07-06-2017, 11:04 AM
(07-05-2017, 12:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I may be a negative partisan, but I still think the only way those states can reduce their misery index, is to learn which party is against them, and which one is really for them. Nowadays, they vote their values and their anger at liberals for pointing out their errors. If instead they voted their interests, and dropped their phony ideologies imposed and brainwashed into them about self-reliance, immigration, militarism and religion, they could gain programs like they used to have when they voted Democratic. Government and social programs would improve their life conditions. Investments could be made in new industry there instead of in military adventures abroad. Regulations would hold down pollution, which ruins their health. Instead of voting for their coal bosses, they could vote for new clean industries. Instead of focusing on resentment of black people for getting money from their taxes, and fear of losing their guns, they could get more tax money for themselves for better schools and highways.
Between trashy media, religious quackery, and even opioid dependency, some people often have little opportunity to exercise rationality in normal life, so why should one expect such people to act rationally in politics? But the poorest people feel life hard in their economic lives. For poor white people, Donald Trump offers nostalgia for a time in which there were plenty of well-paid industrial jobs for white people, when the cost of living was lower, and when people were more likely to heed a preacher than a professor. For such people his "Make America Great Again" offers a hope for a better world by returning to what existed in the past. Of course there are things that he cannot solve.
Even so, the industrial jobs are not returning; we are through the age in which people could get their happiness through spending on manufactured goods. In contrast to the comparatively austere times just after World War II we have a glut of manufactured stuff. Production of stuff is mostly for replacement due to deterioration, loss, or gross obsolescence. Non-replacement is mostly due to population growth. The cost of living has increased largely due to an increase in population. If one is sixty one can remember when the population of the USA was about half what it is now, and... the Lord just isn't creating any more real estate. Anyone who owns rental properties in an area of population or economic growth has an easy way of getting more money easily -- just raise the rent, as Donald Trump does. Note also that more people implies a greater need for public infrastructure from highways and bridges to sewers and power lines. More infrastructure does not imply any economy of scale beyond a certain point.
Unless we are to have the horror of genocide, crop failures that lead to mass death from famine, a plague that kills off half the people, or apocalyptic war... population is not going to shrink fast enough to make life better for survivors. Zero Population Growth is a good idea for allowing some balance -- but the Right seems to oppose the usual controls on runaway population growth that raises rents and cuts pay. After all it can profit (as does Donald Trump) by raising the rent. For every Donald Trump there are hundreds of slumlords. In rural areas that means landlords of tenant farmers or big landlords who hire plenty of farm workers cheaply. Big landowners in rural areas and big urban landlords are much of the backing of the Right in most countries. But New York, Boston, and California renters have an obvious cause to oppose the agenda of rentier landlords. Farm workers in the Mississippi delta region might be helpless against the Junker-like agrarian bosses. This may explain why economic distress in high-density urban areas pushes people to the Left and rural poverty in the South pushes politics to the Right.
Quote:Also, some red states in the west have a higher quality of life than red states in the misery belt overall. That's partly because they actually practice some self-reliance in things like exercise, stopping smoking and eating less fat. They are also less hooked on drugs. But the Republican Party's answer to opiates is to put addicts in jail and waste money on drug wars. The Democrats know that treatment programs work better. Again, it's a question of people in the misery belt voting their prejudices instead of their needs.
If one is a real farmer or rancher -- or farm laborer or ranch hand -- one must stay in shape just to do one's work. But opiates? As a rationalist I dislike them, but I can see better ways than a judicial and penal war on addicts (especially non-white addicts!) Treatment is far more effective than incarceration because jail terms do nothing to solve the mess inside an incarcerated person. Prevention can come from offering people viable alternatives to wallowing in drugs. Our educational system well prepares people for a world in which one does a job and goes home to vegetate in front of a TV, chips in one hand and beer or sugary soft drinks in the other, and no capacity for criticism of the content of the television programming piped in (or on occasion the heavily-touted feature film or the vapid video game). Someone with a high-quality education looks upon such as if a penal term.
Just think of the contrast between the 'Sixties and now on drugs. In the 'Sixties many of the Best and Brightest sought chemicals offer 'mind expansion'. Now the drugs heavily in use (including illicit meth, opioids that may have started with legitimate medical need, and the completely-licit booze) and are intended to numb a mind and conscience. Don't forget the numbing schlock of the 'plug-in drug', a/k/a television.
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There is no root cause other than their dedication to Trump and Republicans.
Donald Trump is a symptom of a cancer of the American soul -- especially the mass white soul. The 2016 election showed that non-white members of the middle class rejected Donald Trump resoundingly even though they had economic interests fitting an Eisenhower-style conservatism. Update Eisenhower-style conservatism some and you have Obama.
I do not yet have polls for any of the States of the High Plains except for Oklahoma (which is more like West Virginia than like Nebraska) or Texas (which straddles regions and does not even constitute a region in its own right. To be sure, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas have about as many electoral votes together as Michigan or Georgia, two states that will get much attention in 2018 and 2020.
Donald Trump is something that America has little heritage of dealing with -- the demagogue. He will fail to solve problems; he has already sold out the masses that he gulled. Donald Trump is a sick joke to the educated middle class as a rent-gouging landlord who exploits the need of much of the educated middle class to live in high-cost areas like New York City, Boston, Washington, and big urban centers on the West Coast. But as someone who fleeces the educated, secular middle class in high-cost urban areas he could pose as a sort of folk hero to people not so well off. The demagogue offers the biggest scam ever pulled off, one that makes the likes of Enrob executives and Bernie Made-off look like small-scale grifters by contrast -- someone who hurts others for the wish-fulfillment of those not well off. The solution for poor white people is to put more effort into education and rely less upon mass media. Hurting the middle-class by compelling them to pay more for what they need on behalf of the elites while giving poor, angry people some self-righteous satisfaction as a return for giving them lower wages and higher costs of living? Now that is a hustle!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.