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[benjipwns]

https://www.thenation.com/article/liberal-elites-are-not-the-problem/

If I have to read one more article blaming liberal condescension toward the red states and the white working class for the election of Trump, I’m moving to Paris, France. These pieces started coming out even before the election and are still pouring down on our heads. Just within the last few weeks, the New Republic had Michael Tomasky deploring “elite liberal suspicion of middle America” for such red-state practices as churchgoing and gun owning and The New York Times had Joan Williams accusing Democrats of impugning the “social honor” of working-class whites by talking about them in demeaning and condescending ways, as exemplified by such phrases as “flyover states,” “trailer trash,” and “plumber’s butt.” Plumber’s butt? That was a new one for me. And that’s not even counting the 92,346 feature stories about rural Trump voters and their heartwarming folkways. (“I played by the rules,” said retired rancher Tom Grady, 66, delving into the Daffodil Diner’s famous rhubarb pie. “Why should I pay for some deadbeat’s trip to Europe?”) I’m still waiting for the deep dives into the hearts and minds of Clinton supporters—what concerns motivated the 94 percent of black women voters who chose her? Is there nothing of interest there? For that matter, why don’t we see explorations of the voters who made up the majority of Trump’s base, people who are not miners or unemployed factory workers but regular Republicans, most quite well-fixed in life? (“I would vote for Satan himself if he promised to cut my taxes,” said Bill Thorberg, a 45-year-old dentist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “I’m basically just selfish.”) There are, after all, only around 75,000 coal miners in the entire country, and by now every one of them has been profiled in the Times.

In her fascinating recent book Strangers in Their Own Land, the brilliant sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild asks readers to climb the “empathy wall” and really try to understand the worldview of Trump voters—as she did, spending over five years getting to know white Southern Louisianians, many of them Cajun, who have extreme free-market, anti-government Tea Party politics although they live in “Cancer Alley,” an area where the petrochemical industry, abetted by the Republican politicians they voted for, has destroyed nature, their communities and their health. Hochschild has a deep grasp of human complexity, and her subjects come across as lovely people, despite their politics. As she hoped, I came away with a better understanding of how kindly people could vote for cruel policies, and how people who don’t think they’re racist actually are so.

But here’s my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us?

True, by the time the world burns to a crisp, today’s voters will mostly be dead, but where’s the empathy for their own grandchildren?

Sorry, self-abasing liberal pundits: If you go by actual deeds, liberals and leftists are the ones with empathy. We want everyone to have health care, for example, even those Tea Partiers who in the debate over the Affordable Care Act loudly asserted that people who can’t afford treatment should just die. We want everyone to be decently paid for their labor, no matter how low they wear their pants—somehow the party that claims to be the voice of working people has no problem with paying them so little they’re eligible for food stamps, which that same party wants to take away. We want college to be affordable for everyone—even for the children of parents who didn’t start saving for college when the pregnancy test came out positive. We want everyone to be free to worship as they please—including Muslims—even if we ourselves are nonbelievers.

sure, of course i serve to please my fan (he knows who he is):

Carl Gilbertsen says:
June 9, 2017 at 12:36 pm
This article has been written about 20 times already.

No one is saying "be empathetic"

They're saying stop being so fucking condescending and derisive about the poor, most of whom dont' vote.

Yiren Lyu says:
June 9, 2017 at 11:29 am
No, empathy is not the problem. That empathy wall really is an ideological one, because you are too busy attacking other people along the liberal/conservative line within your ideological bubble. What you think is racist misogynist platform is as normal as they come to a lot of voters (they don't get to consume some liberal wisdom that supposedly would automatically enlighten them reactionary voters). What they see in Trump is a vote against the bipartisan liberal establishment, which really serve the oligarchic capitalists than anyone else; a vote for someone who has provided a narrative(however mythical it is) that seem to be relevant to their daily lives and their identities; they see someone who at least offers something. The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, did not even bother to offer those people any substance, precisely because the status quo neoliberal establishment has no real solution. An empty box not much deeper than its superficial brand.

I just read about how Bernie people and Corbyn people engage voters at the grassroots level, how they really are communicating progressive platforms. Guess what, in merely few weeks, Corbyn is able to turn the table and gain seats despite tremendous opposition coming from the government, his own party and the media establishment, destroying Tories' projected landslide mandate. Because when you actually talk to people and offer them a REAL alternative, many of them do change their minds. And without a real alternative, more people will join the right side of the spectrum. In comparison, this article looks like something written by a grumpy 13-year-old who could not contain his/her primal instincts. Also good luck in Paris with that "progressive" center-right President Macron.

Francis Louis Szot says:
June 9, 2017 at 11:15 am
Why aren’t political policies that makes people’s lives better endorsed by right–wingers? Because FAR too many “Liberals” don’t support and FIGHT for such policies either.

The top Liberal Democratic politicians (the Clintons, Pelosi, Obummer, Biden, etc.) differ from the Right only in the degree of their indifference and opposition to many of the MOST empathetic policy prescriptions; national health care, military budget reductions, demanding a reduction in arbitrary police powers, an end to Middle East “wars”, reduction of imperialist military bases all over the world, resistance to the promotion of “free market” economic fantasies, and on and on

How do words like “feminazi” become wide–spread? Because “liberal” idiots like Chris Mathews make a habit out of showcasing video and audio from right–wing provocateurs, like drug addict Rush Limbaugh and propagandists from FOX, and many others, without unrelenting condemnation, so they too can claim to be “fair and balanced”.

ESPECIALLY since the Bill Clinton ran for the Office, the Democratic wing of the CRONY CAPITALIST PARTY (CCP), which administers the wishes of the “USA Plutocratic Corporate State”, made the evaluation that what passes for “The Left” in the USA has “nowhere to go” in this two–party political system.

The supine and incompetent “Left” could safely be ignored and marginalized, their timidity easily herded into obedience by merely evoking the specter of the Republikkklan Wing of the CCP. That Right Wing of USA politics has been even more Authoritarian and Rabid in their service to the “1%” within all living memory, and beyond.

The next move in the Democrat’s simplistic process of triangulation was to invade and usurp political positions previously held by the Right Wing of the CCP, having correctly predicted that the Left would not have the courage to fight the rightward drift.

Today, the Democrat’s movement of the political spectrum has veered so far into Right Wing territory, the infamous Richard Nixon would be considered a “Liberal”, were he alive today.

The Republikkklans only method of counter–attack was to move even further right and mobilize the OVERTLY racist, misogynist, xenophobic, superstitious, anti–intellectual, and fascist portions of the population that had been previously ostracized from participation in power at the Federal level of Government.

Democrats continued to slime their way even further to the right to pilfer more of the Republikkklan base. Desperate to remain in the contest for power, the Right Wing decided to OPENLY court even the actively traitorous residue of the Fringe Right; secessionists, anti–government libertarians, and advocates for an avowedly un–Constitutional Christian Caliphate.

The result to date; a life–long Goldwater Girl fronted the Democrat Party, and Donald Trump, a certified Buffoon and Con Artist, won the Presidency because there wasn’t anyone speaking to the “left of center”, and Trump was the only candidate who actually could be believed when he said that he would change The Game at all.

ooooh yeah that last one is the good stuff

 

[HStallion]

Surprised this is getting more attention here. Its something I've been saying for a long time myself. Not too mention those rebuttals are hilariously off base and in some ways just confirm what the original writer was trying to say. I'd call it ironic if it wasn't so sad.

 

[The Technomancer]

In her fascinating recent book Strangers in Their Own Land, the brilliant sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild asks readers to climb the “empathy wall” and really try to understand the worldview of Trump voters—as she did, spending over five years getting to know white Southern Louisianians, many of them Cajun, who have extreme free-market, anti-government Tea Party politics although they live in “Cancer Alley,” an area where the petrochemical industry, abetted by the Republican politicians they voted for, has destroyed nature, their communities and their health. Hochschild has a deep grasp of human complexity, and her subjects come across as lovely people, despite their politics. As she hoped, I came away with a better understanding of how kindly people could vote for cruel policies, and how people who don’t think they’re racist actually are so.

I think I need to read this book. It sounds like it dives right into the heart of a point I've been making recently, which is about prioritizations and ideology.

 

[G.ZZZ]

Benjipwns bringing the good fight in a nest of lassex-faire hard winger capitalists. The US simply has intoxicated the political discourse so much you can no longer talk about certain topics, like the massive shift in wealth from the bottom up since the '70 onwards in a mainstream political party. Trump is just the logical consequence of a political derive toward a corporativism of economics where the right to survive and keep its identity had to shift even further to the right to downright nazism and racial supremacy.

EDIT: the UK is another example of this, where after the shift of labour by Blaire, the Tories went literally insane. The issue is when there's money in politics, inevitably all political parties will drift toward pluto-corporativism, and the moment the left is so far right economically to be literally right-wing, the right wing has no way to survive than to descend in nationalism and identity politics (= racism) to keep an appeal to voters and appear different from the left. It's also why the left has embraced so strongly social politics in the last 20 years, optics and identity politics the most, while on the other hand assfucking 99% of the population and removing them from their wealth. The treatment of Corbyn by all the mainstream media and his own party is another proof of this. There's simply too much intrenched economical interest to keep left-wing policies actually alive, and then when everything drift to the right you get the shitshow you have now in the US and to a lesser extent, the UK, where voters managed to actually, for once, win against the machine, even if they're still fighting a battle that they'll never win. The drift is clear and will always be.

 

[kirblar]

Yup. The left aren't the ones who made this a war based on identity and culture.

We didn't pick this line of delineation, but it doesn't matter. We have to fight that battle all the same.

Benjipwns bringing the good fight in a nest of lassex-faire hard winger capitalists. The US simply has intoxicated the political discourse so much you can no longer talk about certain topics, like the massive shift in wealth from the bottom up since the '70 onwards in a mainstream political party. Trump is just the logical consequence of a political derive toward a corporativism of economics where the right to survive and keep its identity had to shift even further to the right to downright nazism and racial supremacy.

You can talk about them all you want.

It just won't mobilize any voters. It's been pretty explicitly clear that income inequality equates to a grand total of "jack" when it comes to actually influencing how most people vote.