…comes from Thomas Edsall at The New York Times
He answers his question “Why Trump Now?” by looking at the material reasons for working-class white disaffection, not just with the post-civil-rights Democratic Party, but with the cabal to whom that group turned in increasing numbers from 1968 forward. He writes:
The share of the gross national product going to labor as opposed to the share going to capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by 2013, according to Loukas Karabarbounis, an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Even more devastating, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from 19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.
The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stopped (see the accompanying chart).
In other words, the economic basis for voter anger has been building over forty years. Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes…
If you’re too busy the TL:DR of those two developments are the interrelated facts that from the year 2ooo, upward mobility reversed itself, with more people falling into the middle class and poverty and fewer making it up the ladder — and the impact of China and its increasing integration into a world-wide free-trade regimen. Edsall’s reporting on the China development — with its accompanying misreading by free-trade elites — is particularly sharp.
Add to that, as Edsall does, the TARP bailout after the elite-engineered collapse of 2007-8 and the Citizens United decision and you have specific and plausible reasons for Republican working class voters (and everyone else, of course) to see their chosen political leaders as shills and swindlers:
By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.
Edsall’s conclusion?
The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.
The crux for this year is exactly that: Lots of Americans have been screwed — systematically, with comprehensive effect — for decades. The material losses they – we — have suffered are real. The responses Trump offers, such as they are, may be hopelessly at odds with any actual redress of those wrongs. But any campaign (are you listening, Hillary?) that ignores the fact that two generations of Americans now have seen the basic expectations of life reversed is going to have hard time winning, just by pointing out that Trump’s bloviating won’t help either.
Image: David Vinckbooms, Distribution of Loaves to the Poor, first half of the 17th century.
F
Trump’s voters will never get their ponies.
Mnemosyne
The problem is race.
Trump’s supporters are convinced that the reason for all of their woes is because of increased racial equality, and no amount of statistics is going to convince them otherwise.
They’re right to be angry, but until we can convince them that they’re angry at the wrong people, nothing is going to change.
Frankensteinbeck
Tom, you are a great front pager usually, but no. They were wildly racist when they were economically stable. They are wildly racist now. The well off ones are, if anything, even more racist. Yes, they’ve been fucked over economically. We all have. Trump voters are only mad at the establishment in the sense that the establishment has promised them they will put the black man down, and failed utterly. They’ve also resented open racism being publicly shamed since the Civil Rights Act. Those things drive their anger. Their economic situation is irrelevant.
EDIT – Never assume that what motivates you is what motivates Republicans. History suggests the opposite.
Thoroughly Pizzled
I’m sad that Bernie wasn’t as good a candidate as his platform. Going hard on single-payer was a strategic blunder.
cckids
Somewhat OT, but Carson is dropping out, supposedly on Friday. He “does not see a path forward”.
ETA: He’s skipping the debate tomorrow night.
Linnaeus
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
Think of the long game, though. Sanders’s candidacy can help create some political space for further activism on the issues that he has emphasized. That’s a good thing.
NR
Good article. EJ Dionne has said basically the same thing.
Of course, Hillary has no plan to address any of these problems. And her link to Wall Street is something that Trump is going to hammer her on every day of the campaign. Granted Trump has his own problems. But he is going to hit her on her Wall Street ties, and Hillary has no defense. She, and most of her supporters, are utterly clueless about the political liability that those ties create.
It doesn’t help matters that Hillary and her people think that the 90s were great and then the Republicans got into power and screwed everything up. The reality is that neoliberal economics has been a disaster for a huge swath of the country, masked only by stock bubbles. The system is broken. This right here addresses it pretty well:
Trump is obviously not the answer, but people are turning to him because they don’t feel they have another option.
beltane
@Mnemosyne: There is the possibility that nothing can change regardless of whom they are angry at. I was having this same conversation with an Italian journalist who described the rise of populist-right parties such as Front National and the Lega Nord as futile “resistance” movements against the economic realities of downward social mobility and declining standards of living. He concluded the only way to restore postwar prosperity and optimism was to have a third world war, with even that being an impossibility in a nuclear age.
What’s happening here is not happening in a vacuum. It exists in varying forms through much of the developed world. Maybe we can call it “shrinking pains” as opposed to growing pains.
Marc
I don’t know when liberals hit on the idea that racism is the sole explanation for everything, but it’s neither correct nor useful.
I think that the article provides a pretty powerful set of reasons why people might be susceptible to racially-tinged appeals, for example. The country was not less racist in the 1960s, but liberalism was powerful and we were able to pass things like the Civil Rights laws. It was not less racist in the 1930s, but we could pass the minimum wage, expand labor rights, and have Social Security. (No, the fact that minorities couldn’t take full advantage of these things wasn’t central to their passage.)
If your explanation is that racism is everything, I’d love to hear ideas for what to do. Every time I see it brought up, it’s basically used as a vehicle to shut discussion down, rather than as a component of a solution.
Mnemosyne
@Frankensteinbeck:
I wouldn’t say that their economic situation is irrelevant. It’s truly horrible, and they’re right to be angry about it.
But they’ve been told all their lives that they have something that makes them automatically superior — their skin color. If you take that away, what do they have left now that their economic security has been destroyed? Very few people are able to completely discard their deepest beliefs even when those beliefs are shown to be wrong.
Fred Clark has written a lot about how fundamentalist Christians have been told that they MUST believe everything they’ve been taught, no matter how illogical, or else their entire faith with crumble away and they’ll be left with nothing. I think that’s part of what’s happening here — if you take white supremacy away from these people, they have nothing left to build their lives around.
daverave
“If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.”
The last paragraph of the article deserves highlighting. Based on his dismantling of the R Party, the Trumpenfuhrer’s been fairly “competent” to date on the campaign trail despite the establishment forces arrayed against him. That competence will probably not transfer well to the Oval Office when he has a hard time bullying the House and Senate; however, Obama managed to get some things accomplished despite the same scenario. Then again sitting congresscritters may begin fearing for their seats at the feeding trough if enough of their constituents finally feel they deserve a piece of the action.
khead
Speaking of China, turns out Obama killed their coal industry too.
Mnemosyne
@Marc:
You may need to review the history of the New Deal, because excluding minorities from those benefits was *crucial* to its passage. FDR blocked federal anti-lynching legislation for years so as not to alienate the Southern Democrats he needed to pass his agenda.
As for what to do about it — I honestly don’t know. What do you do when people are willing to cut themselves off from benefits as long as it means people of color won’t get them, either? How do you overcome someone’s *moral* sense that health insurance is morally wrong and they should accept death from preventable causes rather than have health insurance?
Betty Cracker
True, but I think Hillary is listening — with an assist from Bernie. Obama has been saying this all along too, that real wages are stagnant, rising wealth inequality is unsustainable, etc. But one thing that makes me have hope that Hillary really does get it is that she’s running away from TPP. Not that bad trade deals are the cause of all ills. But it makes me hope she does get it.
@Mnemosyne & @Frankensteinbeck: I have a lot of respect for you both, but honest to dog, y’all are as one-note on race as the so-called BernieBros are on economics.
Yes, it’s hella important, and any candidate who doesn’t acknowledge the gigantic role race plays in our politics, justice system, wealth distribution, etc., isn’t worthy of being our nominee (and BTW, Bernie DOES acknowledge it a lot more than is generally allowed among the more rabid Hillary supporters).
But it’s just not that fucking simple. This is a large, complex country with a lot of shit going on and colliding currents. Boiling it all down to race and hand-waving the economic screw-job as irrelevent is just as fucking dumb as failing to acknowledge the role race plays in what’s happening.
p.a.
@Frankensteinbeck: I’ll read the article later, but I’m skeptical of analyses (esp from the Chicago school) that blame ‘international economic developments’ and a natural evolution in the domestic economy as implying this is a natural development (again, if I’m misreading this post’s gloss on the article I apologize) when the US economic system and the middle class-including especially hourly employees- have been under legislative and judicial attack for about 2 generations. #powellmemo
goblue72
@Frankensteinbeck: Seeing everything through the lens of race is as stupid as seeing everything through the lens of class. There are inter-related but not completely overlapping cultural AND socio-economic issues at play here and over-simplistic reductions of it to just based on racism is sophomoric at best.
Chyron HR
@NR:
How about Carter? Was Carter pure enough for ya?
Linnaeus
@Betty Cracker:
The way I like to put it is this: Understanding the salience of race and racism in American society is necessary – but not sufficient – to understand American politics.
MomSense
Unfortunately I am not near my computer to provide links, but isn’t the history of manufacturing in the US that it increased from WWII through about 1980 (Cold War production) and then returned to pre WWII levels. A significant factor in manufacturing in the US was war production. We definitely need to grow manufacturing and my preference would be for solar and wind to be our booming manufacturing industries and not bombs.
gwangung
If I may, the seeming one note focus on race is a reaction to the one note focus on class. Most of the folks emphasizing the race component have been very clear about intersectionality….
Linnaeus
@Betty Cracker:
As an aside, this is one stance of Clinton’s that I’m a little skeptical of, given her past support for the TPP. My guess is that she’s calculating that the TPP will be a done deal – either way – by the time she takes office, and so it’s safe for her to oppose it. If it crosses her desk when she is president, we’ll see what happens, but I don’t see her outright rejecting it.
Steve in the ATL
@Betty Cracker: Here is my take on it: the GOP exists for the sole purpose of transferring wealth to the 0.01%. Since you can’t win elections on that platform, you create a bunch of side issues to obscure your true purpose. When your rubes start feeling the financial pain, you distract them with various boogie men (blacks, immigrants, women, gays, commies, the Chinese) and they come back to the fold. You start a war; the rubes get fired up and scared and vote for the “security” party, meanwhile you use the war to profiteer. Lather, rinse, repeat until the guillotines appear. And as a strong party, you don’t worry about mixing metaphors.
Peale
@Chyron HR: Don’t bother. I’m still trying to figure out how the 90s were awful. People keep saying that, but there was a good long stretch in there that I remember being at ease wtih.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
You may need to re-read what I said. The job-screw is not about race, but we are not able to *fix the problem* because of race.
Race is not causing the problem, but that’s what Trump’s supporters *think* the cause is, so they automatically reject any solutions from the liberal side. if you can come up with a solution that isn’t going to be automatically rejected by the very people who are suffering because it helps everyone regardless of race, I’d love to hear it.
NR
@Betty Cracker:
The problem is, people aren’t going to buy this. She was for the TPP, then she was against it. The recently released emails show that she was privately lobbying for trade deals while publicly opposing them.
The Clintons have always been for free trade. I don’t think a deathbed conversion by Hillary is going to hold much water, especially given her very real problems about honesty (see the exit polls from MA, for example).
Steve in the ATL
@MomSense:
And as automation increases, profits flow more to owners of capital (or IP rights) and less to workers, creating a big mess of haves and have nots. I’m no utopian or hippie or communist, but I’ve come to the conclusion that we are going to have to institute a universal basic income at some point in the not too distant future.
NR
@Chyron HR:
Oh look, I can play this game too.
schrodinger's cat
Edsall is problematic, he always finds a way to blame Democrats in his analysis and see their electoral prospects as perennially gloomy.
Citizen_X
I’m not the first to link to it around here, but this (long) article is a good complement, covering the mob psychology of Trump’s rise. Shorter: expect more Trumps in the near future.
Mnemosyne
@gwangung:
I think someone said once that the US has both a caste and a class system. The caste system is racial and the class system is economic. A working-class white person can be simultaneously upper-caste and lower-class. If we give up our caste system, then those lower-class white people don’t even have their caste status to comfort them. They have nothing. I’m not sure what we have available to replace that.
Ready
Chilled! Trump is going down, the Peter Singer and the Hedge Fund Boys are the cavalry coming in to save the fort from the Indians.
An anti Trump negative campaign the likes of which has never been fucking seen ever anywhere.
#NeverTrump
#DumpTrump
Goblue72
@MomSense: Less than 10% of jobs in the U.S. are in manufacturing. While Germany, almost 20% of jobs are. Despite Germany deploying three times as many robots per hour worked than the U.S.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: There is an overlap between class and race. However, working class solidarity has a been a dream.
Goblue72
@Peale: How old are you?
Ready
Trump and liberals seek to divide Americans along color lines. Rubio wants to unite us all in a color-blind 21st Century society.
#NeverTrump
Ready
#NeverTrump because the Koch Bros say they will keep their money on the sidelines if he’s the nominee.
#NeverTrump because he doesn’t believe in constitutional limited government, but wants to rule in the same lawless manner as Obama.
beltane
@Ready: Is it you? You have returned to us? Please make sure your guy is stocked up on water for Thursday’s debate. He is going to need it.
Goblue72
@schrodinger’s cat: Well except that during the peak of unionization in the U.S., unionization crossed conservative/liberal barriers. And other countries have maintained high rates of unionization.
Working class solidarity is possible. It just takes work.
Daulnay
@Steve in the ATL: Here’s my take on it: the DLC exists for the sole purpose of transferring wealth to the 0.01%. Since you can’t win elections on that platform, you create a bunch of side issues to obscure your true purpose. When your rubes start feeling the financial pain, you distract them with various boogie men (fundamentalists, white nationalists, patriarchy, fascists, neocons and more fundamentalists) and they come back to the fold. You fight a social war; the rubes get fired up and scared and vote for their “security” party, meanwhile you use the war to profiteer. Lather, rinse, repeat until the guillotines appear. And as a strong party, you don’t worry about mixing metaphors.
Goblue72
@Ready: I see you have returned from attempting to space Dave.
Marc
@Mnemosyne: Except that they didn’t always do this in the past. That’s the piece that’s missing from the insistence that working class whites are primarily motivated by racism: they supported major liberal programs in the past despite racial attitudes that were, if anything, much worse than they are today. Something besides pure racial animosity is at play. The latter amplifies problems that would be there even in its absence.
Ready
@beltane:
Rubio is going to pound Trump into the fucking ground. Bullies have a glass jaw. Trump better get used to the heat, but just from Rubio but Singer and the Hedge Fund Boys. They’ve got money to spare and they’re not afraid to use it–rumor has it there even putting together a full length feature film anti-Trump documentary!
As Jen Rubin pointed out in the WaPo and Kevin Williamson wrote in NRO today, the anti Trunp vote had a surprisingly good night! Momentum
#NeverTrump
Goblue72
@Daulnay: Pretty much.
NR
@Peale: The trade deals from the 1990s were devastating to large parts of the country. To take just one example, the deal with China in 1999 (negotiated by Bill Clinton) hammered American wages. Some analyses have concluded that it reduced worker take-home pay by $2,500.
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne: Most everyone here is fond of the “sparrows and curtain rods” parable, and I believe it does apply to a not-insignificant number of Americans — I’d estimate 27%. I’m under no illusions that those people are reachable — fuck ’em, I say.
But with the right approach and packaging, I do think broad, liberal, social compact-type solutions could be sold to the public, and yes, even most working class whites. You’ll probably counter with the ACA, but let me pre-spond by noting that most people already had insurance through their employers. The ACA began to solve a huge, gaping problem, and it was worth all the pain, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a fair test-case for what’s possible as far as liberal social policies go.
Goblue72
@Marc: Scapegoating the Jews in Germany didn’t become a platform with succeed amongst everyday Germans in a vacuum. Took an economically destroyed Germany post WW I to accomplish that.
The tinder was there. But it took economic malaise to provide the spark.
beltane
@Ready:
Remind him to bring his step stool this time.
Steve in the ATL
@Daulnay: Great point–both sides do it! And white people lynching black people is EXACTLY the same as black people not lynching white people. The KKK is a liberal organization, right?
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne:
I’m not saying you’re doing this, but I sometimes see the assumptions (implicit and explicit) that 1) racism is somehow a uniquely white lower-class problem and 2) white lower- and working-class voters will always go for the racist. Neither is true.
This is one reason why institutions outside the parties, such as labor unions, are so important. They’re not perfect instruments by any means, but what they do is make possible the alliances and mobilization necessary for liberal victories politically.
Chyron HR
@Ready:
Hey, that sounds just like what you said on September 18, 2012 at 8:14 pm:
How did that work out for you?
superpredators4hillary
@Betty Cracker:
Talk the talk, walk the…
Ready
Rubio will rip he mask off Trump and show the world who is behind The Trump Organization, and who they really is.
OGLiberal
It’s all about race in that the ruling class – we call ’em the 1% today but they’ve been around since before this country was a country – use it to divide and conquer and distract the lower classes – ie, everybody except them – from the fact that they are screwing everybody, all races. The reason they use racism against people of color is because white people are in the majority. (maybe not for much longer but the coming minority majority will be made up of a bunch of racial minorities – non-Hispanic whites will still be the plurality) If whites didn’t think that the main reason they weren’t as well of as they thought they should be is because the browns are getting a bunch of free stuff, there’s a good chance they’d realize it was the fault of the ruling class and they’d team up with those brown folks, creating a 99% v. 1% scenario, which would scare the hell out of the ruling class and likely mark their end. Read, American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan. Even before slavery, before plantations, before Jim Crow, wealthy landowners in colonial Virginia got poor whites on their side by stoking the fears of brown folks (then mostly Native Americans but also pre-slavery blacks) taking their jobs, land, and women. Slavery was the next logical step and when a civil war ended that we got Jim Crow and when that ended we got the Southern Strategy. But each step of the way, it was the ruling class making sure that the white, powerless masses always had somebody else to blame for their ills and always had somebody else they were above.
So, yeah, it’s mostly about race because the ruling class makes it about race, whether they themselves are racist or not.
The thing about Trump supporters that makes them a bunch of tools is that they say they hate the ruling class, claim that’s what mostly motivates them yet a large number of them are racist assholes who would rather do without than have everybody – including the browns – get more…which is exactly what the ruling class wants them to do.
Ready
Cruz will also relentlessly pound Trump–Cruz an Rubio have a non-aggression pact now, and Trump will play the role of Poland.
Los Hermanos Cubanos!
Joel
Hunter S. Thompson was railing about how this (my) generation will be the first to enjoy lower standards of living than their forebears. And he was citing others. Note that he killed himself about ten years ago. The reality is, life isn’t s zero sum game, but certain aspects are. And the worst is yet to come.
beltane
@Linnaeus: I have read that among whites, support for the GOP rises along with income, yet white, upper-middle class liberals seem to single out poor whites for disdain. Punching down is the favorite American pastime among all groups. It is the one thing that unites us as a people.
Mnemosyne
@Marc:
They supported major liberal programs *that didn’t help minorities*. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was primarily passed by Republicans, not Democrats. Many of those selfsame Democrats switched to the Republican Party afterwards, because they felt the Democratic Party and LBJ had betrayed them, and Nixon courted them to switch with a little thing called the Southern Strategy.
The Republican Party is now the white people’s party. It’s true that our two-party system didn’t used to be this racially divided, but that’s because minorities *weren’t allowed to vote* in large swaths of the country.
Elizabelle
@schrodinger’s cat: LOL. My take on Edsall too. Would it surprise you to hear he was with
David Broder TodayThe Washington Post for years and years?Stopped clock and all; will read to see if he’s that useful.
The NYTimes reader comments are usually the best feature. Very Boboesque in that fashion.
Betty Cracker
@NR: RE: TPP, Hillary Clinton was advocating for the president’s trade policy, which was her job at the time. I don’t hold her accountable for shit her husband did. But you’re probably right that “people” in general won’t buy it. I’m just saying her current repudiation of TPP gives me hope that she gets it. Whether the conversion was undertaken cynically to bolster her electoral prospects or if she sincerely believes it, at least she recognizes the liability, which I find comforting.
beltane
@Ready: OK, who gets to be Stalin and who gets to be Hitler? I say Cruz would like to be both.
Ready
@beltane:
Given that Stalin and Hitler were left wing tyrants , neither.
The Hedge Fund Boys are getting off the sidelines!
Los Hermanos Cubanos!
#NeverTrump
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Sadly, after 30 years of propaganda, I don’t think that a broad-based social overhaul would sell to white people if it was coming from the Democratic Party. Maybe a Republican could sell it to them, but that ain’t going to happen.
Elizabelle
@NR: And how is your Wednesday going, Neurotic Repeater?
beltane
@Ready: In that case, the smart money’s on Trump.
Ready
@beltane:
Singer and the Hedge Fund Boys and the Ricketts Family (owner of the White Sox!!) might have something to say abou that
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Marc: Race is an important component but certainly not the only one. Guns, religion and racial resentment are basically the things that keep the working class Republicans from with the Democratic party and voting in their own economic interest. They love the stuff Trump is pitching about protectionist trade policies, not just the bigotry and xenophobic wall building. Unfortunately in the not so distant path the Democratic party decided to buy the free-traderism the Republicans were selling, and that’s been enough evidence for someone inclined by racial resentment or some other culture war issue to vote Republican to say the Democrats are just as bad on economics. The Democrats aren’t as bad, but they’ve been just bad enough (NAFTA, accepting China to the WTO) that Republicans can deflect all the blame. Unfortunately the wife of the guy who did most of the free trade damage is our current candidate. That doesn’t make it as easy to strike a populist tone.
aimai
Ok, maybe I should save this for my own blog but I’ll take a first crack at this now. Its going to be Trump (angry white people looking for a fight) and Hillary (a mixed group of voters composed of the Obama coalition and depressed/angry/selfish Sander’s voters). Trump is going to promise his voters everything and yet not give them any details. He’s doing a cross between a fascist seduction and the prosperity gospel, promising to make not only “American Great Again” but also make “all of us rich!” I’ve even heard him exorting his fans to “get greedy” because he’s going to “make them all rich.” This, needless to say, is not an argument for the presidency that can be rebutted by direct attacks on America’s wealthiest (i.e. Trump) or exactly parotting Trump’s viewpoint.
Hillary is going to have to go after the disaffected Republican voters, those for whom the open racism and jingoism of Trump is kind of too much, even though they probably agree with a lot of what he is saying (the racism and the jingoism and the anti elite stuff). But they will only come on over to Hillary as long as she promises them, in effect, the same peace and happiness that Obama promised them. Trump is going to ratchet tension up until there is literal blood in the streets between his supporters and any minority person out there. And then he is going to gin up a race war to be the retroactive excuse for his racist pandering. Its going to be all “see what you made us do” all the time. Our only hope is if HRC can hold on to the Obama coalition, and ride a wave of specifically anti trump fervor, while also assuaging the fears of the sliver of Republican voters who will sit out the election even if they don’t cross over. In other words regardless of the provocation or the cries from the most left fringe that she become abusive to Trump or his voters she has to take the position (which, btw,she is already taking) of welcoming defectors and promising good treatment to everyone.
Trumpers are in the throes of a self justifying fury–every single thing that rebuts their love affair or attacks their love object is going to just harden their determination to crawl over broken glass to defend him and vote for him. Only by lowering the tension and fear for (some) of them can we overcome them.
geg6
@Chyron HR:
FDR wouldn’t be pure enough for these people. Hell, I don’t think Eugene V. Debs would be.
Kylroy
@Goblue72: And a largely monoethnic population doesn’t hurt.
Citizen_X
@Daulnay:
Um, no, it doesn’t, and hasn’t for five years.
Mnemosyne
@Linnaeus:
This is kind of the weird thing: a lot of white voters identify themselves as “working class” when they’re actually living comfortably in the middle-class exurbs. They’re culturally “working-class” but not economically.
There’s also the geographic divide. White working-class voters in the South vote solidly Republican, but it’s more mixed outside of the South (including in the West). Geography distorts any broad-based ability to say what white working-class voters do.
Middle-class whites and above vote Republican, including the ones who call themselves “working-class” because they drive shiny pickup trucks and listen to country music.
Steve in the ATL
@beltane:
Maybe they single out poor whites for disdain because they are the GOP base whose votes against their own self interest allow the GOP to win elections?
Ready
Rumor has it Rubio will propose a “GOP Dream Team” before Flordia:
For President: Marco Rubio
For Vice President: Ted Cruz
For SCOTUS: Mike Lee
For Flordia Senator: Ben Carson
Secretary of the Treasury: Rand Paul
Commerce Secretary: Carly Fiorina
Attorney General: Miguel Estrada
Secretary of State: John Bolton
Secretary of Defense: Lindsey Graham
Steve in the ATL
@Ready:
Notwithstanding the fact that you are a troll, and notwithstanding the fact that the Ricketts family deserves massive amounts of scorn, disdain, and ridicule for everything it does, let’s not libel them with this kind of statement. They own the CUBS, not those south side loser White Sox.
Chyron HR
@Ready:
You forgot the Chicago(!!!!) White Sox and the Hedge Fund Boyz.
NickM
This is a very good read.
The jist of it is that authoritarian tendencies can be rated by asking people the following four questions:
1 Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
2 Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
3 Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
4 Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?
The answers to these questions reveal how much you value authority, and that in turn is highly predictive of your politics. It corresponds exactly to what I’ve noticed: that the number one reason assholes I know seem to be gravitating towards Trump is because he’s “strong”.
Elie
I believe the ending three paragraphs in the Edsall column:
Paragraph two is VERY important and something I am very concerned about even if “the forces of light” are able to win the election. These people are aroused and there are a lot of ’em all over the country. Calming that is critical or we have the nexus of great civil unrest and continued problems for years. NEITHER party did right by them or anyone other than the very rich and its going to be a real challenge. Yes, many, maybe even most of these Trump folks are racist — but that does not allow us to dismiss the challenge and the real vulnerability that has been rend in our country. Edsall has painted a very scary and I believe accurate picture. We should take this seriously…. not talk bullshit about what his past affiliations were.
Ready
@Steve in the ATL:
My bad!
Former Christie supporter Woody Johnson will also come on board and he owns he Jets!
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne:
Good point, and I think it’s a reason why, in the context of electoral politics, any generalizations about entire groups of voters (however those groups are delineated) need to come with caveats.
pamelabrown53
@Linnaeus:
If understanding the salience of race and racism is necessary but insufficient then what is necessary and sufficient?
Our country was forged on slavery and genocide. The white privilege runs deep Too many on the left ignore this while patronizingly substituting their reality as the only reality.
Basically, I’m for incremental coalition building then another white leftest “revolution” that puts us further in the hole.
Betty Cracker
@aimai: Love and kindness.
@Ready: Okay, all doubt that you’re a spoof troll now removed. Thank you!
Elie
@aimai:
Wise comments, aimai. Its gonna be very tough this fall.
Cermet
@beltane: This was all spelled out clearly in “The Rise of Fall of the Super Powers” back in the 80’s. What that author wholly missed and is the key to our inability to reversing our fall is the ruling elite once again has obtained the required power to ridge and control the masses – like in the middle ages with religion. They have created corporations as humans and free speech as money. Thus did humanity fall to the corporate overlords
p.a.
@Steve in the ATL:
Nixon admin toyed with the idea, as a ‘negative income tax’; mostly as a way to end transfer payments: AFDC (or whatever its name at the time), food stamps, housing subsidies etc. So caution is advised: devil/details etc we all know the drill when cons start espousing lib-sounding policies.
“I try to be as progressive as I can possibly be
as long as I don’t have to try too much”~ Lou Reed
geg6
@Steve in the ATL:
You said it before I could.
trollhattan
@Ready: Holy she-yut mah, them BRINKS TRUCKS CASH trucks what done got lost done been finded.
And, the remora, having been shed by the Jeb!shark has found purchase on a new, if smaller and less shiny shark in the nick of time. It’s hard, being a little remora alone in a giant ocean containing approximately zero BRINKS TRUCKS.
Napoleon
@schrodinger’s cat:
That’s an understatement. I quit reading him because I came to the conclusion he is a flawed source of analysis.
beltane
@Steve in the ATL: Still, since lower income whites tend to vote for Democrats in greater percentages than whites as a whole, it seems odd to single them out to be on the receiving end of venom. Why not mock the cultural proclivities of the “moderate” Republicans who live side by side with moderate Democrats in all-white suburban enclaves whose children attend the same all-white schools, etc. Racism in behavior, if not in language, afflicts most of American society, not just the white trash elements. There is a lot of blame to go around.
p.a.
@Ready:
#TrumpTrump?
#RenegTrump?
Brachiator
@Steve in the ATL:
There are a number of economists and futurists suggesting this. But it perhaps presumes a world in which income is irrevocably decoupled from the idea of working for a living. But as you note, automation is one of the factors that may accelerate considering this as an option.
Ready
@Betty Cracker:
No this isot real Glenn Brck talked about it this morning (research it) with the top two positions reversed.
Iowa Old Lady
A lot of my former grad students are on my FB feed and they tend to be Sanders supporters, so I see reactions like this to Clinton’s wins yesterday: “The problem comes with the fact that I am not sure Clinton can beat Trump, at least Bernie can sway some of the red. She will not get the youth vote, which Dems need to be successful”
Assume Clinton is the D nominee. Where does this person thing the youth vote will go? Or does he just assume young voters won’t see the danger in an R presidency (Supreme Court?) and stay home? And could he be right?
Sometimes I despair.
Napoleon
@Daulnay:
?? The DLC has been defunct for years.
Linnaeus
@pamelabrown53:
That’s the thing: there probably isn’t a single, irreducible explanation of American political dynamics. So you have to take into account multiple factors. We can talk about the relative importance of a particular factor in a particular context, and you will probably still get some disagreement, but you might get enough agreement to enable incremental coalition building.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
We have giant economic problems. Our problems are not as simple as racism, but racism is the core message of the Republican party, and Trump is the pinnacle and epitome of that. Trying to represent his support as anything else is like arguing pirates are defined by the skull and crossbones flag. And frankly, since Obama was elected, I have seen a racist freakout the likes of which I could not imagine, where Coca Cola commercials about the Anthem being sung in multiple languages are controversial. I’m one note on this because the same incorrect point comes up over and over and over, and needs to be refuted over and over and over. It was the same when I had to tell people Jeb wasn’t going to win.
goblue72
@Betty Cracker: Completely agreeing with you – kinda scares me. ;)
But yes, this exactly. Your example with the ACA is spot-on – and something too many upper middle class liberals and partisan Dems miss. The bulk of the benefits of ACA – in pure dollar terms – were concentrated in the Medicaid expansion and the portion of the income spectrum that was above Medicaid cutoffs but qualified for deep subsidies on the Exchange. In other words, mostly concentrated on poor households.
And given the how race cross-sections with SES – that is, that poor households are disproportionately non-white – that means that the bulk of the benefits of ACA accrrued disproportionately to low-income non-whites.
Upper-middle class liberals don’t see this – they had pretty decent employer provided healthcare pre-ACA – and they generally still enjoy decent-ish employer provided healthcare post-ACA. But at the pinched part of SES spectrum – working class and lower-middle class range – which is proportionately more white than at the low income range – the ACA provided little benefit. Either those households had employer provided coverage and all they saw was the coverage getting more costly (due to ACA mandated coverage requirements) or getting pushed onto the Exchange. Or if they didn’t have employer provided coverage, they had to buy on the Exchange and found little in the way of subsidies provided. From their not unreasonable perspective – the ACA didn’t provide much benefit – and may have even left them worse off in dollars and cents terms.
Means-tested public welfare benefits have their role – and indeed, budget constraints at time dictate it – but they also come with a political cost. The more we restrict we public welfare benefits to primarily the poor, the more we are providing those benefit to disportionately non-white households, and creating easily exploitable racial schisms.
Elie
@Napoleon:
I don’t think his analysis is flawed this time, though I agree and have not generally supported all his analytical conclusions. I recognize his bias, but this column seems straight on to me. Can you really just dismiss it out of hand?
celticdragonchick
@Ready:
I see we have have another one of those poly sci failure idiots who think Hitler was “liberal”.
I guess you missed that whole thing where Hitler and the Nazi’s promised a conservative return to traditional values and merrily made a lot of money building weapons. Of course, that assumes you know how to read academic work instead of lifting your leg and spraying GOP talking point urine on the fire hydrant.
Ready
@trollhattan: l
Keep laughing but the billionaires weren’t United before now they are.
You don’t want to go to war with the Hedge Fund Boys…they’ll even start shorting Trump properties and assets to decrease his fortune if necessary, real personal ratfucking right in Trump’s wallet. And he will never get a loan from any bank ever again, and they’ll jack up interest rates on any debt through the fucking roof.
Beware Singer and the Hedge Fund Boys…
#NeverTrump
Barbara
@Mnemosyne: Civil rights laws were passed in the mid-60s, just as the post-war boom in American manufacturing was peaking, and the trick of the Republican Party has been to persuade white workers that extending greater rights for minorities caused the loss of their own manufacturing jobs. I saw this when I lived in North Carolina, where the textile industry was essentially obliterated by the early 90s, as manufacturing moved abroad. But still, Jesse Helms made political ads that explicitly attributed job losses to affirmative action in the most obnoxious way imaginable.
trollhattan
@Ready:
Only missing Press Secretary: Post-punk David Broder
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Marc:
Look at the presidential election numbers breakdown by race since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964/1965. It’s pretty enlightening. Democrats haven’t come close to getting to 50% of the white vote since then. Poor and middle class whites vote against their own economic self interest because of racial animus. Change that behavior, and then whites won’t mind expanding government programs that Democrats propose for benefiting everyone. If you don’t, you’ll never get nice socialist things. That’s what Fred Hampton started doing – raising class consciousness – and it got him assassinated by the FBI.
celticdragonchick
@aimai:
Hey aimai :)
Brachiator
@beltane:
Wow. Kind of a “Dr Strangelove” option. I was listening to a BBC news program about the economic situation in Spain. The unemployment rate is 21 percent, and in the Southern area of the country, the unemployment rate of young people is 46 per cent. This is insane. And they are trying to form a new government after recent elections in which no party won a parliamentary majority.
But I can’t see war or plague forming any background for a new prosperity.
celticdragonchick
Can we get rid of this billionaire fluffing boilerplate spouting tool, or is it DougJ screwing with us?
Napoleon
@Elie:
I did print it out and will read it this evening, so I will give him a fair chance.
Elie
@goblue72:
Astute comment… Important to think about in what we need to do
beltane
@Barbara: And back in the 1970s and ’80s, it was only the most old-school, “out of touch” Democrats who made a huge issue out of the obliteration of manufacturing jobs. We were going to get better jobs, and unlimited growth, etc. For the most part, both parties were on board with the elimination of manufacturing jobs. The difference is that the Democrats at least wanted to ease the pain by maintaining the social safety net.
Elie
@goblue72:
You are right on. Agree with your analysis. Now, what to do about it!
Ready
@celticdragonchick:
You envy them don’t you? The money. The prestige. The POWER that you will never have. Envying he success of others is the taproot of the Progressive disease.
beltane
@Brachiator: I think he was being tongue-in-cheek about WWIII, but serious in his belief that there was no viable way forward. Political parties cannot win by telling voters they are the losers in the new global economy and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Chyron HR
@Ready:
Which part of this is supposed to bother us?
beltane
@Chyron HR: Maybe he thinks Melania posts here. This would be very bad news for her.
trollhattan
@Ready:
keeping up of the laughing I shall, especially as I luxuriate in this fond memory.
Beep-beep.
celticdragonchick
@Ready:
Has to be DougJ.
El Caganer
@Steve in the ATL: Agree with you about UBI. I can’t imagine either Democrats or Republicans even proposing such a thing, though, let alone trying to get it passed.
trollhattan
@Ready:
And how do you handle those serial disappointments in your life? Any tips?
trollhattan
@celticdragonchick:
Now post-punk Doug!
aimai
@celticdragonchick: Hey back at you, celticdragonchick.
trollhattan
Carson out.
The grift stops here.
ET
I don’t disagree with the analysis. Here is what I totally don’t understand. A large number of his voters are the angry whose lives/incomes having kept up over the last 30 or so years while at the same time a lot of that is because the very wealthy have gotten much, much richer and because companies are going overseas. But then why are his voters voting for such a wealthy man who made most of his fortune precisely because of the very trends they hate most about the modern economy that has so damaged them?
I know voters aren’t always rational, heck frequently they don’t get in the same neighborhood as rational – his success proves this. His anger about the decline of America strikes a chord but his America and their America aren’t exactly he same place. His railing about immigrants is bringing in the bigots. His off the cuff, calculated, bully language appeals to that arrogant strain in the American psyche. For me, his candidacy puts on display the absolute worst parts of the American psyche.
Brachiator
@beltane:
Yeah, I fugured (or hoped) that he was kidding. But still, there is the sense of futility, that there is no viable solution.
Contrast that with Trump’s brutish … optimism… that we will soon all be “winning.”
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
Also because the legacy of the Civil War meant white people were divided. There were TWO white Anglo-Protestant people’s parties back then – the Republicans in the North and the Democrats in the South.
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: There’s nothing wrong with correcting people who say race has nothing to do with it — godspeed! But you seemed to be chiding Tom on the grounds that it’s 100% race and 0% economics, which struck me as wrongheaded and reductive.
@goblue72: I agree — with equal trepidation! :)
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: How does your theory account for broad public support — even among Republican knob voters — for programs like Social Security and Medicare?
Daulnay
How do we overcome having both a class and caste system? We had a chance to isolate the white supremacists in the late ’60’s, when the Civil Rights bills drove the deep southern whites out of the Democratic party. But Nixon welcomed them into the Republican party, where they currently make up the rotten heart of the party.
Blacks and deep southern whites will always be on opposite sides, at least until the crypto- (or not so crypto) confederates abandon white supremacy. Looking at the exit polls from the last Presidential election, blacks overwhelmingly supported Obama, and southern whites likewise overwhelmingly supported the Republican (over 90%). The rest of white America was roughly 50/50, with regional tendencies looking more like religious or age categories. So outside of the South, at least half of whites are not white supremacist (assuming that a white supremacist would never vote for a black man.) That division between blacks and the white supremacist South is the deepest, most extreme division in American politics.
The South isn’t homogenous: some Appalachian and some Floridian whites differ in attitudes from the deep southern heirs to the plantation culture. To the extent that we can peel them away from the white supremacist South, we have a chance to politically separate the class and caste divisions.
Right now, we’re screwed as far as class divisions go; the Republican establishment and the DLC/Hillary Democrats have both been strongly supportive of the agenda of the 0.1%. As the most recent example, look at Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s work to protect Payday lenders from Elizabeth Warren’s CRFB. That tells us what we can expect from a Hillary administration.
You can see how class plays out on the Republican side, too; there have been several anecdotes of people at Trump rallies who would otherwise vote for Bernie. The voting public isn’t stupid, and the frustration with the economic stagnation (for the 80+%) of the last 40 years has finally been given two outlets. By nominating Hillary and sticking with the ‘demographics will triumph’ playbook, the Democrats are missing the opportunity of a huge realignment. The DLC Democratic establishment thinks that the left doesn’t have anywhere else to go. But Hillary/DLC isn’t any place to be either.
We need 3 parties. At the very least, we need 3 parties so that we can isolate the white supremacists in one, so that the rest of us have a choice of parties and some leverage.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Betty Cracker:
A better question is what has been the resistance to expanding the ACA’s Medicaid provision? SS was only passed because it excluded 50% of workers – the work that black people did. It took 25 more years of legislative shoulders to the wheel to get it to cover everyone.
WereBear
It would make no sense if he were a Democrat. But as a Republican, a group that has a slippery grip on cause and effect, he’s the ranty uncle whose bon mots they agree with. “He’s a real smart guy, see, he’s rich.”
Practically family.
Anoniminous
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Fred Hampton was a political genius. The white power structure couldn’t afford to let him live.
Fair Economist
@Mnemosyne:
This error needs correcting:
Votes for in the House: 153 Democrats, 136 Republicans 153>136
Votes for in the Senate: 46 Democrats, 27 Republicans. 46>27
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
Marc
@Mnemosyne: A good discussion on the Civil RIghts Act:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights
Bottom line: it only passed because of a Democratic president and had overwhelming support outside of the South, regardless of party. Calling it a republican achievement is buying into republican propaganda. In particular, Democrats from any region were more likely to support it than republicans from the same region.
And, back to my point, northern working class whites did support it then. I think that we confuse the issue with the white working class when we mix together the south and the rest of the country. There are overwhelmingly white, liberal states in the north. The south is a different country.
Daulnay
@Napoleon:
The official organization, yes. The political group that formed around it still exists, as the New Democrat Coalition and the Third Way think tank (the latter announced itself as the successor organization when the DLC shut down). The DLC was too much of a lightning rod, it’s essentially renamed, not defunct.
glory b
@beltane: I was listening to someone on national public radio this a.m. who said that the growth of the third world countries and the globalization of just about everything means a squeeze for the labor markets in the US, Canada and Europe.
His only prescription was to say that americans need to make sure that theya nd their children are educated and adaptable becuase there’s no way to predict what’s coming next.
Scary and uninformaitve.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Protip: the answer to what the resistance is to expanding Medicaid is not the GOP saying “we have a legitimate and principled philosophical difference about the appropriate size and role of the federal government”.
glory b
@NR: Yeah, people of color beg to differ.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Anoniminous:
He was a dangerous man. Also a community organizer from Chicago like someone else we know.
Daulnay
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Obama got 50% of the white vote, when you ignore the South. Democrats are never going to get a significant part of the Southern white vote until they throw blacks under the bus, which I hope never happens.
Elie
@Daulnay:
I was almost with you until your solution of having three parties. That would necessitate a coalition between the liberals, non racist conservatives or whatever and presumably isolate the white supremacists? Are you sure of the numbers to do that? I’m not. We are not a parliamentary system which has safeguards (called elections when no confidence), that we don’t have. Even with that, see Israel — permanently in the worst of all worlds with the right winged factions teamed up to dominate the actually more populous moderates. Also, I saw what you did there in just assuming that Hillary will continue the corporatist trends of her husband. I can support your skepticism but am less pessimistic — .. Bernie aint it man. That aint gonna happen for a number of reasons so how do we make the best of it?
Chyron HR
@Fair Economist:
Aha, you see, the Democratic votes weren’t enough for a majority in the Senate or the House, so clearly it passed because of the Republicans who voted for it.
Chris
@Fair Economist:
@Marc:
This.
Really, the whole debate on civil rights was between Democrats. A Democratic president (Truman) took the issue off the shelf and put it back into politics in the late 1940s, another Democratic president helped mostly by Democrats in Congress passed the CRA and VRA in the mid 1960s, and the Southern wing of the Democratic Party led the opposition in both cases. The Republicans were just kind of… there.
Chris
@Elie:
Yeah, making Southern White Racists a third party is basically making them the balance of power, and the temptation for Democrats and Republicans alike to go after their voters would be irresistible. It’d basically be putting them right back where they were in the late sixties and seventies, actually.
Betty Cracker
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Because most WWC folks already had health insurance via employers, which made it easy for racism-exploiting plutocratic knobs to paint the ACA as a giveaway to the poors and blahs.
But back to the question about broad support for Social Security and Medicare; I’m aware that the programs originally got off the ground via deals with the Dixiecrat devils. But I’m talking about the support those programs enjoy now, even from Republican knobs (voters, not legislators), and even though they cover everyone. How is that possible?
ETA: @the Conster, la Citoyenne: Fuck that bullshit!
glory b
@NR: But see, this always seems to be the answer from people who, as it turns out, won’t get screwed around too much by a Trump presidency (or any repub presidency for that matter). Do you really think that, after inauguration, Hillary will turn around and say, “Suckers!! I’m now going along with the people who tortured me and my family for the last 25 years!”
So, why don’t you have a care for the people who will need food stamps and low cost housing and a civil rights act and a voting rights act and school lunches, etc.?
Holding your nose and dragging yourself to the polls to vote for her is a prescription for losing. If Bernie wins, I and most people of color I know are going to tear the roof off the sucker to campaign for him. Too bad you can’t be bothered to drag yourself away from your worry wart-itis to do the same for us.
glory b
@Peale: Hey, black folks household income/value went up 25% and the income gap between whites and people of color shrank significantly (only to expand again under Bush).
Employers were holding job fairs in prisons. Black unemployment was at 8%, which for us, is low.
And let’s not forget new jack swing (runs away).
Daulnay
@ET:
Trump speaks to them because he says something that is true:
the improvements that ‘minority’ groups have seen came at their expense. Improvements to blacks’ and hispanics’ economic standing absolutely came at the expense of whites.
It is the mathematics of averages, a logical proof.
Given:
– the bottom 80% of Americans have gained no improvement in their average real income over the last 35 years. This is a fact.
– the average economic condition of blacks, women, and minorities in the bottom 80% has improved over the last 35 years. (whether or not this is actually true, it is believed to be true).
If both of those are true, then non-‘minority’ parts of the 80% necessarily saw economic declines. Bigoted Trump supporters see those declines as a result of people taking the other side, whereas they’re a consequence of the 0.1% scooping up nearly all of benefits of economic progress. The Republican establishment and the DLC/Clinton Democrats cooperated to build this economic system. So one can argue (and Trump will!) that a vote for Hillary is a vote for rats-in-a-barrel economic competition for the working and middle class.
Elie
What people continually forget is that Medicaid (and Medicare for that matter) are provider payment programs! Yes, they benefit people but its providers (hospitals, nursing homes, x-ray and labs, etc), that get the money. These providers not only help people who need it (mostly), but they are key employers and are therefore central to local economies. There is an economic multiplier effect of having hospitals, clinics, etc in sufficient numbers. The employees buy things in the local economy. Not saying this is the whole story, but big program cuts would obviously affect these providers and exacerbate local unemployment. Just saying. The very states that do not expand Medicaid, are not supporting local employers, making their own unemployment problems worse.
Mnemosyne
@goblue72:
Imagine for a minute that the Supreme Court did not gut ACA by removing the requirement for states to expand Medicaid. I think the working-class group you identify as not benefiting would have gotten many more benefits. But conservative Republicans screwed them, and they turned around and blamed … liberals.
Basically, everything is liberals’ fault, even when conservatives did it, so they vote for conservatives instead. I honestly don’t know how to overcome that.
Mnemosyne
@Marc:
I think it’s naive to say that the South is alone, though. Look at states like Wisconsin and Michigan, which have gone almost entirely red despite their long history of being Democratic strongholds.
As former front-pager Dennis G used to say, the Confederacy has broken out of the South and has started infecting the rest of the country. What do we do to stop the contagion?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Elie:
Cutting off their noses to spite their faces seems to be the racists’ MO. Hard to reason them out of that, since it’s tribal more than anything rational.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
It’s kind of reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan phenomenon in the 1920s. A regional, separatist, Southern phenomenon being revived and reinvented as a nationwide, patriotic movement that any white Anglo-Protestant could join.
Daulnay
@Elie:
How are we going to make it work? I don’t know, but Bernie raised hopes for me that I didn’t even know I had.
There’s definitely a lot of political opportunity right now, especially if the Republican party shatters. There are a lot of fractures in our political coalitions right now, and many people are very fed up with things as they have been.
A few ideas:
— split between the ‘big corporation’ and ‘small proprietor’ businessmen: there’s a lot of resentment towards big corporations for rigging markets (e.g. credit cards, forced arbitration)
— split between the tech corporate rulers and the ‘knowledge worker’ techs who do the actual innovation and create technological progress. There’s long been a mistrust among tech workers of the monopolist-du-jour, whether IBM, Microsoft, or (currently) Google.
— split between the ‘leave me alone’ Republicans in the sagebrush West and the ‘everyone must live my Christian way’ fundamentalists.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Betty Cracker:
Those programs have been around as long as most of us have been alive – they’re there, they’re there for me and you and entrenched in the social fabric of the US now, and there’s no way anyone can realistically propose to deny any benefits from them to a specific group of people in this day and age. I honestly can’t imagine Social Security passing in its current form today. Can you?
sherparick
@Marc: No, it is not the “single” explanation, but it is a big one. In fact the racism and the reaction to the Civil Rights revolution, the urban riots, the rising crime, and the Vietnam War protest was the hook to draw working class voters to vote for Republican politicians, politicians who would then do their donors bidding to start changing the laws so more and more income would be redistributed upwards. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf
As an example of how this works, Scott Walker and his Republican legislature came to power in 2010 saying that they would stop runaway Government spending (for Those People) and cut the hard working taxpayer’s tax bill (they have about a whooping $75.00 per year for the medium Wisconsin tax payer; for the Menards, and Johnsons and their ilk, millions in tax cuts. They also pass bills like this which will suck money for the average Wisconsin worker and pass it to the donors. http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/bill-awaiting-scott-walker-s-signature-loosens-rules-for-debt/article_4f71aa08-b45a-582b-8f1f-035fe20db1d4.html
Did the average Wisconsin Republican in the collar counties around Milwaukee vote Republican so he could be dunned to death by bill collectors? No, I don’t think so. But he did not look at the fine print of Scott Walker’s governing plan, or did not care, as long as “those People” were going to get screwed worst.
O. Felix Culpa
@Steve in the ATL: Sir, you are both very right and very wrong: Yes, the Ricketts family owns the perennial loser CUBS (last World Series, 1908), while the “loser” White Sox garnered the World Series title in…2005. Alas, my beloved southsiders have reverted to their mean in recent years, but grant them the glory of major victory in this millennium. Otherwise, water pistols at dawn.
Barbara
@beltane: beltane, since I grew up in a Rust Belt before I moved South, for school, what I would say is that the loss of manufacturing jobs where I lived was attributable to so many different things that it’s not easy to draw a straight line to the correct policy response. In addition to the fact that Japan and Europe might want to manufacture steel too, there was also — manufacturing that moved elsewhere in the U.S. (south), and manufacturing that began using a lot less labor even when it did not move (there are still a lot of steel jobs in Pittsburgh, just not nearly as many — like 10% — of what there used to be). When Bill Clinton was elected, I know that the operating wisdom was that free trade would only be in exchange for greater safety net. Clinton made huge tactical errors, in essentially giving free trade away for nothing. He badly misjudged his opposition. He should have held NAFTA hostage to health care reform. I understand the urge to take the “both sides do it route,” but in all honesty, there is no desire to enlarge or strengthen the safety net among Republicans. Not at all.
? Martin
But that’s not exactly true. Manufacturing in China is in decline, as it is in Germany, South Korea, Japan, India, and every other nation – not just in decline in terms of GDP but in terms of labor as well.
This trope that we are outsourcing our manufacturing is patently false. Yes, some jobs are being outsourced, but overall we have made technological advances that allow us to manufacture with far less labor – labor that gets diverted into engineering and design, into services, and so on – and many of those things simply cannot be easily or inexpensively outsourced.
The decline in manufacturing is really a function of technological efficiency, no different than the decline of the secretarial class, the farm hands, the longshoremen, and hundreds of other careers that were toppled by some technological or social invention. It doesn’t not serve Democrats well to bang on Donald Trump’s immigration/outsourcing drum.
Leto
Just thought I’d leave this here: Donald Trump Jr grants radio interview to prominent white supremacist:
Eldest son of Republican presidential candidate will be guest of honor on The Political Cesspool, called ‘primary radio nexus of hate in America’
The long forgotten dog whistle is an all out ship’s fog horn.
Gelfling545
@Mnemosyne: Hmm. My observation has been just the opposite – people who are culturally and economically working class defining themselves as middle class.
Daulnay
@Leto:
Oi.
Well, if we have to choose between white supremacists and anyone else, there’s no contest.
Daulnay
@Barbara:
That was a feature, not a bug. Clinton and the Third Way people were and are pro-corporate. Period.
Leto
@Barbara: One of the largest industries from the South that moved overseas was furniture manufacturing. I just finished Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local – and Helped Save an American Town and it was depressing. NAFTA was the opening salvo and then when China joined the WTO is just snowballed from there. Tens of thousands of jobs lost, massive amounts of money heading upwards and nothing coming into those regions to financially help (I.e. Jobs).
Betty Cracker
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Well, without old people starving in the streets, no — that was probably a necessary precondition for SS. And I’m not saying it would be easy for any big, social-compact type of initiative to pass. But some of y’all seem to be saying that until racism is utterly and completely annihilated, we can’t get any big things done. I don’t believe that’s true. We’ve made progress under worse conditions than today. It wasn’t easy. But it was — and is — possible.
NR
@Mnemosyne: The Democrats could have avoided that problem by simply passing Medicare for All in the first place.
NR
@glory b: With what, exactly?
Linnaeus
@Betty Cracker:
I’m with you on this. It will require – dare I say it – incremental progress on all fronts.
NR
@glory b:
You have a citation for that? Because this study says otherwise.
Barbara
@Leto: NAFTA was not the opening salvo. Steel manufacturing had significantly contracted more than a decade before NAFTA. I know because in 1982 I worked in summer manufacturing (non-steel) jobs where I met a woman whose husband was getting “federally enhanced” unemployment because his steel related job had been lost do to foreign competition. At any rate, Pittsburgh was decimated by the mid-80s.
There are a lot of issues around trade and I go out of my way to buy things made in U.S. or by unionized labor, but I don’t think that the future was ever going to include a U.S.A. with huge and robust manufacturing sector and the rest of the world without. I have been thinking about this for a long time, I don’t have happy or pat answers but increasingly believe that robust safety net irrespective of employment is the first step.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
And if my aunt had a cock, she’d be my uncle.
Sorry, but we have to deal with the reality of the law that was actually passed, not your fantasy football version of what *totally* would have been better.
Elie
@? Martin:
Very good point though its a favorite talking point of both the left and right. Its very important however that we stare it in the face to address the correct solution — which aint to bring back the same manufacturing jobs that disappeared due to efficiency and changing technology. To me the question is to how better anticipate what is needed in the workforce and to get the training there. Its harder than it looks though and seems to lag the changes by quite a bit — which is why we are in the pickle right now. How do we bridge that?
NR
@Mnemosyne: Right, I forgot. Nothing else could have been done. God is good, therefore this is the best of all possible worlds, therefore any evil that happens is both absolutely necessary and the least that it could possibly be.
Tripod
The problem is the hard economic left just goes on and on about steam punk industries of yesteryear. But one man in a front loader replacing ten men with shovels doing the work in a tenth the time is a global phenomenon, it’s relentless, and bitching about TPP or NAFTA isn’t going to change those facts.
A two thousand person line that is recapitalizing and moving to Mexico or New Jersey, or wherever, will be cutting half those jobs. In ten years it will move and cut half again.
Elie
@Tripod:
Yes — and this is what we have to get a solution to somehow. Progress (for lack of a better word), aint stopping. What do we do to help/protect our people for the real reality — not just their resentment — which won’t fix anything. Folks on left and right are pretty angry but that won’t get us where we need to go —
rikyrah
@Frankensteinbeck:
tell it.
TELL.IT.
They are mad when the days of
All you gotta be is WHITE
doesn’t take them where it used to.
Steve in the ATL
@rikyrah: Reminds me of a young lawyer friend years ago. He was lamenting that lawyers didn’t have any guaranteed lays. Doctors have nurses, pilots have flight attendance, but we had nothing. We weren’t friends much longer after that comment.
fuckwit
Meh. Trolling disaffected angry working-class people and gettign them to aim their hate and anger against minorities and foreigners instead of against the elite who fucked them, is nothing new.
Read “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”. Or any book on the rise of the Third German Empire.
Tom Levenson
@Mnemosyne: The civil rights act of 1964 was not primarily passed by Republicans. More Democrats than Republicans voted for it in both the House and the Senate. The percentages were higher among GOP members — though not among those from northern states. But the Democratic party supplied most of the votes for the act via substantial intra party majorities.
Brachiator
@Steve in the ATL:
I always thought that lawyers fvcked their clients, fvcked their partners, fvcked their friends, pretty much fvcked everybody.
Daulnay
@Tripod:
There’s a big difference between enhancing technological progress, and shipping jobs to less technologically advanced but much, much cheaper-wage locales. The latter is what happened in the U.S., not the former. Germany prevented that in their society, but American companies preferred to go for the cash and pay their CEOs obscenely with the profits.
So mfg job losses were and are far from inevitable. Saying they are just makes you a callous cheerleader for the DLC/Republican corporatists.
Daulnay
@glory b:
We can’t have a zero-sum economy for the working and middle class, but we can’t sacrifice justice and fair play either. I’ll back your Hillary if you’ll hold her feet to the fire on fixing the economy (and hold the feet of your Democratic reps to the fire, too. Some of them are really awful about economic stuff, like payday loan companies.)
? Martin
@Daulnay:
No its not. The US lost jobs whose value to consumers fell below prevailing wages. That is, they were jobs that were on the path to obsolescence, and before vanishing completely to technological progress, they got a stop in China or Indonesia. But the driver in that was technological progress – either for industries that weren’t investing adequately and being replaced by others (witness the tech companies all jumping into the automotive space, which will have a devastating effect on autoworkers but create a ton of new tech/service jobs) or for direct automation. Don’t see the stopping point for that job in China as evidence that it wasn’t a technological shift, odds are that job that went to China is now completely gone.
But what also isn’t being discussed is that manufacturing are low-productivity jobs. That is, they’re necessarily low-paying jobs. Service jobs on average pay twice as well as manufacturing jobs in every economy and if given the choice of losing a manufacturing job in favor of a service job, that should be a no brainer for any economic planner.
Now, none of this speaks to what to do for the folks that are necessarily tied to those jobs, and they should be trained, but part of that effort needs to be for this national denial to end. Nobody is going to eagerly sign up for retraining if we keep advancing the idea that these folks were wronged by some inevitable economic process – and everyone keeps advancing that idea. You know, we went from 90% of people having agriculture jobs a century and a half ago to less than 3%. That wasn’t due to outsourcing – the US is even more of an agricultural powerhouse than it ever has been. We went through the Farm Aid phase of trying to save agriculture jobs, but they were brutally hard, low paying jobs. It was one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Good riddance, we replaced that labor with much more productive, much better paying jobs. We made that transition and we’ll make this one, but first we need to accept it.
? Martin
@Daulnay:
The only way you wind up with a zero-sum economy is when you insist on preserving low-productivity jobs, people that don’t have the purchasing power to expand consumer demand. All economic growth comes from either of two things:
1) making more workers (birth rate, etc.)
2) making workers more productive
Those productivity improvements routinely result in massive labor disruptions – and promising people they can keep their high wage, low productivity job is just irresponsible. The alternative is an economy that looks like North Korea’s – with no growth and therefore no capacity to invest in improvements.
I Am Not Jon Snow
@Ready: Uh, you do know that Rubio dropped out tonight, don’t you?