I do have to return to this. And those specific jobs with signs out? What are they?
Much of the hiring is for those with various technical skills. Tell us about the jobs the people we are talking about can move into an area (with its higher than they’ve previously had cost of living) are moving for. Jobs that are not becoming and staying the working poor.
Look, people who are as far right as I am (i.e. not hardly!) - mostly don’t go to DU. I have a hard time believing that anyone who might be remotely persuadable to vote Republican saw that, until you dug it up and quoted it here.
And as gatorslap said, “What, exactly, is the Democratic Party supposed to do about random people, who are not affiliated with the party organization, saying bad things on the internet?”
Yes, I’m sure those people exist. And I’m sure that the GOP and their friends at Fox News will find every last one and trumpet them to make people think that’s what we libruls are all about.
There seems to be a “well, DO something about this” aspect to the OP. But WHAT?
Your example is the thing that doesn’t have the actual fuck to do with this argument.
The point is that if someone hears all the crap that the Republicans throw around daily about Dems who are unpatriotic and liberals who hate America and blacks living on the Democratic plantation and Hispanics who are all MS-13 and Muslims who want to impose sharia law on us, to the extent that more than a few GOP-controlled state legislatures have been roused into action about it - and then, after all that, the comparatively mild stuff that comes from some random lefty on the Web, if that guy pushes that someone into the arms of the Republicans - our chances of getting that person to vote for us was fucking zero, and would be negative if negative probabilities were a thing.
The only relevance of your kids v. Jayden is that if some other kid in the neighborhood has to spend an afternoon at your house or Jayden’s, and Jayden likes to hit his playmates with metal rods after he’s pushed them down the stairs, while your kids are so mean that they throw spitballs at their playmates, your kids aren’t going to drive that other kid over to Jayden’s, are they?
How many anecdotes do you need to provide to convince me you have data? Is that your question?
Well, you tell me. If my thesis is that conservatives are engaging in “constant negative references to” black “men,” how may individual posts garnered from across the entire Internet would I have to provide to convince you of this trend?
We all have had those moments where we’ve thought to ourselves: I wish this person who is ostensibly on my side would STFU.
It kind of reminds me of the GOP “minority outreach efforts” where years of effort get derailed every time some racist jerk-off (of which they have multitudes) makes some stupid “joke”.
This is really just another political correctness impact thread.
Dems have much larger problems with this than worrying about millennials, because millennials don’t vote and what they say in polls doesn’t mean shit, not that what anybody else says in polls means much.
I’m an old white guy liberal and the left wing is racing away from me at light speed. Much of its thinking is illiberal. The Repubs as exemplified by Trumpism have already exceeded the distance at which I can even see their light. But nothing’s permanent. It’s hard to see them getting any further away. But they certainly have room to get closer.
It’s a perfectly plausible scenario where Trumpism wrecks into the ditch and Repubs wind up with a guy like Kasich who will look all the more reasonable vs Trump, vs some Dem who trapped him/herself pandering to people who don’t vote by jawboning about ridiculous shit like cultural appropriation.
Snowflake-ism isn’t a creation of FoxNews any more than Trumpism is a creation of MSNBC. You may say to yourself as a liberal that snowflakes have a better end in mind, but they really don’t. It’s all about turf and mindless purism.
I don’t want them to have power, not because I care about what they say about white men, but for the same reason I don’t want Trumpies to have power - because of EVERYTHING they say, and how their brains work.
You mean the snowflakes who are driven away and offended by discussion of privilege and systemic bigotry?
No, I mean you.
Every restaurant in the area. The car repair place I went last week, the convenience stores, my local grocery store and pet store. I live a mile from a sprawling retail development and pretty much everyone is hiring.
I don’t see signs out in front of the doctor’s offices because that’s not how they hire professionals.
Ahh, thoughtful discussion offends you. Apologies and sorry if I hurt your feelings.
You really have a bizarre frame of mind.
I’m a left wing guy and I see no sign of the left flying off to the left. In fact, the only people I ever hear claiming that are right wing guys who try to claim they’re left wing people who are just being critical of their own side, but somehow can’t quite seem to keep all the right wing buzzwords and talking points out of it.
I would be careful about concluding that this single poll represents a broad trend, but I won’t dismiss it out of hand, either. Racism is a dangerous thing to play around with, and the Republican party seems to be embracing this as a political strategy. People aren’t born racist, but we’re likely born to be tribal, which manifests itself in different ways. The Republicans are campaigning on people’s fears and in doing so, they’re also selling whites on the idea of tribalism and their membership to a tribe. Don’t get confused by the fact that this strategy isn’t always well-organized or that its messages aren’t always coherent - none of that is necessary for our society to feel the impact in terms of tangible ethnic tensions.
In line with that, it needs to be pointed out that privilege is not something that ethnic majorities necessarily enjoy conceding. Thus, while a lot of white men might consider themselves to be progressive and enlightened, if someone threatens to take away their privilege in terms that are explicit or concrete, you might see a different side of them. Ultimately, the baseline assumption for many is that economic welfare and social status are kind of a zero-sum game, with the underlying perception being that if others gain more liberty, wealth, or what have you, than the majority to which they belong necessarily sacrifices these in exchange. Ultimately, fear of being displaced and losing standing, even just a bit, is enough to convince them to change how they perceive their social and political environment. This isn’t a white phenomenon, but a human one. Tribes might take in outsiders, but the tribesmen expect their meals to be served first.
That right there is the biggest flaw in the Democrat strategy; they’ve hitched their wagon so tightly to minorities and special interest groups, all the while either ignoring or alienating the huge white majority.
I mean, what’s in it for your average working-class or middle class white man? The Democratic party seems to talk about social justice and alleviating the direst sort of poverty, with very little mention about anything else or anyone else. And once you get above a certain income, you actively become the enemy unless you are willing to gleefully foot the bill for all this other stuff.
I can totally see why younger white male voters would be turned off by this- I was, 20 years ago, and neither party was as extreme back then.
Oh boy, the old “you’re paying too much attention to EVERYONE and not enough to White People!” ploy. :rolleyes:
Hey, if you think equality is oppression of the majority, then I’m happy not having you in my party. Clearly you want the White Supremacist party.
Well, they’ll benefit from affirmative acti— oh, right.
This is utter nonsense. Do you rely on Republicans to find out what Democrats talk about?
Here’s the latest platform. Is the only thing in there alleviating dire poverty and social justice? Or are there planks about
-Improving schools
-Increasing wages
-Creating jobs
-Improving infrastructure
-Tax reform
-Cutting health care costs
-Making sure families have paid family/medical leave time
These are all things that speak to working class and middle class people. White men aren’t some sort of rare species that are different from other working class and middle class people; as a middle-class white man it irritates me to be treated with this sort of weird deference.
Of course, there’s a strand in the Democratic party that doesn’t just want to have equal rights, they want us to ignore everyone who’s not a white man. Any time Democrats say something like “Ending Poverty and Investing in Communities Left Behind” or “Guaranteeing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights,” they freak the fuck out and act like these are the only things Democrats stand for.
There’s a pretty good chance that if someone smirkingly wears the “paternalistic racist” hat, they’re gonna be unhappy with any plank of the platform that doesn’t cater exclusively to white guys.
Speaking as a working-class white man, I believe that I and my fellow working-class white men would benefit from universal health care, stronger labor laws, stricter banking regulation, an increased minimum wage, better public transit, stronger environmental protections, clean energy, net neutrality, more investment in education, reforming our drug laws, higher taxes on the wealthy, eventually a universal basic income, etc. You may have different positions on these issues, you may have your arguments, but it is unfathomable to me that anyone would be swayed away by seeing “sneering progressives” on Youtube making objectionable statements about white privilege or cultural appropriation or whatever.
On the flip side, I do not see what working-class white men gain from arcane restrictions on abortion, transgender bathroom bills, lowering corporate tax rates, blowing up the EPA, a trade war with China, cutting Medicaid, so-called “right to work” laws, far-right judicial appointments, ramping up offshore drilling, privatizing social security, repealing Dodd-Frank, bombing Iran, teaching creationism in public schools, denying the reality of global warming, subsidizing coal, cutting food stamps, etc. Again, no matter how distasteful I might find the rhetoric of certain self-styled “progressives” on the internet to be, that doesn’t really carry any weight on any of these aforementioned things.
When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
The car repair place likely is looking for someone with some skills in place. Not for someone who they can train.
The others? Likely paying minimum wage with no benefits and no likely path upwards for those without education or skills. In an area that has higher cost of living than the rural area they would have moved from has.
The jobs of the working poor mostly. But now with added no supports!
Move to take the dishwasher, or bagger job in the big city, borrowing from your family that doesn’t have it to give, and then save and bring them too!
And if you don’t like that message and choose the other side that at least says they feel your pain (I do remember when my side said that, and delivered on meaningful change too) as they sell you a bill of goods … well you must be a racist.
There’s lots on that platform that LHOD cites that can speak to this population and Obama had a great rural initiative. This is about the failure of marketing it. Democrats have become the urban (all) and to an increasing degree the educated suburban brand and have allowed the GOP to own the rural marketshare unchallenged with some bleed into a previously loyal Democratic consumer base of Blue collar workers. The Democratic brand catch phrase is “inclusive” … a campaign that markets, in a politically acceptable respectful and empathic way, “that means you too white boy” is not a big reach and a little of it can go a long way.
I disagree with LHOD that there are so many who “freak the fuck out” when they hear those things. Many can even sign on to those things. They just need to hear that their lives, their “blues”, matter also.
The problem with that is that the candidate wearing the coal miner hat claiming he is going to make everything back like it was is going to beat whatever realistic plan you present them 99 times out of 100. Their way of life is over, the days when single industry rural towns could provide middle class jobs to an entire community for their whole lives are not coming back. This is a very hard sell when the other guy is promising to bring back the 1950s. We absolutely understand the problems they are facing, the problem is they are absolutely opposed to any real solution.