Aimai over at No More Mister Nice Blog has some interesting observations about the current budget and debt ceiling standoff. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:
To refresh everyone’s memory we passed the 14th amendment because we were about to accept back into political life our former rebels and traitors–these men, once they were back in public life, were quite likely to repudiate the war debts of the victors or to once again engage in sabotage of the union. That is what this neo-southern confederate rump is doing: they are sabotaging the US Government and using the budget to do so. They are both smarter and more cowardly than the previous batch of Confederates. Let’s hope the current President can save the Union.
A guest on Chris Hayes’ program last night (a former official in the Reagan administration, IIRC) made a related point about the GOP morphing into a neo-confederate insurrectionist party. As we all know, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” used the civil rights movement as a wedge to coopt the Dixiecrats. This former Reagan administration official argued that the Dixiecrats coopted the GOP instead, implying that “reasonable Republicans” like himself were then left behind.
The part about the Dixiecrat takeover is true enough, but when disgruntled Republicans heap all the blame on their Bible Belt crazies, it conveniently lets a lot of guilty people off the hook. Like Reagan himself, who inexcusably launched his presidential campaign from Philadelphia, Mississippi (where the three civil rights workers were famously murdered in the 60s) and trafficked in blatantly racist tropes throughout his presidency. As did every single one of his Republican successors.
As MLK noted, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The arc of the immoral universe is long too, and it bends toward insanity. Thus we behold the spectacle of the current Republican Party, with craven bagmen cowering before a phalanx of gibbering, bomb-throwing nutbags who are intent on bringing the whole edifice crashing down on the heads of the righteous and unrighteous alike.
The loons aren’t just from the former Confederate states either; they hail from Alaska, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, Arizona, Kansas, Colorado – even California. Patient Zero may have been caught the fever south of the Mason-Dixon line, but Republicans in every region avidly aided the spread of the infection by splicing Confederate grievances and religious zealotry with anti-government paranoia. Exhibit A: Michele Bachmann.
The Republicans transformed the traditional Bible Belt into a Sash of Insanity that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. They built that.
Chris
It’s both. The old Republican Party, like their opponents, contained both a liberal and a conservative wing. The flood of Dixiecrats into the GOP, however, drastically tilted the balance of power in favor of the conservative wing, which was able to take control of the party and subsequently chase the liberal wing out.
It’s not “Republicans coopted Dixiecrats,” or “Dixiecrats coopted Republicans,” so much as “one Republican faction executed a hostile takeover against the other faction, and enlisted the Dixiecrats in order to do it.”
Botsplainer
Betty, the root of the infection, the beating heart, thumps loudest in Dixie. Carve it out, and the Neo-Confederates that are scattered through the Plains and in the rest of the country slink away.
Until then, we’ll get to hear continued bleating about how Liberty dies every time a white man can’t say “ni**er in polite company without getting ostracized.
joel hanes
We should never have traded away the Fairness Doctrine in the budget showdown over the Contras.
BGinCHI
It was Bruce Bartlett, if memory serves, Betty.
BGinCHI
If your philosophy (such as it is) fetishizes reactionary thinking (such as it is) and standing athwart progress/history and shouting “NO, dadgummit” then you will likely not evolve and thus be forced to pander to the least evolved among us.
NotMax
@BGinCHI
They’ve sped by reactionary, are well into retrograde and heading hellbent for leather into antediluvian.
max
I can’t read the writing on the pic.
Well, strictly speaking, they were already trying. The 14th Amendment is all about not letting the courts set up by ex-Confederate plantation owners (who were sitting around eating raw turnips and bitching that they didn’t have any money since they couldn’t trade in slaves) rule that, legally, existing Federal debt was invalid. The problem is, is that 14th amendment doesn’t apply to Congress – if it did, FDR couldn’t have gone off the gold standard.
That is what this neo-southern confederate rump is doing: they are sabotaging the US Government and using the budget to do so. They are both smarter and more cowardly than the previous batch of Confederates. Let’s hope the current President can save the Union.
Exactly. They’re trying to wedge the crack left open by the 14th Amendment allowing Congress to default. (Which is good – if we ever need to default, as FDR did when going off the gold standard, we want Congress to be able to do so.) But it’s essentially a bluff here. They want to rook Obama into some stupid concession by threatening to blow everything up. Only correct response as far as I’m concerned is ‘Please to be going and fucking yourselves’.
This former Reagan administration official argued that the Dixiecrats coopted the GOP instead, implying that “reasonable Republicans” like himself were then left behind.
Well, the great masses of white voters are split between the Dixiecrats and everybody else. The strong supporters of ‘give all the rich people money’ are few and far between, as are all the strong supporters of most other conservatives causes. The Dixiecrats have got the numbers, so they’re going to call the Confederate tune. The old Democrat party was Dixiecrats plus liberals – so this boils down to a fight between the two wings of the New Deal Coalition. Someone like Mitt Romney had no chance of actually winning anyone over on what he actually believed in. If he’d run on it, he’d have gotten numbers like the libertarian party pulls down.
As did every single one of his Republican successors.
Sure. They care about morality as long as that morality is measured in cold, hard cash. The Dixiecrats/Tea Partiers hate them, since the old R’s don’t really believe in all that neo-Confederate horseshit.
Patient Zero may have been caught the fever south of the Mason-Dixon line, but Republicans in every region avidly aided the spread of the infection by splicing Confederate grievances and religious zealotry with anti-government paranoia. Exhibit A: Michele Bachmann. The Republicans transformed the traditional Bible Belt into a Sash of Insanity that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. They built that.
They did indeed.
And now we’ve got a version of Pickett’s charge, conducted by old grumpy insane white men.
max
[‘So the comedy is there, if you look for it.’]
p.s. Nice post.
MattF
FYI, here’s a map of the GOP districts in the ‘Suicide Caucus’:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html
And if you want an explanation for the odd gaps in the Southern part of the map, try googling ‘african american demographic map’
Ash Can
This. Mr. Former Reagan Official can go fuck himself with a chainsaw. He and his partners in crime invited what they knew to be a deranged cretin into the GOP car and let the cretin ride shotgun. Said cretin did as all deranged cretins do — bit the driver repeatedly, wrested control of the wheel away from the driver, and is now flooring it toward the cliff, sideswiping other objects both stationary and moving on the way. He can cry me a fucking river.
GregB
Pickett’s Charge lead by lemmings with suicide vests.
BGinCHI
@GregB: Uphill.
NotMax
A “Murphy Brown” scene, with Wallace Shawn as a House member, was prescient.
jo6pac
@Ash Can: Thank You, so True
fuckwit
Well, wait a minute. The Civil War was 150 years ago. The Civil Rights Act was 50 years ago. PEOPLE MOVE AROUND. Not only do the memes spread, but the actual people do too.
Remember the First Great Depression, when all those Okies got on Route 66 and moved to Cal-i-for-ni-yay? Well they brought their racist redneck attitudes with them, and settled in LA, and now their kids and grandkids sit in traffic on the 405 listening to hate radio. The culture moved with them, and the hate along with it, but instead of hating on black people now they’re hating on Mexicans.
Likewise, there have been migrations from the South to places in the west and north, over the past 150 years. People move for jobs, for family, for opportunity. The descendents of the Confederates are all over the place now, and some of the attitudes have persisted through the generations.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the people in, say, Issa’s district trace their great-grandpappy’s history through to Robert E. Lee.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@joel hanes: This. It can’t be said enough. Getting rid of the fairness doctrine is the root of all the evil on the right.
The Ancient Randonneur
Instead of burning Atlanta to the ground this time the Feds could threaten to force them all to get gay-married. Or, convert to Islam. Isn’t that the Kenyan Usurper’s real agenda anyway?
MattF
@fuckwit: True enough. One thing that people forget is that the AA migration northward was accompanied by a white migration that was just as big. The AA migration ended up in the cities, the white migration ended up in the small towns of the Midwest.
Mary G
Lovely rant, Betty Cracker!
JPL
uhoh! Norquist is not happy with Ted Cruz. link Rand Paul has a happy.
The link is to TPM,
JPL
@MattF: If you haven’t you should read the Warmth of Other Suns. by Isabel Wilkerson. It covers the migration north by African Americans.
HinTN
I work in an office ostensibly populated by VERY well educated engineers, EEs, MEs, AEs, and these folks from Ohio State, Auburn and other proud engineering schools are over the top Tea Bagging LOONS. No rational thought in their Belief Systems. Transform that with semi-educated illiteracy and Houston, we have a problem.
joes527
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: meh. Cable was fixin to make it irrelevant anyway.
BGinCHI
@HinTN: Went to Purdue, undergrad. Feel your pain. The only engineers who have any sense drive trains.
HinTN
@JPL:Truly a magnificent book!
Davis X. Machina
@fuckwit:
Works in both directions. Arizona, parts of the Carolinas, Texas, greater Atlanta, are all full of ex-Yankees who upped stakes for the weather, employment, or other reasons.
The moderating effect of this counter-migration is for some reason undetectable in the composition of the House. There ought to be an ever-growing number of Elliot Levitases and instead, we get Newt.
El Cid
Neo-Confederates, John Birch Society anti-Commie Paranoiacs, and 8th century Talibangelical Sectarianists, all backed by the 1896-style Robber Baronies who pay their bills.
Hill Dweller
@HinTN: My father and brother are engineers(EE and ME), racist wingnuts, and willing to believe almost anything from the Republican propaganda apparatus.
BGinCHI
Haven’t seen it, but there is a film called “We Bought a Zoo” on the cables.
Is this a biopic on the Koch Brothers?
Stella B
@fuckwit: People don’t move around as much as we think or at least we move in a particular pattern. Confederates moved to AZ and southern CA (Issa’s district included), but people from Puritan and Quaker stock moved to the PNW. Immigrants tend to take on the characteristics of the place where the first generation lands. Part of what the confederates mourn is their agrarian past, so they don’t migrate to dense cities.
The first time I went to Portland I wanted to move there. I told my husband they were my people. A few years later I did ancestry.com and discovered they were indeed my people.
HinTN
@BGinCHI: Not sure why but I fight that characterization every frickin’ day.
ira-NY
Terrific post. Thank you.
HinTN
@Davis X. Machina: My great grandfather was a Confederate general. Returned from the war to teach mathematics at a small private university. I live three miles from that town today. It can be very different from the stereotype.
BGinCHI
@HinTN: They have a tenuous grasp of culture, art, and most of all, empathy. I could go on….
Kay Dennison
Great job, Betty!!!!!!!!!!!!! You said it well.
HinTN
@BGinCHI: a, yelp
low-tech cyclist
Sure, but there aren’t that many people in Alaska, the northern Rockies, or the northern and central Plains states. And states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Colorado, let alone California, are places where the loons are in the minority.
The cancer growing on this nation is still mostly a Confederate/border state thing, even though it’s metastasized to other locations as well.
sharl
Reports from the field:
That’s the true story you libs refuse to tell!!!!1!!
JPL
@HinTN: That’s an excellent point. You might be intelligent and skilled, i.e. Ted Cruz, but if you surround yourself with like minded folk, your views can be skewed. Supposedly Cruz read the extreme Austrian economists Mises and Hayek while in his teens. His views were formed pretty early. He wouldn’t allow himself to socialize with those beneath him, or so he thought. I don’t question Cruz’s I.Q. but I do question his knowledge.
Recently I read the Unwinding and although I found it depressing, it’s an important read about how we got here.
NotMax
@sharl
Time to convene the Undead Panels.
JPL
@BGinCHI: Yes it is and you should definitely watch it. You’ll thank me.
BillinGlendaleCA
@HinTN: All they study in college is Math, Chem, Physics, and Engineering. It’s a very narrow education. I’ve always had a problem with undergrad professional schools.
Davis X. Machina
@BillinGlendaleCA:
That’s too bad. In 10 years, except for a few showy, and well-endowed, dinosaurs like Amherst and Bowdoin, that’s all there’ll be.
STEM swallowed secondary education a decade ago — and that was just an hors d’ouvre.
Tom Q
@Chris: There’s actually a key moment when this happened: during the presidential primaries of 1976.
Reagan was challenging sitting president Ford (who by default took the liberal/moderate crown). For the first month or so, it looked like Ford was going to triumph easily: after squeaking by in NH, he started winning primaries by bigger and bigger margins.
But something happened over in the other party. George Wallace had been attempting to repeat his 1972 Democratic primary success, but Jimmy Carter defeated him in several successive Southern primaries. At a certain point, Wallace supporters realized he had no hope of winning the Dem nomination…
…at which point, they started voting in the GOP primaries in crossover-allowed states. And, suddenly, Reagan’s campaign was turbo-charged. He started winning primaries, sometimes by wide margins (he took Texas 2-1), all fueled by relocated Dixiecrats.
In the end Reagan, fell just short (probably lucky for him, as ’76, after Watergate/recession, wasn’t much of a GOP year). But the fact that he got so close to unseating Ford made him the logical favorite in ’80 — by which time these Dixiecrats were GOP voters from the start. The rest is history.
BGinCHI
@Davis X. Machina: I don’t think the Kids are all right with this. The backlash in education has to come or we won’t have anything else to argue about in our caves wearing our skins.
joel hanes
@HinTN:
an office ostensibly populated by VERY well educated engineers
I work for a prominent computer company. My chip design team includes brilliant engineers from India, China, Korea, Pakistan, Germany, Russia, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam, and the odd African nation.
Many of them say privately that the US went insane sometime in the ’80s, and has grown progressively less sane since — ideologically diseased with guns and religion and delusional paranoid rightists.
I cannot disagree.
another Mildred
Pet peeve: Although MLK, Jr. both improved and popularized the “arc of the moral universe” quote, it originated with noted firebrand abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Just sayin. Poor guy never gets credit.
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
russ
Ideas are like the butterflies, they have a home and fly out a pollinate areas far from their home and in this case the southeastern United States. It take awhile for this political pollination to overcome the political norms in areas “not like home” but when promoted with vehicles like Fox and others their pollinations take hold.
Hill Dweller
Jake Tapper is on the Twitter machine telling me this is the “Obama-Cruz shutdown”.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
ABC News man on the street interviews tonight universally complained about the GOP and the Tea Party.
Gimme another bite of that schadenfreude pie.
Comrade Jake
Day 2 of Obamacare, and all of my students look like zombies. Fuck!
Of course, it’s also midterm exam time.
BGinCHI
@Hill Dweller: Nobody fucks the chicken like Jake Tapper.
Roger Moore
@BGinCHI:
That’s understood when talking about Pickett’s charge.
Amir Khalid
@BGinCHI:
It is Based On A True Story about some idiot who bought a zoo without knowing anything at all about zoos, but managed not to make a hash of it because he and hjs wife and kids had Lots Of Heart. Matt Damon stars as the guy.
Davis X. Machina
@BGinCHI: The kids have to find $150, $300,$ 600 a month forever to pay off their tuition loans. I don’t fault them — and I’m a classicist — for seeing higher education in purely transactional terms — they really can’t view it any other way.
WereBear
@Amir Khalid: Man, I’d like to have that kind of money to throw around.
Oopsie! Bought a zoo!
BGinCHI
@Amir Khalid: So you are confirming it’s about the Koch Brothers and the Teaparty congress. Thanks.
That Matt Damon has range.
BGinCHI
@Amir Khalid: Ps. It’s killing me how good Suarez is playing.
gogol's wife
@Comrade Jake:
Wow, that happened to me too.
MikeJ
Has anybody read Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession? Just saw it at the library but haven’t read it yet. Any good?
Southern Beale
I heard that Darrell Issa has vowed to launch a hearing into the shuttering of the WWII memorial.
I’m not making this up.
ruviana
@fuckwit: Just a note that not every descendant of Okies stayed right-wing and redneck. And two other words: Woody Guthrie. Just sayin’.
Comrade Jake
@Hill Dweller: that’s actually simply what Carly Fiorina described it as. Tapper is pulling his usual tweet bait stunts. What a clown that guy is.
gogol's wife
@MikeJ:
Ooh, sounds real good. My poor husband is so tired of me saying that. Maybe if I could give it to him in a book he’d listen.
BGinCHI
@Davis X. Machina: A solid liberal arts education at an affordable school is still a great way to make a career in the world. It also makes you a better person.
If you want to be an unhappy asshole, get a business degree or engineering.
Apologies to those who have fought their way out of these generalizations.
Cervantes
As MLK noted, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The arc of the immoral universe is long too, and it bends toward insanity.
Nice article, except your use of the word “insanity” (passim).
I guess I know what you mean but insanity is a word I’d reserve to describe a medical condition. The truly insane should get our sympathy (even empathy; after all, we may all be a little bit insane).
Evil, I think, is a better word for what you’re describing.
BGinCHI
@Comrade Jake: Leave Bozo out of this or the monkey gets it.
Davis X. Machina
@Southern Beale: My torts prof used to say “You commited six torts before breakfast. You just didn’t get sued.” I think Issa feels the same way about impeachment and Obama.
Villago Delenda Est
@sharl:
This.is.EPIC
RAM
You call it insanity; I call it evil. The modern GOP is far closer to the Bolshevik and Nazi radical political minorities who seized power in their respective nations than it is to the traditional Republican Party.
Villago Delenda Est
@Southern Beale:
Issa needs to be drawn and quartered on the Mall.
? Martin
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Until we can convince employers and students to make an engineering MS or PhD the minimum qualifications for employment, we’re stuck with it. We’re already at a huge disadvantage turning out engineers as a nation. Raising the bar is only going to make it worse.
Keep in mind we turn out twice as many MBAs annually as we do engineering BS degrees.
gogol's wife
@MikeJ:
The Amazon description makes it sound fantastic.
Davis X. Machina
@BGinCHI: I’m sitting here — Phi Beta Kappa, Hon. B.A. in Greek and Latin — agreeing with you.
But when I die, there won’t be any more of me. Legislatures full of car dealers and osteopaths will make sure of that. I was telling an English-teacher colleague the other day that I’m the last person his students will ever meet who had substantially the same education as Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist and since that’s the book they’re presently reading, they should come over and interview me while there’s still time.
Amir Khalid
@BGinCHI:
Just to be on the safe side, Liverpool should make him play in a hockey goalkeeper’s mask like Dr Lector used to wear — you know, just in case he gets the munchies again. And if he really wants to go in January, even after the club and fans have put up with so much of his crap, then he really wasn’t worth keeping anyway.
Villago Delenda Est
@joel hanes:
They are not necessarily keen observers, just honest ones.
The insanity began with the election of the shitty grade Z movie star, and the election of both Clinton and Obama did nothing to tamp it down…instead it got even crazier, as the lunatics wailed about usurpers and illegitimacy.
BGinCHI
@Davis X. Machina: That makes me so sad I almost can’t stand it.
I fucking love the Classics. I’m glad at least in my field there are many good classicists (such as my pal Heather James at USC).
I’m toasting you with a nice glass of red wine later, after my seminar.
Roger Moore
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I don’t think that explains it. Scientists tend to concentrate at least as heavily in STEM subjects, but they skew very heavily to the left. Somebody at my work printed out a little ditty claiming that 6% of scientists are Republicans, and scientists are baffled at why the number is so high. There has to be some plausible explanation beyond education to explain why there are so many wingnut engineers.
Villago Delenda Est
@? Martin:
This is why we’re doomed.
BGinCHI
@Amir Khalid: Agree with you. Maybe we can at least get some dough for him if he leaves and buy us a replacement for Lucas. WTF is wrong with him?
Seanly
@HinTN:
I’m one of the few liberal engineers I know. I avoid discussing politics with my co-workers. A smattering of science & math doesn’t tend to enlighten the soul of most people.
The magazine for the National Society of Professional Engineers did an article on registered engineers serving in politics. I was surprised that they found one of the five or six who was a Democrat.
BGinCHI
@Roger Moore: One self-selects for inquiry (hard sciences) and the other chooses a field where they follow all the rules.
BillinGlendaleCA
@? Martin: I never said my position was popular with my fellow students in the Engineering School.
joel hanes
The craziness in north-western Iowa that puts Steve King in the House is home-grown. It’s mostly about culture wars.
This is the most rural part of Iowa, and the whitest, and the most culturally homogeneous and culturally conservative.
Take a look at the demographics of Odeboldt, his base.
Google for some pictures of Odebolt.
Small towns in this part of Iowa haven’t changed much since the 40s. The same buildings line Main Street; the same families go to the same churches. The culture of gun ownership and hunting is very strong.
All change is perceived as a threat to this way of life — but the nation has changed dramatically. Mr. King’s constitutents want it to stop changing. They are very unhappy about the acceptance of homosexuality, and regard gay marriage as an insult to their beliefs. They wish abortion was still unmentionable and illegal, and regard control of young women’s sexuality as a parent’s natural right. They strongly value conformity, and dislike “city people” and people who are different in speech, dress, religion, pigmentation, or food habits. People of color and non-Christians are viewed with suspicion; having either in a position of authority is perceived as an inversion of the natural order of things. These people revere Reagan, and are sure that America is the shining city on the hill that he told them it was. They’re sure that Muslims and Communists are conspiring to undermine America. They listen to a lot of talk radio.
Comrade Jake
Well, almost all the engineers in academia are DFHs, so fuck you people!
More seriously, our students take almost as many courses outside the engineering school as they do in.
WereBear
@Roger Moore: Scientist are supposed to think and come up with alternate scenarios.
Engineers “already know.”
joes527
So, the House had a chance to end this today.
R: Partial funding bills offered under normal rules.
D: Motion to recommit (and turn them into a clean CR)
R: Nu-uh
D:Appeal!
Vote on the appeal:
R: Crickets.
This idea that there is are sane republicans who would vote to end this if the mean old leadership would just let them is once again proved to be a fantasy.
Roger Moore
@Southern Beale:
Impeach!
Davis X. Machina
@BGinCHI: The classics were probably kept alive by the churches (Church of England, RC Church, mostly) for a couple generations past their natural demise, just in time for the likes of me.
This 21st c. trivium, the core of our New Scholasticism — management, financial engineering, marketing — is what the new churches of Mammon need.
If you believe in them, you can perform the public liturgy, interpret the sacred texts, and preach the gospel. Even if you don’t believe, it’s still the key to a fat payday.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hill Dweller:
How much is Boner’s campaign staff paying him to keep the Orange one’s name off of this?
Probably not much…Tapper is such a willing whore.
BGinCHI
@Comrade Jake: Not at Purdue, my friend, unless there has been a world of change. If so, I’m happy to be wrong.
Comrade Jake
@BGinCHI: there are plenty of rules in engineering, but it’s not like physics is markedly different. Any decent engineering school is developing critical thinking skills.
Eric U.
@Roger Moore: I don’t understand the wingnut engineer problem either. I once made the mistake of making fun of Pat Buchanan in front of a couple of engineering profs and one of them got incredibly angry and agitated. It was for the “culture war” speech .
It bothers me that so many pundits fail to realize that “both sides do it” is taking the republican position on this. They were also parroting the thing about negotiating with Iran but not the ‘thugs. It has been the most partisan episode for the press in a long time
BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: At least when I was in college, back in the days of clay tablets, there was breadth requirements for all students in the College of Arts and Sciences. A Chemistry major had to take Poli Sci or Economics and English or another humanity. A Poli Sci or Econ major would have to take some, even a survey course, in the sciences. The School of Engineering had no such requirements.
Comrade Jake
@BGinCHI: I only know one engineer who went to Purdue, and he transferred to my school because he wasn’t being challenged. Maybe it’s more of an Indiana thing.
It’s a highly ranked program, but mostly because it’s enormous.
BGinCHI
@Comrade Jake: Hmm. I would love to agree, but yet engineers seem not to have any critical thinking skills beyond bridge stresses and the like. Anecdote is not evidence, so I wonder if there is any data on their (your) political affiliation as a species.
Plus physics leads often to teaching while engineering leads to the corporate world. The former can think freely while the latter tend to conform. I wish these generalizations were false, but have you read the papers lately?
NotMax
@BGinCHI
Way back when it was not unheard of to have wine, along with some cheeses and crackers, available during late in the day seminars.
But that was at Swarthmore, a moderately leftie liberal arts bastion (which also always boasted an Engineering Department and major).
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Actually, that fits closely with what I think. Some people are simply interested in how something works, not why it works. In the STEM world, I would guess that the how people self select for engineering and the why people into the pure sciences.
In law school, there were a bunch of people who just wanted to know the answer and were uncomfortable with ambiguities – my guess is that these were the “engineers” of the legal world. Others were more interested in the process and could handle that the correct answer to a question could be “maybe.”
Comrade Jake
We have roughly 100 engineering faculty in our school. I only know one -one! – who is a Republican. I’m sure there are more but gosh they hide it well.
BGinCHI
@Comrade Jake: “Maybe it’s more of an Indiana thing.”
Pistols at dawn, or maybe 9:00. I have a late class tonight and I can’t shoot without coffee.
IowaOldLady
Mr IOL is a liberal engineer, but he has a PhD, which he always claimed takes a different mindset.
Comrade Jake
@BillinGlendaleCA: my undergrad degree is from a state school, about 20 years ago. I was in an engineering school and needed to take about half a dozen liberal arts courses, so I suspect your experience isn’t universal.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: GMTA.
joel hanes
@BGinCHI:
It’s entirely possible to major in engineering and get a broad education — but you have to value such a thing enough to either take a very high workload, or take an extra year.
I took an extra year (thanks, GI Bill!), and did “virtual minors” in writing and literature and anthropology.
And even without academic background, many fine engineers are autodidacts in the humanities, and are quite well-rounded intellectually.
But many other engineers lack the interest in other human beings that make study of the humanities interesting.
For such young men (and they’re mostly young men), it’s a relief to stop talking about people and start dealing with the world of mechanism and math and computer code, the things they’re good at and find interesting. Such proto-engineers hate their required English courses, and despise any field in which the answers are fuzzy or non-quantifiable, and look down on all non-STEM fields of study (while harboring, probably, some feelings of inadequacy toward the pure-science and pure-math elites).
So: the same boys who find a adolescent Randian worldview attractive, the boys who find other people baffling and don’t date in high school, self-select into engineering majors, where they are relieved to find nothing much that will challenge that worldview.
Overgeneralizing, to be sure, but I have been an engineer for thirty years, and know the territory well.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: I miss these fabled Olden Times.
Comrade Jake
@BGinCHI: I’ve never looked for any data, but I’d hesitate to draw any broad sweeping conclusions about degree choice and political mindset. My guess is that place of birth plays much more of a role, and there are some very large engineering schools in some very red states.
Davis X. Machina
It’s more like sTEm.
Our local state uni is shutting down its physics major, but keeping all the physics staff, because they teach the required courses for engineering of various sorts.
That science stuff is hard, and the number of unemployed scientists is legion. Besides, the labs cost a mint to run. 100-body cattle-call sections of various prerequisites for other majors, though — that’s what pays the rent.
Pogonip
@joel hanes: I’ve been living in the U.S. for 54 years and I agree with your foreign colleagues. I saw all this coming beginning in the mid-80’s–and not one person I knew would listen to what I found so obvious. I think the reason I have such a clear view of the U.S. the reason I see what most citizens seem unable to perceive, is that I was very poor for a time. Poverty locks you out of the whole American-dream (or hallucination) thing and you can see what the society is really like.
JPL
@MikeJ: My latest book is W is for Wasted. The life and times of George Bush. (not really) After reading the Unwinding, I might read that fifty shades book next.
Comrade Jake
I remember being an engineering undergrad and thinking less of business and liberal arts majors, this is true. But this didn’t have anything to do with politics or worldview. It’s simply that everyone who washed out of engineering became a business major. Further, everyone who was washing out of the business school was headed to liberal arts. Nobody seemed to wash out of the liberal arts school.
Original Lee
@BGinCHI: Original Daughter’s school has been a STEAM school for a long time, and apparently that’s the new trend (STEM + Arts).
NotMax
@BGinCHI
Pre-climate change, so we did have to trudge uphill through the snow. Both ways.
sparrow
@Hill Dweller: Not to heap on engineers, several of them being close friends I adore, but I have to point out the every single person that has ever come up to me at a public talk with some loony “alternative cosmology” idea because they don’t like the way physics describes the universe (i.e., big bang, redshifts, general relativity), has been a retired engineer. Every single one. Semi-educated morons.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Jake:
In a liberal arts program, if the history major isn’t working out for you, you can switch to English or vice versa. I know several people who bounced through three or four majors before they found the one that fit.
Original Lee
@Southern Beale: Not surprised. Some of my wingnuttier FB friends have been explosive over national parks being closed during the government shutdown. Many of them are old enough to remember the last two, so it’s been annoying as hell to see all of those posts.
NB: One of my neighbors works with the Park Police, and he says that cursed Mississippi Honor Flight was told a month ago not to come if the government was shut down.
sparrow
@Roger Moore: The reason is that engineering provides certainty. There is good engineering and bad engineering. There are rules and regulations. All kinds of things to attract a mind attuned to authority and authoritarianism. Scientists, on the other hand, are told to question everything from the get-go. DFHs, all of em.
joel hanes
@Davis X. Machina:
But when I die, there won’t be any more of me.
Well, there will be fewer.
My 23 year old nephew, bless him, is an actual Latin major, and it’s looking as if he may actually be able to support himself teaching. In Texas. (well, Austin)
And my Austin TX cow-orker, a very Christian and buttoned-up engineer in his early forties, reads the Latin classics and writes fairly fluent Ciceronian Latin, and is reading the Septuagint in the original, and has made a habit of picking up a new language every two or three years since graduation. His Russian and German are not so hot, but it’s pretty impressive all-in-all. I need to work with him, so we talk about literature and history and archaeology and make multilingual word-play jokes, and studiously avoid US politics.
Mike in NC
The engineers that I worked with for many years tended to be white males who associated with other white males, and bitched about everyone outside the tribe. Many engineers deal better with things (blueprints, databases, spreadsheets, etc.) than they do with people.
A good many are also of the “I’ve got mine, so screw you” mentality.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s what I did. In liberal arts you can do less or more and still get a degree. But the only bridges that will fall down as a result are in poems.
Seanly
There could be an entire book about the issues with engineering education. I have 2 masters and I don’t agree with the growing trend to make a masters a requirement for getting out. It already takes most engineering students 5 years to get a BS (call an enginering degree a BA & I will cut you).
My undergrad alma mater prides itself on requiring a good selection of humanities along with all the engineering, math & science. They also didn’t try to teach to the FE (back then the EIT), but rather to give us the background & tools to be able to pass the exam and not be burdened with crap in other disciplines in our first job.
What I do think engineering needs (at least my branch, civil) is a big shot of diversity. It’s too white & too male. I’m very happy that my Fortune 500 employer will have a female CEO (who came up through the ranks) come January.
The most conservative place I worked was in Harrisburg, PA (the heart of Pennsyltucky).
Mike in NC
@joel hanes:
Years ago I was sent on a business trip to Des Moines. I rented a car and the first store I stopped at had Rush Limbaugh cranked up to ear-piercing volume.
Seanly
Also, while I personally have trouble in social situations, there are plenty of outgoing & well-adjusted engineers. It isn’t just a collecting house for people with Asperger’s syndrome & an RPN calculator.
Felonius Monk
@BGinCHI:
What BULLSHIT. And you complain when people make sweeping generalizations about black people, or different ethnicities, or LGBTs, or the poors, etc. You are a fucking hypocrite.
ETA: And I’ll match my critical thinking skills against yours any day.
I got a pretty damn good education at Purdue as an engineer. I worked 40 years as an engineer in industry and most of the other engineers I worked with or met along the way were nowhere near being as narrow minded as you seem to be.
Short version — stop talking like an Indiana shit-kicker.
BGinCHI
@Felonius Monk: And…..scene.
Chris
@Eric U.:
I always figured the wingnut problem in engineering is the same as the libertarian problem in computer nerds; they’ve achieved mastery in their chosen field, they are enormously impressed with themselves for having done so, and they think that puts them above and beyond all the people who’ve chosen to achieve mastery in other fields.
There are professional fields who seem to collect folks like that and others that don’t. I’m not really sure why, just that it’s not limited to engineers.
Let me know when Iran holds the U.S. government hostage and threatens to melt down out economy. :D
Roger Moore
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I went to a tech school- the one in Pasadena, which is why I still live here- and we had a strong concept of a core curriculum that everyone was required to take. Being a tech school, it was fairly heavy in the sciences (2 years math, 2 years physics, 1 year chemistry, 1 year lab classes including a mandatory chem lab) but also had a humanities and social sciences component (4 years total, with a requirement for at least 1/3 to be in humanities and 1/3 in social sciences). We still had some tendency for the scientists to be more liberal than the engineers. I suspect there’s some truth to BGinCHI‘s claim that the sciences require a spirit of open inquiry where you get credit for questioning and overturning established ideas, while engineering is about making the world do our will.
Omnes Omnibus
@Felonius Monk:
One is born an engineer?
Chris
@joel hanes:
I always thought Vietnam was the trigger. America always had plenty of arrogance and self-centeredness, that’s normal (if unhealthy) for a major power. But losing a war injected a huge dose of insecurity into the mix, and we’ve been trying to compensate for our lost manhood ever since, more and more irrationally.
Bubblegum Tate
@BGinCHI:
Or man the consoles and racks in a recording studio.
lurker dean
i think engineers make excellent wingnuts. they think they know everything and never think they’re wrong (seen this A LOT), they tend to have good paying jobs (many in the defense industry) so they never have to deal with healthcare or food security issues, and up until recently they didn’t really have to deal with too many women or minorities in the profession. and i say this as someone with an engineering degree who has worked as an engineer (i no longer do).
Roger Moore
@joel hanes:
There is no “reading the Septuagint in the original”. The Septuagint is a translation from the Hebrew. If you want to read the Old Testament in the original- or at least as close as is achievable given scribal errors- learn Hebrew and get a copy of the Masoretic text.
BGinCHI
@Bubblegum Tate: Amendment cheerfully accepted.
BGinCHI
@Roger Moore: This is funnier when Mel Brooks says it.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think some people really are born with an engineering mindset.
BGinCHI
This shit-kicker is off to teach, so be nice, unless you feel like you have to tell the truth.
Comrade Jake
Yeah some of the sweeping generalizations from some of you are rather breathtaking.
schrodinger's cat
So where on this continuum do people who study the pure sciences fall? Where liberal arts majors are the epitome of learning and engineers are wingnuts.
Comrade Jake
@schrodinger’s cat: they’re much better than engineers but nowhere near as enlightened as puppetry majors.
NotMax
@Comrade Jake
Also depends on whether or not they take a minor in Klingon.
polyorchnid octopunch
As a person who did his first run at uni in politics and philosophy, and his second in computer science, the people mocking the liberal arts (puppetry, Klingon, etc) are looking a lot like they ate some sour sour grapes.
Comrade Jake
Ted Cruz has a BA from Princeton. That’s all that really needs to be said.
NotMax
@polyorchnid octopunch
As a holder of degrees with several majors in Liberal Arts, making light banter about such comes with the sheepskins.
schrodinger's cat
@Comrade Jake: What was his major?
gogol's wife
@Comrade Jake:
So does Michelle O.
SiubhanDuinne
@Davis X. Machina: Thank you for reminding me about Elliott Levitas. When I first moved (back) to Atlanta in 1984, he was my Representative. Would it were still the case….
Comrade Jake
@polyorchnid octopunch: sour grapes over not being a… puppetry major? You might have something there.
FWIW, it wasn’t mockery so much as pointing out how ridiculous the generalizations were.
tybee
@polyorchnid octopunch:
damn. first time through i was a history major. second time was computer science.
and yes, i do feel superior. :)
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
I read it, I think, about the same time you did or maybe a little earlier. Yes, depressing read. Yes, important read. Who do you have to know around here to get a book chat going? I truly think this book would be tailor-made for this crowd.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Jake: Please link to a puppetry major program.
ETA: Odds are that you will find in the theater or fine arts school
Comrade Jake
@Omnes Omnibus: like this one?
SiubhanDuinne
@Southern Beale: I’m not sure who it was on NPR tonight — don’t think it was Issa but I could be wrong, wasn’t paying close attention — who was whining about river access being cut off for a family vacation canoe trip or something because the only access was through a national park, and the guy had taken his kid out of school and paid a $2000 deposit and everything, and now they couldn’t have the vacation they had planned for all these months ago. Sorry to be vague, as I say, it was in the background, I was at work, and not paying close attention. But what I heard loud and clear was the aggrieved sense of entitlement gone WRONG. I’m sorry for the individuals who are feeling the pain, but that’s the point, isn’t it? If the government shuts down, the idea is that a lot of normal everyday citizens will be affected. Let them scream at the GOP bastards who made it happen, say I.
joel hanes
@Roger Moore:
OK, my ignorance is exposed. He’s reading the Greek. Acknowledged that it’s a translation from Hebrew, a language he has not yet studied much.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
They have one in West Virginia. Coincidence?
SiubhanDuinne
@Original Lee: FWIW, the very first time I heard about string theory, many years ago, was from a scientifically-inclined musician (violinist-composer) friend. I don’t think he’s alive now, but if he were, he’d be the first to value a holistic education.
joel hanes
@Omnes Omnibus:
One is born an engineer?
I really think that in many cases the characteristics that suit many potential engineers for that career path are more innate than acquired, yes.
Engineering is a good potential career for people with certain forms of Aspergers, frex.
schrodinger's cat
@SiubhanDuinne: Nothing annoys me more than the new agey interpretations of quantum mechanics. Not saying that applies to your friend.
JadedOptimist
@Roger Moore: It might be that engineering, as opposed to basic science, has a low tolerance for ambiguity. Engineers I have known tend to see the world in very black-and-white terms, with very little gray. There is one best answer to every problem, and it is usually a simple one that is based on known principles. One size fits all and efficiency reigns supreme. The teajadists have very simple straightforward and wrong answers to the issues of the day.
schrodinger's cat
@joel hanes: And all liberal arts majors are angelic?
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: No one has said that.
workworkwork
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I was a computer science major and had to take theology, philosophy, fine arts, history and classical studies. Granted, this was a Jesuit-run university but at least I can talk to non-nerds.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think the sciences are probably in the same general range as the liberal arts as far as pure learning goes. Science is about asking why, and you learn it by finding out not just what we know but how we know it. Of course, that’s mostly for practicing scientists; there are people who major in the sciences with the intention of going into careers where the free inquiry is less important, e.g. premed students.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: But people are making a broad generalization that engineers are wingnuts.
NotMax
@JadedOptimist
Oldie but not a baddies (shortened version):
Three engineers are having lunch and discussing what kind of engineer God is. The mechanical engineer says, “God must be a mechanical engineer, look at the complex structures and musculature of the body!”
The electrical engineer says, “No, look at the electrical processes of the body, which the brain could not operate without; he must be an electrical engineer.”
The civil engineer says, “You’re both wrong, he had to be a civil engineer. Who else would run a waste line through a recreational area?”
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: I would guess that there more wingnut engineers than wingnut literary editors – by percentage as well as gross numbers. Libertarian too.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: What about liberal arts majors who become lawyers? There are plenty of wingnut lawyers around.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Most of the wingnuts I knew in law school had been business or criminal justice majors.
ETA: In addition, no one said all engineers are wingnuts. But they did note that as far as educated professionals go, the field has more wingnuts than many others.
Roger Moore
@joel hanes:
There are some quirks with reading the Old Testament because there are clearly flaws with all the extant texts. The Masoretic text is generally considered to be the most authoritative Hebrew text, but a lot of that is because it was cleaned up by scholars in the Middle Ages. The Septuagint is possibly less authoritative because it is a translation into Greek, but it was translated much earlier (2nd Century AD) and thus presumably from texts that had undergone less scribal corruption. So some Christians (especially Eastern Orthodox) treat the Septuagint as the definitive text, but most use the Masoretic text.
mclaren
Do you have any more detail about that, Betty? Sounds exactly on target. I would really like to know the name of that guest and if possible, I’d like to track down a transcript or a video clip of that program.
mclaren
Hey, found this juicy tidbit from Chris Hayes’ show last night. A Republican says “Republicans are acting like lemmings with suicide vests.”
Southern Beale
@Seanly:
I had no idea engineers were all RWNJs until recently. Why the hell is that?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Really, really late to this discussion, but does no one else remember the personality profiles that suggested what career would be the best fit for the kids? I think I took mine in the fourth grade, which would make it the early 1970s. All of us misfits turned out to be misanthropes (huge surprise there, eh?) and were told that our best fits would be chemical or civil engineering because they had the least interactions with other people.
NotMax
@mclaren
It was Bruce Bartlett. Look for segment with ‘lemmings’ on the blurb here.
sharl
@NotMax: Hahaha, I had forgotten that joke. It will NEVER stop being funny for me.
joel hanes
@Southern Beale:
All engineers are RWNJs, except for those who aren’t.
I’m an engineer, as are several other reliably-liberal commentators on this blog.
But the stereotype fits often enough that it doesn’t bother me when people use it.
schrodinger's cat
@joel hanes: I am not an engineer but tarring with such a broad brush is a bit tiresome. I have encountered more wingnuts in the econ department than in any other dept.
gvg
Overly broad generalizations are offensive not correct. My dad is engineer for example. However he would agree that their are too many libertarian types in his field to his continuing annoyance. He was a defense contractor. Designed rockets, missles, night vision systems etc and he always stressed the impact of a field where when your project was done you were laid off. It seemed to make everyone around him obsessed with building their stock portfolio. The started up side businesses and discussed investment strategy’s endlessly. His whole career that is what they talked about at lunch. It really impacted how all of them thought-they were always about to be laid off. They made good money when they had a project but it was always under threat. Their friends were always being laid off too. Rehired sometimes later but not stable.
PurpleGirl
@NotMax: Primo comedy. Thanks for the very loud laughs.
joel hanes
@schrodinger’s cat:
When I was a sprout, the Dean of Engineering at my Fine Land-Grant Institution of Higher Learning was an out-and-proud young-earth creationist.
It was a good engineering school anyway, but it did teach one not to have a thin skin about engineer jokes.
And I do still own RPN calculators.
Paul in KY
@ruviana: That’s just one guy. My cousin is sorta right-wng wacko (gun nut variety) & when he long haul trucked thru Oklahoma he would complain about what a bunch of no-fun, bible thumping crazies they were.
Made Kansas seem like Sodom & Gommorra
Paul in KY
@RAM: I think so too.