> It's a mistake for the Democrats to obsess over blaming and castigating those people, instead of focusing on convincing them, swaying them, educating them, peeling away voters and ultimately delivering real life improvements (the big part of that) if they truly believe they have a better path to offer for their future.
What if there simply isn't a better path? Between automation and foreign competition, it might simply not be possible to return to an economy like the one we had post-WWII.
This is where everyone comes along to tell me about UBI, but I think this is not addressing the problem. A lot of people don't want to be handed free money, they want opportunities to work and improve their lives. A slower treadmill is still a treadmill. I wonder if it is simply impossible to provide that, and maybe the current reality is close to the best this is going to get.
I think maybe the best possible future is one where many (and eventually most) people live out their lives hooked up to an opiate IV and a VR headset.
We also simply are too efficient to have multiple of a field any more too. We end up having one department store chain instead of four or five in an area; every market seems to solidify into 2 or 3 companies. Many jobs are virtualized to where those companies hire a fraction of humanity and have weak supply chains.
I think what will happen is just over time we will have less people. People will stop reproducing in sort of an equilibrium until we reach a point where we balance out to the economy's needs. I don't think it will be top down, but people simply cannot afford to have kids in a part time gig economy.
I'm all for tariffs when there is some other goal that makes sense (for example I think tariffs should bake in the cost of environmental or other regulatory compliance we have that the foreign trading partner does not).
China’s not free trade anyways (not in terms of tariffs, but in terms of foreign businesses operating locally, and in terms of manipulating currency) so there’s only so much they can retaliate...
The Trump supporters who I am talking about have spent the last 4 years alienating their friends and family, bragging about their success, and making fun of those who are less fortunate than themselves. The Trump supporters who I am talking about have spent the last 4 years running people over with their cars, pointing guns(and shooting) at people that disagree with them, and now attempted to overthrow a democratic election.
Whatever filter bubble you think I am in is not as tiny as you might think. I have lived all over the country. I am from rural Michigan. I personally know conservatives and have close family that I deeply care about that are fully absorbed into the Trump cult. These are people who were upper middle class by the time the Bush and Obama administrations had come to pass; these are people that have destroyed lifelong relationships to maintain their allegiance with Trump.
I know the hardship is out there, and that I can agree with you on. However, the Trump supporters I know have more property and wealth than I could dream of.
And he did take a few steps to fix issues, including on criminal justice reform and eg his executive order on healthcare pricing (how was something like that not in the ACA?). A pittance for sure. However if you're drowning and grasping at straws, those will do. The way the system attacked Trump for four years also makes them believe even more so that he represents the anti-establishment, that he would tear down the existing system.
Trump voters also liked his economy until the pandemic crashed it. They think he was at least partially responsible for it. Wages for the bottom 2/3 were rising at the fastest pace in two decades. That wasn't courtesy of Trump (it was due to a very tight labor market, which would have happened in that term regardless), however as President he gets the credit for it, that's how it always works politically. Absent the pandemic, Trump would have easily sailed to a second term via the electoral college.
Why did Bernie Sanders voters come back and vote for him so voraciously again after he (maybe) lost last time vs Hillary Clinton? Because they reject the Hillary Clinton & Joe Biden status quo, the never-ending cycle of sticking to the types of candidates and policies of the recent past that have failed.
Imagine an alternative election without Trump as a Republican: vote for system status quo conservative candidate (Jeb Bush clones at best, maybe we'll get some more war out of it), or vote for Joe Biden, one of the guys that put us into Iraq & Afghanistan for two decades, represents everything wrong with the past 50 years of American politics (which he was an important part of), is a pure establishment candidate, represents the entrenched political elites, and sponsored the human rights smashing 1990s crime bill. One helluva choice Americans get. Death by this, or death by that. Besides, people largely vote by partisanship (which is how you get prominent Democrat Congresspersons that will say Biden is guilty of sexual assault, and they still support him for President; or how you get his VP calling him a racist one minute and then gleefully joining forces with him and pretending he's not a racist the next minute; that's the nature of being a partisan). The vast majority of voters on each side will stay on their Republican / Democrat side; so if you're a Republican, your choice is Trump or a likely return to something akin to Bush's various terrible policies (the Bush money machine likely would have handed Jeb the Republican nomination in 2016, absent Trump). So as I said, flail it is.
I'd gladly take Jeb Bush over Trump. Not that I'd actually vote for either one, but, at least Bush seemed competent.
These people have been told that their trouble is caused by brown people coming to take their jobs, by affirmative action. They are told that the government is the problem, when in reality so many poor people in the South rely on government assistance just to survive. They look for a cause for their troubles and the right wing media hands them a false narrative.
How did white privilege allow them access?
I assume you have noticed how the majority of the people in the 1/6 "protests" were white, didn't you?
This was supposed to be a group of people who "backed the blue" and stood for law and order. Perhaps their guard was let down because of this?
Perhaps it was because the police response to mass gatherings has changed and become more lenient since the beginning of the BLM protests.
Interesting that you posted this link with the image of national guard members on the Lincoln Memorial steps this summer. I had read the an official, maybe Mayor Bowser didn't want this exact scene pictured to happen again because it looked bad.
Anyway, here is the tweet from the Mayor Bowser officially declining additional federal law enforcement to help MPD and their partners.
I don't think that Mayor Bowser refused to get additional law enforcment because of white privilege.
Are you actually trying to make that claim or just arguing for the sake of arguing?
That's fine, obviously we don't have to agree.
I do ask that you be a bit more civil though in our discussion.
All I'm saying is that if you're going to disagree with Occam's Razor, given the history of racial relations in this country, including the fact that there's an entire protest movement about police violence against non-white people, you've gotta bring something besides "could it be," and "perhaps."
If you can't deal with that, I'd suggest you avoid internet discussions entirely.
"I assume you have noticed how the majority of the people in the 1/6 "protests" were white, didn't you? "
"You're gonna have to provide more than "could it be," and "perhaps," if you want me to swallow that line."
"Are you actually trying to make that claim or just arguing for the sake of arguing?"
"If you can't deal with that, I'd suggest you avoid internet discussions entirely."
So I don't think you're arguing in good faith.
I'm not certain the context of why she begins her statement "To be clear". I looked at her previous tweets from the day and day before and this matter wasn't specifically addressed. The only thing I could think of is that a federal law enforcement authority wanted to get involved and she didn't feel the need?
https://twitter.com/MayorBowser/status/1346530358674792466
"To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD if such plans are underway."
Jobs. Opioid deaths. Suicides. Life expectancy. Standards of living. Manufacturing erosion. Lack of a future. Lack of wealth creation. Rural and middle class erosion. Education costs. Healthcare costs. Endless war. Shitty rotting infrastructure. Mismanagement of the US fiscal house by worthless political elites obsessed with their own petty bubbles in DC. A mediocre social safety net despite enormous government spending. Corporate-government-lobby coordination to endlessly pillage the people (eg per capita healthcare costs in the US being 2x what they should be). Being lied to for generations by the elite political class while things haven't gotten better for half the country for 50 years.
Everyone is starting to look around and ask good questions. Like, why do US taxpayers & citizens fork over $8.2 trillion (directly or through debt/inflation) every year, equal to ~40% of the economy, and have so little to show for it? Why is there no money in Social Security? What did they do with what should be the world's largest sovereign wealth fund? Why does nobody call them out on the lie that is the non-existent Social Security lockbox? Why do we keep burning trillions of dollars in the Middle East? Insert 487 other lies from the political class.
Trump got their attention because he brought up some of these lies - including the endless war aspect - and was one of the first leading candidates to ever do so. It's a similar reason why Bernie Sanders came so close to the Presidency twice, a large group of people on both sides are very angry and have had enough of the same old status quo (which the elites in power have an interest in perpetuating forever). Those trillions of dollars wasted in the Middle East should have been in a Social Security wealth fund, and some of it should have been put toward infrastructure.
Tens of millions of white people - those core Trump voters - are getting increasingly angry about all of it. Most of them probably have no idea what to do, so they're flailing for something different (if you're not an experienced fighter and you get hit in the face, your only capable reaction may be to flail). Those voters are not supposed to be upset about anything (so goes the fantasy social theory), because of their privilege. How is their privilege looking compared to a white person in Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Britain, France, the Netherlands or Sweden? I'd say many of them are increasingly worse off and they know it when they look around. Those standards are what white people in the US look at to compare their well-being, and that's where they start to get increasingly upset.
Michael Moore was right about what he said about Trump voters prior to the 2016 election, why they were seeking to elect him. Those voters wanted to throw a molotov cocktail at the system. And they were not thinking particularly rationally, angry people rarely do.
People tend to vote for radical options when they're desperate. One can think less of them for voting for Trump, say they chose wrong, shit all over them, call them stupid, mock them, call for their arrest or purging, call for them to be blacklisted, try to suppress their speech and so on. One can shake one's head and proclaim that if they only voted Democrat they could have all of those things they want (which also begs the question on how the Democrats screwed up so badly that they lost the poor and lower class white voter that they used to have). Those voters feel attention-abandoned by the Democrats - which is an ongoing mistake by the Dems - and Trump scooped them up by paying attention to them. They're angry regardless of anyone's thoughts about them, they're increasingly lost regardless, and they're going to get more so as time goes on and as things fail to improve, as their lot in life fails to improve. They're angry because their point of comparison isn't what some people think it should be, it's what they think it should be. White lower & middle class people are never going to bounce around happy because they're better off than a poor black person in the US (which is what the premise of throwing white privilege statements at them is meant to accomplish), that is never going to be their point of comparison no matter what anybody says to them; their point of comparison is going to be other affluent white people around the world (that is not a politically correct thing to say, of course, it's the actual truth of their perspective and what's really going on).
Telling people that they shouldn't be angry does not work, particularly when they've been dealing with decades of standard of living erosion and have little hope for the future being better. The elites have been conspiring against their interests forever at this point, it's little wonder they're staggering around in a daze with little clue as to what direction to go. It's a mistake for the Democrats to obsess over blaming and castigating those people, instead of focusing on convincing them, swaying them, educating them, peeling away voters and ultimately delivering real life improvements (the big part of that) if they truly believe they have a better path to offer for their future. The Democrats have power again (narrowly), and they need to deliver a lot better than they did in 2009-2010 with their mostly squandered super majority.