Complicated Shoes

southpol:

muppetpants:

complicatedshoes:

jgh:

onefootinthegrave:

kristynseda:ridiculousaurus:zadi

Oh for crying out loud. Learn the damn language!

Elitism has nothing to do with personal wealth! It has to do with thinking you’re better than everyone because of what you’ve achieved. It’s snobbery. It’s going to an Ivy League school and looking down your noses at everyone that didn’t. It’s thinking you know what’s better for us than we do. It’s belittling people because they don’t come from the city or somewhere sophisticated.

Agreed—whether than perception is accurate or not, there is a distinct difference between being “elite,” being “wealthy” or “rich,” and being an “elitist.”

Calling someone an elitist simply means they have liberal social values. The “snobbery” dodge is the marketing it gets dressed up in, but you’ll have a very hard time winning an argument that dems “look down on” people more then republicans unless your audience is already predisposed to believe that.

Since the Nixon days a lot of money, time and energy went into predisposing lots of people to believe it, cultivating the politics of resentment.

It’s bullshit. I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, and yet even I know what false consciousness is.

It’s a lot more acceptable to belittle the supposedly elitist, latte-swilling, limousine-driving liberal than the other way around. Singing the praises of the small town and a mythical agraria has been de facto patriotism for a long time, and every poitician knows it. Saying liberals think they know what’s better for us than we do stops holding water when republicans want to tell me what to do with my genitals, presume to speak for zygotes, tell me whom i can marry, tell me my desire for a healthy environment isn’t as important as the local polluter’s, tell me who gets to be tortured, wants to freely wiretap me etc. Everybody who’s not a libertarian or anarchist gets to call everyone who is an elitist by the rules of this little parlour game, but from where I and 95% of the people in this country sit, the shoe doesn’t fit and I’m fucking tired of being made to wear it.

Liberals believe the government is us. Conservatives believe the government is them. The elitism tactic is just a way to create more ‘them.’ This ‘they look down on everybody else” nonsense, along with the “they don’t love their country” nonsense is meant to be divisive, and it is. I recommend we stop doing it.

I think I’d agree that its hard to convince people that “Democrats” look down on them.  But easier with the “Liberal” label.  People generally believe that Democrats stand for equal rights, helping out the little guy, etc.  But there is a significant difference in public perception in the word Liberal.  “Liberals” are latte-swilling long haired hippies that want me to go to prison for getting fewer than 30 miles to the gallon.  “Liberals” are people that want to legislate my life.

Democrats in the rust belt, for instance, are union voters.  They don’t appreciate being told they’re Neanderthals for going to church on sunday.  But they vote democratic because the Democrats have always stood up for the unions. As someone that lives in one, I can tell you that people in the flyovers don’t like being told what they can and can’t do.  That is where the “elitism tactic” comes from.  It’s not some Nixonian conspiracy.  It’s from regular Americans that want the government out of their lives and don’t appreciate coastal condescension.