Political Language

Kaddie Abdul, “I went to a Trump rally in my hijab. His supporters aren't just racist caricatures”

My (lukewarm) hot take on this:

1. Donald Trump is human garbage, but his supporters are all kinds of people. Much of the media treats his backers with a kind of class-ist condescension and disgust that few deserve.

2. Some Trump supporters can be persuaded to back center-left alternatives, and some nominally center-left voters are vulnerable to becoming Trump supporters. "Bernie is my No. 1 choice, and Trump is No. 2. They’re not that different," said one dude who isn’t as unrepresentative as one would hope. Also, the far-right European parties have their greatest success among voters who previously voted for the organized left. Failing to engage with Trump supporters is a recipe for disaster.

3. However, not everyone can be converted, and frankly, some portion of the Trump base deserves to be shamed and marginalized. As I’ve written before, when a Trump backer says, "We have no spirit. Boys become trannies, grass-eaters. This has a major consequence on our confidence as a nation." (I read Trump supporter Twitter so you don’t have to). And a Sanders-backer replies with, "I hear you, we have to break up the big Wall Street banks. And he says, "Uh, no, LOL, my problem is that 'Rapefugees' are running amok."  And I respond with, "Wow, you must have a lot of economic anxiety!" ... Well, obviously this is not a productive conversation and I’m being obtuse about this voter’s real motivations.

President Obama, SOTU

Devil’s in the details, but wage insurance sounds great. Wholeheartedly endorse.

As for government retraining schemes, the open secret is that, unfortunately, they don’t do much to raise wages or reduce unemployment.

Barnow and Smith (2008) [PDF] give a brief history of job training programs:

In addition to the public employment programs of the Great Depression, the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) [1962-172], the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) [1973-1982], the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) [1982- 1998] and the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) [1998-present] have provided vocational training, along with remedial education, subsidized on-the-job training and job search assistance to disadvantaged youth and adults as well as displaced workers.

And find that the results are extremely modest. From one 1996 study of JTPA:

U.S. General Accounting Office  provides impact estimates for five years after random assignment based on Social Security earnings data. They find stable impacts of around $800 per year for adult (22 and older) men and women which lose statistical significance over time. In contrast, the estimates for male and female youth remain resolutely near zero throughout the follow-up period.

An $800 income boost that becomes statistically insignificant after 5 years and does nothing for young people.

Barnow and Smith conclude:

First, most employment and training programs have either no impact or modest positive impacts. Many if not most do not pass careful social cost-benefit tests, though some that fail may be worth doing on equity grounds. Existing evaluations have important analytic limitations that bias them in favor of programs with short-term impacts and large spillover effects.

All this sucks, because at least in the abstract, job training is a bi-partisan solution to stagnant wages.

Via PPP, the trolliest of polling organizations:

30% of Republican primary voters nationally say they support bombing Agrabah. Agrabah is the country from Aladdin.

Dem primary voters were asked too. They oppose bombing ‘it’ 36/19, while GOP supports bombing 'it’ 30/13.

Trump is at 45% with Republicans who want to bomb Agrabah and only 22% with ones who don’t want to bomb Agrabah.

A couple days ago, Jon Chait wrote about the Paris climate deal as a major Obama administration accomplishment.

I came across this chart today via Nicholas Christakis.

Impressive declines in child-mortality is one of the ways the world has gotten dramatically better over the last century. Today, child mortality in most wealthy countries is below 5 per 1,000 live births.

The US does considerably worse, mostly as a result of large geographic and racial disparities.

Which, to me, is another reason to cringe every time a “let the South secede” or “red staters are real the welfare queens” meme spreads in the wake of some awful policy or statement concocted by a southern, conservative politician.

Freddie deBoer is a harsh critic of the point-and-laugh brand of liberalism.

The argument goes something like: every week, a significant part of internet bandwidth is dedicated to videos of John Oliver “DESTROYING” the GOP, yet somehow the GOP remains distressingly lively. Lively enough to, erm, destroy the Democratic Party at the state and local level, placing Republicans one presidential election away from controlling every important representative body in the country outside of a modest bulwark of deep-blue states.

A corollary of this view is that to sneer at supporters of Donald Trump is to engage in the most counterproductive political advocacy imaginable. Right-wing nationalist movements are largely driven by economic dislocation. So either left-leaning activists try to build a broad coalition of working-class Americans -- many of whom are attracted to the siren call of Trumpism -- with an agenda of economic solidarity, or they’ll watch in impotent fury as forces of the right grow in strength.

There’s a lot here I agree with. Condescension toward Trump voters, or working-class GOP-supporters at-large, isn’t going to organize any workers, win any legislative seats, or pass any bills. Yet deBoer overstates his case.

For one, sharing John Oliver videos -- which are widely shared because they are genuinely funny, not just because they tickle some sense of social superiority among social liberals -- doesn’t preclude any other kind of political action and discussion. The political world deBoer finds himself in sometimes looks nothing like the one I live in, where even the most milquetoast, centrist, and cautious of elected Democrats fight for an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and a refundable Child Tax Credit. Matt Yglesias and company are constantly writing pieces about the impact of relatively obscure but hugely important topics like monetary policy on the well-being of everyone who makes their living through the labor market. More left-y folks are organizing around minimum wage hikes. Unadulterated condescension is a blessedly minor feature of my world.

But more importantly, suggesting that the failure of elites to provide for economic security is the only factor (or so overwhelming a factor as to make others insignificant) behind Trumpism (and right-wing nationalism more broadly) is to ignore the expressed views of millions of Americans. A Reuters-Ipsos polls finds 58% of Americans agreeing with the statement, “[m]ore and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 53% agree with “[t]hese days I feel like a stranger in my own country.” A minority agreed with the statement “America is a place I can feel comfortable as myself.” You can probably puzzle out the correlation between these nativist sentiments and being older, whiter, less-educated, more conservative.

A feeling of cultural dislocation is a real phenomenon, whether anyone likes it or not. An imagined dialogue:

“Why do I have press one to hear English? This is America.”

“So what you’re saying is, the purposeful destruction of organized labor has undermined workers’ bargaining power in a globalized economy.”

“No, I’m saying this used to be a nice neighborhood.”

You can see the problem.

Will a stronger safety-net, a tight labor market, and growing wages help allay the cultural fears of many Americans? Probably, yes. Also, any justice movement worth its salt will want to accomplish these things anyway. Is social-democratic solidarity some kind of panacea? One can ask the Swedes, where a party with frankly neo-Nazi origins commands as much support as the mainstream parties.

Moreover, there’s also the fact that far from every Trump backer is some kind hard-working American with legitimate grievances about the elites of both parties. Take a gander at alt-right Twitter if you want to know what I mean. Some Trumpkins deserve shaming.