I'm from the south.
I spent most of my life there. When I was young my politics were as deep red fundamentalist Christian conservative as any you’ve ever seen. But then I reached, as Bill Maher says, the age of reason. I decided that the cultural attitudes and political ideology of my youth were wrong. It wasn’t easy. There wasn’t anybody around to support my decision. In fact, there was active resistance. It alienated friends and family. It affected every job I got thereafter. But I persisted, because I knew it was the right thing to do.
It was the right thing to do because I saw how people in the south got treated and how southerners treated each other. I saw workers of every race screwed over by corporations, lied to by religion and traumatized by education. At the same time I saw poor and middle class southerners of every race, creed, and sexual orientation quietly working together in peace to try and have a better life while getting screwed over at every turn.
After graduate school in the north I finally moved away from the south to an unabashedly liberal community and I have seen the same bigotry that gets blamed on the south every day. It comes from people who have had their liberalism handed to them on a silver platter. They have enjoyed the privilege of marinating in an ideology they didn’t have to earn. For many of them, liberalism is little more than social plumage.
There is an especially dangerous and ugly kind of bigotry beneath the feathered plumage of ideological arrogance. Liberals, or progressives if you will, are supposed to support others and help them have a better life, not use them as a foil to prove the bona fides of their liberal ensemble. Behaving that way is dangerous because the obvious arrogance and bigotry of such an attitude makes it impossible to build a successful political coalition. If you behave that way not only will people not work with you, they will actively work against you. And there will always be somebody out there willing to exploit that division.
When ideology becomes an affectation it also becomes a product. The people that profit most from ideology as a product are the 1%, and they are selling us the tools of our own destruction. They pit us against each other by turning citizens into consumers. The result is the Morton Downey horse race culture war scrum that American politics has become. It's nobody else's job to tell us how right we are. It's up to us to prove that we can make what we believe work for them.
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What then is precise per capita percentage from which, we may then extrapolate the attitude of an entire state for justifiable condemnation, and from what objective, peer-reviewed source is that base-line measured?
Else, it seems you are resting your entire premise on nothing more that fuzzy numbers, inconsistently applied...(which is I believe, a part and parcel of the mechanism of bigotry) 
That map is very interesting on that site, indeed.
Hello, from a fellow Tennessean. 
That is a good site for everyone to know!
Howdy, neighbor!
Ghost
There's a reason cats are so hard to herd.
Liberals are human too, and subject to all the same foibles as anybody else. I don't think we're going to make it just squeaking by every election. I don't like Karl Rove "51%" politics. We need to win and win big. That means making serious inroads into the other sides constituency. But we won't do it if all they hear from us is "fuck you redneck".
If we want to win people to our side we need to come up with something more than "because, liberal". Orthodoxy ain't proof. All I'm doing here is posting a possible contributor to soft support for liberal ideology.
Last edited Thu Oct 24, 2013, 12:08 AM - Edit history (1)
Just like there is nothing positive about the Confederate flag, or what it stands for.
Just a matter of letting go, I guess.
I need to let go of my prejudices about certain areas of the US
and my mis-perceptions of "where they're at".
The South needs to let go of the Confederate Flag and what it stood for.
That is the answer, no doubt.
Fair, balanced, logical, compassionate.
I'll take any non-response as agreement.
Thank you very much. 
and that we're not supposed to take it seriously
Seems to me it goes deeper than simple fantasies, especially for those that want to break up the Union in order to rid themselves of the South. Nevermind the fact that such an act would be worse than even having President Ted Cruz as far as economic damage the world over. It's more important to assuage their feelings about us, and not the other way around. They're just "venting."
No. They're not.
And that was back when the power company had company-linemen, did regular maintenance on the lines, and kept it all in tip-top working order. We discovered what happens during Ike when corporations don't want to pay for that kind of "gold standard" level of maintenance. I'm sure that was also part of the power problems after Katrina.
I have to admit that I can't imagine going that long without power. While I've spent two weeks at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico, that's still only two weeks.
There's a Top Gear episode out there somewhere when they came to the US, and drove across the South. They ended the episode in New Orleans, and were absolutely appalled that the place still looked like it had gone through a massive disaster, and that was years after Katrina. Even hard-core conservative member Jeremy Clarkson was in shock at what they were seeing and how we, as a country, hadn't done anything more to help that area out.
(gotta leave work now, and will pick this up later )
I've never understood that.
Nor can I grasp deriving False Pride from an accident of birth.
I have lived & loved in Northern Blue Cities, The Great Lakes States, The West Coast, The PNW, the Gulf Coast and now our chosen home deep in The Ozark Mountains of the South.
I enjoyed them all to the fullest,
and found sensitive, intelligent, open minded, caring people everywhere.
I also seen closed minds, Bigotry, Ignorance, and Hate everywhere.
The choice was always up to me which one I embraced.
Its MUCH easier being Blue in a Blue State.
All you have to do is follow the crowd.
Being Blue in a Red State takes good boundaries, intelligence, commitment, dedication, and courage.
It is also a MUST to have the current FACTS at one's fingertips,
including the latest Conservative Talking Points in order to know what is coming.
(The latest one that emerged in our area yesterday is that Muslims are exempt from ObamaCare)
A toast for all those Liberals living in Red States!
Nerves of steel.
No, make that titanium.
But I have relatives down south, hard core religious who are all seemingly drinking the koolaid. I don't know if I can even persuade them. I re-butt their wrong information on a daily basis some times and it just makes me feel crazy. They know me to be an honest, caring person, but think I'm deluded by the anti-Christ or something, I guess.
For them it's less about racism and more about supporting others who aren't pulling their fair share. My one aunt married a man from El Salvador, I think and he was the best man she knew. But he was hard working and got his green card and citizenship at a time when it wasn't as close to impossible as it is now days. My cousin, her daughter married an actual African from Africa who she met during a mission trip. They went through immigration hell, including she had to go live with him in Africa and bribe officials to get him over here. Took 3 or more years I think. But THEY did it, THEY jumped through hoops and so why can't everyone else?
The fact that the bottom 80% split 7% of the money is putting people at each others' throats and down south (my folk live in North Carolina) it is 24x7 blame Obama for everything. (Or that is my perception from my interactions. Trying to make sense of it long distance sometimes makes my head hurt.)
I just spent the last half hour reading this thread trying to get a sense of your "dilemma" and in each post/reply there are 5 new points. In regards to your "What If..."- this is how "it could have happened" to me-
My "Silver Platter" of which I was unaware until 15 years ago (the reason will become apparent as you read on):
I was born to Marxist Catholics who met on the editorial board of Dorothy Day's "The Catholic Worker" They had a sense of duty to fellow human beings, especially the poor, as a way to serve God. My father tried 3 times to enlist in the Navy to fight fascism (another ism) and The Nazi's in WWII but was refused each time because his work on the Manhattan Project made him too important in the war effort. He later founded the chemistry department at Saint Louis University and threatened the Jesuits with his resignation when they refused to give one of his first doctoral students his PhD because he was black. He also appeared before the HUAC in defense of his boss on The Project. My parents welcomed with open arms the first Jewish family into our little cul du sac when all the other residence shunned them.... I could go on. But-
My father died when I was two years old. He had berylliosus, a fatal disease which crystallizes the lungs and rots the bone marrow over a period of a decade or so. My mother, because of the sensitive nature of his work, rarely spoke to us of him (an issue I've long since forgiven her). He gave his life for his country, though never joining the military his work directly helped shorten the war and saved thousands of American and allied soldiers lives.
From my birth to the age of 39, because his life's work was classified, I assumed George Washington Schaeffer, Jr. was a staunch Catholic (which he was in many ways) Anti-choice, Anti-Gay, Anti-whatever Conservative who would have voted for Nixon and Reagan, etc (a quick aside: on only one occasion did my mother give a clue- when we were watching the RNC and Nixon was being nominated she said "George always said if that man was ever elected this nation would be in trouble!"
. As far as I knew, my father was the archetypal image of "The Man" that my generation were rebelling against in the late '60's. I only found out otherwise when my siblings and I did some research to see if we qualified for a "Weapons Workers Compensation Act" signed by Bill Clinton. We had to file FOIA papers and go to The National Archives in D.C. and all that shit- it was pretty cool!
So- THIS is my "Silver Platter". I was WRONG about my legacy until I was 40 years old. I was a "Liberal by birth" as you say, without even knowing it- Hell- I just grew up wanting to do what's right (even without a father-figure in my life for guidance). Turns out- I AM my fathers son.
The grave I never visited 'til I was 40.
The man I never knew 'til I was 40.
In 1812?
Thanks for proving the Op Ed.
Maybe those who "don't get it" will now.
How is your fracture? I read that you had a compound fracture of the leg and I'm just hoping that you are healing up well 
you good people. 
Thing is, I never left DU -- iPads work great on hospital wifi!
Seriously though, we know politics needs more change in the Southern states. And the Midwest. And Alaska, etc.
But it's not like we're all helping it suck. In fact, organizers down here could use some more positive national attention, and less disdain.
I personally know people from a left leaning background that went the other way as their fortunes rose. There are no doubt others that went the other way changed as well. Some dude with a big beard wrote a book about it.
by all means have a good evening.
If you decline nature or nurture, you're stuck with...
I dunno if you want to go that way.
ETA
Oh, wait. There's always God, but that isn't any more satisfying to me than aliens.
for responsibility for racism and ultra reactionary wing-nut politics. It's a false dichotomy. I was raised in the North and taught that racism was something that happened in the South. It wasn't our problem. That, of course, was a complete lie. It's also a dangerous lie because when one refuses to acknowledge a problem exists, there is no possible way to combat it.
As far as conservative politics, voting patterns break down by population density. Cities vote Democratic and exurban, rural, and small towns vote Republican. Suburbs tend to be swing areas.
Fixating on North vs. South misses the demographic reality of American politics.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-state-blue-city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-is-splitting-america/265686/
Looks great under a black light.
Oh. Sorry.
Thanks for your comments, and the link.
Very interesting point. Funny how familiarity with The Other makes us less fearful, more accepting, and more able to peacefully coexist. It's unfortunate, because there seems to much to admire about small-town life. And, as we see from the Vanderbei map, there are some areas of low population density that skew either Purple or even Blue.
This "cartogram"* from Mark Newman is also pretty interesting (and even more psychedelic
):
* cartogram = a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population
We do have Republicans in my hometown, but they are a novelty compared to the number of Democrats and the influence of the local Democratic Party here.
Thanks to gerrymandering, though, we are stuck, once again, with another Republican representative. As blue as this area is, you'd think we could get a Democrat voted into that position more often than we do, but they redraw the district lines every few years, way too often, to make damn sure we end up with a Republican representing us most of the time. Gerrymandering the districts and tweaking them to stay Republican controlled despite a large number of Democratic counties is killing my area when it could be thriving and growing. 
Looks different when you look at the winner-take-all map of electoral college results, of course. I won't copy that one here, because it's easy enough to find in hundreds of places.
