My household income in pretty significantly higher than 100k now but for most of my adult life it has hovered right around 100k and up until very recently this would have been true for us as well. Between student loans, old medical debt, credit card debt from when we were young and foolish, car loans etc we were paying many thousands of dollars a month to old debt with no room for more. We also live in the Philadelphia area where the cost of living is relatively high, but lower than where we came from, Los Angeles and New Jersey. We don’t own a home but rent one and that costs about 1800/m too. Plus we have an 8 year old and kids are expensive. Going to grad school was, in retrospect, the worst mistake I could have possibly made.
Like most millennials figuring this all out has been difficult. Only now at 35 are we finally making it work.
I would encourage liberals to watch the brief Jonathan Haidt talk on YouTube and gain appreciation that social conservatives have their own moral viewpoint, and that liberals would do well to understand and accommodate social conservatives.
Unfortunately, on the national political stage the social conservatives have been co-opted by the kleptocrats, who could care less about any moral values, whether liberal’s’ care&fair or conservatives’ care&fair&loyal&holy. The real political divide is between Truth and Fiction, with conservatives rejecting the truthful but liberal media, and listening to FakeNews which panders to their moral views.
As I’ve been saying at SDMB for quite a while, liberals need to stifle their sanctimonious stances on social issues — which turn off half the public — and start encouraging conservatives to vote in their own self-interest on the economic issues which are far more important (than issues like gay wedding cakes) at the federal level.
Some good posts but the thread generally shows, from the predominant liberal POV of this board in this case, how each side has come to view the other as basically illegitimate. So why ‘hang out’ with people who are ‘evil’?
Also, I have seen that my liberal friends are always sharing their opinions and views on FB, but many of my conservative friends tend to not respond, and do not often share their views, and those that do are often the extreme versions, so the liberal friends think that all conservatives are looney or have horrible views.
As to the $400 bill. As stated above, I think many get caught in the credit card trap (and other spending traps) and get to a point where even with higher salaries, it is all accounted for.
When my wife and I got married 25 yrs ago, we were making it on 18k a year. I was still in college, we were paying for a house and a car. Sure things have gone up over the 25 yrs, but everything is not 10x more than then, yet making 10x more money, we should be swimming in cash, but are not. Mainly being stupid early on and abusing credit cards and not budgeting and spending money when we did not have it, and getting into financial trouble. We had a perfectly good house that would have been paid off in less than 15 yrs, but we wanted a bigger house in a better area, so double our monthly payment to start all over on a 30 yr note. New cars, because we worked hard and deserved them. Trips, conveniences, etc. It all adds up to a mountain of debt.
I think one of Americas biggest problems is people are not disciplined in terms of spending money. Immigrants come here and have the mentality that they did back home and will make decisions to spend less money. Americans, want to have what their parents had as soon as they are out of the house, cars, TVs, furniture, stuff. We can get easy credit. At one point, we had over 80k total credit limit and did not even make 80k per year. That is rediculous. It is too easy to get credit and then use it on things that vanish and then you are stuck paying bills on things that are gone, instead of learning to spend only what you have available.
This is going to come off snarky, but I’m not sure how to buffer this message.
When a college-educated liberal from San Francisco or New York journeys into the southern and central US as above, it’s called “seeking understanding”.
When a conservative from Alabama or Nebraska moves to San Francisco or New York to understand their ways, it’s called “seeking a tech job”.
The kind of dialogue that Silverman is initiating in the example above is rooted in privilege. As a well-off woman, she has access to the discourse of the red-state working class. It’s kind of hard for the dialogue to go the other way.
To be even more snarky, the post-1994 conservative movement has flourished largely by demonizing liberals. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have been painted as flat-out evil. The Clintons are regularly called criminals; Obama has been depicted as the Antichrist, sometimes quite seriously. Moreover, the prevailing conservative discourse has been that people who support Obama and the Clintons are just as bad - this is what I see my conservative acquaintances post in social media all the time. If you vote liberal, it’s just because you want free stuff or whatever.
Liberals obviously demonize conservative leaders, too, perhaps as much or more. I don’t think that usually translates into the same disdain for the conservative base, though, except where demonstrations of racism and queerphobia are concerned. The liberal view is more patronizing than demonizing - forgive the conservative base, for they know not what they do.
Ergo, you’re going to see more outreach from libs to conservatives than the opposite. I’d think, anyway.
Or watch TV. Or read newspapers. Just about every late night show, including SNL, is staunchly liberal. As are most news broadcasts. As are major daily news sources like Washington Post, NYT, LAT, etc. As are websites like this one and Reddit. Not hard to see and understand the liberal viewpoint.
As a libertarian, I see the folly of many liberal and conservative platforms and viewpoints. But I regularly hang with both, and it goes smoothly most of the time… until political issues are brought up. Even then, it’s much easier to remain civil in real life than on the internet.
The bolded part is due to what Haidt identified. Liberals tend to focus on care/harm and fairness. Many liberals, since they don’t understand the moral foundations that the conservatives are relying on, assume that conservatives are either evil or stupid. They literally do not understand where the conservatives are coming from and therefore invent a reason that they themselves can understand for the conservative position.
And as far as disdain for the conservative base goes, go read this board some. The standard response to ‘Why would a conservative support X’ is ‘Cause they are stoopid, uneducated rednecks!!!’. Or ‘Conservatives hate women’. Or ‘Conservatives hate black people’. And so on.
Conservatives will state why they believe or support something and those reasons are tied to the moral foundations the conservatives are working from. Since many liberals don’t get or care about those moral foundations, they do not believe the conservatives. It sounds like bullshit to their ears because they aren’t working from the same base.
For example, take the post **septimus **made:
This is a pretty good example. I agree that it is true some conservative politicians don’t really share the same moral values of the social conservatives. The alliance between the social conservatives and economic conservatives has always been a bit odd. However, those conservative politicians *understand *those values and can speak to people who hold those values. Liberals tend to put forth views like **septimus ** where ‘Truth and Justice!!!’ are on the liberal side while the liberal side is incapable of understanding what the social conservatives care about. If the liberal side seems incapable of understanding or articulating what you care about (or, even worse, mock you for caring about those issues), you are going to not believe them in other areas as well.
Then, the next step is to label the side you agree with as the one on the side of "Truth, Justice and the American way!’ and the other side as ‘Evil and stupid for believing all the lies from those in power!’.
Of course, this works both ways. Conservatives and Republicans certainly have their own problems in this area. Though the conservative/Republican side is working from a bit of truth when they use the argument like ‘Liberals don’t care about *our *values’. Most liberals don’t because most liberals are most concerned with harm and fairness alone while conservatives value loyalty/authority/purity as well as harm and fairness. So the conservative politicians have a rather easy moral piece to play up and, being politicians, they will use and abuse it.
Okay, then conservatives have a different moral foundation than liberals do.
Could you expound upon that foundation? Liberal have a foundation that decreasing suffering and increasing quality of life are things that should be goals in a functional society.
What are the goals in a conservative society? When liberals see conservatives fund health programs in order to give ultra wealthy a tax cut that will not be used to create jobs or otherwise increase economic activity, they have to question on what moral grounds, exactly, are conservatives coming from.
You have said that conservatives understand liberals very well, and that could well be the case. We tend to be straightforward and pragmatic, with visible and easily identified goals, and proposals by liberals try to achieve those goals (admittedly with mixed successes).
Could you better describe your moral foundation, so that we liberals can better understand it?
I fourth what Shodan, Orwell, and adaher said. It’s perhaps the most critical thing that coastal elitist types just don’t get.
I live in North Dakota, which is about as non-coastal and deeply Republican territory as you can get. And yet the fact remains that I am forced to absorb opinion from the liberal coastal elite all the time. If I go to the gym, there are 20 TV’s, and the majority are showing coastal liberal elitists. Some are explicitly advancing politics. At most one is offering Fox News as an alternative. Even those TV shows that are not explicitly political, often work liberal messages in implicitly. (For example, ESPN changed from being about sports to have a heavy political component. This has been a huge topic on right-wing blogs and twitter in the past year.)
It’s not just gyms. It’s restaurants. It’s bars. It’s airports. It’s libraries. It’s bookstores. It’s public school curriculums. It’s everywhere, except perhaps the most isolated rural regions. You basically cannot live in a city or town anywhere and not hear constantly from the coastal elite.
Conservatives believe that it’s a good thing when people can keep as much of the money that they earned as possible, and when as little as possible is taken from them by force. For example, if Joe is walking down the street and a mugger pulls him into an alley and steals his wallet, that’s bad, because Joe loses the money that belongs to him, and the mugger gets money that he didn’t work for.
As far as taxes are concerned, the government is a mugger on a much bigger scale. I have to hand over a large portion of all the money that I earn in my lifetime. If I don’t, the government will send some heavily armed men to take the money by force. If I resist, they may kill me. That’s what it means to collect taxes, though most people try not to think about it much.
So some will say, “taxes are the price we pay for civilization”. Fair enough, but taxes still suck. So if we must have taxes, they should be as low as possible, and cutting taxes is an end in itself. It does not need to be justified as a means to boost economic growth, or anything like that. A tax cut means that innocent people who have done nothing wrong are keeping more or their money, and will be able to spend that money on what they choose.
I think one difference here is that conservatives have more stomach for “fair” suffering than liberals do. For instance, if Amy and Peter are both paid $50k a year, but Amy is frugal and saves a lot of money, while Peter is wasteful and maxes out his credit card and spends thousands of dollars on frivolous things, then when the time comes that Amy is well-off and secure, while Peter is homeless, broke, and sleeping in a cardboard box, most conservatives would see no problem with “Peter made his bed, now he can sleep in it; his suffering is deserved.”
Liberals, on the other hand, would be more likely to say, “We shouldn’t let someone suffer like Peter is in his current homeless/broke condition, let’s shell out some money through taxation to get Peter some shelter, food, and a minimum basic income.” In other words, liberals would put less emphasis on *how *or *why *Peter got to his current broke condition, and rather just focus on the fact that “He’s broke now, who cares how he got here, let’s help him.”
That being said, I think there is starting to be a shift in this attitude among the left, to become more like the right. A lot of liberals are/were saying things like, “Trump voters who wanted Obamacare repealed shouldn’t complain when the day comes that they need health care and can’t get it.”
They also have more stomach for “unfair” suffering. The children who lose medical care because of defunding CHIP, should they have done better financial planning, saved their allowance better, or is it that conservatives are just fine with punishing children for the sins of their parents?
There are many other situations where Amy and Peter may have not had the same opportunities and abilities to take advantage of them, leading them to different places in life, even with an equal amount of work and effort on both parts.
Liberals don’t look at a person, and judge them based on their circumstances and use that judgment to justify them being in those circumstances. Liberals do try to remove or reduce those circumstances that leads people into poor outcomes.
Yes, liberal don’t try to fix problems by finding the person that is to blame, liberals try to fix problems by fixing the problem. What if peter would have done perfectly fine working in a a factory making widgets, but there were no factory jobs to make widgets available. Is that peter’s fault, or society’s?
Or, do we really need to assign blame, when the fix in either case is obvious.
I don’t see that as a shift, I see that as a simple observation of watching people shoot themselves in the foot and then complain that there is blood all over their carpet.
So, let me play this back to you the way I heard it: It’s as though there’s been a civil war, and you lost. You’re living in the same place, but it feels as though you are an exile in your own country, because the dominant culture isn’t yours any more. You lost, and now you are a dwindling, misunderstood, despised minority culture.
If that’s the way you feel, well no wonder you’re cranky.
By the way, I think that’s exactly what is happening. It isn’t “coastal elites” though. That would be a very small group, by definition of “elite”. It’s a big group. It’s a huge group. It includes every city in the US and Europe. Millions upon millions of people, and against that there’s, you know, North Dakota. Rural white people, a dying breed.
Hanging out together is not a problem. I live in trump country. Most of my acquaintances are conservative.
We just don’t about politics, as we know that there is no way to see eye to eye on such things, and we are getting together to enjoy ourselves, not to fight and argue.
I am often tempted to break that rule, but I know how annoying it is when someone else does, so I resist that temptation.
But that’s actually a much more restrictive condition than it appears at first glance; a lot of my friends bring up politics simply by existing or by talking about their daily lives. Non-straight people (especially same sex couples), trans people, blacks and hispanics (and to a lesser extent other non-whites), and the like are political simply by existing. You wouldn’t say that a M-F couple is bringing up politics by talking about the marriage they’re planning, but a M-M couple is bringing up the political issue of gay marriage. Me talking about the annoyance of getting pulled over on the way to the party isn’t politics, but a black guy talking about how he feared for his life is bringing up the political issue of police brutality. Me using the bathroom at a bar isn’t political, but a trans person doing the same is. Anyone talking about dealing with a medical condition is now ‘talking politics’ because costs are always going to be a major issue.
So while you may not intend it that way, ‘as long as they don’t bring up politics’ really excludes a lot of minorities.