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The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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DWill

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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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as your President I will be your greatest champion. I will fight to ensure that every American is treated equally, protected equally, and honored equally.
How do you square this lofty statement with his continued targeting of individual American citizens with Twitter attacks, resulting in others piling on to that individual with abuse and threats? This man is in several ways an abomination.
We will reject bigotry and oppression in all its forms
Yes, an example of a great American value. How do you square what Trump read from the teleprompter with his own unscripted bigoted remarks about Muslims, blacks, and Hispanics?

Are you really just having some fun with us, Robert? Did you happen to catch DJT at the last stop in his Victory Tour Saturday in Alabama? This was a uniter a work, rehashing every minor slight he suffered in the campaign, chiding the "dishonest media" for reporting polls? The performance was appalling. It was appalling even from a showmanship standpoint--boring as hell.

I wonder when Trump will have his first press conference in front of the dishonest media. Maybe he'll just deep-six that old tradition, too.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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DWill wrote:I wonder when Trump will have his first press conference in front of the dishonest media. Maybe he'll just deep-six that old tradition, too.
It's odd, isn't it, that Trump, who probably isn't even aware of many of our nation's traditions, is now the standard bearer of the GOP. Nothing is sacred to him. He's as profane and un-American as they come and, yet, staunch conservatives and the religious right support him fervently.

This is a populist uprising, after all, and everything is topsy turvy. But we've had populist uprisings before and we eventually moved past them. The pertinent fact is that Trump didn't win the popular vote and if he's going to launch a new political party, he will have to find a way to bridge the gap between his brand of populism and all the people who didn't vote for him. He will try to do that, but I think he will fail. He's far too compulsive and arrogant and out-of-step with mainstream America, as the popular vote clearly shows. In these "victory tours", Trump is sticking to his base. He has to because his ideas are strange and repugnant to everyone else.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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It seems to me that we are engaged in imagined catastrophes when we think of the potentials of Trump. Further more it seems to me that those imagined catastrophes outweigh the potential positives.

The GOP controls 32 state legislators, 5 are split, 13 are Democrat. With the GOP having such a commanding presence in national politics, do we have a legitimate concern of a constitutional convention lead by this same GOP.

The GOP is positioned to make irreparable changes to the U.S. constitution. It may be the fight of our lifetime.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Robert Tulip wrote:Hello Harry, racism is a difficult and sensitive and complex topic, and I appreciate your efforts to respond to my comments.
I see now that much of our clash has been because of differences in understanding of terms, rather than deep disagreements over substance. I shall try to focus as much on clarification as on confrontation.
Robert Tulip wrote: the aim of moral reasoning is to make our instinctive responses open to explicit analysis, bringing the subconscious and unconscious emotional factors and prejudices into the open where they can be dissected. So we do have the potential for conscious access to our unconscious reactions.
In general I agree, but I think the difficulties involved make for a lot of confusion and many opportunities for inappropriate blame.
Robert Tulip wrote:But that cuts both ways. It is not valid to argue that all racism is simply irrational unconscious response, whereas all anti-racism is high-minded conscious moral reasoning. Anti-racist campaigners like to see the world in that black and white way, with anti-racism as good and racism as evil, but they can be just as guilty of playing to an emotional mass response as the racists can.
As a general matter I have already agreed with this. But I am a bit concerned about your use of "anti-racism" in this context. First, it is a term unfamiliar to me. Second, you sometimes seem to use it in a broader sense which would include what I called "Black racism" - opposition to White people, Euro culture, or in general, systems of dominance which have been used by Western powers. Russia, which is still in the thick of racism culturally, has often used "anti-racism" in this sense, not as opposition to themselves, but as a card to play in international diplomacy. I gather that (and the similar finger-pointing of a Mugabe or a Nasser) is the sort of appeal to emotions that you are citing here.

Frankly I think we are pretty capable of working out the difference between thoughtful criticism on moral grounds and incitement based on past wrongs and current frustration. One of the problems with the #BlackLivesMatter movement has been that the two were both present, and it isn't always easy to maintain the one when the other is also a factor. I saw an African-American post on FB to the effect that he was "tired of always having to be the high-minded race," and I certainly saw his point.

As I slow down a minute to ask myself what my real point here was, there are a couple. One is that "high-mindedness" is not instinctive, and an approach which takes that perspective will not be subject to the same confusion. It is what I like about reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' writing: his rage is real, but he sets it aside to make solid, substantive points.

The second is to acknowledge what I think is your point, that anti-Europeanism partakes of two instinctive processes which are also likely to confuse matters: simple racial antipathy, the same instinctive us/them judgements which operate in White racism; and the sense of injury, preferring to blame others rather than do something about a problem.
Robert Tulip wrote:What I meant by the other motives of anti-racists in calling people racist was that anti-racists are campaigning to install progressive liberal governments. They demonise conservatives as racist as a way to shut down debate on social issues and to promote the interests of their side of politics.

It took me a while to sort out why this seems so weird to me. People who want progressive liberal governments, and therefore naturally find themselves targeted by authoritarians like Putin, consider anti-racism a goal in itself, not a means to grab power. It is one of the main purposes of power.

The demonization is a by-product. Quite a bit of it is created by rhetorical excess, since the process of herding the members of the group involves attaching some social penalty to dissent. There is even some cynicism involved at times, and some of this may be "to promote the interests of their side of politics." But you would be wise to keep means and ends clear, if you wish to understand normal political processes.
Robert Tulip wrote:For example, I do not believe that it is intrinsically racist to argue that immigrants should assimilate to the country they move to. But we routinely see criticism of immigrant culture (eg sharia law) depicted as racism.
Yes, I see your point. Of course assimilation is almost impossible to avoid, and while I have no intrinsic objection to people wanting to use sharia law for divorce, inheritance, etc, I consider this to be a contract which they must consent to before it applies. Some brands of Islam attempt to impose traditional ways without that consent, and so there will be a clash of cultures.

Of course many communities in America maintain ethnic traditions and use some pressure to keep children in the tradition. German-Americans in some communities educated their children in German right up to the time of WWI, and parochial (Roman Catholic) schools have kept their tradition in some cases as transplanted resistance to the English who tried to suppress Catholicism in Ireland. Hebrew School is part of being Jewish, and many Muslim parents insist that their children learn Arabic. And then there are the Amish. All of this is part of the American experience, and I remain as bothered by people trying to selectively suppress certain cultures as by those who would impose the old ways on their family by force.

It is also true that there have been allegations of sinister plots to impose sharia on everyone, a silly bit of Islamophobia which is just scapegoating someone different. Such racism is present when women wearing the hijab are targeted, as has happened in the U.S. recently.
Robert Tulip wrote:The problem though is that some measures which work in the short term are damaging in the long term. The clearest example is in charity, where the recipient can be made dependent on the giver and can lose the potential to become an autonomous responsible person. Tough love measures of identifying what is best for people in the long run are more sustainable and effective than ‘sugar hit’ measures that look and feel good but which do damage to people’s values and capacity.
I have a strong impression that the dangers are overrated, mostly by people who don't want to pay anything to help the unfortunate. For every person who loses the potential for autonomy and responsibility due to receiving help, there are more people who are held back by their poverty from their potential to be autonomous and responsible. There are still millions of people in the world, for example, who are denied a proper education or are so damaged by hunger and ill health that they are unable to learn at a normal rate.

This is a real problem in the United States. People who have no trouble understanding the importance of good health and a good education then turn around and want to avoid paying for it if they perceive it to be for the children of "those people." The poison of housing segregation becomes most toxic in the context of local financing of schools, which is the method used on almost all of the U.S.
Robert Tulip wrote: I take the view that free market capitalism should be the foundation of politics, and that the Republicans are better at that strategic vision than the Democrats. A well regulated free market is the best way to provide opportunities based on merit and justice, more powerful than state intervention.
Free market capitalism is the foundation of U.S. politics. Only a small portion of Sanders backers would prefer any other economic organization. The issue is usually over how regulated or unregulated that capitalism is to be.

There was a time when one could make a case that Republicans are better at implementing free-market capitalism. That time has past. They are so thoroughly in the grip of special interests, and have based so much of their strategy on exploiting ignorance, that there is no longer any room for a thoughtful, coherent candidate like Jack Kemp or Bob Dole. What has passed for strategy on the Republican side for the last six years has been "make people afraid, because when they are afraid, they prefer conservatives."
Robert Tulip wrote:But the problem was about bringing people from the stone age into the space age, to use an exaggerated cliché from Papua New Guinea which I know much better than Africa. I have worked for Australia’s overseas aid program for nearly thirty years, so these questions of what works, what doesn’t and why, to use David Dollar’s celebrated book title, have been central to my thinking.
I am a development economist myself, and agree that the problem is complex. Maintaining realistic ideas about the pace of development is as important as fending off corruption and dependency.
Robert Tulip wrote:With the shift of manufacturing to Asia in recent times, we see that people are generally better off being exploited than not being exploited. Exploitation may produce obvious suffering, and outrages, but in the long run offers pathways from poverty that are better than subsistence stagnation.

Indeed. If people take jobs they know are bad, then it follows that their alternatives were even worse. This is basic, and I have no patience with people who argue against, for example, multinationals investing in poor countries because it "exploits their poverty." That doesn't mean they can't use labor standards with some fairness to them.

In China there have been cases of workers being forcibly brought back to factories where they no longer want to work (including Korean factories, prominently), which makes them slaves. I normally limit my use of the term "exploitation" to cases in which ordinary norms of justice are set aside in a relationship that is one-sided in terms of ability to use force.
Robert Tulip wrote:Harry, you are spinning a slanted story here. Justifying Mugabe for his false blaming of Britain for Zimbabwe’s economic collapse is the sort of line that is singularly unhelpful in putting African countries on a good track.
I did not mean to justify Mugabe's behavior, only to observe that Blair's efforts to force him to allow compensation (much of it paid for by the U.K.) played into his unscrupulous hands.
Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, white farmers were slow to allow expropriation, but the Marxist idea that they themselves were expropriators of Zimbabwe fails to see that they brought technical skills, trade contacts and governance values which in the long run could have lifted Zimbabwe to middle income status and prevented its collapse into destitution.
In South Africa post-apartheid, there has been a gradual process of admitting Black workers to skilled jobs, which they were excluded from under apartheid. The same thing could have happened in Zimbabwe, if White settlers had not been intent on maintaining their superior status as a group. Namibia and Botswana have seen much progress in opening up their economies, and while they are incredibly unequal, they are not stratified by force. I am not so much interested in assigning blame (those who seek mainly to punish past crimes are usually either utopian fools or cynical demagogues) as in seeing the technical skills, etc. be actually brought to the people of the country, not just to "the land."
Robert Tulip wrote:It rankles to put up with inequality, but unfortunately that is necessary to achieve progress.
It rankles with some people, but I am not one of them. The point is to avoid letting inequality set up systems in which those who start out behind are held back from catching up, on purpose. As good jobs have gone more and more to people who serve in unpaid internships first, for example, it is impossible to miss the implication that only those whose parents can support them in these internships will be admitted to the investment banking opportunities, the consulting firms, and the executive ranks of thepillar companies of a region. This is not what was meant by "success based on merit."
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:The White Africans had the good jobs, the factories, the education, the sanitation, the food, etc. to be more productive.
I am using economic policy as a proxy for all those things.
Sorry, but admitting people based on qualifications rather than ethnicity will not cause an economy to tank. If the reins of power are seized by kleptocrats who think their friends can do as well as the skilled people who were there before, then there will be poor performance. But there is a big territory of meritocracy in between.

In the U.S. in the 19th century, a system known as "agricultural extension" grew up, in which the land grant universities had paid agents go around to the farmers and demonstrate the effectiveness of improved methods such as contour plowing, crop rotation, intensive fertilizer use, etc. Not all farmers took the risk of change, but those who did generally prospered, the others could see it, and so the methods spread. This is not rocket science: demonstrate better methods, and people will take it on board.
Robert Tulip wrote:But that transplanting is exactly what Mugabe and his ilk have pretended is possible, by portraying your argument here as a racist plot. A typical ploy for anti-racist schemers such as Mugabe is to portray wealth transfer as a simple matter, ignoring the deep cultural values which enable the creation of wealth in modern societies.
The countries who have been patient about development have mainly not gone in for expropriation. There is something to be said for land reform: Japan, Korea and Taiwan all had land reform programs early in their development. But public education counts for more, and it was the denial of opportunities such as a good public education which created much of the rage which then turned to expropriation in countries like Zimbabwe and Uganda.

I am currently living in a relatively advanced country in West Africa, and I understand the frustrations of management, coordination, communication, and so forth. It would be good if White people understood how much their expectations are based on a fairly uniformly high standard of living (including education and high-markup sales) in their home countries, but never mind. They figure it out quickly enough. The problem of building stable social structures remains. I would say it is doing reasonably well, but it may be decades before we can really say.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Taylor wrote:It seems to me that we are engaged in imagined catastrophes when we think of the potentials of Trump. Further more it seems to me that those imagined catastrophes outweigh the potential positives.

The GOP controls 32 state legislators, 5 are split, 13 are Democrat. With the GOP having such a commanding presence in national politics, do we have a legitimate concern of a constitutional convention lead by this same GOP.

The GOP is positioned to make irreparable changes to the U.S. constitution. It may be the fight of our lifetime.
Could you elaborate on what you're saying, Taylor? Are you saying we are overreacting to Trump's election or that we need to respond forcefully?
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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geo wrote:Could you elaborate on what you're saying, Taylor? Are you saying we are overreacting to Trump's election or that we need to respond forcefully?
Taking the second part first. Certainly not. The fight is going to be in centering U.S. national politics through the democratic process. This must be done at the state and local level and it must be done quickly to restore balance. That's the fight I'm referring to. It doesn't mean we give the Dems a free ride, they need to present candidates who can appeal to folks like me. People who have traditionally thought that center right was safe. They need to present an argument that coherently demonstrates the necessity of balance. In my case I realize now the mistake in some of my thinking. My thinking has been fiscal conservatism based on capitol markets, and at the same time recognizing the value of Keynesian economics, my thinking has been that center right would manage this paradox, I have thought that we...that is all of us in the U.S have been on the same page but we never have been. This dichotomy is what I think creates havoc in the U.S. I think that most people want and need social liberalism but how do we manage that when American dollars are spread so thin, not only across the U.S. but across the entire world. Without our money the world as we know it stops. Its partly what Chris O'Connor alluded to when he asked are we 'torn about this election'. I worry as do many people about the potential downside of Trump because it doesn't seem hard to imagine a worst case scenario. Trump oozes worst case scenarios from his pores. My worst case scenario imagination extends to the GOP as well. I can easily imagine those Rural white evangelicals writing the new constitutional amendments that destroy women's reproductive rights, I can easily imagine those same people constitutionalizing the definition of marriage, I can imagine the National Rifle Association liberalizing the second amendment, so much so that cities like Chicago are inundated with firearms, I can imagine the Patriot Act being embedded along side the former fifth amendment, I can imagine immigration to the U.S being constitutionally shut down. As I said Geo, I take responsibility for some bad thinking, you see I trusted my instincts about political rhetoric, so much of it is lofty, ambitious and noble. I've carried what I think are noble goals with me but I lost sight of true checks and balances, I must think that others have as well, as I do not think that I am alone. As an example of potential bad thinking on the part of the GOP, It chafes me that during an event as serious as the Iraq war, the GOP and Bush 43 had to pass the defense of marriage act, ( a ridiculous waste of time and an infringement on personal freedom imo). I think that I am not off base when I or we imagine the destructive depths the current GOP may sink to. That was my point, I hope that I've been clearer. It's interesting that I use the word hope, Hope has lost value not because life has changed but because imagined change appears bleak. One of the things I've learned about politics over the past year is that people do control outcomes they just don't pay attention to the nuances of the rules or the need for balance, maybe they do and it is I who hasn't, either way the GOP controls a whole lot and it concerns me the part I played. My fear now is that the GOP will not let sleeping dogs lay and will strike while the iron is hot. I fear that there will be a push by the GOP toward what I consider a 19th century mentality.

Time to shower and eat :)
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Wow, great post, Taylor. You get one of these.

:goodpost:

I think I agree with literally everything you say. I kind of go back and forth, worrying that our country is going down a very dark path. But I also believe that Trump is an anomaly and an aberration, and that we will shrug him off in a few short years.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Harry Marks wrote: As an aside, GDP is not "wealth" but "income" (or, even more accurately, production).
Yes, thanks.
Harry Marks wrote:High population growth rates alone are a quick route to declining GDP per capita, and the fastest way to get population growth rates down is to provide high levels of education, especially to girls. So one could make a case that the fall in South Africa had more to do with failure of the White power structure to pay for proper education to its citizens than to any change of power.
One could make that case, but it is hardly compelling. The suggested counterfactual that greater investment in black education would have delivered higher economic growth in South Africa assumes that this education could have occurred in a context of relatively weak governance systems. The theory of change for South Africa’s development trajectory is not simple. South Africa was the richest and best run country in Africa because of the presence of its 5 million whites, but “domestic issues” (code for government corruption and incompetence under the ANC) have seen it lose that mantle of Africa's biggest economy behind Nigeria and Egypt https://www.sablog.kpmg.co.za/2016/05/s ... continent/ .

To say that this slide, including the steady depreciation of the rand, could have been averted by investment in public education is like saying you can move a string by pushing on it. The ideology of primary education as a first order development priority needs to be set in the context of the prior importance of good governance.
Harry Marks wrote: Mandela was elected in 1994, and notably avoided confiscating White wealth, so the upturn in the later 90s could simply be the return of foreign direct investment after boycotts were ended. However, I would guess that commodity prices (and production) likely played a larger role than anything having to do with race.
The main factors having to do with race that affect economic growth in Africa are summed up in the political risk perception of investors. This map of political risk has obvious racial correlations.
Image
Harry Marks wrote: It is a little strange to expect effective African institutions to emerge suddenly in a decade or two after independence, or to cling to the notion that self-governance is simply impossible.
When you look at the naïve optimism for African development from the 1960s, it is very clear that false political assumptions overrode expert advice. There was a broad failure by decision makers to appreciate the depth of institutional weakness in terms of capacity for effective regulation. Insistence on unfactual claims which are more congenial to prevailing political culture is a recipe for failure.

Botswana is one African country that has shown capacity for good governance, essentially due to its wise and humble long term Presidents such as Festus Mogae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festus_Mogae My view is that countries that demonstrate serious failure of governance should lose the right to sovereignty.
Harry Marks wrote: Throughout the entire Cold War, Western powers continued to distort African politics with weapons and client armies in a rivalry with Russia. We propped up dictators and did next to nothing to promote education or democracy. Then when we suddenly discover that democracy and human rights are important, we look around at wars over the resources we pay for and blame the people who are there.
But when you compare Africa to Asia, looking at countries that had similar poverty levels seventy years ago, the main different factor behind Asia's success is human capital.

Asia has achieved middle and even high income status due to cultural values which promote human capital formation. This core role of cultural values, for example in entrepreneurial risk, investment in skills and support for rule of law, illustrates themes which cause Trump supporters to react to political correctness with repugnance.

The belief that Africa’s poverty is the fault of the West is a good example of political correctness gone feral.
Harry Marks wrote: There were other destructive forces at work, including the statist ideology of the 60s and 70s which led to corrupt and ineffective policies all over the developing world. I don't want to promote an ideology of "it's all the fault of White people." Africans have the problem, as they well know, and it is not an easy problem, as the corrupt and violent history of Western nations shows. But to simply give up before development has a real chance to be tried is quite foolish and, yes, racist.
Realist, not racist. The best way to improve African values and wealth would be to appoint international military governments in failed states, with a mandate to use the resources of the country for national development, remove kleptocrats and cancel democracy for several decades in order to smash the patronage system.

The ability of African tyrants to manipulate elections means that the failed states of Africa are not ready for democracy. Trump is obviously not going down that path of intervention given his comments against nation building, but installing benevolent governors would be better than pissing money up against the wall on feel good charity projects that entrench despots.
Harry Marks wrote: anti-racism has to actually be tried before it can be assessed.
Anti-racism has been tried extensively, and has become a sort of dogma within green elites, expressed by anti-racists as a loathing of western civilization.

The communist and socialist movements have had strong alliances with the anti-colonial movements which see world politics through racial eyes.

The key factor behind much of the sentiment driving voter choice in the Presidential election turned on attitudes of respect for America’s heritage. Anti-racism seeks to overcome the guilt of white power and status and wealth by expressing disrespect for America’s heritage, to subvert and undermine the traditional culture which Trump argues made America great. Unfortunately, emotional guilt does not provide a good path to greater wealth or even equality, but rather opens the door to manipulators who can use deceptive language to achieve personal power. And no, I don't think that is a description of Trump.
Harry Marks wrote: Second, Black majority rule in Africa, which is simple justice, is not part of the picture in the U.S. where less than 20 percent of the population is African-American.
It is not “simple justice” to defend a failed experiment. The relevance of Africa to American politics is that Trump voters, as I read it, see liberal politics in monolithic terms. Part of the monolith that they reject is the cultural relativist idea that cultures with a worse track record are just as good as America. An attitude of cultural superiority is not the same as racism, since people in other cultures are always at liberty to adopt superior values, without demeaning their race or disrespecting their own identity and cultural heritage.

The problem of racism is that it asserts that it is impossible for the allegedly inferior race to change. That false racist assertion is what in logic is called a genetic fallacy. But the reason Trump is not racist is that he is calling for the deadbeat cultures to junk their failed values and become like America as a beacon of hope and prosperity to the world.
Harry Marks wrote: Obama has done an excellent job in his presidency, as will become clearer over the next two years, and it is White Conservatives who have covered themselves in ignominy in near-Mugabist fashion. Every one of their policy positions has been on the wrong side of both history and economics.
We shall see. Apocalyptic hand-wringing about the Trump disaster looks like Chicken Little moaning about the popping of the liberal bubble. Comparing white conservatives with Robert Mugabe is the sort of exaggeration that brings liberal demonisers into disrepute.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:There is a continuum from Robert Mugabe murdering and dispossessing thousands of his opponents, black and white, to Barack Obama recognising the tyrant state of Cuba, which should never have happened while the Castro clique exercise their private fiefdom.
Even Cuban-Americans recognize that the time had come. This has nothing to do with racism or anti-racism.
The ideology of anti-racism is like a religion, presenting a fervent ideological message about the evils of western civilization and white European culture. Therefore Cuba stands as a big middle finger insulting the alleged racists, suggesting that Cuba has demonstrated a better approach.

Unfortunately, the claims of “people’s democracy” in these communist states cannot be tested by the people at free elections because they would immediately cause the people to reject their vanguard, speaking in the Marxist jargon. I think the USA should have waited until after Cuba held a democratic election before offering support, but Obama’s decision was a testament to his anti-racist credentials and ideology.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Cuba talks big on anti-racism, but manifestly fails to deliver progress for its people.
Their medical care system is arguably better than that in the U.S., and their quality of life is not that much worse, with the obvious exception of political freedom. Gains in quality of life have much more to do with access to necessities than with quantity of luxuries.
That reminds me of the observation by Sebastian Junger in Tribe, our recent non fiction book, that the early USA had to forcibly prevent people from running off to live with the Indians who had a more happy and free lifestyle. There is no question that the conformity and momentum of industrial civilization causes massive problems and stress which can be avoided in a small island. But I don’t think that siren song of 'stop the world I want to get off' makes sense when you consider it seriously, since the lack of political freedom should be recognised as a fundamental problem preventing a whole range of other freedoms.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:What they need is capitalism, with free markets governed by rule of law, where advancement is by merit rather than politics.
I imagine that is what they will get, now, although it may look more like China or Vietnam than like Brazil or the Philippines.
While Raul remains head of the armed forces and there is no democracy in Cuba, it is not possible to have rule of law, since the communist party is above the law, as is the case in China and Vietnam and North Korea. Trump is saying that whole command model of the state is corrupt and wrong, and that American freedom, even with its risks, offers vastly more potential for growth and productivity for all than these controlled societies.

Linking all this back to the thread topic, Rural White America has a much better connection, compared to the urban elites, to these basic intuitions about politics and society that Trump is responding to. So it is far from a "cop out" to say that we need to understand Rural White America, it is an important corrective to the group think of urban society with its ideological sympathies to failed policies.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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To interject: getting a lot of buzz is J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. I just bought it for myself for Christmas. The book should offer some perspective on the topic of what bugs or eats at rural, largely poor, white America. Vance is from the territory but has had an atypical second half (Yale Law no less). He talks of the plight of "his" people in sympathetic yet frank terms, rejecting the all-purpose excuse that economic hardship has produced pathology. It's not as simple as that. Some have chided him for blaming the victim, in fact.

From an L.A. Times review:

"Vance emerges as a conservative who disdains right-wing “conspiracy mongers” and “fringe lunatics” who have tainted politics with a divisive pessimism over the diminishment of the American dream. Wall Street, wage stagnation, foreign competition and the closing of mines and mills have gutted Appalachia and the Rust Belt. But Vance worries that the hard work and self-reliance that were the creed of that dream have succumbed to welfare, crime, addictions and broken communities.

President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them,” Vance writes. “We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with.

Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it — not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”

Hardly insights you’d hear at a Trump rally. Trump, whose father gave him a fortune, and Vance, whose father gave him up for adoption, are speaking of the same audiences but with opposing messages. Trump peddles mistrust and a belief that the white working class has been decimated by a liberal government whose trade, immigration and environmental policies killed jobs in the coal fields and shipped other work overseas. The presidential candidate’s bluster is much keener on projection than introspection.

Vance accepts that the blue-collar world has been jolted by many of the same factors. His prescriptions, however, are harder to hear and often push the blame back on individuals. His lessons can appear preachy and simplistic. The memoir would have benefited from a bit more history of how the timber and coal industries — economic saviors that often ran on duplicity — dominated an Appalachia isolated by geography and tradition. Mechanization and the decline of coal forced significant migrations from the region but many who left yearned for their hollers. Perhaps nowhere else in America does the land figure so prominently in the soul."

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy ... story.html
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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I read Hillbilly Elegy recently, partly because a good deal of it takes place in Kentucky and Middletown, OH close to where I live. (He mentions specific locations in that town, I might drive up there and take photos of those spots.) Vance has had a very broad exposure to America, from hillbilly culture (his words), to the marines, to college, graduating from Yale law school, and practicing law at a high level. He comments on differences in all of those sub-cultures. Although many of the problems in hillbilly culture are self imposed, a good number are not and that might make you feel more compassion towards their plight. In sharp contrast to the title of this thread, Vance's book may be worthy of a BookTalk discussion...

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