NY, the Democrat stronghold, shows the future.

[The_Trouvere]

Didn't you say that the poor white Republicans are snookered into believing in upward mobility and that they believe the Republican party will help them in that. So when they vote for Republicans are they not voting for their upward mobility, in other words, for their narrow self interest?

They might think they are voting in their self interest, but they are not. Rich Republicans think they are voting in their self interest, and they are.

One more point: if patriotism means anything, the meaning would seem to include a concern for the good of the United States as a collective unit. Cutting taxes has become Republican identity politics. Republicans do not care about how seriously chronic budget deficits are harming the United States.

 

[The_Trouvere]

It shows, it really does.

The self-loathing is almost palpable every time you start talking about "homos". It's funny to listen to a self described atheist and "not Republican" constantly spewing the ideology of both Republicans and Christians.

You're just a huge fucking parody of yourself.

When Cap'n AMatrixca outgrew the childish delusions of Protestant Fundamentalism he retained many of the hard edged values. He found confirmation of them in the writings of Ayn Rand.

 

[unregistered]

 

[The_Trouvere]

Great, are you all packed and ready to go?

If I could get a decent job there I would run to catch it. American liberals will feel at home in Western Europe or the British Commonwealth.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Democrats=Champions of the lower class that is a drain on the public welfare system.

If you promise entitlements to people who'd rather do nothing and have no skills to do so if they wanted to, you get votes.

We do need to think about the lower classes right now. We should think about how much of a drain they are on govt. money. They put the least amount into the pot, yet get the biggest share of the soup.

M

Let me be clear. From Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, by Paul Fussell:

My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows:

Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle
------------------------
Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian
------------------------
Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight

One thing to get clear at the outset is this: it's not riches alone that define these clases. . . . "Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor," says George Orwell, "but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but -- this is the essential point -- generally persist from birth to death. . . . It is . . . very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born." When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, watching Richard Nixon on television, turned to his friends and, horror-struck, said, "The guy has no class," he was not talking about money.
* * * *
Not that the three classes at the top don't have money. The point is that money alone doesn't define them, for the way they have their money is largely what matters. . . . The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pres, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely. . . .

"When I think of a really rich man," says a Boston blue-collar, "I think of one of those estates where you can't see the house from the road." Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called "the class in hiding." Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. . . .
* * * *
The next class down, the upper class, differs from the top-out-of-sight class in two main ways. First, although it inherits a lot of its money, it earns quite a bit too, usually from some attractive, if slight, work, without which it would feel bored and even ashamed. It's likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate. . . . And secondly, unlike the top-out-of-sights, the upper class is visible, often ostentatiously so. . . . When you pass a house with a would-be impressive facade visible from the street or highway, you know it's occupied by a member of the upper class. . . .

* * * *
We now come to the upper-middle class. It may possess virtually as much as the two classes above it. The difference is that it has earned most of it, in law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate, or even the more honorific kinds of trade, like buying and selling works of art. Although they may enjoy some inherited money and use inherited "things" (silver, Oriental rugs), the upper-middles suffer from a bourgeois sense of shame, a conviction that to live on the earnings of others, even forebears, is not nice.

Caste marks of the upper-middles would include living in a house with more rooms than you need, except perhaps when a lot of "overnight guests" are present to help you imitate upper-class style. . . . This class is also the most "role-reversed" of all: men think nothing of cooking and doing housework, women of working out of the house in journalism, theater, or real estate. (If the wife stays home all the time, the family's middle-class only.) Upper-middles like to show off their costly educations by naming their cats Spinoza, Clytemnestra, and Candide, which means, as you'll have inferred already, that it's in large part the class depicted by Lisa Birnbach and others' Official Preppy Handbook, that significantly popular artifact of 1980.
* * * *
. . . The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right. . . .

"Status panic": that's the affliction of the middle class, according to C. Wright Mills, author of White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Hence the middles' need to accumulate credit cards and take in The New Yorker, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. . . .

If the audience for that sort of thing used to seem the most deeply rooted in time and place, today it seems the class that's the most rootless. Members of the middle class are not only the sort of people who buy their own heirlooms, silver, etc. They're also the people who do most of the moving long-distance (generally to very unstylish places), commanded every few years to pull up stakes by the corporations they're in bondage to. They are the geologist employed by the oil company, the computer programmer, the aeronautical engineer, the salesman assigned to a new territory, and the "marketing" (formerly sales) manager deputed to keep an eye on him. . . . IBM and DuPont hire these people from second-rate colleges and teach them that they are nothing if not members of the team. Virtually no latitude is permitted to individuality or the milder forms of eccentricity, and these employees soon learn to avoid all ideological statements. . . . Terrified of losing their jobs, these people grow passive, their humanity diminished as they perceive themselves mere parts of an infinitely larger structure. Interchangeable parts, too. "The training makes our men interchangeable," an IBM executive was once heard to say.
* * * *
. . . Oddity, introversion, and love of privacy are the big enemies, a total reversal of the values of the secure upper orders. Among the middles there's a convention that erecting a fence or even a tall hedge is an affront. And there's also a convention that you may drop in on neighbors and friends without a telephone inquiry first. . . .
* * * *
. . . Proceeding downward, we would normally expect to meet next the lower-middle class. But it doesn't exist as such any longer, having been pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class. What's the difference? A further lack of freedom and self-respect. Our former lower-middle class, the new high proles, now head "the masses," and even if they are positioned at the top of the proletarian classes, still they are identifiable as people things are done to. They are in bondage -- to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast food, consumer schlock. Back in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to "saving" and "planning" maintained it in a position -- often precarious, to be sure -- above the working class. . . . These former low-white-collar people are now simply working machines, and the wife usually works as well as the husband.

The kind of work performed and the sort of anxiety that besets one as a result of work are ways to divide the working class into its three strata. The high proles are the skilled workers, crafstmen, like printers. The mid-proles are operators, like Ralph Kramden, the bus driver. The low proles are unskilled labor, like longshoremen. The special anxiety of high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you're proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer. The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you're probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want.
* * * *
But high proles are quite smart, or at least shrewd. Because often their work is not closely supervised, they have pride and a conviction of independence, and they feel some contempt for those who have not made it as far as they have. They are, as the sociologist E. E. LeMasters calls them and titles his book, Blue-Collar Aristocrats (1975), and their disdain for the middle class is like the aristocrat's from the other direction. . . . Like other aristocrats, says LeMasters, these "have gone to the top of their social world and need not expend time or energy on 'social climbing.'" . . .

Since they're not consumed with worry about choosing the correct status emblems, these people can be remarkably relaxed and unself-conscious. They can do, say, wear, and look like pretty much anything they want without undue feelings of shame, which belong to their betters, the middle class, shame being largely a bourgeois feeling. . . .
* * * *
High proles are nice. It's down among the mid- and low proles that features some might find offensive begin to show themselves. These are people who feel bitter about their work, often because they are closely supervised and regulated and generally treated like wayward children. . . . Andrew Levinson, author of The Working-Class Majority (1974), invites us to imagine what it would be like to be under the constant eye of a foreman, "a figure who has absolutely no counterpart in middle-class society. Salaried professionals often do have people above them, but it is impossible to imagine professors or executives being required to bring a doctor's note if they are absent a day or having to justify the number of trips they take to the bathroom." . . .

The degree of supervision, indeed, is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. . . . One is a mid- or low prole if one's servitude is constantly emphasized. Occupational class depends largely on doing work for which the consquences of error or failure are distant or remote, or better, invisible, rather than immediately apparent to a superior and thus instantly humiliating to the performer.

Constantly demeaned at work, the lower sorts of proles suffer from poor morale. As one woman worker says, "Most of us . . . have jobs that are too small for our spirits."
* * * *
At the bottom of the working class, the low prole is identifiable by the gross uncertainty of his employment. This class would include illegal aliens like Mexican fruit pickers as well as other migrant workers. Social isolation is the norm here, and what Hoggart says of the lower working class in Britain applies elsewhere as well: "Socially . . . each day and each week is almost unplanned. There is no diary, no book of engagements, and few letters are sent or received." Remoteness and isolation, as in the valleys of Appalachia, are characteristics, and down here we find people who, trained for nothing, are likely out of sheer despair to join the Army.

Still, they're better off than the destitute, who never have even seasonal work and who live wholly on welfare. They differ from the bottom-out-of-sights less because they're much better off than because they're more visible, in the form of Bowery bums, bag ladies, people who stand in public places lecturing and delivering harangues about their grievances, people who drink out of paper bags, people whose need for some recognition impels them to "act" in front of audiences in the street. When delinquency and distress grow desperate, you sink into the bottom-out-of-sight class, staying all day in your welfare room or contriving to get taken into an institution, whether charitable or correctional doesn't matter much.

When I say we need to be thinking more about the "lower classes" in America, I am speaking of all from the high proles to the bottom out-of-sight. Together they probably form a majority of the population. And you can't dismiss them all as "people who'd rather do nothing." And they didn't get much talked about, this election cycle, by either party.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Let me be the first to offer a one way ticket for any American Liberal who wants to get out and stay out. I'll even hold the door so it doesn't hit them in the ass on the way out.

Oh, no. This is our country. You leave.

 

[miles]

Oh, no. This is our country. You leave.

Define "us."

 

[tmleadr03]

They might think they are voting in their self interest, but they are not. Rich Republicans think they are voting in their self interest, and they are.

One more point: if patriotism means anything, the meaning would seem to include a concern for the good of the United States as a collective unit. Cutting taxes has become Republican identity politics. Republicans do not care about how seriously chronic budget deficits are harming the United States.

So the poor white people are too ignorant to be allowed to vote, but the poor black people (whom you agree with) are right on target?

 

[The_Trouvere]

So the poor white people are too ignorant to be allowed to vote, but the poor black people (whom you agree with) are right on target?

I never said that anyone should be denied the right to vote. I did say that the GOP pursues policies harmful to the interests of lower income people. Most poor blacks understand that. Most poor whites do not.

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

So the poor white people are too ignorant to be allowed to vote, but the poor black people (whom you agree with) are right on target?

Nobody said that they shouldn't be allowed to vote. You're putting words in mouths Mr. Strawman.

The real issue with low income conservatives is that they have been sold a pig in a poke for the most part. They really and truly believe that they will one day become one of the entitled few, one of the upper class rich and so vote in favor of those policies that heavily favor the wealthy and oddly enough work to keep them exactly where they are.

What they need is a good dose of reality and an education in odds. The odds are very much against them moving from the trailer park to Beverly Hills. Voting as if it's their turn to hit the lotto next week is ignorant and misinformed. They aren't looking out for themselves, they're looking out for how they wish they were. Meanwhile red states continue to draw the majority of social services while their party continues to actively campaign against them and they just keep on supporting them. Because they won't need that government check next week, it's their turn to hit the Lottery ya know!

 

[tmleadr03]

I never said that anyone should be denied the right to vote. I did say that the GOP pursues policies harmful to the interests of lower income people. Most poor blacks understand that. Most poor whites do not.

My apologies, let me rephrase.


Poor black people are very knowledgeable about how they vote and have a great understanding of the politics of both sides and in this certainty vote for the Democrats.

Poor white people really dont have a clue but are very ignorant, have no understanding of the politics of either side and have been tricked by the Republican party to cast their vote for them.


Is this what you are saying? If so do you also believe that segregation is still in effect in schooling or perhaps there is a significant genetic difference between whites and blacks that causes this "disparity".

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

My apologies, let me rephrase.


Poor black people are very knowledgeable about how they vote and have a great understanding of the politics of both sides and in this certainty vote for the Democrats.

Poor white people really dont have a clue but are very ignorant, have no understanding of the politics of either side and have been tricked by the Republican party to cast their vote for them.


Is this what you are saying? If so do you also believe that segregation is still in effect in schooling or perhaps there is a significant genetic difference between whites and blacks that causes this "disparity".

Most low income blacks vote for their own self interest and therefore support the more socially conscious Democratic Party.

Most low income whites do not vote for their self interest, they vote for where they wish (in the vast majority of cases erroneously) their interests lie.

I'll leave it to you to decide who's being duped. The people who vote for those who support programs that benefit them NOW or the ones who support programs that support where they think (in most cases they never will be) they may one day be. I know who I think is cutting their nose off to spite their face.

 

[The_Trouvere]

My apologies, let me rephrase.

Poor black people are very knowledgeable about how they vote and have a great understanding of the politics of both sides and in this certainty vote for the Democrats.

Poor white people really dont have a clue but are very ignorant, have no understanding of the politics of either side and have been tricked by the Republican party to cast their vote for them.

Is this what you are saying? If so do you also believe that segregation is still in effect in schooling or perhaps there is a significant genetic difference between whites and blacks that causes this "disparity".

You raise intriguing issues, and I do not want to seem condescending in responding to them. Contrary to what Karl Marx alleged, among working people loyalties of class are usually less powerful than loyalties of race, nation, and ethnicity. Lower income whites have an easier time identifying with the employer/investor class because nearly all in that group are white. They also have an easier time feeling nationalistic because the United States has always been a white majority country.

During the 1960's and 1970's working class whites had legitimate reasons to feel alienated from the Democrat Party - which the great majority of them had been voting for since at least the election of 1932 - because of issues like crime, affirmative action, and busing. Since then the Democrat Party has adopted a more punitive approach to crime, and it has backed away from affirmative action and busing.

On two important issues the GOP certainly does not pursue the economic interests of those in the lower half of the income distribution. These are taxes and health care. Blacks seem to have an easier time understanding this than whites.

 

[Borscht]

Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt. How was that good for the country?

It trapped the USSR into a spending war that they were bound to lose.

And lose they did.

Say what you want about Reagan, but he did manage to win a world war without spilling (much) blood.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Say what you want about Reagan, but he did manage to win a world war without spilling (much) blood.

If instead of Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union had been governed by an equally capable neo-Stalinist, Ronald Reagan's belligerence may have provoked a nuclear war.

One of the factors that brought down the Soviet Union was the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq continue to be an drag on an American economy that is collapsing.

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

I never said that anyone should be denied the right to vote. I did say that the GOP pursues policies harmful to the interests of lower income people. Most poor blacks understand that. Most poor whites do not.[/QUOTE



What right to vote? Decided law, Algore V. Florida, I'm sure someone has already told you that REPEATEDLY...






Most blacks are as fucking stupid as most whites, Howard Stern proved that in aces which means they "believe" that, they don't understand shit, it’s why they stay poor for the most part. The funny thing is its usually over-educated idiots who CHOOSE to be poor to pursue intellectual fantasies who defend them because THEY understand THEY need a hand out, so they work very hard to make the stupid BELIEVE they are owed a handout too, just to get numbers...

Then the system goes belly-up and they get frog-marched to the fields.

Baba O' Reilly!

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

If instead of Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union had been governed by an equally capable neo-Stalinist, Ronald Reagan's belligerence may have provoked a nuclear war.

One of the factors that brought down the Soviet Union was the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq continue to be an drag on an American economy that is collapsing.

Uh..., the first Stalinist idiot pretty made sure that there was a generation or two of leaders NOTHING like him...



DOH!



First thing Saddam did too.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

I have to go live on the Canadian border, where it touches the French Quarters, and wait for the Germans to kick them out if I want to be "home..."

I guess.




I'd go back to KANSAS, but I don't want to be the only one; Toto surrendered and took up Mormanizing up around Salt Lake City....