WHO EXACTLY ARE THOSE 33% OF AMERICANS STILL SUPPORTING BUSH? AND WHO VOTES FOR KOOKS LIKE GARY MILLER AND KEN CALVERT... IN CALIFORNIA?

I live in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood of single family homes with nice lawns and gardens. It's called Los Feliz and it's right off the 5 Freeway. Ethnically, the neighborhood is pretty diverse, one of the things that makes it so attractive. I don't think Republicans bother running in the area. I know one didn't challenge our congresswoman, Diane Watson (although that isn't because they approve of her impeccably progressive voting record); it probably has something to do with the fact Bush only managed to garner 16% of the voters against Kerry (an increase of 2% over what he managed against Gore). Not far down the 5 Freeway there are two very different districts that have long perplexed me-- the 42nd CD and the 44th CD, represented, respectively by Gary Miller, the single most extreme right wing congressman from California and by Ken Calvert, whose voting record isn't much different from Miller's.

Here's a description of the situation in CA-42 that I wrote last May:

CA-42 is a district of suburban sprawl snaking down from Chino, Diamond Bar and Rowland Heights through Brea and Yorba Linda to Mission Viejo. It has the highest percentage of married people in the entire state and it is very white bread (although 40% of the people living there are Hispanic and Asian). In 2004 Bush carried the 42nd with 62%. The district is so hopelessly conservative that no Democrat bothered to even file to run against extreme right-wing nutcase, Gary Miller, who has one of the 10 most far right voting records in the entire Congress, more extreme than Tom DeLay or Roy Blunt and more extreme than any of the California Republican dead-enders like Richard Pombo, John Doolittle, Duncan Hunter, Jerry Lewis, although, like them, he is a crooked self-server who uses his congressional power to enrich himself at the public's expense. The only times Miller is not busy being a Bush rubber stamp is when Bush's (and DeLay's) positions aren't steeped in a high enough degree of sheer Wingnutery for him. Hate to see a kook like this get off without even having to defend his pro-war, pro-Big Business, anti-environment, anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-Labor, anti-education, anti-health care, anti-human positions?

Since then Miller, like my congresswoman, faced no opposition to his re-election bid. Ken Calvert, once arrested for having sex in his car with a prostitute and more recently caught using his office to make sweet real estate deals for himself, had token opposition and won another term. A few weeks after writing about CA-42, this is what I wrote about the situation in CA-44:

Change has been a lot slower in CA-44. This district, sprawling through the endless suburbs of southern Orange County and western Riverside County is improving... but more slowly. Ask anyone in the district what the biggest problem is and they'll all be reading out of the same hymn book: development and the problems that come with development from overtaxed public services (like education), runaway local taxes, traffic, crushing corruption... And the 44th CD has been represented in Congress by a greasy former real estate speculator as sleazy as the day is long (or, in summer, short), Ken Calvert. A gross little porky-pig lookalike, he was once arrested-- as a congressman-- with a prostitute giving him head in his car. (Yes, yes-- he's as much for Republican "family values" as the rest of them and, like most of them, flatly refuses to honor his word to step down after 6 terms.)

Both are rated as Safe Republican districts. Bush took 62% against Kerry in CA-42 and 59% in CA-44. Neither district is walking distance from my house. I could get to either in less than an hour by car, even if the traffic is bad, as it often is. In fact, I have attributed the bad traffic to why these two districts are so different from my own. These are classic suburban/exurban commuter districts. At least one, if not both, adults in the family are commuting... for hours in miserable traffic. I think they listen to Hate Talk Radio on the way to work and on the way home. I think their brains have become addled from too much exposure to Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, O'Reilly.

A few days ago Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America wrote an insightful article for AlterNet that goes a lot deeper into explaining what's gone wrong in districts like Miller's and Cavert's. It's as strong as Thomas Frank's bestseller What's Wrong With Kansas?

Millions of Americans live trapped in soulless exurbs which lack any kind of community, leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable. Without alternatives for their social despair, they flock to demagogues promising revenge and a mythical utopia.

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

Miller's and Calvert's districts are wealthy... and utterly soulless. They fit well with Hedges description: "lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely." His article deals with how these folks have been driven and suckered into a theology of despair and revenge that "says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand. Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve." When you wonder who would vote for hateful and corrupt wingnuts like Gary Miller and Ken Calvert election after election, and who are those persistent 33% of Americans still supporting George Bush's catastrophic and disastrous policies... well, they're not all in Utah and Idaho. Some are just an hour's drive down the Freeway.