The Bitter Clingers

It's not that I enjoy being the downer, but somebody has to be the adult. Don't misunderstand, I don't mean "adult" in the sense of the voice of sober, experience-honed reason and responsibility, I mean "adult" in the way I understood adults to function when I was a kid, namely someone without the presence of mind to wear pants when your friends would visit.

Right now I'm supposed to be cluttering facebook and/or twitter with invective and vitriol in defense of the downtrodden 47% (a massive end-of-summer, one-time-only reduction from what used to be The 99%) in which I cleverly draw parallels to Mitt Romney's flagellation of the teat-suckling culture of American victimhood and his sneaky tax-dodger status and also kind of imply Mormons eat babies.

I have two issues. The first one is, he's absolutely correct. Not about the victimhood thing or the laziness of people who do not have a recordable net worth, but just that there are 47% of the people in this country who will never, under any circumstances, vote for him. This is, paradoxically, because the 47% doesn't actually exist. There are too many different kinds of people separated out by language, cultural tradition, regionalism and the level of how pissed off they still are about how the Civil War turned out for us to reach that level of consensus about anything. A "hit" television show, the one that "everyone is talking about," draws about 20 million viewers on its best night, whatever that show might be. And this is TV, the great flickering candle to the dim-eyed moth that is American popular culture. I'm not really a math guy, but that's like... way less than 47% of 300 million people. So it's stupid to talk about 47% of anything in the United States because that level of consensus is completely out of the question.

Almost. There are two things we do in numbers that large. One is consume pornography. But even that is fractured into genres. Shaved Asian Fisting guy doesn't have a lot of smalltalk material to share with BBW MILF Furries guy or Leather-fetish CBT Dominatrix lady really, even if they are starting from the same websites more and more often anymore.

The other thing we do in mass numbers is politics. There really are roughly 50% Republicans and 50% Democrats in this country among likely voters. And among those, a larger and larger plurality are largely unable to imagine themselves voting for someone from the wrong team. So he hit the nail more or less on the head with that part of his analysis. What got him in trouble was, after the nail was driven in, he decided to keep pounding and pounding until eventually the whole deck fell in. The irony, of course, is that if you want a deck built properly, you hire a downtrodden illegal. Everyone knows economic desperation equals quality craftsmanship. Good luck with that now, Mitt.

The second issue is that the parade of triumphalism among those of us on the Left automatically makes me queasy. I know Mitt Romney is no Harry Truman. And the conventional wisdom is way, way more sharply honed than it was in 1948 when everyone got their news from some bullshit analog, unrefreshable source that only showed up once a day. With no hypertext links. Every tick in every poll is tracked, composited, parsed, sourced, ignored if it doesn't fit the narrative and then misrepresented on Fox News. So I don't know if it's possible get it that wrong again.

But I also remember the Zogby projections in 2004 saying John Kerry had it in the bag.

Nobody thinks they're actually the 47%. Republicans think it means the evil army of brown-skinned parasites spending their fat welfare checks on everything except condoms. Horchata mostly, probably. The white middle-class progressives I know think the 47% are the poor exploited Emma Lazarus masses who need our shielding, guiding hands to guide them to this place where they have the freedom to have us not pay a lot for fruit.

And if nothing else, I'd be happy to leave the premature celebration behind and settle into something we know better and have been so good at for so long: condescending infantilization of an imagined proletariat. Something like that will stoke the fires of outrage to sustain us. And kill some time. It's gotten us through the last 50 years or so. What's another six weeks?