{"id":7021,"date":"2006-03-31T14:47:33","date_gmt":"2006-03-31T19:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7021"},"modified":"2006-03-31T14:47:33","modified_gmt":"2006-03-31T19:47:33","slug":"smug-red-state-superiority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/smug-red-state-superiority\/","title":{"rendered":"Smug, red-state superiority"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, after being mocked rather relentlessly on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show for not owning a gun, brought some much needed attention this week to an interesting cultural phenomenon: [tag]red-state[\/tag] elitism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is a very odd cultural moment we find ourselves in, where there is a stigma attached to not owning a gun or not having friends shipped out to Iraq. This isn’t a moral question; military service is obviously admirable, but knowing people who serve is no more admirable than knowing people who donate to charity. It’s a cultural question. Since Bush’s election, and especially since his reelection, liberals have grown painfully aware of the cultural gap with the white working class. The approved liberal posture is cringing self-flagellation. We brought the catastrophe of the Bush administration upon ourselves with our latte-sipping ways, and we must repent. Conservatives are gleefully pressing their advantage. Did you mourn Dale Earnhardt? Do you sport a mullet? Well, why not?<\/p>\n

David Brooks, in his 2004 book On Paradise Drive, taunted blue-state liberals: “They can’t name five NASCAR drivers, though stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country. They can’t tell a military officer’s rank by looking at his insignia. They may not know what soybeans look like growing in the field.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chait points to “an orgy of reverse snobbery,” and while I hadn’t thought about it before, it’s been hard to miss. Forget all that “metrosexual” stuff from a few years ago; “Americans” no longer live in big cities at all.<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe recently took this analysis a step further, declaring that the blue-state elites are not part of the United States of America. “They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They’re usually called blue states–they’re not blue states, the states on the coast. They’re parenthesis states — the entire country lives in between.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just yesterday, some of the folks at The American Prospect defended<\/a> the magazine’s recent report<\/a> comparing red states and blue states on a host of social indicators, and found red-staters falling short on everything from divorce to crime to drug use to sexually transmitted diseases. The complaint from the right, of course, is that TAP’s observation was itself an example of educated blue-staters filled with smug superiority.<\/p>\n

But that’s what makes Chait’s observation so compelling. In Bush’s 2006 America, conservatives are the [tag]elitists[\/tag]. You don’t hear liberals making fun of conservatives for owning a gun or watching car racing, but we seem to have reached a point in which the opposite is true.<\/p>\n

Or is it? I’m opening the floor to a [tag]blue-state[\/tag]\/red-state smackdown. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, after being mocked rather relentlessly on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show for not owning a gun, brought some much needed attention this week to an interesting cultural phenomenon: [tag]red-state[\/tag] elitism. This is a very odd cultural moment we find ourselves in, where there is a stigma attached to not owning a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}