Armchair Sociology On Obama's Comments Comes Up Empty

You writing about what working class people do or don't think as opposed to what the Yale-entitled want them to think is truly the funniest thing you have penned for Jewcy. Do tell us more about the working class, Koffler. Perhaps you can demonstrate how we underestimate them in other ways as well.

Some of us are proud of our bitterness:

Bitter Americans
http://www.bitteramericans.com

Oh Christ. No, I'm obviously not a working class middle American. I'm the son of two Ivy-educated Jewish liberal arts professors, one of them an immigrant, who speak at least 6 languages between them. I graduated magna cum laude from Yale, the third generation in my family to go to Yale. My grandfather (Yale '32) was the WASPiest Jew you could ever meet. And I don't pretend that my lineage or my culture are anything different than what they are. Nor do I pretend, for a moment, to be qualified to make unstudied judgments of the behavior of people from cultures of which I am not a part. What I am willing to do is draw inferences from statistically sound quantitative data. Which is my injunction to other elite-educated salaried non-laborers who prematurely form judgments in which they are not entitled to any confidence. Which is the point of this piece.

Note my emphasized use of "some," expressed by the sign some, indicating an existential quantification, in symbols ∃ x: P(x), rather than the alternative "all," indicating a universal quantification, in symbols ∀ x: P(x). I am very deliberate in my choice of quantifiers.

Just as an intellectual exercise David, could you try, just try, not necessarily succeed, but try to read something, anything that you disagree with (not necessarily mine) in good faith and then respond to the argument or arguments expressed therein in a civil, debate-encouraging tone. In that case I'd probably be game to sustain an argument with you, which is what posting invective underneath all my articles is presumably meant to do. (I say that because it is both my nature and my abiding moral value to practice interpretive charity to the extent possible, and to spot cases where I miss that mark and learn from them. Therefore I assume that your serial spleen-emptying is part of an effort to have a conversation, and not simply an epiphenomenon of a habit of trolling through cyberspace posting needlessly acrimonious comments.)

But pending a shift towards civility, this will be my last response, and I renew my suggestion that if you are positively determined to write comically angry responses to everything I write, that you register your own blog for that purpose. Adieu.

Good, this is good. 

But are you making the point that Obama was correct in his evaluation, or are you saying that the national poll numbers are saying he got away with it? 

And are you also saying that even if he does lose, which means the poll numbers would be wrong or that a new trend is developing that we can't yet see, that those who claim this to be a long-term disaster for Obama will still be wrong--which, at the moment, leaves no possible evidence that would show that they were correct?

Because there are polls that showed Obama moving into a tie with Clinton in Pa., only to have her open a large lead over the weekend.  So the questions remain--did he say what he truly felt in SF, if it was a mistake, has he addressed every aspect of the statement and corrected it to say what he really believes, and will this affect his numbers.  Three issues.    

"...I graduated magna cum laude from Yale..."

What, not summa?

Fucking slacker. 

Ismail: Woulda been if I had got my ADD diagnosis before graduating and/or weren't supremely confident in my ability to memorize c. 500 pages of medieval history reading the night before a final sophomore year.

Naftali: I think Obama was partly right, partly wrong, and much too quick in his judgment. I think the available data bears out the idea that opposition to trade is partly a product of economic insecurity, and also (but rather more weakly) bears out the idea that opposition to immigration is partly a product of economic insecurity. In the latter case, but not in the former, xenophobia exists as a powerful motivator. With trade, given that the vast majority of laborers are not in fact threatened by standard free trade agreements, and in fact are likely to profit indirectly from them, and also that money is money and introduces no emotionally or culturally sensitive element to their lives, the form and tone of opposition to trade seems to be a wildly irrational response. With immigration, the startling fact is that the highest levels of nativism tend to be found in areas with low immigrant populations and no real prospect of importing many illegal immigrants. Suggesting an irrationality as well, although I'm in no place to say whether what's going on is proxy xenophobia, namely fear of strange people in America at large since they're not in your community, or whether it's an expression of economic insecurity. The most important and under-appreciated point about trade and immigration is that they come to the same thing: free movement of capital and free movement of labor are economically equivalent.

Obama is quite wrong in saying that gun-culture and religion are products of economic insecurity --- they long preceded the current cycle of post-industrialization and indeed were present in boom and bust times since before the founding of the republic. But his claim in fact is so strikingly wrong that my guess is he meant something quite different, namely that in periods of economic duress, people will turn to the most solid seeming things around them, like, say God and hunting, to maintain their sense of identity, and as a consequence, they are likely to be quite amenable to political appeals based on the idea that their culture is under siege. This has been an ongoing theme of Obama's --- that for too long politics has been determined by things like cultural wedge issues; cf. his 2004 convention speech. Whether you think that diagnosis is accurate is up for grabs, but there's nothing morally objectionable about it, and I don't see how, unless you were determined to read him an in implausibly uncharitable way (sorry, he's not a stupid man), you could come up with a viable alternative interpretation.

This point of his, if it is his point, incidentally is decidedly not Marxian economic determinism. Quite the contrary. Although the red-baiting tactics of Kristol and Lieberman should not obscure the point that Marx was an important sociologist, and certain ideas of his, like the role of economics in influencing cultural and political trends, are quite sound and serviceable provided they are circumscribed in un-Marxian ways.

Obviously he's not perfectly at ease with the culture of the conservative rustbelt white working class; it's not his culture.

As for making predictions on what this will do, I'm not in that business. My point here is simply that the evidence does not license the inference from some quarters, which reads like blatant wishful thinking, that Obama's remark presents a mortal danger to his campaign. On the contrary, there is yet to be any evidence distinguishable from statistical noise to the effect that this has cost him in a major way. One possible explanation of these poll results is that Obama simultaneously lost support in the working class and gained offsetting support in the creative and professional classes (that is my culture, so in this case I do feel confident in saying that we don't like the clear if unspoken assumption that our culture isn't a culture, that we aren't real Americans, or whatever; and that ceteris paribus I would be less inclined to vote for somebody who appealed for votes by bashing elites). Remember: a) Obama doesn't have to win "the working class" or even a majority of the working class, he just needs to win enough, and b) the creative and professional classes are much bigger than they were 20 or even 5 years ago, hence Obama has a bigger natural base than similarly positioned candidates like Gary Hart and even Howard Dean.

Naftali, one last point, electoral defeats tend to be overdetermined, and it's very difficult to isolate their factors. Somebody who asserts with absolute confidence that x caused election outcome y is almost certainly full of it. Ray Fair's economically deterministic prediction model has the Republican candidate getting about 47% of the vote this year. Of course this could be the year the Fair equation fails (any year could), but I'd bet on Fair much sooner than I'd bet on a pseudo-populist Harvard grad lecturing me on what ordinary people think.

All of that is fair.  No pun intended.  I would however adjust your comment about immigration to illegal immigration.  I don't think many Americans have any problem with immigration, since--well I don't know anyone whose family didn't migrate to America at the most four generations ago. 

But, given that the overall topic is what Obama said this weekend, that was a darn fine analysis.  Thanks. 

I'm not sure who's being more condescending here - Barack Obama, or Daniel Koffler. Nobody has claimed that Hilary Clinton or John McCain are somehow the salt of the earth, but both have had the moderately good sense to avoid speaking of white, working class small town voters (who are, incidentally, and enormous part of the American electorate) as some sort of bizarre species whose repulsive cultural habits (guns, Jesus, Wal-Mart, ranch dressing, truck balls, ad infinitum) are due to a lingering economic resentment of their educated, urban betters. What's more, neither Clinton nor McCain have publicly linked cultural attachments viewed as positives by many of these voters (the second amendment and Christianity) as linked in some sinister but intrinsic way to negatives like racism and xenophobia.

Obama's remarks are somewhat typical of the way wealthy urbanites in America view small town Americans as the way an American anthropologist might look at a tribe of Amazon Indians. He's quick to heap praise on their "virtues" as "noble savages", but is equally quick to attribute their faults (such as he perceives them) on their lack of a more advanced material culture. Why if these hillbillies could just get their degrees from Yale and make partner at a good law firm, they'd not only give up guns and Jesus, they'd be working to make their cities a safe refuge for undocumented aliens! And so on, and so forth. And how do we help John and Jane Q. Redneck do this? Through the redemptive power of government programs, naturally.

Obama is going to take a political hit from this gaffe. I'll grant it's not going to be as big as some pundits have predicted, but this is a segment of the electorate that resents being treated as some sort of backward tribe of rednecks by presidential candidates.

I'll risk having this comment dismissed by raising the "R word" ... as Jesse Jackson once said (referring to opposition to busing to achieve school integration), "It's not the bus; it's us."

Hillary lies about her "courageous" flight into Bosnia and the story commands the news cycle, that is until Obama (admittedly somewhat ineptly) opines about how working class whites seem to behave after years of being played by conservative idealogues and the media uproar is deafening.

Having attended a historically black college, and graduating neither magna or summa ... more like eventually ... I may not obviouslyqualify as an elite, though I admit to often thinking of myself as better than most.

Once again, the media - Koffler included - missed the central issue of Obama's comments. The word "bitter" doesnt matter, nor does the supposed elitism; what is truly upsetting about the quote is the attitude that the key topics of Religion and Gun-control are non-issues, mere wedges distracting voters from economic questions.

But guns and god do matter. To both their supporters and opponents, they are fundamental moral debates that we have to struggle with. "Its the economy, stupid" only goes so far, we really do care about these issues Obama brushed aside as straw-men. If Obama cant see that, he's more myopic than elitist. 

There was more to more people leaving California than moving there two years running than the "recession of 1992" as I thought at the time.A long history of covert US foreign policy actions in South and Central America and, amnesty for illegal immigrants combined with a point system of racial preferences that legalized discrimination for everyone but whites had a profound effect on pop culture and the education system there that are still in place today.

Having lived in the Midwest since, trying in vain to find and reap the "benefits" of the good ol' boy network I had heard so much about, I now have a better idea what racism is. My skin color being white, I have to take at face value what blacks tell me about it. I can study history and surmise what my uncle was thinking when he quit school and went to Selma to march against injustice. I can and do reflect on how and why my parents went to such great lengths to expose me to different cultures.

The media has obsessed on G_d and guns because as we all know, most are inherently lazy. What the pundits haven't figured out is that enough white blue-collars know that the best opportunity for change is Obama. (Starting of course with fighting wars that aren't ours to fight.)

As the Bush regime took and kept control, It occurred to me how similar the extreme right wing of both our countries were. The modal was obvious to me. I now understand that Neocons are just the bastard children of Zionists.

Thank you Daniel for a well written piece, I enjoy your work. I'm also grateful to all who have contributed. As Open illustrated so well, I think there is shades of elitism all the way around.

How's it feel?  He's citing you for giving the swing of his anti-semitism a nice big push.  You can't let him footnote you for his hatred, can you?

A regrettable choice of words perhaps. As I'm all too aware, most will recognize my ignorance to things that many have known all along. I didn't even know what a Zionist was four weeks ago. It could be argued that I still don't, and I probably wouldn't contest that. I'm sill trying to figure out what a neocon is other than a hijacker or agent provocateur.

Nafta, Anti-semitic? I have to say given the loose application I have witnessed of that label, it isn't unexpected. Hatred? In my experience when someone points a finger, there are three others pointing straight back. Given the context of alleged "self-hatred" by anyone that dares have anything but an elitist, if you will, view, this is just the same nonsense used to shut down discussion. I regret making it so easy for you.

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