I haven't finished but I would like to register a complaint about Eric Cantor being mentioned as an example of "moderates" having difficulty holding on in the political world.
1: Yes. "Moderate" isn't one of the officially recognized euphemisms for "Jew".
Heh. I didn't describe Cantor himself as "moderate." I admit I could have phrased the reference to him better. I still think he's relevant here.
He's certainly relevant. I think his loss is a great part of the reason why Trump is able to do whatever he wants with no Congressional push-back or oversight.
On religion, it is perhaps noteworthy that the only "big tent" quality left in the Republican Party is that it contains both very prominent Jewish people and more blatant antisemitism than was ever acceptable in either party since 1941.
We really have sorted ourselves, "we" in this case applying to me and my wife and in-laws if nothing else.
Something that I put my finger on and was enraged by (am I enraged too easily? Perhaps.) The 'we' the book is addressed to is only white people. That happens subtly in a lot of books, but in this one, it makes the thesis very strange.
A white Republican who's moved into a county that's 90% white, 90% Republican, and 90% evangelical has sorted themselves into a highly similar likeminded demographically uniform community. I don't know your neighborhood details, and maybe your block is all white, all one religion, and all Democratic. But if you back out to the county level, or even a lot smaller than the county level, I'd bet that you've got a whole lot of religions and ethnicities in walking distance. The only sense in which you've moved into a uniform community is that it's heavily Democratic, and the white part of the community is heavily not-Evangelical Christian.
This is not a remotely symmetrical sorting process. Half the white people in the country have sorted themselves away from the other half of the white people and all the POC. (over-simplified, but kind of.) Moving into a diverse community is not sorting yourself away from people who aren't like you, it's only sorting yourself away from people who can't tolerate people who aren't like them.
A white Republican who's moved into a county that's 90% white, 90% Republican, and 90% evangelical has sorted themselves into a highly similar likeminded demographically uniform community.
Most of these (90+% white) counties are more like 65% Republican, 35% Democratic though. You have to go to rural West Virginia or Idaho to see Republicans concentrated as much as Democrats are in any number of urban locations.
They may be less politically uniform, but they're a lot more demographically uniform. And the thesis of the book is that the demographic uniformity is what drives the political uniformity, which is only true on one side.
I can look at at Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and hear her say two words and be pretty sure that I'll be happy with how she votes on almost everything. That's demographically profiling her as someone I'm going to agree with politically, but it's not profiling her as like me.
Spitballing. The vast spaces in most red states talk about agricultural products as their main export, but mostly also they produce a disproportionate number of youngish white people and have been sending them into cities for a couple hundred years now. It sounds like this applies to myself and Cyrus. Before the suburbs and exurbs, this would have been a continuing source of demographic mixing. But now, you can, if you'd like, work in Pittsburgh while living some place almost as white* as where I was born.
* 99%, per Wikipedia
One thing that just struck me as an idea, but I'm going to share because even though it could be wrong or just dumb pop-sociology, is that in the past 30-40 years or so we've seen the rise of a coherent "rural" "white" identity in a way that didn't exist before, and that this is largely a cultural identity that extends into exurbs and small towns and plenty of places that aren't strictly rural. Sure there have always been small towns and farmers. But when they were more firmly-grounded as a majority, these were themselves largely defined by diversity -- regional, ethnic (often within different white-european groups, but still), cultural, etc. The idea that a Polish-Catholic farmer in rural Michigan had much in common with a small town baptist in Alabama and a snowmobile-driving exurbanite part-time oil worker in Alaska would have seemed ridiculous. But in the past 40 years or so there's been much more of a coherent "rural white" identity, centered largely around country music, guns and the NRA, religion (but only to some extent, with the fact of being religious at all more important than the precise denomination), trips to Wal-Mart, etc. Everyone has cable or satellite and so gets to feel part of this imagined rural community, which of course is linked in a lot of ways to the Republican party but not just driven by that. That's not really a "sort" so much as it is a cultural smoothing of a lot of small town/rural area diversity into one (IMO kinda gross) whole of rural white person identity.
Thanks for the writeup Cyrus.
11: To what extent does that identity exist among actually rural white people? I can but that being held by all the Republican suburbanites, by they aren't actually rural, probably haven't been for 2 generations.
This might be Texas, but there's a whole lot of city (suburbs? exurbs? newish outskirt developments with different town names than the city of which they're metropolitanning) where a whole lot of the residents identify with the rural farmer and country music mythology despite not literally living in the country.
My guess is that faux-country outnumbers actual-country.
12.2 - How the fuck would I know? The only time I'm even in the vicinity of rural white people is on the way to pleasant vacation spots.
But the point was the idea of the "country white" as a national ethos and identity, including a lot of (maybe mostly) people who are not actually rural, and how relatively new that is.
There's rural, and there's literal functional farmers. My ex-laws live in a rural area, but aren't employed in agriculture, and I'd call them part of Halford's unified rural identity. Actual farmers might be less so?
I don't usually talk politics around rural white people, but I'm very certain that faux-country outnumbers actual-country. And that actual-country, unless it is being paid, is a bit nervous and resentful when faux-country goes deer hunting.
I don't county rural people not employed in agriculture as faux-country unless they just have a vacation home there or something. If you need to earn a living in that kind of a place, you can't help but be affected by the concerns of the people employed in ag.
16: Weird. Almost as if an ethno-nationalist movement were constructing a myth of a past golden age.
19: Agreed. My in-law who does highway repair in the summer and hunts coyotes in the winter is certainly country, even though he doesn't till the land.
If he's willing to drive some coyotes into a west coast urban neighborhood with a feral cat problem I can talk $$ with him.
First you get the coyote, then you get the money, then you get the women.
I think he usually turns them into pelts (and hence the money, and the fur-clad women). Probably less lucrative but less illegal than introducing an invasive species into California--I think our coyotes are larger and nastier than yours.
23: But the roadrunner still eludes you.
I think some of them in the rural areas are coywolves.
19 is also how I'm sorting. Rural is rural. Faux-country is suburban or exurban.
I don't know how to classify the ranchland suburbs of, say, Amarillo or all the people that live with 15 minutes of cities under 100K. Faux-real-country.
That's probably for the best.
Because I'm not at all suffering from writer's block, I didn't just learn that the Coyote Ugly Saloon was launched into national notice in an article written by a former bartender who went on the write "Eat, Pray, Love."
When coywolves run down a deer they just nip at it teasingly and slink off with sidelong glances.
11 made me think of the confederate flags I saw on trucks when I lived in Ohio. I'm pretty sure the drivers were not newcomers from the South.
I wonder if there's any good information on when confederate flags started to be an identity symbol for people who never lived in confederate states? Did all the Northern and Western racists adopt it during the civil rights movement in solidarity with segregationists, or did it happen earlier or later?
27: But a bit of research indicates that I am likely wrong.
One source: So besides being about 10% dog, the average northeastern coyote is also about 13% eastern wolf and 13% western gray wolf.
Another (a good overview): Coyotes in the Northeast are mostly (60%-84%) coyote, with lesser amounts of wolf (8%-25%) and dog (8%-11%). Start moving south or east and this mixture slowly changes. Virginia animals average more dog than wolf (85%:2%:13% coyote:wolf:dog) while coyotes from the Deep South had just a dash of wolf and dog genes mixed in (91%:4%:5% coyote:wolf:dog). Tests show that there are no animals that are just coyote and wolf (that is, a coywolf), and some eastern coyotes that have almost no wolf at all.
My ears pricked up at the bit on the Californian Congressmember. No idea which district you're talking about, but is it fully comparable with intervening redistricting?
7: Fair point. I'm pretty sure my neighborhood is still mostly African-American. DC is gentrifying but the process is far from complete. My commonality with most of my neighbors is political, not demographic.
12
11: To what extent does that identity exist among actually rural white people? I can but that being held by all the Republican suburbanites, by they aren't actually rural, probably haven't been for 2 generations.
In Vermont they're less religious and country music isn't the only thing on the radio, but big chunks of it genuinely are rural and agricultural by any reasonable definition, I heard more country music there than here, and hunting is big. Haven't set foot in the state in two years now, but my parents still spend half the year there, and in my twenties I worked at a newspaper. TL;DR: my impressions are out of date but not totally anecdotal.
Sort of on-topic: town-by-town results for Vermont in the 2016 presidential election
About America's willingness to discuss politics, Bishop says that Americans are unusually unlikely to discuss politics with people holding an opposing view.
Compared to people in other countries? That's interesting, I never thought of that.
Is this a recent development? Like how now 2/3 of partisans would be unhappy with their child marrying someone from the opposite political party, where it was 1/4 fifty years ago?
Between the 2016 election and Thanksgiving, I asked my aunt if her long-term boyfriend, who I knew to be a Republican, was a Trump supporter, to try to preempt or steer around difficulties when we all got together. She felt my merely asking the question was intrusive ranging to offensive, and said, among other indignancies, that she didn't know who he voted for and vice versa. (She may have been uncomfortably avoiding the issue in her own household, I don't know.)
36:The Northeast Kingdom went for Trump. I wonder whats the deal there. Is it a matter of being the ruralist of the rural?
39: Yes, and probably being less educated, because that was such a strong predictor in 2016. Although Vermont as a whole is 7th in percentage with bachelor's degrees and 6th in advanced degrees, which is a lot higher than I would have guessed.
I saw an explanation that whites in rural New England being much less religious than rural South or even Midwest, resisted Republicans for a while BECAUSE of Republicans' obsession with demagogic bible-thumping. Until the irreligious Trump came along.
39: Yes, as far as I know. When was Hamilton Lovecraft seen last? IIRC he's from Vermont.
I kept getting into silly variations of this in relation to our recent congressional primary. The seeming front runner, a consumer rights lawyer from Billings ran as the unambiguous leftist, on the theory that a true leftist could awake the hidden army of disaffected non-voters. The moderate, let's be fact-based and reach across the aisle guy, I kept being told, couldn't possibly win because he lives in Missoula. Widely regarded out of state as the home of leftist hippies. Wait, what, says I. Sorry, them's the rules, says everyone else.
Both of them got beat by the woman from Bozeman who had experience in the legislature.
I'm all for gleaning morale from AOC's win, but it's been a long primary year, and there have been a lot of dogs that didn't bark, EG, highly centrist incumbents that could have been repudiated and very much weren't. Feinstein, O'Malley...
Yes, but leftist candidates that lose primaries -- due to perfidy by Democrats! regular Democratic voters are the worst! -- are great candidates in general elections, because ordinary voters know what leftist candidates stand for, and ordinary Democrats offer the people nothing. Also, no swing voters exist, even though somewhere around 8-15% of voters switched their presidential party votes between 2012 and 2016, meaning that the absolute most important thing in electoral politics is turning out people on the left, who are massive and legion. Therefore there is only one true way to electoral success which is to run candidates with whom I agree about everything.
Sorry, I get at least one "internet political discussion had made me crazy" comment per week.
Thanks for the writeup Cyrus.
Seconded. I appreciate you ambivalent reaction to the book, and I think you did a good job of communicating both sides of that.
I wonder if there's any good information on when confederate flags started to be an identity symbol for people who never lived in confederate states? Did all the Northern and Western racists adopt it during the civil rights movement in solidarity with segregationists, or did it happen earlier or later?
I do not remember Confederate flags being a thing when I was a kid in rural SW Washington. I think it happened later, along with the growth of gun-nut batshittery, but my memory isn't particularly great and I could be completely wrong.
37: Like how now 2/3 of partisans would be unhappy with their child marrying someone from the opposite political party, where it was 1/4 fifty years ago?
The documentary had the tidbit that Fred Rogers was a lifelong Republican. So fuck the rotten bastard. Died in 2003; I assume he would have had some reservations by now?
I do not remember Confederate flags being a thing when I was a kid in rural SW Washington.
Yeah, my intuition [based on memory of driving to pleasant vacation spots, what do I know] is that you would be more likely to see a Confederate flag in, for example, upstate New York in 1995 than in, say, 1980. And then less likely again after that as it got marked as more purely racist, but that the idea of a similar national culture of rural people to which you'd belong in, say upstate NY just kept growing and growing.
I moved to Michigan in 1995 and saw more confederate flags than I was used to seeing in North Florida.
Which was a nontrivial amount. They weren't rare.
I assume he would have had some reservations by now?
My dad switched, not sure if it was as far back as 2003, but certainly before Obama. His high school yearbook made jokes about him supporting Dewey.
"Knock knock!"
"Who's there?"
"Dewey supporter!"
"Dewey supporter who?"
"23 Skidoo!"
At least it rhymes.
51: Current era has not improved the situation. I have to restrain myself from keying a lot of trucks.
3, 12, 47: Thanks, everyone. FWIW, I didn't comment in most of the previous threads, but I appreciated them, particularly Thorn's. It seems like we felt the same way about this for opposite reasons, or something.
"Moving into a diverse community is not sorting yourself away from people who aren't like you, it's only sorting yourself away from people who can't tolerate people who aren't like them."
No. It's moving to where the cheapest housing is in the cities where you can get the best job. And the locals hate you, because you are displacing them and destroying the culture of their neighborhood, but they are powerless to stop you.
https://www.theroot.com/how-gentrification-destroys-black-voting-power-1793746386
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-boyle-heights-gentrification-coffee-20170621-story.html
57 makes a lot of good points but it doesn't make the next step, which is to come up with any solution.
The problem, apparently, is that formerly-black inner cities are seeing a lot of young white hipsters moving into them (They're not sending their best. They're sending sandwich makers, baristas, app developers, beard trimmers. And some of them, I assume, are good people. But they're destroying our wonderful culture).
And this is hurting the Democrats by weakening their core vote (you know how those young white urban hipsters in multi-racial districts are all rock-solid Trump supporters).
This phenomenon is being made worse because lots of black families are moving out of the inner cities into "formerly lilywhite suburbs that were once off-limits to people of color" where their votes don't do any good.
Here are three modest proposals to solve this problem: two top-down, which may appeal to supporters of central government action, and one bottom-up for people who prefer community action.
1. Repeal the Civil Rights Act and the Community Reinvestment Act.
This would mainly address the second part of the problem. Black families would not be moving to the suburbs if they couldn't find anywhere to live there. If suburban communities were once again allowed to explicitly block non-white residents, and banks were again allowed to refuse to lend to non-white mortgage borrowers, the problem would solve itself; the black vote wouldn't be diluting itself by moving because it wouldn't have anywhere else to go. (One should be careful not to get carried away and repeal the Voting Rights Act as well; that would undermine the whole point of the exercise.)
2. Introduce a Group Areas Act.
1) above would not be a complete answer; it would stop black voters buying houses where they weren't supposed to, but it wouldn't stop them renting where they weren't supposed to. Nor would it completely stop white Trump-voting hipsters moving in; the residents of black communities lack the economic power necessary to make them really feel unwelcome.
Fortunately, we can adopt a solution which was very successful elsewhere: the South African "pass laws", which would simply make it illegal for black voters to move into majority white districts, and vice versa. Note that, following the introduction of the pass laws, South Africa has a majority-black government and is now on its fourth black president in a row - well ahead of the US record - and also has several vibrant, flourishing, politically mobilised and above all monoracial black communities.
3. Community action to reverse gentrification.
Both 1 and 2 are extremely practical as legislative solutions, and would certainly receive plenty of support from across the aisle; the Attorney-General would very likely speak in support, for example.
But if you prefer a non-legislative solution, simply ask: what is driving gentrification now? Why didn't it happen thirty or forty years ago? After all, there were annoying young white people looking for cheap apartments forty years ago, and there were cheap apartments in majority-black areas of the inner cities forty years ago.
The answer is of course that thirty or forty years ago they generally didn't want to live in the inner cities, because the inner cities had very high rates of violent crime. This is no longer true, thanks to improved social policy, better policing and the reduction in environmental lead; but it could be again.
Bringing the murder rate in, say, Manhattan back up to the level where it would successfully discourage gentrification would involve killing an estimated additional 300-500 residents per year; the negative effect on voter registration would be minimal and easily outweighed by the benefits of the preservation of the historical Democratic core vote, especially as the victims would tend to be young men (who are unlikely to be registered voters anyway).
Again, we can learn from examples abroad; the communities of the Falls and Shankhill Roads in Belfast have been unchanged for generations and are highly robust, politically active and culturally monolithic, and this is maintained through a level of murder that is low even by the standards of the modern lead-free US.
7: this is roughly what I said on the previous Big Sort thread. it's not that all the groups have separated out into homogenous blocks, it's that there is one block of homogeneity and one block of diversity - one group has self-segregated by making itself intolerable to all the others. I don't know if yer man has failed to perceive this because the group is Republicans or whether he is well aware of this but can't get past a respectability barrier to say so.
11 is on point, too. It's strictly false to imagine that you have to be a farmer to be rural - farmers use a lot of other trades and businesses! - but it is interesting that a unified nationwide (and even international) identity has emerged based on a kit of products and tropes.
It's strictly false to imagine that you have to be a farmer to be rural - farmers use a lot of other trades and businesses!
In fact farmers are a very small minority even of the rural population. There are 3.2 million farmers in the US, according to USDA, and the US rural population includes 47 million adults - so farmers are about 1% of the US and 7% of the rural US.
one group has self-segregated by making itself intolerable to all the others
Intolerant of, surely, rather than intolerable to? They're moving out not being kicked out.
Aren't most republican areas losing population not gaining it? Intolerable is right. A main indicator for voting for Trump among white people is never having moved away from where you grew up.
Republican politics is high school bullying by other means.
62: ah, I see what you mean. Non-Trump voters are leaving the Trump country where they grew up because they find Trump voters intolerable.
61.2: Both. The Weiler book I quoted in previous threads showed rising left-wing hostility to the right, esp after GWB. That was written in 2008, so presumably it's a lot chillier now.
I read something pretty interesting yesterday, and look forward to more depth on this as time goes on: the primary driver of the Obama to Trump voting shift among those shifting wasn't (a) Trump's nationalism or (b) Sanders' critique of Clinton, but rather (c) Obama's embrace of BLM.
I saw that also. I found it convincing. Lots of people are only not racist until somebody mentions race.
Yes, I saw that too and it felt intuitively right (for whatever that's worth, not much). Some nontrivial chunk of white people thought that by voting for Obama they'd finally put racism in the past as something they'd ever have to worry about or be confronted with, and were pissed off when he failed to deliver.
I always figured something would happen because of the conflict between the NRA's "Let's all carry guns everywhere" and the fact that there's no way that could happen generally because even unarmed black men and boys are shot for "having a weapon". I was wrong because I figured the NRA would at least pretend to be racially neutral.
65
Got a link? That's dumbfounding. Not that I doubt you, the daily news is dumbfounding. Or maybe "dumbfounding" is the wrong word; 66-68 make sense. But still, the idea that a significant number of people would support a black man as president until he supported BLM...
That's not the way opinion works. It's that they supported a black man as president until an issue came along that activated their "black vs. white" mental switch. Voting for Obama hadn't changed a single opinion of theirs, it just happened because others switches were turned on during the campaign.
With the right stimulus, I'd bet at least 11% of Trump voters would have sex with a dead crow.
I declare it crows having sex with dead crows day on Unfogged. Let's exercise our gratitude muscles and celebrate that article. Frankly nothing else matters.
71: I saw this before I saw the other thread. And misread "crow" as "cow". This seemed odd even by Moby standards.
68: The NRA not standing up for Philando Castile was the big tell. They aren't a "gun rights" group, whatever that means, they're a white supremacist group.
65, 69: If we're thinking about the same tweet, it was one noting a lot of the switches happened in 2014 and 2015, exactly the time of BLM coming to the fore. So plausible, but pretty circumstantial, unless there was more I didn't click through to see.
75: Yes, there was a series of tweets and retweets that went from Yglesias to Bouie to Nikole Hannah Jones saying this - but it all seemed to start from a Pew Survey on attitudes toward the police.
Nikole Hannah Jones wrote an article about this right after the election.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/20/magazine/donald-trumps-america-iowa-race.html
75 Right, that's why I say I'm looking forward to more indepth exploration as to whether this is what really happened.
74 is completely correct. We always knew that all talk of principle on the right side was a sham; I still kind of surprised how blatant they are about showing it, when it would be pretty easy to keep up the sham. Maybe this is the defining attribute of our present moment: the right no longer feels the need to pretend, which leaves folks like the editors of the NYT hanging out in the breeze, having treated those 'principles' seriously for all those years.
Of course, they still default to pretending that the right has principles, but keep getting called on it, and shown to have been "fooled" again by the right's ready rejection of any mildly negative consequence of their principles.
Lots of people have been fooled by this. There's that guy who paid over amillion to shield Trump from the truth of his getting a girlfriend to have an abortion, to protect him from Xtian wrath, when we now know that the Xtians wouldn't give two shits so long as he hates foreigners and people of color.
Relevant to several subthreads:
At the end of the 2018 fiscal year in June, 3,273 Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates were active in Tennessee, a number 72 percent higher than at the end of the 2015 fiscal year when the display of Confederate flags was thrust into national debate.