Republican Senators and Representatives won’t let the Democrats tax the rich.
IMO, that’s one of the biggest disconnects: people on the left side of the political spectrum are generally terrible at talking about class privilege (although they pay lip service to it) and don’t really want to talk at all about educational privilege, which is a related, although distinct, thing. So there are a whole lot of people out there who are theoretically “privileged” but really pretty seriously disadvantaged on one or both of these axes, and who are justifiably resentful about being told they’re living life on easy mode.
White fragility is so powerful that any slight deviation from complete control over all aspects of society is seen as a grave insult.
All policy decisions must be made with the fear of white vengeance.
Exactly so. If you are a white Christian male, living in an economically depressed rural area, don’t have a college education, and are struggling to make ends meet, who is then told that you “enjoy privilege” due to your race, gender, and religion, you’d probably be offended by it.
I remember very vividly a friend of mine explaining that her son was more privileged than the Obama children. Her son who joined the military for the opportunity to go to college. I don’t want to slam the idea of privilege theory, I find it useful, but sometimes people get too hyper focused on one point to the exclusion of others. I have sometimes asked people who learned about privilege theory at university whether they had any privilege because they went to university, but that dog didn’t hunt.
At least in the academic world, there’s the idea of intersectionality where one can be part of one privileged group and simultaneously a member of another disadvantaged group.
Charles Blow (who is one of those writers who seems to have exactly one viewpoint for anything and that is that it has to be racism) just had his latest opinion post at the NYT. Currently headlined as “Republicans’ Depressingly Effective Minority Outreach Strategy”, once again he seems unable to actually understand why minorities of any kind might vote Republican. But it’s like he finally gets why people aren’t interested in this narrative that the media still pushes that the only important interaction is black-white.
Republicans — driven for much of that span by Trump and MAGA — seized upon an uncomfortable but (for them) beneficial reality: Racial and ethnic tension extends well beyond the white-nonwhite binary.
Republicans’ Depressingly Effective Minority Outreach Strategy https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/opinion/trump-republican-minority-outreach.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
My immediate family is totally non-white but except for one of my siblings, all of them hate Blacks, Hispanics (except Cubans), Muslims and Hindus as much as any white person I know.
So they are all-in on MAGA. Sometimes, incongruously, even comically so.
One of them was told she “was very nice for an Indian” by a future mother-in-law and insists that it was a genuine compliment. Her in-laws treated her like crap for years, and she has never tired of defending them as “just assholes, not racists”
From a strictly pocketbook standpoint, Trump appeals to a lot of voters who are nostalgic for the economy during his Presidency. And it was decent, though Trump inherited a good economy from Obama and it declined markedly during the early phases of Covid.
Biden has the double whammy of Covid restrictions having hit some retail businesses hard, and significant inflation. It doesn’t matter that we’ve gotten a pretty good grip on inflation, the economy by most measures is good and that Democratic administrations historically do better on the economy than Republican ones. The old mantra about Republicans performing better on economic issues still holds for many voters.
So there’s a significant degree of economic self-interest joining with right-wing beliefs on social issues that help Trump with a lot of the electorate. Also factor in resentment not just of the “privileged elites” but of experts in health and other fields. Trump voters want to fly the plane.
I bet it was one of those damn DEI pilots too!
Why? It’s very simple.
It’s currently impossible for any party other than the Dems and GOP to win the presidency. So people vote largely by party. Thus we see people voting Republican against there own best interest. They don’t have a choice.
You can’t expect Republican voters to vote for the diametrically opposed candidate; why in the world would they? The rigid, unshakable two-party monopoly is the source of almost all of the US’s political problems.
Until we find a way to defeat this unbeatable stranglehold the two parties have over our presidential elections (and other elections as well) you can expect more of the same. If people had real choices they wouldn’t reflexively vote for whoever is nominated by their party.
Agree. Our “democracy” is pretty much reduced to tribalism now. Most people simply vote for whomever is on the ballot that is on their team.
Those people I understand. What I don’t understand is the people I know, who are white Christian males , not living in an economically depressed area , who are not struggling to make ends meet who resent being told they are living in “easy mode”. I’m sorry, but even in NYC , if you own a house and have over $175K household income or a $50K pension plus Social Security , you aren’t struggling to make ends meet. And if you are wondering how I know their income, it’s because those two examples are/were government employees and their pay and pension is public information. There are also others whose exact income I don’t know but who worked in union jobs and who were able to choose to retire on their pensions before turning sixty. I don’t understand how anyone who can afford retire voluntarily before the age of sixty can think they aren’t “privileged”. And although I think these people absolutely are privileged, they aren’t the kind of “privileged” who need to worry about taxes being raised on incomes over $400K or the estate tax , so that’s not the reason.
Although I said I don’t understand , I sort of do. I mean, I know the reason because I grew up with these people but I stlll don’t really understand. Because what someone else said earlier is true - they wouldn’t mind living in a cardboard box using a curtain rod to cook over a fire just as long as the Black/Hispanic/Muslim/you name it next to them had a smaller box and no curtain rod. Because it doesn’t matter what they have - just that someone else is worse off than they are. It doesn’t mean anything to win unless someone else loses.
I think it’s very common for people to fall into the trap of thinking their experience is typical or near universal. When the majority of your peers are in the same socio-economic bucket that you are it’s sometimes hard to remember there are a great many people out there with different experiences. There’s a great line in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 where a guy is describing his neighbors. I’ll have to paraphrase because I don’t remember the exact quote.
My next door neighbor graduated from Yale Law in '72, my neighbor across the street from Princton in '74, my other neighbor from Brown in '68, and I graduated from Harvard in '73. You know, just a typical American neighborhood.
I also don’t think we can’t ignore that the word privilege has certain negative connotations when used in some circumstances. It doesn’t help that for a few years there people used the world privilege as a club. As in, “Oh, that’s just your privilege talking.” If you call someone privileged they’re going to get defensive.
I’ve said before and still think it’s true that one of the Democrats bigger communication problems is not one they can completely control. The problem is that some term like “privilege” gets coined as a jargon in academia. This jargon gets used for a specific concept and argument, not really that much different from a named reaction in chemistry or other case where jargon has a perfectly fine use. Said jargon then gets picked up by the Internet, expanded far beyond the original usage, and generally weaponized against a group the user doesn’t like. A decade ago this might have been more on Tumblr, these days more likely Reddit, in both cases also on Twitter. To the degree that it’s just some dumb person on the Internet it doesn’t really matter, to the degree that the “important” people start using the term in such a way it does. But in either case the target of a “check your privilege” kind of rant, or someone laughing at the concept of the “progressive stack”, or someone sitting through a badly designed Kendi or DiAngelo-esque presentation at work is unlikely to make the distinction between some random person on the left and the Democrats. Hitting back in a safe way, by say voting for a party and candidate that might discomfort or hurt the other person, is both tempting and even defensible. After all, all you did was exercise both your right and duty to vote.
These are people who hate government. They do not admit that they need it for anything. So anything the governmnet gives is for “those other people.” They want to stop that. Very proud people in their poverty. Would not ask for a thing because that is weakness.
I kinda maybe remember that from Sunday School? Luke, right? or Mark?
Anyway… something Jesus said…
My BIL is that guy. Very well off from what I can see. Was CEO of two different companies. He voted for Trump twice. I donno. I think he will claim it’s the tax ‘burden’. Deep down, and I don’t like to say it, I think it’s racism and bigotry. He hated Obama.
What is interesting, is that we get along great. As long as we don’t talk politics or religion. But that’s the same with a lot of people I suppose.
This right here. The hatred of Obama continued to Hilary, and Trump said all the right things that these folks wanted to hear. The bigotry is now acceptable.
In essence, Obama was proof that the Democrats had jumped the shark and no longer represented anyone in White America. Clinton was a different sort of shark-jump, but by oing straight from balck male to white female, the Ds once again “proved” to White America that they stood for something alien and untrustable. Something that wasn’t White First.
Oh, sure the Ds had minority-friendly rhetoric for years, as did a few Rs too. But nobody really believed they meant it.
Until Obama. Which of course became the excuse for all the troglodytes to start saying the quiet part out loud. Which in turn recruited a lot of fence-sitters and new young blood to the white racist cause.
She got all kinds of shit for saying it, but Hillary Clinton wasn’t wrong in describing half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” (“racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”).