Country club conservatives Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney

Post Reply New Topic

I think Country Club Conservative is meant to have the connotation being surrounded by wealthy country club boys and thus being out of touch with the reality of life for ordinary working people. It's not about hypocrisy.

Of course, I don't believe hypocrisy to be the greatest human sin. Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree. Nobody can ever live up perfectly to an ideal perfectly. I think someone who rejects moral/political ideals just to avoid hypocrisy is committing a graver offense than the hypocrite. I think accusing people who believe in some degree of social justice (universal healthcare for instance) of being hypocrites for owning a piece of technology or not giving all their money to charity is a slimy tactic.

You guys are missing my point. A "limousine liberal" is not just a liberal with money, but refers specifically to monied liberals attempting to pass themselves off as part of the working class. Like I mentioned in my other post, the quintessential limousine liberal was the person opposing reforming public schools while putting their own children in private school. Now though I think Michael Moore may have usurped the title with his wriggling about trying to explain how he wasn't part of the "1%" despite his massive wealth; to their credit the OWS people didn't seem to buy it either. The insult stings because there is a grain of truth to it, and it effectively stokes the conservative's favorite weapon; resentment.

'Latte Liberal" is more of a politically specific version of "poseur" that plays on the same theme of phoniness that "limousine liberal" evokes; it says "how poor can you be if you're sipping your $4 cup of coffee conspicuously using your Airbook?". Again, it stings because their is a grain of truth at the center of it, a contradiction between rhetoric and reality that is uncomfortable for some people to confront.

I say "Country Club Conservative" doesn't work on the same level because there isn't the same dissonance between the desired image and the reality on the ground. The Conservative ideal is the successful businessman, and attaining a country club membership would be seen as the pinnacle of success. Again, it might work on populist conservatives or as an attempt to tie conservatives to the unpopular wealthy class generally, but it doesn't sting the way the liberal insults do.

To make a short digression, a group of bloggers opposed to libertarianism christened the writers at Reason "glibertarians", a term which the writers gleefully self applied as it wasn't insulting to them the way the bloggers thought it would be. Now, being called a glibertarian is a mark of pride, proof that you succeeded in pissing off a liberal in such a way that the best he could come back with was trying to call you a modern sophist. That's how an insult can backfire.

A better line of attack on Conservatives would be to go after their inconsistencies on things like big government, pork project, individual liberties and cronyism. They're wide open on these issues, and insults like "big government conservative" do sting because of that nugget of truth that contradicts what they're portraying themselves as. I'll leave the alliteration up to you guys, I can't sleep and my brain is slow, but I think I've given you a good starting point.

Liberals tend to talk about the working class not because they are necessarily a part of it (no politician is), but because Liberal policies are more in line with what the working class needs.

Republican=Screw everyone, business needs to thrive.

Liberal=There needs to be a balance.

And what are working class needs? T.V. to watch endlessly, enough beer to guzzle and a woman to penetrate.

ruveyn

If the goal is just to piss people off, accusations of hypocrisy and inconsistency aren't particularly effective. The best way to piss someone off is to make a ridiculous mis-characterization/strawman out of their ideology and continue repeating it and believing it regardless of how may times people try to correct you.

Working class people's needs include security for his/her family, including medical care and freedom from fear of life after retirement. That, and attaining a middle class lifestyle, which includes enough money to send the kids to college.
As my Dad had worked in an aluminum plant, I think I know of what I speak.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Who said the goal was pissing people off? I'm talking about creating an effective political meme, demonstrating why some gain traction and others fail. M_P has deployed this particular phrase on a number of occasions and it's never really caught on, so I'm analyzing why I think that is. He and others have mentioned the terms limousine liberal and latte liberal as labels that anger them, so I'm further analyzing why those two labels have been successful as both simple insults and political memes. If they were just BS, they could be more easily shrugged off, but it's that nugget of uncomfortable accuracy in the center of them that gives them their power. They're powerful totems in their own right, they allow disaffected voters to dismiss whole groups with a simple grumble, and they stick in the mind long after they're first employed.

Now if someone were to say "progressives eat babies and carry diseases" and coined a phrase around it, it would be such obvious BS that it would backfire and be roundly mocked. It's the same with the conservatives; just making things up is pointless, some people might make a show of being offended and try to spin the failed attack back onto it's source, but it's otherwise completely ineffective. Phoniness, duplicity and pandering are much nastier charges, especially when they're backed up by at least a little truth, preferably a truth that nags at the target of the attack even if only in the back of their mind. Belonging to a country club is not something a conservative would be ashamed of or afraid to admit in public; duplicity on things like cutting spending or reducing bureaucracy are much more damaging charges. A good meme should inspire defensiveness and feel like it needs to be rebutted, like it can't go unchallenged.

"Country club Republican" is used more often, although it's usually in contrast with "true conservatives".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_club_Republican

http://books.google.ca/books?id=B1Rqy9k ... an&f=false

I'm not sure if I heard the word somewhere else first or started using it because of how natural it sounded, by a (very, very) few other people have used it.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... nservative

http://countryclubconservative.com/

http://www.dailykos.com/news/Country%20 ... servatives

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/tag ... ervatives/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... _id=333138

It can be used to signify hypocrisy (as there's quite a few conservative politicians and businesspeople who rail against government dependence yet eagerly await the subsidies - like Michelle Bachmann) or just to signify being out of touch with ordinary voters.

The reason it hasn't "caught on" is because, for one, Wrong Planet isn't the place to popularize political epithets to the wider public, and secondly that "conservative" isn't a dirty word by itself like "liberal" has become. It's much more common to attack Republicans or Neocons than conservatives in general. Also, the public messaging networks of progressives are generally less centralized and effective then those of conservatives, so that also explains the disparity in use.

No, you don't want to make something up that's totally implausible. I'm talking about touting around false caricatures that can look plausible from an outside perspective but aren't generally true. Insinuate that conservatives are "greedy" and generally want to screw poor people over on purpose. Insinuate that liberals are "whiners" who are "envious" of "successful people". Instead of arguing the merits of a particular ideology, make the debate about falsely perceived character flaws of the people you disagree with. That's how to really make people mad if that's your goal in life. One doesn't have to be particularly clever or smart to be a successful troll. All you have to do is push the right buttons. You just have to be as dismissive and condescending as possible.

Then again, I don't think political memes and slogans are usually meant to piss off their targets. The primary intent is to give people who already happen to agree with you something to chuckle over. Other than M_P, I haven't met many liberals/progressives who get bent out of shape over terms like "limousine liberal" or "latte liberal". I'd be fine using those terms myself to describe a significant chunk of the Democratic party.

That was actually humorous but then again I drink Canadian beer (Molson's) so I guess it's rubbed off on me (more like in me).

Good man

I noticed that you turned from a chimp into a black man. I'm sure there was no insensitive humor intended.

Dox47 wrote:

Established or claimed? The internet is full of claims.

Kraichgauer wrote:

Republicans don’t see anything wrong with anyone belonging to a country club therefore they don’t hang out at the country club and criticize country club membership.
Liberals, on the other hand, are always trashing the rich. So when you see a rich liberal who makes a show of relating to commoners (or even the poor) it comes off as highly hypocritical.
This really isn’t rocket science here.

Dox47 wrote:


More like they refuse to but nice try.

Abacacus wrote:

Here again we have a contradiction.
First you say liberal policy is more in line with the working class (note the word "working").
Then you say that republicans are out to screw everyone because business needs to thrive.
People work in businesses so therefore these evil businesses benefit the worker as places of employment.
That is unless you mislabeled welfare recipients as “workers”.

Kraichgauer wrote:

What, none of us evil republicans have dad’s that have jobs?
Whatever.........

When business thrives at the expense of the workers, that is not good for the workers. Which is exactly what Republicans want. Unless you are going to claim low wages and no workers rights are a good thing?

I think you know you've taken me out of context. I never said Republicans don't have Dads who had jobs.
And who says Democrats are against people getting rich? No, Democrats are against those rich individuals who take all the tax breaks, but don't share their prosperity - which is how the capitalistic system actually works.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Kraichgauer wrote:


Gee, it sure looked like you were saying that. What did you mean, then? This should be good.


Rich from being a professional victim and poster child for the ACLU, maybe.
Liberals have demonstrated over and over, ad nauseum, that they think business success is bad.



Tax breaks are there to be taken as long as they are legal or are you saying all republicans are guilty of tax fraud? Do I need to hunt up some examples of rich liberals who have committed tax fraud? No, why bother since you’d claim that the sources were biased.
The taxes that the rich republicans have to pay are sharing enough. Many, probably even most, republicans are generous toward charity without government robery.


Move to North Korea, then……
Oh, and don’t even bother to remind me how much you love America.