http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/mark-ames/33836/we-the-spitefulIn the summer of 2004, I published an article in the New York Press that answered Thomas Frank's question "What's the Matter With Kansas?" The Bush-Kerry campaign was heating up, and it was clear to me that the American left was going to make the same mistake it's been making for 30 years, and will continue making until it faces some unpleasant truths about the rank, farcical psychology that drives American voting habits. Why don't they vote in their own economic interests? Why don't voters vote rationally, the way we were taught in grade school civics classes? In a rational world, with rational voters voting in their rational economic interests, Bush--who dragged America into two lost wars before destroying the entire financial system--would've been forced to resign before the first primary and exiled to Saudi Arabia; rationally, rational voters would have elected anyone or anything, John Kerry or a coconut crab, over that fuck-up of fuck-ups, George W. Bush.
The answer came to me just I was just finishing my book Going Postal. Researching and writing that book was a real mind-fuck: spending all those isolated months sloshing through Middle American malice. I realized something obvious when I pulled back from all that research and looked at the Kerry-Bush race: malice and spite are as American as baseball and apple pie. But it's never admitted into our romantic, naive, sentimental understanding of who Americans really are, and what their lives are really like.
If the left wants to understand American voters, it needs to once and for all stop sentimentalizing them as inherently decent, well-meaning people being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs--because the awful truth is that they're mean, spiteful jerks being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs. The left's naive, sentimental, middle-class view of "the people" blinds them to all of the malice and spite that is a major premise of Middle American life. It's the same middle-class sentimentality that allowed the left to be duped into projecting candidate Obama into the great progressive messiah, despite the fact that Obama's record offered little evidence besides skin pigment to support that hope. (For the record, I called out the left's gullible Obamaphilia during the primary campaigns in early 2008--here in Alternet, and here in The eXile.)
Here we are, in 2011--and although 2004 seems like a different world from today, separated by more events than we can make sense of, the left still hasn't come around to answering that big Kansas mystery about Americans' farcical voting habits. So the left was left baffled once again when, in 2009, millions of Americans volunteered as foot-soldiers to fight for a second-rate TV personality named Rick Santelli and his rich speculator friends at the Chicago Exchange, who called for a revolution to protect their money from "losers" because Santelli and his speculator buddies didn't want to "subsidize losers' mortgages." Next thing you know, these same losers took to the streets to defend the semi-celebrity Santelli, his rich speculator pals, and the Koch brothers from... losers.
That is, they revolted against themselves.
More at the link --