spite

Via Ken Macleod, Mark Ames discourses on the Spite Vote, the Republican secret weapon. He starts with a confession:

IT CAME ON suddenly and without warning. Fuck the Democrats. Fuck the liberals. I hope Bush wins. I hope Bush steals another election and urinates into everyone's wounds…

This interior rant lasted for a good five minutes before I snapped out of it. The realization that some pro-Republican sentiment lurks inside of me was enough to make me want to stick my head in the oven. Or throw myself out the window like the possessed priest at the end of The Exorcist.

I get attacks from my inner tory too, who I believe lurks somewhere at the top of the brain stem, the better to avoid cognitive processes. He tends to perk up his cute little ears at the sound of the word “initiative”, as in “latest government initiative” and takes negative patriotism as his line of attack. He goes something like this:

No. Stop it. Just fucking stop it. Leave it alone. You’ve been having initiatives non-stop since 1997. Mainly, they’re just attempts to fuck with people’s heads, but sometimes you insist on taking perfectly serviceable public institutions into dark corners and mutilating them horribly. You’ve made the country an international laughing stock under the leadership of a man whose main talent is receiving rich men’s gifts. Because of you, people worldwide think we’re wankers. They argue about America, but they say: “the Brits – what a lot of wankers. Look at that government of theirs. At least we can agree on that”.

Now I know this is our fault. We were desperate, and desperate people fall for conmen in the same way that old folks get bullied into buying useless alarm systems by sleazy door to door salesmen, a technique that David Blunkett has adopted wholesale in his home affairs policy. All you have to offer us is fear, and now we’re so disgusted with ourselves that a lot of us have stopped voting.

We’ll sort it out sometime, but meanwhile just go and sit in a corner, suck your thumbs draw your wages and do nothing.

Anyway, now you’ve seen the ugly little goblin I’ll put him back. Ames goes on to profile the Republican voter.

Elitism as defined today is a synonym for "happy," not "rich" or "powerful." Happiness is the scarcest resource of all, not money. And the happy supply has been cornered by the beautiful, famous and wealthy coastal elite, the ones who never age, and who are just so damned concerned for the have-nots' well-being. In that sense, you can see how the Republicans were able to successfully manipulate the meaning of "elitism" to suit their needs. They weren't just selling dogshit to the credulous masses; they were selling pancreatic balm to the needy.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, non-millionaires who vote Republican, the so-called "Reagan Democrats," know that the country is not theirs. They are mere wage-slave fodder, so their only hope is to vote for someone who makes the very happiest people's lives a little less happy. If I'm an obese 40-something white male living in Ohio or Nevada, locked into a permanent struggle with foreclosure, child support payments and outsourcing threats, then I'm going to vote for the guy who delivers a big greasy portion of misery to the Sarandon-Robbins dining room table, then brags about it on FoxNews. Even if it means hurting myself in the process.

Inter alia, this reminds me of the little red footballs crowd. While not exactly fans of Blair in domestic policy, they’ll forgive him anything because of Iraq. This is the spite vote as it operates in the UK.