Censorship Series: If You're A Democrat In A Deep Red State, In Some Progressives Eyes You Might As Well Be A Republican

 

Much of this series has argued that when it comes to the other side, progressives are as intolerant as they say conservatives are.  I’ve read so many articles on this that you’d think I’d be numb to it by now. But this afternoon I read a column in a progressive website that was so blatantly condescending if not downright bigoted when it came not just to conservatives and Republicans, but really red states in general, that it outraged me.  It made it clear in a way that so few of these articles do that, at the end of the day, so much of the discussion about equality, freedom of speech, representation and all the things progressives spend so much time argue and fundraising for, is at the end of the day pure bluster. At the end of the day, a certain branch of the Democratic party has no use, none, for nuance at all. You’re either with them or against them.

I’ve known this for a while, to be sure. I’ve only recently begun to realize just how blatant that prejudice is. I should mention that I have a more personal bias towards this particular article, which is why it hit me so hard.  I will withhold my personal connection towards the end of the article in order to explain I am neutral towards. At a certain level, I know these same people who claim to argue for nuance but reject it upon disagreement will not listen anyway. But here goes.

Let’s say you are a resident of Wyoming. Perhaps you were born there; perhaps you grew up there. You have throughout your life no doubt been the source of mockery from pop culture from much of America; jokes saying that there are more cows than people; out-of-staters asking you how many guns you own, or how much fishing you do every day. Over the years, these references have gotten increasingly cruel, particularly when it comes to the fact you live in a deep red state and how so many progressives will constantly argue that a state with so few people gets the same number of senators as New York or California.

Now let’s say you are also a member of the Democratic Party. I already see most of the people who’ve read this far saying things like “now he’s just making shit up.” I know, Trump carried Wyoming in 2020 with nearly seventy percent of the popular vote. That still means that 73,491 people voted for Biden.  You want to argue that all of these people were just Never Trumpers and therefore aren’t ‘really Democrats’, go right ahead. In that same election 66,576 people voted for the Democratic candidate against Liz Cheney. I’d mention her name, but you didn’t bother to fundraise for her and probably would have argued against wasting money there anyway.

The point is, there are Democrats in Wyoming. The Squad would no doubt argue that they aren’t real Democrats the same way that they do every time someone who doesn’t fit the exact progressive mold in a Democratic district in a red state tries to run for reelection. AOC and Bernie will argue that the Progressive agenda is the one all Democrats should follow and then can’t understand why their candidates go down to defeat in districts in Texas or North Carolina.  Progressives, you see, don’t understand nuance. There are, as Bill Maher mentioned, a certain percentage of Democratic voters opposed to gay marriage and abortion and for increased gun ownership. Progressives have no interest in winning them over then the Republicans who are in favor of these things. They’ll mention them when it comes to polls saying a certain percentage of Republicans are in favor of these issues, but at the end of the day, they don’t want to win them over or care about them much. (I’ll get back to that.)

These people, to be clear have no clear idea about the history of Wyoming. Perhaps they know that Wyoming repeatedly refused admission to the Union until 1890 when the U.S. government agreed to let them enter the state if women would be granted equal suffrage.   If they do, they only do so in a form of mockery as to how far the state has fallen in a century.  Do they know Nellie Tayloe Ross was the first female to win elected office to serve as a governor in her own right in 1924? Did they know she was a Democrat and a major figure of the party for years, serving for 20 years as the first female director of the U.S. Mint?  Do they know  that the state went Democratic in all four of FDR’s elections as well as LBJ’s landslide? Do they know that during the twentieth century three Democratic Senators held one of the states seats for most of the twentieth century and that it was completely Democratic from 1948 to 1953 until Lester Hunt committed suicide because a relative was involved in a homosexual affair and the Lavender Scare – which ran parallel to the Red Scare but is far less known – was to much for him to handle?

Of course they don’t. Because in their mind, Wyoming has been Republican their whole lives and is therefore utterly irredeemable. There is no such thing as a good Republican, not Alan Simpson, certainly not Dick or Liz Cheney. History, as I have said over and over, has never mattered to progressives: at the end of the day, they only care about the right now and the future.

As a Democrat in Wyoming, you are not unaware of the problems your state is and you are very aware how much things have gotten worse in the country over the years. You know that Dick Cheney is currently the most famous resident of your state and that you will be associated with him even if you never voted for him. You know how much of a struggle it is for your party in this state. But no matter how futile it is, you keep going because you believe in democracy.

After 2020, you see the GOP has been continuing to head in a downward trajectory and that your elected Congresswoman Liz Cheney is now a flashpoint for it nationwide. You put aside your feelings for her and you are proud of her when she agrees to serve on the January 6^th committee. Maybe you even put party loyalty aside and try to help her win a doomed primary campaign. Because you believe in democracy and you know that a functioning two-party system has to exist for it. Even after she goes down to her inevitable defeat, you plow ahead. The midterms that year are not nearly as bad as the country thought they would be either for your party or democracy as a whole.

As 2023 progresses you witness the continuing civil war in the GOP. You worry, understandably, about what will happen in your state. You’re not foolish enough to believe the Democrats can win election in the next cycle or even in your lifetime, so you focus on what happens. One day you read an article in the New York Times from a Republican named Susan Stubbon. You know the name: her husband served in the Wyoming legislature. She writes a long op-ed in which she expresses her dismay on how much worse politics has gotten in her state since the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

You might think that this ‘come to Jesus’ moment is better late than never; perhaps you are genuinely hopeful because at least someone admitted that there is a problem is the country.

Now say, you go to Daily Kos which as a good Democrat you subscribe too. You see an article that reads “Christian Nationalist bemoans the results of Christian nationalism” You know clickbait when you read it and you know this websites tendency. Still you are curious.

You then read an anonymous author (like almost all of the ‘writers’ for this blog) shitting on everything the Republican Party stands for from Barry Goldwater on. This is nothing new. However you are astounded first when they choose to mock the author of the article you’ve just read…and then fundamentally shit on your entire state.

“Wyoming conservatives are most of the state’ it says. Wyoming is a conservative bastion.” Wyoming is a racist state.” Not that the rest of America is more evolved but why sit there and pretend that Wyoming is a thing that it clearly isn’t (Italics mine). It argues Wyoming deserves to suffer its hard problems with hospitals because it’s tiny population and ultraconservative senators are the vanguard against universal health care. You note the smugness as this article talks about how doctors refuse to come to Wyoming because it’s a rural red state. That’s its hard to find sympathy with a state that argues for Christianity.  It ends with the article saying, “Wyoming has been the worst of the worst for a long time.”

Just to drive the point home, it also berates the deep red states of Tennessee and Utah as part of the noxious package.

There is not a shred of empathy or sympathy for the residents of Wyoming who might not have voted for any of your elected officials. If there are any Democrats in your state (and you know some) the message from this article is very clear: the best thing you can do is leave and go next door to Colorado. Your poor, unenlightened neighbors who have spent their lives voted for Republicans, basically they brought this on themselves and they deserve to reap the whirlwind. They mention the Golden Rule in this article but they show no sense of mercy to the less fortunate in Wyoming.

An article like this lays bear the utter ugliness and bigotry that so many of the people who claim to speak for the underprivileged and the victims of so much hatred in America is as well as their other hypocrisy.

A few months ago when Marjorie Taylor Greene famously called for a national divorce of red states from blue states, progressives tore her to pieces for many reasons. They mentioned that her state  Georgia had two Democratic senators and had voted for Biden in the last election. They left out the fact that a Republican was the governor and that, along with Greene, there are eight other Republicans representing Georgia as opposed to five Democrats. They also make a public noise about how red states are fundamentally more dependent on the federal government and that blue states are, in their words, supporting them.

Now I’ve read more than my share of articles over the years arguing not only for a national divorce, but for a complete dissolution of the U.S into at least eight or nine separate countries. One person on this blog actually made his decision on how to vote for the governor of Oregon based on the concept that the US government would dissolve not long after. (He must be disappointed there was no red wave.) That is the most extreme example I’ve seen, but countless articles on this website make similar arguments for heavily red sections of the country. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read basically arguing the South is irredeemable and implying that is should have been left to go its own way when it seceded from the Union.

Articles like this basically speak to the natural mindset of so many progressives. They might say a national divorce is impractical, but I think some of them wish it wasn’t. In their minds, the problem with this country is so many of the states in the South and the West.  They’d rather try to make new states out of D.C. or Puerto Rico rather than try to organize a Democratic campaign in Idaho or Mississippi. Even the occasional red state Democrat is barely even a Democrat; they’ve made that very clear when it comes to Joe Manchin.  Manchin is a Democrat in the sense that Democrats vote for him, but in the eyes of progressive ideologues that honestly says more about the people of West Virginia.

That’s the dirty secret of progressives even though it’s technically not one. If you live in a state that is deep red, they don’t care about you even if you are a woman, African-American, LGBTQ+ or any of the marginalized people they say they are in favor. They’ll shout out for you, and they might make your cause public to fundraise it for, but in their minds, the best thing you can do for them is to move to a blue state. If you can’t, well, you’re part of the same red state package.  They might fight for your rights, but make no mistake, they won’t try nearly as hard as they would in Texas or Georgia or North Carolina or Florida as they would in Idaho or Utah or, yes, Wyoming. They will use your states laws as an example of what the nation shouldn’t do, but they’re not going to work as hard to try and fix them as they will in battleground states or swing districts. You’re good for fundraising and publicity but not good enough to help.

Now to my personal bias. A large part of my family lives in Wyoming and grew up there. I love them very much and wish I could see them more than I do. They are all fully aware of the politics of their state and while some of them have moved, all of them will fight for it and for democracy at large. I won’t tell you what their political leanings are because its none of your business any more than mine are.  And as I keep saying in some variation in so many of these articles, it is irrelevant.

They are citizens of this country. And an American citizen is entitled to be treated with respect and dignity no matter where they live or who they vote for. Anyone who tells you that an entire state needs to be written off because of who its elected officials are or who it has gone for in a series of elections, they are bigots. They are trying to paint every single resident of that city or state under the same brush, even those who voted on their side in the last election or series of elections. And if they try to tell you that the people in that city are unworthy of redemption when they express their opinions – and then tell you that the paper that led them express them is complicit in the problem by giving them voice – well, if they tell you that they care about the good of the country, I’d take it with a grain of salt, and ask them where they live first.

 

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