I am relentless with these numbered lists, lately.

Democrats appear condescending if you're already primed to react to everything that way.

Does anyone remember Brad Pitt in True Romance, in a fairly small role as a stoner, and when the bad guys leave after interrogating him, he picks up his honeybear bong and mutters to himself in a helpless whine, "Don't condescend me, man, I'll kill you."?
His delivery is so, so great. I love that line.

My personal theory is that white people are broken. We can worry about the different types of white working class people, but white people with money voted for Trump in huge numbers.

I get that that middle and upper middle class white people are probably not most of the ones issuing death threats to election officials and the like (at least not the ones who can get caught at it), but voting Republican still correlates positively with money.

I'm uncomfortable with saying that everyone is a victim of greedy corporations and feckless politicians except the hillbillies who are just lazy.

2: and the bad guy is played by James Gandolfini! I love that scene.

5: That's because discrimination against hillbillies is illegal in Ohio.

I think Trump's talent is getting shitheads to vote.

8: Yeah, pretty much.

Flip!

The blacks who moved to Chicago to flee a segregated South certainly didn't pine for or return to Mississippi.

Is this really true, though? When I read The Warmth of Other Suns, which is a very large and immersive book, it seemed like visits home were a really big deal, though less frequent and more fraught, especially if your family was near a railroad line or not too far south. And kinship ties among people who had migrated north or west were also a big deal. And why wouldn't you pine for home-cooked food and your family and the landscape you grew up with? You wouldn't pine for Jim Crow and intense segregation and sharecropping and violence, but you'd probably pine for something.

I think the difference they're trying to get at is the if you left the Black Belt, you wouldn't be holding up the white south as a terrific place morally and culturally, the home of truly authentic values. Whatever you pined for, it would always be in the context of flight and discrimination.

(If you haven't read The Warmth of Other Suns, you really should. It's extremely readable and goes very fast for such a large book and it's extremely informative. Also, unless you literally read from dawn to dusk on a whole weekend, you're going to take some time to finish it. I found that reading it over a couple of weeks was really good because it allowed me more time to absorb the feelings of the book.)

Serious question: Does The Warmth of Other Suns have a light enough touch that it isn't too stressful to read? Otherwise I would save it for a vacation or something to read.

You save stressful stuff for vacation?

12: Yes, I think it does. The stories within the book are not too long individually, and the overall effect comes from their gradual accumulation.

http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/26/the-warmth-of-other-suns-by-isabel-wilkerson/

8: I heard something like that on a podcast. These people had given up on voting, because they saw both Republicans and Democrats as slaves to "globalization" (aka global Jewry).

13: No, but on vacations I phrase my questions on Unfogged to imply that I'll read meaningful books as soon as I'm back at work.

I do wish someone would ask that nitwit Betsy Devos Heebie's #1. There's an article in WashPost today about her decrying student loan forgiveness as socialism. Explain to her that the socialism we're hoping for is to take every cent from her and her even more evil brother and then to send them to a public school where they will learn a useful trade, such as how to contort their bodies so that they can be used to fill potholes. Or failing that, being lunch ladies in the school cafeteria.

I don't know the links between the general white working class and the hillbillies are that new, at least in the rural areas around here. The Italians mined coal too, and the ones I know best (kids of the generation that mined) openly refer to friends as hillbillies.

Why didn't the Beverly Hillbillies go with the name Hillbillionaires?

Did billionaires even exist back then?

floccinaucihillibillification noun
1. The act of estimating someone to be a no-account Appalachian-American.

+ni

Sure.

12: Yes. It tracks a handful of individual migrants and tells their stories against the backdrop of the larger sociological trends, and IIRC, it actually introduces each of the main characters by telling you about their lives in the present(ish) day, when Wilkerson first met them. So even though there is a lot of sad and difficult material in the book, it's not exactly stressful, in the sense that you kind of know from the start what happens to each of the individual players.

I really, really loved this book. It's so great. I remember wishing there was an edition with maps and photos, though. Photos especially.

The subculture story is interesting, but I wonder how many people this "hillbilly diaspora" actually accounts for in the Midwest, compared to white people of other origins. It might not be that electorally significant.

Another vote for it not being too stressful to read. It's incredibly vivid and concrete about daily experience, which is not exclusively harrowing, so you're largely just caught up in the subjects' lives.

Speaking of Wilkerson, I am halfway through Caste and its very good and readable (no surprise!) and also very, very relevant to this discussion. It would probably make a good reading group subject.

I will read the link at some point. I will note that if you look at swing maps for Presidential elections, the swath of "greater" Appalachia runs in arc from Oklahoma up through upstate New York has been trending R pretty consistently every election. (Against the tide in 2004 to 2008 is particularly stark, although it only extended up to SW PA at that point.) 2016 is when it really took fire in the whole upper Midwest.

The industrial midwestern WWC and the hillbilly exiles should both be strong union demographics, but I think Democratic failures to support unionism over the past 50 years or so has really reduced the salience there. Ohio didn't have to be red.

Have Democrats really failed to support unionism, or have they just lost state elections? Republicans made Union-busting a priority and won elections and so they got to do it.

Democrats had control of the Presidency, the House and a 60 vote majority of the Senate and the Employee Free Choice Act never even came up for a vote.

Trump makes upper middle class white men in the suburbs feel as if they are kin with the hypothetical working class even as they shop at Whole Foods. When the suburbs vote for Trump, he wins. When they don't (see, Pittsburgh's South Hills, DelCo), he doesn't.

There's something here that's hard to spell out, but it's the idea that Real America means the white working class, and you can be part of it even if you're not working class and are indeed the overeducated cosmopolitan that the working class is supposed to despise. Like, does my ultra conservative sister with her degree, NoVA life, and six-figure salary really think she'd get along fine in coal country?

This is hard for me to think through without it coming back to my own family history but a decent portion of my family stopped speaking to me when I went away to college, and grad school made it worse... but these are people who... are also college grads? Suburbanites?

Speaking of Wilkerson, I am halfway through Caste and its very good and readable (no surprise!) and also very, very relevant to this discussion. It would probably make a good reading group subject.

I heard an interview with her and she was very interesting.

Is there sufficient interest in a reading group to read Caste?

Took forever for the South Hills to get a Whole Foods. Local politics, not lack of demand.

Anyway, I know that none of my siblings voted for Trump. I don't know how many have a six figure salary.

I guess I could ask now that I've sold out and they won't think I'm trying to borrow money.

I would read Caste.

12: I found The Warmth of Other Suns pretty harrowing in places - the parts where people had to flee secretly because they would literally be beaten and brought back if they tried to leave town to go north, the long drive across the West where the guy can't stop because it's basically not safe (and this in the early sixties IIRC), some other stuff. But more solemn and somber than too hard to read during a regular day.

I would read you people writing about Caste.

I ordered Caste, but that is not the same as reading it.

I ordered Caste, but that is not the same as reading it.

I'm not convinced, so I'm repeating myself.

29: I'm not sure how one can look at the choice of the Democratic party elite since the early 90's to support foreign trade agreements that facilitate the transfer of jobs to union-hostile countries without even a sham attempt to provide for labor protections as anything other than a slap in the face to domestic labor unions.

At their best, industrial labor unions represented a real counterweight to the power of capital. At their worst, they represented the exclusionary, often bigoted self-interests of their members. As the Democratic elite cozied up with capital, perhaps necessarily, perhaps out of simple expedience, it's not surprising that with no one acting for their labor interests any longer, that the rust belt folk would turn to the party encouraging their xenophobic and bigoted interests.

I'm down to read Caste. Relatedly but sort of offtopic, does anyone here have any opinion on the relative terribleness of ordering books from Barnes and Noble? There are a lot of books I need to get in time for the capitalist gift-giving holiday, and my last pickup order from my local independent bookstore took six weeks to complete. (I understand that they're understaffed and also that they need the support, but I also gotta get on with my life.) I'm trying my best not to use Amazon, especially for book-buying. I could walk in to a bookstore and shop, but yesterday my county exceeded 7500 positive tests and the world is too scary to go outside. Is B&N a reasonable compromise?

I get my books hand-copied by an independent scribe working from Bhutan, or on my Kindle. But I'm sure B&N is fine.

Eight years in office, Obama never walked a picket line. He said he would, but he didn't.

42: You might try Bookshop.

AIHSB, imo the 90s Democratic party's drift capital-ward was a direct consequence of union members turning away from Dem candidates in 1980 and 1984, over other issues. (Abortion and racism most significantly, I think.) Dems had to go where the voters are, because the alternative was continued Republican rule. The Biden coalition stretched from the DSA to the Lincoln Project, but there's a significant segment of the wwc that just can't/won't be in the same coalition as blm: folks disagree about whether some particular set of policy proposals will be enough to get them to join. I've come to think that this really is a fool's errand: those people can't be bought, they can't be reasoned with, we just have to outnumber them when/where we can.

Obviously, pro-union policies should be pursued whenever and wherever. But no one should fool themselves that some hypothetical set of policies is going to overcome fundamental dedication to white supremacy etc.

I'll throw up a post about a possible book group for Caste.

46. I share Charley's view, and I'll add that when you talk about a 60-seat Democratic majority, the vast majority of those 60 seats are held by people who are quite friendly to unions. But if you have one firm dissenter, you can get nothing done because not a single Republican senator will support a pro-union measure.

Certainly the failure to kill the filibuster could more plausibly be attributed to the Democratic party. But I bet today the vast majority of Dem senators would be willing to get rid of it. Even the longtime holdout independent Bernie Sanders has come around on that issue.

Obama shoulda walked a picket line, though.

I share Charley's view, and I'll add that when you talk about a 60-seat Democratic majority, the vast majority of those 60 seats are held by people who are quite friendly to unions. But if you have one firm dissenter, you can get nothing done because not a single Republican senator will support a pro-union measure.

I guess I don't feel like the Democrats utter happlessness with respect the the filibuster really provides much reason to cut them any slack. Accepting a 60 vote threshold was a choice that they made, repeatedly, and as a result they failed to deliver for key constituency.

If we had had a not-moribund union movement over the ensuing decade, a lot of elections would have turned out differently.

46: Most pro- union policies are great, but right now the police union in MA is actively fighting a lot of reforms, putting it in opposition to BLM.

Oh look, a book distribution and labor thread. I am here to inform you that everything sucks. (I cannot personally confirm this account, and one of the ppl accused -- almost as an afterthought all the way at the end -- is a friend of a close friend of mine, so I'm not broadcasting it on social media. But how could anyone read it and be at all surprised? I am so frustrated and angry -- guess I'm surprised that I'm this angry.)

when you talk about a 60-seat Democratic majority, the vast majority of those 60 seats are held by people who are quite friendly to unions. But if you have one firm dissenter, you can get nothing done because not a single Republican senator will support a pro-union measure.

*cough* Blanche Lincoln *cough*

FTR the great 60 vote Dem senate ran from late September 2009 to early February 2010. They had no idea how short it would be: who could have guessed that Massachusetts voters would give Ted Kennedy's seat to a guy whose claim to fame was driving around in a pick up. Oh wait, there was a black man in the White House -- so everyone should have expected disaster.

As for getting rid of the filibuster, I'd say there are two points to make. First, having been in the minority for enough of the post-1980 period, you can see why Democrats would be worried about this. There's an obvious structural advantage for the Republicans now that rural areas and the South have gone all in. Will we ever see even a Daschle, much less a McGovern? A Lincoln or a Pryor? It'll be a hell of a turn of the wheel. The other thing, though, is that procedurally, getting rid of the filibuster, even with 60 votes, requires an affirmative act of bad faith. It was a stretch for the coalition of decent functional government to get pushed far enough to do that, and I think it's right that we're there now. But hardly surprising that we weren't there in 2009 or 2013 or whenever. Merrick Garland was really the straw that broke that back, I think, from my distant perch.

Maybe we're not actually there -- but I'm not sure I'd take Sen. Manchin's responses to hypotheticals as immutable.

I don't know about everybody else, but I'm certainly in a very different mindset that I was in 2009 or 2013.

I'm not so much angry at their failure to the Card Check past the filibuster as I am by their failure to even make a show of trying. Some demonstration that they didn't take the labor constituency for granted might have gone a long way, but, you know, neoliberals are going to neoliberal. I think its fair to say that Democratic leadership of that era genuinely didn't view labor as a particularly important element of the coalition.

And in the end, all it cost was the blue wall in 2016.

Losing high-profile policy battles isn't the political winner that a lot of people think it is.

Merrick Garland was really the straw that broke that back

I'm not sure I'd take Sen. Manchin's responses to hypotheticals as immutable.

Similarly, Bernie was inevitably going to be pushed in the direction of abolishing the filibuster. Garland wasn't enough to get him to commit to it publicly, but I think it's fair to say that Garland was an important factor in the eventual result.

the relative terribleness of ordering books from Barnes and Noble?

I recommend Powells.

It is always an incredible coincidence people always think that the best policies politically are the ones they support on the merits.

As a white lower middle class type in Appalachia I feel like I should say something here, but I don't have much I want to say, and even less people want to hear.

Most people I have talked to about politics in person think the Democratic party, particularly in WV, is very corrupt.

I think white supremacy is on the come back, not that it ever went away, really. I think white people are going to like the prospect of nonwhites in political control of the country even less than they like the current window dressing.

If card check or an increase in the minimum wage had happened during that brief window, it might have helped poor people feel like they had something to gain from voting Dem.

I'm pretty sad that Medicare for All didn't become the standard position in the Democratic party. I think some people here assured me that was happening. I don't think any Senators other than Bernie and Liz support it. Similarly that would have helped working people in Appalachia afford health care. They might have been grateful I don't know.

I'm convinced of the advantages of supporting Dems, but I have a hard time coming up with strong simple arguments for why others should.

I feel that the selection of Neera Tanden for OMB was a calculated insult to Bernie and his supporters, but really only an insult, the injury has already been done.

60.last Tanden is an unhinged shithead on Twitter but good on policy. I'll take it.

61 And if they end up withdrawing her nomination a month from now, she'll have drawn a lot of fire that would otherwise have gone to others.

And it really is delicious that all those Republicans who never seem to have ever seen any of Trump's tweets are all wrapped up in NT having been mean on twitter.

I thought this was an ok article on poverty as it was in better times.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/11/couch-surfing-the-waves-of-american-poverty

Losing high-profile policy battles isn't the political winner that a lot of people think it is.

I'm not saying it is, but not fighting those battles is worse. As Elizabeth Warren says, the best option is to win, the second best is to loose with plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.

Its important to show the institutions that you rely on for votes that you will spend some blood and teeth on their priorities. If you don't, it undermines the ability of those institutions to sell their membership on reasons to vote for you.

Tanden seemed like an uncharacteristically provocative choice, so I do wonder if there's an element of strategy involved. Though I guess the disadvantage of always ignoring Twitter is that you don't know who has a polarizing reputation on Twitter.

||

Ishmael sees a Kracken:

A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

|>

Alexandra Petri on insufficiently clear slogans.

Is New Hampshire doing it better?

Live Free and Spread Disease

It's on the license plates, so you know they mean it. (That's why the Supreme Court made Pennsylvania drop the "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania" from our plates.)

Its better than their other motto, "Pennsylvania. Fuck you!"

"You've got a friend in Pennsylvania"

I always thought that was meant to remind New Jersey residents to patronize their Philly drug dealer.

When you care enough to send the very best.

"It'sylvannia Pennsylvania!" would be worse.

Our town's initials are S.M. and when the youth soccer league was changing its name, I lobbied really hard* for "Smoccer" but to no avail.

*to Jammies, who was on the board

"VisitPA.com" is the worst. It's like telling the world we're just now catching on to the idea that the internet can be used for commercial purposes.

I signed a petition to name an NHL team the Mad Cows. Since it failed, I've given up on hockey all together.

Anyway, let me warn you about how annoying it is to be married to the person running the kiddie soccer league. It's such a time suck and your basement gets filled with all kinds of shit.

Joe Biden won a campaign with the motto "Text MALARKY to 303330" so, could be worse.

Oh, no worries. We don't have a basement, and Jammies running the baseball league is even worse.

77: My favorite store name ever:
1-800-Luggage.com

There's megachurch on I-35 towards San Antonio called " Tree Of Life" with a tiny awkward ".org" squeezed in the edge of the sign. I love it. It always reminds me of "I'm not George Bluth Sr! I'mOscar.com!"

Oh yay!! I found it: https://goo.gl/maps/3b4HLjXzZiPp7RZh8

The American Legion here had to cancel their Fish Fry Friday event because some people got covid.

82: Right across the interstate from "Animal World and Snake Farm". Is it a snake-handling church?

82. I come from a Catholic tradition, and that church name seems delightfully pagan to me.

In Dallas there's a "True Church of Christ" church. I'm surprised they didn't go all the way and call it "The True Church of Christ, Fuck You!" church.

"Tree of Life" is the name of the local synagogue that had the terrorist attack two years ago.

As a white lower middle class type in Appalachia I feel like I should say something here, but I don't have much I want to say, and even less people want to hear.

As a white middle class type from near Appalachia(1) I feel like I should have something to say in these periodic discussions, but I'm baffled. Democrats keep carrying Vermont by 20 points, and if they lose at the state level they often perform behind a third-party candidate that's further to the left(2). It seems unfair to assume that this is because Vermont doesn't have mainly enough black people to energize the hardcore racists and scare the moderates into siding with them, but nothing else comes to mind. Unfair or not, it's also maybe not productive. I don't see how to export Vermont's culture or whatever to the other problematic states. (Put weed in Ben & Jerry's!)

(1) "Near Appalachia": most maps seem to put Vermont outside "Appalachia", even though the Appalachian Mountains run through the state.

(2) "Often perform behind": besides the example of Sanders, that happened in the 2008 gubernatorial election.

AIHSB, imo the 90s Democratic party's drift capital-ward was a direct consequence of union members turning away from Dem candidates in 1980 and 1984, over other issues. (Abortion and racism most significantly, I think.) Dems had to go where the voters are, because the alternative was continued Republican rule.
White people turned away from the Democratic party, union members less so. Declining union membership has been an electoral disaster for Democrats, but is counted as a win by the capital and neoliberal technocrats who've dominated the party since.

I think Bernie is Sui generis. If WV had had someone like him he'd win elections there too. WV has very few black people as well. It doesn't seem to prevent racism there though. The problem in WV is the Democrats we have are untrustworthy.