Farmboy, I feel you

[innonimatu]

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

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cSh
Correct me if I'm reading this graphic wrong, but it says that corporate profits climber from an average of 5% of GDP during the 90s (a period most people would claim was prosperous - though it laid problems for the future) to an average of 10% over the past 10 years, when real wages have gone down.

I won't claim that it is a zero-sum game, that higher profits always mean lower wages in an equal proportion. But it is correlated.

Compare that graphic with this, for wages. Clearly the history of the past has been one of "sky-rocketing" increases in profits (they doubled!) accompanied by declining wages. Whatever recoveries happened in wages were minimal compared to the increases in profits.
And that statistic about wages would have to be decomposed to verify if it is not being inflated by higher wages for the "managerial class" - which I strongly believe it is - keeping this value from declining even more is this aggregate statistic. Do investigate if you can find the data, but I'll venture to predict that wages of "ordinary workers" have been falling more that this graphic would indicate.

 

[Lexicus]

Additionally it's important to remember that wages aren't the only place employers can take relative income from employees. Profits often suck money from things like safe, healthy workplaces, paid time off (like parental leave), and other benefits like health insurance. The overall trend from compensation of employees, paid, which incorporates this data from benefits, is also downward, though slightly less so. I'd also wager this is heavily tilted toward management, perhaps even more so than wages and salary alone.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4002E1A156NBEA

 

[metalhead]

This is laughable. If you think this is an attempt to 'exonerate racist family' you haven't the slightest idea where I'm coming from. I'm a coastal elite who comes from a family of coastal elites, and I simply don't have those racist family members everyone talks about. I'm also - as I explained in the posts you seemingly ignored - not trying to exonerate anyone. I think voting for Trump automatically aligns you with Nazi filth regardless of your personal motives for doing so.

But it's kind of amusing that you just completely neglect the factors that lead people to vote for Trump - you react exactly the way the stereotype of the urban liberal in the OP article does. You act like everyone in rural America is just some entitled ******* (kind of like a miniature version of The Donald or something) when the truth is that a lot of these people are hurting. They. Are. <snip>. Hurting. No one who knows a dozen chronically unemployed heroin junkies wants to hear your <snip> nonsense about how privileged they are. Some of these people are chronically unemployed heroin junkies themselves.

You have no <snip> idea what it's like to live in a small town where every third person is an opiate addict and there are four times as many people as job opportunities because what you euphemistically refer to as 'global economic forces' (code for the unlimited greed of the capitalists) has resulted in the foreclosure of job opportunities because it's no longer profitable to employ people. And your lack of even a cursory attempt to empathize with this is disturbing.

Honestly, seeing this response has, I think, made me empathize with Trump voters even more than the article did. There is absolutely no reason why we can't give everyone in this country- including people who live in rural areas - the opportunity to have a stake in society.

I know full well that people of color have had a <snip>ier deal, on average, than white people pretty much across the board. I know that. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the 'lived experience' (nice PC term there) of white Americans living in these hollowed-out communities, and frankly your bringing it up in this context is little different from reactionary morons who talk about how bad women have it in Saudi Arabia when feminists say maybe we need to treat women better in the USA.

Moderator Action: Language. -Bootstoots
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Easy there sparky, I was talking about the OP's article, not anything you had said. That was the purpose of this thread, to discuss that article and its implications.

That being said, give me an effing break, man. First, I never used the term "lived experience," so I don't know what you're even attacking there. Second, where the hell do you get off assuming I don't empathize with people? You obviously missed the whole point of what I was saying to go on your little high-horse bullcrap rant, so let me enlighten you a little bit.

For starters, it isn't just people of color that reject Trump. The majority of people in these very communities will not be voting for him. Some will vote for someone else, many will not vote at all, but the majority will reject using their anger and frustration and desperation as an excuse to throw brown people out of the country. They will reject reactionary impulses to jump on the train back to the 1950s where everyone who wasn't a white man knew their place in society. The point I was making, which flew right over your head, was that these people are not picking Trump because of their "anger" or "desperation" or whatever other excuse you want to make for them. If they were, then I'd expect solid majorities of the economically disadvantaged, from all walks of life, all races, all locations, all political leanings, to be hearing and liking what Donald Trump is saying.

But they aren't. The most disadvantaged, by far, are rejecting him by gigantic, historic margins. I don't know why you get so angry demanding empathy from me, but it's OK for people to decide that we need explicitly regressive policies that put women and people of color back in their places, and ban Muslims altogether because they are "angry." Why do they get a pass on empathy? Why do I get yelled and screamed at, but you show empathy, almost reverence, for people who will be voting to turn the clock back to when our country was a repressive, segregated disgrace? Sorry, but yeah. These kinds of people are a dying breed that our country will be better off without. I do not consider all or even most of the people in these communities among their ranks. I know people who struggle to provide for several kids on $8/hr, who lose friends and family to the horrors of addiction. They not only aren't supporting Trump, they aren't really angry or desperate at all, despite having a tough time of it due to our absurd economic system that does nothing for them.

I have great empathy for them. I also think we should implement policies and spend an awful lot more of our elite tax dollars to do so, money that will go to help even the deplorable Trump supporters whose communities are suffering. But I will not abide someone who uses their personal situation to take out racially-based anger on the whole of society when they go to vote. I can't, and I won't, because that kind of crap is what has been holding our society back for decades now. Anger and desperation are not excuses to treat other people this way, to feel that "America" belongs to white men and, to a lesser extent, their homemaking wives. And yes, it is partly a feeling of privilege that has led to their mindset. Think about it. You yourself point out that the horrors of drugs are a huge problem that we need to come up with real solutions to. And I agree, we do. Remember 30 years ago when black communities across the country faced a similar drug epidemic? The response was to put as many of them as possible in jail for as long as we could possibly justify. Where was empathy then? Why are today's opioid addicts entitled to solutions while wanting everyone who is not like them put back in their places?

That's the privilege I'm talking about. Believing that their concerns belong at the front of the line. Mind you, I don't think this privilege is necessarily a product of their own making. I think they have been lied to and pandered to by politicians for so long - and also gotten policy in their favor - that it's perhaps understandable that they feel their drug epidemic is the one that deserves real treatment. That they feel that their economic concerns are of primacy and our goal should be to reopen all of their factories. I would assign responsibility for their privilege largely to the elites from both parties that for so long have propagated small town values as American values, small town, factory-centric economics as the primal economic paradigm upon which our entire society rests. From this perspective, then, to the extent these people feel entitled to attention, feel entitled to the government moving heaven and earth to provide them with jobs and ease their opioid problems, it isn't necessarily their fault. But it needs to stop. People need to be told the truth that their factories aren't coming back, and if they really want employment they may have to work a service job and relocate.

 

[aelf]

How far do the categories "poor rural white" and "Trump voter" actually overlap? Nobody's suggesting it's 1:1, of course, there are still plenty of blue-collar union diehards and Country Club racists. But poor rural whites are consistently presented as a large and growing constituency for Trump, so how far has that actually been demonstrated to b the case?

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

Indeed, while the narrative in the article is neat and well-presented, it appears to be anecdotal:

The press has gotten extremely comfortable with describing a Trump electorate that simply doesn’t exist. Cottle describes his supporters as “white voters living on the edges of the economy.” This is, in nearly every particular, wrong.

There is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class. Exit polling from the primaries found that Trump voters made about as much as Ted Cruz voters, and significantly more than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000, a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America.

A major study from Gallup's Jonathan Rothwell confirmed this. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Lower-income whites are always likelier to support Democrats than other whites. It’d be very odd if Trump singlehandedly reversed that longstanding trend in American public opinion. But it suggests that the image of Trump supporters as whites on the economic margins, being failed by the elites in Washington and New York, is wrong.

In this vein, I've always thought that Farmboy champions a very specific demographic and only makes it look like this group is being oppressed by a smaller number of elites living in cities. It's only because he's less frothing-in-the-mouth and more capable of "weaponising his intellect" among this group that some find his viewpoint terribly interesting, despite the fact that it's not a particularly representative articulation of the common man's concerns.

 

[Gigaz]

Rural regions are loosing economically, and this phenomenon is not restricted to the US. The local wealth is almost perfectly predicted by the population density. USA, Europa, Russia, China, its all the same. There are several reasons for this I suppose, but access to highly skilled and specialized labor is likely the most important one. People can just manufacture more cheaply with robots in a city than they could with human employees in the countryside. Thats particularly bad for the US because the overall population density is lower than in most other rich countries.
It is very difficult to change shifting economic realities and I think it has not been demonstrated anywhere.

 

[Bootstoots]

The median Trump voter will likely be a middle-class suburbanite with some college but no 4-year degree. A lot of American suburbanites are as conservative as their rural peers, especially small business owners and the like, and people in the suburbs obviously outnumber the rural areas and small towns. One of the more important things to get, that I've never really seen addressed, is that middle-class conservative white people tend to have a lot of relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are lower-class and are struggling. Poor white heroin addicts rarely vote, but they feed into the narrative of social decay that Trump has made the cornerstone of his campaign, and you can bet that their better-off relatives are really angry about what is happening. It also helps to drive home to middle-class people that they are only a job loss and a prolonged period of unemployment from failing the same way, which builds a sense of precariousness that also feeds the Trump narrative. The net effect is that the median Trump voter will be personally doing okay, and this fact will be used (is already being used) as a further tool to denigrate Trump voters as deplorables.

@aelf: I'll quote something I said about this earlier in the thread. I admit I haven't done enough data analysis from the Gallup report to see how much truth there is to my claims above. I do remember that one of the things that is most predictive of Trump support is economic anxiety, which strangely doesn't correlate well at all with income. The result is that there are a lot of people who have incomes above the median, but are still anxious about their position and have a pessimistic view of the economy. These make up a substantial fraction of votes for Trump.

Social class here is likely to have as much if not more to do with education status than with income, as well. Plumbers and electricians often make more money than teachers or postdocs, but the former are considered working class while the latter are middle class. The college-educated/non-college-educated split among white voters is enormous in this election cycle, even though the income differences among white voters for Clinton vs. Trump are not significant.

 

[Lexicus]

Easy there sparky, I was talking about the OP's article, not anything you had said. That was the purpose of this thread, to discuss that article and its implications.

That being said, give me an effing break, man. First, I never used the term "lived experience," so I don't know what you're even attacking there. Second, where the hell do you get off assuming I don't empathize with people? You obviously missed the whole point of what I was saying to go on your little high-horse bullcrap rant, so let me enlighten you a little bit.

I never said you did - but 'lived experience' is a concept commonly associated with the identity-politics-aligned left. It's a term I've used myself in the past.

For starters, it isn't just people of color that reject Trump. The majority of people in these very communities will not be voting for him. Some will vote for someone else, many will not vote at all, but the majority will reject using their anger and frustration and desperation as an excuse to throw brown people out of the country. They will reject reactionary impulses to jump on the train back to the 1950s where everyone who wasn't a white man knew their place in society. The point I was making, which flew right over your head, was that these people are not picking Trump because of their "anger" or "desperation" or whatever other excuse you want to make for them. If they were, then I'd expect solid majorities of the economically disadvantaged, from all walks of life, all races, all locations, all political leanings, to be hearing and liking what Donald Trump is saying.

But they aren't. The most disadvantaged, by far, are rejecting him by gigantic, historic margins. I don't know why you get so angry demanding empathy from me, but it's OK for people to decide that we need explicitly regressive policies that put women and people of color back in their places, and ban Muslims altogether because they are "angry." Why do they get a pass on empathy? Why do I get yelled and screamed at, but you show empathy, almost reverence, for people who will be voting to turn the clock back to when our country was a repressive, segregated disgrace? Sorry, but yeah. These kinds of people are a dying breed that our country will be better off without. I do not consider all or even most of the people in these communities among their ranks. I know people who struggle to provide for several kids on $8/hr, who lose friends and family to the horrors of addiction. They not only aren't supporting Trump, they aren't really angry or desperate at all, despite having a tough time of it due to our absurd economic system that does nothing for them.

I don't see what is hard to understand about intersectionality. There is more than one reason people are voting for Trump. The fact that not all poor people are supporting him is meaningless as to that. However Trump's supporters are predominantly white people without college degrees. The idea that many of these people are not voting for Trump due to desperation brought on by economic dislocation is simply laughable.

I have great empathy for them. I also think we should implement policies and spend an awful lot more of our elite tax dollars to do so, money that will go to help even the deplorable Trump supporters whose communities are suffering. But I will not abide someone who uses their personal situation to take out racially-based anger on the whole of society when they go to vote. I can't, and I won't, because that kind of crap is what has been holding our society back for decades now. Anger and desperation are not excuses to treat other people this way, to feel that "America" belongs to white men and, to a lesser extent, their homemaking wives. And yes, it is partly a feeling of privilege that has led to their mindset. Think about it. You yourself point out that the horrors of drugs are a huge problem that we need to come up with real solutions to. And I agree, we do. Remember 30 years ago when black communities across the country faced a similar drug epidemic? The response was to put as many of them as possible in jail for as long as we could possibly justify. Where was empathy then? Why are today's opioid addicts entitled to solutions while wanting everyone who is not like them put back in their places?

That's the privilege I'm talking about. Believing that their concerns belong at the front of the line. Mind you, I don't think this privilege is necessarily a product of their own making. I think they have been lied to and pandered to by politicians for so long - and also gotten policy in their favor - that it's perhaps understandable that they feel their drug epidemic is the one that deserves real treatment. That they feel that their economic concerns are of primacy and our goal should be to reopen all of their factories. I would assign responsibility for their privilege largely to the elites from both parties that for so long have propagated small town values as American values, small town, factory-centric economics as the primal economic paradigm upon which our entire society rests. From this perspective, then, to the extent these people feel entitled to attention, feel entitled to the government moving heaven and earth to provide them with jobs and ease their opioid problems, it isn't necessarily their fault. But it needs to stop. People need to be told the truth that their factories aren't coming back, and if they really want employment they may have to work a service job and relocate.

Meanwhile the idea that I am excusing the people who are voting for Trump is absurd almost beyond words given everything I've said about Trump supporters on this forum. Who is excusing Trump voters? The point is to understand why people vote for guys like Trump. My concern in all this is firstly avoiding a crazy lurch into fascism, and secondly actually fulfilling the promise of creating an economy that works for everyone, not excusing people who vote for Trump. Your arguments to the effect that I agree with Trump or these people when they vote for him are strawmen, and disappointing strawmen at that.
And consider the irony of you throwing 'black people were put in jail as a response to the drug epidemic' in my face when, not so long ago, we were arguing about this and you were quick to exonerate Bill and Hillary Clinton for their role in that horrid policy response. @Timsup2nothin even justified it as a reasonable response in the moment, with the mass incarceration of black people merely an unintended, unforeseen consequence...

By the way, saying "these people need to die for society to become more decent" isn't exactly my idea of empathy, but maybe yours is a little different...

Record corporate profits, the return of the robber barons, pardon me, the "captains of industry",

The term today is 'billionaire philanthropists'.

 

[Leonel]

My girlfriend was talking about the concept of de-industrialization once to describe the falling fortunes of Black Americans. Basically just when Black Americans started moving into factory jobs that white people did less and less of, those factories started moving overseas and depriving Black communities of the traditional path to wealth development that white people took before.

Interestingly enough, I also saw an article before about how jobs were coming back but they weren't returning to rural America since business creation that happened in the countryside was primarily around factories or mines that workers would live around. It occurs to me that rural white people are now experiencing the same de-industrialization that hit communities of color in the 70's and 80's but much harder since the white community has had a 'taste' of unfettered economic prosperity for lack of a better word. We may think that they're exaggerating but their way of life is literally dying because of de-industrialization.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Well, looks like the old Linlcon conservative base of the Republicans are switching for the democrats
Suprised to find out that the middle class has been part of Gop even though they lived in Blue states.

The Rich Vote Republican? Maybe Not This Election

While polling data on the rich is imprecise given their small population, polls of the top-earning households favor Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump two to one. The July Affluent Barometer survey by Ipsos found that among voters earning more than $100,000 a year — roughly the top 25 percent of households — 45 percent said they planned to vote for Mrs. Clinton, while 28 percent planned to vote for Mr. Trump. The rest were undecided or planned to vote for another candidate.

The spread was even wider among the highest earners. For those earning $250,000 or more — roughly the top 5 percent of households — 53 percent planned to vote for Mrs. Clinton while 25 percent favored Mr. Trump. The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus four points.

Since the 1950s, with few exceptions, upper-income voters have leaned more Republican than the broader population

“The Republicans have the support of the richer voters within any given state but have more overall support in the poorer states,” Mr. Gelman said. “Thus, the identification of rich states with rich voters, or more generally, the personification of so-called red and blue states, is misleading.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/business/rich-vote-republican-not-this-election-maybe.html?_r=0

 

[Cutlass]

Industrial jobs have been on a slow downward trend for about 60 years in the US. With a few increases in the speed of decline under Reagan and Bush. Industrial production in the US has not declined. Instead, productivity has grown hugely. But the numbers of jobs in both industry and resource production has gone down. And will continue to do so. And the jobs that do exist won't as commonly be in rural areas. That's just a reality everyone has to face. It's not anyone's fault. It's just what is. Or, not anyone specifically fault. This is called 'market forces'.

Haven't seen Farm Boy for a long time, where's he been?

Anyways, I think that I understand where he's coming from. And while he would probably not believe me, I really do have a lot of sympathy for his point of view. If I'm reading him right, that is.

Go back to the article linked in the OP. A little down the page there's this map.

See that red spot in the state of Maine? My family has lived in that red area for the past 200 years. I don't, but have spent a fair amount of time there. I get there for a bit of time every year. I'm not that removed from a rural background. I understand that it is tough in such places. And I understand that the urban populations don't make it any easier. And I genuinely regret that that way of life, and many other things, are fading from the world.

But the flip side of that is that the world is changing. And it can't be stopped. And trying to hold onto the past in the changing world isn't going to do anything other than make it harder for everyone.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Article lost me at point 4, at how secularism led to all of urban society's ills.

 

[Cutlass]

Article lost me at point 4, at how secularism led to all of urban society's ills.

It didn't. But many people see the 'loss of values' that comes with secularism as either part or cause of the problem. It's a perception issue.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

So what's the solution then? Undo secularism to placate the periphery?

P.S. I really enjoyed that Tony Stark comment.

 

[Cutlass]

That's fundamentally the problem. Trying to be more conciliatory means that the majority has to abandon their values to adopt, at least the semblance of, the values of the minority. And, even if we do, we don't get the quid pro quo. So it's for nothing.

 

[metalhead]

I don't see what is hard to understand about intersectionality. There is more than one reason people are voting for Trump. The fact that not all poor people are supporting him is meaningless as to that. However Trump's supporters are predominantly white people without college degrees. The idea that many of these people are not voting for Trump due to desperation brought on by economic dislocation is simply laughable.

No, actually, it isn't. Not at all. He isn't offering realistic solutions, and the people in those communities, contrary to what elites like yourself sometimes think, are not stupid. They know he isn't bringing their jobs back. They know he has no concrete plans to improve their lives, to treat those struggling with addiction, or do anything. He's selling an idea, a point-of-view for advocacy that they identify with. He talks like they do. He sees immigrants and Muslims like they do and, more importantly, talks about those groups the way they do. He's willing to indulge conspiracies that are typically the domain of people who live in poor communities.

Tons of people are desperate, as you may have heard me mention before. If Trump is a desperation vote, why aren't all or most desperate people seeing him as worth their support and, more importantly, worth their votes? If desperation were the overriding reason, then he would have unified the vote of the desperate. But he hasn't. So that obviously is not the unifying thing driving his candidacy.

Meanwhile the idea that I am excusing the people who are voting for Trump is absurd almost beyond words given everything I've said about Trump supporters on this forum. Who is excusing Trump voters? The point is to understand why people vote for guys like Trump. My concern in all this is firstly avoiding a crazy lurch into fascism, and secondly actually fulfilling the promise of creating an economy that works for everyone, not excusing people who vote for Trump. Your arguments to the effect that I agree with Trump or these people when they vote for him are strawmen, and disappointing strawmen at that.

And consider the irony of you throwing 'black people were put in jail as a response to the drug epidemic' in my face when, not so long ago, we were arguing about this and you were quick to exonerate Bill and Hillary Clinton for their role in that horrid policy response. @Timsup2nothin even justified it as a reasonable response in the moment, with the mass incarceration of black people merely an unintended, unforeseen consequence...

By the way, saying "these people need to die for society to become more decent" isn't exactly my idea of empathy, but maybe yours is a little different...

Are you even reading my words? Where did I say that you're excusing anyone, or agreeing with anything Trump stands for? My point was about the relative privilege these people have enjoyed, which contributes to their sense of loss, of their sense of entitlement that the government act on their behalf to do something to help them. That doesn't make their loss less real, and it doesn't make it any less of an imperative to enact policies to help them. You should know by now that I am actually in favor of the government going as far as it has to in order to do exactly that.

But I think that sense of entitlement is something that does, in fact, help explain the totally disproportionate response these people have had versus those had by black people after their urban factories shut down and their communities were ravaged by a drug epidemic. They didn't turn to a dangerous demagogue. They worked within existing power structures, to unfortunately be paid little mind as far as policy to actually improve their situation. But they did and still do largely try to operate within those structures. So then that should beg the question - why is this response different?

Why are rural whites having a totally different response to similar circumstances? Leonel's point is an interesting one, that perhaps they are angrier because they had more to lose in the first place, but then you still haven't answered the question as to why plenty of so-called desperate or angry people are not voting for Trump. Why? You want to find out, so let's discuss. I think it's because they aren't willing to submit to a militantly racist demagogue as an outlet, and would prefer the frustratingly slow process of working within the existing power structures to hopefully find solutions. There is unfortunately a far more sinister stripe of person who is more susceptible to the allure of either a fascistic strongman or a racist demagogue, or both. They are the deplorables, and that is the main reason they are supporting Trump.

Re: empathy - if my grandma is dying of cancer, I can want her to die for her benefit and the benefit of the family while still caring deeply about the pain and anguish she is suffering from as a result of her disease. It's not an either-or thing. Social progress always requires people of older mindsets to die, and this is no different. I'm not saying I want them all to die of unnatural causes or anything like that, but a preponderance will have to die if we want to be assured another Trump doesn't come along in 4 or 8 or 12 years.

 

[cardgame]

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

If only capitalism worked that way. Unless of course your perspective depends on which 'people' you're talking about. The robbers or the rest.

I must have whiffed on that. But, as I have read and processed this attempt to exonerate racist family before, allow me to retort.

So, if Trump was really about economic anxiety and nothing else, Trump would have an awful lot of people of color on his side. After all, every wave of economic disenfranchisment over the last ever has disproportionately affected people of color.

But, er, people of color are poised to vote against Trump in historic margins. So it's quite obviously not economic anxiety. Because the real anxious people, who have been systematically disadvantaged? Aren't willing to toss our whole multicultural democratic tradition aside because nobody is meeting their needs. It takes the position of unique privilege occupied by small town white people to think that they alone deserve government intervention to preserve their way of life. I can't tell you how much we need these people to just die so we can have a decent society.

"Society advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck

 

[Lexicus]

No, actually, it isn't. Not at all. He isn't offering realistic solutions, and the people in those communities, contrary to what elites like yourself sometimes think, are not stupid. They know he isn't bringing their jobs back. They know he has no concrete plans to improve their lives, to treat those struggling with addiction, or do anything. He's selling an idea, a point-of-view for advocacy that they identify with. He talks like they do. He sees immigrants and Muslims like they do and, more importantly, talks about those groups the way they do. He's willing to indulge conspiracies that are typically the domain of people who live in poor communities.

I'm an "elite" am I? Interesting, it's news to me. What makes you think so?
To the point, though - I know you are wrong because I've been talking with Trump voters in New Hampshire for the last two weeks, many of whom do believe he has concrete plans to improve their lives. Now, you're right that many are aware that he's just a man of straw, a windbag without any substance. But as you say, these people aren't stupid. As the article said, they're voting for Trump because he's a brick through the window of the nice corner offices where 'elites' reside. It's not that he's selling a point of view, it's not that he talks the way they do - he doesn't - he's seen as a wake-up call for a system that's failing people. And really, when people have that perception, just about the worst thing you can tell them is to shut up and keep their heads down and hope the system will spit out some change.

Tons of people are desperate, as you may have heard me mention before. If Trump is a desperation vote, why aren't all or most desperate people seeing him as worth their support and, more importantly, worth their votes? If desperation were the overriding reason, then he would have unified the vote of the desperate. But he hasn't. So that obviously is not the unifying thing driving his candidacy.

When did I say it was? Do you know what intersectionality means?

Are you even reading my words? Where did I say that you're excusing anyone, or agreeing with anything Trump stands for?

...whatever other excuse you want to make for them.

but you show empathy, almost reverence, for people who will be voting to turn the clock back to when our country was a repressive, segregated disgrace?

Anger and desperation are not excuses to treat other people this way

Are you reading your own?

My point was about the relative privilege these people have enjoyed, which contributes to their sense of loss, of their sense of entitlement that the government act on their behalf to do something to help them. That doesn't make their loss less real, and it doesn't make it any less of an imperative to enact policies to help them. You should know by now that I am actually in favor of the government going as far as it has to in order to do exactly that.

But I think that sense of entitlement is something that does, in fact, help explain the totally disproportionate response these people have had versus those had by black people after their urban factories shut down and their communities were ravaged by a drug epidemic. They didn't turn to a dangerous demagogue. They worked within existing power structures, to unfortunately be paid little mind as far as policy to actually improve their situation. But they did and still do largely try to operate within those structures. So then that should beg the question - why is this response different?

If we want to get right down to it, obviously black people have worked a lot outside the system, and voting for Trump is about as 'inside the system' as you can get. When there is widespread terrorism from these people (as I have predicted will happen when Clinton wins the election) then you can make this point.
In historical terms, this is a bourgeois whitewash (almost a parody of a bourgeois whitewash) of the history of social change (particularly as it relates to race) in this country. There were "dangerous demagogues" aplenty that black people turned to, and a lot of them ended up dead.

Why are rural whites having a totally different response to similar circumstances? Leonel's point is an interesting one, that perhaps they are angrier because they had more to lose in the first place, but then you still haven't answered the question as to why plenty of so-called desperate or angry people are not voting for Trump. Why? You want to find out, so let's discuss. I think it's because they aren't willing to submit to a militantly racist demagogue as an outlet, and would prefer the frustratingly slow process of working within the existing power structures to hopefully find solutions. There is unfortunately a far more sinister stripe of person who is more susceptible to the allure of either a fascistic strongman or a racist demagogue, or both. They are the deplorables, and that is the main reason they are supporting Trump.

They aren't willing to vote for Trump for all kinds of reasons. Many feel personally victimized by the racist tone of his campaign. Many find themselves unwilling to vote for someone as indecent as Trump is. My entire point was that it is not a straightforward path from economic insecurity to voting for Trump - this is not a one-dimensional problem. But to ignore economic insecurity, as you are doing, seems foolish to me. It is like saying that the Nazis won because Germans hated Jews while ignoring the near-50% unemployment rate.

Re: empathy - if my grandma is dying of cancer, I can want her to die for her benefit and the benefit of the family while still caring deeply about the pain and anguish she is suffering from as a result of her disease. It's not an either-or thing. Social progress always requires people of older mindsets to die, and this is no different. I'm not saying I want them all to die of unnatural causes or anything like that, but a preponderance will have to die if we want to be assured another Trump doesn't come along in 4 or 8 or 12 years.

This is BS and you know it. You don't have empathy for Trump voters. I don't either, mostly, but at least I'm trying to work on it. And in any case in my view we need to figure out some way to address widening economic insecurity or we will have people who come along and make us wish Trump was back.

 

[metalhead]

I'm an "elite" am I? Interesting, it's news to me. What makes you think so?

You referred to yourself as such. I wasn't sure if you meant it tongue-in-cheek, but I assumed it was, at least in part. I'm frankly a little tired of the term as it is bandied about as an epithet against people who don't "get" Trump, but that's neither here nor there.

To the point, though - I know you are wrong because I've been talking with Trump voters in New Hampshire for the last two weeks, many of whom do believe he has concrete plans to improve their lives. Now, you're right that many are aware that he's just a man of straw, a windbag without any substance. But as you say, these people aren't stupid. As the article said, they're voting for Trump because he's a brick through the window of the nice corner offices where 'elites' reside. It's not that he's selling a point of view, it's not that he talks the way they do - he doesn't - he's seen as a wake-up call for a system that's failing people. And really, when people have that perception, just about the worst thing you can tell them is to shut up and keep their heads down and hope the system will spit out some change.

There is a difference between "trusts he has plans," and "know he has plans." Political trust has always been a fascinating animal to me. People are willing to believe all kinds of great things about leaders they trust. I'll never forget the George W. Bush fan who told me he liked him because he was a "regular guy" who grew up poor.

Have you asked any of them if they believe that the factories will come back? I've seen interviews with supporters of his and they always realize that Trump won't actually be able to restore the factory towns like he claims. They know the economic realities, which is why even if perhaps they believe he has plans for things, the old way is simply not coming back.

The proverbial brick through the window comes with some rather terrible collateral damage, which Trump has been very explicit about. Do they opine on whether the brick is worth the damage to communities of color? I have a feeling if you broached the subject you might not get an honest answer, but you have to be really uncaring about an awful lot of other groups of people to think Trump is an appropriate brick. And I think he will lose in large part because a lot of these people recognize this and don't like it.

When did I say it was? Do you know what intersectionality means?

I do, which is why I think it is urgent to address the legitimate grievances these people have with the way they've been ignored. I'm fully aware that legitimate grievances exist. What I dispute is that it is the uniting factor behind the ardent Trump supporters. Many people will vote for him simply because he is the Republican nominee, which is in many ways worse than what the brick-throwers are up to. And maybe you weren't trying to whitewash the disturbing racist and fascist parts of Trumpism necessarily, but in the context of the story linked in the OP which didn't mention it, it seemed that way.

If we want to get right down to it, obviously black people have worked a lot outside the system, and voting for Trump is about as 'inside the system' as you can get. When there is widespread terrorism from these people (as I have predicted will happen when Clinton wins the election) then you can make this point.

In historical terms, this is a bourgeois whitewash (almost a parody of a bourgeois whitewash) of the history of social change (particularly as it relates to race) in this country. There were "dangerous demagogues" aplenty that black people turned to, and a lot of them ended up dead.

I was talking in the post-civil rights era. A lot of antiwar people also turned to dangerous demagogues. Some even with the express mission of dismantling the existing power structures. Such things were not are not nearly as common in the 80s and 90s (or today) as they were then. BLM is called a terrorist organization by some, but they are fighting systematic state murder, not by wanting to upend political instiutions, but by pressure and awareness to force them to act. Their actions exist outside the spheres of power, but seek to force their action. The Trumpists are channeling their anger in a very different direction.

They aren't willing to vote for Trump for all kinds of reasons. Many feel personally victimized by the racist tone of his campaign. Many find themselves unwilling to vote for someone as indecent as Trump is. My entire point was that it is not a straightforward path from economic insecurity to voting for Trump - this is not a one-dimensional problem. But to ignore economic insecurity, as you are doing, seems foolish to me. It is like saying that the Nazis won because Germans hated Jews while ignoring the near-50% unemployment rate.

I don't dispute that the loss and hardship people feel at their way of life having disappeared likely forever makes people more receptive to someone like Trump. But attempts like the OP story trying to ignore the other, far more disturbing undercurrents at play are bothersome, to say the least.

I mean, there is a reason Trump began his campaign by saying that Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals, and maybe some are nice. It's the original sin, the original stain that I think encapsulates where his appeal really lies to the people that support him enthusiastically.

This is BS and you know it. You don't have empathy for Trump voters. I don't either, mostly, but at least I'm trying to work on it. And in any case in my view we need to figure out some way to address widening economic insecurity or we will have people who come along and make us wish Trump was back.

Well, the idea that one can have empathy for an abstract group of people is questionable, but I do know people who face the same lack of opportunity, and suffer being surrounded by the drug epidemic. I do legitimately have empathy for people in those circumstances.

 

[FriendlyFire]

It is like saying that the Nazis won because Germans hated Jews while ignoring the near-50% unemployment rate.

OK then please explain Kansas ?
Cause they voted Republicans into power to enact the economic and social destruction of the state ?

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s trickle-down economics experiment is so bad the state stopped reporting on it

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, the Republican responsible for the state’s business-friendly tax policies, is now trying to erase any evidence of just how wildly unsuccessful his Reaganomics experiment has proved.

Last month the state’s Council of Economic Advisors, which Brownback created in 2011 and still chairs, quietly discontinued quarterly reports originally intended to showcase the state’s rapid economic growth. (During Brownback’s re-election campaign in 2014, the reports were scrubbed from the internet and subsequently available only upon request.)

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/25/kan...-is-so-bad-the-state-stopped-reporting-on-it/

 

[Hygro]

If only capitalism worked that way. Unless of course your perspective depends on which 'people' you're talking about. The robbers or the rest.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf

You don't need profits to drive investment, theoretically, but profits drive investment. Employment is a function of investment. Indeed, employment is the expression of investment. When the forces that drive investment are strong, the forces that drive employment is strong. When the forces that drive employment are strong, wages are pressured upward.

We have seen wage growth among all income quintiles the strongest in periods of high corporate profitability.