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I’ve spent just as much time time in the “dying” rust belt as coastal cities (it’s where I grew up), and it’s just a different kind of bleak.
It’s true that if you can manage to belong within certain in-groups in these places (often religious, reactionary), there is not as much baseline cruelty. But if you’re outside them for whatever reason, good luck. It’s made all the worse by the fact that many of their judgements of others are laundered through religion, making them even more entrenched. Wealth, poverty, disease, addiction lose much of their social determination and instead come to be a reflection of how “right you are with God.”
Let’s be clear, the majority of people fall within these in-groups. As contrasted to say California or New York, where the in-groups are defined in a much more class-based way that excludes most people.
As to the rest belt—that’s an odd point of comparison. Those economies are devastated, while California’s is thriving. I’m thinking of places that still have an economy—Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Idaho, Utah, Wisconsin, etc. These places manage to have half the poverty rate of California. California has about double the number of homeless families with children (adjusted for population) as Kansas. More than double that of Texas or Mississippi. (New York has more than 10 times the rate of homeless families as Texas or Kansas.)
I’m just curious - are you from one of these places? Because the class distinctions you’re describing are very much in place in the same way as in big cities, they’re just mediated through many of the same forces. So you have the rich church and the poor church, but also god forbid if you’re poor and don’t go to church at all. The lowest of the low. And many people likewise just feign belief in this culture because the material circumstances are much worse on the outside than in.
As to your point about homelessness, given the cost of living in California, wouldn’t you expect people to be more prone to homelessness than in a place Kansas? Especially since wages are actually quite bad in California (for the median household), relatively speaking.
If you’re argument is that liberal Capitalism is more openly cruel than liberal Capitalism, mediated through religious in-groupings, I’d say sure, that’s possible.
Two things that really shook my views on the last several years was (1) living in downtown DC for a year; and (2) traveling regularly to Texas. In DC we lived in Chinatown, which has been completely gentrified. Everyone was rich, and nobody had children (the local schools are still terrible). There was an extreme disparity between the (white and Asian) gentrifiers and the people of color they were displacing. Despite there being lots of white people, you almost never saw a white kid working a service job. (All this gave me flashbacks to Bangladesh, so I packed up and moved my family to somewhere less dysfunctional.)
Texas, especially East Texas, was the opposite. Thriving suburbs of people enjoying Big Box amenities. No Michelin star restaurants and lots of religion, but with much lower display of class and race distinctions. Tons of families with children. I encountered a cab driver in Austin who sang the city’s praises. He was from Morocco and had moved to the Austin suburbs about a decade ago. He and other cab drivers were able to buy three bedroom homes with pools in a good school district. He was living the American dream.
As to cost of living in California, that goes to my point. California isn’t “liberal capitalist” in terms of housing. It’s centrally planned in the extreme.
Yes, DC has a very dark past in that regard, but decades of progressivism hasn't fixed anything. And the most recent trend in the city has been yuppies who vote the right way and say the right things pushing out all the people of color, leaving a starkly segregated and stratified society. Meanwhile, given what's going on at the border, I don't think it's accurate to say that Texas doesn't have its own issues with respect to disenfranchised demographic groups. But the combination of cheap housing and plentiful jobs is allowing broad-based prosperity in Texas.
> Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ?
There is a place to talk about social issues, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The material prosperity of the people in the middle is a really important thing too. Indeed, that is deeply inter-connected with social justice issues, such as how easy it is for immigrants to assimilate into the country and establish themselves.
Speaking as an immigrant myself, what was important to my family when we were first starting out wasn't the incarceration rate, or how our neighbors felt about people from Muslim countries like the one we came from. It was the fact that, on a middle class income, without my mom working, we could afford a decent house in a good school district. That's something that Texas delivers on, and that results in tangible prosperity even (especially?) among immigrant groups.
The median income for a hispanic household is just 2% higher in California than Texas, but the median house in California costs 3 times as much. If I were in my parents' shoes, trying to pick a place in this country to get started, I'd pick the suburbs of Houston or Dallas over the suburbs of San Francisco in a hearbeat. It wouldn't even be a question.
> California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws.
That it's the product of democracy and local zoning laws doesn't mean it's not central planning. Californians have used democracy to create a zoning system that forces construction into centrally planned models. You can't renovate your house or build a new one (or, god forbid, turn your single family home into an apartment building) without going through a central bureaucracy. That bureaucracy considers things like the "zoning plan" and the "character of the neighborhood." That's central planning!
But I would caution you from contrasting this too much with how class differences and racial disparities manifest in more rural states. How the white working poor are treated by their “betters” (including the middle class) is often as vicious and cruel, but masked by a veneer of racial and cultural homogeneity. And the private, “dinner party” racism among middle class whites in these regions is amongst the most extreme and normalized I have ever witnessed. People do go a lot further to mask this though, hence things like the concept of “Midwestern nice.”
I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway. It seems entirely defined by laws that protect incumbent property owners and developers, who then use their resulting wealth to buy off the government and protect this advantage. But maybe this is a difference in definitions because I mean “liberal Capitalism” in its lived, pragmatic, and arguably corrupt sense, not as a philosophical ideal.
As a brown person myself, I don't know what midwesterners say at dinner parties. But I also don't really care. "Midwestern nice" is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. What is important, to me, is that it's a society that's flatter and more egalitarian than anything I've observed on the coasts. Middle class people aren't on the outside looking in, people aren't jockeying to send their kids to private schools or a handful of competitive magnets, those kids can get normal jobs and afford to live near where they grew up. You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.) And all that appears to pay real dividends in quantifiable statistics such as poverty rates and homelessness rates.
> I fail to see how housing in California is centrally planned in anyway.
If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan, and you have to jump through hoops and follow detailed specifications on height limits, etc., that's central planning. By definition.
Fair enough, but that really doesn’t jive with my experience. I graduated from a class of 300 people in a farming community and many of my classmates I know have left because of an inability to find decent paying or meaningful work.
The nearest large town of about 100,000 people is in the middle of a housing crisis and has to grapple with all the same issues that large coastal cities have been dealing with for a decade. And they’re certainly not egalitarian about any of the solutions. Large, national real estate companies have moved in, developing primarily luxury stock, but also buying up existing housing and apartments to make sure prices and rents stay high. There’s all kinds of eliminationist rhetoric about the poor and homeless being tossed around (which honestly was always the case, even when I was a kid). Local politics are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy families. They’re archly right-wing, which is different from the coast, but not really too much in terms of how much the poor are cared for. I looked up the stats for Texas and they seemed pretty bad on inequality, healthcare, etc.
> You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.)
Again, I really want to emphasize that just because it doesn’t seem as apparent to you doesn’t mean it’s there. In my very small school, the class distinctions were very sharp, even if we weren’t as easily segregated. That happened too, but mostly in the form of kids being sent off to expensive religious schools for middle and high school.
Wealthy kids bullied and mocked kids from families who were service workers. Everyone knew who lived in the trailer parks versus the subdivisions. Poorer, working farmers were mocked by those who had wealthy hobby farms (and often took care of animals like horses for the rich kids). It’s definitely a different tapestry of cruelty from city life, but it shouldn’t be romanticized or misunderstood in anyway.
> If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan
Right, but there’s not a central zoning plan as far as I’m aware, there are many competing corrupt ones who seemingly stifle all but the most unaffordable development. A state-level, less restrictive, centralized zoning plan would probably actually be an improvement.
I like this phrase - very expressive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
California is somewhere in the middle. Failed red states have the worst poverty rate
https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20...
The term continues today, with similar physically left-right distribution of comparable views within the U.S. legislative chamber.
In the US, the Democratic party is the more left-wing of the two main parties and is sometimes included under the "leftist" umbrella. However, some people, mostly on the far-left, reserve the term "leftist" for those who oppose capitalism.
In most of the world (outside of some one party states where the ruling party shifts with the poltiical winds to avoid losing dominance, like Mexico when it was under one-party rule), especially in multiparty democracies, the association of ideologies with parties is much stronger and more consistent than in the US. That aside, the dominant ideology of the Democratic Party has actually been consistent for a little over two-decades, but that ideology is center-right neoliberalism, not leftist. “Lefist” has mostly been associated with the Democratic Party because of the propaganda efforts of the even farther right party, not because of any real substance. It's only recently (since about 2014) that a faction even vaguely leftist has given any significant challenge to the dominant center-right faction of the Democratic Party.
To someone who grew up during that period, the allegations of socialism from the right never made any sense to me. It was only recently when Democrats started fighting to distance themselves from Obama that I understood the criticism from the right. I would also argue that you’re understating the profound shift that has happened in the last two years. The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it. It’s again the party of FDR, not the party of Clinton or Obama.
We’ll see about that. No sweeping legislation has been introduced, and words are cheap. I’m not convinced that many of the Democrats who support it now won’t suddenly find reason to water it down or oppose it when they need to put their vote on the record. It looks like Democrats are becoming the party of FDR again, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
The commenter who made the accusation of present leftism chose the time period of interest (the last couple decades.) Discussing within that frame rather than changing the subject to the distant past isn't "misleading".
> FDR was not a center right neo-liberal.
FDR died more than 70 years ago.
I mean, I might just as relevantly point out that Thomas Jefferson was a follower of the kind of old-school liberalism that modern center-right neoliberalism seeks to return to in reaction--at least within the Democratic Party--against center-left progressivism.
> There was a brief interregnum during which Clinton and Obama governed as center-right economically and center-left socially.
Well, except the Democratic Presidents governing from the economic center-right include Carter, as well; 1977-2008 isn't all that much shorter than 1932-1968 (the FDR-Johnson period). It was no "brief interregnum".
> To someone who grew up during that period, the allegations of socialism from the right never made any sense to me. It was only recently when Democrats started fighting to distance themselves from Obama that I understood the criticism from the right.
But the criticism you didn't understand didn't concern the times that you describe it as making sense. So...how did the later change validate it?
> I would also argue that you’re understating the profound shift that has happened in the last two years. The Green New Deal is an openly socialist document, and every Democratic candidate has committed to supporting it.
(1) The shift didn't happen in the last two years, more like the last 5.
(2) You are overweighting establishment candidates seeking deny candidates challenging the establishment ground to fight from, while burying substantial differences in policy below the level of headline positions; its a fairly standard strategy. Also, the GND is not, in any case, an "openly socialist" document; it does endorse both environmental and social-democratic goals, but does within a capitalist framework.
> It’s again the party of FDR
I think you are jumping to conclusions on the flimsy basis of early primary campaign strategy.
Harris, Feinstein and Pelosi are all pretty center, until 2011 they had a Republican governo,r and these tech companies and their values are decidely not liberal.
Further, Cali is home to some very conservative politics, Devin Nunes is way out there as is Kevin McCarthy.
The idea of leftist doesn't seem consistent with the usage.
Perhaps pondering that question will trigger a recalibration.
California may not be “socialist” like Sanders wants (and frankly, no country in the OECD is “socialist” anymore the way Sanders wants), but it’s certainly more leftist than the rest of the US. It’s got the highest taxes, among the highest social spending, much more government regulation of the economy, higher percentage of union workers than the US average, the highest minimum wage, etc. If should be doing a lot better than other US states.
No. The 1996 Democratic platform was quite right wing for example. And California Democrats’ policies on criminal justice were very much to the right.
> Like it's not just Sander's dems, its California which is not all that extreme (yet?)
I’m comparing states to each other, so I’m using “leftist” to indicate that California’s policies are further to the left compared to other states.
Sanders “Democratic Socialism” is basically European social democracy; none of the things Sanders seeks are all that uncommon, or even for the most part particularly “socialist”, by OECD standards.
> [California]’s got the highest taxes
It's not even in the top 20% of states by tax burden, coming in at 11 out of 50. (Iowa, which somehow never gets called leftist, is #10) [0]
[0] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...