Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
thesis of a possible effort-post. does this have legs?
Globalization didn’t have to break the working class, but blank slate liberalism did
A few decades ago you could show up with a 3rd grade education and still get a decent factory job that fed your family and gave your life... maybe not meaning, but some dignity. Today, those jobs are gone. Globalization took them, and now America has a surplus class of unemployable and underemployable mopes; people born too late for easy jobs but too early for gay-space communism to take care of them. They're stuck, adrift.
Was there any way to help them? Was the populist backlash unavoidable except for the choice of the form of our destroyer, Bernie Sanders’ classist rage or Trump's MAGA nationalist rage?
Is this a false choice? Yes, but the solution hinges on IQ realism. It hinges on slaying blank slate liberalism.
Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures but came out intact. They kept their working class employed, respected, and connected to dignity. How? By accepting a truth America refused: not everyone is wired for lambda calculus. Germany didn’t chase a fantasy of universal upskilling, or telling freshly unemployed coal miners to learn to code. Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting, precisely for the millions who weren't destined to debug beta reductions.
America, by contrast, swallowed a comforting lie: that we could escape globalization’s consequences without sacrifice. We embraced blank slate thinking, believing with enough TED talks and vocational bootcamps everyone could become high-skilled, high-status knowledge workers. We decided dignity wasn’t found in factories or plumbing, but in laptops and cubicles. Work that liberals secretly preferred.
But the bell curve didn’t care. IQ didn't budge. And so today, millions of Americans remain underemployed, abandoned, and pissed off.
Globalization didn't have to do this. Our denial of human cognitive differences, our stubborn insistence on the blank slate, did.
Germany got it right. America told itself comforting lies.
You have quite a bit of work to do to claim that the stagnation of manufacturing wages is due to globalization rather than technology, and also to claim that this is a US-specific issue. Lines like "Work that liberals secretly preferred" are just not good.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link