Reasonable people need to make reasonable decisions. What Republicans seem to advocate is a wild west mentality where anyone can do anything because jobs. Cost too much to dispose of industrial waste safely? Dump it in the river! Jobs! This mentality that all regulations are bad and government is evil isn’t going to lead to sound decisions that move the country forward.
Thank you for expressing the perspective that I feel, but am unable to articulate so eloquently.
Are they essentially saying the same thing? It seems to come down to the fact that the average American is sick and tired of stagnant wages, high insurance costs, lack of access to health services, overpriced educational institutions, and a Congress that has demonstrated time and time again that they really don’t care about anything but their own re-elections.
Both American political monopolies (parties, if you prefer) have become nothing but money machines designed to advance the interests of the super rich and the endless loop of money to power. Governance in the United States is no longer a process of ensuring that all people have equal access, but rather a means for a small group to perpetuate their family fortunes. Gerrymandering is a clear demonstration of this objective and the majority of Americans have no idea what it means, or how it is controlling their lives.
Congress grants themselves power and immunity from laws while the average American is left to make do with whatever they can scrape by with. Why is Congress exempt from insider trading laws? Why is Congress continually promoting laws like H1B that allow foreign workers to take our jobs and depress wages? Why was NAFTA allowed to become law?
These things and more are why Trump and Sanders are in the spotlight. Let’s just hope that this somehow causes our horrible political landscape to change. But I’m not holding my breath.
No. It’s like Sanders is an M.D. and Trump is a homeopathic or Scientologist “physician” or something (or the other way around, if you like, but, really, you don’t): They diagnose some of the same problems, but they trace those problems to very different root-causes and prescribe very different remedies.
Wait. WHAT!?!?! Poor whites hate regulation on oil and gas companies and THAT’S why they vote Republican? WHAT!?!?!
Poor whites vote Republican for several reasons. Some of them are racist. Some of them believe that Democrats are giving stuff to else at the expense of poor whites. Some of them are culturally more aligned with Republican values that align with regional values in places where poor white live. But it is rarely because the Democrats are mean to monied interests.
I bet less than 1% of poor white voters even know that Hillary has shifted her position on fracking and of the 1% that know I bet that less than 1% believe anything she says or gives two shits about her position on this issue anyway.
IOW, he is just doing what the Republicans have been doing since Reagan.
Since Nixon.
Ah, but he started by talking about higher taxes. Trump’s policies are only understood with quantum theory - for the most part they are indeterminate.
If he gets nominated he’ll probably propose citizenship for undocumented workers.
So if we were to lock Donald Trump inside a box and . . . well, let’s just end the thought experiment right there, and keep the box locked until after the election.
Let’s just keep the box locked. Full stop.
…ok, ok, install plumbing and cut in some air holes. Better?
I think you’re assuming that everyone who votes Republican is in lock-step with all the ideology, and that’s not any more true for Republicans than Democrats.
Look at it this way- something happens in your neck of the woods that suddenly raises the amount of wealth and economic activity in the area significantly. It comes with some environmental costs that aren’t entirely clear, and that as best you can tell, aren’t affecting your family or anyone you know, or if they are, the impact is minor. Let’s go a little further and say that you’re a working class or lower middle class person who is seeing some significant benefit from this - more county services, or maybe a better job, or better property values and therefore more school funding for your kids.
Now let’s say one party is for not fettering this economic activity through regulation, and the other advocates strong regulations that would seriously dent the economic activity and eliminate or greatly diminish the benefits enumerated above.
That’s the choice that people in some of these areas are being faced with- basically single issue voters for economic activity in their areas vs. something else less attractive, imposed from without, and that they perceive as reducing their quality of life.
First, we need to quit saying Trump supporters are all stupid & blue collar. It’s stereotyping and not useful for figuring out what is behind his popularity. In another thread it was pointed out that the median Trump supporter makes between $50-100k. There a lot of white collar/small businessman/tradesman that support him and are solidly middle class and definetly not stupid. They are more likely to be rule-following, black&white thinking authoritarians. They are not deep thinkers or entirely logical but that is not the same as stupid.
This middle class portion has probably seen where regulations have made doing business doing more difficult. They have had to deal with bureaucracy in their own business or on a jobsite or seen a factory move somewhere else where labor is cheap and regulation is lax. The true poor whites have also seen something similiar. Many I know think the man/Washington is always telling what to do or the government is going to take their guns/tell them to how to raise their kids/put a muffler on their hot rod. There is a strong anti-government streak in American poor whites.
The Republican party and Fox news have been telling these people for years regulation is killing jobs. Government is taking their guns. The EPA and Obama are killing the coal industry. (Ironically for this discussion. That one has more to do with fracking and cheap natural gas).
So yes many of these people are anti-regulation.
You make a lot of sense and present your case well. My position is that we have regulations precisely so that short-term local thinking doesn’t trample over the health and safety of the citizens and their environment. I can understand how they might want to roll the dice but there has to be a rational risk assessment before decisions get made that could cause long term harm.
As one Democrat who understands the white working class once put it:
Taconite, coke and limestone
fed my children and made my pay.
Them smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God
into a beautiful sky of soot and clay.
This article seems relevant to the thread:
There are real problems in these communities, so much so that they are literally are dying off, even as everyone else is living longer. And yet too many members of the supposed party of the little guy have nothing but contempt for their concerns (see: e.g. the BobLibDem post that has now been approvingly cited twice, and msmith537’s dismissive response to funky little lee). Small wonder they look for a chance to defect.
Since Grant
Well, no. From Grant’s day through Ike’s it was mainly the Dems who exploited working-class resentment and the Pubs were more the party of the upper and middle classes. But then Nixon came up with his “Silent Majority” and “Southern Strategy,” the parties began to exchange constituencies, and a great deal about them changed in consequence.
Just FTR, I’m not saying I necessarily agree with these folks; I personally tend to try and take a much longer view of policy when considering things from a national level. (kind of like worrying about the current landscaping or tree size of a cemetery, I suppose)
But I understand where they’re coming from in many cases. In this case, I’m familiar with that conservative blue-collar mindset that I’m talking about- people in my family, people I’ve worked with, and people I’ve been acquainted with have that same view- it’s often a sort of “I’ll put up with some shitty working conditions and potentially a shorter life span by working at this job/living in this community/dealing with this pollution if by doing so, I can provide for my family and give my children a shot of doing something bigger and better somewhere else.” kind of mentality. It’s actually a pretty noble sentiment. However, it’s not the kind of mindset that engenders whistleblowing or that has a lot of tolerance for environmental regulations that would cause layoffs or for industries to pull out of communities entirely.
One thing that’s big with American whites is that everyone should play by the same rules and that people should be held accountable for their actions within the context of those rules. But the guy in the middle looks up and sees a ruling class that invades other countries on pretexts, blows up the financial system, flies around on private jets while lecturing the rest of us about our carbon footprint, mishandles classified documents and engages in the legalized system of bribery we call lobbying, and they never get held to account. Then he looks down and sees people going on disability with fake injuries, breaking the immigration laws, having kids out of wedlock but expecting the government to support them, and using government services even though they’ll never pay any taxes. Those people, also, are never held to account. He also looks left and right and sees a rapidly expanding class of minorities entitled to special privileges under the law - their own special set of rules.
But when that guy in the middle looks at his own position, he feels hemmed in by all kinds of rules that others seem to break with impunity. He’s only one DUI or one intemperate tweet from losing his job. Maybe you can see how a guy like that might be inclined to vote for whichever candidate seems most likely to drain the swamp.
Or for whatever candidate at least stands for making intemperate tweets with impunity.
But yeah, there is a lot of feeling of “I played along and all I got was screwed”, and it is especially galling for those who have spent the last generation voting for a platform that never seems to be put in place – thank Og for that, says I, but I can see how they will feel played.
Everyone has it shitty in one way or another, it is hard to find sympathy when they choose to blame Mexicans or Muslims when their troubles are mostly self inflicted. The day their feeling switches to “i voted Republican and all i got was screwed” things might start getting better for them.
This data may upend all your assumptions about what kind of voters are attracted to him. It did mine! (I was less surprised by what it shows about Bernie.)