Last night I said I wasn't convinced that middle-of-the-road voters would be put off by Mitt Romney's "47 percent" rant. David Frum, of all people, points to some disturbing survey results that help explain why they might not feel personally insulted:
Start with this data point:I fear that's right. I imagine that a lot of white heartland voters see the "47 percent" as THEM.
When you ask white Americans to estimate the black population of the United States, the answer averages out at nearly 30%. Ask them to estimate the Hispanic population, and the answer averages out at 22%.
So when a politician or a broadcaster talks about 47% in "dependency," the image that swims into many white voters' minds is not their mother in Florida, her Social Security untaxed, receiving Medicare benefits vastly greater than her lifetime tax contributions; it is not their uncle, laid off after 30 years and now too old to start over. No, the image that comes into mind is minorities on welfare.
And the belief that America is increasingly becoming a mass of swarthy moochers dovetails with what Frum says in a follow-up post about widespread fears of a currently nonexistent mob:
The dread to which Romney gives voice in his Boca Raton speech -- that "makers" are about to be electorally overwhelmed by "takers" -- is a dread expressed again and again by conservative media and conservative thought-leaders. "Democracy is two lions and a lamb voting on what's for dinner": how often have we heard that old country-club quip repeated these past four years? Only this time, the quip is repeated not as a joke, but with real fear.Indeed:
... what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout. No Coxey's army is marching on Washington, no sit-down strikes are paralyzing factories, no squatters are moving onto farmer's fields. Occupy Wall Street immediately fizzled, there is no protest party of the political left.
... From the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, the rights and perquisites of wealth have emerged undiminished....
Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses....
I say this all the time -- most recently over the weekend, in reference to a paranoid Ben Stein post, and the work of some apocalyptic filmmakers from Minnesota -- but I think a lot of right-leaning people actually take comfort in paranoid scenarios of doom. What Frum is talking about here -- the notion that mobs of angry "takers" are going to overrun the barricades -- probably makes the rich, the old, and the wingnutty feel vital and important (in the case of the rich, even more important than they already feel). It makes them feel that they're the heroes of sagas in their own heads; they're civilization's last line of defense, and possibly martyrs to civilization's cause.
As opposed to being a bunch of empathy-challenged SOBs who want the have-nots to go without for the sheer pleasure of watching them scrounge. That's not how they want to see themselves.
