Rednecks. Hicks. Hillbillies. Dumb crackers. NASCAR Dads. Trailer trash. Joe Sixpack. Economically masochistic culture warrior fundies. Ignorant, beer-swilling, rib-eating, Bible-banging, truck-driving undereducated yokels. Poor white trash. Those people. You know the kind. The ones who are the matter with Kansas.

That’s why the Democrats lost, isn’t it? Because the True Blue are out of touch with working-class America, and because the yokels are too benighted to see that they are actually voting against their own economic interests. Right?

Wrong. Democrats, quit your whining. Quit your hand-wringing over why the working class doesn’t love you anymore. Quit saying things like:

I think the Democrats are not comfortable speaking the language that resonates with many middle-class and poorer voters: moral values, faith. That’s a message that is reassuring to many voters.

Quit blaming working-class America, and quit worrying about how to get poor people to stop electing Right-wing Republican war-mongers. Why? Because poor people don’t elect Republican war-mongers. Rich people do.

If the election were held only for people makng $50,000/year or less, John Kerry would have whipped George Bush 55%-45%. In fact, if it were held only for people making $100,000/year or less, John Kerry still would have beaten George Bush, 51%-49%.

No, that’s not just a regional dynamic. No, poor people still don’t elect Republicans in red states. Bush lost the South (49%-50%), the Midwest (44%-56%), and the West (47%-52%) among voters making $50,000/year or less. If only people making $50,000/year or less had voted, John Kerry would have picked up Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Virginia, and Louisiana and South Carolina would have been too close to call.

(Election data thanks to CNN Election 2004 Exit Polls.)

So, my dear Blue State Democrats, it wasn’t Joe Sixpack or the American working-class or Bubba down yonder who was responsible for the late unpleasantness. If you want to find someone to blame, don’t blame them, and don’t blame the Democrats for not knowing how to connect with them. If you’re a white dude living in a comfortable suburban neighborhood, blame your neighbors, your boss, and your dad. It’s educated professionals making over $50,000/year who went for Bush, and it was the folks making out with $100,000/year and more who put him over the top. This shouldn’t be surprising–being poor doesn’t mean you’re stupid; people tend to know where their bread is buttered and vote accordingly–yet somehow it has been lost amidst vituperation of the South, masochistic rhetoric about the urgent need for Democrats to slither further to the Right in order to reach middle America, and sadistic rhetoric about the grotesque vices of them there rednecks in Oklahoma and homophobic knuckle-draggers in Wyoming. Fancy that–it’s almost as if Democrats were falling victim to some kind of propaganda or ideology or something.

Here is my modest proposal. For myself, I’m fed up with this crap, so I’m not going to worry too much about it, but if Democrats want to put a roadblock in the way of Bushism then it might behoove them to worry about it some themselves. You just won, convincingly, the working-class vote. You got beat on turnout and disenfranchisement. People making $50,000 / year or less are about 75% of the voting-age population; but they were only 45% of those who were willing and able to vote on November 2. If you want to win, what you have to do is not to slither ever further Right, but rather to energize your base to turn out, and fight back against on-going Republican attempts to purge and suppress their votes. You can do that, not by turning into lite war-mongers, but by having the guts to call Bullshit! on this rich man’s war and poor man’s fight. You can do that, not by trashing feminism and gay liberation, or ignoring them as you just finished doing in 2004, but rather by framing them as part of a comprehensive, populist program, together with some serious talk about class in America. (No, this does not mean that I want Smiley John Edwards as the next candidate.) You can do this, not by capitulating to the Republican’s corporatist pork / warfare program, but by defying it. And you can do this by standing up to make sure that every vote is counted and that the victims of the Republican machine (those working class dudes you want to reach out to so much) actually have an opportunity to vote.

Don’t blame Bubba–but don’t try to pander to the caricature of him that the Republicans want you to buy, either. Try sitting down and having a talk with him over some ribs sometime. You might be surprised to find out how much you agree.

It seems that the first victims of George Bush’s recent accumulation of political capital are the people of Fallujah. In the days leading up to the assault, over 10,000 encircled the city and sealed off all roads. Then they urged “civilians” to flee the coming assault–but by “civilians” they meant all and only women, children, and men over 45. Any and all “military aged men” trying to enter or leave the city would be taken prisoner. Either you sit and wait for the slaughter, or else you enjoy a lovely trip to Abu Ghraib.

And yes, it is slaughter. If you’re a military-aged man in Fallujah, he stated policy of this disciplined and precise strike is, as Wendy McElroy points out, the logic of the old Crusaders: Kill them all! God will know his own. The first major act of this offensive was to raze a hospital to the ground. Aside from the brutal inhumanity of the act, Wendy McElroy also points out that the likely motive is nothing more than to suppress information about the scope of the massacre:

Well…the invasion of Fallujah is now underway with the first brave target being the city’s main hospital. ABC Action News
reports, “The invaders used special tools, powered by .22 caliber blanks, to break open door locks. A rifle-like crackle echoed through the facility. Many patients were herded into hallways and handcuffed until troops determined whether they were insurgents hiding in the hospital.

“Dr. Salih al-Issawi, head of the hospital, said he had asked U.S. officers to allow doctors and ambulances go inside the main part of the city to help the wounded but they refused. There was no confirmation from the Americans.

“‘The American troops’ attempt to take over the hospital was not right because they thought that they would halt medical assistance to the resistance,’ he said by telephone to a reporter inside the city. ‘But they did not realize that the hospital does not belong to anybody, especially the resistance.’

“During the siege of Fallujah last April, doctors at the hospital were a main source of reports about civilian casualties, which U.S. officials insisted were overblown. Those reports generated strong public outage in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world, prompting the Bush administration to call off the offensive.”

These are war crimes being committed in front of our eyes. What is there to say about it, except to report on the latest atrocity? This is nothing less than the face of evil–and all of it being done in our names.

The latest issue of Wired arrived at my door a few days ago with a delighful surprise tucked into the front cover: an unassuming white compact disc, included for free with the magazine, that just happened to contain 16 precision strikes against the intellectual monopolists, freed under a Creative Commons copyleft license for sharing and sampling.

Since I’ve inveighed against enforced intellectual property monopolies and praised copylefting content here before, you know that I’d be delighted just to see the growth in the world of free content (free as in free speech, not as in free lunch–the songs were gratis as well as libre, but that’s not the important part) and the contribution of big-name artists to publicity for the work that Creative Commons is doing.

However, I’m also happy because it has so many damn good songs on it; in the car and at home I’ve been enjoying a free culture that now embraces fantastic tracks from the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Le Tigre, and Chuck D, among others. The real hidden gem of the CD, though, is from The Rapture, a group I’d never encountered before hearing them on the Wired CD, in the form of 7:05 of deviously pulsing electronic deliciousness known as Sister Saviour (Blackstrobe Remix). The groove–racing, zigzagging, turning back on itself in my mind–is something that has to be shared. And the best part is that I can, thanks to artists who are actually willing to turn their work out into the world without threatening people who presume to use it.

Since I like this m?@c3;ba;sica libre so much, I’ve decided to do just that–by making it all available to you, gentle reader. You can find a full track listing and MP3 files of each track in the extended section of this entry. Listen, share, remix. Enjoy!

Further reading

• GT 2003/11/06: Copyleft and Copyright: the Prospects for Liberty
• Rad Geek People’s Daily: Copyleft Notice
• In a Blog’s Stead 2003/09/14: Thoughtcrime Read the rest of M?@c3;ba;sica libre …

Something I meant to mention earlier, but put on the back burner for the duration of the usual November Nonsense: Rad Geek People’s Daily is now syndicated at Anarchoblogs, a rad project that Anarchogeek launched a bit more than a month ago in order to raise awareness of anarchist weblogs and build community and conversations between anarchist webloggers.

If you’re interested in the technical jots and tittles, Anarchoblogs tracks the Atom feed of Geekery Today, and then uses Planet Planet to aggregate posts with posts from all the other feeds that it tracks, and shoehorn the results into an HTML template and some syndication format feeds. If you’re not interested in the technical jots and tittles, the main thing that you need to know is that Anarchoblogs is a great place to find out about anarchist weblogs you haven’t read before, and to keep track of what’s going on on their sites all in one place. All in all, a very cool project cobbled together out of some neat, low-energy hacks.

Give it a look. If you’re an anarchist (autonomist, voluntaryist, syndicalist, whatever), submit your site. Keep on rocking in the free world.

I suppose that I’d feel worse about all this except that I never pinned too much hope on electoral politics–let alone lame-o weak-kneed liberals in the first place. It sucks, but we’ll have to find some way to muddle through–even, perhaps, to resist–and we’d have to do that no matter came out on the top of the heap.

By the way, Greg Palast thinks that Ohio and New Mexico were stolen–based on the exit polls and on worries about ballot spoilage. (He predicted that this would be a problem beforehand, and today he argued on Air America that he was right–based on the disparity between exit polls in Ohio and New Mexico.) If this is true, then I hope people will make something of it–and by people I mean you, because Droopy and Smiley Face have already made it painfully obvious they aren’t going to make a fuss. But as for myself, I’m thinking about voter initiatives and ways forward that don’t involve spending my time on these jerks. (The other, more important, parts of the way forward are education and direct action, but since many of us are going to be thinking about defensive voting in various ways, I do think it’s helpful and important to think about smarter ways of going about that.)

In the meantime, I hope that Democrats are thinking long and hard about the arguments that led them to pick electable John Kerry over Howard Dean–and giving themselves a good, hard kick in the ass over it.