Every campaign goes through rising and falling phases. For the Trump movement, there was a low point leading up to and just after the Iowa caucus, which reversed itself and reached a peak on Super Tuesday. Then another slump in late March and early April, around the Wisconsin primary -- which reversed itself and reached another peak during the ACELA and Indiana primaries, and clinching the nomination.
In late May and early June, there was another slump during the controversy around the La Raza judge presiding over a civil case involving Trump. It turned into an identity politics issue -- with Trump correctly accusing the judge of reverse racism -- similar to the common-sense abortion controversy before the Wisconsin primary.
No matter how justified his comments were, they are identity politics topics from the old Republican party, and probably gave Independents and fence-sitters the idea that he was going back to Gingrich-era politics, when his appeal is about leaving behind identity politics and pushing populism and America first over corporate elitism and globalism.
But that slump appears to be reversing itself, perhaps in response to the Islamic terrorist attack in Orlando, and will reach another peak sometime in July. According to the Reuters tracking poll, Trump's numbers have been improving all week. You can see earlier rising and falling and rising-again phases.
At the rate things are going, it seems like there's a month-up and month-down rhythm to the campaign. Peaks occur in the early part of an odd-numbered month, and slumps early in even-numbered months. Fortunately, the election will be held in the early part of an odd-numbered month, favoring the apparent rhythm, although it also predicts a slump during the Republican National Convention in late July. We'll see.
And so far, the polls in battleground states and bellwether counties look favorable. Remember that we will win through the electoral college, or broad geographic appeal, rather than getting over 70% of the popular vote.
The Establishment politicians, the media, and shills on social media have been trying to hawk a narrative about Trump hitting a wall -- but we've heard that a million times already, and every time his numbers go back up. Now that he's back on-message with Islamic terrorism, immigration, and putting America first, it's only a matter of time before he's back where he was when he clinched the nomination.
And from now on, he'll be unloading on Crooked Hillary's record of corruption, which will only steadily drive her numbers down during this anti-Establishment zeitgeist. She didn't have to suffer through too many slumps of her own during the Democrats' primary because Bernie wussed out and didn't touch her record, preferring instead to debate abstract principles hypothetically.
No more kid gloves once you're in the ring with Trumpzilla. We're gonna say, "Bye-byeeee".
An additional number of Muslim terrorist incidents between now and November wil further help him.
ReplyDeleteThe strategy of splitting gays from globalists won't work for long because gays embody the vision of the globalist world view. The emancipated, atomistic, deracinated and often cosmopolitan gay man lives a hyper-modern existence where he has freed himself from all organic social bonds. He even engages in the sterile parody of miscegenation by buggering men from other races. Gays just naturally gravitate into the orbit of feminists, open immigrationists (more fresh meat for domestic gays) and denationalizers because they share similar assumptions about how a "rational" and "enlightened" world should look. If you want to see the logical end of the globalist agenda, look to the gay anticulture.
ReplyDeleteThey serve as global disease vectors too with fag tourism and Gridr
ReplyDeleteGays don't matter -- only 1-2% of the electorate. If anyone, Trump is angling for the homo allies, who have the large numbers to pass gay marriage, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe pitch is that he'll make America safer for your imaginary gay BFFs, whose safe spaces would otherwise be the target of Islamic terrorists with their backward puritanical agenda.
He'll only persuade those homo allies who are the do-gooder social worker type who's concerned with concrete results -- protecting their lives whether he agrees with their lifestyle or not -- rather than the culture war type who wants a public figure that will "feel the gays' pain," rationalize their degenerate lifestyle, and other empty symbolic gestures.
The leaked DNC report on Trump that got released by Guccifer is pretty telling: they've already used up their ammo on him. So for the next 4 1/2 months, they will be recycling old talking points, with less and less effectiveness. No hidden trump cards to bust out if they are down and out, nope, just call Trump "Hitler" again and maybe this time it will really stick!
ReplyDeleteCuckservatives claiming that LGBT is part of our national identity and are our "natural allies" doesn't seem like an end to the Culture Wars. It seems much more like a case of doubling down and rolling over for the left. Even Roger Stone is proclaiming that we've entered a "new stage of equality." I don't see how this is going to help us push back degeneracy on a grassroots level.
ReplyDeleteA good deal of degeneracy will naturally go away along with the rise of the populist and America-first movement, which is a repudiation of laissez-faire.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it bad for corporate managers and stockholders to selfishly ruin the country for personal benefit, but not bad for gays to poison the cultural and public spheres with their degeneracy just to boost their self-esteem?
Obviously the change won't happen through logical arguments like that. People will sense which way the wind is blowing, and go along with it. No more worship of the individual -- personal desires have to be dampened down for the good of the group, or else "there will be consequences," as Trump repeatedly warns about companies who send their manufacturing outside the country to improve their bottom line.
Apple is supposedly boycotting the Repub convention due to Trump, have to wonder if this is this queen Tim Cook's decision
ReplyDeleteBreaking up the media monopoly will also go a long way toward curbing the promotion of degeneracy. Now, only 5 corporations control effectively all of the media -- it used to be 50-some corporations in the early 1980s, before mergers & acquisitions mania.
ReplyDeleteEach of those 5 corporations wants to promote degeneracy so that the population will be passive consumerist addicts on the hedonic treadmill. With 50-some corporations in control, there will be more competition and diversity, and unmet needs met among untapped niches.
There's also a feedback loop between economic prosperity and moral behavior -- the more egalitarian, the more moral. When inequality is rising, and a decent middle-class life looks insecure at best for the majority of the population, why bother trying?
ReplyDeleteMight as well stare at porn, get into the occasional random drunken hook-up (infrequent sex, but with more total partners), then self-medicate with pot, booze, and carbs, while staring blankly at the binge du jour on Netflix.
At the next level up from personal behavior, people will not enforce norms on others. If you don't see a moral middle-class lifestyle being possible or secure, then why would you bother trying to enforce such an arrangement on others? It'd be as pointless as living that way yourself, only now with extra aggravation since those others aren't going to want to hear any of it, because -- like you -- they don't see such a lifestyle being secure when the zeitgeist is "greed is good".
That point is completely lost on the "moral libertarian" types, some of whom are actually well meaning. Why would anyone strive to live according to bourgeois norms (in a non-dismissive sense), when their station in life keeps sinking deeper and deeper?
ReplyDeleteThat makes it seem like the righteous are being punished. You don't have to believe in a prosperity gospel to still feel a bitter injustice when you're behaving well yet circling the drain on a material level.
When inequality narrows, it makes people feel like living a moral life is proving its worth by improving their material station. Again, you don't need to subscribe to a prosperity gospel -- it's an intuitive conclusion to most people.
Because they're in a feedback loop, we need to encourage both moral behavior in the social and cultural realm, while encouraging a break-up of inequality in the political and economic realm.
BTW, in my ongoing recent interest in the differences between CNN and MSNBC, I've noticed that the non-news programs on MSNBC are mostly concerned with domestic social worker / do-gooder causes among the lowest class. Prisoners and prisons, prostitutes / massage parlor workers and their interaction with both law enforcement and social worker types who want to get them out of "the life," drug abuse and drug dealers, and so on and so forth.
ReplyDeleteCNN's non-news programs are all concerned with the elites rather than the lumpenproles, and are more globalist / cosmopolitan in scope than the strictly American focus on MSNBC. The only "social problem" show they had was a mini-series about prescription drug abuse, which effects all classes and not just the bottom. Then there's the Anthony Bourdain show where he lives the foodie lifestyle all over the globe.
MSNBC also has shows that appeal directly to proles themselves, like the "accidents caught on tape" type.
CNN's audience is more amoral and cosmopolitan, hence more obsessed with promoting degeneracy (such as homosexuality and diversity), while MSNBC's audience is more of the social worker type who wants to improve the lot of the bottom layer on the class pyramid, and who probably lead boring dull and perhaps puritanical lives, rather than going out to nightclubs and getting into drunken hook-ups with randos every weekend like the CNN viewer.
Pursuing the hunch of MSNBC's Puritan roots, their anchors and main reporters are from the Colonial centers of Philadelphia (Chris Matthews, Kasie Hunt, Hallie Jackson) and Boston (Lawrence O'Donnell, Steve Kornacki). Only one amoral / cosmo New Yorker (Chris Hayes). One each from northern and southern California (Rachel Maddow and Katy Tur).
ReplyDeleteCNN's evening personalities are more diverse and not as Colonial: Buffalo (Wolf Blitzer), New York City / metro (Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, Gloria Berger), Baton Rouge (Don Lemon), a lone Philadelphian (Jake Tapper), a lone Bostonian (John King), Delmarva peninsula (Erin Burnett), and foreigners (Ashleigh Banfield, Brianna Keilar, etc.).
"There's also a feedback loop between economic prosperity and moral behavior -- the more egalitarian, the more moral. When inequality is rising, and a decent middle-class life looks insecure at best for the majority of the population, why bother trying?"
ReplyDeleteWhich is totally lost on Charles Murray types; hard (but honest) work, courtesy, selflessness, and a graceful unpretentious affect were reliably rewarded once upon a time. Now that those things faded away over the last 30 years, what do libertarians expect? Smug elites shaming the lower classes for their crude affect isn't going to make any difference. Anymore than Boomers (like Murray) lecturing Gen-Xers about "why don't you guys act like you care more?" Highly individualistic and stubborn Boomers like Murray might not ever wake up; the nasty ultra competitiveness of the Me Generation has basically alienated and demoralized a substantial number of people who were born too late to ever feel like they really belonged to anything. Or that anything ever really worked the way that, in a better time, it ought to.
Also, LOL at the anti-statist snobs who act like the church ought to be a suitable replacement for the gubmint. What people seek in religion, and even what people can get out of it, are determined to a big extent on the cultural climate. Religion also functions as a way to forge bonds between very similar people.
The goverment's job is to referee the interactions of various elements of our society. And also to serve as a last ditch back stop for desperate people. We tend to see that tight brick and mortar religiosity is associated with people who are well-adjusted, responsible, and reasonably outgoing. In other words, in low inequality and high camaraderie times the church is yet another institution that is strong.
I believe some guy with a name like Martin Olasky got a lot of play in post 1980 circles by claiming that a lack of religious conviction is what weakened our morals and amplified gubmint handouts. Correlation isn't causation. As people found it harder to find dignified work, we saw greater alienation that led to both declining interest in religious fervor/communal worship and greater welfare claims.
Murray and Olasky make the culture war mistake of blaming declining signs of morality (like lower religiosity and welfare status) on a crisis of squeaky clean values being rejected. But what caused such a thing in the first place? Isn't it fair to assume that libertarian friendly greed and individualism diminished the prospects of many Americans such that they got yanked from the mid-century refinement and modesty that Boomers have been yearning for since the 80's?
At this point the level of glibness and decadence is so overblown that it's going to take a combative and ostentatious type like Trump to finally begin to repair the damage.
I think things are going to change big-league once the Millennials shift from their quarter-life crisis into their midlife crisis.
ReplyDeleteWork hard and get rewarded? Not when all the good jobs have been shipped overseas, you go through four years of degree-mill grinding, and all you get is a patchwork "career" of several crappy part-time low-paying dead-end jobs, plus tens of thousands in student loan debt that you'll never repay.
There's a mismatch there that cannot be rationalized away -- kids who grew up during the turbo-charged higher ed bubble, where high school has been turned into a Korean cram school, have experienced nothing but "hard work" in preparation for their entry into the labor force.
But then when they get there, they find -- nothing.
Then they hear stories about their slacker / stoner parents back in the '70s who graduated free from debt, got jobs wherever they looked, all of which had promotion potential and paid enough to start a family.
Those jobs have not been replaced by technology, but simply sent out of the country, or been stolen by foreigners imported to displace natives who expect decent pay. The remaining good jobs being done by natives are mostly entrenched Me Generation incumbents who got started back in the '70s and '80s, and refuse to retire and free up the clogging of the labor market's arteries.
Economic heart attack cannot come soon enough.
Teh ghey issue is also cocooning related. Early adopter strivers and disgusting cosmopolitan weirdos latched on to da gay boys in the 70's but Middle America was bemused at best by efforts to mainstream homos. The AIDS crisis amplified both rootless weirdo sob stories and middle American homophobia. People were far too insightful into what separates natural and unnatural behavior before the 90's.
ReplyDeleteWe really let our guard down in the 90's, though, probably because way too many people stopped caring about what it takes to strengthen everything. We just don't "get" people like we should, I guess because we get nerdy and snarky. "Why should I tell some fag what to do with his life. It's not my business anyway, and who is he hurting?" The "compassion" is destroying respect for natural and useful boundaries. As Western civilization burns we might as well invite queers to roast some marshmallows.
Then they hear stories about their slacker / stoner parents back in the '70s who graduated free from debt, got jobs wherever they looked, all of which had promotion potential and paid enough to start a family.
ReplyDeleteLet's not forget either that elder G.I.s and still youngish Silents did not look upon Boomers as "junk". Rather they saw to it that Boomer ambitions be stoked every step of the way. Or, alternately, that the more shiftless Boomers be treated with patience and forgiveness. No matter how stoned or brash a Boomer was, at the end of the day they still had some kind of charisma that warded off accountability.
No quarter was given to Gen-X teenagers, who were instantly rejected as a defective bunch. Boomer critics in particular rarely or never at all bothered to actually listen to Gen X-ers or understand just what made them tick. Of course X-ers weren't interested in explaining themselves to preachy sell outs anyway.
We've seen greater attempts at "helping" young Millennials. Problem is, the foundation of a sound economy has been withered by:
- the post-modern delusions of current policy (like the idea that America doesn't need a manufacturing base)
- irresponsible Boomers stuck in economic adolescence
-the lousy personalities and/or low IQs of heavily brown/yellow Millennial demographics
Are we ever again going to see the kind of prosperity that a mostly white population achieved in the past?
"the post-modern delusions of current policy (like the idea that America doesn't need a manufacturing base)"
ReplyDeleteI was shocked to hear Bernie selling this point in his stump speech -- not just an off-hand remark, but a central part of his argument.
"In the old days someone with a high school education could get a well-paying manufacturing job, but those jobs are gone forever, so get used to it, and join the higher ed bubble."
His solution is not to bring those jobs back, but to make higher ed free.
He says the same thing about trade unions -- they were great back in the old days, but we don't need to organize unions or collectively bargain anymore. Just get a degree and you'll find a good job -- again only focusing on student debt rather than the hollowed-out labor market.
Progressives are, at bottom, uninterested in real change -- otherwise they would work on building up a demographic base. By dismissing the idea of bringing back high-paying manufacturing jobs, and speaking of trade unions as a quaint relic, he's not going to appeal to blue-collars (who are going to Trump).
They don't have a message for any racial or ethnic group, since they're focused on economics.
Which also removes women or men as their base.
Time and again, the "base" of progressives is naive college students. Being a student is not a permanent trait (...in most cases), like being blue-collar, black, female, or gay.
So a particular person who comes into the movement is bound to leave it after at most a few years. There's no permanence to membership or affiliation. You have black women who have been voting Democrat for 40 years, and white men who have been voting Republican for as long. But how many who voted Nader in 2000 have continued to show up to the polls, and then vote Green?
"No matter how justified his comments were, they are identity politics topics from the old Republican party"
ReplyDeleteI don't remember the old Republican party ever standing up for whites, or openly criticizing Hispanic racialism or any other kind of non-white racialism or racism. On the contrary they always seemed eager to bow down before the racial Other. Bush and his Hispanic "family values", his apology for slavery, etc. Hasn't their thing always been the constitution and abstract equality of all humans and the proposition nation? When did they ever make a big deal out of the fact that non-whites openly promote racial interests, and are celebrated for it, while whites who do that are destroyed? (Did they even mention that fact?) Seems to me that if anyone actually took up the culture war in defense of white racial interests that would be a totally new and shocking thing -- way more extreme than anything Trump's done yet.
This is a great blog but I don't understand your position on "culture war" issues. The degenerate Left has won every single battle in the "culture war" for decade after decade -- and they keep winning right now, over and over, and they will never ever stop until the culture of the white west has been totally destroyed. The wars seems to be over, at a given time, only because everyone comes to accept the most recent evil degeneracy imposed on society the Leftist elites. It's never really over until there's not a single normal decent person or normal decent community left. This doesn't matter? Or it doesn't matter enough that normal people should pursue the "culture war" in national politics?
I don't watch much cable, but from what I've seen CNN has sunk into self-parody with over the top pandering to blax, almost like what McDonald's was doing a few years back
ReplyDelete"I don't remember the old Republican party ever standing up for whites"
ReplyDeleteMore during the '80s and '90s than the 2000s. And it was not just the paleocons -- neo-connish and libertarian types (a major wing of the old GOP) were against affirmative action, pointed to examples of "reverse racism," race differences (The Bell Curve), and so on.
These were topics that could be heard on talk radio back in the '90s, and that still occasionally come up on Fox News.
If Trump went hardcore on culture war issues, his campaign would immediately implode -- you just saw that with the reverse racism example of the La Raza judge, before that the abortion question, and before that "two Corinthians".
He got skewered by both the Left and the Right for each of those examples. So he correctly concludes, "I don't need this culture war shit."
Right now, lower-level matters are more important -- the economy and the government. If we don't fix that, we'll never get around to culture and social matters. And even then, it will not be through the government but through grassroots organizing, evangelizing, and so on. The only role for the govt will be to let states decide their own positions on cultural and social matters.
Right now, it's more important for the working class to get good jobs than it is to repeal gay marriage at the federal level. If you say otherwise, you prove to the majority of white people (below managerial-level in the class pyramid) that you don't care about their survival, and only about airy-fairy matters (as it were).
According to reports, an attempt was made on Donald Trump's life.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/06/breaking-foreigner-arrested-trying-kill-donald-trump-vegas-rally/
"""""the post-modern delusions of current policy (like the idea that America doesn't need a manufacturing base)"
ReplyDeleteI was shocked to hear Bernie selling this point in his stump speech -- not just an off-hand remark, but a central part of his argument."""
Bernie sucks... you've treated him really charitably, but he's totally content for his whole election saga - that his frankly desperate supporters poured millions of dollars into - to be a moral victory. The alt-right's first impression was correct; he's a cuck, pure and simple, and is happy to watch globalists continue to have their way with the USA as long as we prove to the world that we're "better" than Trump. Disgusting.
I've been defending the Sanders *voters*, not the candidate himself -- who at that very beginning I said wanted to be an Old Testament-style prophet rather than king, grandstanding about righteousness and wickedness as a way of influencing the actual policies of the actual leader (Crooked Hillary).
ReplyDeleteI don't think Sanders is a bad guy. I think he was playing chicken with the globalist/multicult Dem establish and the pressure got to be too much, making him swerve away. Whether he came to demurring because of his own sense of discretion or because of threats stated or implied isn't clear.
ReplyDeleteI do think that rather than Bernie being cynical or showoffey with his run, he does (naively) think that his populist ideas and followers will have clout with Clinton who Bernie assumes will win the White House. If Bernie wasn't sure of Clinton's chances I think he would've fought harder. If the party nominee really detests the runner-up(s) the convention confab and platform wrangling usually is strictly ceremonial. Jesse Jackson can boast about steering the Dems leftward after losing to Dukakis in '88, but duh, the Dems were well on their way to being the party of disgruntled non-whites and rootless bohemian elites anyway. If they weren't that party already. Bernie's economic reforms won't slowly wither away on the vine; they'll be slashed off just after party elites fluff Bernie's ego and feign interest in his mission.
Bernie probably doesn't have the guts to come to terms with the fact that blacks run the show. And he would be bothered by the idea that the black vote and black Dem machine has singlehandedly destroyed the Dems. He frickin' was right there in the 60's civil rights marches dreaming that we'd all be able to achieve harmony. What actually happened is that as soon as you give anything to blacks they become grossly entitled and start screaming for attention and bossing everyone around.
ReplyDeleteA return to the healthy stasis of pre-mid 60's America means keeping blacks in line and encouraging people of all races to stick to their own. If we don't agree to give up certain liberties (like living among and even screwing people who don't belong to your race) we are never going to diminish the tension and jealousy that happens when you don't set boundaries.
http://polling.reuters.com/#poll/TM651Y15_13/filters/SC_RACE:1
ReplyDeleteHandy for breaking down Demos. Trump wins by around 10% among whites while Hillary beats Trump 68% to 4.7% among blacks, with 27% of blacks saying they wouldn't vote for either. Course it's disgraceful that more whites aren't pro-Trump but it wouldn't make any difference if you blocked the black vote altogether. Unless a GOP candidate regularly makes black the center of attention (or the candidate is black himself) they ain't got a chance of gaining black votes.
Asians also are hostile to Trump though not to the same degree as blacks. Feather indians are just +7 for Hillary, bolstering the wisdom of America's old racial demographics and policies in which each race had their niche and place.
"From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven former Confederate states completed political suppression and exclusion of these groups by ratifying new constitutions or amendments which incorporated provisions to make voter registration more difficult. These included such requirements as payment of poll taxes, complicated record keeping, complicated timing of registration and length of residency in relation to elections, with related record-keeping requirements; felony disenfranchisement focusing on crimes thought to be committed by African Americans,[33] and a literacy test or comprehension test." (From wiki)
So as to prevent policticans/parties forming with the intent to agitate established whites, voting laws were passed in the reform era which kept agents of division (especially blacks) at bay.
Though the reform era of roughly 1900-1940 ultimately was rather liberal in the sense that everyone gradually became happier and more secure, it certainly wasn't liberal in the sense of racial grievance dominating everything. Many whites knew better than to empower blacks, knowing how hard it would be to keep them in line.
I'd be careful about using the Reuters poll to estimate absolute levels of support, since the respondents are recruited online and seem to represent extremes -- 11% are gay/bi/other, and most of the Republicans are Tea Party types, neither of whom are Trump's core of support.
ReplyDeleteAlso apparently no Hispanics taking that poll, which would weaken the Clinton support among non-whites. They can only be tracked monthly, not weekly or daily b/c of small sample size.
It's better to use that poll for movements over time than for estimating support levels.
I'm sceptical of the whole 'blue collar is economic victim' argument. Somehow, because of 1930's propaganda (or perhaps Rosie the Riveter), factory work is now seen as dignified, honest labor, and service work (at MacDonalds, or at the Mall) as beneath even a prole. I'm not sure how that happened other than pure propaganda.
ReplyDeleteIf you've ever worked in a factory (I have. As an engineer student thirty years ago, I worked a summer on an assembly line, and later, had an engineering internship in a chemical factory), they are miserable, ugly, unpleasant places to be. Assembly line work, in particular, is the most mind-numbing work imaginable.
I have no doubt that any of us would prefer to clean tables at the local food court over work an assembly line for Ford (money notwithstanding).
Furthermore, farming, another blue collar stable from the 'good old days,' is hot, miserable work that doesn't pay well. Independent farmers (i.e. family farms who own their own equipment and land, and are doing their own work) have the dignity of a small businessman. But farm laborers have hot miserable jobs.
So the whole modern spiel that lower classes, in the 'good old days,' had some kind of dignified job (working in 100 degree heat for a pittance, or on a factory floor screwing bolts on the same thing 90 times a day), while modern blue collar folks are oppressed by having to unload trucks, or clean floors, or stock the shelves at night at Walmart, is nonsense.
And once you get rid of that myth, you lose alot of the argument. Modern immorality caused by the shitty work available to the lower classes? But that shitty work is far preferable to old-fashioned shitty work. Factory workers somehow managed to marry and raise kids. Amazon stockers somehow manage to take drugs, impregnate or get impregnated, and completely neglect the nuclear family.
The difference between assembly line work and service work isn't causing the problem. Something else is going on.
anonymousse
"I have no doubt that any of us would prefer to clean tables at the local food court over work an assembly line for Ford (money notwithstanding)."
ReplyDeleteYeah, nothing mind-numbing about working in fast food. At least on the assembly line, you aren't being talked down to by customers.
Nice save at the end -- other than manufacturing paying 3, 4, or 5 times as much money, there's nothing to recommend it.
People work to pay bills, put food on the table, raise a family, etc. You can't do that working in fast food, but you can by working in manufacturing.
So we either hit those developmental milestones by earning decent pay, or we stay stunted due to earning squat. You've already admitted that the shift in social behavior is due to crappy pay for the service economy -- that's why you tried to hide it in parentheses.
Working at a fast food place in a heavily black area will make the most PC-whipped person into a hardcore racist.
ReplyDelete@Feryl Bernie probably doesn't have the guts to come to terms with the fact that blacks run the show. And he would be bothered by the idea that the black vote and black Dem machine has singlehandedly destroyed the Dems. He frickin' was right there in the 60's civil rights marches dreaming that we'd all be able to achieve harmony. What actually happened is that as soon as you give anything to blacks they become grossly entitled and start screaming for attention and bossing everyone around.
ReplyDeleteBernie is unpopular with blacks, even though he worked with civil rights movement since the 60s. Now blacks don't like him.It's like that Awyattman cartoon
"People work to pay bills, put food on the table, raise a family, etc. You can't do that working in fast food, but you can by working in manufacturing."
ReplyDeleteAgain: you have obviously never worked on an assembly line. It would be impossible to do unless you are autistic or have an IQ of barely functioning. If you had ever done it, you would understand.
The only reason manufacturing work was enough to raise a family was because of the artificial economy of 1950's America. That was an anomaly, and it won't come back-unions or no unions.
Fast food was my pat (quick, unthought) answer. Family folks don't work fast food. They drive delivery trucks, they work as carpenters or plumbers, they stock shelves at Walmart until they get promoted to stocker manager, etc. Even competent fast food workers do it until they are managers-and they earn enough to raise a family.
I still think you are essentially forgetting the past with your perception of it. Mobile homes weren't invented in 1986. Factory workers and blue collar labor lived in mobile homes in 1950-THAT was 'family wage.' One industry (auto manufacturing) for basically one decade (1950's) which was artificial due to the destruction of WWII is not the norm.
anonymousse
In Henry Ford's autobiography, he has a fascinating perspective on mechanization and industrial work. His perspective is that a lot of people aren't very capable. Therefore, they can't produce enough to earn high wages. Machines make these workers more productive and therefore enable them to earn higher wages. This is a fascinating perspective. I've never seen it anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, you are right that a lot of industrial work is mind-numbing. And it is true that some people view the past through rose-colored glasses, and that many people fail to account for the fact that US industry enjoyed a de facto monopoly in the immediate aftermath of WWII because our competition had been literally blown to bits. But there used to be a lot of industry. It wasn't just the auto sector. Most major cities are filled with former factories that made things like furniture, tools, lighting, toys, airplanes, electronics, etc., etc. -- most of the products that we buy were made here in the USA at one time. And these factories paid decent wages.
Don't you agree that the working and lower middle classes have seen a significant decline in their standard of living over the past 30 or so years?
I personally don't know what the solution is. But I want to DO SOMETHING and TRY to fix the problem. Trump wants to bring back manufacturing. Great -- let's try it. I don't know if it will work; the Chinese factories aren't going away, we can't just wish them out of existence. But let's try something. During the 80's and 90's, the idea that American companies could not manufacture cars cost-effectively because of high wages never made much sense to me. Japan and Germany are both first-world nations and they still have an auto industry. Why can't we have one too? And we made airplanes and computers here in the 80's and 90's. Why not cars? Also, the US still has a garment industry. That's the kind of industry that should be dominate by third world countries -- and yet, we manage to compete.
Also, I am open to an economic model in which more American workers have good jobs, and in return American consumers simply HAVE LESS STUFF. We don't NEED all of this cheap crap from overseas - we just don't. If a $29.97 Blu-Ray player cost $59.97, it wouldn't cause the economy to collapse. Right now even the poorest Americans have more stuff than they know what to do with. Instead of having 30 $4 t-hshirts, maybe each of us could have 15 $8 t-shirts instead?
ReplyDeleteIt's clear that the current system isn't working. It's time to try something different.
anonymousse: Modern immorality caused by the shitty work available to the lower classes? But that shitty work is far preferable to old-fashioned shitty work. Factory workers somehow managed to marry and raise kids. Amazon stockers somehow manage to take drugs, impregnate or get impregnated, and completely neglect the nuclear family.
ReplyDeleteTeen preg, drug abuse, promiscuity has dropping tho, or stayed stable? Since at least the 1980s. Partly the thesis of this blog. Agnostic's spent quite a bit of time explaining how these trends actually don't relate to the political-economic trend.
I have no doubt that any of us would prefer to clean tables at the local food court over work an assembly line for Ford (money notwithstanding).
The guy who works on the assembly line probably has a bit more real skill to understand how the product is made at least. Which he can use to further himself if he wants. Were factories, even assembly line, seen as dead end?
Generally, it strikes me you could make these arguments about domestic service, which was huge during the Victorian-Gilded Era and before the Egalitarian Midcentury. Surely it's better than factory work and field work? After all, they're just doing a bit of cleaning and the like. Yet what was the revealed preference when factory work was more available? Other than something the present day pro-servants globalist class want to stick down the memory hole.
Domestic service at its worst had extremely low pay and high rates of abuse and mistreatment. Including whippings not very different from the scare-pictures of slave's whip-marks. And that was white people doing it to other white people.
DeleteFactory work paid more and was less physically brutalizing.
I'm an advocate for domestic work returning, but not under the relatively historically common conditions. People of all ethnic groups who could bail from domestic work did so for historically sensible reasons as they had a chance at other jobs that paid even a little more. And technology makes people more anti-social and consumption focused, which is part of what drives the lack of family formation.
"worked on an assembly line. It would be impossible to do unless you are autistic or have an IQ of barely functioning."
ReplyDeleteYep, everyone in the Rust Belt region pre-1980 was autistic -- either they were, or the engineer sperg I'm responding to now.
"they stock shelves at Walmart until they get promoted to stocker manager, etc. Even competent fast food workers do it until they are managers-and they earn enough to raise a family."
So only the managerial class gets to raise families -- wonderful pitch to ordinary Americans. "If you don't like your job, become the manager!"
You didn't need to be a manager to raise a large family. My grandfather worked in coal mines, on railroads, then more skilled carpentry work. Even when he was doing less skilled work, he was married, had 4 children, and paid off his mortgage in probably 20 years. He also had lifetime pensions and other income from his time in the unions, and so has my grandmother who never worked for a wage but was married to a union man.
"One industry (auto manufacturing) for basically one decade (1950's) which was artificial due to the destruction of WWII is not the norm."
Inequality began narrowing after the stock market crash of the late '20s, by decapitating the top of the class pyramid. Then with the New Deal, fedgov protection for unions, WWII, etc., prosperity lasted for working-class Americans right through the 1970s, in all industries.
You must not come from the eastern part of the country -- there was more than just farm labor and auto manufacturing. We used to make everything in this country -- steel, glass, plastics, rubber, housewares, tools, electronics, everything.
And the homes they lived in were not crappy mobile homes or the clapboard apartments that have been built since the '80s. They were single family detached homes that were built in the '30s and '40s -- not the unnecessarily sprawling McMansions of today, but more than enough for even the Baby Boom-sized families.
It's not the Seventies anymore, and shilling for the stripmining of the American economy could not be more tone-deaf.
About domestic work, here's a great article from Fortune magazine back in the 1950s, detailing how executives were living compared to the more extravagant pre-New Deal era:
ReplyDeletehttp://fortune.com/2012/05/06/how-top-executives-live-fortune-1955/
They mention that most of them had no domestic workers -- certainly none that were live-in, let alone a team of them. At most they might have someone stop by now and then to take care of odd chores.
Upper-middle class wives were not perpetually engaged in status-striving -- social climbing, throwing parties, shopping, etc. They kept house and raised their own families, rather than outsource wifely and maternal duties to wage earners.
Domestic work, or "personal assistant" jobs, are like fast food or other low-level customer service work -- you're always being ordered around, talked down to, and treated like a slave. While also doing mind-numbing work.
Working in a steel mill, or at a sewing machine making garments, didn't place you in constant contact with people ordering you around and treating you like a slave.
This isn't true. Pat Nixon, for example (a good proxy for the class of people you're talking about) had live in domestic and lawn help and asked them to not be in photo shoots about her life as a Vice President's wife who made her own curtains and cooked her own family's meals.
DeletePhyllis Schafly also had domestic help, as the wife of a prosperous lawyer. It was downplayed and hidden during the 1950s, and reduced or converted into quasi egalitarian mother's helpers and au pairs and demi pairs (the college girl or neighbor's teen helping out after school) as women who did the work professionally (blacks and white immigrants) gained more work opportunities, but it was still something middle class SAHMs had access to.
There was also a major decline in the birth rate for larger numbers of kids, masked somewhat by the larger overall number of women having children at all. So they did with less domestic help and more labor saving devices, but also with fewer children and much smaller overall family sizes.
Amen, Agnostic become a manager so you can raise a family. Why would anyone want to manage autistic idiots? Yes, I do blue collar work and frankly I wish that their were more detail oriented dummies who were interested in how the place actually worked and how it could work better. Just my experience, but the managers and the engineers just aren't that interested in actually improving things and wondering around talking about how horrible the place is doesn't give me much confidence that your coming up with many ideas, either.
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