A bunch of Third Way wankers did a tour of flyover country and were saddened by all the negativity. For some reason, I decided to skim the article about their trip, and I liked where these unions guys were coming from:
At the Labor Temple Lounge in Eau Claire, nine gruff, tough-looking union men sat around a table. One had the acronym of his guild, the Laborers International Union of North America, tattooed on a bulging bicep. The men pinned the blame for most of their problems squarely on Republicans, from Trump to Governor Scott Walker. School funding, the minimum wage, college debt, income inequality, gerrymandering, health care, union rights: It was all, in their view, the GOP’s fault. A member of the bricklayers’ union lamented Walker’s cuts to public services: “If we can’t help each other,” he said, “what are we, a pack of wolves—we eat the weakest one? It’s shameful.”
But their negativity toward Republicans didn’t translate to rosy feelings for the Democrats, who, they said, too frequently ignored working-class people. And some of the blame, they said, fell on their fellow workers, many of whom supported Republicans against their own interests. “The membership”—the union rank-and-file—“voted for these Republicans because of them damn guns,” a Laborers Union official said. “You cannot push it out of their head. A lot of ‘em loved it when Walker kicked our ass.”
This made the Third Wayers sad:
Debriefing after this particular group, the Third Way listeners said they found the union men demoralizing. “I feel like they can’t see their way out,” Hale said.
“They were very negative,” Paul Neaville, another researcher, concurred.
They were so fixated on blaming Republicans, Hale fretted. “It was very us-and-them.”
Here’s the thing though: those union guys are fucking right. If the right-wing really is out to fuck you, and they are, you should hate them and see it as us-and-them.
Doesn’t reality count for anything with centrists?
Major Major Major Major
Except about how the Democrats ignore the working class. It’s not enough to hate Republicans if it doesn’t translate into Democratic votes.
Doug!
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t think Democrats focus on the working class enough. They’re much better than Republicans but it’s not enough.
Downpuppy
I like the end of the piece when the report comes out & it’s all “People just want to get along”.
Scott S.
Third Way is a pro-Republican group. That’s really the only thing they care about.
schrodingers_cat
@Doug!: You mean like the Senator from Vt does? With empty slogans and rhetoric.
Major Major Major Major
@Doug!: How should Hillary’s platform have focused more on the working class?
SatanicPanic
Too many otherwise decent people I know wanted to engage in this very same thing after the election. I tried to warn them it was a waste of time. Liberals need to get used to the idea that some people just hate us, and in the end we can’t fix that.
schrodingers_cat
@SatanicPanic: Are these liberals, wealthy and male?
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: She should have felt the Bern, silly.
Thoroughly Pizzled
See, these are the actual centrist assholes, not the entire Democratic Party, according to some Internet traditions.
Kay
I skimmed it too. It took me forever to figure out what it was about.
However. This is the Better Deal and it’s bad. They have to stop talking about these people as if they are someone else. This is the same thing that lost not just ’16 but also ’10 and ’14.
This is the Ladders of Opportunity. It’s a group of people saying “oh, look at those people down there! whatever do they need?” It’s just wrong and they have to stop trying it. Try something else. Ladders of Opportunity is a loser.
Tim C.
Third way equals Big tax cuts for the rich, fewer services for everyone, but they don’t care about abortions or all the sex stuff. They also don’t care quite as much about guns. Mostly they want to loot the country without looking like complete bigots.
Doug!
@Major Major Major Major:
More emphasis on strengthening Obamacare, maybe adding a public option, for example. Also more about opioid addiction. I could probably think of other stuff too.
schrodingers_cat
BTW, T’s USCIS is screwing legal immigrants big time.
Making the process of getting an employment based green card, which was already difficult, even more so.
By adding more hoops to jump through, without a subsequent increase in the number USCIS employees.
ETA: They want readjudicate the already approved immigrant petitions and H1-B extensions. Its a big fuck you.
Doug!
@Kay:
Bingo.
Corner Stone
Corker is dropping it like it’s hot. Giving a hallway press avail and just dragging Trump all over the place. Saying Trump debases our country. BOOM!
Go for it, Corkdog!
Corner Stone
Now, Corker, go all the way and actually *DO* something about him.
Tim C.
@Corner Stone: gee, if only it were a year ago and he said something. #toolate
Doug!
@schrodingers_cat:
Yup. And it’s totally contrary to what they claimed, which is that they would make it easier for skilled workers to get green cards. (I’m not saying that I agreed with their plan in principle, which was about prioritizing skilled workers over family members etc., but they’re not doing what they said they would do.)
Brachiator
@Doug!:
Yawn. More whining that the Democrats don’t make it about “all white men all the time.”
The Republicans just lie and pander. The Democrats need to be better at focusing their message and find better ways to counter the lies?
ETA. And what is this always harping on “centrists” shit? Is there some magical enlightened left where fairies and unicorns dwell?
Major Major Major Major
@Doug!: Wasn’t Hillary the first candidate talking about the opioid issue, even back during the primary? I seem to remember thinking she was very good on it. I’m not saying Democrats are perfect but, well, look at Obamacare. We talking about preserving it, I’m pretty sure we talked about strengthening it, and the people who were on it didn’t even know they were on it because they hated Obamacare so much. We paid huge electoral penalties from the beneficiaries for enacting it. Giving them what they say they want doesn’t even work. And at any rate, a half-baked “medicare for all” plan is now basically official party policy.
Kay
This is identical to the 1990’s Dem message. Then it was healthcare. Now it’s “coding”. They can’t keep recycling “retrain” without more. Someone needs to physically remove the phrase “skills gap” from their reach. Forbidden. Say something else.
Corner Stone
@Doug!: Were you watching the same general election runup that I was?
Corner Stone
For anyone who couldn’t catch it, I heartily recommend looking for a video snip of what Corker just said this AM in the hallway. He blasted Trump’s ass.
Doug!
@Brachiator:
Plenty of non-white people in the working class last time I checked.
schrodingers_cat
@Corner Stone: To be fair to DougJ, he is repeating the MSM narrative, of liberal elites ignoring hard working “real” Americans.
FlipYrWhig
@Doug!: I don’t understand what working-class white people like those described in the clip _want_. They know that Republicans are screwing them. But they think Democrats “ignore” them. In what way? I have a hunch that what they mean is the Mark Lilla kind of bullshit where they wish Democrats wouldn’t spend so much energy on immigrants, police shootings, abortion, and where trans people poop. What would not-ignoring look like such that it would make the doubters stop doubting? I have my doubts that it’s about policy at all.
OTOH, IIRC Simon Rosenberg says that working-class white people like Democratic and liberal agenda items better when they’ve been primed first to think about good-government and anti-corruption priorities. I suspect a lot of the people who rallied to Sanders’s side were thinking of him more as clean, honest, and indignant than as a labor lefty who’d put more money in their pockets.
Doug!
@Corner Stone:
Yes, I think the Hillary campaign spent too much time attacking Trump and not enough time talking about things that affect people’s lives. To be clear, I thought attacking Trump constantly was a good strategy at the time, because Trump is genuinely scary and said/did lots of awful things. But it turned out not to be a good strategy.
JR
1. What is the Third Estate? Everything.
2. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing.
3. What does it want to be? Something….
cleek
3rd way folks want people to say “both side are wrong”, since that’s the only way they can justify their own existence. when people mostly find fault with one side, a 3rd way makes no sense.
Kay
@Doug!:
Democrats have a UNIQUE opportunity to make “the working class” much more than white men. They are the ONLY powerful people who CAN do it.
Republicans have abandoned the majority of the working class. Instead of pining after a minority of the working class (white men) – go get the rest of them. They could look at Trump as solidifying the white male working class but alienating all other working class, and really make some hay with that. The truth is there are a HELL of a lot more black, brown and female service workers than there are coal miners.
Gin & Tonic
Union laborers are a small minority of the “working class.” Working class is your waitress at the Waffle House, or the people working at McD’s trying to fit in a second job while getting jerked around by a schedule that always keeps them under 30 hours but varies from week to week, or the guy behind the counter at your local gas station/minimart.
P.s. Lots of them are POC. Union laborers mostly aren’t.
libarbarian
Stuff like this, and this are getting to me.
It looks like a lot of people are starting to want to belong to something bigger than themselves. After 30 years of post-Cold War “Consumerist Individualism” a lot of people seem to want to be a part of something “greater” than just themselves. This seems to be true of the rich and poor alike.
This will be a mixed bag. For some it will mean embracing causes to help all people. For others, it will mean embracing aggressive forms of racism and nationalism that are united in hatred of outsiders.
Chyron HR
@Doug!:
Yeah, and a majority of the working class voted for Clinton. It’s just the WHITE working class that have a problem.
SatanicPanic
@schrodingers_cat: no, not at all. white men generally don’t ask these kinds of questions
Betty Cracker
@Doug!: That’s what Clinton ran on! Strengthening Obamacare, dealing with the public health crisis caused by opiod addiction — key parts of her platform that she must’ve mentioned that 10,000 times! Lots of people tuned Clinton out because they personally hate her for their own reasons, and their low opinion of her is stoked by 25 years of wingnut slime. But she ran on this shit! It’s important to take that into account for next time.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Corner Stone:
Yeah, it’s kind of late, but I’m glad he said this. There’s no surprise that it took him until he made his mind up not to run again before he said this, but I guess it’s better that he’s saying this now than not at all. It’s now time for more of these guys to step up.
schrodingers_cat
@libarbarian: Tyler Cowen is a libertarian and usually full of shit. I wouldn’t trust his “analysis” if I were you.
Kay
@Doug!:
It’s as if Democrats don’t believe this themselves- as if they also believe the only “worthwhile” working people are white men.
First they have to believe it. There is nothing inherently more worthy about mining coal as compared to caring for the elderly or waiting tables or cleaning motel rooms. These people WORK. Recognize that and respect it.
When Trump is out kissing truck driver ass go out and join a picket line at a casino. Those are their working people. Be proud of them.
SatanicPanic
@Major Major Major Major: she was the first and she talked about opiods on account of her listening tour. Typing the last part of that sentence was painful after years of hearing her called out of touch.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: But what DougJ stated was the media narrative and if you didn’t follow the race obsessively like we did, people bought because that’s what they heard in prestige media like NYT, Atlantic etc.
I am slowly bringing my husband kitteh to the POV that media is not our friend and covers politics in ways favorable to the R party.
FlipYrWhig
@Gin & Tonic: I often feel like the “white working class” burly union laborer is as shopworn and retro a political symbol-slash-mascot on the left as the family farmer is on the right.
Doug!
@Betty Cracker:
I still think she could and should have pushed those issues harder.
JPL
@Major Major Major Major: Hillary would give major policy speeches, but 24/7 was more concerned about covering the bigot’s campaign. They would switch coverage. Hillary should have talked about solutions, is the biggest lie 24/7 tells.
rikyrah
Say WHITE membership, cause the Non-White membership isn’t voting for phucking guns.
ANY shiny phucking object placed before them.
ANY OBJECT.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat:
But at least TenguPhule will be happy that you dang Indians have stopped stealing our jobs.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: We collectively get very confused about the relationship between “ran on” in the sense of a platform with various policy planks, and “ran on” in the sense of a set of marketing strategies and especially TV ads.
A Ghost To Most
I can’t believe I am rooting for Bob Corker.
/theworldturnedupsidedown
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Nope. The only thing that counts with them is their above-it-all fake neutrality, their both sides are equally bad attitude, which requires no thought and no judgement, yet they interpret it as being morally pure
It’s bullshit – they’re in the middle ground, where dead soldiers and roadkill rot, and they think they’re taking the high road.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Instead of saying “learn to code” say “we know you work hard and work should be rewarded” – they don’t have to harangue on “skills”- the people who want to retrain will get there if they make the opportunity available. Don’t offer career advice. No one elects advisers. They elect advocates – people who already believe someone is worthwhile.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic:
That would be the non-union working class people Hillary ran on giving a $15/hour minimum wage, right? Ignoring them my ass.
Oh, right, she “didn’t mean it”.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: my original objection was to the word “ignore”.
A Ghost To Most
@JGabriel: What matters to the centrists is Preparation H. They need it from all that fence sitting.
FlipYrWhig
@Doug!: But when was the last time when a president got elected on the basis of promising to implement a detailed wishlist? I know I’m stacking the deck to describe it that way, but I daresay it’s rarely happened since the development of modern mass media.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: True. Expect a lot of law suits.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
The problem is they aren’t really speaking TO working people and you can tell. They are reassuring college graduates that they have a solution to the “working people problem”. They can’t maintain this distance – it can’t be “this will help those other people”
Aimai
@Doug!: what does focus in the wirjing class mean? These guys as much as told you that bread and butter economic issues which the dems are focused on Don’t mean anything to their wirking class brethereb. Those guys like working class lifestyle/culture war issues. The issue is not focus or lack of focus at all. Its that a big part of the white working class is stupid and racist and sexist enough to prefer GOP candidates because they massage their spite glands. Dems can propose all the WC friendly policies all they want and it won’t make a dent in the spite wall the republicans and their willing voters have built.
glory b
@Chyron HR: You’re right, probably 80% of working class people of color vote Dem. Much of the problem for them isn’t messaging, they like the message. It’s VOTER SUPPRESSION!!!
Closing voting places, ID requirements, limiting voting days and hours. We don’t concentrate enough on this. Instead, we’re fretting about “the message.”
They heard the message, they bought the message, but they can’t get to vote.
@Kay: “In addition to investing in successful existing partnership models, like those created by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, we will create new partnerships that allow for paid training programs so that Americans looking to gain a new skill while also supporting a family aren’t left behind by our changing economy.”
I’m sorry, but what’s wrong with that?
NCSteve
Third Way?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8piMHsOya4
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: They also want to redadjudicate I-140s (immigrant petition for permanent residency based on employment) which is an extremely long drawn out process, already.
Major Major Major Major
@Aimai:
The word ‘white’ is missing here in several places.
Aimai
@Kay: no. Stop daying that. Non white working class people get the dems. Racist white working class people are simply excusing the vote they wanted to take. Its a rationalization of a forgone conclusion.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: Maybe, but I remember hearing Clinton repeatedly address those issues — on TV. I think Doug makes a decent point above that Clinton’s TV ads focused more on the horror of a prospective Trump presidency rather than issues (a strategy that I also thought made sense at the time). But I’m not convinced an all-issues-all-time-time ad strategy would have worked either. Maybe. We just don’t and can’t know that.
I lean toward the theory that Clinton was just too weighed down by the decades-long personal attacks to overcome voter suppression, Russian interference, Comey’s self-righteousness, etc. It matters now to the extent that future candidates base decisions on what happened in 2016.
schrodingers_cat
@Aimai: We immigrants get it too. One party wants us dead or deported it is really not that difficult to figure it out. Naturalized citizens went for Obama by huge margins in 2012, when he bled a lot his white support from 2008.
ETA: Most of my immigrant friends from all parts of the globe are Ds, they get it, irrespective of their color or continent of origin.
JMG
If POC voters made as a big a deal of firearm fetishism as rural WWC voters do, whites would strip the franchise from POC. These are people who live in a dystopia that exists only in their heads. Tough for policy, any policy, to dent that.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: I don’t see that Republicans are particularly talented at speaking TO working class people either, insofar as “speaking to” means telling them how they benefit materially from the policies the party favors. I find the whole thing frustrating and the only strategy that’s seemed even mildly hopeful as a way to break the logjam is the Simon Rosenberg thing about corruption, responsiveness, and good government. IMHO developing killer strategies for Democrats to win back the white working class in the Midwest is on par with developing killer strategies for Republicans to win the votes of churchgoing people of color. Makes sense in theory but there’s too much toothpaste outside the tube already.
schrodingers_cat
@JMG:
You described my Yoga teacher ex-friend to the T.
geg6
No, it doesn’t. SATSQ.
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker:
Which I agree with! And which is very different from saying that Hillary’s problem was e.g. ignoring the opioid problem. “Oh, republicans are awful but democrats ignore the working class too” is just the polite lefty version of the knee-jerk totebaggerism that Doug despises. It’s cached wisdom that gets people nodding along on Twitter.
hitless
No, Donnie, these men are idiots.
Boatboy_srq
Centrists and “Third-Way-Treaders” always underestimate the hatred the Reichwing has for anyone left of Franco and (these days especially) for Those Other People®. There remains the lingering illusion that Conservatism remains objective and principled, when it really has become pure malice, greed, and unapologetic self-centredness.
FlipYrWhig
@glory b: The problem is that it’s very “Atari Democrat” circa 1980s — too attached to the idea that displaced workers need to learn to do jobs with computers. It also seems very stuck on imagining working-class work as factory work rather than service work like retail and restaurants.
geg6
@Kay:
This.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: it’s almost like they’re choosing to emphasize work that is traditionally white, male, and straight for some reason.
japa21
@Doug!: Most of the time I don’t get all the anger pointed toward you here. But I understand it now. You are being very snobbish, and nobody likes a snob. She pushed it as hard as anyone could, it was in her ads and everything else. And here is the real point. People concerned about economic issues voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Three things were the biggest contributors to Trump’s victory: racism, misogyny and voter suppression.
Boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: Modern Rethugs are too busy riling up the base and egging on their hatred of Teh Other. It’s no longer about positive motivation, but about Dummocrats And Their Eeeeeevil Shiftless Thieving Paedo Babykilling unXtianist Friends.
JMG
As noted on other threads, I had outpatient surgery on my wrist last week. All it takes is one visit to a hospital to see the working class, and indeed there’s a high percentage of POC in the vast number of relatively unskilled jobs there, from collecting laundry to food service in the cafeteria to cleaning rooms, etc.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
But you’re talking past me because you’re insisting on the stereotype you object to.
NOTHING is stopping Democrats from expanding the definition of the “working class” except Democrats. You DON’T have to accept that the only worthwhile working people are white men with lunchbuckets, since that is not true, you shouldn’t accept it.
Forget the Howard Dean guns and pickups. Talk to the nail ladies.They voted for Obama. Court them. Pander to them. Kiss their ass like Trump kisses coal miner ass. They’ll be so shocked to be noticed they won’t know what to think.
There was a huge labor day Fight for Fifteen in Chicago this year. They’re not coal miners. Show them Democrats see the work that they do and don’t consider them some “problem” to be solved with a coding course. This is their actual life, their “real” job. Speak to that.
FlipYrWhig
@Major Major Major Major: ISTM that there’s a trust problem more than anything else–the people who think the Democrats ignore (white) working-class people, including many (white) working-class people, don’t really mean “ignore” as in having no policies to help. They mean “don’t get,” as Kay has been saying. They mean that they think Democratic politicians are elite and elitist. But I don’t have a lot of hope in fixing that. And FWIW about my least favorite term of political analysis is “authentic,” which strikes me as _extremely_ totebaggerish, in the same universe as farmers’ markets and the term “artisan.”
Major Major Major Major
@japa21: some people like to act like republican voters don’t have agency—like they had to choose trump for lack of a better option, when in reality it was an affirmative choice.
Jeffro
The thing I hate about both-sider-ism and splitting the difference like these “centrists” always do? A) It’s fucking LAZY. Lay-zee. Requires no effort whatsoever. B) It never acknowledges (as DougJ said) that there might actually be a right and a wrong…and that when people are out to screw you, let’s call it out for what it is.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I agree, but that’s not policy, it’s talking about policy, and like “charisma”, that’s not something that can be taught.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: I don’t know what “speaking to that” looks like. Using different kinds of jobs as examples when talking about wage-earner work? I liked your point from months back about overtime rules. I still have my doubts about whether a program to do right by working people translates into more votes from working people. I have a bad feeling it turns into “shit, about time, and now I’m going to vote for the guy who promises to have fewer Mexicans around.”
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Democrats think they’re being egalitarian – everyone can and should get skills! but really they’re putting the work that these people do into a lower tier. They’re afraid if they say “wow, you’re really a Pizza Hut assistant manager, that must be hard” that is somehow discriminatory, which IMPLIES this is lower tier work – not “respectable”. It’s almost like “get back to us after you get those skills, buddy! Then we’ll talk!”
Kathleen
@Kay: I don’t understand what you mean.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Aspiring is great. Telling people they CAN do anything is great. But you can’t only speak to that. You have to talk about what they ARE doing and not assume this lower wage job is some way-station on the road to.. whatever. There are nail ladies. Full stop. They don’t have to stay nail ladies but your whole message can’t be “find better paying work and then we’ll address your concerns”.
SFAW
@JMG:
Well, they’re justifiably worried that if are allowed POC buy guns, the immediate result will be MS-13 ranks will swell to 5 gazillion in Virginia, and from there it would spread to the rest of the Real ‘Murican states.
Someone should ask Wayne LaPierre how he feels about the (New) Black Panthers having guns. Or maybe have the Panthers go to some open carry state, just walk around for awhile, parading the same way those obese, pasty-faced, camo-clad morons do, to show how tough they are, etc. I was going to suggest that people put up pictures of Huey Newton everywhere the NRA is king, but that would probably mean the local WWC will start buying RPGs to go along with all their other External Death Peni$e$ (as Atrios calls them).
Hunter Gathers
“The Democratic Party Sucks” is one hell of a slogan. Must be why all those Democratic candidates for Congress next year are raising shit-tons of money.
Timurid
@schrodingers_cat:
And white, too.
Kay
@Kathleen:
I’m not explaining it well and I’m really trying so I’ll give up now :)
Thanks for trying- it’s my fault. I can’t express it well.
khead
@FlipYrWhig:
Ding, ding, ding. Martin is writing about southwestern VA again over at Booman. He just can’t understand how Wise County VA could go 80-18 against Clinton. “Maybe the demise of the coal industry explains most of this. I dont know. It’s obviously very culturally conservative…..”
Or maybe it’s because they just really don’t like “others”. Wise – and one of the neighboring counties – used to have sundown towns. Wise Co is also next to the county where George Allen had his “macaca moment”.
Mike in NC
In Trump Country they don’t care for black or brown people. No need to spend millions of dollars to figure that out.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: I had forgotten about your earlier call for Democrats and liberals to say “that sounds hard!” more. I liked it. Still it seems like there needs to be a solid way to combine empathetic “getting” with wonkish solutions to what to do to show that the “getting” is real. People like to be pandered to, but people also _don’t_ like it when pandering is exposed _as_ pandering. And IMHO promising minimum wage increases has sort of run its course in terms of political utility: far too many people want higher pay and also Republicans to run things and crack down on Those People. We’d need something broader and more integrated _and_ that would make Republicans expose themselves as ridiculous and/or awful, even more so than usual.
The Thin Black Duke
White people don’t want to see that white people are the problem. Same as it ever was.
Kathleen
@Doug!: What about but her emails don’t you understand? Didn’t one of those media studies from Harvard report that her coverage of her policies was about 12 minutes. It was very clear to me what her policies would be. The AA women who voted for her got it
I’m sick and tired of reading that her policies weren’t good enough and she focused on wrong things in her campaign. Sick of it.
Brachiator
@Doug!:
Plenty of women, too. But that’s not how the narrative is usually played out.
Kathleen
@glory b: Thank you.
Doug!
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You’re right it’s not policy. And others are right media focused on emails.
I *still* think Dem party could do a better job of communicating how its policies help the working class.
Felanius Kootea
@The Thin Black Duke: Yup.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: Or maybe what’s needed is a competing story about rigging and waste. IMHO the very grand narrative that binds together most all conservatives is that liberals want the government to take everyone’s money and use it to give Those People a free ride, so they’ll vote for them. Obama, Sanders, and Warren have gotten some traction by talking about how it’s the super-rich who try everything to get out of paying their fair share. Maybe we should be spending more time talking about how to un-rig the system and less about how to give downtrodden people more money, because a plan to give downtrodden people more money sounds like validating that conservative narrative, which is going to negate a lot of its potential efficacy with the intended audience. (I think Sanders and Trump both scored a lot of points with this kind of talk, which sometimes gets lumped in with “populism” but may actually be, in D hands at least, more like “progressivism” a la LaFollette.)
Brachiator
@Kay:
I agree with you big time here. Trump lied and promised “whatever it is you know how to do is fine because I’m going to bring your job back.” Like I said, this was a lie, but it is easy to digest.
Promising job training is empty because there is no guarantee that the person will have a job at the end, or that he or she will have a job that pays what they were earning before. This may be an honest answer, but it does not always satisfy.
Also, the criticism that “far too many American companies have placed short-term profits above investing in their workers and giving them the tools they need to succeed” is easy, but empty.
geg6
@The Thin Black Duke:
Yup. I can attest as a white person that this is very, very true.
@Kathleen:
Totally correct. And I’m deathly sick of it, too. To keep focusing on incorrect analysis and to keep magnifying it is to play right into the GOP’s and dudebros’ narrative. And I’m over and done with pandering to straight white men. They need to be marginalized and their messages and narratives mocked and ridiculed. I’m over them. I really am not interested in hearing another word from them. About anything.
Wapiti
If I were king of the Democrats, I’d make labor – wages – king. Make wages, up to the social security limit ($127k in 2017?) pay a lower tax rate than other income.
geg6
@Doug!:
Exactly how do you propose to do that? In the media environment in which we live, please feel free to provide your wisdom on this. Because, apparently, you’ve been keeping this simple fix to yourself all this time.
Kathleen
@glory b: Thank you.@Kay: I don’t get that message. We interpret or perceive some things differently. I’m a 68 year old working woman who voted for Hillary, which in the eyes of the culture and probably some on BJ makes me candidate for Home For the Demographically Irrelevant. I work too. I don’t think Dems are out of touch elitists. Hillary’s positions and concerns were clear to me. But I guess my perceptions don’t count. I’m not directing this to you. I’m just very tired of notion that Dems are only OK if xyz group of white people get what they’re saying.
Kathleen
@geg6: Thank you.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
Also, a lot of immigrants voted for the Democrats even though they are not always the “stereotypical” working class voter.
That is, union membership is lower among some immigrant groups, and more of them are small business people or even large business people, professionals and some executives. But they recognized that the Republican Party is hostile to them, their interests and their existence.
libarbarian
@glory b:
1) Even assuming you are correct …. How do we stop that? We got to win elections to Gov and State Assemblies to stop those. Or win enough seats in the House and Senate and have the Pres to appoint judges to stop it. But right now, The GOP has the advantage in all those areas. Yes, if we could stop the voter suppression and gerrymandering then Dems could win without appealing to ignorant whites but Dems need to win elections to stop the voter suppression and gerrymandering … so …… Maybe we have to suck it up and appeal to some people to win in the short term so we can lay the groundwork for winning in the long term. Maybe not. IDK. I just know that Dems complain about these two unfair things but I hear precious little to stop them except “increase turnout among Dem constituencies” …. but the GOP is actively working to prevent that and they hold the reigns of power in most states and in the nation.
2) I’m not sure it is right. I’ve grown disillusioned with the “bring more people into the process” narrative. It worked for Obama, but he was both a historical figure AND had incredible charisma. A lot of the non-voters I know are totally cynical about politicians and will not turn out to vote regardless of what any party promises them because they don’t believe those promises. I thought Trump’s appeal to racists would motivate turnout in opposition , but they didn’t. The most reliable predictor of voting in an election is if they voted in the previous election. Maybe non-voters are just fucking hard to move.
libarbarian
@schrodingers_cat:
I know that, but the surge in aggressive Nationalism/Jingoism across many disparate countries is a simple fact. It cannot be explained by purely local factors without a heck of a lot of coincidence.
You got theory that isn’t America-centric or West-centric? I’m all ears.
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
I concur. It’s not that that Hillary didn’t talk about stuff that affected people’s lives. It was in fact most of what she talked about. There was no candidate in 2016 more policy-oriented than she. But people whose minds had been poisoned against her wouldn’t listen. Maybe part of it was class resentment against elites, in particular liberals — if you are in politics at her level, you are of the elite no matter what you profess.
The media wasn’t interested in covering it either, for some reason. Maybe journos found the horse-race stories were easier to do (no homework required!) and/or attracted more clicks and more viewers, maybe they were sexist, maybe they’d come to believe the Republican hate campaign, maybe their editors were Republicans. Maybe it was some combination of these.
The problem here may be finding a way to persuade those who hate you and your party for irrational reasons, to the extent of preferring Democratic policy but voting for Republicans instead. Trying to appeal to their rational side might not work well. I would suggest a touch, or more, of deviousness.
schrodingers_cat
@libarbarian: The generation that was alive during WWII is dying. They knew where this nationalistic and jingoistic fervor could lead. So the post war status quo is slowly dying with them.
satby
@Gin & Tonic:
this! I work And live among these people. And though I’m a pretty plugged in voter, most people in the two to three job working class didn’t get to hear all that much about Democratic proposals other than keeping the ACA from major media, because media no longer considers a duty to inform as part of their job description. And the retraining issue is popular but there wasn’t structure around how it would work that was widely known (sorry Kay, but people around here KNOW they need more skills, they just can’t pay for it or take time out from two jobs to attend college while raising kids too). Higher minimum wage, a winner… But a guy in her own team said she didn’t mean it.
So many people are so discouraged and unconnected from whatever is in a policy platform because they haven’t the time, the background, or the context needed to assess and filter real news from fake to evaluate how to vote any longer.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Who was that?
JimV
In so far as a few sound bytes can inform me, the Union guys sound very sensible to me. Including their opinions of most Democrats. As a result of a lot of Act Blue donations (mostly from this site) I get about 20 emails a day from Democrat campaigns. Approximately none of them say anything but (valid) complaints about how bad their opponents are. I want to hear what they are going to do, not what they are not going to do.
Villago Delenda Est
Given that the “Third Way” are essentially Rethuglicans embarrassed by all the white nationalist crap that has been the basis of GOP campaigns for the last fifty years, they can all fuck off and die.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
Third Wayers exist and they’re a continued irritation. They’re not Hillary Democrats; they’re wealthy professionals who like empty platitudes about how all the smart people should set aside their differences, get together and hammer out reasonable solutions. They like to blame Democrats for “doing nothing” when Republicans are being hopelessly obstructionist and control everything. They are actually not very numerous, but they have money and an outsize voice in the political media.
Brachiator
@libarbarian:
But 2016 was special, or worse. According to one PEW study, dislike of the candidates was at a new high:
In the future, there may be some hope here that some of these people, and a new generation of people who attain voting age, might be encouraged to actually show up at the polls.
Being West-centric matters. More advanced, industrialized nations want to keep out poorer people and Muslims. And Trump formed a mini-axis of evil in the mutual admiration society he formed with nationalists in the UK and France. The US is obviously not the root of all this evil, but conservatives here actively aid and abet this noxious sentiment. You can also probably find a common link in Rupert Murdoch.
Matt McIrvin
@Villago Delenda Est: Some of them are more what I call “vulgar libertarians”: financially comfortable people who consider themselves “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”. They probably vote for Democrats more than half the time, except they immediately fall in love with any Republican who shows rudimentary signs of not being an insane person, like the people who keep getting elected governor of Massachusetts.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin: RE: ETA. And what is this always harping on “centrists” shit?
Sounds like David Brooks. I don’t know. This sounds like a very small group.
There seems to be some sort of general disparagement of people who are not deemed progressive enough. I was listening to a BBC podcast about the recent Labour Party meetings, and lefty’s who were insufficiently committed to the Labour leadership were derided by being called “Centrist Dads.”
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think that means Bernie Sanders, or at least his supporters, who had a hard time taking yes for an answer when it came to minimum wage increases or a lot of the other progressive elements to the Clinton campaign.
Brachiator
@satby:
Great point. A benefit is useless if it is not a “practical benefit” that people can actually use.
Huh? What? I’m pretty sure that Clinton was firm on this. There might have been some wariness about an actual figure, but not the general concept.
HOWEVER, I talked to people who were turned off by a discussion about the minimum wage. They saw it as helping the people at the bottom or those who had the fewest skills, but did nothing for people who were afraid of losing their jobs or who had not seen raises in years.
StringOnAStick
@FlipYrWhig: I think you’ve hit the issue perfectly. The D’s should harp on “unrigging the system for the very wealthy” (and be sure to point out what they mean by very wealthy) instead of the worn idea of “we’ll retrain you, honest!”. For one, like Kay says, saying ” retrain” implies “your job sucks and you’re a loser for choosing that” since for the working class, choice isn’t exactly a huge part of their lives. Unrig the system, make the rich pay their fair share and then the whole country benefits, especially all people who work for a paycheck.
The Moar You Know
The Atlantic article on this is great, roasts the shit of of the Third Way people for going in with a pre-determined conclusion and never deviating from it in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
StringOnAStick
FYWP won’t let me edit but I want to add that D’s should push actual examples of how the rich don’t pay their fair share (rich donors will hate it I suppose). Turn the resentment angle back on the R’s; every time FUX tries screaming “class warfare” it never works and small light bulbs start to flicker in their audience’s dim brains.
StringOnAStick
@libarbarian: It’s population pressure and it’s happening in every growing democracy. The rural areas here are more racist and I suspect that’s true in Europe as well. Who is doing the awful jobs there, like slaughter houses, far labor, landscaping, etc? Immigrants, so even rural areas are seeing more of “them”, and RW media is exploiting that (with a little Putin help).
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@FlipYrWhig:
A lot of union guys in my family and they all mention this, the number of wankers in the union who vote against the union. It always sounded to me the wankers were running on a mixture that the union was holding the wankers back, that if wasn’t for the damn union the company would pay them more and voting Republican delibertly to be an ass. In otherwords stupid people got to be stupid.
Oh, and a lot of these realtives of mine are racist jerks, but they vote Democrat anyway because they know the GOP is out to get them.
StringOnAStick
@Brachiator: Getting younger people to vote is key, ad tricky. They’ve grown up in a world where government barely works so they are cynical about the whole world of politics. The Berber I work with likely has never voted,at least in primaries, until this year and she’s 40.
I have Millennial friends who hate Boomers, saying they took all the good stuff and left them with a ruined planet and social safety net. Im a late Boomer, and my answer to that BS is “you’ve been able to vote since you were 18, have you?”. There’s nothing stopping them from greater involvement except themselves.
Stan
@Kay:
People who are highly skilled already but don’t have jobs, or good jobs, really get annoyed with that line of argument.
Stan
@StringOnAStick:
I have millennial adult children and their friends who say the same thing to me (a boomer).
Only the thing is, they are pretty much right. We did fuck it up, and they are reaping the whirlwind. Once you admit that they really appreciate it and will start listening.
I suppose one of the things stopping many of them from greater political involvement has been that they work insane hours (longer than I have EVER worked in my life other than the military) at lower pay, and many of them have student loans that are equal to a small to mid-size mortgage. That’s because us boomers told them to go to college.
Stan
@schrodingers_cat:
Right on, I think this is very true.
ruemara
Dems ignore working class? Man, fuck those guys. The one group not ignoring working class voters was Dems. That’s why they kept doing things for them.
@schrodingers_cat: True, but many of them cosigned this racist, jingoistic fervour. They just don’t want to believe they could be as bad.
And fuck Corker. He has the ability to do things to prevent Trump from blowing shit up, metaphorically and physically. He gets on twitter and the tv to bitch about him instead. Fuck him with a doublewide.
Kathleen
@Stan: I don’t. I had 25 years in Corp America and was well paid. I chose another path and realized I lacked skills. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that but if they had it would not have bothered me at all.
Raoul
Doesn’t reality count for anything with centrists?
As Jim Hightower put it (though I thought it was a Molly Ivins saying) “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”
ciotog
I can’t find the article, but it was in the New York Times recently, about workers losing factory jobs in Indiana when the plant was moved to Mexico. It centered on a woman named Shannon who said that she doesn’t vote because all politicians are liars, but she was leaning towards Trump because while she didn’t look down on people getting food stamps (and had herself), Trump talked about jobs and Hillary didn’t. Not training, not skills, not unions or wages, jobs. J-O-B-S. I live in coal country and here’s the thing about coal–it can only be mined in certain places. That’s why it resonates with the people who live in those places. They know full well that solar panels can be made anywhere, and likely will be made in places with better infrastructure. And yes, Trump’s racism, sexism, nihilism and everything else should have been a deal breaker, I agree completely. But there are ways to scoop up some of the infamous WWC without surrendering *any* of our principles.
libarbarian
@Brachiator:
I agree. The article I was referring to was saying that the these cultural issues (especially the increasing exposure over the last 20 years of almost all countries to “foreigners”, through trade, immigration, etc) seem to explain this better than the “economic anxiety” argument. The “it boils down to economic anxiety and if we fixed that then these cultural issues would fail to move people” argument might look plausible in America to some but it utterly fails to explain the similar Nationalist/Populist surge in countries like Turkey, the Philippines, or Mongolia etc. which have had totally different dynamics than America.
I also remember something Solzhenitsyn said of life in the camps and Russia generally. He said that in the early days of the USSR, the youth ( teens and young adults who had grown up quite a bit before the revolution) really wanted to “join the collective”. They wanted to wear uniforms and march in formations and otherwise lose themselves in a great “we”. The second generation, who had grown up under Communism and only knew the Collective, wanted the opposite. They wanted to be individuals. They had grown up with uniforms and sameness, and so what was “cool” was finding ways to add something unique and non-standard to mark yourself out as an individual. We all react to what we grew up under to some degree.
Part of me wonders if we are seeing something like that now. Part of me wonders if those who grew up under the the rise of globalization and the view of life as just a series of commodity exchanges and where the concept of “we” was generally not cool, aren’t looking to become part of something, anything, bigger.
schrodingers_cat
@Stan: I see it in India too the generation that was responsible for India’s independence and lived during the partitions is dying off and they knew better than to play with matches of long standing religious animosities. The current government believes in stoking those hatreds instead.
schrodingers_cat
@libarbarian: Its also the poisonous fruit of IGMFY economics promoted by Milton Friedman since Reagan era.
Chris
@ruemara:
Yeah, I have to say that I have doubts about the virtues of the WW2 generation. Tons of them turned Nixonite/Reaganite in their old age, and were the kind of people who shit on returning Vietnam veterans because “we actually won when it was our war!” before realizing what a dick move that was and accusing the hippies of it.
Chris
@libarbarian:
“All utopians resemble men with toothaches who think happiness consists of not having a toothache.”
Sergio Lopez-Luna
@Major Major Major Major: So it was only the guns that made these Union guy vote for Trump? Not, let say, racism?
schrodingers_cat
@Chris: I am not saying that the WWII generation was wonderful, it was probably the fear of communism that kept them from going full scale Galtian. All these trends accelerated after the fall of Soviet Union.
Sergio Lopez-Luna
@Doug!: White Working Class (mostly men) don’t see POC as truly part of the Working Class. and Working Class POCs are concerned about issues other that economics, such as not getting killed by police.
Miss Bianca
@The Thin Black Duke:
Alas, I fear that this is all too true.
@Kathleen: “I’m just very tired of notion that Dems are only OK if xyz group of white people get what they’re saying.”
FWIW, I”m tired of this, too.
J R in WV
@Doug!:
Sometimes it isn’t what a person is saying, but what the people listening are hearing; these things do not have to be the same and frequently are not. Sometimes I tell a person 2+3=5 and in seconds it become clear that they heard me say 2+2=5, which they disagree with, rightly so. If the news media is not prepared to hear what a candidate is saying, it isn’t going to make any difference what they say!
And that’s what happened last year to Hillary Clinton. She talked about her plans and programs and beliefs, and all they could hear was “Illegal Email, illegal Email, illegal Email, illegal Email, illegal Email!” She attends Methodist church services almost every week, not in the news coverage because “everyone” knows she is an atheist communist.
In Republican land, they are going to hear that the DemocRAT wants to take their guns, send their jobs somewhere that only black folks can work, and that their daughters have to start on birth control immediately for reasons. After they hear this at church for a few months it won’t matter what the Democratic candidate says to them, that’s what they’re prepared to hear.
What a person says is only as important as what the people hearing it actually hear in their minds. Racists are going to hear what they are conditioned to hear when a Democrat speaks about equality. Same for misogynists. And they aren’t going to like what they think they heard, either.
OzarkHillbilly
No.
Uncle Cosmo
@Stan: Co-sign. By 2025 nearly everyone who was alive and aware as of V-J Day (2 Sep 1945) will either be dead or living in a blurry-nightmare dementia/Alzheimer’s assisted-living parallel universe. In any case they will have almost no influence on the real world (unless the Kochroaches pull off something out of Bug Jack Barron).
I have long been a fan of the Strauss-Howe generational-constellation theory of American history (yes I know many are not) & IMO one of the things it gets very right is the 80-90 year saeculum cycle – because that’s the interval at which all the “lessons learned” lose the voices of them as l’arned ’em & fade into “mere history,” leaving the current generational cohorts with nothing to stop them from ignoring the hard-won lessons of their ancestors & making the same (sort of) goddamn mistakes all over again. Subtract 85 from 2017 & it’s not much of a surprise we’re seeing fascism resurgent…
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major: Fuck you Major for libel.