Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisV
Re oppositional culture, it's a tough one because it's very clear that people feeling rejected by the norms of their society can lead to oppositional cultures. As DVaut notes, this is what has happened with the alt-right, "deplorables" etc. On the other hand, some rejection of ideas and belief systems is useful in getting people to soften or abandon unacceptable ideas, keep the Overton Window under control, etc. It plays out all the time in the Fly v chezlaw debates in these forums. Should we vocally oppose and criticize soft racism, or would it be better to take a more conciliatory approach to avoid people doubling down on their beliefs and becoming defensive? It's a pretty hard line to draw sometimes.
I think the argument is more robust than that, though. Although obviously on an informal forum I didn't do it justice. I think the model is much more than how we talk to or debate each other, although certainly that's included. But it is as much as anything an argument about political geography. The way where and how we live inform our politics -- literally where you live and the physical space you occupy, and who lives near you -- can inform your worldview and your ideology.
So the idea is that in highly segregated communities, and that can be as small as an ethnic neighborhood in an urban area that maintains their own language, businesses, maybe schools -- those are the kinds of communities and places where oppositional culture can flourish. It can work the other way too, in rural and exurban areas in modern America like we see today, or places that explicitly embrace segregation like the American South -- we see religious fundamentalism and pivots to ever-increasing right-wing stridency. It's no accident the modern incarnation of evangelical fervor emerged like, right after
Brown v Board and especially later in the 60s after courts moved stronger against segregation in cases like
Green v. Kennedy.
Take our current hot news items like immigration. Liberals actually talk a lot about these factors; so do hardline immigration people, too! Whenever you hear nativists yelling about how migration is fine as a hypothetical, but that immigrant populations struggle to integrate and cause problems -- they're fundamentally making this argument. It's not even wrong! Migrating populations that are segregated or self-segregate are problematic. It's problematic when native populations do it (e.g., white flight).
In fact the model insofar as it has explanatory power isn't even that novel. And it has a lot of cross-over appeal into other disciplines in politicial science (e.g., social and political anthropology or comparative politics or political history).
Whenever you hear an argument about gated subdivisions, or social stratification and income disparities and gentrification in urban areas, or Afrikaners and Africans in South Africa and the long history of segregation and conflict there -- or the very conscious way American progressives of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century had watched many of the same factors we see today develop in the Gilded Age in the generation before and sought to re-write zoning laws and promote public schooling to counteract the effects of segregation and economic disparity and promote genuine social integration -- we're describing more or less the same stuff. The process of how political geography and our policies that promote segregation or fail to successfully integrate populations can lead to conflict.
It's not even an old problem! Here we are in 1967:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerner_Commission
Quote:
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner, Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member commission established by President Lyndon B. Johnson in Executive Order 11365 to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots in the United States and to provide recommendations for the future.[1]
The conclusion:
http://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylo...r%20Report.htm
Quote:
The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation.
The worst came during a two-week period in July, first in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities.
On July 28, 1967, the President of the United States estab*lished this Commission and directed us to answer three basic questions:
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What can be done to prevent it from happening again?
To respond to these questions, we have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many witnesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country. .
This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.
Reaction to last summer's disorders has quickened the move*ment and deepened the division. Discrimination and segrega*tion have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.
This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The move*ment apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.
We've been struggling with this question for 50 years. But certainly much longer.
The policy prescriptions from there become manifest and are obvious imo. The plea to liberals, policy wonks, non-nihilists is basically: yes, lets have liberal border policies. Please let people in who want to come. But it's equally important to integrate these populations successfully. Even more insidious and hard-to-counter-act are the self-segregation of native populations out of cities.
I'd ask the same thing of Belgians who are anxious and want to how to counter-act the radicalization of populations of Molenbeek or people interested in promoting liberal immigration laws in the US or who want to counter-act persistent black poverty in the American South: fight segregation. Be deeply on guard for it. Promote integration.
I've made this point before and I'm a certain class of people roll their eyes at it, but the ultimate causative factors that have built to the ascendancy of right-wing authoritarianism in 2016 are things like the National Highway System, cheap oil, and exclusionary zoning that prevent mixed-income housing or apartments in buffer areas right outside of urban areas. All of the things that promoted white flight in the wake of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the south and mass-migration movements from South America into the US starting a little later than that. They are the things that most directly led to today.
Consider a guy like Trump, who we might with some alarm identify as an unhinged madman sitting on top of the world's deadliest weapons and armies and wonder aloud how that happened. The answer: Let people, specifically in this case whites, march themselves out to their own segregated communities in America's far-off hinterlands and you get the paradoxical thing this
huge Gallup survey demonstrates: the most ardent, hard-core Trump supporters who are angriest and most apprehensive about immigrants and blacks and protective of their white identity movement and empower maniacs like Trump to address their grievances and resentments
are people who hardly ever see or deal with immigrants or black people and live nowhere near them.
If there's any failure of government in the preceding generations which led to the building of Trump, who has the potential if not the outright goal of the self-destruction of the republic, it's failing to address that problem right there. The government has never been able to counter-act white flight and segregation and meaningfully integrate and unfettered immigration has exacerbated the problem in that climate. It's the source of the very toxic political climate that seemingly has us wildly successful by so many measures (rich, peaceful, technological wonderments abound) but so many feel anxious and panicked and wary and have these bizarre apocalyptic, paranoid mindsets -- and making them into self-fulfilling prophecies by empowering increasingly unhinged right-wingers. Segregation has allowed an emboldening and growth of oppositional culture in many quarters, including and most dangerously in majority white populations.
Last edited by DVaut1; 02-09-2017 at 05:43 AM.
