I consider him part of the heckling "Why Oh Why do the Jews vote Democratic crowd?" He does no serious thought into anything about Jewish theology or philosophy than would cause them to vote Democratic. He does not care about why Jews might consider the paternalism of Evangelicals to be off-putting.
What about the idea that red areas of blue states have been largely confederatized?
I'm being serious. The red counties in California have a lot more in common with Alabama than they do with San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Jose and the rest of the blue cities/counties. Same with the red areas in states like Oregon, Washington, New York, and other states that the Republican Party have no hopes in winning in the electoral college.
There is also the issue that the Confederate Flag has sort of become or is a universal Fuck You sign by large sections of the white, working class. You can see it displayed in the rural areas of many Blue States. I used to belong to another Internet group. One member was a Canadian working class woman. She wrote a post complaining about how her Canadian ex wanted to sew a Confederate Flag on a denim jacket that their two-year old daughter used. Why would Canadians care about the Confederacy? My theory is that in North America, the Confederate Flag has become a universal system of defiance by the rural (or semi-rural) white working class. It is a classically purposeful "anti-PC" Fuck you against upper-middle class, liberal pleas for tolerance and respect and equality,
So I think we are in a cold civil war but it is more of a divide between cities and inner-ring suburbs that think they are cities on the liberal side and rural/exurban communities on the conservative side. Many of these rural communities have a lot more in common with the old Confederacy than any blue section of their own state.
Ah somehow I suspected Karl Rove would be involved.
Interesting Bush I was not very friendly towards Israel and was more than willing to court Arab countries. Or as James Baker said "Fuck the Jews, they never vote for us anyway."
I think you second paragraph is spot on. Peter Beinart expressed similar thoughts in an Ask Me Anything video on Sullivan's website. Beinart theorizes that older Jews (up to the Boomers) were more likely to experience direct anti-Semitism at some point in their lives. However Jews from Gen X to later were highly unlikely to experience such direct anti-Semitism. Though how much of this is because we grew up in more insular Jewish communities. New York's Jewish population is large enough that you can take your Judaism for granted and always be surrounded by other Jews. In other cities, I observe that Jews tend to just flock together and socialize with their shuls or stick to particular towns like Newton in Massachusetts.
I often do feel like Jennifer Rubin is only Republican because of Israel. When she writes about other conservative issues, it feels like her heart is not in it. Even Adelson is fairly liberal as long as he is not being a union buster or Greater Israel fanatic.
The problem is that Cantor and Mandel are not moderate Republicans but generally indicative of the far-right trends of the modern Republican Party. Both of them have more in common with Michelle Bachmann and Paul Ryan than they do with Jacob Javits or Rudy Boschwitz.
Serious: Do you know what percentage of Irish-Catholics now vote Republican?
I think Jews still feel a certain amount of othering that Irish and Italian Catholics do not. Irish and Italian Catholics probably never questioned their own entry into Caucasian. Jews still have the luck of being white when convenient and not white when convenient to the speaker. Jewishness is just connected to race and ethnicity in ways that Irish and Italians probably did not feel personally.
There is also a certain innate conservatism in Irish-Catholicism. How many Irish Catholics went for Socialists like Debs?
Breyer was a clerk for Justice Goldberg, taught at Harvard, and was counsel for the Senate Democrats before Carter appointed him to the first circuit.
Ginsburg did women's rights cases for the ACLU before Carter appointed her to the D.C. Circuit.
Scalia was in corporate law and then did some crim stuff in the Justice Department but seemed to be largely in the civil side of the Justice Department.
I think Sotomayor is the only current sitting Justice with real prosecutor experience. Kagan has some indirect experience through her days as Solicitor General.
Okay this is what I don't understand. It seems like every Presidential (and maybe Congressional) election year, there are a ton of articles published about how "this year the Jews will switch". And what happens? We don't switch. We consistently vote for the Democratic Party by 75-80 percentage points.
Why are the Republicans so crazed about turning Jews into Republicans? Why don't they realize that it is more than Israel that Jews care about and most of us think the Democratic Party is just fine on Israel.
Josh Mandel* and Eric Cantor and Sheldon Adelson are exceptions not rules. Yet they get most of the coverage.
*Oh boy is he an exception to the rule. The New Republic published a very funny quote from an Ohio grandma about how she thought that Mandel looked like a nice Jewish boy but certainly didn't have nice Jewish boy beliefs when he opened his mouth.
The interesting thing I read about Sandy is speculation about how it might cause a Constitutional Crisis.
The East Coast got hit very hard and it will take days to get everything back on-line if not weeks. What if the East Coast is not ready to vote by a week from now?
Also I find it very odd to live in a huge country right now. Life as normal seems to be happening on the West Coast. San Francisco is preparing for a ticker-tape parade to celebrate the Giants. All my East Coast friends seem to be fine and safe but NYC is in havoc.
I was supposed to fly to New York tonight. Obviously the flight was canceled. I told my airline that I would need to cancel and reschedule for a later date but they ended up putting me on a crazy flight for Wednesday that goes from SF to Salt Lake to Cincinnati to NYC. I will probably cancel this.
I was supposed to do my interview, orientation, and admission for the New York Bar. The last communication was on Friday. They said they were still planning on going forward as planned and if you could not make it because of Sandy, your admission would be postponed. However, this was before the government decided to shutdown the subways and commuter rails. It takes a while for those to get back on-line. I don't see how the can conduct interviews on Tuesday if everyone is stuck. Also the courts are closed today and probably tomorrow as well.
Though I am a bit surprised in the age of e-mail and remote website access that they can't find a way to send out a brief message. Is this a sign of no one wanting to make an executive decision about canceling the interviews, orientation, and admission?
I don't think the empty chair was a dog whistle but less savory sorts turned it into one by hanging empty chairs if effigy. Okay that is not even a dog whistle as much as blatant bigotry and racism.
I think one of the many problems is that a lot of people (especially white people) think of racism and bigotry as being things that exist facially only. Everyone recognizes someone like Jim Phelps as being openly bigoted or a KKK member.
The problems arise from institutionalized racism and disparate impact which I think do exist. Look how the drug war is waged more brutally against minorities. Why was crack punished harder for so many years than cocaine?
I think we need to think of racism as being something beyond active bigotry and even though the word drives me up a wall with how often it is used and overused, privilege does exist.
Whites are not necessarily racist when voting against minorities but there are a lot of factors (psychological, historical, sociological) that need to be taken into account. We can not deny racism outright. I certainly think it is at least a semi-unconscious factor. Some thoughts and questions in no particular order.
1. The civil rights movement is still fairly recent history. We still have plenty of people alive who can remember Jim Crow and Segregation. We still have people alive and voting who went tooth and nail against the Civil Rights movement and other progressive movements from the 1950s-70s. I'm not saying that a vast majority want to return to Jim Crow but some must and others must certainly still have lingering thoughts from the era when causual racism was okay.
2. Is it acceptable for John Sununu to say on national TV that Powell only endorsed Obama because they are both black? This is done to make the endorsement less legitimate because Collin Powell is still respected (whether he should be or not is another question). What if Hunstman came out for Romney and a Democratic politician said it was only because they are both Mormon. Wouldn't the GOP be up in arms? We can either call out all tribalism or no tribalism. We can't cherry pick between some tribalism being okay and some tribalism being not okay.
3. As to your survey: Most people would not answer those questions honestly. People don't want to sound bad.
4. Nixon's Southern Strategy was real and that is when Whites especially blue-collar whites began fleeing the Democratic Party. Maybe racism is not the exclusive reason for many whites (except Jews who might or might not count as white) from leaving the Democratic Party in droves but I think simple logic can show an Occam's razor.
5. Why is the Silent Generation (those too young to fight in WWII and too old to be Boomers) much more conservative than the Greatest Generation and those that followed?
The United States will probably be a 50/50 nation or close to it for the foreseeable future. Though these things change quickly but I feel very odd about being part of a seeming minority of whites (or at least passing) who vote liberal and Democratic. What part of my background sets me as different? Is it my Judaism? Education level? Urbanish background? Etc.
There has always been a narrative that baseball represents American innocence because it is a relatively cheap sport. All you need is a ball, a bat, some mitts, and a field to play in. Many of the great players came from rural areas and small towns. Some came from big cities.
However, this myth of American innocence can always be used to call out minorities in American life for corrupting the spirit of America.
Nope. I am one of those annoying people who has not watched the history channel for a long time because it is not real history.
There best stuff was from the mid to late 90s and they have largely been downhill since trying to be more like reality TV/pop sociology with a little history thrown in.
Too much military history as well. I think of the channel as being for people who think they are history buffs but not really interested in going beyond the surface on many things.
Spitzer was the Attorney General of New York. IIRC he was never a prosecutor or district attorney.
I don't recall him ever making a press conference about that law or trying people from it himself, though I could be wrong. He was about financial misdeeds.
Of course, his assistant attorney generals could have brought those cases but I think that would be largely done by local DAs who were not under his authority or supervision.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The South Hasn’t Risen Again”
I don't consider Medved a credible source.
I consider him part of the heckling "Why Oh Why do the Jews vote Democratic crowd?" He does no serious thought into anything about Jewish theology or philosophy than would cause them to vote Democratic. He does not care about why Jews might consider the paternalism of Evangelicals to be off-putting.
"
And red areas in non-Southern states seem to have adopted the language and symbols of the Confederacy.
"
What about the idea that red areas of blue states have been largely confederatized?
I'm being serious. The red counties in California have a lot more in common with Alabama than they do with San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Jose and the rest of the blue cities/counties. Same with the red areas in states like Oregon, Washington, New York, and other states that the Republican Party have no hopes in winning in the electoral college.
There is also the issue that the Confederate Flag has sort of become or is a universal Fuck You sign by large sections of the white, working class. You can see it displayed in the rural areas of many Blue States. I used to belong to another Internet group. One member was a Canadian working class woman. She wrote a post complaining about how her Canadian ex wanted to sew a Confederate Flag on a denim jacket that their two-year old daughter used. Why would Canadians care about the Confederacy? My theory is that in North America, the Confederate Flag has become a universal system of defiance by the rural (or semi-rural) white working class. It is a classically purposeful "anti-PC" Fuck you against upper-middle class, liberal pleas for tolerance and respect and equality,
So I think we are in a cold civil war but it is more of a divide between cities and inner-ring suburbs that think they are cities on the liberal side and rural/exurban communities on the conservative side. Many of these rural communities have a lot more in common with the old Confederacy than any blue section of their own state.
"
Ah somehow I suspected Karl Rove would be involved.
Interesting Bush I was not very friendly towards Israel and was more than willing to court Arab countries. Or as James Baker said "Fuck the Jews, they never vote for us anyway."
I think you second paragraph is spot on. Peter Beinart expressed similar thoughts in an Ask Me Anything video on Sullivan's website. Beinart theorizes that older Jews (up to the Boomers) were more likely to experience direct anti-Semitism at some point in their lives. However Jews from Gen X to later were highly unlikely to experience such direct anti-Semitism. Though how much of this is because we grew up in more insular Jewish communities. New York's Jewish population is large enough that you can take your Judaism for granted and always be surrounded by other Jews. In other cities, I observe that Jews tend to just flock together and socialize with their shuls or stick to particular towns like Newton in Massachusetts.
I often do feel like Jennifer Rubin is only Republican because of Israel. When she writes about other conservative issues, it feels like her heart is not in it. Even Adelson is fairly liberal as long as he is not being a union buster or Greater Israel fanatic.
The problem is that Cantor and Mandel are not moderate Republicans but generally indicative of the far-right trends of the modern Republican Party. Both of them have more in common with Michelle Bachmann and Paul Ryan than they do with Jacob Javits or Rudy Boschwitz.
"
Serious: Do you know what percentage of Irish-Catholics now vote Republican?
I think Jews still feel a certain amount of othering that Irish and Italian Catholics do not. Irish and Italian Catholics probably never questioned their own entry into Caucasian. Jews still have the luck of being white when convenient and not white when convenient to the speaker. Jewishness is just connected to race and ethnicity in ways that Irish and Italians probably did not feel personally.
There is also a certain innate conservatism in Irish-Catholicism. How many Irish Catholics went for Socialists like Debs?
"
Breyer was a clerk for Justice Goldberg, taught at Harvard, and was counsel for the Senate Democrats before Carter appointed him to the first circuit.
Ginsburg did women's rights cases for the ACLU before Carter appointed her to the D.C. Circuit.
Scalia was in corporate law and then did some crim stuff in the Justice Department but seemed to be largely in the civil side of the Justice Department.
I think Sotomayor is the only current sitting Justice with real prosecutor experience. Kagan has some indirect experience through her days as Solicitor General.
"
I do wonder why these Rand-lovers always end up looking like overgrown middle school students.
"
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/107282/josh-mandel-wants-be-senator-if-only-he-could-get-his-in-laws-donate
"
Okay this is what I don't understand. It seems like every Presidential (and maybe Congressional) election year, there are a ton of articles published about how "this year the Jews will switch". And what happens? We don't switch. We consistently vote for the Democratic Party by 75-80 percentage points.
Why are the Republicans so crazed about turning Jews into Republicans? Why don't they realize that it is more than Israel that Jews care about and most of us think the Democratic Party is just fine on Israel.
Josh Mandel* and Eric Cantor and Sheldon Adelson are exceptions not rules. Yet they get most of the coverage.
*Oh boy is he an exception to the rule. The New Republic published a very funny quote from an Ohio grandma about how she thought that Mandel looked like a nice Jewish boy but certainly didn't have nice Jewish boy beliefs when he opened his mouth.
"
Everything about Jerry Lewis is so Jewish to me that I don't understand how anyone can see him as anything but.
Even as a Jew, there are some non-Jews who give me false positives though. For example, Ethel Merman. Surprisingly, she is not a Jew.
"
Neither did Breyer or Ginsburg as far as I know. Sotomayor started as a Prosecutor though.
On “Hurricane Sandy, and Why Sound Risk Management Should Always Trump Populist Banner Waving”
The interesting thing I read about Sandy is speculation about how it might cause a Constitutional Crisis.
The East Coast got hit very hard and it will take days to get everything back on-line if not weeks. What if the East Coast is not ready to vote by a week from now?
Also I find it very odd to live in a huge country right now. Life as normal seems to be happening on the West Coast. San Francisco is preparing for a ticker-tape parade to celebrate the Giants. All my East Coast friends seem to be fine and safe but NYC is in havoc.
On “Hurricane Sandy Open Thread”
I was supposed to fly to New York tonight. Obviously the flight was canceled. I told my airline that I would need to cancel and reschedule for a later date but they ended up putting me on a crazy flight for Wednesday that goes from SF to Salt Lake to Cincinnati to NYC. I will probably cancel this.
I was supposed to do my interview, orientation, and admission for the New York Bar. The last communication was on Friday. They said they were still planning on going forward as planned and if you could not make it because of Sandy, your admission would be postponed. However, this was before the government decided to shutdown the subways and commuter rails. It takes a while for those to get back on-line. I don't see how the can conduct interviews on Tuesday if everyone is stuck. Also the courts are closed today and probably tomorrow as well.
Though I am a bit surprised in the age of e-mail and remote website access that they can't find a way to send out a brief message. Is this a sign of no one wanting to make an executive decision about canceling the interviews, orientation, and admission?
On “Post-post-racial America”
Fair enough but solution to dog whistles is not to ignore them. That simply allows people who blow dog whistles to get away with it.
"
Yes. The Romney campaign announced it was reprehensible.
This goes to an underlying problem. We denounce open bigotry but not anything less or more subtle. Also it makes Sununu very galling.
"
I don't think the empty chair was a dog whistle but less savory sorts turned it into one by hanging empty chairs if effigy. Okay that is not even a dog whistle as much as blatant bigotry and racism.
"
Well said and I agree fully.
"
I think one of the many problems is that a lot of people (especially white people) think of racism and bigotry as being things that exist facially only. Everyone recognizes someone like Jim Phelps as being openly bigoted or a KKK member.
The problems arise from institutionalized racism and disparate impact which I think do exist. Look how the drug war is waged more brutally against minorities. Why was crack punished harder for so many years than cocaine?
I think we need to think of racism as being something beyond active bigotry and even though the word drives me up a wall with how often it is used and overused, privilege does exist.
The code words used are often kind of obvious.
"
Whites are not necessarily racist when voting against minorities but there are a lot of factors (psychological, historical, sociological) that need to be taken into account. We can not deny racism outright. I certainly think it is at least a semi-unconscious factor. Some thoughts and questions in no particular order.
1. The civil rights movement is still fairly recent history. We still have plenty of people alive who can remember Jim Crow and Segregation. We still have people alive and voting who went tooth and nail against the Civil Rights movement and other progressive movements from the 1950s-70s. I'm not saying that a vast majority want to return to Jim Crow but some must and others must certainly still have lingering thoughts from the era when causual racism was okay.
2. Is it acceptable for John Sununu to say on national TV that Powell only endorsed Obama because they are both black? This is done to make the endorsement less legitimate because Collin Powell is still respected (whether he should be or not is another question). What if Hunstman came out for Romney and a Democratic politician said it was only because they are both Mormon. Wouldn't the GOP be up in arms? We can either call out all tribalism or no tribalism. We can't cherry pick between some tribalism being okay and some tribalism being not okay.
3. As to your survey: Most people would not answer those questions honestly. People don't want to sound bad.
4. Nixon's Southern Strategy was real and that is when Whites especially blue-collar whites began fleeing the Democratic Party. Maybe racism is not the exclusive reason for many whites (except Jews who might or might not count as white) from leaving the Democratic Party in droves but I think simple logic can show an Occam's razor.
5. Why is the Silent Generation (those too young to fight in WWII and too old to be Boomers) much more conservative than the Greatest Generation and those that followed?
The United States will probably be a 50/50 nation or close to it for the foreseeable future. Though these things change quickly but I feel very odd about being part of a seeming minority of whites (or at least passing) who vote liberal and Democratic. What part of my background sets me as different? Is it my Judaism? Education level? Urbanish background? Etc.
On “Baseball…reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again”
And How!
"
There has always been a narrative that baseball represents American innocence because it is a relatively cheap sport. All you need is a ball, a bat, some mitts, and a field to play in. Many of the great players came from rural areas and small towns. Some came from big cities.
However, this myth of American innocence can always be used to call out minorities in American life for corrupting the spirit of America.
http://www.tnr.com/article/109050/american-shylock-arnold-rothstein-1882%E2%80%931928
I am not against sports or pro-sports but I don't want to give them myths. They are what they are.
On “Jacobin-ing”
But I did enjoy your article.
"
Nope. I am one of those annoying people who has not watched the history channel for a long time because it is not real history.
There best stuff was from the mid to late 90s and they have largely been downhill since trying to be more like reality TV/pop sociology with a little history thrown in.
Too much military history as well. I think of the channel as being for people who think they are history buffs but not really interested in going beyond the surface on many things.
/Mini-history nerd rant
On “Let’s Not Demand an Apology from Ann Coulter”
I stand corrected.
"
Balise,
Spitzer was the Attorney General of New York. IIRC he was never a prosecutor or district attorney.
I don't recall him ever making a press conference about that law or trying people from it himself, though I could be wrong. He was about financial misdeeds.
Of course, his assistant attorney generals could have brought those cases but I think that would be largely done by local DAs who were not under his authority or supervision.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.