Comments Elsewhere

Frank clarifies: “Oh, and the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand…”

So, we’ve got all of Europe, and apparently the British colonies where the majority of the population are now the descendents of the colonists.

What about Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, etc.? Are these part of the “West”? Why or why not?

Dan Dare suggests: “My answer would be that the West is those countries that have a Christian heritage. That includes recently secularized societies like Europe. But I would perhaps also include at the fringes, Russia and Latin America.”

I don’t get it. Why would “Russia” and “Latin America” be “at the fringes” under the explication you’ve given so far? Russia and Latin America are certainly countries that have a Christian (or “Judaeo-Christian”) heritage, if anyone at all does.

However, I’m a bit afraid that this explication might rule out too much or too little, given what people normally mean. For example, Albania and Bosnia-Hercegovina have been majority Muslim countries for centuries. But it’s hard to conceive of any reason, short of ad hockery, to exclude them from “the West” while including Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, etc.

Dan goes on: “I might be tempted to include societies that were based on Classical Roman and Greek models even if they were not Christian, but no such thing exists any more. (Unless one means the modern “pagan” West). This recognises that “the West” has classical as well as JudeoChristian roots.”

There are two different claims you could be making here:

1. Classical pagan thought and culture is counted as part of “the West” as we know it today.

But if that’s what you mean, then what sort of argument could you give that Jewish thought and culture is more closely related to classical pagan thought and culture than it is to Islam, such as to group Jewish thought and culture, and classical pagan thought and culture, together while leaving Islam as an outlier?

1. “The West” as we know it today has continuities with, and roots in, the classical pagan thought and culture, but classical pagan thought and culture are not, properly, counted as part of “the West” as we know it today.

If this is what you mean, then things become a bit clearer. But you’d have trouble convincing, say, Averroes or Avicenna or al-Farabi that classical pagan thought and culture is the exclusive property of Christendom.

So, since I continue to be puzzled, let me add a bit to my original dumb question. The new dumb question is: “What is ‘the West’—and on what basis do you determine whether a society is part of ‘the West’ or not?”

I have a basic, stupid question here.

To wit: what is “the West”? What societies does it include and over what time periods?

Tim S. said that Democrats should: “Blame yourselves, and blame your party for ignoring how most of working class america feels about moral and domestic issues.”

But Tim, “working class America” didn’t vote for George Bush; it voted for John Kerry.

If only people making under $50,000 per year had voted, John Kerry would have beaten George Bush 55%-44%. (In fact, John Kerry would have even won Dixie, 50%-49%.)

In fact, if only people making under $100,000 per year had voted, John Kerry still would have beaten George Bush by a margin of 50%-49% nation-wide.

Kerry won every single income bracket from under $15,000/year to $30-$50,000/year. It’s professionals making more than $50,000/year who voted for George Bush, and the richest 18% (people making $100,000/year or more) who put him over the top.

(Source: CNN Election 2004 national exit polls, http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html and Southern regional exit polls, http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.3.html)

Working-class people don’t elect Republicans. Middle managers, CEOs, and trust-fund babies do. If the Democratic Party wants to win more in the future, then obfuscation about who their electoral base actually is certainly won’t do.

Good post. I’m excited about the crosslinking and cross-pollination I’ve been seeing too.

A technical note: rather than keyword screening, might it be best to just encourage people to submit a category feed, if your blog ranges over a lot of (say) non-political topics? Most blog software makes this not too difficult to set up, if it doesn’t come that way straight out of the box. I don’t have category feeds set up for my blog yet, but I know I’d be glad to do it and put up some information to help others do it, if there were a demand for it. I just fear that keyword screening is going to be a pain to manage and turn up too many false negatives.

Rivers, I live in Michigan at the moment, but I lived in Auburn for ten years (junior high, high school, and University). I’m well aware of why you think poor people in Alabama are the problem—I thought the same thing for many years. The problem is that it just ain’t true. Here’s the exit polls for Alabama specifically:

TOTAL VOTE: BUSH: 63% KERRY: 37%

VOTE BY YEARLY INCOME:

Under $15,000 (10%) BUSH: 42% KERRY: 58%

$15-30,000 (23%) BUSH: 52%
KERRY: 47%

$30-50,000 (30%) BUSH: 52%
KERRY: 46%

$50-75,000 (21%) BUSH: 78%
KERRY: 22%

$75-$100,000 (8%) BUSH: 78%
KERRY: 22%

No statistically significant data was available for people with incomes above $100,000. However, since the overall Bush vote for people with incomes below $100,000 (59%) came out below the overall Bush vote (63%), you can pretty reliably predict that the trend got even worse with richer Alabamians.

Once again, poor people don’t elect Republicans. Rich people do. Even in Alabama.

Of course, on Parallel Earth where, due to an increased youth turnout or to the Rapture, Parallel John Kerry managed to pull it out, the Parallel DLC would have taken it as plenty of ammunition for saying that it was proof positive that his weaselley liberal insider politics were what the Party needed to convince voters, rather than Deaniac rabble-rousing. Never mind that Kerry lost on turnout—on the depth of support rather than on the breadth—the DLC still thinks it’s time to blame the uppity queers. If weasels win, they think that’s proof that Democrats should move to the Right; if weasels lose, they think that’s proof that Democrats should move to the Right faster.

Clintonism is dead, but still moving. Time to stick a stake into its unholy heart.

“Despite the fact that Republican politicians ARE elitists that support only themselves and the friends that they bought, for whatever reason, they’re able to appeal to farmers and people who went from high school straight into the workforce with their holier than thou art righteous bullsh-t attitudes. They make these people feel like a vote that isn’t for their guy is a vote against God. Just do a little bit of research, people. It’s not that hard.”

The CNN Election 2004 exit polls (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html) tells us the following about economic class and the Presidential vote:

Yearly Income Under $15,000 (8%): BUSH: 36%
KERRY: 63%

Yearly Income $15-30,000 (15%): BUSH: 42% KERRY: 57%

Yearly Income $30-50,000 (22%): BUSH: 49%
KERRY: 50%

Yearly Income $50-75,000 (23%): BUSH: 56%
KERRY: 43%

Yearly Income $75-100,000 (14%) BUSH: 55%
KERRY: 45%

Yearly Income $100-150,000 (11%) BUSH: 57%
KERRY: 42%

Yearly Income $150-200,000 (4%) BUSH: 58%
KERRY: 42%

Yearly Income $200,000 or More (3%) BUSH: 63%
KERRY: 35%

Poor people don’t elect Republicans. Rich people do. If you want to look at who is being hornswoggled into giving Bush his narrow win, the people to worry about are white men living comfortably in the suburbs. Why aren’t they doing their research? Well, judging from the policies of the Bush administration over the past 4 years, perhaps they have done it. People tend to know where their bread is buttered and vote accordingly; the pressing issues right now are disenfranchisement and suppressed turnout among people who don’t get the pay-off from the Republican machine.

“We’re not going anywhere. Push back. Push back.”

I couldn’t agree more. We’ve been resting on our laurels for too long, with many of us assuming that we won the culture war back in 1992 and from here on out we don’t have to worry about such matters as democratic politics, because it’ll all work out somehow. I hope that if anything comes from the late unpleasantness, it’ll be the recognition that that was wrong, wrong, wrong.

In every voter initiative and referendum campaign dealing with gay rights issues, we’ve been on the “NO” side—NO on special exclusion from anti-discrimination legislation, NO on banning gay marriage, etc. Why are we always on the defensive, and why aren’t we pushing for our own initiatives and demanding the kind of laws that we want made? The Right has been following this strategy for years now because they know that (i) it energizes their base and boosts grassroots turnout, (ii) because of (i), it’s often effective, and (iii) it allows them to pose as the mainstream while painting gay rights advocates as being afraid of democracy. But there’s no law (yet!) that says only the Christian Right can petition for voter initiatives. So what are we waiting for? There are good laws that need to be made at the state level—including bashing under hate crimes laws, including sexuality and gender identity in antidiscrimination laws, and so on. Nearly half of the states in the country let us bypass lobbying and go directly to the people on these issues.

What are we waiting for? Let’s get started.

‘Please provide evidence for your assertion that Harding was “initiated” into the Ku Klux Klan. Poor Warren can’t get no respect but I never heard that claim before. Again, I’d like to see where you read that.’

Harding reportedly was inducted to the Klan by Imperial Wizard William Simmons. The claim’s made in a number of books on race in the 1920s and the Second Era Klan—e.g. Wyn C. Wade’s THE FIERY CROSS, Philip Dray’s AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN, etc. If you want I can hunt track down some more detailed bibliographic information on the matter. (I wouldn’t be surprised if most biographies of Harding specifically went more or less entirely without mentioning it—the gruesome fact is that being a member of the Klan would not have been a distinctive or unusual fact about a politician of the time.)

‘BTW, the Klan was refounded during the term of Woodrow Wilson, who brought Jim Crow to the federal government and absolutely loved “Birth of a Nation” which he considered accurate history.’

Of course. Nothing in my remarks about Harding should be taken to imply that Wilson wasn’t a scumbag, or even that Wilson wasn’t even more of a scumbag than Harding. He probably was. Fortunately, neither Bush nor Kerry (for all their faults!) happens to have the attitudes towards race that white public figures in the 1910s-1920s routinely acted on.

As for Harding’s joke about “jumping the fence,” I’ve read a number of differing accounts about the remarks and Harding’s attitudes toward the possibility (some claim he was indifferent and joked about it; others claim he was ashamed and tried to hide it; etc.). Even at the strongest, though, the remark would be compatible with Harding joining the Klan—it was not at all rare for politicians of the 1920s to opportunistically participate in the KKK without actually believing much of it. I don’t know whether Harding was of this sort or was more of a sympathizer (a la Wilson); but I don’t actually think that either option would be any better for judging his political legacy.

‘As to quotas and tariffs, well…..nobody is perfect, but then I was comparing Harding to Bush and Kerry!’

But it’s not just a matter of minor flaws that vanish in the comparison to contemporary pols. The tariff rates that Harding and the Republican legislature enacted during the 1920s were far worse than anything even remotely envisioned by either major party today, and of course was among the leading causes of the worst economic depression in U.S. history. But beyond that, neither the tariffs nor the immigration quotas stand alone; they are both quite clearly of a piece with the nativist, white supremacist politics of the 1920s. The Republican administrations between Wilson and Roosevelt enthusiastically participated in that vicious atmosphere—and on some issues actively made things a lot worse. And whatever their merits vis-a-vis Wilson before and FDR after, or vis-a-vis modern pols such as Bush and Kerry, these are things that need to be remembered.

Thanks for the questions. Hope this helps.

“In Right-wing political philosophies, political power rises from the bottom up. These would include true democracies and representative republics. In Left-wing political philosophies, political power originates at the top and moves downward.”

This is not what the terms were made to signify, and it’s not how they’ve historically been used. In Revolutionary France (where the terms were coined) the “Left” were those (among them many classical liberals and libertarians such as Frederic Bastiat) who argued for the sovereignty of ordinary people, claimed that government could have no rights except those that people chose to give it, and defended the right of those people to make fundamental changes to the structure of government. The Right were those who argued that the absolute authority of the King was sanctioned by Almighty God.

If you want to clarify how the terms are used, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind would recommend that the clarified terms have at least some connection with their historical use.