A really good article.
Originally shared by ****
Interesting and deep dive into the psychology of Trump voters and the sense of societal decay and unease.
#trump #teaparty
A really good article.
Published
A really good article.
Originally shared by ****
Interesting and deep dive into the psychology of Trump voters and the sense of societal decay and unease.
#trump #teaparty
Never Stop Posting 
That was indeed a good article. Thanks for sharing.
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Very good article. Gives some perspective.
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A well-written, empathetic article.
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The disenfranchised people profiled won’t identify with the Democratic party, and especially the well educated Hillary Clinton. (Now why they believe anything that Trump says is baffling)..
I think Clinton should make the attempt to reach these people, rather than the too obvious and easy approach of ridiculing Trump. (Anyone with half a brain knows that Trump is a pathetic buffoon. )
How she might try to reach out, I have no idea..
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Gord Wait — Ms Clinton has done a good job reaching out to another disenfranchised group — she has sky-high favourability ratings with the Black community, despite being marked not only by her privilege but by her skin tone. Unfortunately, in the US, being liked by the Black community virtually guarantees that she’ll be detested by the economically-disadvantaged part of the White community (under the principle “the friend of my enemy is my enemy”).
I haven’t studied Marxist theory much, but John Hardy not a Turnbull fan probably knows a term for when disadvantaged groups turn against each other rather than making common cause to fight for a better deal.
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Oddly I can’t think of one off hand but the phenomenon is certainly well recognised. I heard the term downward envy used the other day. I could easily imagine this sentiment taking hold of any group losing relative status or prestige (including the currently liberal urban middle class). As for Marx, well, he did reserve a fair degree of ire for the “petite bourgeoise” who were the mainstay of every counter-revolutionary tendency of his era. The idea is that those with a little tend to be the most vehemently opposed to those who traditionally have had nothing at all.
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Very good article. It brilliantly sums up much of the socio-political narrative of today in the US and to a lesser extent, elsewhere.
I think the take-home message is that while social progressives should still try to reach across the political divide, we do need to recognise that it’s not to meet in the middle somewhere: It’s more to reach across to grab our blind friends from walking off a cliff.
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The author never mentions it, but the picture she painted here is deeply reminiscent of Great Depression-era Germany. The once privileged class, suffering while appallingly disconnected from reality, develop their own simplistic narrative to explain their circumstances — a narrative which is based almost entirely on scapegoating minorities who they perceive as having it better off than they do. Then an equally simple-minded opportunist leader comes along with a perfect solution to their minority problem, one that he alleges will solve minority problem once and for all.
I think “reaching across the isle” is a good idea, but it is almost impossible to do given how severely detached from reality these Tea Partiers are. We are hardly even speaking the same language. Every idea needs to be expressed in the context of scapegoating, otherwise you are a liberal and a threat to them, and they won’t listen to you.
So how can you even begin to explain them that their problems aren’t being created by minorities, and that scapegoating is wrong and evil? How can you convince them that their problems are really being caused by phenomenon that are described by words like “income inequality,” and “oligarchy,” and “austerity.”
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John Hardy not a Turnbull fan wrote «As for Marx, well, he did reserve a fair degree of ire for the “petite bourgeoise” who were the mainstay of every counter-revolutionary tendency of his era.»
He always was a bit of a social snob. 🙂
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Ramin Honary — as the article suggested, these people are generally kind and decent on the individual level: they’d stop to help a Muslim motorist stranded by the side of the road, send a gift to their neighbour’s kid’s same-sex wedding, take soup to a sick Black co-worker (and wouldn’t resent her, personally, collecting disability benefits while she’s unwell), etc. The problem is that they get very angry about abstractions like “Islam” or “Political Correctness” or “Welfare State.”
The solution is to appeal to that inherent kindness as a countermeasure to the cynical, commoditised anger they get bombarded with in media and online, and, as much as possible, to deal with actual, complex human beings rather than oversimplified abstractions.
At the same time, we have to look to the beam in our own eyes, stop listening to the commoditised anger merchants here on the Left, and start seeing people in red states as complex human beings rather than oversimplified “Tea Partiers,” “mouth breathers,” “white trash,” etc. The angry adolescents (emotional age) trolling from both sides won’t disappear, but at least we can try to isolate them.
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and read Steinbeck, the themes haven’t changed all that much. Just the politics.
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I worked with what i would describe as rednecks for almost 40 years. All i can say is that they’ve bought into the American nightmare. Long workdays at low pay were considered “work ethic”. They threw out the union because it was getting 4% of their wages…even though that covered a pension fund and healthcare.
They grumbled about the boss but were convinced that he was better than them because he was the boss. He MUST be….he owns the business!
This is the kind that goes for Donald Trump. The “Thank-you-sir-may-i-have-another” crowd. They literally worship the wealthy. They see the rich as rich because they’re better and work harder than the rest of us…..and we’d all be rich too if it weren’t for “them”…the minorities that feed off of us.
As far as talking sense to this attitude, there’s almost no hope (not that i didn’t try). They don’t see jobs going overseas as a ploy to increase profits for the wealthy….They see it as a response to the controls and regulations of big government.
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John Hardy not a Turnbull fan — you can see this as the sequel to Steinbeck’s novels, I think. Three generations later, his characters’ descendants have achieved the dreams that eluded the characters in the novels (family, property, jobs, respectability), but they realise that their grip on them is terrifyingly tenuous, and the trailer park is a constant memento mori of what they could slip back to.
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Phil Rounds wrote «As far as talking sense to this attitude, there’s almost no hope (not that i didn’t try).»
I feel your pain here — I’ve had similarly futile debates — but I don’t think we’re going to win by talking at them and pointing out their logical flaws until they admit we’re right.
This is a very long-running culture war in the US. The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, for example, was largely a setup by the urban northeastern newspapers (then Republican, now Democrat) to show how stupid rural southerners (then Democrat, now Republican) were — after all, the rural hicks were banning a textbook about evolution and eugenics, even though intelligent urbanites knew both were backed by science.
I think the article’s author took the right approach: we need to stop trying to prove how right we are, at least for a while, and try listening and understanding instead.
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Well, that is, to be fair, the usual liberal response: to listen and try to understand the other’s point of view. For every story of stereotypical urban liberal high handedness, you’ll find progressive minded liberals everywhere trying to fathom and accommodate the conservative perspective*. It’s not as though it is foreign territory for many liberals, many have themselves come from conservative families and have conservative relations.
Liberals actively seek out other points of view. Conservatives as a rule do not.
What is going to need to happen is generational change. Even in heavily conservative parts of the US there are still a lot of liberal minded people. As hinted at in the article, there are Sanders supporters among the young. The internet is a new factor here as well. It is going to take Southern white progressives to organise change in their own communities and to reach out and connect with the rest of the nation.
People outside those communities, more urban, more liberal, are always going to be seen as the enemy to conservatives, no matter how patiently they try to listen. Their whole cultural orientation is to shut those voices out.
* In fact i would argue, this kind of listening and accommodating was the main operating principle of liberalism during the 1980s until the 2000s. That usually means shelving their own program in favour of a hash of conservative compromise policies.
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John Hardy not a Turnbull fan – I recognise the pattern, but I’d redefine it slightly. I find that people on the moderate Left or Right are somewhat more willing to listen, while people on the further Left and Right are somewhat more inclined to shout (with wide variability among individuals, of course).
I’m not sure if being near the centre improves your ability to listen, or being better at listening pulls you to the centre. Or it might just be that the centre (moderate liberal or conservative) defends the status quo, while the extremes attack it.
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“….and try listening and understanding instead.”
How do you listen to and understand racism,homophobia, warmongering and ridiculous conspiracy theories? There’s no way these people are just going to come around all on their own. In their minds they’re being victimized by the poor and by people of colour. Lending credence to their delusions (like FOX “news” does) just reinforces the falsehoods that they subscribe to. I think someone has to tell them, “I’m sorry, but you’re full of it”. They may not like it, but at least they’re given the facts…not just more excuses to blame the poor for the sins of the wealthy.
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Phil Rounds – that’s not all there is, though. There’s also economic insecurity, fear of global change, etc. You don’t have to agree with racism, but you can listen to people whose mental macroeconomic model doesn’t happen to be the same as yours (even if you’re pretty convinced that yours is correct).
And there is a lot of room for debate: do tariffs protect jobs, for example (the protectionist PoV), or are they just an unjust tax on consumers to slow the inevitable closing of a few unviable industries (the free-trade PoV)? Neither is an obviously invalid argument prima facie, so there’s real value in talking instead of just assuming that the other side is stupid.
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Once again I don’t agree with the symmetry. Being near the centre is not the defining characteristic. It is a liberal vs conservative divide. Liberals read more widely and discuss ideas from a wider range of sources. Conservatives by their nature shut themselves off from engagement and discussion. Sure you can point to a few isolationist elements on the Left that don’t even want to engage with the centre Left but they are a tiny, miniscule and puritanical minority. The vast majority of progressives are open minded and listening. The whole epistemic closure thing is a right wing phenomenon. They actually see engagement with liberals as a bad thing which they (rightly) identify as a danger to their political ambitions. This closure is the problem and it was built deliberately by right wingers and has manifested itself in separate institutions and even its own mass media. There is nothing even remotely symmetrical about that situation.
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As I said before, liberals are not trusted. Engagement is not really an option. Change has to come from within the community itself as the old consensus breaks down due to internal factors. Sure liberals should remain as open as always but the lock on conversation and engagement is not coming from their side.
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Well, someone has to do the convincing and it sure isn’t going to be their fellow Conservatives. For us all to get together here and preach to the choir does nothing. There’s nothing more useless than a Liberal bitch session. If you want change you have to talk sense to the people that matter. Some are your family, some are your friends and some are your neighbors. So you’re not necessarily the enemy. You might just be someone who they like who has a different opinion. That opinion needs to get heard….or you might as well not have it.
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John Hardy not a Turnbull fan — it might come down to dueling definitions. If a “conservative” is simply someone who believes in lower taxes, smaller government programmes, and maybe stricter law enforcement (like most Conservatives I know personally in Canada and the US), then that’s someone you can talk with; if your definition of “conservative” is limited to people who shout the N-word at Trump rallies and/or support the bombing of abortion clinics (like the people we see on Fox News or hear on talk radio), then not so much.
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One more point. There is a set of socially-progressive people who are somewhat trusted by conservatives, and that’s their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, etc. Barry Goldwater became an advocate for LGBT rights late in life not only because it was consistent with his libertarianism, but because his grandson was out. It’s the younger generation who convinced a majority of Americans (including many conservatives) to support marriage equality. And in the article you cited, the woman seemed that she would be willing at least to listen sympathetically to her Sanders-supporting daughter.
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Canadian conservatives don’t seem as shut off as Australian conservatives but yes there is a difference between those business conservatives and their tribal/nativist/culture war conservatives. I would even go as far as to call the former kind “business liberals” although that nomenclature wouldn’t fly in the USA. They aren’t the ones that are cut off from the conversation so much although they naturally trust the Republicans more than the Democrats. Some may follow the trend of holding their noses and voting for Hillary Clinton.
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Phil Rounds everyone should do what they think is right. I’m just saying that honest discussion is nearly impossible between two vastly different world views. I think it’s more constructive for liberals to engage with and support the liberal people that already live in these regions. Every place is in a state of change and those people will have a better chance of connecting with others of their communities.
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Yes David Megginson that was what I was getting at regarding “liberals from within their own communities”. Many of those liberals may in fact be libertarians but that not really a separate category, I’d just call them “business liberals”.
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Although it might not be likely that , by talking to a Conservative, you will change their worldview there’s the distinct possibility that subjecting certain of them to rational, well presented Liberal ideas it will sway them somewhat. I’ve had some little success with that. No die-hard Conservative is going to become Noam Chomsky as a result, but i’d say some might see the logic and common sense presented by someone like Bernie Sanders.
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John Hardy not a Turnbull fan I considered just using “liberal” for all economic centrists, but I do think there’s a genuine difference between (moderate) liberals and conservatives that goes beyond just the attitude towards trade and taxation. Centrist conservatives tend to resist social change by default, until proven worth the risk, while centrist liberals tend to embrace social change by default, until proven harmful.
Neither approach is ideal. Liberals embraced eugenics and aboriginal residential schools in the first half of the 20th century just as eagerly as they embraced women’s suffrage and the New Deal. That’s why I think the best policies come out of cooperation between the two groups, one of which always wants to hit the accelerator, and the other, the brakes (though as a social liberal, I think you need to use the accelerator much more often than the brake if you’re going to get anywhere).
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That kind of “political ecological” perspective i.e. seeing utility in conservatism as a damping mechanism which leads to an optimal outcome is fundamentally liberal outlook. You’ll rarely get the compliment repaid by the other side. Conservatives never see any utility in liberalism. Looking backwards into the past, if a change has been deemed worthwhile (anti-slavery, universal suffrage, civil rights and (in the future) marriage equality) then it will be retroactively recast as having always been a conservative cause and emphasis will be put on the conservative pedigrees of the social reformers. Liberalism therefore is seen as a purely destructive force which is associated with the decline and decadence of an era but the products of liberalism will be assimilated and rebranded.
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Again, we might be looking at different kinds of conservatism. Most (moderate) conservatives I know are quite willing to talk, and have changed their views repeatedly over the past decades (as I have). It’s tempting to use “conservative” just as an “not-us/enemy” label — helped along by the far-right reactionaries in the US trying to claim exclusive ownership of the term — but I don’t see that as much different from people in Boston hating the New York Yankees just because they’re the rival baseball team.
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I guess I’m talking about reactionaries who claim ownership of the word “Conservatism” much as certain evangelical fundamentalists lay claim to the word “Christian”. These conservatives are “movement” conservatives and they have an ideology and a political programme.
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