Much ado is made by Democratic leadership and strategists of the need to cultivate voters who are not committed Democrats. Every program proposed by the "left wing", every advertisement by MoveOn.org, is countered with a wail that "we"must avoid alienating these uncommitted moderates, these working-class and union backers, these social conservatives and paleolithic patriots, who must be courted with proposals that are, above all, not too Radical. There’s just one little problem with this strategy, about which I think perhaps the Democratic leadership needs more information. The problem is, it’s WRONG. I should know, because I’m one of those people who will never, ever allow themselves to be labeled as Democrats. Liberal, maybe. Radical, far more likely. Independent, always. NOT a Democrat. Where I come from, that’s like saying you’ve given up the right to think for yourself.
Let me put it upfront: I was born into the Defense Department and took my childhood scrapes on playground equipment made of the scrapped hulks of WWII fighters and bombers. My parents were Goldwater Republicans; my father was an ardent Cold Warrior of the Defense Intelligence Service and spent several tours of duty in Okinawa, Vietnam, and Burma tracking down illegal arms-for-drugs deals. My stepfather managed the library at CIA headquarters. My little brother supervised hush-hush weapons development projects for the Pentagon for twenty years until he got so disgusted with the Rumsfeld regime that he walked across the street to NASA. I married a Virginia farmer whose family had been in the country since 1640, a member in good standing of the National Alliance, whose primary hobby was collecting firearms, which he used mainly to shoot snakes. Although my father was from New Jersey, my mother claims Illinois, and I was raised in and out of DC, my Chicago-born partner at work assumed from my speech and affinity for our rural, southern Ohio patients, that I was a native Appalachian.
What I’m trying to say is, I was born and raised in Defense Department Groupthink and naturalized in Red State Mental Gymnastics. I know the jokes you think are too crude to imagine and have laughed at many of them. I’ve run out of the apartment at ten pm because some jerk was shooting at his girlfriend in the courtyard below, comforted her inside sobbing and shaking, and watched her refuse to press charges against him because he was "the best thing that’s ever happened to me". I’ve dealt blackjack to ranchers on the wrong (East) side of Oregon, and offered unwanted medical care (and advice) to truckers on the Kentucky border. I’ve pushed paper for the lawyers who defend Right-to-Lifers and property developers on the Chesapeake Bay. I own property in the mountains next to a man I have sued, who has threatened me with a gun, and I go back up there regularly with and without an escort; usually without my rifle either. I can also wash up, put on a nice necklace, and have tea with the lady business-owners of Richmond, retired admirals on the Neck, or active mid-level bureaucrats in Alexandria without seeming out of place. So perhaps I can shed a little more light on how such people are thinking, than pollsters who call people up during dinner and ask them a series of stock questions, or people who don’t ask them anything at all. In the interest of electing more Democrats so as to pursue a more progressive governing consensus, let me give you some psychobabble to chew on.
The Defense/Contractor Moderate differs from the NASCAR Dad. Their knowledge bases are different, as are the linchpins of their psychology, but neither of them is going to vote for the Democratic party based on its current leadership performance, because these voting blocks seek to align themselves with a perception of STRENGTH. You can think of it as the "authoritarian" propensity if you want; or you can recognize that this is a fundamental aspect of all human politics. The Alpha Male is the one who is strong enough to enforce his will, whether directly or through the mobilization of leverage and alliances. People who hold and crave power -- and that's the nuts and bolts of both military and civilian Insiders -- ally with an Alpha because he has the power to either force their obedience or purchase their loyalty. But "a helpless King is no man's lord" -- an Alpha must be able to deliver "the goods" or they're no use to the power-seekers. And the Democrats are doing their damnedest to make themselves look as UNPOWERFUL as can be imagined.
Consider the Defense/Contractor mindset. As an outsider, you might think that these are the people who worship strength, but you’d be wrong. They worship COMPETENCE. Ever since the Iraq war started to go obviously south, they (my little brother is one of them, so I hear it ALL at home for the holidays) have become disenchanted with their leadership. That the war is "wrong" is not a point that will make any headway with them. That Bush showed "strength" in attacking doesn’t impress them in the least, either, because that was then, and this is now, and it didn't work. My father would point out that the Army always wants a nice little war – not too big, not too long, but just big and long enough to rotate the entire officer corps through so that they can be eligible for promotions. You can’t really shine in the Army unless you occasionally go to war. You can’t justify larger commands, and with them higher ranks for career officers, without SOMETHING for all those warm troop-bodies to do. But the post WWII army is a product of the Machine Era. The point of the exercise is for everyone and everything to operate seamlessly, mechanically, precisely, without a hitch. The messiness of a real war – one in which attacks are unpredictable, casualties unavoidable and unplanned, and troops and supplies overextended – doesn’t fit the bill. It makes holes in the nice little organizational units. And the continuation of the business far beyond specifications has meant all sorts of shakeups in the regular schedule of training, maintenance, and volley-ball tournaments. It’s no longer neat and organized. It’s a MESS. And military people hate messes. They hate uncontrolled, erratic, unpredictable situations .... like wars. They hate the people whose blithering incompetence, failure to PLAN PROPERLY or have sufficient contingency plans, and gross disregard of the RULES are destroying their lives and the lives of their friends and families. The Powell doctrine is much more to their liking: never go into a war you can’t win and be finished with in time for Christmas at home, with everybody still alive and in possession of all their body parts. Soldiers are people, too.
But that doesn’t mean they are likely to vote for people who can’t even organize a single up-or-down vote in Congress. Where’s the competence, in a leadership that can’t control its own rank-and-file? That rolls over on matters it proclaims to be of supreme importance? That can’t decide if it’s going to fund the war or not? Military and contracting leadership is made up of engineers. When they have an argument about whether something will work or not, they can resort to crunching the numbers. They don’t need to swap lies and promises in a back room in order for water to run downhill and dynamite to explode. Your failure to achieve consensus or embrace action is, to them, the same thing they’re already facing in Iraq. Play to win, or quit, they say; stop monkeying around. The most obscene insult in military society is "politician".
The NASCAR Dad probably watches Fox News, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, etc., far more hours in a day than he ought to. The fact is, that if he’s got a job he’s working about sixy hours a week, while if he doesn’t have a job, he’s got no money; and either way he has not enough cash, not enough sleep, and very little to be proud of in his life. The only thing that keeps him smiling is his wife and/or kids; otherwise, life sucks. Whether working or on disability, he is consistently treated by people in positions of power as though he were still a child. He is most likely in debt to the tune of twice his annual earnings or more, so he doesn’t dare quit or act out in a way that could get him fired. His only choice with regard to work is whether to volunteer for more overtime or catch up on Saturday mornings for all the sleep he missed during the week. His wife is in similar circumstances (whether still married or now a divorced single mom), but she gets paid less and also has primary responsibility for the kids. Stress and sleep deprivation combined with constant suppression of ego puts them both in a continual state of disseminated, unfocused anger. About half the time they focus this anger on each other or on a particularly obnoxious boss, but even without real marital conflicts and with a decent superior at work, the situation is infuriating. Every day makes them "another day older and deeper in debt". Subconsciously they know that it’s because The System makes it so. The information they have available tells them that The System is The Government. Obviously The Government is their enemy.
Are Reid and Pelosi changing that perception? Not bloody likely. For one thing, there’s the matter of all the easily-available information still being controlled by corporate goons. Remember, these folks don’t have a couple of hours a day at a computer terminal to seek out real information. They have to take what they can get on the fly, and that’s usually abreviated and spun. The problem is compounded by their education, or lack of it – working class people went to working class schools, where they were probably taught to memorize the answers in the book and NOT to ask questions. As were their parents before them, unless perchance the family has been involved with a union. But if Daddy belonged to a union in the seventies, he probably lost his job in the eighties. As one disgruntled worker told me, "I learned that being in a union is no protection from having the entire company offshored." Public school is no guarantee of education. And among the working class, intelligence and initiative are not rewarded; they threaten the Boss’s insecure ego (just like the Teacher’s before him) and are likely to get you fired, and therefore if you have them, they’re best hidden from sight.
So what do these angry, disgruntled, indebted, uninsured voters want? Pussyfooting around issues and polite compromises with the Powers That Be that are slowly strangling the life out of them? Look at what they watch on TV: people who look like them ranting angrily at everything and everyone who appears to be in control of their lives. Angry white men don’t want your dignity, your professional courtesy, your genteel acquiescence to bullying without a fight. Their anger arises out of being trapped in circumstances where they CANNOT fight against the powers that hold them down without hurting themselves and their loved ones even more. They LONG for a good, open excuse to land a fist straight on their oppressor’s nose ... except that it’s hard figuring out who that oppressor really is, and very likely that if they do they'll be hauled away for life; so they’re inclined to follow just about anyone who offers them a target that won't or can't punch back, or takes on one of the targets they'd LIKE to hit but can't, and gets out there and FIGHTS.
Are you fighting? Are you taking on the Powers That Be and landing them a good snock on the nose? Hell, no. You’re sitting around passing meaningless resolutions to disapprove of a private citizen group taking out an ad to say publicly what every one of them has said to his TV set in the privacy of his own home. You have a stupid, arrogant, incompetent lame-duck of a President as an enemy, and you can’t even force him to use the veto power he keeps threatening. You have a majority, and you continue to act like a pussy-whipped minority. How can the downtrodden and genuinely oppressed turn to you for relief? You can’t visit the Congressional washrooms without first getting a pass signed off on by fifteen major lobbyists. You’re as impotent as the NASCAR Dad, but while he attempts to maintain some shred of his own ego, you get down and lick the feet of the corporate toads that are standing on his back.
The idea that you can triangulate your way to raprochement with moderate and Independent voters is fundamentally flawed. Lead, and people will follow. But you can’t be King of the Hill without knocking a few heads together. The people whose approval you are seeking don’t want moderate, reasoned, charitable, "adult" behavior, forgiveness of sins, and "everybody get along". They don't want incompetence rewarded by a pat on the back and generous pension, and corporate villains offered the opportunity to shift their investments into a new line of profit while being gently eased out of their last scam. They want competent control reasserted over our military, fiscal, and administrative disasters, and then some solid ass-kicking where it is richly deserved. There are those who say that the conservative mind is a primitive mind, the mind of a child who still wants the Bad Guys to be punished. Well, if you're going to court the votes of those primitive minds, you'd best keep in mind what satisfies them.