Really? You think that retirees who vote a certain way in hopes of safeguarding their retirement income instead of voting for social change and/or justice have values that are “way out of whack”?
I suppose, if social justice is what you think the primary goal of everyone and the government should be above all else. Few people think that way, and honestly, prioritizing it like that is kind of on the fringe.
If retirees are voting to protect their retirement income, they shouldn’t be voting for the party that puts SS on the chopping block every chance it gets, and maybe vote for the party that has extended its solvency.
It’s one thing to vote against your interests in the interest of advancing social progress that you favor, and it is another thing to favor your personal interests in spite of going against social progress that you may favor, but it doesn’t make any sense at all to vote both against your personal interest, and against social progress that you favor.
i.e. solid Democratic voters.
I had to word it carefully. I chose "corrupt establishment " because I don’t think Trump was perceived as part of the political establishment. But yeah he does appear corrupt and I think people were willing to overlook that because he wasn’t part of Washington.
I think the Democrats made a fatal mistake, and continue to make this mistake, in believing that their interest groups should vote as a bloc for Democrats, and that it’s okay to make direct appeals to these groups to ensure that they vote as a bloc, but that it’s wrong for whites to vote as a bloc, and no direct appeals should be made to white interests.
Leaving aside the moral issues of this, this is democracy. Unless Democrats repeal the secret ballot, social pressure cannot undo fundamental rules of democracy. If you establish that various demographic groups should vote their interests, as they perceive them, then that logically leads to President Trump. Maybe we should find a better way?
How do you explain the fact that Trump supporters voted against their own interests?
That is thoroughly discussed in the article cited in the OP of this thread.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on that article, as IMHO you are one of the smart, articulate conservative apologists on the board.
I said, “as they perceive them”. And even objectively, I’m not sure that a pro-globalization party is what the white working class needs right now. It’s better for the country as a whole, but for these small town folks it’s not going so well.
It’s late and I’m out of cognitive gas, but the Democrats have relied on demographic politics and focused too much on national elections. They’ve won the majority of presidential elections since 1992 but gotten their asses handed to them in congressional races and state elections as well. As much as a lot of us want to taunt rural Trump voters for voting for an imbecile, let’s not forget that a large number of progressive voters have note voted at all in elections that mattered. Consequently we’ve been left with Great Liberal Hope candidates who are unable to deliver because liberals only show up in major elections.
What is in their interests is subjective. A parent may think that a child eating ice cream is against the child’s interests (“he’ll get cavities!”) The child may think that ice cream is very much in his interests (“It tastes good!”).
Also, when many liberals claim that conservatives vote “against their own interests,” they are often only taking economic factors into account, not social/religious ones. A pro-life Trump supporter may know that Trump is likely to negatively impact his or her personal finances, but think that Trump appointing pro-life justices to the SCOTUS would more than offset that, and so that overall speaking voting for Trump is in his/her interests.
You’re right about that. The abortion issue is an absolute dealbreaker for some.
See, there’s one little mistake in that analysis. Liberals do show up, they are dedicated voters. The problem is that the party has become so focused on identity politics that there’s no overarching values shared by everyone in the party. The Republican Party, at least pre-Trump, is a conservative party united by a skepticism of government. The Democratic Party by contrast is a coalition of interest groups. Liberals provide what ideological impetus there is to the party, but they haven’t sold it successfully to the Democratic base as a whole, just to parts of it and only on certain issues. So these various interest groups only show up when they have a good reason. And they all can’t have a good reason at the same time.
No, it really isn’t. It’s a party defined by business freedom and social conservatism. The Republicans are happy with government being of any size that it needs to be to enforce business freedom, and social mores. The small government thing is to some (minor) extent something that Republicans prefer, but mostly it’s just a neat excuse for shutting down parts of government they don’t like, and not something they feel any need to adhere to when it comes to government they do.
See for example:
It’s just one of those legends that is so ingrained it is immune to the facts. A Republican president can spend what they like, then say they are in favour of small government, and everyone nods. A Democrat president can cut spending and everyone will still assume they have been a spendthrift.
It’s not about voting for social justice – it’s voting to prevent (or allow) bigotry from regaining power. Yes, someone’s priorities are way out of whack if they understand the incredible brutal legacy of bigotry in the US, and understand that Trump based a significant chunk of his campaign on bigoted rhetoric, and still put something else as a higher priority and voted for Trump.
[hack choke gasp rattle]
What exactly are “white interests”? Whites are a very large and diverse group, and the only things that can be said to be “white interests” are things that are in everyone’s interests. Unless, of course, what you really mean by “for white interests” is “against minority interests”, and no, we shouldn’t do that, because it’s wrong. Absolutely wrong, no matter what all those moral relativists on the right might say.
(and seriously, how did moral relativism ever get associated with the left, anyway?)
I won’t argue that nobody, anywhere will lose their job if we do what we need to do to protect the planet. But (a) we’ve **got[:/B] to protect the planet from overheating, for our own good and everyone else’s - that’s protecting the jobs of wheat farrmers in Kansas, dammit - and (b) every time industry and its apologists have claimed that the Dems are going to kill off tons of jobs to protect the environment, it’s been bullshit, and loss of jobs has been minimal. This has been going on for nearly 50 years, and it’s the same old same old.
Yes, some coal miners will lose their jobs. But we’re talking 50,000 jobs in the whole freakin’ country, over a period of years. Our economy created 178,000 jobs, net, last month.
Now, about those trade agreements: Dems are ambivalent and divided about trade agreements. But aside from Trump, the GOP is all for them. Now whose hand gets strengthened when workers vote Republican? The Republicans and the pro-trade Dems.
And the way to protect Americans’ jobs from illegal immigrants is simple: you put the employers in charge of making sure their workers are in the country legally, and hammer them with serious penalties when they drop the ball.Again, Dems are ambivalent (although most Dems would favor such a system), but Republicans are absolutely against such sanctions.
So most of what I’m seeing here is that Republicans are good at sticking Dems with the blame when Dems halfheartedly go along with what big business and their GOP allies absolutely want, or massively exaggerating the cost of fending off environmental catastrophe, which needs to be done, period, but the GOP sticks the Dems with the responsibility for, by refusing to acknowledge that there’s a problem at all. Party on, dudes! says the GOP, and people get mad at the Dems for saying it’s time to get up and go to work.
Dunno about degree inflation (is this a real problem?), but see above for #4, and again, programs like H-1B and H-2B are stuff that Dems are divided about, but Republicans are all for. You don’t strengthen the hand of those who are against such programs by voting for the party that’s 99.44% pure pro-business.
Oh, and about those coal mining jobs: My grandfather briefly worked as a coal miner. He says that at the beginning of the day, before they went down in the mines, all of the workers would first open up their lunchboxes and eat their desserts. They did this because they all knew that there was a chance they wouldn’t live to lunchtime, and if they were going to die, they were at least going to eat dessert first. That’s the kind of job that Republicans are trying to protect.
Granpap didn’t stay at that job for very long.
It was a hypothetical; my point was that some people have things that to them, trump racism, sexism, and any kind of social justice/political correctness. And rarely are those things outright hatred of minorities or trans people or gay people, or Muslims. Usually they’re more mundane things that they just prioritize more.
And… I don’t know about you, but I’m not putting any faith in SS as my retirement income; if I get some benefit from that, great, but it’s not part of the plan. So my retirement investments are of far more importance to me than whatever the government may do with SS.
I would surmise that coal mining has become a safer industry in the year 2016 than in your grandfather’s time. But - isn’t it the coal miners, or the coal communities, themselves, who have been agitating for the coal jobs to stay/return? It’s not so much the GOP calling for coal jobs to say, as it is the GOP *responding to calls by the coal folks *for the coal jobs to stay.