Blues and Blue Dogs

Heath Shuler and the decline of conservative Democrats.

Asheville, North Carolina

With a week to go until the midterm elections, the evidence continues to mount that Red America and Blue America are being pulled apart by tectonic ethnic and cultural forces. Most recently, I explored this theme in Red October and Whites Revolt. In Dead Aim, I predicted that polarization would drive “Reds” and “Blues” into segregated political parties.

I was given a lot of fresh material to analyze and work with over the weekend. Where to start?

1.) In The New York Times, Ari Berman (a Jewish writer for The Nation) advocated purging the Blue Dogs from the Democratic Party. In his view, a “rogue group of predominantly white men from small rural states” have blocked President Obama’s liberal agenda and antagonized the party from within.

The Democrats should abandon the “50-state strategy” and purge the conservatives in their midst – the “fake Democrats” like Heath Shuler and Bobby Bright that Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean worked so hard to recruit. Shorn of White conservatives, Berman argues that Democrats would be able to govern more effectively with a smaller majority.

In an era of “near absolute polarization,” Democrats would be more united and productive if they adapted their political strategy to prevailing conditions. Essentially, this means giving up on White America except for homosexuals, SWPLs, unionized workers, college students, and single women with children.

Note: In 2008, 60% of Barack Obama’s voters were White. A Democratic Party which can’t win a sizeable number of White males (a healthy minority) can write off the South, forget about winning swing states, and prepare itself for massive losses in the Midwest.

2.) In Politico, Jonathan Martin announces the return of the 2004 political map, polarized into Red America and Blue America, which Barack Obama’s “post-partisan” and “post-racial” presidency was supposed to draw to a close. Barack Obama has been flying across America and plopping down in liberal urban enclaves to rally the Democratic base.

The unstated message: Obama is giving up on the Heartland. The Democratic Party is shrinking back to its bi-coastal, urban base of Jews, SWPLs, and non-Whites. The Republican Party is set to win races all across the continental interior, especially in the rural South and Midwest, where the Blue Dogs have been abandoned as roadkill.

3.) Also in Politico, Carol Lee draws our attention to the inescapable political reality of our times: Barack Obama is the president of Blue America. In 2008, White America voted against Obama. In 2010, less than 40% of Whites approve of his job performance, and less than 30% believe he deserves reelection. In Portland and San Francisco, Barack Obama is a rock star, but he is a demonic socialist (and possibly the Antichrist) in Nebraska and West Virginia.

4.) Meanwhile, Bill Clinton is campaigning like its 1992 in states that Obama has abandoned. He has stumped for the hated Blue Dog Health Shuler in Asheville, NC. According to a recent Gallup poll, Clinton’s endorsements now carry more political weight than Barack Obama’s, particularly among rural Democrats in the Scot-Irish Belt that he won twice in 1992 and 1996 and Obama lost in 2008.

5.) In The Washington Post, Charles Murray verifies what the Tea Party has always suspected: America is controlled by a “New Elite” that is suspicious, if not downright hostile, toward ordinary White people in the American Heartland.

This “cognitive elite” is the product of America’s meritocracy. It sucks up the brightest kids through the universities, brainwashes them into a progressive worldview, and sorts and concentrates the “best and the brightest” in selective geographic suburbs, where they have little contact with the common people and their culture.

The cogelites differ from ordinary people in everything from their travel destinations to their exercise routines to their favorite television shows to their taste in fashion to the sports they watch. Not to mention their political ideology, religion, zip codes, sense of identity, and moral sense. Most of them don’t have the slightest familiarity with the skills and intelligence it takes to run a successful business.

Lee Harris explored the implications of this in The Next American Civil War. Angelo Codevilla has also draw attention to the growing political chasm between the “Country Class” and the “Ruling Class.” His popular essay has since been released as a book.

What Lee Harris, Angelo Codevilla, and Charles Murray don’t tell you, which we can say openly here, is that Jews are the core component of the “Blues” or the “Ruling Class,” as we saw when CNN fired Rick Sanchez, or when Jimmy Carter begged for forgiveness from the Jewish community.

Every Jew isn’t a “Blue.” Jews aren’t the only people who are “Blues.”  Quite often, Judaism and “Blueness” are at odds, but it is fair to say that the majority of Jews are Blues, or that American Jewry is the “center of gravity” of the Far Left in America, and that its weight and cumulative influence in our political system (especially on our moral and aesthetic sensibilities) explains much of the SWPL phenomenon and the Left’s success in the culture war.

The Tea Party is a “pointless rebellion” unless it is willing to take on the sacred cow of meritocracy which is the ultimate source of this type of social stratification.

Final Thoughts

I don’t see this sorting and polarization going away anytime soon. The most likely scenario is that the “Reds” (the coalescing White vote) will concentrate in the Republican Party and the “Blues” will concentrate in the Democratic Party. Identity politics will gradually come to the fore and polarization will drive a wedge between the American Heartland and the political class.

In the context of a collapsing economy and the declining legitimacy of the federal government, White Nationalists will be in a position to spread their radical message to a broader, mainstream White constituency. The success or failure of the White Nationalist project will ultimately turn on their ability to connect with and mobilize Red America around separatist ends.