You might wonder how a Senator who was once called the “Senator from Chase-Manhattan” because he was so friendly to big banks and big business in general could be called a “socialist” by Republicans once he started running for President.
The word “socialism” as used by Republicans doesn’t mean “a system where all economic assets are owned by the government”. Rather, it’s a dog whistle for “I don’t want none of them thare n-words to get the same advantages as me.” It’s coded racism. The word “socialist” as used by Republicans is a dog whistle for “people who oppose white supremacy.”
This is why poor whites consistently are voting against Democrats these days. They still have not forgiven Democrats for passing the Civil Rights Act of 1965. LBJ muttered that he’d lost poor whites for the Democratic Party for a generation because poor whites wouldn’t vote for a “n-word lover”. He was off by a couple of generations. And this is also why poor whites consistently label Democrats as “socialist”. It’s not because Democrats want all businesses to be owned by the government. It’s because Democrats are against white supremacy. And that makes them evil because taking white supremacy away from white trash Americans… what do white trash Americans have left after that? Other than seething resentment and hatred of everybody who isn’t white, I mean?
White supremacy is a hella drug. As lethal as meth, in the end. These white trash Americans will literally vote to kill themselves rather than allow black people to have the same rights that they have. And I doubt there’s a damned thing we can do about it other than to ignore their racism while making sure they have access to health care, education, and other necessities of life, which we Democrats will do because we’re good people, not because there’s any hope of us converting people who think it’s okay to rip babies out of their mothers’ arms and put them into cages to anything resembling human decency. There’s no way to reach out to hate-filled people and make them *not* be hate-filled people. All we can do is treat them with kindness while making sure they’re as far the fuck away from the reins of power as we can manage.
– Badtux the Dog-whistle-recognizing Penguin
Rich people (both conservatives and liberals) have sought to elide their privilege by redefining class in terms of education level instead of wealth. White people who are actually poor do vote for Democrats (if they vote at all): Trump’s base is actually made up of white people who are poorly-educated but still bring home middle-class incomes. Most of these people are not proletarians in the Marxist sense: their “economic anxiety” isn’t so much “I’m scared an immigrant will steal my job” so much as “I’m scared the immigrants working for me will get uppity and demand more pay”.
And much of the hateful rhetoric in the right-wing media is directed more against those who are well-endowed with education than against those who are well-endowed with melanin. It’s fundamentally down to the bifurcated nature of the American economy.
Blue areas are dominated by corporations which sell information of various kinds. These corporations are price-makers due to the monopoly power they get from patents or copyrights, and support globalization because they has relatively little to fear from foreign competition. Blue states can offer the working class high wages (and are tolerant of unions because its corporations have enough market power that they can afford to pay high wages) but impoverish them with high housing costs. It also demands high quality education because its wealth comes from people’s brains, and is pro-diversity because diversity brings more perspectives to bear against whatever problem needs to be solved.
Red areas are dominated by corporations which sell material commodity goods. These corporations are price-takers which are hard-pressed by competition from Asian countries (where land and labor costs are much lower), and thus support protectionism. Red states can offer the working class cheap housing, but impoverish them with low wages (and union militancy is pointless because it would bankrupt the employer). Low wages also encourage an anti-intellectual attitude (because high-achieving red-state kids move to the blue states to make more money) as well as nativism (because wealth comes from the land, so adding new people just makes the existing population poorer).
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Your statement that “white people who are actually poor do vote for Democrats” does not match the precinct-level data. Census tracts which are predominantly populated by poor whites voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2006.
Regarding educational levels, Kansas has a higher percentage of college-educated people than California.
Your notion of extractive or industrial economies versus information economies is interesting, but does not explain why New Mexico and, usually, Michigan, are reliably Democratic.
In short, you throw out a lot of interesting ideas, but they don’t explain why 58% of white people voted for a racist pussy grabber rather than for a decent hornorable man. Other than the “racist” part, I mean.
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I don’t discount that racism is a major influence on how Americans vote: I just don’t believe that it’s the be-all and end-all. Lots of Trump voters were also motivated by spite towards their intellectual “betters”.
And Michigan is clearly still a purple state and no longer “reliably Democratic”: its historic Democratic leaning may be a legacy of the time when the Big 3 auto manufacturers in Detroit were able to function essentially as a cartel, with enough pricing power for the UAW to profitably parasitize.
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“Socialist”, “communist”, “terrrrrrrrrrrist” — it’s just shorthand for “a person I don’t like.” Words have lost all meaning in political discourse. It doesn’t matter what the DEFINITION of a word is. That dikshunerry stuff is for elitists! If I think yer a weakgayfag and I’d like to kill you because you don’t share the same angry mania as me (only I can’t because I’m afraid of fist-fights and I feel ashamed of myself because of that) then I’ll call you a socialist. Especially if I can do it in some online forum where I’m protected because you don’t know who I am and I’ll never have to look you in your scary eyes! Anonymity brings out the Gollum in lots of humans…
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