yeah. a better thesis, aligned to current observations, is that demographic change erodes reactionary conservatism to a certain floor at which further decrease is a long-tail process, if not an outright plateau.
Ultimately, as I see it, the US economy’s fundamental racist-capitalist structure contains enough incentives to guarantee that a signficant minority will always align with reactionary conservatism. Our current economic system depends on a durable and reliable underclass, and racism has always been the most efficient mechanism of securing that social structure. As long as a significant minority stands to benefit, that minority will defend racism to protect its interests.
So unless we have a complete economic and social revolution that changes the existing order, there’s always going to be a certain floor of right-wing chuds that will never diminish, and we’re probably near or at the threshold now. This is consistent with that faction utterly trying to destroy the democratic order. It’s the last-ditch effort to preserve white minoritarian rule.
They likely won’t completely subvert the democratic order, but they’ve hobbled it enough to prevent meaningful change for at least one generation. I think this state of affairs could probably go on more or less indefinitely.
Which significant minority is it that you’re referring to? If you mean the largely white oligarchs themselves, then I agree with you that they benefit, but obviously they are much less than a significant minority if we’re talking about numbers alone. I’d guess that that the total number of oligarchs (in the sense of extremely wealthy people who obtained that wealth by exploiting the labor of other people rather than by their own hard work) in the US is almost certainly less than 100,000.
If, on the other hand, you mean the white working class, then yes, numerically they are a significant minority. My disagreement would be with the claim that they benefit from the system, since they clearly don’t, unless you mean some small psychological benefit from being able to tell themselves some fiction about how at least they are still better than the black (or Mexican) man.
That is the biggest part of our present situation that I don’t understand. Why the white working class thinks that “what is good for the wealthiest white men is good for me” when it’s extremely obvious that this is isn’t the case. To bring it back around to the topic at hand, apparently Democratic politicians haven’t figured out the answer to that one either.
We all need to understand that the racist white working class has never at any point “voted against their interests.”
Their interest is in maintaining a racially stratified class system that ensures they’ll never be the on the lowest rung. This preserves their socioeconomic position while requiring nothing from them as far as change, growth, or adaptation to modernity. They’re willing to suffer quite a bit of poverty and deprivation to maintain this structure.
It should also be noted that a lot of this is because much of the white rural working class actually has a floor as to how far they can fall economically. The perks of rural life are few, but they do usually involve living on at least a small piece of land that can’t be taken away. There’s shelter, there’s a bit of food to be had from the garden or forest. It’s not lavish, but as long as there’s someone else to perform the labor and to be looked down on, it compensates for their lack of upside mobility. It’s all they have and they can be relied to vote for it at any cost.
If you think they’re voting against their interests, you don’t understand what their interests are.
If the rest of your analysis is correct, then you are correct about that. The way I see it, is if, say there is a flood with rising waters, and the bottom rung is only one foot about the water, and second only two feet above, then it would benefit both of them if they could both move up to some rung that is something like five or six feet above the water. Making that move would likely require knocking the top rung down from several thousand (or million) feet to only a few thousand (or million) feet, but if that’s what needs to be done, then that’s what needs to be done. Yet they refuse to join forces with those just beneath them on the ladder.
To stretch the analogy, the only valid (in my viewpoint) reason to not join forces with those beneath them is NOT because they fear that those beneath them will reach an equal rung, but rather that they fear falling into the water should they themselves try to move up by knocking down those at the very top. If it is truly the latter than the former (and that’s the only thing that makes sense to me), then I think they have nothing to fear, since they vastly outnumber those at the top, and in the end it’s just a numbers game.
ETA: Why the most Democratic leader to use that argument was LBJ also makes no sense to me.
This demonstrates the exact misbehavior that I’m describing.
Their prime interest is in ensuring that whites always have higher status and power than nonwhites. That’s it. Every other interest is secondary - material, economic, moral, spiritual, whatever.
It doesn’t matter how many analogies you contrive to explain how “a chicken in every pot” helps them as much as their nonwhite neighbor, because that’s precisely what they don’t want. If everybody gets a chicken, that means nonwhites deserve the same things as whites, which is an open declaration of war on their ideology. It’s not just whiteness, it’s religion, gender, rural vs. urban, all that cultural stuff.
They don’t care if that’s harmful to their material interests. That’s a lower priority to the interest of cultural supremacy. It won’t change no matter how much you cleverly explain that it’s incorrect.
What I was trying to get at is that I don’t understand why this is their prime interest. It doesn’t make sense to me, on either an intellectual or an emotional level. For someone to have such an interest is completely foreign to my way of thinking, to the point that I can’t conceive of why it would even be the case that someone would think in this way.
Yeah, well, that probably means you’re a good person who was raised right, and most specifically, not in that ideology.
I was raised in that ideology, and it’s reflexive thinking that can’t be fully purged, just consciously suppressed on a continual basis. If you could look in someone’s head and see what that’s like, and understand how many millions of people think exactly the same way, you’d think you were living among space aliens. Because you kind of are, in a way that’s nearly impossible for you to grasp.
That’s my point. Normal people don’t think like that. If you think the right rising-tide analogy can set it right, you have literally no idea what you’re facing.
I think we’ve more than sufficient reviewed the sidetrack on Right wing and White Nationalist policies and agendas. Note I don’t quite say it’s a hijack, but it it is drawing away from the focus on what the Democratic Party think is the winning formula, unless you’re saying that appealing to such is the right way to win elections for Democrats. Which I can’t rule out, thus the “sidetrack” label. Without a more direct connection to the OP though, I think we’ve discussed it sufficiently for this thread, so feel free to take it to another or spin off a new thread.
This is just a guidance, not a warning.
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