Farmboy, I feel you

[luiz]

It is difficult to have more enclaves when 3/4rths of your city consists of favelas

I don't know about what location you're talking about, nor what point you're trying to make. I certainly never lived in any city which was 3/4ths favela.

Yet an individual is either on the continuum or not, and in this conception it makes no sense at all to talk about racist systems (which is the level where grandma and the klansman really are on the same level).

Indeed, but on the beginning of the continuum it is hardly fair to call the individuals "evil" - it is merely the result of upbringing and social mores, and indeed it is probable that a certain mistrust of "differents" is deeply ingrained in the human psyche, and that it takes either a conscious effort or being raised in a very diverse setting to totally overcome it. Most American grandmas were not raised in a very diverse setting, and never had much incentives to overcome this "shallow racism" either.

I don't know what you mean by racist system, but if it puts grandma and the klansman on the same level, I don't think it's a very good theory.

 

[Bootstoots]

Okay, I'm going to go a bit off-topic here, but that's an example of a thing I often noticed in many immigration discussions and which really makes me scratch my head about. Isn't it absolutely obvious that heterogeneous populations have less stability and more friction than homogeneous ones ? I mean, strictly factually, no moral/ethical judgement attached.
Does it really requires some kind of eye-opening moment to notice the social equivalent of "water is wet" ?

There are some multi-cultural societies that work fine (not without problems, but still as functional as other places in their era). Strangely to true believers in progress, multi-ethnic empires caused these to be more common in the past: for one example, witness how incredibly diverse the Ottoman Empire was, and how its collapse coincided with an enormous rise in ethnic Turkish nationalism, ending up with a genocide against Armenians, the violent expulsion of Greeks, and so on.

In modern times, metro areas that are major hubs of global capital often are also diverse with fairly low levels of tension. New York and SF+Silicon Valley are both like this, as are Singapore and to some extent London. In fact, a lot of urban progressives live in cities or enclaves within cities (e.g. the better parts of Chicago) where multiculturalism actually is going pretty well, which gives them a rosy view of it overall. Regardless of geography, they also end up in social circles where there's a lot more contact with the global upper middle or upper class and feel more affinity for them than for lower-class native people of whatever country they're in. I just came back from a scientific conference and can see this first-hand: science is a very global enterprise now and we have a lot more in common with foreign people and immigrants who share our interests than with working-class people (of any race) within the US. It feels like a virtuous, well-functioning multicultural entity as long as you exclude all the non-science people first. If I hadn't grown up in a small town I probably wouldn't have any understanding of the types of people who back Trump myself, and I'd be as clueless as any other educated type.

Overall, multiculturalism can work. What does not work well is to take a homogeneous society and rapidly introduce large numbers of people from different cultures, especially if the people are poor (with associated problems like violence) and if there are elements of their culture that offend the native population. The rate of immigration has to be controlled to make it a more gradual process, or the level of social tension will skyrocket.

 

[Akka]

There are some multi-cultural societies that work fine (not without problems, but still as functional as other places in their era). Strangely to true believers in progress, multi-ethnic empires caused these to be more common in the past: for one example, witness how incredibly diverse the Ottoman Empire was, and how its collapse coincided with an enormous rise in ethnic Turkish nationalism, ending up with a genocide against Armenians, the violent expulsion of Greeks, and so on.

Actually, what I noticed in history is that, nearly invariably, homogenous states survived while heterogenous ones fragmented or collapsed. Multicultural states only worked, AFAIK, while they were the top dog and could keep all their components in line either through brute force or because they were so powerful they were seen as the future. Once they started to grow weaker, they were torn down.
Again, it seems absolutely obvious that it's vastly easier to keep together a state where the population is unified than when it's not.

In modern times, metro areas that are major hubs of global capital often are also diverse with fairly low levels of tension.

Actually the racial tensions are nearly always found in metro area. Just no the wealthy parts - obviously no problem in the Silicon Valley, but then go to a not-very-well-off neighborhood and it's another story.

Overall, multiculturalism can work. What does not work well is to take a homogeneous society and rapidly introduce large numbers of people from different cultures, especially if the people are poor (with associated problems like violence) and if there are elements of their culture that offend the native population. The rate of immigration has to be controlled to make it a more gradual process, or the level of social tension will skyrocket.

What boggles my mind is not people thinking multiculturalism can work, but people not realizing that differences causes frictions, especially when some parts of the population feels threatened (for good or bad reasons, that's irrelevant).

 

[Cheetah]

There are some multi-cultural societies that work fine (not without problems, but still as functional as other places in their era). Strangely to true believers in progress, multi-ethnic empires caused these to be more common in the past: for one example, witness how incredibly diverse the Ottoman Empire was, and how its collapse coincided with an enormous rise in ethnic Turkish nationalism, ending up with a genocide against Armenians, the violent expulsion of Greeks, and so on.

In modern times, metro areas that are major hubs of global capital often are also diverse with fairly low levels of tension. New York and SF+Silicon Valley are both like this, as are Singapore and to some extent London. In fact, a lot of urban progressives live in cities or enclaves within cities (e.g. the better parts of Chicago) where multiculturalism actually is going pretty well, which gives them a rosy view of it overall. Regardless of geography, they also end up in social circles where there's a lot more contact with the global upper middle or upper class and feel more affinity for them than for lower-class native people of whatever country they're in. I just came back from a scientific conference and can see this first-hand: science is a very global enterprise now and we have a lot more in common with foreign people and immigrants who share our interests than with working-class people (of any race) within the US. It feels like a virtuous, well-functioning multicultural entity as long as you exclude all the non-science people first. If I hadn't grown up in a small town I probably wouldn't have any understanding of the types of people who back Trump myself, and I'd be as clueless as any other educated type.

Overall, multiculturalism can work. What does not work well is to take a homogeneous society and rapidly introduce large numbers of people from different cultures, especially if the people are poor (with associated problems like violence) and if there are elements of their culture that offend the native population. The rate of immigration has to be controlled to make it a more gradual process, or the level of social tension will skyrocket.

You seem to be mixing multi-cultural and multi-ethnic. Those terms are not interchangeable. All your examples of success are mono-cultural (the Ottomans had different family courts for different religions, but otherwise the different cultures were relatively similar; rich people have their own type of culture, that's why they coexist so easily; scientists also have a certain culture which makes it possible for them to work and coexist together). Multi-ethnic societies easily work together, the problems only occur when the different ethnicities have different cultures.

It's even possible to have lots of sub-cultures inside a society, that's how you see all the diverse types of people coexisting. But it is important to notice that all groups in a well-functioning society share a common, overarching culture.

 

[Bootstoots]

Sure, I would grant that it generally works better to have all significant groups in a society be part of one broad overarching culture with many sub-cultures. The US appears to have made successful transitions of this sort with most of its immigrant groups, and is well on the way to doing it with Hispanics and Asians as well. I am actually quite glad we border Latin America and not the Middle East and North Africa, because the integration process is a lot easier with poor Catholics (which the US has been integrating throughout its history) than with poor Muslims. I don't know where you draw the line between "one culture with subcultures" and "many cultures" but of course there will always be conflict between divergent subcultures or cultures. My point is only that it can work fairly well in the long run, especially if the immigrant group is willing to adopt some of the host country's cultural identity and identify as a subgroup within that country.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't know what you mean by racist system

Yes, which proves my point.

 

[Arwon]

It's worth noting that the number one reason people are voting for Trump is the (R) next to his name.

I don't know to what extent this really needs to be explained or understood.

 

[FriendlyFire]

How DARE YOU !
Label the poor rural Republican supporters as "Morons", why that is something a Liberal Clinton supporter .... oh wait.

Trump tells the newspaper just what he thinks about "the poor people making up his base." "How smart can they be? They're morons," host Trevor Noah said, quoting Trump's interview

“Poor people love Trump,” Trevor Noah declared on Thursday night’s episode of The Daily Show, reporting that of the 50 poorest counties that have voted so far this year, 45 of them went to Trump. And the thing they love most about him is his “honesty.”

“So what does Donald Trump really think about the poor people who make up his base?” Noah asked. For his answer, the host turned to a 1999 Maureen Dowd column in The New York Times.

''My entire life, I've watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn't the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office,” Trump told Dowd, adding, “How smart can they be? They're morons.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...rump-quote-on-poor-people-they-re-morons.html

 

[Traitorfish]

Yet an individual is either on the continuum or not, and in this conception it makes no sense at all to talk about racist systems (which is the level where grandma and the klansman really are on the same level).

The only way I can imagine placing grandma and a Klansman on the same level is if they're reduced to a single vote; can racism really be understood as an extension of partisan or factional politics?

It's worth noting that the number one reason people are voting for Trump is the (R) next to his name.

I don't know to what extent this really needs to be explained or understood.

That's what I'm wondering. Were any of Trump's "poor rural whites" every going to vote for a Democratic candidate, or were just going to vote for Cruz, or whoever, without enthusiasm? Does enthusiasm for Trump represent an increase vote-base among this demographic, or just a more enthusiastic one?

I can appreciate that, as Cutlass suggested, there are a number of blue collar white men whose union affiliations would traditionally lead them to a Democratic vote, and that in this election they're drifting towards their demographic norm, but it's not clear if this is this is actually a large number of people, or if it's just enough to trouble those Democrats who think of themselves as the party of labour.

 

[warpus]

It's worth noting that the number one reason people are voting for Trump is the (R) next to his name.

I don't know to what extent this really needs to be explained or understood.

Yeah, if he was running as an independent nobody would give a crap and he'd get 0.1% of the vote.

If he was running as a Democrat, I don't even know

 

[Askthepizzaguy]

Given the high level of unenthusiasm about Clinton for her mildly corrupt pro-establishment centrist nature, you'd better believe Democrats would be flocking away from Trump given his wishy-washy positioning, history of racist treatment of black people, history of misogyny, and general intellectual inadequacy.

Versus a truly repugnant far right Republican like Ted Cruz, may be a closer race, but Cruz would win. I'd even vote Cruz, between the two, and ensure he had absolutely no power by pushing Democrats in all the down ballot races. More likely I'd hold my nose and vote Jill Stein the wackadoodle who should in no way be representing a liberal party.

Trump would not get as far as he has in the Democratic party. The party is even more fractious than the Republicans, because it is made of up minority groups with different interests. You put a despicable person in there, and support falls away a lot faster.

Republicans are mostly nativist whites, rural whites, poor whites, uneducated white churchgoers, and rich libertarians. They have a lot of overlap and the only major division is between the establishment rich and the poor base, whose interests are in fact wildly different.

With Democrats, it's hard to get the traditionally more conservative black base to agree with the gay base on basic rights. As a coordinated unit, they're more like the town faction in a mafia game. Distrustful of everyone and likely to vote against their own interests out of fear or doubt.

 

[civvver]

I thought it was an excellent article. But the problem is Trump can't fix rural issues. Those one industry towns that have died are never coming back, not without some new investment in some new tech. Manufacturing has suffered here more from globalization than anything any administration has ever done. Trump bags on nafta all the time (which was drawn up by bush1 btw, but passed through congress under clinton so that's a bit hypocritical how he keeps placing all the blame on bill), but what he doesn't seem to get is those jobs were going to leave eventually regardless.

You can slap tariffs on everything, and cut taxes all you want, those jobs aren't returning to the blue collar workers. The only thing he could possibly do I think would be to remove a ton of environmental regulation so coal towns can boom again, but is that really the best idea?

I'm not saying we should forget about rural america or everyone needs to live in cities and throw away the culture of traditional christian families. But those economies have to adapt somehow. With the internet there's no reason you can't have a business out in the boondocks. You can write software from anywhere for example, or provide consulting online, or whatever. There's a lot of things. But the days of going to work 10 hours a day hammering nails or pushing the same button over and over on an assembly line for a better than median wage are over. Auto workers are never making $40 an hour again no matter who is president.

 

[Hygro]

Traitorfish, Trump's primary voters had higher-than-average median incomes, and higher than [some? all of?] that of his opponents'.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Traitorfish, Trump's primary voters had higher-than-average median incomes, and higher than [some? all of?] that of his opponents'.

That possibly true but I havent seen a breakdown based on average income.
Republicans have been the allies of big business which probably skew the income, the general voters however seem to be by poorly educated

 

[Traitorfish]

"Degree" and "no degree" seem like over-broad categories. Shouldn't we at least expect a distinction between people with no college education and some college education, and between people with undergraduate degrees and people with higher degrees?

 

[Cutlass]

The numbers of production oriented jobs isn't ever going back to rural areas. It just makes no sense for it to happen. And because of that, the rural population will always be a declining part of the total population.

But one thing that needs to be understood is that this really is not something that anyone "did to" the rural population. The rural population has been exporting people to the cities for 3-4000 years. And the reason is that that's where the jobs are for any people who can't find jobs back home. There's nothing new in this. What's 'new', over the past 100-150 years, is that the cities haven't had the immensely higher mortality rates that they used to have. Farming simply doesn't require the amount of labor it used to. All other resource extraction has both lower labor requirements and more foreign competition than previously. It's just the way it is. You can't place the fault for it on anyone, or on any group.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Tangentially, Hillary is the only candidate who is proposing help for extreme poverty.

 

[innonimatu]

The numbers of production oriented jobs isn't ever going back to rural areas. It just makes no sense for it to happen. And because of that, the rural population will always be a declining part of the total population.

Concentration of economic activity in cities is a political choice, not a technological inevitability. And I do want to generalize here, because you're not applying that logic just to farming, you're applying it to everything. Economic efficiency above everything else.

The problem with that logic is that it made "no sense" (technical or economic) to break AT&T (kind of relevant now that it aims at monopoly again). It made no sense to break Standard Oil. Or the big railways. Or Google and Microsoft and Amazon and the other "technological giants" (the modern versions of those past technological giants - there is nothing new under the sun in social dynamics, it seems). A monopoly is more efficient than smaller companies, right? So it makes "no sense" either to protect inefficient rural industries from being crushed by either aspiring national giants or international competitors. No sense to protect family farms from big agro-industry, no sense to protect small manufactures of anything from bigger, more efficient competitors, no sense to protect local banks from the larger-scale, indeed "too-big-to-fail" giants that have spread in recent decades, no sense to... well, you get the idea.
And if you follow this logic, it must follow that there is no sense either in protecting workers from their employees. And indeed your country has seen (been victim of...) a bipartisan consensus on that, though both sides sometimes try to pretend otherwise.

But where has this pursuit of economic and technical "good sense" led you? Record corporate profits, the return of the robber barons, pardon me, the "captains of industry", off-shoring, stagnant or falling wages, under-employment or unemployment, corrupt politicians and indeed "legalized corruption" in the form of lobbying. It has led to the concentration of power in the hands of few, to increasing feelings (justified!) of political disenfranchisement. This is the triumph of TINA. Gone is the need to attempt to justify power and wealth on moral grounds - those that benefit from this arrangement can just justify it on technical grounds!

Unsurprisingly, the losers in all this (and they are a majority), will eventually be fed up, and cease accepting technocratic excuses for why they should lose out in the distribution of social power. Because, let's be honest, all these big corporations could be broken up (as past giants were), and the economy would work just fine (better) if that was done. Those record profits would be history, but the money would flow through far more hands. And the "free trade" that is used to construct a technical justification for the not breaking them (competition with the big ones from abroad...) could be rolled back to what it was 30 years ago and things would still work fine. So people can can, and do, place the fault for their problems on the managerial class, the technocratic class, that has aided and defended the current "captains of industry" in exchange for a pick of the scraps from their table. And populists arise. Where have we seen this before?

By the way, recommended read for all those that thing "populist" is a bad word. History repeats itself there...

 

[danjuno]

Degree holders tended to skew right somewhat until recently because undergrads tended to skew that way (Voted for Romney 51%-47% in '12) and they well outnumber postgrads (who Voted Obama 55%-42% in '12). This leads to the overgeneralization that degree-holders = GOP, non-holders = Dem.

Somebody with Bernie Sanders' economic populist credentials but lacking his baggage in regards to the S word would do well in a place like Appalachia. Someone like Sherrod Brown. I would also like to note that I have seen as many Bernie signs as I have Trump signs, but hardly any Clinton signs, in the Eastern Panhandle, despite it being HRC's best area in the D primary this past May.

 

[Hygro]

In the USA, wages have only risen in times of high profitability. "Record profits" are when a people are winning, not being robbed.