Be clear: not to the entire working class, but to that segment of the white working class who cast those votes for Trump. They should be flippin mortified.
No, I did not.
Why don’t you reread what I actually wrote and tell me what’s confusing about it? For your convenience, here’s what you misunderstood the first time around:
I’m not calling them stupid and I’m not trying to win them over, so you’re 0 for 2 here.
I’m pointing out that they keep voting for the party that has consistently worked to make their lives miserable, and against the party that has done the most for them. I’m pointing out that many of them believed obvious lies because the lies - that all they had to do was to vote Trump and, hey presto, America would be great again - were far preferable to the truth that the world is changing, that there is no going back, and that any path to prosperity for them would be an uphill one.
Does that make them stupid? No. It makes them human. It also makes them the victim of decades of a co-ordinated right-wing disinformation campaign which has taught them that black is white, right is wrong, and every problem is somebody else’s fault.
And I don’t have a solution for that, other than to keep trying to shoot down the lies as they pop up. What have you got?
Saying that the working class make themselves look bad by voting against their own interests and principles is not the same thing as calling them stupid.
As an electorate, we have got to get over this exaggerated squeamishness about the dangers of making any criticisms of white working-class voters because they might throw a tantrum and not like us any more.
No other segment of the electorate is thought to need such fawning deference. Black voters get criticized for low turnout that sabotages their electoral representation, conservative Hispanic voters get criticized for prioritizing religious and social conservatism over protecting the rights of Hispanics in general, women voters get criticized for supporting female candidates on the grounds of their gender, etc. All these groups somehow manage to survive these brutal assaults on their self-esteem. :rolleyes:
If white working-class voters are really going to respond to similar thoughtful criticism of their electoral choices with “Waaaahh! How dare you call me stupid!” and rushing off in a tantrum to vote for Trump, we are not going to do them any favors in the long run by pandering to such childishness in the fond hope of “winning them over”.
One strategy I hear suggested a lot is that if we leftists want to win elections against the coordinated rightwing misinformation machine, maybe we should just admit that we’re wrong and the lies are right. Maybe if we weren’t so stubbornly committed to our principles, we wouldn’t lose so much!
This advice is offered to us with the sincerest concern for our electoral chances, and it’s greatly appreciated.
Historically, unions have done a lot to protect the workers. Instituting safety laws, mandating overtime and work week limits, etc.
The same way that Republicans historically started as abolitionists and fought hard for civil rights (you even had a greater percentage of Republicans voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 since the South was so heavily Democratic).
Times change. These days my labor union spends most of its time and money trying to stump for Democrats and get its members to do so. Leaders yell about the Koch brothers and how climate change legislation needs to be supported. What the hell?!
I wrote a whole paper on this but unions have played a massive role in the Democratic Party ever since the emergence of the New Deal coalition in 1932. If anything their role was bigger from the 1930s through the 1970s. And considering the Koch brothers wants to destroy every New Deal and Great Society social insurance program and work protection law it makes perfect sense the unions stand against them.
The best way to protect the workers is to elect Democrats and support climate change legislation.
Identity politics is merely the recognition that people of a certain subsets of the population have political interests that may not be shared, or at least shared to the same extent, by members outside of this identity, and so therefor it is worthwhile to consider these interests even if the subset represents only a minority. Why it doens’t make sense to engage in identity politics for cis-gendered right-handed heterosexual whites is that their needs are for the most part already catered to without the necessity of engaging in identity politics. It would be like complaining about the fact that today’s publishers print books in braille for the blind but there are no books out there that are being particularly printed for the sighted.
The thing is that it does make sense to consider identity politics for certain subclasses of the cis-gendered right-handed heterosexual whites. In particular lower middle class rural voters (who are predominantly white) have been getting the shaft. If they wanted to the Republcan’s could target messages and policies to help this subcalss, but since their plaform of feed the poor to the rich doesn’t mesh well with assisting these people, they instead convince them that their problems are because they are part of a larger class of cis-gendered right-handed heterosexual whites, and so any policy that is directed at advancing the cause of wealthy cis-gendered right-handed heterosexuals will inevitably help them.
I think if you want to convince someone making $10 an hour they should be “called out” for the “privilege” of their skin color, you’re going to have a hard sale.
Do you think that the republicans will support the legal protections to your union?
Do you think that the Koch brothers have your union job as a high priority.
I’ll agree it’s a bit odd to talk about climate change in a union meeting, but to be fair, climate change is important, and should be brought up in more places than it currently is.
So, are you complaining that times change, in that republicans used to be more labor friendly, and they have moved far away from that position, or are you complaining that you feel that your union has changed, and is no longer protecting your interests?
Not if you can make them realize their loyalties should be with the guy making $8 an hour rather than the guy making $180 an hour.
I am so flippin relieved I don’t want to do that, then.
A couple of thoughts:
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If you play the identity-politics game, and still want to win elections, then you have to either A) Support the majority or B) Support minorities, but hope that the majority doesn’t really have a backlash against you. Because otherwise you then run the risk of losing elections by having turned away the majority group of voters. When white people are the majority, and you play identity-politics on the minority side, or when heterosexuals are the majority, and you play identity-politics on the LGBT side, then you are playing the riskier game, elections-and-votes-wise.
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The number of people who ***feel ***“privileged” will almost always be smaller than the number of people who *are *“privileged.” So there are, no doubt, a large number of white straight men who do not feel "privileged, "and will respond with a voting ballot (and other means of) backlash against those who claim that they are “privileged.”
Is this a sins of the father argument, or something else?
Once again, you are misrepresenting what he said.
But, in any case, if you are making $10 an hour, and a minority with the same qualifications as you does not have a job due to the color of their skin, their sex, their sexual orientation, or their religion, then you are benefiting from it.
I do not know that you need to be “called out”, but if you are unaware that your being a white male comes with privileges (or at least not disadvantages) that every other demographic has, then you will make poor decisions that are self serving, short sighted, and ultimately not even in your own best interest.
In what way is he being punished, in a way to make up for the sins of his ancestors?
If it is about scholarships, then you must not know that the vast majority of scholarships are privately funded by individuals or by groups.
So, if a group wanted to make a scholarship exclusively for white men, they legally could, the fact that you don’t see any out there is nothing to do with the govt, and has everything to do with individuals making choices.
So, if I decided to give a minority $100 to help him out, and I even say that I did so because they are a minority, does that make you feel put out?
If so, well, you need to get over yourself, if not, then what is your complaint when it comes to scholarships?
In the interest of full disclosure, I did once receive a scholarship due to being a minority. Though I am a white male, I am left handed, and that earned me $25! Assuming that you are right handed (an assumption based only on statistical likelihood to be sure), do you feel that $25 should have been yours instead?
I have little faith in unions when they spend very little time or effort in actually protecting me or my job, and just try to ensure its own power and existence. At some point the symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Party went from being a means to an end to being the end itself. I don’t even go to our meetings anymore.
And no, climate change has nothing to do with protecting workers and their rights. It’s pretty clear that they’ve lost their way. 
No doubt you’re right, on both points. Having said that, I think you can argue in favor of inclusion, without alienating people you need to win elections.
I think this is a big part of why the ‘deplorables’ campaign strategy flopped so badly. When you’re being called ‘racist’ for saying ‘I think that a person of any race should be able to wear any hairstyle they choose’ (and despite the deniers on this board, I’ve encountered this outside of tumblr echo chambers), or for ‘it’s fine if a crowd sings along with a song regardless of what race they are’ it dilutes the word from indicating something bad to something like ‘the speaker disagrees with you or doesn’t like you’. If you keep playing the racism card for absurd or extremely minor things like hairstyles it becomes meaningless, so later on it’s ineffective to play it when it’s really needed, like when you have a candidate who is endorsed by the KKK and refused to rent to black people when he could get away with it.
Also, silence doesn’t equal agreement - if someone starts ranting on about cultural appropriation or about how much they hate cishet white males, people who disagree will often just tune them out and move on with their lives. Getting into an argument, where you’ll be accused of all kinds of ‘-isms’ and then told that you can’t respond on the basis of immutable characteristics that you don’t control like race, sex, gender, and sexual orientation, with someone who you know will be shrill and loud just isn’t a fun way to spend time, isn’t going to help you, and might make you look bad to other people (especially if you misspeak or make a typo). I think that a lot of ‘progressives’ tend to take ‘no one objected to my shrill rant’ as evidence that everyone agrees with them in all particulars and backs them on that issue, when it’s more common that people just don’t want to get into it.