If I'd known the outrage that mentioning Morse code and communicating with dirt cheap low powered transmitters was going to cause among the people of fashion, I'd have done it a decade ago.
There is nothing more damaging to traditional American liberalism than the habit of snobbery that flourishes among the alleged left. People of any level of intellectual ability and achievement, from lowest to highest can tell if someone is looking down on them, and what goes for class goes for region, accent, ethnicity, etc. To a good extent that has been a result of what has been considered "the left" being perceived as being concentrated in college towns, among college grads, in places such as New York City and the greater Boston area - why that should be, I don't know because generally their politics are hardly far left.
I think the association with Boston or Massachusetts, New England, may come from that unremarked on fact of American history that Marilynne Robinson was the first to bring to my attention, that the Geneva Bible which did so much to form the culture of early New England contained some radical statements about the moral obligation to provide for the destitute and poor, that some of the earliest (and sometimes among the most severe) of Puritan preachers stressed the moral obligation found in The Law of Moses to furnish the least among us with not only bare bones sustenance but liberally so as to give them a decent life. Of course that took only in part, stinginess among New England Yankees is a real phenomenon, as is generosity, but I don't think they're any more prone to it than anyone anywhere else.
The early habit of legally requiring schooling be provided in towns over a certain size in New England was matched with some of the earliest institutions of higher learning*. The influence of any liberalism gained from those things, especially as New Englanders moved into the Mid-West certainly has petered out. The more I read of the New England "Founders" it seems to have mostly petered out by the second half of the 18th century.
Rowing away from that stream of consciousness - One of the things I said that got the most heat from the online play-lefties was when I objected to their snobbery about the food of the working and lower classes, Kraft Dinner was the focus of that, as I recall. It is remarkable how much of the junk that gets heaped onto that college credentialed form of "leftism" and "liberalism" that is merely a convention of those who hanker after the respect of snobs. As if someone is lesser because they don't have a sense of food snobbery and they eat cheap food that isn't pleasing to the snobs. I will remind you, some of those same people are the same idiots who got sold that civit shit coffee I talked about, though that was a step too far for some of them. But they will buy or adopt anything, even the most inexpensive food of the very poor from other lands and places, it getting in under the convention of adopting "exotica" or other things as written up in places like the New York Times feuilleton or some other such dubious engine of influence.
The snobs have cost us everything, really. I think they are one of the biggest reason that the same political side which has policies that would be the most helpful to the working poor, the poor, the destitute, even the lower rungs of white-collar working class people have found it so difficult to convince them of the benefits of those policies. It is one of the reasons I think having a college-based left has been a disaster, as the Bernie Sanders campaigns have proved, it is also insane to put your hopes in the youngest, most callow of voters who can be so easily swayed and gulled on the basis of fashion. I think only to a lesser extent is it dumb to put your hopes in campus radicals among the faculties of colleges and universities, so many of them are con men on the make, the Marxists to a person I would put in that category, as well as the anarchists.
It is one of the unexpressed but frequently demonstrated habits of thought among the credentialed snobs that they don't believe the majority of people are capable of understanding as much as they can certainly understand (often better than those with credentials) or appreciate "the finer things in life"
One of the earliest experiences I had with that online was one of them piously telling me that my taste in music, "classical" music was a damnable example of "elitism". Which I'm sure I wouldn't be the only person who has lived a life in music would know was an idiotic statement. I could cite a plumber I knew who probably knew as much about Bela Bartok's music as most music majors did, I could cite high school dropouts who knew more about opera than most instrumental majors with degrees in music did. My general response to that is that I'm such an elitist that I won't be satisfied till everyone is elite. Which includes, certainly, the ability which the greatest musicians, the greatest composers have had to appreciate the simplest of folk music and the most complex of it. A lot of the folk tradition, some of the commercial popular music is music of the best kind. Only I don't think the snobs of the left like to think that. I don't want anyone to give up any music they like, I would like them to be able to enjoy all kinds of music they want to without having someone gull them into thinking they don't have any right to it because it's above them.
The bad reputation that the left, that liberals got for being snobs is exaggerated in the movies, on TV, on radio, in the friggin' media, and it was done in no small part during my lifetime to hurt the electoral chances of the likes of the Kennedys on the national scene (remember what they did to John Kerry on that count. If Elizabeth Warren had been the nominee, you can be certain that that would be invoked against her for her Harvard years, covering up her roots in Oklahoma and the fact that she is entirely a product of public education in places other than New England. It has been a useful tool for Republican-fascists and the media that has supported them. But in many cases they have had heaps of help from the "leftists" themselves. In too many cases, it's a reputation that has been bought for us by the snobs among us, snobs who really aren't interested in the success of those policies I mentioned above, they are mostly interested in their own status and their own self-regard.
That as much as anything has been a source of friction in my studying the reasons the left has failed. And it is certainly related to the insistence that any positive mention of Christianity is a source of anger and annoyance and generally fussiness among the babies of the pseudo-left. My post about "The Woman Taken In Adultery" which was an anti-capital punishment post got that anger. There was absolutely nothing in what I came out with that was anything but a support for what should be one of the most important positions of an American style liberal. It pointed out that that argument against it was about the strongest that could be made, that God, in the person of Jesus, had said only those without fault are eligible to execute someone. But that strongest of possible framing - there is no possible framing stronger than that God wills it - is unacceptable to such anti-religious snobs.
It is part of that snobbery that the religion that a majority of Americans profess belief in never to be mentioned in the polite company of the college-credentialed "left" without disdaining it. If it is mentioned it is to be considered a joke or an occasion to make some kind of crude and dismissive remark, it is certainly something that piques them if it doesn't really piss them off in any other context. That such an attitude has been one of the most damaging things about the college-credentialed "left" one of the other things the Republican-fascists and its media have used to damage Democrats, has not made any difference to such "leftists". It's clear that my conclusion is true, they hate God more than they believe in the positions they claim to support, they won't even take strong arguments for those positions that may well sway some if not many to adopt them because those arguments are made in the framing of religion.
* Researching this point, it was fun to find out that the legitimate claim of Harvard to being the first University in what would become the United States is easily outdone by a number of those in Latin America. Some of them noted that while the Philippines were considered an American possession that The University of Santo Tomas had Harvard beat by a long shot. But, then, Catholics did invent the University, as such. Though by some definitions, the University of Cairo is older than that, even. One online source claims that if you wanted to push the definition of public education, that the Incas had instituted mandatory education, though I have never read on that interesting claim so I don't know if it's true or not. Harvard got lucky in money - much of it from moral atrocities such as the triangular trade - and as a status symbol among the New England rich from whence its claim to quality is founded, not in maintaining any kind of moral authority or its ersatz substitute.
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