Forums

[sebastian_dangerfield]

You seem to think that I do not believe in equality, or something like that. You are preaching to the choir. I believe in global warming, too, but that does not mean that it caused populism and Trump.

I don't think that. I think that, like me, you don't have a response to inequality. I don;t have one. I readily admit that.

For your "losers," I think that's loopy. How does Trump "rationally" advance their interests?

You have to focus on their perception. These people have a mixed bag of goals. Some are xenophobes, some racists, some pining for a nation they think existed in the 50s. And some just want opportunity, they "want their jobs back" (South Park inflection).

It's their perception of what Trump would bring that matters, not what he actually provided.

Dude, you are the pocket Marxist here, the one who keeps saying "inequality" as if everything else just follows naturally from brute economic conditions. I never said economic conditions don't matter. I said that you need *more* to explain where populism and Trump came from.

Fair enough. But I think a solid slice of Trump voters are indeed simply and solely economic voters. They think the President can bring those jobs back. And many others have, as Krugman notes in the excellent article you cited in another post, allowed anger about the economy to transform into anger at "others." This is a common psychological behavior. People need to personalize, to find a human target to blame. It allows for easier cathartic release.

Where they are and where they see themselves going are two different things. People who voted for Trump, on average, are *more* affluent than people who voted against him. You have a hard time explaining that, and indeed keep constructing explanations that suggest the opposite. What you need is an explanation about how people who are better off than a lot of people nonetheless feel so aggrieved that they turn to populism.

I think the demographics are tricky. I remain confident the majority of Trump voters are lumped around that median, which is not affluent. I also don't think they rate themselves versus those below (except in terms of crying about not receiving transfers). "Affluent" is my word, and perhaps I should not have chosen it. Perhaps the better descriptive is, "stuck in the middle," and a shrinking middle at that.

If you are going to play Marxist Dude here, you shouldn't pretend that we haven't had a long economic expansion since 2008. Because we have. Yes, I understand that not everyone has done well. But you (again) are not reckoning with the fact that Trump voters tend to be better off than others. Among other things, the problem with what you are saying is that it doesn't explain why people who are doing better than average are voting for Trump but people experiencing *more* inequality and doing worse are not.

It's not that "not everyone has done well." It's that roughly half the nation has not done well. Fifty two percent of people own stocks. Forty eight percent did not enjoy the run-up since 2008. That's a lot of folks who missed the party.

But putting that aside, you need to reckon with this consideration: That the seriously poor vote Democrat does not mean the better off Trump voter is doing well. I don't think he is. As I think I said to Adder before, the Trump voter, I suspect, is king of the slag heap, highest paid in a hollowing middle class.

Why does that speak to Trump voters and not to others?

That's a really excellent question. My reason for that conclusion comes from actually meeting with lots of poor Trump voters. I've run into lots of Trump voters in the past few years. Some were friends who ran funds, some were small businessmen, and some were middle class, or even quite poor. (I'd like to think I hit a broad group of them.) The poor ones were fascinating. They always had that same gripe, "the banks got a bailout, the rich get richer, and I got shit." That was the same thing I heard after the 2008 crisis.

Unfairness sticks in people's psyches. Evolution has wired us to recoil from it. I suspect Trump voters viewed Hillary as in the bag for the banks and corporations and so voted against her. Democratic voters are a bit less naive. They know the new boss is the old boss and I think decided, "Whoever's in charge isn;t going to do much for me, but I think I'll take the new boss who doesn't want to deport me, and will give me cheaper health care!"

Then I said, and this is key, The more money you have, the more likely you are to vote Republican.

Perhaps I hang with strange folks, but my quite affluent friends voted D last time around. The people I know who have a billion supported Trump, but they worked in fossil fuels. (And they donated to both sides, as those sorts do.)

For individuals, there is a direct relationship between income and likelihood to vote Republican. For states, the opposite is true.

I think that's breaking down a bit. There's a good economic reason to vote D. They tend to preside over better markets. Rs give you the tax decrease, which is nice, but you always thing, "What'll this cost me later?" Or, "What long term gain am I wrecking for a few bucks now?"

I don't care what label you use, but you seem blissfully unaware that inequality and dashed expectations are two different things.

I think they're quite intertwined. Again, we're talking voters, and therefore, it's a matter of perception. If a person is doing okay, but struggling in terms of expectations, while others are handed things, is that person not unequal to those he resents?

If you look like Stanley Tucci but you really wanted the parts Brad Pitt is getting, I think you'll feel unequal.

Suppose that you are doing 70 mph in a 55 mph zone, and you get pulled over. You say to the office, hey, I was slowing down. Does he give a sh*t? No. Because the issue is your speed, not your acceleration.

Again, it's not about the actual. It's about the perceived. We're trying to get into the mind of the voter.

As I noted, this sounds right to me. But you are really talking about their feelings, not about objective inequality.

I see little difference between the two when discussing why voters do what they do. In this regard, we may have been talking past each other all along.

So is your view that populism is rational, and minorities are not rational because they won't support a R populist?

An R populist who desires to deport you has blown the cost/benefit for a minority voter so badly that no economic promise can justify voting for him.

OK. Again -- not a story about "inequality" -- a story about people who find themselves on the middle of the ladder, unable to climb, and choose elect someone who will punch people below them.

I think you're defining inequality too narrowly, but I agree with the rest. I also think there's a perverse deification of wealth at work here. No matter how hopeless their futures might be, a lot of R voters cling to the belief that they can hit it big. There's something laudable about that delusion. People should never give up and desire that their government alone make their lives better. But it's still quite perverse because, even though they know the guy down the ladder isn't harming them, and the guy up the ladder is actually the one blocking their ascension, they choose to step on the guy below. Shit rolls downhill, right?

Well, thank you for acknowledging that populism (in this country) is right-wing now.

I don't know how you concluded I didn't think that.

I think the fundamental reason why you are wrong in your prediction here is that populism reflects a frustration with mainstream politics. Conservatives are much more frustrated with the GOP than the left is with Democrats. So do not hold your breath waiting for left-wing populism.

Really? Did you listen to Bernie? You're aware he rose by beating the crap out of Hillary's traditional party platform, not Trump, right? I mean... srsly?

But this shows why pointing to inequality doesn't explain populism.

It doesn't explain all of it, but it does explain a lot of it. I remain absolutely convinced that if we had a sudden boom for some unknown reason, and the Trump voters suddenly found themselves accruing all sorts of gains, and saw a bright future for themselves, populism would vanish. Most men can be bought. They have little in terms of principle, and are most concerned with comfort.

You are saying, "I blame everyone equally because the only alternative is to absolve people." That's stupid. Tell an accurate story that puts blame where it belongs. You don't have a real explanation until you can distinguish between what different people did, and why it matters.

Apportion blame across all responsible parties to the percentage of liability they own. For instance, the 2008 crisis was 25% banks' fault, 25% borrowers' fault, 25% the fed's fault, and 25% the govt's fault (Bush used a housing bubble to replace the hole left after the tech bubble burst).

You don't pick one bad actor of many and attack that actor as though the whole thing was its fault. That's what I see when people "take sides." They choose to fixate on one group and give others a pass by omission. This creates a false story about what happened.

This is the nub of it, and you contradict yourself in the space of two sentences. If the psychology is just a manifestation of economic factors, then it doesn't explain anything. That's a simple Marxist explanation. If psychology matters as an explanation, that means that it can drive a different result than the economics would suggest. You have to make up your mind about whether you think it's all about the economics (and inequality), or whether something else is going on.

Think of it as a process, or perhaps a better analogy is a relay. The economic malaise starts the race, then it hands off to the psychological factors (people starting thinking crazy things and looking for scapegoats), and then that creates a bizarre political environment where the final handoff, to a demagogue and his movement, takes place.