Lots of commentary on the Barack Obama "rural people cling to religion and guns" comments in San Francisco. You can see commentary from Rod Dreher, Tom Daschle (via Denise Ross), Mickey Kaus, Jay Reding and our own Ken Blanchard. These are all good. Give them a read.
Much of the commentary has referred to Thomas Frank's book What's The Matter With Kansas. For a solid review of that book, see James Nuechterlein. The essential error with Frank's book, from Neuchterlein's point of view, is that it is stuck in the 1930s when economic issues dominated everything. Frank, and by extension Obama, cannot believe that middle and lower class rural folks might actually put their cultural conservatism ahead of their economic interests (assuming voting Democrat is in their interest).
Obama seems to believe that people turn to cultural issues not because there is a good argument that those issues are actually the most important issues. Not because people have actual reasons for holding culturally conservative views. No, they are simply angry, i.e., irrational. They are trapped in a kind of Marxist false consciousness where the capitalist elite have propagated the ideologies of religion, race and xenophobia to destroy the class consciousness that would otherwise prevail. It was wrong when Marx made this claim, and it is still wrong when Barack Obama makes it.
Michael Young notes Obama's attempt at damage control in Indiana. Here is what Obama said:
People don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody is going to help them. So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on. But they don't believe they can count on Washington.
"But they don't believe they can count on Washington." This is of a piece with what we know about Obama's church and his publicly stated desire to create "a kingdom of heaven on earth." Obama's religion is of a decidedly worldly sort. The problem, as it seems Obama diagnoses it, is that people have an inadequate faith in the power of the state to do good. If they just put their faith in men like Barack Obama, and the power of the government, he will then lead us to a promised land where justice and right prevail. As Lisa Schifferen intimates, Obama's own religion seems to have little to do with a personal conversion and freedom from sin and more to do with converting society and freeing us all from social sin. Yes, Obama wants to immamentize the eschaton.
See Barack Obama counter the charges of "elitism." He is good. Very good.
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