, Doublespeak, fear tactics and 'patriotism' talk?

Among all of the voters who participated in the presidential election of 2008, the only so-called demographic of which a majority supported John McCain was white people over the age of 65. The generations that fall under that heading are going to hold on tight and continue voting for the duration of old age. They're likely to become really really old, too. They have most of the money, they have huge numbers, and they represent myriad special interests to which elected leaders will continue to be beholden. Try as they might, they probably don't have the best interest of younger generations in mind.

The way to curtail their power is to continue making progress on what was started with the Obama's electoral and popular majority. How much do you want to bet that the divide will over time cease to be cultural and will become generational. That means that if we're smart, we can continue electing candidates cut from the same cloth as Obama. Candidates that resist and even condemn demagogy, that speak plainly, practically and in a manner that respects the electorate.

If the Republicans continue confining themselves to the backward, resentful, provincial niche they have carved out for themselves, the Democrats have a real opportunity for continued dominance. Now that we've seen that it can work, the new Democratic coalition can only become stronger. If the Republicans wise up and drop their weirdo social conservatism/pro-racism platform, it might save their party, but it would do so in a way that -- we can hope -- has a chance of pulling the country back from the dangerous precipice upon which it currently finds itself perched.

If voters continue to send a message that they won't fall for totalitarian, neo-McCarthyist, fear-mongering shenanigans, then politicians will respond by getting in line. We need to keep demanding that the Constitution be respected and not distorted, that the Bill of Rights is not negotiable in times of 'war', that we won't stand for declarations of war against vaguely defined enemies, with no discernible objectives. In other words, if younger generations hold firm to their media literacy, the message it sends to politicians is clear: don't fuck with us, Old Man. Don't fuck with our rights.

(Heh heh heh.... I think I just had to get that out of my system. Which is, after all, the point of having a blog.....Don't mind me....)


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* For the benefit of readers uninitiated to urban slang: the term "douche" is here used as an abbreviation for "douche-bag."

Sound the Death-Knell for Dixie (Part One)

Media are speculating about whether or not Barack Obama's electoral landslide represents a reconfiguration of voting alliances and the redrawing of the national political map. Is Obama's victory the end of the era of Culture War-besotted politics ushered in by Nixon's appeals to "the silent majority" (i.e. racists)? Have electoral demographics shifted such that we are putting behind us the politics of fear, hate and neo-McCarthyism behind?

Much has been made of the swift rise in populations within the ranks of the cosmopolitan, professional class in the large cities and suburbs in the Southeast and West. This population boom, combined with Obama's unprecedentedly robust ground game, are said in varying degrees to account for Obama's victories in formerly Republican-voting states like Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Mexico, and even in states in which Obama failed to prevail, yet was surprisingly competitive, like South Carolina and Georgia.

(Map credit: FiveThirtyEight.com [updated 11/8/08])

To be sure, there are innumerable other factors, including strong turnouts -- and strong support for Obama -- among young voters, first-time registrants and, of course, voters of color. In the latter group, we mustn't neglect to include Hispanic populations, which voted to an unprecedented extent overwhelmingly Dem. (The GOP repelled these voters with its shrill anti-immigrant turn...a hard line to which McCain eventually -- and famously -- caved.) And no doubt high turnout among black voters helped Obama pull off the feat of prevailing in the state of Indiana: something that no Democratic presidential candidate had done previously.....that is, since Lyndon Baines Johnson's resounding defeat of Barry "Crazy, Nuke-loving Cracker" Goldwater in 1964.

We'll continue discussing LBJ in Part Two of this post. But first, let's return to the demographics of Obama's victory. Crucially, Obama outperformed preceding Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Al Gore in his support from among white male voters. Politico:

Obama performed slightly worse with white women, 39 percent of voters, than Al Gore did in 2000. McCain won the votes of white women, 53 to 46 percent, perhaps an indication of the historical [sic] candidacy of his running mate, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska.

Obama compensated for the drop-off in white female support with the strong 41 percent support from white men. No Democrat since Carter had until Tuesday’s election earned more than 38 percent of the white male vote.

In 2000, white women split between the two parties while Republicans won white men by 24 percentage points. That white male gap was dramatically narrowed Tuesday to 16 points, a trend that began with the financial crisis, and one that allowed Obama to split the male vote overall. (Rest of the article.)

In other words, fears expressed among many in the chattering caste of the "Bradley effect" -- wherein there exists a disparity between how voters said they would vote and how they in fact did vote -- appear not only to have been misplaced, but at times reflected the reverse of what ended up occurring. In fact, in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- Obama was much more successful at capturing the white vote than any polls had indicated. Overall,

Mr. Obama lost white voters by 12 points, but that is the same margin Al Gore lost them by in 2000 and better than the 17-point margin John Kerry lost them by in 2004. (New York Times; here's the full article.)

And remember, we're talking about percentages here, not raw numbers. The expansion in nationwide participation that characterized the 2004 election, and again the 2008 election, means that by definition, the head count of Obama's support among these voters exceeds Gore's.

Where and who are these white men that are switching to the Dems? Well, the speculation to which my opening paragraph refers is in fact mostly correct. The Republicans are losing suburban and, as it were, 'ex'-urban (far-out suburbs [not 'far-out' in the psychedelic sense, but rather in the boondocky one-way-ticket-on-the-bridge-to-nowhere sense]). This trend is striking both in the newly blue states I mentioned above and in historically Democratic-yet-conservative states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

This Washington Post piece is worth quoting at length:

Nothing demonstrates this reversal as clearly as the Democrats' ascendance in the suburbs and among the moderate, college-educated voters who dominate them. Obama won 50 percent of suburban voters, three points higher than Sen. John F. Kerry's showing in 2004 and the most by a Democrat since exit polling began in 1972, swelling his margins in a number of battleground states.

In Virginia, Obama offset losses in the rural parts of the state by not only winning Fairfax County, as Kerry did, but also the big outer suburbs of Prince William and Loudoun counties, home to many high-tech workers and government contractors. Obama visited Prince William County, which has been hit hard by the real estate bust, on the first day of his general-election campaign and the last, as well as in between. He also easily won the big Richmond suburb of Henrico County, a largely white community that Republicans had sewed up for years.

In Pennsylvania, Obama fared worse than Kerry in many steel towns around Pittsburgh. But he ran up such big margins in the formerly Republican suburbs of Philadelphia that he was able to run away with the state, by more than 10 points.

In Colorado, he gained 100,000 votes over Kerry in three big suburban counties outside Denver. In Ohio, he achieved a narrow majority in part by reducing the Republicans' margins of victory in the outer suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati.

In Florida, he won partly by improving on Kerry's numbers among suburban voters in the Interstate 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando and in Indiana and North Carolina, his showing with suburban voters improved by about 20 points in each state, far exceeding his gain among rural voters. Obama nearly carried the most iconic Republican suburb of all, Orange County in Southern California.

And what do these Democratic inroads in the nation's suburbs add up to for the Republicans, who'd formerly relied upon these politically moderate and economically middle-class voters to shore up their "fear of terrorism" vote and their "we're afraid of taxes" vote? Remember that even four years ago, George W. Bush continued to enjoy broad support from voters in those electoral districts. Apparently, the economic meltdown and Bush's continued neocon foreign policy shenanigans finally started to piss these people off. And good for them, say I, for articulating their displeasure.

But where did that leave McCain? Toward what audience was the fractured, intellectually and ideologically barren Republican Party of John McCain to aim its mouth-breather rhetoric and robo-calls? The Post article lays it out, and the brutal facts ain't pretty:

The Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate -- young voters, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas. The Republicans appear at the moment to be marginalized, hanging on to a coalition that may shrink with time -- older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia.

That McCain (and Palin) embraced demagogic tactics, race-baiting and condescending, cynical fear-mongering wasn't -- as we all know -- an accident. The traditional GOP playbook insists that the candidate must first and foremost flatter its intended audience. And you can't flatter an audience on any but that audience's terms, irrespective of its median IQ.

As sure as eggs is eggs, you can't count on their vote unless you give 'em what they want. And if that group of voters tends to be rural, uneducated, racist, and excruciatingly provincial, well Sir, ya gotta serve up some good old-fashioned deep-fried nuggets of HATE. That's when you get all of the the Bill Ayers shit. And you know, calling people socialists and terrorists and such.

I will comment on this dynamic more fully in Part Two of this post, wherein I shall explore the Republicans' ineffective stab at creating an electoral majority out of these barely conscious redneck hordes, this strategy's rhetoric, and its persisting dialectic between "cosmopolitan snobs" and "real folks." (I shall argue that this dialectic constitutes little more than a half-baked update of the rhetoric and ideology of the secessionist -- and subsequently, segregationist, and eventually "Dixiecrat" -- South.)

One last point should be made before I conclude Part One. Although Obama's white support -- and particularly white male support -- was considerably weaker in the deep segregationist South, which is and was to be expected, Obama didn't perform all that badly among rural and blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio; including in areas that are known to include communities infamous for their entrenched racism.

For example, there is much encouragement to be found in the strong support among union workers enjoyed by Obama in many battleground states. The AFL-CIO provided "key support" in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and even ratcheted up its efforts to get out the union vote in Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, according to this report:

Union voters played an important role in President-elect Obama's historic victory, delivering a critical bloc of support in swing states that helped propel Obama and other working family candidates to big wins last night, election-night polling released by the AFL-CIO today showed. Calling the victory in the presidential race and the expansion of majorities in the House and Senate a working families' mandate for broad-based economic change, AFL-CIO leaders vowed to continue the large-scale mobilization to push through broad economic reform....

...AFL-CIO union members across battleground states supported Obama by a whopping 68-30 margin, according to an election night survey conducted for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates....

So, although Obama's victories in these states had their foundation partly in his newly robust support among suburbanites, we cannot discount the impact of this refreshingly effective union activity, which anecdotal reports in Ohio and Pennsylvania declare to have actually changed the hearts and minds -- and raised the political consciousness of -- many white blue-collar workers who'd not initially been of the mind to countenance the presidency of someone named Barack Hussein Obama. That's very exciting, says me. Makes my bleeding heart bleed all the more.

I conclude Part One of this discussion with a sample of data appearing in this article on the impact of union voting initiatives:

• Obama won among white men who are union members by 18 points while losing that group by 16 points in the general public;
• Obama won among union gun owners by a 12-point margin while losing that group in the general public by 25 points;
• Union veterans voted for Obama by a 25-point margin. He lost among that group in the general public by nine points;
• Working America members voted 67-30 for Obama. Working America gun owners (33% own guns) voted 23 points for Obama; general public gun owners voted 25 points for McCain;
• Sixty percent of union members identified the economy and jobs as their top issue with 84 percent saying strengthening the economy was the most important factor in their vote.....