I agree on the nice-jobbing, although I still hate twitter threads. And as nicely jobbed as this was, it still doesn't answer what eludes me about his conclusion -- "Harm is not a lamentable cost of the policy. It is the purpose of the policy. And the angrier it makes you the happier it makes them." -- which is: Why? Especially for someone like Bannon, who is rich enough to be protected from most of the trends that are supposed to make us feel sorry for the poor red state white people... what is the perceived harm that motivates this hostile tribalism that pretty much completely defines the American right, since it's not like there's any coherent ideology that does it?
This is what makes it unbearable for me anymore to hear people discuss left vs. right as if it were still all about the cold war, or big vs. small gummint, or a "spectrum" at all. Those on the right who are actually politically active and effective and in power are all and only about destruction; they are the counter-enlightenment and that's all.
1&2 Both mostly true. I'm still going to link this: https://twitter.com/Chris_arnade
There are valid reasons for people to be mad at "front row kids" which is a pretty good description of a lot of people here.
I hope we aren't talking in four years about how it is impossible to beat the Trump coalition that I fear we are continuing to solidify by our actions.
The problem here is moral relativism. The center, especially Obama, but also Clinton, Wasserman-Schultz, Schumer, Feinstein etc. has held for decades that "the far right and the far left are equally bad" -- the right has imbibed this message with gusto, and so they feel that any criticism of their position need only be answered by a canned tu quoque argument and they're magically good again.
There aren't even close to enough back row kids to have put Trump over the top.
Unless Scott Baio counts as back row.
That guy was talking about back row kids supporting Trump showing a bunch of pictures of people who look so down on their luck that the subtext is you shouldn't blame them for latching on to any chance at improvement even if it meant voting for Trump.
There's not enough of those to have won it for Trump. He got older, white, comfortable people by a huge margin.
Pat Buchannan on September 20, 2001 said that the problem of 9/11 was immigration (and we need to avoid getting caught up in stupid wars of empire):
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-us-pays-the-high-price-of-empire-383
the immigration part was a road not travelled but it is back again.
They really do think Muslim immigration is bad and they want to stop it. There also are radical islamists that do mass killings of people in the US every 5 years or so. They think an immigration ban will deal with that as well.
I don't think that any of this is going to work but they are not just trolling the left.
I agree they aren't just trolling the left, but the rollout of the immigration ban suggests they are doing that also.
So are you saying you don't think the bottom 25% in the US acutely feel their low status, or that 25% of the US population couldn't swing an election if they tried?
I pulled 25% out of my ass because that was the percentage of back row or back row adjacent people in most of my classes growing up.
The adult, white portion of the bottom 25% of the U.S. isn't very big. Obviously this election was close enough that lost of things could have swung it, but I think getting them to vote Democrat would have been among the harder ways for the Democrats to have won, even assuming they had foreknowledge that they would lose in time to switch tactics.
Those older comfortable white people are reliable Republican voters, we're never going to get them. Trump got some extra, I've met people like the ones Chris takes photos of, here in hillbilly heaven.
I don't know if that is true or not, but I feel I can blame them for voting for somebody they certainly knew was openly and extravagantly racist and sexist in order to avoid a small tax increase.
I wonder how Mike Pence is feeling about himself right now? On one hand, he can expect more nice presents down the road on the Handmaid's Tale-Shock Corridor tip. But he's surrounded by a bunch of people even crazier and stupider than he is, and it's all spiraling out of control, and he never had any control anyway. Sort of an Admiral Dönitz figure, in a way.
I think Ernest Rohm is a better comparison than Donitz.
I dunno, Rohm really liked to party. I suspect Pence is much more of a furtive-sex-in-airport-bathrooms-followed-by-drinking-himself-into-oblivion-alone-in-his-hotel-room sort of a fellow.
But Dontiz's face was too small for his head.
Mulling over the least worst outcomes from this point. Possibly this: T__p gets bored of being president, starts to watch TV all of the time (and not the news channels), looks for fulfilment mostly by filling his boots, the rest of the time by winding up or ignoring Bannon. Republicans in congress do indeed reliably get the votes to pass crappy legislation ... but the president is watching TV etc. Invisibility of the president leads inexorably to declining poll ratings. Then, 2018 elections arrive.
In PA, the important elections start in 2017. If Wolf gets replaced by a Republican or not enough Democrats win in the senate races, a fair redistricting will be close to impossible.
Rohm really liked to party
But in the end the Party didn't like me.
Mary Douglas is still alive! She's wonderful.
Guardian article/interview about her latest, woefully short, but better than the OP stroking exercise that contained this link.
Uhh, mote-beam, any analysis like in the OP is only useful if you first try really hard to apply it to your own ingroup.
Not that liberals or Democrats ever ever get any pleasure from discomfiting the representatives of their enemies, the Douthats, Brooks, Frums, etc. We're better than that.
"We"? You don't even listen to you.
The idea Chris only talks to white people is pretty gross, he talks to poor people all over the middle of the country including cities like Milwaukee. He's not some sort of crypto white whisperer. At any rate I think dems are far more likely to be able to peel off poor white people rather than rich ones.
I fear that Wolf is going down, Mobes. I think the state GOP did to him what the national GOP did to Obama: enough obstruction, particularly around the budget, to make him look ineffectual. But I haven't been there for six months, so perhaps things have improved. I hope so.
Also if the dems don't fillabuster trumps SC nominee I'm writing in Bernie Sanders on every ballot for federal office for the rest of my life.
27: Morning Consult has him in the bottom quartile of governor approval ratings, at 44%. On the other hand, I've seen him take leadership on the opiate crisis; he's looked impressive to me. So I dunno.
|| This is pretty concerning. Better with sound. |>
1. Perceived harm The guy rtcb links, Chris Arnade, is pretty good on this. Outside the big cities, the US is not doing so well. Being told to leave a place you feel attached to is not the end of the world, but it does kind of suck. Bannon doesn't have to have that feeling personally to understand it and use it to get traffic.
"front row kids" which is a pretty good description of a lot of people here.
Delusional.
Does he define what he means, or is it just vague gesturing at urban professional types who are doing okay, versus rural poverty?
Meh. I read some of the Arnade posts and they sound like basically a polite way of saying that these folks are spiteful assholes. They have genuine problems, sure. So do other people. The difference is that they respond to their problems by fucking up the lives of complete strangers to make themselves feel better. Not everyone with problems does that.
30- Lotta people here brag about their educational achievements. Some even went to good schools. That makes them front row kids.
I follow Arnade, but find him frustrating. Yup, it's true that being poor, screwed over, and uneducated make you an easy mark for racist demagogues, but he's not willing to say, "these super nice people I'm meeting are also racist fuckheads, and that's part of the reason they're still where they are." And Arnade himself does a bit of fetishizing of "lower class" authenticity. I think the front-row kid nonpareil for him is Matt Yglesias, with whom he has glancing twitter spats.
34- He likes to point to the volatility argument and the fact that not all Trump supporters are white, to say that not all Trump supporters are stupid and racist as well.
It doesn't totally work, because the volatility argument is flawed, but they really do have reason to be spiteful.
Plus define "bottom 25%". The poorest 25% of people in the US did not generally vote for Trump. Trump's median voter was well over median wage. Get away from the Idea that Trump is the tribune of the neglected poor: he is not.
As I've said before, it's not shocking rural white people on the margins voted for the person who said he would help them (even if they had real doubts) over the one who said everything was fine, and was the same political party as the guy their living standards declined under.
Arnade's dichotomy between front-row kids and back-row kids is also literally all white. He talks about voters of color in other contexts, but they really don't fit into that structure at all.
By and large, the rich voted for Trump and the poor voted for Clinton, exactly as you might expect. That is the factual starting point for any analysis of the election.
What changed that basic pattern: race and education. Being black, even if you were rich, meant you were probably a Clinton supporter. So did being educated.
36: Such aggregates are deliberately deceptive, concatenating poor blacks in Los Angeles with poor whites in Des Moines.
Trump did show an increase in as asteele says, rural white people on the margins over Romney, while Romney and Clinton did show a marginal increase in middle class and UMC college educated whites.
38- There are black front row kids as well as black back row kids. Arnade mentions black Trump supporters.
38: yes because that thread of his thought is pretty explicitly about people who do or could vote Republican which means white people. I don't want to endorse everything he says, I think his reporting is more interesting than his editorializing.
42: But that's really weird. "Of people who might possibly vote Republican, the ones who do are worse off than the ones who don't." without mentioning that "Of actual voters, the ones who vote Republican are better off than the ones who vote Democratic." It erases the question of what the difference is between people who plausibly might vote Republican from people who are very unlikely to from the discourse.
I'm explaining it badly. Chris' point is large sections of the country have been screwed basically because of intentional policies pursued by and for the "front row" kids. By which I think he basically means professionals/people from rich families, that make 6 or more figures. Some of these left behind "back row" kids ,which exists in all races, but we are only going to talk about the white and rural ones here, because they're the trump voters, are probably reachable by dems if they sold themselves better and at the very least are worth designing polices to help because they need it and their plight is often minimized/ignored in mainstream discourse/media.
I've been getting into this with Emerson on FB, but this:
are probably reachable by dems if they sold themselves better and at the very least are worth designing polices to help because they need it
We're not talking about policies that help poor people generally. Democrats aren't nearly as good as they should be with those, but they're incomparably better than Republicans, and it shows in that poorer voters tend to vote Democratic. Trump voters are not happy, eg, about the ACA.
So we need policies that are specifically targeted to help poor rural Republicans. What were you thinking of? I don't have a lot of ideas. Emerson's take, so far as I can figure it (and if you're around, John, correct me, please), is that it comes down to trade agreements, and in the absence of NAFTA and the like these guys would have manufacturing jobs and wouldn't feel abandoned. This doesn't sound plausible to me -- is there anything else you've got in terms of relieving their plight?
The steel jobs Trump says left because of NAFTA were gone a decade or more before Clinton came to office. The coal mining jobs were mostly gone before Clinton was born.
There are huge subsides for rural areas, farm supports and ethanol and all. Not to mention farmers were big TPP supporters.
There are huge subsides for rural areas, farm supports and ethanol and all.
To what extent are those subsidies for large landowners rather than for the average rural person?
Mostly they go to landowners, especially large ones. But it's not like rural areas are ignored by the government. They go through some considerable effort to get the subsidies the way they are.
Yes, the fight for state governments begins now. Some state senates are so far gone that it's nearly impossible for them to flip Democratic before 2020.
Sadly, the current administration will never allow it, but Puerto Rico finally has a chance at becoming a state this year. Their pro-statehood party just won the last election and they are scheduled to have a yes or no vote on statehood later this year.
I think Naked Capitalism has the right ideas on this stuff. Simple, easily described programs that benefit everyone. $15 minimum wage, Medicare for all, free college, universal pre-k etc.
Puerto Rico finally has a chance at becoming a state this year.
Puerto Ricans think they know everything. If they knew shit they wouldn't be Puerto Ricans.
Those are good policies, and if we could get them through the political situation might be healthier. But do you think promising those policies would attract Trump voters? They seem to hate that kind of thing.
Not all of them not even most of them, but some of the marginal ones who abandoned us. I think simple concrete benefits might even disarm some people's spite and distrust of technocracy.
Minimum wage increases that go to a public vote tend to win with big margins even in conservative states. I think 52 may be on to something.
They have, but those are well below $15/hour.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I think the pipelines and the salary for "exempt status" are important places for Democrats to move on.
God yes on the pipelines. So much has changed since Trump took office that my blog post about DAPL is going to take even longer than it already has, but researching it has been quite eye-opening.
And godamnit Ogged, ANOTHER link to a fucking tweetstorm or whatever the hell it's called? You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
The Ace guy linked in the tweetstorm [sighs, punches self in groin] seems like a sincere asshole.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a basically sound, functioning government that wasn't full of giant assholes?
I'd settle for a sound, functioning government. According to Madison, it's supposed to work even with giant assholes.
Ever since I heard the term "front row people", "Don't Stop Believing" is going through my head.
Of course, because the high-end version of Journey is Fleetwood Mac, Bill Clinton used "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow."
Sorry for the delay, I had to do some work. Here in my own personal rural community people have been moving away we've been shrinking around .5% a year for the last two decades. Unemployment is lower than in the nearest large cities (which is one reason why moving isn't really a solution for people) but most of the jobs around here are shit. The decline since Reagan has mostly been caused by the closure of several factories and the slow closure of a large state mental hospital over the past 3 decades. So the answer I guess is smaller trade deficits, and a larger government employment sector.
On the larger government employment sector -- I'm all for it, but again, don't you think increasing the size of the government is going to be a hard sell to these voters? Isn't that what they explicitly say they hate?
Putting the mental hospitals out in the country away from where most of the population lives isn't (and shouldn't) happen again.
I think hatred of gov jobs is like hatred of taxes on the rich more what the republicans would like you to believe than what is true. I mean they don't hate the prison jobs.
The placement of the hospital here was logical but I don't want to get into it as it would become easy to guess where I live.
That's fine. I just think that the vast majority of those large hospitals were sited with considerations that were reasonable at the time (when patients were expected to stay for decades and country air was considered a cure) but that no longer apply.
I think Yglesias' idea of decentralising a few massive govt. institutions to the Rust Belt is actually a good one. It was an economic truism in Ireland for a long time that a new army barracks was worth more to the local economy than a new factory, because of knock-on effects. Presumably a bunch of civil servants arriving would do the same.
It would probably do the Democratic party good to be seen to be pushing it, even if its chances of success are low.
PS of course decentralisation in Ireland was totally implemented as pork rather than based on existing regional planning.
Same here. Like when Rep. Murtha moved some government offices out to Johnstown, PA, and made defense contractors put offices there. I complained about it at the time (and even more so about Robert Byrd's attempt to revitalize West Virginia by using federal dollars to name every piece of infrastructure after himself). But, it's really a small price to pay.
Maybe, but I don't see MY volunteering to move his own self to Akron.
You don't have to go the full Akron.
76: if it's pork for the rural areas, I can't think of anything better than government-funded hunting. Government funds a week of hunting camp for every high school kid. Instant employment as hunting guides and instructors for all those unemployed coal miners. Massive, barely-concealed bribe for the NRA to bring them back towards being a firearms safety and field sports group, not a handgun lobbying organisation. Huge sop for the pro-gun lobby. Justify it on national defence grounds too - teaching fieldcraft and marksmanship to the soldiers of tomorrow. Toughen up the kids of today (who are all far too soft). Call it the Audie Murphy Plan or something similar.
what was said by others above. Trump killed it among white suburban respectable middle class and UMC types. I started sympathetic to Arnande but I keep getting the feeling that yesterday's rootless cosmopolitans are today's front-row kids.
I think they would be more upset about somebody shooting all of their deer.
76. I proposed that here a year or so ago. Should have copyrighted it.
83: there must be 30 million deer in the US and only 3 million kids finish high school every year. And I doubt most high school kids are going to get one after a week of instruction; I'm not proposing that we make "killing a deer" a graduation requirement.
I'm sure the population will survive.
Yeah. There really are angry rural voters who feel abandoned, but they're both hard to reach (everything that's been suggested seems like a good idea to me, but also like something that would poll terribly among Trump voters. You'd have to pass that stuff with them kicking and screaming against it, and hope they liked it after the fact) and not the bulk of Trump's support at all.
It's not like nobody is shooting the deer now. Right now, except in areas where it isn't safe to hunt (say city parks), they already have to limit the hunt in order to maintain the population.
Hmm. What else could they hunt? Boar? Do you guys have boar? Squirrels?
I've never seen a wild boar, but I'm told they exist (feral, I think). Lots of squirrels. I only ever hunted various birds. Dove, pheasant, quail, little brown thing flying around when I was bored, etc.
I think wild pigs are a thing in CA, but I'm not sure where else. And I actually thought deer were still at pest levels all over. Maybe the overpopulation shelters in the suburbs where it's unsafe to hunt?
I think a better plan would be some kind of CCC 2.0.
90.last: Yes. At least around here.
By "CCC" I mean Civilian Conservation Corps, not Council of Concerned Citizens.
Back in 09 when we were talking about stimulus spending, I was suggesting incredibly labor intensive wilderness restoration projects. Wipe out kudzu! Hunt pythons in the Everglades! And so on.
I would really love to hunt pythons in the Everglades except that I hate humidity.
There was a marvelous decentralisation SNAFU involving where I live recently:
Let there be Government Dept. A; Dept. B. Both have small policy units in Sheffield (in same building).
Senior bureaucrats in Dept. A decide they want to centralise everybody in London because cheaper(1)*
Senior bureaucrats in Dept. B decide they want to devolve as many people as possible to Sheffield because cheaper.
Dept. A offers redundancy terms which anybody nearing retirement or good enough to be confident of getting another job takes.
Dept. B starts recruiting massively to replace people who don't want to leave London.
Everybody (nearly) left in Dept. A applies for and gets jobs in Dept. B.
*** BREXIT! ***
New government transfers responsibilities of Dept A. Sheffield unit to Dept. B.
There's nobody left to do the work. (Further massive recruitment exercise ensues.)
* Idle incompetent tossers who can't be arsed to get on a train once a month.
Pittsburgh Parks have a thing where they get kids (and adults) to try to cull a plant called garlic mustard from the parks. Once you learn what it looks like, you see it everywhere. I really had no idea that such a common bit of low-level green stuff was both edible and invasive.
91, 94: that would be better on practical grounds but not on the far more important symbolic grounds.
They could just teach the city kids to shoot stop signs like the rural kids.
Well, pythons? Killing pythons is butch, right?
There's nothing more butch than going out into a swamp to search for a big snake.
100: true. Killing pythons would be acceptable. Especially in a swing state.
97: It really doesn't taste bad, but it sure is everywhere.
I never ate it because we didn't have any dressing.
Killing pythons is butch, right?
On the scale of butchness, killing pythons with your bare hands > killing them with a machete > shooting them.
Guaranteed jobs for all, city and country. Some can be hunting classes, some your classic ditch-digging for heaps of public works projects (even if that requires somewhat less efficient labor-intensive construction methods), some residential housing construction, and a bunch of chair jobs for those disabled, older, or just not strong-backed. Not sure what the latter is, maybe database entry/cleaning/archival, something useful.
97
The great thing about pulling garlic mustard is that if you do it it comes back the next year, but less of it, and eventually it really is gone. Actual visible progress! On the other hand a lot of invasive species experts say we should give up on it. Wusses.
OT, but film recommendations: "Raw" (French vet student becomes cannibal; at least one person fainted in the audience) and "The Apology" (heartbreaking documentary about the "comfort women" campaign). Both definitely worth a look.
Perhaps our governor is thinking along your lines. He just legalized semi-auto weapons for hunting in PA.
109 I've heard good things about "Raw"
The one with Eddie Murphy looks hugely homophobic in retrospect.
It looked homophobic back then too.
If you knew the concept existed, sure.
Boar? Do you guys have boar?
That'd be a great candidate. In a lot of states they're already a pest animal and can be hunted year round, no limits. Supposedly they're such a problem in certain parts of TX that the counties are paying X amount of dollars for each set of ears or whatever you bring in as proof.
There are lots and lots of pig ears around. How do they tell the difference?
Even domestic pigs scare me. I still remember being in a pen with all the sows that were not yet knocked up. There were hundreds of them and we were trying to fix something and they kept looking like they were trying to decide whether to trample us. Believe me, I waited until I was sure I wouldn't have to go back in there before I shouted that I would eat their children.
Googling around, looks like at least one county is doing it with the tails.
That'd be a great candidate.
Fantastic eating too. Better than venison.
And, as a side benefit, your campaign slogan for 2020 just leaps out.
BOOKER 2020
KILL THE PIGS
Since the conversation has turned to film recommendations and mortal fear, I have been needing to share how much I liked this little short... documentary? -- I'm not sure what to call this -- "10 Meter Tower" at the NYtimes. Just video of random people freaking out at the edge of a high dive platform, but inexplicably charming. To me, anyway.
Film recommendations: The Family Fang. Wonderful.
I'm still wondering how they tell the feral hogs from the slaughterhouse ones when it comes to the bounty. Maybe they figure if you come in with a truck reading "Bob Evans" that's full of ears and tails, they don't give you the bounty.
121 is really, really good. Or rather the thing it links to is really, really good. The comment itself is, you know, workmanlike. Gets the message across. A worthy contribution. Nothing wrong with it.
The problem with deer hunting in the suburbs isn't just safety. People get attached, especially after the deer learn to use the crosswalks.
124: If I fall apart trying to live up to your commenting standards, you're going to feel guilty.
(But seriously, the link IS so great, isn't it? I really loved the one with the guy who had just gone trying to get his mate to jump with him.)
126: it's negging.
The couple at the start who have that sort of Liebestod conversation are also great. And the curly-haired woman in the sleeved top who almost backs down but then no! back up on to the platform and off she goes! Well done!