Wait, are we blaming “the media” for Trump now? I don’t think I got the memo. Silly me, I thought it was the republican establishment keeping quiet and letting him run wild for so long.
Do I dare to dream that even Fox now becomes ‘thems media elites’?
I didn’t click through, of course, but the excerpt makes it clear enough. It’s like Wm. F. Buckley decided to publish an unedited transcript of an after-dinner cigars and brandy session in his magazine (complete with cluelessness over their own serious contribution to the mess). Read it with Buckley’s mid-Atlantic drawl or with Thurston Howell III’s and it’s more entertaining.
It sounds like the National Review is only now saying what I’ve heard many conservatives say, well, pretty much all my life. Honestly, if I had a nickel for every time I heard “People are only poor because they choose to be…”
Well, I don’t know if I could bring myself to benefit from another’s stupidity. I don’t think I’d want to stoop to their level.
In public at least.
It was funnier when Jim Gaffigan said it.
How is it that you’re able to use blockquotes in your comment, yet don’t recognize the use of them in the original post?
I think @anon50609448 knows I didn’t write that. Somewhere between html blockquotes in the original post, the wordpress-to-discourse bridge and discourse’s own quoting, everything just ends up automagically attributed to me, like so.
It looks like a simple problem, but I bet it isn’t. The only thing I can think of would be to have everything originally in a blockquote not be attribted to the author when quoted in discourse.
I thought I copied the text and just put a ‘>’ in front of it to format the text as a quote like I did in the second quotation from the article. I have no idea what I actually did.
“they deserve to die”
And there, ladies and gentlepersons, is the American conservative elite’s view of poor communities and the people in them, a stance they’ve made abundantly clear time after time. How is it that everyone hasn’t recoiled from them in horror and contempt?
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they
deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they
are indefensible.
Part of this resonates with me. I grew up in a town that had less than 500 people. In its heyday, it had 30,000 people in it. It wasn’t even close to the poorest town around, but was poor enough, and a crappy enough school system, that a whitebread kid like me got a break on college admissions through those progressive admissions standards the conservatives say are soooooo unfair.
The notion that people should just pack up and leave? For the most part, the people who can, do. The same was, and is, true of eastern Kentucky, where my grandpa was from; some folks there left for Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, anywhere there was work. Having said that, we as a country would be in a world of hurt if the author got his way, in most these little towns all over the midwest. Even though less than 5% of Americans work in ag, there are a lot of service jobs that farmers rely on. Do people honestly think their groceries will stay cheap if farmers have to start driving for hours on end just to get to the closest town? Do they think we can just outsource all the farming to other countries? I struggle to understand what the hell they think.
That little town was mostly a victim of automation in shipping. It had a huge trainyard, but once it took a skeleton crew to run the thing, coal miners kept the town going. When the EPA cracked down on high-sulfur coal, almost all the regional coal mines shut down in short order. School districts went from being in the black, to being deeply in the red, in nothing flat. The notion of some of those folks just heading for someplace else? If you got yourself in debt up to your eyeballs, forget it.
Conservatism, to me, resonates on some levels, yet seems to be so shortsighted on others. I’ve worked for some fairly conservative follks, and when times are good, their methods are just fine. But when things go south, they’re sunk. “What can we cut? Who can we lay off?” Never, “What can we do to grow our business, even if it means taking out a loan to get a kickstart?”
Obligatory…
Probably because they think they are “on the way up” to join their overlords, just like all the other boot-strap heroes before them… They know they don’t mean all poor people, just “THOSE” poor people…
If people just blindly hated conservatism, rather than being informed, that would be ignorant, imho.
All the average American wants is to be better than the poor shit-heel who lives down the street.
I am from the third world. I am also from a fairly rich family. There are many languages spoken in my home country. A lot of them could be heard in my father’s factory, because workers kept flooding in from all across the rural areas. They are trying to escape abject poverty, the kind where they have to chose between feeding the kids or themselves. The kind which means you are happy that you get to work a Sunday so you can get the overtime. The kind where they move away from their families so they can support them.
When there is no work, you move. This is what the rest of the world does. That was what the Latin immigrants are doing. And the South Asians. While I would not use the language used in National Review, nor would I use the term responsible, the idea is correct; Poor white communities do not want to face the facts. No amount of protectionism can save the American working class. Starting trade wars with China and Mexico is not going to help anyone, and it would turn the Midwest into the South.
Thanks, but I don’t think I’d like to take the third world as a new model for American life. If you come from a rich family, I think we can assume that it is from starving those poorer than you. In that situation, I would probably gather a mob, come to your house, and steal everything I could get my hands on. You could probably spare a few pieces of furniture.
You might not be aware, but the American working class often has done this, more than you probably realize. But the cost of moving also can prohibit that. Additionally, in many other cultures, there is still an extended family that can help pick up the slack - it’s still not uncommon for grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc, to help with family responsibilities, while a wage earner goes elsewhere for labor. This is far less common and many American working class families are not able to tap into communal and kinship networks in the same way (and when they do, they can).
Additionally, the third world working class is subjected to a fair amount of deep exploitation that isn’t exactly enviable or good for workers there. And what do you think would happen to these labor markets if they were flooded with poor American workers on top of the workers already there? It just isn’t a workable solution. It’s barely workable for the people in these migration patterns already.
I get your point about relative privilege of the American (especially white) working class, but this isn’t much more than calling the American working class lazy, just like the American conservative party have been doing.
At it’s peak our factory employed 500 people.
But if you are a Marxist, then yes all I have done in my life is theft.
Anyway, I do not think you understand what poverty is, and what it can do to you. You and I are speaking from different contexts.
I understand poverty just fine. And I think I have a pretty good grasp of exploitation, as well as smearing people as Marxists. 500 people, eh? Well, that must have made a dent in the poverty! How much did you pay them? Any health care? Sick days? Maternity leave? Vacation?
One of the most ancient of human feelings is the desire for home. A stable place where one can retreat when things get difficult – a place full of memories of your family. Our society has turned that desire – ahem, need – into a commodity that goes to the highest bidder. So we should just not need that anymore because, let’s face it, we can’t really afford it.
Some folks get attached to what could charitably be called an Unemployment Vortex. To explain, that is a community where work is scarce enough that escaping on a Greyhound with the shirt on your back competes with feeding your kids. Perhaps you do escape one day. Say you get educated somehow and chase a good paying tech job into a bustling city. Imagine how delighted everyone is that you made it there! They’ll even let you call the new place home if you have a few hundred K rotting in your savings account. But that’s a ridiculous dream. You’re actually going to show up poor and be even less welcome.
During the Depression, the only cheap means of chasing a job out of town was to illegally hop aboard a train. When you arrived, you got your skull cracked for your troubles. The situation has not advanced by any noticeable degree.
