As I have noted before, people in Kentucky seem unusually hostile to Obama, and far more so than in any other border state, so Kentucky may represent an extreme case of surging anti-Obama sentiment.  Obama’s general election polling in Kentucky cratered post-Wright, so Kentuckians seem to respond strongly to all of these Obama controversies.  Nonetheless, it seems worth noting that in Democratic primary polling by SUSA, Obama has lost significant ground in the past two weeks and now trails Clinton statewide by 36 in a poll conducted 4/12-4/14.  SUSA sums up the change:

Compared to an identical SurveyUSA tracking poll released two weeks ago, Obama has lost ground among men and women, young and old, conservatives and moderates. In Western KY, Clinton had led by 30, now leads by 43. In Eastern KY, Clinton had led by 52, now leads by 63. in North Central KY, Clinton had led by 30, now leads by 39. In greater Louisville, Clinton had led by 12, now leads by 16. 

But remember, folks, no one cares about what Obama said and Obama is gaining ground daily! 

Update: Their Indiana polling for the Democratic primary, conducted 4/11-4/13, shows the same slippage:

Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released two weeks ago, Clinton is up 3 points, Obama is down 4 points. Clinton had led by 9 at the beginning of April, leads by 16 mid-month.

Of course, everyone seems to be forgetting that ARG Pennsylvania poll that showed a 20-point swing to Clinton and against Obama in one week.

Both Jim and Dan have made important points in response to Yglesias’ post in which he wrote:

Back in January 2007, the congressional Republicans reached the conclusion that lockstep support for the wildly unpopular president and his wildly unpopular war was the right way to respond to the Democrats’ big win in 2006.  I think some folks are going to be standing around in January 2009 wondering why they thought that was a good idea.

Both observe correctly that the antiwar Republicans, what few of them there were, suffered significant attrition during the midterms on account of the general anti-GOP backlash (including in Indiana, of all places).  Gilchrest has since succumbed to a primary challenge in Maryland, supposedly because his moderate Republicanism was not representative of his district but largely because of his post-2006 dissent on the “surge” and other war-related votes.  In fact, there is a relationship between the broader disappearance of moderate Republicans and the losses of antiwar Republicans.  Half of the original six antiwar House Republicans were moderates, and Chafee was obviously on the Republican left.  These moderates are getting shot by both sides, to use Dan’s phrase, on account of things other than the war, or more precisely they cannot necessarily rely on rallying core Republican voters on issues unrelated to the war.  (Hostettler’s loss was an almost freak case that belonged to the implosion of the Indiana GOP because of disaffection with the state as well as the national party–indeed, he is the only conservative antiwar Republican of the original six members to have lost his seat.)  Meanwhile, even though they may be more competitive in their districts and states as moderate Republicans (no one seriously believes Laffey could have won in Rhode Island), the very quality that makes them competitive can also make them redundant in a year when they are identified with an unpopular party label (despite the best efforts of incumbents like Chafee to eschew the Republican name).  In these districts and states, why settle for the “me-too” Republican who happens to be antiwar, when you can have a Democrat? 

Ironically and depressingly, the defeat of antiwar Republicans together with the rest of the party, even though the party’s unpopularity is a result of support for the war, provides perverse justification for the GOP tying itself to the war even more closely.  If opposition to the war from the beginning is not enough to shield you from the antiwar backlash, which the defeat of Leach, Hostettler and Chafee would indicate, there is litte incentive for most House members in switching positions later, suffering the inevitable credibility attacks and providing ammunition to Democratic challengers who will argue that antiwar voters might as well vote for them rather than back the Johnny Come Lately Republican.  Plus, one of the peverse consequences of gerrymandering is that it ensures that the broad majority of the caucus would actually risk losing re-election by adopting what is the nationally more popular position.  It remains to be seen whether Walter Jones will survive his primary challenge, and while I think his chances are much better than Gilchrest’s, his case is a good test of whether Republicans can embrace a genuinely antiwar position and stay in office.  Having been gerrymandered into “safe” districts, most House Republicans are also prisoners to a policy endorsed by the Republican administration, especially when that administration remains unbelievably popular among rank and file Republicans.  As Jim’s article on the subject reported, even Inglis down in South Carolina made some anti-“surge” noises and was dubbed part of the “White Flag Republicans” by the buffoonish Hugh Hewitt.  Inglis suddenly found himself having to worry about a primary challenge.  Inglis now faces a challenge for the June 10 election from Charles Jeter, a former EPA Administrator during the Reagan years.  Though Jeter is mainly emphasising immigration and the economy so far, he takes an effectively much stronger pro-war position despite calling the war a “mistake,” and his primary challenge would not be possible against such a solid incumbent (and there would be no encouragement for it) were it not for Inglis’ departures from party orthodoxy on the “surge.” 

No doubt the GOP’s decision after the midterms to tie themselves to the continuation of the Iraq war was terrible policy and politically foolish for the long-term chances of regaining the majority, and part of this was willful blindness on the part of the party leadership and the activists that the war had nothing to do with the ’06 defeat (it was earmarks and corruption, don’t you know?), but the political calculation makes a certain amount of sense.  As they see it, there is nothing to be gained politically and much to be lost by abandoning a war that, despite a significant degree of bipartisan support, was overwhelmingly a Republican war.  One also shouldn’t underestimate the degree to which a lot of Republicans have internalised the idea that the war in Iraq is vital and necessary, such that they take it as a point of pride that they are remaining supportive of it despite its unpopularity and the political damage it is doing to the GOP (if they can acknowledge the latter).  The success of McCain in winning antiwar votes in the primaries, and the successful (and dishonest) portrayal of Romney’s wait-and-see attitude towards the “surge” as defeatism before the Florida vote both serve as signs to doubting Republicans that there is no upside for them in turning against the war.  For a lot of them, the greater political risk is to take the overwhelmingly popular position, because antiwar sentiment is concentrated in all those parts of the country that they don’t represent.  What this means, though, is that over the long term the GOP will be limited to their safe districts and to extremely “red” states.

This is a belated response to something Michael wrote last week.  Michael said:

MARs were not interested in protecting ancient Orthodox monasteries from molestation, because that’s just the right thing to do. MARs wouldn’t shed a tear if American bombers wiped every single one of these off the face of the planet if they thought it was in the legitimate security interests of the United States [bold mine-DL]. MARs (and many others) were more concerned that American kids were being involved in a war that no one seemed to understand, in a country they didn’t care about, and didn’t pose a threat to Americans.

The sentence in bold jumped out at me at the time, and it kept nagging me for days afterward, because Michael was absolutely right, and I found this observation to be so profoundly depressing that I couldn’t think of anything to say about it.  Likewise, they wouldn’t shed a tear if some of the most valuable antiquities in the world were looted and/or destroyed in the wake of the initial invasion of Iraq, and probably do not much exercise themselves over the destruction of Christian communities in the Near East, and at the same time seem disposed to support military actions that they can be deceived into thinking are in the security interests of the U.S.  It seems to me that this is why arguments against unjust wars–at least when they are being waged in the name of “national security”–continually fall flat with most of these voters, even though the war in question is “a war that no one seemed to understand, in a country they didn’t care about, and didn’t pose a threat to Americans.”  More depressingly, I have the sneaking feeling that these voters would have supported laying waste to Serbia if the man in the White House hadn’t been Bill Clinton.  At that point, paleo opposition to the war would have gone from being quixotic and “weird” to being labeled unpatriotic or worse.  As I said before, “I’m not sure what can be done about it.”

But they can’t, because those stunted, unsophisticated Americans out there — the ones Brooks is able simultaneously to look down upon and understand and speak for [bold mine-DL] — don’t want to hear about any weighty matters. ~Glenn Greenwald

Greenwald will get no argument from me that there is something inherently absurd about elite pundits acting as if they were the voices of the Everyman, and he is also right that the defense of the media’s “gotcha” style is self-serving and designed to keep journalists and pundits from having to accept responsibility for the poverty of political discourse in America.  (Think of this way: it’s as if a bunch of cooks kept producing terrible, tasteless food, and then justified their bad cooking by saying that it was what the customers wanted to eat.)  But this phrasing of part of his complaint against Brooks is telling, since looking down on and understanding and speaking for a certain class of people is exactly what Obama was engaged in earlier this month.  The indictment of Brooks extends to Obama as well.     

The thing I have found most entertaining about the responses to the debate on Wednesday is the complaint that the “substantive” part did not start until 45 minutes into the debate.  Taken at face value, one might think that the problem was with the order of the questioning, and not the content of the first 45 minutes, but at the heart of this complaint is the assumption–a potentially dangerously elitist assumption!–that voters actually care about policy detail and substance.  This is the wonk’s self-serving myth.  It occurs to me that most voters don’t even watch televised debates and never will (and not just because they are “turned off” by the way they are done), and a great many primary voters actually do vote on the basis of personality (how else can we explain the success of John McCain?) or such insipid, meaningless themes as “change” and “hope” around which large numbers of people rally with no idea what the candidate actually proposes to do about much of anything.  Even though you have people documenting how, for example, undecided voters decide in the most irrational ways which candidate they will support, and we can find antiwar and restrictionist voters backing McCain in large numbers, we are supposed to intone very piously that these same people are seriously concerned about “the issues” and are demanding that “the issues” be treated more seriously by the media.  Why do “petty” personality issues continually work to drag down candidates?  Because there are enough voters who actually do judge candidates primarily on these things and can be influenced in this way.  If Brooks’ account is self-serving, there is a kernel of truth in it. 

Still, Brooks certainly has engaged in the ultimate expression of pundit’s fallacy.  It isn’t just that the pundit mistakes his views for those of the public and then builds up his argument from there, but that he is claiming that he and his colleagues are compelled to talk about things that matter to them only because The People demand the coverage.  Of course, the main reason for a lot of the “gotcha” style is simply to go on a power trip, to make national politicians squirm on television or throw obstacles in their path to power.  This is what unaccountable gatekeepers always do when they have the opportunity.  It is the response of most people who have their own little petty kingdom, wherever someone has leverage or control that others don’t.  Fundamentally, journalists and pundits engage in this kind of questioning, just as all kings of their own little hills will act arbitrarily and unfairly: because they can.  The idea that they shouldn’t do this and should instead act in the public interest is all very well, but that’s expecting something that isn’t going to happen.  It won’t happen because, for one thing, journalists and pundits already think they are acting in the public’s interest, and so we are back to the beginning.

Lexington doesn’t like all this pious admiration for small town folk:

Isn’t America supposed to be a meritocracy? Two-thirds of Americans reject the idea that people’s chances in life are determined by circumstances that are beyond their control, a far higher proportion than in Europe. Almost 90% say that they admire people who have got rich through hard work. Yet whenever elections come around politicians treat the people at the bottom of the heap as the embodiment of American values.

This is, of course, more or less inevitable in a mass democratic society, which delights in nothing if not the celebration of the ordinary and the glorification of the mediocre.  Snobbery and the resentment of snobbery (and it is really snobbery, and not elitism as such, that we have all been discussing) are always going to exist in societies with significant upward social mobility.  The more opportunities available to people through merit (or at least largely through merit), the more pretensions the arrivistes will put on to demonstrate that they do, in fact, belong in their new status group.  Snobbery may not be limited to arrivistes, which is to say those who have succeeded in making their own way, but I suspect it is most obvious among these people, because they are the ones who most have to prove that they have adopted the mentality associated with their new status and their new peers.   

Still, elite Hyde Park resident that I am, I was thinking about why the charge of “elitism” is so popular as I was walking to campus this morning.  I was reminded of Ober’sMass and Elite in Democratic Athens, which explained how a city with a democratic regime continued to acknowledge and tolerate a wealthy social elite and continued to invest them with power.  The elites were able to retain the respect and toleration of the masses, rather than, say, having their wealth confiscated and being driven out of the city, because of two things: the liturgies that they performed at their own expense as their fulfillment of civic obligations, and their respect for the citizens and a careful avoidance of emphasising social and economic superiority.  This is what kept the social elite from becoming, and from being perceived as, oligarchs who threatened the political status of the mass of citizens.  Because elites are unavoidable in any political or social arrangement, and some measure of inequality in the distribution of power and wealth is always going to exist, it is not usually these things in themselves that rankle people, even those who have been conditioned to believe in equality, but any behaviour that seeks to dwell on inequalities, including inequalities of education or status, and either implicitly or explicitly denigrates the non-elite becomes intolerable. 

I think this is why it is so popular to bash politically activist actors, whose salaries the very same people have no problem helping to pay by going to see their movies and buy the DVDs.  It isn’t the wealth, fame or status of these people that offends, but the presumption that this status, which is built almost entirely on popular acclaim, entitles the actor to then lecture the people on anything.  And it really is the feeling of being lectured to that drives people crazy, which is why politicians of left and right who come across as hectoring, condescending or arrogant usually deeply alienate a lot of voters.  This is the “who do you think you are?” response that we hear voiced so often.  Of course, one man’s condescending elite is sometimes another man’s principled speaker of important truths, because the kinds of “elitism” that people care about depend greatly on the spheres of life in which they believe they have the most at stake.  Thus social conservatives tend to get exercised about corporate elitism only when corporations overtly promote or sell things that strike the conservatives as profane, lewd or immoral, but they will reach for their guns if someone suggests that it is the concentrated wealth and power of corporations and the heavy economic dependence on them that make them effectively unaccountable to the community.  

Evidently, there are a lot of people on the left who find the controversy over Obama’s San Francisco remarks absolutely infuriating because he “told the truth” and is being punished for it, but for everyone else the remarks were not just condescending–they were insulting because they were false.  More than that, a politician presumed to know why people did or believed certain things, when he probably cannot know their motives and, more importantly, shouldn’t care.  In an election, it is the politician’s motives, his beliefs, that are at issue.  The pol is the one who is supposed to be scrutinised by the voters, not vice versa. 

Update: As Caleb Stegall points out in a new post at Taki’s Magazine, the servility and dependency that I alluded to above are the real causes of the discontent and bitterness of a lot of Americans.  The awareness of this dependency may be made more acute during economic downturns, but it is always there, and it is made perfectly clear when they find that their concerns about immigration and trade (policies again decided by the dynatoi against the voters’ interests) are ignored and, indeed, are being psychoanalysed as displaced anxiety about the economy.  Caleb is right: what embitters is powerlessness.  Economic grievances come into it only to the extent that economic changes reflect the dependency on those who have no concern for your interests, and so underscore how powerless you are.  This just drives home the point that there is nothing that Obama is offering that would even attempt to change this dynamic.

It is hard to overstate Georgia’s importance for the West. ~The Economist

Yet somehow The Economist always manages to do it.  The same kind of argument could be made about Turkmenistan with more reason, since this is where some of the oil and gas going through Georgia comes from, but anyone who said, “It is hard to overstate Turkmenistan’s importance to the West” would be laughed out of the room, because no one really thinks Turmenistan is important to the West.  So instead we pretend that Georgia is vital to Western interests, when, in fact, what the West cares about is access to the oil and natural gas.  In other words, the reason we’re supposed to care about Georgia is so that we can have access to Central Asian resources that do not come under Russian control, but as The Economist points out in this very article the actual oil and gas-producing countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia on whom we are ultimately relying are far, far worse than Russia in terms of their domestic political arrangements.  Meanwhile, Georgia is merely equal in its local despotism and one-party rule, which obviously makes it a beacon of freedom that must be defended.  Pardon me if I don’t buy into this.

Mart Laar works for the Georgian government, so naturally he takes the Saakashvili line on Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  Mart Laar and the Georgian government were nowhere to be found when Western states recognised Kosovo, which set in motion the chain of events now leading to either the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “independent” states (which will be as dependent on Russia as Kosovo will be dependent on the West) or to their annexation into Russia, so I have to say I am not that impressed by the Georgian government’s sudden concern for legality and international peace.  At this point, annexation might be the best practical arrangement, only because the alternatives seem even worse: an attempt to reintegrate them into Georgia will mean a resumption of conflict, and the creation of two failed mini-states in the Caucasus would be a disaster.  However, I don’t really think annexation is a good idea, because it would undermine state sovereignty and destabilise Georgia, which could easily see Ajaria slip free of Tbilisi’s control as well, and possibly worst of all for Russia’s relations with the West it would feed into McCain’s myth that Russia is some “revanchist” state in neo-imperialist mode that needs to be challenged and checked (by expanding NATO, among other stupid proposals).  Georgian membership in NATO would actually make even less sense if Russia annexed Abkhazia and South Ossetia, since it all but guarantees that NATO would be drawn into an armed conflict between Georgia and these statelets, but it might become more politically feasible if it was seen as a way of “drawing a line in the sand” against supposed Russian expansion. 

You have to enjoy Laar’s lame justification for his call to action towards the end:

The west must awake and unite, not to oppose Russia or support Georgia, but to stand up for its ideals.

How do our ideals involve getting into an international controversy over mini-states in the Caucasus?  Oh, that’s right, they don’t.  Obviously, Laar thinks that the West must “awake and unite” precisely to support Georgia and oppose Russia.  That is what he has been advocating for the entire column.  However, that might seem a bit too obvious and petty, and it might be that Westerners don’t want to go to bat for the heavy-handed dictator of Tbilisi.  The partition of Serbia, unless it is reversed, will continue to provide the precedent and the pretext for this kind of destabilisation and political fragmentation in volatile parts of the world.  What seems to be happening in the North Caucasus is just one example of how partioning Serbia will come back to haunt the West for years and decades to come.

John Schwenkler and Clark Stooksbury point to this Bill Kauffman column on the importance of identification with and loyalty to place, and he makes many of the points that need to be made, especially with respect to the policy implications of a rootless and boundless internationalism.  The connection between a lack of local horizons that define a person and the lack of any sense of limits on what constitutes national interest is an important one.  Unable to mind their own business, because they do not really have their own business, rootless people seem to find meaning in supporting projects everywhere and anywhere.  As I and Brendan O’Neill have argued before, Obama’s interventionist vision is on an unprecedented scale, and Mr. Kauffman agrees:

Obama’s limitless internationalism is encapsulated in his statement that “When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern.” This is, quite possibly, the most expansive definition ever essayed of the American national interest. It is a license for endless interventions in the affairs of other nations. It is a recipe for blundering into numberless wars-which will be fought, disproportionately, by those God & Guns small-town Americans evidently despised or pitied by Mr. Obama.

Kauffman advances the critique, not just of Obama, but of all three interventionist candidates by linking this endless international ambition to a lack of rootedness at home.  All the more reason why I think it is imperative to cultivate a culture that stresses loyalty to place, because without that it is extremely difficult to develop a political movement dedicated to resisting intervention.

There was something especially ironic about Obama receiving pointed criticism in, of all places, The New Yorker in this George Packer post.  I was reminded of the famous partially self-ridiculingcover of one issue, showing how New Yorkers saw the rest of the country: New York City loomed large in the foreground, and everything beyond the Hudson became indistinct and unknown almost at once.  For non-New Yorkers and Middle Americans in particular, this cover has long served as a kind of shorthand for people in the coastal and urban areas who know little about the rest of the country and care even less.  (I am reminded of something my father told me decades ago–people who live in big cities like to think of themselves as some of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan in the world, but are in fact some of the most incredibly provincial people of all.)  The Packer post reminded me of this cover because it seemed striking to me that even someone blogging for The New Yorker could see what was wrong with Obama’s remarks, and he refused to accept the explanations of what Obama meant that conveniently and consistently ignored the remarks about racism and xenophobia:

In November, 2004, Senator-elect Barack Obama told Charlie Rose that hunting and church provide solace to men like the laid-off factory workers he met in a small Illinois town. Unfortunately, in spite of his best efforts and those of his supporters, this is not what Obama said last Friday in his now notorious remarks in San Francisco.  He equated guns and religion with racism, xenophobia, and crude economic populism as the refuge of the hard-pressed—the false consciousness of the white working class who need to channel their financial frustrations somewhere.  

What is striking is how willing some people are to credit Obama’s later explanations, when, as Packer says quite correctly, “his remark doesn’t require strenuous feats of interpretation.”  They really don’t.  Not, that is, unless you wish to give the impression that Obama wasn’t explaining the behaviour of small town Americans, but was actually praising it (which entails leaving out the bits about racism and xenophobia, which he obviously isn’t going to praise).  Here we see the reverse of what Obama and his supporters hoped his Philadelphia speech would achieve: in that speech, he wanted to explain, but not justify what Wright had said, and now he wants us to believe that he was lauding or approving of the habits of small town Americans, when he was principally trying to explain them (or explain them away so that his audience would not dismiss these people out of hand as racists–instead he defined them as racists and xenophobes who didn’t really mean any harm).  Now I think, as I have said before, that he was trying to be sympathetic in his efforts to explain them, but even with good intentions assuming that people do something for reasons other than the reasons they themselves give is insulting.  We should all be able to remember just a few weeks back when many of Obama’s harshest critics were attempting to explain the reason for his attendance at Trinity United.  They were prone to impute to Obama the most cynical or careerist motives, claiming that he had joined the church “just” to advance his community organising or his political ambitions.  This is frankly about as convincing as Marcottian arguments that men become Christians because they want to oppress women, and conservatives would never advance this kind of argument against one of their own.  Not surprisingly, the sorts of people most likely to advance these arguments tend to be equal-opportunity bashers of religious Americans.  The inability to imagine that the religious belief of someone with radically (or even moderately) different politics is nonetheless genuine and reached through no less real an epiphany or spiritual experience than one’s own was marring a fair amount of the anti-Obama commentary last month, but it was then replicated in what Obama said about the small town folk last week.  This has opened him up to the (typically) unfair charge from the likes of Schiffren, whose hatred for Huckabee was likewise incandescent (and also bound up with weird regional and class obsessions), and it has been compounded by the rather lame defense that he couldn’t possibly have been demeaning other “people of faith” because he, too, goes to church.  As I suggested before, someone whose church adheres to a kind of liberation theology is going to be exposed to, and likely will come away with, a very different understanding of the relationship between a relationship with Christ and questions of economic and social justice than most more traditional and conservative churches are going to provide; what seems like common sense to someone who goes to such a church is probably going to sound like vulgar Marxism to the rest of us.  Where Obama exposes himself to this charge of cynicism is in the failure to extend to those small town folks the same kind of understanding that he has asked of the public when explaining his membership in his own church.  Of course, Schiffren is wrong, but that also means that Obama was wrong in what he said as well.  They are actually mirror images of each other in their apparent contempt for or condescension towards people in Middle America, but that is why it is all the more imperative for Schiffren to strike the pose of being a defender of “ordinary Americans.”   

P.S.  In case I hadn’t made it clear already, there is something supremely rich and hypocritical in attacks on Obama’s elitism coming from any Republican and movement elites who derided Huckabee as “Huckleberry” and regarded him and his supporters as obnoxious rubes.  Patronising social conservatives is all very well when they’re being criticised from the left, but actually taking them seriously is something that a lot of Republican elitists would never dream of doing.

It occurred to me earlier this week that there is a Republican view that mirrors Thomas Frank’s puzzlement about why socially conservative people vote against their economic interests as if they were socially conservative, and it is based on just as much stereotyping and self-serving mythology.  This is, of course, the argument made by many Republicans that Hispanics and blacks are “natural” Republicans because they tend to be social conservatives and therefore share the same “values” as the GOP, and indeed this is the logic of the never-ending “outreach” efforts that typically yield nothing except bad immigration policy.  The mythology comes in when it assumes that people who have socially conservative views on abortion or homosexuality are therefore “natural” supporters of the party of corporate America; this wasn’t even obvious to white evangelicals thirty years ago, it still isn’t and it wouldn’t be the case except for judicial rulings, government social policy and the cultural radicalism of the left.  That is a classic case of a party believing its own propaganda, even though this is the same propaganda that it uses to mobilise the social conservatives whose issues it doesn’t take very seriously, so you have the absurd situation of a party that has taken social conservatives for granted for three decades wondering why it can’t get minority social conservatives to join the party.  Then there is the assumption that because people have “family values” that they therefore have the nuclear family, bourgeois definition of those values that entail a certain ethos complete with habits of pursuing middle-class respectability and a move away from tight-knit extended families.  Further, there is the assumption that because people go to church and take Scripture seriously that they are therefore on board with particular social and economic policies.  This is to treat an artifact of political coalition-building (the working alliance between pro-market and pro-business Republicans and religious conservatives) as if it were a coherent or logical combination of ideas, when there is a good argument to be made that the views of these two blocs are often opposed to one another and should clash much more often than they do.  Fundamentally, all of the “outreach” efforts are based on the idea that the GOP has something to offer these voters with its economic and social policies, when these voters repeatedly and consistently affirm that it doesn’t.  Just as Democrats have bought into their own myth (i.e., that they are the party that really represents and serves working class America), the GOP seems to believe its own, and both become very frustrated with those voters who refuse to endorse the myth.  

The Thomas Frank lament, like the GOP “outreach” lament, sounds very much like the late 19th century Austrian liberal complaint that the mass political movements that competed with and eventually overwhelmed liberalism were “irrational.”  In fact, liberalism failed in Austria in a democratic era for the same reason that it failed all over Europe in the 19th century, or else moved in a more activist and reformist (and, in many cases, nationalist and/or imperialist) direction: it represented a very small part of the population and did not serve the interests of most of the voting population.  The complaint that political opponents have “irrational” obsessions is the recurring complaint of political movements that cater to one particular set of interests and have no imagination or capacity for speaking to other constituencies in a language that they will find meaningful.  Not really understanding these voters at all, activists and partisans substitute their own party narratives as the “correct” voting behaviour that should be happening, and then engage in a great deal of gnashing of teeth when the voters “fail” to adhere to a script they don’t even know exists and wouldn’t follow even if they did. 

P.S.  I should add that there is an additional level of stereotyping, especially of Hispanic immigrants, who are assumed to be like the family-oriented, toiling Catholic peasants of Poland, and therefore somehow magically a reliable vote for the GOP, despite the fact that most of the actual Polish Catholics who came to America, like virtually every other ethnic immigrant community, were Democrats for almost a century before any of them began to move to the GOP.  In fact, even among church-goers, stable families are not necessarily the norm at all.  So behind a lot of these arguments there is a preference for stereotypes over empirical evidence.  Whether intended as flattering or condescending, the stereotypes may have once been true, or perhaps never were, but certainly are not today.