General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm from the south. [View all]rrneck
(17,671 posts)I get a little tired of the south bashing that goes on here. I don't think it hurts to give the perpetrators a little brush back now and then. But it has less to do with a personal umbrage than with an assertion of common sense and the possibility of political opportunity.
I didn't wake up one morning and decide to attain the label "liberal". I never was much of a "joiner". I was some kid on a farm in Tennessee that happened to get hold of the right books and started thinking about stuff. The decisions I made along the way in my life changed my ideology.
Others were raised in a different milieu and their experiences will lead them to view their ideology in a different way. For almost anyone posting here changing to a conservative would be unthinkable, especially if their entire lives were steeped in liberalism. Do you think the conservatives in the south would feel any differently? And yet, here I am. How the fuck did that happen?
I suspect, although I'm obviously not a sociologist, that there is a strong positive correlation between partisan extremism and affectation. While everyone needs to belong and ideology is an important social adhesive, if it can be donned as plumage it can be removed just as easily. Easy come, easy go. That translates into weak political support. People who are just in it for the looks aren't likely to hit the streets for a cause.
So if you wanted to turn an ideology into social plumage and weaken political support, how would you do it? Turn it into a product. A disposable product. Sell people media that tells them what they want to hear and turn their beliefs into plumage. Keep their minds on obtuse points of ideological conflict in the form of brand loyalty instead of pushing them to think for themselves. Asking "what's the matter with Kansas" is the wrong question. Better to ask "what's the matter with the United States". We are terribly balkanized and it's not getting any better. Our government doesn't function which appears to be exactly what a certain small slice of the country wants.
I could use conservative southern tea party rednecks as an example but that would just be throwing gas on a fire. There is a huge ideology industry designed to tell liberals what they want to hear as well but it seems to be largely invisible to liberals. But if ideology as social plumage translates into soft political will (where is the liberal backbone?), the same problem exists on the other side of the aisle. Support for the conservative product is shallow as well. That looks like a political opportunity to me.