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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35581 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/

Pull quotes:

The fact that Trump is doing considerably better among Republican voters of color than White Republicans flies in the face of the fact that many Americans view Trump as racist. I noted in 2019 that more Americans described Trump as racist than the percentage of Americans who said that about segregationist and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968.

This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.

Indeed, the Republican Party as a whole has been improving among voters of color. The party’s 38-point loss among that bloc for the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms was a 5-point improvement from 2020. Its margin among White voters stayed the same in exit poll data.

This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

I don't think that returning to historic trends can really be counted as a realignment. Looking at the black vote since 1932 gives us these numbers:

1932: 77%

1936: 28%

1940: 32%

1944: 32%

1948: 23%

1952: 24%

1956: 39%

1960: 32%

1964: 6%

1968: 15%

1972: 13%

1976: 17%

1980: 14%

1984: 9%

1988: 11%

1992: 10%

1996: 12%

2000: 9%

2004: 11%

2008: 4%

2012: 6%

2016: 8%

2020: 12%

Blacks largely turned to Democrats during the New Deal; they had largely been wary of them before due to the historic association with the Republicans and concern that national leaders were too beholden to the racist Southerners who comprised their base. The next big drop was in 1964, when Goldwater specifically opposed civil rights legislation while Johnson explicitly supported it. Then it recovered to a stable equilibrium on either side of 10%. before dropping again in 2008. This was due less to anything McCain or the Republicans did, though, than to the presence of Barack Obama in the race. With Obama out in 2012, Trump was bound to get a larger share of the black vote, though it took until 2020 for the numbers to recover to near the historic average. Similarly, looking at the Hispanic vote since 1976 we get:

1976: 18%

1980: 37%

1984: 34%

1988: 30%

1992: 25%

1996: 21%

2000: 35%

2004: 44%

2008: 31%

2012: 27%

2016: 28%

2020: 32%

Here it's even worse since the party isn't getting huge swings so much as staying consistent over time. The big news was that in the 2022 midterms Republicans got 39% of the vote, which would be a sizeable increase (though still not the record). But that overlooks that looking at midterm results is more than a bit misleading since not all states vote in major midterm elections. There are obviously House races everywhere, but these races aren't big enough to get a decent sample size for exit polling, a lot of them involve candidates running unopposed, and redistricting makes direct comparisons difficult, so where they do exist they're usually excluded from comprehensive numbers. Only five states with a population greater than 8% Hispanic had gubernatorial elections, and only 4 had Senate elections. And the gubernatorial races are already suspect because they often don't really tell you anything about how a state feels nationally—Vermont, Maryland, and Massachusetts all have Republican governors, and Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky all have Democratic governors, and none of those states are even swing states, let alone identified with the party of their respective governors. Anyway, FWIW, DeSantis got 58% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, but from there it drops off a cliff, with Republicans getting 47% in Arizona, 40% in Texas, 37% in Nevada, and 25% in Pennsylvania. The Senate, which is probably a more accurate signifier, looks a little worse, with Republicans getting 55% in Florida, 40% in Arizona, 33% in Nevada, and 31% in Pennsylvania.

But there's something missing from this breakdown. Actually, quite a few things. California had no elections that counted, and it has the largest Hispanic population in the country. Ditto New York, the number four state, as well as number 5 Illinois, number 7 New Jersey, and number 8 Colorado. The Hispanic uptick is dominated by massive numbers in Florida and above average numbers in Texas. Arizona held its own as well, but it's only a recent addition to the swing state club, and the numbers in Pennsylvania and Nevada, neither particularly blue, are about in line with 2020. I think it's a bit premature to say that there's a relalignment going on among Hispanic voters. There's certainly somewhat of an uptick in GOP support, but 2020 wasn't really an abberation from historic averages, and 2022's uptick was limited to certain places that may not be representative of the country as a whole, and one year does not make a trend. I'd want to see more consistent growth before coming to any conclusions.

That is a generally upwards trend in the Hispanic GOP vote, though. There was a spike with bush, which dropped off a Cliff with McCain and Romney, and trump brought it back to near bush levels.

I think a lot of this is people leaving the Democratic Party not so much because they agree with the GOP, but because the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class on almost every issue, and has become the party of the elites and sneering at the working class.

Hispanics are Catholics generally, and thus are pretty strong Christians (at least culturally), strongly pro family, and are thus pretty conservatives on most social issues. They also fled parts of the world run by criminal gangs and would thus be fairly strong on law and order stuff. Blacks are usually conservative Protestants and thus also pro family, and so on. They might also want the supposed left-leaning economic policies, but on social issues, they’re pretty conservative.

Which gives the democrats two major problems. First, they’re not only against these more conservative social policies, but they often sneer at anyone not fully on board with them. They aren’t just generally in favor of LGBT stuff, they insist on drag queen story hour, full on drag shows in elementary schools, and so on. Secondly, they are not even trying to deliver any of the kinds of policies that would help the working class. The last minimum wage increase was just after the financial crisis of 2008. Biden had both houses and all he really needed to do was ignore the parliamentarian— who he can outright fire — to put a minimum wage increase in a budget bill where it might have passed. He chose not to. Instead the big economic policies of the moment are environmentalist infrastructure and paying off student loans (and he was blocked on the loans).

Now if you oppose the woke stuff, and don’t like being lectured to about it, that’s a strike on the democratic side. They aren’t upholding your beliefs and values. In fact the6 often mock you for holding them. They’re teaching things in your kids schools you don’t like, and often at the expense of very necessary skills that your kids need for their future.

And there’s nothing gained by holding your nose for them. They’re not working on making working class lives better. They sold out the train engineers. They aren’t raising the minimum wage at all, they’re not paying for trade schools or on the job training. They’re not teaching your kids to read. They’re not even doing anything about drugs and crime. They care about Ukraine, they care that the upper class failsons are unable to pay back their loans. They care about the cultural interests of the laptop class.

Yeah, I think that's it. There are a lot of normal "voters of colour" and the people who owned/worked in small businesses and saw them get smashed up in rioting for the whole BLM circus, and the Democratic Party defending all that, are the ones likely to say "Oh hell no" and look for an alternative.

When even the white liberal parents are questioning what is going on in school districts, do you think black and Hispanic parents are going to be "Oh how delightful, I get to Drag My Kids To Pride"?

There’s a misconception that Hispanic Catholicism is a driving force in Hispanics moving towards the GOP(which does appear to be a trend over time, but one with lots of spikes and stops and steps backwards)- in reality, while church attending Hispanic Catholics probably vote more GOP than non-attending Hispanics, a lot of the GOP’s recent strength with Hispanics has been their ability to run up their margins among Hispanic evangelicals until they’re voting almost like white evangelicals. I don’t deny that the recent prominence of the abortion issue has probably hurt the democrats among Hispanic Catholics(who I would, BTW, not associate with particularly strong homophobia compared to either white Catholics or other Hispanics), but the trend is utterly swamped by the rightward lurch among Hispanic evangelicals.

If Desantis/Abbott/Trump/whoever is in Arizona can figure out how to get church attending Hispanic Catholics voting like Hispanic Protestants, that’s huge and also unexpected.

I notice this poll is compatible with whites angry at Trump for not being racist enough. Or COVID-skeptic enough, or loud enough, whatever. Dissatisfied, in some way, but unwilling to jump ship and register D. It’s not so surprising that different Republicans want different things from him.

For that matter, there aren’t that many nonwhite Republicans, period. That’s one obvious avenue for selection bias. If you think Trump’s a racist, by God, the Democrats will be happy to agree. No realignment necessary.

I remember thinking that the Christian right would collapse in the wake of Obama’s re-election. If it’s even done so, it’s been in slow motion, more shelved than imploded. Any realignment to right-populism is going to be just as slow and noncommittal.

I notice this poll is compatible with whites angry at Trump for not being racist enough.

Is it? In what way? That richer, more educated voters are more racist than the poorer, less educated ones? And they think DeSantis is more racist than Trump, and so prefer him as a potential candidate?

I can see half of that, but the other seems ridiculous.

I was thinking in terms of dissatisfaction. If whites saw Trump as betraying his initial campaign, say, by mellowing on race or on vaccines, they might poll against him. Depending on which issues pulled minorities to vote Republican, those same factors may not apply.

My confidence in any conclusion is pretty low.

I remember thinking that the Christian right would collapse in the wake of Obama’s re-election. If it’s even done so, it’s been in slow motion, more shelved than imploded. Any realignment to right-populism is going to be just as slow and noncommittal.

What would that have looked like?

Take all of this with the grain of salt: I was definitely just discovering libertarianism as a political force, with all the pretension that entails.

At the time, I viewed the 2012 election as a referendum on the negative tactics of the GOP. There had been two major attempts to repeal the ACA with, as I saw it, no credible attempts to build something else. The Tea Party was in full swing, milking the debt ceiling crisis for all it was worth. It was the time of the weaponized filibuster. And it was the time of birtherism and Dijon mustard.

So when all this “negative” politics failed to oust Obama, I concluded that the GOP must be in shambles. I figured that its coalition was going to splinter before dropping the parts that weren’t pulling any weight. Since my exposure to the party planks was largely filtered through Fox News, that meant Christianity. I’d just watched Rick Santorum get thrashed in the primary by a big-business moderate. Roe v. Wade wasn’t on the table. The religious squabbles of the early 2000s seemed so thoroughly settled. Clearly, the libertarians were going to get folded into a new, more constructive Republican Party.

And yes, I realize this evidence could have been taken the exact opposite way: a sign Republicans needed to double down on social conservatism. Arguably, that’s what ended up happening, as the party struggles with a Democratic insistence on idpol. I don’t claim that my youthful political theorizing was very good.

The word racist means whatever the media wants it to mean. Bears no resemblance to 60+ years ago.

Both sides claim to be for the working class yet this is like paying lip service for votes. I don't think either care that much.

I agree. This is about judging the advertising, not the underlying corruption.

Is it a realignment? This article doesn't really provide evidence of that. It shows that Trump is doing better among non-whites when looking at Republican voters and comparing to other Republican candidates. This doesn't necessarily generalize to doing better among non-whites in general, or doing better compared to non-Republican politicians. I believe that Scott has a few posts that show some evidence that he did (or e.g. improved his performance among non-whites from 2016 to 2020), although the effect is not as strong as the one described in this article.

Your caution is correct, this alone proves nothing and this could go either way.

But I think there's a little more meat on it than that. As the article notes, the breakdown is more economic than racial, but race correlates with income. It means the working class is the margin of victory within the Republican Party, which also means that the (relatively small number , currently) minority Republicans have increasing influence. In the same way a Democrat has a tough path to the presidency if they do not do well in the heavily black south, so Republicans have a hard road if they do not win the working class of the Midwest.

The realignment will hit its stride when one party manages to break down the barriers to whichever side of the working class isn't in their coalition. Either the Republicans convince working blacks/hispanics that they can represent their interest better than the Democrats, or the Democrats convince working whites that they can represent their interests at all. Either way, this process is probably going to inform the next thirty years of politics.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

Probably the best idea would be to breakdown the individual positions. Taking my working class neighbors at their word the positions they are roughly in favor of are (not a complete list of course):

  1. Reduced immigration - Right coded

  2. Traditional morality/End of wokeness/American values taught in schools - Right coded

  3. Universal Healthcare for Americans - Left coded

  4. Regulations on businesses to prevent them screwing over workers pensions/workers comp - Left coded

  5. Cheap college for their kids - Left coded

  6. Federal money into rural/rust belt communities - Both?

  7. Protectionist trade/manufacturing policies - Right coded nowadays?

I live in a rustbelt town where my neighbors are ex miners/steelworkers and the like. Notably Bernie Sanders got a pretty good reception nearby when talking about holding big businesses accountable for pensions and better access to healthcare. My neighbors don't want their kids to be miners or steelworkers because they have the injuries, missing fingers, limps, bad backs and the like to show for it. They want their kids to have "better" careers and options than they did. And for most that means they want them sitting in an office. And that means mostly a college degree. That's why so many want to send their kids off to college. Not all of course and I think if you look at plumbers and other tradesmen it changes somewhat. But most of the manual workers emphatically do not want their kids to have to do what they did. For better or worse, they have bought in, I think to the American dream, which involves higher education.

Trump was popular here for campaigning on/towards 1,2, 6 and 7. Bernie Sanders would have hit 3, 4, 5 and 6 perhaps. 6 is unclear politically because farm subsidies and green subsidies are in play for both sides so depending on framing spending could be either. Though it would probably annoy the Libertarian leaning wing of the Republican party. 7 used to be more left wing Union sides leaning but is probably more associated with Trump style populism now.

Interestingly the poisoning of the idea of unions has been very effective. My neighbors might wish there was a group that would advocate for the workers and protect them against rich business owners outsourcing their companies to India or Mexico, but they don't want unions because they associate that with corruption and the like. Trust in the Federal government is low, but the idea that the Federal government SHOULD protect it's working people over business owners is pretty strong, they would be likely to call big Business leaning Republicans as RINOS and the like. Whereas a century ago miners unions fought near wars against mining companies for workers rights.

Some excerpts from Sanders town hall in "Trump Country"

"He (Sanders) reminded everyone of how hard he was working to get Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to restore pensions and health care that they had been cheated of by the mining companies."

"They applauded Philip Lucion, an almost painfully sincere coal miner, recently rehired (Thanks, Mr. Trump!), when he told them, “I love being a coal miner, that’s what’s in my blood.” They also applauded when he said that most miners he knew would quit and do something else for the same pay and benefits if they could."

"They agreed with Bernie that climate change is real"

"Coal mining, they knew, killed you quick or killed you slow, and the only way to get anything out of it was to make a serious demand on power."

"Their support for “Medicare for all” seems genuine,"

This one was from a different town hall in PA:

"When the town hall moved to Medicare for All, the single-payer health-care plan that Sanders backs, Baier asked for a show of hands from everyone currently getting health care through their employer: Most of the hands in the room went up, Baier's and Sanders's among them. Then came the follow-up. "Of those," Baier asked, "how many are willing to transition to what the senator says, a government-run system?" Hands fired back up and the crowd began cheering."

A working class Republican party would be like a Trump/Sanders unity ticket. Trump's immigration and MAGA and protectionism combined with targeting the proceeds at the working class through healthcare, pensions and siding against big business/ the 1%.

I wonder how Medicare for all would poll against literally just giving everyone checks. Across the entire political spectrum, helicopter money from the government seems to be very popular. Getting something for nothing is always an easy choice. I think free stuff is what's popular here, not the prospect of being roped into a bloated government healthcare scheme. Given the choice, would a typical working class American rather have Medicare or $10,000/year?

The main issue is that the left have been successfully propagandized to that they need both socialized medicine and UBI, and the right has been succesfully propagandized to that they need neither, ensuring no one on either side notices here that a better, perhaps the best, solution is spending as much money as is currently spent on the safety net on UBI instead, being in the process more generous in general to recipients (less money being lost in administrative matters) while at least partly preserving market incentives.

One of the concerns about drastically changing the health care system is that, despite it's flaws, people using the system are concerned that changing it could make it worse in at least their local case. People want to "keep their doctor," and aren't sure whether their doctor covered by their current insurance would take Medicare For All. For better or worse, the folks shouting about "keeping government out of my Medicare" don't directly care that the government is paying, but they do care if they have to change doctors or pay more out of pocket: major changes to reimbursement rates or rules could absolutely cause their doctor to drop Medicare patients.

While insurance companies often mix things up (changing in-network providers to out-of-network annually), there isn't much trust that a federal solution would be better. Witness the SNAFU that was the launch of the ACA exchanges, or that the states promising to move to single-payer at the time have all quietly dropped those plans.

Helicopter money for healthcare probably polls better because it changes these things less directly by distorting the market and is difficult to compare.

Yes, exactly. Here's my model of the preferences of an average person.

  1. Government gives me $10,000/year per family member (average cost per beneficiary is $15,000 in 2021 FYI)

  2. Government gives me free health care

  3. Nothing changes

  4. Government forces me to pay $10,000/year government health care

Demagogue politicians like Bernie Sanders frame the issue as a choice between 2/3, when it is more accurately a choice between 1/2 or 3/4. If we're going to do helicopter money, we should just do helicopter money not spend it on the most wasteful health system imaginable.

Manual job working class people are likely to be greater consumers of healthcare however. Unless you are also reducing pricing as well as giving cash 10 grand might not cover a great deal, for people at risk of manual injuries. A 25 yo in an office is likely to consume less health care than a 25 yo on a construction site or down a mine.

A low paid working class worker also isn't the one paying the 10 grand either for 4) It more accurately might be seen (by my neighbors at least) as Government forces middle class/rich people to pay 10 grand per year to subsidize MY healthcare because I am the one building the America they profit from. They often feel the urban centers profit from hollowing out US industry and resource production at the expense of the people who gave their painful time and energy making it work. That they have been deliberately left behind.

Now would they trust the current Federal government to do it? Seems highly unlikely. But in some future where Republicanism has gone working class and somehow managed to take control of the government regardless, that might indeed be exactly what they want.

I think we're not far away from explicitly race-based campaigns by Republicans in some blue districts. Imagine a Hispanic candidate, running as a Republican, campaigning for the following:

  • Jobs, not welfare

  • Traditional families

  • End of anti-Latino racism

Debate catch phrase: "I dare you to say Latinx one more time, Senator."

Hispanics and Republicans seem like natural allies on the culture war at least. All the woke stuff is Anglo imperialism. Successfully tarring Democrats as imperialists would also have the effect of demoralizing progressive white voters.

This has been a Republican pipe dream for a long time, not just for Hispanics but for other minorities as well. The problem is that these kinds of politicians are too beholden to a national party apparatus that is opposed to the kinds of things that would make such a candidate successful. Most voters are savvy enough to realize that "Jobs not welfare" is just code for cutting social services without any plan to replace them with anything. If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare. Add to that the fact that actual welfare is already restrictive enough that further cuts aren't really on the table and you're left with a host of ancillary programs like food stamps, CHIP, subsidized housing, etc., and a good number of these beneficiaries already have jobs anyway, just not ones that pay enough to obviate the need for some forms of public assistance. "Jobs not welfare" is a good applause line for people who already have good enough jobs that public assistance isn't really part of the calculus (Except as a drain on their tax dollars), but it doesn't exactly inspire hope among poor people that electing you will improve their position.

Something similar goes for "End of anti-Latino racism". Well, okay, I have no doubt that the Republican establishment isn't opposed to ending anti-Latino racism in theory. But in practice... it's hard for me to think of a single new policy that the GOP would get behind to serve this end. First you have the rank and file Republicans who will tell you that anti-Latino discrimination isn't a problem and that they all benefit from affirmative action anyway. The most obvious way in which Latinos experience distinct challenges on account of their ethnicity is that many of them don't speak English, and bilingual support is absent in a lot of places. I don't know how one begins to address this through legislation but the GOP has been the party of "if you're in America you should speak English" for some time now, and I don't see that general sentiment going away any time soon.

And as for Latinx, that ship already sailed. A lot of Democrats jumped on that bandwagon in 2020 but the term has been in steady decline ever since. It was kind of big news when polls started being released that showed only a few percent of actual Latinos preferred the term, but contrary to conservative belief, this resulted in most Democrats curtailing their use of it. These days the only people who use it are dyed in the wool wokesters like AOC, who got into a spat with fellow Bronx Democrat Richard Torres this past summer after the latter lambasted the Yankees for using the term. Torres's comments were indicative of a growing trend among Democratic politicians to use "Latino" or "Hispanic" for the simple reason that most members of the community prefer it. In any event, just because a group may not prefer a term doesn't necessarily mean they actively oppose the use of it, much less that such a term would actually affect a voting decision. The fact that most black people prefer "black" over "African American" doesn't seem to have made too much of a political impact, even if the latter is just as much a piece of contrived political correctness as "Latinx". It's just not that big a deal.

If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare.

Why? If one can get $X for merely being alive, one would have to be offered stricly more than $X to work, certainly not less than $X.

But what happens in reality is that due to a phemenon called "welfare trap" sometimes abstaining from work, brings in more bucks than working, as in the latter case one would no longer be eligible for some means-tested programme.

Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear but I'm well aware of the welfare trap, hence the language "good enough pay that people would get off benefits", which would be the amount where it wouldn't make sense to turn it down to preserve benefits.

If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare.

They do in fact have this ability! Politicians absolutely can deliver jobs that pay enough to get people off benefits.

The problem is that in practice politicians have a galaxy of confounding special interests, donors and misaligned personal incentives, and actually giving those jobs to people means not getting fat donations and cushy sinecures once they're out of office - which is why it rarely happens. They don't use that ability, but they absolutely do have it.

A few jobs, yeah. Not enough to make a meaningful impact, especially since the kind of jobs they can deliver tend to be ones that require a greater degree of skill, like political appointments or jobs in the politician's office. Civil service has eliminated most of the sinecures, and in any event the machine politics of the past didn't exactly eliminate poverty, it just provided enough positions that it gave the community the impression that the politicians were serious about eliminating poverty, at least compared to their opponents who sought to eliminate the sinecures.

No, I am talking about enough jobs to make a meaningful impact, not just the free handouts they give to their friends in office. There are real, serious policy changes that can be made which create new jobs on a larger scale in the community. But again, the problem is that doing so involves going against the interests of the donor class and so it doesn't really happen.

Like what? If you're the mayor of a city like Buffalo (or a rep from the district) with some 80,000 people in poverty, what kinds of policy changes, at either the local, state, or Federal level, do you implement to, say, halve that, or provide 40,000 well-paying jobs?

I don't have an answer to your specific question and have no idea what the situation in Buffalo is like, but the actual policies I was thinking of were along these lines:

  1. 10 years in prison for hiring illegal immigrant labour, with a policy that specifically pierces the corporate veil. If your company has any illegal immigrants getting paid or doing work, the people in charge go directly to prison and they're forced to pay a fine of triple the costs "saved" from hiring illegal immigrants. If your boss is hiring illegal immigrants and you report him, you (ideally) get his job, though this isn't always the case due to qualification requirements et al. I'm sure the left will love this policy - it directly attacks bosses and prevents exploitation of economically vulnerable populations!

  2. Mandatory regulation equalisation tariffs on all imported finished goods. If a product is more expensive to manufacture in the USA due to government regulations, the cost of compliance with those regulations is multiplied by 1.2 and added onto imported products as a tariff. All proceeds from these tariffs are earmarked for government investment in local manufacture of the goods in question.

  3. Supply-chain reinforcement - we can dip into the military budget here, but the goal would be to shore up supply chains in the USA and make sure that important and essential products can be manufactured with no reliance on external companies, countries or chip fabrication plants. In uncertain times and with the global economic/trade systems experiencing crisis after crisis, this would ideally be a top priority even without any additional jobs being created.

  4. Major effort to repair US infrastructure. Modernise, repair, replace and maintain all major rail lines and roads, as well as water and power supply infrastructure.

  5. And as a bonus I'd throw in marijuana and psychedelic legalisation - let the industries growing in some parts of the country expand and create a bunch of new jobs.

The first one would most likely create well over 40k jobs even without setting up an enforcement agency, but I'm sure you can appreciate why a politician would be unable to get an agenda like this passed - there are too many special interests making sure that these problems remain unfixed.

The first one only works if you buy into the idea that the only participation illegal immigrants have in the economy is through labor. Think of a city with 40,000 people and everything that has to exist to support those 40,000 people, not just locally but all the stuff that comes in from far away to ensure that there's actually, say, stuff that's on the shelves for the people to buy. Get rid of 40,000 illegals by whatever means you want and you've just shrunk the local economy by as much. Except your means is worse. I know you mean for this to be more of a deterrent than anything but a lot of deterrents don't work so if a company employing illegals gets busted now the entire company is probably finished since most companies that employ illegals aren't corporate but independently-owned restaurants and roofers and the like who now have to dip into the assets of the business to pay whatever fines are levied, which may pose a problem if they're on the hook for other debts (which most small businesses are), and then you get into issues of collateral and the like and before you know it they'er in Chapter 7.

As for the rest of them, they're all of the same "creates jobs" rhetoric that both parties have been spouting for decades now, and that the kind of people who are on public assistance aren't exactly inclined to believe. At least when Democrats do it, the presumption is that the jobs will enable them to get off welfare when they're making enough money to afford to. Contrast this with Republicans, where the implication is that people are too lazy to work and the first step is eliminating or greatly reducing assistance programs to force them back into the workplace.

More comments

I know this is kind of beside the point, but has anyone ever won a political debate by “daring” their opponent? If so, I hope it’s on film, because it must be part of a larger smackdown.

This has been the establishment right dream for a long time, not just in the US but in the UK and EU as well. The end result is an ever more 'left' leaning right wing. A secondary result is a more classical 'class' based political landscape.

The problem with that for the establishment right is that through the process of becoming more 'left' they alienate a part of their base. Which opens the door for, as we have seen: Nigel Farage and Brexit, Trump, and to a lesser extent the 'rise of populism' in Europe. Notably Le Pen, Swedish Democrats, AfD and so on. Some of these became a lot more notable than others. But regardless of anything else, giving these things space to operate poses a threat. In the case of Brexit and Trump, the entire right wing establishment had to reorganize itself. They still 'rule'. But it's a pitiable sight to see all of the Republican establishment career politicians mouth off about how much they love Trump when they very sincerely don't.

A more general question is what the point of the establishment right is in the first place. If it just exists for its own sake to maintain power, sure, make alliances, build bridges, co-opt the popular rhetoric of your opposition and steal their supporters. But what does that functionally entail? Becoming left wing? Does the right honestly have any power as a 'right wing' element in that form?

You can attribute the degeneration of right wing political ideals to a host of things. But at its core it is the same as when the left wing sees a degeneration in its political ideals. When reality meets ideals, reality wins and the political parties have to bend and contort their ideals so they can save face and continue to exist. The reality that faces the Republican party of the future is a white minority voter base. No more dog whistles about 'the boarder'. All you have left is class. And there's the final nail in the 'Republican' coffin.

America isn't going to be a majority 'middle/upper class' society anymore. It's instead moving towards ever greater stratification. With an ever growing underclass and an ever richer and diverse upper class. The 'jobs, not welfare' mantra is a middle/upper class ideal. The 'I'll give you money if you vote for me' mantra works much better on the underclass. This isn't a prophesy or anything. As I understand it, looking across the Atlantic, It's just California.

Agree. It's certainly not an enviable development. It's just my speculation on what needs to happen for a stable two party equilibrium to remain in place. Democrats now dominate all aspects of elite culture and business, so clearly the Republicans will need to find pivot leftward and add new coalition members find balance. Either that or we become a one-party country. Elite whites have completely abandoned the Republican party. Working class whites and evangelicals are not enough to sustain what remains.

The future of American politics probably looks a lot like Mexico or Brazil: a small, quite comfortable upper middle class elite and a large disaffected working class whose votes are effectively bought.

The goal of a functional Republican Party is to ensure we indeed have a republic, wherein no sector of society, public or private, can easily run the lives or abuse the rights of any other sector. That takes the identification of power and the disarming of it.

Since Reagan left office, that has meant the centrist wing abusing the business community through tax subsidies and breaks and strategic regulation to mold it into the picture of bad-faith capitalism while the right wing focuses on trying to ensure good-faith government.

I don’t have much faith that the Republican Party ever represented that, nor that it claimed to do so.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

No, for the same reason the torries failed, the mainstream right parties are the parties of corrupt oligarchs who signal to the working class by making fun of woke people. The democrats are portrayed as the elite party among online right wingers, but the republicans are to a great extent the party of Boeing, Raytheon, or Exon mobile. Boris Johnsson could be funny, but in the end his brexit ended with replacing polish workers with Pakistani cheap labour, since his donor class voters want open borders. The working people who supported brexit weren't specifically hating eastern Europeans, they didn't want immigration. The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.

Most left voters are not online twitter mobs. Most of them want cheaper health care, they dislike extreme wealth disparity, and they want to protect the environment. Instead of having an honest discussion surrounding the grievances of most democrat voters, the online right fights bipolar 21-year-olds having a meltdown on a college campus, ignoring that 29950 out of 30000 students on that campus were not protesting some event.

The mainstream right has tanked all over the western world. In the anglosphere the right as a whole has tanked because of the first past the post voting system. In the rest of the west, newer right wing parties have picked up the slack.

Boeing, Raytheon and Exxon all contribute fairly equally to Dems and Repubs. All favored Biden over Trump.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/raytheon-technologies/summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000072615&toprecipcycle=2020

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/boeing-co/summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=d000000100&toprecipcycle=2020

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs//summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000000129&toprecipcycle=2020

The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.

It is true that the left and their allies in the military industrial empire did prevent Trump from ending existing wars and conspired to mislead the American people about him (ze russkies!!!). Wall St has been solidly part of the left for 20 years.

You might be confusing Trump and the populist right with Liz Cheney.

That's people who work for those companies, not the companies themselves.

Yes, the links I provided also explain that.

An HR manager at Exxon or an accountant at Boeing sending a couple of hundred bucks to Biden, Hillary, or Bernie does not equal the tons of SuperPAC spending in favor of Republican candidates that all three of those companies have backed for decades. Especially Exxon. Rayheon and Boeing are slightly more split, due to home state concerns and making sure congresspeople in military base districts keep the pork coming, but the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now, because they don't fully buy into the fever dreams of the right-wing fringe of the country is frankly, kind of silly.

It seems in your world a group is part of the "left" if they accept non-white, LGBT, and women exist, and thus, can be important parts of a capitalist economy. Which is all Wall Street really does.

The reality is your talk about how Trump was "stopped" from ending the wars (weird how "ending the wars" turned into heavily expanding dronee warfare) just shows how non-existent the populist right actually is, and how few actual populist right voters there are, at least in the way you're talking about. Because even if I disagreed with him, a true right-wing populist who truly cared about ending wars, instead of getting distracted by 89 different issues would've had a speech on TV every day about ending the war, fired members of the Joint Chiefs until he got who he wanted, and actually compromised on other issues to say, get left-wing people who wanted out of Afghanistan behind him.

Instead, he failed, and the true dove Joe Biden, got us out of Afghanistan, basically ended the drone war, and is currently beating down another power, without a drop of American blood, all with basically the equipment we've had sitting in the back of the DOD's garage for a decade.

the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now,

Is a straw man you invented, along with the rest of your comment.

and is currently beating down another power

Ukraine is not another power. Just because Biden Jr and Sr both have a history there does not mean the Ukrainian people have to die over it.

Oh and he ended Roe v Wade too! Praise to Biden!

You might be confusing Trump and the populist right with Liz Cheney.

Trump didn't even manage to run the party when he was president. Trump really didn't deliver on much, where is the wall? Two years of republican presidency and congress under Trump and not much to show for it. Trump could make funny tweets until he got banned but when it comes down to it it is the Liz Cheney types that run the show.

Recall that the question you were answering is premised on the Trump wing beating the Cheney wing. You are now saying the Trump wing has not successfully beaten the Cheney wing yet.

That's true, but kind of a non sequitur.

Three SCOTUS judges. Although they'll certainly rule mostly in ways favorable to the Cheney wing, things like Roe are also very much not what the Republican elite care about.

Overall, though, you're right: Trump was wildly ineffective. Which is why lazy and undisciplined isn't what you want if there's a better alternative on offer (I suspect most of the populist right would say there wasn't an alternative.)

Three SCOTUS judges. Although they'll certainly rule mostly in ways favorable to the Cheney wing, things like Roe are also very much not what the Republican elite care about.

The three SCOTUS judges were much more an accomplishment of McConnell and the FedSoc than of Trump. It's just that the only thing the Trumpist wing of the party hates more than Democrats is Mitch McConnell, so he's conveniently left out of that part of the narrative.

No. McConnell was centrally important in getting Trump's nominees confirmed, and Leonard Leo from the FedSoc was in charge of vetting the nominations, but it was Trump that put Leo in charge and selected candidates from Leo's short list. Putting Leo in charge of judicial nominations was a key part of Trump's strategy to attract the votes of the Republican base--which was not part of his initial core support--to the benefit of both.

Trump will get credit for the actions of his Supreme Court appointments as part of his legacy, just like every other President. He also deserves this credit no less than any other President, as Leo was his choice to vet nominations, and Trump himself decided which candidates made the final cut.

This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism".

Does anybody dispute that what we mean by "racism" in 2023 is different than what people meant by "racism" in 1968? That's a whole one year post-Loving v. Virginia. I'm confident if you asked a bunch of Americans if anti-miscegenation was "racist" in 1968 they would say "no." I suspect a large majority asked the same question today would say "yes."

The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.

Why "pretends to believe?" If our understanding of racism has changed why isn't it the case that more Americans today authentically believe Trump is racist than believed Wallace was racist in 1968? Note that your quote isn't comparing Americans today calling Trump or Wallace racist. It's comparing Americans today calling Trump racist with Americans in 1968 calling Wallace racist.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

I guess it depends on what policies they advocate that involve taking up this flag. Most pro-working class policies seem pretty left-coded in the United States to me though.

Define ‘pro-working class policies’. Working class people broadly support the police, immigration restrictionism, tax cuts for themselves, and picking jobs over environment.

1.) This is true, but they also support common sense reforms the GOP opposes. Like, a lot of working class white people, especially in rural areas where there are basically no minorities have had run-ins with terrible cops.

2.) I've seen no actual evidence of immigration support based on income.

3.) Sure, everybody is selfish. OTOH, I'm sure if I looked into local ordinancs and bonds and other things, I'd actually bet lower-income working class voters consistently support increasing taxes on themselves far more than rich people do.

4.) Again, depends on the specific policy. Yes, coal miners in West Virginia are going to continue to support coal mining, but is a construction worker in Sheboygan? Probably not so much. Of course, everybody is selfish, but I guarantee you the vast majority of working class people do not want to go back to the pollution level of even the 90's, even if it meant working class jobs.

local ordinancs and bonds

Voting to tax yourself and have those taxes administered and spent in your local community, is very different than sending taxes off to the blackholes of statehouses or DC.

If there's in recent news to show that #4 is true, we only have to point to the train derailment in East Palestine. It's definitely a white working class area, and there's no love lost for Norfolk Southern having to foot a large cleanup bill, and people are still concerned about the water despite tests repeatedly coming back without showing any increase in pollutant levels. Contrast this with the days when companies would have dumped chemicals of a similar hazard level in an open pit and not told anybody about it, the residents not knowing anything until people started suffering adverse health effects decades later. Republicans can be a little more proactive about this than in the past since environmentalists are now almost exclusively concerned with climate change, but my guess is there would be broad conservative opposition to new environmental regulations if they weren't connected with a specific incident. I have a friend who worked for an environmental contractor and he said that the EPA turned into a joke under Trump, with operators totally unconcerned about being dinged with Federal violations. State environmental agencies had more teeth in those days, and in Pennsylvania, that's saying something, since DEP is viewed as notoriously dysfunctional among people in the know.

Fair enough. I suppose I was thinking along the lines of "policies that improve the material conditions of working class people." Stuff like universal health care, increased business safety regulation, unionization, things along those lines. I think SSCReader's comment upthread has a good enumeration.

I suspect a large majority asked the same question today would say "yes."

Depends on who you ask. I suspect BIPOC would give very different answers to white people.

According to Gallup non-white Americans have been more supportive of interracial marriage than white Americans any time they've ever been asked.

Break down the demographics a bit further......

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/202003/how-racial-minorities-view-interracial-couples

In fact, the participants’ responses depended not only on their race but also on their gender. In the case of Black-White marriages, Black men showed roughly equal warmth for both Black male-White female and White male-Black female couples. Black women indicated a similar level of warmth for White male-Black female couples, but they were quite cool toward couples where the husband was Black, and the wife was White.

When the researchers looked at the data from the Asian participants, they found the opposite pattern of results in terms of gender. Specifically, Asian women were equally warm to couples where the husband was White, and the wife was Asian and to couples where the races were reversed. In contrast, Asian men indicated high warmth toward Asian male-White female marriages, but they were quite cool to couples where the husbands were White, and the wives were Asian.

I don't know what the issues will be

It will be very interesting to see if AI will lead to any realignment of the existing political blocs.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that leftists will be more hesitant about AI, because it's going to threaten their types of jobs first, and rightists will be more optimistic about AI, because they want to own the libs. But it's also hard to imagine Bible Belt evangelicals filling up pews on Sunday morning to listen to sermons from the robo preacher. It just doesn't seem to fit well with a socially conservative worldview.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

Although I'm still prone to engaging in such discussions myself, I no longer think there's much of a point in trying to discern the true Platonic essence of "left" and "right". I now view "left" and "right" as two arbitrary designators for two political factions that just so happen to contingently exist in the modern West, much like the terms "Tory" or "Whig". Leftism is just whatever leftists say it is. Call it "the establishment", "the cathedral", "the PMC", whatever you want to call it - it's that thing. The content of the ideology itself can be freely changed based on political expediencies. If rightists take up the cause of the working class, then that is a rightist position, by definition.

But it's also hard to imagine Bible Belt evangelicals filling up pews on Sunday morning to listen to sermons from the robo preacher. It just doesn't seem to fit well with a socially conservative worldview.

"Preacher" seems likely to me to be one of the most resilient jobs against AI. It's a job that's explicitly religious, which means there are no issues with declaring by fiat that a living, breathing human is meaningfully "better" than an AI that could perform all the same tasks in all the same ways. In contrast to secular jobs, where if an AI could do all the same tasks as a living, breathing human, then that human is just shit out of luck.

I do wonder about how, if at all, AI will realign political blocs. I think that conventional wisdom has some truth because of that jobs issue, and the robotics tech to replace blue collar work is less far along than the AI tech to replace white collar work. That said, improving AI will surely be used to accelerate the development of robotics tech, and so that difference might not be a difference very soon.

I feel like I see a sort of alignment developing in the AI image generation space right now, though, with the biggest pushback against stuff like Stable Diffusion coming from people who are very firmly on the left "woke" side. I think this could largely be historical accident, due to most small-time illustrators who are most threatened by the tech being on that side, rather than an issue of ideology. After all, there are leftist/progressive reasons to be in favor of the tools, such as giving greater access to the least well-off and capable to create high quality illustrations. However, I don't see much indication of right-wing love for these tools, and most of the space is still fairly left-wing; I'm guessing it's because tech adoption and illustration both tend to have more left-wing people. It's still very early times - Stable Diffusion was released publicly only 8 months ago - so there are a lot of possible ways things could go. I imagine just one politician from one party coming out with one piece of legislation in relation to this tech could have very large effects downstream.

However, I don't see much indication of right-wing love for these tools, and most of the space is still fairly left-wing

Well, some of the earliest adopters have been 4chan's /g/ and I think their Stable Diffusion thread is still one of the more popular communities. 4chan posters may not qualify as right-wing per-se, but they do tend to be anti-SJW. The developer for Automatic1111, by far the most popular UI, attracted some controversy a couple months ago when people discovered his Rimworld mods included one mocking the George Floyd riots and others like White Only/Yellow Only/Black Only. And one of the up-and-coming UIs is the node-based ComfyUI, which is made by a /g/ poster.

Channers are South Park republicans. They only align with the right as long as it’s contrarian to do so.

Assuming there are no physical limits I quickly suspect that AI will render all humans obsolete for the reasons you articulated unless there is something that augmented humans can do better than AI.

But it's also hard to imagine Bible Belt evangelicals filling up pews on Sunday morning to listen to sermons from the robo preacher. It just doesn't seem to fit well with a socially conservative worldview.

Maybe they won't have to worry about that? Could be a literal kind of "Baptists and Bootleggers" situation somehow: AI destroys the more progressive bits of society, religious conservatives ignore the technological revolution somehow, kick back, and grill.

I no longer think there's much of a point in trying to discern the true Platonic essence of "left" and "right".

I agree, but I think there is merit in looking for the most parsimonious and general explanation. There are no inherent "left" or "right" policies, but there's a pattern over time, if one can maintain context which vanishes quickly with time.

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