That is really excellent:
To the extent, then, that we continue to treat Trump's own shock doctrine as anomalous rather than as the latest fruit of the now long-standing marriage between tabloid journalism and the American right, we remain caught in one of the most powerful distractions contained in most coverage of this election: the idea that any of this is going to end on November 8.
the Internet itself has become the infinitely circulating tabloid we live our days inside. We don't even require the Murdochs of the world anymore. On social media, we turn our own lives into tabloids: gossiping, titillating, publishing our moral outrage and our political diatribes
This is something I'd been feeling for the last five or six years, every time I go back and visit the US, but was never sure if I was just imagining it. It's as if society has been hollowed out, and there's nothing but inertia and fear holding everything together.
"A savage servility slides on by grease"
Eh. What else has there ever been to hold a society together but inertia and fear? I imagine trace elements of sympathy, and love have been detected from time to time.
Eh. What else has there ever been to hold a society together but inertia and fear?
Solidarity, common goals, a viable, widely accepted social contract. One could go on...
4: Yeah, trace elements of those detected now and then too.
This goes a long way to explaining the current clown hysteria.
Maybe clown hunts can rebuild our sense of community.
First they came for the clowns, and I did not speak out, because I was a mime.
I made a very similar joke to 9 just this morning!
I bet you emailed it to a lurker.
The linked piece reminds me of nothing so much as Cobb and Sennett's Hidden Injuries of Class, injuries which Nixon had already begun to weaponize even before this study was published.
Can someone translate the linked piece from bloviation and generalized assertion/wankery into, like, actual comprehensible statements? Because I'm pretty sure this is essay-writer bullshit that collapses on the merest of inspections but you all seem to think it's great.
Perlstein's Nixonland deals with a lot of the same themes, including the connection of shame to right-wing politics.
The shame thing is just the obverse of the American ideal that you aren't expected to stay in your place, that you're allowed to be whatever you can make of yourself. That means that you have to be continually progressing just to remain in the same place self-esteem-wise. The idea might be net psychologically empowering at moments in history when the typical person can improve their prospects by trying harder, but intensifies the humiliation at times when they can't, particularly when there are still large economic windfalls being randomly tossed about.
15:
a. Trump is not an outlier; he's the distillation of racism and nihilism that has animated the conservative movement for decades.
b. American politics has largely devolved into a fusion of professional wrestling and The Jerry Springer Show.
c. People mad about living in dirt are mostly assuaged by making sure that somebody else has to live in shit.
d. But when that fails, you just need to provide a scapegoat.
If anybody needs a scapegoat, Yom Kippur is coming up.
Shame, which was invented in about 2008, is our only feeling, and gossip, which was invented a couple years later, is our only way of dealing with it.
The generalized use of "shame" as some new mysterious force/phenomenon/my-theory-that-explains-everything still strikes me as pure wankitude. Were people in 1968 less shamed? 1848? Pretty sure you could construct a similar narrative around the concept of "shame" to explain literally every election.
b. American politicseverything has largely devolved into a fusion of professional wrestling and The Jerry Springer Show.
The essay is basically a litmus test for how you feel about graduate work in the humanities...
My eyes glazed over a couple paragraphs in.
b. American politicseverything has largely devolved into a fusion of professional wrestling and The Jerry Springer Show.
Tim Burke had a recent post in which he talked about how 2016 feels like a time of political rupture ("a perception of a momentous and widespread crisis in the order of things grips and takes hold, intensifying the unfolding rupture"). I wrote a long-ish comment saying that, while this election is terrifying, I don't share his reaction.
In response he referenced an argument which wasn't one I'd seen before which seems like an interesting explanation*:
I found Moises Naim's The End of Power interesting and useful to explain some of my feelings and why they're trending as you describe. Naim's analysis argues that people are increasingly feeling that they have no input into the systems that control their lives except a sort of refusal: they can block or stop or inhibit action by an institution or government or system, but they cannot initiate or propose or see an idea come to fruition. ... Naim basically observes that people are right to feel powerless at the same time that they're missing just how inclusive many organizations are.
So this is exactly the politics in which small incremental reforms are difficult (perhaps impossible) even while we have wide-ranging discussions of big possible changes. ...
* I'm not entirely convinced, but it seems like a much better attempt at explaining, "what's different now than it used to be?" than just saying, "resentment."
If anybody needs a scapegoat, Yom Kippur is coming up.
Let's, ah, rephrase that a bit.
Mine too, but I was too ashamed to admit it.
Were people in 1968 less shamed?
I wasn't an adult here then, but I think many were, yes. The idea that you pull yourself up by your cowboy bootstraps is really soothing if you're doing OK or better economically. There was good work and good future prospects for machinists then. Now despair is so widespread that it's showing up demographically (life expectancy among the uneducated is dropping), this among people who have spent a lifetime thinking that they make their own fate.
OK, then why was Richard Nixon able to win an election largely dominated by incredible hysteria from both right and left, intense social breakdown, and flat-out intense racial resentment from working-class whites? Someone mentioned Nixonland above which is a pretty good antidote for the bizarre notion that full Keynsianism somehow kills off white working class resentment.
My feeling is that it's not entirely not-wank, but it's not entirely wank either. No-one's actually starving, and not that many are literally unemployed, but there's a more widespread than usual sense of narrowing prospects. Not every election has taken place under those circumstances. Combine that with relative loss of cultural centrality among the white working class and, bingo, fascism-lite.
I think it was really good too. I want to expand on b. in 18. People seem to be choosing the joy of contempt over the pain of compassion. I don't know if reality TV and humiliation comedy are causes or effects but it reminds me of this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/08/merciless.html
I just don't know if "why this, why now?" is a question that supports this sort of speculation. Maybe another essay could have convinced me, I dunno. We just currently have a successful, black two term president, and the front runner in the current election is a woman, and people can be sexist/racist AF. Sexism and racism create and amplify shame and anger, so sure you get some uniquely vile manifestations of those emotions, but it's not a deep or abstract Jungian puzzle.
Which isn't to say that there weren't previous elections with similar forces at play, but just less advanced (along the road to Trumpism).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLtRHN7fsgY
Tangentially: I'm so conflicted about 24. I miss humanities grad school and I loathe stuff like this piece, but I was also pretty animated by that loathing throughout the academic years (and wasn't quiet about it).
I'm sympathetic to the Trump-is-human-clickbait argument (i.e. we've been primed to pay attention to stuff like this), but I do think the sheer number of people intellectually invested in writing analyses of popular culture is larger now than it used to be, and people have been pretty happy to shift from Game of Thrones thinkpieces to Trump thinkpieces. I'm a little indignant about the false consciousness involved and the better uses to which that labor (GoT/Trump/grad school in the humanities) could have been put. You can decide whether I'm just bitter because I couldn't watch enough fucking TV to get a Times by-line for my thoughts about it. (To be clear, I don't hold any thinkpieceworkers responsible for Trump or "the Trump phenomenon," but all those small contributions to keeping his name in my face add up.)
As you were.
Also "presidential elections are one of the only chances we have left to fulfill the basic human need to experience collective emotion" is a series of big assumptions that don't seem particularly well-supported. This may not be a fatal flaw because I don't actually see how that assertion is central to any argument in this piece, but I definitely raised my eyebrows there.
36: Funny that that ended with
Are you ashamed yet? If not, you're part of the problem.
Everyone wants us to feel shame!
"Cover your shame in American Eagle board shorts. Now only $19.99."
32. Nixon won because his opposition was divided-- the south voted for Wallace rather than Humphrey.
I have been meaning to read Nixonland.
literally unemployed Hard to look at this historically because women started working in large numbers in the late sixties-- but the labor force participation rate has dropped a lot, and I strongly suspect that it's geographically unevenly distributed. Living in a thriving city in the US is OK, but that leaves a lot of people who identify with the place they are from behind.
The article faults HRC and the Democratic Party for
1). Acknowledging the shame and suffering of every group but that of working-class whites; and
2). Using this identity-politics acknowledgement as a kind of cover for neoliberal policies
For example:
In contrast, the Democratic Party that Clinton now leads is grounded in the opposite, ethical response to shame--at least for the historically disenfranchised identity groups at the heart of the Obama coalition--which is to acknowledge the existence of shame and the suffering it has caused, and then to seek its political repair. This is the social balm that the party proposes to cover the bruising of its neoliberal economic policy: We'll give you gays in the military, you give us the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That one of the unintended consequences of this gambit has been to open up space for Trump and others to exacerbate the shame experienced by a large segment of the white working class is the most volatile and misunderstood dynamic of this election.
But it ends with the idea that the only response to Trump's weaponization of shame is to create more space for "shame's articulation" (so, presumably, to include working-class whites in the identity politics that he argues is merely a cover for the neoliberal economic policies that create the suffering that causes the shame in the first place?). Doesn't really add up (or maybe I'm misreading?).
Were people in 1968 less shamed?
Again, I'd refer you to Nixonland. Trump is harnessing many of the same themes that Nixon exploited (and that, Perlstein argues, have set the tone for American politics ever since -- hence, "Nixonland.")
I haven't read much Perlstein on Trump, but I get the sense that he might not be sympathetic to my interpretation of his work. He might see Trump as more of an anomaly.
43- Misery loves company.
41 there's a Trump/GoT thinkpiece on the Shame Nun waiting for you to write it.
The first couple of paragraphs had me eyebrowing too, but I persisted like the sucker for long form I am.
Everyone wants us to feel shame!
One of Tears for Fears' more disappointing follow-up tracks.
I loved the essay but thought the parts on "shame" were the weakest parts. The strongest parts were the analysis of Trump's outrageous statements as something akin to rhetorical violence that captures all attention and therefore distracts from real issues, and the explanantion that Trump is not sui genesis in this but rather just continuing and amplifying a multi-decade Republican playbook (which was already being amplified anyway).
52 I'm not, but the existence of, for example, sports, weighs against a finding that "presidential elections are one of the only chances we have [] to experience collective emotion," whether or not that is in fact a basic human need.
To be clear, I'm on board with each thing that Apo mentioned in 18 as being basically right, so if that's all the piece is saying I'm fine with it.
But -- and here comes a "super unfair and uncharitable alert" -- one thing that has struck me about the Trump thinkpiece boom is how much of it is so obviously a lament of (mostly white, highly educated, liberal men) for the disappearance of an imagined white male working class. "You, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, have set up this election in such a way that I can no longer plausibly imagine myself as somehow fighting for the values of hard-working appalachian salt-of-the-earth men from my Brooklyn apartment! I either have to take the side of the buffoon or the boring old pragmatic woman who real men hate. I resent this fact! Please bring into play policy X that will somehow allow me to re-feel the feels of somehow being connected to an imaginary folksy white guy in a hard hat swinging a hammer!"
56: Interesting! You should expand this into a thinkpiece.
the disappearance of an imagined white male working class
I think it was pretty real. Some of them are still walking around.
I haven't fully thought through 56 but just want to register that I am on board insofar as I am ready to belittle this imaginary Brooklynite.
55. I was referring to the author, I am agreeing with you that the author is in error by providing a counterexample.
From what I've seen of them, the retired remnants of the white male working class would very eagerly vote for Trump to piss off a Brooklynite if they knew one was taking an interest in them.
So the trucker hats (and PBR) are now fully internalized? A shame because you used to be able to deliberately step into the street and methodically knock them off at times like this.
If only we could turn "Interesting! You should expand this into a think piece" into IYSETIATP. Although I guess we already have fuck you, clown.
I'm on board with the general point that we're devolving to politics as entertainment -- well illustrated by the Gil Scott-Heron song I linked above -- and that passive entertainment is playing an outsized role in a lot of people's lives. That said, the two candidates here are truly unique. Their personal journeys to get to this point are not remotely like the next cycle's candidates are going to be, and their success this time is very strongly predicated on those personal journeys.
If Biden had decided in 2010 or so (maybe as late as 2012) that he wanted to run in 2016, he could have locked in everyone, and locked Clinton out, and the whole dynamic of the race, on both sides, would have been different.
I can't say I understand why so many peripheral characters on the Republican side thought they had a chance. It really created a carnival atmosphere, which the actual professional entertainer was able to exploit. Trump might have won a two man race with Bush, but more likely not.
So, yes, the times are such that this is what we have, but no one else would have made it like this, and so while the times we live in matter, so too do just the random throws of the dice.
53: The impeachment was such a success even in its failure; it set the template for how the right could operate from a position of political and, increasingly, cultural weakness to nonetheless achieve its revanchist aims: by violating a political norm in spectacular fashion, thereby creating a media frenzy and, under cover of the ensuing distraction, advancing its otherwise endangered or unachievable goals.
This bit from the essay was interesting. It sets up the Republican party as using tactics structurally similar to asymmetric warfare aka terrorism. (Which is itself a move structurally similar to what would normally be a Godwin's, but whatever.)
59 - I don't mean that the white working class was imaginary (well "working class" is a construct, but you know what I mean). I mean that the lament is from well educated white middle-upper class paper pushers for the loss of an imagined empathetic connection to a more-or-less imaginary vision of white working men. Either there's the boring chick who's not going to bring the [imagined version of] the steel mill back and attracts only older ladies, minorities, and other paper pushers, or there's the psychotic monster.
68: That's certainly the vibe I get from a lot of these thinkpieces and I have no interest in engaging with them because of it.
And 66 is a great point. The thinkpieces would be completely different in a Biden/Trump race, even though the policies on the table and everything else about the world would be literally identical.
Although I guess we already have fuck you, clown.
I really did think it was interesting!
I run across a lot of Trump supporters in more rural areas right outside Richmond. The things I mostly hear from Trumpers:
1. Clinton will take our guns. Trump wont.
2. We don't want more liberal Supreme Court Justices.
3.Clinton is the most crooked politician ever! Benghazi! Clinton Foundation!
4. We need someone honest like Trump who tells it like it is and isn't a politician!
72 -- A Biden/Bush race would have 1-3, and 4 is such bullshit that nearly anything can be made to fit (including Bush's service as a governor). Bush would be posting Romney-like numbers with white women.
The thinkpieces would be completely different in a Biden/Trump race
If we're reading the same thinkpieces, this doesn't seem right to me. The thinkpieces are about Trump - who he is, what he means, and they were being written before he even won the nomination.
So, yes, the times are such that this is what we have, but no one else would have made it like this, and so while the times we live in matter, so too do just the random throws of the dice.
Every counterfactual is, more or less by definition, different from every other. But while Trump didn't have to win the nomination, something similarly awful - grossly racist and proudly ignorant - was pretty much inevitable.
After all, the most likely outcome had Trump not won is that Cruz would have. Kasich -- seemingly the only Republican who would take the radical step of extending healthcare to poor people if it was nearly free to his government -- was never a factor, and he's a fucking nut, too.
Those think-pieces do exist but I'm not sure that this is one of them (though it's vague enough to be something of a Rorschach.) The only thing it says about Hillary that wouldn't apply to Biden or Sanders is that Hillary Clinton's inability, for a variety of reasons, to become that vector of shared sentiment, as Obama so clearly did, is one of the defining facts of this election but that leaves open pure sexism as one of those reasons.
Yeah, that wasn't really this-piece specific.
The thinkpieces are about Trump
But the thinkpieces are also about the failure of establishment or centrist or neoliberal Dems to reach working-class white males.
I mean that the lament is from well educated white middle-upper class paper pushers for the loss of an imagined empathetic connection to a more-or-less imaginary vision of white working men.
I don't actually know people like that anymore. Unless somebody here counts.
I haven't read the article, and now that I know that it uses the n-word, neoliberal, I never will, but the analysis seems to elide the fact that Trump's reality show instincts are death in the general election. Trump had a good month because he basically disappeared from the news, and the media filled up that month with insane Clinton Foundation and email stories. Now that the debate put Trump back in the news, he's taken a big hit at the polls.
Every survey I've seen estimates the median household income of Trump supporters as between $70,000 and $75,000, well above the national median income. So why does this "poor whites support Trump" myth continue to be so popular?
It's easy to see what republicans like it, since it lets them pose as champions of the little guy as opposed to the "fuck the poor" party they actually are. But why is this myth so popular on the left?
I'm going to go ahead and be a jerk by suggesting it's popularity has something to do with allowing the kind of college educated upper middle class type that gets think pieces published to indulge in some good old fashion hating on the poors while feeling righteous about it.
81: I think there's something to this -- whenever the left loses an election, it's all "what's wrong with the working class," but I do think Trump does somewhat better with the white working class than Romney did, and somewhat worse with educated whites.
Every survey I've seen estimates the median household income of Trump supporters as between $70,000 and $75,000, well above the national median income. So why does this "poor whites support Trump" myth continue to be so popular?
I haven't seen that (and am interested), but did the the statistic that, compared to Romney, Trump is doing worse with college-educated white voters and better with non-college-educated white voters -- which supports the narrative that (compared to an average Republican nominee) he's popular with poor whites.
What's the route to a decent income without college for the white man today? (Asking for a friend's thinkpiece.)
Jesus fucking christ: a Pepe-avatar tweets a video at a journalist designed to trigger his epilepsy.
And the Trump lead is most significant among whites without a college degree, which (especially for Brooklyn-apartment-bound writers of thinkpieces) is a better indicator of "class" than income.
[Which, of course, is another problem with the whole analysis. The worst correlation for Trump support amongst whites is income -- it's about lack of education and degree of (mostly evangelical) religiosity. But in the mind of Mr. Thinkpiece the "working" class is by definition the non-college class, regardless of income.]
I'd like to see sources for 87 not because I disbelieve it but because it ought to be widely circulated as a corrective (as it probably has been).
Speaking of correctives my left eye is messed up and seeing double, as of a few days ago. I should see an optometrist sooner rather than later, right? (I have never had glasses or problems in the past.)
I should have double-previewed.
You see double with only one eye open?
Democrats feel entitled to all the working class votes as well as all the youth vote. The hate for millennials is pretty popular right now, just as the hatred for the white working class is perennially popular.
You know, if only 45% of white college educated folks support Trump, that's really bad electorally, but not that bad when you're looking at the income stats. Trump may not win as many 1%ers as Romney, but he'll get a whole lot of them.
They're big coalitions, so every thinkpiece that focuses on a single part is wrong. Each in its own way, of course.
92: You're going to have to do a little better than that if you want to publish your thinkpiece.
Looks the Millennial "problem" is subsiding in latest polls, possibly due to debate, poll freakouts, and/or the hectoring. Same with the enthusiasm gap, again, at least at the moment: Clinton has 89% of Dems, Trump 87% of Reps.
First they came for the clowns, and I did not speak out, because I was a mime.
Surely the canonical form is: First they came for the clowns, and I did not speak out, because, fuck you clown.
91: right, if I close my right eye and try to read there is one (or more) ghostly image of text floating above it, paler but also legible.
You should probably get that checked out.
Democrats only hate white working class voters who vote Republican because of "strength," dogwhistling, or the deluded hope that they'll be able to take advantage of tax cuts for the rich. Saying they hate white working class men in general is a calumny, and I'd challenge you to give three examples from this century of actual Democrats expressing actual hate for people who are not acting in a racist manner.
What's the route to a decent income without college for the white man today?
Oil prices aren't what they used to be, but every time I'm in an airport, I still seem to encounter guys who work on offshore rigs being flown here and there at great expense by their employers.
I'd really like to see those "no college degree" numbers broken down by age. It seems to me that those numbers might largely be functioning as a stand-in for age, since college degrees used to be much less common.
College degrees have gone from being as rare as Dragonite to as common as Pidgey.
I wish so much that I hadn't followed the Charlie Stross link in 36, because when I did, I found it quite good, and I thought, oh yeah, Charlie Stross, I used to read him, what's he writing about these days, which took me to his current front page post, which is about Brexit, and now I am feeling panicky about finding a way to leave the UK sooner rather than later.
... there is one (or more) ghostly image of text floating above it, paler but also legible.
It's probably a CAPTCHA and you've just discovered a glitch in the simulation.
Any thinkpiece about "what's different now" that posits a change in the American people is wrong because they haven't meaningfully changed. What's different now is that Republican party leadership lost control of their demagoguery and their party. The people who vote for them are the same as ever.
100: Well, next time start a conversation with one of them, and then we'll have the answer to all these questions.
101: I wondered that too, but the 538 article shows a weaker association with age than with education.
101--yeah, that was my thinking...like, the 30something floor boss at Wal-Mart has a degree from a for-profit, right? (plus he's less fun to identify with than a longshoreman!)
Trouble is the more crosscutting you do, the bigger the error typically gets, no?
Well, next time start a conversation with one of them, and then we'll have the answer to all these questions.
Right. Me initiate a conversation with a stranger. That's going to happen.
105: Another difference which may be significant, is that there has never been a black president before, and there has never been a woman nominee of a major party before.
103 The whole Brexit fiasco has really underscored for me how much I don't understand about UK politics. Principally why the fuck Labour is not eating the Tories lunch over that colossal error? Is it because a faction of Labour has played around on the edges of anti-immigrant racist sentiment? Is Corbyn that inept? What gives?
92
This is dumb. If there's hatred for a particular generation (and hatred is way too strong a word), it's for the Boomers. Perhaps you could credibly argue that there is a mutual antagonism between Boomers and Millennials, but arguing the Millennials are universally hated is dumbass self-serving nonsense.
110: Well, how do expect to be the next Tom Friedman? The mustache alone won't do it.
112 And I follow UK politics more closely than most Americans. I've been thinking of writing up a guest post for this topic but then see the latest procrastination thread.
arguing the Millennials are universally hated is dumbass self-serving nonsense.
Right. While Boomers are objectively terrible, Millennials are merely the annoying, if endearing, younger sibling at whom one is constantly rolling one's eyes.
Also, Dean Baker is doing yeoman's work pointing out every fucking time someone writes one of these that the labor force participation rate for women has dropped just as much as for men. All your stories about white working-class males and voting for Trump have to explain why a) women have stopped working too and b) they haven't turned to Trump.
Maybe women just don't want America to be Great Again.
What about men?!?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RinjWQQ-8s
I'd challenge you to give three examples from this century of actual Democrats expressing actual hate for people who are not acting in a racist manner.
I guess you'd have to define "actual Democrats". I've certainly seen a number of pieces in, for example Salon, whose basic thesis is "We need to stop trying to win the working class white vote because they're a bunch of big dumb racists". I'm guessing the writers of these are mostly registered Dems.
As for "acting in a racist manner", I'm not sure how that works with these pieces, since they more or less define the white working class as people who act in a racist manner.
I don't want to make a big deal out of it, since it's not like it's the world's greatest injustice. But I notice that pieces like the ones I refer to above are all written by college educated
people in big (expensive) coastal cities, so I can't help thinking that old fashioned class snobbery is playing a role.
I'm not sure anyone needs to explain to anyone else why Trump is more appealing to men, nor is it likely to make a thinkpiece less boring and hamfisted to do so. There's also a convention whereby no politician makes economic appeals to women as human beings and agents, just through the medium of "families." Obviously there's been some breaking of that convention lately.
What mythical "greatness" would amount to for working-class women is a decent question. I had two maiden great-aunts who died in their 90s, who worked as coil winders for some part of the auto industry in the Rust Belt until retirement. They did impressively well financially and were sweet and generous people, devout Catholics, I assume lifelong Republicans. Parents were German immigrants; I don't recall if they were born here (probably). So that's one kind of good life: the pension, the retirement at a decent age. Substantial invisible lives.
Perhaps you could credibly argue that there is a mutual antagonism between Boomers and Millennials, but arguing the Millennials are universally hated is dumbass self-serving nonsense.
I went to a weird management training last year where a Boomer trainer told a roomful of primarily Xer managers that Boomers thought Millennials were great, although maybe a little dumb, but that Xers were terrible. So Boomers weren't going to retire until Millenials were senior enough to promote into all the top jobs, skipping Xers entirely.
This was probably just that one trainer, but it was certainly disturbing.
I'm interested in the "imaginary" element in the composition of Brooklyn-man. The impulse to identify with, and measure yourself against working men is not new, in fact it's a thread running through 19th C American literature. Blue-collar work—and military service—were on my "bucket list," as we say now, when I was growing up. I did those things, took pride in doing them, but in a real sense got them out of my system.
Has this process become more rare now, especially since the en of the draft, so that the identification is much more likely to be "imaginary," or were there always examples of this sort of person, Brooklyn-man I mean?
123 And you let him walk out of there alive?
123: I wonder if that's a cover story for many of them planning to keep working for as long as they can to maximize their pensions - if that can affect the calculations in some way.
124 I don't think anyone reads Norman Mailer anymore.
125: Her. She also told us we were bitter, cynical, and didn't get emotionally involved enough in work, we just wanted to get the work done. At which point we rolled our collective eyes and didn't get mad.
Wow. That link in 89 just nails it. I was wondering what to think of the recent articles about evangelicals deciding to vote for Trump because they only care about abortions, but it looks like it's not just anecdata. I would have loved if they'd gone the extra step and done a multivariable regression. Maybe someone can do that once we have the county vote data after this whole thing is thankfully over.
85 Neither Aegi nor his brothers went to college (for INFURIATING reasons imo) and they're all doing pretty well as UX managers so that's probably the answer for everyone.
124: I mean, for a potted summary of a potted phenomenon you can go for"What Was the Hipster?" detailing a decade of romance of working class/tradesman/artisan figures. (Controversial because you know. But it's part of the thing it discusses.) Anyway much of that "thing" was a self-conscious put-on, no matter how much dropping-out-and-starting-a-workshop went on. Lots of writing about experiments in manual labor for an audience, by people who can't do without an audience (in some cases financially -- it's easy to forget that even now writing can pay more than part-time lower-class work of other sorts). I'll probably regret this incredibly lazy comment but not as much as I'd regret borrowing more crunch time to research the answer.
124, 128 there is nothing I love more than workplace trainings on intergenerational communication. I'm being completely sincere, the world imagined in those trainings is a really compelling dystopian fantasy about the coming battle between the Scaly Ones and the Slippery Ones.
why the fuck Labour is not eating the Tories lunch
Go ahead, stick the knife in.
Being relatively new to UK politics myself, this has been bewildering to me as well, although I think I am starting to understand. I think the British left has not had the benefit that the American left did of a George W. Bush wake-up call, of a right that is not merely evil in the usual ways, but is also completely incompetent and in power long enough to make multiple consequential mistakes.
I was really stumped at first about why all the criticism directed at Corbyn from the left seems weirdly unspecific and more about style than anything else. I think that he's viewed by New Labour or the center left or however one classifies his critics in the same way that mainstream Democrats and especially DLC types viewed Howard Dean, as, basically, too tacky to win.
The American left had 8 years of Bush during which there was a long, useful conversation amongst ourselves about HOLY SHIT HOW DO WE NOT LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN. Although we haven't entirely answered that question, I think we got past being embarrassed that people might think we're dirty hippies if we ever talk about helping poor people with policy, etc., and I think we learned not to take threats to postwar progressive advances lightly.
Many in the mainstream British left, I'm afraid, are too concerned about being mistaken for one of those unpleasant union commie types (their dirty hippies) to notice that Farage, Cameron, and May have started to get serious about breaking things. And of course the breaking-of-things got started in earnest under Blair, who was one of their own, and so charming on the telly.
So yeah, watching the British left now, having completely failed to learn from the recent lesson of the American left, is painful.
I do think I mentioned here that on my way out of my job I spoke to manangement about a few thing including "maybe you want to do some sexual harassment training, since people keep getting sexually harassed" and they were like "we didn't do it before because we didn't want to seem like we were not chill, chillness being the most important value at a law firm, but you're right that was an error, however it's not an error we have to address, because we are now hiring millenials who are all post-gender and so unharassable."
134 is mostly in response to LB but should also be considered in as an argument against the theorized culture of shame described in the article linked in the OP; counterpoint there is clearly not enough shame out there.
135: Everyone agrees we should be ashamed. The only disagreement is what we should be ashamed about
129: The Trump advantage among evangelical voters really upsets me, because it feels so calculated to feed into my prejudices as a secular Democrat.
Like, I want to believe that religious voters are sincere and well-meaning in their beliefs, and that when I look at voting behavior that looks to me to be driven by racism, misogyny, and spite, I'm failing to appreciate the cultural differences driving it and I need to be opener and more understanding.
And then Trump comes along, and evangelicals vote for someone who's the closest possible human incarnation of Godless Sinner, and all he's got going for him is the racism and misogyny, and it is such a strain not bitterly thinking "Looks like I was right about those people all along." But I know I shouldn't! But it's hard not to!
133: the unions, though, are not Corbyn's most loyal supporters. They're very unhappy about his opposition to Trident - subs mean jobs, for union members, in parts of the country where there aren't a lot of alternatives.
I've seen multiple pieces written by very religious types that say, "Clinton would destroy the things you hold dear, and so you need to hold your nose and vote for Trump" which at least isn't hypocritical in the sense that they aren't pretending that Trump himself is a good Christian.
No, but it means that they're straightforwardly voting for him on policy, not godliness. And I can't see a non-horrifying reason for evangelicals to prefer him on policy, unless abortion is literally the only issue there is. (I don't even know, actually, if he's been saying stuff about abortion or if he's just getting credit for being anti because he's a Republican.)
He's come out in support of banning abortion with exceptions for the health of the mother and mistresses of wealthy men.
I'm not sure how much policy affects your average evangelical one way or another. They can afford their delusional voting patterns. They're in a safe place. (To be fair, a lot of us are too, although by no means all of us.) I'm sure they're correct in assuming that Trump will basically leave them alone to do their thing.
Some of them are voting for Trump because he is part of God's plan to put Mike Pence in the White House. All Trump has to do is win, then get struck by a lightning bolt on January 22.
I'm not sure how much policy affects your average evangelical one way or another. They can afford their delusional voting patterns.
Right. But it's not cultural affiliation with Trump -- he's an obnoxious New Yorker. And it's not perceived religiosity or godliness. I can't see any delusional basis for evangelicals to strongly prefer Trump that isn't really ugly.
Evangelicals are Exhibit A in my list of people who would be defecting from Trump right now for just about any Democrat other than Public Enemy Number One for 25 years running Hillary Clinton.
And I can't see a non-horrifying reason for evangelicals to prefer him on policy, unless abortion is literally the only issue there is.
The piece I remember - which I almost posted here - the issues they cared about were things like religious freedom, gun control, drowning in regulation, teaching poor people to depend on hand-outs, etc. None of it makes any sense if you drill down, but no worse than any other election.
He's a Republican. He sucks, but most Republicans are people they think they can trust. He's affiliated with their party and will appoint people who pass their party's litmus tests.
145: They didn't defect from an avowed non-Christian (by their view) because Obama didn't try hard enough? I think they never were really likely to defect.
145: I feel certain this is wrong, although I can't think of any reason to believe that I would know anything about evangelicals.
136 I think there is some evidence for the proposition that there is too much shaming going on. Ironically I think that fact contributes to people not feeling shame when they should.
Maybe it is my imagination that liberals are deploying more and more shaming tactics as part of their electoral strategy, but certainly they get deployed a lot. That might cause shaming to lose some of its power.
I can understand why, believing what they do about the Clintons, some people are taking up calling themselves deplorable as a badge of honor. A google image search brings up some good ones. For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=deplorable&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_qfSSt8nPAhXBKiYKHb_mCx0Q_AUICCgB&biw=960&bih=478#imgrc=J0QKNDGKwgLf-M%3A
I don't think that an appreciable number of Evangelical voters are open to persuasion to vote for any Democrat who isn't willing to openly attack "liberals". That appears to be the litmus test. You don't have to share their religion, as neither Romney nor Trump did. You have to share their enemy.
150: They're waiting for you to start the end of the world.
137- On the other hand sometimes you just have to let the hate flow through you.
Lurid is right, repeatedly. For a big chunk of the evangelicals we're talking about now, social conditions are much less of an issue than participation in some cosmic telelology that somehow Republicans forward and Democrats don't.
Evangelicals may also not be entirely wrong that a lot of liberals despise them and their way of life and want to keep them out of power, and that many of those people would find roles in a Clinton administration. They are wrong, though, in believing that any Democratic administration will compel them to do a whole hell of a lot besides generally share the country with other people. But seriously: white conservative evangelicals are objectively wrong about people of color being inferior and dangerous criminals, but they're not objectively wrong about liberals regarding them with contempt and wanting to block their paths to political power. At least I can confidently say they're not wrong about me there, oversimplified as it is.
I am so delighted that people are claiming "basket of deplorables" as a badge of honor, as I presume we all immediately knew they would.
And the widespread suspicion among liberals that she's not as liberal as they'd like doesn't have any impact on her acceptability. I doubt Sanders' challenge from her left helped her at all with people who had voted for her husband.
Aside from the obvious difference, there is also her Yankee-ness, in their eyes.
Also, because she's been the most likely D for the last few years, it's been possible to make her into a powerful partisan symbol, whatever she may look like to us. I had occasion to look at some back issues of American Hunter, from a year or two ago, and she was clearly public enemy number one. In the crosshairs, you might say.
But seriously: white conservative evangelicals are objectively wrong about people of color being inferior and dangerous criminals, but they're not objectively wrong about liberals regarding them with contempt and wanting to block their paths to political power.
This is right. It's just that the two clauses aren't independent events.
Stab me in the face, but I think I agree with Tigre about the linked article. The signal to noise ratio in it is very high, as is the fatuousness-to-noise ratio. And to the extent that apo's 18 or any other ideas are in it, I'm pretty sure I've read them all months ago, right here, in some form or other, and they are noncontroversial among most of you and my friends in real life. I sure am lucky we're all such geniuses.
To me the most interesting topic in apo's 18 is "Trump is not an outlier; he's the distillation of racism and nihilism that has animated the conservative movement for decades." Pretty well-accepted around here, but IMO the most important point of the ones being discussed here. I'm vaguely disappointed that Clinton isn't making more of it but I admit that it would probably be bad politics to do so. I've love some ideas about how to make that point to a fence-sitter, or how to get people in power to start acting like it's true. But, no, the article acts like it's a new discovery and then goes off to ruminate about honor, shame, and other stuff I vaguely remember from freshman English.
(Maybe I'm being too cynical. Saying it often enough, in more and more respected publications, makes it more likely to go mainstream eventually. The author of the article is probably no worse than the average journalist on the issues. Sure is long-winded, though.)
Trump missed a big opportunity not putting his Ohio headquarters in this building.
151
"People are trying to make me feel bad about assisting in the election of a racist shitbag, and everyone should worry about this"
Also, what do we mean when you use the word evangelical? Self-described born-agains? People who think they're required to preach the gospel to non-believers? I think a lot of times when liberals use that word they're using it to mean Christians with different values from me, which of course then you're going to come up with a group of people with deranged, incomprehensible voting patterns. I don't think that's what's happening here, but I am curious what defines evangelism for y'all.
When anyone says "evangelical", they're just being too polite to say "fundie".
Maybe way off topic, but how much of the conflict between social conservatives and liberals is a conflict between deontological and consequentialist ethics? Or is that just self-evidently true?
163 but even "fundie" feels imprecise. Like, I know what it means but I'm not sure it's the right shorthand. Do we mean baptists?
That is a real issue. I mean, by what I understand to be the religious definition, Jimmy Carter definitely and Bill Clinton plausibly were evangelicals.
Most of what I said can apply to conservative Christians who feel that "conservative" as well as "Christian" is a part of their cultural identity. Some Catholics, esp in my home state. I'm ignorant of evangelical churches and culture, am not & never have been Christian, and have only a loose extended-family affiliation with (midwestern German-American) Catholics, so take with a heap of salt.
AWB was always a good informant on American church and politics, but I don't know if she's reading atm.
164: way, way, way too clean a distinction.
(Hey, Clytie, I'm on a collision course with serious trouble at work for procrastinating right now as we speak! At the very least a colleague is probably furious with me. At worst I'll be working over the weekend to ship a bunch of poorly-edited nonsense. Why do I keep doing it? Terror.)
Most of what I said can apply to conservative Christians who feel that "conservative" as well as "Christian" is a part of their cultural identity.
This is actually the answer: "evangelical" is just being used as sloppy shorthand for "rightwing Christians". Because there are plenty of lefty evangelicals - a whole slew of religious black people, for example.
166: We had a long discussion about this a while back. "Fundamentalist", IIRC, has a precise definition -- there's a document called something like 'The Fundamentals of the Church" that a number of Protestant denominations have endorsed, and it's roughly the ones you'd think (that is, I don't know in detail offhand, but like, Southern Baptists and similar). And so they were self-identified as 'fundamentalists'. But that got to sound pejorative in practice, sometime in the eighties maybe, so people have gradually stopped using it.
"Evangelicals" is less precise, but (again, IIRC) names roughly the same denominations as those that accept a religious duty to proselytize. I get puzzled, because I thought even Catholics and mainline Protestants were supposed to proselytize, but I figure there's a subtle difference I'm missing.
Protestants who aren't Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians or Episcopalians? So mostly Baptist, Pentecostal, and nondenominational megachurches.
The sloppiness of the definition makes statements like "white conservative evangelicals are objectively wrong about people of color being inferior and dangerous criminals, but they're not objectively wrong about liberals regarding them with contempt and wanting to block their paths to political power," really frustrating even though they're true.
Because the enmity from liberals really seems to me to be driven so much by the conservativism and so little by the religion, and the same for the way conservative evangelicals vote. That's what I was bitching about upthread, that even though they're a group who's voting habits can be predicted by their stated religious affiliation, when it comes to voting for Satan himself over a Methodist grandmother, they vote like conservatives, not like Christians.
Aside from the obvious difference, there is also her Yankee-ness, in their eyes.
No kidding. Pictures like this are a huge part of the reason I myself have trouble supporting her.
"Religion" is being used to distinguish different (stereo)types of Republicans - the Wall Street CEOs from the small town yokels.
You know, in my neighborhood, the Yankees are the local team supported by workingclass people of color. So phtbbtbt.
the enmity from liberals really seems to me to be driven so much by the conservativism and so little by the religion
Two responses: 1) that enmity itself varies a lot in its causes (I've known people who got out of certain communities who hate them far more intensely and single-mindedly than I ever will), just as the target beliefs and churches and communities vary; 2) it's too hard to extricate the religion from the conservatism. It's a promiscuous fusion of church and state, which is a great deal of the problem. I mean, you know this!
The good news is that religiously unaffiliated continues to grow and should be larger than white evangelicals in the next decade or two.
175: You're right, but it's systematically confusing, because the felt hostility from liberals has a lot more to do with 'yokel' than it does with religion.
Conservative Christian is a much better description. It picks up some Catholics who are basically in the same boat as well as right-leaning mostly non-mainline Protestants who are the core group. It loses "evangelical" liberal Protestants -- there are some white ones, and lots and lots and lots of black ones.
But even "conservative Christians' is really too broad, since there are tons of liturgically (or even politically!) "conservative" Christians who are educated but not quite in the core group that we mean when we use the term "evangelical."
Honestly, it is this simple -- the people we're talking about are white Christians who think that abortion and (repressing) sexuality are among the 2-3 most imporant religious issues and core parts of their personal and religious identity. That's it. That's basically the entire dividing line. It's all about sex.
Why people would think that people with this worldview wouldn't vote for Trump with a (soundly pro-choice) woman on the other ticket isn't a mystery at all yet people keep wanting to act as if it is.
145 Any Democratic nominee would be pro-choice, and would be responsive to particular concerns of the poor and minorities.
Isn't saying that the party pressing for the Affordable Care Act , card check, and an increase in the minimum wage does not reach out to working class white men some sort of dogwhistle? Isn't the real knock on Dems (as opposed to Republicans) that they refuse to reach out and slap minorities?
I totally buy the notion that Dems have been too centrist, and if working class white men were flocking to Jill Stein or something maybe I'd find Dems aren't reaching out to WWC men or even Dems say the right things but don't try hard enough credible. But as an explanation of why they've favored GWB, McCain, Romney, and now Trump, I think pundits are basically pissing on our legs and telling us it's raining.
Reeling it back a bit, I get the distinction between fundamentalist and evangelical, and I think if we make that distinction actually there's meaningful overlap between "white fundamentalist" and "those fucking people"* but I don't know what these surveys of evangelicals are looking at; is it actually fundamentalists?
*those fucking people are basically conspiracy theorists where the conspiracy is "dinosaurs existed," and I totally get why they would be Trump voters.
So phtbbtbt.
Please halt the bad bitching toward ball teams?
Hillary's not from your neighborhood. She didn't choose the evil empire out of geographic necessity, she chose it because she's a bandwagon-riding, terrible baseball fan.
Because the enmity from liberals really seems to me to be driven so much by the conservativism and so little by the religion, and the same for the way conservative evangelicals vote.
This is 100% right, and really it's specifically "conservatism" about sex that drives both.
Honestly, it is this simple -- the people we're talking about are white Christians who think that abortion and (repressing) sexuality are among the 2-3 most imporant religious issues and core parts of their personal and religious identity. That's it. That's basically the entire dividing line. It's all about sex.
It's this, but it's also about not giving handouts to lazy people.
The key feature is: don't interfere with God's punishments. Pregnancy, STDs, and poverty are all punishments that people have coming to them.
Most syphilis bacilli are very poor.
184: Probably the real reason why that other notorious Yankees fan Lebron James endorsed her.
186 last is right though I honestly think Trump could be pretty pro-choice though and still keep the voters we're talking about when we say "evangelical." It's more "get your worldly government out of the way of my apocalypse" than anything else.
Sex, sex, sex. That's really it. Except for black evangelicals, who can be (as a theological matter) just as strict on sex stuff but will never ever vote Republican because race trumps sex.
It's really this: is a big primary political thing you get out of going to church repression of sexuality, or is the sex-repressive stuff non-existent at your church or very low on the list of things that are important? If the former, you are a politically conservative Christian. If not, not.
But even "conservative Christians' is really too broad, since there are tons of liturgically (or even politically!) "conservative" Christians who are educated but not quite in the core group that we mean when we use the term "evangelical."
Well specifically this sub-conversation is about a) Trump voters; b) people who would regard Trump as a serious unrepentant lifetime sinner based on their beliefs, but don't because he's a Republican and isn't Hillary Clinton.
This is 100% right, and really it's specifically "conservatism" about sex that drives both.
And if "conservatism" about sex was actually about anything besides social control over women, there is no way they would support a creepy philanderer like Trump.
I think there is some evidence for the proposition that there is too much shaming going on.
I would have been more inclined to agree with that had I not just watched this Samantha Bee clip (short: 2:01). "Weren't things great before PC culture? .... If your mom is irritating stoked about Hillary Clinton becoming president it may be because she remembers when publicly humiliating women was lighthearted entertainment"
On a different note, this is an interesting bit of poll data:
How people plan to vote appears to correspond, albeit broadly, with whether they decided to move away from where they grew up. ... 40 percent of Donald Trump's likely voters live in the community where they spent their youth, compared with just 29 percent of Hillary Clinton voters. ...
The effect is even stronger among white voters, who already tend toward Trump. Even a bit of distance matters: Trump wins by 9 points among white likely voters who live within two hours of their childhood home, but by a whopping 26 percent among whites who live in their hometown proper.
"Whites who were born in their hometowns and never left are really strong Trump supporters," said Daniel Cox, PRRI's director of research. "If you're raised in a more culturally conservative area and you never leave, chances are that you're going to be a bit more insular. I think among those kind of folks, there's an appeal that Trump is hearkening back."
While Trump often talks about bringing manufacturing jobs back and restoring American dominance in the world, he paradoxically fares best among communities that haven't yet been adversely affected by globalization. His supporters live in towns that are somewhat better off than average (Trump has more votes than Clinton does among people making between $50,000 and $100,000) and racially homogenous.
it's too hard to extricate the religion from the conservatism. It's a promiscuous fusion of church and state, which is a great deal of the problem. I mean, you know this!
"Extricate", I'm not sure what it means exactly in context. But you can find a matched set voters with really similar religious views who don't think liberals hate them and don't vote conservatively, so long as they're black. That really makes the religion feel like a red herring as a driver of the politics; you've got this identifiable social class of white conservatives, and they're definitely more likely to be members of evangelical churches than white non-conservatives, but their reasons for being conservative don't seem plausibly actually religious.
138: That's beside the point, though. I was trying to describe what kind of boogeyman he appears as in the eyes of his fellow party members who are afraid they'll be seen that way too. The UK has different flavours of dirty hippy than the US does, and one of them is a striking coal miner, during a cold winter, before Thatcher showed them what's what.
The fact that the actual unions don't love Corbyn is irrelevant in the way that reality always is when fear is driving.
The key feature is: don't interfere with God's punishments. Pregnancy, STDs, and poverty are all punishments that people have coming to them.
Yes, fair enough. But the big one (and the one that they use to set themselves off from the notionally irreligious external world) is punishment for improper sex.
192 - yes. It's about social control and a political position. It's not even a personal thing -- they're OK with personally immoral people as long as they're on board with the bigger picture of allowing and promoting sexual repression.
The latest Thomas Frank piece is ok, but kinda commonplace (hope is dead) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/06/hillary-clinton-democrats-barack-obama-middle-america
This is pretty good though I don't really agree that Trump's followers aren't stupid. https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/trump-is-a-scam-21315584bac6#.lxhqyigx8
This is pointless junk although the title and last sentence showed promise. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/hell-likely-lose---but-trump-is-the-final-warning-to-elites/article32278545/
Oh, huh, I got interrupted before posting that and it's mostly been said already.
You're not really selling any of the articles linked in 197. . .
Masses that joined the tea party said they were upset by the crony capitalism of the bailout in Oct 2008/feb 2009. They don't distinguish between the two.
Now they are voting for a crony capitalist who will bring more.
Has anybody pointed out this contradiction in a think piece?
I'm going to double down and continue to insist that the predicate belief fundamentalists use to set themselves off from the notionally irreligious external world is hostility to science. Am I wrong? Probably.
But you can find a matched set voters with really similar religious views who don't think liberals hate them and don't vote conservatively, so long as they're black. That really makes the religion feel like a red herring as a driver of the politics;
It is a red herring as a driver of their politics. It's not a red herring as an aspect of liberal contempt, though, because the religious conservatives are trotting out religion constantly to excuse all their heinous beliefs, and so it's impossible not to scoff at their abuse of religion.
193: That is really interesting. I imagine staying in their childhood hometown over the last 20-50 years gives many people an overwhelming sense of pessimism that it would be cognitively hard to overcome.
194: their reasons for being conservative don't seem plausibly actually religious -- yeah, that's not for me to answer, but there's probably a good source or two on the question out there. Beyond Tigre's answer.
I suppose... I think of two versions of conservatism: there's the intensely "moral" religiously-inflected version, and there's the intensely amoral survival of the fittest version. They've been interlaced in very strange ways here. A lot of cognitive dissonance consequently has to be resolved, and it does get resolved one way or another.
203.3 is right and really confusing to me.
That is, why the situation described there exists, not how it is described in 203.last.
199- Yeah I'm not that motivated, although everything in the Arnade piece has been said before, but still deserves much wider circulation than it gets.
The fact that Trump really can't be bothered to give a shit about the prospect of actually becoming President seems to me to be the biggest mostly ignored story of this election.
the felt hostility from liberals has a lot more to do with 'yokel' than it does with religion
This is probably true about the *felt* hostility, but surely the real hostility has to do with all the behaviour policing the evangelical right is always trying to do, which really isn't about either religion or being simple country folk, but is rather about leveraging and securing their place in status hierarchies.
I think that belief in an invisible sky father is looney, but there is no way that merely believing crazy shit could make me feel hostile toward someone. And many of us worldly city folk started out as yokels ourselves and still surround ourselves with ones we're related to on holidays.
It's when the yokels start petitioning our government to make or keep me in a position of lower status, or to pursue demonstrably destructive policies because Crazy Belief System says so that I get hostile.
I really wonder how mad the Republicans will get when after the election Trump's disinterest gets discussed more widely.
I suppose some shiny object will distract them though.
Their Hillary hate, and liberal hate in general, will see them through.
punishment for improper sex.
Every once in a while I'm reminded how actually *weird* it is that American Christians are so obsessed with other people's sexual behaviours. There are a lot of ways to live any religion, and for Christianity, an obvious approach might be to try to act like Jesus and focus on the loving and forgiving and helping the wretched part, and also on the things that Jesus actually talked about part. Yet I know of no mainstream Christian communities that are entirely about just acting like Jesus and meanwhile churches that openly welcome gay people are a scarce minority. I try to recall then whenever I'm feeling the old liberal I-should-be-tolerant guilt toward evangelicals.
It is weird. And I don't think it has much to do with religion or Christianity per se, except that religion is always an effective means of social and moral control. In part it's that the relatively diffuse organizational structure of US protestantism made it easy for people who primarily were concerned about these issues to take over in the 60s and 70s when feminism and the sexual revolution became a thing.
The particular weird turn taken in 210 goes way the hell back, though, doesn't it? To the various church fathers? It's always been lurking there. I know the Protestant focus on abortion is quite recent and the result of some deliberate planning, although I forget the details.
I now wonder if we should propose a history of American Christianity reading group. Or crowdsource a list.
With "these things" meaning, really, reinforcing hierarchy. Abortion was a total side issue until people understood that it could be used as a syncechdoche for opposing the feminist, sexual, and civil rights revolutions generally.
212 That group sounds like a really good way for me to procrastinate.
I did finally get my will notarized though, so everything is squared away for the Final Procrastination.
It's also the fact that it's obvious garbage. Somewhere between 1950 and now, the Christianity that could trace its roots all the way back Jesus Christ himself died out, and was replaced with the result of bees buzzing around their heads.
Oh, hey, this just dropped and seems relevant. Happy Friday, everyone.
The particular weird turn taken in 210 goes way the hell back, though, doesn't it? To the various church fathers? It's always been lurking there.
Yes, though the conditions of late-Roman Egypt and 1974 Arkansas are so, so different that I'm not super-fond of the linkage -- the ranting on licentiousness in the late Roman empire definitely gives lots of precedent/fodder attacking licentiousness in a post-birth-control, post-emancipation of women world, but it's so not the same thing.
With "these things" meaning, really, reinforcing hierarchy.
Yes. When you're a scared little monkey near the bottom of your status hierarchy, undermining the status of others to secure or improve yours is a strategy with an appeal that's hard to avoid.
Demonise a sexual minority to make sure there's always someone at the bottom who's not you. Take away women's reproductive choice to make them dependent and weaken their position relative to men. Slut-shame women to reduce their position in this dependency-based marriage negotiation.
In general I think the crazy religious and crazy Trumpist (he really doesn't deserve an -ist of his own) element can be understood as the anxious low-status'd trying to place someone else at the bottom of the pile.
217: Christ, he really is such an extraordinary piece of shit. You really can't blame people for wondering if it's all performance art, it's so hard to believe.
Regarding Brexit, is this as bad as it looks?
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-37590044
218: I'm not going to press the point, fair enough, but there have been a few rounds of this repression thing, within indeed quite different political situations. To what extent the more liberal eras were therefore more in touch with the actual teachings of Jesus -- I just don't know. I fail pretty hard at basic Bible trivia.
220- He's been a professional con artist for ~50 years now. I'm not sure how you draw that line.
I'm starting to wonder whether we'll see Trump do a perp walk before the election. You know, he was doing fine: golfing, getting his portrait painted, enjoying his children. If he had just left well enough alone, he might have kept it all going for several more years. But nope. Pres. Obama teased him and he had to run, and nothing is ever going to feel as good as those rallies again, and his taxes and foundation are now publicly extremely interesting. Mr. Trump hastened his downfall and bent the Republican Party over in the process.
a history of American Christianity reading group.
How about a Left Behind reading group instead? Maybe leavened with readings from the same author's The Act of Marriage. I'm serious, I would prefer to understand these ideals better but have not been able to bring myslef to read these books, which would be IMO genuinely informative.
224: Fred Clark/Slacktivist did an excellent extended (very, very extended--hundreds of them) series of blog posts on those books. Or at least the first few, anyway. Hopefully that'll suffice.
Do not start a Left Behind reading group. There are no ideas in those books. They are like the Dan Brown books but stupider and full of vindictiveness.
Anything from the Tim LaHaye school is just going to get everyone outraged about the culture wars. We all know about the culture wars and how they are on the wrong side. How about something nice, like a book by Philip Yancey.
225: They were good, the ones I read. I sort of stopped reading them after a while because they got repetitive.
How many separate things has Trump said or done that two years ago anyone on either side of the aisle would have considered independently sufficient to completely disqualify someone from national office? 12? 20?
Even though there were objectively worse things he said, my favorite is still when he accused Ted Cruz's dad of killing JFK. That's hard to top.
Bits just leaked from Clinton's Wall Street speeches on Buzzfeed. Maybe they're GRU fabrications, and most of them are only bad if you squint, but some bits do annoy me - mostly just the carelessness of her saying "you need a private and public position" even behind closed doors. OTOH, it has her as supporting Canadian-style health care in the extremely long term, and reminding Wall Street she wanted to close the carried-interest loophole.
230 - it would be nice to see a list. That really is the most amazing part of the campaign, and it'll be interesting to see if it has a for-real slippery slope effect. Do normal politicians in Maine now go around speaking at like 3/4 Paul LePage?
OMG, I just looked at the excerpts in 233. What level of Clinton derangement syndrome would you need to be at to think any of that even a little bit bad.
As of September 2, Slate was up to 191 reasons Trump was unfit to be President.
I don't know if it was on Slate or not. I mean this.
Fallows has been doing a good job with his time capsule series.
OTOH, it has her as supporting Canadian-style health care in the extremely long term
Back in the day when we lived in Astoria, Queens, and Hillary Clinton was our Senator, Mr. Just Plain Jane submitted a question on single-payer health care to an NYTimes "10 Questions for ... Hillary Rodham Clinton" forum.
Mr. JPJ [in his exact words]: "Your recent article in the New York Times Magazine adroitly avoids taking a position on single-payer health care systems in the United States. However, the logic of the article -- the need for reducing bureaucratic overhaul and maximizing the focus on the patient -- would seem to drive toward that position. Can you state your position on single-payer health care systems?"
HRC [loosely paraphrasing]: "You know I support single-payer health care systems, but I'm a goddamn United States Senator with presidential aspirations, and we're not in Canada, and you're never going to hear me state my position..."
The exchange can now be found online, which is how I reproduce Mr. JPJ's words exactly.
This Disney Channel tween program my kid is watching is unspeakably vulgar, stupid, and racist. Maybe it explains Donald Trump. God, maybe I've been spending my life defending these Trump-creation factories.
Why are these 10 year olds in dyadic coupling relationships and talking about dating and hotties? How is this indian stereotype kid even possible? Why is the authority figure covered in spaghetti?
Why are these 10 year olds in dyadic coupling relationships and talking about dating and hotties?
WTF?! I remember when Disney was a Sunday night movie about a boy and his dog.
a boy and his dog.
Talk about dyadic relationships! Amirite?
Hillary took a lot of damage from the failure of HillaryCare. I can see why she plays healthcare policy close to the vest.
I remember when Disney was a Sunday night movie about a boy and his dog.
Talk about dyadic relationships!
Trump learned everything he knows about black people from the crows in Dumbo.
JP arguably deserved to make that joke, or reference anyway, since I've neither read nor seen any version of "A Boy and His Dog", whereas he may well have both read and seen it in its various guises.
I was completely unfamiliar with that reference, but it does seem apropos.
Talk about dyadic relationships! Amirite?
Teo! You're being deliberately provocative and obtuse, of course.
But if you want to see deliberately provocative, follow the link in 246.
You'd prefer the preteens in polyamorous triads?
As long as there are no dogs involved.
I actually shed a tear over Hudson, the Railroad Puppy. Some sick f**k (who is no doubt mentally ill, and who is probably the victim of gross mental and physical abuse in his own childhood) actually nailed one of Hudson's paws to a railway track, and left that pup there to die.
I forgive the plastics industry its self-serving infomercial, because Hudson! there you go now, and you're such a good boy! Hudson is now a therapy dog, and I'm not crying, that's just a bit of dust in me eye...
I stopped reading the linked article when it looked like it was going to be all about "shame". I think if you're looking for an oversimplified explanation of Republican success, if not of Trump specifically, it boils down to "strategic accommodation"* in response to the Civil Rights movement and close attention to voting rules, as shown through gerrymandering to maximize Congressional representation and of course all of the voter suppression tactics they've been pushing for years now. Where Trump (and some of the extreme Tea Party candidates in recent years) is a break from the past, it's in how he crosses the rhetorical boundaries Republicans have been observing, strategically, to elect the most conservative candidates they can.
*N.B. I haven't read the book but am familiar with the argument.
The Trump coalition is the direct descendant of the Jackson coalition. I've thought this for a while now but it's becoming ever more apparent. The question: Is this 1824 or 1828?
Who is William Crawford: Jill Stein or Gary Johnson?
Didn't Jackson fight duels to defend women's honor, though?
"Andrew Jackson lewd monologues" is a project for the more misanthropic steampunks among us.
He's just lucky they didn't have smartphones back then. (Or recording of any kind, I guess.)
Maybe live mic/dead girl will be the new standard for campaign killing scandals.
TV campaign coverage not like it used to be.
249: Yes I believe I saw the (part of) the movie (under extremely awkward self-induced circumstances), and then read the story, and ultimately saw the whole movie. Many, many years ago.
No one's talking about the part of the Trump video where Billy Bush has to explain to Trump how to open the door on the bus. That's the real scandal.
Swope you're wildly off beam about Corbyn hatred. Among the political classes, it is John McDonnell who is hated personally and feared but that is a result of his record in forty years of dirty internecine politics.
Lefties who are horrified by Corbyn, rather than hating him, do so because they know he is electoral Marmite. He has no chance at all of winning a general election. He has the policies of a brexiteer and the persona of a remainer, which means that he turns off almost everyone who voted in the referendum.
Personally, the view among his enemies is that he is just completely incompetent. It is impossible to imagine him in any position of responsibility, let alone as prime minister.
None of this is class based embarrassment.
"Electoral Marmite" would make a good pseud.
Clem and ajay, I'm willing to believe I've got it wrong; as I said, I've been trying to understand what's going on as a relative outsider.
But what you've written, Clem, seems exemplary of my reading of the situation ("Electoral Marmite," you could hardly have made my point better). I know his enemies consider him incompetent, because they never shut up to the press about their feelings on that subject. But I never hear *how* he is incompetent. Just that he couldn't possibly be PM. He can't be PM now because there are 100 more conservative members in the HoC than Labour ones. But it's not otherwise obvious to me that the general public is so repulsed by him that he is the barrier to Labour having more seats. Maybe he is uncharismatic or a shitty leader or whatever, but it seems like Labour would do better to concentrate on winning more seats before they worry about whether Corbyn looks too funny when eating a sandwich to be the prime minister.
He has the policies of a brexiteer and the persona of a remainer, which means that he turns off almost everyone who voted in the referendum.
Is that what it means? Or does it mean that someone who is known to be skeptical of the EU on economic/free trade grounds, who supports policies that might actually help the same disaffected poor who voted Brexit, yet conceded the importance of supporting remain, might be someone who could appeal to both sides? I don't know, but when the criticisms of Corbyn always come down to style or unarticulated claims of incompetence, I can't believe his critics know either. He was competent enough to get himself voted head of Labour twice with a comfortable margin. Like him or not, Corbyn is what Labour has to work with at the moment. Maybe they should get on with it instead of just letting May dismantle the place without the least opposition.
And to be clear, I don't think the problem is *real* class-based embarrassment. I think it's upper-class labourites projecting their own misimagined image of how he's perceived into the mind of the average voter.
Again, I'm willing to believe I'm wrong. But I would like to hear a more complete story about why.
67: the Republican party as using tactics structurally similar to asymmetric warfare
Before he became a total stuck record, David Kaiser came out with this, which I think right:
dau tranh, or struggle, the philosophy behind the Vietnamese Communist revolution [...] doing whatever they could, in particular, to make the South Vietnamese government unable to function effectively [...] Their goal, essentially, was to reduce society to chaos and allow the well-organized Communist Party to take over [...] the Republican Party has been practicing dau tranh for more than twenty years. It has now crippled government at all levels and has a good chance of reducing much of the United States to chaos in the next ten yearsWhich is hardly unprecedented. What was the KKK but an insurgency and parallel government set up against Reconstruction?
doing whatever they could, in particular, to make the South Vietnamese government unable to function effectively
As I understand it this was also the basis of the organised resistance in occupied Europe during WWII. You read tales of spectacular sabotage and derring-do, but on a day to day basis people were mainly trying to make the German authorities' jobs harder in multiple little ways.
Dau tranh was also adopted by the ANC in its 1980s civil disobedience campaigns, with 'ungovernability' as the explicit goal. It was infinitely more effective than their actual military insurgency. And left the country largely ungovernable down to the present, but, whatevs, they got theirs.
When the government is created explicitly to keep you excluded from participating the government, striving for "ungovernable" strikes me as a very reasonable strategy.
Yes! And it worked! But that doesn't mean the ANC aren't scum.
Take your pick. The first five stories you see are all corruption/misgovernance/chaos. That was the first page I went to, and that's a totally normal new week.
The KKK alone isn't what took down Reconstruction. While the KKK was most violent, the federal government, with Congressional authorization, kept sending troops in. It was the "respectable" whites who sidelined (while also benefiting from) the KKK who took over power.
Of course. And it's the respectable 1% who have benefited from the Republican insurgency.
246-250 A Boy and his Dog is a great 70s post-apocalyptic film. Early Don Johnson and the dog's narration is really unforgettable.
Swope, the chief evidence for his incompetence is that he spent 35 years in parliament (and, incidentally, in that time voted against Labour government policies more often than David Cameron ever managed in *his* parliamentary career) without ever seeking or exercising any executive or administrative power at all. That is an extraordinary record for a professional politician. It's quite different from the record of backbenchers who have never or only briefly been in government, like Frank Field, because Frank has worked tirelessly to amass and use power on behalf of the people he represents and wants to help.
His opponents in the parliamentary party were utterly useless this summer, and he has some very effective and ruthless operators on his side, but he is not one of them. But no one who has worked with him or alongside him regards him as any more competent than Prince Charles (who, be it noted, is also popular with many people).
There is no doubt that Corbyn represents a constituency (in the non-geographical sense, as well) but he has no ambition to do anything for them except to articulate their positions. His election was entirely unexpected the first time round. He didn't expect it himself. He is almost entirely unable to comprehend, let alone to answer, questions about how to win over Tory voters. In this he speaks for his constituency, too.
As for the Brexit point: the answer to your question is "not a chance in hell". There were two things that animated the bulk of voters in the campaign. The leavers were hostile to immigration, even if this mean leaving the single market; the remainers wanted to stay in a single market, even if this meant bearing the costs of immigration. Corbyn's position is pro-immigration and anti-single market. This isn't electoral marmite, it's electoral dog vomit.
All this would be comical were we not sleepwalking into the catastrophe of Brexit and the nearest thing to an effective opposition is Nicky Morgan, Anna Soubry and Philip Hammond. The ranks of Tuscany can scarce forbear to giggle.
NW, there are a shitload of MPs on all sides who have no ambition for executive or administrative power. They choose to sit on one or two select committees in an attempt to control the people who are ambitious for it, and otherwise concentrate on constituency work. What such people do not do, however, is put themselves forward for the leadership of their party from a standing start.
Chris, fair enough, but I don't think Corbyn even sat on any select committees: I would reckon those as the exercise of administrative power.
As you say, to stand for the leadership from a position of consistent nonentity was remarkable, but we know he stood more as a candidate of the Islington tendency, if I can call it that: the old London hard left. Note how he has just attendedan SWP front rally , after his office announced that he would not.
That is deeply stupid. I would have thought, given the company he keeps, that he would have the sense to steer clear of the SWP, at least in public, since the Martin Smith episode.
[Clem] and chris y: Thanks for this input. With Labour stuck, for the moment, with Corbyn, what do you think would be the most useful thing they could do in the context of the ongoing Brexit shitshow?
Maybe he is uncharismatic or a shitty leader or whatever, but it seems like Labour would do better to concentrate on winning more seats before they worry about whether Corbyn looks too funny when eating a sandwich to be the prime minister.
This doesn't make any sense. You can't, as a matter of fact, "concentrate on winning more seats" before worrying about the party leader, because the only time you can win more seats at scale is at a general election, when the first question anyone is interested in will be "who is going to be the prime minister".
It's really important to understand that the function of picking a representative from your local area and the function of picking a prime minister are fused in a British general election. There isn't a distinct ballot for the prime minister and for an MP. You can't split the ticket; if you vote for a Labour MP, you inherently also vote for the party leader for prime minister.
Also, I would steer well clear of analogising the EU and NAFTA. Being in the EU means being in a single market with Germany, not Mexico. The dynamics are quite different.
It also plays into the rift between social democrats and communists; generally speaking, if you're a social democrat (or a Green or a Liberal) you're pro-European and if you're further to the left you're against (with the complication that the New Left and after tends to like "another Europe" while traditional communists hate the whole project).
When Jeremy Corbyn went through his formative political years (the late 1970s), protectionism was a big deal on the extreme-left, and he's just stayed where he was.
And now it's a big deal with the Tories.
I must say that the Labour party candidate-selection system that produced Corbyn seems like about the worst designed thing in the world and that the party got into a horrible trap based on shitty institutional design. Having actual politicians or stakeholders with power seems like a fine way to pick a nominee. Having a primary that genuinely captures a mass electorate select a nominee also has some advantages. But why on earth would it ever be a good idea to have a self-selected bunch of activists without actual responsibilities select the candidate? It's a system waiting to be gamed and that once gamed produces the horrible trap in which the party finds itself. It's shitty institutional design at the level of the pre-partition Parliament of Poland. Nice work, whoever came up with that idea.
293: That was Ed Miliband who came up with that genius idea. I have to say that although I know people who have voted for Corbyn they all give as their first reason, when prodded seriously, that the other candidates -- as represented by E Miliband, Andy Burnham, etc, were utterly useless, doomed -- and unprincipled as well. Miliband certainly wasn't competent to be Prime Minister or even -- as he showed -- leader of the opposition. I have a soft spot for Yvette Cooper because she was in another lifetime a colleague and a clever, decent competent one. But she's not very charismatic. Andy Burnham appears to be made from the kind of foam rubber that cheap Chinese sofas are upholstered with. So there is a problem there. But as Tigre says, the system they have now is the worst. The only comparable fuckup is the one for electing lay people to the Church of England's General Synod.
the function of picking a representative from your local area and the function of picking a prime minister are fused in a British general election. There isn't a distinct ballot for the prime minister and for an MP. You can't split the ticket; if you vote for a Labour MP, you inherently also vote for the party leader for prime minister.
This may be the part I'm failing to understand. Is it really the case that who you like for PM is the primary determinant of who you vote for as MP? My eyebrows are raised as far as possible as I type. I know you can't split the ticket, but surely if your general political sentiments are Labourish, then you vote Labour even if you don't like the head of the party? I mean, Clinton...?
What I'd like to understand is, if Corbyn as head of Labour, for now, is a done deal, as it seems to be, what better thing could Labour be doing besides shitting itself blind about Corbyn? Why is it that nothing can be done about the conservative shitshow until everybody's happy with the Labour leadership?
Getting your head around another country's politics is not so easy. Probably for the best that I can't vote here yet.
