If Jonathan Haidt is right, it would be because liberals simply don’t value in-group loyalty as a positive trait in the first place.
What do you attribute your personal experience and outlook to? Do you think your experience is more or less typical than is commonly understood and described by various sources and accounts?
That kind of loyalty (to a person, not a set of ideals) isn’t really seen as a virtue on the left. In fact, it’s rather distasteful and my guess is most of the party would turn on anyone who tried to demand fealty.
Questioning authority is important to many of the people on the Democratic side and it’s hard to question the authority of someone you’re that fanatically loyal to.
I’d attribute my personal experience and outlook mostly to my parents. I think my experience is more typical than what is commonly understood, despite being less common among blacks than other groups.
I don’t believe my experience is universal, but it certainly isn’t unique. And I do agree with you that being middle class is as much about mindset as it is about salary. Predictably, my black friends who had middle class mindsets raised kids who are very successful and well adjusted today. With the clarity of hindsight, I can see now that some of those families were actually poor.
On the other side of things, I have black friends who despite going to the same schools as the rest of us, living in the same neighborhoods, and by and large doing the same things as the rest of us, turned out far less successful. Their families are also almost universally dysfunctional. I’m well aware that not all functional families raise successful kids, and not all dysfunctional families produce failures; even the definition of success varies from person to person. But it is true that one of the greatest indicators of later success is whether or not a child is raised in a two parent household.
Even assuming I believe one is less evil than the other, how does that obligate me to vote?
Contrary to popular opinion, there is indeed merit in not voting at all.
While I’m certainly not going to claim the Democrats are free of bigotry, corruption and/or incompetence, those are three metrics by which the current Republican party leaves them in the dust. Consider, as an easy example, the recent RNC, with its multiple blatant violations of the Hatch Act and the litany of dogwhistle racism including a call for the return of de facto redlining. Anyone voting Republican because they are bothered by bigotry, incompetence and corruption among the Democrats is basically saying “I’m afraid that dog will bite me, so I’m going to go stand in this pit of rabid wolverines instead”. It is not a decision based on a rational assessment of the evidence.
No political party will ever be completely free of bigotry, incompetence and corruption because political parties are made up of people and people (collectively) suck. All you can do is either vote for the least worst option or not vote at all - and if you’re not voting, why should any party care what you think of them?
And here we see another common refrain: “I might have voted Democratic if only they’d nominated someone else.” Strangely, it’s always “someone else” who might have somehow convinced these purported fencesitters to vote for the Democrat. And there’ll be jam tomorrow…
Democratic Party. Don’t worry - it’s a common mistake often made by roughly half the country.
And if they have actually taken stock of the given choices, they can do what they want. But given the rampant anti-minority sentiment and support for white nationalism amongst Trump and his administration, I’d certainly be curious as to how they reached that conclusion.
What role do you believe institutional racism in America plays (if any) in contributing to a less cohesive family unit among blacks? Poverty is often blamed as well but I don’t know whether poverty or racism explain the higher occurrence of single parent homes phenomenon. I often hear and read about prominent black community leaders talking about the importance of traditional two parent families. I don’t think there’s any reason to question or doubt black people value that any less than any other ethnicity. But as you say, there remains that problem among black Americans, more so than among other communities. Any thoughts about why that may be?
I used to believe that participation in the political process only serves to encourage politicians and their behavior. But this election is the only one in my memory that I consider to be even more consequential than the last.
To answer the OP:
Not sure if this has been discussed in the thread, but if you look inside the polls over the last few months, the biggest difference between '16 and '20 is in white voters – Biden is doing significantly better with white voters than Hillary was in polling, especially white voters with college degrees. So the answer to the OP is that maybe they are having an impact on the polls.
It may have been better to make the point that these guys, for instance, coal miners are worried about their jobs and a party that cares for everyone’s well being needs to fins a solution.
Here is what she actually said about that:
…and here is her actual position in 2016:
Hillary Clinton suggests those jobs are not coming back. “The way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs,” she said Monday. Rather than reversing Obama’s climate agenda, as Republicans have promised to do, Clinton wants to help coal country adapt. The $30 billion plan she released last fall calls for increased job training, small-business development, and infrastructure investment, especially in Appalachia. The plan also seeks to safeguard miners’ healthcare and pensions. “I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said this week.
By the way, this has nothing at all to do with her calling out bigots as “deplorables”. You didn’t just move the goalposts, you changed the game. But that’s okay. It’s a familiar tactic by the right at this point.
She did give solutions.
Did she give solutions to what exactly they wanted, of having coal mining jobs in an era where not only is the demand for coal collapsing, but the labor needed to extract coal was also collapsing as automation took over?
Well, no. You’d have to lie to promise that. Hence Trump.
What she gave instead were solutions to deal with those displaced workers, and to help them and their families find other opportunities, in industries that would be more lucrative and safer.
They rejected that.
In the end, they got nothing.
That was what I was taking issue with. We hear about how Biden is doing better with all these different groups compared to Clinton. But according to 538’s model, Biden is in the same spot Clinton was four years ago, with a roughly 70% chance of a a narrow win.
He’s not really in the same spot – if the polls are as they are now on the day before election day, 538’s model would have him at something like 90+% chance tow in.
The problem with individual civic duties like voting is that there isn’t necessarily a perceived individual benefit that someone realizes; you only notice the problem if enough people shirk their responsibility. But there is no merit to not voting. It encourages aggressive fringe groups to engage in anti-democratic behavior. The only alternative to democracy is non-democracy, and that means being led without having any opportunity to have input over who governs you, how they govern you, and for how long. Democracies don’t just exist on their own; they require effort. And a black person living in the United States, of all people, should understand what I’ve written above.
I personally share some of your concerns about dysfunctional black families. I won’t disagree that some individuals - black, white, and whatever else - just make bad choices that result in perpetual poverty, and it wouldn’t matter if you gave them a winning lottery ticket. But looking at things at the community level, if black communities have a unique problem with poverty and social dysfunction, it’s probably because they have received unique treatment. White power had a lot to do with creating African American communities and culture, which is important to note in a society that expects people to mostly pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and tells individuals that they’re on their own.
This. If (generic) you have issues with both candidates that you can’t overcome, at least show up to vote and then write in “none of the above” to make your displeasure known.
I think much of this apathy can be addressed through a wider practice of mail-in ballot voting. Easier to express your displeasure if you don’t have to leave the house to do so.
Some of us take voting for granted.
In order to vote, I need to leave for work about 15 minutes early. (I am also in charge of the hours of operation, and have chosen to be closed for federal elections, though primaries I stay open.) I usually don’t need nearly that much time. It’s on my way, there’s never a line, and I already know how I am going to fill out my ballot.
Others have farther to go, less ability to get there, and are facing a long line. They may not have as easy access to get a sample ballot to check over at their leisure.
That’s a lot of work to write in none of the above.
Mail in voting equalizes most of this.