Our Brilliant Pundits
Andrew Sullivan regales us once again with his Oxford education. Sadly enough, he must come to terms with the fact that white rednecks still exist; their votes count as much as anyone else’s; and they like neither Obama nor black candidates in general. Why might that be?
Sullivan’s analysis consists in part of the following: “The race factor seems to have tipped very heavily toward Clinton in West Virginia. In Indiana, 16 percent said race was an important factor for them; in Pennsylvania, 19 percent; in West Virginia, 22 percent. The racial skew to Clinton does soar in West Virginia: 81 percent of race-based voters went for Clinton; in Pennsylvania, it was 55; in Indiana, it was 53 percent. Oddly, Obama did better among white Catholics in West Virginia than he has in the past. No idea, if that means anything.”
Consider how incredibly facile this statement is. For starters, 81% of 22% of West Virginia’s Democratic voters amounts to 17%. Hillary won by a good deal more than that with a net lead over 40%. More important, the net effect of race-conscious voters was smaller, since 4% voted for Obama for race-related reasons. Even if every single race-based voter went for Obama, he still would have lost.
Indeed, isn’t all this talk of white race-conscious voting ignoring the elephant in the room? West Virginia is almost all white. Its voters will split, nearly evenly, between Republican and Democrat in the fall. Yet blacks will not. We know, for example, that 90% or more blacks will vote Democratic in the general election no matter who the Republican candidate is. We know also that for many years majority black voting districts have been created purposefully with an eye to electing black candidates and cultivating distinctly black political power. This takes place because everyone knows that black voters, given a chance, will almost always choose a black candidate over a white one, just as they will almost never vote Republican. Black voters are the ones with racial solidarity, whereas white voters have strong cohorts in both parties. Obama’s 90% showing among black Mississippi Democrats didn’t exactly occasion hand-wringing about rising race consciousness by Sullivan, but 17% of West Virginia’s white Democrats voting against a black man on racial grounds is major cause for concern. This reveals, once again, the basic rules of “diversity”: everyone can act and think tribally, except whites, who are supposed to be aloof from appeals such appeals and internally divided.
Sullivan’s thinking out loud about Catholics in West Virginia is even worse, revealing his foreign roots and general ignorance of American life. There are almost no Catholics in West Virginia; they rank 49th out of the 50 states as a percentage of West Virginians. Whether they tipped this way or that is almost entirely irrelevant. It’s an old school Protestant state, with snake-handling churches and everything. West Virginia is a metaphor for all that the cultural left hates about America, its past, and its culture. Like America (particularly the America of yesteryear), it is majority Protestant, majority white, with a significant (75%+) cohort that is not university educated, where hard-working white people do the jobs Americans supposedly won’t do. This older America is a persistent reality that deeply frustrates Sullivan, Obama, and other forces of the cultural left. It’s why they resorted to court-led change and rearrangement of America’s demographics in the 1960s. Among this older, mostly white America, the cultural left sees nothing but hate, racism, and malevolence. If Obama loses, it will be because whites reject him. In the age of the trans-racial candidate, the rednecks and the white suburbanites will mutatis mutandis be the swing voters--the power-brokers of a democratic system. The Jewish vote, the black vote, the gay vote, and the various hodge-podge alienated minorities who make up the Democratic Party cannot (yet) outweigh the collective voice of America’s historical majority.
Leftist elites presume to have a moral claim to rule against majority sentiment because of their education. It would be nice if that included basic numeracy. There’s a reason it does not. Numbers representing facts are the starting point for realistic appraisals of everything from our enormous debt to the burden of mass immigration. Numbers too demonstrate the deep alienation and tribalism of black Americans and other minorities. Jeremiah Wright’s loony speeches were not a “distraction”; in fact, looking at the numbers tells us that he is a typical representative of his people and their chosen leaders. Numbers relating to voting, criminality, illegitimacy, IQ, and poverty also tell the story of our deep internal divide in an undeniable and often depressing way . . . if only we take the time to count.
Comments
No comments? Gee whiz Wally. So Sullivan has an Oxford [Clinton] education. Can he leap tall buildings? Does he dash into phone booths and save the world?
No. Education is nothing more than rote training, that is to focus on, be tested on history and be able to repeat said history and given a gold star in your forehead when you gave the required, but usually not the true answer.
Intellectuals are useful idiots.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sir, the Reverend Wright is not a “loon”. I do remember your arguing on these pages for locking away a certain part of the population (disproportionally of colour) for non-crimes (drug use, to wit) just to brighten up crime statistics. Your argument being that someone who breaks one rule will break another one - so just lock him up. That sort of “reasoning” of course you see as less loony than pronounced criticism of the US of A. That sort of reasoning is of course, what the Reverend Whright quite eloquently criticises - and rightly so.
Given your cheap shot at Oxbridge education, class-hatred may well be the motivation behind - hating, despising and fearing those of a lesser station in life, hating and envying your betters. But your motivation is for you to sort out, and sort it out, you should.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Mencken was right about you Americans: you really ARE a pack of anti-intellectual Yahoos, unable to hold (to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald) two true (and NUMERICALLY verifiable) FACTS in your heads at the same time: even “poor whites” are not so stupid in times of economic crisis to refrain from voting their pocketbooks; and NOBODY has tried harder than Barack Obama, during this campaign season, to UNITE the disparate elements of the American electorate.
Do tell, what has he done to “unite” us? And how is that NUMERICALLY verifiable, as you put it? Told us he understands our concerns? Paraphrased our arguments for us? Told us we need to get beyond our differences?
Forgoing rationally analysis for thereputic gestures is an important part of modern anti-intellectualism.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Great commentary, Mr. Roach!
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I see that someone’s post has fallen down and gone “boom.”
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I’m curious about who posted the presumably deleted comment you are quoting Mr. Moltke, what is that reliable Obamabot named digbydolben?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
To “Whatever”:
You say, “I do remember your arguing on these pages for locking away a certain part of the population (disproportionally of colour) for non-crimes (drug use, to wit) just to brighten up crime statistics.”
I say to you that if you think drug use is a non-crime, you should light up a crack pipe in front of your local police station. It is illegal, as in against the law, as in it’s written in a book somewhere you can’t do it and you will be arrested and convicted if you do so. How is such a thing a “noncrime?”
And since law-breakers for drugs are endogenous with other law-breakers, a happy byproduct--a positive externality if you will-- of our harsh drug penalties is that other crimes are being reduced in the process because the easier-to-identity and easier-to-prosecute offenders are getting busted on the drug-possession part of their crime portfolio. It’s true many are part of the black underclass, but so are many criminals. I don’t really mind that lots of white offenders are going to jail, though; I imagine their rates of offending are much higher than the population in general.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@ Roach, There you go again.
Change “Whatever’s” “non-crime to “victimless crime”. (It was clear what he was saying.)
Why don’t you propose that blogging be a crime, if the blogger disagrees with you. Then you’d get lots of people YOU don’t like off the streets. Are you intentionally abrasive, or is it a gift?
FYI, you misused the word “endogenous”.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
You’re right, “whatever”: A Farakhanesque demagogue who believes that whites invented AIDs in order to exterminate blacks is not a lunatic. And if he doesn’t believe this and other bizarre and demented accusations, then he’s even more despicable: a manipulative and calculating liar who says what he knows is not true to fuel and inflame an endemic and virulent hatred of whites for political and ideological reasons. And, yes, it’s reasonable to assume that most blacks more or less agree with Rev. Wright and his ilk: Obama, apparently, less than more.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@ SK, You wrote, “And, yes, it’s reasonable to assume that most blacks more or less agree with Rev. Wright and his ilk: Obama, apparently, less than more.”
Why?
I think Reverend Wright is an idiot. But so is Pat Robertson.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Dominic,
Yes, interesting fellow. A window into the thought process of our pundit class.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I agree with Reverend Wright’s assessment of 1) the historic genocidal treatment of native Americans; 2) the long-lasting effects of slavery in America 3) terrorism during WII and other wars practiced by the American and other governments; 4) world-wide terrorism as a reaction to injustices perpetrated by Western governments.
I was disappointed in Obama’s across the board denunciation of Wright. Ron Paul would not have done something like that.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@Christopher Roach - may I slightly alter your proposal, sir? We both meet at that police station, I shall take a line of cocain, while you smoke an equivalent amount of crack. If you do not know now why the Reverend Wright talks the way he does, you might know then. May I spell it out in advance? Forbidden “caucasian” behaviour is punished decidedly less severely than forbidden “african american” behaviour.
@SK you have point there, sir. To understand, where the Reverend Wright comes from, you might want to look up the infamous syphilis experiment - and have, once you at researching, a good look at Nuremberg and medical professionals ...
@mcbrown - thank you sir. I actually wanted to say victimless crime, did not find the word and then got angry at the whole concept of prohibition - locking up people for doing damage to no one but themselves - and even that damage might be orders of magnitude lesser without criminalisation. That is however another subject.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@ Whatever, If you really want to get angry, read C. Roach’s column of a week or so ago, “The War on Drugs has its Advantages.” That ewas the “another subject” you mentioned. Mr. Roach is even further out there than you know.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Taki's Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff. Repeat abusers of this policy will be barred from leaving comments. All comments reflect only the views of those posting them and not necessarily those of this website, its editors, or authors. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.