Of reds and rednecks: response to Ed Hansen and Herman Rebel

摘要

Americans, or so a very English friend of mind found recent occasion to remark, arerna lot like hobbits: you can learn all there is to know about them in a month, andrnthey’ll still surprise you after a hundred years. This singular homily on thernmercurial mindset of the American public was not prompted by the election ofrnBarack Obama a few short years after The Daily Mirror announced the 2004rnelection results with the headline ‘‘How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?’’—rnthough many here in Blighty are still shaking their heads in disbelief that thernYankee electorate could so abruptly replace a bumbling, brutal boob of a tyrant withrnan enlightened philosopher king. The facile millenarian contours of this titanicrnclash, which spoke aptly to the temperament of our apocalyptically inclined times,rnare rapidly fading, even for those who invested genuine hope in the ideologicalrndeployment of yes-we-canism from the get-go. No, it was sparked by a more subtlernevent: an obscure Rasmussen survey whose results sent murmurs of bemusementrnrippling across both sides of the water. It was elegant in its simplicity, asking onernquestion of a modest sample of American citizens: which is a better system,rncapitalism or socialism? Capitalism won by the hair on its chinny chin chin, withrn53% of respondents rallying to the banner of the market, 20% flying the red flag, andrn27% flummoxed by the conundrum (Rasmussen Reports 2009).