This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There is something I really like in this Ygeslias article. Whatever is causing more partisan politics it’s not the economy. We’ve done well the past few years.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-obama-and-trump-and-biden-beat
Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky but he yelled at the Fed for being too hawkish.
I like how he led with the shale Revolution. I’ve been saying this for years. Tech gets all the fan fare but if Tech was the Jordan of the economy American energy independence over this time frame was the Scottie Pippen in creating wealth for America. I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus moat building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs versus companies having high margins. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant our trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red; people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue. Someday I should write a long article on this because I have not seen anyone write about it. But the split in voting patterns makes a lot of sense based on the economics of their business. It would even make sense to have different tax regimes for these businesses but would be impossibly hard to execute. As a driver of political views it seems as powerful as male-female splits which seems a lot more talked about.
I think maga and the left like to cite American wealth not making it to the middle class etc. But honestly this much wealth creation can’t just be consumed by the 1% it pretty much has to flow to others. Perhaps, the middle class isn’t doing as well as we want them to be doing but the counter factual (Europe) would be poorer than what we got.
The GDP numbers are more pronounced because we calculate things in currencies and the cited figures were when the dollar was weak. The gap has definitely shifted in favor of the US but I do think this overstates the change.
The Tea Party seems underrated to me. They put a halt to more government spending. Less fiscal policy meant the fed could keep rates lower which basically crowded-in private investment in tech and shale and a host of things with cheap money. The current situation is the opposite of this where we increased federal spending from about 20.5% last decade to 24% now. And that’s caused a massive change in rates to get inflation close to target.
Culture Wars seem to have little to do with economic mismanagement by either side. I think the right is correct that the fall of small towns is bad but I think that largely came from economic forces (like productivity) gains that couldn’t be prevented. And there small towns have also been hurt by the people (probably like myself) who would be logical local elites moving away.
As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
I think that really most of the culture wars and the dislike of those who disagree feels more like a social class thing than anything really about politics. And as such, it’s not economics and economics won’t fix it.
The upper class of this country essentially wants to remake America to be much more like continental Europe. An open fairly liberated culture, walkable cities with good public transport, strong regulatory state, strong safety net, no guns, and irreligious. To them, the more rural, religious, and traditional red staters are “deplorables”, people who are just so far behind culturally that it’s an embarrassment to them. They’ve long sneered at those fools in flyover countries.
Of course the people in flyover counties are not onboard with the upper classes and their attempts to remake American culture into something different. They like their do-it-yourself culture, they like Christianity, they like speaking their minds, and they like guns. They obviously aren’t too keen on being sneered at by people who consider themselves better than a deplorable.
Do you think that the upper class in America really wants a strong safety net? If they do, why do they not put more support behind people like Sanders and Warren rather than people like Clinton and Biden?
Yes, I think it's fairly obvious they do, but they don't want to do it with their money, they want to do it with the common pot. And they get pushback because there's people suffering close to the bottom who work hard, floating just above the line where a safety net would need to catch them, who really could use the money they're forced to put into the common pot, who wonder why they shouldn't keep their money instead especially when they see others not working as much as they do being entitled to equal or more of it.
And as a result, the elites feel annoyed because they believe (and I think they truly do) that if everyone just shut up and paid taxes and didn't try to resist their plans, everyone could have a strong safety net and if they have to enact policies that explicitely fuck over the red tribers they'll see the necessity of a strong safety net, and they'll stop resisting.
So in general, they believe they have to soften up people a bit to accept ideas like UBI.
More options
Context Copy link
I think it’s again about social class, not wealth, so a person socialized into the upper class would have those values. I do question the sincerity of them really being willing to hand their money over to those rednecks in the south, or other groups they find odious. But as a group, they see welfare states as good things to be in favor of alongside universal health care and free college.
I mean the governments welfare programs often do go to those rednecks in the south and there’s little protest from blue tribers.
Doth protest too much, or just generally confused about the facts on the ground in the south? The south has lots of poverty, primarily, because it houses more black Americans per capita.
It’s true that very high black populations make several southern states look worse than they really are on everything except military recruitment and diversity, but southern states with more nationally typical racial mixes(such as Oklahoma and West Virginia) still have elevated poverty rates, albeit not Mississippi’s. There are lots of dysfunctional poor whites, you just don’t see them because they live in rural areas.
West Virginia and Oklahoma is a very expansive definition of "the south" IMO.
Poor whites certainly exist, but their dysfunctions are, yes, largely contained to rural areas, and often in those areas you can be well below the poverty line and not really be doing anything wrong. There is just no wealth anywhere around you, so you are subsistence living, because that is all that is available. A poor person in a city is simply squandering every possible advantage.
Yes, they are, but it’s the closest match to ‘the south without the large black populations’. And in any case blacks out of the south seem to do better than blacks in the south, so there’s a factor of ‘southern-mess’ distinct from just ‘lots of blacks’.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Blue tribers frequently complain that red states are net takers ime.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If we're talking about some upper class kid who dropped out of college, or the illegal immigrant they pay to do thier gardening then yes absolutely.
If it's some farmer facing a bad harvest in Minnesota, or some poor schitzo who's been in and out of psychiatric care, then no.
I think that @MaiqTheTrue is absolutely correct that it's a class thing, and largely motivated by Europhelia on the part of upper and middle-class blues.
They absolutely want a strong safety net for the latter. Unfortunately they want that safety net to be provided by everyone without strings; that is, they keep them alive and roaming free-range, occasionally attacking ordinary citizens with legally enforced impunity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The upper class supports a strong safety net for the children of the upper class. Specifically, they think that the low paying jobs that rich kids take for status reasons should come with an income that allows that person to stay in the class of their birth. The daughter of a surgeon or a banker who becomes an adjunct or a journalist should be guaranteed an income to allow her to live in the manner to which she has become accustomed. A Clinton or a Biden ensures this.
A Sanders could take wealth from backwards patriarchal dad who still pays the bills.
As far as I know democrats have not generally been better for the fortunes of those entering academia than republicans.
More options
Context Copy link
Does a Clinton or Biden really ensure it? As far as I know, wannabe journalists do not have it easy during Democratic administrations. And why would a rich person not just give their kids money directly rather than indirectly through trying to manipulate the levers of government? It takes more out of their pockets but on the other hand, is more sure of success. Some parents have the attitude of "make the kid learn by working for their own money", but making it so that the government supports them would be almost as bad for such a policy as giving them money directly would be.
The driver here isn't the rich parents, it's the adult children of rich parents in the lumpen-PMC. They simultaneously want to inherit the status and comfort of their parent's class like you can in the old world, and still be seen as having "earned" that status independently, like Americans.
That's what colleges are selling to people with useless degrees - it's a way to launder their parent's money into the child's "accomplishment".
More options
Context Copy link
Biden has certainly pulled every lever he could reach to send as much money as he can to universities. His initial student loan bailout had a cost of hundreds of billions before SCOTUS spiked it...
And here's the bailout for news organizations, framed as allowing them to collectively bargain to collude against tech companies.
So that's university jobs and news media jobs...
More options
Context Copy link
I think the parent is a little off base. It's not ensuring the kids have sufficient income to support their lifestyle. Mommy and daddy could probably support them in upper middle class bobo comfort indefinitely. What is about is ensuring the outside and respect of those people and their positions. To ensure that being a "journalist" accords the level of prestige and unearned influence that being a "reporter" does not. To ensure that being and adjunct or NGO executive confers status and access that being a researcher or business executive does not. That's why Trump's open disrespect for these people and their unearned positions upset them so greatly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It would probably help to clarify what is meant by "upper class", since it gets applied to anything from tech billionaires to regional business gentry to second string journalists at mid-tier outlets.
People I don’t like, of course.
I’ve no doubt that there exists a class of rent-seeking nouveau riche with a taste for Continental aesthetics. Many of them surely endorse high immigration, humanities educations, and the perennial pastime of scoffing at proles. By merit of their wealth, they no doubt wield outsize influence on the course of the Democratic Party.
But how many of them are there, really? How much of the Democrat platform hinges on these elites, rather than on the modern sensibilities of America’s middle class?
Those are some fair points. I won’t contest that stereotypical Democrat beliefs owe a lot to the opinions of an actual elite. What bothers me is the insinuation that believing such things implies upper-class status.
My intuition is that most of these thought-leaders, the journalists, creatives, and academics—most of them shouldn’t be rated as an “upper class.” They have their own elites, but most will never be household names. They won’t handle more money than a company accountant or direct more people than a blue-collar floor manager. Organized religion is a good comparison. Most local preachers don’t qualify as an elite, even though they hew closely to an elite-approved doctrine. But gosh, it sure is nice to dunk on the whole edifice whenever Joel Osteen does something distasteful.
I think such a bait-and-switch was pretty explicit in Maiq’s post. He’s using everyone’s favorite punching bag, Hillary, as a stand-in for the whole outgroup. Weak men are superweapons, I guess.
More options
Context Copy link
That's sort of what I'm getting at. Anti-elitist rhetoric is fairly central to populism, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the object of that rhetoric are actually elite or upper class in any meaningful sense, as opposed to merely being political adversaries. (It doesn't help that Americans are simultaneously obsessed with success and embarrassed by it, so we'll do tremendous backflips to explain how we're just a working Joe despite making six figures and living in a house that arguably qualifies as a palace). Urban professionals may have different values than suburban small business owners, but identifying them as upper class seems like a stretch.
More options
Context Copy link
If we take the sort of people who get jobs in the media or accademia as representative (a dangerous assumption I'll admit) I would say that the class "rent-seeking nouveau riche with a taste for Continental aesthetics" represent the bulk of the DNC or at the very least it's public face.
I wouldn't describe those as rent-seeking, neither in the traditional, landowning sense nor a more modern position atop the stock market. "Nouveau riche" doesn't seem right, either, for a class which is effectively trading off earning potential for a chance to be a Thought Leader. At least by the time they get that PhD, academics have given up hope on being the financial elite.
No, I'm talking about the Pelosi-type. Relatively new to wealth and power, perhaps immigrants or their children. Heavily invested in a neoliberal worldview. Played the American system to its full effect, especially including the stock or real estate markets. Little incentive to rock the boat with progressive zeal, and very little concern for the potential downsides of neoliberal policy.
When people talk about coastal elites, are they talking about Sanders, or are they thinking of Soros?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link