Slate asked a number of wise liberals to take up the question of why Americans won’t vote for the Democrats.
The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States by Jane Smiley: Hang on for a wild ride. I checked back several times to make sure this piece wasn’t meant to be a parody. She’s serious. She says (among other things):
The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. What Ms. Smiley is saying, for the ignorant among us who can’t quite follow her reasoning, is that Republican voters are stupid and Democrat voters aren’t. Immediately after this statement of colossal arrogance, Smiley goes on to say that her Republican relatives are greedy and full of feelings of superiority. I suppose we could argue all day about who feels superior to whom, but why bother when she is hoist with her own petard, so to speak.
Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. Smiley then goes on to cite frontier brawls and the blood-letting of the Civil War as examples. I suppose the people in the “blue states” didn’t fight the Civil War, didn’t bleed , didn’t really kill anyone else either. Also violence is unknown among blue state liberals. All that violence and crime we hear about in the (mostly Democrat) inner cities is just a myth. The only ones who have a “tradition” of violence and bloodlust are those “red state types.” And violence of course leads to . . . ignorance. (Or is it a product of ignorance?)
The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do—they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable. I’m lost here. Either we’re ignoramuses who let those preachers and Republican politicians tell us exactly what to do and what to think, or we don’t like to be told what to do. Wait, I get it. We don’t like liberals telling us what to do and what to think, so we’re “unteachable.” ” WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME?”
screams the liberal. “I’M RIGHT.”
A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey—workers and consumers.
Ye olde class war. Neo-Marxist thought rears its ugly head yet again. The big capitalists have no morals. The middle class is at risk of being destroyed, and religion is, of course, the opiate of the masses. If I protest that I don’t feel drugged, don’t recall being drugged, haven’t given anyone (except God himself) the authority to rule my thoughts, I am told that:
If you are sufficiently ignorant, you won’t even know how dangerous your policies are until they have destroyed you, and then you can always blame others. O.K. I admit it. You’ve boxed me into a corner, Ms. Smiley. You say I’m ignorant. You say I’m too ignorant to know that I’m ignorant. You say my ideas will destroy me. I guess I’ll just have to await destruction. In the meantime, I still believe it’s better to “appeal to reason and common sense, and the law, even when they can’t understand it and don’t respond.” Reason tells me that I’m not half as ignorant and uninformed as Ms. Smiley thinks I am. Common sense should be just that: common, and the common people voted for Bush. And the law is generally what conservatives are trying to conserve.
So we can continue to call each other names, or we can actually discuss why red state voters agree with the Republicans on issues such as the economy, the war on terrorism, abortion, and the definition of marriage. (Hint: Some of us red-staters have thought about these issues and actually have ideas about them that we can articulate and discuss. Just because we don’t agree with liberals doesn’t mean we’re stoopid.)
Thanks to Betsy’s Page for pointing out Ms. Smiley’s article in Slate.