My problem with that proposal is that it specifically calls for focusing less on social issues like LGBTQ+ issues and, presumably, BLM and other social justice issues. So once again, they’re advocating for throwing vulnerable populations under the bus in order to win elections. I don’t think that’s going to work, because it’s been tried before. A lot. And it doesn’t work. You lose at least as many votes as you gain. Also, that article specifically calls for making promises that clearly can’t be kept, and I am not in favor of intentionally lying to people to get their votes.
On the economic front, the situation is different. Most working-class voters are what we call “economic egalitarians” – they favor government interventions to level the playing field, they take inequality seriously, and they support programs that increase the economic and social power of working people. Large majorities favor raising the minimum wage, import limits to protect jobs [we know this doesn’t work], increasing spending on social security and Medicare, using federal power to bring down the cost of prescription drugs, expanding federal funding for public schools, making it easier to join a union, increasing infrastructure spending, implementing a millionaires’ tax [I would love it, but come on . . . it’s not going to happen unless progressive Democrats gain a supermajority], and even the notion of a job guarantee [how would this work? New Deal WPA type stuff? maybe, but again, we would need a progressive supermajority]. Luckily for Democrats, middle- and upper-class voters have drifted to the left on many of these economic issues, embracing a more social democratic outlook. That bodes well for developing an economic platform that can appeal to the broadest electoral coalition. Yet there is an important caveat here. While working-class voters are strongly in support of a range of progressive measures, they are wary of big new government programs, skeptical of new regulations and broadly suspicious of welfare spending [what? in the preceding sentences, you said they wanted increased social security and medicare funding . . . pick a lane]. Their economic progressivism is jobs-centered and pro-worker, not built around cash transfers and expansive social services.
So basically . . . progressive but don’t call it progressive, and ignore people that make us feel icky. I’m sorry, but that is NOT a winning strategy. That is a strategy for continued losing. You want a successful model? Look at what Mamdani did. He did advocate for that social populist progressivism, and he did it without sacrificing vulnerable groups. We can do both.
Okay… what about the people with a college education who also fall within the bottom two-thirds of income distribution? Such as the 70% of college professors who are adjuncts? Or many K-12 educators? Are they not also working class? Having a college degree is no longer the same guarantor of a higher income that it once was, and there is a reason why, but if you only looking at it through the lens of a definition of the working class from the 1950s. It’s incredibly easy for a college degree being a metric to slip into the cultural argument, it seems to me.
I absolutely agree on both those points.
It should be, but as long as there are white dudes who will not vote for a woman or POC, and who don’t believe that protecting the rights of everyone in the working class (and in all classes) is a necessary strategy, we’re gonna keep getting this same result.
We can have this complex conversation. We keep being told we can’t but we can and must have it, or we’re done for. They will have won, if we can convince enough people that throwing trans people or women or POC under the bus won’t save them and we have to work together. I just don’t believe it’s enough to fight on economic issues.
That’s what I’m getting too from that. Yes, economic issues matter, but SO DOES NOT LETTING OUR SOCIETY KILL OFF AN ENTIRE GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS!!!
Well, but don’t the fascists who favor mass deportation ALSO want good jobs and healthcare!!! /s
I don’t understand how some really can’t wrap their minds around the idea that oppression functions in multiple ways, and who you are can impact your ability to do basic shit like make a living, have a house, get an education, get health care… I don’t really understand how “identity politics” came to be identified as separate from economic analysis. It shouldn’t be, because who we are shapes our horizon of possibilities within any given society.
I haven’t bothered since Trump’s first win. While he did have an unfortunately decent poll chance, he did far better than they expected. And continues to do so.
Poll methods haven’t caught up to today’s way of life. Neither has politics, for that matter.
I agree about the polling, but my own personal experience with my fellow Gen Xers is that an awful lot of us are moving to the right politically. It’s disappointing.
That makes no sense, but logic was never a part of this. I can, maybe, see it as hunkering down and trying to protect what they have while the world burns? I don’t know. I feel pretty damned hopeless just now.
I do think you’re right. I think it comes, in part, out of the anti-establishment and highly cynical culture of the era we grew up in… Lots of lefty of our generation tended towards a very anti-establishment mindset, and not trusting any of our institutions at all. But lots of right wing gen xers sought to imitate Reagan and the new right movement… I think lots of the anti-establishment types got cyncial enough to embrace sort of excellerationism because they don’t see our society working for them and others.
This probably needs to be a book of some kind…
Another reason why gen X is so cynical about the world - we grew up with a major rise in divorce rates (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given it came out of greater freedoms for women), so many were latchkey kids, and so lots of us felt kind of neglected… and everyone always forgets about us (unless we’re doing something bad - being punks or apparently supporting Trump). Plus many of us grew up during the Nixon/Reagan era and everything that came out of that… it certainly undermined our collective sense of trust in our government.
As a Gen X person, I think that any right movement might also be because we never really had someone to rally around. It’s a wholly unremarkable generation. We had the massive boomer population restricting what we could do more and more - thus driving rebellion - and Gen Y coming after us with all the benefits of tech we built but less understanding of it. I can certainly understand why some feel they need to be selfish. It’s stupid, but I can see the logic leaps.
Yeah, except the conservative ones, who rallied around Reagan, I guess.
I don’t know if that’s fair… there were some punks doing some great political stuff, but we were a small cohort, and punk didn’t catch on as well as the 60s counterculture, which had mainstream acceptance to a degree with regards to the music and support from the music industry. Punk/post-punk bucked that system, and was relatively demonized in the media as a major social problem by way of contrast.
It’s interesting to me how many parallels there are between Gen X and the Silent Generation. We were both preceded by, and followed by, generational cohorts that were bigger and made more noise (well, I don’t know if the generation preceding the Silent Generation was smaller). We’re both known for kind of being overlooked. That’s the whole reason the Silent Generation got that name. That generation had one President, Biden. Gen X hasn’t yet produced a President. And it’s entirely possible we won’t. We could jump straight from the Boomers to a Millenial.
When I was still on Facebook, I saw quite a bit of that among my old cohort, not just in the run up to 11/2016, but the Tea Party before that. I didn’t look at its details, but this poll could be correct… …about the previous decade.
Compulsives, in other words, exhibit deficits in cognitive-behavioral integration. “It’s like they’re thinking, ‘Yeah, sure, Action A is good, Action B is bad… instead of a 50-50 split, I’ll do 60-40,’” said Dit Bressel. “They really should be going cold turkey and doing 100-0. An implication of the trajectory analysis we did is that no amount of action belief updating would get them to behave optimally. We need a way to improve how those beliefs translate to perceptions of what’s optimal.”
