The Working File

I’m glad Don Surber wrote this up:

A liberal admits to the racist attitudes of the liberal elites against the “white ethnics” who do the dirty work of earning the money.

I ignored the racial slur by Charles Lemos, a blogger at My DD, this weekend because it was just some blogger (although he is fairly popular). When I saw it posted at the New York Times, I realized I cannot bite my tongue on this.

Without embarrassment, Lemos said there is a WASP liberal vs. “white ethnic” capitalist dichotomy in this country. He is not a WASP, of course, but he sure has their attitude. He wrote, “I spent a decade on Wall Street working for Alex. Brown & Sons, Deutsche Banc Securities and Goldman Sachs. I found Wall Street a largely liberal environment with one major exception, the trading floor. In my experience I found traders, who are largely white ethnics — Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Slovak among others — and graduates of the Seton Halls, the Boston Colleges, the Notre Dames, the Penn States were the most rabid conservative and foul mouthed people on the planet. Nor could any of them ever get my name right. ‘My name is Charles, not Chuckie’ was something I would repeat whenever I had the misfortune to have to interact with them. Some of these folks made William Buckley appear moderate.”

Translation: It is Charles to you serfs. You are a bunch of greasy haired Slavs who probably are Catholics instead of Unitarians. Why next, you will be want to marry my daughters.

via Don Surber » Blog Archive » Liberal bigotry.

I saw that same comment at the Times Opinionater Blog here and was too lazy to blog it myself at the time, which is why I’m glad Surber nailed it. I’ll add one comment to Don’s point. A significant portion of the left/Democrat response to Santelli’s impromptu rant is purely ad hominem. In fact, calling it ad hominem probably gives it more credit than it is due. It is simply an attempt to discredit entire classes and races of people. Robert George dismissed Santelli not ion the merits but as the voice of derivative traders:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs jumped at the chance Friday to rebuke a CNBC reporter whose attack on President Barack Obama’s anti-foreclosure plan caught fire on the Internet.

Gibbs took on CNBC’s Rick Santelli in unusually personal terms after being asked a question about Santelli’s bracing critique during a regular White House briefing.

“I’ve watched Mr. Santelli on cable the past 24 hours or so. I’m not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives but the American people are struggling every day to meet their mortgages, stay in their jobs, pay their bills, send their kids to school,” Gibbs said. “I think we left a few months ago the adage that if it was good for a derivatives trader that it was good for Main Street. I think the verdict is in on that,” the press secretary said, poking directly at the cable journalist, who reports from the trading floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

or this comment on a Columbia Journalism Review article (it’s the “ed ericson comment at 11:19 am on Feb 22):

I think it’s a cultural issue. To oversimplify, the frat-jocks surrounding Santelli on that trading floor are of a piece with the frat-jocks who manned the boiler rooms and started all those shifty mortgage brokerages. They are steeped in an ideology–more than an ideology, really; a lifestyle–that reveres the clever, the macho and the myopic. These men (the vast majority of them are white men) have been trained since puberty to believe that they are an elite, and that, upon graduation from BU or Seton Hall (or just some bullshit Catholic high school) they are entitled to “earn” no less than $100,000 per year as salesmen. That is the minimum. Whether selling cars, advertising, stocks, mortgages or pork-belly futures, they will “work hard, play hard” and be a “success.” Everyone else is a “loser.”

Or this at the Democratic Strategist:

The sheer self-righteousness of Santelli’s rant–inflated by attaboy cries (genuine or facetious) from the prosperous white men on the trading floor around him–was what was remakable about it.

This same post ironically goes on to accuse his conservative opponents of racism for raising moral hazard arguments.
Even an article in Time that agrees with the moral hazard argument and opposes the mortgage bailout plan dismisses Santelli and his supporters as a bunch of white men:

But CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s now famous rant against President Barack Obama’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade only seemed like populism. Sure, he was screaming, and his theme was every man for himself, and the mass of white men behind him assembled into an angry mob, and — like all the great populists — he is oddly unhandsome.

This is what poasses for argument on the left. The concerns of white men are dismissed because they are white men, unless they get to ivy degrees and move left. Then they are enlightened. But there’s no substance to the left. it’s just identity politics and demonization. The “enlightened” folks who buy into it are empty, and clueless.