Going For Woke

Via Vox.

I'm always pleased to see somebody I admire catching up with some ideas I've been cherishing for a while, even more so when they're using words I might well have used myself, as in this from Washington Post's Greg Sargent on dated concepts of the US working class:

In the emerging Democratic reading, the old vision of a White, male, breadwinning working class concentrated in burly jobs shapes much political analysis, but it’s a pundit fiction. With service, retail and health-care sectors growing as manufacturing and mining jobs dwindle, the new working class is far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and more socially liberal — than commonly supposed.

What he's commenting on is the remarkable string of progressive legislation that's been coming out of Michigan all year since Democrats captured the state legislature in spite of its gerrymandering, most recently when they repealed the state's "right-to-work" law, enacted in 2012 to combat unions by disallowing closed shops so that workers could benefit from union contracts without paying union dues. 

Class Interests

 

The Branko Milanovic–Christoph Lakner "Elephant Chart" showing global growth rates from 1988 to 2008 arranged by income percentiles, with its four major highlights: mediocre growth in red for the poorest people, or most people in the poorest countries, extraordinary growth in green for most people in the emerging economies of Asia, especially China, serious stagnation in blue for the pretty rich people of western Europe and North America in particular, and fabulous growth in purple for the global super-rich (not as fabulous as China, but keep in mind that the 1% are starting with a lot more money, ending up by 2020 with 43% of all the wealth in the world).

This post from Nathan Newman ("Education Polarization in Elections: People Are Voting Their Class Interests"), giving me at long last a way of thinking about that "White Working Class" that makes some sense, has been sitting in an open tab on my computer for almost a month. He's looking at the same voting pattern as everybody else, but he's seeing it in the historical context of how it effectively happened that the outsourcing economy of the last 40-odd years primarily affected white workers in relatively rural areas; because that's how the distinction between workers in the growing service industries and and those in the shrinking manufacturing industries had sorted itself out in the US, where the former remained as traditional multiracial and urban, the latter came to be concentrated in

Victim-Blaming With a Human Face

 

Gloria Swanson in Lewis Milestone's/Richard Rosson's Fine Manners (1926).

David F. Brooks fries up some tasty leftover turkey and stuffing ("The Rotting of the Republican Mind"):

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on?

Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?

Why indeed? Brooks goes to the well of journalist and Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch, who became well known after the 1993 appearance of his Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks of Free Thought, which explained in the nicest, most clubbable possible way how the project of "political correctness"—the idea that one should refrain from using language that demeans and abuses and hurts members of racial, ethnic, sexual, and other kinds of groups less powerful than one's own—was in spite of its "wonderful moral clarity" actually "inherently deadly, not incidentally so—to intellectual freedom and to the productive and peaceful pursuit of knowledge". No, that's not the one Brooks is citing today. Today he's talking about Rauch's 2018 essay "The Constitution of Knowledge", which examines the relative success in misinformation-spreading of Trump and his army of "epistemic trolls" and points at—well, he points at the Internet, actually, like the other many people Brooks mostly rejects, but you have to read well over 20 paragraphs of the piece to find that out, and that's not the idea Brooks wants at the moment.

Mustache of Radical Love

When Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, gets depressed (I think of it as getting back on his meds) he can get insightful: today, on the subject of the bizarre war between the Department of Homeland Security and the municipal government of Portland, Oregon ("Trump's Wag-the-Dog War"), though he's still pretty crazy:

Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to “wag the dog” by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home. Be afraid — he just might get his wish.

Trump's told us all about how he hates endless foreign wars, but he's not opposed to domestic ones.

Listen to how Trump put it: “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you. Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”

These cities, Trump stressed, are “all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

Wrongthink

Siri, show me a stupid person's idea of a smart person.

It's the Intellectual Dark Singularity! Where on the same strange Tuesday, Andrew Sullivan gets the sack from New York Magazine

The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident, and I’ll be discussing the broader questions involved in my last column this Friday.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 14, 2020

the young throwback artist Bari Weiss, representing the liberalism of the good old days of Woodrow Wilson and Alan Dershowitz, takes her departure from the New York Times editorial board, to an extremely gloomy response from National Review's Rich Lowry

They warned Trump would bring fascism to America even as they implemented their own exquisite system of thought control https://t.co/D6HITsn7bp

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 14, 2020

and Squeaky Ben Shapiro the Straw Man King has emeritated hinself from the helm of the alleged publication he's been associated with, "The Daily Wire" (I have to admit while I haven't seen any proof it exists, I haven't looked very hard)

Don't Care

Drawing by Peter Brookes.

Roger Cohen, a columnist from whom I sometimes learn sort of useful and nonpartisan things, in The Times, on the kinds of voters he thinks Democrats should be aiming at for 2020:

Chuck Hardwick, lifelong Republican, former Pfizer executive, now retired in Florida, voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but not without misgivings. He’d met him in the 1980s and noted a “consuming ego.” Still, elections are about choices, and he disliked the “scheming” Clintons. He was mad at the media for first mocking Trump during the primaries and then turning on him as nominee.

Three years later, Hardwick, 78, whose political career included a stint as speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly, is unsure how he will vote in November 2020. Trump confounds him. He admires the president’s energy, his courage in taking on difficult issues like China “stealing its way to prosperity,” his corporate tax cuts, and what he sees as a revitalizing impact on American ambition.

“But if I was on a board that had hired Trump as C.E.O.,” Hardwick tells me, “I’d have to say to him: ‘You’ve got good traits but you can’t manage people. You’re fired.’”

Steve M is pretty savage about the piece, which more or less pulls a Salena Zito on us in suggesting there is any possibility that this man, a mainstay of the New Jersey GOP though the 1980s who worked hard for National Right to Life and NRA endorsements, is a necessary element of a Democratic victory:

What Got You Trump

Continuation from yesterday

Photo via Garrett Bridger Gilmore, "David Brooks's Imaginary Friends", at The Outline.

Opinion

Why NeverTrumpers Keep Trumping

An imagined conversation with Capitol Hill Opinionist.

Upper West Side Blogger: I hope you read the transcript of that Trump phone call with the Ukrainian president and the whistleblower complaint and the WhatsApp messages among the various flunkies. Trump clearly used his power to withhold defensive weapons from a foreign ally to ask the ally to forge documents incriminating his political opponent. This is impeachable. Not to mention trying to give some kind of official status to Rudy Giuliani's tinfoil hat theories about how Russia didn't interfere with the 2016 elections and Paul Manafort was wrongly convicted and everything in Volume I of the Mueller Report was apparently some kind of hallucination. I don’t see how you can deny the facts in front of your face.

Voyage into the Heart of Whiteness, Revisited

The death of Cleopatra, by Domenico Riccio, via Daily Beast.

Opinion

Why Trump Voters Stick With Him

An imagined conversation with Flyover Man.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

• Oct. 3, 2019

Honest to god, and then he gets offended when people make fun of him for offering an argument-by-fiction.

I checked Twitter today and saw the last column got some criticism. For the record I visit 4 states a week. In the last two it’s been Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, and Georgia. If my columns stink it’s not from lack of contact with Trump voters.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) October 5, 2019

That's only 3.5 states per week so far, sorry. And last week you only went to three.

It's not so much the quantity of contact as the quality, my dear David. You may talk to all kinds of people, but you show few signs of having listened to them. And then when it's time to write it up you give us an "imagined conversation", as your dek text puts it, instead of a real interview, and answer your question by making it up.

Demographics

Something I've been saying for quite a while now about the 2016 presidential election: that the Trump "base" isn't exactly like that pathetic picture of the bewildered "white working class" left behind by globalization. Yes, they're white and don't have college degrees, but the real core are financially pretty comfortable, typically owners of small businesses, with sufficient leisure to eat breakfast out every morning and give interviews to The New York Times pretending to represent the working class, while their abject and underpaid employees (who rarely vote at all) open the shops. That's who made the party what it is today, which is strangely similar to what it used to be, back when it was the party of the wealthy.

So now there's some relevant information, surfacing in the column of the Times opinionist nobody ever notices because he's too interested in reality, Thomas B. Edsall ("We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is"), reporting research by Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, and I can report that the numbers don't exactly support a strong version of the theory, but they do confirm that there's something there:

Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

Brooks sights the rare White Democrat

Opinion

How White Opinion Columnists Moved Centerwards

Racial equity has become the defining issue of the moment.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

• July 25, 2019

People are always changing their minds, day to day. But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white opinion columnists. I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, and the effects are reshaping our politics.

The easiest way to describe the shift is to say that educated opinion columnists have moved steadily to the center. In 1994, only about a sixth of pundits who had gone to graduate school said they were neither liberal nor conservative but really appreciated the ideas on both sides and wished everybody would be more civil. In 2015, more than 50 percent did. In 1994, only 12 percent of pundits with college degrees said they were consistently neutral. Eleven years later, 47 percent did, according to the Pew Research Center.

Hi It's Stupid: White Working Class edition

Cooperative Congressional Election Study 2016.

Hi, it's Stupid to say there's no such thing in the United States as "the white working class", but there's an elegant new way of saying it, from Thomas B. Edsall, the New York Times columnist so colorless that nobody even knows whether they hate him or not, but I often kind of like him, when I remember to take a look, as in this case, where it's right in the headline: "There Are Really Two Distinct White Working Classes".

The idea, which is drawing on polling for the AFL-CIO that I think I don't have access to, is that when you look at the polling category of white people without college degrees (standing in for the hopelessly ill-defined "white working class" category), which would be an enormous group if it was in fact a bloc, from 48% to 54% (see above chart) of the electorate, they are very sharply divided by political behavior, around 40% of them being Democrats or Democrat leaners, and about 50% Republicans or Republican leaners (the leaners being pretty small groups on both sides), with the balance being true independents.

They're also distinct in other demographic ways, as you might expect. The non-college white Democrats are a lot younger, twice as many of them under 38 or so as the Republicans, and a lot more female (59%-41%, as opposed to 51%-49%). They are markedly less Christian, and less evangelical/born-again in particular. Edsall doesn't give any figures for income, but I think these factors make it obvious that the Democrats have a good deal less money, and from there I would speculate, on lines I've talked about before, that the non-college white Democrats are much more likely to be low-level employees, while non-college white Republicans are the ones who have mastered the art of getting rich without a college degree, the proprietors of small or tiny businesses. Hold that thought for a few minutes.

Restless Natives

Poster for the 1985 film by Michael Hoffman.

A slightly fresher version of the thesis about how "we" cosmopolitans, I guess, need to listen to "them" rednecks, or whoever the enemy is supposed to be, as long as you understand they're not supposed to be the enemy, came on my radio yesterday morning, at 6:00, and I found myself not going back to sleep. It was an interview with the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, a clearly better qualified person to defend any thesis than David Brooks or Bari Weiss in the New York Times, but I still got irritable right away.

Hochschild, a Berkeley professor emerita who has been hanging out ethnographically with people from southwestern Louisiana since 2011, whose "deep story" she elicited and wrote up in her Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which came out last January and has been praised as "humble" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande:

The metaphor for the right-wing deep story that I describe in Strangers is that you’re waiting in line for the American dream that you feel you very much deserve. It’s like waiting in a pilgrimage, and the line isn’t moving. Your feet are tired. You feel you are properly deserving of this reward that’s ahead. And the idea is, you don’t begrudge anyone in this right deep story. You’re not a hateful person. But then you see — the second moment of the right-wing deep story — somebody cutting ahead of you. Why are they getting special treatment?

Then, in another moment, the president of the country, Barack Obama, who should be tending fairly to all waiters-in-line, seems to be waving to the line cutters. In fact, “Is he a line cutter?” — the idea is. How did his mother — she was a single mother, not a rich woman — afford a Harvard education, a Columbia education? Something fishy happened. That was the thought there.

It's what's for breakfast

Sweatshirt via Beloved Wear LLC.

There could be a purpose to all those journalists reporting on breakfast in Trumpland if they'd only report on the economic realities in which the breakfasts take place, as in the case of this big AP story from last week, which explains that

a striking number of Trump counties are losing jobs. The AP found that 35.4 percent of Trump counties have shed jobs in the past year, compared with just 19.2 percent of Clinton counties.

The jobs data shows an economy that is as fractured as the political landscape ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. As more money pools in such corporate hubs as Houston, San Francisco or Seattle, prosperity spills over less and less to smaller towns and cities in America’s interior. That would seem to undercut what Trump sees as a central accomplishment of his administration — job creation for middle class and blue-collar workers in towns far removed from bustling urban centers.

Thus all of the job growth in Texas has been in Democratic-run cities, while in the Republican rural counties things keep getting worse.

And in Beaver County, PA, northwest of Pittsburgh, which has lost 191 jobs in the past 18 months even as the workforce shrank by 1000 from things like outmigration,

Getting Old

Via me.me.

"He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff. But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old." Defending their support for President Trump has become somewhat of a bonding experience for Republicans. https://t.co/1Mwompb2OZ

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) June 23, 2018

Kind of like the old bowling league. In these days of crumbling social institutions, emptying churches, declining volunteer fire departments and reading groups, when things start to fall quiet among the breakfast crowd at the Sweet Pie 'n' Bye, you can sense the 2016 nostalgia, and somebody's bound to say, "Say, why don't we call up the New York Times and tell them we're still Republicans? Maybe they'll send down that nice young Jeremy Peters!"

For the Record: The Self-Denominated Far Left

Drawing by Matthew Diffey, New Yorker via.

So young Master Walker Bragman, the limousine leftist who seems to be aiming at being the HA GOODMAN of the 2018 campaign, took umbrage at a tweet from neoliberal shill Dr. Krugman:

Hey, Roseanne Barr is only worth $80 million, and was being paid only 250K per episode. So her tweets were clearly driven by economic anxiety https://t.co/2SBgBJge0z

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 29, 2018

Promise, what follows is NOT ABOUT ROSEANNE. It's about that zombie "economic anxiety" theory of the Trump vote, which keeps coming back, and bad faith argumentation:

Trump voters aren't suffering from economic anxiety (median income $75K compared to $50K for Clinton, not to mention Roseanne). Poor people and low-wage workers are suffering from it and unfortunately fewer vote than other income groups.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

Satire

Boy representing the month of June in a Roman mosaic calendar, 3rd century, posted by user Saliko at Wikmedia Commons.

By unpopular demand, I feel obliged to say a few words about the Indiana journalist Adam Wren and his Politico Magazine piece "My 72-Hour Safari in Clinton Country", which has roused a lot of comment around the neighborhood, and about which I already expressed an unpopular view (over at Steve's place), which is that when Wren says his piece is "satire", he is being sincere, though probably wrong in the sense that he doesn't have a very clear idea what satire is like.

But he did have an idea of a target, apparently, when he was pitching the piece to Politico (or, in his version, they were pitching him):

My editors had given me this assignment as something of a lark. The idea: Just as reporters from New York and D.C. trek into Trump Country to visit greasy spoons and other corners of Real America™ to measure support for the candidate, I’d venture from Trump Country to the most stereotypical bastions of coastal liberal elitism, and ask the people I met whether they still support Hillary Clinton. An innocent abroad, I would leave Hamilton County, Indiana, a deep-red suburb north of Indianapolis that Trump won by nearly 20 points, the kind of place where the Koch brothers are presently carpet-bombing Democrat Senator Joe Donnelly with $2 million in television and digital ads for his vote against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Once on the decadent East Coast, I would luxuriate in its undiluted upscale liberal consensus at bookstores, wine bars, cafes and other Blue State institutions peopled by NPR tote-bagging sophisticates. Perhaps I’d drop in on something activist-y, a meeting of Resistance types.

When a hoo-ha erupted about the assumptions of the piece, that Clinton voters are all decadent, undilutedly upscale sophisticates who spend all their time consuming high-end products like books and booze except when they're whipping up the Molotov cocktails at their Resistance meetings (in spite of the fact that there are three million more of us than there are of them), and its procedure of looking only for evidence that confirms it, Wren explained that what he was producing was "satire":

For the Record: Ben Shapiro's Working Class

I didn't watch Roseanne back when she was still alive, so to speak, s so I can't imagine why I'd be watching her now, but I've still managed to acquire enough opinions to take issue with young Ben Shapiro, who's pissed off because Roseanne and Dan voted for Trump but are not in his opinion authentic Trump voters, who are all, in his view, identical:

The whole premise of "Roseanne" is that this pro-abortion, pro-LGBT woman who is happy to watch her grandson wear girls' clothing voted Trump -- because she's blue collar. That isn't an accurate depiction of Trump voters. (/3)

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 28, 2018

I started out trollishly agreeing with him:

You're right, it would have been better if Dan was more clearly self-employed and somewhat better off, but the age and lack of education fit the profile very well. I'm pretty sure sexual puritanism wasn't a factor either way.

— Smash-Mouth Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) March 29, 2018

It lacks (damn the word!) empathy

Another Blast From Kevin D. Williamson's Past:  Remember how he took on the white working class Trump supporter in March 2016 as "whelping human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog"? That's the kind of spirit they need at The Atlantic!

Mr. Trump Potato Head, by Hannah Rothstein. Via Time.

Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review, a day or two ago, telling us how he really feels about those white working class Trump voters (rearranging slightly):

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization.... Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.... nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

You seem nice, Kevin.

And now he can't believe everybody's so pissed off with him! Well, I guess he remembers it a little differently, because he doesn't wonder if he was wrong to compare people to dysfunctional, negligent, incomprehensibly malicious stray dogs who are 100% to blame for whatever suffering they may endure. What? No, he thinks it's about the advice he gave them; he's

Ill-educated But Well-off White Sexagenarians are the Real Hippies

Mungo Thomson, "Levitating Pentagon", colored pencil on paper, 2004, via Kenneth Pobo.

But before I get to David F. Brooks, in breaking news, the Senate just did something: confirmed Trump's second nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, corporate lawyer William Emanuel, giving it a Republican majority which is expected to take away some of the gains achieved by workers during the past three or so years (for most of Obama's two terms, Senate Republicans wouldn't allow him to have a functioning National Labor Relations Board at all). Or at least that's what Senators Warren and Murray are worried about (I'm quoting from Fortune):

that he would favor industry over workers on a board they view as tasked with protecting fair working conditions and the right to collective bargaining.

However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said the board should act as a neutral party in the resolution of labor disputes, rather than explicitly protecting workers as his Democratic colleagues suggested. He said the board had become too activist under Obama and expressed hope that Emanuel could return it to impartiality.

For their part, industry groups said they welcomed the addition and hoped Emanuel would soon lead the board to undo Obama-era policies, including allowing employees to organize in “micro-unions” and holding franchisors responsible for franchisees’ violations of labor law.

Love how McConnell objects to fairness because that's not neutral and feels the Board needs to be more passive (its official mission is to enforce the 1935 National Labor Relations Act protecting the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively, not to beam equally on the parties to a dispute and ask them to get along).

Anyway I guess that must be what Brooks is getting at with his lede this morning:

Turnout troofing

Yesterday the Times Upshot ran a piece by Nate Cohn analyzing the 2016 presidential election in terms of what looks to me like another take in the Legendary White Working Class family of takes, identifying the crucial factor in Trump's victory as that particular set of white-no-college voters who voted for Obama in 2008 and/or 2012 but for Trump in 2016, and who are said to have made this remarkable switch mostly out of racial resentment (I actually don't think that's as bizarre as it sounds, but the obvious question it raises, of why a white person who voted for Obama one year would turn around against Clinton out of racial resentment the next time, is one Cohn doesn't even discuss) and then out of disappointment with Obama and then lastly because they agree with Trump's policy prescriptions as they understand them.

Which Cohn does not take to mean that Democrats need to appeal more to racists, even though that's what his data makes it sound like, but that we should take positions more like those of imaginary Trump, in favor of lots of infrastructure spending, and trade protectionism, and relatively relaxed sexual views. The great Zandar of Kentucky, though, hears Cohn thinking it, and he doesn't like it:

What that means is that Cohn is strongly suggesting that in order to be competitive, Democrats have to make a sea change to attract voters that harbor no small amount of racial resentment. Trump was able to leverage that resentment into massive distrust of the Obama administration and Democrats in general.

The problem is that this will come at a cost, and the cost will be borne by black, Latinx, and Asian voters and candidates [and female candidates too, I'd add].  I've said before that this path is suicidal for the Dems and so far Trump is making it incredibly easy to make the Democrats be the party of inclusiveness in comparison by simple dint of Trump's overwhelmingly awful racism, if not open support of white supremacists.

Nor do I.