Haro on Barack Obama

A priori, there is nothing more banal than the declarations of Mr. Barack Obama’s estimate, last April 6th, that the bitterness of middle-class Americans who are victims of unemployment or the fall of purchasing power has sometimes led them to, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment”. (1) If Mrs. Hillary Clinton had decided on attempting to pull out, in Pennsylvania this April 22nd, a (improbable) designation for the democratic candidate, would it really have been considered “elitist” to make such an analysis? A democratic candidate however had developed it since 1992, well before Obama made himself known. His name William Jefferson Clinton…
Until recently, the Republicans, Nixon to George W. Bush via Ronald Reagan, took offense whenever a Democrat unveiled their strategy. Which is it? Since at least 1968, they employ themselves to divert all social discontent into resentment against the intellectuals, the experts, the officials, the atheists, the ecologists, and the destroyers of the moral order. This strategy, detailed by Thomas Frank in, Why the Poor Ones Vote Right (Insults, 2008), has, one knows it, been implemented elsewhere than the United States, recently again in France with Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy and in Italy with Mr. Silvio Berlusconi. Until Mrs. Clinton compares the cause of this political technique to a “defiance of class,” there will be conservatives who argue that any analysis (or observation) of their conduct amounts to scorn for the beliefs and the legitimate attachments of the popular electorate, to even be antipatriotic.
As if it were scandalous to suggest that, sometimes, the victims of the social order can be mistaken in anger.
(1) the quotation (remarks in an abstract way at a fund raising meeting in California): “In these small towns of Pennsylvania, as in a number of other small cities of Midwest, employment has volatilized for twenty-five years now, and nothings replaced it. They continued to decrease under the administrations Clinton and Bush, and each one of these administrations, one after the other, affirmed that these communities were going to regenerate themselves, but it is not what has occurred. It is thus not surprising that these people are angry, that they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment “original version.