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"To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/04/15/elitism/index2.html

"The attempt by eminent figures on the left to belittle traditional values by reducing them to personal pathology dates back at least to 1950, when the German Marxist émigré Theodore Adorno, in "The Authoritarian Personality," attempted to explain fascism (and by implication American McCarthyism) in terms of repressed individuals who take out their psychic frustrations on minorities. Similarly, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset explained the Goldwater-Reagan conservative movement as the product of "status anxiety" on the part of socially insecure Americans. This line of thinking, inspired by absurd comparisons between Weimar Germany and post-1945 America and between libertarian conservatism and Hitlerian totalitarianism, has been discredited by scholars like Lisa McGirr, who shows in her 2001 book, "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right," that Goldwater-Reagan activists tended to be successful, educated people for whom conservative ideology was not a mask for something else but a coherent belief system. Nevertheless, the cliché that working-class and even middle-class social traditionalists, * * -> when they are not simply ignorant, "low information" hicks, are maladjusted misfits whose political views are nothing more than feeble gestures of misdirected rage, persists as an article of faith among many progressives, who then wonder why the Democrats cannot win over more of the voters they despise. <- * * "