And then, as any film historical record from the 30s and 40s will show, hire nothing but Black people to do the actual labor of maintaining said railroad,
And as the dearly departed PB&J sandwich would remind us,
“If you can convince the lowest Black man he’s better than the best Hispanic man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll vote Republican for you.”
First generation immigrants did not and do not assimilate much, but their kids do. You could argue that first generation immigrants actually assimilate more now than a century ago because we don’t have the self-contained ethnic ghettos of the past, and partly because of that you really need to have some command of the English language to get by. Also mass media has exported a lot of American culture so some immigrants don’t have to assimilate as much to still be relatively similar. Still, since today we see the first generation immigrants it feels like they’re not assimilating, because they aren’t, but their kids will become part of the mix just like the German and Italian and Russian immigrants’ kids did.
An Us being against Them is as American as apple pie. The mere existence of a Them demands that some people think about themselves as Us. Any crumb given to Them is a crumb taken away.
The wildly ironically named Native American Party, usually called the Know Nothings, were virulently against the newly-immigrated Catholics. The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s also targeted Catholics, and added on hate for Jews and Immigrants as well as Blacks. They controlled Indiana and many major cities in the North. They got the Immigration Act of 1924 passed so that darker skinned Thems (i.e. eastern and southern Europeans: Asians had long been banned) had little chance of entering the country. The Civil Rights era looked like strides were being made until Nixon’s Southern Strategy slowed it to a crawl.
The present day world is nothing new. It’s always been there, under the surface in times of backlash, in our faces when they could take control. In every era, the Us look for a Leader to destroy the enemy. Study Huey Long’s career for a frighteningly similar pre-Trump example. Once a group gives total allegiance to a Leader, only death can break that hold.
Polls keep trumpeting that Trump is underwater in every policy issue. Nobody cares. Trump has maintained a steady 90% approval rating from Republicans since day 1 of his second term. Almost all the Republican politicians in Congress who say a word against him have announced that they won’t be running for office again. Trump has personal power that he translates into authoritarian power - that is mainly being used against Them. Hallelujah!, cry his supporters.
Many good analyses of today’s culture have already been given. I don’t mean to slight them: everything matters. But the core issue has always been Us vs. Them.
I disagree somewhat. I make a decent middle class living in Arkansas, mostly in computer science. No one asked to see that I have a BS in electronics and a Master’s in Instrumentation and Electronics. I have encountered several people working on computer networks who have no college degree at all.
Does a college education enable one to act more intelligently? I recall a US Senator chiding Mrs. Biden for “calling herself a doctor” when she had a PhD in education.
This.
I also work here in Arkansas, and a few years ago I was playing HR recruiter for a large company here. My experience has been the opposite. My IT guys aren’t keen on hiring people without degrees even if they’ve been doing the job for 5+ years. They’re an insular bunch, so they’ll make exceptions for people they know, but by and large they want someone with a degree.
For some people, it’s not that they remember mistreating people who they thought of as not normal (though I agree that for some it is.) For some people, there’s A Right Way To Live. And because there is A Right Way, any other way must be Wrong. They may recognize that perfectly nice people live in what they think are Wrong ways; they may even think they ought to be nice to such people. But, because they think there is A Right Way, they therefore think that anyone saying those other ways of living are Right must be saying that their way of living is Wrong.
Therefore saying that it’s OK to be gay, or trans, or of a different religion, or atheist, or in an interracial relationship, or whatever they’re objecting to, is perceived as a direct attack on them and on their entire way of life. Because there’s no place in their heads for ‘these different ways of living can all be right’.
It’s not a frame of mind limited to any particular economic or social group. But it’s unfortunately pretty common. I first recognized it many years ago when I said casually to a group of co-workers who were discussing music that I didn’t much like country music. (I would now say that’s an over generalization; I like some of it.) They reacted exactly as if I’d continued on to say ‘and all of you are obnoxious and stupid and Wrong for liking it’; which I had neither said nor meant.
And I agree that some of it is the result of people deliberately trying to terrify every group of every other. We all want ourselves and our loved ones to be safe, no? There isn’t any safety in turning us against each other — that way lies only danger for everyone. But a lot of people — and I include in that some of the people doing the terrifying — can’t see that.
Chiding Dr. Biden?
Maybe because there are no good solutions to that.
When you are not educated, it is easier to lie to you. Note that the GOP won in 2024 based upon three Big Lies- The Economy was bad, The borders were open, and crime was out of control. None of those things were true.
Xenophobia is rampant the world over. Not just in the USA. It is the main issue.
Right, Fox and Conservative Talk Radio brainwashes people with a barrage of scary talk and out and out lies. One of my Liberal biddies got “converted” as there was a local CTR that asked him on as a “gun expert” (he really wasnt). But then he listened to them- started calling Obama “the Muslim in Chief” etc.
Not every but most. A combo of being Primaried out and death threats.
It is not that. Even in nations that arent “white” xenophobia is rampant. See Japan.
Right Wing Populism thrives in the modern world- Many nations have a RWP leader. RWP is based upon lying to the lowest common denominator and xenophobia.
IMHO, it’s that the left tries to talk them out of their fear. Have you ever spoken to someone with arachnophobia and reassured them that the spider isn’t venomous, or spoken to someone with a fear of flying and told them commercial flying is safe? The success rate of such logic-based persuasion is near 0%. Whereas the right affirms them in their fear, makes them feel heard and listened to, makes them feel understood and empathized with.
It may be useful to remember the old adage that “you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into”. It simply means that beliefs based on emotion, identity, or social influence, rather than logic, cannot be changed through rational argument.
You’re trying to fight a losing battle against a vast disinformation campaign supported by numerous institutions that these people implicitly trust, including now the White House itself and a president who shamelessly lies every time he opens his mouth. Most of these people love what they think Trump is doing because they haven’t a clue what he’s doing, and blindly believe everything he tells them even if contrary evidence is right in front of their faces. When Trump tells them the people shot in Minneapolis were terrorists threatening federal agents, they believe it. When he tells them the protestors are all paid professional troublemakers and you can tell because all their signs are professionally made, they believe it, even when all the pictures and videos show no such thing. How do you fight such insanity with facts and logic?
Closely related thread started today that might be of interest to people in this thread:
To me this is the crux and all else is details.
There is a vast for-profit propaganda system feeding these people BS. And they’re eating it up happily and begging for more. Because, like junk food, it’s designed to create that craving, not to provide nutrition.
Conventional donation-driven and passion-driven politics and conventional random world event-driven news media doesn’t stand a chance against that propaganda spew. And because it’s profitable to operate, there’s no upper limit on how big and strong and crazy it can get.
Add in foreign malign actors and their millions (no exaggeration) of bots and that onslaught will preclude having a rational populace within our borders. And hence preclude normal politics.
The recovery will begin the day all those propaganda feeds and bots are cut off permanently. Then we wait sixty years for enough of the people conditioned by the feeds to die off, despite their best efforts to pass the crazy onto their kids.
Then we start the process to work back from whatever horrors are the then-current world towards 1980s-style mildly polarized but fully pluralistic politics.
But IMO every democracy and every pluralistic society will be dragged under by the concentrated power of modern propaganda. And the evil bastards are just getting started on harnessing AI to that end.
What’s your support for the idea that it must, simply must be something other than what these people are telling us about themselves?
Journalists have tried for years to hit on the magical formula for this. “Economic insecurity” and so forth. Many have tried and failed to crack the code because nobody wants to confront the simple fact that about a third of the country feel that men and white people should be on top of the social and economic order, and if that’s not the case, then it’s a sign that everything’s falling apart.
Trump voters have a stratified vision of the ideal society where rich white men are on top, working white people are in the middle, and everyone else is on the bottom. Their belief is that this order should remain just as it is, with no effort from them. So when other ethnicities and women start to out-achieve them, they panic and experience this as a collapse of the entire system and all of their future prospects. Simply because their vision of the future is that they’d stay out of the bottom rung of society without changing or growing or doing any work at all.
They will of course phrase it as “economic anxiety” because no racist admits to racism. Even David Duke, grand whatever of the KKK, insists he’s not a racist. But the economic anxiety is about nothing else than having to work harder to avoid being out-competed by races they see as inferior.
There is of course the entire sub-category of gender issues, but it’s the same thing. Everyone should stick to their birth gender and fulfill their socially assigned reproductive roles so that men have a clear path to best advantage. There’s a reason MAGA so prominently features the manosphere and guys who are angry about alimony and child support.
These are the root causes. Being on the top rung of society in terms of gender and race is a thing of value. People feel the loss of this value, and they’re fighting back hard. Every effort to find a “root cause” that’s less glib or reductive is just an elaborate way to maneuver around the ugly truth. Loss of privilege is extremely painful.
Nailed it. If we start looking for the root causes of the root cause I nominate American, Protestant, Christianity. Every aspect of the perfect world they’re losing was ordained by God.
The MAGA stuff is not new, though the intensity and lack of alternatives and the influence of what could be called “anti-social media” is. The US has always been sharply polarized, and the notion that conservatives in the past were reasonable people is largely a myth. A new biography of William F. Buckley–sometimes heralded as “the liberal’s conservative”–makes his ties to the crazies of the John Birch Society and even the US Nazis clear, for all the talk about him making conservatism respectable and reasonable.
Some of the causes for the present mess have been around for a very long time: authoritarianism, hierarchy, order-giving and taking in the political and the economic spheres. People resent and resist this, as they should. We don’t always resist in smart ways, and institutions that used to exist to help shape and develop effective resistance (by which I mean a variety of things, from unions to political parties to literature and the list goes on) and understand the real world of capitalism have been gutted. Without smart, effective resistance, people fall prey to the stupid, ineffective resistance of the grifters and grafters as their anger and fear have no productive outlets and thus they have little hope. This of course works very well for said grifters and grafters.
That’s why they are keen to double down on authoritarianism in schools, universities, politics, work, art, the home. The false solutions reinforce the despair and the anger while reducing the ability to think and act creatively. Building new institutions, forging new connections, encouraging people to think and dare to act on new ways forward is a way out of this.
Are there really a lot of liberals that think this? Is it actually true? Or is that a social-media caricature of liberals being pushed by actors who want to malign them for various reasons?
Part of the conversation needs to be that, yes, when fascism is on the ballot, the only responsible thing to do is shut off your fucking brain and drive to the polls and vote against the most credible challenger to the fascists. It’s mind-boggling that people think it’s appropriate to think “hmmm, secret police kidnapping people off the street does sound bad, I grant you that, but what about the price of eggs?”
It should be a literal no-brainer. And yes, it will always sound supercilious and tone-deaf to say your kitchen table issues need to take a back-seat to the fight against fascism. That is exactly why influence campaigns lean so hard into exaggerating economic precarity. That is exactly why they amplify and distort liberal voices in ways that cast them as downplaying kitchen-table issues rather than prioritizing the fight against fascism. Because the disinfo influencers know they’ll find willing collaborators on both the left and right who are more than ready to shank liberals for their own reasons.
I think this is dead-on.
I work closely with a Trump vote, and I have to say that I like her-- or, at least like working with her. We don’t talk politics, albeit, occasionally we agree on things: neither of us liked the media trashing Charlie Kirk the day after his death, and neither of us thinks ICE should be shooting US citizens.
But she also thinks a lot of things that aren’t terribly MAGA-- like women’s rights, and gay rights. We have a lesbian, and an FTM trans person, and she is very friendly to both, and really likes one of them, asking her advice about her computer all the time.
What she doesn’t like from Democrats are any mandate they’ve handed down, like any vaccine requirement, or insurance. Now, she’d still get all her vaccines, and have insurance. She just doesn’t like being told what to do.
Why on earth she perceives Democratic mandates as “being told what to do,” and Republican ones as polite suggestions, I have not figured out, other than Democrats frequently order us TO do things, while Republicans order us to NOT to do things, and those are somehow very different for her.
She doesn’t like being told what to do, but being told what not to do doesn’t require any extra effort on her part, so she sees it as less invasive, and so far, nothing Trump has forbade has hit home. She post-menopausal, and had trouble getting pregnant when she did, so abortion is a non-starter for her.
And like Velocity’s mother, she believes the world is very evil now-- maybe uniquely evil, and at any rate, critically evil, and something must be done, NOW. She knows this, but for some reason a great number of people don’t, so it is important for her to stick to her guns, and, to mix my metaphor, keep the ball in the air.
It makes her feel important.
She gets some of that in her personal and professional life, and it would be enough for me, but I guess it’s not enough for her.
That may be the difference, or what is “awry”: how much a person needs to feel important or in charge vs. how much of that they actually get in their daily lives. Non-MAGAS are in balance, whatever that might mean for the individual. MAGATS are out-of-balance.
How’s voting for Republicans been working on those issues America? At least the Democrats claim they want to fix those problems with something other than another Republican tax cut for the rich.
Answer: it doesn’t matter because it was never about kitchen-table issues. When they say “the cost of housing is too high” what they mean is “I’d like to get rid of all the Mexicans.” This morphs into VPOTUS suggesting that Mexicans on welfare are sucking up all the housing capacity somehow.
They’re pretending to care about kitchen-table issues, which means it’s important that we pretend to do something about kitchen-table issues. But nobody should ever, for a single moment, assume that actually doing something about kitchen-table issues will bring MAGA back to supporting reasonable candidates.
Their grousing about kitchen-table issues is always code for something else. So it’s important not to waste too much political capital addressing what ultimately is a fake complaint anyway.