Five years to get the same insight that we get every four years about disappointed, thwarted people blaming the targets they're encouraged, by crude opportunists, to blame?
I think this may be spot on:
Trump, the King of Shame, has covertly come to the rescue. He has shamed virtually every line-cutting group in the Deep Story--women, people of color, the disabled, immigrants, refugees. But he's hardly uttered a single bad word about unemployment insurance, food stamps, or Medicaid, or what the tea party calls "big government handouts," for anyone--including blue-collar white men.
In this feint, Trump solves a white male problem of pride. Benefits? If you need them, okay. He masculinizes it. You can be "high energy" macho--and yet may need to apply for a government benefit. As one auto mechanic told me, "Why not? Trump's for that. If you use food stamps because you're working a low-wage job, you don't want someone looking down their nose at you."
But in another stroke, Trump adds a key proviso: restrict government help to real Americans. White men are counted in, but undocumented Mexicans and Muslims and Syrian refugees are out. Thus, Trump offers the blue-collar white men relief from a taker's shame: If you make America great again, how can you not be proud? Trump has put on his blue-collar cap, pumped his fist in the air, and left mainstream Republicans helpless. Not only does he speak to the white working class' grievances; as they see it, he has finally stopped their story from being politically suppressed.
I mean "Government benefits that were only provided to or disproportionately provided to white men" was basically the New Deal coalition's stance.
It's racism, combined with the fact that poor white men have it legitimately shitty right now, combined with the fact that the Party of Racism who they trust to have their back has not acknowledged at all that poor white men have it rough.
I saw this meme yesterday:
The worst part about having mental health issues is that you're seemingly required to have a breakdown in order for people to understand how hard you were trying to hold yourself together.
I think that's how poor white men feel: how come all these other groups get to have breakdowns and get sympathy, and we're just expected to keep holding it together? WHERE'S MY BREAKDOWN?
They don't seem to actually want sympathy as much as they want sympathy withdrawn from anybody else. The grand analogy has defined life as a zero-sum game (to talk Neoliberal for a moment). It's a world view in which you are either a victim or an asshole. I guess moving up to asshole counts as self-actualization.
That's just a cold veneer to protect their fragile, weepy Tin Woodsman hearts. They really do want sympathy. They want a politician to stand up there and rail about how hard it is to be them, and to do something about it.
Then, once their position improved, they could be the other kind of conservative who doesn't want anyone to get government help. So - moving up to asshole - comity!
moving up to asshole
I think that's a Chuck Tingle title.
I don't claim any personal insight into the Trump voter, but "poorer white Louisianans fine with government largesse but in no way can blacks have it because that makes them just like blacks" has been basically the stereotype view of white Louisiana since at least Huey Long, right?
I dunno that Trump is exploiting anything really new there. And it's not like these guys were into either (a) generosity and inclusion for others or (b) reducing government largesse to themselves when you had an oil boom, or Keynsian full employment in the late 70s, or whatever.
So I'm very skeptical of the implied claim that there is something specific about the current economy that leads these kinds of people to be Trump voters, though certainly economic stagnation/moving down the status ladder has beeb a real thing for all non-rich Americans for a while.
6 sounds like the elevator pitch for Falling Down.
For that matter, I want someone to rail about how hard it is to be me, and then to make my life easier.
So I'm very skeptical of the implied claim that there is something specific about the current economy that leads these kinds of people to be Trump voters, though certainly economic stagnation/moving down the status ladder has beeb a real thing for all non-rich Americans for a while.
It's not the current economy. It's that their racist representatives actually don't give a shit about them. Which isn't new, but it is what Trump taps.
I want somebody to rail about how hard I am.
I'll be happy to rail about how hard it is to be you. Not sure what I can do on the making your life easier front. Maybe one of the other commenters can handle that. Division of labor makes things more efficient.
(and for the record, I've got tons of help and no reason to complain. Still I feel weary!)
17: Yeah, we already sent E. Messily to help out! What more do you want?
The takeaway, though, seems to be that breaking up this informal coalition of white assholes could be accomplished by making people richer and more secure. Plenty of these people would just go on being rich white assholes, but some of them would drift at least modestly leftward if they weren't afraid of being impoverished. One does not have to convert all of these people - just pick off, say, 30% of them who can be seduced by the hedonism of the liberal lifestyle.
I think that the best bet for the Democrats would be expanding the welfare state as much as political capital allows. Obviously that creates tension with Democratic billionaires/tech people/etc, but surely there's enough "I would rather have lots of power in a welfare state than little power in libertarian paradise" people left in and around government to make it work.
Every generation of This Kind of White People still has a pretty solid percentage of kids who are queer or weird or hedonistic or academic or like foreign things or manage to be super into hiphop and realize that being racist and into hiphop is kind of dumb. If those people have decent life chances, they will drift left - even if they don't drift very far, it will be enough to break them off from the far right.
By way of illustrating the mind set, I just watched an ad attacking McGinty as a tool of special interests. This was illustrated with a picture of her standing in front of a "Fight for $15" sign.
I thought what we're all supposed to read right now re: OP.1 is J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.
That's a whole book. Nobody can read that much.
Unlike all you racists, I'm not reading about Trump voters as well as not reading about ghetto policing.
it is what Trump taps.
That, and Eastern European models.
This is why I think social safety net items that are truly universal are crucial. No need to get into the weeds of who deserves what. Everyone gets the same benefits regardless. A strong UBI and/or EITC + universal health care.
And the end of the article made something very clear. It really is about culture, and as soon as she got her son traveling and exposed to other ways of thinking about the world, he turned squishy liberal. So, guaranteed travel grants? Exchange programs for American youth to go live somewhere different?
I fully agree with both 27.1 and 27.2. Though even actually universal items don't necessarily kill the purely status-based resentment of government programs -- e.g., everyone in the US over 65, rich or poor, black or white, working or not working, gets Medicare, but it would [presumably] be more popular still and more amenable to expansion among white Louisianan men if it were restricted to white Louisianan men.
The takeaway, though, seems to be that breaking up this informal coalition of white assholes could be accomplished by making people richer and more secure. Plenty of these people would just go on being rich white assholes, but some of them would drift at least modestly leftward if they weren't afraid of being impoverished.
I don't think that's the takeaway. I mean, I support making people richer and more secure. But this particular coalition of white assholes started exactly when people were richer and more secure (i.e., the late 60s). It would still be nice to see these people, and other people, richer and more secure, but I don't think that's gonna bring white Louisianans into a coalition supporting social democracy available to all, or at least won't obviously do so any faster than the alternative, more evil process of letting older people die off and a good chunk of younger people move. I mean there are very good reasons to oppose the "die off or move" solution to weakening the older white racist voting blocks, but ISTM unlikely that more broad-based social spending is going to turn these folks into Democrats.
A truly booming economy with tons of equitable growth run by social-democratic Democrats might well peel off a good chunk of the white racist vote, because a party that could deliver that would get tons of votes generally, but that doesn't really seem to be on the list of things that anyone in the industrialized world knows how to do right now.
One does not have to convert all of these people - just pick off, say, 30% of them who can be seduced by the hedonism of the liberal lifestyle.
Isn't that about what has occurred over the past couple of decades, and why these people are a declining, complaining rump* of irredentism? Can we improve our conversion rates somehow?
To take it from another perspective, don't many of these people believe that the liberal lifestyle is, intentionally and unfairly, simultaneously both hedonistic (for non-whites, non-"makers" and non-heterosexuals) and suffocatingly censorious (for whites, hard-working blah blah blahs and ordinary God-fearing heterosexuals)? I.e., that the "progressive program"/"gay conspiracy" is not only to promote deviancy, perversion and herbal tea but to extirpate and punish the pleasures that these people have inherited and built their lives around? Football, barbecue, NASCAR, what have you?
* The worst kind! Heyoooohhhh!
Herbal tea and NASCAR are equally baffling to me.
"This is why I think social safety net items that are truly universal are crucial. No need to get into the weeds of who deserves what. Everyone gets the same benefits regardless. A strong UBI and/or EITC + universal health care."
I agree with this. As long as the tax system is progressive, you don't need to worry so much about means testing.
30: Not to worry, Moby: extremists of both the right wing and left varieties are extremely tolerant of middle-of-the-road positions, compromises and middle grounds, and never post tedious memes on Facebook about how the system has to be burned to the ground along with anybody who goes along with it because they're as bad as King Leopold.
"extremists of both the right wing and left varieties are extremely tolerant of middle-of-the-road positions, compromises and middle grounds, and never post tedious memes on Facebook about how the system has to be burned to the ground along with anybody who goes along with it because they're as bad as King Leopold."
Those guys are equally bad. Exactly equal in badness.
I thought the story was that the demographic transition, education and the youth effect explain approximately 120% of the shift towards democrats, and that we have been able to pick off basically no older whites at all.
Green tea is O.K. Brown tea is pretty good, especially if it is very strong and served with milk. But herbal tea is just weird.
32: Aren't right wing extremists basically OK with King Leopold, at least to the extant that they have any idea who he is?
everyone in the US over 65, rich or poor, black or white, working or not working, gets Medicare
Not quite! Since Medicare is a credit-based system like Social Security, people who haven't worked, or worked on the books, for enough of their lives can be shut out, so there are uninsured seniors out there, and not just undocumented immigrants or never-worked-here immigrants. The 65+ uninsurance rate was 1.4% in 2014, over 600,000 individuals.
37: Christ, I don't want to know. I've already read far too much about those al/t-r/igh/t* wankers.
* Can't be too careful.
At least he made the ivory-from-dead-elephants-carried-by-malnourished-slaves trains run on time.
Correction: Leopold II.
Leopold I may have been perfectly decent, for all I know.
Sure, if you were a Walloon, asshole.
I knew a Walloon in law school! Turned out her father was the chief judge of the Belgian supreme court. I refrained from inquiring about the state of waffle jurisprudence.
"Shut out" above is misleading because you can still get the coverage by paying a premium, and all seniors get Parts B and D while paying premiums, but still, Part A for hospital coverage is pretty important.
My roommate for most of college was a Walloon. Delicious food, wacky culture.
A bunch of my coworkers and I just received spam to attend an event hosted by the local Honorary Consul of Belgium, at a very snooty club, to convince us to move our European businesses to Wallonia post-Brexit. Which we might just do, because free lunch buffet. I love been confused with Captains of Industry.
Eh, I can't feel too bad about any of this. "It's the white supremacy, stupid." Maybe if the white people of Louisiana hadn't spent the last several centuries making white supremacy their overarching political priority, I might be more sympathetic, but Christ, David Duke almost won the governorship there, and that was a quarter of a century ago! Shit ain't got nothing to do with Obama.
You know, Football, NASCAR and country music are all things I valued and enjoyed once, but no longer really do. They've become degraded commodities, by a slow but inexorable process of development from something genuinely likeable.
So I've a soft spot for an idea of them, a memory that thrives only when sheltered from contemporary contacts with the thing that goes by that name.
Barbecue is still good, however.
The takeaway, though, seems to be that breaking up this informal coalition of white assholes could be accomplished by making people richer and more secure. Plenty of these people would just go on being rich white assholes, but some of them would drift at least modestly leftward if they weren't afraid of being impoverished.
As it happens, BDL wrote this earlier today:
Speaking as a card-carrying neoliberal and as a proud member of the Rubinite wing of the Democratic Party, I say that back in the early and mid-1990s we had a theory of why (major increases in top marginal wax rates, the expansion of the EITC, and the push for universal health insurance aside) we prioritized growth over (further) redistribution: we thought that slow growth would further empower right-wing identity politics, while fast growth would create a more generous and cosmopolitan electorate.In the next para he refers to the left's "herbal teabaggerism." Perhaps this isn no coincidence...
I think DeLong was probably right about that. The problem is that aside from getting lucky about the creation of the internet and having a nice stock market bubble, his 90s crew didn't really have much of an idea about how to create real economic growth, either. In particular the idea that micro-economic deregulation would be a big part of creating economic growth turned out to be wrong.
My current baseline view is "you should redistribute anyway, but that's not bringing the 1945-75 economic feeling of good times and social progress back, because the primary driver of that economy was growth that no one, right or left, has any idea how to re-generate." Whatever liberal policy plan you can imagine is probably right on the merits and is something we should be doing anyway, but the fantasy on the left that this is sufficient to bring back the economy of 1955, only this time with minorities, women, and gays included, is really just a fantasy.
As far as I can tell, DeLong believes the economy was fine before 2008 so I don't know what he blames the Bush adminstration for.
BTW, to be clear, while I kind of suspect that returning to a high growth state isn't technically impossible, just politically impossible, in the current moment, darB's solution doesn't do much good.
But OK, let's say a miracle occurs, and HRC has a compliant House and Senate. Everyone is so jazzed over the victory that they're feeling their oats, and we don't have to deal with a lot of Bauci and Liebermen. There's enough political capital to do either of the following:
A. Growth policy, with the best of Obama- and Clinton-era tax policies (i.e., today's top marginal rate, Bill's estate tax, etc), massive deficit-financed infrastructure investment, some fiddling with the safety net, but no big expansions. Result is the best growth since '99, maybe even a return to the pre-'07 trend.
B. Major expansion of welfare/safety net: Fix TANF, add public option to AHCA, allow Medicare buy-in at 65, a lot less means-testing, more aggressive taxation than in A. Result is growth comparable to what we've had, but a higher floor of outcomes for the poorest/sickest/unluckiest.
This is all aside from peripheral issues like justice reform; just imagine that your preferred outcomes happen in either A or B. People will be tempted to blend the two, but my idea is that there's not enough votes to get all of both, so you're either selling A. non-ruinous tax increases, closing the gaps in the safety net, and direct economic investment, of B. soak the rich to make things better for everyone else, but that doesn't leave much for infrastructure.
So which do you pick? Which is better for human misery, which leads more reliably to Democratic gains*?
*taking it as given that, for the foreseeable future, GOP control of anything is ruinous: if the public option results in complete GOP control in 2020, you're fucked.
Evidence for 50? I mean, he spent the entire Bush administration opposing everything Bush did, so I'm curious why you think he loved Bush's economy.
He has fully admitted that he misjudged the downside risks of the economy in 2007; that's not actually the same as thinking that Bush policies were good ones.
49: FWIW, I really do think that a combination of *massive* deficit-financed infrastructure investment, confiscatory taxation*, IP reform, and support for robust SEC and CFPB enforcement would give us the best non-'90s growth since '72.
*the first two items include pricing carbon and green investment, but when I say "massive", I'm thinking in terms of replacing every old sewer and water supply line in the country, replacing every defective bridge, maybe high speed rail... blank check kind of stuff.
If there was realistically a political or ecinomic tradeoff between "equitable growth" and "redistribution" I think you'd pick "equitable growth" every time. Better politics better for people's life outcomes, plus whatever redistribution you can imagine will be much harder fought-over (with more going to the currently powerful) than you can without it. I thought that was one of the deepest lessons of Piketty -- you want more equality, realistically you need more growth (or else you have insane political infighting).
The problem is that basically nothing we know of (right or left) is going to produce that growth at a sufficient rate. Sure we should probably still be deficit-spending more at low interest rates but that's definitionally a short-term thing. So it ends up being a false choice.
I think 49 is almost certainly wrong, but that doesn't mean that those things aren't worth doing anyway, if done well.
One thing that would go along with the trente-glorieuse experience would be massive increases in basic and translational R&D investments, maybe enough to be Keynesian on its own even without whatever comes out of it.
I don't think IP reform is a big piece on its own (could be wrong, though), but IMO there's significant deadweight loss there (mostly in tech, don't freak out, RT), and if you're going to try to kick the economy in high gear by brute force, you're more likely to get something (kind of) self-sustaining if you get rid of that kind of friction. So kill software patents, patent trolling, etc. I think Bono-era IP stuff has bad distributive effects, but I don't think it creates the drag that Amazon's one-click patent does.
Same deal--I forgot to include this--with antitrust enforcement. Kill the "consumer welfare" standard, go back to a classic industry dominance standard. I'm not actually sure how to apply that to eg Apple, which A. didn't grow its position by acquisition, and B. doesn't sell the most of anything, they just make the most money doing it, but it would be huge for health care and telecomm, two of the shittiest industries we have right now.
Both antitrust and patent reform strike me as core examples of things that are probably wise to do for purely distributional reasons but that will do almost nothing for economic growth per se.
Sure we should probably still be deficit-spending more at low interest rates but that's definitionally a short-term thing. So it ends up being a false choice.
Well, this is why you spend it on infrastructure, because that's the foundation for future, non-deficit financed growth. I think we undersell how much of the growth of the '50s and '60s came from what the New Deal built.
Part of my thinking is that the current low-growth equilibrium, aside from being driven by bad policy at the top*, is largely down to the bottom 90% just scraping by. Dump a trillion a year into the economy for a few years, almost all of it going to workers and professionals, not financiers and rentiers, and now maybe you've got a market where it makes sense for industries to invest in products that sell to anyone other than the 1%.
*I mean, since 9/11 has any country/region been dominated by smart economic policy? Maybe China, kind of, for awhile there?
But our growth hasn't been worse (actually it's been better) over the past 25 or 10 or 5 years than Europe or Japan, which have done much more of the kinds of things you're mentioning.
Japan got old. Europe was distracted by the twin dangers of toplessness and burkinis.
61- How much of the difference is due to fertility rates? Tough to grow when your population is shrinking- Here's the trend for GDP per capita in US Japan and EU which aren't as dramatically different as GDP (especially Japan).
I can't tell you how many times old women in the EU tell us how impressed they are with the number of kids we have.
63 - a lot. And I'[m not saying that we shouldn't try to make the US more like Western Europe/Japan. We should be doing that! The idea that right-wing microeconomic ideas are good for economic growth is also bullshit, so why take the bad distributional consequences that they have? I'm just saying that making the US a lot more like the existing more social democratic social democracies almost certainly won't itself create economic growth, and needs to be done on a baseline assumption of a political, social, and economic climate with lower growth than the trentes glorieuses.
Europe was distracted by the twin dangers of toplessness and burkinis.
In search of the Goldilocks Solution.
51 is an interesting question, but I think Tigre gives a complete correct answer in 54/64.
So I'll mention that I liked this (long) piece that DeLong linked.
This election, I've been trying an experiment, judging journalism from a different perspective, from the outside, as a member of a community and a partisan. I don't like what I'm learning about my profession.
...
My community of Hillary Clinton supporters is unheard and unseen. But that's by no means the best example of journalism's faulty mirror. Because of this election, we now know that the media has done a terrible job of reflecting the concerns and goals of underemployed, angry white men in the heartland. If media had done a better job of reporting -- and then informing -- their worldviews, would there have been an opening for them to be recruited by Trump and the forces of the so-called alt right?
Far more important than either of those examples, of course, is the experience of minorities in this country: African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, too often women, and too many others who are unseen in media....
the twin dangers of toplessness
Heh.
63,64: And what is the canonical solution to low natural birth rates? Immigration, but see how far that gets you in Japan or enlightened, appropriately-topped Europe these days
Evidence for 50? I mean, he spent the entire Bush administration opposing everything Bush did, so I'm curious why you think he loved Bush's economy.
He had a lot of criticisms, as any sane person would, but mostly about their mendacious policy details and rhetoric, nothing that would explain slow, maldistributed growth. Isn't his post-2008 story that the economy would've recovered much better were it not for a broken financial system and too tight monetary policy (tightness as measured by shitty growth)? Unless his belief is that macroeconomic performance is critically effected by, eg, the doughnut hole in the prescription drug plan.
But our growth hasn't been worse (actually it's been better) over the past 25 or 10 or 5 years than Europe or Japan, which have done much more of the kinds of things you're mentioning.
Have any of these countries done enough to halt or reverse rising inequality? How have countries that increased their redistributive efforts done comparatively? Comparing the static sizes of country's safety nets doesn't tell us much about the effects of rising inequality on growth.
Isn't his post-2008 story that the economy would've recovered much better were it not for a broken financial system and too tight monetary policy (tightness as measured by shitty growth)? Unless his belief is that macroeconomic performance is critically effected by, eg, the doughnut hole in the prescription drug plan.
Looking quickly I find this which partially matches your description but with different emphasis.
Why did the collapse come? Start with the huge rise in wealth among the world's richest 0.1% and 0.01% from the 1970s into the 200s, and the consequent pressure for people, governments, and companies to take on increasingly unsustainable levels of debt. Continue with policymakers lulled into complacency by the widespread acceptance of the "efficient-market hypothesis"--believing that investors in deregulated financial markets were relatively good judges of risk. CEnd with hubris: the confidence in the Federal Reserve and elsewhere that grew because the Penn Central collapse of 1970, the Latin American financial crisis of 1982, the stock market crash of 1987, the S&L crisis of 1991, the Mexican crisis of 1995, the East Asian crisis of 1997, the Russian/LTCM crisis of 1998, and the dot-com crash of 2000 had not caused the Federal Reserve problems ...
But from our standpoint today, we have reason to fear that partial success may turn out to be Pyrrhic victory. Politicians--Obama, Cameron, Merkel, and others--declare that the crisis had been overcome and the economy is strong. Yet by the standard of the pre-2007 period we have a depressed level and anemic growth, combined with acceptance of these as the new normal. Thus the North Atlantic is on track to have thrown away 10% of their potential wealth. And there have been insufficient changes in financial-sector regulation or in automatic stabilizers or in other institutions to keep the North Atlantic from once again developing the vulnerabilities it turned out to have in 2007.
That is the end of my story.
The little lesson from this story? We should not be satisfied with the current state of the economy. We should be pressing for policies to not just stabilize the situation but reverse the damage, and pick the fruit that back in 2007 we thought we would have today but that is still hanging.
The big lesson from this story? That your ideology, like fire and (we hope) fusion, turns out to be a good servant but a terrible master. Ideologies make sense of the entire world. We need them--our brains cannot handle too much complexity, for we have barely evolved barely enough smarts to have made it this far. But they break in our hands precisely because they force the world to make sense, and make a single kind of sense, and the world may not--or may not make that particular kind of sense.
And what is the canonical solution to low natural birth rates?
Didn't some countries (France?) successfully boost their birthrates with especially generous maternal/family aid policies?
We may never know if Trump has done this intentionally or instinctively, but in any case he's created a movement much like the anti-immigrant but pro-welfare-state right-wing populism on the rise in Europe.
I found "welfare chauvinism" a very useful concept when I first heard of it.
That puts the French prime minister's recent remark in a more complete context.
62: so today when I saw the word "burkini" I instantly imagined a thinkpiece with the title "Reflections on the Revolution in France" and Edmund Burke's head photoshopped into a beach snapshot. But what would the content be?
Also, all of you were too high-minded to note this line in 48/quote: back in the early and mid-1990s we had a theory of why (major increases in top marginal wax rates...
72- Awesome deals for larger families in Europe. Traveling in Switzerland, you buy your kid a card for €30 that's good for a year and they get unlimited travel for free with you on any public transit in the country, including trains, boats, gondolas. After the first two kids for €60 total all other kids get their cards for free.
But our growth hasn't been worse (actually it's been better) over the past 25 or 10 or 5 years than Europe or Japan, which have done much more of the kinds of things you're mentioning.
Well "Europe" takes in a lot. I don't think (without checking) that we meaningfully outgrew the median northern European country prior to 2008 (the malign incompetence of the ECB explains everything about post-2008).
I mean, Germany has spent a ton on infrastructure and has a good Gini coefficient and arguably the most productive economy on earth. We can't all be countries driven by advanced manufacturing export, but we're big enough to trade with ourselves.
And yeah, Japan is in a demographic death spiral, which we're simply not.
Germany has an artificially weak currency, and had their economy stimulated by bad loans to trading partners that were made "good" by the aforementioned malign incompetence. For every Germany, there must be an EU.
Unless his belief is that macroeconomic performance is critically effected by, eg, the doughnut hole in the prescription drug plan.
Gee, was that the biggest economic push of GWB? Seem to recall some tax cuts that may have had redistributive effects.
Is your claim that BdL supported those, or that slashing the top tax rate had no distributive consequences?
I mean, as he lays out, the "soft" neoliberal plan in 1993 was: pursue growth-friendly policies (mostly deficit reduction*) paired with big tax increases on the 10%, resulting in (marginally) reduced inequality and increased median income for all. This happened.
Then Bush came in, and the plan was: cut taxes on the wealthy. This resulted in a the worst recovery of the postwar era, skyrocketing inequality, and a static median household income.
So is there some continuity of policy that I'm missing? Under a Gore administration, tax rates on the 1% stay where they were, deficits don't grow during growth years, and stimulus in 2001 isn't limited to a shitty tax rebate plan. But, just because neoliberalism==evil, we should assume that people who favored Gore policies were equally fine with Bush's?
*although I wonder if anyone thought of health care reform as one; I always have
80 - I'm no expert, but here's a percentage-growth-of-GDP US to Germany comparison Looks like the US does better overall and for the period 1978-2008. Not that much better, mind you! Again, this isn't an argument against modifying the US to look more like Germany, just that doing so doesn't mean free automatic soaring economic growth. Neither left wing nor right wing economists have a magic formula for growth by either right-winging or left-winging the microeconomy.
And, for comparison, here's per-person GDP growth US vs. Germany. Even there the US looks like it comes out modestly ahead, both before and after 2008. No expertise actual claimed but this website with graphs is fun to play around on to avoid working.
83, 84: Remember that that period includes the incorporation of the DDR into Germany.
85 - I dunno if it matters, but here's the US v. Sweden if you want a growth-rate comparison to a prosperous much more social democratic country that was not absorbing East Germany. ISTM that the takeaway is not US rules, Sweden drools but that neither social democracy nor the absence of social democracy has much to do with GDP growth.
Tigre is correct. You can play with all this stuff via Google, but European GDP per capita has always been lower and is not catching up, even in the richest countries. Countries like Spain are surprisingly poor, and poorer than our poorest states.
Bear in mind that GDP is boosted in resource-rich countries beyond what we normally think of as economic activity. And the US still counts as one. Look at Norway, for instance.
Oh yeah, it's always been that way. Strange however, that Canada behaves like a European country economically. Must be the health care. Nb: if you are a country that starts with an "I", your GDP is weird and I don't trust you.
Right. To be clear, absolute GDP is not the be-all and end-all of anything. Personally, I'd rather live in Germany with its lower overall GDP but better social institutions and delicious pork products.
My only point is that more social democracy is not a magic trick for producing economic growth. Neither is less social democracy. Thus to my mind (a) the whole question of a growth/distribution tradeoff is basically a false choice; (b) even with better distribution/a bigger welfare state, we're not re-creating the economic or psychological conditions of the high-growth, 1950s-1960s economy; (c) that's too bad because much of what people on the broadly-speaking "left" are nostalgic for about the 1950s-1960s economy depends on economic growth we're not getting; (d) that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a ton more distribution, because we clearly should, and doing so won't cause meaningfully less growth than we'd have anyway.
The big question always has been how much of the gap is due to the greater natural resources in the US and how much is due to social policies and/or competitiveness (i.e. rapacious capitalism is good for GDP). Canada seems to answer the latter, but it's not an answer I like much.
Can some economics sense be made of the idea that Europeans are poorer than Americans in the sense of having less stuff (smaller apartments, fewer cars, whatever) but that they make better use of it (walkable cities, good public transport)? Or is it just that the biggish cities in the places that a foreigner might go to are pretty nice, but that things get rapidly crappier as you go to more out-of-the-way places?
Attention Pittsburgh commenters: There is dollar Yuengling at Dinnette and not one of you told me. I know you've all eaten there before.
There's nothing much new in it, but man oh man. Reading that "five years with the Trumpers" piece just makes me extremely angry, and I mean damn but I find it hard to come by any fucking sympathy for Peckerwood America at this point. Wow, you spent decades trying to gut government benefits and shame recipients in order to screw over the darkies -- and now that this is come home to roost and you're feeling the pinch, all of a sudden it's time for everyone to Kneel Before Zod and meekly accept your boot on their necks so that White men can feel "proud" again. How's about FUCK THAT, AND THESE PEOPLE CAN GO STRAIGHT TO HELL. Maybe it's time to learn how to feel "proud" without deliberately screwing other people over. Maybe it's time to learn a "deep story" that doesn't have to be nurtured in a fragile bubble of cowardly, self-serving fantasy. Maybe it's time to build an identity that isn't built almost entirely around self-destructive race hate. FUCK.
95 seems totally right, though frankly I'd be more sympathetic if the white Louisianans were in fact invoking Zod, a personal hero.
Eh, I can't feel too bad about any of this. "It's the white supremacy, stupid." Maybe if the white people of Louisiana hadn't spent the last several centuries making white supremacy their overarching political priority, I might be more sympathetic,
I disagree with the direction of your argument here, Minnie, even as I share your sense of revulsion at the supporters of David Duke.
You know, I can't feel too much sympathy (almost none, really) for the only two known Trump supporters that I personally know: parents of a friend of my son, who own a very nice house in a very nice, tree-lined neighbourhood in an NJ suburb -- even though I do know that the father was laid off about a year ago, and was unemployed for many months before finally getting another job a couple of months ago. I mean, I did sympathize up until learning that he was a Trumpster, because unemployment is no joke, and it causes lots of anxiety and distress, in addition to the financial uncertainty. But as soon as I learned about their support of Trump, my heart hardened against them, because: 1). they should know better; and, 2.) despite their recent bout of unemployment, they're still firmly within the top 5 percent; and, moreover, 3). I figure they must have some really ugly ideas about immigrants who are brown (white immigrants such as myself are just fine, of course) if they're ready and willing to support the Cheeto Jesus.
But white working-class people who are trapped in a cycle of downward mobility; of permanent under- and unemployment, and of hopelessness and despair and poverty; and whose jobs are never coming back (and their jobs are never coming back: that ship has sailed, and they now find themselves in cargo class...)? Yeah, I do have some sympathy, even as I'm disgusted and horrified by their nativist, racist ideals, and by their kooky, crazy conspiracy theories.
And anyway, if you really want to expand the social welfare system and earn support for policies of redistribution, you can't get all caught up in notions of "deserving" and "undeserving" recipients of income and wealth distribution. The white, working-class beneficiaries of New Deal legislation in the 1930s were probably at least 2 or 3 times more intensely racist than the poor whites in Louisiana who are the subjects of Hochschild's article. But FDR was not wrong to pursue policies to ameliorate their conditions.
95 yep, I can totally see that.
3rd para of 98: no, because there are plenty of folks in steerage there with them who never indulged the hate or sabotaged the safety net. Fuck em.
Eh. Hating these people is moral masturbation. Sure does feel good though.
96: Point.
(And seconded to 99.)
I don't want to hate these people. But utterly rejecting this worldview instead of trying to soft-soap it as "gosh darn it, but they feel right even if they're wrong about absolutely everything" is more a matter of survival than moral masturbation.
One dollar for a bottle. That's what the distributor charges.
I don't hate them. I support policies that will help them despite their 'what's the matter with Kansas' resistance to same. But what I hear over and over is that a part of their grievance is the disrespect they get from coastal and local elites, and no, I'm not going to respect the choices they are making. Which affect all of us.
I cannot respect someone who sent Ted Cruz to the Senate.
What if they found $1 Yuengling bottles before voting?
They don't have Yuengling in Texas, Moby.
And really, the current iteration -- 'oh helpless me, I sent Ted Cruz to the Senate to burn everything down and yet it's still standing' -- elicits neither respect nor sympathy.
To be fair, if they did really want to burn everything down they couldn't have found a better standard-bearer than Trump.
Speaking of which, did you hear he's not paying his staff? Classy guy. The best.
But they all signed agreements not to disparage him, so what's the downside in not paying them?
the disrespect they get from coastal and local elites, and no, I'm not going to respect the choices they are making.
Eh, I guess I feel guilty for being a member of that coastal elite. Because, though nobody is ever supposed to admit this (American discourse over socioeconomic class is so completely fantastical and dishonest), I'm uncomfortably aware of the fact that I totally married up.
How committed do you think Trump is to being president of the US specifically? Because a vacancy just opened up in Uzbekistan that might be a better fit for his style.
I read the 5 years article yesterday. I didn't post about it here because it seemed too much like one of the many other similar articles this election season. It seemed likely to result in this same show of hate for the racist working class.
My state is definitely going for Trump. I won't claim there isn't a lot of racism here. It is a common failing. A lot of people are always going to be motivated partly by resentment. It is human nature I guess. In most social interaction Trump supporters seem pretty normal, no more hate-filed than the average group of lefties. The other weekend I was hanging out with a blue-haired SJW who was all about slaughtering her enemies, and certainly I usually have little to no sympathy for Republicans.
There is something extraordinary pitiable about these Trump supporters though. Here is a 70 year old man who has been a con artist his entire adult life, essentially everyone who has ever trusted him has regretted it. He's even stiffing many of his staff on this campaign! He seems to regard the whole campaign as just another short con, and refuses to spend money on it unless much of that money goes into his own pockets. He doesn't seem interested at all in seriously trying to win, especially if that might cost him a dime.
Somehow these people trust him anyway and give him credit for "telling it like it is." I don't know how much of it is because of the few truths he utters (maybe by accident) and how much is because of the lies they want to hear. Still I find it hard not to have some pity on them because of how incredibly desperate and helpless they are.
I still recognize that hapless as they are they are also incredibly dangerous. I wish there were a way we could help them be less of a danger to themselves and others.
Convincing them that they're wrong about pretty much everything other than the fundamental fact that their lives aren't great is the only way to do it, but god knows how you do that.
You don't really have to decide how you feel about these people. The country is better off when even pieces of shit are doing well, so higher taxes, infrastucture spending, jobs for all.
It's like you're not even on-board with the vagenda of manocide, ogged. Troubling.
Look, I'm hardly reveling in an orgiastic miasma of hatred over here. It's like Courtney Love -- I don't hate her, but I don't have that much sympathy for her either. We're not talking, after all, about some calamity that descended from Heaven. This is all the result of specific political decisions -- often backed up by the promise and execution of intense physical violence -- that many, many individuals and groups made over a long period of time.
115: A lot of people are always going to be motivated partly by resentment. It is human nature I guess.
A lot of people aren't going to be motivated by resentment to the extent of trashing their own economic prospects for some fifty years in exchange for the paltry benefit of getting dog-whistle race hate language from the people exploiting them, and then finally doubling down on the electoral fortunes of a human Cheeto with the all the rational appeal of a novelty dog turd. We know this because we have other populations to compare with. It's not that hate or human shittiness is unique to them, it's that at a certain point one just has to face the fact that this is, on account of its out-sized commitment to the white supremacist idiocy and myth-making choking it, a uniquely shitty sector of the North American populace. Their plight is cultural and a consequence of choices, nobody foisted or forced anything on them.
117: You don't really have to decide how you feel about these people.
You kind of do, because a decision has to be made about how much energy you continue to spending on "reaching out" to them and "understanding" them, and I think we're pretty much at the end of that experiment with the point being reached where they've wilfully made themselves toxic to pretty much any voting coalition whose mission is more complicated than "put the darkies back under the White boot."
You kind of do, because a decision has to be made about how much energy you continue to spending on "reaching out" to them and "understanding" them, and I think we're pretty much at the end of that experiment with the point being reached where they've wilfully made themselves toxic to pretty much any voting coalition whose mission is more complicated than "put the darkies back under the White boot."
Indeed, and it seems the Democrats are gladly ceding them to Trump, who is glad to take them and doesn't really care about attracting anyone else. Luckily we're at a point now where they aren't numerous enough to be politically crucial on a national level.
Nobody else can take them on board without basically jettisoning every other demographic. That's the nature of their demographic now.
(122 is a simplification but I think it's basically broadly true. Trump's unprecedented unfavourables among Black and Hispanic voters in particular are a direct reaction to the narrow White nationalist nature of his campaign.)
Not even that much of a simplification, I think. Trump is extraordinarily toxic with non-white voters, but he's also losing middle-class whites, which is a departure from past trends that seems to be due mainly to his explicit racism. The combination of the two is why he's polling surprisingly poorly in the deep south as well as in the usual swing states. He's a lock in overwhelmingly white working-class states like West Virginia and Idaho, but there aren't very many states like that anymore and the remaining ones are small.
49:getting lucky about the creation of the internet
Clinton & co got lucky there, but the US didn't: the tech industry comes from decades of federal R&D and higher education spending. Which is a great argument for redistributive spending.
IIRC, George Wallace's economic policy was pro-welfare state. It's not really that new a thing in racist American politics.
Wallace was absolutely in favor of a welfare state as long as it was limited to white people, and that was the mainstream interpretation of the New Deal in the South. Goldwater's version of extreme conservatism was unpopular for a reason. He won a few southern states where people were willing to prioritize racism above redistribution, but he still lost most of the South, and Nixon's Southern Strategy was a genuine innovation.
Herrenvolk democracy has always been a popular idea in the US, although its acceptability among political elites has fluctuated a lot.
120: We hate alike. But. To dissolve the assholes in the long run you have to make the assholes (or their children/granchildren) safe enough that they can afford not to care about oppressing anyone else. FWLIW, apartheid only died when most Afrikaners were rich enough to stop caring. Paying off barbarians is a time-honored tradition.
131: The other approach is to wait for the most hardcore racists to die, which seems to be where we're going in the US. They are admittedly helping by getting addicted to heroin in disproportionate numbers.
In conclusion, America is awful and Trump is what we deserve.
132 is taking a hell of a long time, and isn't bringing any redistribution with it.
Well, you have to wait until they're actually dead. Opioid addiction is much longer-term strategy than Philippine-style death squads.
And if we do end up with death squads, which we well may if Trump wins, they're likely to go the other way.
The Filipinos elected their very own pistolero. Will Hillary man up and do what's needed? Time will tell.
I can see mass suicides in the face of relentless federal life-preservation efforts. Make it happen.
IN A WORLD WHERE DEATH PANELS HAVE BEEN OUTLAWED...
66: Jeff Jar\rvis deserves Tigre levels of scorn for his thoughts on anything journalistic. Well, he has got what he deserves in the form of the perfect parody account on twitter, but his absolute, resolute determination to ignore the economic realities of journalism is aggravating for those of us still struggling through the shit rather than teaching how it should be done.
TL;DR People do not consume news media because it is their democratic duty to do so. Therefore news values are not primarily shaped by democratic duty even if we bullshit about that stuff a lot (more in the US than elsewhere)
131: The present-day assholes squandered the strongest economic positioning that the White working class in America has ever enjoyed when faced with the prospect of maybe having to share wealth and political rights with anyone else at all. "Making them safe" will not ever, ever persuade them to abandon white supremacism and the toxic concept of "White man's pride." It's simply the wrong answer.
Making them aware that they need to give up white supremacism in favour of solidarity before they can get back to the promised land might work, and is probably the actual practical reality. Certainly so long as they wish to persist as the dead-end manifestation of mid-19th century race politics they can in practical terms expect to attract only the same bottom-feeders and grifters who landed them where they are.
I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, though. I'm not even very convinced that waiting for the dead-enders to die will solve the problem, because by now they've generated a parallel schooling system indoctrinating fresh generations into the same fantasy version of the world who could well find themselves laughed at when they try to move or work outside of the "white nationalist" bubble.
Moreover I expect that once it becomes clear that they don't have the clout at the ballot box that they think they have -- or perhaps worse, if they get what they think they want and it becomes clear that their power at the ballot box can actually still get someone like Trump into office, only for them to discover that he's exactly the braindead loser everybody warned them he was and he utterly discredits everything about their cause on the world stage for generations to come -- then the next step after that is systematic violence and genuine fascism. They're already the movement that sprouts terrorist militias whenever something goes wrong for it at the ballot box, and they've veered close enough to real-deal fascism with the Trump run that there's no reason they can't go over that cliff in the future.
142: Agreed on all points; but the squandering in 142.1 happened 40 years ago and won't necessarily be repeated in future, hence my "children/grandchildren". You're especially right about the parallel schooling though.
I get what you're saying about the squandering happening forty years ago, but it just doesn't seem to me like attitudes have evolved or moved forward in any way in this demographic such that history wouldn't repeat itself given another chance.
You kind of do, because a decision has to be made about how much energy you continue to spending on "reaching out" to them and "understanding" them, and I think we're pretty much at the end of that experiment with the point being reached where they've wilfully made themselves toxic to pretty much any voting coalition whose mission is more complicated than "put the darkies back under the White boot."
When I was reading about lesbian separatism a few years ago, I was very taken with the idea that the energy you expend trying even to explain yourself to oppressive forces is energy you can't use for your own liberation. So talking to or working with women only, lesbian or not, was seen as a meaningful preservation of strength. Mostly what I took from this was that I have enough squanderable privilege to take on more of those energy-sucking roles than people who don't, that I can do a certain amount of scut work and be fine with that because it might have some sort of impact around the edges. I've done the opposite of separatism and opting out, I think, but I don't know if I'm particularly good at it and figure that I still get more from it than I could possibly give.
Also I read Ghettoside a few weeks ago and really appreciated it.
Also also I just got up to take a muscle relaxant and may not be making sufficient sense. I managed to throw out my back and trigger a particularly bad sciatica episode, but getting heavily medicated has helped a lot.
53. Agree in principle, but I don't see how you get there from here without pitchforks. The other day I was trying to refute a boring little person who argued that post-Brexit Britain could afford to maintain all the agricultural subsidies it got from the EU because there were agricultural subsidies before accession. So I looked up prevailing tax rates in the UK at the end of the trente glorieuses, and they really were confiscatory at the top end- basic rate income tax: 33% (currently 20%); top rate, earned income: 75% (45%); top rate, unearned income: 90% (N/A, top rate of tax on dividends: 38.1%); Purchase tax: 25% (VAT: 20%).
Trying to revert to that would, I honestly think, precipitate a coup. And the middle class would widely support it. So: live with it or burn shit down?
On topic: rural Pennsylvania has a bunch of Trump signs. Some homemade but I also had my first in the wild sighting of that the Trump/Pence sign where the T is fucking the P. No signs for anybody else.
In 92 and 96, Clinton won LA, TN, and WV, all lost by Gore. Sure it was a vector started 40 years ago, but the tip was a lot more recent than that.
I think the polling shows that the educational system is failing to perpetuate the most virulent forms of supremacy.
Assuming Trump loses, it'll be interesting to see what comes up in 2020. I've thought Cruz would be in the drivers seat, but it sounds like he's going to have a real race for re-election, and that maybe he'll be a big a part of the stab in the back story.
Hope you're feeling relaxed, Thorn!
I can basically stand upright today, which is huge progress! This hasn't been helpful with my move but meant I didn't have to drive to my brother's wedding yesterday and instead made my parents drive all of us, so I even got a nap. Today I've promised the girls three hours at the pool before we go to the wedding reception, and I can probably handle that. I just have to take my pills strategically so the fuzziness passes when I need it to. I'm very grateful for the initial shots, or I'd be in really bad shape now instead of just, I don't know, bad shape.
151: It would be interesting if we can tell for sure from polls, but I wonder if it was simply that people who remembered FDR and the Great Depression died.
I have a friend on FB who's a Democrat, but it seems like everyone he knows is a Trump supporter. One day I cracked and got into an argument with one of them, and she was exactly like the people in the article. She was working two jobs and could barely make ends meet, and she was complaining about how her tax money was going to the ghetto. What can you do with a person like that? It's not just racism -- it's a complete explanation of how the world works that justifies the racism.
155-2-end That is what I've been thinking about. On the grounds that I am my brother's keeper. I keep thinking of W.C. Field maxim "You can't cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump." Mark Twain said something similar; "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
The conclusion that I was trying to get to in 156 is that maybe someone needs to construct a countervailing story these people like instead of trying to sell them on our truth.
This was pretty good:http://thebaffler.com/blog/harry-potter-laurie-penny?utm_content=buffer09b32&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
And this is on topic: http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2016/09/two-bit-trump-hustler-fails-to-make.html
120: It's not that hate or human shittiness is unique to them, it's that at a certain point one just has to face the fact that this is, on account of its out-sized commitment to the white supremacist idiocy and myth-making choking it, a uniquely shitty sector of the North American populace. Their plight is cultural and a consequence of choices, nobody foisted or forced anything on them.
You know, I have to disagree somewhat with this: their plight is due to a woeful education. That was foisted on them. It leaves them unable to think critically, therefore in a position to be entirely swayed by Fox News/Rush Limbaugh style demagoguery.
142: Making them aware that they need to give up white supremacism in favour of solidarity before they can get back to the promised land might work
Sure. That requires expanding their horizons -- they can't/don't hear that kind of message from anyone they trust. Leave aside the obviously condescending nature of what I'm saying. It's simply true: they've been deliberately stupidized. I'm not prepared to say that it's their fault.
Also at least partly at fault, the concerted effort to make our major subsidization of the middle class and working class procedurally invisible and not recognized as such (mortgage interest exemption, EITC, etc.).
Right. Think about the kinds of things the people profiled in the Mother Jones piece would have to understand. In no particular order:
- Unions are good. Right-to-work laws are bad. The latter are pushed by one ALEC in concert with corporate interests and Republican governors and legislatures who are themselves too enfeebled to think toward the broader good.
- Education financing is good. Moves toward privatizing education are bad. The latter are pushed by any number of private interests who count among their goals the pulling of monies from public education toward private companies.
I shouldn't go on.
Asking people to grok what's putting them down is asking them to prioritize class over race. There are plenty of people on the left who don't think it's class, it's race. There were plenty of people pissed off at Bernie Sanders for making insinuations in the class rather than race direction. The left has a problem here.
148 - and even if you had taxation at those levels, you wouldn't have the growth to sustain the biggest parts of the 50s-60s economic story.
158: their plight is due to a woeful education. That was foisted on them.
Except it wasn't. The bubble that has come to encompass the white nationalist right was self-selected by degrees. The gutting of public education in red states like Louisiana was enabled using their votes. It was part of the same package of union-busting and general market worship that the Republican Party pushed using their votes. People like the trailer park manager in the MoJones story who still worship Ronald Reagan even as they look around them in bewilderment at the long-term effects of the "trickle-down" con... they voted for all of that.
Not that they made the connection when they were doing it, I get that... but it wasn't like they didn't have access to opposing opinions or data. They chose to isolate themselves from those perspectives because their first criterion for supporting anything was dog-whistle racism. And they chose to make that their first criterion for supporting anything, and yes they were exploited with ease as a result in ways they didn't foresee, but that exploitation wasn't "foisted" on them. The people doing it barely even bothered to conceal it, in much the same way Trump barely bothers to conceal that he "loves the poorly educated" like a glutton loves his lunch.
Who is responsible for a culture? It seems like that's the question here, and I'd be surprised if there were an obviously right answer.
(I mean, the picture is perhaps different as regards the backest of backwoods Applachia or something, places which have been depressed and poorly-educated since forever. But I don't think that's true of the bulk of Trumpian America.)
Castock, I love you, and you make a persuasive case. That said,
but it wasn't like they didn't have access to opposing opinions or data
What it comes down to is that if you don't know what kinds of questions to ask, you can't find any explanations at all other than those already imposing themselves on you.
Hey. I like the idea of blaming the voters for failing to vote or to register to vote at all. Half the time when they do vote, they vote wrong. Information blindness is a real thing, though. I say again: when you make people stupid, they do stupid.
161: Basically, the only tried and true method for generating decades of sustained economic growth is to have a world war first. Maybe there's a case for Trump after all.
Tangentially, I was stunned to hear recently that in the Sandtown/Winchester area of Baltimore -- Freddie Gray's neighborhood -- there are 12,000 to 14,000 citizens, and only a couple thousand registered to vote. There was a campaign to get people to vote in that neighborhood in the primaries, and a record 800-odd did so. Out of 12,000-14,000.
165: Fair enoug, but I just don't think that not knowing what questions to ask was the basic problem. At the outset at least, the basic problem was refusing to face those questions because racism mattered more. It's more complicated now that have you've had generations growing up in the information bubble that resulted from that refusal... but even now there are elements within movement conservatism that have, or should have, the educational tools to break those habits of thinking, and help others break them, if they choose to use them. If they choose to really confront the possible consequences of this growing isolation. It's an uphill battle now to be sure, but it's one they can still choose to fight. What's certain is that nobody else can do it for them.
Literally everyone around them is telling them they're right, so why would they think to ask if they're wrong? Their parents agree, their TV shows agree, their leaders agree, successful people agree. Everyone except those self-righteous far-away liberals who think they know better but have never fucking set foot near your trailer park or your lower middle class neighborhood. Not to mention that to truly ask the question honestly would require them to face hard truths about themselves and their role in the world.
169: Literally everyone around them is telling them they're right, so why would they think to ask if they're wrong?
At a certain point one can hope for the brute facts of reality to penetrate the bubble. If they're right and everyone around them is right and those distant liberals are wrong, then life in their bubble shouldn't keep getting steadily worse and their "successful" leaders shouldn't get steadily more visibly incompetent and insane while other groups leave them behind, and the supposedly superior ideals within their bubble should actually make an impact on the wider world. At what point this kicks in, who can say, it's impossible to predict; it's like a regime at war that can suppress all talk of "defeat" in its media... but can't hide the fact that the "victories" keep getting closer.
Of course the contrast with everyone else's reality might just serve to fuel "stabbed in the back narratives" and the scapegoating of outsiders, in which case it's distinctly possible that this fever never breaks and they just continue spiralling off into their own parochial pseudo-reality for generations to come. That might well be the likelier outcome.
At the outset at least, the basic problem was refusing to face those questions because racism mattered more
Agreed. At the outset.
What's certain is that nobody else can do it for them.
I'm provisionally agreed with this as well. I dunno -- their educations are so blinkered that I don't know how you bootstrap yourself out of that.
Off now.
Certainly a lot easier to dig a hole like that than it is to dig oneself out of it.
Nice chatting with you!
Hope is not a plan, nor is it a reasonable expectation. I hope all kinds of people realize all kinds of obvious-to-me things, but it ain't gonna happen.
The point is that it never kicks in. When has a group of people with a destructive culture or government spontaneously changed it for the better without dilution, revolution or conquest?
At a certain point one can hope for the brute facts of reality to penetrate the bubble.
I definitely hope that, but looking at Kansas makes me despair. Brownback proved that you can burn the place to the ground and people will still vote for you.
174- Conquest it is then!
60: Dump a trillion a year into the economy for a few years, almost all of it going to workers and professionals,
not financiers and rentiers, ...
Hobo consultants are always shovel ready.
178: We left the aristocracy in place.
The dilution is already happening fairly quickly through the "die off or move" strategy and will continue to happen going forward, probably at an accelerated pace as rural Louisiana where these whities live becomes ever more of an ecological and economic catastrophe, which is happening now.
In fact if it wasn't for the tremendous over-weighting of rural political power in our federalist system the question "what's the matter with white people in Louisiana (or Kansas)" would seem just about as important as "what's the matter with crazy white people in Yreka" to the government of California -- an area of concern, certainly if you live there, but a clearly socially, economically, and politically declining group of white people that isn't particularly a threat to everyone else in other places.
Sharknado is on now. All of America's people can come together and let the healing begin.
My son just said "Don't harsh the weasel." I've never been so frightened as a parent.
Developed countries at full employment all have practically identical growth rates despite vastly different economic and social policies, so claims that comparatively minor tweaks will accomplish much are dubious. Economic growth in the long run is a function of technology, so... massive government investment in sciences and R&D? Actually employing STEM graduates rather than simply giving them student loans would help drive up median wages as well.
Won't do much for the anti-science southern men, of course, and it's obviously politically impossible, thanks to those same assholes.
185 - right. I mean, no one knows much about what drives technological innovation, either, but massively supplying even more money to it couldn't hurt.
The standard economic theory (JW Mason, slackwire) has a bunch of good stuff on this) Beowulf say we are suffering from insufficient demand, so presumably a larger government sector paid for in part with higher marginal rates to reduce inequality (thus more real growth for those down the income spectrum. Maybe also the government not doing everything possible to suppress wages? Partly the story of mid century growth is a large movement of non-market Labour into the market, but I don't think there is a whole other gender around to enter the work force.
As for white people having weird ideas about why real incomes are decking for 90% of the population. The big issue is that the thing actually causing the problem is capitalism, and neither political party can admit this. Probably because liberalism in general can't. So the cause of the problem isn't available but people need a reason for it, and since capitalism isn't available, the reason gets filled with other stuff. It gets filled with garbage racism on the right and I don't know weird bullshit about globalization amongst liberals.
Non-capitalism is also not so great for these guys, either. I mean, sure, redistribute something to them but that's not getting them the joys of middle class status either.
And in the specific case of Louisiana, to the extent that their potential for middle class jobs depends on the oil industry (and it 100% does) their prospects depend on an industry which we should all actually hope suffers big employment declines and regulate accordingly.
189.2: Capitalism is way ahead of you on that one at the moment, though of course that could change at any time.
So the NYT's latest Clinton "scandal" is apparently that she holds fundraisers with rich people.
191. And doesn't hold press conferences. How can she get the views of common people without that, they wonder. The New York Times is doing a fantastic job of living down to its reputation.
166. Apparently only even numbered ones.
"The gutting of public education in red states like Louisiana was enabled using their votes."
Which is true - and/but was powerfully aided by politicians and the church fulminating against 'public education' as run by a fifth column of godless socialists. who would teach undermine faith in the Good Book while teaching sexual perversions (which isn't too different to how it is portrayed these days - but had greater purchase back in the day).
Couple this with an element in scots/irish culture that derided too much book learning and retained the class ridden sense of cutting down anyone who was seen as acting beyond their station.
Which doesn't necessarily quantify all Trump supporters, but it does serve as a general background against which his campaign operates.
How can she get the views of common people
By reading David Brooks columns, of course.
Btw: we're at the beach w no reception. See you guys Monday or Tuesday morning.
The ridiculous Times coverage of Clinton and the Chesley Sullenberger movie are contrasting examples of too much fuss over people doing exactly their jobs.
You guys, I know I just whined about the sciatica and stuff but then last night I stepped wrong, twisted my ankle on a curb, and now I'm in an air cast with a bad sprain. This is getting ridiculous and I already realized I needed to just contract out the rest of the move, but sheesh! I could really handle a break. (Custody etc. stuff too seems likely to tilt to 100% soon, so rest is probably not much of an option.) No new drugs with the newer injury, but at least I only have one more day of steroids at this point.
199: I never thought to see someone capture my life so perfectly in three words.
201: Yikes. Sorry to hear it. You haven't perchance been... cursed by any ancient Egyptian mummies recently? Or palero brujas? Or creepy groups of organized Midwestern psychic ill-will projectors?
"...it's like uber but for palanquins in the Ohio River valley. I've been doing demographic research and pretty sure there's a market."
Ouch! That sounds terrible, Thorn.
I think I can drive on it when I'm not on muscle relaxants. I did end up driving myself to the hospital because the not-yet-sobered-up brother who was supposed to drive me this morning couldn't manage a stick shift. That was before the cast, but surely it will be doable at some point soon even if it's painful now.
100% custody sounds tough, but I suppose picking up the pieces after someone who can't manage the bit they're supposed to do is not great either. Here's hoping the fact that you were already on steroids will have a super duper anti-inflammatory effect, or something.
I don't know what it will go to 100% but I'm not sure how much less she can do than she's doing already. It might be easier to work no breaks than to constantly be dealing with the aftermath of their time with her.
The good news is that it's already better than my prior life! But it could get better than this and I'd be happy with that, and it will.
Per sciatica ad astra, if you will.
Ha, exactly! And until I get there, I can keep elevating and icing my ankle and grumping about how I timed my medicines wrong and left myself with an upset stomach. I was also trying to figure out the logistics of an ethical sex grotto, but I think that's beyond me.
I'm sure all of us can relate to that exact set of problems.
In other news, it appears the NYT has given literally no coverage to Trump straight-up bribing the Florida AG.
Good grief! Get better quickly Thorn! Can you get, e.g. to the kitchen and back?
215. Has the NYT been taken over by Murdoch or what?
A search for coverage in the Nexis database, which contains almost all English language print and broadcast sources, found just 23 mentions of the "Trump Foundation" since September 1. That was vastly overshadowed by continual coverage of the Clinton Foundation, even though it was not the foundation linked to any illegal activity.
It's really quite something.
The NYT has gone completely crazy in the last month or so. It's totally bizarre. I was thinking about subscribing, but fuck 'em.
I'm thinking seriously about unsubscribing.
216: Yes! I decided against crutches and can do what I need to so we can get through a bare-minimum day. I should have some help from my parents if not friends during the holiday today so I can rest more. My back is definitely improving too. Mostly I just feel like a doofus, but even that should improve in time.
Today's a holiday so the dialed it back from scandal mongering to concern trolling.
221. Modified rapture. Still, I'm glad you're coping. Are the girls old enough to help at all?
Double yikes Thorn! Hope you will feel better soon.
The NYT is going to push me into the full on R Tigre #I'mwithher mode. Holy shit is that some BS.
Just wait til the debates. He wins if he doesn't drool, especially if she is either passive or aggressive.
I'm having flashbacks to the early 2000s, where I was having these maddening conversations with conservatives about 'the liberal media'. And it was so hard to get across that I really did agree that culturally, the NYT and its ilk are 'liberal' -- they do kind of generally think of evangelicals and whatever Tea Partiers were called back then as inbred idiots, and talk about them with contempt. But that was still compatible with them being completely enthusiastic about any lie anyone wanted to tell about the Clintons or Gore, and incredibly forgiving and easy on Republican lies and bullshit.
It's a weird set of behaviors.
Oh hey Krugman has a column about this today- but on NYT mobile it's hidden in the front page, you have to click through to Opinion to even see the headline.
I've been going over and over this with my father as well. He's been kind of stuck on the email thing. And I have been hammering the reminder that with the Clintons, you cannot rely on reporting of a scandal unless you're paying enough attention to know (a) exactly what it is they are supposed to have done, precisely, and (b) exactly why it's wrong, on a level clearer than a belief that people wouldn't be reporting it as scandalous unless there was something wrong about it.
230 Yes. The more they report on it the more I become convinced that not only did she do nothing wrong, but that she was actually scrupulously conscientious in what she did do with her email. Alas, I am neither the typical news consumer nor the typical voter.
I'm finding that my two rules for the campaign season are treating me pretty well. 1 No stories about things Trump has said. 2 No Clinton 'scandals.'
Even this mundane story summarizing today's campaign schedule has this- the bubble/echo chamber reporters live in is astounding, for a job that supposedly talks about what's going on in the real world.
And Mrs. Clinton, who has not held a news conference since last year, will kick off the holiday by finally allowing her press corps onto her campaign plane for the first time this election cycle. (The Republican nominee still travels on his own, Trump-branded private plane, with his press corps trailing behind on a charter.)
I have to admit, I have no idea what the fuck this news conference bullshit is about. Who the hell cares? Where the hell are Trump's tax returns? Isn't this unprecedented? Are they hitting that every story they can?
231: Yeah, it's really remarkable. Even though I've always viewed the server scandal as essentially meaningless, I was at least on board as far as, "probably not the best practice, narrowly defined, and almost certainly not the best practice, broadly considered." And from there, I was willing to think that maybe she was sloppier about this stuff than one would hope.
But now it's become really clear to me that even the narrow definition is dubious*, and that the broader considerations were A. irrelevant, because the Clinton Rules are in effect more than ever, and B. it was in no way a synecdoche for general sloppiness. She really did run a tight ship, and her subordinates were on board.
*because the nonsecure server was a substitute for nonsecure--not intended to be secure--state.gov servers
Meanwhile this whole thing has been eye-opening for Iris. She came in as I was reading Pierce today, and there was a link onscreen for a different post of his titled "'The NYT' Screws up its Clinton coverage, part infinity." She asked me to click it, and read the whole thing. She's going to come through this election without a shred of respect for the NYT, and rightly so.
234: Reporters care because it makes their job harder. That one is at least understandable on that level.
230: He's been kind of stuck on the email thing.
Gah. If his concern is the possible dissemination of classified information via the private server, point out to him that the FBI found 110 or so out of the 30,000 emails Clinton sent; that's a 0.37% error rate. I've read here and there from people with security clearances that the government standard for a we're-all-just-human error rate is 3%. That is hearsay, though; I don't know if it's true.
People I've pointed this out to harrumph and say that just because no major leak happened that we know of, doesn't mean one couldn't have (or maybe did, and we just don't know it!)
The supreme irony here is that if Clinton had been using the State Dept's unclassified system for her unclassified email correspondence, those emails would have been hacked.
Oh, wait. All I can find about this, googling, is something like this, about State's 2014/2015 hack. I could have sworn I read extensive stuff a few months about about the State Dept's unclassified system turning out to have been in a state of hackedness for years before they discovered it. I'm not turning that reporting up now, though. Hm.
234/237: Reporters are hung up about the absence of news conferences because, even though Clinton's done hundreds of media interviews, those are by invitation only. The journalists who haven't been invited are annoyed. It's pure careerism on their part.
110 retroactively classified by a different agency with often conflicting standards. 4 classified at the time but improperly marked (in body, not in headers as required to inform recipients) 3 of which have been determined to not actually be classified and only one of which is still classified at the lowest level ("confidential"). So an error rate of .003% and the information in the one error was so trivial it was probably something like what kind of toilet paper some embassy prefers to order.
Thanks, SP. I had a vague sense that 110 was too high, but couldn't bear to look it all up again. At any rate, that kind of reality check doesn't appear to sway those who are hung up about the emails. My cow-orker declared that nothing but a 0% error rate was acceptable.
I could only stare at him at that point, of course.
Kevin Drum is really on a roll about this. LB, you could just refer your father to Drum's careful examinations.
If it's not face to face with me bullying him,Dad has a tendency to drift off into "Shape of the world, views differ." Drum is one guy saying everything's fine, other people say she's a huge crook, who can tell? But yes, Drum has been good on this.
Again, I would like to register a protest against the NYT for making me defend the Clintons. I have many things against them. Just not the imaginary stuff the media makes up about them.
Here's something that technically will get Unfogged banned at government sites: the United States operates a drone program that kills people. That's classified information and cannot be seen on an unclassified system.
The NYT has a lot of defenders in its readers. It's difficult to get them to see that the Times' reporting is less than solid and upstanding.
I thought this was kinda interesting: https://www.buzzfeed.com/globalsupercourt
Partial List of Crooked Trump corruption charges. I have to admit that I read that initially as "Partial List of Crooked Timber corruption charges" and thought at long last, now it can be told.
They had no difficulty getting inside. Wandering across the lobby, they came on a large tiled space surrounded by tiers of benches. In one of the tiers a glum crowd of sixty or so well-dressed people sat listening to a man with a megaphone.
"We want you to cheer, gang," the man with the mega phone was saying. "Please don't groan or scream. If you want to scream, do it outside in the street."
A boxing ring and its draped platform had been hauled to the wall opposite the occupied tier. People in bright casual clothes sauntered about and lounged on the empty benches. In the center of the space where the boxing ring should have been, there were two camera cranes with technicians standing beside them. At the far end of the place was a table with stacks of what appeared to be box lunches and, beside that, a partitioned area where there were lighted mirrors and barber chairs. Four or five trailers were lined up beside the doors to the lobby.
"Stand by, gang," the man with the megaphone called.
Marge and Hicks walked closer to the crowd.
The man with the megaphone was watching a small sour-looking man who sat in a canvas chair behind him reading the Daily Variety. After a moment or so the small man looked up from his magazine, flung a hand toward the seated crowd, and returned his attention to the page.
"O.K., gang," the man with the megaphone cried. "Let's hear it!"
The crowd began to cheer for all they were worth. A camera boom descended on the third row and Hicks saw that Eddie Peace was sitting there. He was in an aisle seat beside two tough-looking men with vaguely familiar faces; Eddie and the two men beside him were the only people in the crowd who were not cheering. On the contrary, they glowered and sneered as though they found the spectacle of the camera, heartening as it was to everyone else, a loathsome provocation.
Amid the delirious cheering there sounded several distinct demented cries. The man in the canvas chair threw his Daily Variety to the floor. He did not look at the crowd.
"All right," the man with the megaphone called through his megaphone. He waved the cheering down.
"You bastards who are screaming, please stop! There will be no more screaming!" A little flurry of giggles ran through the crowd.
"Is he there?" Marge asked.
"Yeah," Hicks said, "he's there."
When the cheering rose again, Eddie Peace and his companions once more registered their anger and disappointment. One of them turned to Eddie and whispered something in his ear. Eddie nodded in a purposeful and sinister fashion, stood up and made his way up the aisle, past the transported multitude. The camera boom tracked him. He had not gone very far when the screaming began again.
"Shit sake," the man with the megaphone cried. He turned his back on the crowd and conferred with the second man.
"All right," he announced. "Is there a union representative present?"
The crowd stopped cheering. Eddie Peace turned around and shook his head in good-humored frustration.
"We will take disciplinary action against you screamers. We'll take this up with the union."
That's it, campaign is over- today Trump used the phrase, "Attorney generals."
In his defense, the phrase "attorneys general" is stupid. Postpositive adjective, my ass.
And then HRC does something genuinely shitty like go back on her $15/hour pledge. It would appear that she stupidly thinks being the not-Trump is enough.
To go in the other direction, is it me or is JMM overreaching here?
Trump: "I never spoke to her" ... "Never spoke to her about that at all."
Legit?
Who knows? But according to multiple reports, well before this became a big story and never denied by Trump, Pam Bondi personally solicited the contribution from Trump.
Well, sure, but up until now I never assumed she'd spoken to him directly. I mean, I generally took it to mean that she, rather than some underling or PAC, solicited the donation. It could have been solicited from Trump himself, or his office, or someone she knew at the organisation. And it could have been in writing rather than verbally. It seems a bit weird to leap on this as proof of a flat out lie. Not least because the offence is far worse than the cover-up in this instance (in part because the cover-up is so ineffective, other than in getting the media to ignore it).
ATM: I am in British Columbia, and more than one person has said that she doesn't understand why so many people hate the Hillary Clinton. I always say that I don't understand it either. Is there a concise answer?
There was an editorial in the local paper yesterday that seemed to exist for no other reasons than to say "Clinton has crows feet."
Crows will definitely eat kittens, given the chance.
For the record, I love crows and would totally eat kittens if they were well cooked.
Keep the right side of crows. When Trump has eliminated the human race, they're lined up to take over.
255: but some of those people hate Bill almost as much. What explains hatred of "the Clintons"?
For the record, I love crows and would totally eat kittens if they were well cooked.
Medium rare, surely.
She's not a natural politician. She's improved over the years, but she doesn't make it look easy. Absent her family connections, no one would be picking her out of a crowd for a career in politics. That's not to say, obviously, that she hasn't been effective in the jobs she's had. What's strange to me is that John Kerry seems to have exactly the same problems and exactly the same resume. I don't know who told that man he could be a politician; Massachusetts is weird sometimes.
'Well cooked' as in 'cooked with skill', not 'well done'. I regret the ambiguity.
264: Hey! Massachusetts rules! And I said this when he faced GWB and I will say it again: compared to George W. Bush, John Kerry was, and is, the brilliant love child of Superman, Mr. Rogers and James T. Kirk.
There's no Wikipedia entry for Clinton Derangement Syndrome, but there is one for Bush Derangement Syndrome? What the fuck, Jimmy?
There's one for "Clinton crazies."
I don't think anyone ever used the term Clinton Derangement Syndrome. It was always either the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy or the Village.
And why do people hate Bill? Tim's parents are the most conservative of his family, and they talk vaguely about Clinton sleaze. They were Harper supporters, but Bernie Sanders was their preferred candidate. ?!? His other relatives are dumbfounded.
Because he can't keep his wife in line.
Because he eats puppies. It's like you people don't even watch the news.
What's strange to me is that John Kerry seems to have exactly the same problems and exactly the same resume. I don't know who told that man he could be a politician; Massachusetts is weird sometimes.
Kerry was a nationally recognised political figure before he was out of his twenties. (He's in Doonesbury, for heaven's sake.) That might have given him the idea that politics was something he could do.
Both Kerry and Clinton seem to me to be politicians of circumstance rather than aptitude. The Bill Clinton thing I do not get,as well as the general inability to disambiguate "The Clintons".
There were thousands of veterans in VVAW. Thousands of decorated veterans, even. But Kerry was the national spokesman; doesn't that hint at a bit of aptitude?
I don't know who told that man he could be a politician
At least one of the Senators he testified in front of told him that he wished Kerry could join them in the Senate one day.
I don't think anyone ever used the term Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
I've heard it, but the variant these days is "Clinton Rules," as in, Clinton Rules apply: the rules governing how the Clintons are judged are far, far harsher and less forgiving than those governing most other politicians.*
But it certainly is a derangement syndrome.
* Actually, I wonder whether this is because people somewhere along the line developed the view that more should be expected of them, and they let us down, goddamnit. In that case, there should be Obama Rules as well, surely.
Well, for a lot of these people it's silly to talk about a "Derangement Syndrome". They're just nuts.
Clinton Rules, if you're not familiar with them.
