Sure, these people have real problems. But how on Earth do they see conservatives as the solution? Who do they think moved their jobs to China? Who’s trying to lower the minimum wage and break up unions? Who’s trying to eliminate Social Security and public health care?
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Sure, there are the Trump-followers who are marginalized white, usually rural working class folks who are financially insecure and who pine for a return of the good old days when they could work hard, save a few bucks and provide a good life for their families. They tend to see a lot of the more modern(?) changes in society and the government as responsible for the decline of that ideal.
It’s not really a desire to kick people of other races, or twirl the ends of their mustaches while they contemplate keeping their privileged position. Furthermore, I’d bet any amount of money that if you said they were privileged, they’d be monstrously offended, as they’re not perceiving much if any of the benefits of this privilege. It’s not helping them get or keep jobs, and being white and rural means that a lot of the low income/poverty amelioration programs are not aimed toward them, being mostly big-city type things, at least in terms of where the facilities are. So they’re just desperately trying to hang on to what they have, and position themselves for a little more- the exact same thing that minorities have been doing all along, but it’s not mostly limited to them now. I personally can’t fault a person in that situation for voting for the candidate who seems to have concern for them and their situation.
Then there are the suburban republicans. They’re a lot harder to defend. In my experience, these people are usually middle to upper-middle class white people who for whatever reason seem to have a very harsh and/or us-vs-them conception of the political world. They’re the ones who are oblivious to the ways that the system is geared specifically to help them, and as a result, feel that a lot of the problems that minorities and other non-mainstream groups (LGBT, poor, etc…) face are a result of being too dumb or lazy to work within the system to be successful. They’re not aware of the institutional hurdles and barriers that are in those other groups’ way. And it’s not malice either; most of these people are actually very nice. They’re just ignorant as hell of how the world actually works- things that are actually intended to level the playing field are seen as trying to give someone else a leg up vs. them.
To use a personal example from a quarter century ago, I was a scholarship student at one of the big Texas state schools. I was pretty hacked at the time the minority-only scholarships were, compared with the scholarships I was eligible for:
[ul]
[li]Something like 20-25% larger[/li][li]Required lower scores/grades to get[/li][li]Required lower grades to keep[/li][li]Had a smaller pool of applicants [/ul][/li]
And there were more scholarships available to them to boot. I felt this to be a massive injustice, and somewhat patronizing to the minority students- why wouldn’t the school want the best and brightest, regardless of race, and how must a minority student feel valued if they know that their scholarship requires less and gives them more?
As time has passed, I realize that a lot of it is trying to make up for other problems that the minority students face, more than it’s trying to reward them with more for less just by virtue of their race. In other words, it’s not a prize, but more of a way to try and help those students succeed- compared with me back then, they were probably coming from a somewhat less financially well-off home (that one is debatable), a lesser academic background and with lesser family and community support. So they might conceivably need more money and some leeway on grades to be successful vs. your average high-achieving white student.
But that’s not how the suburban republicans view it- they see things like I did back then- everyone is/should be equally treated by the government and society, and they assume that everyone else is being treated that way. And a lot of the hostility that other races get is because they’re being perceived as getting special treatment and/or privileges that ‘everyone else’ doesn’t get.
It’s basically massive sheltered ignorance, not malice.
Is this true? My impression is that a lot of programs, benefits, and facilities are targeted specifically at rural people.
If you want to appreciate the difference between liberals and conservatives, compare their view towards poor people and what they think government should do for them. Focusing on what they say about the middle class ain’t going to tell you anything, mainly because it’s the category everyone from Joe the Walmart greeter to Joe the investment banker lump themselves into. The reality is that Walmart greeters are poor if that’s their only real source of income, and investment bankers aren’t really middle class either.
Yes, it does favor the wealthy. Do conservative politicians talk about the need for people, regardless of socioeconomic status, to have things like food, shelter, and access to healthcare? Do they say stuff like “all children deserve good educations, not just those who can pay expensive tuitions”? Nope they don’t. What I see more frequently is them appealing to the importance of helping “job creators” and by extension, helping the middle class. That is not the same thing as espousing a government that protects those without power. Some within that “middle class” cohort has a lot of power and don’t want to part with it.
Which is why they voted for Trump.
Oh wait.
I don’t think I’m myopic here, sorry.
[quoteThey then leverage this largesse into voting power that they exploit in order to advance their social agenda which is largely predicated on the destruction of their traditional way of life. They’re not completely wrong by the way, nor are they completely right.[/QUOTE]
What “traditional way of life” do they feel is under threat by their opposition? Gonna need you to expound.
Rural aid has very specific challenges that urban aid doesn’t have that makes those programs very difficult to access. So, let’s say you want an after school program for kids in an urban area. You rent out a gym and you tell the kids to stay late. Done deal. Rural kids may have homes an hour or more away from their school. Staying late requires transportation to be provided since many don’t have their own. The economies of scale mean that your putting a program in place for maybe 10 kids in a small school instead of a hundred at an urban school, so the programs don’t get put into place at all. If you look at something like summer lunch programs. In urban areas, the challenge is simply getting the food together. In rural areas, how exactly do you get the food to these kids who live in the middle of nowhere? When you talk about facilities, let’s say you plop a community center down in ‘Anytown, West Virginia.’ What happens is that it is used by the wealthier community members that have cars and can get to it. The truly poor may never see the inside of it because it’s too far from their homes. Again, because of economies of scales, rural places have a tendency to be overlooked. Putting a community center in an urban neighborhood with thousands of people within walking distance is a much better use of resources than putting one in a town of 500 people.
Rural people also lack a lot of political power in comparison to towns and urban areas, so it’s hard to divert resources to them. Poorer people in urban areas also tend to benefit from public works projects that are aimed at the wealthy, but raise all boats in ways that rural people do not. As an example, the town I grew up near of 1500 people has a dike to prevent flooding. It was put in with emergency funding following a flood in 1985. It has not been repaired since and is eroding quickly and nearing its lifespan. The town is quite aware that without that dike, they will be vulnerable to catastrophic floods. They completely lack the resources to fix it and have been petitioning various government agencies for aid for a decade with little response. If they lived in a larger city, it seems inconceivable for such a situation to go essentially unnoticed, but rural areas due to their small size are much more expendable. If we look at something like the Flint Water Crisis, it’s a very major deal that we at least hear about, but rural water problems are just par for the course and normal. My last house, every year we got a letter that they tested high for carbon tetrachloride in the water and if the water smelled sweet, you shouldn’t drink it. Boil water advisories were common. Line collapses occurred multiple times a year. The water systems in the area were all put in during the mining booms 100 years ago and haven’t been touched since. There’s no money to fix them or fix problems and when you only have a few thousand people on a water system and tens of miles of pipes, it’s easy to ignore them.
Anyway, this is only to say that the dream of helping rural people and the reality do not always line up. Money in programs to serve the rural doesn’t stretch nearly as far as money in urban areas and the programs reach fewer people.
Of course it doesn’t. You just think their programs don’t work, so you ignore their rhetoric. If you look at Betsy DeVos as an example, she’s not saying, “Schools should be for those that can afford them.” She says, ‘Parents of all classes are being denied access to high quality education, so the state needs to give vouchers to poor parents so they can afford privates.’ Will that work? No, I don’t believe it will, but the point is though that the rhetoric is not anti-poor. Look at Trump himself. He pitched his tax cuts for the wealthy specifically as a poverty alleviation program. One of his quotes from the values voter summit just prior to the election. “And all of us here today are determined to lift suffering Americans out of poverty. Going to do it, with a lot of other people going to help. As your president, I will pursue a complete reform of our economy to bring back millions of new jobs into our country. That includes, we will be doing massive tax cuts for working families and for businesses. It includes, very importantly, the elimination of all needless job-killing regulations.” Donald Trump on the stump was very anti-wealthy. He said that Wall Street was getting away with murder and he was going to ‘tax them hard’ and his final campaign ad was that he was going to stop the wealthy and political elites from bleeding our country dry. His rhetoric was always that he was anti-elite and since he was one of them, he knew how to put a stop to them.
Sure thing. Conservatives prize a way of life with an emphasis on shared values and communal thinking. Homogeneity and clear behavioral norms enforced primarily by social pressures are necessary to their social structure and I might even go so far as to say survival as a cohesive unit. Liberals aren’t into that for obvious reasons and wish to destroy those modes of thinking.
Except for the very means that let them live out there in the first place, highway monies and rural utility programs.
But the main thing I take issue with is the assertion that rural people lack political power. Looking at who has the per-capita votes to elect Senators, rather the opposite is true.
However, it’s true that a lot of things are going to be less efficient in places with a low population density. Aren’t conservatives in favor of pulling ones self up by one’s bootstraps and moving to a place where the money invested will go farther, rather than whining for a disproportionate amount of the resources?
Rural people lack political power for the sheer reason that there just aren’t that many of them. Something like 19% of the country is rural in terms of population. Due to the way that they divide up into states, they have disproportionate power in the Senate, but in the House, even punching above their weight due to the way seats are apportioned, they are still very much in the minority.
Case in point- South Dakota is on an equal footing in the Senate with Texas. But in the House my metro area has nine congressmen to SD’s one. That kind of thing is the case across the country.
What this means is that if there’s a bill for some kind of poverty related program, those 9 are going to be joined by other big cities and make sure that it pertains to their constituents’ interests. Poor SD is going to be somewhat overruled in the final analysis.
Well, what let them live there in the first place is generally one of three things, a dude with an axe and a few head of cattle who showed up 200 years ago and said this is where I’m going to live, a lumber company looking for cheap labor or a mining company that shipped people in like cattle and their descendants stuck around.
I object to the idea that rural people have too much political power. I’m a West Virginian. When was the last time you heard us moving the needle on anything? Sure, Trump has his ‘coal jobs’ rhetoric, but truthfully are you sitting in wherever you live and saying, “Man, those West Virginians sure are controlling the political strings of power. Their 5 electoral votes cause much injustice in this world. The boot of the West Virginian oppressor is upon me.” Of course not. Yes, more rural states have out-sized representation, but their overall smaller numbers serves to mitigate the effect. If 99 Senators were chosen by a vote of 10 thousand people each and I alone got to choose the last one, my vote would be outsized, but my power would still be extremely limited. It’s also important to note that only 4 states have more than half of their population that lives outside of metro areas - Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and Mississippi.
As for your last point, this conversation began with bump talking about rural people feeling that they aren’t seeing programs for them that they see for the urban poor. It has nothing to do with bootstraps or the cowboy ethos or the ability to move. They see advantages for other people and they feel excluded from those advantages.
As my final word, why am I being forced to argue for conservatives? I don’t even like them, I just happen to know lots of them. Aren’t the rest of you capable of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes? Maybe our country really is too divided.
Come on, dude. Conservative politicians use vouchers as another way to the debase the government, enrich business execs, and entice conservative voters who think their kids–but not those other people’s kids from the bad side of town–deserve more than public school peasantry. No one–not even conservatives–believes the Betsy Devos’ of the world are really concerned about giving the poor access to good educations.
Everything I bolded above only supports the point I made, which is that conservatives side with the power side of the equation, i.e. rich people who own businesses. Helping the middle class is supposed to occur through trickle down economics, not through government intervention. The fact that Trump even talked about slashing taxes for the wealthy underscores this. If it was true that conservatives, as you say, think the wealthy are the problem, they should have booed Trump off the stage when he talked like this. But they didn’t because they’ve been programmed to equate helping the rich with helping themselves.
And at the same time, he bragged about being a billionaire and called himself “smart” for evading taxes.
I understand what the challenges are. What I’m skeptical about is whether the existence of these challenges result in a system that overall benefits the urban poor in comparison with the rural poor.
Logistical aid, such as child care centers, might be harder to implement, but I have a notion that this is more than made up for by direct cash transfers, which are far more generous to rural people than urban people. For example, I’ve heard about stories in which entire small towns are on disability payments, in circumstances that urban people don’t get such benefits.
I’m not saying that this solves the problems of rural poor, but that I would need hard numbers to believe that the rural poor are significantly worse off than the urban poor. It sucks to be poor in all areas, and I understand that circumstances are different in rural and urban areas, but without something more concrete, I don’t buy that the system overall results in worse treatment or outcome for rural poor compared to urban poor.
See, this is something I absolutely don’t buy at all. Rural people are significantly overrepresented in pretty much all state legislatures and in the national legislature.
As noted above, rural people have an absolute lock on the U.S. Senate, which one might argue is the most powerful legislative body on the planet. If that isn’t giving them some advantage, then maybe it’s because of how they choose to exercise their powerful votes.
Why are liberals and democrats so into censorship?
It was democrats who got the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” banned.
It was democrats who drove that christian baker out of business for refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding.
Liberals and democrats want women and minorities in position of power. PROVIDED they are not conservative.
Apparently, you have no idea what “censorship” or “free speech” or the “free market” means.
That didn’t happen.
Liberals and Democrats want liberals and Democrats in power, so that liberal and democratic policies may be pursued, which, they believe benefit and empower women and minorities.
Why should any liberal or Democrat support a candidate who is anti-liberal or anti-Democratic just because of some other identity status?
Either you truly don’t understand what liberals believe about gender and race, or you’re deliberately using deceptive arguments to try to trick people into believing that liberalism is hypocritical.
Your experience is different from mine. The parents of most liberal people I know are a mix of liberal, conservative, and apolitical. In cases where I know the parents have been strong liberals, the children are mildly liberal or apolitical. (Anecdotes, I know, but you brought yours).
Personally, my environment was conservative and I feel like the direct exposure made me run in the opposite direction. I tried on a number of political identities including libertarianism before I decided I was a plain old liberal or maybe a social democrat. Perhaps a liberal environment would have made me rebel toward conservatism. But I don’t think so. I just don’t have the meanness in my soul it takes to be a conservative.
Eh… there’s a raging battle over nature vs. nurture and I think the current consensus is that it’s about half and half.
I’m not out to deny the effects of environment. Far from it. I am suggesting that conservative people are often raised by strongly opinionated conservative parents who actively push their ideology. Maybe there are liberal parents like that, but I think most liberals were raised in an apolitical or mildly liberal environment.
If you think conservatives households aren’t indoctrination camps, here are 3 conservative childrens books titles, 2 of which I have seen displayed unironically on coffee tables:
Truax (a satire of The Lorax, and a defense of logging)
Help! Mom! There are liberals under my bed! (self-explanatory)
My Parents Open Carry
So my belief is that conservatives side with those who have historically had power in this country. This means rich white men.
What you describe as conservatives having a traditional way of life, I’m not seeing anything clear or specific to be honest. But your use of “social structure” jumps out at me. What does this social structure enable and what is it about liberal thinking that causes this structure to be threatened? And how does this challenge what I’m saying about power?
Let’s take your typical liberal. They are pro-choice, pro gun control, and want to see universal healthcare. They support SSM and want more to be done about climate change, even if that means higher taxes. What about this person and their beliefs should cause a conservative to feel under existential threat?
This is why it is so insanely frustrating trying to talk to these people. If you say they have ‘white privilege’ or benefit from ‘white privilege,’ they immediately say, “But I’m poor, I don’t have any privilege!” Because they’re so ignorant (often willfully so) that they refuse to acknowledge what that term actually means. I’ve even heard people on this exact message board say the same thing… People who definitely know better. And I’m completely sick of trying to explain it to them.
It all speaks to a bigger problem in which people can’t communicate anymore, because we can’t even agree on the meaning of words. I struggle to discern the difference between someone who genuinely doesn’t know what these terms mean, and someone who is just a troll. Right now, my thought is that I’m just so fed up with it that I assume anyone who can’t be bothered to educate themselves must be deliberately playing dumb.
This is another point I’m sick of arguing about. The concept of ‘affirmative action’ has been around for literally decades before I was born (even if it wasn’t called that). They need positive steps to help level the playing field against massive, institutional inequity. But try telling that to a conservative and they act like they’ve never heard of such a thing. If people in the sixties could grasp the concept, you have no excuse!
Very roughly, those on the right and on the left tend to correspond respectively with
(a) those who are motivated by selfishness and greed;
(b) those who try follow the Imperative: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”
It is easy to disobey the imperative in real life and, out of duty to one’s family, work selfishly to improve their circumstances.
My own solution is this: I may violate the imperative sometimes, but I always follow the imperative when voting in national elections. Since my individual electoral power is too dilute to have effect, except as part of an aggregate, it is easy to vote unselfishly.
I did bother to read it and found it interesting and intelligent. (I wonder if “Christianity” is a good description for your religion and Kierkegaard’s but that would be a different thread.)
Does anyone else have explanations of how they as white heterosexual males turned liberal?
Perhaps, a Conservative parent mistreated you?
Conservatism sexually repressed you and now you’ve rebelled?
An employer treated you poorly and thus capitalism sucks?
I think a lot of you like one or two liberal songs but ended up buying the whole liberal album.
Just ideas to prime the pump. There’s no point in arguing specific issues just explanations of how you got there.
Probably relates to why conservatives and Republicans hate not-white, non-heterosexual, non-Christian people. Why is that?
I’m a Democrat. I think it’s a great song, because I think it shows how a woman is perfectly fine rejecting the moralistic, right-wing societal pressures that make her look like a slut if she wants to hang out and smooch a guy she likes. You know, rejecting the Christian Taliban version of the United States.
Why do Christians hate gay people? I can’t figure that one out.
Looking forward to your answers.
That’s an interesting claim. He explicitly believed in the man-God paradox as embodied in Christ. He spent most of the late 1840s and early 1850s expounding on Christian theology. He certainly was critical of the established church and embraced an understanding of individual rather than communal faith, but that’s hardly unique in Christian thought. He was a universalist, but again not unique in that regard.