Regarding the Vance piece, I think one of the most clarifying (and to a certain extent surprising) thing about the rise of MAGA (both the politicians and the voters), is just how much they loathe me (and my wife, and our friends, and our neighbors, etc.). I mean, really loathe us. I am reminded of Tim Miller relating the story of his GOP…
Regarding the Vance piece, I think one of the most clarifying (and to a certain extent surprising) thing about the rise of MAGA (both the politicians and the voters), is just how much they loathe me (and my wife, and our friends, and our neighbors, etc.). I mean, really loathe us. I am reminded of Tim Miller relating the story of his GOP consultant friend, an otherwise reasonable person, getting just incensed about Prius', paper straws, and "coexist" stickers. And I continue to be kind of baffled. I mean, I grew up in SE WI in Paul Ryan country, and have lived in a progressive city for a long time. I get how insufferable some folks can be sometimes. A lot of times. My progressive friends drive me bananas too sometimes. But isn't an eye-roll enough? Why does it drive the Vance's of the world to such rage filled distraction? I like a wellmade, locally-sourced, grass-fed ribeye as much as the next guy, AND a tailgate brat and beer. How do either of those things negatively or positively impact Vance and the contituency he's championing (supposedly)? I have never been able to identify the answer to that. Why does Vance or generic MAGA guy/gal care what I like or dislike? Or that someone else (also) has a kind of insipid, tenuously supported social position? Why do they see it as such a personal affront? Sometimes I think it's at least partially because a lot of MAGA America has seen their kids and neices and nephews and cousins and grandkids go off to college, then come back to tell them how wrong they were (at least according to the college family member). And they're just done with it. Which I actually kind of understand. What I don't understand is, again, why it became untenable to just roll their eyes and ignore their progressive family members, and it had to become "burn the whole goddamned place down."
They hate us but they live among us because they cannot go without those molasses-glazed Brussels sprouts. Otherwise, they would live someplace downscale far away from us, where there would be no opportunity for the resentment to build.
I always revert to the wounded, dying animal analogy. They are most dangerous when they are wounded and especially when they are cornered. As demographics and society itself keeps marching on and maga types refuse to adapt, grow or even keep up, there is existential fear. It is why the replacement theories play so well. It is why most Jan 6 participants came from areas that used to be fully conservative and/or white but are now politically and racially diverse. It is why those areas are the most likely places that political violence will occur.
Eye rolling no longer suffices when you perceive that your entire world is changing without your consent. And when you listen to an entire media universe that hyperbolically screams this to you 24/7. You are cornered, numerically weakened and wounded. Snarling and biting is seen as your only chance of survival.
Forcing everyone to believe and act as you do, even when you know (or used to believe) it is wrong, then becomes a reasonable and justifiable alternative for survival. And here we now find ourselves. Snarling, biting, and adherence to a my way or burn it all down philosophy. Or a strongman/men will come along who promises to save you by smiting your enemies and returning life to some point you were comfortable.
I think you're spot on. A lot of these people are scared of the social change they see and are desperately trying to force it all back into the box.
When my conservative parents have been the most honest with me about their feelings on politics this has always been the message. They're afraid of being branded racist/bigotted for their beliefs, they're scared that young people are changing the country in ways they don't like, etc.
But they never seem to do the introspection and ask why their beliefs may be offensive. They never consider that some of us want social change because the old order was cruel and damaging to so many people.
I sometimes wonder if conservatives understand, deep down, the pain and terror they've inflicted on certain groups, and they subconsciously fear that if those groups ever gain power, they'll seek retribution.
Keep in mind, part of the conservative mindset is a healthy distrust of human nature. With that as your baseline, why wouldn't you assume that others will use power to benefit themselves and hurt others, just as your group has?
It also comes down to those people MAGA hates having so much power in culture, politics, and the economy. If the liberal kale-eaters didn't have so much economic/political clout, they'd just be another minority group for MAGA to shit on and make memes about. It's because college-educated, kale-eating liberals *have* so much power and wealth that they become demonized to such a degree.
The Big Sort is exactly that: the people with education, wealth, and ultimately power cleaving themselves off from everyone else via physical geography, culture, and wealth and then expecting things to be live-and-let-live. If you think one chunk of society can just cleave off from the rest because it has more money and cultural power than the other and looks down on them, and then you expect thing to be *okay* politically after that cleavage then you are smoking metaphorical crack rocks by the boat load. Post-college liberals created the education/wealth divide during The Big Sort and then got all surprised when populism came around to take their precious democracy from them as a punishment.
Point being, if the smart liberal kids tend to marry each other and think alike and always have more money than the average non-college couple who doesn't make as good money as they do and doesn't have the same views on culture or economics, then there's probably going to be a lot of beef between those groups just based on one group having way more college education and money and cultural clout, while the other group has to get by without college and without as good net family unit income. That is Iraqi Sunni vs Shia-style segregation by choice, so don't be surprised if it ends up with Sunni vs Shia-style politics and eventually bloodshed. When you rip a country apart at the fabric, you don't always get to seem them back together.
I think you’re blaming liberals too much here. The Republican Party elite have spent two years disseminating a lie about a stolen election to raise money from their own supporters. Trump has spent his entire career grifting. Bannon did the same. They have nothing but contempt for their own voters. It might also help if there weren’t an entire media ecosystem screaming about how the “evil libs hate you and your way of life.”
I think you have some points here, but these days, it doesn't seem to be people who go to college who have money. Well, unless you're born into money, but populists don't seem to have anything against the Trumps, Waltons, and DeVos. It's the self-made millionaires like Bill Gates they hate. It's been a point made many times, but somehow college education+debt+minimum wage job = elite, but family money, inherited business, and lots of expensive toys = regular, real American.
Trumps, Walton’s, Devos are using maga voters to increase their own wealth. They do not for one second believe they are anything like their maga voters.
Trumps, Waltons, DeVos' get a pass because they are conservative elites, but they are also *counter-liberal* elites. You get to be an oligarch so long as you shit on the people who are one rung above the working class, because that's the class of people the non-college working class sees when they look immediately up on the economic ladder. The working class doesn't see billionaires when they look one rung up at who is shitting on them, they see post-college couples with higher household net incomes than they have. Matthew Stewart probably explains this hatred dynamic of the post-college scribe class (the top 9.9% who are below the top 0.1%) better than me. This NYT article from a year ago covers his thesis, but the book is 100% worth the read/listen:
Basically, the post-college scribe class self-segregated via class, culture, and geography--leaving many non-college people in the dust (not just economically, but culturally and politically too). Not only did they do this, but they poisoned the "meritocracy" with the wealth they have, which made it harder for the children of the working class to get where the children of the post-college scribe class were going to be. College tuition rates went up because the post-college scribe class could afford them while the working class could not--inducing higher levels of debt for the working class via the inflation of tuition that wealthier families were causing, which made the "meritocracy" of who gets into college onto the better jobs really more about what kind of parents you had, how much money they made, what neighborhood you grew up in, and what that school system--including private ones--looked like. That's the dynamic that drives who gets into college, gets to marry a higher-income partner via social capital networks established in college, and who gets to get a better-paying job that usually comes out of getting the right kind of degree while holding the least amount of college debt (a function of parental wealth). And the post-college scribe class still wonders aloud how it came to be that the working class grew to despise them. Trump and his family get a pass on elitism because they're the oligarchs who are beating the shit out of the post-college scribe class rather than blessing them up.
I've read Matthew Stewart before, in the Atlantic. He made some excellent points. But I took it as
him talking about surgeons and stockbrokers, not the average college educated person. About 24% of Americans have at least a bachelors degree - we are not the 9.9%. Then again, I remember when I was laid off from a legal editing job that moved to India for a huge drop in quality that didn't affect sales in the slightest bit (yay colluding monopolies). I asked about working at the local community college, and I was told by the NY Department of Labor, "Don't bother, state colleges don't hire people with degrees from state colleges." Everyone has to look down on someone, I guess.
Nice, I first read him in The Atlantic before reading his book after as well. But even a household making net $150-200k can afford a lot more savings and better living than a net $75k household or even a net $100k household. Nurses marrying nurses (both post-bachelors) make a lot more than a cabinet repairman married to a barista (both non-college) for example.
That different tiers of income exist isn't really the problem so much as that the upper and even middle incomes tend to self-sort, accelerate wealth inequality generation-to-generation as a byproduct, and then spoil the meritocracy via making it more about wealth than actual merit. Equality of opportunity goes out the window and then you layer a self-reinforcing state of classism on top of that. That's kind of where we are as a "country" right now (I always say this "country" is really just an economic competition among individuals who like to still pretend they're a country).
There's some truth in it, but most couples I know in my neighborhood / income bracket, the woman has a college degree (nursing or teaching, usually) and the man doesn't because he can become an electrician or plumber and make a decent living without accumulating education debt.
The part that really resonates for me is that people like me send their kids to college, hoping they'll meet and marry other college-educated people rather than the local barfly / weed dealer. Oh, and the other part that resonates: there is real discrimination against the less intelligent. Some part of intelligence is genetic, so this is patently unfair. I don't know what to do about that, but excoriating people for voting based on the Wrestlemania-ification of politics doesn't seem to be an answer.
That is our situation-- sort of.. My husband has a college degree and he is also a journeyman electrician (IBEW). He did not have any college debt though. His father paid his tuition (state college). I met him at said college. I ended up dropping out but returned later and got my nursing degree. We only had one kid and he currently has his Master's degree and is applying for doctorate programs in his field (clinical psychology). As a young man he had a year of working blue collar construction and 4 years in the military so was able to make good decisions about his future after he was discharged. His fiance is also in his same field and finishing her Master's. She did grow up with a lot of poverty in a small deadend town so is very ambitious, hardworking and fiercely smart. My husband is not a big reader but my son and his fiance and I are. Our neighborhood is made up of homes that cost less than $150K, generally 1500-1700 sq. foot, 1970's stock suburban split/raised ranch or colonial style homes, good public school system. In fact, we don't have a private school in our district.
From the stats I've seen, women with degrees tend to marry men (or women) without degrees more than men with degrees do.
Check out the disparity between men with degrees doing the assortative mating versus women with degrees--particularly in the key 20's/30's marrying years. You'll notice trends that started showing up from the 1970's until now (college+ men do it wayyyy more than women):
From the article: "But what ultimately unites its members (the 9.9%) is less the size of their bank accounts than a mind-set, Stewart contends. At its core lies “the merit myth,” a shared belief that the affluent owe their success not to the color of their skin or the advantages they’ve inherited but to their talent and intelligence. Under the spell of this conviction, Stewart argues, the privileged engage in practices — segregating themselves in upscale neighborhoods, using their money and influence to get their children into elite colleges — that entrench inequality even as they remain blithely unaware of their role in perpetuating it."
Grass-fed beef? This guy sounds like he drinks microbrews with his brats. Or worse, imported Trippel. PITCHFORK, WHERE IS MY PITCHFORK!
I don't get it either. It's utterly baffling. That libertarian "live and let live" streak seems to have totally dissipated from the Republican party. It seems like more of a personality thing than an ideology thing.
I don't think the Republicans ever really had a libertarian streak.
Sure, they loved to take out the libertarian branding and wave it around when Democrats were in charge, but the second they took power again they instantly went back to a religious authoritarian position.
If I had to guess it's because the people who vote for Vance have seen their lifestyle go from being the lifestyle of middle class mainstream America to being seen as the lifestyle of the poors. It's easier to ignore the liberal lifestyle in NYC and LA when everyone around you is just like you. Harder to ignore it when the people in the city 20 miles away act just like the people in NYC and LA.
Regarding the Vance piece, I think one of the most clarifying (and to a certain extent surprising) thing about the rise of MAGA (both the politicians and the voters), is just how much they loathe me (and my wife, and our friends, and our neighbors, etc.). I mean, really loathe us. I am reminded of Tim Miller relating the story of his GOP consultant friend, an otherwise reasonable person, getting just incensed about Prius', paper straws, and "coexist" stickers. And I continue to be kind of baffled. I mean, I grew up in SE WI in Paul Ryan country, and have lived in a progressive city for a long time. I get how insufferable some folks can be sometimes. A lot of times. My progressive friends drive me bananas too sometimes. But isn't an eye-roll enough? Why does it drive the Vance's of the world to such rage filled distraction? I like a wellmade, locally-sourced, grass-fed ribeye as much as the next guy, AND a tailgate brat and beer. How do either of those things negatively or positively impact Vance and the contituency he's championing (supposedly)? I have never been able to identify the answer to that. Why does Vance or generic MAGA guy/gal care what I like or dislike? Or that someone else (also) has a kind of insipid, tenuously supported social position? Why do they see it as such a personal affront? Sometimes I think it's at least partially because a lot of MAGA America has seen their kids and neices and nephews and cousins and grandkids go off to college, then come back to tell them how wrong they were (at least according to the college family member). And they're just done with it. Which I actually kind of understand. What I don't understand is, again, why it became untenable to just roll their eyes and ignore their progressive family members, and it had to become "burn the whole goddamned place down."
They hate us but they live among us because they cannot go without those molasses-glazed Brussels sprouts. Otherwise, they would live someplace downscale far away from us, where there would be no opportunity for the resentment to build.
I always revert to the wounded, dying animal analogy. They are most dangerous when they are wounded and especially when they are cornered. As demographics and society itself keeps marching on and maga types refuse to adapt, grow or even keep up, there is existential fear. It is why the replacement theories play so well. It is why most Jan 6 participants came from areas that used to be fully conservative and/or white but are now politically and racially diverse. It is why those areas are the most likely places that political violence will occur.
Eye rolling no longer suffices when you perceive that your entire world is changing without your consent. And when you listen to an entire media universe that hyperbolically screams this to you 24/7. You are cornered, numerically weakened and wounded. Snarling and biting is seen as your only chance of survival.
Forcing everyone to believe and act as you do, even when you know (or used to believe) it is wrong, then becomes a reasonable and justifiable alternative for survival. And here we now find ourselves. Snarling, biting, and adherence to a my way or burn it all down philosophy. Or a strongman/men will come along who promises to save you by smiting your enemies and returning life to some point you were comfortable.
I think you're spot on. A lot of these people are scared of the social change they see and are desperately trying to force it all back into the box.
When my conservative parents have been the most honest with me about their feelings on politics this has always been the message. They're afraid of being branded racist/bigotted for their beliefs, they're scared that young people are changing the country in ways they don't like, etc.
But they never seem to do the introspection and ask why their beliefs may be offensive. They never consider that some of us want social change because the old order was cruel and damaging to so many people.
I sometimes wonder if conservatives understand, deep down, the pain and terror they've inflicted on certain groups, and they subconsciously fear that if those groups ever gain power, they'll seek retribution.
Of course they fear it. And not subconsciously.
Keep in mind, part of the conservative mindset is a healthy distrust of human nature. With that as your baseline, why wouldn't you assume that others will use power to benefit themselves and hurt others, just as your group has?
It also comes down to those people MAGA hates having so much power in culture, politics, and the economy. If the liberal kale-eaters didn't have so much economic/political clout, they'd just be another minority group for MAGA to shit on and make memes about. It's because college-educated, kale-eating liberals *have* so much power and wealth that they become demonized to such a degree.
The Big Sort is exactly that: the people with education, wealth, and ultimately power cleaving themselves off from everyone else via physical geography, culture, and wealth and then expecting things to be live-and-let-live. If you think one chunk of society can just cleave off from the rest because it has more money and cultural power than the other and looks down on them, and then you expect thing to be *okay* politically after that cleavage then you are smoking metaphorical crack rocks by the boat load. Post-college liberals created the education/wealth divide during The Big Sort and then got all surprised when populism came around to take their precious democracy from them as a punishment.
Point being, if the smart liberal kids tend to marry each other and think alike and always have more money than the average non-college couple who doesn't make as good money as they do and doesn't have the same views on culture or economics, then there's probably going to be a lot of beef between those groups just based on one group having way more college education and money and cultural clout, while the other group has to get by without college and without as good net family unit income. That is Iraqi Sunni vs Shia-style segregation by choice, so don't be surprised if it ends up with Sunni vs Shia-style politics and eventually bloodshed. When you rip a country apart at the fabric, you don't always get to seem them back together.
I think you’re blaming liberals too much here. The Republican Party elite have spent two years disseminating a lie about a stolen election to raise money from their own supporters. Trump has spent his entire career grifting. Bannon did the same. They have nothing but contempt for their own voters. It might also help if there weren’t an entire media ecosystem screaming about how the “evil libs hate you and your way of life.”
I think you have some points here, but these days, it doesn't seem to be people who go to college who have money. Well, unless you're born into money, but populists don't seem to have anything against the Trumps, Waltons, and DeVos. It's the self-made millionaires like Bill Gates they hate. It's been a point made many times, but somehow college education+debt+minimum wage job = elite, but family money, inherited business, and lots of expensive toys = regular, real American.
Trumps, Walton’s, Devos are using maga voters to increase their own wealth. They do not for one second believe they are anything like their maga voters.
Trumps, Waltons, DeVos' get a pass because they are conservative elites, but they are also *counter-liberal* elites. You get to be an oligarch so long as you shit on the people who are one rung above the working class, because that's the class of people the non-college working class sees when they look immediately up on the economic ladder. The working class doesn't see billionaires when they look one rung up at who is shitting on them, they see post-college couples with higher household net incomes than they have. Matthew Stewart probably explains this hatred dynamic of the post-college scribe class (the top 9.9% who are below the top 0.1%) better than me. This NYT article from a year ago covers his thesis, but the book is 100% worth the read/listen:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/books/review/the-99-percent-matthew-stewart.html
Basically, the post-college scribe class self-segregated via class, culture, and geography--leaving many non-college people in the dust (not just economically, but culturally and politically too). Not only did they do this, but they poisoned the "meritocracy" with the wealth they have, which made it harder for the children of the working class to get where the children of the post-college scribe class were going to be. College tuition rates went up because the post-college scribe class could afford them while the working class could not--inducing higher levels of debt for the working class via the inflation of tuition that wealthier families were causing, which made the "meritocracy" of who gets into college onto the better jobs really more about what kind of parents you had, how much money they made, what neighborhood you grew up in, and what that school system--including private ones--looked like. That's the dynamic that drives who gets into college, gets to marry a higher-income partner via social capital networks established in college, and who gets to get a better-paying job that usually comes out of getting the right kind of degree while holding the least amount of college debt (a function of parental wealth). And the post-college scribe class still wonders aloud how it came to be that the working class grew to despise them. Trump and his family get a pass on elitism because they're the oligarchs who are beating the shit out of the post-college scribe class rather than blessing them up.
I've read Matthew Stewart before, in the Atlantic. He made some excellent points. But I took it as
him talking about surgeons and stockbrokers, not the average college educated person. About 24% of Americans have at least a bachelors degree - we are not the 9.9%. Then again, I remember when I was laid off from a legal editing job that moved to India for a huge drop in quality that didn't affect sales in the slightest bit (yay colluding monopolies). I asked about working at the local community college, and I was told by the NY Department of Labor, "Don't bother, state colleges don't hire people with degrees from state colleges." Everyone has to look down on someone, I guess.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
Nice, I first read him in The Atlantic before reading his book after as well. But even a household making net $150-200k can afford a lot more savings and better living than a net $75k household or even a net $100k household. Nurses marrying nurses (both post-bachelors) make a lot more than a cabinet repairman married to a barista (both non-college) for example.
That different tiers of income exist isn't really the problem so much as that the upper and even middle incomes tend to self-sort, accelerate wealth inequality generation-to-generation as a byproduct, and then spoil the meritocracy via making it more about wealth than actual merit. Equality of opportunity goes out the window and then you layer a self-reinforcing state of classism on top of that. That's kind of where we are as a "country" right now (I always say this "country" is really just an economic competition among individuals who like to still pretend they're a country).
There's some truth in it, but most couples I know in my neighborhood / income bracket, the woman has a college degree (nursing or teaching, usually) and the man doesn't because he can become an electrician or plumber and make a decent living without accumulating education debt.
The part that really resonates for me is that people like me send their kids to college, hoping they'll meet and marry other college-educated people rather than the local barfly / weed dealer. Oh, and the other part that resonates: there is real discrimination against the less intelligent. Some part of intelligence is genetic, so this is patently unfair. I don't know what to do about that, but excoriating people for voting based on the Wrestlemania-ification of politics doesn't seem to be an answer.
That is our situation-- sort of.. My husband has a college degree and he is also a journeyman electrician (IBEW). He did not have any college debt though. His father paid his tuition (state college). I met him at said college. I ended up dropping out but returned later and got my nursing degree. We only had one kid and he currently has his Master's degree and is applying for doctorate programs in his field (clinical psychology). As a young man he had a year of working blue collar construction and 4 years in the military so was able to make good decisions about his future after he was discharged. His fiance is also in his same field and finishing her Master's. She did grow up with a lot of poverty in a small deadend town so is very ambitious, hardworking and fiercely smart. My husband is not a big reader but my son and his fiance and I are. Our neighborhood is made up of homes that cost less than $150K, generally 1500-1700 sq. foot, 1970's stock suburban split/raised ranch or colonial style homes, good public school system. In fact, we don't have a private school in our district.
From the stats I've seen, women with degrees tend to marry men (or women) without degrees more than men with degrees do.
Check out the disparity between men with degrees doing the assortative mating versus women with degrees--particularly in the key 20's/30's marrying years. You'll notice trends that started showing up from the 1970's until now (college+ men do it wayyyy more than women):
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-gender-gap-in-marriages-between-college-educated-partners
There's also this data (in the PDF) from the National Bureau of Economic Research. See the graphs at the end:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w19829
Ooh, that first link is very interesting! I'll have to look at the graphs in the second link. Thanks for sharing.
From the article: "But what ultimately unites its members (the 9.9%) is less the size of their bank accounts than a mind-set, Stewart contends. At its core lies “the merit myth,” a shared belief that the affluent owe their success not to the color of their skin or the advantages they’ve inherited but to their talent and intelligence. Under the spell of this conviction, Stewart argues, the privileged engage in practices — segregating themselves in upscale neighborhoods, using their money and influence to get their children into elite colleges — that entrench inequality even as they remain blithely unaware of their role in perpetuating it."
Grass-fed beef? This guy sounds like he drinks microbrews with his brats. Or worse, imported Trippel. PITCHFORK, WHERE IS MY PITCHFORK!
I don't get it either. It's utterly baffling. That libertarian "live and let live" streak seems to have totally dissipated from the Republican party. It seems like more of a personality thing than an ideology thing.
I don't think the Republicans ever really had a libertarian streak.
Sure, they loved to take out the libertarian branding and wave it around when Democrats were in charge, but the second they took power again they instantly went back to a religious authoritarian position.
The Republicans didn't have a "religious authoritarian" position before the 1980s.
If I had to guess it's because the people who vote for Vance have seen their lifestyle go from being the lifestyle of middle class mainstream America to being seen as the lifestyle of the poors. It's easier to ignore the liberal lifestyle in NYC and LA when everyone around you is just like you. Harder to ignore it when the people in the city 20 miles away act just like the people in NYC and LA.
This times a thousand.