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[MetalSlimeHunt]

In fairness, the more one cares about politics, the more likely one is to become an outlier. Even posting in this thread marks one as having an above-average political dedication. It's hard to imagine, but a lot of people out there treat politics in the same vein as even more people treat culture and religion. They just...do what their parents tell them to and don't think about it, telling their children to do the same.

[Egan_BW]

Or the same way that people treat sports.

[redwallzyl]

There is an extremely visible oscillation between "liberal" and "conservative" dominance in the body politic. Much of this is classical thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. Starting post-War (due to the radical realignments that sprung up from the Depression), the staid mid-forties to late fifties icons of American conservatism gave way to the flower children of the sixties to mid seventies, which gave way to the conservative Eighties, which lead to the freewheeling nineties, to the conservative resurgence of the turn of the century.

In a real sense, many of the problems we're facing today come from the increasing rapidity of this cycle. In the past, we usually stayed one course long enough for the ideas to get played out, but also to have the good parts of the philosophies engraved in the body politic. Nowadays, social change is coming so swift that we don't have time to form a proper synthesis - we just have thesis and antithesis switching places rapidly and smashing each other with rocks.

Sounds like a very America centric model. also an old one. a newer one that I have recently read I will attempt to summarize now in a total disservice to the original paper. there is a very modern crisis of identity. things are so interconnected in such a complex way its hard to trace so what is effecting any one area might as well be chaos theory unless your crazy through on it. but some things can be said "deterritorialization" that is grossly simplified as global diaspora and diffuse influence is disassociating and upsetting a previously more static system rapidly changing how people interpret and imagine everything especially identity. This plays into the modern crisis of what is refereed to as cultural reproduction. the passing down as it were of ways. you can see this in the sudden spring of diffuse nationalism around the world. its very much a reverse homogenization. people are identifying with the nation (not synonymous with the state) and that manifesting itself as conflict between groups and groups and the state. That was probably a horrible summery. but it all wraps around the connection, identity and the disjuncture of people in the modern world.

[Reelya]

That's pretty much it. Jonothan Haidt has some videos talking about that exactly, since he studied specifically the basis of both conservative and liberal moralities as his main body of research.

Basically you have globalization of culture vs local culture. Cosmopolitans vs nationalists has been suggested as perhaps the new left/right divide. That's why traditional things like labor vs capital aren't so relevant in the new political schema.

e.g. this can explain left/liberal "confusion" about why so many working class people supported Trump. The left/liberals in question have the older labor vs capital worldview, so they view all struggles in terms of that, and critically they assume everyone else does too, so they have cognitive dissonance about working-class people who support Trump, and they rationalize this by one of several methods, e.g:

(1) you're lying, it's only upper-middle class people who support Trump. It's all lies!

(2) the working class have "false consciousness". And of course I have "real consciousness" on their behalf

... and so on. Basically either downplay or dismiss anything the supporters of the other side care about. Then wonder why they aren't listening ...

However, the problem with working out why working-class people aren't acting "like they're supposed to" in the "theory" is that the working person isn't using your theory to decided for themselves how the world works. To them, the categories and conflicts fall on completely different lines, so if you still couch things in the traditional labor vs capital framework, you might as well be speaking a foreign language.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I guarantee you that nobody in the mainstream American left is accusing the blue-collar population of having "false consciousness". At best you get endless pontificating on why people won't "vote in their own interests".

I again would like to reiterate a warning to everybody in AmeriPol about assigning too much importance to any one data point, which is all Trump really is in the end. When you look at the way Trump did things as a whole, and everything that happened around him, does that say "trend" or "outlier" to you?

Oh and:

(3) The working class doesn't support the left because the legacy of Reagan and Triangulation have lead to an extreme paucity of economic leftism in the United States, the closest mainstream version of which is neoliberalism with social democracy-levels of welfare. Because both parties have almost the same economic policy, workers and also everybody choose their sides primarily based on social and diplomatic policies, which ends up favoring the right in most demographics because the left has ceded one of the major battlegrounds almost entirely. This is also why some of the Republicans have gone mad dog loony about their economic policies, because they're desperately trying to distinguish themselves from the Democrats but the only place they can go is into the extreme obstructionist hypercapitalist hellscape.

[Reelya]

I guarantee you that nobody in the mainstream American left is accusing the blue-collar population of having "false consciousness".

Not in those words, but whenever you act or say that the other guy doesn't know their own best interests, you're applying the concept of "false consciousness".

I again would like to reiterate a warning to everybody in AmeriPol about assigning too much importance to any one data point, which is all Trump really is in the end. When you look at the way Trump did things as a whole, and everything that happened around him, does that say "trend" or "outlier" to you?

Huh? It implies the opposite actually. The fact that someone can be so freaking pathetic and still get elected on that platform suggests that the "outlier" part of it is merely that there wasn't a more competent fascist running, not that people didn't elect a fascist. e.g. if you elected an actual circus clown instead of a competent person in a suit, and the clown turns out to have down's syndrome and be a terrible leader. The "outlier" part isn't that you chose a clown.

[redwallzyl]

Ya, the old marxist dichotomy and others is breaking down. Their too simple to explain whats going on. Everything as a billion factors now.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I again would like to reiterate a warning to everybody in AmeriPol about assigning too much importance to any one data point, which is all Trump really is in the end. When you look at the way Trump did things as a whole, and everything that happened around him, does that say "trend" or "outlier" to you?

Huh? It implies the opposite actually. The fact that someone can be so freaking pathetic and still get elected on that platform suggests that the "outlier" part of it is merely that there wasn't a more competent fascist running, not that people didn't elect a fascist. e.g. if you elected an actual circus clown instead of a competent person in a suit, and the clown turns out to have down's syndrome and be a terrible leader. The "outlier" part isn't that you chose a clown.

No, I'm pretty sure that the outlier is choosing a clown. That's the part that doesn't happen a lot. Also, dear god, can you please make your arguments more straightforward? I've read this like a dozen times and I'm still not sure if I kept the negative count right.

[RedKing]

(1) you're lying, it's only upper-middle class people who support Trump. It's all lies!

Literally no one anywhere has espoused this view, because it's disproven by about a five-second Google image search of a Trump rally.

... and so on. Basically either downplay or dismiss anything the supporters of the other side care about. Then wonder why they aren't listening ...

Again, another bullshit strawman. Plenty of folks on the Left (myself included) understand why a lot of working-class people would support Trump. What infuriates us is that their support is built on a foundation of industrial-strength bullshit arguments and outright lies (it's all Mexico's fault! We're gonna bring back manufacturing and coal jobs! Liberals hate America! Obama is a Kenyan Muslim! etc. ad nauseum).

And those same people seem impervious to fact and cogent argument that no, in fact, that's not true. It's exceedingly difficult to stay engaged and sympathetic to someone who doubles-down on their own ignorance and tops it off with in-your-face belligerent pride in their own ignorance.

However, the problem with working out why working-class people aren't acting "like they're supposed to" in the "theory" is that the working person isn't using your theory to decided for themselves how the world works. To them, the categories and conflicts fall on completely different lines, so if you still couch things in the traditional labor vs capital framework, you might as well be speaking a foreign language.

Now, there is some truth to that. Which is to say, it's ethno-nationalist populism masquerading as economic populism. Sanders is an economic populist, which at its root, is what a lot of those working-class white Trump voters are really seeking. Trump (or more properly, the miasma of people surrounding him) are ethnonationalist populists exploiting both the sense of being left behind by globalism and capitalism, and the sense of being left behind by fairly sweeping generational changes in attitudes on social issues like gender rights, sexuality, abortion, etc. People who weren't culture warriors in the 80s and 90s, but now they're a little weirded out by things like transgender rights, SJWs, etc.

[Reelya]

(1) you're lying, it's only upper-middle class people who support Trump. It's all lies!

Literally no one anywhere has espoused this view, because it's disproven by about a five-second Google image search of a Trump rally.

I have a personal memory of this, because I was shot down myself in the Ameripol thread for suggesting working class people were Trump supporters, so I know this happened.

The counter-argument was to show graphs showing Republican primary voters had higher incomes than democrats, so that way liberals were able to pull the wool over their own eyes about the true scale of Trump's support base. People who tried to point it out were mocked, and the idea of Trump's working class base was openly dismissed as a false media narrative.

Perhaps this was retconned after the election debacle, but right up to the election people were downplaying the scale of Trump's actual support base.

[wierd]

I would also interject that I also suggested that working class people were supporting trump, in very dangerous numbers, and basically had a hail of fire fall down around me.

Additionally, I suggested that many people were voting for Trump out of misguided hope, as they were highly disenfranchised with the current establishments (both left and right), and many found the idea of gutting and sacking the government to be a ***POSITIVE*** thing, given how negatively they viewed the incumbent establishment actors, Hillary heavily underlined and in bold.

That too brought a hail of fire and brimstone.

[RedKing]

From whom? Certainly not me, as it was pretty damn clear that Trump had a working-class base given his rallies. I mean Jesus....that was his whole shtick, that he was running against the establishment elites (who by definition are upper-class).

EDIT: And certainly, no one who isn't off their meds is making that argument now, which is the important part. If you're claiming that liberals are being a bunch of snotty, holier-than-thou scolds who are missing the whole point, you might want to present a hypothetical argument that they're currently making, not one that a handful of idiots were making a year ago.

[Reelya]

From whom? Certainly not me

As I said, this happened to me, and wierd mentions something similar happened to him, so let's just say it was "a thing that happened". It was from people (who weren't RedKing), who were ideologically opposed to hearing that large numbers of working class people were siding with Trump, for whatever reasons (for which I already outlined a suggestion: cognitive dissonance between the old labor/capital divide in politics and the new cosmopolitan/nationalist divide).

The point was ... reality happened, and some people on the liberal side of things tried to define it as not happening because it didn't fit their internal model of how things work. And when it was clear the shit hit the fan, the reaction isn't "change my internal model" it's "reality has gone wrong". Which is the biggest threat to your own political ideology when you start thinking like that.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I think the whole idea that one party or the other has true control of wealth demographics is probably silly. They both have all three, it's the margins that count.

Democrats have the urban poor, the college-educated avocado toast middle class, and the wealthy who believe in enlightened self-interest.

Republicans have the rural poor, the anxiety-ridden suburbanite middle class, and the wealthy who say shit like "small loan of a million dollars".

Trump got the rural poor on his side, but I'm not convinced he did so in some great revelation. He focused most on them, and so he got more of them than a Blank Republican would.

[wierd]

Also, it is important to stress that it was not a minority view 1 year ago.

I was practically told point blank to GTFO for stating that I wanted sanders, and that I would not vote for either Hillary or Trump, because I refuse to vote for space mutants. (Citing the Simpson's false dichotomy between bad offer #1 and bad offer #2.)

It is true that Mainiac basically dominated the thread then, but the opinion that "Middle class and poor people voting for Trump makes precisely zero sense." was mainstream then.