In fairness, this (from Robert Stacy McCain) sounds more commie than Nazi, but still:
People tend to vote how they live and, despite the particular cultural differences that influence the politics of American Jews, I suspect that lifestyle has a lot to do with the persistence of liberalism in Jewish politics.
If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland, where their kids can grow up hunting, fishing and hot-rodding the backroads.
Maybe I’m too touchy about this, but I’m profoundly disturbed by the idea of relocating intellectuals, especially Jewish intellectuals, so they can learn about real values. Isn’t that exactly what Stalin and Mao did? Is there any Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist idea that the American right hasn’t embraced?
You know, if Robert Stacy McCain has slightly more readership/institutional support, Ross Douthat and Charles Lane would be writing “McCain is wrong to suggest that Jews be forcibly moved to the country, but there’s no denying that Jews are too urban…”
And, yes, feel free to make up your own jokes about hot-rodding the backroads.
(h/t JK)
arguingwithsignposts
I cannot believe the man brought teh Jewishness to the table! WTF?
I got nuthin’ else.
PeakVT
Is there any Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist idea that the American right hasn’t embraced?
Atheism.
Spiffy McBang
Maybe a little touchy. It’s not like he’s talking about shoving Jews into Missouri whether they like it or not.
More notable, IMO, is that you quoted the one part of the article that doesn’t sound completely insane. Given the present connection between Republicans/conservatism and “middle America”, there’s at least a string of logic there. The rest of it is straight wow-level batshittiness.
Radon Chong
Amazingly, this is actually a major plot point in Phillip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, which is about an attempted Nazi takeover in the US in the 1930s. Good book, btw.
Cat Lady
So the right accuses the left of Nazism, and promotes tactics of Maoism and Stalinism. My head hurts.
DougJ
More notable, IMO, is that you quoted the one part of the article that doesn’t sound completely insane.
It was the only part that I could make any sense of.
Irony Abounds
This anti-urban strain is rather remarkable. To suggest that somehow city dwellers are less “American” than rural Americans, or that hunting and fishing is morally superior to more intellectual pursuits is to suggest that a mind isn’t necessarily a terrible thing to waste.
ellaesther
So many things wrong with that quote! Only starting with forced relocation of Jewish intellectuals!
Let me see if I can list a few of the problems here, all conclusions that come logically from Mr. McCain’s comment:
1) Conservative = redneck
2) Redneck = conservative
3) Redneck values = real values, but
4) only if the redneck in question is a conservative
The anti-intellectualism (not, I repeat, NOT that I find anything much wrong with being a redneck, per se) that is touted by these East Coast elites (yes, I see what I did there) in the conservative “movement” makes me want to vomit. It is so disingenuous, and so bad for the country (yes, I said it!).
Our constant insistent that people who really think for a living, or in the course of living their lives, are somehow not “real” enough to be trusted makes me want to put my fist through a wall. (But then I have a masters degree from the University of Chicago, so I’m probably too unreal to understand).
gnomedad
I don’t see any implication of a forced march. Besides, such a grim take robs this of its well-earned hilarity.
Fleem
Hm. My secular Jewish family has moved out to the sticks, and mainly we are learning, along with how to stack firewood and run snowblowers, how to keep quiet.
We were at the fair over the weekend. A lady at a “Kids, free movies!” booth handed my 7 year old son an religious tract, and we explained to him it was about Jesus. He’s already a self-avowed atheist, but has been briefed about having respect for others’ beliefs. We still had to shush him from yelling “that’s stupid!” too loudly.
We enjoy the countryside and our community. We’re working on adjusting, but we’re never gonna be assimilated here.
DougJ
I don’t see any implication of a forced march.
I honestly do. I’m not trying to exaggerate here, that’s just my reaction to it.
JK
When I read Robert Stacy McCain, I was reminded of my favorite movie scene dealing with ethnic stereotyping.
From Annie Hall
Allison: I’m in the midst of doing my thesis.
Alvy Singer: On what?
Allison: Political commitment in twentieth century literature.
Alvy Singer: You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.
Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.
Alvy Singer: Right, I’m a bigot, I know, but for the left.
h/t http://cinemapedant.blogspot.com/2008/02/love-and-neurosis.html
Ash Can
If Robert Stacy McCain had a fucking brain he’d be dangerous.
BrianD
In Phillip Roth’s counter factual novel, The Plot Against America, the Nazi-collaborationist government of the US did exactly that.
srv
I don’t know where Stacy thinks all these redneck intellectuals are, but I know plenty of redstate jews who would love to know.
Yutsano
@DougJ: But why the Jews? Why such an obvious bugaboo that is going to open oneself up to massive charges of anti-Semitism? Is he TRYING to be treated as totally unserious? I mean c’mon, the ancient blood libels haven’t been taken seriously in this country since at least Kissinger (regardless of Nixon’s grumblings about him) so what is McCain’s schtick here?
arguingwithsignposts
@srv:
win.
Don Surber?
Delia
Golly, maybe we should just go the full Pol Pot route and force everybody who wears eyeglasses to move to the country and dig ditches til they drop. That should purge Amurka of this nasty intellectual cosmopolitan strain that’s polluting our purity.
tripletee
I grew up in a small town in the Heartland, fishing and hot-rodding the backroads, but I was never much for hunting. Maybe that’s why I turned out to be an liberal.
What a fucking douchebag.
Jim
Jonah Goldberg, Adam Putnam, Meghan McCain, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Ross Douthat, Eric Cantor, Michelle Bachman, Aaron Schock, Ramesh Ponuru….
Yeah, that’s a rootin-tootin’ bunch of self-reliant frontier types ya got there.
JK
John or Doug or anyone else who understands the blogging software Balloon Juice uses,
I don’t get this problem. My previous comment which begins “When I read Robert Stacy McCain…” contains only one single link and yet I received the message “Your comment is awaiting moderation”. John previously informed me that this only happens if you include 3 or more links in a comment. How is this possible?
General Winfield Stuck
This is unique to the American condition. Who lives in US cities.. Answer = Minorities. Just another brick in the racial divide wall that wingnuts are currently trying to build for a winning coalition. They know they have lost or are losing every vote but the white one, so what is left that is white and strongly democrat. Jews.
donr
Former Nebraska Jew here. It’s not exactly friendly territory for Jews out there. I could go on and on, but I’ll just say that Robert Stacy McCain doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about.
Fleem
@donr:
What you said. We may be somewhat clannish, but we’re not Klannish.
Bill E Pilgrim
People tend to vote how they live
No they don’t. Working class people with barely any money vote for mega-millionaires like the other McCain, all the time, and they voted for millionaires like Bush and Reagan as well. They also vote for Democrats like Clinton sometimes who weren’t rich at all.
It’s all over the map, but the idea that “people vote how they live” is idiotic.
Wealthy liberals have voted for unions and increasing rights for poor minorities, many times. Again not all of them, but enough did so as to be legendary as the “limousine liberals”.
Someone got paid to write this?
PeakVT
@Irony Abounds: Anti-urbanism has long been a part of American culture. The attitude comes from several different sources, including Jefferson’s vision of a nation of gentlemen farmers and assorted bits of the Old Testament.
Singularity
To be fair, Cantor and the others are smart enough to keep Jonah and K-Lo around as a contingency against starvation in the event of sudden-onset apocalypse.
DougJ
But why the Jews? Why such an obvious bugaboo that is going to open oneself up to massive charges of anti-Semitism?
That’s exactly what scare me about it so much.
ellaesther
@PeakVT: Don’t forget Thoreau.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Singularity: To be fair, Cantor and the others are smart enough to keep Jonah and K-Lo around as a contingency against starvation in the event of sudden-onset apocalypse.
Mmmm, you can really taste the “doughy”.
General Winfield Stuck
@JK:
There are mysteries in BJ that even our esteemed owner and his associates do not understand. Even the blogmistress who set this current version up, was at a loss from some of the anomalies. It is the way it is because it is. And with moderation that goes double.
mai naem
Okay, enough of this crap, can we just get our daily dose of Lily and Tunch.
Seriously I have just about had enough of this batshit crazy wingnut world excrement. Everytime I think I’ve heard it all there’s more crap. These fuckers are going to be blaming Obama for the Cuban Missile Crisis and the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby, the birth of John Wilkes Booth and the birth of Benedict Arnold all at the same time.
CJR
Maybe we should kill all the professional types and make whoever’s left kill their food by shooting out of a helicopter? Wasn’t that Pol Pot’s ultimate hope?
arguingwithsignposts
Perhaps this is a good time for the Hanukkah song. This shit pisses me off so much I need something to laugh at.
(SOT: My dad thought it would be teh funny to tell me that we came from Jewish immigrants during elementary school. Being proud of my heritage, I went around telling people about it. I was mocked (not for the Jewishness per se, but for the pronunciation, think Franken*stein*), and it turned out to be bullshit. One of the things I still haven’t forgiven him for.)
Yutsano
@Bill E Pilgrim: Someone got paid to write this?
Yep. And probably more than you make too. That’s what makes this even more disturbing.
Upper West
Well, I just saw “District 9” (a great movie, BTW), where they undertake relocation of the aliens. To a racist like McCain, Jews are aliens, so why not?
Fleem
OMFG.
Yutsano
@DougJ: I mean, this disturbs me because a fourth of my family didn’t make it out of the camps. I have my own Israel being dumb moments but seriously this needs to be walked back and hard or else McCain needs to lose his gig tomorrow. And yes I think Buchanan should join him on the unemployment line.
mutt
Rural white intellectuals aren’t quite as rare as you may think. They often take a two fisted approach to injustice & official insanity urban intellectual types just dont cotton to.
But, to be sure- the fact Tanya is Jewish blood never gets mentioned at our very rural Montana hideout…
http://home.earthlink.net/~neoludd/
thats what a political conscience & not bein afraid of firearms will get ya……
Ash Can
@Fleem: This guy needs to lay off the ‘shrooms.
Delia
Yeah, the wonderful tried and true down home American small town values. Like the ones describes in the new book http://www.amazon.com/Methland-Death-Life-American-Small/dp/1596916508/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252380617&sr=1-1Methland
As if there’s any escape anywhere from all the crap the free market ideologues have boxed us into. But it’s always nice to to try to blame it on somebody else . . .
Delia
As a side note: can anybody tell me how to do links under the new word press regime?
Gravenstone
I’m afraid the idiots are winning.
Time to start rebuilding my mixtape of soothing music, bit by bit, otherwise I’m liable to explode. Recommended first track.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtIKFYU8ZXQ
(yeah, too late for the epic youtube battle thread, but whatyagonnado? And yes, I know 1977 != 80’s)
General Winfield Stuck
@Delia:
If you are using firefox, a lot of us use this addon.
Gravenstone
@Delia: I used the code code *snarf*. Anyway, that worked for me.
Ash Can
@Delia: This site is a great, comprehensive reference source for all kinds of markup codes, including links.
srv
This would be the perfect opportunity for someone to connect the wingnut Bell Curve logic to Jews vs Rednecks.
slag
Jesus and hot rods are magic.
DougJ
I mean, this disturbs me because a fourth of my family didn’t make it out of the camps.
Awful.
My closest colleague was a hidden baby during the Holocaust. People forget that it wasn’t that long ago and that it came out of a long tradition of demonizing Jews as urban, intellectual, unwholesome freaks. Which is exactly what RSM is doing, in my opinion.
Fleem
So should Holocaust reparations be 40 acres and a mule?
Yutsano
@DougJ: Does it honestly bother McCain that much that he can’t say the word he REALLY wants to say here? He can’t say it against the darkies, can’t really pick on any other minority group, so he digs up anti-Semitism? I hope he gets defended by the right hardcore, it will be one less demographic the Republicans will have lost to their own devices.
General Winfield Stuck
And think about it. When the rapture comes and the babtists get whisked off to paradise, or DicK Cheney’s secret room, the Jews will get left behind for not converting and getting their arses saved. They can keep the grass mowed and the gardens tended so shit will still look nice in Wingnutburg, USA.
Steeplejack
@JK:
Because your Annie Hall quote included the phrase “the socia1ist summer camps”?
gnomedad
@arguingwithsignposts:
Okay, now I’m getting DougJ’s point.
Polish the Guillotines
Not an original thought on my part, but I really see shit like this as a very deliberate attempt to incite violence.
RSM knows exactly what he’s saying and who is listening.
Allan
The best predictor of political affiliation is educational attainment, not physical environment.
You can forcibly relocate an urban Jewish family with a PhD father and an MBA mom to West Cousinfuck, Arkansas, and their kids are still going to go to college and probably graduate school and vote Democratic.
As do their goyische neighbors with advanced degrees in West Cousinfuck.
mclaren
As a matter of pragmatic reality, small towns in the heartland are depopulating. Throughout the midwest of the U.S.A. kids leave as soon as they’re 18 for either the east or west coast.
People aren’t moving to small towns in the heartland of America, they’re moving away from small towns in the heartland. In droves. Because small towns in the heartland are dying. There aren’t any jobs and the average age in much of the rural midwest is now pushing sixty. And, like vultures pecking out a dying man’s eyes, the Republicans have taken political advantage of that fact.
Incidentally, the main “small town value” of rural towns in the midwest is now methamphetamine addiction.
JK
@Steeplejack:
I love Woody Allen and that was one of many great scenes in my opinion. For the record, I’ve never been to a socialist summer camp. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
asiangrrlMN
@JK: You said s o c i a l i s t which includes the dreaded dick pill.
As for the other McCain, let’s relocate you to the country, ok? Better yet, let’s relocate you out of the country. Wanker.
Steeplejack
@Delia:
Here is the easiest workaround I have found in the current renovation situation:
<a href=”HTTP_LINK”>Text_You_Want</a>
Keep this snippet handy somewhere. (I keep it in my text editor, which is always open.) Put the HTML link you want (important: including the HTTP:// prefix) in between the quotation marks–where “HTTP_LINK” is now–and substitute the text you want to appear for “Text_You_Want” in the snippet (no quote marks required for this).
slag
@DougJ: Not my place to tell you how to run your biz, but isn’t this topic kinda heavy to end a post-holiday, pre-work night?
srv
Stacy need a sticker for those rods: Jews 2 Jesustan
And just what is a hot-rod now? An F150 or ATV was not a ‘rod’ in my day – must be Stacy’s elitist urbanist bias showing.
Delia
I have to say something here and I’m a little uncomfortable about it since I’m not Jewish myself. But it’s always seemed to me that these architects of the rabid right like Kristol and Podhoretz and whoever else plays the game are really dancing with the devil and now in this piece by this McCain character we seem him turning around to bite them, which was a day that was pretty obviously coming for a long time. And what I mean to say is that the rabid right is rabidly intolerant, in a religious, an ideological, an ethnic and in every other sense you can imagine. They’ve formed an alliance of convenience with conservative Jews, but it’s not really a very comfortable one. Back in the 80s the Moral Majority was supposed to include the Mormons, but they were pretty quick to turn on Mitt Romney on religious grounds, because Mormons and fundie Protestants have always been at each others’ throats. My prediction is that the alliance with conservative Catholics with eventually break down as well, because they just can’t stand the Whore of Babylon.
We’ve all seen the ugly racism that’s been bubbling up since Obama’s election and I think we all know the standard ways it links up with anti-Semitism. It’s hardly a coincidence that the wingers are starting to get angry at “The Jews” for not breaking with “The Liberals” at this point in time, right after the majority of them went and supported a black man for President. It’s one more way the discourse coarsens even further as the wingers continue to unhinge. I don’t know what else to say.
JK
Publisher’s Info for Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party By Lynn Vincent and Robert Stacy McCain
“The Democratic Party is like the Gambino mob, but with matching federal funds.”
In this raucous, head-spinning look at the follies and felonies of today’s most famous and infamous liberals, journalists Lynn Vincent and Robert Stacy McCain chronicle for the first time the rampant crime, sex, and corruption of the Democratic Party. Donkey Cons reveals:
1. How corrupt Democrats in Congress outnumber corrupt Republicans by as much as three to one.
2. How Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy were elected with the help of the Mob.
3. What two eyewitnesses said about JFK’s obsession with hookers.
4. How union operatives take from working families to deliver millions of dollars to Democrats.
5. How Democrats in the 1990’s covered up a conspiracy one expert called “the largest incidence of obstruction of justice in American history.”
6. Why Democrats ignore crime victims and take the side of rapists, robbers, and cop-killers-then stump for the right of felons to vote!
From bribery, kickbacks, and sex scandals to espionage, terrorism, and rape, what was once the “Party of the People” has become a party with an appallingly long rap sheet…
From Thomas Nelson website
mai naem
I bet if you somebody did McCain’s genealogy they’d find out he has some of that Jooo blood. Hell, wasn’t Hitler’s grandmother half_Jewish or something?
MikeJ
Yes.
DougJ
Not my place to tell you how to run your biz, but isn’t this topic kinda heavy to end a post-holiday, pre-work night?
I find post-holidays pre-work nights depressing.
ruemara
there are times when I wish there was a “slap a conservative pundit booth” that could tour the nation. and that I had a steel covered cricket to slap them with.
gnomedad
If we wish to promote liberalism among American rednecks, let us find some way to encourage redneck families to move to big cities on the coasts, where their kids can grow up windsurfing, eating arugula, and taking French lessons.
JK
Palin/Robert Stacy McCain 2012
Campaign Slogan – We grow good people in our small towns
Polish the Guillotines
@Delia: Well summarized. I think another dimension of all this “palace intrigue” is that each of these guys thinks he’s Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius. They figure they’re just using the others for their own ends, but the fact is none of ’em are anywhere near as bright as they think they are. If it were comedy, hilarity would ensue, but sadly, it’s real life and people get killed.
PhoenixRising
Golly, maybe we should just go the full Pol Pot route and force everybody who wears eyeglasses to move to the country and dig ditches til they drop.
Delia wins the thread, as the first to mention the Khmer Rouge in response to this derivative, xenophobic fantasizing.
McCain wins a free viewing of The Killing Fields, or being airdropped without a parachute onto Tuol Sleng–Delia’s choice.
BDeevDad
I think someone should point McCain to this.
It’s not that Jews are not in small towns, they’re just leaving like everyone else.
jl
I am not Jewish, but I am touchy about McCain’s American Jewish relocation program. The Irish will be next. To many blue collar union workers. Too many cops (which are now union thugs when those are needed). Too many non-wingnut Irish politicians from the northeast. I have enough Irish in me to worry about it.
Anyway, the wingnuts continue to circle the wagons around the white identity core, and do more and say more to push everyone else out of their leaky lifeboat everyday.
I am sure Steele will be able to embellish on McCain’s them artfully, and I hope on Today, or something similar.
Which reminds me that there might be a silver lining to the attempted censorship of Obama’s speech to schoolkids, which is the reaction of the schoolkids.
I heard a several interviews with HS kids and every one of them was all like, the fuss over Obama’s speech was stone cold like, totally ridiculous. Also. Which makes sense when you think about it. What can work better to make kids from 3 to 18 interested in something than telling them that something is off limits, or that they should not be exposed to something for their own welfare?
More young Democrats! Come on board! Plenty of room down here, Maybe they will be inspired to check out the printing houses of Hell, like Balloon Juice, and open their doors of perception.
Polish the Guillotines
Okay, a little levity for a somber blog thread: Behold the HypnObama.
@General Winfield Stuck: Nice tip on the Firefox plugin.
General Winfield Stuck
@Delia:
Talking about racial stuff is uncomfortable. And when I do it I feel like I am doing something wrong, and using it as a political weapon blithely. I figured there would be some of it bubbling up from some quarters on the right, but pieces like this Mccain dude and all the birther shit and behaviour at the teabagging parties has surprised this early on.
And now with the speech to students, it seems like whatever coding for it is being rapidly rinsed away and it soon will be more overt than we’ve seen since the 60’s. Even the talking heads like Mathews et al are citing it as fueling the over the top emotion coming from the right. There are legitimate ideological differences present, but the blanket rage and irrational myths being propagated and apparently believed by a large faction on the right can’t be explained away from just political disagreement.
And Obama is not doing anything that wasn’t declared by him during the campaign, and sometimes I wonder if his recent timidity isn’t just a kneejerk reaction to not fan the flames any more than they are. It is going to get uglier and uglier. The subliminal messaging from the right is do what we want or else, It wreaks of entitlement in the extreme, combined with mob hysteria and a complete lack of intellectual engagement toward reasonable compromise.
Mark S.
McCain claims world renowned dipshit Michael Medved “nails it” with this statement:
Which leads McCain to his thesis that Jews are liberal because they think the GOP are a bunch of religious whack jobs, which is wrong, because “The Republican Party is chiefly devoted to political policies having nothing specifically to do with evangelical Christianity.”
There’s a kernel of truth here, of course, because the Republican Party’s policies are chiefly devoted to making the richest 5% even richer. The fundies are strung along because there aren’t enough idiots like McMegan running around.
General Winfield Stuck
@Polish the Guillotines:
welcome
asiangrrlMN
@Mark S.: Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. That is the sound of me systematically beating my brains out against my computer desk. Aaaaargh! Wolverines!
jl
@asiangrrlMN: Well, scrape up whatever came out and send them over to McCain and Medved, since they are sorely in need of some gray matter that works better.
I’ll donate the shipping fee.
alex milstein
According to the American Jewish Yearbook, as of 2006, Jews numbered about six million, in a total population of roughly three hundred million, or 2.2% of the population.
I guess that 2% is what’s going to save American conservatism, if they can only move them to Montana.
asiangrrlMN
@jl: Yeah. Even my scrambled brains would serve them better than whatever they are using right now.
BDeevDad
@Mark S.: Quoting Medved on how Jews think is like quoting Bin Laden on what Muslims think. Both are full of shit and completely believable to wingnuts because everyone of another faith think exactly the same in their own little minds.
Fulcanelli
There’s a very good reason intellectuals aren’t found living in the “heartland” in significant numbers and it’s the same reason you won’t find many NASCAR jackets in the audience at the Apollo theater. Who knew?
When did ‘conservative’ come to mean ‘an ignorant and fearful tribal mindset’? The wingnuts freaking out over every thing Obama does and says reminds me of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the proto-humans bug out and attack the mysterious black obelisk. Coincidence? I think not.
jl
@alex milstein: Pay them to colonize Montana? Hmmmm… that might get rid of Baucus real quick.
Polish the Guillotines
I keep staring at this. Re-reading it. My first reaction was “how stupid.” Then, “what a patently stupid mis-statement of the obvious.”
But then it struck me. It’s not stupid at all. This is fucking diabolical. It’s crafted. It’s intentional.
This shit gets people killed.
Fulcanelli
@slag: “Jesus and hot rods are magic.”
Fuckin A right you are! Jesus built mine, bitchez!
Jesus Built My Hot Rod
Turn it up loud.
KG16
@Irony Abounds: you have to remember, they see themselves as the intellectual descendants of Thomas Jefferson, they are anti-federalists (though many, ironically, call themselves federalist – full disclosure I am a currently inactive member of the Federalist Society), they honestly believe that we’d be better off as a nation of yeoman farmers (and to them, that’s what the rednecks are).
In law school, I had an interesting exchange with a classmate who is very much a part of the “movement”. We were talking philosophies and I mentioned that I was more Hamiltonian than anything. She was shocked. She couldn’t understand how a libertarian or conservative could be aligned with Hamilton. I couldn’t understand how anyone who paid any attention to the modern world and American government could not be.
General Winfield Stuck
Wingnut paranoia just notched to Defcon 2
General Winfield Stuck
I published this in wrong thread. Meant for Open one. solly.
KG16
@General Winfield Stuck: and the glibertarians will be preaching the gold standard by sunrise
KG
shit, I’ve got two comments in moderation because I likely mistakenly used a different handle.
Jim
I am just stunned that anyone could write this–or even quote it– and be considered anything less than a crank, if not actually a drooling racist idiot.
kth
I do agree with ‘RSM’, as they call him on the righty blogs, that this Hee-Haw shit is really what conservatism boils down to in this country. Why a subculture as distinguished as American Jewry would want to adopt those retarded folkways is, come to think of it, a pretty good question for John Podhoretz or any would be Jewish-American conservative.
curious
remember when conservatism =/= hunting, fishing, and hotrodding? conservatives can now apparently cancel their subscriptions to the national review and rely exclusively on soldier of fortune, field & stream, and popular hot rodding to stay abreast of any developments in ideology.
it might be nice to have a serious opposition party but sadly what we do have seems to be making a serious enough dent, however farcically.
Robert Stacy McCain
You are asserting, Jim, that Michael Medved, is “a drooling racist idiot”?
Linkmeister
@Polish the Guillotines: But if you told him it would get people killed he wouldn’t understand you.
The other thing that’s so bizarre is the absolute fealty on the part of the right wing to Israel. Israel, whose Labor party is far more left wing than our Democrats have been since about 1933.
They’re still stuck back in 1948 and 1967, when plucky little Israel defeated all the Arabs in the world. They blithely put out of their minds the fact that Israel is a nuclear state and would probably, if need be, use it before the US would.
Mark S.
@Jim:
What’s more amazing is that Medved’s Jewish. Here’s some more Medved:
A lot of fundie support for Israel is because the fundies see Israel as Ground Zero for the Apocalypse. Also, if I were Jewish, I’d probably punch Medved in the balls for being so cavalier about “2,000 years of bloody Christian anti-Semitism.”
Unsurprisingly, Medved also wrote a truly disgusting piece called Six inconvenient truths about the U.S. and slavery.
Auguste
That’s just weird, since for most of American history, the following statement was much more operable than Medved’s:
For some reason in this discussion, I keep thinking of Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Why, yes, McCain, milennialist thought does grow out of inhospitable or just plain depressing living circumstances. For me, that suggests we try to uplift everyone; for McCain that just says more people need depressing living circumstances.
“Shit, if everyone’s going to movies and talking about Sartre, no one’s working towards Armageddon!”
Linkmeister
@Auguste: I wonder how well McCain would have survived on the Lower East Side in the 1920s.
Blue Raven
@Mark S.:
I give you Clarence Thomas and Michael Steele. The “no true Scotsman” argument always has living proofs against it.
Calouste
Sounds like the same sort of mistaken identity politics that made the other McCain think that it was a good plan to nominate Palin as VP to catch the women who voted for Hillary Clinton, and most likely with the same unintended effect: it seriously pisses off the target group.
Jacob Davies
“mistaken identity politics” is a phrase for the ages.
David Ross
I’ve read The Plot Against America too… and it’s a good thing that RS McCain wasn’t suggesting anything in it.
Sorry about the strawman (some of) you have constructed, but please note that McCain was suggesting a VOLUNTARY field trip, by which conservative Jews like Podhoretz might teach THEIR OWN kids conservatism. McCain didn’t say anything about a “relocation programme”; you all can keep on going with your liberal selves.
gnomedad 69: we already do invite redneck kids to our cities to “windsurf, eat arugula, and take French lessons”. It’s called “college” and it is also, I understand, voluntary.
Some of you are hyperventilating about nothing.
ppcli
More precisely, the view is Stalinist. I believe the phrase Mr. McCain is searching for is that the Jews are “rootless cosmopolitans”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan
ppcli
Perhaps this is just the black humor that comes from waking up unable to return to sleep at 4 am but I can’t hear references to Jews “hotrodding the backroads” of rural america without thinking of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
JK
@ppcli: @ppcli:
Two very thoughtful comments at this time of the morning.
Ambergris
Maybe we could relocate all those Jews to Utah, it would be interesting to see what happens……..
Well, bringing up the question of Jews tells me that the anti-intellectualism of the right goes hand in hand with evangelicalism. These trends reinforce each other and the transformation of the Republican Party is reaching the point where the evangelicals take over. Reagan had them under control, he used them to advance his free-markets ideology. Bush II was under the control of Cheney and Rumsfeld who convinced him of the divine nature of the Iraq War. Sarah Palin was awfully close to upstaging the McCain candidacy, and now, without a centralized message machine, like the Bush White House or Gingrich’s “Contract with America”-coalition, the evangelicals take over. They are one of the 2 most organized branches of republicanism, the other being the libertarians à la Ron Paul/Tea Party torchbearers. They go hand and in hand and… voilà, America is moving towards a christian theology.
Ecks
@Spiffy McBang: Hey! There’s city’s in Missouri! That’s why we’re a swing state – half urban, half bass ackwards, so who wins all depends on who shows up that day.
Sloth
That article leaves me speechless. I’m sending it off to my family in the deep south – who will probably be just about as amazed.
I’m just chalking the whole thing up as a gigantic troll piece.
I will add that tying your entire conservative ideology to the internal combustion engine, clearing brush, and having your own well is a master stroke. Maybe he should also add buggy whips, whale oil and hoop skirts.
Xenos
@Ambergris: Well, bringing up the question of Jews tells me that the anti-intellectualism of the right goes hand in hand with evangelicalism. These trends reinforce each other and the transformation of the Republican Party is reaching the point where the evangelicals take over.
While evangelicalism is a broad subject, its absolutism attracts supersiticious and often foolish people who are looking for simple answers and who are easily fooled by the logical errors and cheap rhetoric that third-tier seminaries seem to specialize in. A core of stupid, vulgar, and mistakenly self-righteous jerks has captured the evangelical movement, which has in turn captured the Republican party.
Santiago
DougJ
JSM is totally livid i telz ya. LOL
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2009/09/is-liberal-idiot-redundant.html
Santiago
RSM, i mean
JD Rhoades
I don’t know where Stacy thinks all these redneck intellectuals are, L
You rang?
4tehlulz
>Is there any Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist idea that the American right hasn’t embraced?
No:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast
AndrewJ
This is unique to the American condition. Who lives in US cities.. Answer = Minorities. Just another brick in the racial divide wall that wingnuts are currently trying to build for a winning coalition. They know they have lost or are losing every vote but the white one, so what is left that is white and strongly democrat. Jews.
Every platoon in WWII films always had one member in the from Brooklyn, a working-class type the audience was meant to identify with. Was there ever a more all-American sitcom than The Honeymooners, set in Flatbush? A more all-American baseball team than the Brooklyn Dodgers?
It’s only since the 1960s that big cities have been seen by the Right as the antithesis of “American values.” I suspect the rise in urban minority populations has something to do with conservatives railing against NYC/San Francisco…
clb72
This is just a wild guess, but I think a lot of Jews (including me) are liberal because we grow up learning about how nasty, bigoted idiots have tried to kill us for the last few thousand years, and we think that’s a bad thing that no one should have to put up with.
JD Rhoades
When did ‘conservative’ come to mean ‘an ignorant and fearful tribal mindset’?
Republican Convention, 1992.
There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him.
It’s the speech that convinced me to vote for Bill Clinton.
AndrewJ
Somebody on another blog once said this: The stereotypical pushy, arrogant New Yorkers you come across are invariably the ones who arrived six months ago from Des Moines. Third- and fourth-generation New Yorkers are generally down-to-earth and accessible.
Think about it.
Ann B. Nonymous
Let’s see. Under McCain’s plan, urban Jews “move” to the Great Plains, are allowed to hunt, fish, drive, vote (but never leave).
The Great Plains turn blue. He hasn’t run the numbers.
The next generation will still be blue, like the kids of the Indian doctor and the Taiwanese engineer.
Not only is it a creepy fantasy with unexamined genocidal overtones, it’s also a generational lament for McCain’s country conservative traditions, which, if he bothered to look around his beloved Southland, are mainly meth mouth, tacky gift shops, and extruded Nashvile product.
Chris Baldwin
I love this reactionary fantasy that America has a “Heartland” that is somehow more real and American than the places where most Americans actually live.
JD Rhoades
I love this reactionary fantasy that America has a “Heartland” that is somehow more real and American than the places where most Americans actually live.
JD Rhoades
Whoops, blockquoted the wrong part. That Firefox add on’s still pretty cool though.
Meanderthal
@Linkmeister:
Are you kidding? That thought gives them a tiny little boner. They would love for Israel to use nukes. After all, it’s right there on the Front Line of the battle against Evil Brown People.
doxastic
@Radon Chong: I thought the same thing as soon as I read the McCain quote. When you’re advocating a policy put in place by the Nazi-colluding Jew hating president of a Philip Roth dystopian alternate reality, something has gone terribly wrong.
SenyorDave
This doesn’t even qualify as thinly-veiled anti-semitism. Let me get this straight – Since I’m Jewish, and have never lived in “the heartland”, therefore I’m not a true American with good ol’ American values.
Robert Stacy McCain is a garden-variety bigot, he just doesn’t have the courtesy to call me a pinko kike to my face. Maybe he can collaborate with David Duke on his next book, and Duke can give him some pointers on ways to develop his bigotry in a more explicit manner.
RSR
“hot-rodding the backroads.”
Well, if it was good enough for Bruce Springstein…
Svensker
@ruemara:
there are times when I wish there was a “slap a conservative pundit booth” that could tour the nation. and that I had a steel covered cricket to slap them with.
I was right with ya until the steel-covered-cricket bit — what have insects done to you to deserve that? Scarred in youth by Jiminy? The horror.
JK
2 Nice Putdowns of Robert Stacy McCain
Robert Stacy McCain Is An Ignorant Parody of a Conservative
http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/robert-stacy-mccain-is-an-ignorant-parody-of-a-conservative
The Ballad of RSM
http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/05/the-ballad-of-rsm
vacuumslayer
I actually think cities are shaped by the people who live there, not the other way around. If enough liberals/Jews/intellectuals moved into “heartland” America, don’t you think the area would change some?
There’s a reason Fayetteville is a bastion of liberalism in Northwest Arkansas.
vacuumslayer
I always seem to jump into threads right as everyone has lost interest in it. Screw “vacuumslayer.” Just call me “Threadkiller.”
Chris
Maybe we should take the “heartland kids” and move them to urban areas or college towns. To paraphrase Sam Kinison: “Move to where the intellectual food is!”
Leelee for Obama
@ruemara: Had to go to bed, so missed this thread-Jeebus! I will read through later, but I actually think booths like this should be set up-maybe not hitting, though that would be satisfying, but dunking, like they do at Fairs. We’d probably raise enough money to reduce the debt, maybe pay it off. If the dipshits are so patriotic, we could sell them on it-and I know I’d enjoy the shit out of it! So win-win, in my book!
Leelee for Obama
@Chris: Love this! Miss Sam.
aimai
Bugger, this thing ate my comment.
“The Air of Cities Makes Men Free.” The anti urban thing goes way, way, back to the middle ages–at least in the opinion of the military, landowning castes/class. Cities were where serfs went to be free and became, eventually, bourgeouis, merchants, loose rabble. Cities grew up around universities.
Also, we jews are very sensitive about being told where to live on account of the whole “ghetto vecchio and ghetto novo” and “beyond the pale” thing. It pretty much never goes well for us.
I’d like to help RSM with his plan for world domination by reseeding the soddy heartland with prolific, dumbed down jews but I can’t quite see how it is going to work.
1) Relocate Jews to places even meth heads don’t want to live.
2) Unavailability of good Bagels and night-before-New-York-Times leads to
3) World Domination by Secular Conservativism?????
I think he might just as well have left out the second step.
aimai
vacuumslayer
@Chris: It would probably be good for them to be exposed to something other than their hillbilly, lily-white, culture-less world.
That’s not to say that all of the South or Heartland doesn’t have its pockets of culture. Sometimes those little bastions of sanity in that vast swath are the most charming. Lord knows I get to Eureka Springs, AR every chance I get.
satby
Screw mom and apple pie; hunting, fishing, and hot-rodding are the “real Murikan” values??
I’m thinking the closest RSM gets to the “heartland” is in his dreams as he snoozes on the plane flying over Kansas.
Leelee for Obama
On a happy note, sorta. There was a viewer poll on my LOCAL Central FL news station on the Speech to School Kids. Ended up 50/50. Probably freeped on both sides, but still-better than my DD and I had hoped.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Polish the Guillotines:
I think the strategy is to foment real acts of violence, which will compel the federal government to respond forcefully, which will then convince vast swaths of people that Obama and the Democratic Party really are out to seize absolute power. Barring armed revolution (the preferred outcome, because then you can bypass the process of elections and laws and just install your junta the way you want it), the Democrats lose Congress in 2010 and in 2012 Sarah Palin becomes President.
The strategy relies on vast swaths of people being pig-ignorant and unable to see through such transparent bullshit, but like they say, half of everyone is below average. It didn’t work for radical groups in the ’60s, it probably won’t work now, but that doesn’t mean a lot of people won’t get hurt in the attempt.
Jonny Scrum-half
DougJ — Where does McCain state/imply/suggest anything like “forced” relocation?
General Winfield Stuck
@Jonny Scrum-half:
It’s snark dude.
jrosen
I stopped reading the article at this point:
“Also, and I think this is an important point, city people can’t drive worth crap”
becuase I was laughing too hard to see the screen. This guy should try driving around Boston for a few minutes (which I did for 35 years)!
I now live in Jersey City where generally I find the driving to be benign in comparison. Even at the entrances to tunnels, where you can have 8 lanes of traffic converging to 2 (the Lincoln Tunnel entrance in Weehawken, e.g.) people generally merge easily, if slowly, and don’t get aggressive. Not so in Boston, where driving is a devil-take-the-hindmost blood sport, and where in all those years I received exactly two tickets for moving violations and never saw anyone else get one. I thought of getting a bumper sticker warning “Boston driver!” but I thought it might be provocative so I didn’t.
This article also reminded me of an old joke:
A small Southern town had only two Jewish families, and when the son of one and the daughter of the other decided to marry, there was no one qualified to perform a Jewish wedding. So they wrote to a relative in Brooklyn who arranged to send someone down.
So one fine day, a strange-looking passenger got off the local train. He was broad and heavily bearded, with long forelocks, wearing a black wool suit with vest and a black Homberg hat, and as he wended his ponderous, dusty way through the hazy Alabama heat, he attracted a small crowd of curious locals. Some of them made rude remarks at his back; little kids occasionally threw stones and free-running dogs nipped at his heels. He ignored them all, steadily striding through the town toward his destination.
But finally, as the commotion behind him started to sound like a small riot, he stopped, turned on his heel and fixed the unruly crowd with a glare that silenced them all immediately. And then he said “Vot’s de matter mit you? You pipple never before seen a dem Yenkee?”
DZ
@GrumpyCodeMonkey:
Exactly. It’s, oddly enough, right out of the Baader-Meinhof and Brigate Rossa playbooks. Do weird things that provoke a heavy police response so you can call the police fascists.
Ed Drone
[mode=BlazingSaddles]
[The Johnsons load their guns and point them at Bart. Bart then points his own pistol at his head]
Bart: [low voice] Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it!
Olson Johnson: Hold it, men. He’s not bluffing.
Dr. Sam Johnson: Listen to him, men. He’s just crazy enough to do it!
Bart: [low voice] Drop it! Or I swear I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town!
[Townspeople drop their guns. Bart jams the gun into his neck and drags himself through the crowd towards the station]
Harriet Johnson: Isn’t anybody going to help that poor man?
Dr. Sam Johnson: Hush, Harriet! That’s a sure way to get him killed!
[Bart places his hand over his own mouth, then drags himself through the door into his office]
[/mode=BlazingSaddles]
Combined with a bit of “Nice country you’ve got here. Be a shame if somethin’ bad happened to it,” and you’ve got the Republican agenda for the next umpteen elections.
Actually, I don’t think the public is as stupid as the Johnsons in the excerpt above. I think they’ll get over the shock of Republi-Bart’s gall and blow him away; their first shots were this last election.
Ed
Jonny Scrum-half
General Winfield Stuck — I don’t think so. At least DougJ’s comment @11 makes it seem like he really means it.
Mayken
@AndrewJ: Yeah, the true New Yorkers are the ones who rushed into the Twin Towers, or steered their boats toward the plane on the Hudson. The true New Yorkers are the ones that took my small town brother in, gave him a place to live and food to eat when he was down on his luck and thousands of miles from home. They’re the same ones that helped get him a job so he could be a productive member of society. I owe a lot to those true New Yorkers. Mind you my brother and I are Eurasian, but none of them thought twice about helping him out.
Can’t say the same about our former Midwestern and small town California neighbors, who always saw us as nothing more than the dark-skinned product of a “mixed” marriage. It wasn’t till we both got out of those small towns that we stopped being the objects of constant racism…
Those are some real fu(kin’ American values right there, folks.
Fu(k the conservatives and their supposed small town and rural values.
Comrade Kevin
Who the fuck is Robert Stacy McCain?
b-psycho
Um…wouldn’t the population of those small towns be kinda mad about the idea of policies* meant to subsidize urban Jews moving there? Some may have bigoted reasons, but I’m talking primarily on basic fairness grounds here.
(* – Yes, policies. Because merely having a bunch of conservatives say to jewish people they encounter “have you ever considered moving to the middle of the country? I hear it’s beautiful…” isn’t gonna get ’em far.)
Seanly
@David Ross:
I don’t think anyone truly thinks that RSM was advocating forced moves. However, even as a voluntarily pogrom, this is a stupid idea.
Is “small-town” or rural America a better place or a more American place than anywhere else in the nation? Are the people from rural America more patriotic or more American than anyone esle? Is a liberal or a even a Democrat less American than a Republican?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions than you are an idiot and the true un-American in the room.
Rpm
The entire logic is off to me. It’s not as much where your from as what is in your heart. That’s what the heartland is all about to me. I grew up in Iowa. Hunting and fishing may build a respect for nature and its preservation if that is what is in your heart.
People that live from the earth in many cases understand that it is a part of us and we are part of it. We must be good stewards of the earth. If that is what is in your heart.
Enjoying powerful fast cars is more a testosterone rush than anything political.
I have lived in a hellhole armpit of Conservative alternate reality for the last 10+ years and find little of what I would find as real american activity going on. 70 miles to the west of us Texas is trying to succeed. Most here, from the best I can tell, thinks real americans believe in extremism and near anarchy. Heartless.
Jamey
Grew up Jew in rural, Reaganaut America–the “T” part of Pennsyltucky. Not for the faint of heart or strong of [Hebraic] faith.
No, Robert Stacy McCain, I don’t think it’s the Jews’ role to embrace the heartland; I think it may be the other way around.
And who, again, decided that the cities–where the overwhelming majority of Americans live–are the anthithesis of the “real America”?
Chad N Freude
@David Ross:
And when did Norman take little John on his field trip?
Interrobang
Hey, RSM — observant Jews don’t hunt, not for food (unless they’re starving — violates kosher laws on humane slaughter), not for fun (violates prohibitions on unnecessary waste and destruction).
I’m not even Jewish, live in a city that looks like Hitler’s wet dream it’s so full of white people, and grew up rural, and even I know that. So what are you, all-white-meat chicken-fried ignorance in a crispy cornflake coating?
On the other hand, maybe if you got out more, you wouldn’t be a fucking right-winger.
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ
Yes, in rural America people sleep peaceably because rough men stand ready in the night to hot rod their backroads. Given that I have no idea, none whatsoever, why more Jews aren’t forsaking their urban environments to move to places where they can have their backroads hot-rodded.
Wile E. Quixote
@DZ
And see how well it worked out. Baader-Meinhof were hunted down like dogs by the German police, and unlike the wingers in this country they had the advantage of getting support from the East German Stasi and could always flee Germany and hole up in some third world shithole until the heat died down.
Jager
I’d love to see an Urban Jew like Jonah Goldberg relocated to some place like Wibaux, Montana. He could work the counter in a Tractor Supply Store (good ole TSC) for shitty wages six days a week. In the evening he could sidle up to the bar in one of local night spots and have a polite political discussion with a local biker, a meth head, three drunk cowboys and an alcoholic farmer, who collects CRP checks from the Feds. He would be eating Red Hots, pickled pigs feet and hard boiled eggs washed down with flat tap beer with a Black Velvet back. Topics of discussion would be in no particular order: how the meat packers are fucking the local ranchers forcing them to sell porterhouse for hamburger prices, how every time the wheat crop is good the Cargil company fucks them on the price, how the rail road fucks them on shipping rates, how the oil companies fuck them on their mineral leases. Jonah would be listening to all this conversation in amazment and will discover that the barmaid is fucking one of the cowboys and her husband knows but is afraid to do anything because the cowpoke has served time already for two assault and battery charges and ain’t afraid of a third. By the time the conversation turns to the respective merits of Ford vs Chevy pickups, Jonah would be heading back east as fast as his fat, little legs could carry him! Too bad, because he’d miss the part about how the farm and ranch loans that keep shit holes like this afloat are Federal!
David Ross
140 Seanly: Is “small-town” or rural America a better place or a more American place than anywhere else in the nation? Are the people from rural America more patriotic or more American than anyone esle? Is a liberal or a even a Democrat less American than a Republican?
These are good questions and I think you for being respectful. I know I am an outsider here but, take my word for it, I’m an outsider EVERYWHERE. I’ve got the ban scars from LGF and the flamings from Ace to prove it.
And I’m on record (at LGF, in more halcyon days) opposing RS McCain for, yes, pandering to anti-Semites for posting at TakiMag. I have no particular need to defend him…
… unless he’s being defended against an unfair charge, such as the charges DougJ has leveled here. McCain is not a villain from a fascist dystopia; he has opinions of his own, which deserve an honest audience. Once you’ve read what he has to say, THEN you get to call him names.
I will deal with the substance of your question in an upcoming post here…
David Ross
As to what degree liberals, and Jews, and city dwellers are American:
“American” has two meanings relevant here; an ideology and a tribe.
As an ideology I hold to the theories of Mencius Moldbug that Americanism is a strain of Puritanism, lately divested of Christ (foremost) and of God (ultimately). As such liberalism is “American” – much more so than is conservative Christianity. Reform / Liberal Judaism is not an old interpretation of the Tanakh, I’m sure you’re aware; it owes much to the intellectual ferment of Europe following the French Revolution. Podhoretz interestingly seems to agree with that when he drops the name Tertullian in reference to liberals. Tertullian would be, whether they know it or not, the patron saint of Protestants.
As a tribe, though, Americanism has a mystical meaning, you could say; rooted in love of the land and of fellow tribesmen. This is what Europeans will immediately recognise as “blood and soil”, or “nationalism”; but the best word I know of is Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya. Asabiya has a horrible reputation among Jews and other international peoples like the Roma – first because they never asked to join the tribe and so get shut out of local events; second because demagogues exploit asabiya to rile up the locals. But it is what it is; rural Americans are tied to their land, can’t leave it easily, and make their connections locally.
I have no problem saying that liberals feel asabiya more with other liberals, regardless of national origin or city of residence, than they feel it with their fellow Americans as they actually are. Liberal Jews, too, feel asabiya more with other liberals, even over other Jews; and they have the intermarriage rates to prove it.
AT NO POINT am I saying that liberalism is superior to rural asabiya. I rather think there is a place for both ideology and nationalism in America as long as they do not tread upon one another. Most of you on the other hand type as if asabiya is evil unless practiced by urban liberals, in which case it’s okay because liberals are righteous and so don’t count.
This is Puritan humbug and ought to be dismissed as such.
Seanly
@David Ross:
Yikes and here I thought I was American because I was born here.
The rub is that we are all Americans. Whatever our role in life, whatever our station. Whatever labels and other crap we throw around our own necks or hang on others’ necks.
I may disagree with most conservatives on nearly every subject, but they are welcome to be wrong. I would hope they would afford me the same courtesy. But they should also understand that when I think their ideas are wrong, I will not want them to be implemented. A stupid idea is a stupid idea and tolerant or not, I’d rather not be a party to stupid.
jab
What is McCain’s idea of a hot rod? Kids seem to want to drive factory made fast cars today, rather than get dirty building and tweaking their own vehicles. The ones who do get under the hood many times just turn a working model into junk. Perhaps he means the familiar urban Conestoga wagons with 24 inch rims, which aren’t much good on rural roads. But then I don’t think he means very much at all, save misty nostalgia and cornball nostrums. He just doesn’t know what he is talking about at all. Stay in the city: it’s all you really know, Mac.
David Ross
Seanly 160, If you are using the “I was born here” tack as your touchstone toward being an American, then you are using a legal argument and dodging the point I was making.
But your dodge is revealing.
I was illustrating how conservatives see themselves as part of an American nation, against how a liberal citing “America’s promise” sees America as a set of principles, in part unrealised.
A rural conservative can, from his standpoint, rank his fellow citizens on degree of fealty to America. For this sort of conservative it’s not all about the founding documents or a set of beliefs. Conservatives are up front about all that.
Your post, which I presume is done from the liberal standpoint, implies that being American is foremost a contract of citizenship between the individual and the state.
A liberal is more concerned, emotionally, with how he rates against other liberals. He still might not want to be called “less American”, though, because being “less American” – to the liberal – implies being dismissed as a traitor. And they may well feel some attachment to “American values” which he retains the right to define for himself, usually involving buzzwords like “social justice”. But it isn’t to be confused with the love of country as it exists that the conservative holds.
(I wasn’t born here, by the way. I hold no especial love of this country nor of any other. As for ideology, I don’t much like conservatives, most of whom are ignorant or overly tolerant of ignorance; but few liberals of my acquaintance have impressed me as anything more than scolds, cads, and hypocrites.)
El Cid
Strangely enough, yes, American liberals, as well as, one could argue, the Founding Fathers, viewed the American nation itself as a set of principles, rather than as a geographic fait accompli.
b-psycho
@David Ross:
Fuck “fealty”, whether to a mythological image of “America” or anything else.
Nutella
This is already happening! The article doesn’t sya whether they’ve got gun racks or pickup trucks, though.
h/t Glenn Greenwald
David Ross
b-psycho 166, have you disagreed with the consensus here on any issue? You’ve illustrated my point about liberals in part: how they don’t feel attached to this nation as it is.
Right now I’m wondering how far you’re attached to liberalism; or if you might be a libertarian, an independent liberal, a visiting Jacobite Tory or whatever.
Van Jones is a near-perfect litmus test. Do you think he had aided the Truther movement in 2002? Do you think that’s a problem?
If you agree with the previous paragraph, then you’re an independent thinker. If not, then you’ve signed your soul over to a statement of principles about Movement personnel.
Fealty, to use the proper term.
Dennis
We’ve already seen what happens when the greedy conservative members of the Jewish community move to small towns. Look what they do the the exploited workers in Postville, Iowa. Frankly, I’d rather have some of the liberals here, too.
b-psycho
@David Ross:
I’ve argued in favor of anarchy here, does that count?
The truthers are a bunch of idiots, they hold an unjustified idealistic view of the competency of government and don’t even realize it (coordinating all the various people that’d have to keep quiet well enough for a modern false-flag attack to go off without a hitch? Really?). At least the let-it-happen people are close, as you can argue that the incompetence in preventing it is morally equivalent. I could give half a fuck about Van Jones in particular though, I’m more concerned about Tim Geithner & Ben Bernanke.
Tehanu
@David Ross: I don’t give a damn about “fealty to the nation as it is.” I care about the nation as it ought to be according to the principles it was founded under. I don’t quite see how you can criticize another poster for saying, “I was born here,” and then argue that blood-and-soil nationalism is just as valid as adherence to those principles.
And as a footnote, I think the mere existence of the “Department of Homeland Security” is just about as good an excuse to break Godwin’s Law as anything. Fuck that “heimat” shit. If the national defense we had before 9/11/01 wasn’t good enough, establishing the DHS was a fascist way to try to fix it.