(Caveat: I've lived in New York on two different occasions, love much of the city and end up spending usually nearly a month a year here, so this is not solely the rant of a midwestern raised populist). New York "progressives" need to get over it, you serve no purpose. (Caveat number II: I am not referring to the thousands and thousands of women and men in New York who are actually doing progressive work, be it through labor organizing, queer activism, party building, welfare rights work etc..) I am referring to a certain subset of the population, that is, in large evidence in many major cities in America, but is most prevalent and annoying in New York. These people refer to the rest of the country with terms like "red states" and "blue states," as in "you're teaching in Indiana this summer, isn't that a 'red state'?" Or, " I can't believe that Iowa is a 'blue state.' " The logic behind statements like this is down right demeaning, uneducated an offensive. Take the statement about Iowa. It is demeaning and offensive to assume that a state without a major city has no ability to produce progressive voters. This ties into the uneducated aspect as it seems largely lost on most of the New Yorkers I know, have no understanding that the most progressive state governments in American history arose in rural, "backward" states like Iowa. These states produced generations of farmers and later industrial workers who understood there lives to be intimately connected to national and world politics, who understood the need to organize together against economic interests and contest the power of the state, not the "artist subject." To take another example, such people express surprise at Minnesota's tradition as probably the farthest left state in the nation. Now, this great honor of my home state is fading away, but when one looks at the reasons why, it takes us back to what I will call NYC "politihipsters." The reason Minnesota is begining to tilt to the right lies with a huge demographic influx of relatively young, highly educated, culturally attuned migrants. These people have followed tech and medical industry jobs to the Twin Cities, attracted by both the employment possibilities and the cultural investment of the area in art and theatre. These people, who demographically look a lot like "New York "politihipsters" are trending Republican and usurping the traditional Minnesota left alliance of urban service professionals, industrial workers in the cities, miners in the iron range and radicalized farmers. Most of these people would not like to live in New York, they are happy in their mid-sized towns and cities teaching school, fighting fires, manufacturing cars, harvesting wheat, fishing in the summer and watching hockey in the winter. Many of the Republican migrants are much more likely to have lived in New York for some time, usually after graduating from an elite eastern college and spending a few years fucking around in NYC with cocaine, art and investment banking before leaving for professional jobs in places like Minnesota.
The people I am speaking of here tend to only engage at all with politics when Michael Moore tells them too or GWB says something stupid. After "Bowling for Columbine," I was amazed at how many of these people expressed amazement that America had a gun problem. Wow, America has a problem with guns, thanks Michael Moore, I never noticed. Similarly, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has put the city into a frenzy, it is a badge of polithipster honor to have seen it on opening weekend and spend five hours afterward getting drunk on the lower East Side and yelling about how stupid GWB is. As the great historian William Sewell said about Bush, his idiocy is way down on the list of my probelms with him, right after his stewardship of the Texas Rangers and somewhere before his choice of shoes . Politihipsters act as if Bush had 50 (okay 100) more IQ points we would never be in this mess. If he actually went to those "great" classes at Yale, maybe we wouldn't be in Iraq. As if the intellectual and oral gaffes Bush commits on film are more important than his Byzantine foreign policy or economic fascism.
In short, my problem with these people, who often write for the Village Voice (no offense Nat Hentoff, keep up the good work) and get represented as the embodiment of what left there is in America is a lack of nuance. Bush is bad because he is stupid. People from outside of New York (and maybe California) are conservative because they either believe in some sort of Christianity or they've never scene a film by Godard. New Yorkers are inherently progressive because they appreciate art and sushi. Fahrenheit 9/11 is great because its simplicity will appeal to "middle America" and "Red States." Activism is getting a "Bush sucks" tattoo, or wearing a button. Politics is a style and subject position, not the meaningful contestation of state and economic power
