Snobs All?

James Joyner endorses the thesis that Bush-bashing is all about snobbery. No doubt at some level that's right -- some of the people who hate Bush do so in part because they're snobs. As anyone who's familiar with public opinion research can tell you, the overwhelming majority of voters do not make up their minds on the basis of a coherent ideology or a great deal of information about the candidates. On another level, this is obviously wrong. Like all "liberals are effete snobs" sorts of arguments it neglects a few minor facts about the nature of the Democratic Party electorate. Like most poor people vote Democrats. As do most high school dropouts. I seriously doubt that the high school dropout vote is so dead-set against Bush because their a bunch of snobs. Likewise (and not totally unrelatedly) Bush polls terribly among African-Americans and non-Cuban Latinos for reasons that certainly have nothing to do with snobbery.

And of course one could turn this around. Looking at the two BlogAds on James' sidebar, one would think that support for Bush is motivated by a combination of homophobia and misogyny (the "don't be girlie-men" ad) and xenophobia (the "foreign leaders for Kerry" ad). And, just as snobbery plays a role in some people's anti-Bush views, there can be no doubt that homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia all play roles in some people's pro-Bush views. Similarly, greed partially motivates many of Bush's supporters just as it motivates many Kerry supporters. But what of it all? I don't dislike Bush because I'm a snob. Bush is my social better. He's an old-line WASP, my dad's a nouveau riche half-Cuban half-Jew. I went to Harvard, but he's better-educated than I am (Yale and Harvard Business School) and was in Skull & Bones. His summer house in Maine is in Kennebunkport, my family's summer house in Maine is on the Blue Hill peninsula. Now perhaps I'm motivated by envy of the Bush family and its social graces; perhaps my distate for the man is the resentment felt by an arriviste for the true aristocrats. Perhaps, perhaps.

At any rate, I'm a pretty hardcore reductionist, philosophically speaking, but as a political commentator it's hard to see what the point of these sorts of reductive analyses are. It's obvious, for example, that Bush's endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment was the causal origin of Andrew Sullivan's newfound skepticism about Bush's competence as a wartime leader, but that doesn't -- and shouldn't -- preclude people from looking at what he has to say on the merits.