Prominent Democratic consultant (and current rural liaison for John Edwards) Mudcat Saunders started off a blogging stint at Swampland with a bang:
I have bitched and moaned for years about the lack of tolerance in the elitist wing of the Democratic Party, or what I refer to as the "Metropolitan Opera Wing". These are the people who talk of tolerance but the only true tolerance they ever exhibit is for their own pseudo-intellectual arrogance.
--snip--
I am certain I will get personally attacked for this next statement, but in all honesty, I don't care what the "Metropolitan Wing" of my party thinks. I don't like them. The damage the pseudo-intellectuals have done to my party by abandoning tolerance, combined with their erroneous stereotyping of my people and culture, is something that brings out my incivility. In his column, Joe said, "...the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere." Amen. I must add that this same intellectual arrogance and intolerance overtook the party years ago, and for that very reason, my people in rural America left the tent.
So to those bloggers who believe in a straight-forward dialogue and exchange of ideas, God bless you and thank you. Together, you're coming up with a lot of good stuff, and frankly, much of it has been helpful to me. At the same time, those Democratic bloggers, who have appointed themselves as intellectually superior and believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell.
He followed up with a stirring defense of his words:
1.-Nowhere in my first post did I say I was "anti-blogging". Quite to the contrary, I said to bloggers who want to take the Democratic Party back into the big tent, "God bless you and thank you." I was quoted saying after the Webb election that the "bloggers" led the way. As Casey Stengel said, "You can look it up." The problem I've got is I'm "anti-losing" and don't like a small group of intolerant, intellectually-elites continuously trying to shape the "Big Tent" into a "Pup Tent". The blogs are the Democratic Party's greatest source of power and unity. Why would I am be anti-blogging? In other words, I wasn't talking to all of you. Just some of you.
Chris Bowers gets at some of the contradictions here:
Maybe it is just because I am an irony-loving Gen X type, but there is so much of this type of bizarre, self-contradictory language in Mudcat's post that I think it should be considered a work of true paranoid genius. Start an exchange of ideas by telling people to go to hell. Attack the metropolitan, pseudo-intellectual wing of the Democratic Party by defending Joe Klein. Dismiss John Edwards's biggest area of activist support in the name of rural southern whites. Decry intolerance by stating "I don't care what the "Metropolitan Wing" of my party thinks." Call others pseudo-intellectual without ever sourcing a single stereotype you use. Say you have no problem with incivility in politics, and then lash out against the political blogosphere for being incivil. Claim others are being hypocritical while doing everything I already listed here. Somehow, manage to do all of this in 600 words while maintaining a straight face.
That's a damn good summary, but I want to expand on this. I come to this with some built-in sympathy for the defense of the rural South that Mudcat Saunders specializes in. I've spent a lot of time in small-town Alabama and I have friends there who I love, and it pisses me off to see people like them painted as intolerant, ignorant, or just plain stupid. And I do see that, all too often. But presenting it as if it comes mainly from Democrats (without providing any evidence for that, just casually tossing off a smear against your own party) is hellaciously wrong. It's morally wrong and it's politically moronic.
As Bowers notes, the answer to the problem of intolerance is not to reply by directing exactly the same sneering, dismissive tone at a group you're stereotyping into existence. "The Metropolitan Opera wing"? Saunders can parse his original words all he wants - the fact is that those words bought into every single "effete liberal elites" boogyman the Republicans have tried to create and ride to electoral victory over the past 20 years.
If he wants to make a strong argument for why the Democratic party should give respectful attention to rural voters (in any region of the country) I'm all for it. But trying to do so by furthering exactly the kinds of culture wars bull that Republicans specialize in is not ok.
Update: I meant to point out, before I got too annoyed to focus properly, that as Devilstower posted this morning, Democrats have made major gains in polling of rural voters. Yet another way Saunders is way the hell off base here.
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