Bugs Bunny’s from Brooklyn and if Bugs ain’t a real American nobody is

This op-ed by mild-mannered eugenicist and Social Darwinian Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve or How I Spent My Summer Vacation Proving I’ve Never Read a Thing by Stephen Jay Gould, has gotten a deserved fisking all around the blogosphere but I want to throw in my two cents.

Murray’s thesis, not explicitly stated, but clear enough is that there are such animules as Regular Murkins and these Regular Murkins are more real, more worthy, more anything good you care to list than all other Murkins, and the elitists who look down on the Regular Murkins and sneer do so at their own electoral and cultural peril.  The Regular Murkins are tired of being looked down on and sneered at and they’re riled up, so watch it, you white wine drinking, Francophiliac, NPR supporting, liberal Irregular Murkins!

Murray, being a Republican propagandist and supporting the Republican agenda to deny all social services and societal and cultural goods and privileges to any one who doesn’t vote Republican, pretty much defines Regular Murkins in the good old Republican way.  Socially conservative white folk living in the small towns and small cities of the Midwest and the South and the more rural and therefore more reliably Republican districts in otherwise Democratic states, excluding New York, California, and Massachusetts because as everyone knows nobody but big-city dwelling white wine swilling elitists live in those states.

Which is to say he defines Regular Murkins as a distinct minority among all Americans.

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them--which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.

Note that?

“…where more than a third of all Americans still live”?

See, Murray’s problem here is that if more or less of a third of all Americans live in small cities, towns, and rural areas, then more or less two thirds don’t!  And---I’m glad to do the math for Murray---one third is significantly less than two thirds.

Murray’s thinking here is that people who grew up in places where the vast majority of Americans live are not authentically Murkin.  Most Americans don’t live in America.

There are a few other qualifications for being a real Murkin by Murray’s lights.  Watching Oprah, following NASCAR, taking a Carnival cruise, reading Left Behind novels, being an Evangelical Christian or having a friend or relative who is one, not going to college, working in a factory, belonging to the Rotary or the Kiwanis club.

There’s a contradiction in the list.

Members of the local Rotary and Kiwanis clubs are unlikely to work in factories, as DougJ notes in a post at Balloon Juice:

I grew up in a small town and from what I have seen, this is correct: the members of Rotary and Kiwanis clubs tend to be fairly well-off and college-educated, small businessmen, etc. as opposed to blue-collar workers.

Doug’s post also includes some numbers Murray didn’t bother to gather for himself:

“Murray’s imaginary U.S.A.Time and again, this essay describes as “mainstream” or “quintessentially American” things that the vast majority of Americans don’t do: living in a small town (80% of Americans don’t), reading Harlequin romances (85% don’t), watching The Price Is Right or Oprah (more than 90% don’t), belonging to Rotary or Kiwanis (99+% belong to neither.)”

Which leads to a natural conclusion:

“It isn’t just “elites” who don’t do these things; the average person doesn’t do them. (Nor follow NASCAR.) They’re not even majority behaviors among the groups where they’re more prevalent: the rural-and-small-town, the poorly educated, the old. So Murray’s quarrel is actually with the REAL mainstream America, is it not?”

That’s what it sounds like, and that’s what it is in effect, but what Murray is trying to do Other-fy what he calls the New Elite who are implicitly smart, successful people who don’t happen to vote Republican.

As Andrew Sullivan points out, it’s the old Nixonian gambit of inciting middle class resentment towards people you suspect might be better than you or of at least having an easier and happier time of it than you are.

Murray defines his New Elite in a way that makes these elitists sound like as many Republicans I know as Democrats, upper middle class children of the suburbs with good college educations working in offices located in big cities and the exurban rings around them.

But he gives his Republican readers an out.  They can fail to recognize themselves as members of the New Elite by falling for Murray’s appeal to a false egalitarianism.  Republican elitists may not watch Oprah or read any Left Behind novels, they may take expensive vacations to fancy places, but they know better than to openly sneer at people who watch Oprah and read Left Behind novels and take whatever vacations they can manage in Orlando theme parks or aboard Carnival cruise ships.

Democrats and liberals sneer at these things, of course.  (At Oprah?  Really?)  How do we know they sneer?  Because we say they do.  It’s a fairly consistent Right Wing habit of mind, treating an accusation you make because it flatters your vanity as though it’s an objective fact the people you accuse openly admit to.

Ok, not just Right Wingers are guilty of that one.  That’s a weakness of human nature.

What it gets down to is that Murray is flattering the vanity of a vital block of Republican voters who are no more regular in their Americanness than any other Americans.  In the same way Right Wingers got to feel like soldiers and Marines during the early days of the War in Iraq by talking up blood and death in the name of those doing the actual fighting and bleeding and dying, upper-class, college-educated, suburban and city-dwelling elitists whose ambitions for themselves and their children is to be members of the New Elite Murray appears to hold in contempt, can feel like salt of the earth working folk just by claiming sympathy with a thoroughly romanticized and safely distant class of real Murkins.

But I want to get back to this idea that real, regular Americans are only to be found in small towns and small cities in the South and Midwest and Republican-voting rural areas elsewhere.

This isn’t Murray’s invention.  It’s the central tenant of Know-Nothingism in America.

“Real Americans, the only Americans whose votes and opinions and interests count are the Americans who are most like me.  The ones who live where I live and live and think as I live and think!”

It’s the core belief of the Tea Party who are endlessly whining about how they’ve been shut out of the governing of their own country because they got outvoted in the last couple of national elections.

They won’t stop whining about it after Tuesday either.  They feel shut out no matter how many elections they win because the very existence of people who are not like them and don’t want to be like them and are still happy and successful drives them insane with jealous rage.

This jealous rage extends to their religion.

Real Americans live where they live.  Real Christians go to their churches.

Which ticks off regular commenter PurpleGirl who wrote in a a couple of paired comments on my post last week, Theirs is the Lord our God, we are to worship no other gods before theirs:

Brooklyn was known as the "The City of Churches." And now, a century after its incorporation into New York City, it can still be called The Borough of Churches. Of course, I think, any of the boroughs comprising NYC can be called that. Between large stone edifices, smaller clap-board buildings, and store front using congregations, I think this city is awash with special, spirit filled spaces: Christian of all stripes, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and everything in between. Take a walk in any neighborhood and you find these spirit homes. This place compares very well to any little Southern berg for its spirit-filled people…

I get mad that places like NYC get portrayed as being not religious or not sufficiently religious compared to other areas, and this includes most of the Northeast and other so-called liberal areas. People are religious, period, in their own ways. It annoys me to no end that so many RTCs (as Fred Clark calls them) believe they have a lock on spirituality or religiousity.

Yeah, but most of those churches are Catholic and what do Jews and Muslims know about God anyway?

Besides, they’re New Yorkers, and we know what they’re like.

Woody, a Brooklyn native, said it:

Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.

Like I said, Murray didn’t invent this idea.  And it’s not just a self-flattering delusion of the Right.  Elitist media types have been pushing it for decades.  Real Americans are white, Christian, Republicans living in the Midwest and the South.

Brooklyn?

Might as well be France.

And “Y’all” is a more American way to talk than “Youse guys.”

Comments

[Linkmeister]

Bruce Katz makes the case for cities and investment therein in the current issue of Time.

Why Charles Murray has any credibility left is one of those things that disturbs me. It's not at the forefront of my thoughts, but whenever he writes one of these articles it jumps up and says "The author of that racist apologia for white people has the gall to theorize about American society again?"

[redactor]

"The author of that racist apologia for white people has the gall to theorize about American society again?"

And my second thought is, "And a major national publication is giving him valuable space (and money, too) for this stuff?"

[Rana]

Decades? Try centuries, all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and his fondness for the virtues of yeoman farmers, and the 1830s' anxieties over the seductive appeal the amoral city held for young people.

I wonder, too, if the distinction is that the virtues of the countryside are cast in terms of the people who already live there, and the virtues of the city are cast in terms of the way they attract new people to them; one's about staying in place and accepting your lot, the other about exploring people and places and one's own potential. If you're terrified of change, or suspect that you'll end up lower on the ladder as a result of change or your own inability to adapt, the city's going to be a place to be suspicious of, and its residents along with it.

[KLG]

Interesting that Andrew Sullivan pipes up. Sullivan is largely responsible for loosing the current incarnation of Charles Murray on the body politic by featuring Murray's (and Herrnstein's, let us not forget) "new" work prominently in the New Republic way back when he was Peretz's Poodle.

[chachabowl]

I wish I could remember who first said it about the right-wing teabaggers, but it gets the point across: "They wear their resentments like a badge of honor."