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Automata 10 Pack posted:The anti trans issue was a electoral liability in the midterms and the GOP doubled down. Heck the racism and hatred has been a liability for over a decade now and they keep doubling down. I think it was about the time Obama got elected an internal GOP memo leaked that was basically "We need to bring in more diversity and stop being racist fucks or we're electorally doomed once the younger generations actually start voting" and the rest of the Republicans said "What was that? Be racist harder? Sounds good!"
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Apr 2, 2023 22:36
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I think this is the crucial distinction about the majority of Trump's base vs. common media descriptions of same. Like previous fascists, his demographics are mostly bourgeois/petite-bourgeois types who feel deeply insecure and vulnerable to shifting socio-economic trends and movements, without in the main actually suffering significant damage from them. They have their petty little kingdoms and by god they're not giving up their privileges so some pink-haired androgynous weirdo can feel safe being themselves in public, or whatever other example you care to name. Now, the people actually getting screwed over by the capitalist hellword we live in are no less vulnerable to culture war distractions to be sure, but they're also usually much more keyed in to who/what specifically is giving them the shaft on a daily basis ie: their job, boss. The key split here for people is looking at the split of people who made over $100k but didn't have a college education Trump was up +34 and up +10 in the demographic who had a college educaiton. When Poliwonks was a thread, its useful to think of these people as those who think they are selfmade. Small business owners, living mostly in rural or small suburbs. They own SOMETHING or they are the middle managers at a business and are given JUST enough privileges to want to "protect" what they earned.
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Apr 2, 2023 22:50
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Alkydere posted:Heck the racism and hatred has been a liability for over a decade now and they keep doubling down.
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Apr 2, 2023 22:52
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cat botherer posted:Yet they keep doing pretty good electorally, and are even better at pushing their agenda. Amazing what being able to just gerrymander things in insane ways does for you.
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Apr 2, 2023 22:55
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Angry_Ed posted:Amazing what being able to just gerrymander things in insane ways does for you.
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Apr 2, 2023 23:03
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Alkydere posted:Heck the racism and hatred has been a liability for over a decade now and they keep doubling down. Losing Georgia, Arizona and Virginia as strongholds has been devastating for them, and North Carolina is next, with Texas still out there on the distant horizon. (But hey, they have Florida!) Now mind you I don’t know that the Republicans falling apart would help anything, it’s not like we wouldn’t have conservatives anymore, and the structure of the senate means they will always wield an enormous an amount of influence. And I could easily see it making things worse (eg by causing a debt default).
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Apr 2, 2023 23:06
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Angry_Ed posted:Amazing what being able to just gerrymander things in insane ways does for you. Yes, they recognized and incorporated the report that young people hate them, it's just that "try to appeal to them" is only one of the possible responses and it's just not the one they took. It's always going to be easier to return our democracy back to what it was designed to be than it is to make it actually properly democratic
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Apr 2, 2023 23:08
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Mellow Seas posted:Losing Georgia, Arizona and Virginia as strongholds has been devastating for them, and North Carolina is next, with Texas still out there on the distant horizon. (But hey, they have Florida!) As a Texan I hate to break it to you: Blurple Texas will come as a complete loving surprise one year and isn't some electoral inevitability. And that's if it ever does come. Yes the national electorate as a whole is turning less conservative, but Texas and Florida have been staked out as conservative bastions. Everyone petty small business owner or landlord with illusions of grandeur heads either here or Florida, providing a constant stream of fresh blood-gargling idiots for the machine. Don't rely on Blurple Texas. It likely won't happen any time soon and if/when it does happen it will be a surprise. It likely won't happen until the Clinton-era political hanger-on and advisors disappear so they can't talk anymore political aspirants into screwing themselves over. Beto had problems, but he had a chance for Texas Senate or Governor. He also had a very strong downballot effect. Then he blew all that away because he let some silver tongue Clintonites whisper in his ear that he could go for President in an already crowded arena in 2020.
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Apr 2, 2023 23:18
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Kind of the same as drilling for oil and gas. Once a reservoir of voters is tapped out, fracture that formation and get a bit more out. Except, it's the brains of Americans that they've fractured. In return for a few more percentage points of voter turnout and a bump in scam donation hauls, the madness is nigh-unrestrained and I guess global warming in this metaphor is also global warming irl. Idk, I didn't think this all the way through.
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Apr 2, 2023 23:21
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I’m not saying blue Texas an inevitability or anything, just that it’s something the GOP has to consider in their strategizing. It’s not something for Democrats to count on, but it’s absolutely something that Republicans can’t afford to sleep on, and it should keep them up at night a bit. What I do worry about with Texas (or any other narrowly red state) is them following the Florida model - not only did DeSantis and his legislature disenfranchise tons of people, they also used policy to make their state vastly more appealing to conservatives and less so to minorities and liberals, and trumpeted their “successes” loudly across the country. In the process they’ve shifted the electorate of their state firmly in their favor.
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Apr 2, 2023 23:27
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Mellow Seas posted:What I do worry about with Texas (or any other narrowly red state) is them following the Florida model - not only did DeSantis and his legislature disenfranchise tons of people, they also used policy to make their state vastly more appealing to conservatives and less so to minorities and liberals, and trumpeted their “successes” loudly across the country. In the process they’ve shifted the electorate of their state firmly in their favor. This already accurately describes Texas.
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Apr 2, 2023 23:30
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Yeah Paxton and Patrick and Abbott are a real axis for sure. Oh, I also think that a possibly significant part of the reason south Florida is no longer solid blue is because if you believe climate change is actually a threat, you would never choose to set down roots there. Texas could have similar problems when sub zero cold snaps and 120 degree days in Dallas and 3 feet of rain in a weekend in Houston are established as regular events. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Apr 2, 2023 |
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Apr 2, 2023 23:31
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Mellow Seas posted:I’m not saying blue Texas an inevitability or anything, just that it’s something the GOP has to consider in their strategizing. It’s not something for Democrats to count on, but it’s absolutely something that Republicans can’t afford to sleep on, and it should keep them up at night a bit. What I'm trying to say is... You're at least a decade behind the times and need to catch up. The state's been a draw for conservatives as a True Speaking Conservative (A.K.A. rear end in a top hat) Bastion since at least Bush Jr.'s terms as president and everyone wanted to go to where he was from which was And those severe weather events already have been regularized here. You do realize Houston actually designed its highway system in part as a flood drainage system, right?
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Apr 2, 2023 23:36
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Yeah, I acknowledge that the Texas state government has been implementing restrictive policy and generally leaned into the state’s cowboy image for at least 25 years. They have made open marketing pitches to conservative Californians. But that’s kind of my point: DeSantis turned Florida from a slight Republican lean to a decisive one in just a few years. Texas has been pursuing a similar kind of agenda for a generation and the state has only drifted further towards contention. It very well could function as a “firewall” that keeps statewide elections predictably red. We’ll have more info with each election that goes by.
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Apr 3, 2023 00:07
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lol if you think Republicans will give up power before they give up democracy. They can cheat enough to keep winning with the naked and mauled corpse of civic society we have now. When they start losing with their cheating in place they'll simply take power with as small a fig leaf as necessary to keep the "opposition" complacent, using as much violence as necessary. This has happened and is happening around the globe. The playbook is written, it works, and "It Can Happen Here" is the wrong tense of word choice.
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Apr 3, 2023 01:41
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bird food bathtub posted:They can cheat enough to keep winning with the naked and mauled corpse of civic society we have now. When they start losing with their cheating in place they'll simply take power with as small a fig leaf as necessary to keep the "opposition" complacent, using as much violence as necessary. They tried that with an incumbent Republican commander in chief in 2020 and it didn't work. Is your thesis that it will be easier for Republicans to do a violent coup when the military is taking orders from a Democratic president?
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Apr 3, 2023 03:02
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Alkydere posted:Heck the racism and hatred has been a liability for over a decade now and they keep doubling down. It wasn't even leaked, it was directly published to the press as the official opinion of the RNC. Which makes the following more or less crazy depending on your point of view. Honestly, it's a pretty interesting read for what ended up sticking and what didn't, even though it's trying to divorce strategy from policy. quote:7. We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.
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Apr 3, 2023 04:41
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DarkCrawler posted:Because they are terrible people with or without Trump. They aren't loyal to him, if tomorrow he admitted his wrongdoing, championed gay and trans rights and endorsed a national curriculum that taught American history accurately, they would drop him in a split second. They are loyal to the hatred he spews out, and they would switch to a more better source of it if one should appear. Never been better proof for this that Trump had actively pushed back against the anti-vaccine narrative and tried to claim it as a personal victory, and his base doublethinked it away without hesitation, claiming the deep state forced him to say that or something. Even Trump can't actually get his base to do something they don't already want to do. TheDisreputableDog posted:Do you guys think it’s possible that poor white people in flyover, industrial burnout areas have legitimately been victimized in the last 50 years? The actual victims of that overwhelmingly don't vote by all metrics. The idea that they're the real Republican base is Republican propaganda that Democrats have been eagerly and uncritically buying into for decades, to create the narrative of the 'undeserving poor' who are why we can't have nice things because they'll just vote it all away to spite minorities. As has been said, the actual Republican base is the petty bourg, landlords, business owners, and retirees who very falsely view themselves as the downtrodden hard workers like how british boomers won't shut the gently caress up about the Blitz, or 'Howard's battlers' down under. James Garfield posted:They tried that with an incumbent Republican commander in chief in 2020 and it didn't work. Is your thesis that it will be easier for Republicans to do a violent coup when the military is taking orders from a Democratic president? They'll keep trying, it's not like anyone's doing anything meaningful to stop them, and they just have to get lucky. The Beer Hall Putsch, the Reichstag fire.
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Apr 3, 2023 06:30
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The actual victims of that overwhelmingly don't vote by all metrics. The idea that they're the real Republican base is Republican propaganda that Democrats have been eagerly and uncritically buying into for decades, to create the narrative of the 'undeserving poor' who are why we can't have nice things because they'll just vote it all away to spite minorities. I don’t think so? The electorate is older in general, but retirees make up like a quarter of the Republican base, not significantly greater than the Democrats. Using the lowest tranche of education as a rough guideline for class and earnings, you can see the left used to have an edge, but even as the overall electorate in that category shrank, more of them vote Republican now. sgbyou posted:I'd say that most of that is self inflicted to be honest. I don’t agree that poor people are responsible for their own poverty, op.
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Apr 3, 2023 12:36
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It would be ridiculous to claim that the rural poor and denizens of hollowed-out metro areas haven't been victimized. To say their situation is "self-inflicted" is just as wrong as when conservatives say it about poor inner city blacks. Blaming them for being poor because they voted for a pro-poverty party would be akin to blaming the urban poor for being oppressed by police because they vote for pro-police politicians. The sunglasses-in-the-Ram-in-the-parking-lot-of-his-exploitative-small-business-unhinged-rant-video bougie conservative caricatures aren't the entire party, most Republican voters are people who haven't examined their own ideology at all and don't think about politics almost ever (like most Democratic voters.) TheDisreputableDog posted:I don’t agree that poor people are responsible for their own poverty, op.  That said, at this point it's pretty clear that long-term Republican control is actively hurting the economies and public health of the states that they've dominated for decades. I think it would behoove the poor and working classes in those states, if they find socialists and cosmopolitan liberals so off-putting, to find Andy Beshear-types who can at least run their states like they aren't actively trying to destroy them while not stepping on too many conservative toes. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 13:16
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Mellow Seas posted:That said, at this point it's pretty clear that long-term Republican control is actively hurting the economies and public health of the states that they've dominated for decades. Is it? This isn’t very clear to me at all. For example, I would credit California’s wealth to many factors independent of the state government policies. California owes a lot of its historical wealth to things like: 1) having an incredible climate, enabling great agricultural and other kinds of productivity 2) possessing most of the US West Coast 3) gold 4) oil 5) the US Department of Defense. These things have very little to do with state government policy.
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Apr 3, 2023 13:48
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Mellow Seas posted:It would be ridiculous to claim that the rural poor and denizens of hollowed-out metro areas haven't been victimized. To say their situation is "self-inflicted" is just as wrong as when conservatives say it about poor inner city blacks. Blaming them for being poor because they voted for a pro-poverty party would be akin to blaming the urban poor for being oppressed by police because they vote for pro-police politicians. The reasons why an poor inner city black Democrat votes for pro-police politicians is because their survival as people is predicated on a complex web of clawing out all possible revenue that has never been given to them due to being enslaved and/or excluded from society and the social support system of the country for hundreds of years. Sometimes that includes participating in the political machines of their respective urban areas, and there has not been a political machine that was not tied to the police force in some way since police forces were invented. The rural poor vote for pro-poverty politicians because they hate black people, immigrants, Muslims, women, Jews, LGBT, and so on being equivalent to them in a society. Their entire way of life used to be predicated not on pro-or-anti poverty but not being excluded from society and having a superior position in that society to the above mentioned groups, until MAYBE the last 30-50 years or so when they were relegated to closer to those groups in power and status by the increasingly urbanized middle class and the wealthy. For the first, pro-police is seen a necessary evil that they try to actively mitigate to the best of their ability. For the second poverty is seen as the consequence of other excluded groups being included more in society, and getting a bigger share of the pie of full societal participation. They try to actively mitigate that participation so their own share of the pie is bigger. They were fine with social programs and social progress pies as long as it was white-only, and if they can make it white-only again you would see them being fine with it again. To say neither have not examined their ideology or don't think about politics is insulting. - The former have a very clear understanding of what keeps them above the water and can't help but think about politics on a daily basis because it is directly tied to their survival. They are completely correct. - The latter have a very clear understanding of what KEPT them above water (using the former as a raft) and have a very clear understanding of what is the right way to regain that situation. Fascism. They are also completely correct. Just because someone has not thought about their ideology and politics from the perspective of most of the people in this forum does not mean they have not thought about them. Republicans have. They very astutely see that they have always been hosed over by the wealthy and the middle class, their antecedents were fine with this as long as the trickle down was restricted to them. Maybe self-inflicted is not the best descriptor because the situation for them has never changed. But they have never been victimized to the degree of the actual victims of American history and have no claim to stand on the same boat. Republicans are evil, they are not illogical, or stupid. They simply have different goals coupled with non-existing morals beyond the basic imperative of being nice to their in-group, how they want to meet their goals is perfectly logical and has worked for them and people like them well enough until very recent history. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 13:53
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silence_kit posted:Is it? This isn’t very clear to me at all. Yeah, this is where a lot of the red vs blue economic policy discussion breaks down, because yes, the middle of the nation where our poorer states are tends to be very red. That doesn't mean if they had a sudden change and went blue that they could become as wealthy as California. You can't progressive politics your way into making Kansas a major international shipping port. It's the Singapore problem. You constantly hear people saying "If X nation in Asia was as progressive and open as Singapore then they could be as rich as it too". Somehow I doubt that China is going to be as rich as what is essentially a city state that handles a gigantic portion of the trade in the area, like an eastern Venice. And of course we won't mention how all those great benefits only apply to citizens. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 14:01
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CuddleCryptid posted:Yeah, this is where a lot of the red vs blue economic policy discussion breaks down, because yes, the middle of the nation where our poorer states are tends to be very red. That doesn't mean if they had a sudden change and went blue that they could become as wealthy as California. You can't progressive politics your way into making Kansas a major international shipping port. There is also the following effect, which should be very uncontroversial ITT: wealth tends to accumulate, so historical advantages usually tend to carry over to the present day.
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Apr 3, 2023 14:13
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DarkCrawler posted:Maybe self-inflicted is not the best descriptor because the situation for them has never changed. But they have never been victimized to the degree of the actual victims of American history and have no claim to stand on the same boat. This is the heart of the matter - poor white people are the only group the left feels empowered to punch down on. Taking a poor white person whose direct environment is endemic with worse education, lower real wages, shorter lifespans, more violence, and rampant drug use and sneering down at them about white privilege and claiming they aren’t “real victims” is exactly how we got Trump. “Republicans are evil” feels good in a juvenile way, but from a realpolitik perspective, that’s not a solution. Seventy-five million people (about 2 in 10 of them minorities!) aren’t going away. Put another way, you wouldn’t hand-wave Muslims away as evil because their belief system and be used to oppress and cause violence, right? People are products of and influenced by their environments.
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Apr 3, 2023 14:27
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silence_kit posted:Is it? This isn’t very clear to me at all. California is such an outlier in almost everything that it's hard to apply any of this. As it happens, over the decades that it was in the process of going from empty frontier state to the largest and most economically powerful in the country, it was fiercely Republican. But that was a different party (much of New England was pretty Republican until about the same era), and I find it hard to believe the state would be as wealthy now if Republicans had stayed in control and done things like underfunding/dismantling the UC system. There is a very clear correlation that suggests a strong causal relationship between conservative government and poor economic performance; either that being poor makes white people vote overwhelmingly for Republicans or that white people voting overwhelmingly for Republicans makes a state poor. Probably some of both going on, but I lean towards the latter. I would certainly like further study of it, and of course they could both actually be related to some other factor. So yeah, "clear" is an oversell, sure. In conclusion clarity is a land of contrasts. DarkCrawler posted:- The former have a very clear understanding of what keeps them above the water and can't help but think about politics on a daily basis because it is directly tied to their survival. They are completely correct. As for urban blacks, I was excusing their voting for politicians like Adams and Frey, which I find very understandable, so I don't need you to defend that choice to me. DarkCrawler posted:Just because someone has not thought about their ideology and politics from the perspective of most of the people in this forum does not mean they have not thought about them. I hate to play the "you don't live here" card but the poverty rate for US whites is almost 8%. That appears to be 40 times the poverty rate in your country. For blacks it is 100 times what it is in Finland. I really don't think you're accurately envisioning what these people's lives are like and how little time or mental energy it leaves for any kind of personal philosophy. It's not just a different perspective from politics-obsessed goons, it's an entirely different depth. Their intellects (which I am not disparaging) are not engaged on any of these issues whatsoever. Their biases, while unconscionable and abhorrent, are completely unchallenged in their day to day lives, and in fact encouraged. I agree with the overarching point you've tried to make over the years those who can challenge those biases should, instead of keeping their mouth closed for social convenience. (Bear in mind that there are a lot of ways to challenge them that are unhelpful or counterproductive, here is some info about that.) Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 14:28
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TheDisreputableDog posted:I don’t think so? The electorate is older in general, but retirees make up like a quarter of the Republican base, not significantly greater than the Democrats. Using the lowest tranche of education as a rough guideline for class and earnings, you can see the left used to have an edge, but even as the overall electorate in that category shrank, more of them vote Republican now. From what I've seen, and I think this largely agrees with what Ghost Leviathan is saying, is that the most likely Republican voter is white, over 50, makes over $100k, has a High School degree or some college (but not a full college degree), and lives in a suburban or rural area. These are people who are either small business owners, or worked good paying blue collar jobs for long periods of time. Anecdotally, I work around a lot of people who fit this description, and there are a lot of Trump voters. Republicans have a bad demographic trend in that the lower education level population love them, but they are also the worst voting demo. They also have good support from high income people, and white people, who are very good at voting. Democrats, on the other hand, have huge support from minorities, urban, and low income people, and they are also bad at voting. They also have support from college education people, who are the best voting demographic. Essentially each party has a combo of good and bad voting demographics that are kind of balancing out. Democrats really need to hope that younger voters keep voting for Dems as they get older and become more reliable voters, and I think there are some trends that show this is happening.
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Apr 3, 2023 14:46
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A fun theory barely related to the current discussion: I actually think one of the ways non-political people with "conservative brains" (to be reductive about it) end up being actually politically conservative has to do with their bosses. A "conservative brain" is very hierarchical in its thinking, very much values authority, and deference and loyalty to that authority. So some impressionable kid goes to work at whatever stupid job they have, and makes jack poo poo, and lives with their parents or in some craphole they can barely make rent on. Then they see the owner of the company living in a nice house, and he's got a boat he takes out on the lake, and he's got a great family and beautiful kids and big plans for retirement. When that boss starts spewing talking points at them, they think, "well, if Tom is so successful, I should try to be like him." As a guy from a working class town I've seen this more times than I can count. Like, it can even be a positive influence, I've seen guys who were fuckups, who got in trouble with the law and had drug problems, clean themselves up partly due to a desire to be more like their happy, healthy rear end in a top hat bosses. I think part of the New Deal-era magic was getting those types of passively authoritarian minds to apply those concepts of loyalty and deference to the overall well-being of the country, rather than their own personal ambition. Somehow "the common good" had been placed higher on the hierarchy than the plutocrat. (And it's interesting that the guy who did that was an American aristocrat with a thick transatlantic accent.) Bird in a Blender posted:Republicans have a bad demographic trend in that the lower education level population love them, but they are also the worst voting demo. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 14:47
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The actual victims of that overwhelmingly don't vote by all metrics. The idea that they're the real Republican base is Republican propaganda that Democrats have been eagerly and uncritically buying into for decades, to create the narrative of the 'undeserving poor' who are why we can't have nice things because they'll just vote it all away to spite minorities. It depends by what you mean as "the base." The Republican base (in terms of its largest amount of votes) is white men without a college degree who identify as evangelical Christians. That group usually isn't especially high-income. But, they also have a very large chunk of votes from the groups you mentioned and they wouldn't be able to win without either. It's the same way that the "base" (in terms of largest amount of voters) in the Democratic party is technically college-educated, single, non-religious, white women. But, they also have a huge chunk of their vote that comes from low-income racial minorities who generally have much higher religiosity and lower education that they couldn't win without. So, the non-white voters aren't a majority of the Democrats' votes, but they do massively overperform in that demographic and couldn't win without them. Same thing with the Republicans and "petty bourg, landlords, business owners, and retirees" in their coalition. They don't make up the majority of their votes, but they dramatically overperform with them and would not be able to win without them. So, it depends whether you consider "the base" is the group where you get your most votes or the group that you get fewer total votes with, but overperform with and couldn't win without.
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Apr 3, 2023 14:58
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I find it very amusing that people are actually surprised that Trump's supporters consider him an untrustworthy liar and cheater. They see this as a good thing. He literally brags about evading taxes. As Kanye put it, it's pretty much 'flashing his membership card to the Illuminati'. That is what they value. His brand is playing the game of capitalism correctly and well, while his opponents are tedious and boring. That he is a used car salesman, a crooked landlord, is directly appealing to his base. He is their role model, what they want to be. For those who still believe in the American Dream, Donald Trump is their hero. And that should tell you a lot about what the American Dream means.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:02
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I find it very amusing that people are actually surprised that Trump's supporters consider him an untrustworthy liar and cheater. They see this as a good thing. He literally brags about evading taxes. As Kanye put it, it's pretty much 'flashing his membership card to the Illuminati'. That is what they value. His brand is playing the game of capitalism correctly and well, while his opponents are tedious and boring. I think it feels surprising because those same supporters seem to hate the idea of the illuminati, (Q anon stuff) corruption (But Her Emails), freeloaders & cheats (welfare, medcare), and just generally a ton of stuff you could apply to Trump. They only value these things when Trump does them. It's just the ends justify the means poo poo.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:10
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:It depends by what you mean as "the base." The rhetorical trick occurring here is a conflation of the "not high-income" with the actual poor. The white petite-bourgeoisie doesn't have to take yearly ski-trips to Colorado to vote along class consciousness. Poverty sucks but is so less common among white people than the general population of america that caring about white poverty exclusively is a foolish worry, and to accept the premise that they form a base of anything is to accept that the reason the non-white poor vote against the GOP has more to do with what violence they promise to enact against the Black and indigenous and queer.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:11
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most of his base idolizes him because he gets to be as mean and dishonest and hateful as he wants. the cruelty is the point, and trump is a very cruel person.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:16
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Gerund posted:caring about white poverty exclusively is a foolish worry It's something you do have to think about, though, because it has different causes and different solutions from minority poverty. There is the type of poverty that happens in the inner rings of big metro areas, right under the noses of the wealthy who work in the glass towers, and there is the type of poverty that happens when you're dozens or even hundreds of miles from any useful economic activity. We can't really afford not to address either.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:16
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TheDisreputableDog posted:This is the heart of the matter - poor white people are the only group the left feels empowered to punch down on. Taking a poor white person whose direct environment is endemic with worse education, lower real wages, shorter lifespans, more violence, and rampant drug use and sneering down at them about white privilege and claiming they aren’t “real victims” is exactly how we got Trump. No, we got Trump because a large part of United States are lovely people. Poverty is not correlated with being the kind of a piece of poo poo who votes for Donald Trump. Poverty is not an excuse for obviously evil and immoral actions. I'll punch down on people who aren't white and are more poor than I am and try to gently caress over others. It is just that there usually aren't any people defending them so there is not much need. quote:“Republicans are evil” feels good in a juvenile way, but from a realpolitik perspective, that’s not a solution. Seventy-five million people (about 2 in 10 of them minorities!) aren’t going away. Put another way, you wouldn’t hand-wave Muslims away as evil because their belief system and be used to oppress and cause violence, right? People are products of and influenced by their environments. There are plenty of realpolitik solutions to the problem of Republicans. Do you think rural poor in other countries possess as dominating of an influence? And say, Islamists or Wahhabists are evil as much as Republicans are evil. Conflating a single political party with a worldwide religion is pretty juvenile, by the way. Mellow Seas posted:There are white people in the US who absolutely have not been kept above water, there are white people who were born underwater. And I really think you overestimate how much people in politically homogenous areas (i.e. pretty much any reasonably remote area in the country) think about politics, or the outcomes of their actions in the voting booth. (Meanwhile, the ones who do think about politics are being blasted with unanswered propaganda every day of the week.) Literally everyone thinks about politics and everyone who goes to the voting booth thinks about the desired outcome for that action. The desired outcome for a poor white Republican is for other people who are oppressed to suffer more so there is more left for them of the trickle down, not to change anything about the trickle down. You once again mistake lack of political knowledge for the lack of political thinking or conception. I can guarantee a poor person does not consider politics less than you - they may not be able to analyze it to such a deep degree as you do, or have the energy to execute their political wishes even just by voting, but they consider politics on a daily basis. They are consistently faced with the negative end results of those politics. quote:As for urban blacks, I was excusing their voting for politicians like Adams and Frey, which I find very understandable, so I don't need you to defend that choice to me. I am defending them in that though both groups are looking to survive, one is looking to do so through victimization. Thus their own status of being the victim - of the same thing every non-wealthy American is a victim of - is not really relevant. quote:Eh... None of that means that they are not thinking about politics any more than an illiteral miner isn't thinking about structural safety because they are not a middle class engineer. They may not express the same issue with similar concepts or in similar environs but they consider it among their groups and debate the related issues with what they have. Everyone has a philosophy, even if they don't have the words to communicate it effectively or even a desire to spread it. Very few people are completely apolitical and every person who claims to be so is usually revealed to have very specific political opinions and desires that are under the mask of "idc". quote:I agree with the overarching point you've tried to make over the years those who can challenge those biases should, instead of keeping their mouth closed for social convenience. (Bear in mind that there are a lot of ways to challenge them that are unhelpful or counterproductive, here is some info about that.) Personally I don't really see the logic between thinking these people are political blank slates immersed in the heart of American right-wing propaganda that has turned them into *points at your average Republican* while also believing deprogramming them is even possible by a non-professional except in the tiny minimum of lucky cases. It doesn't seem to have much data to support as particularly effective by amateurs either. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 15:20
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Oxyclean posted:I think it feels surprising because those same supporters seem to hate the idea of the illuminati, (Q anon stuff) corruption (But Her Emails), freeloaders & cheats (welfare, medcare), and just generally a ton of stuff you could apply to Trump. They only value these things when Trump does them. It's just the ends justify the means poo poo. It's literally just because they, directly, are not benefiting. It's a simple trick. 'Someone I don't like is doing better than I think they should- they must be cheating. I want to cheat better.'
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Apr 3, 2023 15:20
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Mellow Seas posted:Uhhh... who is proposing that??? I don't think even our token conservative supports that approach. I'll leave some of OP's posts with the white-exclusive parts bolded to help establish that I am, in fact, reading and reacting to the real argument. But I agree that there are different systems that enact impoverishment: Poverty of geography, of economic activity that requires an underclass because it takes a lot of poor people to allow one private plane trip, of white supremacy. I do not think that one can easily separate and treat the symptoms without talking about the system itself. TheDisreputableDog posted:This is the heart of the matter - poor white people are the only group the left feels empowered to punch down on. Taking a poor white person whose direct environment is endemic with worse education, lower real wages, shorter lifespans, more violence, and rampant drug use and sneering down at them about white privilege and claiming they aren’t “real victims” is exactly how we got Trump. TheDisreputableDog posted:Do you guys think it’s possible that poor white people in flyover, industrial burnout areas have legitimately been victimized in the last 50 years?
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Apr 3, 2023 15:30
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DarkCrawler posted:No, we got Trump because a large part of United States are lovely people. I feel like this is the classic European arrogance of "well of course if we had a diverse population, my society would be cool about it and not close ranks around our dominant ethnicity." Many of your neighboring states have already demonstrated what a load of hooey that was. You have not been challenged by this aspect of human nature the same way the United States has. (Yes, this situation is a direct result of our history of subjugation and slaughter of non-whites, but everybody alive today already had that baked into their cake when they were born.) I'll accept that a large part of the United States are lovely people, sure, but I disagree with the idea that they are particularly unique in that respect. Gerund posted:I'll leave some of OP's posts with the white-exclusive parts bolded to help establish that I am, in fact, reading and reacting to the real argument.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:31
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It's literally just because they, directly, are not benefiting. It's a simple trick. 'Someone I don't like is doing better than I think they should- they must be cheating. I want to cheat better.' It's simpler than that, the only moral X is my X. The only moral illuminati member is my illuminati member because he agrees with my view of the world. I guess if we want to be more in depth about it is that within people's identity is the political identity and what tribe they ascribe it to. We see survey after survey of conservatives who agree with liberals, leftists, and others that wealth distribution is a problem and that the wealthy should be more closer to the middle than where it is now. They also agree that people who are struggling deserve help. Then you say: What if that person is black? a woman? jewish? And their tribal meter goes awry. THOSE PEOPLE don't deserve help, therefore I will oppose this. I will also say this, the Democrats (and other leftists not here) have to be careful about assuming Spanish speaking communities will naturally ally with them. Whiteness is an insidious thing and seeing what Trump did in certain Mexican communities and seeing Miami trend Republican means there some movement into bringing them into the white power family. The Democrats have been bad about organizing outside their safe zones and using the tools available to them. Why they aren't running digital ads all the time or buying ads on internet radio or podcasts or loving twitch, I will never know.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:35
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Mooseontheloose posted:I will also say this, the Democrats (and other leftists not here) have to be careful about assuming Spanish speaking communities will naturally ally with them. Whiteness is an insidious thing and seeing what Trump did in certain Mexican communities and seeing Miami trend Republican means there some movement into bringing them into the white power family. The Democrats have been bad about organizing outside their safe zones and using the tools available to them. Why they aren't running digital ads all the time or buying ads on internet radio or podcasts or loving twitch, I will never know. Because they genuinely don't think they need to try, and that any nonwhite people not voting for them are clearly unreachable ungratefuls or white-adjacent bro-adjacent loony leftists. (unless they're Florida Cubans, for some reason) Also that neoliberal Democrats refuse to acknowledge material conditions, thus the only available acknowledgment of reality is through the idpol lens that poverty and misfortune for white people can only be because of insufficient application of their privilege.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:46
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