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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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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?

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.

often do go to those rednecks in the south

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’.

The South used to be substantially poorer. That is why blacks moved north: To sop up the opportunities and spillover prosperity of a bigger economy. The South is catching up right now because it has better economic policy, generally, than many of the ossified northern states. But largely still hasn't, and even when/if it does, having a large black % will still make it harder to provide jobs and benefits to that many low skill workers and expensive to police that many criminally inclined persons.

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