Rob Anderson of The New Republic has posted a response to Matt's story about what he saw as progressive blogger-bashing in defense of Ben Domenech. It's an interesting self-defense, and I think he deserves some credit for logging on to respond directly, so allow me to front page some of his comments.
My article is about conservatives in the media and what type of conservatives one boss at one blue-state media outlet is looking to hire to be his in-house right-winger (and, of course, how that boss isn't just an extreme-liberal outlier). The world needs less right-wing blowhard pundits. For that to happen, the media gatekeepers have to accept that there are conservative pundits out there who aren't shrill and who can write intelligently and politely (and who don't personally insult writers because of what they write...uh-hem).
I can see where he's coming from, but I still agree with Matt in criticizing the original article. Rob's key point seems to be that "blue-state elites" are simply out of touch with real "red America." I don't buy that, but possibly for a different reason than Matt. The use of the "blue state," "red state" constructs is completely off. Rob seems too eager to accept that we're living in a nation cartoonishly divided along red/blue lines. The red Americans are real, honest Americans, while blue Americans are snooty intellectual elites. This has become conventional wisdom in the Beltway and beyond, and it's as personally insulting as it is misguided.
Rob seems to miss the point of The American Prospect list of blue state/red state statistics he cites. The point wasn't that blue staters are actually better than red staters. Rather, it was to point out the folly of taking for granted the idea that folks in the red states aren't quite so "morally elite" as the conventional wisdom would have us believe. Oddly enough, only a few days ago, another article ran in the print edition of TNR that also worked at chipping away some of the CW. Jonathan Chait's latest 'Washington Diarist' column takes on this very topic.
In yet another nervous liberal attempt to placate the red-state hordes, The Washington Post recently started a blog called Red America. The blog's author, displaying a typical hair-trigger sensitivity to blue-state elitism, used his first entry to flay his Post editors for their unfamiliarity with the 1984 pro-gun action flick Red Dawn. He also proceeded to declare, "Red America's citizens are the political majority." Except that the blue states accounted for more than half the population in 2000. Conservatives cope with this inconvenient fact by redefining blue states as a few urban enclaves and making a fetish of the political map, with its misleadingly large, depopulated red states. To take a typical example, a 2004 postelection Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger announced triumphantly, "[I]f you adjust the map's colors for votes by county ... even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but, between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red." This is a persuasive point if you believe in the principle of one acre, one vote.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." I wonder if Wolfe and his fellow travelers realize how much their mau-mauing of blue staters is, well, Maoist. Mao, like the contemporary American right, saw his country as divided between the great virtuous, patriotic interior and the decadent, traitorous coastal cities. Intellectuals--or, in the Maoist parlance, the "stinking ninth category," a phrase so pungent and catchy I can't believe Bill O'Reilly hasn't picked it up yet--were forcibly relocated from the cosmopolitan cities to the countryside to "learn from the poor and lower middle peasants."
He also points out the absurdist logic of painting culture in red America as good and culture in blue America as bad, as so many Republican pundits enjoy doing. He calls it "an orgy of reverse snobbery." Again though, even Chait falls prey to accepting some ridiculous premises. 'Red America' was a "nervous liberal attempt to placate the red-state hordes." Right, there's that liberal media meme again. Domenech's mention of Red Dawn was a result of his "hair-trigger sensitivity to blue-state elitism." Damn those blue state elites! But the hordes hounding the Post for "balance" weren't red staters at all. They're Republican Beltway elites who are just as out of touch with rural America as rural America is with urban America.
The problem is not that the progressive minority are out of touch with the conservative majority, as the blue and red characterizations make it seem. The problem as I see it is that, inside of the insular Washington, DC punditocracy, people have forgotten about the rest of America. To them, it's just a map. Everyone in the red part of the map thinks, feels, and believes X and everyone in the blue thinks, feels, and believes Y. They forget that 51% to 49% isn't a landslide. They forget that the largest majority is the colorless group who feel so left out of the process that they don't even vote. They certainly care about issues like Iraq and healthcare and the economy and the environment, but they've been bombarded with so many messages about nonsense identity politics that they no longer know which end is up. I'm not the first person to say it, but we need to stop talking in terms of red and blue. It's a false dichotomy.
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