The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America

 

I am continually dismayed by the level of fear, contempt, and anger that many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people demonstrate toward Christians and rural people (especially southerners). This complex of negative emotions often greatly exceeds anything that these same people feel toward radical Islamists or dangerous rogue-state governments. I’m not a Christian myself,  but I’d think that one would be a lot more worried about people who want to cut your head off, blow you up, or at a bare minimum shut down your freedom of speech than about people who want to talk to you about Jesus (or Nascar!)

It seems that there are quite a few people who vote Democratic, even when their domestic and foreign-policy views are not closely aligned with those of the Democratic Party, because they view the Republican Party and its candidates as being dominated by Christians and “rednecks.” This phenomenon has become even more noticeable of late, with the vitriolic attitude of certain prominent “conservatives” toward Trump supporters as a class.

What is the origin of this anti-Christian anti-“redneck” feeling? Some have suggested that it’s a matter of oikophobia … the aversion to the familiar, or “the repudiation of inheritance and home,” as philosopher Roger Scruton uses the term. I think this is doubtless true in some cases: the kid who grew up in a rural Christian home and wants to make a clean break with his family heritage, or the individual who grew up in an oppressively conformist Bible Belt community. But I think such cases represent a relatively small part of the category of people I’m talking about here. A fervently anti-Christian, anti-Southern individual who grew up in New York or Boston or San Francisco is unlikely to be motivated by oikophobia. Indeed, far from being excessively familiar, Christians and Southern people are likely as exotic to him as the most remote tribes of New Guinea.

Equally exotic, but much safer to sneer at. And here, I think, we have the explanation for much, though not all, of the anti-Christian, anti-Southern bigotry. It is a safe outlet for the unfortunately-common human tendency to look down on members of an out group. Safer socially than bigotry against Black people or gays or those New Guinea tribesmen; much less likely to earn you the disapproval of authority figures in school or work or of your neighbors. Safer physically than saying anything negative about Muslims, as you’re much less likely to face violent retaliation.

There are some other factors which I think motivate some people toward the anti-Christian anti-Southern mindset. One is the fear that Christians, especially Southern Christians, are anti-science, and that Republican electoral victories will reduce Federal support for science or even lead to restrictions on scientific research. And indeed, some conservatives/Republicans have been known to make some pretty strange statements, such as Rep. Paul Broun’s recent assertion, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”

But in realistic terms, there is far more threat to US science from “animal rights” terrorists – the vast majority of whom are politically on the Left – than from anti-evolutionists. Also, there are certainly significant pressures on allowable and non-allowable topics for university research emanating from the “politically correct” Left. And numerous followers of “progressivism” are believers in various forms of mysticism, such as magical crystals and a conscious Gaia, which are at least as inconsistent with pure scientific materialism as are the Biblical miracles. At the level of practical technology, the irrational hostility toward nuclear power, genetically-modified crops, etc., comes almost entirely from the Left.

Another factor is sex. Many seem to fear that conservatives/Republicans are anti-sex “Puritans” and will force women into metaphorical (or maybe not so metaphorical!) chastity belts. Democratic Party operatives have done their best to conflate opposition to forcing institutions to pay for birth control with opposition to birth control itself. In reality, no serious Republican national-level politician is remotely proposing the banning of birth control or, for that matter, the banning of homosexuality. And, speaking of “Puritanism,” we should note that the anti-male hostility emanating from certain radical feminists, who are almost entirely creatures of the Left, has done much to poison the relationship between the sexes, especially on college campuses.

Yet another factor involved in fear/hostility toward Christians is historical: it is indeed true that Christianity has often been used as an excuse for religious persecutions. Mary Antin, a Jewish immigrant who came to the US from Russia in the early 1900s, wrote that pogroms in her home country had sometimes been led by priests carrying crucifixes and it took her several years to get past an instinctual aversive reaction when passing by a Christian church. (She later became acquainted with several American priests and came to respect them for the work they were doing among the poor.) The Holocaust was perpetrated largely by people who represented themselves as Protestants or Catholics. But in today’s world, hostility toward Israel, which more than occasionally shades off into outright anti-Semitism, is mainly generated by the “progressive” Left. Surely one is far more likely to encounter anti-Semitism among the members of the church that Barack Obama attended for 20 years than among the members of your typical Southern Baptist church or Catholic parish.

It’s important to understand history, but it’s also very dangerous to identify one’s friends and enemies based entirely on historical considerations while ignoring current realities. In the Polish town of Eishyshok at the time of the German invasion in 1941, many of the local Jews viewed the coming of the German troops with equanimity. The town had been occupied during the earlier war, and the German officers and troops of that time had been very well-behaved and even helpful, and those residents who had been POWs in Germany during WWI spoke highly of their good treatment. Too many of the town’s Jews failed to realize that “German soldier” meant something different in 1941 than it had in 1914. Analogously, “Democratic politician” means something very different in 2018 than it did in 1960.

The primary factor behind anti-Christian/anti-“redneck” feelings is, almost certainly, the fact that these groups offer a convenient target for in-group solidarity and feelings of superiority at the expense of the “other.” To the extent that people not motivated by this factor are considering a vote for “progressive” Democrats based on concerns about Christians and “rednecks,” they are prioritizing fears which are largely imaginary over dangers which are all too real.

These anti-Christian, anti-“redneck” phobias have been key contributors to the spread of the “progressive” ideology that threatens virtually all aspects of American life, from freedom of speech to national security to economic well-being.

This is an edited version of a post that I published at Chicago Boyz in 2012 and again in 2015. There are good discussion threads at both earlier posts.

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  1. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    David Foster (View Comment):

    I discussed some of these issues at my post Faux Manufacturing Nostalgia.

    You wrote there:

    I have also read that circa the same period, there was considerable worker sabotage in the auto assembly plants (for example, dropping bolts in places where they shouldn’t go in order to create a hard-to-find, hard-to-fix rattle.) Some of this was certainly a reaction to the antediluvian and obnoxious management practices that were then common among U.S. auto manufacturers, but it’s hard to believe the hostility wasn’t also driven by the overall change in the social climate.

    At around that time, the father of a childhood friend of mine was a senior manager in a manufacturing plant in a related industry; they had a bad rash of sabotage. They investigated, and found that the organizer was a radical leftist. His application noted his high school diploma, but omitted the two Masters’ degrees. I wasn’t privy to the details but I definitely got the impression that the investigation found there to be a significant organization behind it.

    Probably any industry making equipment used by the military was liable to sabotage.

    • #31
  2. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    Related to this topic:  Heather MacDonald:

    What do you do if you are the New York Times and 20 people show up to the white-supremacist rally that you had been breathlessly billing as further proof of the normalization of hatred in the Donald Trump era? Expand the definition of “white supremacist” to cover a large portion of the American electorate and its representatives.

    Read the whole thing.

    • #32
  3. Dorrk Inactive
    Dorrk
    @Dorrk

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    You can go back 80 years in pop culture and see a certain amount of mocking of the rubes out in the hinterlands.

    Pop Culture plays a huge part in this for my generation (I’m 46). At the end of the 1970s we had two of the highest grossing movies of that era, featuring two of the biggest stars at the time, celebrating or at least not looking down on rural “heroes:” Smokey and the Bandit and Every Which Way But Loose. As soon as Reagan was elected, and The Moral Majority was seen as a force in politics, that disappeared, and from then on the image of the rural man turned from backwoods maverick into pitiable “white trash.”

    Hollywood in the 1980s firmed up its formulas with three stock villains: preacher, soldier and businessman; in other words, the three pillars of conservative America. I grew up terrified of a blurry combination of the first two: that an apocalyptic zealot would start a nuclear war; but, less sensationally, the common image of these three types is that they were mean: some preachers wouldn’t let kids dance while others were murdering prostitutes; soldiers spent all day yelling at other soldiers and killing poor brown villagers; businessmen wanted to take away urban rec centers and turn them into parking garages all while murdering their mistresses. What these three really have in common is that they were mean to the artistic types who create movies and TV. The first two demand conformity, and artists typically reject rules; businessman exploit artists or ruin their works in the name of commerce.

    These are the forces that led that kid in Dead Poets Society to kill himself, so we should all hate them. It sounds reductive, but this was a profoundly media-fed generation with only a few sources of media to choose from. Unlike many others my age, I became aware enough of these common tropes to be able to look at them from the outside and see what they were doing, and yet I still feel their influence in my subconsciousness. I think I have a natural contrariness, especially when it comes to cliches, that has allowed me to compartmentalize their effects.

    IMO, the OP’s argument is the biggest issue conservatives face in the PR war of politics, more than any debate over any issue. An inculcated loathing for these “conservative” types leads many voters to START by choosing whatever position is in opposition to mean old rich white Christian southern pro-military men, because they are the villains. That’s why I posted a few months ago asking what is the purpose of the right’s focus on homosexuality, which only reaffirms a prejudice that acts as an impermeable barrier to many younger voters. We need a powerful and effective branding change before we start introducing issues, but that also means facing the self-imposed identity politics on our side from which we refuse to let go.

    • #33
  4. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    Re television and its impacts:  Trent Telenko provided links about The Rural Purge:

    Wikipedia article

    Medium.com

    From the second link:

    What you don’t see is shows set in rural areas. Try and think of a sitcom that has come out in the last handful of decades that took place in the country. You may find that difficult, and there is a reason for that.

    First, we must go back to a bygone era when you couldn’t swing a dead cow without hitting a sitcom, or TV show, with a rural bend to it. In the ’60s, rural themed shows, and shows that were designed to appeal to a “rural” audience, were all the rage.

    The descriptions of how this changed are interesting.

    • #34
  5. Eridemus Coolidge
    Eridemus
    @Eridemus

    I live in a neighboring state to Tennessee, and was shocked at the reaction when I mentioned to a friend that a relative was considering moving there. There was a time for a year or two that working from his laptop was allowed by his company (no longer). His reasoning was that he could avoid property taxes.

    Now, this friend was born in and spent all of her lifespan so far in a city not any more remarkable than Knoxville and she likes to have “southern habits” stuff on her Facebook for camaraderie. She’s also one of those puzzling voters who, taught her classroom students strict rules adherence etc. but votes far left. So her reaction shone forth the latter part of her inconsistency, sputtering that Tennessee was backwards, everybody was so uneducated and bigoted, etc. I was unmoved, as I had lived there and found if very pleasant years ago. But the point is, this stuff doesn’t just hatch in people from far out of the target regions. 

    • #35
  6. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    The government forcing birth control into compensation is idiotic. The government forcing any benefit package into compensation is idiotic. 

    #GOSPLAN 

    #SOVIET 

    • #36
  7. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Christians conservatives and the like are rivals to the lefty elite. Jonah Goldberg makes this point when it comes to evolutionary psychology. 

    But there’s another reason. As you may have noticed, I’ve become much more interested in evolutionary psychology of late, particularly the topic of coalitional instincts. The coalition instinct is the programming that helped us form strategic groups that advance our self-interest. We are a social species and cooperation is what helped us skyrocket to the top of the food chain. John Tooby, one of the founders of the field, explains, “The primary function that drove the evolution of coalitions is the amplification of the power of its members in conflicts with non-members.”

    He continues:

    This function explains a number of otherwise puzzling phenomena. For example, ancestrally, if you had no coalition you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, preexisting and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership. This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird. Since coalitional programs evolved to promote the self-interest of the coalition’s membership (in dominance, status, legitimacy, resources, moral force, etc.), even coalitions whose organizing ideology originates (ostensibly) to promote human welfare often slide into the most extreme forms of oppression, in complete contradiction to the putative values of the group. Indeed, morally wrong-footing rivals is one point of ideology, and once everyone agrees on something (slavery is wrong) it ceases to be a significant moral issue because it no longer shows local rivals in a bad light. Many argue that there are more slaves in the world today than in the 19th century. Yet because one’s political rivals cannot be delegitimized by being on the wrong side of slavery, few care to be active abolitionists anymore, compared to being, say, speech police. (Emphasis mine).

    Note the causality here. The moral repugnance of slavery is derived from the fact that a rival coalition supports it. Now, I don’t think Tooby is saying that hatred for slavery is simply a product of coalitional us-vs.-themism. But I do think he makes a very good point that when some objectively evil practices are no longer convenient as cudgels against coalitional rivals, they lose much of their power and intensity. 

    This is the real reason why the media are obsessed with Trump’s attacks on them. He is effectively attacking their coalition. This is a pure animalistic hatred of the other and an attempt to seek power in a coalition. As Ctlaw puts it, two allied army soldiers are cleaning their guns in WWII, one says to the other, “Do you think the enemy Germans will surrender before Christmas.” The other soldier says, “The Germans are the adversary, the navy is the enemy.” 

    That’s why lefties are more freaked out about Christians than Muslim terrorists. 

    • #37
  8. CarolJoy Coolidge
    CarolJoy
    @CarolJoy

    David Foster (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    They actively use the laws of their states to cause those areas to die, as with the current situations between the New York City area and Upstate New York, Coastal California and that state’s inland region other than Palm Springs or Sacramento, and a number of other Blue States where the urban centers and their suburbs have passed virtue-signaling policies designed to make themselves feel good, but are toxic to the rural areas and the people who in their minds aren’t worth helping. Compare that to the programs targeting rural areas that were part of the New Deal — you may not have liked the big-government attitude of those programs, but the farm or electrification efforts were part of an overall effort to target the entire U.S. population. Today’s big government types only target their core special interest groups, and none of those live outside the cities or suburbs.

    The current ‘progressives’ tend to be engaging in Horizontal rather than Vertical class warfare.

    And people who are pretty badly-off economically, such as starving part-time professors with little realistic possibility of promotion, tend to identify more with their Horizontal slice (academia) than with other groups on the same Vertical economic level.

    I think men in the academic world who watch while departments like English lit are overtaken by women or gay men actually are getting the message. And a woman who is really into women’s studies but happens to be straight probably is getting the message as well.

    • #38
  9. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    David Foster (View Comment):

    Re television and its impacts: Trent Telenko provided links about The Rural Purge:

    Wikipedia article

    Medium.com

    From the second link:

    What you don’t see is shows set in rural areas. Try and think of a sitcom that has come out in the last handful of decades that took place in the country. You may find that difficult, and there is a reason for that.

    First, we must go back to a bygone era when you couldn’t swing a dead cow without hitting a sitcom, or TV show, with a rural bend to it. In the ’60s, rural themed shows, and shows that were designed to appeal to a “rural” audience, were all the rage.

    The descriptions of how this changed are interesting.

    There was a joyous glee among the urban TV critics of the land when CBS cancelled its rural comedies in the spring of 1971, in the wake of the debut of “All In the Family” that January. Most of the rural shows were getting long in the tooth, but the critics also swooned over the idea that America would now be treated to political situation comedies instead of hayseed farm fluff, which the Medium article also celebrates when it says “Shows such as All in the Family and M*A*S*H dealt with important social issues, which is what television viewers wanted at the time, and what they weren’t getting from Green Acres.

    TV viewers actually just wanted to be entertained, not educated. and had the critics known in the spring of ’71 that America would embrace Carroll O’Connor’s Archie more than Rob Reiner’s Mike Stivic they might not have been as celebratory, since in their minds the proper people with the proper ideas would be writing and producing the new-style sitcoms and the viewers at home would learn the proper lesson while they were being entertained (as for M*A*S*H, that show would get so serious by its last 3-4 years that the final seasons can be painful to watch in reruns).

    • #39
  10. Freesmith Member
    Freesmith
    @

    “It seems that there are quite a few people who vote Democratic, even when their domestic and foreign-policy views are not closely aligned with those of the Democratic Party, because they view the Republican Party and its candidates as being dominated by Christians and “rednecks.” This phenomenon has become even more noticeable of late, with the vitriolic attitude of certain prominent “conservatives” toward Trump supporters as a class.”

    Most Christians and most Southerners do not view Western Civilization primarily through the twin lenses of slavery and the Holocaust.

    That makes them both anathema to the modern Left.

    Have a discussion about voting preferences, politics or policy with a progressive or with people who have internalized progressive beliefs and it will not be long before you’re awash in minutiae over Jim Crow, the Middle Passage, Eastern European pogroms or the Nazi Party.

    This comment thread is a case in point.

    • #40
  11. ctlaw Coolidge
    ctlaw
    @ctlaw

    Freesmith (View Comment):

    Most Christians and most Southerners do not view Western Civilization primarily through the twin lenses of slavery and the Holocaust.

    That makes them both anathema to the modern Left.

    I have news for you. The modern Left is torn regarding the Holocaust.

    • #41
  12. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Could Be Anyone (View Comment):
    I would also be willing to bet that the majority of the death camp and work camp workers and administrators were Nazi fanatics. Most probably did not have a religious affiliation or upbringing.

    That may be true for the SS that ran the big, industrial camps but the regular “Gottglaubig” Wehrmacht and the Ordnungspolizei extensively participated in the mass murders. The big camps were established partly as a “humanitarian measure” since ordinary soldiers were suffering when they had to carry out this dirty but necessary work.

    More than half of the mass murders, Jewish and not, took place outside the death factories. For the more artisanal traditional pogroms, the local helpers in the “Holocaust by bullet,” and the like, local help was essential, and the locals were generally from a religious background. 

    The Croatian Ustache were of Catholic background; they were enthusiastic participants in mass murder.

    The Slovakian fascist state was run by Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, who was executed for war crimes. His superior, Archbishop Kmetko, flew into a rage when asked to urge Tiso to delay the deportation of Slovakian Jewry and was happy that the Christ killers would finally get what was coming to them.

    Lest you think this is all anti-Catholic, the Serbian Orthodox pitched in too:

    A most striking example of Serbian antisemitism combined with historical revisionism is the case of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1880-1956), revered as one of the most influential church leaders and ideologists after Saint Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church. To Serbs, Bishop Velimirovic
    was a martyr who survived torture in the Dachau prison camp. In truth he was brought to Dachau (as were other prominent European clergy), because the Nazis believed he could be useful for propaganda. There he spent approximately two months as an “Ehrenhaftling” (honour prisoner) in a special section, dining on the same food as the German officers, living in private quarters, and making excursions into town under German escort. From Dachau, this venerated priest endorsed the Holocaust:

    “Europe is presently the main battlefield of the Jew and his father, the devil, against the heavenly Father and his only begotten Son… (Jews) first need to become legally equal with Christians in order to repress Christianity next, turn Christians into atheist, and step on their necks. All the modern European slogans have been made up by Jews, the crucifiers of Christ: democracy, strikes, socialism atheism, tolerance of all religions, pacifism, universal revolution, capitalism and communism… All this has been done with the intention to eliminate Christ… You should think about this, my Serbian brethren, and correspondingly correct your thoughts, desires and acts.”

    The Nazis found enthusiastic help in Ukraine as well. Now in Ukraine, after the Holodomor, one can’t exactly blame Ukrainian men for signing up with the Nazis who were fighting the Russians occupying Ukraine.

    There were anti-Nazi partisans who were willing to help Jews, others who had no problem with killing them.

    • #42
  13. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Freesmith (View Comment):
    Have a discussion about voting preferences, politics or policy with a progressive or with people who have internalized progressive beliefs and it will not be long before you’re awash in minutiae over Jim Crow, the Middle Passage, Eastern European pogroms or the Nazi Party.

    That’s because you think you’re talking politics, but it’s their religion.

    If those progressives are Jews, pogroms and the Holocaust are to their Jewish identity what the Exodus and the Sabbath are to traditionally religious Jews, and they identify the USSR with ending the Holocaust. And Communist “ideals” with tikun olam, R”L.

    What Lenin and Stalin did to Soviet Jewry, and what Stalin planned to do the rest of them before death interrupted him are of secondary importance in that religion. The irony is that they share a key belief with antisemites: that because Jews were disproportionately represented among Bolsheviks, Bolshevism is somehow Jewish.

     

    • #43
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