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Self-flagellating liberals like Nick Kristof play into the right's hands: "Murc's Law" at its worst. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-09-03

Coined by a Lawyer’s Guns & Money commenter, Murc’s Law is:

the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politic

You cannot find a purer distillation of Murc’s Law than last week’s column by two-time-Pulitzer-Prize-winning Columnist, Nicholas Kristof, On Their High Horse, Too Many Liberals Disdain Oliver Anthony, which states:

It’s partly this condescension that has driven many working-class voters, initially white voters and more recently brown and Black ones as well, into the arms of conservative politicians who would shaft them even more.

See how Murc’s Law works? It couldn’t be more than fifty years of Republicans fanning the flames of race to divide the working class, from the Southern Strategy to welfare queens to birtherism. It couldn’t be Fox News blasting Dems 24/7, including stories about how condescending we are on repeat.

No it has to be us!*

What the two-time-Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist still does not realize is the “condescending liberal” theme has been carefully grown and nurtured over the same period of time by Rush Limbaugh, his thousands of mini-Rush’s and successors at Fox News, Newsmax and their aiders and abettors in the media like the New York Times.

The Op-Ed Version of the Diner Safaris

It’s now more than eight years after Trump descended the escalator, brayed about Mexican rapists, and instantly won the hearts (and minds?) of tens of millions of whites — upper class, middle class and working class -- with his undisguised racism. (“He’s saying what I’m thinking!”) And yet two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning-columnist Kristof is still banging the “economic anxiety” drum. This is the op-ed version of the Times’ Diner Safaris, where the paper sent reporters into deepest Ohio to diners where Trump voters told them they were economically anxious and certainly not racist.

And just a day after the column, Fox News ran with:

Mission accomplished, Nick.

*Who is “Us” Anyway?

So who exactly are these condescending liberals driving the white working class into the arms of “conservative politicians who would shaft them even more”? Who are they/we? There must be a lot of them/us and they/we must be very powerful. Surely Nicholas Kristof found examples from:

Rachel Maddow or the rest of the MSNBC liberals?; or

Krugman, Goldberg, Bouie — his fellow NY Times liberal columnists?; or

WaPo liberal writers like Perry Bacon Jr. or E.J. Dionne Jr.?; or

The Nation, New Republic, Atlantic? (I think there are still some there).

Nope. Nick apparently couldn’t find or didn’t look for a condescending liberal among any of those usual suspects. Instead, he cites just one example of any liberal supposedly expressing this condescension (in a paragraph to be canonized in the annals of both-siderism).

Yet in this case, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled “Rich Men” the “anthem of the forgotten Americans,” and Fox News asked participants in the Republican presidential debate to discuss it. Meanwhile, some on the left pounced on it as right-wing propaganda and even as “racist trash.”

What do you find when you click the “racist trash” link?

One Diary right here on Daily Kos. A diary that did not make the “Trending” List (though it did get 36 recs). Now far be it for me to diminish the power and reach of the Daily Kos, but according to two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist-Kristof that DK diary has the same reach and influence as MTG and the Republican debate stage.

But what about the Song?

At first, I only had time to listen to the first couple of verses of Rich Men North of Richmond, and I thought, “hey, this is great — a full-red-bearded country guy singing a progressive song.” A day or so later, I saw it had been picked up as an anthem by the right. Then I read the the last couple of verses and realized why.

So it’s only part racist, which is like being part pregnant. Once you sing, “if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds/ Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds,” you’re right in the middle of “those people” getting their “free stuff” paid for with “my taxes,” and it’s August 1980 with Reagan in Philadelphia MS, or forty years later at a Turning Point USA conference with Charlie Kirk.

Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist-Kristof** makes much of Anthony’s disclaimer as to his politics, noting “he said his song was meant to blast politicians on both sides.” [There’s that “both-siderism again.] But Anthony’s politics or belief as to the intent of the song is irrelevant. As the originalists on the Supreme Court might say, the text of the song speaks for itself. And as for representing both sides, I didn’t see lines like this in the song:

“In Texas people are sick and poorly paid/ So why won’t Abbott expand Medicaid.”

*****

** Am I being condescending by repeatedly referencing two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning-columnist Kristof? Well, I am a Daily Kos diarist, so I guess I just can’t help it.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/3/2190996/-Self-flagellating-liberals-like-Nick-Kristof-play-into-the-right-s-hands-Murc-s-Law-at-its-worst

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