Better yet, he should hire him as a consultant. He's author of Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. He's in England now and is making something of a media splash explaining to Brits "redneck" culture and of its influence in American politics. An interesting piece here appeared on BBC website, and this column in the Guardian. An excerpt:
The good news is that many lower working-class people are starting to figure that out. If we bothered to cover redneck culture we'd be surprised to find how many progressive rednecks, what I call leftnecks, are out there. America's media caste, however, is put off by the way these folks look and sound, and by their unpredictable opinions. It's happy to deal with the rural red-state working class as long as it remains out there somewhere in "the heartland", a place to be polled and surveyed by Gallup to fuel self-absorbed political punditry.
Whatever the media thinks of this group, the Democrats better figure out a way to make more rednecks into leftnecks. Perhaps only people like Bageant or Jim Webb–people who self-identify with redneck culture–would have the credibility to do that. But the point is that it's not going to happen until one way or another cultural and economic issues can be detached when trying to get things done in the political sphere.
Once again, I have to point out that the stupidity of the way the abortion issue was handled in '72 has created the single largest stumbling block in that regard. It's not going away, and it will continue to be a wedge issue that separates cultural and religious conservatives from the Democrats.
Many of the commenters to this article are worth reading, and Bageant himself adds a comment way down the thread that picks up on this theme of redneck political relevance/irrelevance, so I'll excerpt a part of it here:
But whatever one calls us, our class represents the majority of Americans in many, maybe most, respects. We are part of the America in which 75% never get a higher education, never pass through a college door in the lifetimes. Of this 75%, three quarters never even complete the sixth form. Rednecks are indeed part of the American majority class, the working class. It is a majority you will never see on television except as the bumbling characters in situation comedies. But more importantly, it is a majority that has no effective political voice or political representation other than the pretense of one offered by the two dominant parties of our political class, both of which are faces of Americas only true political party – the business-financial party.
Having grasped that voting for either party had no direct effect on their practical everyday lives (unless it is beneficial to business) about one half of this class gave up on voting a couple of generations ago. Yet, because of their sheer numbers no president can be elected without their support. Infamously, they have legitimately elected George Bush at least once. And most of them will probably support John McCain next election, in the absence of any Democratic outreach attempt, other than the token working class people displayed as specimens at this year's convention, then promptly forgotten. Whatever the case, my people will make another stupid choice … once again pull the voting lever and shoot off some remaining appendage of their own.
Everywhere I travel outside the United States, people ask me the same thing: Why do so many working class people over there consistently vote against their own interests? Its a darned good question, but one that makes me flinch because they are talking about the people from which I sprang – the white working class Scots Irish.
I think the answer to the question is implied in what he wrote above: As he points out, Bageant's Scots Irish are largely uneducated and poorly informed, and it follows from that they are prone to manipulation by political elites. And, it's true, the Democrats don't do anything for them because the Dems don't see them as their constituency. Rednecks won't get real attention from any politicians, Dem or GOP, until they get organized and demand it, but they're not likely to do that through the Democratic party because they see the Democrats as the party of abortion and gay rights. And the Republicans are not going to help them because all they'll get from the GOP is a lecture about how they have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and that they themselves are to blame for their own economic failures.
So they're stuck, politically powerless and voiceless, and vote GOP by default on traditional cultural-values basis. And they at least get some joy in seeing one of their own–Sarah Palin–who did pull herself up by her own bootstraps, get some success and recognition and give elites some sass. And the GOP elites get a lot of joy from this as well, because the con is so perfect. They get the support of this group without having to do anything except say they're against abortion and gay marriage.
The Dems better figure out how to convert rednecks into leftnecks soon, and the key is to neutralize, somehow someway, the cultural issues as tribal identifiers. I'm not sure how, but they have to. And in this Mike McG and I are in complete agreement, you're not going to do it by telling these folks they're stupid; they're not. But they are poorly informed or misinformed and on some important issues terribly mistaken, and you overcome that by education and effective communication. Obama has the podium; he better use it to do some intense outreach and educational work–or get people like Webb to do it for him.
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