Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen.-- Dwight Eisenhower
A little more than two weeks before the election the Republican party of Kentucky held a rally at the courthouse steps in my little hometown. It was surprising, because Mitch McConnell himself showed up to campaign in a county so heavily republican that save for the national races was uncontested. So in inevitable response the democratic party decided to hold a rally a week or so afterward.
It was held on a chilly October night at our counties middle school (that’s Jr. High for my more cosmopolitan readers). I arrived with a few members of my family a little early and was struck by the extensive remodeling that had been done to the middle school since my time. It was transformed. I was also struck by the prominent ten commandments plaque hanging on a wall a few feet inside the cafeteria’s entrance way. I could have sworn that multiple federal judges had struck down such displays, but I’ll leave that matter to our local branch of the ACLU whom I contacted shortly thereafter. This should have been my first clue that tonight would drive home a topic that has been bantered about in the atheosphere for sometime.
The crowd was sizeable, considering the redness of the county, with forty or so people not counting a few organizers. It was the standard county demographics, mostly grey haired couples with a smattering of lower-middle class families and a few teenagers. I even met an elderly woman who spoke to me and others about her childhood memories of hoovervilles and depression era poverty. It was not the edges of society nor the ivory tower intellectuals of republican myth but the rank and file of my bible belt community.
In the past the atheist community online have brought attention to the increasing Christianization of the democratic party. I saw it first hand at the rally. It opened with a sectarian prayer heralded with the pronouncement, “We are democrats but we are also christians”. It was this sectarian prayer that prompted a fellow godless attendee to say, “So I suppose this means I’m not a democrat”. I suppose that it could be wracked up to a Progressive Christian attempt to reclaim their “moral high ground” from American fundamentalism but I think instead it is just a symptom of the deeply engrained southern culture. It is, after all, the bible belt.
A free meal was offered to the attendees, nothing fancy, during which I was approached by a reporter from the local paper who was snapping pictures and asking questions. Apparently I was recognized from high school days by this reporter who had a few questions for me. I was asked why I support Barack Obama, a question I plan to devote a larger blog post to. My answer was that he was the best of limited options, the major candidate who comes closest to my personal political ideology. And further he questioned why it is that Obama appeals to a younger generation. As I told him we are in war time with a failing economy and it brings back flashes of the hippy generation. There has always been an undertone of liberal youth that surges up from apathy from time to time. This phenomena is triggered this time around by Obama’s relative youth and a better job at energizing the base than the democrats have done in the past eight years. I will post the article when it is available.
The speaker for the event was not a candidate even though the local Republican Party featured a United States Senator. Instead the crowd was treated to a speech by political operative for Governor Beshear. While he was seemingly unprepared his public speaking skills were above average and he had a good sense of humor. The topic of the talk was two-fold. Bruce Lundsford was the focus of many of these talking points, to the exclusion of Barack Obama. At first this puzzled me until during his speech the presenter of the evening made a call for unity in the party. I was reminded that Kentucky was a Clinton state in the primary. An ardent Clinton supporter (both of them) the presenter urged on the crowd to vote for the principles of the democratic party over
Of course the standard slogans and talking points were thrown out. The economic elite are profiting at the expense of the working man. We need to invest in education. We need jobs that worth having and not just more minimum wage seat fillers. The republican politician’s are a friend of Wall Street and not main street and so forth. It’s fascinating the melding of southern small-town communitarianism with American liberal’s pseudo-collectivism. There can be no denying that socialism and its related schools of thought have had an impact on the progression of liberal theory. If nothing else it has had a profound impact on the advertisement of liberal ideals.
There was noting spectacular about this rally save for a more complete look into bible belt liberalism. My county is deeply red and antagonistically fundamentalist. The democratic minority is at once both committed and respectful. Yet despite their progressive politics I still received disgusted looks at the mention of my atheism and no doubt any mention of homosexuality would have received equally disdainful gazes. It is, after all, the bible belt. Despite it’s failings this meeting gave me hope that despite a growing culture of partisanship and anti-intellectualism even a small town American can come to accept ideals I hold in esteem.
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