The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Classic-Xer]

(01-24-2020, 11:23 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-22-2020, 12:49 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: ... I don't live in a liberal run banana republic like St.Paul or Minneapolis. I live in an American suburb that has no interest in ending up being like either of them. We have to remind the Democratic politicians that they could easily be directly challenged and replaced by any of us if they forget where they live and get to far out of line with our values and start acting more like city liberals than Democrats these days. You see, the greatest threat to them are the private sectors who aren't interested in doing jobs these days. Yes, you run the risk of losing talent to us like you have been doing for years and are seeing the results of these days.

Minneapolis-St. Paul sounds like one of the most livable urban areas in America. I saw a measure of social conditions by state, and Minnesota was toward the top. I looked at statewide credit ratings for residents, and Minnesota was near the top (and I used credit ratings as measures of people coping with economic reality. People more often end up in trouble with credit because of inability to meet taxes, medical bills, utility costs, and the like than because they eat out too much or splurge on vacations and wardrobes. I suggested that if one graduated from the University of Southern Illinois and got a chance to sign a local contract to be a schoolteacher in Mississippi (not surprisingly toward the bottom on economic and social reality) or Minnesota but dreaded Minnesota winters -- accept the winters because the district in which one teaches is more likely to have the means (local tax revenues) with which to supply a school and pay an adequate salary. The greater Twin Cities are a big part of the population of Minnesota, so they figure big. Michigan would do similarly well in its social metrics as Minnesota if it had the Twin Cities instead of the dump that is Detroit.

One thing that I have noticed about Suburbia: it may have begun with some very rural characteristics, but it has become increasingly urban. The older suburbs, mostly forming just after the Second World War, were designed with infrastructure such as sewers and streets suited for surviving the original owners (largely returning GI veterans). The expected life of such infrastructure is over, so you can draw your own conclusions of what sort of costs will arise in replacing such infrastructure. If you want to see what happens when a community is unable to replace or renovate such infrastructure, then look at Detroit as the wave of a very bleak urban future. Yuck!

The tiny suburban houses -- 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1-car garage -- from the late 1940's are much out of vogue; many of those have been demolished with large apartment complexes replacing them. Big apartment complexes generate more traffic than the inefficient little bungalows that used to be there, so that creates traffic jams that require widening of once-quiet, verdant, narrow streets.  And where do people in those apartment complexes shop? You guessed it -- big box stores. Populations of many suburbs are becoming more ethnically and economically diverse -- just as in the cities that they used to be distinct from.  

...Sometimes I think myself a dinosaur because I tolerate obsolete technology (I was that way even in good times) because it is still serviceable. The little mathematical exercise of subtracting my age from my birth-year gives a time in the 1890's -- the horse-and-buggy era. But I can see indelible, irreversible trends, one of which is that Suburbia is becoming legitimately urban -- and the suburban politics of such a place as Orange County, California will never again be what they were in the 1970's... again. So it is with Will County, Illinois; Westchester County, New York; Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Eaton County, Michigan; or Montgomery County, Maryland.  St. Louis County, Missouri (not to be confused with the dump that is the city of St. Louis, Misery) is becoming an urban dump in its own right. Is that progress? The Vietnamese-Americans and Mexican-Americans taking over Orange County, California in economics and politics see their presence as progress for themselves. That's nothing to judge. 

The tendency is in earlier stages in such places as Cobb County, Georgia; Hamilton County, Indiana; Collin County, Texas; Livingston County, Michigan... and  I would guess Dakota, Carver, Anoka, and Washington Counties in Minnesota. As Suburbia becomes urban it needs bus lines to get those apartment dwellers who live "twelve-in-one-room in A-may-ree-kah" (reference to West Side Story) on the minimum wage to their jobs, wider roads and more parks that require the demolition of housing to accommodate, big expenditures on expanding school buildings and hospitals, let alone rehabilitating or building new sewers and power lines. Such is not deterioration of your world; it is simply change beyond our ability to stop or really judge. Suburbia simply is losing its old rural characteristics and becoming urban -- even in politics. You can run from the tendency of urban characteristics in Suburbia and even hide by going to isolated rural areas that people are leaving out of economic despair as the jobs vanish. If the economic order necessitates very badly-paid people with shaky employment, then you will need welfare.

You cannot escape some inevitable and irreversible trends. You adapt or you suffer. What is inevitable and irreversible is that America is becoming less stereotypical in its ethnic mix, that the population is increasing as a whole, and that additions to cultural life will accrete to what we already have (after some culling of junk). The finely-tuned brain can create marvels of great value out of a small amount of material investment, and such could be what makes America tolerable when it has 400 million people. America has a tendency to reject ethical and intellectual failure in politics, especially the broken promises, corruption, and anti-intellectualism of someone so awful as Trump. You may loathe Obama (even if not out of racism), but I happen to like political figures who eschew demagoguery, avoid corruption, treat victims of misfortune not their cause with kindness, prefer education and rational processes to gut feelings, recognize the validity of tradition as a stopgap when things go bad, and see integrity as a tool instead of an impediment. Donald Trump may have said that countries ruled by black people inevitably become $#!+holes even if they are America...

Guess what? Plenty of conservatives are beginning to recognize that Obama was a good President except perhaps for being a bit too 'liberal'.

The suburbs are pretty nice but in the cities you don't want to venture/stray to far outside the safe zones or touristy or wealthier areas. My cousin lives in Minneapolis about 12 blocks away from the hood in a cool old house. Her basement windows are barred. She has a high tech security system and her picket yard fence has spear tips. She's fortunate, she has a heavily armed police outpost/fort a few blocks away from the home. I was told by locals, I could enter the hood ( BTW, the hood is no longer just black these days) with little concerns about my life or physical well being because the hood understands the necessity of heat and electricity and other basic necessities (public utilities) associated with professional tradesmen. However, petty theft and robbery was not completely off limits so you had to take precautions like completely securing your vehicle and hiding anything of significant personal value prior to leaving the vehicle. In other words, you lock your wallet in your vehicle too. Back in the day, my old boss refused to accept paying bribes to ex union related officials associated with St. Paul's Inspections Department like his father and uncles had done for many years which made doing business in St. Paul and other affiliated suburbs much easier and less troublesome. Yes, I am familiar with how quid pro quo systems work and familiar with the negative impacts when they're commonly used and allowed by urban minded Democrats. 

Obama was to permissive, to coddled and to into coddling and to uncaring and indecisive and to into himself, his beliefs and what he wanted done and wanted accomplished and hang his hat on than doing his job as an American president or to liberal as we say. His wife, well, she's different than him and probably understands America a lot better than him too. She's old school and she probably came from an old school working class neighborhood that happened to be be black. Like I say, this is boiling down to a major issue/ dispute between the differences between the classes of two cultures mainly modern day liberal culture vs good old American culture. I understand this, do you understand this? I understood that 15 years ago, did you understand that 15 years ago? Like I've said, liberal culture better prepare itself for the education it's going to receive for the next decade or so as it continues to clash and finds itself at odds with good old American values and core American principles.
You weren't here when liberal culture found itself at odds with a strong person who represented good old right leaning main stream American culture and a strong person who represented good old right leaning American Evangelical rural culture and a strong female poster from good old American main stream Democratic culture.