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Originally Posted by well named
I've heard this argument many times. Most recently, during a plenary session at the ASA, although in that case the speaker was using a somewhat more explicitly Marxist way of framing it.
I'm basically just repeating the Frankfurt School of "what foments fascism?" so that you heard it told similarly by a Marxist isn't surprising. I'm not a Marxist but I find the explanation compelling.
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The thing is, I'm not convinced that this is correct. I've not really seen any compelling evidence for the conclusion that cultural strife will recede if economic conditions improve in the US. It's not clear to me why the opposite of your statement can't also be true: that cultural conditions allow for economic strife to become a significant political problem. I think you can read the history of the politics of the welfare state in the US in the 20th century in this way. In the 30s, enacting a progressive agenda required making racist concessions to southern Democrats. It seems reasonable to me to connect the stagnation of the progressive economic agenda in the wake of the civil rights era explicitly to racial politics, for example in the way media depictions of poverty changed from being almost universally depictions of white poverty to being mostly depictions of black poverty, and the impact this had on support for anti-poverty programs.
Or, maybe it's a chicken-egg problem. Maybe cultural strife would recede if widening economic inequality were addressed, but cultural strife makes it much, much more difficult to tackle the problem of economic inequality. There's also the point that there is at least some evidence (survey data about Trump voter incomes, for example) that suggests the people most outraged about Christmas greetings and other cultural issues are not themselves the most economically disadvantaged, so it's not clear why changes in inequality would cause them to care less about those issues. I've seen it argued that economic insecurity makes people less likely to prioritize cultural issues, rather than the opposite.
Re: your edit (the graph)
I think it suggests the strategy I mentioned before of focusing on turning out blue voters rather than convincing red ones, since the <$50k people are already more liberal. From a practical standpoint in the immediate future, I think that's a pretty good strategy. I'm not sure that it's an answer to the long-term problem of American culture though. Maybe the long term solution is education. I would like to make all high school students attend my wife's Sociology 101 courseindoctrination camp.
Right. But to the bolded, the point isn't to activate and convert those voters to our way of thinking. At least not most of them. Surely some percentage of the Trump coalition, maybe ~5% of it, can be won over.
But the basic premise is that in 2016, something slightly less than 55% of eligible voters turned out. That's down from Obama's victory in 2008 when 63% of voters turnout. The difference between uber majorities for Democrats (e.g., 350 EVs, 60+ Senators) and small losses to crypto fascist reality game show hosts are more or less in the 8% of voters who didn't show up. It's glib and probably not exact, but close enough.
See my chart: the voters we lost were working class voters. They didn't decamp for the right-wing spectrum of anything from cultural grievances to race wars. They just stayed home.
The way to create a mass movement which can create durable, lasting political coalitions (e.g., big majorities in Congress that can effectively make the changes we want) is to become much more populist in message: namely tax the rich, redistribute the money.
The left has always and will always only have one durable advantage over the right that is basically almost a truism: we are proposing an economic system that serves to benefit the greatest number of people. Democrats do well to remember that. That much of the current political context is entirely negotiable and fraught with circumstance and we can easily fall victim to outside events. But the principle promise of the left since literally the French Revolution was not necessarily that we have great policies, nor are we always virtuous, nor have we mastered technocracy. It's only that we seek policies to benefit the most number of people. By not stridently highlighting that, we give up our own permanent political advantage.
Regarding the "well, would it solve our long term problems with culture?" No. Almost surely not.
But I made this post back in October 2016, and have been making variants of basically weekly since:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...php?p=51066378
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I've hammered commenting on this over the past few months but it's because it's one of the best examinations of Trump voters: Gallup economics study over 70,000 respondents over 1 year, studying Trump voters
The long and short of it is neighborhood level exposure to minorities predicts lower membership in populist nationalist parties in the US *and* Europe and elsewhere. So then we get that the lack of exposure to minorities predicts higher membership in populist nationalist Trump type movements. In fact it's the most predictive indicator. Astounding in a way. Also predictive: not when economic conditions are objectively poor but when they are relatively poor for racist nationalists, or their children, relative to expectations. See the opiate addiction as a signal here.
September 2016:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...php?p=50742178
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This is a lot of academic bargle but he's basically saying Trump voters aren't poor in income but are similarly not that wealthy, are facing some factors of economic insecurity, and face degradation in a bunch of other quality of life metrics. The intersection of health (e.g., obesity, opiate academics) and zip-codes (e.g., these people are all functionally segregated) is especially cogent imo and a point I made ~last month in the Tragic Death of the Republican Party thread: that Trump is crushing it in the areas that were predominately populated by white flight after WWII but who have seen degradation in their communities as the wealthy and educated flee back to cities, and all of the wealth and opportunity went with them (or "inter-generational mobility" as Gallup puts it). It's an argument rooted in political geography which we often deployed in bad, crude ways in the popular discourse ("Red States here, Blue States there") but has a lot to offer, namely that where we live and the literal, specific context of where we live can definitively shape and influence our political actions.
I don't think you can understand the rotted out mindset of Trump America without seeing this phenomenon -- how much white segregation built this. How the corrective measures that turn your average run of the mill voter into a Trump voter (all other variables controlled for) is literally just proximity to racial minorities. A huge story, totally underreported in popular press enamored with prattling on about trade deals or distrust of the Clintons or whatever the **** imo.
In the end, these people aren't poor and living hand to mouth, they're largely not jobless, and they do have some money, but they aren't accumulating a lot of wealth and their communities are suffering from some generally serious kind of problems (e.g., economic stagnation, incredibly high relative drug overdose rates due to opiates, obesity/diabetes,etc.) So I can whole-heartedly believe they're suffering in a lot of other ways. But the notion they are poor is a disservice to the truth; still, I don't doubt there's a whole host of unresolved social issues underlying the Trump zeitgeist and other assorted right-wing clownshow stuff like the enduring popularity of talk radio idiots or whatever.
This is where I'll say a lot of is totally self-inflicted -- see the enduring manifestation of white flight from the post WWII era until the present -- and yet still the better angels of my nature step-in and suggest we -- that is, the state, with state resources -- could probably do something here to address the underlying causes. I think any overt political messaging is a fool's errand, but like, hey, maybe we can think about economic stagnation in white-flight America, the problems with opiate addictions, etc. and basically work around it. I don't think you can salvage a bunch of the mindsets of these people that are set to be miserable and hateful but you can imagine some solutions to fixing the hopelessness and other parts of the context like drug addiction and mobility.
The basic mechanics of the fuel behind Trump and populist nationalism everywhere start with economic degradation. Human misery can take it from there. Again: I do not mean these people are suffering from economic privation. And their suffeirng is only relative to expectations. Not necessarily to an objective standard. And their problems are severely exacerbated by segregation and social isolation brought about by privatization, surubanization, and when firms with monopoly power dismantle civic and trade organizations; see the bolded part of the post I made earlier. That the largest predictor of Trump support in the GOP primaries was literal physical distance from where racial minorities live. These are harder problems for government to solve, surely, but also hugely aided when economic security, health, etc. are prevalent in a community -- people are more likely to accept new neighbors, and changes, and not flee or retreat into fantasy and paranoia.
So again, my prediction: you are not going to cure most of these people. You might salvage some, and you have some hope to salvage their kids. And it won't happen over night. It you may not see the effects for years.
But the only righteous and sensible first step is to pursue economic justice. Give peoples' lives meaning, give their lives hope -- employ them in government work, or give them a guaranteed minimum income. Give them medicine, give their towns and communities dignity and invest in them. Don't allow the forces of privitzation to dismantle public assets, to privatize public spaces like schools -- don't give in to the temptation to give everyone their own private spheres to operate in, to give every white a suburban enclave to hide out in, a rural town to rot in or whatever. That's been the phenomenon that's been exacerbated for 50 years now.
Do that, and you will be able to atrophy the effects of the toxic, paranoid right wing mindset. It will never be defeated, it will always be with us. But we have to walk before we can run. Take rich people's money and rebuild towns, rebuild schools, employ the willing in government and civic work, guarantee provisions for their health insofar as that is possible. I don't see any other solution. We ain't gonna hector them into sanity.
And just to tie it altogether, this strategy wins in two ways:
1. most importantly and critically, it gives us a powerful, inspirational message to send to voters who are distant from the political process. The voters we lost between 2008 and 2016, and perhaps others who have largely fallen out the political process.
2. it is also the best chance to cure anger, paranoia, fear and self-loathing in Hater America. It's not a panacea but all other strategies are hopeless imo. There is a huge, just tremendous and underappreciated oppostional culture in white America -- fueled by decades of policy that allowed them to flee to their own schools, their own segregated neighborhoods, their own transportation systems. They're ****ing cowering in fear over BLM, George Soros, Census workers, ISIS, terror babies, and who the **** else knows what else, mainlining Fox, AM radio and InfoWars to their brains daily. They need to be cowed back into mainstream society. Most will never accept the invitation. The fascist impulses of the middle and upper classes are way too deep, and they have vast stores of communal and family wealth so they don't need dick from the government. The promise of an organized movement funneled into state redistribution of resources and rebuilding public assets and institutions to materially provide for people offers them nothing at all. Less than nothing -- they have to pay for it. Still, the idea is that you can win back some of the working class haters into a different sort of consciousness with a helping hand. Not a huge percentage of people will decamp from fascism and hate this way, but enough to keep the forces of fascism at bay and isolated.
Last edited by DVaut1; 08-17-2017 at 04:41 PM.
