dagblog - Comments for "Does the White Working Class Really Vote Against Its Own Interests?"

Of interest on the political

artappraiser — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 01:20:17 +0000

In reply to If we look at the little it

Of interest on the political side of immigration, from Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic interview with Trump-hating conservative Jonah Goldberg that I just posted a link to at the end of this thread:

Robert Putnam did this massive longitudinal survey about the role of immigration plays in society. He hated his findings. He delayed a year trying to disprove them and couldn’t. He found that immigration is deeply corrosive, at least in the short term, to civil society. It is not because of racism. Everyone wants to say it’s xenophobia. It is because shared cultural norms are transmitted through language, through traditions, through customs. And when you introduce large numbers of new people into a society, into a community, people have a tendency to hunker down, to pull into their shells. I personally think that we get Trump because civil society in this country is in really rotten shape. The mediating institutions that traditionally give us meaning and a sense of belonging are being eroded. Instead, people are looking to Washington to provide meaning. Read Obama’s second inaugural; he gets deep into this. He basically describes a country where it’s the federal government and the individual with nothing in between. Added into this is this problem of the changing role of media. We retreat to virtual communities, and they tend to reinforce this tribalism. We tend to watch politics as basically this reality television show.

So, yeah, the race stuff played definitely played a role in it. The failure to do anything on immigration played an enormous role. A lot of people out in the country just simply feel like they are the butt of everyone’s jokes, that they are considered the source of all evil in this country, and that the coastal elites look down on them. Then here comes this guy who appealed to their sense of resentment, and appealed to their sense of betrayal by elites who aren’t living with the consequences of policies that come from Washington. They felt betrayed by both talk radio people who overpromised and underdelivered, and they felt betrayed by the Washington GOP establishment who overpromised and underdelivered.

So they looked to Trump. Yeah, you do have to overlook a bunch of racist, nasty crap that Trump said, but they’ve completely tuned out elites who say this makes him unacceptable. They figured, “Well, if he’s willing to say this crazy stuff, then at least that signals to me that he's not a typical politician.”

I don't call on Democrats to

HSG — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 01:17:27 +0000

In reply to I agree with your focus on

I don't call on Democrats to propose aggressive anti-immigration legislation and to adopt anti-immigrant rhetoric because I believe such laws and language are immoral and divide the 99% many of whom are immigrants or have close ties to immigrants or folks who want to immigrate.

Also published at TheAtlantic

artappraiser — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 01:04:01 +0000

In reply to @ The Atlantic today, related

Also published at TheAtlantic.com shortly thereafter: an interview with conservative Jonah Goldberg by Jeffrey Goldberg, who is still braying forth on the anti-Trump front oh woe is us, what he has done to us:

Trump's Tweets Are a 'Narnian Wardrobe to His Lizard Brain'

A conversation with the writer Jonah Goldberg about dysfunction on the right and why the president of the United States can’t stop tweeting about Hillary Clinton.

Some of the most interesting people in the world to me right now are the homeless conservatives, that not-so-merry band of right-leaning ideologues and idealists who reject Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and who find it more pleasurable to stand outside Mar-a-Lago and throw rocks than to make believe that what is happening inside is normal.

One of the most important of these homeless conservatives is Jonah Goldberg, who has been a stalwart anti-liberal voice for a generation. But Goldberg, a senior editor at the National Review (which is itself a kind of shelter for Never Trumpers) has seen many of his friends accommodate themselves to the new reality.

“The slow takeover of the right by the Trumpets is akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” he told me on a recent episode of our podcast [....]

Well that's it, I guess it's long past time I stop thinking of him as a young Republican.

@ The Atlantic today, related

artappraiser — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 00:43:34 +0000

In reply to Does the White Working Class Really Vote Against Its Own Interests?

@ The Atlantic today, related. For Trump activists on college campuses, it does appear to be about class, MAGA, immigrants, getting rid of P.C, and anti-establishment GOP.:

The Future of Trumpism Is on Campus

At colleges across the country, young supporters of the president are demanding that College Republicans fall into line.

By Elaine Godfrey, 9:54 am

[....] Semanko, who has always identified as a Republican, was involved with both the College Republicans and the Bull-Moose Party at Penn State. But once the latter started campaigning hard for Trump, Semanko said it encouraged a lot of Republicans to “convert” to the Bull-Moose Party. Trump, he says, has made people excited about the GOP, when they were previously “scared away by the warmongering, gay-hating, super-religious right.”

Semanko and the other Trump Republicans I spoke with described the MAGA movement as having four basic tenets, including building a border wall and cracking down on illegal immigration; staying out of foreign conflicts; and a more protectionist trade agenda. Semanko predicts that the “economic nationalism that Trump and Steve Bannon advocate for is exactly where [the party] is going.” The fourth tenet, he said, is ending “political correctness”—a consistent, if vague, rallying cry for Trump’s supporters. Semanko says members of the Republican establishment, including the College Republicans, are too careful when they speak. “We don’t like these people being so soft and weak,” he told me. “Trump is a fighter.”

Elliot Jersild, who was also a member of the Bull-Moose Party and served as the group’s president for one semester, put it this way: “I think voters are more aware that they can get something better than old-fashioned Republicans, someone who will actually fight for the middle and lower classes,” he said. “Candidates now are going to have to be much more willing to acknowledge the struggles of working people. You can’t just open up our trade, you can’t just support NAFTA without analyzing whether it’s actually worth it for the working class.” [....]

Spectrum disorder - lacking

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 00:27:13 +0000

In reply to pp,

Spectrum disorder - lacking all specificity.

pp,

artappraiser — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 23:41:38 +0000

In reply to revisiting the article, I see

pp,

just came across this interesting phenomena: gossip column source for Page Six (arm of NYPost, arm of Fox News world) feels the need to glump together Bernie Sanders, BLM supporters and Mueller jury into one identical or indivisible enemy

If you really look at

rmrd0000 — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 22:44:59 +0000

In reply to p.s. By going in this

If you really look at internet social media, you see the same racial divisions that you see in offline society. The interpretation of stories on the Root differs from that at many HuffPost discussions as one example. We are not post-racial. It is the pretense that we are post-racial that gives racism room to grow.

AA, that is the present.

rmrd0000 — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 22:44:12 +0000

In reply to That's the history. You want

AA, that is the present. Donald Trump was elected. Whites would have elected Roy Moore.

That's the history. You want

artappraiser — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 22:40:13 +0000

In reply to Where in the article does it

That's the history. You want to repeat it in the future?

Where in the article does it

rmrd0000 — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 22:38:25 +0000

In reply to revisiting the article, I see

Where in the article does it indicate that the white working class did not operate in tribal fashion? The first paragraph ends with whites addressing their anxiety by drawing a line between black and white. The second paragraph notes that the line drawn continued even when whites were not in direct competition with whites. When you get the whites to give up their tribalism, I’ll give up mine.