I agree, but think lack of purpose, together with loss of community, status anxiety, and economic precarity are directly connected to economics, that is, changes in who gets what how, to a large extent. This is largely, though not totally, a class issue, though obviously race and gender affect how class impacts one.
I note parenthetically that “education” is not a useful indicator of class, despite what the NYT thinks.
Now the question that the OP asked is, “How do you improve the lot for lower education, white Americans?” Answering that question is going to mean proposing things that would help lower education, white Americans to the exclusion of everyone else. That’s implicit in the question. Whether that work should be done - as I noted at the conclusion of my post - is a separate question from how you might accomplish it. If you don’t want factual answers, don’t ask the question.
That said, there are practical reasons to do some of these things that have no basis in Fascist thought nor intent.
First, as Krugman notes, different economies have different needs. Globbing these disparate markets into a single one makes it difficult to target the needs of the unique regions. But, it would be dishonest to not admit that this has some practical side effects that may be of questionable goodness, effectively creating bulwarks between communities. Though, as also said, it may conversely lead to a greater amount of interaction since there’s a larger motive to invest into the economically poorer region and, thus, to travel there, and more of an incentive to migrate into those regions. It may - and hopefully would - cause more opinion diversity and, as asked for by the OP, reduce fascist tendencies. The intent isn’t to wall things, it’s to make the preferred meeting ground in the rural areas rather than the urban. Right now, there’s a one-way wall that keeps city folk from moving out into the countryside. Flipping that doesn’t worsen the situation, it just starts the process of equalizing the pressure that’s been built up by having the one-way valve pointed inward for so long. At some point, maybe you need to flip it back around again.
Second, the US is a central focus for the entire planet. To take Disneyland as an example, it’s prohibitively expensive to go there because it was built for the America of the 50s. It was not built and sized for a future where the entire planet wants to come see the original version, made by Disney himself. The people who want to go to Disneyland aren’t just competing with other Americans, they’re competing with the whole globe and, consequently, the wealthiest across the whole globe.
If you just count up Americas wealthy, it’s not so many people. Disneyland has the physical space for them and many others at lower income levels. But once you expand to the whole planet, and they’ve all irrationally decided that they need to go to that one place - regardless that it wasn’t built for it - you could pack the whole park with billionaires and their friends and family. You’ve isolated Disneyland from the general public and relegated it to the upper echelons.
Now, sure, a fascist might want to keep “furriners” out of “America’s Disneyland”. But, as noted above, you might complain that Venetians are trying to keep out foreigners or that Hawaiians are trying to keep out non-Hawaiians, for racist reasons, despite the more reasonable and factually-based objectives of preserving Venice from collapse due to all the giant ships entering the territory and Hawaii simply becoming too overcrowded and expensive for the people who live there to continue to live there.
As the ability to travel grows, as we become a global community, focal points get hammered past their capacity. Setting up quotas doesn’t have to be racist or nefarious. It can just be practical - even if regrettable - to prevent greater negatives.
Now, I suppose that you could do something like trying to set up a deal with the Philippines and India (poorer English speaking countries), for lower-income and rural Americans to go to those places, to attend university more affordably. That seems very difficult to arrange and, if I’m honest, I don’t think that’s going to decrease the feeling among those who are forced into that arrangement, that they’re a second and unloved class.
So you expect everybody in both your segregated areas to accept money from both?
All that’s going to accomplish would be making everybody have an extra set of till drawers, an extra mess of accounting figures, and an extra hassle in always remembering the exchange rate. It isn’t going to produce two separate money systems.
(And while you may or may not be able to easily use US dollars in Mexico – I wouldn’t know – can you easily use pesos in the USA? I’m quite close to Canada; almost anybody will take a Canadian dime and a lot of people will take a Canadian quarter – but not Canadian bills and not significant numbers of multiple dimes and/or quarters in any given transaction.)
If the demands haven’t changed, then there’s got to be plenty of purpose in fulfilling them.
And if the demands have changed – as to some extent they have – there should still be plenty of purpose in filling them. If you now don’t have to earn all the money but you do have to do half the child care, there’s still plenty that you’re needed to do. If, however, your sense of purpose is all tangled up in thinking that you must have something to do that other people aren’t allowed to do – that’s a different matter.
Paul Krugman’s calling for the USA to have different currency for rural people and city people?
Paul Krugman’s saying that it would be a good thing if it were difficult for rural people to come into the cities?
Rural and urban USA are not “different economies”. They are massively entwined. It would make at least as much sense (though still no sense) to say that LA and NYCity should have different currency.
No, there isn’t. Not as long as we’ve still got cars.
What keeps city folk from moving out into the countryside is in large part that they don’t want to be there. They want to live in a city, where there are lots of people around all the time and a hundred restaurants – and dozens or hundreds of everything else – to choose from within ten minutes’ travel.
You can usually make more money in the city. That’s already true. We’ve got lots of people working in the city and living out in the country. Some of them are even part of their local communites, though others just sleep there (and try to demand city services.) You don’t need two sets of currency to accomplish this. You don’t even need two sets of currency to have two minimum wages. NYState already does that to some extent.
Currency exchange is, indeed, a thing that has been invented.
In border regions, certainly, just like it is with Mexico, Canada, etc. and yet they do in fact have separate money systems that are managed separately.
If the bank will not accept foreign currency without exchange, you’re restricted to the bank system of your currency, and your pay comes in the local currency, then you will be on your local currency for most of what you do, in most of the region.
Local currencies, you’ll note, don’t just disappear in favor of alternate ones.
Foreign? Is it the rural people or the urban ones who you’re saying are not part of the USA?
You’d be providing a great deal of hassle for no benefit whatsoever; and you’d be pissing off even more people than those who are pissed off now. Nobody but nobody (except maybe you) is going to want to deal with this mess.
To my knowledge, we have not yet conquered either of Canada or Mexico. (Nor am I aware of any interest in the attempt.)
Well, not for awhile, anyway.
I don’t have to “earn all the money” but generally I’m still expected to earn more than my wife. I have no problem doing at least half the child care, but I can’t really be a stay at home parent.
“Economic stability” seems to be associated with working as a paper-pushing cog in some large well-known corporation. And those jobs are proving to not be particularly stable over time. And even if they were stable, a lot of these office jobs just seem really tedious and soul-crushing. Not because they are particularly difficult, but because they seem so pointless and subject to the whims of indifferent and capricious managers.
I think the best way I can describe it is the difference between Robert Oppenheimer and Ken from Barbie (as portrayed in their respective films).
Robert Oppenheimer had flaws and dealt with various challenges and setbacks. But he was doing his job because someone needed to build The Bomb before the Nazis did and he was the best person for the job. His wife had her own career and was successful in her own right but she was also an ally to her husband. Granted it was a period where it probably would have been difficult for a woman to get placed in Oppenheimer’s job. But Kitty never demanded she get a turn at designing atomic bombs because it was “only fair”.
In contrast, Ken is an entitled caricature of a man who thinks that somehow he deserves a role as a doctor, high paid businessman, or lifeguard just for showing up. He spends most of the film feuding with Barbie about who should pretend to lead their made up bullshit society and figuring out their lack of any real relationship.
I think young men today face a similar challenge in that for many of them, there is lack of a clear path to financial stability, purpose, and generally how to become the sort of man women find attractive. So they tend to get caught up in various groups and schemes that offer these things (mostly for financial or other self-serving benefit).
I’m not saying we need to roll back the clock to the 1950s. But having an environment where some large percentage of men feel disenfranchised from society without a clear path is dangerous.
Expected by whom?
Well gee whiz, we can’t all be cowboys, lumberjacks and firemen.
Newsflash: Hundreds of millions of men (and women) find these “tedious,” “pointless” jobs to be enjoyable and fulfilling. If the prospect of having one of these jobs is a source of fascism, we’d all be living under dictators.
Opps post.
That article is problematic. It appears to be trying to address one problem, but using ametric that isn’t relevant and, in fact, more healthy.
The relative pay flaw has been discussed. The second part is the article attempts to make a different argument.
The point it makes is that people in the blue collar sector used to be able to have a solid income and a fairly high standard of living without a college degree. Now those type of jobs, the ones that appeal to non-college educated men, are not only going away, but the remaining ones don’t provide as high of a standard of living.
This fact is separate from the white male privilege factor per se. It may be an embedded factor - those jobs were limited to who they were available to.
The issue seems to be a certain class of man seeks more physical than mental jobs, yet those jobs are providing a lower standard of living than they once did.
Other non-college degree jobs exist, but they still seem directed at some element of mental vs physical work: medical technicians, billing agents, computer techs, etc.
To the extent that people perceive their financial status to be dwindling, that creates dissatisfaction and even anger.
People in aggregate look for simplistic answers. Someone feeds them a narrative, especially one that says they deserve better and maybe even didn’t just lose something, but had it taken from them - that kind of narrative makes them feel special and wronged.
That’s largely driving the counter forces against social progress.
Fascism isn’t limited to blue collar white men, or young men, or just men. The fascist turn in this country is a combined effect.
Loss of status as men, as whites, and even as valuable contributors to the economy.
Social changes that overturn and undercut their so-called values - religious or just community. This is strong for conservative Christians who see permissivity and loss of privilege as being morally wrong.
Perception that others are getting privileges they aren’t. Losing privilege looks like discrimination.
The economy may overall be strong and reasonably healthy. It is still a fact that the relative standard of living seems harder to come by, not just for non- college males, but most people. The dichotomy of the wealthy getting wealthier and the middle class losing ground. Families that used to be able to thrive on one income now need two to hold value.
Then there is the split and siloing of information. The rise of slanted “news” sources has spun issues to feed these narratives of unfair loss.
These processes over time have polarized the country politically. The aggrieved want a return of their status, provilege in social hierarchy, and control over social acceptance to limit permissiveness and enforce their worldview on everyone.
The rightward shift of the Republican Party has occurred for the three decades, from Reagan to the Tea Party to MAGA. It has been fed by the myths of the “conservative” right, that word supposed to convey fiscal responsibility along with social stability and constraints on behavior.
The more the right watched social progress, the more they sought control over the change.
That is the root of fascism. The need to enforce restrictions on society as a whole, to limit social upheaval and restore privilege.
So how do we reverse the pressures to fascism? It seems to me the factors that reduce that desire are financial security and a value to their identity.
Financial security has been shown. A strong liberal agenda to increase wealth for the middle class, provide strong safety meets, and use the power of the economy itself to push all ships higher.
The status part is the tougher part. The systemic belittling of rural and blue collar people with labels like “redneck” and stereotypes about inbreeding and incest, and the dismissal of the uneducated as stupid. Those narratives make common cause for blue collar workers and rural people.
I don’t have any answers. DEI in theory should emphasize the value even rural white perspectives bring. But the aggrieved have targeted DEI as part of their complaint.
Acceptance of others as they are is pushed as forcing them to participate in what they feel is immoral.
Add to that a very real loss of our concept of adult. Gen X grew up to redefine adult to be what they wanted, which is extended adolescence, less responsibility, more liberty to play around and avoid conforming to old expectations.
Another factor is the economic crunch of the 2000s that made a lot of people come out of college and not feel like they had opportunities. They are trying to catch up now, but the pandemic didn’t help.
I think it’s going to have to be a bit like Obamacare. We’re going to have to fight like hell to force the progressive changes that will improve everyone’s economic lot. It will be hard and messy and take iterations. But as time goes by people will see the value and then not want it to go away.
I don’t think anyone is worried about the people who find run of the mill corporate cubicle jobs “enjoyable and fulfilling” rising up. The Nazis had plenty of accountants and shipping clerks.
Of course, when people get laid off from those jobs, that adds to the frustration and sense of insecurity.
The left seems to enjoy repeating the narrative that it’s just dumb uneducated rednecks voting for Trump. But I know plenty of people in high paying jobs in tech and finance and other fields who support Trump and right-wing ideologies. I think one of the reasons is that they do enjoy a position of success and privilege. And most of them believe they earned that privilege because they did all the stuff they were “supposed” to do (at least according to the system as they know it) - go to a good college, study something employable, work long hours, maybe some start their own companies, etc etc. They feel threated by liberal economic policies because they are the ones who have to pay for them.
Most people, as far as I can tell. Or at least most people think that’s how it works.
As a backdrop to all of this, a majority of Americans say that society values men’s contributions at work more than their contributions at home. Only 7% say society values men’s contributions at home more than those at work, and 35% say these contributions are valued about equally. When it comes to women, about half of adults (49%) say the contributions women make at work and at home are valued about equally. Some 31% say women’s contributions at home are valued more than what they do at work, and 20% say just the opposite.
“Men are valued for how much money they make” is a claim I’ve heard all my life; I’ve heard people say it’s a good thing and others a bad thing, but I can’t recall anyone saying it isn’t true.
To be clear I’d prefer it wasn’t, I think it’s a stupid standard.
I’m curious how you arrived at the idea that anyone said that anything would be good or should be done?
Which Krugman chose, instead, not to point out and skip over. I don’t see that as a point in his favor.
It wouldn’t do the work you appear to be claiming it would do.
I’m not aware of an economic analysis. Quite possibly, it would be a whole lot of effort for almost nothing, as you say.
You get to choose who you share your home with.
My husband was a stay at home dad for several years. U earned all the income. I valued his contribution to the household, as did our small children.
Who talked about it being uneducated rednecks?
Because, yeah, I think to support maga you have to be pretty ignorant of political issues and/or misled, but I think most of us were very aware of wealthy people or tech bros that supported Trump.
It’s a reliable talking point every election that left-wing elites look down on blue-collar workers; despite repeatedly legislating for better work conditions and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them on the picket line.
And the real people that care are those who block attempts to improve work conditions, and have a personal track record of screwing over people that worked for them. Trump cosplaying as a refuse collector, well, trumps, everything substantive he’s ever said or done regarding blue collar workers because down with those leftie elites