I saw a number of conservatives on Twitter praising James Carville’s interview in Vox. So I thought I would read it.
One part really stuck out at me:
I want to give you an example of the problem here. A few weeks ago, Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics writer for the New York Times, posted a snarky tweet about how LSU canceled classes for the National Championship game. And then he said, do the “Warren/Sanders free public college proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?”
You know how fucking patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but that’s not the point. It’s the goddamn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and there’s not a single person he knows that doesn’t pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. He’s so fucking smart.
Appelbaum doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset. We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.
Keep in mind that Carville is known as the “ragin’ Cajun” and is a graduate from Louisiana State University.
He’s right that the Democrat party has developed an internal narrative that it’s smarter than and looks down on regular middle Americans.
The fact is that human beings are tribal, give humans the ability to join a tribe and exclude others and they will do it. That is the basis of every club, social organization, and fraternity in existence.
Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson said about the South in the 1960s:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
The Democrat party of 2020 is just as bigoted and hateful as the Democrat party of Jim Crow. All they did was change the targets of their hatred.
The best way of summarizing the Democrat party leadership and the prime time media talking head class would be:
“If you can convince the lowest top tier college graduate he’s better than the best community college or mid-tier state school graduate, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Or
“If you can convince the lowest New Yorker or Californiana he’s better than the best Southerner or Midwesterner, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Or
“If you can convince the lowest white-collar employee he’s better than the best blue-collar worker, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
And it’s probably some combination thereof, depending on the audience.
Democrats rally around their ability to look down on some groups of people and mock them. This was the very heart of the Don Lemon/Rick Wilson minstrel show from a few weeks back. That was the motivation behind Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” quote.
And so it becomes natural for a New York Times editorial board member and graduate of America’s only Public Ivy to mock LSU for not being an “actual school.”
The problem with this is that it’s hard to build a majority coalition out of hating people who don’t go to elite selective colleges and live in a city that touches saltwater because the majority of Americans don’t go to elite colleges and live in cities that touch saltwater.
Unfortunately for Carville and fortunately for us, the Democrats are too high on themselves and their hatred for “reg’lar Americans” to come down from that any time soon.
Thank you James Carville for letting us know that dumb Democrats aren't being respectful enough of reg'lar folks, what an insightful take I've never heard before, if only they could do something like this victory would be assured. pic.twitter.com/mgi2RRenYG
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) February 7, 2020