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Comment by melenaboija | Hacker News Reader

The working class in America (specifically the lower segment) is surprisingly opposed to social protections, which is strange considering they live in the wealthiest country in the world while also being the most unprotected among Western democracies.

Social protections are something that not even conservative parties in Europe can challenge (at least for now, we’ll see if the US trend spreads there though).

As a European who has spent a decade in the US and has always had a speech for expanding the social safety net (and, BTW, I’m on the fortunate side of US society), it seems impossible to me that some people will ever understand this, especially and shockingly, those who need it the most.

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Poverty in America is a moral failure and why would you give money to people who are immoral?

This is the center of every issue in America that people need to understand. Poverty is seen as personal failure. You were lazy or a bad person thus you are poor. By that token, the rich are moral, just, and what we should aspire to be. But the biggest Trump supporters are the biggest consumers of welfare and social services, how can that be? It's not their fault! It's the blacks,immigrants,gays,trans,dems and whatever boogeyman we need that are causing their suffering. Vote for us and we'll solve that and you too can be rich and powerful.

I have some extended family members who have never worked a day in their lives by exploiting social services. Not surprisingly, their (now grown) children are doing the same thing. I don't judge people using it, nor do I consider it a purely moral issue, but I'm also not going to adopt a black-and-white view and just pretend this sort of stuff doesn't happen.

No one is saying it doesn't happen so I don't see what the point in your statement is.

I was picking up on the context of poverty, social services, and morality. In some cases, people end up in poverty due to laziness and an unwillingness to work. They then choose to (in my mind) misappropriate social service funds to maintain that lifestyle.

While I generally agree we shouldn't look at all poverty from this lens, I'm simply pointing out that in some cases it's warranted.

I agree but in your attempts to find nuance, you are missing the forest for the trees. Poverty doesn't mean you are lazy and unwilling to work and rich doesn't mean you are a genius leader who everyone should look to emulate but it is those two beliefs that underpin most of the political problems in America.

> I agree but in your attempts to find nuance, you are missing the forest for the trees.

No, because I agree with:

> Poverty doesn't mean you are lazy and unwilling to work and rich doesn't mean you are a genius

I think we are just talking past each other. You didn't think my nuance was necessary, and that's OK.

That's fair.

How would this work in practice? Indifferent case worker?

IDK about never in their life, but I have in-laws who got a sympathetic doctor to declare them permanently disabled around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, at which point their lack of education and skills had rendered them unemployable.

I've been disconnected from them for a long time (necessary as they routinely tried to grift me). However, from my recollection, there was a whole scheme they used that started with getting "hurt" in a commercial space. They would then sue the business while simultaneously getting a crooked doctor to sign off on some new disability they "got" from the incident.

They could have actually sustained a decent lifestyle had they not routinely decided to drop large chunks of the settlement money at Vegas.

This is largely a legacy of reconstruction as well. To prevent the lower class uniting based upon their shared class the upper classes pushed division based upon their differences.

Whose money would you give, mine or yours?

Well, I don't see your name on it.

> it seems impossible to me that some people will ever understand this, especially and shockingly, those who need it the most.

After many years of denying it, I've come to the realization that to solve social welfare in the United States we need to first solve racism and religion. So I agree it seems impossible.

What do you mean when you say we need to "solve religion?" I don't mean my question to come across as combative or challenging, I just don't understand what you have in mind.

Some 12yos think Jesus is just like Santa. They think this amazing analogy exposes all of society to be idiots. Everyone else is indoctrinated. But not them.

What I mean is we have issues with racial/ethnic/religious tolerance in the United States, and it's impossible to divorce politics from it. When it comes to social programs, the lines of support of/opposition to policy can be drawn pretty cleanly around identity.

We can't "solve" social problems with welfare unless we "solve" the problem of identity, where we can't even agree whether its the role of government to provide (or just fund!) services if there's a large group of people who believe such support is an attack on their ethnic identity, or something they have a religious opposition to.

There is a significant minority of conservative religious people in the US who see any kind of government-provided social-welfare benefit program as an unwelcome infringement on the proper domain of the church.

> The working class in America (specifically the lower segment) is surprisingly opposed to social protections

Probably because we stopped distinguishing between the hard working poor and the indolent poor, among other reasons.

Nobody trusts the government not to throw the money away giving it to their friends who administer NGOs, or staff up huge offices of administrators, or give it away to encourage lifestyles the majority disapprove of strongly enough that they’re willing to go without themselves to prevent it.

> The working class in America (specifically the lower segment) is surprisingly opposed to social protections

It is not that they are opposed to social protections. It is just that the Republican party has succeeded in distracting them with more important topics: Guns and Jesus.

> the Republican party has succeeded in distracting them with more important topics: Guns and Jesus

Trump voters were not significantly moved by these sells. The pushes were immigration and anti-wokeness, the latter intentionally ambiguously defined. (Compare Graham’s earlier works to this self-congratulatory nonsense [1].)

[1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html

If you want to generalize across multiple election, GOP shifts their focus to the "values and cultural issues" of the moment, to get working-class Americans to vote against their own self-interest.

In the past, it was gay marriage and abortion; today, it's trans kids and DEI. Once these issues dominate the conversation, little attention is paid to the real priorities and actions of GOP and the Billionaires that bankroll them: cutting funds to Medicaid, food stamps and other welfare programs, cuts to health insurance subsidies, cuts to education, cuts to medical research funding, cuts to development assistance to the poorest in the world and so on, all to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.

I think that's a one-way analysis excluding the Democrats, who also pivot to these issues.

Democrats have agency as well, and the ability to prioritize bread and butter issues over things like DEI or trans issues. I think their self-image as defenders of the vulnerable binds them to positions that are generally unpopular, and the GOP exploits this.

I think both parties suffer from a form of oppositional defiant disorder, where they have to stake out opposite claims. If one party says the sky is blue, the other has to disagree.

You are absolutely right, engaging GOP on these topics plays into their hands, and this is the Democratic party's key mistake.

I think a lot of people are just opposed to the proposed solutions.

They don't decrease poverty. They increase dependence on the government, and they are funded by money that is taken from you at gun point.

Hot take. I for one, am, and will always be, forever grateful for government cheese.

Stuffed crust pizza is a heck of a drug.

> (specifically the lower segment) is surprisingly opposed to social protections

They are already in a weak social position and were taught that asking for any kind of protection or assistance is a bad thing. The last thing you want when society is already looking down on you is give more reasons for it.

There's certainly a cultural element that a certain sector of society has been enabling to prey on. That's why Bernie Sanders was so important; for the first time, someone was telling all of these struggling workers that they weren't the problem and didn't have to be ashamed.

> working class in America (specifically the lower segment) is surprisingly opposed to social protections

A lot of social protections for them were shams. Worker retraining after signing NAFTA, for example. Unions that turn into hereditary job pools outsiders can’t break into. Hell, public-school taxes for universities they can’t afford because their public-school teachers couldn’t teach their kids math.

But many other social protections - the comparatively huge ones - are ones that workers value a lot: Unemployment Insurance, Disability benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

But unfortunately many workers have taken those as a given and therefore untouchable, rather than a societal choice.

I don't really know how to tell you this delicately, but you're in an information bubble.

If you have to go reaching back 30 years to a jobs program for an example of a sham social protection program, they are probably in great shape (a jobs training program isn't even really a social protection).

I know some unions have nepotism problems with jobs in the union (which is different than union jobs). I wonder if they are particularly worse than other political arenas though, where many value loyalty and control more than merit. And, of course, unions are not social protection programs. They are a response to the lack of social protections.

School funding isn't even tangentially related to social protections.

I’m relating what I hear from Trump voters.

> School funding isn't even tangentially related to social protections

It’s a benefit paid for collectively. It’s not a social protection, but it’s definitely a social programme. You’re seeing the DoE attacked in the same swipe as Medicaid because they’re political similar to the right.

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