The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(11-30-2019, 04:11 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(11-30-2019, 01:02 PM)sbarrera Wrote:

(11-27-2019, 10:45 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(11-27-2019, 12:31 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Certain people, such as Amy Bell, tend to call me a troll for pointing out that rural white America is the source of our lack of progress these 40 years. The conclusion is inescapable that this is indeed the source. Our country is now divided between blue, moderate-to-liberal, mostly-coastal urban areas and the rural flyover country that is loyal to its rural white territories, its religion, race, conservative culture and right-wing politics. If you live in those red territories, you are expected to conform and vote Republican. They are now called red states and counties, where the people vote Republican in margins of 4 or 5 to one. Election returns prove this beyond any doubt at all. They are locked into their views. They are poorly educated, and have no access to information, or they ignore what access they may have. Their fortunes are falling, which makes them unhappy and resentful. In some states this has resulted in opioid drug overdoses and suicides. They blame black people, welfare, taxes and liberals for their plight, even though it's actually the people they vote for who are responsible for their plight, for the most part. They vote for Republicans because they say the "urban elites" (anyone more educated than they are and who live in blue states) don't like them and insult them. They have never heard of learning a lesson and changing behavior. They are unable to do so. They don't realize that the only reason people in blue states and cities may criticize them, is because they vote Republican. If they would change their votes, people like me would have no problem with them at all. Put the horse before the cart, rural white red-state people! It's not who you are, it's how you vote. Full stop! 

The Red Rural Regions are shrinking and their economies are collapsing, for the most part at least.  Residents are now in a fully defensive crouch,, trying to preserve their lifestyles even as they wither away.  What you see here is fear and loathing.  The fear is under stable.  The loathing is part envy and part anger at being done wrong.  The harder we in Blue America push against these ideas, the stronger the adherents cling to them.  Here's a good article from the NY Times that covers a lot of it.

And don't think the GOP doesn't understand this very well.  Bill Barr is out there pitching the idea that secularism on the left is destroying the fabric of society -- essentially an anti-American act against Real America.  Never mind that the facts are on the other side.  Facts don't count these days, as you already know.

That is a good article, David. Here's an excerpt that speaks to the idea that the Blue State is going to ultimately have a more successful 4T than the Red State will.

"The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction."

So, in other words, the American Left is now beginning to move to the right and aligning itself more with the American right these days too. Ah, that's not good news for the left. Hint, Bill Barr doesn't have a problem with the American left. Hint, I don't have a problem with the American Left. THE SO CALLED BLUE STATE IS DOOMED AND WILL BE GOING DOWN.

A parallel was in German Jews before 1930 in that they had the economic markers characteristic of the right-wing German National People's Party (DNVP) yet distrusted the antisemitism and anti-intellectualism of a party associated with tycoons, financiers, and big landowners. If Weimar Germany had one model minority, America has several, one of which is Jews. Others include Arab-Americans, South Asians, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Puerto Ricans, middle-class Mexican-Americans, African immigrants, Jamaican-Americans, and the native Black Bourgeoisie. All of these groups have cause to distrust the populist racism and anti-intellectualism of the GOP. 

In general, middle-class minorities are well-disciplined, well-behaved people -- which may explain their participation in formal organizations, high educational achievement, low crime rates, operation of small businesses, and willingness to uplift such poor among them. (White middle-class gentiles not in these groups are more likely to seek employment in public and private bureaucracies and do little for poor whites). The GOP has been cultivating resentment toward ethnic and religious minorities and toward educational success, which both handcuff people who have little more than the myth of white privilege. 

People who would have been in a once-large center-right ("Eisenhower Republicans" or "Rockefeller Republicans") thirty years ago have no place in a right-wing, populist party. What has happened is that the center-right has gone to the Democratic Party. It believes in enterprise, thrift, formal education, formal education, and modest behavior. If it does not go for hawkish patriotism, it is for a strong defense and a coherent foreign policy.

The Blue America of our time voted heavily for Eisenhower in the 1950's and almost as heavily (except in the Great Plains) for Obama in 2008. Consider that in 2008 Obama won only one state (North Carolina, and barely) that Eisenhower lost even once and in 2012 won only states that Eisenhower won twice. It's not that the core values of regions have changed; it is party affiliation that has changed. Richard Nixon started the Southern Strategy to woo southern whites that would not succeed until the Reagan landslides of 1980 and 1984. Note well that the anti-populist, anti-segregationist "Eisenhower/Rockefeller Republicans" have never been compatible with the politics of the racist, anti-intellectual, populist, and heavily-agrarian South. Nixon tried to build a Big Tent GOP, but a Big Tent fails when constituencies within it prove incompatible. OK, Trump has governed as if he has a Big Tent, but he has tried to force the culture of the populist South upon people incompatible with it, and that ensures political failure even without pervasive scandals.