avram | Red-state blues

immlass has called a bunch of us to account on the whole red state/blue state thing, and, well, she’s, um, right. Nearly three million Texans voted for Kerry, along with 3.5 million Floridians, 700,000 Kentucks, eight Alaskans, and millions of other assorted people who are all feeling even more depressed than we blue-state liberals.

And hey, let’s hear it for those million Coloradorados who sent a Democrat to the Senate!

An even better reaction came from a commenter on Making Light:

Let me tell you how we do it here in the red states.

We fight and we fight and we live in a certain amount of fear from the results, because we don't have the comfy, self-satisfied environment the rest of you have.

When we go out for gay rights, sometimes we get kicked around--it's happened to me. When we demonstrate againat Reagan, ditto--it's happened to me. When we petition for tenants' rights, the landlords take the petitions and blacklist us for signing--I've watched them ask for the lists, and get them. And when it's done, we go back for more, if not the next day, then the one after that.

That’s me told. So no more mocking the red states. I’ll reserve my mockery for individual fuckheads. In fact, plenty of fuckheads live in blue states — folksy jackass James Lileks lives in 51% blue Minnesota, Little Green Fascist Charles Johnson lives in California, and would-be rapist Adam Yoshida comes from Canada and is currently living in Massachusetts.

I reserve the right to mock Libertarians for nominating Badnarik.

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I agree, and said much the same thing a week ago (but without the good quotes).

I do like Matthew Yglesias's takedown of Red Voters, if not applied to Red Staters in general.

thank you for posting this. I spent almost 12 hours on election day knocking on doors & asking people to vote for Kerry, knowing it wouldn't make a difference, but wanting to do my part anyway. It's been disheartening to be written off as an ignorant hick by my "allies" up north.

On the topic of Lileks, I keep meaning to email him about how his whole rip apart of a Spider-Man comic is bogus - he questions the hugs slices of pizza as being absurdly large, but he's never been to Koronet.

One of my local pizza places does (or did; I think they just changed owners) pretty big slices too.

Eight Alaskans? Make that 90,000.

Badnarik (and Green party candidate Cobb) are both sponsering a recount in Ohio.

Lileks . . . sheesh. He can be really funny and insightful, but if anything remotely political comes up it's like an electrode goes off in his Derivative Smug-Ass Republican lobes. I don't think I've read any political column of his that's remotely original or helpful.

He should stick with riffing on postcards and stock certificates.

Stefan

riffing on postcards and stock certificates
at which he is GENIUS.

Yeah, "comfy and self-satisfied" describes my life. The endless gratification I get from my fellow blue NYC voters entirely makes up for the imminent destruction of my country. Also for being hated by 51% of the electorate. To say nothing of my possible death by terrorist action, which will no doubt make red-state voters of both right- and left-wing tendencies feel vaguely justified. Good thing for that comfy self-satisfaction! It's all good!

It struck me as a perfectly justified response to Felber’s red/blue generalizing that Teresa was quoting.

Yep, we rock here in the Rockies! (Well, I am closer to Kansas, but we still rock.) Not only did we get a Dem seat away from a former R-guy, BUT we put a Dem majority in our state House and Senate!

For the big picture, I like to think of us all as Purple states, with some perhaps a prettier shade than others....

I like Urban v. Rural, frankly. It just so happens that certain states are more rural than urban, and therefore backwards.

But hey, I reserve the right to mock the FUCK out of Alabama, where they just retained segregationist-fucking-language in their constitution. That's right. They voted down a measure to remove segregation-requiring terms in their constitution.

What, unanimously?

By a very narrow margin, I heard.

Which means almost half the Alabama voters voted against it, right?

Yep. Last I heard, it lost by about 2,500 votes, out of over a million.

It still suggests half of Alabama is made up of unreconstructed racists, unless there was some other problem with the measure that we Yankees don't know about.

May I suggest you read War Liberal, a guy from Alabama who has been documenting the Amendment 2 fight? That it lost is horrible, but hearing how and why it happened is also important. It was significantly more complex than the sound bites make it. (Short form: voting to remove that language from the constitution was associated successfully with a mandate to tax the crap out of people.)

"voting to remove that language from the constitution was associated successfully with a mandate to tax the crap out of people"
Yes. By unreconstructed racists. And people bought it. There is a certain point at which I'm unwilling to let someone go as just easily tricked. That 50% of Alabama has just crossed it.

I'm sure your well-stated point would have convinced any Alabaman who was wavering to vote for Amendment 2, too.

I won't bother arguing the point. One of the things I've learned from arguing with unreconstructed bigots is that there some people simply won't open their eyes, and it's better not to waste your time on them.

Thank you! I know some Texas liberals who will be very happy to read this and sentiments like it. We'll pick up and fight again, but it helps to know that we have don't have to watch our backs from blue-state liberals.

If you haven't read it, I really recommend this post, particularly the last couple of paragraphs. This is how we win things in the red states, and I'm more interested in winning by making coalitions than in being right/righteous.

Red-state blues

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Eight?

For what it's worth . . .

Re: For what it's worth . . .

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