Just as people like to accuse their enemies of outrageous, fantasized sexual transgressions, we also like to accuse them of a lack of education. It's the obverse of the way we overestimate the brilliance and competence of those we approve because they're on our team. These are all what Patricia Roberts-Miller called "demagoguery,", also known as Othering, or among those who haven't fully expunged their inner racist, "tribalism." What it's called is less important than what it is.
Maloney's statement is repellent in its contempt for the less-educated, but there's an even more serious problem with it: the Trump base, and a sizable number of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, are.largely college-educated, and middle- or upper-middle-class. It was hardly obscure to anyone who followed the arrests of the rioters, but Maloney and a disturbing number of liberal Democrats have chosen to ignore it.
A new article in The Atlantic bears this out:
Third, the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations...
Fourth, most of the insurrectionists do not come from deep-red strongholds. People familiar with America’s political geography might imagine the Capitol rioters as having marinated in places where they are unlikely to encounter anyone from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Yet of those arrested for their role in the Capitol riot, more than half came from counties that Biden won; one-sixth came from counties that Trump won with less than 60 percent of the vote.
Yet I keep seeing liberal Democrats on denouncing the Right as ignorant, uneducated, low-class trash. No matter how much evidence to the contrary they're confronted with, they won't let go of the illusion. (Much like the QAnon-brainwashed Trump cultists they deride.) They don't believe it because it's true, but because it lets them feel comfortable. Why that should be is difficult for me to understand, because the Trump Right is a serious threat to this country whether its members are educated or not. I think their refusal to face reality is of a piece with the same Democrats' belief that with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in office, they can relax and go to sleep for the next four years.
That bit about "more than half [of arrested rioters] came from counties that Biden won" is important too. Maybe living in a red state like Indiana spares me the sweet illusion that the bad guys are somewhere else. Time and again liberals are shocked when they find that the menace was living next door, that the bigots were so much nearer and more numerous than they had ever guessed. As a Hoosier queer I've never been able to have that false comfort. But then I 've known other Hoosier queers who could.
This willed ignorance -- knowing so much that isn't so -- is why I don't trust liberals as a class, and why I refuse to indulge their complacent certainty that they are, in one of their favorite terms, "reality-based." In that respect they're not much different from conservatives I've known, who fancied themselves more rational and realistic than woolly-minded, wishful-thinking liberals -- until I spelled out the atrocities and horrors their heroes supported and carried out. They'd go green and sweaty and back down, but they'd forget it in a day or two. Liberals are, I admit, made of somewhat sterner stuff: they simply get indignant and accuse me of wishing Bush or Trump was still president. But the Right has learned from them and adopted their approach; don't let anyone tell you conservatives don't learn from experience!
