An Elaboration

It seems that folks are unhappy with my earlier proclamation on collective responsibility. Because I’ve been uncomfortable with this for some time, I think it’s worth a moment of elaboration.

On Leopards and Faces

Many in the comment thread saw a hypocrisy in the oft-mentioned trope on this blog that runs “I never thought the leopard would eat MY face.” I don’t usually use it here, but on Bluesky and elsewhere I have been known to say things such as “I hope that all those single-issue Gaza voters are happy!” Voting is a responsibility that should be taken seriously, and that means taking the consequences of voting seriously. The first thing is that while a lot of the citizens of Dearborn voted for Donald Trump, a lot of them also voted for Kamala Harris. Any condemnation of Dearborn writ large is in error at best and dishonorable at worst (and to the extent that I have done so it was a dishonorable thing). I’m not perfect, I’m sure I’ve done it, and I won’t defend it or take pride in it.

Second, and more important, there is a difference between pointing out the consequences of political action and taking joy in those consequences. More Palestinians are going to be blown up in airstrikes because Donald Trump is President than would have gotten blow up if Kamala Harris were President, an outcome which was wholly foreseeable in November 2024. I fully disapprove of and heartily condemn the voters who ignored this or pretended it wasn’t so, but I don’t want their grandmothers or cousins to die in airstrikes as consequence of that decision. I think naturalized immigrants who are watching their communities be torn apart by ICE are fucking morons and should have known better, but I don’t want ICE to tear apart those communities in order that they receive their just desserts. The comments in the earlier thread contemplated the destruction of Kentucky’s bourbon industry with glee that was barely disguised, if disguised at all. It’s not illegal to wish ill upon your political enemies, but neither is it honorable.

Very nearly every day over the last eight weeks I have received notice of a friend or a student (or both) who has lost their job because of Trump and Elon. Understanding that politics is a contact sport and the winners feast while the losers go hungry doesn’t make me feel any better while I watch careers being destroyed in real time. As you would imagine in a professional school that often leads to public service, the people whose careers are being destroyed lean Democratic, but they are by no means uniformly so. I take no satisfaction or pleasure in watching the arbitrary destruction of the career of a Republican-leaning FBI agent, much as I will take no pleasure in watching Trump’s tariffs rip through the communities that have developed around the bourbon industry. You may plead “but they need to learn their lesson so that they can do better!” but that’s bullshit and we both know it. There’s a reason “shameful joy” is considered shameful.

On Electoral Landscapes

As I pointed out on a thread from a couple days ago, political parties in the United States exist largely, if not entirely, to contest and win elections. In the US-specific context, this means plausibly threatening to win 50%+1 in a substantial number of elections across the entirety of the country. Donald Trump may have succeeded by wishing evil upon a huge portion of the American electorate but the Democrats have a much different kind of coalition and that tactic won’t work for us. In short, it’s not likely that we’ll win Kentucky for a while, but we can contest some elections within Kentucky and that contest isn’t helped by references to “moonshiner hillbillies.” This is a point that would seem so obvious to me that it need not even be expressed verbally, but here we are. “Yeah, but those people never read this blog!” Ok, that’s probably true, but I’m also going to lay a heavy wager that the comment section of this blog ain’t the only place you’ve ever expressed such sentiments. Loomis is and Abraham Lincoln was fond of saying something along the lines of “you have to meet the voters where they are,” and wherever that is it sure ain’t by calling them “mooshiner hillbillies” or the various other epithets that I regularly read in our comment section. It’s also bloody unlikely that the destruction of many of the most cosmopolitan parts of the state is going to produce an electorate more amenable to voting for Democrats.

More broadly (and Erik has discussed this at length) the future of the Democratic Party should not be built around the idea that we can fight and win a war between the urban and rural portions of the American electorate. It’s probably untrue on the one hand, and it’s horrible on the other hand. If we want to contest fifty states and 435 Congressional districts, we need to talk about politics in a way that’s not off-putting to huge portions of the electorate. People who live in rural areas already believe that Democrats have only condescension and contempt for them; it is not necessary to reinforce that impression by making it true.

On Elected Officials

I’m paraphrasing a great many of the comments in the earlier thread as “The people who elected Mitch McConnell deserve nothing but scorn.” Fair enough! Those people also elected Andy Beshear, who is currently on the right side of a political brawl with the governor of California over whether trans people should count as human. Explain to me, with care, which ones are the evil ones, because I find it hard to tell. I’ll also put Beshear way ahead, in political wins over replacement, of any governor of New York or mayor of New York City since, like, the 1990s. Moreover, while I’ll vouch no defense of Mitch McConnell, I will say he’s head and shoulders more human and more moral than J.D. Vance, who was elected by the same group of Ohioans who sent Sherrod Brown to the Senate for three terms. Curiously, I never see as much enthusiasm for the punishment of Cleveland in these threads as I do for Kentucky; wonder why that is?

The Red State-Blue State dichotomy is a sometimes-but-not-always useful shorthand for describing the American political divide that has held since 2000, but it is never less useful than as a heuristic for declaring specific arbitrary political communities “good” or “deserving of punishment.” Red and Blue is mainly (not entirely, but mainly) a consequence of the relative balance between exurban and rural communities in a state and large, cosmopolitan cities. Kentucky has the misfortune of only have two of the latter (Lexington and Louisville), and so falls into the “deserving of punishment” category. If you cut Nashville out of Tennessee and Cincinnati out of Ohio (the latter is a bit more geographically plausible than the former) Kentucky would suddenly be a lot closer to being a “good” state, which does nothing but demonstrate that using arbitrarily drawn lines on a map to determine the moral worth of a region’s inhabitants is a fool’s mission.

On Racism and Its Cousins

American racism is a deep and complex, and I would reject the notion that references to “moonshinin’ hillbillies and their stills” constitutes racism in the American context. But it’s a cousin, and it comes from the same inclination to prejudge, to caricature, to stereotype, to dismiss, and to hate. “Moonshinin hillbillies” isn’t the same as “crack-dealing gangbangers,” but it’s not far off and you bloody well know it. The latter will get you banned in a heartbeat, and you now know that the former will as well. The latter is intended to evoke in your mind the image of a young Black man wearing a bandana, a loose-fitting t-shirt, and low hanging pants, while the former is intended to evoke a toothless white guy in old, ripped clothing with a cigarette, a cheap beer, and no shoes. And as with any stereotype, Kentuckians and West Virginians often take control in their own ways. Little Bubby Child is much loved in Kentucky, because of course it comes from a place of love rather than a place of cruelty and contempt; it understands and values the culture that it gently mocks. Take a look at that and then compare it to what WJTS wrote, or what a dozen other people write in the comment threads every time Kentucky is mentioned.

You may say that you can’t compare the impact of racism upon Black communities and the impact of prejudice upon Hillbilly communities and you’re not entirely wrong, but you’re also not entirely right; apples and oranges, but even apples and oranges have points of productive comparison. I have had more than a handful of students over the years in my classes who are quite literally terrified of speaking in class because of the depth of their Appalachian accents, an issue that persists well into their professional careers and generally has to be addressed in some fashion (either kill the accent entirely or wear it loud and proud, the latter being an option that only a few personality types can manage). Moreover, socioeconomic structures are real; retention practices at the University of Kentucky have long been concentrated on the problem of getting rural and Eastern Kentucky (hillbilly, in other words) students through their first semester, a herculean effort that has shown positive impact, and that itself will probably be gutted as a “DEI” program. I’m a Board member of the University Press of Kentucky, and reading through the book proposals for our large catalogue on the history and culture of Kentucky/Appalachia has helped me understand how diverse and complex this region really is… which is probably why we had to fight off extermination at the hands of Matt Bevin eight years ago.

In any case, as with a great many racist stereotypes, it’s fundamentally wrong; bourbon country in Kentucky and the people who work in the bourbon industry are not hillbillies (a term that has specific territorial connotations in Kentucky) but rather suburbanites from the Bluegrass region (roughly northwest Kentucky), the most cosmopolitan and politically liberal part of the state. For what it’s worth, this is the part of the state that produced both Andy Beshear and Mitch McConnell.

On Shame

The rhetoric I’m condemning here is by no means limited to the LGM comment section. Back in the day it was all over twitter; now it’s all over Bluesky, and it makes me sick every time I see it. That the most recent round of such comments came in a thread where I, Scott, and the podcast guest all explicitly made the point that the devastation of communities in Kentucky would be a bad thing is particularly irritating. Let me quote Scott directly:

I think something I was assisted on is that there’s always that temptation. We see in our comment sector saying, “Oh, well, their Medicaid is getting taken away like fuck them.” That’s not the right thing. That’s awful. In part because, let’s be frank, even if you were paying attention, you would have no idea what Republican healthcare policy preferences are. The tariffs Trump was telling the truth about. Healthcare is a whole other thing. It’s just not, you know, it doesn’t, you know, it’s, it might feel good, but it’s, it’s a bad, you know, it’s a really bad thing. You know, I think the Democrat party, Democratic party stands for helping people, you know, whether you get their support immediately or not, is not really the point. So there’s nothing to celebrate. I mean, there’s, you know, everything that is going on, there’s nothing good about it. I have, I’ve no, you know, to, to, to hope that ordinary people get their lives devastated.

I make fun of Florida all the time, and I make fun of Ohio all the time. A lotta folks in the previous thread wanted to conflate that with the vile nastiness that was on display in the bourbon pod thread. The difference is that I don’t actually want to punish any Floridians for Ron Desantis or any Ohioans for J.D. Vance, in large part because I know large numbers of both Floridians and Ohioans who are good, decent people. You can pretend that it’s all the same but I doubt you can believe it for very long. Lexington has a local DJ who runs a “Florida or Not?” bit every morning combining “Florida Man” with some horrifically entertaining news story… and of course it turns out that the DJ is originally from Florida. I am not, in short, trying to steal your comedy.

WJTS is, as many of you mentioned, a long-term and valuable commenter. WJTS should also feel ashamed of what s/he wrote in that comment. If you liked that comment or upvoted it, you should also feel ashamed. It is not a crime to do a shameful thing and of course as Americans we have the freedom to say shameful things on many and varied platforms. If you wish to say shameful things of the variety I have described here, you should say them somewhere other than the LGM comment section. Kentucky is my home and having the freedom to blog about my home without some joker shitting out stereotypes and caricatures in the comment section is important to me. If you persist despite this injunction, you’ll be banned. This is my blog, and I won’t have it.

Thank you for your time.