The Right’s Hypocrisy Meter Goes Into the Red Zone

Maha makes the essential point about the right’s latest volcanic eruption:

I concur with many of Obama’s critics that the place of guns and religion in American culture is older, deeper, and much more complex than Obama’s remarks reflected. But don’t tell me small-town, working-class white folks in America aren’t xenophobic. They are, deeply, and they have been going back generations. That’s just a plain fact. Believe me, you don’t know the half of it until you’ve lived among them.

What’s rich about the current flap is that the biggest reason small-town, working-class whites have tended to vote “conservative” in recent decades is that the Right has stoked that bitterness, frustration and xenophobia, election after election, and turned it on the Left. As Joe Bageant pointed out in his pretty-brilliant book Deer Hunting With Jesus, small-town, working-class whites learn everything they know about the outside world from highly paid media elites like the perpetually angry and xenophobic Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Fear and anger are the bread and butter of right-wing politics; it keeps the rubes compliant.

Limbaugh, btw, may be from southeast Missouri, but his family had tons of money. True Redneckland would have been a place Limbaugh visited growing up, but he never had to live there.

Yep. Victor Davis Hanson is another one like that. Here is his response to Obama’s statement, “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.”

“Nothing’s replaced them”? As someone who lives in a small rural town that saw a lot of closed plants and farm depression in the 1980s, a lot has “replaced them”—explaining why for much of the last decade the national unemployment rate has been below 5%.

“A lot”? “For much of the last decade”? As someone who knows weasel words when she reads them, it’s hard to take Hanson seriously here — and even more so when you know that Hanson himself grew up in very comfortable circumstances, and has spent his entire career snugly ensconced in academia and right-wing publishing circles.

Distorting or mischaracterizing Obama’s words is another popular tactic. Here, Ed Morrissey comments on Obama’s reference to small-town America’s religiosity:

“or [they cling to] religion …” People don’t become religious because the economy hits a few bumps in the road. Obama may have chosen his religion based on politics, but most people follow a religion out of a deeper sense of spirituality. I can’t think of a more condescending and contemptuous analysis of religious dedication than this statement.

Uh-huh. Just one problem… no, actually two problems. First, the economy did not “hit a few bumps in the road.” We are, and have been for some time, in a deep and severe recession — and economic conditions in small-town and rural America, especially in places affected by plant closings, outsourcing, and farming problems, have been significantly worse than anywhere else for decades now. And second, Obama did not say that people become religious because of a bad economy. He said that people cling to religion when they cannot count on anything else, and when government, regardless of party affiliation, betrays them, fails them, and turns its back on them over and over and over again. It’s not hard economic times that makes people turn to a tried and true personal refuge like religion; it’s the lack of recognition that there even is a problem, except maybe at election time, and those promises are quickly forgotten when the election is over.

Ed is even obliging enough to give us a free demonstration of that very indifference toward the economic distress in small-town and rural America that Obama said has made Americans living in these places so bitter (emphasis mine):

Bitterness, however, wasn’t the objectionable part of the statement. Hillary Clinton chose to chase that particular rabbit around the track, and some of the media followed, although not all. Obama’s camp seized on that and has tried adopting bitterness as its strategy, claiming that small-town voters are right to be bitter about an economic expansion that has created the lowest unemployment we have had in any 25-year period of this nation’s industrial history.

Hear that, y’all? There is no economic crisis in Pennsylvania or Indiana or Ohio or Michigan or any of those places. So if those small-town voters are bitter, they have no reason to be.

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