Ross says that there is no false consciousness:
In this reading of the culture wars, middle-income voters privilege culture over economics because they perceive the breakdown of "traditional values" - manifested in everything from divorce, marriage and out-of-wedlock birth rates to what's shown on television and taught in schools - as a greater danger to their well-being than, say, the specter of outsourcing or the spike in CEO salaries. In a robust economy, most Americans - yes, even most blue-collar Americans - feel like they can control their own economic destiny; ...
But doesn't this beg the question? Aren't the very perceptions of what is a "danger" the essence of the dividing lines that are offered up to the electorate to keep them from strictly voting their economic self-interest? Don't these fears, sometimes cut from broadcloth, redline issues in such a way to get voters into thinking that to vote GOP is to vote righteous?
What proposal has ever been advanced with the serious chance that hunters in Pennsylvania give up their hunting rifles and shotguns? Are gays really threatening us? Has a GOP administration really lowered a divorce rate? Did the Meese commission change the course of television smut history, or did FOX and cable really just blast right past all that?
How much is feeling "like they can control their own economic destiny" not an illusion, even for the upper middle class? How much are their economic beliefs simply untrue, rather than carefully weighed against other dangers?
I suspect Ross concedes a lot of that in the last part of his post.
However, a more charitable reading of Obama suggests that, if people weren't quite so disillusioned about Washington can do for them economically, they would weigh the equation Ross sets-up quite differently.
In Moore's latest movie, Sicko, Tony Benn makes the same point, in another way, with respect to universal health care. In America, people are afraid of their government, rather than the ruling class being afraid of the The People. It's diminished expectations about what can be collectively achieved at the root of a poor choice. Even an irrational choice, if you want to go that far...
Update: an almost must-read about Mark Warner in Virginia, from NYT:
Running for governor in 2001, Mr. Warner, a Harvard-trained lawyer who admitted he knew nothing about guns or Nascar, made it a priority to win over rural Virginians by essentially neutralizing cultural issues, so that he could talk about the economic concerns he really wanted to talk about. In some cases, that meant simply showing up; I remember accompanying Mr. Warner to the coal region’s fiddlers’ festival. In other cases, though, Mr. Warner’s strategy meant accepting compromises on core social issues. When he shocked the political establishment by winning — and then went on to reform the state’s tax code, reaching an approval rating of about 80 percent — Democrats and their presidential hopefuls seemed eager to replicate his success.
