Joe Biden: polls of approval and favorability

[pbrower2a]

(01-22-2022, 08:05 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(01-22-2022, 05:13 PM)David Horn Wrote: I don't see the young moving toward the Trumpists.  I don't see them fleeing in horror either.  They seem more disgusted than angry, and resigned to their fate. 

I agree that the 4T may fizzle. I don't see it as a left-right thing though.  The youth, both Millennial and Z, are less idiomatic in that sense.  Stress has led them to view the world in the starkest of terms, and that degree of realism doesn't promote the kind of cohesion needed to create movements.  What might break through and trigger another wave of political engagement is something only a Millennial (or Z) might be capable of producing.  The one missing and necessary element: a real leader they can rally around and follow.  Biden's not it.

I disagree about the end of the saeculum, though.  The so-called ACW anomaly may have merely be the FOAK for transformational 4Ts.  How it plays this time is TBD, but assuredly not like the last 4T.

Agree that Biden hasn't been the cheerleader for the young.  Thing is, he has identified the right positions on the right issues.  I'm still hopeful that the steady obstruction of the Republicans will cost them in the mid terms.  If you are going to solve the problems we are facing, it is clear you have to give the Democrats a few more seats in the Senate.  If he gets that, Biden looks very different.

Yes, in prior crisis nobody had trouble about getting behind change.  Democracy, not being on the wrong side of colonial imperialism, slavery, enabling the industrial revolution over a government controlled by agriculturalists, letting the government regulate the economy and containing expansionists powers all attracted the youth of the time.  This time, the need seems less pressing to a rural population who doesn't see the difficulties as clearly.  At the time Covid was politicized, it was more an urban problem.  Prejudice is desired in the rural areas.  Attempts to overthrow democracy weren't as obvious.  The environment still seems wild and exploitable enough.  Trump's criminality was not as obvious.  It is still not clear that the rural folk will see the problems, but two votes in the Senate might be possible?

In the introduction to the life of the shtetl  Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof the leading characters of the community are introduced, one of the figures is of course the highly-learned rabbi who is noted for having a blessing for anyone and everything. One of the Jews asks "Is there a blessing for the Tsar?'

To this the Rabbi responds, "May the Lord keep and bless the Tsar... far away from us!"

The more distant a powerful creep is and less likely to do harm, the safer he is to his potential victims.  People in urban areas and suburbia find Donald Trump easy to recognize for the vile, loathsome creep that he is. This dreadful man is much that city-dwellers despise: an extreme narcissist with an overweening sense of entitlement, someone who in economic life puts his hooks into someone's personal and economic life and keeps taking while offering little more than the threat of separating one from what one considers a basic decency in life or a survival need. He is the bad boss who sees a subordinate who exists solely to make that executive look good and the landlord who sees a tenant as nothing more than an income stream. He is also the skirt-chasing maniac around whom no woman beyond the end of childhood (which opinion changes should he be connected to the Epstein/Maxwell ring of high-profile perverts). Urban America (and Suburbia is becoming legitimately urban as it loses such rural character such as low density) knows him well. It is telling how Trump did in the three states (Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York) that have been most exposed to him as a Personality through the news media that have exposed his sordid character over time in the 2016 and 2020 elections:

rank/
state    '16   '20
CT        11     8
NJ        10   13
NY         6     6    

The numbers are the years in which Trump ran for President, and below those years the rank from the bottom among the states in voting for him. Ordinarily over time a person acclimatizes to the community in which he lives and to the cultural and behavioral norms. Even for such failures as Goldwater in 1964, McGovern in 1972, Carter in 1980, and Mondale in 1984, such pols have done  well, or at least relatively well in their home states. The only state that Goldwater won outside of "Kukluxistan" was his home state, Arizona. McGovern lost South Dakota, but he did sixth-best by stare there. Carter's best state in 1980 was Georgia in the most troubled bid for re-election for President since at least Hoover. Mondale barely won his home state, Minnesota, in 1984 -- and the District of Columbia.   

People in the Tri-State Area surrounding the Big Apple know Trump about as Arizonans knew Goldwater, South Dakotans knew McGovern, Georgians knew (or know) Carter, and Minnesotans knew Mondale; the difference is not that they recognize Trump as an obnoxious and offensive character. To be sure, Trump has no voting record and thus has never brought home any political goodies like highway funds, military bases, or farm subsidies -- but people who live in the biggest media market have had more exposure to the grandiose expressions of his overweening self.

But -- if one lives out in the sticks, where Trump does not invest and where he does not seek to indulge himself, he might be a hero for sticking it to sophisticated urban dwellers --"rootless cosmopolitan" types proud of their formal learning, having more of a cultural connection to some foreign country, contemptuous of such gross ignorance as young-earth creationism, indifferent or even hostile to 'whiteness', and accepting of feminism and homosexuality instead of 'family values'. Never mind that people can be highly ethical and exemplify Christian morality without being Christian (actually, "Christian morality" is really Jewish morality) and that urban dwellers can see the sleaze of America at its immoral worst and reject that -- I love to contrast Dearborn to abutting southwest Detroit...the Muslims seem to hate prostitution, drugs, drunkenness, and brawling and I would suggest that anyone who indulges in prostitution, drugs, drunkenness, and brawling avoid Dearborn. Then again I am an arch-conservative on family values except on feminism and homosexuality because other divergences lead to great harm to children and other vulnerable people. I have written some nasty diatribes against pornography and even worse against human trafficking, much of which involves forced prostitution.

Trump is seen in rural America as someone who agrees with them about people whom city folk have the reputation of believing that their excrement has some delightful aroma. (OK, rural folks typically have indoor plumbing by now and are proud of it. It has been an absolute necessity in giant cities for over a century just to prevent outbreaks of cholera). 

The rural-urban divide is one of the most common, and one of the most pervasive in history. It typically overpowers even the class struggle, with smallholder peasants often siding with urban plutocrats against city-slickers on taxes and spending. In most democracies, small farmers are the cornerstone of mass support for the conservative party. (Obviously if the peasants are landless laborers or tenants being gouged they are very much on the Left but typically are excluded from the vote, and the Party representing the rural elite is arch-reactionary and hostile to anything urban and learned).    

Trump is an exploiter and abuser, which should make him a pariah everywhere. For people in the sticks, his exploitation and abuse is of people that the rustic types hold in contempt for being denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah.