Help Me Understand the Right. Really. — By Kevin Drum

First off, we all live in echo chambers nowadays.

Now, grow up in a small town in Oklahoma. Maybe you went to Oklahoma State for a couple of years (maybe). You got a job at the shoe factory like your dad did, and expected to put in your 40 years there, get a watch, and retire on a pension, just like your dad did.

And what happens? Your shoe factory closes down because a liberal Democrat (Bill Clinton -- remember, you live in an echo chamber so you've heard him described as a "liberal Democrat" for 20 years) pushed NAFTA through Congress and now the shoes are made in Mexico.

Your town is dying and you know it, and nobody cares. The article mentions coastal elites sneering at hayseeds from the heartland. Well, I'll come clean here: we do. We do look down on people who live in small dying towns in flyover country. Not all of us, but many of us, and those of us who do, do so loudly and many of them write sitcoms (what was the last sitcom not set in a city on one of the two coasts, or Chicago? I can think of Drew Carey and that's about it). So while the stores and gas stations you grew up with are being boarded up, you're starting to get a lot of mercados and bodegas opening up catering to the immigrants from Latin America who now work in the chicken processing plant outside of town -- a plant that won't hire you because they think you'll stand up for yourself and want too much money. They'd prefer the immigrants of dubious documentation so they can keep wages low and conditions bad -- again, thank you, Bill Clinton, for pushing NAFTA. Now you can't go to 2 out of the 5 stores on main street because you don't speak Spanish and the people who work at those stores barely speak any English.

So, the chief liberal Democrat made clear his Wall Street buddies were more important than your job. He and the rest of the liberal Democrats don't care about your town. What do they care about? Let's watch the 90's: they seem to care a lot about whether the rifle you keep in the gun case has a handgrip that sticks out vertically from the body or not (and they not-so-secretly think you're crazy for owning a gun in the first place). They care about the stagnant water that sometimes pools in your backyard -- so much, in fact, that you aren't allowed to build a shed back there because it's "wetlands". They care about reminding you, over and over again, that you're racist. There are all these inspiring success stories in the media and whatever about women and minorities who made good one way or another. That in itself doesn't bug you, but what does bug you is that this is happening right when people like you, middle-age white males, are facing economic hardship like you never have before. It's not a difficult piece of arithmetic: more for them must be why there's less for me (this is false, it turns out, but not unreasonable).

Your experiences with people in the government have pretty much been uniformly negative. There's the IRS agent who says you aren't doing your 1099 right (and you have to do a 1099 now, because your W-2 job with the shoe factory disappeared, remember?) There's the EPA guy who denied your appeal about the shed without even bothering to come look at the property. He just read that there was X amount of standing water, so you couldn't build anything. There's the USDA guy who basically bribed your friend to sell his farm to Monsanto and left him with a few hundred thousand dollars and no livelihood.

Your local bank gets bought by MegaNationalBankCorp, because Bill Clinton decided banks needed a free hand in the Brave New Economy. Now you have to pay $8 to see a teller.

I could keep going.

Lower middle class white men feel the way they do because we Democrats haven't been very good at disguising our contempt for them, from their perspective.

We need to do a better job.

This is a fight between the greedy and the middle class, between Wall Street and Main Street, between the elite and the people. It is the same fight that the founding fathers fought. And we are losing. But it isn't hopeless. We just need to help each other and understand each other.

I have a RW brother in law (several in fact) that I work hard to help them understand that we are on the same side and that Bill Clinton (God - I hate it when they bring him up - as much as I miss that folksy way he had of explaining things, he was a RWer by policy analysis) was NOT a liberal despite the title. It's slow going but I keep bringing up how policy will effect their kids and how different policy will help them.

They sort of get it and they sort of question it but then they turn on AM radio and Faux Noise again (not that they actually ever turn it off) and ... It's been interestsing tho' to watch them start that the country is sinking now that the water is washing over the bows into their budweiser.

I was sort of like the type you described there ( I'm reasonably well read and didn't live in the echo chamber, and I'm secular ) but looking back, it was really was the "third-way" governing of the democratic party ( made most apparent during Clinton's terms ) that kept me registered GOP as long as it did. As a blue collar union worker I always knew nearly all the GOP was hostile at worst, indifferent at best to the hardships you described above. Problem was, the Democratic party, other than in som lip-service "I feel your pain" rhetoric, was just as contemptuous when it came to actual governing/legislation. In oversimplified terms, the "Brie and Volvo" crowd really cared not a whit for the 6-pack and Ford crowd...except of course on election day when the tent needs to be temporarily larger. The "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" types were, for all intents and purposes, viewed as the worst of both worlds by myself and my peers. Not that we were hostile to the progressive social views as such: It's just that we weren't the idle rich/comfortably well-off types that could afford to care only about noble ideas. They're too busy just trying to survive, and they don't like their tastes or hobbies being ridiculed.

It was the GOP's going full-on off-the-rails crazy that made me recently quit the party...though in reality at was a gradual 2 year or so process. Just too too hard right for me.

Nice and succinct...any further explanation needed?

The assumption of the article is that conservatives in general believe each of the things stated in the first paragraph exactly as stated, and that there isn't any truth to any of those things. And the author just assumes the truth of that. He doesn't refute any of the statements. He doesn't show how there isn't any truth to all of them. He takes as given that conservatives believe a lot of crazy stuff that is just totally untrue, and then asks "why?" He's not even in the real world. If he really wants to understand conservatives, he could start by admitting that there is some truth in what they say.