[UPDATE1: haven’t had a chance to read all comments, I’m in a bit of a time bind. Getting ready to move to London City, the Isle of Opportunity with the coming of Brexit and the British £ falling 20%. Will view the political lunacy on both sides of the great divide (Atlantic Ocean I mean) from afar. Decison time for Syria in Lausanne talks, the regional powers (a$$holes) and Kerry/Lavrov have concluded, after 5 years of bloody sectarian/religious/civil war to let the Syrians decide their own future. Yep, way above my pay grade, need to be a corrupt politician and propagandist to believe this stuff. People suffer and decision makers gather in palaces with gilded ornaments . What a corrupt end of civilization we live in. You bet on it. ;-)]
The division in America runs deep, this election just mirrors the cultural divide in society. There is no hope for change!
Hidden faultline: how Trump v Clinton is laying bare America’s class divide | The Guardian |
The sign hanging on Main Street announces, “Crawfords Restaurant, Guns & Ammo“. In the window an illuminated sign elaborates: “Breakfast, lunch specials; cards, gifts, toys, ammo, guns, groc.” Inside, there is an unpretentious cafe and shelves of gift cards, tinned food and other sundries as well as camo hats, firearms and ammunition. A deer’s head is mounted on the wall.
The family that helps run Crawfords, in downtown Boonsboro, Maryland, owns more than a hundred guns. Allen Crawford, Pam Rutherford and their four teenage daughters are deer hunters; a single kill yields around 80 to 90lbs of meat for their dinner table, and they donate the hide and antlers to be recycled as furniture. Come November’s presidential election, they will vote for Donald Trump.
“You either have the common man with Donald Trump or the privileged with Hillary Clinton,” Rutherford said this week. “Clinton’s supporters could go 50 miles or less from their plush condos and elegant houses and find someone who has to hunt to support their family. I don’t think they realise that.”
EDUCATIONAL REVERSAL SINCE BILL CLINTON
One marker is education. In 1992, Republican voters were much better educated than their Democratic counterparts, according to the Pew Research Center. Today registered voters with a college degree favour Clinton by 23 percentage points, while those without a college degree prefer Trump by five. This trend cuts across demographic groups, although it is most pronounced among whites. The Slate website noted: “The educational split among white voters is the defining characteristic of this election.” If this holds in November, it will be the widest educational divide at the ballot box for several decades.
TRUMP’S FOLLOWERS ARE DEER HUNTERS
Clinton’s followers would object to him hunting deer, Stonesifer believes. “They have their opinions and I have mine. As long as we don’t bother each other, that’s fine. If you try to interrupt me when I’m hunting, that’s different.”
The country has a bigger divide now than ever, he added. “You’ve got your gay rights, abortion laws, racism. Everybody’s split. It wasn’t this bad when I was growing up. Everybody’s afraid to say something ‘cos you’re going to hurt someone’s feelings. The 80s were better. I think God needs to be back in the picture; everyone’s taking him for granted. Times are getting nearer.”
« click for more info
5 facts about the NRA and guns in America (Pew Research Center)Kevin Dobereiner, 36, owns two small businesses and complains that taxes are too high. He is also supporting Trump. “He’s not a liberal and we’re $20 trillion in debt and unemployment is too high and our healthcare is terrible. The community organiser-in-chief has no qualifications and Hillary Clinton is just an extension of that.
“I don’t care what Trump says; I care what he does and he’s not a billionaire because he’s stupid. I like a guy who puts his foot in his mouth because at least he tells the truth.”
Trump’s plain speaking has been identified as one of the sources of his appeal to voters angry at the status quo in general and Republican establishment in particular. Even his outlandish gaffes are said to humanise him, emphasising his status as outsider and non-politician. His anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim diatribes have disgusted liberals and been cheered at raucous rallies, where he declares his love for “the poorly educated”.
More below the fold …
Good old times when campaigns were more … ehhh classy?
A trillion here, a trillion there …
CNSNews – Federal Debt in FY 2016 Jumped $1,422,827,047,452.46–That’s $12,036 Per Household
Guess that “grow the economy” to increase tax receipts thingy isn’t working out so well. Next stop (1/17), austerity except for the MIC because HRC has many wars on her to do list.
Sure be nice if we had something besides a bloated financial sector to show for it…
I imagine it will be back to Pay-Go and Grand Bargains.
Obama did not destroy our economy. Neoliberalism did. He was just the office holder when it became glaringly apparent–to many, but not most, it seems. But neoliberalism has no new answers, so it just keeps digging the hole.
He was the office holder when a very visible major minority became ascendant. But I think they did most of the lifting themselves.
I imagine gun sales might explode even more under Clinton than they did under Obama.
Not if Bernie Sanders is chair of the Senate Budget Committee. That’s why I’m fearful about the Senate at the moment. I’m not yet seeing the cratering in Trump’s support that would trigger downticket panic on the Republican side.
If you throw in new tax breaks to grow the economy, of course you get deficits. The past two years have been what the Republicans can agree among themselves to pass. The last six are held hostage by the House and the filibuster.
It would do my heart good some time in my remaining lifetime to see a Democratic Senate and Democratic House override the veto of a Democratic President in order to make economic legislation more progressive.
Can we talk about why neoliberal child tax credits increase the deficit and are paid by citizens, while an increase in the minimum wage enables parents to afford child care, does NOT add to the deficit, and is paid by private business? Which increases our GDP.
once we get rid of Republicans we can talk about stuff like that.
Change the Congress and we can start arguing economic policy again. Another Republican win just freezes a bad status quo.
esquimaux is on target on this.
And it matter which Republican dingbats lose. For example a Ryan loss is huge for the Ayn Rand faction.
And it matters which Democrats win and what their backgrounds are.
The increase to the minimum wage and the increase in Social Security benefits should be a poltiical no-brainer for Democrats. Shame it isn’t.
The tax code needs major rework to strip corporate and high-income taxpayers of a lot of the dodges that have reappeared since the Reagan rework killed of some of the tax shelter business.
As for child care, public funding of pre-K schooling and pre-K through 12 afterschool programs will go a long way to moving those expenses to provision of infrastructure as in most developed countries.
Step 1 is still to crush the Republican Party’s hold on the American economic imagination.
Step 2 is to crush the neoliberal hold of failed economic theory and policy on academic economists and business consultants. They work to the short-term advantage of CEOs but kill the overall economy.
Step 3 is a real discussion of who gets included in a full employment economy and who should not be expected to be a 40-hour-a-week or more producer. Some Republicans answer this as women belong back in the home; they already set aside some kinds of uncompensated work as being useful enough for societal benefits. Of course, we realize what this amounts to at bottom is just another form of male domination.
Step 4, is to take down the high-income social class status and privileged access to setting their own incomes.
You are making an art of using neoliberal as an epithet. Nowhere here is an acknowledgement that working families are heavily dependent on things like the tax credit and that most see it as a good thing.
Most people do not care if something is neoliberal, socialist, or conservative as long as it works as intended.
This is not a practical outlook. The ACA is neoliberal, correct? Yet, Bernie Sanders voted for it. He did this, even though it was not single payer, because he know it would help people.
Yep. It works as intended as a subsidy to private industry! Subsidizing poverty wages and reducing our GDP. It also is merit based–you have to be earning at a certain level and paying withholding to automatically get a refund. And usually the refund is limited to a max of what you paid in, no matter how many kids. (There is a way to get more, but they don’t make it easy and don’t broadcast the fact.)
ACA is neoliberal kludge and the courts made it worse. Yeah, it works, like you can still roll on a flat tire. Sanders’ price for his vote was an increase in non-profit clinic funding for the poorest in the states. ACA will do what it will do–I don’t think tinkering at the edges is gonna help. But industry still might extract more sweeteners before it fully bails.
And now the plan is to do to doctors what has been done to teachers. Merit-based pay according to their metrics. That is gonna get interesting.
I agree with most of your points here yet you’re still reinforcing my point. It sounds like you’re saying these policies are ineffective because they are :neoliberal” when what you’re really saying is that we should make better policy.
It’s very easy to nitpick at our level but the policy-makers, like Sanders, have never had this luxury. And such politicians will never run around saying the child tax credit is terrible because supporting this kind of policy may be the only win they are able to deliver in our current system.
What makes it worse is that there is a faction stridently opposed to even “neoliberal” solutions to poverty.
How many politicians are saying that neoliberal solutions are too f*cking expensive for taxpayers???
So I should just shut up about it?
Plenty. See any right-wing criticism of the ACA or any market-oriented solutions offered by mainstream Democrats. It’s always too expensive.
Who told you to shut up? I thought we were having a discussion here.
If you think neoliberal policy is a failure and desire better policy then I suppose you are doing your duty by discrediting it.
My original point was that it often gets lost in the criticism that even neoliberal efforts at alleviating poverty has its merits – which is why many progressive folks are willing to defend those policies.
The ONLY program that significantly reduced poverty in the US was LBJ’s original War on Poverty.
A very interesting essay from Al From, the LEADER of the DLC, whose neoliberal “fixes” did just what the hippies prophesied in the Big Recession. “In 1964, the poverty rate was 19 percent. Ten years later it was 11.2 percent.” Today it is 13+ from a high of 15.1 in 2010.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/the-war-on-poverty-was-not-about-welfare-101898
When they turned ADF over to the states to experiment, it created that same old, same old white power structure that LBJ’s programs bypassed. That is what neoliberalism does–block grants to state to monkeywrench federal programs.
Yes, two different issues. Programs that reducing poverty (promoting social mobility) versus programs that help alleviate poverty. Both are essential for the poor, neoliberal or not. I support both.
Yes, indeed. They plan to do to Medicaid what they did for public schools.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/the-wacky-final-macra-rules-and-the-crapification-of-rural-he
alth-care.html
thanks for links
what a strange headline. What is it you think Obama is trying to take credit for?
to frame the divide as a class issue is purely and totally bogus. The deer hunting thing is a rural/urban divide, which is not the same as economics. And to leave out the racial aspect goes beyond stupid into intentionally misleading.
And the graphic on gun ownership caught my attention. Notice how the percentage of those buying a gun for “protection” as opposed to “hunting” has flipped between the time of each survey. What’s changed there? Could it possibly have something to do with the increase in coverage of violent crime (even as violent crime has been generally trending downward, and even now is near historic lows), or even the increased saturation of media violence? What exactly does Obama have to do with that? At the moment, our political leaders exert very little control over the content of what appears on television or various streaming services, or that appears as clickbait on aggregator sites like memeorandum.
One thing that happened since the 1990s is increasing migration of whites into gentrified areas of cities and migration of minorities into (generally inner ring) suburbs that were created as white flight havens and have mostly older whites who stayed behind as white residents.
The desegregation that occurred at both ends of this migration as the effect of markets operating within more strictly enforced anti-discrimination laws and more real estate companies seeking a share of minority spending could very well have upped anxieties about safety.
And then there’s the anxiety engendered by 9/11 that might not be confined to fear of terrorism.
There’s also the way that media covers crime in local markets.
And I have lived in or near rural areas for the last couple decades. In these areas, owning a shotgun or hunting rifle has practically nothing to do with wealth. Heck, I’ve had friends who qualified for WIC who would go out deer hunting whenever deer were in season. Also had others who could afford a new F-150 each year cash on the barrelhead who would do the same thing. It’s sport, and it also is potential food on the table. Income may affect the quality of the ingredients going into your venison stew, I guess. But yeah, it’s very much a culture thing.
you see what i mean. I’m in the California suburbs and the number of people I know who hunt keeps decreasing, but the differences between them and the other neighbors were always more cultural than socioeconomic.
I’m in SoCal and know plenty of hunters. Mostly birds now that they got old.
I always kid them that one bad video and hunting will be illegal in California. Not all that many women appreciate the sport.
It’s like salt water sport fishing in California. One bad video.
.
The class divide and the race and gender divides that obscure it existed from the beginning of settler colonialism in America. If America has changed, it has been in the direction of actually having to look in the mirror again after 50 years. What’s in the mirror is pretty ugly for a “city on the hill” and “the world’s indispensable nation”, and “the last great hope for peace”, and all the other exceptionalist rhetoric that have been endemic to America’s self-talk since the promoters who were selling the abundant land to people who were expected to send indentured servants and criminals there the tap that abundance with plantation agriculture.
Rural gun culture has been lightly traditional but never the current cult. City dwellers so-called elite culture is no more that the Walt Disney movie Bambi, a desire to see fewer guns in their city, and the isolation from where their meat comes from. (It’s the grocery store, right? And not even the butcher shop.) And now even a lot of abattoirs and meatpacking plants have relocated to rural areas (where indidentally some even in the South have become unionized–by Hispanic and black workers). Suburban tourists one or two generations from the farm can be more elitist than long-time city dwellers, and those in small towns and the country are more likely to come in contact with these travelers.
It has become a matter for pearl clutching when Democratic candidates point out that it is the frustrations with the economic, political, and social (read status) conditions or rural and small town life that has been passed by progress that has since World War I been urban in style, scientific in the basis for understanding truth, and secular in the symbols used to represent life issues. And that going back to the rural style, direct practical sense and untested speculative knowledge, and strictly iconoclastic religious symbols of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America is not longer possible anywhere. There are now good Chinese and Mexican restaurants in Mt. Airy NC, for pete’s sake. What is unsettling for conservatives is they were raised not to change, and yet their communities changed so much that their daily sense is being strangers in a strange land, a sense that a generation of preachers since the 1970s has emphasized in order to hold on to a religious tradition that really is grounded in the 1890 to 1910 period of fundamentalism and pentecostalism.
The proliferation of gun shops and gun shows has occurred since the Great Recession in 2007. It’s the poor man’s art auction and allows trading at price points lower than automobile trading.
The same economic pressures in so-called “flyover” country mean that rural and small town families are moving more to subsistence economics to make it. Hunting (and not just deer) is now a necessity for families in some communities. (I wonder how many work out the cost of ammunition for what they bring in.) And in having to do this to keep going, they imagine a return to frontier America and take much harsher and less civil attitudes to politics than even the same people took ten or twenty years ago.
Example:
Has that ever happened? Other than in a Rush Limbaugh monologue?
Out of work metal workers with access to a local machine shop can make custom guns for sale to the very rich city slickers the otherwise dislike–at least the ones who collect guns, mostly long guns. Those with a skill for speculation and arbitrage can run the gun show circuit and make profits from the differing prices in one area and another. There is a huge suburban gun dealer business supplying minority neighborhoods with cheap guns. The gundealers are not in affluent suburbs for the most part.
All of these entrepreneurs will have an affinity for both the NRA and Donald Trump. Most find the gun trade a good business for a tough time. Some even grow cultish about the lore of guns in America.
Obama did nothing other than being born the product of miscegenation to antagonize these people. The birther movement is integral to the Trump movement for this reason. It is not that a black man or even the descendant of a slave became President; a mutt became President. There’s your class antagonism and it’s not directed at Obama’s Kenyan father except on the surface; it is directed against Obama’s Kansas mother and grandparents. the accessories to legitimizing mutthood in White America.
It’s a class issue, but Trump is playing it to divide the working class for the benefit of Trump’s own aspirational billionaire class. So he divides white people — middle class and working class — from each other on the basis of supposed elitism by those with a formal education or those with progressive ideas. If you don’t understand that left = progressive = liberal = Democrat = enemy for the most intensely political in Trump’s camp, you’ve not talked much with friends, family, and neighbors who are deeply supporting Trump. It is the Republican Party, three elections, and the changes in the media that have changed America so that it cannot confront straightforward problems of governance, infrastructure, finance, eduction, healthcare, and foreign policy.
There are indeed the folks whose white nationalist, misogyinist buttons Trump has pushed and whose conduct borders or crosses over to criminal. There was a serious assault on a Muslim kid in Cary NC; his dad works on software to protect public buildings from attacks. The family is moving out of the US as a result.
This is 48 years of Republican “ethnic strategy” to capture former Democratic constituencies and split the working class so as to destroy the labor movement with racial politics. Too many white lefty-progressive-liberal-Democrats still have not figured out how the failure to push through civil rights outside the South played into this division. Justice delayed, for the “moderates” were peddling delay, is indeed justice denied. It even allows for retrogression.
It is curious how gentrification of urban centers on the Coasts is progressing without any penalties for Dems.
It is gentrification that tars Democrats with the elitist label by those who are being pushed out. Without absolute bigots in the Republican Party, this would even be apparent among minorities.
Where gentrification is inclusive of identities, you also will not notice it because those who get pushed out look little different from those who move in except in the style of conspicuous consumption. Whites who are pushed out don’t necessarily complain about whites who increased the price of property, but they do complain about minorities who do. And in the next breath complain about the minorities lowering the value of the property in the neighborhood.
I’ve wondered about this issue precisely in the context of what has been going on here in Portland, Oregon for the 15 or so years. The historically African American district was first, uh, colonized by the hipsters young “creative types” so-called, but now the white population in that district is demographically more diverse. Displaced African Americans have wound up in Portland’s outlying neighborhoods or the suburbs for the most part. I’ve seen some of those displaced families in the big apartment complexes where I usually go to meet my adult-literacy students. (I’m an ESL volunteer.) The thing is, this area is heavily Democratic, and the folks who’ve been displaced are pretty traditional Democratic voters.
Perhaps we’d see a political backlash to gentrification if Portland elected its city commissioners by geographical district, but we elect on a city-wide basis.
Some of that was intentional (GOP design) and some of it evolved and was exploited by “conservatives” in a vacuum as liberals engaged in circle-jerking.
Taft-Hartley 1948. Democrats failed to repeal it in 1949. In part because southern Democrats could envision unionized factories relocating to open shop states. Once in a defensive position (maintaining the power of the unions in service to its leaders and not in service to its members), corruption in unions flowered and that could be exploited by “conservatives.”
1964. While LBJ predicted it, it was still surprising that the south could flip so quickly to the GOP. The subsequent riots in AA communities and rejection of the Vietnam War by younger Americans facilitated consolidation outside the south. Added to that was the belief among industrialized workers that war was good for them and the economy. But that challenged the long-standing belief as to which political party supported the MIC/Pentagon. Not the only major issue on which the two political parties are clearly defined and at odds with each other at that time. War, civil rights, and reproductive rights crossed political boundaries. Nixon signed the ERA and Reagan signed the CA abortion law in 1967.
The battles of those years were fierce but modernity and equality were slowly winning. (A good enough time capsule of those years was “All in the Family,” if one recognizes that it lagged the real world by a few years. For example, the lower middle-class Edith Bunkers had been entering the workforce from the beginning of the 1960s.) The most toxic element, IMO, came with the politicization of church. Just in time to distract from the depreciation of the economic well-being that had been developed for the prior four decades. And only now is being seen or felt by young and old. With the old guided by feeling (correctly that the GOP and Democrats have screwed them), but responding by doubling down on their knee-jerk, scapegoating proclivities. Fascinating that its ripped off half the mask of their churches and they can’t even see it. And contrary to Democratic-speak, it’s not strictly racist nor sexist as evidenced by their acceptance of Colin Powell in the ’90s, Condi Rice in the naughts, and Cain and Carson in the last two presidential election cycles. (And SC Senator Tim Scott and Governor Haley.)
>>>The most toxic element, IMO, came with the politicization of church.
good point. It’s a division not the same as class nor the same as rural/urban, but by the early 80s churchgoing white people were overwhelmingly Republican, and still are.
>> contrary to Democratic-speak, it’s not strictly racist nor sexist as evidenced by their acceptance of Colin Powell in the ’90s, Condi Rice in the naughts, and Cain and Carson in the last two presidential election cycles. (And SC Senator Tim Scott and Governor Haley.)
disagree here. inclusion of a tiny number of tokens so they can scream “see! we’re not racist!” is not acceptance.
Huge growth in suburban mega-churches (and those suburbs were most white) from the late seventies through the naughts. Attracting people that had grown up in more working class families and mainstream religions that skewed Democratic. It was a two-fer for the GOP. Politicizing the more rural churched and re-churching and politicizing as Republicans a younger population.
Disagree with your disagreement. The country has moved far beyond A Raisin in the Sun. Self-identified socio-economic status/class and not pure racism better describes the white ethos today in urban/suburban communities, even some in the south. Of course, white folks do overestimate their own socio-economic status and more correctly identify the socio-economic class of POC; therefore, the status bar for POC that are easily accepted by whites is higher, but such POC aren’t viewed as tokens by whites.
Part of this shift in consciousness may be a product of the declining socio-economic status of the white working class, but among the middle-class it’s been a function of educational and workplace integration. For those younger than fifty, mixed race marriages and children are far too prevalent to cause distress. Racial segregation continues. In part because AAs are too small a percentage of the population and they no more want to be the only AA surrounded by nothing other than honkies than white people want to be the only white face. Also, a higher percentage of minorities have a lower socio-economic status in comparison to whites and which, of course, is a legacy of long-standing overt racism and immigration over the past several decades, but that’s not within the consciousness of the average white person.
Assigning an “I want to prove that I’m not a racist by supporting an AA” as the motivation for the acceptance of Rice or Carson or Oprah by white people is Demo-speak and very disrespectful of others doing their best. I don’t believe that on average white Democrats/liberals exhibit less bigotry than white conservatives on the Implicit Racism test. How could we when we’re all products of a white dominated culture?
What was toxic about the politicization of the church was that it was a reaction to the politicization of the church in the civil rights and peace movements, and it built on a fundamentalist, entrepreneurial tradition that enriched itself as it became politically powerful. At the same time its wealth and power depended exactly on not challenging people to be better to comforting them for just “saying the name of Jesus”. Rev. Barber of the NC NAACP has rightly labeled it a heresy that departs from the Christian gospel. Even non-Christians can spot where this hypocrisy occurs and gets religiously justified. Franklin Graham, Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr. and others who have endorse Trump have exposed themselves to some of their followers as just grifters and there is now a little bit of a reaction.
Yes, the coup against Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter in order to preserve racism and put Ronald Reagan in office is the most toxic part of the conservative stew. It is also the part that Trump does not have in his pitch, which is why the religious right leaders are coming under criticism by their followers. Trump has not promised to roll back same-sex marriage or LGBTQ equality other than promising a conservative appointment to the Supreme Court.
In looking at the role of token minorities in the Republican Party, one must look at what those playing that role had to give up in order to maintain a foothold for African-Americans in the Party of Lincoln (for that was the explicit strategy-“We are not going away just because you took over our party.”) It would go a little too far to say that any of these folks have been accepted as more than tokens and the “minority who is my friend to prove I am not racist”. And it was acculturated Sikh-American Nikki Haley who appointed Tim Scott before he ran for reelection. Colin Powell worked his way up a military that Harry Truman desegregated. Condoleeza Rice came in through oil industry contacts with the Bushes, who seem to have been more open to minorities than their Texas neighbors. A lot of the Republican leaders are neither racist nor misogynists except lately, but those that are tend to come from similar geographical or socio-economic constituencies. And over time Repubicans have gone from civil rights advocate Jacob Javits (not to mention Abraham Lincoln) to Donald Trump. The current party is the most racist and misogynist they have ever been. They get no historic props for the minorities who have hung with them although some of those minorities, but not all, do.
It would take us years to tease all this apart and put it within proper historical context. I was referencing the very concerted and planned GOP politicization of white church communities that can be dated from the late 1970s and outside the south. Before then, god-speak from politicians was far more generic and limited than what Carter introduced as acceptable and was quickly and consciously co-opted by Republicans. In part to build up a voter base among evangelicals that for some time had been apolitical. (Support for birth control was high in such communities before Roe.)
White MA voters didn’t elect the Republican Senator Brooke in 1967 to “prove that they weren’t racist.” Racism in Boston was high at the time. And the state was more reliably Democratic than Republican as well back then.
It was natural for AAs in the south to gravitate to the Democratic Party because it was a Democratic President that pushed through the Civil Rights Act that made it possible for them to vote at all. Before then, if he identified with a political party at all, MLK, Jr. tended to be seen as a Republican. I’d like to think that had he lived, that MLK, Jr. would have rejected direct politicization of black churches.
I don’t think that the GOP today is more bigoted than it has been since 1980. They’ve merely dispensed with the dog-whistles and are more overt because their target market is no longer understands the code of dog-whistles. The Democratic Party in the south still holds the record on the “most racist and misogynist” for a very long period of time — like hundred years.
Typical profile of a “50-year old contractor” who thinks if Clinton is elected, Trumpistas should stage a coup and she should be put in prison or shot.
Notice that contractor is generally a small business in construction (unless he is the occasional worker called “contractor”)
What also struck me was the passive voice construction of “be put in prison” or “locked up” and “be shot”. He’s not exactly volunteering to do the imprisoning or shooting. And neither is Trump, likely for self-aware legal reasons relative to the Secret Service.
More and more it looks like a campaign of white, male unsuccessful (in their own eyes) small-bore bosses railing against the inability to discriminate, sexually harrass, or do whatever they damn well please because of civil norms and public laws.
Clickbait?
Contrast with the landscaper who lost her business and her home because so many of her clients lost their homes to the various banksters that we made whole.
But boring by comparison, no?
Actually it was part of a reporter’s tweet. But it is typical of the pro-Trump folks I know in my neighborhood. Not the alt-right coup stuff, but the general socio-economic and occupational tags of Republicans in working class suburbs. One is a guy who is now retired but worked as a handyman-carpenter on most of the houses in the neighborhood because he did good work for a reasonable price. But on politics he is a bit of a crank and has been for a while. Fiscal conservatism through and through. Just doesn’t want to pay any taxes at all because it is more for his personal whimsical use.
I hav no earthly idea if this is true or not, but if so, it certainly is counter-intuitive.
“Trump is in Charlotte this afternoon and as I walked to my car I passed 3 vendors selling Trump regalia. One vendor was a black woman, one was a black man, one was a Hispanic family. The customers were even more surprising – mostly young, good looking uptown types….more men than women but still plenty of gals shelling out cash for hats and tees. Far from being angry middle aged white rednecks, they were happy and joking and dressed bankers casual Friday style….interesting to me as I know the local banks are “advising” their employees that unless they want to see their jobs end they better vote Hillary.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/200pm-water-cooler-10142016.html
Guess it could be “punking,” no?
I’m an old geezer and don’t understand some of your jargon, but I do understand that your claim of this situation being counterintuitive is a problem.
During the primary season, there were many stories in the media challenging the stereotyped view that Trump’s supporters were overwhelmingly working-class whites. I’ve grabbed a couple at random here and here. But the stereotype that Trump’s supporters are overwhelming white and working-class is a sort of zombie that just won’t go away. Why won’t it? Well, this discussion thread suggests part of the reason might be that some folks are invested in the stereotype because it provides them with a cudgel to beat Democratic Party politicians they deem insufficiently left.
Forgot to say that Digby wrote about this issue at length and pointed out that the Democratic Party still gets lots of working-class support. It comes largely from working-class people of color.
And see this Boston Globe story about a Trump rally this week in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, about which the writer says “contrary to media descriptions of his supporters these were not prototypical white working-class, Rust Belt denizens. This was a solidly middle class crowd.”
They are the impoverished middle class (now retail or service industry) that resulted when the manufacturing plants walked away from the workers of Wilkes-Barre. A retail worker must appear middle class to get and keep a job.
Moreover, everyone dresses down compared to a decade or two ago, even to go to political rallies.
Well of course. The vendors are making a buck. Or have been specially hired to be counter-intuitive. (I go with making a buck.)
Who else works downtown Charlotte these days but professionals who dress in banker casual. I don’t know what the uniform is now, but it used to be khaki pants, navy blazer, light blue shirt, yellow paisley tie; light blue-striped seersucker in the heat of summer.
I don’t know about what bosses are advising; that sounds like Trump propaganda unless bankers are pretending “Don’t throw us in that brier patch.”
Retired BofA chair Hugh McColl, Erskine Bowles, and some of the Wells Fargo executives in Charlotte have been long-time Democrats. But then the Republican Party has only been around as a force in North Carolina since the 1990s, Jesse Helms notwithstanding.
And the “local” banks are in no way local in the sense of community banks. Charlotte is a major regional banking center that is headquarters to Bank of America and regional headquarters or other major banks like Wells Fargo and whoever bought out BB&T.
What this person is saying is that the customers looked like Republicans.
You have interesting arguments to present. I just wish that you’d present them without appending remarks that have no purpose except to impugn other people’s motivations. The fact is, you have no clue whether Tarheel finds one item “boring by contrast” with the other item that you’d like him to pay more attention to.
David Dayen covers the situation of folks like the landscaper fully in Chain of Title. Not boring at all. But victims of the mortgage frauds that triggered the credit default swap and derivatives collapse in 2007 are not uniformly voting for Trump. More frequently they were minorities maneuvered into sub-prime loans in effectively redlined neighborhoods and pre-emptorily evicted by sheriffs from their American Dream. No matter how angry the bankers made them, they are not going to be voting for Trump.
To get a better assessment, check out the polls for the areas hardest hit by the mortgage crisis: South Florida, southern Nevada, certain areas of California, select suburbs of Atlanta, Chicago, and other cities. And then the second-order foreclosures like this landscaper.
This is not a straight-forward class-based election no matter how many lefties want to argue that. It is an election in which the wealthy are trying to reassert their power by splitting their lessers in the same way that their lessers have been familiar with for several hundred years. Familiar but not conscious of what is being done to them.
I stand by my description. Which story just got front paged by Booman? The Second Amendment yoo-ha!
Identification with those most successful in the construction industry? Construction contractors are almost exclusively Republicans. It’s an industry that’s male dominated with an entrepreneurial ethos. Most aren’t “alt-right” crazies, but there are the Kochs. And a large percentage of the owners of the larger firms recognize that much regulation benefits them, in part because it reduces competition from new players. That said, as a group they are better guys than the Wall St. scum.
I don’t know about better than Wall Street scum.
Most successful includes Kellogg-Brown-and-Root, Bechtel, a number of the construction companies that built Trump properties. What these guys know is that government contracts benefit them, especially military contracts. They get their bailouts differently, that’s all.
Most successful contractors are not alt-right crazies, but some local just-above-jackleg-carpenter contractors are alt-right crazies. And they emulate what they think brought Trump his success–being and SOB, looking out for #1, the art of the deal, taking no prisoners, retaliation. All the popularized get-rich books say so. None of this mentoring BS that the ladies read or networking BS. This is the type of 50-year-old guy who could long for a coup.
The Koch’s merely buy legislatures when the public isn’t looking.
The title superposed over your video clip (“Obama Bitch Slaps Hillary….”) is as inaccurate and misleading as it is insulting. I just watched the whole clip. Obama and Clinton were going at each other, no doubt, but “bitch slap”? The harshest remarks came from Clinton at about 3 min 50 sec, when she denounced Obama for providing legal representation to a “slum landlord”.
Hey, I realize you have no use for Barack Obama. Criticize him all you want, but geez louise, maybe you want to actually watch the video clips you embed in your posts before you share them.
[Couldn’t post photo in diary update – Oui]
-Please keep refugees away so we can keep pretending to have a liberal asylum policy. What more do you want, we’ve already given you a ton of cash? And we’ll look the other way if you stash it in a private account in Switzerland.
-Well, the price just went up. Now we want visa-free travel too.
-But the whole point of you preventing refugees from traveling to Europe is that we fear that our economic policies in combination with migration will strengthen the far right. Surely you understood that we would never go through with visa-free travel? Besides your purge of the military, the courts and the universities worries us.
-What is there to worry about, it’s going great. Look, it’s not like we complained last summer when you brought Greece to the brink of a coup. Now do what we say, we just invaded Syria so we have even more refugees we can stop beating back at the border.
And the play goes on, the script is just getting weirder.