I am on over at Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd now talking about health insurance shopping.
Open Thread
This post is in: Open Threads
I am on over at Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd now talking about health insurance shopping.
Open Thread
This post is in: Politics
What follows is another guest post from VidaLoca, who will be along to answer questions shortly.
Introduction
I wrote the following article as the first of three retrospectives on the lessons learned from the WI governor’s race (a previous article about the hail-mary pass we took to win that one is here). John agreed to publish the new article on Monday morning, and the news from Ferguson came Monday night. And in the wake of that I was debating whether to delete this article entirely because it didn’t seem too important any more, or rewrite it massively. In the end I decided to leave it intact.
In many ways this was a disappointing, depressing, even terrifying month. While neither the outcome from the elections nor the outcome from Ferguson was exactly unexpected, the elections were a major blow and Ferguson was much worse. I don’t have the words to sum up Ferguson, to talk about lessons learned; others can do that better than I. I do know something more about the elections in WI and the political situation here so I’ll offer up the following with the thought that the lesson from the elections is the same as the lesson from Ferguson: we are on our own here. Nobody has our backs. We have to figure out our own path forward. To do that we have to figure out where the current path is going wrong.
Right-wing populism and the “tribalism” myth
I don’t know why I got such a laugh out of these signs. I saw them all over the place here during the last month or so of the campaigns, from the west side boundary of the City of Milwaukee all the way out through the blasted bourgeois hellscapes of Waukesha. One of them was 1/2 block over the city line in Wauwatosa, in a decidedly working-class and racially-mixed neighborhood of houses that could use at least a little work. The other was just inside the Milwaukee city limits about 4 blocks from Scott Walker’s (rather modest, actually) personal home. Neither of these are wealthy neighborhoods by any means — but somebody there bought and erected these tacky 4′ x 8′ monsters that always made me think me of a big old pair of Truck-Nutz hanging off the bumper of an Escalade. These specific cases are both rental properties and that probably helps to explain something, but they fit right in among all the other adjacent and more conventiionally-sized declarations that “We Stand With Walker” that people proudly plant like dog turds on their lawns (Brad Schimel is the former Waukesha Co. DA who’s now going on to be the state Atty. General. The current Atty. General is going to run for the WI Supreme Court. There’s not much reason to doubt that he will win, and then the current right-wing majority on the Court will become a lock).
One of the reasons Walker did as well as he did is he’s put together a coalition of white workers; nouveau riche strivers; and the truly rich, truly pathological, greed-driven and power-hungry base of the Republican Party. These folks are convinced that they won something in 2010 and they are fighting to protect and extend it now with spirit, passion, and a sense of purpose. Far from being some kind of “astroturf” front group they are in fact a broad-based right-wing social movement. They won’t be going away soon; in fact now that Walker has shown an ability to win three elections in four years his model will likely be replicated in other states — such as your own. So it’s important to try to understand what’s going on.
Let’s begin by dumping the idea of “white workers voting against their interests”. I see this analysis used a lot here, on other liberal-ish web sites, and among liberals in personal conversations. It’s both counterproductive and just plain wrong.
It’s counterproductive because the only way you can explain the (I repeat, falsely perceived) phenomenon of white workers voting against their interests is by adopting the conclusion that white working-class people are stupid. I see that done here, both explicitly and implicitly (with words like “tribalism”, “cult”) quite often. And it’s fundamentally a lazy, arrogant, and thoroughly bankrupt analysis. Assuming you’re interested in social change[1], you have no choice but to reach out, talk to, and organize white working-class people. How you think you can make any headway in that project while holding the premise that the people you’re organizing are stupid is beyond me. Because stupid they are not: they’ll realize what you’re doing even before you realize what you’re doing and once they realize it, your game is over.
A more subtle but related point. I’ve seen a lot of discussion recently about “messaging”. I have friends among the liberal activists here who are very focused on “messaging” these days but their idea of it seems to be that the voters they need to “message” to are sort of backwards and not too bright. So they have to “explain the issues to them”, they have to do “voter education”. The level of noblesse oblige is pretty dramatic.
More fundamentally though, the “white workers voting against their interests” theory fails because it’s wrong on the basic facts. White workers do have an interest in voting to support the right wing and its agenda. That’s one of the reasons that “white privilege” is called “white privilege”: if there weren’t real interests at stake there would be no privilege involved and the whole enterprise would have collapsed years ago. The fact that white privilege is alive and doing very well should be a clue that there is something material going on, otherwise you’d be left with nothing more than some kind of “privilege of the mind”.
Let’s walk through an example. I own a house in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee. It’s assessed at around $225,000. I pay about $6500/yr. in property taxes, plus $1400/yr. for water, sewer, and snow removal, plus $1000/yr. for insurance. So my basic expenses come out to about $8900/yr. Every year, Scott Walker brings in some kind of a tax cut — reduces the state income tax, increases state aid to local governments which reduces property taxes[2], etc. For the average taxpayer it works out to $100-$200/year. To me, that’s trivial: I have the privilege of being able to sneer at it. So I do.
However, for many other families in neighborhoods to the south and west of me, it’s not so trivial. If you’re a married couple where one income covers the mortgage, one income covers the health insurance, you split the cost of groceries and try to keep a couple of cars running and pray the kids don’t need braces — it’s not so trivial. If you’re retired and living on a fixed income, it’s not so trivial. If you’re counting the weeks until your unemployment runs out, it’s not so trivial. If the good job you had ran off to the Pacific Rim and now you’re a greeter at WalMart, it’s not so trivial.
I have the privilege of sneering at these people too. All their trivial little concerns, why don’t they focus on their class interests? Why don’t they listen to me when I try to explain the issues to them? Why are they so tribal? So stupid, they are. It’s all just so frustrating…
I can point out, until hell freezes solid, that the $100-$200 break they’re getting from Scott Walker will be more than eaten up in the coming year by increased costs and declining services.
I can point out, until hell freezes solid, that the $100-$200 break they’re getting from Scott Walker is dwarfed by the much bigger breaks that richer people and corporations get. Scott Walker will organize rings around me — by saying “here’s a $100 tax break for this year — and I’ll give you the same next year”. All I can say is “vote for a Democrat — things will get better”. My neighbors don’t believe that and I don’t believe it either because we’ve all seen enough Democrats to know it just isn’t a claim that you can make with a straight face[3]. If you believe it, persuade me in the comments or face the fact that we’re talking about a whole lot more than just “tribalism” here: this is lived experience. And I’ll grant any claim you might want to make about Obamacare because I think, like most of you do, that it’s a great reform and long overdue. But talking about Obamacare just will. not. cut it.Now there’s no question, $100 is not going to change anyone’s life [4]. So let’s do a quickie historical review for some context (and I’ll keep this brief because it don’t think it will be controversial here):
The history of the last 40 years or so has been the transformation of the economic system from national to global capitalism. Read the praises in the works of Thomas Freidman.
With this, the transition from industrial capitalism to financially-based capitalism has meant a complete reorganization in the way profit is generated and how it is realized. You may have noticed this yourself, unless you were sleeping through 2007-2008.
This reorganization of the economy has meant a complete reorganization of the working class. The working class has not done well in all of this. We see an increasing concentration of wealth among an ever-shrinking sector of the population and an increasing concentration of misery among an ever-growing sector of the population. So, Occupy Wall Street.
Along with the economic changes we also see the rise of a crabs-in-a-bucket model of social organization where the two dominant principles are “I’ve got mine, fuck you” and “I don’t have shit so you shouldn’t either”. It’s the latter that drives the parable of the sparrows and the curtain-rods. This model reinforces the inequality while it makes its effects a lot worse. What used to be called the “social safety net” is on its way right down the shitter. So is any kind of working-class solidarity or consciousness (not that those were ever big forces in the past). It’s every crab for themself. No doubt you’ve noticed that the Republicans are the chief architects of this vision but the Democrats have done precious little over the last 40 years to put forward, much less fight for, an alternative.In this context anything that helps you keep the house, keep your head above water, keep your family together becomes kind of a big deal. The $100 from Scott Walker is Scott’s way of reaching out to help families like yours — by making government smaller, helping you keep your hard-earned tax dollars, offering opportunities to people like you who are willing to work hard to achieve their dreams. Scott keeps his promises, too, because that’s just the kind of a guy Scott is [5]. Middle-class, like you. Like us [6]. It’s true that Obamacare will help many people too, no question. But Obamacare is a one-off exception in the pattern of the last 40 years and while you may need better health care coverage than you’ve got before the year is out, you will have to pay your taxes.
It’s an oversimplification to call this a bribe but that’s how it works. It’s an oversimplification to think that the whole system of white privilege boils down to $100 on a tax bill because there’s a lot more to it than that, it ignores the whole dynamic of political and cultural dominance. But it’s also an oversimplification — and a profound error as well — to think that white working-class support for reactionary Republicans like Scott Walker is based on stupidity, or racial prejudice (though there is plenty of that and Walker is quite skilled at using it to leverage his message), or “tribalism”, or the false consciousness brought on by Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. If it were only prejudice/tribalism/false consciousness then maybe it would be more reasonable to think that the Democrats could improve their outcomes by just tweaking their slogans until they were serving up more appealing sound-bites than the Republicans are. But it’s not that easy.[7]
There are material interests, as well as the history of the last 40 years of de-industrialization and the deconstruction of the working class, involved. So you want to trump a bribe? Begin by offering a better bribe. Your Democrats need to begin by offering a better deal economically, and they need to begin to show even a slight passion about the re-construction of the working class that goes beyond economics. If that’s going to mean anything, it’s going to mean shifting wealth back from the 1% to the 99%. It would mean class warfare.
Anyone thinks the Democrats are up for class warfare, raise your hand.
[1] If you’re not interested in social change, or if you think you can just sit back and count on the Democrats to do it for you, you might want to consider the recent events of this month as a wake-up call. [2] A side note on property taxes: they involve an inherent privilege as well. You could imagine a completely different set of economic supports directed at, say, renters — who don’t see much of the effects of a property-tax offset. But think about who rents vs. who owns their property. [3] At least in Wisconsin. The Democratic Party here is just the dog’s breakfast and that also helps to explain Walker: the Republicans are successful in part because they are just filling up a power vacuum. If the Democrats in your state exceed the standards of the Democrats in my state, please mention and explain why in the comments. But don’t conflate your state D.P. with the national D.P. and don’t conflate your state elected officials with Pres. Obama. State government has a lot of impact on peoples’ daily lives and a lousy state Party organization (such as we have here) can do a great deal to undermine both the hard work and the credibility won by national elected officials. Given that, it’s completely credible to me that Wisconsin could vote for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Walker in 2010, 2012, and 2014. And that’s even before you compare OFA to the Democratic campaign organizations in the latter 3 races. [4] It’s not like the millions you could win playing the lottery (which is why a lot of people who don’t seem to have two nickels to rub together will throw more money than seems reasonable into that exercise in taxation for the mathematically challenged: how else are you going to turn your life around? Working sure isn’t going to do it). [5] This horseshit almost writes itself — but he has kept his promises. Boy, has he kept his promises. Granted, they’re a pretty destructive set of promises but he’s kept every one of them and even people who disagree with and don’t like him will give him credit for that. [6] Walker is no fool, he beats this drum endlessly. And it’s actually a true fact. Sort of. But not immaterial in the political scheme of things. [7] Another point about “tribalism”, directed specifically at the people who use that word. “Tribalism” is not well-defined. Other people are “tribal”, while we are broad-minded, knowledgeable. Sophisticated. And aware of all internet traditions. But it may be more worthwhile to engage with white working-class people who may be savvy enough to see multi-racial unity as a means to solving their own problems even though they maintain some prejudiced notions about people of color, than it is to engage with white sophisticates who in spite of all their broad-mindedness are too well-off to be willing to do much of anything — even though it’s a lot easier to have sophisticated conversations among sophisticated people like ourselves. In other words, how much of what you dismiss as “tribalism” is just your own class privilege and prejudices shining through? And furthermore, how does the “tribalism” analysis help you do anything to change what you’re bitching about? If you can’t answer that question then in the end your “tribalism” analysis is just a cheap way of blaming the victims while letting yourself off the hook.
White Working-class Voters, Right-wing Populism, and the ‘Tribalism’ MythPost + Comments (184)
by Zandar| 138 Comments
This post is in: Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, Very Serious People
Seems Chris Hughes broke his toy to the point where Frank Foer is out as editor at The New Republic and everyone else is jumping ship in protest. People are resigning by Twitter. It’s freaking AWESOME.
I expect the circumstances surrounding TNR’s transformation will be framed as a matter of modernity versus tradition. There is certainly an element of this. At the magazine’s 100th anniversary gala two weeks ago, where Hughes, Foer, Wieseltier, and Hughes’s new CEO, Guy Vidra, all spoke, the speeches took a sharply, awkwardly divergent tone. Foer and Weiseltier gave soaring paeans to the magazine’s immense role in shaping American liberal thought. Hughes and Vidra used words like brand and boasted about page views, giving no sense of appreciation at all for the magazine’s place in American life. In a comic moment, Vidra mispronounced Foer’s name. I happened to run into Wieseltier a few days after the gala, and when he asked me what I thought, I told him he and Foer won the debate.
But the conflict between Hughes and most of the staff of The New Republic is not about technology. Foer and the staff, with the exception of Wieseltier, are comfortable with modernity. They are joyous bloggers, and willingly submitted to the introduction of cringe-worthy Upworthy headlines to their stories and other compromises one must make with commercial needs.
The problem, rather, is that Hughes and Vidra are afflicted with the belief that they can copy the formula that transformed the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed into economic successes, which is probably wrong, and that this formula can be applied to The New Republic, which is certainly wrong.
Several weeks ago, Vidra communicated the new vision to the staff in what I am told was an uncomfortable stream of business clichés ungrounded in any apparent strategy other than saying things like “let’s break shit” and “we’re a tech company now.” His memo to the staff predictably uses terms like “straddle generation” and “brand.” It promises to make TNR “a vertically integrated digital media company,” possibly unaware that “vertically integrated” is an actual business concept, not a term for a media company that integrates verticals.
Hughes and Vidra have provided no reason at all for anybody to believe they have a plausible plan to modernize The New Republic. If they did, Frank Foer would still be editor. My only hope now is that one day this vital American institution can be rebuilt.
Me? The number of damns I give about TNR as a going concern at this point equals approximately the number of black voices writing for the magazine, which is to say zero, but YMMV. The thing survived two world wars, the Great Depression, Watergate, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, New Coke, and 74,927 episodes of Law and Order, but couldn’t handle one Silicon Valley douchebag with a giant checkbook in possession of all the common sense of a chunk of asphalt. I guess it’s a little sad to see something like that implode but….
Naah.
Also, anybody else notice that Techbros Turning Journalism Outlets Into Huge Piles Of Shit(tm) seems to be a recurring theme of 2014? There’s an awful lot of that going around.
This post is in: Shitty Cops, Assholes, Sociopaths
And the whining starts from the NYC police union:
The head of the New York police union has criticized the city’s elected leaders for not being more vocal in their support of law enforcement following a grand jury’s decision to not indict a white officer in the death of Eric Garner.
“Police officers feel like they are being thrown under the bus,” Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said at a Thursday press conference. “What we do need and what we’re not hearing, we need city hall to support the police department.”
He added: “Look, last night, the protesters we may not agree with their message, but we were protecting their right to do it. That’s what they should be saying.”
How about protecting their right to breathe, you sanctimonious prick?
And could they find a worst named head of the union, fer chrissakes. Couldn’t they find someone named Mr. I. Kill Blackpeople or Mr. Ray C. Istcop? Fer fucks sake.
by Zandar| 27 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell
In a development that should surprise precisely nobody, the Department of Justice’s 21-month investigation into the use of excessive force by Cleveland police has yielded depressingly awful abuses by cops of suspects and bystander citizens, and the department will be getting a new federal babysitter to watch over them.
The so-called “pattern or practice” report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was released Thursday afternoon as DOJ and the city announced plans to develop a court-enforceable agreement that would impose an independent monitor on the Cleveland Division of Police.
“Accountability and legitimacy are essential for communities to trust their police departments, and for there to be genuine collaboration between police and the citizens they serve,” said Attorney General Eric Holder in a press conference on Thursday.
Just a few of the examples in the report:
According to the DOJ report, Cleveland police officers “carelessly fire their weapons, placing themselves, subjects, and bystanders at unwarranted risk of serious injury or death.” For example, the agency pointed to an incident in 2011 where officers “fired 24 rounds in a residential neighborhoods,” with six rounds striking houses and 14 hitting parked cars. In another case, “An officer’s decision to draw his gun while trying to apprehend an unarmed hit-and-run suspect resulted in him accidentally shooting the man in the neck.”
The Justice Department also claimed to have identified “several cases” where “officers shot or shot at people who did not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to officers or others.” For example, in 2013, the report noted that police shot at a victim who had been kidnapped by armed assailants after he fled the house in his boxers. The sergeant believed that the victim had a weapon because he raised his hand.
In another case detailed by the Justice Department, a 6’4″, 300-pound officer punched a 5’8″” 13-year-old boy who was handcuffed inside a police car and kicking the door, “three to four times” until he was “‘stunned/dazed’ and had a bloody nose.”
The agency noted that, “supervisors’ analyses of use of force incidents is superficial at best and, at its worst, appears to be designed to justify their subordinates’ unreasonable use of force.” For example, in the case of the teenage boy, the agency said that, the officer’s supervisor “failed to even consider that the punches might have been retaliatory [perhaps because the officer was angry] and unnecessary to secure the boy.”
And this is all on top of last week’s shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by an officer who we later found out was judged unfit for his previous position as a cop.
As they say, it’s a start. But there’s hundreds of thousands of cops out there in America, and way too many of them think people who look like me are their enemies, not the people they are supposed to serve and to protect.
by Betty Cracker| 105 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Assholes
Further evidence that cursive sucks:
This morning, I got into a shouting match in the street with a man who was wearing nothing but boxer shorts and topsiders. I was walking my two largish dogs, and a little Jack Russell terrier (who bore a strong resemblance to Rosie) shot out of a yard and began circling my dogs and me and barking furiously.
I was walking right down the middle of the street (it’s okay — I’m white), so it wasn’t like we were invading the micro-dog’s territory, but it kept circling and barking and nipping at us. I didn’t get angry immediately — shit happens, dogs get loose, etc.
But the dog’s owner just stood there in his yard shrieking at his dog instead of picking it up. My dogs were straining at their leashes, and I was afraid one of them might bite the little dog’s head off, so I stopped and held their leashes in a death grip really close to me while I waited for the JRT owner to get his dog. He kept screeching ineffectually.
Finally, I said, fairly politely under the circumstances, “Could you please come over here and control your dog?” And he did shuffle out into the street and shriek at it some more. But he wouldn’t pick it up! So I yelled at him about it, which I kind of feel bad about, but for chrissakes — pick up your 10-pound dog and take it in the fucking house!
Finally I crab-walked my two bristling, growling, slobbering behemoths away until the little JRT lost interest and went home. A bus stop full of middle-schoolers found the whole thing very entertaining.
There are so many more weighty topics to talk about today than ill-trained animals, but I haven’t the heart for it. Please feel free to discuss whatever.
by Elon James White| 4 Comments
This post is in: This Week In Blackness
Yesterday America faced another giant blow to our faith in the justice system when a grand jury refused to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death, a black unarmed man in Staten Island. His only offense was selling loosies. This ruling came despite video footage from a bystander and the fact that chokeholds are banned by NYPD as a takedown method.
New Yorkers protested from Harlem to Rockefeller Center, disrupting the annual tree lighting:
On the streets of the city, from Tompkinsville to Times Square, many expressed their outrage with some of the last words Mr. Garner uttered before being wrestled to the ground: “This stops today,” people chanted. “I can’t breathe,” others shouted. While hundreds of angry but generally peaceful demonstrators took to the streets in Manhattan as well as in Washington and other cities, the police in New York reported relatively few arrests, a stark contrast to the riots that unfolded in Ferguson in the hours after the grand jury decision was announced in the Brown case.
Social media reported many of the actions and anger at the outcome of the ruling.
Team Blackness discussed the case, the outrage, and the reality and rage of being black in America.
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