I used the term redneck here as a somewhat snarky placeholder to illustrate the culture war. I should have come up with something similarly snarky for the city-living college grad or just not used those terms at all. I didn't really mean it as a pejorative to owners of towing companies or country folks. And I suppose I should probably clarify that I absolutely do not think that those people are a "pitiful joke." Their political opinions may be, but so are many shrill liberals on the left, and most of the source of this is the disguised culture war we are fighting, where we pretend to defend laws or institutions or people but what folks are really trying to do is "own" someone of a different culture.Maddy wrote: ↑Sun Oct 07, 2018 6:58 amI doubt the "redneck with a towing business" gives much thought to whether or not he's a meaningful owner of the means of production. His very real accomplishments in life are not a pitiful joke, as they apparently are to you. His choice of job and lifestyle may well represent considered decisions about how best to spend his 90-some years on this planet. His rejection of free health care and social safety nets just might reflect a principled set of values, and not ignorance or stupidity. In fact, I'll give you ten-to-one odds he's a lot happier with his life than you are with yours. Just sayin' (as one of those fuzzy-headed women who are too oppressed to understand how bad they have it).moda0306 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 4:26 pm
Diversity and globalization don't help these people. But neither do corporate tax cuts and the military industrial complex. And free healthcare, tax-credits, and other safety nets sure as f'k DO help them, yet they eschew those options in favor of a bombastic clown because they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires rather than the working-class that they (and most of us) are.
But I really don't care for the culture war. I'm from a blue family in a red-as-fk county in a blue state. I shoot guns and drive a Prius. I sit in both city and rural culture a bit and I see what many others seem not to... that there IS general anxiety about the economy, because our version of capitalism is a flawed system leaving folks feel stressed as hell even when they're successful... this anxiety and alienation leads (yes) to some actual economic analysis but more-so (IMO) to them settling into their cultural resentments. It's city vs rural. Nativist vs Cosmopolitan. If we really want to get reunited around economic grounds, we'd leave that framework behind, AND align on our true battle-lines that matter of Labor Vs. Capital.
You don't even have to be for socialist or even liberal policies to see that THIS is nature of the economic dilemma we have, and when every college grad with some stock in a Roth IRA and a redneck with a towing business think they're owners of the means of production in any meaningful sense, then get in a pissing match over gun policy or religion or immigration, we're never going to get anywhere. We'll keep rearranging the deck-chairs on the titanic while the REAL owners of the world rake in more and more wealth while the world turns into ever-more a warming pile of garbage and angry cultural resentments.
Our world economy and domestic economy have both grown SO much... exponential growth into perpetuity is probably impossible on a planet with limited resources. Even if tax cuts DID work for these saps, it would be because the economy actually has to grow in size for these rural, hard-working-but-underpaid folks to have anything close to a decent life. That's unsustainable, and even if it weren't, it still says a TON more about the nature of labor interests vs capital interests than it does about the "success" of tax cuts and regulation cuts.
I don't know if he's that likely that much happier... I thought that the rural middle class was bitter about being screwed over by globalization? What happened to that narrative? But I didn't say he couldn't be happy... he's just a LOT closer to working class than he is "Capital Class." He's going to have a hard time just living off the dividends if he sold his business tomorrow (obviously this is a hypothetical middle-class business owner... not a hypothetical much-more-wealthy business owner).
I'm a pretty happy guy.. I just use aggressive language from time to time to shake the bullsh!t narrative foundations in peoples' heads (built not by logic but by culture and emotion). So if I have to use the term "knuckle-dragging" when pointing out that red states and red counties are far-more "on the government dole" than blue counties and states, I will. That-said, I say these things because I want to end the culture war, not perpetuate it. I want people to align themselves less on what they drive and whether they shoot guns than on how their economic foundations are rested. Sometimes to build a new identity you have to crush the one that's already there. And the identity that the rural poor have build around themselves and their well-being (similar to the SJW-left) is one that is utterly inconsistent, toxic and easily debunked for one that includes the urban poor/middle-class. And even the middle-and-upper/middle class that has to sell their labor for income rather than just living off of dividends.
I see little "principled" in what most folks (left and right) do as it pertains to the state and government benefits. Many folks on the right happily dive into the treasure troves of Social Security and Medicare, Both (especially the latter) of which they probably contributed far-far less than they might take, while simultaneously abhorring the use of food stamps by an urban single-mom. Folks in the country proudly look at their predecessors who took free/cheap land appropriated by the government as a massive welfare payment and criticize the urban poor who collect the Earned-Income-Tax Credit as they work 20-40 hours a week while raising children.
On the flip side, liberals want their subjective values taught in schools while criticizing traditional conservative values as almost illegal to teach in school. They say "my body my choice" on one topic but then ignore it on almost every other. They criticize gun ownership and hunting as backwards and immoral then eat meat from animals who were tortured their whole lives.
I see little consistency, nor (more troubling to me) the acknowledgement that it's downright difficult to be truly principled on big issues because they have limiting principles that we don't want to acknowledge.