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Old 12-08-2018, 11:11 PM   #4366
Hank Chinaski
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Re: Barcelona

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Originally Posted by Icky Thump View Post
The only person who could make 100k upstate NY would be Walter White if he moved there.
In Syracuse? Plus, I've been to client calls to these Hudson river cities at very big companies. Sebby's right that you can spit and hit someone making 100K pretty much anywhere.
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Old 12-09-2018, 12:18 PM   #4367
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Re: Barcelona

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In Syracuse? Plus, I've been to client calls to these Hudson river cities at very big companies. Sebby's right that you can spit and hit someone making 100K pretty much anywhere.
News flash: Westchester isn't upstate NY.
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Old 12-09-2018, 12:56 PM   #4368
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Re: правда!

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Dude, Trump inflates shit cuz it Tuesday
You may have noticed it's not Tuesday and he's inflating shit anyways....

He even lies about what day of the week it is.
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Old 12-09-2018, 02:39 PM   #4369
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Re: Barcelona

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Originally Posted by Icky Thump View Post
News flash: Westchester isn't upstate NY.
TCOTU does not take definition from B&T. No offense.
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Old 12-09-2018, 03:01 PM   #4370
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Re: Barcelona

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The sentence that I've underlined is interesting because it's a function of dashed expectations, not of economic growth itself (in other words, change in acceleration instead of change in speed). This is fundamentally different from pointing to bromides about inequality.
Fine. I'll call it "dashed expectations." (Nevermind that it 80% of the country has no hope of reaching its expectations, and 20% easily get to theirs by luck of birth near the top, these crowds are very unequal.)

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Maybe Obama raised expectations that things would be different and better, and Trump was partly a reaction to those high hopes.
I think the certainly explains the voters who went Obama in 08 and 12 and then Trump in 16.

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At any rate, I think what you are trying to say is still not thought through. Sure, Trump is a reaction to the failures of neoliberalism, but that's like saying that the French Revolution was caused by monarchy, since the kings weren't making people happy.
The advocates of neoliberalism still refuse to admit this. They remain committed to coming up with any alternative narrative. They blame the current populism entirely on bigotry, xenophobia, differential in education, etc. They never concede the elephant in the corner: Trump was a very rational vote for a lot of people who are not doing well in the current economy.

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Maybe that's part of it, but maybe it's more that Trump voters aren't stupid, but expect more than they are getting. Or replace "expect" with "feel entitled to". That starts to be a story about their psychology, not about their average incomes.
I don't see how you divorce the two. Income is just the measuring stick used to determine whether a Trump voter is getting what he thinks he deserves.

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We weren't talking about what the government has an obligation to do. We're in explaining mode. My point, with which I think you agree, is that Trump voters feel entitled to more from their government and resent that they are not getting it. In other words, it's not that they are losers. It's that they have some resentment from not being treated more like winners. Again: this is not about inequality per se, though inequality if a feature of our economy so is not irrelevant.
I think Trump voters are losers in the sense that they cannot go further up the ladder than where they are, or are actually losing ground. They're perhaps doing ok compared to those at the very bottom, but they're spinning their wheels. The live in places with limited opportunity, or don't have the skills that provide for bright futures.

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This is backwards, and/or makes no sense. There are always economic conditions. And inequality. Always. So they are not a spark. A spark is something that ignites something in the conditions and sparks a reaction. You are right that economic conditions are relevant, because of course, but you are looking at a fire and you have not figured out what the spark was.
2008 was not a normal "economic condition." And inequality has not always been where it is today. It is roughly on par with what it was in the 20s, just before the Depression.

We were stagnating in 1992. Then we had the internet. The tech boom collapsed in 2000. We replaced it with a housing bubble. That collapsed spectacularly in 2008. And we've found nothing to replace it with save a stock market run-up.

So, the last two bubbles, housing and tech, delivered more broadly for the public. The 2008 recovery, unlike those, has not. It has delivered nicely to those who had assets (stocks most notably) before the crisis. Those who did not have not enjoyed the same recovery.

There remains a nagging sense of unfairness about the bailout that I think sits at the base of this populist response.

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Let's make this more specific. Tulsa and San Francisco are cities. San Francisco has a lot of money, and few Trump voters. Tulsa is poorer and has more Trump voters compared to San Francisco. The Trump voters in Tulsa are more affluent than the non-Trump voters in Tulsa.
I'm inclined to agree with this, but it's more on gut than anything else.

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Trump voters are mostly Republicans.
Agreed.
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The more money you have, the more likely you are to vote Republican.
Huh? That's not what I saw in 2016 at all. Most of the wealthy were voting for Hillary to protect their portfolios. Even Republicans were saying, "I'm holding my nose and doing so because his election will kill the market."

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The less money you have, the more likely you are to vote Democratic.
I'd rephrase this as, There are more poor Democrat voters generally, and therefore, more poor Democrats than poor Republicans.

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At the same time, the states with higher incomes are more likely to vote for Democrats, and the states with lower incomes are more likely to vote for Republicans.
Agreed.

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I don't understand why you are so insistent about try to slap the label of "inequality" on this.
I explained this above. But if you prefer dashed expectations, I'm happy to work with that.

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This would make more sense if you expressed the same idea without the word "inequality." The worst off are in the least "equal" position, so the fact that they are not upset here should tell you that what's driving the anger is not "equality" but something else -- the something else that you describe here in your last three sentences. Trump voters have a grievance about expectations and reality, a resentment towards other people whom they see as getting more than their share. Yes! That's not about inequality. Now figure out what it is about.
As I noted many posts ago, Trump voters see people at the top making out like Croesius and people at the bottom receiving things like the ACA (which Trump voters seem to think is somehow screwing up their health care). They feel unequal to the top in terms of opportunity and unequal to the bottom in terms of attention and transfers.

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To complicate things for you: People who are not white who are in the economic position you describe do not go for Trump populism. That suggests that there's something important about ethnicity going on.
I think that's just the traditional racial politics. Minorities don't get behind Rs. It'd be really interesting if Trump had run as a D. If he had not used racist dog whistles, not courted the bigot vote, and been friendly toward minorities, his message - "you're getting screwed in a rigged game" - would have garnered a lot of support among Ds. Bernie is proof of that.
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Then I suggested that you have some view of the lower class as being poor people who don't work.
I don't, and I don't know how you can conclude this.

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I guess I didn't make myself clear. You seemed to be using "the working poor" and "the middle class" as if the former is a subset of the latter. Implicitly, there is someone poorer than "the working poor" who is not part of the "middle class", because "middle" means between two other things. These poor people presumably are not "working," because you refer to the "working poor" to distinguish them from the other poor, who are implicitly non-working. The idea that poor people just laze around may be 180 degrees from your "thinking about the working poor," but I was suggesting that's what you were implying about the people poorer than the middle class, since you seem to thinking that they are poor and are not working.
This is bizarre reasoning. I think the fraction of people who wish to remain poor, not work, and loaf about is ridiculously small. My view is that almost all people who are not working are not working because the economy has rendered them unable to find work. They're obsolete, unskilled, run into terrible luck, etc.

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And I am saying that a lot of the specific things you have said about the middle seem right, but that referring to the problem with the label of "inequality" is not right, because you are talking about voters who are more affluent than the people in their communities who are not populist. And white. They are white.
Fine. I'll work with "dashed expectations." But it's awfully clumsy.

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Dude, I voted against it. If you want to focus on who these populists are and what they stand for, you ought to start with the fact they tend to be affluent whites, older than most of us, and they vote for Republicans. I haven't ignored shit. I didn't vote for a third-party Libertarian candidate. But again -- I'm not talking now about what to do about it, I'm just talking about what it is. I'm disagreeing with you about how to understand what is happening.
Maybe a ladder is the best analogy. Trump voters seem to think they can't get up the ladder. I think many of them believe you can still do so by simply working hard. They don't seem to understand that working smart is what's really required. And they really don't grasp what dad said in those truly honest moments - "It's mostly about who you know." I think a lot of Trump voters are people who actually believed the narrative about the American Dream. This may be a large part of their feeling entitled.

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Populism is not about inequality. And it's not a disease. And if you think left-wing populism is our problem, you have your head up your ass.
Oh yes it is. If we stumbled into a "new internet" and gains accrued broadly, lifting the incomes of the Trump voters, this populism would disappear overnight.

Left wing populism isn't a problem now, but it will be in the near future. After trying right wing populism via Trump, the next pendulum swing is left wing populism.

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No. I advocate for finding a group to blame because different people have done different things and bear more and less responsibility for what has happened.
Which is another way of saying everyone owns part of this mess. Which is why picking one group to blame is both intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. You're never fixing anything. Your just elevating one group of blameworthy folks' bad ideas over another's.

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Undeniably, my view about what has happened drives me to take a side. If you're not going to pick a side and stand for something, then you don't stand for anything, and blaming everyone is just a cop-out.
No. It's being intellectually honest. It's being factual. If numerous causes were at work, all numerous causes should be flagged as such. We can discuss who owns more or less blame, but if you're to blame -- and we're all to blame for this new populism's emergence -- we must admit that. You cannot run healthy societies on lies, and ignoring any group's liability while focusing on another's is a form of lying. It crafts a false story about what happened.

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I'm not tribalized. That's a populist thing. There's a fundamental asymmetry here, which is that the right feels like a beleaguered tribe in a country they feel entitled to, and the left does not.
That's part of the story. But nowhere near the whole of it. The economic factors at work are the fascinating part. You downplay those in favor of a psychological explanation. I think the two are essential to the analysis in equal amounts. The psychology at work is largely a manifestation of the economic pressures.

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No shit, Sherlock. That is exactly the point I am making. Since globalization has been around for a long time, and this populism we have now is emergent, then you need to think critically about how then differed from now, because just saying things like "globalization" and "inequality" isn't it.
Three things have made this moment different. The aberrational US dominance and middle class gains in the US following WWII, 2008 (emphasis on the bailout), and the Internet. I don't need to explain the interplay between the three, and the uniqueness of the last one, to show how this is a much different world. Sometimes, "this time it is different."
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Old 12-09-2018, 03:17 PM   #4371
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Re: Barcelona

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Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy View Post
They are absolutely racist, if you want to speak in absolutes.

$100K really isn't that bad in, say, upstate NY. Taking into account the cost of living, it's like making $225,000 in Boston. Which means a Trump voter in Corning making $100K is affluent. https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-l...ning-ny/225000

God, you are a moron.
Right. Now go out and find me a data set that proves that the 1/3 of Trump voters above $100k were all from areas like Corning, rather than cities.

God, you're a tool.
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Old 12-09-2018, 04:17 PM   #4372
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Re: Barcelona

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Right. Now go out and find me a data set that proves that the 1/3 of Trump voters above $100k were all from areas like Corning, rather than cities.

God, you're a tool.
Actually, I think you need time crawling data sets, so I'll let you.

But at least shut up about the no one who makes $100K anywhere is affluent.
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Old 12-09-2018, 05:08 PM   #4373
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Re: Barcelona

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Trump voters seem to think they can't get up the ladder. I think many of them believe you can still do so by simply working hard. They don't seem to understand that working smart is what's really required. And they really don't grasp what dad said in those truly honest moments - "It's mostly about who you know." I think a lot of Trump voters are people who actually believed the narrative about the American Dream. This may be a large part of their feeling entitled.
This does not sound like a single Trump voter I know, and I know a reasonable number of trump voters, espcially in my family or from where I grew up.

They are all rabid (and I mean rabid) Republicans. They generally hate democrats and like to snicker about them, whether Hilary or Obama. Most of them are better off than those around them. And most of them grew up that way.

Some of them are evangelicals, and those who are believe God makes them better than others, especially others who don't look like them. Half the evies I know are pretty well off, generally have good jobs and came from families that set them up. The other half are very well off, and own businesses or a fair amount of real estate. They're not motivated by economics but by their religion and their hate.

Some come from educated suburban families, mostly but not all establishment protestants or Catholics. These people believe they are better than other people because they are smarter or work harder; even in the numerous cases where neither of these is particularly true, their biggest grievance in life by far, repeated ad nauseum, is that they think "diversity" gets in the way of their kids getting into the same college they did. This may be the closest to your group, but they're all very well off - this is the wealthiest group I know who were Trumpers.

Finally, I have a sizable number of Trumpers I know who are military, ex-military, or law enforcement. For this group, Trump support is usually driven by a sense that we as a country and they as military or law enforcement should be able to throw our weight around more and pay less attention to the rights of individuals, domestic or abroad. These folks are all economically secure but in general less wealthy than the other groups.

The people I know who fit your description, people who have economic expectations that aren't being met, who truly work hard but still struggle, generally voted for Hillary.

Of course, I'm pulling this out of my ass just like you're pulling it out of your ass, but my ass is smarter, better educated, and knows more of the world than yours, which, lets face it, tends to sit in one place whining a lot.
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Old 12-09-2018, 07:59 PM   #4374
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Re: Barcelona

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This does not sound like a single Trump voter I know, and I know a reasonable number of trump voters, espcially in my family or from where I grew up.

They are all rabid (and I mean rabid) Republicans. They generally hate democrats and like to snicker about them, whether Hilary or Obama. Most of them are better off than those around them. And most of them grew up that way.

Some of them are evangelicals, and those who are believe God makes them better than others, especially others who don't look like them. Half the evies I know are pretty well off, generally have good jobs and came from families that set them up. The other half are very well off, and own businesses or a fair amount of real estate. They're not motivated by economics but by their religion and their hate.

Some come from educated suburban families, mostly but not all establishment protestants or Catholics. These people believe they are better than other people because they are smarter or work harder; even in the numerous cases where neither of these is particularly true, their biggest grievance in life by far, repeated ad nauseum, is that they think "diversity" gets in the way of their kids getting into the same college they did. This may be the closest to your group, but they're all very well off - this is the wealthiest group I know who were Trumpers.

Finally, I have a sizable number of Trumpers I know who are military, ex-military, or law enforcement. For this group, Trump support is usually driven by a sense that we as a country and they as military or law enforcement should be able to throw our weight around more and pay less attention to the rights of individuals, domestic or abroad. These folks are all economically secure but in general less wealthy than the other groups.

The people I know who fit your description, people who have economic expectations that aren't being met, who truly work hard but still struggle, generally voted for Hillary.

Of course, I'm pulling this out of my ass just like you're pulling it out of your ass, but my ass is smarter, better educated, and knows more of the world than yours, which, lets face it, tends to sit in one place whining a lot.
I agree that all of those groups fall into the Trump umbrella. I don't agree that they entirely represent anything near the majority of it. YMMV, but in the MidAtlantic, I see more Trump voters congealed around that $72k median.

But I also see what you've described.

I'm going to take the high road on your last statement. You know not much of what you speak. But I'd offer this: It's best not to post after that much scotch. I respect you more when your pathological insecurity is in debate.
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Old 12-10-2018, 10:25 AM   #4375
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Re: Barcelona

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I agree that all of those groups fall into the Trump umbrella. I don't agree that they entirely represent anything near the majority of it. YMMV, but in the MidAtlantic, I see more Trump voters congealed around that $72k median.

But I also see what you've described.

I'm going to take the high road on your last statement. You know not much of what you speak. But I'd offer this: It's best not to post after that much scotch. I respect you more when your pathological insecurity is in debate.
Something else to remember is the wealth/income distinction. Trump voters are generally older, more are going to have a higher wealth to income ratio. Income numbers only tell half the story.

I stand by my statement.
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Old 12-10-2018, 10:54 AM   #4376
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Re: Barcelona

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Something else to remember is the wealth/income distinction. Trump voters are generally older, more are going to have a higher wealth to income ratio. Income numbers only tell half the story.

I stand by my statement.
If the numbers only tell half the story, then this debate has been entirely circular. You could not have succeeded, nor could I, and nor could anyone else.

Your last statement is perfect. If you didn't stand by it, I certainly would.
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Old 12-10-2018, 12:15 PM   #4377
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Re: Barcelona

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The advocates of neoliberalism still refuse to admit this. They remain committed to coming up with any alternative narrative. They blame the current populism entirely on bigotry, xenophobia, differential in education, etc. They never concede the elephant in the corner: Trump was a very rational vote for a lot of people who are not doing well in the current economy.
How do you figure? What is he doing for those people other than offering bigotry, xenophobia and racism?

Tariffs? Restricting immigration? You think those voters believe they directly benefit from those things? Are they dumb or something?

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Minorities don't get behind Rs.
People of color do not get behind the Rs because they are rational.
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Old 12-10-2018, 12:36 PM   #4378
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How do you figure? What is he doing for those people other than offering bigotry, xenophobia and racism?
He was claiming he'd bring back jobs. He was lying or delusional in most regards, but it was something. Hillary was offering nothing to those people. (Or at least that's how her poor messaging was perceived by them.)

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Tariffs? Restricting immigration? You think those voters believe they directly benefit from those things? Are they dumb or something?
A majority of Trump voters are dumb. I don't think income and intelligence run hand in hand, but there is some correlation. And my entire argument last week was that Trump voters are not generally well off people. I don't expect them to have above average intelligence.

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People of color do not get behind the Rs because they are rational.
Does this need to be said?
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Old 12-10-2018, 02:44 PM   #4379
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Re: Barcelona

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Fine. I'll call it "dashed expectations." (Nevermind that it 80% of the country has no hope of reaching its expectations, and 20% easily get to theirs by luck of birth near the top, these crowds are very unequal.)
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.

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The advocates of neoliberalism still refuse to admit this. They remain committed to coming up with any alternative narrative. They blame the current populism entirely on bigotry, xenophobia, differential in education, etc. They never concede the elephant in the corner: Trump was a very rational vote for a lot of people who are not doing well in the current economy.
For your "losers," I think that's loopy. How does Trump "rationally" advance their interests?

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I don't see how you divorce the two. Income is just the measuring stick used to determine whether a Trump voter is getting what he thinks he deserves.
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.

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I think Trump voters are losers in the sense that they cannot go further up the ladder than where they are, or are actually losing ground. They're perhaps doing ok compared to those at the very bottom, but they're spinning their wheels. The live in places with limited opportunity, or don't have the skills that provide for bright futures.
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.

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2008 was not a normal "economic condition." And inequality has not always been where it is today. It is roughly on par with what it was in the 20s, just before the Depression.

We were stagnating in 1992. Then we had the internet. The tech boom collapsed in 2000. We replaced it with a housing bubble. That collapsed spectacularly in 2008. And we've found nothing to replace it with save a stock market run-up.

So, the last two bubbles, housing and tech, delivered more broadly for the public. The 2008 recovery, unlike those, has not. It has delivered nicely to those who had assets (stocks most notably) before the crisis. Those who did not have not enjoyed the same recovery.
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.

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There remains a nagging sense of unfairness about the bailout that I think sits at the base of this populist response.
Why does that speak to Trump voters and not to others?

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I'm inclined to agree with this, but it's more on gut than anything else.
You could try living in both places, but just taking my word for it is easier.

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

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Huh? That's not what I saw in 2016 at all. Most of the wealthy were voting for Hillary to protect their portfolios. Even Republicans were saying, "I'm holding my nose and doing so because his election will kill the market."
You had a non-random sample, dude. You seem to have it backwards.

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I'd rephrase this as, There are more poor Democrat voters generally, and therefore, more poor Democrats than poor Republicans.
For individuals, there is a direct relationship between income and likelihood to vote Republican. For states, the opposite is true.

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But if you prefer dashed expectations, I'm happy to work with that.
I don't care what label you use, but you seem blissfully unaware that inequality and dashed expectations are two different things.

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.

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As I noted many posts ago, Trump voters see people at the top making out like Croesius and people at the bottom receiving things like the ACA (which Trump voters seem to think is somehow screwing up their health care). They feel unequal to the top in terms of opportunity and unequal to the bottom in terms of attention and transfers.
As I noted, this sounds right to me. But you are really talking about their feelings, not about objective inequality.

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I think that's just the traditional racial politics. Minorities don't get behind Rs. It'd be really interesting if Trump had run as a D. If he had not used racist dog whistles, not courted the bigot vote, and been friendly toward minorities, his message - "you're getting screwed in a rigged game" - would have garnered a lot of support among Ds. Bernie is proof of that.
So is your view that populism is rational, and minorities are not rational because they won't support a R populist?

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This is bizarre reasoning. I think the fraction of people who wish to remain poor, not work, and loaf about is ridiculously small. My view is that almost all people who are not working are not working because the economy has rendered them unable to find work. They're obsolete, unskilled, run into terrible luck, etc.
OK.

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Maybe a ladder is the best analogy. Trump voters seem to think they can't get up the ladder. I think many of them believe you can still do so by simply working hard. They don't seem to understand that working smart is what's really required. And they really don't grasp what dad said in those truly honest moments - "It's mostly about who you know." I think a lot of Trump voters are people who actually believed the narrative about the American Dream. This may be a large part of their feeling entitled.
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.

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Left wing populism isn't a problem now, but it will be in the near future. After trying right wing populism via Trump, the next pendulum swing is left wing populism.
Well, thank you for acknowledging that populism (in this country) is right-wing now.

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.

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

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[E]veryone owns part of this mess. Which is why picking one group to blame is both intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. You're never fixing anything. Your just elevating one group of blameworthy folks' bad ideas over another's.
This is twaddle. You can do better.

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If numerous causes were at work, all numerous causes should be flagged as such. We can discuss who owns more or less blame, but if you're to blame -- and we're all to blame for this new populism's emergence -- we must admit that. You cannot run healthy societies on lies, and ignoring any group's liability while focusing on another's is a form of lying. It crafts a false story about what happened.
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.

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The economic factors at work are the fascinating part. You downplay those in favor of a psychological explanation. I think the two are essential to the analysis in equal amounts. The psychology at work is largely a manifestation of the economic pressures.
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.

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Three things have made this moment different. The aberrational US dominance and middle class gains in the US following WWII, 2008 (emphasis on the bailout), and the Internet. I don't need to explain the interplay between the three, and the uniqueness of the last one, to show how this is a much different world. Sometimes, "this time it is different."
I absolutely agree that the world is different, but you are still not explaining why it matters to your explanation.
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Old 12-10-2018, 02:47 PM   #4380
Tyrone Slothrop
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Re: Barcelona

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Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy View Post
Actually, I think you need time crawling data sets, so I'll let you.

But at least shut up about the no one who makes $100K anywhere is affluent.
There are other people who make less than $100K and who are affluent. They are elderly people who are no longer working, and they tend to vote GOP.
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