Magical white rain, and Republican class warfare

Totally unrelated to anything else that I'm going to say here, but the baby in that pumpkin is sooo adorable!

A very very very very long time ago (we're talking colonial times here), it snowed in Florida. A lot. A veritable "shit ton" of snow. Some of you are probably already thinking that I'm telling fairly tales, but I promise you on my testicles that snow in fact does occur in Florida, although it virtually always (99.999% of the time) melts long before reaching the ground; significant accumulations are things that only happen once per generation, at most, and then generally only in northern parts of the state. As it turns out, this snow was much more like something you'd see in Vermont or Michigan as opposed to Florida. The thoroughly confused locals, lacking any sort of knowledge of science (or Northern weather), referred to the stuff as "extraordinary white rain." And now I can perpetuate stereotypes about Floridian winter ignorance by using that term jokingly :-). Hence the title of today's post, and also our first snow of what promises to be an incredibly bitter winter (the worst in 5 years, according to the wonks who study that stuff.) Rather cold rain this morning, and I just walked outside a tad ago after noticing this on my Weatherbug and it is indeed snowing, albeit a rather wet snow at this point. And wouldn't you know, for some odd reason it cheered me up a tad. Not that I like snow, but I think it's because it has such strong holiday-oriented connotations. Plus I don't have to drive anywhere, so let it snow boatloads if it wants; won't really affect my mobility, and I could just build a snowman in Schenley Park :-) Brrrr....I need to get some hot chocolate. The good news is that it will be warming up next week - I even see 65 degrees on the forecast, yay! (I know that these little warm spells can only delay the eventual long-term pain for only so much longer...but I can still be happy about them ! :-P

Technology and Business

Continuing my blogging by connecting my usual set of topics into the upcoming election, I decided that I'd like to discuss some of the various factors that have been slowly but surely pushing many technologists - oftentimes white-collar, high-income, highly educated professionals - squarely into the ranks of the Democratic Party. Even though it often means higher taxes for them. Even though it is commonly considered that the Democratic Party is the "anti-business" party. I was going to do my own analysis, but NY Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks - not at all a raging liberal, but a sensible and well-reasoned journalist - wrote an article a few weeks ago that summarizes the points that I would have made, only better than I would have likely presented them. So without further adieu, here is his thoughtful article discussing the consequences of anti-intellectualism and other destructive trends in contemporary Republican ideology:

The Class War Before Palin

By DAVID BROOKS

Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.

Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company