I’m glad you mentioned David Fischer considering he’s my professor at Brandeis and I’m taking an extremely interesting course on the Second World War with him as of this moment. That said, your description has been used on a lot of cultures besides those of Scotch-Irish/Borderer whites such as urban blacks or the large Muslim underclass residing in Europe’s banlieus. Yet were you to apply those stereotypes to them, it would be considered bigoted, classist, and essentialist. I’m generally more open to cultural explanations then others on the Left, but its clear other factors including socioeconomics play a large role too and you seem to ignore all that in favour of a simplistic, monocausal explanation based on cultural pathology.
The postindustrial new economy will be a big dichotomy between highly paying professional positions and low-wage service jobs. The trick is to unionize the jobs in the latter category and (probably through State mechanism) provide them with the sort of benefits and security afforded by midcentury factory jobs. A form of cultural renewal is needed to reduce social atomization, encourage family formation, instill community/national pride, and so forth but that’s more difficult through the mechanism of the State.
“I don’t mean to create another let’s-bash-the-ghetto thugs thread. I am hoping for positive suggestions.”
If there was a new Terror or Great Purge in America, it will be directed against the upper middle-class suburbanites of the Wall Street-Washington-Silicon Valley-Hollywood axis whose selfishness and hedonism have destroyed the Republic’s implicit social contract. The sons of Appalachia and Detroit will march side by side in this holy endeavour and will have no need of fancy French geegaws like the guillotine, instead taking advantage of their God-given Second Amendment rights.
An awesome link. I did a little not so light reading to get through it before bed last night. Just the breakdown of the three strains of conservatism fights a lot of ignorance that comes up in threads about politics.
Of interest to me directly related to this OP from the reading:
Some of the suggestions to “fix” the issue (like education and changes that affect family income) are actually addressing issues only weakly correlated to intolerance compared to the authoritarian tendency.
The intolerance = authoritarianism x threat notion that Stenner presents based on her research. If we want to fight the intolerance that rises and recedes it’s useful to understand what triggers the latent authoritarian impulse to produce intolerance.
That certainly raises the prospect that some methods in our hyper-partisan environment, focused on direct confrontation, might actually increase intolerance as it highlights divided opinion.
The authoritarian impulse to focus on the social collective, while generally harmful, can, in certain situations, be harnessed to the benefit of society. That certainly presents an area to think about if we want to reduce the negative effects.
Stenner’s book just made my reading list. Your link is a prime example of why I come here. Thanks.
Yip. The exact opposite of the truth. We are born tribal, liking the people like us.
We aren’t talking about people with legitimate complaints here. They exist, but they aren’t part of the alt-right, which is who the Op seems to define. They are mostly reluctant Trump supporters, which is a different group.
The problem is that compromise isn’t a possibility with the alt-right. You can’t be partially racist. And there’s nothing to compromise with their provocation.
The only solution is Andy’s. We keep on driving the anti-racist message. We keep making appealing to them to be political suicide. And they go back to being irrelevant.
We don’t have Nixon winning while using the Southern Strategy. We have Trump lose a lot of Republican support.
Trump supporters need their voices heard. Their proposals/policies don’t necessarily need to be enacted, but they should be made to feel that they have a voice.
Many people are willing to compromise or even let go of their demands, as long as they feel that they were truly heard.
This. The solution is to brainwash them by the liberal academics. Maybe someday we can even get Safe Spaces into the work place. Has your boss complained to you that you’ve been leaving work early too often or not completing your reports on time? Report them and get them fired for oppression and go to the Safe Space at work and cry and pet puppies.
Their voice has been heard. And it is being amplified and regurgitated back to them 24 hours a day via Fox News.
The Cracked article you linked to provided an interesting perspective. The thing is, you want to feel bad for these people, however there definitely is a strong resistance to any sort of change.
I guess my main question is what does a “victory” look like to Trump supporters living in rural areas?
Yeah. Being polite and tactful to people who espouse faith-based hatred is how we got to this mess. We’ve spent the last twenty years hearing how we have to be nice and calm and whatever the opposite of “shrill” is or the conservatives will just dismiss our message. We’ve been told that we can’t challenge them, because that wouldn’t be fair or balanced. We’ve been told that if we disagree with them, the conservatives will just pout and sulk, like somehow that’s our fault.
It’s all bullshit. It’s just an attempt to silence and intimidate their opposition. Bottom line - you can’t reason people out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into.
It’s 2016. If conservatives don’t know how to get to Sesame Street by now, they have only themselves to blame.
But they can’t be made unilaterally. Go find me some “Trump supporters”, like the op is talking about, who are making an effort to bridge the gap and then we can talk about what sort of concessions that need to be made and by whom.
Y’all can do emotional outreach on the bigots if you want. I’m going to be having cocktails over at iiandyiiii’s table.
For Trump supporters I’ve spoken with talking about “concessions” is to miss the entire point; they don’t want more of the same but watered down - they want out, a whole new social contract as between the people and the political class (who they see as corrupt through bribery).
Liberals can be dismissive and negatively characterise Trump supporters from their bullshit high ground but, as best I can see, there is only one group of voters in this election willing to tackle the issues surrounding the 1%.
Yeah, but Bernie supporters have mostly made peace with voting for Hillary. What that’s got to do with the idiots who get excited when Trump yells, “I’m building a wall!”, and “Lock her up!” - I don’t really know.
You realize, right, that Trump only solid economic plan is tax cuts for millionaires, right?
The article is about the armed Trump supporters and the talk of revolution.
Again - Trump supporters are dangerous and irrational. The onus here is not on Liberals to reach out to them and lead them gently to the path of decency and kindness.
What disgusts me is that you have less irrational republicans that have decided that they are not committing themselves to fight them. The strongest rebukes among those currently active republicans are things like “I might vote for Trump but I’ll just have to wait and see” – that’s about as strong as the rebukes get. What that really means is, if there’s a way for them to capitalize on Trump supporters’ blind rage, they’re still open to doing it, and probably will. It’s probably a combination of a desire for personal gain and genuine palpable fear of what Trump die-hards are capable of.
These people vote against the people who are more likely to represent their interests. I don’t really feel sorry for them. These are people who don’t want to exercise even a modicum of intellectual energy. I will concede that it doesn’t help that we live in a society where news media hardly educate and where primary and secondary schooling are a joke. But again, these people vote against their own interests a lot of times so the responsibility is on them. And at any rate, it doesn’t take wealth or education to be a decent person, which these people are not.