For a different view, try reading this:
You don’t believe all these ‘woke’ apologies are sincere though, right? Many of them read like parody, attributing terrible harms to some minor error.
I read it. I see basically the same conclusion I draw, only cast in a more sympathetic light. To quote that article. “The profits of the industrial firms would be restored, without a restoration of underlying productivity, through a process of oligopolization supervised by Wall Street, and reproduced ever since through the deployment of overcapacity to deter entry.”
In other words, “I’m good with those rich white folk on Wall Street making their money, as long as the minorities are worse off than me.” The solution to the problems are simple (but obviously not easy to implement, simple ≠ easy). Vote out the Republicans that enable those Wall Street fat cats to do what they do and enact the kinds of regulations such as minimum wage increases, universal health care, etc. supported by Democrats. But this doesn’t happen because those working class white people have (much) greater sympathy with the white oligarchs than they do with working class and poor minorities.
ETA. To tie it back in to my overall thesis, what’s happening now is that they are not only losing economic power, they’re losing political power. They’re pissed about it, and would rather destroy the system, as seen on 1/6/2021, than change their way of thinking.
I don’t see how on earth you get to that conclusion. The paragraph you quoted is explaining why the working class declined, not what policies or philosophy the working class support. Your paraphrase is entirely unrelated to the quote.
And I don’t think anyone claims that a higher minimum wage or universal health care will bring back industrial jobs. The Democrat’s response to these people seems to be either ‘go on welfare’ (UBI) or ‘learn to code’ (impractical for most, and even if possible means radically changing your lifestyle, and abandoning family and community to move to Silicon Valley). Neither of those are an attractive proposition.
Right. We don’t need the article to tell us what polices or philosophy they support. We learn that every two years at the ballot box, when they vote overwhelmingly Republican. As you say, the article, and that quote, are about the economic decline of the white working class. My thesis is that we are now in a phase where that class is now also losing political power (in addition to the economic power they already lost), and that that’s the main source of the current problems in US politics, leading up to the attempt on 1/6/2021 to take control by force now that they know they’re only option to win at the ballot box is to change their philosophy. They would, apparently, rather try to eliminate US democracy than adjust their political beliefs.
ETA again. All that remains to be seen is whether they will win or lose. 2022 and 2024 should give us a final answer either way.
Sigh…
See, here’s the thing. Every now and then, conservatives (and I’m assuming that you’re a conservative, and I apologize if I’m wrong) will make a good point.
For example, I (and I consider myself a leftist, and by conservative standards, a far leftist) think that liberals and leftists ought to really sit down and put themselves through a really rigorous examination of conscience and consider how neoliberalism alienated and marginalized the working class. And the article to which you linked had some actual insight into that.
And there’s something we might agree on.
But then conservatives, and especially Trumpists, will blow it by misstating and strawmanning liberal positions. As did the article to which you linked.
Trump offered them something that was attractive. Bring back industrial jobs through protectionism and deregulation, and turn the clock back to the time when the working class was at it’s zenith. Plus he supported their values, like patriotism and the idea that hard work leads to success, and not least told the self-righteous, judgemental professional types where to get off.
Probably some percentage of Trump voters are motived by racism, but it’s a mistake to ignore the positive parts of his message and assume that is all there is to it.
Attractive to those who feel they’ve been left behind, but don’t want to themselves change the way they think and live.
Which is not how economics works.
With no concern for the moral implications of turning back to “the time”
The vacuous kind based on nationalistic sloganeering and ignoring of history
i.e. petulance
All designed to tell that working class “YOU have NOTHING to change or adapt to, and I will make it so you are on top again”, knowing full well he was not going to do that.
I’m not. I don’t know what I am. I used to be on the left, but I find many aspects of leftist thought alarming these days. The dogmatism, the newspeak and accusations of bigotry calculated to prevent questioning of their beliefs, the outsized importance placed on protecting (some) people’s feelings, the focus on relative irrelevancies, and most of all the demonization of opponents and former allies alike.
The author isn’t a conservative either so far as I know. How does he misstate liberal positions?
All of what you describe fits Trumpism much more closely than modern liberal/left thought.
Especially the demonization. But the rest fits too.
Exactly. Like I said, what is the left offering them that is remotely attractive?
Or looking at it the opposite way, the foundational myths that built a unified country from a bunch of disparate immigrant groups.
Look, no one is eager to completely change themselves and their lifestyle for extremely uncertain or unappealing rewards. They don’t have many good options here.
Fortunately, being a ‘woke’ progressive or a conspiracy-believing Trumpist are not the only options.
Out of the “right kind” of disparate immigrant groups. While leaving out of the “myth” a huge segment of the nation.
TBF when someone does try to reinterpret the foundational mythology, often they get bombarded from both sides.
Oh, some of us have mentioned it before - this group already feels they’ve been lied to all this time and that those in power will not let them really move up, but they felt that at least the MAGA faction validated how they feel about the whole thing. Many of that electorate probably felt “yeah, I know, I will still be stagnating no matter what… but at least maybe those “self-righteous, judgemental professional types” will know what’s it like to be losers for a change.” The Trumpist elite are vile for taking advantage of them by throwing worthless crumbs at them, knowing they are in a place in life in which they are thankful for worthless crumbs.
He claimed he was going to do that. That’s certainly true. IMHO, however, it should be obvious that there’s no way to actually do so. You do bring up a very interesting point with the hard work leads to success value. I would argue that liberals hold the same value as well. The problem is that conservatives also believe the converse (success is due to hard work) where liberals recognize that in many cases success is due to being lucky rather than working hard.
I’m not even sure what to make of this. This sounds like your’e saying minorities should just stay satisfied with their lot in life rather than fighting for equality. It also sounds like you’re saying that we should just ignore bullies rather than calling them out. As far as the focus on irrelevancies, I’m not at all sure what you’re describing.
The left is offering a different path toward success. The economy has changed, and the jobs are different. But why is it somehow shameful / wrong / unfair / whatever if the government forces Walmart or McDonalds to pay well, so that those with less skills can still make a decent living? Why is it wrong to encourage previously unskilled laborers to become better educated, wether through a university education and becoming a doctor / lawyer / architect / scientist / whatever, or through education in the trades to become an electrician / plumber / carpenter / whatever? Those are things liberals are offering.
The rewards may be uncertain, and I’m sure they consider them unappealing or we wouldn’t be having this debate, but that doesn’t mean the options aren’t good. Becoming a professional, whether white collar or blue collar, is a good option. Forcing the wealthy assholes to pay a good wage for unskilled labor (even though that unskilled job is now stocking shelves at Walmart or flipping burgers at McDonalds rather than on the assembly line in a steel mill) is a good option. Why the white working class think of those things as bad options is what I don’t understand.
I’ll agree with you on this point. There’s a huge left-middle, which just so happens to include Joe Biden.
Yes. This is exactly the point. The thing is that the solution is as simple of changing those who are in power. They (the large white working class) are the ones who have the ability to make that change. They simply refuse to do so.
The party in power has changed several times in my lifetime. And the problem has not been solved. In fact, these issues have largely been ignored. Why wouldn’t they try voting for the first person who promised something different?
I don’t know how old you are, but the last time the Democrats were in complete control of both the presidency and both houses of congress was back in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was president. That was a different era, with many of those Democrats being conservative Dixiecrats who had yet to flip to the Republican Party they would eventually join. Before that, the last time what I would classify as liberals were in control was back during the LBJ years, and in fact much progress was made during that time. The current version of the Democratic Party, which I would suggest came into existence in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s victory, has never had full control of the federal government, not even in the first two years of Clinton’s and Obama’s presidencies. They came close, but never actually got there.
But it was a fantasy based in ignorance, because in that golden time, when the old-school Trumpers were young and there knees worked and their wives were hot, the top marginal tax rate was 91%. That means your wealthy boss, the person that built the company you worked for, the guy that owned “the plant”, handed over 91% of his income over 300K or so to the tax man. This money built our interstates and bridges, brought water and electricity to everyone, funded programs to help and uplift the poor, as well as funding what Trump called “the great things that we don’t do anymore” like the space program and build a “Great Society” Kind of like, you know……socialism
The industrial jobs you are pining for weren’t great jobs because they let macho men work with big macho things like steel and drill presses and assembly lines. They were great jobs because they were secure - many people worked at “the plant” their entire life - and relatively well-paid. The job at the plant paid well enough that you could own a decent home and car, support a family comfortably on one income and have enough left over for a decent family vacation and a nice Christmas. The work might have been hard, but it paid well. Strong labor unions were a big component of this.
Trump’s “jobs jobs jobs nothing matters but jobs” push was nothing but performative bullshit. We all know that you can replace one $15 an hour worker with two $7.50 an hour workers if you don’t offer benefits. We know that if you gut worker safety regulations, you can hire even more people. So now we have three $7.50 an hour window washers with no safety harnesses instead of one $15.00 a hour worker with a safety harness. Republicans see this as success. Democrats see this as failure.
When your job creation strategy is based solely on quantity, with no thought to quality, you’re going to end up with lots and lots of crappy jobs no one wants and a labor shortage. Which is exactly what happened.
Remember the Wisconsin FoxCon plant and all the ballyhoo about how it heralded the resurgence of an American manufacturing renaissance? It was a dismal failure by any metric, for a while they just hired the minimum number of people required to get the sweet government subsidies, who wandered around all day doing nothing. They may not even be doing that anymore. At its best, it was a dismal failure……although it’s starting to look like it was a deliberate con job. Which isn’t surprising, considering that the con artist Republicans worship was in on it.
I would coach the team whose players included several nephews, sons, and cousins of the referees (the Republican party, if the metaphor isn’t obvious enough).
What do you think are the limits to that approach? Election thefts tend to be committed at the state level, and affirmed at the SCOTUS level. Republicans have packed state governorships and legislators in their to achieve the former; they’ve packed SCOTUS 6-3 to hold the latter. And for the past 20 years they’ve been building expertise in contesting elections and throwing out votes.
Several states, most notably Wisconsin, came perilously close to throwing out a tranche of votes that would have decisively flipped the state for Trump. This is their strategy, and it almost worked. Their efforts are only intensifying, and there’s no apparent concerted Democrat attempt to counter it.
I really believe (or at least I strongly fear) that 2022 will be the last fair federal election in this country. Republicans will pick up narrow leads in Congress, and it will be over. Oh, there’ll still be “elections”, but battleground states will always see “irregularities”, which will get kicked up to the Republican-led state level for resolution, where blue precincts will be thrown out. Or, as I expect will happen next time in Georgia, they’ll simply say the vote was too tainted by “controversy” and have the Republican-led legislature appoint electors. And once Republicans get enough power, they’ll rewrite laws so their theft doesn’t need to be so blatant.
It happened. It’s happening. It’s almost complete.
I’m not quite so pessimistic. I agree that there’s a decent chance things will play out this way, but it’s far from a guarantee. The good news is that if they try and fail, I think things will get really ugly for them after that, to the point where the Republican Party as it currently exists would implode by 2028.
That isn’t “good news”. It’s wishful thinking. Nobody should be planning to win a battle, let alone a war, by hoping the enemy makes a mistake.