Reply #7: that may be, but... [View All]

[Lexingtonian]

People here seem to think that what the flap was about was blue collar whites in the South.

It is to some extent. It is also about black Southerners, and about New South/Old South matters, and also about people outside the South.

The problem Dean has is not that Democrats actually think he's wrong in wanting what he says- to represent the best interests of Southern white blue collar folks who get lured into voting Republican. It's that he doesn't understand the political context properly, the priorities and demands according to which Democrats have had to work in the region.

So, even if the argument is formally wrong, Sharpton and Edwards do have a point that the committed Southern Democratic constituencies have to be listened to before Dean tries to take his portion of the Party in that direction.

The critique is misformulated into a shorthand as "Dean doesn't actually understand the South." I do suspect he does see the South rather more like rural Vermont than most of us do.

But there is a more essential problem with Dean's proposal, which is about him personally. It is that in taking an ahistorical tack on the South he's once again indicating that he doesn't really grasp what all the fighting with Republicans has been about for the past fifteen to twenty years. The Dean campaign strategy is in essence the claim that it's all really about control of money. That is to misunderstand the Culture War in its breadth and earnest as merely a raid for plunder, during which the United States has remained much the same country as it was in 1980 as a place to live.

So the real point of the flag flap is not that Dean is an active racist. The point is that he politically misunderstands the country as a whole as the 85% white country he grew up in, and he assumes the conservative notion that white cultural domination is a given. In a country that is 35% non-white (as the South has been, historically), a proportion which is increasing (even if the federal politician class and voters are still over 75% white), there is a problem. And this is how it plays out.