The media is trying to figure out how Trump got elected, and one common undercurrent to this effort is finding ways to define Real Americans. Some of these efforts get mighty peculiar. Sean Davis’s criterion, for instance, is what kind of truck you drive. It’s ridiculous.
The five most popular vehicle models among Republicans, for example, are all trucks, with the ubiquitous Ford F-150 leading the way. Among Democrats, the Subaru Outback is the most popular choice. If you drive a truck, you’re probably a Republican. If you drive a Subaru, you’re probably a Democrat. Donald Trump won every single state in which the Ford F-150 is the most popular vehicle (even Pennsylvania). He won all but four of the states in which the Chevy Silverado is the most popular vehicle, including Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Hillary Clinton handily won the states where people prefer Subarus.
Which brings us to the simple question about truck ownership from John Ekdahl that drove Acela corridor progressive political journalists into a frenzy on Tuesday night: “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”
Whether you drive a truck or a small car is simply a crude proxy for rural and urban. I’ve lived in that “Acela corridor”, and it would stupid to own a F-150 (although many people do), because parking is limited, on your commute you’re going to spend most of your time idling or creeping along, and they’re gas hogs. Now I live in the deepest part of rural America, and they’re still stupid, most of the time, but there are actual circumstances in which they’re useful. People here hunt and fish for recreation, and it’s impractical to use a Subaru to haul a boat, and very awkward to stuff a dead deer into one. There are also work-related reasons: when I was a young’un helping out on my uncle’s ranch, I drove a truck, too: how else do you get the hay bales out to the cattle in the far field?
I think Roy Edroso has it exactly right, though: most of the trucks you see around, especially in urban areas, were bought for symbolic reasons and as an exercise in manliness and profligate excess.
if you don’t know what it’s like to drive a truck, you ain’t a real U.S. male, sez tough guy Sean Davis of The Federalist. Davis’ angle is that “A Bunch Of Journalists Freak[ed] Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck.” In this case “Freak Out” means they asked, upon being questioned as to whether they owned a truck or not, what owning a truck has to do with anything. This Davis interpreted to mean that reporters are “the most cloistered and provincial class in America” and live in a “liberal media bubble.” Davis neglected to mention what sort of truck he drives, what sort of loads he hauls, or if his rig is equipped with a CB and a jaker breaker.
Actually, turns out he’s not talking about big rigs, but about Silverados and Tacomas and other such Canyoneros one sees driven by accountants and middle managers all across the fruited plain. But I suspect that is, as the saying goes, central to his point. Davis also lists a bunch of Twitter responses which he portrays as evidence of his thesis; in one of these, Jose A. DelReal says yes, he has a truck “b/c I’m from Alaska. Do any friends own one in DC or NYC? No, because they’re unnecessary here.” Davis’ response: “This person writes for Washington Post and just missed the entire point.” That point, apparently, is that in order to be unbubbled and in touch with the Real America you must have a truck, not because you need it, but because lots of Americans have them whether they actually need them to do actual hauling or not, just as many Texans wear cowboy hats whether or not they ever rode herd, or many conservatives revere the Confederate flag whether or not they ever faced the Union Army in battle.
So here’s a better spin on the difference between liberals and conservatives: liberals buy the vehicle they need that suits their purposes in a practical way, while conservatives waste money (and gas!) buying an overpriced symbol for the purpose of public posturing…virtue signaling, if you will. Which could be a sign of which would make better bureaucrats and leaders.
I drive a Honda Fit, by the way. When we were last in the market for a car, we went looking for an inexpensive, reliable vehicle for light commuting. We don’t need a Canyonero since we don’t hunt, fish, or haul firewood, and personally, I don’t feel that I have shortcomings that could be compensated for with a monster truck.
Davis wasn’t the worst, though. The NY Times ran an op-ed to explain why rural America voted for Trump. It’s because they’re such damn good virtuous people.
One recent morning, I sat near two young men at a coffee shop here whom I’ve known since they were little boys. Now about 18, they pushed away from the table, and one said: “Let’s go to work. Let the liberals sleep in.” The other nodded.
Oh. It’s not because they’re good people. It’s because they’re self-centered bigots, like those two young men.
By the way, I read that at 5am. Many of us liberals also get up early to get our work done.
They’re hard workers. As a kid, one washed dishes, took orders and swept the floor at a restaurant. Every summer, the other picked sweet corn by hand at dawn for a farm stand and for grocery stores, and then went to work all day on his parents’ farm. Now one is a welder, and the other is in his first year at a state university on an academic scholarship. They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the military and cops, and they know that abortion and socialism are evil, that Jesus Christ is our savior, and that Donald J. Trump will be good for America.
And working hard makes them different from liberals…how? My father, a proud liberal and union member, basically worked himself to death as a mechanic, often working two jobs at a time to keep his family well. I started working when I was 12; I had a job shoveling rocks that ended up wrecking my knees. I worked my way through junior and senior high school in agricultural jobs, too, and got an academic scholarship to the state college, and wouldn’t have been able to go if I hadn’t.
I’m liberal AF. My siblings are similarly liberal, and also have had to work hard all their lives.
Back when I lived in that “Acela corridor”, I taught at an urban college, and my classes were full of first generation college kids from black families who aspired to be doctors…and they worked their asses off. They got there out of barely adequate high schools and had to play catch-up with all the kids who came there with advantages. I doubt those men and women are now Trump voters.
I know that rural, conservative kids also have to work hard — I’ve got them in my classes right now. This is a universal human condition, that we have to work to better ourselves, but it’s goddamn conservatives that try to claim it as their own, unique, special property, along with other virtues like patriotism and responsibility, while denying those virtues to others. Again, it’s not hard work that sets them apart, it’s bigotry.
It is not a good thing that those two men reflexively regard abortion and socialism as evil — they don’t know anything about either. And dare I point out that another strange property of both of those essays is that they take an exclusively male point of view? Driving big trucks and controlling women’s reproductive freedom seem to be such stereotypically masculine attitudes.
But wait! We haven’t yet met our quota of conservative bullshit! Here’s the argument that most persuaded the NY Times essayist.
“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good,” said Mr. Watts, who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. “We are born bad,” he said and added that children did not need to be taught to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that.
“We teach them how to be good,” he said. “We become good by being reborn — born again.”
He continued: “Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us.”
Mr. Watts talked about the 2015 movie theater shooting in Lafayette, La., in which two people were killed. Mr. Watts said that Republicans knew that the gunman was a bad man, doing a bad thing. Democrats, he added, “would look for other causes — that the man was basically good, but that it was the guns, society or some other place where the blame lies and then they will want to control the guns, or something else — not the man.” Republicans, he said, don’t need to look anywhere else for the blame.
Ah, so they’re bigots who believe in a dishonest caricature of Christianity. That makes it all better.
None of what Watts said is true. Liberals also think the theater shooter was a bad man. It’s just that, when you’ve got these mass murders popping up all over the place, it is short-sighted and unproductive to simply play whack-a-mole with them one by one — at some point you have to ask yourselves, why? What’s driving these crimes? What enables them? Can we get to the root causes and prevent these problems before they happen?
Conservatives apparently think it’s as simple as declaring one person to be bad, and then throwing up their hands and saying we can’t do anything about it. Fuck that attitude.
I’ve only touched on that godawful essay — I’m going to have to turn it over to the Rude Pundit to give it a more appropriate treatment.
It’s all bullshit. The rest of Leonard’s column is about how it seems like cities in red states are taken care of by their government, but not the rural parts of the state, where the roads need to be improved and there is a need for police and firefighters and EMTs: “To rural Americans, sometimes it seems our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better. We recognize that the truth is more complex, particularly when it comes to social programs, but it’s the perception that matters — certainly to the way most people vote.”
And there you have the reason why liberals are called “elitist.” We actually know that most of our taxes go to the Republican-run states. We aren’t fucking hypocrites who condemn government, elect people who want to shrink government, and then are pissed off when the government doesn’t offer enough services. We don’t get our news from conspiracy theorists and liars. Are there excesses on the left? Of course. We’re fuckin’ human. But when one group is inclusive of all races and religions and genders and sexual orientations and more, while the other pines for a time when white Christians ran everything, it’s pretty damn clear who the real elitists are.
What you’re calling “elitism” is just simply not being ignorant. We don’t have our heads shoved up Jesus’s ass. And when the left gets angry because of how fucking dumb some of the shit coming out of rural and red mouths is, we’re told we need to understand what they believe. No, we’re just gonna say that stupid is stupid.
You can stop explaining the white working class rural conservative Christian farming folk, hot-takers and self-justifiers. Instead, why don’t you explain liberalism to them? Why don’t you explain that jobs are drying up and communities are dying not because of abortion and same-sex marriage but because of Republican economic policies that have favored the wealthy, most of whom live in cities, including a certain president-elect they voted for who took advantage of those very policies in order to stay rich? Ultimately, though, it won’t matter. Because despite every fucking word to the contrary, the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant.
The whole thrust of these “let’s learn about the yokels” articles is to imply that there are real Americans and there are coastal elites. Sorry, motherfuckers. We’re all Americans. And if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.
Preach it. It astounds me that the NY Times would publish a bad op-ed that purports to argue that conservatives aren’t bigots, they’re just hard working, when the whole foundation of that argument is an acceptance of conservative bigotry that liberals and urban folk (you know, those dark-skinned people) are lazy. Their thesis was a demonstration of the antithesis, which is an academic elitist way of saying they managed to fuck up their own shit.
At least the Washington Post recognizes where the real problem lies: How nostalgia for white Christian America drove so many Americans to vote for Trump. America is not white, so get used to it: citizenship is not defined by the color of your skin. And yeah, let’s dethrone Christianity, too.
What if elections were just vote counts and didn’t actually have an historically or morally significant reason?
What if democracy didn’t actually produce good outcomes, or pick the best people, or represent our best selves or finest aspirations, but was a practical solution to a real problem that only provides minimally workable outcomes?
I pick up the implication from the head-scratchers above that, because certain people voted for Mr. X, and Mr. X won*, those certain people are necessarily virtuous.
Retired blue collar union member here. College music major (piano), then aviation industry for employment. Saved $ when working, retired early.
I own a Silverado (2nd one) and a Prius. Good vehicles both. The Silverado tows a salmon fishing boat and the trout boat fits in the back. The Silverado also brings home firewood, of which I have already burned about 2 cords this winter.
Have not voted for a Republican for about 20 years and am explicitly aware that the top 17 states leading the league in diabetes//obesity (90% correlation) voted orange P.O.S. without exception. Also explicitly aware that the blue side of my state sends significant tax revenue to the red side.
So maybe I’m just weird.
upside down.
How many times do we hear from Godbotherers that when something evil happens, “God made it happen, tsk tsk”.
People who think people made God, blame the person first, while the persons defense brings in excuses and other causes to absolve them of responsibility. Godbotherers always will say “god works in mysterious ways” and “hate the sin, love the sinner”. Which is what this op-ed is accusing the liberals of. He knows it is a bad argument, so just claims liberals use it, while it is the most common amongst his conservative friends.
*barf*
Reminds me of a study that showed that drivers of family vans had the most satisfying sex both in frequency and quality and not the Porsche drivers or the dudes with the Mercedes SLK.
This has of course nothing to do with the fact that family vans are usually owned by, well, families, people with a permanent significant other who might be up for some fun sexy time even if you stayed home all Saturday night and watch TV…
Now, I’m not American, but I come from a line of working class people. Miner, professional lorry driver, mechanic, lab assistant. Yeah, I know what the inside of factories look like and the longest time I didn’t work was a spell of unemployment this summer. It was when I demolished the interior of the house…
It would be interesting to follow a random selection of pickup trucks in a city like Saskatoon and see how many are just car substitutes. Last winter I saw a Harley Davidson edition Ford F150 truck. I kinda doubt that truck has ever seen much use hauling around dirt, or construction materials, or anything else that might risk messing it up. Just like the giant crew cab monsters with a bed the size of my bed, Not much practical use for that setup.
“Because … the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant.” And they are proud of it.
Regarding good vs bad, looking at the murder rate in various countries, predominantly Christian USA must have a high proportion of bad people if you compare it with Europe, let alone essentially non-Christian and not very religious Japan. Is it something in the water, or the religion, or perhaps a different gun culture? I wonder….
Japan btw does have its share of amok runners who respond to an urge to kill people. But they don’t have access to guns, so the effect is somewhat limited.
time to rant about “suburban pickups”. (I guess?)
I’ve always wondered what use these are in the environment of suburb development housing and mall shopping venues. I know my sense is biased having been raised in a suburb and shopped at malls, yet wha. I understand the need in rural environments on farms and dirt/gravel roads, but developed regions with smooth asphalt, highways, and malls don’t require pickup capability. “Yeah but when you have to move don’t you want a pickup to take your couch witchu?” is often the response. To which I reply, “When I move I’ll rent a UHaul (why keep a vehicle I’ll only use quite rarely?)”
Aside from that, SUVs. always proud of how “safe” they are. That a collision between a SmartCar and a SUV, the SUV will crush the SmartCar, “How Smart is that SmartCar then, eh????” Never considering the fact that crushing the small car means killing the occupants. Nor considering the possibility of SUV hitting another SUV, with neither having “crumple zones” and are built like perfectly rigid steel cages where all the forward momentum gets dissipated by the occupants and not the sheet metal composing the vehicle.
Last thing about Pickups (for now) is height. In suburban environment, does one really need 3 feet of road clearance? Bumper heights are almost adjusted properly, yet headlights can be very obnoxious when positioned at such a height, about the height of the rear window of a small car. (I know, being a Miata driver where my rear window height is very low). Also about the height issue, rollover susceptibility. Stay low, rollover improbable, tall means rollover likely. And pickups have such a small roof that rollover means certain crush of roof, so OMG.
*sighhhhhhhh* I hate pickups and SUVs, so …… ?
@slithey tove – Yeah, being hit by an SUV is soooo safe…
re 7:
One
wordacronym answer:–> NRAI saw a very good response to this on twitter: there are fewer models of trucks than of cars. As a result, there are more car drivers than truck drivers despite the truck models being the most popular models. Department of Transportation*
*data is only good til 2006 when the DoT combined the truck and passenger car categories.
slithey tove
Not to mention that at least in Europe many of the posh SUVs aren’t even capable of going offroad. There’s a few people here who have use for them, like horse owners who may need to pull the horse trailer even when the underground in muddy, but 90% of the owners don’t even have a tow hitch (and yes I know what you need to look for).
BTW, the EU banned those fixed bullbars for vehicles under 3.5 tons because they needlessly kill pedestrians and people in other cars.
It seems that conservatism has always placed a fairly significant value on keeping up appearances, whether it be saying and owning the right things to prove you’re a Manly Man Man, hiding the abuse to maintain the lie that you have a Perfect Husband and a Perfect Family or simply hiding your tax returns so you can maintain the appearance of being a billionaire.
I guess it’s inevitable that authoritarianism would demand conformity which would require keeping up appearances.
This whole argument sort of touches on an underlying truth that it then completely and utterly ignores.
In my experience, conservatives seem overly obsessed with “fault” in a way that liberals aren’t. To a liberal, an event may have a cause, but to a conservative it can only ever be somebody’s “fault.”
Which is actually the same anthropocentrism behind their religion, also conveniently mentioned in this same argument. While the specifics vary quite a bit, religion as a whole seems to be, at its core, the inability to understand that things can happen without a human specifically intending for them to happen. The universe had a beginning, therefore a human must have caused it to begin so let’s invent stories about who that human might have been since they must have been very powerful to begin a universe.
The argument about Good People and Bad People reads very much like the same anthropocentrism on a smaller scale— instead of asking: “Which human created the universe and what was his motivation?” it asks: “Which human(s) caused mass shootings and what were their motivation(s)?” The idea of discussing factors that lead to mass shootings and how to address them without attributing fault to a human for their deliberate actions is as alien to them as the idea that the universe arose in its present form through undirected physical processes.
That’d be a great idea, but we need to be able to back it up. Explaining liberalism to them and then pointing to a liberal candidate who is advocating the same policies on a local/state/national level can be extremely effective. However, explaining liberalism to them and then pointing to a conservative who supports those economic policies that favor the wealthy and saying: “Vote for them” is viciously counterproductive— if the only information I had about liberalism is the false claim that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid are liberal, I would hate it myself.
Jobs are drying up and communities are dying because of conservative economic policies that the Democrats are just as guilty of pushing— if anything, Trump won because he opposed them on the campaign trail while Clinton supported them. Yes, those red state voters are bigoted and that bigotry adds appeal to a bigot like Trump, but their bigotry is neither absolute nor unshakeable— many of the people who supported Trump in 2016 voted Obama in 2008. In both cases, they voted for the outsider promising to tear down the conservative Washington establishment and enact liberal policies first; bigotry may be a plus for them but it’s not decisive.
Adam Cadre nailed it last year wrt. the self-image of regressives (http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/15/15559.html):
Max Weber had this pinned down. In his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he argued that a certain combination of Protestant Christianity and Capitalist dynamics resulted in a culture of asceticism, whereby work was seen as a virtue in and of itself – particularly if it caused hardship – rather than a means to an end. Acquisition through work was good, spending money on enjoying yourself was bad. Although I would point out that this idea is actually much older in origin – the 7th century Greek poet Hesiod wrote odes to the virtues of hard work in his Works and Days, and castigated the shirkers, the parasites and the lazy.
As far as I’m concerned it’s a dangerous and anti-human ideal. Particularly in our modern, technological world where more and more of the work is done by machines. Rather than vaunting work as a good in its own right we should be finding ways to free people from having to do quite as much of it to achieve the valuable effects it can have. In Britain when it is pointed out that the French tend to work several hours per week less than us on average, we tend to use it as a way to cast them as lazy, rather than thinking that we ought to learn a few things from them, strengthen our unions, and work a bit less ourselves. We aren’t any better off than the French, after all, even though we work longer hours. Americans are no better off than us despite working longer hours still. It turns out that the longer people work the lower the percentage of that time is actually useful and productive. Some studies of American office workers have hinted that as much as half their working day is wasted thanks to a culture of time-serving.
Wealthy countries have it well within their power to significantly reduce the amount of work that needs to be done by their most overworked individuals. Shorter hours, higher wages, and pay for it by massively reducing the obscene salaries and benefits that the wealthy cream off. Institute a maximum wage law. Hire more people to do the same work. Funnily enough this will actually benefit the capitalist economy too, as people have more disposable income.
Or. as the inimitable Mary Beard once said on the Daily Politics, “if I hear one more politician bring up “hard-working families” with such smugness, I’m going to start my own party to promote the interests of lazy single people”.
You’re not joking about the virtue signalling in that first piece. I was reading the comments on it, and calling it “virtue signalling” is spot on.
On almost any weekday, the south parking lot of where I work is a microcosm of this sentiment. Gleaming F-150 and -250’s and Silverado’s, all with pristine beds- bedliner or not- and not speck of dirt on wheel housing, and every one of them made within the past 10 years that all the guys who sit at their desks and peck away at a keyboard drive around in. In all their break room banter, I never hear of them hunting or fishing, or about any farm or construction work they do on the side to justify the trucks; no, I only hear them talk about how Obama is a foreign-born Muslim and Trump will make American great again, if they aren’t whining about something a neighbor from their sub-division did to annoy them over the weekend.
Of course, since the parking lot was designed at a time when the people worked there tended to drive smaller cars, they either have to take up two spaces to park or fill one out so much most people look for a different space than one next to it anyway; and they always have to park up at the front of the lot to make sure everyone can see their shiny truck!. What would be the point otherwise?
There are a few who have trucks because they go hunting and fishing, or they do a small bit farms on their land and they’re necessary for that. I know this because that’s what I hear them talk about- not politics, though with some I could guess what their opinions might be- but they also have trucks that are usually older, dirtier and dinged up. It’s not an affectation for them: it’s actually their life. And they also tend to park toward the back of the lot so they don’t make a nuisance of themselves.
I don’t recall if I already said this, but isn’t it funny how virtually everybody agrees that racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia are bad things? Almost nobody calls themselves racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or Islamophobic, at least not openly.
Even more so for fascism. Fascism has set the standard of evil. Nobody wants to be compared to Hitler, not even the Hitler-elect.
When asked, the right wing in The Netherlands do not see themselves as the collaborator. They see themselves as the Resistance.
So generally, people simply deny being racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or Islamophobic when pointed out their racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic views.
Adam Cadre wrote:
To be clear, I assume the connection was to the argument for the light sentence for that rapist, recently.
“He was such a good swimmer and was headed for the Olympics.” which managed to reduce his sentence to a mere, sub minimal, 3 months, for raping and battering an unconscious woman, causing more physical damage than only sexual violation.
*ugh*
like SUV argument: “It keeps the occupants safe in a collision”. Never mentioning it will likely kill the occupants of the other car.
Personally I prefer all getting bruised and breaks in such a collision, totaling both cars; rather than death for half and only small scratches for the other half.
slithey tove @ 20:
Especially since, in my experience, the proclaimed safety of SUVs and the like tend to render the drivers of such vehicles thoughtless to others on the road with them. Far more often than not, it’s rarely a mid-sized car that’s riding my rear bumper or veering slightly into my lane or acting like they should be able to drive 90+ mph on a freeway with a 60 mph posted speed limit; it’s usually an SUV or massive pick-up truck.
On the cars thing, I note that in England we also have a group of people who insist on buying superfluous large vehicles for use in urban areas. The stereotyping couldn’t be more different though.
In England these vehicles (generally Land-Rovers, but other types do exist – I know next to nothing about vehicles) are referred to as “Surrey Tractors”, because they tend to be driven by wealthy, upper-middle class people (just as often women as men) as a sign of conspicuous wealth and a vague cultural hint that they belong in an agricultural setting. These are the “green welly brigade”, who affect the trappings of the landed rural elite as a sign of class aspiration. The classic scenario has them using their extravagantly oversized behemoths to transport tiny children to school in the morning, cluttering up the roads for regular people.
Here a needlessly large and expensive off-road vehicle is a sign of elitism and pretension, not of earthiness and masculinity. The closest we get to that is probably the battered white van, though “White Van Man” is a different stereotype again. Real farmers tend to use actual tractors and other custom-designed agricultural vehicles, very occasionally drive a land-rover or equivalent on their farms, and have a sensible small car for going anywhere else. Though in general the UK has far less of an automotive culture than the US.
To add to the comment from qwintz, I looked at the list of best selling models from 2016 and it not only includes the ranking but the number of each model. Sure enough, non-trucks outsold trucks by more than 2.5 million (among the top twenty models) but because the top twenty models only included four trucks they took the top three spots for sales per model.
So the entire premise of this thinkpiece is seems to be largely nonsense.
There’s an interesting contradiction here. Mr Watts thinks people are fundamentally bad, and yet doesn’t apparently think there’s any reason to keep machines for killing out of their hands.
“But we need guns to protect ourselves from the bad people!” You are the bad people, Mr Watts. You just said so. And yet you want the ability to project lethal force without demonstrating otherwise.
(I suspect the actual, unspoken version of the argument is “people are fundamentally bad, except me and people like me”.)
Yeah, this essay is pure lies.
A lot of rural areas (but not all) are now sinks of poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, lack of access to medical care, domestic violence, child abuse, crime, suicide homelessness, and any other social problem you care to look at. It’s especially noteworthy in red states of the south.
The result. Two demographics with sharply falling lifespans.
1. Older rural white women of the south and west.
2. Middle aged low education white males.
But my love is bigger than a Honda
It’s bigger than a Subaru
Hey man there’s only one thing
And one car that’ll do…
Yeah, I know, totally off-topic, but that just popped into my head.
@23, specialffrog:
Actually, using a statistical quirk to claim a spurious “win” for something that lost a contest by ~2.5 million people is entirely fitting under the circumstances.
It’s the myth of the welfare queen. “Let the liberals sleep in”, because all liberals are either uber wealthy elites in the big cities or leeching scum abusing the system to live a glamorous life off their tax dollar.
They purport to see the welfare queen everyday at the grocery store, and they’ll use dog whistles with out mentioning the color of their skin, when they aren’t overtly racist and don’t care. The WQ is buying all sorts of non-essential items like ding dongs and koolaid with her welfare card and her three kids in tow but is sporting the $150 manicure and $300 hairdo (sometimes they’ll even call it a weave), and leaves the store and hops in her Cadillac Escalade with the $6000 gold spinner rims on it.
The welfare queen is a lot ghosts, bigfoot or aliens, because the only people who ever see ghosts, or bigfoot, or aliens are people who are either lying, or misunderstood what they saw, but prone to magical thinking, attribute it to something supernatural, where as the skeptic, prone to critical thinking, has never seen a ghost, or bigfoot or aliens, because they tend to lend strange sightings to more mundane explanations.
To the conservative who drives a pick-up and thinks liberals are all leeches on their tax dollar, the welfare queen is everywhere they go. If you engage them in discussion about actual abuse of welfare and other government assistance, which does actually exist by the way, and ask them what their actual solution to the problem is, it’s to get rid of all welfare, since the vast majority is either being abused or “keeping people addicted to the handouts”.
If you point out that their are actually people in government who’s job it is to investigate cases of fraud, and that people do get prosecuted for it, they don’t believe that because well, they see the welfare queen at the grocery everyday so that can’t possibly be true.
Repeat
So why did Trump win?
I know barrels of photons have been spent on this and the alleged causes are legion.
I’ve been waiting for some data. Numbers. Facts.
And here is one.
It was racism and sexism. Followed by economic inequality.
A lot of the Trump vote was just acting out hate, desperation, and depression.
We do have problems in the USA. This is not a constructive solution.
ughh, proof read fail:
a lot like ghosts*
Repeat
So why did Trump win? We now know.
I know barrels of photons have been spent on this and the alleged causes are legion.
I’ve been waiting for some data. Numbers. Facts.
And here is one.
It was racism and sexism. Followed by economic inequality.
A lot of the Trump vote was just acting out hate, desperation, and depression.
We do have problems in the USA. This is not a constructive solution.
I don’t get this urban versus rural voters thing.
That really shouldn’t matter much.
The USA is one of the most urbanized countries on the planet.
It’s 84% Metro.
AFAICT, the rural voter is a myth.
You see various numbers for how many of us live in Metro areas. It runs from 84% to 91%.
Raven,
There are plenty of people in metro areas with “rural” mindsets. Take my county for instance, Erie in NY. Buffalo is the Metro area, which voted dominantly blue, but the county as a whole barely tipped blue because if you go 5-10 miles outside the city, you enter the world of white-bread suburbia, where confederate flags or the blue police american flags stream proudly atop both obnoxius pick-ups and minivans. It is all still considered “metro”, it’s all concrete jungle, but the make-up of the population dramatically shifts.
IOW, I suspect you have to look more closely at your statistics and district demographics to understand the divide.
I own an F-150. I haul firewood, camping gear, rocks from my mine, etc. I need the 4-wheel-drive to reach most of my preferred destinations. I am a liberal.
I work hard, always have worked hard. I put myself through college (took my five years to get it done).
The over-simplification of people into political categories, or into categories of “good” and “bad,” is part of the problem.
Reminiscent of another era in which populist debasing, defamation, contempt and otherwise othering of others held sway…how dare anyone avail themselves of economic success through education at the expense of ‘hard-working’ true Germans? /snark
That sounds about right.
But it is still inaccurate to call the suburban whites “rural”.
They are more accurately called….”suburban”.
And oddly enough, they aren’t working at the hardware store or driving a wheat combine. I’m sure a lot of those so called rural voters commute inward towards Buffalo every workday
Oh Christ, the truck mania here in nDakota is almost at the level of gun mania. Yes, there are a lot of reasons to have a truck when you live rural, but there’s a stark difference between people who have a truck for rural use, and those who just have the truck.
The ‘just have the truck’ people, it’s a competition, they have to have the latest, biggest model, and are generally in debt because of this need to keep up with the neighbours’ trucks. Someone gets a brand new truck, and the others run off to trade in one or two year old models.
People who have a truck for actual use? Generally an old model, beat up, but a solid runner.
Yep, there’s at least 3 of them with in 15 feet of me at work as we speak. We’re not quite in the city but we’re within that 5-10 mile buffer zone where liberalism typically is still dominant. It’s no coincidence that the three people who work close to me who commute from further out were positively giddy on Nov 9th.
There really was a welfare queen, but her ambitious welfare fraud was far from the most interesting thing about her. It’s an understatement to call her an extreme outlier.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that commercial country music these days panders to suburbanites. It allows them to keep the illusion that they’re more rural than urban.
Aggressive and fear based communication (esp. intense) tends to be short and simple relative to other kinds of language which creates a speed accuracy problem in bigotry. That goes for signalling social information as a group too.
I can see what they are getting at with the trucks but that’s a terrible filter to sort voters by. Political parties are a bad way to filter people in many cases too (though there are many significant patterns that inform social strategy when it comes to political party and social concerns). I see bigotry as a fear based psychology so it’s symbols communicate simple things that are when defining people and groups. Those symbols have to do with the people they fear. They make their symbols in open society fast and strategic relative to one another (something a social opposition should think about).
Trucks? Sorting by attitudes and opinions is much better. That way you can see what the fear is pointed at. Disgust and anger too but that is secondary to the fear in my opinion.
Lindsay @39, great link, thank you for. Fascinating read. I hadn’t seen that before.
@raven
Wow. That study. Fear and ignorance. Fear and need to control. We are going to need some really specific and /or intense social messages that undermine social confidence in that fear. If we are to make Trump feel negative (and his political placements) it has to be directly relevant to the results of actions that can/will/do create social harm.
Trump’s the social symbol for the real problem. Trump voters in all of their definable types and sub-types made the Trump presidency happen. The specific sets of things they like about Trump and hate about Hillary are motivated by different things and need seperate strategy. Intergroup conflict is a bit different between attacking the symbol (Trump) and attacking the beliefs and reasoning of specific Trump voters .
I’m going to have to put some more thought into this.
The transformation of the pick-up truck from a specialty vehicle used by rural folk to an everyday vehicle used by suburbanites for commuting is a genuine triumph of marketing. The auto industry has convinced millions of people to buy a vehicle that is impractical for their needs, costs too much, is dangerous to themselves and other drivers, and has expensive fuel and maintenance costs. All by playing on insecurities over their perceived masculinity and toughness. And the industry isn’t about to stop, because it’s a gold mine: trucks have the highest margins of almost any vehicle, another sign that the people who buy them aren’t thinking with their cortex.
Needless to say, being proud of your tribe having been suckered like this only signifies still greater gullibility. These are the people who after plunking down $60k for a souped-up truck wonder why they have no money, and then vote for a plutocrat who promises to make them great again with tax cuts for the rich and taking away their health care.
Growing up on a farm in the Michigan, we had 6 plus vehicles including an F-150. All of them were 2-wheel drive (as well as the tractors). There really was no need for a 4×4 vehicle even when hauling loads through the fields. However, every winter we would get a couple of folks knocking on he door who needed to be pulled out of snowbank. Each case the vehicle was a 4×4 truck. Effectively, in flat land or small rolling hills there is little to no need for a 4 x 4 vehicle and for getting through snow, I always liked our Chevette: decent clearance and if you did get stuck, it was easy to push yourself back onto the road.
However, I am the odd one who bicycle commutes year round in the shadow of the Great Lakes and when a car does purposefully try to run me off the road for having the temerity to ride my bike in the snow, it is always a 4×4 truck. Thus I wonder if folks who drive a 4×4 truck are even more American than the other truck drivers.
re @44:
It’s become a cliche, how 4x4s think they can stop better on snowy roads. Forgetting that it is 4 wheel drive. All cars have 4 wheel brakes, and road grip determines handling and stopping ability.
Weight distribution between those 4 wheels determines tendency to spin. Miatas (like mine) have essentially 25-25-25-25 weight distribution so almost no tendency to spin. 4×4 only helps once IN the snow, doesn’t help staying out of it.
[sheesh I’m stuck in preaching winter driving, sorry, the cold temps outside (teens F) have put me in that mode]
None of the farmer relatives of mine I know have owned a pickup. For all the farm stuff, they used their tractors and they’d have small or medium size cars (mostly Fiat or VW, the same company that sold farm supplies was the Finnish importer of Fiat in the 80s) for things outside the farm. One of them sold firewood and hauled logs using a 750 kg single-axle trailer towed with his VW sedan.
Like you I drove a Honda Jazz (UK name for the Fit) for 10 years. It was a very satisfying and efficient car. But technology moves on and my current car, a Nissan Note, gives me 20% more miles per gallon (50 miles per US gallon on a long run) and is smoother and quieter.
I remember a story one of my pastors told me in high school about a farmer in a rural parish he started in. Said farmer would ring him at 4 in the morning, for a couple of weeks and say, “This is when I start to work.” Then he hung up. This went on for a week or two when there a sudden death in one of his parishioner’s family. My pastor did the whole grief counseling, and organized the funeral for the family. It was 2am when he got home, he thought about it and then rang the arsehole, and said, “This is when I finish work.”
The phone calls stopped after that.
And like that arsehole farmer the journalists mention here seems to pick arbitrary characteristics about themselves and swan around like it’s some noble virtue. I guess that’s the appeal of racism, you don’t have to work to achieve anything. Privilege is granted to you by a quirk of nature.
…what do they have against Subaru Outbacks? They’re damn fine cars — easy to get into, easy to get out of, and you can haul a wheelchair around in the back, it’s the perfect car!
You know, I’ve never been at a faculty meeting and had a professor go ‘okay, let’s go prove some theorems! Let the conservatives bail hay, shoot guns and speak in tongue!’ Overall, that sort of talk would be in bad taste. Most leftists view conservative people as not bad people, but misguided.
Rural America is bigoted against liberals. They assume not that liberal politicians are bad, but that every single liberal is a morally defective leech on society. And yet somehow, us ‘coastal elites’ are supposed to compassionately understand people who hate us and everything about us, who don’t feel obliged to do the same. They’ve been listening to Rush and his 2 minutes hate too much.
They are bigoted against everyone. Nonwhites, nonxians, the wrong sort of xians, women, the highly educated, hippies, city people etc..
Anyone the slightest bit different from them.
gijoel #48
If they had a rural phone it was probably a party-line.
Everyone on the party-line could listen in. And quite likely, did.
They all knew everyone’s ring.
raven #51
Have a porcupine.
My son is plugged into the Detroit auto industry. He says the big manufacturers make most if their money from truCK sales, not sedans. So these people in in the suburbs are paying more for the privilege if seeming like “real Americans.”
I’m sure Democrat and Republic voters both work hard.
What I’m not sure of, is why that is considered a virtue? This is the 21st century. Most of our technological progress over the past few millennia has been geared towards making our lives easier – and yet we’re still spending 40+ hours a week at work for decades of our adult lives. If you love your job, and it brings you fulfilment – good on ya, really – but for a lot of us work is just what we do to pay the bills. We should be aspiring, as a society, to free ourselves from as much drudgery as possible – and yet we think that people that don’t work hard are losers.
I dunno, maybe I’m just lazy by nature.
In short: Protestantism.
how else do you get the hay bales out to the cattle in the far field?
A tractor with a special front end loader? http://fscomps.fotosearch.com/compc/STK/STK022/rwc2090.jpg
Pickup trucks are sooo passé. Farmers are laughing at the wannabes in trucks.
@44 whywhywhy
I am the odd one who bicycle commutes year round in the shadow of the Great Lakes
I fail to see anything odd about this. In fact, I just put new studded winter tires on. And it’s -4C and the wind on Lake Ontario is 29 gusting to 41 km/h. Ah, warm weather today.
@ 55 garysturgess
maybe I’m just lazy
Hard working people get the job done; lazy people figure out how to do it more efficiently.
It’s still true the majority of the US voters voted for Clinton. What they drove to the polls in doesn’t seem to be relevant to political discussion.
Also, didn’t a lot of well-off white suburbanites vote for Trump too? I doubt that many of the neo-fascist internet trolls who supported Trump embody the sort of work ethic being championed here. Trump himself certainly doesn’t.
@raven
Rural America is bigoted against liberals.
They are bigoted against everyone. Nonwhites, nonxians, the wrong sort of xians, women, the highly educated, hippies, city people etc..
Anyone the slightest bit different from them.
And then rural America wonders why nobody wants to bring jobs to their area. They may ‘work hard’ but they don’t have a 21st century skill set, and don’t seem inclined on learning. So, why would I dump a bunch of educated ‘others’ into a rural shithole where they’ll be hated just so some local ‘good ole boys’ can get jobs taking out the trash? When rural America says ‘jobs, not handouts’ they don’t realize that the ‘jobs’ they want are just as much handouts as free money. We’d have to demand that all AI researchers like myself quit making advances so that we can artificially up the value of unskilled labor and keep robots from taking their jobs.
Maybe instead of reading Guns and Ammo and the King James Bible they should have read Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming or CLR(T) algorithsms.
smrnda@59: I think that’s possibly a bit harsh. I’m a computer programmer myself, and it’s not for everybody. I’d rather aim towards a society where nobody has to work, rather than insisting that they learn to do jobs that are “currently unlikely to be easily automated”, because the latter is a moving target and it’s always going to leave somebody SOL, through no fault of their own.