Attention Must Be Paid: The Electoral Lessons of the Working Class | Hacker News Reader

Attention Must Be Paid: The Electoral Lessons of the Working Class

dennissanders.medium.com

45 pointsdenminn105 comments

> with the plant under new management, his union rep no longer had the relationship with plant management that he used to have so they couldn’t help Alex

What? The union depends on the company being nice? Is the union rep compensated?

Yes, the union does depend on the company being nice. Not every union is powerful.

Well, the union leadership depends on the company being nice if they arent willing to fight. If a union wont strike, then yeah you are left begging management for scraps.

A decision like firing this employee is not made at high levels of management. Merely involving senior management in the issue is already an escalation.

If the union rep has a solid relationship with management, this conversation can be a simple "hey can you take a look at this". Management trusts that the union rep wouldn't approach them with frivolous complaints and looks into it, maybe reinstates the employee. If that trust relationship doesn't exist, then the rep would have to apply pressure somehow, which engenders bad will.

Part of the job is knowing which fights are worth fighting, when they're worth fighting, and what sort of tools you're willing to use.

The union holds management to a set of policies and there is probably a step-by-step procedure laid out for calling off for sickness with what the employee's responsibilities are and the penalty for not following policy, and based on the description the manager probably was holding to policy so the union rep didn't want to fight against the policy.

The previous management may have been less strict or forgiving about specific policies (especially with sicknesses). But at the same time if you don't follow the policies evenly, people will start accusing you of favoritism and making up rules as you go along.

I don't usually comment on here but this article seems poorly written and highly opinionated. While I agree that discussion can be had on the relationship between the working class of dying industry and the new wave of highly skilled youths, I don't think this article hits the mark.

The article isn't talking about highly skilled youths, it's talking about how the standards of living for more than 50% of the population are being cored out by people who disdain them. The author argues that the demographic realizes what's happening, and further points out that this could lead to some very serious trouble.

Living standards for people doing lower-skilled manufacturing work are decreasing because that work is (in a whole lot of cases) not economic to do in the U.S. any more.

That isn't anything to do with "coastal elites" or whoever you're referring to as the disdainful part of the population here. The causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point.

Rather than making this into a culture war, perhaps we should be talking about policy alternatives that don't result in a trajectory of helplessness for those affected by those global, secular changes.

> causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point

The gains from these trends are accruing to the educated and the urban. That’s a big part of the problem.

And globalisation of US manufacturing was a political choice. Does nobody remember Ross Perot, who ran for President twice saying that NAFTA would doom the US manufacturing workers?

There was some kind of assumption that as long as the West kept the jobs requiring education, everything would be fine.

The results, somewhat predictably, were (amongst other things) Brexit and Trump.

> globalisation of US manufacturing was a political choice

Not really. Fundamental economic costs are fundamental. Protectionism would have delayed the inevitable. Instead of a snap, we would have had a slow decline through loss of exports, fall in economies of scale and finally starvation of R&D funds.

What was a political choice was abandoning those workers and communities. And pissing away trillions and a decade of political capital on a war.

For my money, these things are almost always a political choice.

Can you explain how the fundamental economic costs necessitated the globalisation of US manufacturing?

It was cheaper to get stuff made overseas. If you see the economy as a perfect optimizer that can't be stopped, that necessitates it.

Cheaper how, though? It does seem that a lot of the costs have been externalized or have gone otherwise unacknowledged. Factoring in the losses sustained by unrest, despair, missed opportunity, rent and interest, and so forth, I think you come to see a more accurate model than the "stocks go up" one that outputs a much rosier picture of America's economic wellbeing than is reality.

At the very least, the War on Terror blows a $6 trillion hole in whatever the calculations are; a less anxious, more homogeneously affluent America might not have acted so rashly following 9/11, and might not have even conjured the political and economic global paradigm that gave rise to al Qaeda in the first place.

> It does seem that a lot of the costs have been externalized or have gone otherwise unacknowledged

Probably. But if you’re selling a dishwasher to someone in Poland or Peru at 5x your competitor, you’re going to lose market share.

Yeah, but that cost differential was dependent on a political choice to allow imports from poorer countries.

There's no law of the universe that required this to be so.

To a large extent, it's the removal of capital controls and the signing of trade agreements that facilitated this, and those were 100% political choices.

No, I don't think so: the benefits are accruing to the entire U.S. population who get cheaper goods - the concentration of the downside is the problem.

It’s hardly a benefit if your goods are 20% cheaper but you no longer have a stable job to pay for them with.

No, obviously not. But your small-town tax preparers in Iowa are benefiting, and they're hardly your urban, coastal elites.

I'm not convinced that lowering wages actually decreases price of goods enough to compensate for the lower wages - for that to happen, the money needs to cycle all the way through the economy and back to the workers without ever being "leaked". Depending on the entire economy to not break sounds like a way-too-large-scope solution.

Things that could ruin the effect:

1. Any sort of natural monopoly

2. The "free market for senators" letting a corporation buy itself an un-natural monopoly through regulatory capture (either unnecessary regulation, or refusal to create necessary regulation)

3. Any sort of repeated irrationality in human nature that can be systematically exploited

4. Workers with lower wages purchasing less in the interim, resulting in fewer purchases and higher prices due to less economy of scale, resulting in fewer purchases and less economy of scale, etc etc

5. This probably overlaps with several of the above, but market distortions as a byproduct of initiatives to "create jobs", which is something everyone (as in both industrialists and working class) wants/needs to keep the economy afloat. IMO this is a result of people refusing to acknowledge that past a certain point, demand for wages is inflexible and will be paid, and if market mechanisms don't deliver then political forces will.

The "coastal elites" refuse to make their cities affordable for people to live in, so how are people supposed to move there to get better jobs?

It's not clear to me why you think I'm suggesting the answer is to have people move to coastal cities. That is almost certainly not the answer.

Rural areas throughout the world are poor. Rural Indiana is not going to ever again have such a high relative standard of living at it did fifty years ago. Appalachian communities don't have anything highly productive to offer; resource extraction doesn't require much labor anymore.

The jobs aren't coming back. If you don't want so many poor, we need to let them move to where the jobs are and will continue to be.

I don't agree with everything in the article, but I do believe that the non-urban folks are feeling ignored. I think the results of the election highlight this very well. In the critical "mail-in" states, the difference in the Presidential election was made by the large urban populations. In the House and Senate, local preferences were more strongly favored.

In the aftermath of the elections, all of the "land doesn't vote" posts serve to amplify the feeling of abandonment and disdain felt by the non-urban populations.

>I think the results of the election highlight this very well. In the critical "mail-in" states, the difference in the Presidential election was made by the large urban populations. In the House and Senate, local preferences were more strongly favored.

The part about the Senate doesn't make any sense to me: voting for the Senate works exactly the same way as voting for the Presidency in most states - it's a winner-take-all plurality vote on a statewide basis.

>The part about the Senate doesn't make any sense to me: voting for the Senate works exactly the same way as voting for the Presidency in most states - it's a winner-take-all plurality vote on a statewide basis.

Whoops, I wrote one thing while thinking the other. IIRC, the Democrats picked up a seat, which does seem to follow the statewide popular voting vs. regional voting.

Good catch!

I honestly think this is a case of equality appearing as persecution to those who've lived relatively blessed lives heretofore. For all the rigors of rural, small-town, w/e life, you don't see a mass exodus to the cities. Why not? Because, ultimately, they're getting what they want out of the deal: tight-knit communities, regulatory autonomy, and - the dirty little secret, which we must at least mention lest we make liars of ourselves - clear cultural (and even racial) hierarchy, if not homogeneity, among other things. But, of course, it's not sustainable in an accelerating information and service society. People are getting left behind and they don't like it (just not enough to move).

Their desires matter, but not more than anyone else's. So we have to find the balance. No, you can't just do what your dad did. No, you don't, just by nature of being you (whatever that entails), deserve a stable, affluent, modern lifestyle in an inoffensive culture surrounded by people who look just like you - at least, not anymore than urban folk deserve what they want. If we're going to do this thing, it's not going to be make-work pork (that would be your given farming subsidies, federal contracts - including in highly-educated STEM work, and whatever other public-private partnerships that get cast as bootstraps when they're very much not) getting shipped out to your rugged individualist homestead, funding your technically-rigorous but otherwise anti-science and ahistorical curricula, $80k lifted trucks, and mall-scale megachurches, while everyone else has to scrimp and sacrifice and live on the margins.

A true national solution will respect regional interests while, at its core, recognizing an equal right to whatever quality of life we deem workable and sustainable, and our collective interest in such. If the goal is a) rural folk get what they want, and b) fuck everyone else, it's not going to work. And what I've seen lately is city-dwellers switch from a patronizing to a hostile regard to these demands, so the decision on what to do is going to have to be made quickly, before the bottom falls out. Most of America's big cities could "secede" economically and be fine; after all, their reliance is on the trade of digital goods and intellectual services. Good luck to our landlocked states who sour their relationship to our ports of entry and exit.

I hear their sense of abandonment, and I want to reach out to them: stop voting for ignorant incompetents.

It's not just the top spot, but all up and down the ticket, those voters repeatedly choose morons. The last four years they've had overwhelming control, and their chosen leaders have done absolutely nothing for them -- except deliver a steady stream of insults, which seems to be all they really want. Their message is clear: given the opportunity, rather than help themselves, what they desire more is to stick it to those urban populations they hate so much.

Every election we go through this hand-wringing cycle of trying to listen harder to them. It's time to turn it around: how about you flyover chuckfucks listen to me for a change? Not the psychotic delusions of me being handed to them by the single solitary news stream they watch (the only one, they're told, that isn't lying to them), but the things I actually say and think.

Maybe then I'll stop referring to them as flyover chucklefucks. But thus far, they've spent so much time convincing themselves that I despise them that they've made themselves right.

>Their message is clear: given the opportunity, rather than help themselves, what they desire more is to stick it to those urban populations they hate so much.

The constant refrain that the rest of the country needs to sympathize with them and understand their pain rings hollow coming from the same people who use "fuck your feelings" as a campaign slogan.

Unskilled Americans had such high quality of life and economic opportunity because for 20 years after ww2 literally every manufactured good in the world was produced in America since every other country had their factories destroyed. Now that other countries produce their own goods unskilled Americans are not worth as much. It's no ones fault, certainly not the "coastal elites" who have continued to make unskilled Americans the wealthiest group of unskilled workers in the world.

This is a gross oversimplification.

In 1920 it took 3 man hours to produce 1 ton of steel in the US. Today 1 man hour produces 300 tons in the US. Similar efficiency improvements have been seen across a wide range of manufacturing sectors. US manufacturing productivity has continued to grow along the same trend it was on throughout the 20th century, though wages sharply stagnated in the early 70s and employment started declining in the 90s. The US trade deficit was reasonably stable except for a sharp decline from 1997 to 2006. Exports as a percentage of GDP for the US have nearly tripled since 1970, in constant 2010 dollars they've 10X'ed in that period. Manufactured goods as a percentage of exports peaked in 1999, and in 2017 were the same as in 1963. Manufacturing value added adjusted for inflation plateaued in 2007.

The world didn't simply stop buying american after they recovered from WW2, if anything they bought more. The global economy has evolved over the past 70 years, just as it had prior, but this does not on its own explain the plight of the American working class.

Capital intensive manufacturing stays here longer, labor intensive leaves first as competition allows the goods to be much cheaper.

Except that's not at all what we see. Big factories representing immense capital investment were shut down first, while smaller factories and job shops remained constant or even increased. Major manufacturing employers like the automotive industry (which is not just the cars themselves but the many vendors making parts) didn't move their operations overseas - but instead consolidated production. The goods that start being produced overseas during this time period (late 90s - early 00s) are primarily things like injection molded plastic which are not very labor intensive but are capital intensive.

There were several changes that much better explain the decline of the rust belt than off-shoring. In the first part of this period (70s-80s) you have low cost air conditioning becoming widely available, meaning that manufacturers could move operations out of the relatively cold rust belt and into the sun belt where labor regulations were less strict and real estate generally cheaper. You have the mass entry of women into the workforce as two income households become the norm, increasing wage competition, along with the weakening of unions. Increasing fuel prices mean that transportation is a greater concern in factory placement while the relatively new interstate highway system means that factories can be located anywhere instead of just pre-existing water and rail hubs. As computer technology becomes readily available you have the proliferation of CNC manufacturing, PLC controls, and robotics which dramatically increase productivity. By the time you get to the 90s-00s, wages have been stagnant for 20 years while secondary education has become more common and white collar jobs with higher wages have dramatically increased with the wide adoption of personal computers and the internet. At the same time, digital electronics have emerged as a much larger section of the economy, and they employ different skillsets in different regions. As all these forces both decrease the need for manufacturing labor in general and the desirability of the rust belt in particular, you have a snowball effect of fewer workers -> less skill in circulation -> less economy of scale of concentrating industry together -> less production in the rust belt -> fewer workers.

Meanwhile, let's look at what's happening outside the US. Germany and Japan become major industrial powerhouses in the 70s and 80s, mostly specializing in very high value added manufacturing - cars, electronics, machine tools, etc. Growth in Japan stagnates in the 90s however, and Germany is far from a runaway success. The soviet union's collapse destroys the second most industrially powerful nation practically overnight. China obviously has been very successful since 1990 in industrializing, but their results don't actually match up with America's decline: America's trade balance suddenly starts plumetting in 1997 and bottoms out in 2006 before it starts recovering, and with the exception of 2008 and 2020 has since been stable while China's trade balance remains essentially constant until 2005 when it slowly but steadily starts increasing. Chinese steel production started a steep upward growth in 2002 and has since increased by about 4X whereas US steel production has been essentially constant since 1983. There is a sudden spike in manufacturing employment in china from 1989 to 1991, but nothing concurrent with the either the US manufacturing job losses in the 1999-2004 or the 2008-2010 periods.

Now I won't argue that off-shoring has had no effect, but clearly the data is not consistent with jobs simply moving overseas.

Thanks for the schooling. In the end I'd say the effect is similar, rust belt workers are less needed than they once were and therefore wages have declined. The idea that the government can convince jobs to come back without handouts is a pipe dream.

Lest anyone be dissuaded from reading the article by the above, I find it to be a rather accurate description of why the working class is disaffected towards both of the major US political parties.

I literally could not disagree with you more. The article is both well written, which I can't give any evidence for except that I also read it, and states testable hypotheses, which are not opinions.

Two things to comment on this article:

1. I agree with the article that the left is much too focused on the "white supremacy" narrative around Donald Trump. I used to buy into this hardcore, but Trump increased his votes among both blacks and hispanics in 2020 compared to 2016. Ignore that fact at your own risk.

2. I don't have much hope that the Democrats are going to do much to meaningfully reach out to the working and rural classes. One of the first things I saw that Biden is pushing is climate change goals with various federal agencies. While these are noble goals that I agree with, let's be clear: the working and rural classes (generally) don't give 2 shits about climate change. In many of these places oil jobs are the only good jobs left (I firmly believe this is why Biden did so poorly with South Texas hispanics), and without messaging how we'll invest in these communities, climate change rhetoric will fall on deaf ears.

My prediction: Democrats will get killed in the midterms and will lose in 2024, to everyone's detriment as the US continues a degradation of democratic ideals and moves closer to authoritarianism.

The Democratic messaging sucks. The Green New Deal promises 30 million new jobs. South Texas Hispanics would get a large fraction of those jobs because Texas has both wind and sun, and the Hispanics are overrepresented in construction jobs. That's a good trade for the tens of thousands of coal and oil jobs that are going to disappear anyways, Green New Deal or not.

> The Democratic messaging sucks.

1000% agree. There was a serious of images of Fox News voter analysis polls that made the rounds in social media. The results are here: https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results/voter... .

The vast majority of these answers show broad support for Democratic priorities. I mean "Do you favor or oppose each of the following? Changing the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan if they want to" got 70% "strong" or "somewhat" support. 71% support giving a pathway to apply for legal status to illegal immigrants, vs. 29% in favor of deportation. "Do you favor or oppose each of the following? Increasing federal government spending on green and renewable energy" got 68% in favor.

And this is a Fox News poll. In poll after poll when you ask what policies people want, they lean strongly toward Democratic priorities.

It also comes at the cost of the entrenched business interests, both in raising their taxes and rolling back their regulatory capture, that bought all their election campaigns off.

Ultimately politicians on both sides walk a tightrope of how much they can sell out against how unpopular and unelectable they want to be. The races are always close almost everywhere as politicians optimize their corruption budget.

I don't honestly think they are worried about elections. They have them firmly in control. Case in point, this group from MIT recorded a zoom analysis yesterday showing algorithmic tendencies of the vote counts. Why are vote totals stored as decimal? They dig into this and analyze four counties in Michigan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztu5Y5obWPk&feature=emb_logo

"This group from MIT"

You mean this total, fraudulent tool who claimed to invent email long after it was in widespread use, and spread completely baseless bullshit conspiracy theories in the past?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai

Why do you think the US is moving closer to authoritarianism? And how do you link that to Democrats losing elections?

I'm trying not to be snarky, but, with all due respect, is "Why do you think the US is moving closer to authoritarianism?" even a real question considering what is currently going on? We have a president who is completing rejecting the results of the election, while providing no evidence for the fraud he is alleging. In 2016 the margin was virtually the same, if not slightly smaller, in the other direction, and in that case the GAO gave Trump's team resources to start the transition the day after the election. More worrisome is how Trump is installing his most sycophantic cronies at multiple levels in the Defense Department.

Al Gore didn't concede until Dec 13th when he lost against Bush. He used all legal options he had to dispute the election. How is what Trump is doing any different?

Also, I don't see how the president's behavior has anything to do with a nation uniformly shifting towards authoritarianism. The president is but one person in the government, and some would argue not even the most powerful. Re-orienting an entire country's alignment requires much more than a handful of idiotic tweets.

Bush/Gore came down to a paltry number of votes in one state and a dubious court ruling. Perusing some amount of legal action there is not unreasonable.

Trump was claiming election fraud before a single ballot had been counted, repeatedly insisted that the only way he would lose the election is via fraud, and has had multiple cases dismissed due to the simple matter of not presenting any evidence.

That's how Trump is different, since you asked.

I mostly agree, but:

> ... as the US continues a degradation of democratic ideals and moves closer to authoritarianism.

That depends on what Republican wins. Not all Republicans are Donald Trump-style authoritarians. (For that matter, Obama did quite a bit of rule-by-executive-order, too. If we want that to change, we need to fix the dysfunction in Congress. Presidents more and more almost have to rule by executive order, because Congress has become more and more unwilling or unable to actually do its job.)

> Not all Republicans are Donald Trump-style authoritarians.

Perhaps not all, but I've been pretty shocked, and dismayed, about how feckless Republican senators and congressmen have been when it comes to pushing back against Trump's most dictatorial impulses. It's like "Profiles in Cowardice". That's actually what scares me the most, how someone with such transparent disdain for democracy as Trump has managed to get the Republican congressional leadership to rollover and be his lapdog.

> That depends on what Republican wins. Not all Republicans are Donald Trump-style authoritarians.

The last week of falling behind Trump in that massive election fraud occurred (without any evidence) shows that the GOP is the party of Trump whether they like it or not.

Thinking anything else is delusional.

Only a few national political figures are backing Trump's massive fraud narrative. Most are just saying "he has the right to recounts, and let's see how it plays out." Because they know he is full of shit but don't want to piss off their voters.

So, if passing off Trump passes off Republican voters then they (political figures) are beholden to Trump...

I'm a little worried that Trump wasn't just an aberration, but rather was just first of a new breed. Thinking back on the Republican playing field in 2016, I don't know that any of the other candidates could have handled the media abuse as well as Trump did, and in failing that most first prerequisite for a republican president, they couldn't have gotten very far.

He's the new standard. I don't think his supporters would vote for someone that's more of an eloquent speaker like Mitt Romney. In fact, I believe Alex Jones has a better chance of winning the primary and I'm completely serious

> let's be clear: the working and rural classes (generally) don't give 2 shits about climate change

Though I agree with you, it is very unfortunate. Climate change is going to effect the less well off the worst; we're all going to be affected. For instance: this report from Brookings goes into the effect hurricanes have on the poor, and it does not spell out a rosy picture:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/09...

"White supremacy" narrative around Donald Trump is just a media amplification. Only the upscale white faction of Democrats, the media monopolists, rank it as critical and push it to political agenda. The same with climate change. It's just the Maslow hierarchy of needs in action.

> but Trump increased his votes among both blacks and hispanics in 2020 compared to 2016.

FWIW, that's not true, or more accurately is unknown.

Those numbers come from election-day exit polling, and since many more Democratic voters voted by mail or voted early than Republican voters, exit polling skews Republican in 2020.

It would be quite interesting to see if those numbers hold up when corrected for the percentage of Democratic mail-in voters, but I don't know of anyone who has done that yet.

Wait, are we talking more black voters proportionally, or more votes absolutely? AIUI there's simply been flat-out more voters in the 2020 election on every side, so saying "more X voters voted for trump" might be technically provable today but not very useful.

Proportions are harder to pin down, as an accurate "X%" necessarily requires knowing the full set (or at least a random sample, and votes are being counted as they come in rather than in a random order).

Exit polling showed that a higher proportion of back and minority voters voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016.

However, since exit polling only counts those who vote on election day, and far more Democrats voted early or by mail than Republicans, we don't know to what extent those numbers are representative of voters as a whole.

I'd love to see that analysis, but AFAIK no one has done it yet.

My biggest concern about Biden is that he will return to the status quo with China. Pushing back on China is literally the only thing I agreed with the Trumpists about, but it's a big thing and I did at times wonder if Trump was worth it to break the Chinese liberalization delusion. Chemotherapy is literal poison and makes you sick, but sometimes it's what is needed.

It is impossible for American companies that must operate under American EPA and OSHA rules to compete with Chinese companies that can completely disregard the environment and employ borderline (or even literal, see Uyghur "work programs") slave labor. This is doubly true when the state is subsidizing these industries to "dump" on the market and drive competitors out of business and is employing its state intelligence agencies to conduct industrial espionage on their behalf. Private companies cannot compete with governments because governments can do things private actors fundamentally cannot.

A similar unfair trade issue exists with other countries, but China is by far the largest.

If we return to treating China like a developing nation (it isn't, it's a superpower) or a liberal democracy (it isn't), we will continue to see a collapse of the working class in the West. If that trend continues we will see a much smarter, slicker, and more ruthless totalitarian come to power in 2024 or 2028. Whether this future dictator of America is hard-left or hard-right mostly depends on which side fields the most compelling demagogue. Ultimately the working class won't care if a Lenin/Stalin or a Hitler is handing out the pitchforks.

A defense of the (minority) rioting wing of BLM and other recent protestors I've heard is "a riot is the voice of the powerless." I sympathize with this view a bit, but people need to understand that Trump was in part a political riot of the working class. An actual quote I heard in 2016: "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Trump." If trends continue another riot is guaranteed and this one may be much more destructive.

China both is and isn't a developing nation. It's massive, it has so many nations worth it's ridiculous.

Seriously, let's compare the top 1% of China with the bottom 1%.

China has 1.4 billion people, 1% of 1.4b is 14 million.

Actually, that's not that important. Let's talk about the top and bottom 10%.

The top 10%, being 140million, are the size of Germany (~80million) and France (~60million) combined.

The bottom 10% are the same size, obviously, but they share all the laws of the top 10% (at least on paper). Now the real question is "what percent of China's population are 'developing country' level?", because if it's 40%, that's 560 million people.

So how the fuck do we deal with it? China is unique, although India may face the same problem later.

https://buildbackbetter.com/the-transition/agency-review-tea...

Remember after Trump’s election it seemed like half of New York was reading The Hillbilly Elegy [1]?

I don’t remember when that desire to reach out to rural America vanished. Maybe it was always posturing. But everyone who was planning vacations to Appalachia and Iowa forgot about those ambitions quite quickly.

I have always thought America needs an Erasmus program [2]. Something that prompts young people to spend time in a different population density regions of the country.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Programme

> Remember after Trump’s election it seemed like half of New York was reading The Hillbilly Elegy?

The New York Times (yes, the Times) pointed out after Trump's election stunned the press that (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...)

>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.

>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.

In other words, it isn't just a question of the Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.

(Of course, as you point out, such open-mindedness didn't last long.)

Many of these “working class” folks aren’t voting Trump because they are mesmerized or duped by him, they are voting Trump to stop or “stick it” to the most left wing (and loudest) fringe of the Democrat party.

If the Dem party just flat out denounced Defund Police / Green New Deal / Critical Race Theory etc and consolidated around a moderate platform they would effectively end the Republican Party.

I am a dem voter but have felt this way myself. However, I only _feel_ this way. I'm curious whether there is any substantial evidence to back this claim up.

Do you have any evidence that this is a driving factor for significant numbers of voters?

> If progressives stopped being progressive, they'd attract more conservatives to their cause

Voting Democrat is already the compromise.

That's literally Biden's campaign. Yet the Republican Party didn't end.

See Biden's answers to packing the court or regarding green new deal in the first debate. WBW synopsis will suffice.

I think just not calling rural whites "deplorables", "uneducated hicks", or "trailer trash" would go a long way.

Most of the people I know who voted for Trump aren't "deplorables", they are hard-working salt-of-the-earth people who would come plow out your driveway if they saw you struggling to clear the snow with a shovel or cook you a meal if they learned you just lost a loved one.

Are there rural people that aren't that kind of people? Sure. But they exist everywhere.

What's missing is respect. That alone would lead to some healing in this country, especially if it came from both sides.

The "deplorables" speech was one reference in one speech. They seized on it because they're convinced that we hate them. They seize on any signal and tell each other, over and over, that it's Democratic policy.

And now they're right. They're ignorant fucks, and I'm done reaching out to them. Time for them to reach out to me. They can shove their snowplow where the sun don't shine. They can stop voting for the people who do use hateful language, over and over, as policy.

They just turned out to vote for a person who was demonstrably incompetent, and their visions of his opponent were delusional -- he never once called them any of the things you say. Until they stop doing that, they will remain correct that I have no respect for them.

"Liberals and Never Trump Conservatives must learn Donald Trump was a warning from the Working-Class."

---

Ah, here in lies the problem... "Liberals" and "Never Trump Conservatives" are divided out as different as "Working-Class".

If you sell your labor, you are working class. Until there can be more solidarity there, I see the division of America only worsening.

Having "works for a living" in common means a lot less than your entire worldview, what you think the purpose of life and existence is, and what the properly ordered priorities of the State are.

And all of those are drifting faster and further apart.

> If you sell your labor, you are working class

This is a convenient trope. I mostly hear it from well-off friends.

There is an American aristocracy. They live on inherited wealth, have never connected to the common person and are a scourge.

But there are people whose compensation is tied to productivity growth. And there are people who are not. Getting those of us making six or seven figures, with health insurance and a retirement portfolio, looking to buying a house and having kids, to find common policy with someone constantly facing foreclosure, who may not have a bank account, whose kid is struggling with opioid addiction and can’t afford to fight an illegal parking ticket issued by their dying town will be hard.

Put another way, we have Americans who feel they need to fight to survive. And we have Americans who feel they need to fight to thrive. Those result in different policy priorities.

"to find common policy"

This is also a convenient trope. You can literally be both of the pictures you paint in America, sometimes in the span of the same year. Things like affordable job training and college education, and universal health care would benefit most Americans.

I have a feeling especially on Hacker News that a lot of people do not like to compare themselves to poorer working people - and think they are wildly different somehow.

> affordable job training and college education, and universal health care would benefit most Americans

In theory. In practice, job training has a poor track record [1]. College aid mostly helped middle- and high-income families [2]. Universal health care is an unknown.

A high-income New Yorker and rural Obama-Trump Alabaman will prioritise different things in a healthcare bill. The latter don't trust the former. For good reason. We have ignored them.

We then dressed up that ignorance by pretending our interests are identical. Those who checked found uncomfortable truths. A healthcare bill fighting for support in Texas can't fund abortions and transition surgery and drug rehabilitation. But without those things it is a non-starter in New York and California.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5n7j_-EhB3IC&oi=...

[2] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7756/w7756...

Saying that doctors and waiters are both 'working class' may satisfy some ideological preference of yours, but it will reliably confound understanding and any improvement that could be downstream of that understanding. People have long been able to understand the notions of 'professional class' and 'service sector'; I recommend taking advantage of their intellectual legwork.

(Extrapolating from assumptions made in the article about who didn't vote for Trump:) So more than half of the United States isn't working class? I don't think that's the case.

Considering that people of color and (to a lesser extent) younger people are largely Democrat (while noting that e.g. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/theres-no-such-thing-as...), it seems likely that race/ethnicity and age are bigger factors than this guy is making them out to be--most of the working class black population, certainly, is still reliably Democrat. This person themselves may be a Republican person of color, but they are certainly an outlier.

https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/natio...

Note in particular that 72% of Trump supporters claim that they are better off financially than they were four years ago, and 84% believe the economy is in better shape than it was (compared to 16% of Biden voters).

The narrative this piece is pushing doesn't seem to fit the data, assuming these CNN numbers are representative.

This being the case, I'm curious why the discussion isn't (also) framed as "why aren't black people voting Republican in greater numbers?" Black voters have suffered from economic distress in higher proportions, yet are arguably responsible for the continued success of the Democratic party. Why don't we talk about this more when we talk about political divisions in the U.S.?

The fact is, that, while we do have to contend with class in the United States--and I absolutely see truth in the notion that Democrats failed to support working class, rural whites especially, leaving a void waiting to be filled--it's worth examining _also_ why working-class black voters didn't similarly swarm en masse to the Republican party because of economic conditions (which have on the whole been consistently _worse_ than those of most working-class white people). Solving the problem of divisiveness in the United States requires acknowledging and working to address the challenges faced by of _all_ its citizens, not just poor white people.

P.S. to folks who think that the "white supremacy" narrative is bunk because Trump increased his numbers among blacks and latinos, note that black support is still at 12% (per the CNN link above) --not high! And the Latino narrative is complicated: compare Cuban-Americans in Florida and Mexican-Americans in Arizona, for example. I wouldn't be so quick to make too many assumptions about this narrative.

So, we are supposed to listen to a group of voters who do not know what is good for them? A union would have definitely helped and these voters chose to vote for the party that decimated unions. Are we supposed to pay attention to a group that refuses to look at facts and often votes driven by baser needs than what is good for them. I say we just need to build a collation that makes this group of voters irrelevant. If the last 4 years haven't made them not support Trump then I do not see the point of trying to bring them into the fold.

I agree with the comments here talking about the highly opinionated nature here

Yes, Trump was a bit of a trainwreck, or at least how I see it from Canada

But, echoing the comments of David Brooks, I believe the Republican party may be in one of the best positions ever to center their core values and policy about protecting the working class

With the GOP still having a stronghold in uneducated people, this election it has had gains in other minorities (male and female latinos, male african americans)

Hopefully they can realize that they have this opportunity before next election cycle. Elect candidates that can resonate with the working class. If they could have an impressive platform for them, I'm sure they could engender more support within that base, let alone make major gains with women

I am young and am ignorant of a lot of this history, but the claim here is that Democrats have lost working class voters, particularly white working class voters. What I do not see is how this is consistent with:

1) policies advocated by people in the D party like Bernie Sanders, e.g. social safety nets for such job losses in manufacturing as described. Isn’t this part of the progressive dream?

2) How working class voters end up aligning themselves with a party that is less likely to care about them, e.g. by cutting taxes for earners well above the working class income bracket.

To be fair, it doesn’t seem like either party does a _great_ job helping the working class. Populism comes in ‘left’ and ‘right’ flavors...maybe it just happens to have come from the right (Trump) at the right time.

> How working class voters end up aligning themselves with a party that is less likely to care about them, while cutting taxes for earners well above the working class income bracket.

That's words vs. actions. His words were that he was going to take care of them, and his voters believed him. The fact that he didn't do it is just like any politician lying. They might not even have believed him either, but at least his voters felt like he listened to their pains.

No, he took care of them. He redid NAFTA and other trade agreements. Even those are favor free trade see the pain while forcing the issue as necessary to fix some problems. (There is not agreement that the replacements are enough better to be worth it, but that is different)

With respect to point 1, the entirety of the leadership of the Democratic party acted in concert to prevent Bernie Sanders from being the nominee. The overwhelming majority of the party is ideologically opposed to the kind of large-scale social programs he advocates. With respect to point 2, working class voters, who still tend to vote Democrat, although less so than before, are reacting to the failure of the Democratic party to offer them any substantial improvement in their material conditions for the past 40 years. 2016 afforded them a chance to vote for someone who was at least promising positive change (as spurious as it was), and in addition to that, was free of the kind of sneering technocratic contempt that Democrats so often direct at the working class.

People don't want safety nets; they want _jobs_.

If a worker's job gets eliminated by market forces and then the government steps in to pay that person to do the job anyway, that's literally a safety net in the form of public subsidy.

They don't have to admit that. They can pretend that they pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.

I remember reading someone on the right of British politics saying something like "Everyone keeps saying conservatives don't like poor people. It's true: we want to turn them into rich people."

Notwithstanding whether or not their policies actually achieve that, if that's the way the US working class see it I think that might answer your first point. They may see it as the elite throwing them bones as long as they stay in their place.

> 1) policies advocated by people in the D party like Bernie Sanders, e.g. social safety nets for such job losses in manufacturing as described. Isn’t this part of the progressive dream?

Yes, but progressives aren't really a majority of the party, nor do they have much control over it. The progressive caucus of the Democratic party in Congress has ~100 members, but there is no actual policy one has to support to be in that caucus. Being a "progressive" is a useful label for many Democrats, so they join. As far as I'm concerned, the only "true" progressive members of congress are Justice Democrats (Dems that don't take corporate PAC money for their election campaigns). All others need to have their record carefully examined first.

Secondly, the moderate wing of the party always is the first to blame the progressive side for any and every electoral upset or issue, arguing that being associated with their radicality costs them votes. Maybe this is true to an extent, but if these moderate members had their own thing they were running on, they wouldn't be associated with the progressive wing.

> 2) How working class voters end up aligning themselves with a party that is less likely to care about them, e.g. by cutting taxes for earners well above the working class income bracket.

Republicans cater to a lot of single-issue type things. Guns, abortion, religion. Finally, and maybe I'm completely wrong, but there's a lack of class consciousness among the rural working class (working class in cities at least has geographic proximity to aid organization).

I think the problem is that the Democrats treat the working class like developed countries often treat people in the third world. They don’t respect them as equals but as people who don’t know what’s good for them so they need to be helped. That causes a lot of resentment amongst the people because they aren’t allowed to have self respect. This may just be a problem of messaging. I am not sure.

But I am 100% sure that the left wing in the US right now is mainly comprised of well educated upper middle class people who have a certain level of disdain for blue collar workers.

Can we not spread mistruths?

Some of us who support leftist policies grew up and may still exist in heavily working class areas. Assuming that we have disdain for our current or former neighbours is borderline slander. In all honesty, the majority of my more left leaning friends tend to be from more blue collar backgrounds.

Maybe that's true for you. From my experience a lot of blue collar people I talk to absolutely despise democrats and liberal people I talk to can't even comprehend why the working class doesn't join them in their efforts or how anybody could vote for Trump. It's a total disconnect and I think it's because of growing inequality. People of different income and professional classes are mixing less and so they only know caricatures of each other.

Their ego and sense of entitlement necessitates that they believe they are self reliant. This means they don't want social safety nets, they want jobs. Republicans are willing to lie to them and say they can bring back jobs even though they can't. Democrats aren't willing to lie. So they vote fior the people who say they'll bring back jobs.

> "Bernie Sanders... Isn’t this part of the progressive dream?"

no, the "progressive" label has been appropriated (or misunderstood) in this regard, since "socialist" has been so negatively politicized, but they're not synonymous, and in many ways, are othogonal or antagonistic.

progressivism aims to empower workers toward social, economic, political, and technological progress, while socialism aims to split stuff among everyone more equally, regardless of progress or holistic benefit.

a cursory perusal of bernie's policies belie the same aims as other politicians: to shift political, economic, and social power, not a coherent vision for a more progressive future.

the working class isn't stupid. they (we) know that the both parties are captured by moneyed-interests focused on amassing more power for themselves, not building a great society inclusive of workers and respectful of regular labor.

>1) policies advocated by people in the D party like Bernie Sanders, e.g. social safety nets for such job losses in manufacturing as described. Isn’t this part of the progressive dream?

Bernie didnt get the nomination. It's President Biden.

>2) How working class voters end up aligning themselves with a party that is less likely to care about them, e.g. by cutting taxes for earners well above the working class income bracket.

There's a huge amount of misconceptions and misrepresentations by how progressive taxes work. There's a very clear understanding as to why "all tax cuts are for the rich" which is a true statement. The thought experiment goes: Imagine 3 brothers who earn exactly the same wage in exactly the same industry. Except they work different hours. The first brother works 20 hours, second brother 40 hours, and third brother 80 hours.

They all have a shared project that costs $30,000. The fair split of the cost is $10,000 each. the first brother exclaims he cant pay it, he doesnt have the money because he doesnt work enough. The middle brother then devises the 'progressive' system. Since the third brother works so many more hours, he's to pay for over 2/3rds. The first brother agrees because he gets benefits without paying anything. The second brother designed it such that he pays less. They voted democratically that the brother who earns much more money pays virtually all.

That's exactly how society breaks down. If you look at real tax rates net of spending. Even the middle class who 'pay taxes' actually receive more back from the government than they put in. Therefore when you look at 'who pays taxes' it's always the rich. That's why "all tax cuts are for the rich" is a true statement.

>To be fair, it doesn’t seem like either party does a _great_ job helping the working class. Populism comes in ‘left’ and ‘right’ flavors...maybe it just happens to have come from the right (Trump) at the right time.

Did you also know that the real tax rate has pretty much not changed in the USA for >40 years. Politicians have come and left all changing the way the tax system works but fundamentally have never actually changed taxes.

The rich pay the taxes, but they also have the ability to make everyone else pay the taxes for them. High taxes benefit the rich. This is why you keep hearing about mega corps who pay no taxes.

The rich get all the power because they are who control the spice.

Quick summary (obviously not comprehensive) relevant for self-interested white working class voter:

Relevant Democract policy: Minimum wage(+), Healthcare(+), Progressive Taxation (+), Affirmative Action (Diversity Ban)/California Prop 12 stuff (-)

Relevant Republican policy:Minimum wage(-), Healthcare(-), Progressive Taxation (-). Affirmative Action (Diversity Ban)/California Prop 12 stuff (+)

Relevant Democract Rhetoric: You are white supremacist deplorable hillbillies

Relevant Republican Rhetoric: You are "real" Americans and the backbone of this country

Which one would a white working class voter prefer?

Keep in mind the rhetoric is experienced every day in the relevant news/social media, whereas policy decisions and impacts are not... Even if most Democracts don't use that kind of language, it's the language that gets headlines and is reported/retweeted.

Finally, many policy consensus issues (with mainstream Republican and Democract support) such as military spending, worker hostile trade agreements, etc... mean that policy differences may not be as large as they appear. I also put healthcare as a (+), but often things like Obamacare may appear as a burden to many healthy working class voters.

They don’t think like that. The Democratic Party needs to listen to them and speak in a language they understand. Today they believe in conservative talking points. Eg the Left wants to ship all your jobs overseas. The Left wants to end Fracking and take away the few good jobs remaining. The Left wants everyone to be unemployed and live off welfare and be completely dependent on the state. This is the conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party needs to rebut. The Democratic Party needs to restart talking about fighting for the working man, good jobs, and economic issues. When Bill Clinton ran for president, the mantra was “It’s the economy, stupid”. Now you can debate if the president or congress can influence job creation or not. But economic pocketbook issues is what the working class has on its mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid

Stopped reading after "Liberals" in the subtitle. Writer assumes that liberals, the most internally diverse of the political classes, are a monolithic group :-( Many liberals have already pointed out the reasons why many working-class folks flocked to Trump. Had Dennis Sanders used "Establishment Democrats", I may have read further.

No one wakes up one day and says "I'm going to start hating black/gay/muslim/whatever people!" Bigotry is learned behavior: even if some degree of tribalism is innate, there's absolutely nothing built into our DNA that leads people to hold any particular belief about any particular group. People become bigoted for a reason.

It would be absurd to argue that the Nazi's attrocities were simply caused for no other reason than germany being inherently racist and anti-Semitic - the loss of WW1 and the subsequent economic hardships drove millions of people to support a demagogue who would otherwise have remained at best a fringe voice. Likewise today, bigotry can explain how a demagogue seizes power, but it's not the why.

And this extends to more than just bigotry. Availability of guns explains how the violent crime rate is so high, but not why people would turn to violence. Opioid availability explains the how of the opioid epidemic, but not why people would abuse them in the first place. Persistent problems tend to be mere symptoms of underlying issues that go unaddressed.

Before anyone writes an article like this, claiming to understand the body politic, consider that an enormous number of people right now refuse to wear masks during a pandemic. They don't just oppose wearing masks, they violently and angrily oppose it. They make a big point out of not wearing masks. Anyone who writes an article like this suggesting that I need to compromise with political opposition needs to start here, and explain to me what I need to change about my own behavior in order to meet sociopathy 'in the middle'. Sure, mask wearing isn't a perfect left/right venn diagram, but societal issues and political issues are very much tied together (see religion, abortion, LGBT rights, etc.).

I will argue the reason this happens is not because of bad marketing by "Democrats", "liberals", or scientists, but because misinformation is highly effective, and backed by what could be one of the most advanced algorithms in the world: The facebook addiction algo. It is as much a human programming tool as anything that has ever existed, and I wonder if society can maintain stability while it prints money.

> societal issues and political issues are very much tied together

The average person has much less ideological coherence than the subset of Americans who closely follow politics.

Finding anti-mask pro-LGBT anti-abortion anti-gun nationalist isn’t unusual. This is why politics is about which issues get prioritised. Not which way they go.

Find, don't compromise - I don't compromise on that issue either. However you are probably out of issues to refuse to compromise on now just with this one.

If you define the people who disagree with you (even about masks) as sociopaths, then you are part of the problem.

Calling your political enemies "sociopathy" is functionally identical to calling them "deplorables", and people are likely to take you at your word when you do so.

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