Radio talk show hosts and their callers have been having great sport of late with the peevish comments from the left-wing media gurus and Hollywood-types about the “stupid people” in the “Red states” and “Jesus-land” who had the audacity to ignore the tub-thumping from their betters on Election Day.
Nothing wrong with that: turnabout is fair play. People who think it appropriate to make snide comments about “red necks” and “ignorant Evangelicals” should not be surprised when those they have belittled gloat a little when they get the upper hand at the ballot box.
I must admit that there are times when it is hard for me to determine if those attacking the Bush-voters really mean what they say, or are employing Machiavellian tactics in a last-ditch effort to carry the day politically. How, for example, can one take seriously their accusation that the voters in the Red States are being “un-American” and “unconstitutional” when they exert themselves in the political arena against abortion and homosexual marriage? How does that logic go? That it is unconstitutional and un-American to take a stand against changes in our societal life that would transform the country into something unrecognizable by the Founding Fathers, as well as by the great majority of Americans up until about 30 years ago?
It should not be necessary to cite examples of the angry commentary about the ignorant Red State voters by people like Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman. I suspect you have heard it all by now. Why beat a dead horse? What I propose to do is something else: To consider if there is any merit to their claim that the Red State voters are stupid. Might Dowd and Friedman and Cher be onto something?
Well, yes, they might be. Bear with me.
It was John Stuart Mill who maintained that conservatives are “by law of their existence the stupid party.” Mill was on the mark, if you buy into his notion — shared by the modern Left — of what it means to be an intellectual. Russell Kirk once made the point that the term “intellectual” is of relatively recent origin. Before the 20th century, thoughtful, well-read people were called “scholars” or “bookmen.” Such individuals tended to be defenders of our cultural heritage. In contrast, when the Left uses the term “intellectual,” they mean someone who has bought into one of the “isms” — agnosticism, empiricism, behaviorism, Marxism, Freudianism, and deconstructionism, for example — that challenge the Christian understanding of the social and moral order.
The corollary for the Left is that those who cling to the notion that God made us to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next, are hopelessly naïve, no matter how much they read and how high their IQ. It is their attachment to traditional values that makes them “stupid.” If we could give Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman a dose of truth serum, they would concede that the IQs of the church-going engineers at NASA or the graduates of the Naval Academy who live in the Red States and voted for George Bush are — at least — as high as those of their colleagues at the New York Times, to say nothing of the guests at a cocktail party fund-raiser at Cher’s house. If the truth serum held, they would also concede that Antonin Scalia more than matches Alan Dershowitz in intellectual firepower.
No, it is attitude more than scholarly accomplishment that defines what it means to be intelligent for the modern Left. That is why the Blue State elites will hold in high regard a Hollywood starlet or Manhattan clubwoman, who never reads anything more profound than the society pages but is “tolerant” toward homosexuals and abortionists; and why they will express disdain for a Christian woman with traditional values from the South who reads Flannery O’Connor and T.S. Eliot in the evening after she puts her children to bed.
It is why being able to repeat some reviewer’s clichés about the homosexual deconstructionism in Angels in America counts for more with them than a thorough knowledge of King Lear. Why a familiarity with the vendors who advertise in Architectural Digest establishes bona fides more than the ability to discuss intelligently Jacques Maritain and the Thomistic revival. But why go on in this vein? There is a better way to make our point. We can answer the Blue State elites in kind.
Let’s see: Red State Christians are “stupid.” OK. In comparison to whom? To what segment of the Democrats’ Blue State base? In comparison to the MTV simpletons who repeat clichés about the Bush family’s ties to the Saudis that they learned from Michael Moore? Who ran around their campuses in a tizzy after hearing John Kerry’s warnings about a secret plan to re-establish the draft? To the Clinton apologists who were willing to believe every lie he told about Monica Lewinsky, until the DNA turned up on the blue dress, and who continue to this day to see nothing out of the ordinary about the missing Whitewater files turning up on a desk outside the White House bedroom? Who nodded in agreement when Hillary spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy?”
In comparison to the Democratic voters in the Blue States who fell for decades for the propaganda from butchers like Mao and Stalin about their Marxist utopias? Who went to Cuba to cut sugar cane on Fidel’s collective farms? Who bought into the new Left’s notion that the Cold War was the result of the United States government’s efforts to open markets in Eastern Europe and Asia for its corporate bosses? Who are convinced that that AIDS was created in a laboratory by white scientists to wipe out the black race? And that we would have a cure for AIDS by now, if not for Republican gay-bashers who refuse to fund the research necessary to come up with a cure? Who took seriously Oliver Stone’s paranoia about the assassination of JFK?
To the folks who are willing to buy and repeat every wild rumor about Halliburton’s control over the White House? Who tried to sell the proposition that John Kerry had a principled reason for changing his position on the Iraq War, rather than that he flipped when the polls showed John Dean ahead of him in the race for the Democratic nomination? Who are lining up for psychological counseling to deal with the “trauma” brought on by Bush’s victory?
To the crowd that thinks Al Sharpton was a serious candidate for the presidency? That spent much of their young adult years in a marijuana haze, under a Che Guevara poster, playing Beatles’ records backwards to find out whether Paul was dead? That fell for Dan Rather’s fake accusations against George Bush? That thinks we invaded Afghanistan to get control of an oil pipeline?
That rejected the Swift Boat veterans’ charges without reading the evidence? That is convinced we would have cars running on solar power by now if it were not for the oil and automobile industries’ control over the White House? That thinks George Bush knew about the attack on 9/11 before it happened? That wants to throw the book at the prison guards at Abu Ghraib, but free Mumia Abu-Jamal? That bemoans from Manhattan brownstones and Hamptons summer homes the crass materialism of Republican suburbanites?
Ah, yes, those stupid Red State voters…
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
