Somewhat disturbingly, I have to largely agree with Ross Douthat on the likeliest explanation for why working class whites (and only working class whites) are seeing an increase in their mortality rate in this country. Although, unsurprisingly, I’d put the emphasis less on losing their religion and family structures and more on something else that Douthat identified.
Noting that religious practice has fallen faster recently among less-educated whites than among less-educated blacks and Hispanics, [Andrew Cherlin and Brad Wilcox’s] paper argues that white social institutions, blue-collar as well as white-collar, have long reflected a “bourgeois moral logic” that binds employment, churchgoing, the nuclear family and upward mobility.
But in an era of stagnating wages, family breakdown, and social dislocation, this logic no longer seems to make as much sense. The result is a mounting feeling of what the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher calls white “dispossession” — a sense of promises broken, a feeling that what you were supposed to have has been denied to you. (The Donald Trump phenomenon, Dreher notes, feeds off precisely this anxiety.)
For obvious historical reasons, though, Hispanic and (especially) black communities have cultivated a different set of expectations, a different model of community and family (more extended and matriarchal), a different view of success and the American story writ large.
These distinctives come with their own set of problems, particularly where family structure and fatherhood are concerned. But they may create a kind of resilience, a capacity for dealing with stagnation and disappointment (and elite indifference or hostility), which many working-class white Americans did not necessarily expect to ever need.
In this context, the word “resilience” is doing a lot of work. But it’s the right word.
I think the best analogy I’ve seen for this is that white Americans have been playing the game on the lowest difficulty setting. Like a video game that allows you to start off as a beginner and advance to expert, people who have never had to deal with the worst the economy can bring are not as well prepared to deal with ever-increasing levels of adversity.
What we’re seeing is a lot of folks who are just giving up and turning to alcoholism and opioids because they don’t have experience with playing the game on the expert level.
Now, maybe that’s insulting to white folks, and that’s not my intention. But the black community has already experienced high unemployment, drug epidemics, mass incarceration, and the sensation that the system is rigged and just biased against them. That’s the default setting of their lives, and always has been in this country.
So, yeah, partly, white folks have to up their game. But they also need to adjust their expectations. Douthat seems to get this:
Maybe sustained growth, full employment and a welfare state that’s friendlier to work and family can help revive that nexus. Or maybe working-class white America needs to adapt culturally, in various ways, to this era of relative stagnation, and learn from the resilience of communities that are used to struggling in the shadow of elite neglect.
Or maybe it will take a little bit of both, more money and new paths to resilience alike, to make some of the unhappiest white lives feel like they matter once again.
The first thing they need to figure out is that they aren’t going to get to play this game on the beginner setting anymore and that yelling at the better players is no substitute for watching and learning from what they do.
The second thing they need to figure out is that their lives still matter and that they can change things for the better by joining with the folks who’ve been getting screwed from the beginning.
Now, it’s been frustrating to watch white and black progressives argue about priorities in this election, and both sides need to learn. White progressives need to better understand that these class issues are so ingrained in our minority communities that they simply don’t seem all that pressing. It’s like complaining that there are too many alien invaders on Level 12 of your video game. It’s like complaining about potholes or bad schools or things that never change. Those things are always a concern, but they’re different in type from being denied the right to vote or getting gunned down by the police. Basic civil rights are what’s on the minds of minority voters, and white progressives need to respect that.
Black progressives, however, need to understand that something is changing. Where once they had few natural allies on class issues and structural biases in the system, they now have a cohort of working class whites who should be welcomed into the tent.
That’s not easy when a lot of those working class whites are still kicking and screaming and acting out their frustration with racist acts and statements. But, with your eyes open, you can see that whites are having their own crack epidemic with heroin and oxycontins. They’re beginning to support sentencing and prison reform. They’re as fed up with the post-Citizens United campaign finance system as anyone. They’re pissed off at Wall Street.
I don’t know if Hillary can bring these whites into the fold and I don’t know if Bernie can bring blacks into his fold, but between them they have the basic idea right.
Perhaps what’s needed here is for blacks and whites to give permission to their politicians to go after each other’s votes. And this is just a suggestion, but I’m guessing that the folks who’ve been playing the game of life on the harder difficulty setting will need to be the folks who offer the first olive branch.
It should surprise no one if the minority community figures this out first.
Great piece. As you know, I’ve been playing the game on a higher setting as well for the past 4 years. As someone who worked in the nonprofit human services field before that, I never made a lot of money AND I worked with low-income people (of all races) that had ALWAYS played the game at the highest difficulty level. I am not surprised that so many are turning to booze and opioids. In fact, my facebook feed is filled with people on the edge.
But yeah, this is pretty much spot-on.
You are exactly right. As the middle class has hollowed out, blue-collar white people have been getting knocked to down to the kind of experience that minorities deal with.
On an odd note, though, we always have to take a shot at Fox News and AM radio. If you are a down and out guy who can’t seem to get even close to the nice deal your daddy had at the factory that closed, you feel pretty bad. Now you watch Fox News or listen to Mark Levin and you feel much worse.
There is a usually unstated idea in the economics profession that:
You can certainly argue with #1 – though the global Ginnie number has actually decreased, and certainly the Chinese have been able to significantly improve their standard of living in a way that would have been impossible without globalization. Yes – I am aware of the counter examples – see Mexico and Nafta.
In any event #2 is rarely expressed, but a common sentiment shared from left to right among economists. This was always nonsense, and in any event government policy came nowhere close to effectuating the “winners will compensate the losers” assumption I heard repeated over and over again in grad school.
The point is this isn’t a surprise. What is a surprise is that the white working class hasn’t reacted by demanding more government intervention.
A cornerstone of the white working class identity is self-reliance. When trouble comes there is a tendency to move right,not left. That self-reliance is in fact impossible in a global economy seems not to register.
The South as a permanent internal colony. One could also view the intermountain West that way as well.
Martin.
No. Fuck this. I categorically reject this bullshit.
You know why? Here in Kentucky, a 92% white state, where the heroin and meth and painkiller epidemic has been wrecking the goddamn place for years, where the victims have overwhelmingly been working class white families, Democrats like Gov. Steve Beshear stepped up and said “Here is help. We have the money to help you and your families get healthy and stay healthy. We are going to invest in education and broadband and job training to help you, working-class white Kentucky.”
And working-class white Kentucky said “Fuck you, I ain’t takin’ no handout from no ni-CLANG! president. I’d rather die than take help from one-a them blacks that took our coal jobs.”
And last week they voted in Matt Bevin, who ran specifically on taking that help away from them. Jack Conway lost 80+ counties in Kentucky that voted for Steve Beshear in 2011. Every one of those counties got at least some help from Medicaid expansion and treatment anyway, and 400,000 people are going to lose that help now.
Matt Bevin ran on blaming Obama and unions and progressives and won by nearly 10 points.
And you’re telling me as a black Kentuckian, I have to come crawling to these racist country fucksticks in order to save the country?
Fuck that, Martin. It’s not happening. And the more we try to “win back the working class white vote” the more we lose everyone else.
Well, that’s kind of half the problem right there. Isn’t it?
Maybe the smaller half, but still an essential piece of the puzzle that we need but aren’t getting.
Well, no Jim Webbs anyway. If that’s necessary it’s better to lose. From the political standpoint, what’s needed is a formula like Bill Clinton’s, which recognized those hillbillies as a part of the oppressed class and spoke directly to them, without (most of the time anyway) denying or minimizing the unique oppression of African Americans. It didn’t get him a majority of their votes, but enough of them, or their better educated wives, to take Kentucky twice.
And for white congressional candidates to simply not contradict the message (the way Grimes and Conway have done in the recent elections), even if it means that they themselves have to lose, because the other way they’re going to lose for sure.
As far as I can tell to the extent there’s any valuable lesson in this awful story it’s something black people figured out around 1960 (when John Kennedy was trying to win West Virginia and support civil rights legislation at the same time), and have stuck to ever since. It’s time for the other olive branch now.
…what’s needed is a formula like Bill Clinton’s, which recognized those hillbillies as a part of the oppressed class…
Is that what those “hillbillies” heard? Or was it Clinton’s ease with throwing AAs under the bus and employing a few racist dog whistles when speaking to exclusively white audiences? Except for the 2008 primary contest, Bill has long gotten away with that.
Bill Clinton didn’t need to do anything other than just to show up and smile.
While 2008 and 2012 Obama did much better with whites outside the South than Kerry, Gore, and Clinton he absolutely tanked with Appalachian whites. There’s no way to explain a 20-30 point drop between Kerry and Obama other than naked racism.
This isn’t to say that the Democratic Party should keep trying to soothe the racial neuroses of Appalachia/the South. Because the advantages Obama had over Kerry et. al in the Northeast, Midwest, Rockies, and West Coast WRT whites more than trump having pink districts go dark red in WV and MO. I just want people, especially whites, to know just how far the rabbit hole goes.
Purplish states like AR, KY, MO, TN, and WV flipped in 2000 (Georgia in 1996). Last time I checked, Gore was white. So, this pre-dates Obama and what is easily labeled as the rise of white resentment. Interpret it anyway you want, but just as I see that Carter set it up for the rise of the politization of evangelicals, I view Clinton as having played a role in the GOP shift in the above states to the GOP.
Yes, the Clinton administration was the beginning of the end of Democratic hopes in Appalachia, but there’s no doubt that Obama accelerated the trend.
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/electionate/110039/the-gop-has-problems-white-voters-too
Obama gets a full pass on this from me. He’s not responsible for the color of his skin and he did nothing in the 2008 campaign to stoke rational resentment. In fact he did an excellent job of presenting himself as without any special allegiance to any demographic group which was effective because it’s true. He was raised in a multi-cultural/multi-colored environment but his principal caretakers were white. He attended private elite and mostly white schools.
It was team Clinton first and team McCain/Palin second that injected the color of Obama’s skin in the race. That stoked racism. This time team Clinton is doing something similar and getting away with it because AA voters have for some reason fallen for her again.
Thank you for saying this Zandar.
As an African American man I find it highly offensive that we’re somehow required to reach out to people who don’t get it because they don’t want to get it. I mean now that things are happening to the White Working Class that have been happening to everybody else now we have to extend them an olive branch? Whatever man.
Well, the Democratic Party should try to find a way to get their votes without kissing Barry Goldwater and George Wallace’s ass somehow. It’s doable; Obama won a plurality of whites <45 years old in 2008. Hell, he won whites 18-29 years old 54-44 that election.
The white youth vote is my biggest data-point for my ‘bastards, not bigots’ argument. And repeating the success of 2008 is crucial for the Democratic Party going forward.
Amen, KennyM
There’s plenty of evidence that the White Working Class is accepting the olive branch that the Clinton-Obama coalition is extending — despite the fact that the Democratic Party is more socially liberal post-Obama than it was during the 90s. You just have to look outside the South.
The overclass’s greatest trick was to get Democrats to believe that the Southern White Working Class is indistinguishable from the White Working Class. Because once this gets established, neither Democrats nor Republicans have any reason to believe that there’s a way to win their votes in places like Ohio and New Jersey and California.
You’re stuck on one part of what I wrote.
It’s not about what you are “required” to do. It’s about what you now have a new opportunity to do.
If we get stuck in a battle over which politician can respect us more and talk to our top priorities the best, we’ll stay in the minority in the House forever and may well lose the presidency.
One thing you’re right about is that we can wait forever for the white working class to be the first to reach out their hand. I’m talking about understanding that aggressive outreach to this hostile and wounded band of voters isn’t neglect of your interests but a necessary way of creating a coalition big enough to replicate New Deal-like progress, or any legislative progress at all.
Frankly, I don’t know how much evidence we could possibly need to learn that we will not will base turnout elections in midterm years or win back state legislatures or the House with our current strategy.
Probably after four years of gridlock, economic disillusionment, and warhawkery causes the Democratic Party to lose its advantage with Latinos, Asians, and white youth.
Oh, yeah, Latinos and Asians! The sector that doesn’t seem to enter into the thoughts of black OR white progressives* except as a vague and inscrutable force of support that leftists just happened to pick up despite decades of parity and indifference. Listen: the only reason why the Democratic Party has even a chance right now is because of their vote. However, there’s no reason to suspect that they’ll stick with the Democratic Party indefinitely, especially if the Republican Party pulls its head out of its ass.
* And let’s be even more specific: I mean Baby Boomer and Silent Generation-era black and white progressives. They still seem to want to fight the battles of the 60s-70s (they certainly cast the terms of their political struggles through the lens of this era) and are completely blind to how much the country has changed since then.
I wonder what the pie-fight commentariat will say if Sanders wins the Democratic nomination off of the backs of Latinos and Asians despite tanking with the black vote. You know, like Clinton almost did in 2008. They’ll probably just stare like their brain hit a bus read error and continue to obsess over their anachronistic black leftist/white leftist split.
I know you mean well Booman but here’s my question. How is it that Black folks can get it, Latino folks can get it, Asians, Native Americans.. Everyone else gets it from the jump but White Working Class voters got to have some special messaging and then only after things that have been happening to everybody else start happening to them?
You talk about opportunities but the opportunities have been there for White Working Class voter to “Get It” since the Reagan era. And they haven’t because they don’t want to. But keep chasing that unicorn. I think it’s a lost cause.
Do they, now? I believe that they (or at least the former two groups), like most humans, don’t really grok the philosophy of leftism and instead are going to the party that promises to oppress them the least in the short term.
I don’t take that George W. Bush winning 45% of the Latino vote in 2004 as an anomaly, but a warning. That can easily be the new normal if the Democratic Party fucks up administrating and the GOP abandons racial supremacy — or at least racial supremacy that doesn’t hastily write in Latinos and Asians as whites.
Is this really so hard to believe? Humans are selfish and greedy and short-sighted. It’s not a white thing; you see this ridiculous farce of the second-to-bottoms economically depriving themselves in order to have the fig leaf of cultural supremacy playing out in Japan, India, and Brasil.
This is why I am extremely alarmed at how Democrats, both centrists and leftists, talk about the non-black racial minority vote as if it’s something they can take for granted.
I see what you did there. But it’s cool. My original point stands.
My point is that casting the terms of our current political struggles in terms of ‘enlightened, clear-eyed racial minorities and white leftists’ and ‘bigoted, short-sighted conservative whites’ is misguided. The reality, IMO, is that the vast majority of humans and thus voters are selfish and myopic. Latinos, blacks, and Asians don’t ‘get it’ because they have some kind of special insight into their real interests that the white working class doesn’t; as a member of the pitiful and emotionally stunted homo sapiens, they stochastically prize cultural supremacy over egalitarianism just as much as anyone else. It’s just that no party is currently credibly offering to pander to their tribal neuroses so they appear to be voting their ‘real’ self-interest.
But the dynamics of American cultural supremacy can change reeeeeally quickly. Hence the fact that the Democratic Party better have a damn good backup plan the day that gays/Latinos/Asians/even blacks (hey, happened briefly during the Philippine War) decide to culturally identify with the dominators.
the opportunities have been there for White Working Class voter to “Get It” since the Reagan era.
Since 1865.
“A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” White privilege is like the bird in hand. And they don’t trust anyone that promises the two in the bush because they do get that they’ve been lied to for decades.
strategy that will increase mid-term turnout signiicantly.
Mid-term turnout has been the same since 1912. The gap between mid-term and presidential turnout has been constant since 1832.
You can increase turnout generally, which will increase turnout in both presidential and off year elections, but mid-term turnout has been plus of minus 3 points of 40 since before the start of World War I.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/24/voter-turnout-always-drops-off-for-midterm-elections
-but-why/
Not over the bigots. There’s pretty much no way to reach out to them.
However, there is a large contingent of whites who, while completely indifferent to the struggles of people outside of their tribe, don’t buy into out-and-out WASP cultural supremacy. The kind of people, while perfectly happy to feast on the fruits of white privilege, don’t prize it above all other concerns. These people are selfish and greedy and myopic, but not bigots.
My theory is that they exist in politically relevant numbers but don’t show up in voting margins because they feel that neither party in the long run will improve their situation. This isn’t a ‘both parties are the same!’ argument, this is a ‘I love apples and oranges equally; one politician is promising me two oranges and one apple, the other two apples and one orange’ argument. If all you care about is you and your family’s personal situation and that whiteness is nothing more than a convenient fiction, there’s little net difference between a white nationalist party that promises you cultural domination at the cost of economic prosperity and an egalitarian party that promises you economic prosperity at the cost of racial privilege.
My evidence for this hypothesis is the Democratic Party’s inexplicable rising strength with whites OUTSIDE the South and Appalachia. Compare the demographics and then the exit poll margins of the Midwest and Chesapeake; despite the fact that the Republican Party has been increasingly beating the drums of racial privilege since Clinton, they’re slipping badly in this region. If you agree with the hypothesis that non-Southern whites are becoming less racist (note that I said less racist, not non-racist) over time, by generational turnover if nothing else, then the ‘selfish bastards, not bigots’ argument makes a lot more sense.
The Democratic Party should not try to reach out to bigots. It should, for various reasons, not try to water down its platform of egalitarianism and multiculturalism even a little bit for electoral advantage. However, it should be making more naked appeals to economic self-interest. And not in an abstract way, but in a direct ‘I will cut taxes on the non-rich and fund a jobs program targeting poorer states’ way.
TELL IT, ZANDAR!!
TELL IT!!!
I heard that Grimes, who was re-elected as Secretary of State, got thousands more votes than Conway. And so did Beshear’s son as AG candidate. Like 50 thousand or so more. Seems either KY has a lot of cross-party voters, or something is very fishy.
I found this interesting:
The abstract term with which that is hidden from sight is “The Protestant Ethic”. It is a totalitarian society that integrates plutocrats as the pillars of economics, politics, and culture (including the religious party of culture). It was what The Fundamentals of the Christian Faith was intended to restore at the turn of the 20th Century and why it was so heavily endowed by Union Oil Company executives. It is what the free-enterprise-In-God-We-Trust reaffirmation against “godless Communism” after World War II and during the civil rights era was all about. It is what Citizens United and Hobby Lobby decisions seek to protect. And it isn’t working for the 99%, regardless of color. And like in the 1930s, it visibly is not working. But unlike the 1930s, political organization and rebellion have been totally shut down by anti-communist ideology that has suppressed labor unions, a paranoia about homeland security that sees peaceful protest as terrorism and deploys immediate detention, and the purchasing and shutting down of ordinary and electoral forms of political discourse. Of course, white anger turns inchoate or is guided into racist tropes. If whites understood the agency they have in unity with minorities, the changes would come rapidly.
Throttled rage becomes depression and pain and addiction and all sorts of other issues. Richard Bolles in What Color Is Your Parachute used to have a chart that showed the uptick in suicide, crime, divorce, drug addiction, and so on for each 1% increase in the marquee unemployment rate. All of those are mitigated by social contacts in church, family, friends, co-workers, former co-workers–exactly what the “bowling alone” work-all-the-time-and-then-shop society that white formerly middle class lacks. And with the internet, anger can become identity.
Unlike with minorities, the white version of the Protestant Ethic overemphasizes individualism and personal responsibility in a way that hides the effects of social policies and structural features. That is why conservative politics has become so vapid and devoid of reality. It is emotional honey for the raging bears.
I very much want to see Sanders and Clinton run neck-and-neck through most of the primaries and resist the temptation to go negative on each other for this reason. But it seems too many consultants don’t know the difference between “contrast” and “trash”, a “winning is the only thing” category error.
You’ve not noticed those olive branches? They’ve been there for well over 50 years. Almost continuously. Part of institutional racism propagated by the media and white politicians is diminishing those olive branches and postulating an aggression from minorities that does not exist in reality and if it appeared would trigger a state of emergency. Non-violent protests in Ferguson triggered a state of emergency. And there are enough white people who are entrapped in the magistrate court shake-down that they should be allies. And there are white people being gunned down by cops too.
White people have to accept the olive branch, and there are institutional pressures working to prevent that from happening. Getting high on your own supply is not just a metaphor when you are talking about Rush Limbaugh and likely there are other “professional white people” in the same situation.
The situation with white angst is that it prefers to resolve itself as fascism, even Nazism, than as socialism. Unity with the powerful with the illusion that that will protect ones’ position. It is that that is no longer happening; the sooner Democratic politicians point out that reality and that not only are the powerful not protecting white people, they are taking them for fools.
It is the Donald Trumps of the world who are laughing at working people, not progressive advocates. Amirite? Well, there’s one thing that must be fixed. Having some actual working people in the movement that seeks the interest of working people.
This is an action item for white people. We have to figure out how to deal with our own relatives, friends, co-workers, neighbors.
Not as long as “dealing with them” involves coddling their racism. Look, only African-American voters have saved this country from complete disaster. Nothing else is as important as motivating them to turn out and fighting any attempts to prevent them from voting. We owe them big time, and we need them desperately.
It most emphatically should not mean coddling their racism. It should mean the sort of fusion politics that showed up briefly in the late 1930s when there were instances of desegregated unions seeking to organize factories (and getting shut down by the state home guards).
This is “gene sink” in action, Booman. You can see it is devolved ethnic and socio-cultural neighborhoods all over the U.S.
A group forms around some commonality of interests…newly arrived immigrants, a common industry that provides income, a shared religion, etc…often all simultaneously. The group with that shared commonality occupies a town or neighborhood. Thousands of people, sometimes more. It breeds. It grows. It climbs the ladder of economic opportunity. After a generation or two, the most talented people begin to leave. They get a better education and better paying jobs. They marry each other as well. The ones w/less talent stay in their system. Generation after generation the brain drain continues. The talent drain. Several generations later the neighborhood or town has reached a gene sink level. The genetic material available has devolved to the point where whatever it was that they were doing to make a living is adversely affected. Also they cannot adjust well to changes in that work culture because the whole IQ level of the system has been lowered. So has been its moral IQ as well. The societal foundations that kept it afloat…often church-oriented…begin to sink. And down, down, down it goes.
Fairly short-term survival of the fittest took care of this problem for eons. Devolved groups simply died out. But not now. Now they linger on, getting stupider and stupider and stupider. And there we have the devolved section of the U.S. white working class. Held in place way longer than it should have been by white privilege, it is finally coming to a massive cul de sac. Dinosaurs headed for the tarpits. In a panic, it has turned on its supposed oppressors any which way it can.
Any stupid which way. Bet on it. From bashing with beer mugs to bashing with Trump and every other scared-as-shit move it can make. Bet on that as well.
Sorry, but there it is.
Evolution is as natural a form of energy as is gravity. There is no long-term evolutionary stasis; what doesn’t go up must come down. It’s going to be a nasty journey, too. This isn’t just some local neighborhood that can be gentrified into respectability by simply raising the rents and chasing the gene sinkers down the road into an available backwater where they will peacefully die out, it’s a group comprised of millions upon millions of people. It is wll-armed; it is dumb angry and it is being manipulated for profit by huge corporate entities.
Buckle up.
It’s gonna be a rough ride.
Watch.
AG
Might be wise to take a course in current understanding of genetics and evolution before going down this well-worn path.
I trust a lifetime of observation more than anything from academia that might contradict that lifetime, Tarheel. Really. I literally bet my life on it…medically…quite recently and here I still am, living and observing.
Thriving, actually.
Yes, I know…you might say that this is exactly what Carson and other fundamentalists are saying.
But…I didn’t get mine out of a book or a religious tradition. I have lived in some of those gene sinks and…truth be told…I escaped one myself as a young man.
I am sure that the official “…current understanding of genetics and evolution…” will look as ridiculous to our offspring 100 years from now as does the so-called scientific orthodoxy of 1915 to us.
Bet on it.
I am.
Later…
AG
Genes are always an excuse from dealing with culture and behavior and other things that can actually be changed over time. The ambitious ones who leave are not necessarily the best adapted to the location. And most small communities have experienced narrowing horizons over the past 40 years. Unlike the the previous 15 years.
You do realize you sound like Ben Carson.
But I am not Ben Carson. He is a religionist…a Seventh Day Adventist. I am not.
I think that science has become a religion. We are encouraged to “believe” it by the media, even though plentiful evidence indicates that whatever dogma it comes to are soon contradicted by other dogma.
I neither believe nor do I disbelieve in various religions. I trust none of them. I come to my own conclusions. See my sig for another take on the same idea.
AG
well, that’s my point. your reasoning is identical to Ben Carson’s. toss out any community/ guild vetted info, rely on your own beliefs based on your own experience. so his come from one context, yours from another? same methodology, same flawed methodology.
I think that the so-called “scientific” method is flawed when it is skewed towards desired results rather than used as it was supposed to be used. This has been the same for centuries. When used well, the results often contradict the current societal dogma. So it goes. And so it has gone. Check out the bad treatment of any number of brilliant scientists by the cultures in which they lived for all you need to know on that account. Give me “scientific” results that are not so skewed as to be unbelievable to anyone with an ounce of independent sense and I will consider them. The so-called “scientific” world has given us a food supply and medical system that is absolutely poisonous on the face of it. Another branch of it…all from the same corporate-owned and controlled academic system…tells us that “the polls” show this or that or the other thing. The U.S. population swallows it whole. I do not.
Mainstream, corporate-owned “science” does not tell us anything about UFOs. Thousands upon thousands of people have seen and heard things that pretty much guarantee we are being visited…and have been visited…by creatures way further advanced than are we. “POPPYCOCK!!!” shouts science. Publicly, at least. Don’t want to alarm the marks.
“Science” says that nuclear energy is clean energy and that there is little or no danger from its use. Were Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima not enough evidence of the falsity of that statement? They were sufficient evidence for any rational human being no matter what “science” might say, only very few people who live under the sway of mass media remain rational.
This goes on and on. Cicero nailed it:
I live by that creed.
Bet on it.
We have been publicly lied to…bald-faced lies…so often by this corporate-owned system that I now take nothing that it says as truth. Nothing. Especially anything that my osn observations contradict.
You wanna keep lapping it up?
Fine.
You’ve got a lot of company.
So that goes as well.
See ya at the end of the race.
AG
There is practically no resemblance between the scientific method that I use in my own work (geophysics) and that which Mr Gilroy describes here.
That’s true, but I will say that AG’s basic idea has at least some merit. He’s out of his depth trying to explain it biologically, but still…
We really do have hollowed out communities in this country where the brightest and most enterprising people have been systematically leaving for a few generations now. It’s a side effect of the loss of a solid and widespread manufacturing base.
The time scale doesn’t support an evolutionary explanation for this, but it doesn’t really have to for it to be an astute observation. We have communities that have been brain drained, and it’s showing.
Well then, I guess Europeans countries should welcome the ME refugees and the US should welcome the Latin American migrants because the smartest people leave their homes for greener pastures and the dumb ones stay put and produce more like themselves.
Not buying either “brain drain” or “brain sink.” It’s multi-factorial and in the US one of the factors is what Chris Hedges has described as Sacrifice Zones.
You write:
Yes. Indeed they…and we…should. I escaped a sort of suburban/post-urban ethnic ghetto in the mid-’60s. We called the South Shore of Long Island “Brooklyn East” because so many 2nd/3rd generation Irish, Italian and Jewish Brooklynites moved there after WWII. It in turn became a gene sink even more quickly than had the ethnic neighborhoods from which it developed. The smart ones moved on once again; the less gifted stayed and became the classic L.I. Republican dummies who supported people like Senator Al Dumamato and Preznit Ronald McReagan.
I think that the Central/South/Caribbean-American population of the U.S. is going to turn out to be what saves this country from itself. i also think that the ex-slave, African-American community is what saved the U.S. from itself during WW II.
We won that war because we could swing, Marie. We swung…and laughed (credit the Jews who produced so much comedy throughout the Depression and beyond)…our way to victory. The Hispanic culture in the U.S. is so healthy on so many levels!!! It is a working culture…as were those of the ethnic groups from the great migrations of the late 19th/early 20th centuries…and it is a very strong familial culture as well.
I dunno about what is happening in Europe. The militarily enforced economic imperialism of the previous 100+ years may have ruined that culture forever…driven it back into a fundamentalist stone age.
We shall see.
However…here is what I see happening here.
Like I said…we shall see.
Won’t we.
You know where my bet lies.
Where is yours?
AG
Yes, if one hasn’t, and Arthur I include you, one should take a look at Stephen J Gould’s refutation of Murray’s The Bell Curve, which I happened to hear him give in person at a day long discussion of The Bell Curve to which my science colleagues invited me. Anyway, the issue is how much is learned and how much is genetic/ instinct. with the human the preponderance of brain activity is learned, with animals the preponderance is genetic. Gilroy’s effect of flight from neighborhoods affects the social infrastructure not the genetics. And I have confidence in Stephen J Gould’s facility with science, in which I also have confidence.
here’s one link on Gould’s arguments, there are many
https:/prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/gould
Have long admired Stephen J Gould and wished that he had been able to live longer.
“The Bell Curve” is crap statistics based on deeply flawed administration and reports of IQ tests, most of which have serious shortcomings for many demographic groups.
It is “Carsonism” to throw out science just because one thinks ppl who purport to use it [and actually do not, e.g. the climate denialists] argue cr#p, just as I also do not throw out religion just because some ppl misuse it [but to each his own as far as religion as far as discussion goes here since almost no one agrees with me I won’t spend time on the value of religion].
Like this?
This is a recurring dream in American history, but white racism has always, always trumped even the glimmers of any recognition among lower-class whites that they have vital interests in common with people of color. I’d like to think it will be different this time, but I doubt it very much.
That is because the plutocrats have always invested large amounts of money into keeping racism alive. Just look at how much wingnut welfare is devoted to this today.
When it is dealt with, it is a matter of whites waking up to the how they are really being ripped off by those financing the racist tropes and propaganda.
How to counterbalance that well-financed propaganda is the practical problem. The great hope for the Democratic Party is that the bully pulpit can counter-balance the Great Wurlitzer. Or that an actual grassroots movement can undercut the propaganda with personal relationships that amount to resistance. There is some evidence that that was beginning to work in the mid-1970s, which made Reagan’s victory necessary for the status quo.
You folks ever hear of Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJUqcjJIzHU
Think about it.
Written 3 years ago, John Scalzi’s post on the difficulty setting for straight white males is well worth reading:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
You know I disagree with you.
I disagree with your premise.
I disagree with any Democrat even trying to coddle these people, who routinely vote against their own economic self-interest.
They do it, time and time again…
Yet, folks like you, keep on chasing the unicorn.
They just did it again, last week in Kentucky.
it wasn’t a matter of turnout in Kentucky. It’s because the same White folks that you want to chase and coddle…voted against their own interest.
And, to that, I have no sympathy, and I say phuck ’em.
They want to cling to the Whiteness.
They really do.
So, let them.
SO, go ahead and waste the resources on them if you want to in 2016.
Fool’s errand.
It’s an errand.
If we want to ever control the House of Representatives again, and if we want to do anything about the opioid epidemic, the election financing system, the tax code, climate change, civil rights, or any progressive priority requiring legislation, it’s an errand someone will have to carry out and succeed in carrying out.
What I’m doing here is giving one side of this debate credit for being able to figure this out.
I think the House arguement overlooks the resource imbalance at the state level. The dems don’t have enough to face Koch money everywhere its deployed.
Is Koch money really that important? Trump and Carson and 2012 Obama are showing us that malaise + money rarely beats enthusiasm + poverty.
Koch money is important if you pretend it’s not in the mix and go about doing the same old same old. It is Democratic strategy, tactics, and message that puts it at the disadvantage of being outspent. Too many unforced errors on the Democratic side, beginning with clumsily corrupt politicians.
Well, elided social liberalism + economic centrism + plutocratic money was a winning formula (for a generous definition of winning) back in the 90s. But as usual when talking about the Democratic Party centrists and leftists, they always seem to want to refight battles of the past rather than look to the future.
Well, that might be unfair to them. Victory disease is common to all political parties. It even upended Churchill and his hapless Conservatives. Still, just once I’d like to avoid the step where the newly-minted losers realize that their problem was fetishizing the mechanics of previous victories and thus need to rebrand and just skip to the rebranding directly.
Maybe at the presidential level people are aware enough that Koch money isn’t determinative. But state and local elections can be bought cheaply. Look at Kansas, Wisconsin and North Carolina for examples of plutocrats drowning out any other message. The “laboratories of democracy” show a great return on investment.
At the highest levels there does seem to be diminishing returns I guess because of saturation. Same at the lowest levels where local interaction is constant so it does a lot to counter other narratives. Its the middle levels and special events (states, counties, refferenda) that the money imbalance shows up most.
I think this is a very important issue to understand in some detail. Because, in the past, every time the Democratic Party gets concerned about white working-class voters, it tacks right, starts whistling Dixie, and does the free enterprise shuffle. That’s what happened in Kentucky this past week. What happened to full-throated Democrat Conway in the runup to the vote? Where was the GOTV apparatus that was to turn out the white vote for Conway? Where were the folks who should have remained sceptical about the supposed lead in the polls right before election day? Where were the election protection lawyers? The poll watchers in every county? Those organizational resources seem to have been MIA. But they get off with a “Sorry guys, we just lost.”
So what exactly are we talking about practically with this: what’s needed here is for blacks and whites to give permission to their politicians to go after each other’s votes.
What exactly is “go after each others’ votes”?
Does that mean that whites vote for black candidates and blacks vote for white candidates? Whites vote for “black” issues and blacks vote for “white” issues? Rhetorically treating white people as the minority group they are becoming instead of the default political reference?
And who is it that decides which votes candidates go after? Is that not the candidates’ campaign staffs?
I think I understand the quandary here. Bluntly, it is how to get labor voters, who should know better, to vote Democratic. And some of the old Democratic farmer/labor coalition that exists vestigially in a lot of red states to be able to strengthen their position by having something more important than keeping black folks down as the political objective (no matter how gussied up as values voting). And a lot of the young white voters who have moved beyond racism in their personal friendships but are not yet active in politics.
I actually think the question has to do with how to let Republican voters see the failure of conservative thinking in some inescapable way. It is the promise of Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman that has failed them, no to mention the mass of corrupt politicians who used conservatism as a way not to be accountable for any results. But until they see the grace to admit that failure, they and we are stuck.
Maybe the problem isn’t with the ends, but with the means. Let’s go back to my ‘many voters aren’t bigots who prize cultural supremacy above all else, they’re just selfish cowards’ theory. Like it or not, cultural supremacy is a bankable benefit, akin to that of decent pay or access to health care. The Republican Party was offering cultural supremacy as their primary bargaining chip, the Democratic Party offers better marginally better health and economic outcomes, at the cost of slightly higher taxes and no cultural supremacy. Why are we not surprised that the Republican Party won?
Because as far as I can tell, Sanders’ plan to grab the white working class is to tell them that they won’t get even a quarter-loaf measure on social liberalism* but they will be getting full-throated economic support in the form of minimum wage increases and free college and infrastructure spending.
Will it work? I don’t know. Social issues trump economic ones. But I do know that the Democratic Party has been competing better for non-Southern whites since the 21st century started and that economic liberalism (as long as it didn’t go to Those People, of course) used to be very popular in the past. And I know for damn sure that more Conways and Kerrys and other economic centrists will not be cutting the mustard.
*Except for guns, but racial minorities are a lot more agnostic on guns as a whole than are white and non-white liberals.
That’s one part of the message. The other part of the message has to do with letting them understand clearly why modern conservatism has failed them and why totally privatized solutions will not work for them. And why the New Deal worked for their grandparents. Undoing the Reagan rhetoric and GOP sabotage of government is a major project. And in a way that disempowers the Grand Wurlitzer bullshit. It’s going to be easier for Bernie to do because he can call out how the DLC Democrats pushed a similar scam. The difficult part is undoing 25 years of triangulation and neoliberal apologies by Democrats. Historical necessity or not, it is now an obstacle.
Do social issues trump economic issues, or do only some social issues trump economic issues — depending on what they are? But the social issues are an attempt to put the Protestant Ethic total social fabric back together with preachers, bosses, and husbands at the top. And the intensity of those issues increases with the departure from the implicit post-World War II social contract, which among other things required women to resign from their wartime jobs in order to restore moral harmony. The women who in the 1960s balked at that upset the moral harmony and all of their issues became the social issues that loom so large. Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man is still a good description of this mindset but requires updating by a generation. Because the movement is conservative, it appeals back to those older impulses.
Guns are a bit of a proxy issue. They are symptomatic of the toxic state of the corruption in Washington and state capitals. This is something likely better taken care of with the tax code (a lobbying tax and stiff firearms excise tax would make sense) than with gun control legislation. But that turns it into a revenooer problem. Still it’s a bit of a proxy issue that also points to definite failures in law enforcement, mental health services, and education.
For the most part? Definitely the former. It’s just much easier to find fronts people are willing to suffer and fight for (gun control, abortion access, separation of church and state, immigration, civil rights) than economic ones.
Here’s what I feel is the biggest evidence for ‘social issues trump economic ones’: Consider the formerly unstoppable New Deal Coalition. ACW happened, and then for a brief, shining moment the Democratic Party fully embraced economic and social egalitarianism and liberalism… and then proceeded to get utterly crushed. And not just in the South, but the Democratic Party was threatening to collapse nationally during the Nixon-Reagan era. It’s also important to remember that the Reagan Democrats stabbed the post-American Civil Rights Democratic Party in the back, not the other way around, otherwise its capitulation towards centrism, especially economic centrism, won’t make any historical sense.
This is why even though I think that Bernie Sanders’ platform is the only real way forward, I’m also not promising miracles. Yet if the Democratic Party in 2016 or 2020 captures just 10-15% more of the non-Southern white working class vote than it did in 2012 while getting similar margins in its other demographics, the GOP in its current incarnation will be completely finished. And I think that it’s quite possible. 2008 Obama won a majority of whites 18-45.
That said, the country has become genuinely less racist since the days of McGovern and Reagan. White supremacy — and more broadly, WASP patriarchy — is no longer the trump card, at least outside of the South and Appalachia, that it was in the bad old days. I think that it’s time to reforge the old social and economic liberalism pacts that the New Left tried to advance and America spat upon.
Depends on what the elite do. FDR showed them they have to give in a little to placate the people enough to racially divide and conquer but they dont think they have to anymore thanks to technology and governmental capture, and media. We’ll see.
It still just astounds me that white conservatives think minorities get all the breaks. I just can’t get past that.
This brings to mind for me another point. Clinton’s “ending welfare as we know it” was correctly perceived as handing out less to minorities and just enough white reactionaries rewarded him with a second term for it.
Advertisers pay billions of dollars in continuous radio and TV time to ensure that result. You perhaps have heard of ClearChannel Radio and Rush Limbaugh. That is exactly what they were set up to do in the mid-1980s.
Apparently it was a good return on someone’s investment.
The Republicans have long characterized the Democrats as being Big Spending Big Government Liberals to win election after election. The identified problem is that Big Government was going to take what white people have or think they should have and give it to the `others’. So now the solution, according to this analysis is social welfare to ease the suffering at the extremes without changing an economy that continues to collapse for the former white middle class, something they’re not used to experiencing resulting in higher rates of suicide. In other words, forget about consumerism taught to you by corporate media and learn to live without money, same as members of the more established under classes.
What this analysis fails to point out is the real villains in all this are the out of control corporations and the corporatist politicians who make it possible for the corporations to become out of control in the first place. We may be the wealthiest country in the world but the rigged economy is pulling so much wealth out of the economy that the economy itself is dying for far too many people. Social welfare is not going to address this problem.
The heart of Bernie’s political revolution is for people to understand how they’re being screwed and by whom through a discussion of key issues. The idea is to mobilize large numbers of people around these issues to demand change by challenging the corporatist politicians of both parties.
This revolution is not about voting in social welfare as Mitt Romney warned in his 47% speech. A federal jobs program to help black youth with over 50% unemployment is not welfare. Investing in much needed infrastructure is not welfare. Investing in college education for all qualified students in state colleges and universities is not welfare. Health care for everyone as a right is not welfare. A federal minimum wage of $15 per hour is not welfare. Getting overtime pay for workers making less than $55k is not welfare. These are just some of the things that can make everyone’s life better, even the former white middle class.
Elections may be about winning the argument but first you have to argue about the right things.
100% correct.
The Orwellian “doublespeak” that’s twisting everthing upside-down begins in the 1980s with “Supply Side.”
It’s exactly the reverse of reality, like all “makers vs. takers” rhetoric. The workers have always been the supply side; they create wealth. The plutocrats, captains of industry and Wall Street types have always been the takers, like in the mob.
But today’s well-to-do genuinely believe that they personally generate the GNP (like, without them we wouldn’t have it) and that working-class people siphon that value away.
these are the people you think you can reach:
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
When your hatred for POC outweighs your love for your child.
Just had an infant die that I could’ve saved,but parents said no nigger nurses
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
I am the most qualified peds cardiac nurse in this facility. I knew exactly what to do…ive done it a million times before…but..
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
The father, with his confederate flag shirt and camouflage pants, made sure I didn’t get in the room. And now his child is dead.
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
Yes yall. A white family had a child come in N critical condition. Crashing fast. I went to respond bc i am the one who should have.
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
The family said no nigger nurses. And blocked my entry When my sup explained I was the most qualified & the only one who had done it before
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
The dad threatened to bash our faces in if I so much as stepped foot in the room. I walked in anyways, trying to talk the other nurse thru
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
What to do. But some things…u just have to do urself. I got ready to and was physically removed from the room.
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
That baby died bc his parents refused to allow a black nurse to save his life.
And this isn’t the first time I have seen this happen. Sick
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
To be forced to watch a child die…that you KNOW you could’ve saved….is soul crushing.
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
Their hatred murdered their child.
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
This is the second time in my career this has happened. Babies whose lives I could’ve saved, dead bc parents refused “Nigger Nurses”…
FierceFemtivist @FierceFemtivist
Staff standing around stunned. Sobbing. Meanwhile dad’s only comment is “make sure no niggers touch my kids body”…while staring at me.
No, those are not the people we think we can reach nor think we can reach. We are thinking more of the friends of the white people you see at Bernie and Hillary rallies who have be voting against Democrats because of peer pressure or believing the nonsense on the Wall Street media.
There is a bit of an iron curtain of information beyond Fox News in a lot of places because of an active effort to get people to shut out other sources. It is very much like the behavior of abusive spouses who isolate their spouses. The amount of excommunication for alternative sources of information and the fear involved in reading a different view is quite amazing. Some folks are more reasonable than others. And it just takes a 10%-20% swing to move an election from red to blue.
And yes, this is heartbreaking on all sorts of levels.
We are thinking more of the friends of the white people you see at Bernie and Hillary rallies who have be voting against Democrats because of peer pressure or believing the nonsense on the Wall Street media.
They tend to be one and the same with the folks Rikyrah just described.
I’m sorry but hoping for some magic economic populism message to get the White Working Class Voter to finally wake up is a fool’s errand.
Why is that? Economic populism was very popular back in the day and the non-Southern White Working Class voter is a lot less racist and socially conservative than during the heyday of Reagan.
Like, what is your basis of saying this? I keep hearing this repeatedly. And it doesn’t matter how many trends or polls or comparative examples I point to, people just keep blandly repeating this talking point.
agree. and in support of your point, Sanders attracts an audience … .
the talking point is designed to depress activity
Obama carried Virginia twice and North Carolina once, right? I think those are the two Southern states that have seen the greatest amount of migration from outside the South. (Texas is in a separate category.–not exactly Southern.)
Coincidence or not?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/opinion/despair-american-style.html?_r=1
New Yorker on same topic. (Case and Deaton’s numbers appear to overstate the magnitude of the trend, but even adjusted, the trend remains.)
I think part of the problem is that Gen X white males largely have bought into a libertarian ethos, and that means their failures are their own fault, not society’s. And if they do give a listen to the left, all they hear is how privileged they are and how much they are the cause of all the world’s problems. They’re ready to turn against the establishment, but they need someone on their side.
If that’s the case then that subset of Gen-Xers is even stupider than the Reagan Democrats. At least Reagan offered to give them the mellow high of cultural supremacy in exchange for mortgaging their futures. They by and large apparently surrendered to the plutocracy for… what, exactly? Handjobs from the ghost of Ayn Rand?
IMO, bento is off in dating the rise of libertarianism. It was inherent in the GOP voter appeals from at least 1964. Didn’t have much appeal for the co-hort born roughly from 1938 to 1954. Those born after ’54 needed something to rebel against to distinguish their generation. Liberalism/Democrats/the ’60s/hippies/peace/agnosticism filtered in as what they could be against. (They kept the sex-drugs-and rock-n-roll because that was fun.)