After suffering through the umpteenth diary entry about how all southerners are racists unworthy of voting Democrat, I think it is about time we have a frank discussion about bigotry on this site.
It is starting to seem to me that many self-proclaimed liberals on this site have a tendency to decry racism and stereotypes while simultaneously wallowing in several of their own. I am not going to name names or provide quotes, because I do not want to call people bigots and racists. Having such a term thrown in your direction is an extremely unpleasant experience.
Decrying Zell Miller as a racist for arguing that the Democratic Party is too liberal is absurd and offensive. Comparing people with confederate flag stickers to Nazis, which has happened several times on this board, is offensive on several levels. Saying its time to write off the South is both a stupid election strategy, and is actually quite prejudicial.
For me, that Kerry, Gephardt and many of the Anybody But Dean posters on this site would immediately and gleefully excoriate Dean for stating that he wants people with confederate flags to--horrors!--vote for him is to me demonstrative of the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and the decline of liberalism in this country. If poor and working class whites in the south are deemed unworthy of voting Democrat because non-southern liberals stereotype them as racists who would only vote for other racists, then we as liberals and progressive have engaged in an extreme form of bigotry that will certainly doom the Democratic party for the foreseeable future.
The best article I have read on this subject came from Sam Smith. Of course, Smith is a well-educated middle-class white dude from Philly who edits the progressive review and who is morally complicit with thousands of civilian deaths in Baghdad by supporting Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, so he may be unworthy of voting Democrat as well:
By any traditional Democratic standards, this constituency should be a natural. After all, what more dramatically illustrates the failure of two decades of corporatist economics than how far these white males have been left behind? Yet because some of them still cling to the myths the southern white establishment taught their daddies and their granddaddies, the likes of Gephardt and Kerry don't think they qualify as Democratic voters.
In fact, the best way to change people's minds about matters such as ethnic relations is to put them in situations that challenge their presumptions. Like joining a multicultural political coalition that works. It's change produced by shared experience rather than moral by revelation.
Martin Luther King understood this as he admonished his aides to include in their dreams the hope that their present opponents would become their future friends. And he realized that rules of correct behavior were insufficient:
"Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right."
...
The decline of liberalism has been accelerated by the growing number of American subcultures deemed unworthy by its advocates: gun owners, church goers, pickup drivers with confederate flag stickers. Yet the gun owner could be an important ally for civil liberties, the churchgoer a voice for political integrity, the pickup driver a supporter of national healthcare.
We'll never know until we try. Dean, coming off some successful approaches to black voters, has now turned to another group the establishment, including its liberal branch, doesn't really give much of damn about: the struggling white male. These two groups are primarily antagonistic because they have been taught to see life that way by those who really don't want them getting along. Instead of inveighing in the best liberal fashion against all stereotypes save one's own, Dean is mixing things up a bit. A Dean bumper sticker next to a confederate flag on a pickup may not be utopia, but it would be sure sign of positive change which, these days, would be a pretty big change in itself.
We need to stop insulting people and making assumptions about them because of where they were born. Unless Democrats can make the south competitive without always having a southern nominee, we are doomed nationally. Personally, from now on I am going to give a "1" rating to any comment that stereotypes all southern whites as racist. I hope that other people do the same and that we can work to stamp out a clear case of liberal bigotry on this board. This bigotry exists in a larger context outside of this board and, much like racism in the south, is just as damaging to us as it is to those who we stereotype.