Controversial Political Opinions

[pbrower2a]

(05-17-2022, 12:41 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Side note: Liberal whites often fail to realize that....white people are just about the most liberal demographic in the United States. The Hispanic and Asian communities have a strong preference for more pragmatic (rather than overtly religious or spiritually motivated) social conservatism. For the most part, most Hispanics and various Asian-American communities have little desire to imitate the broken family structure of typical WASP Americans. I've said it for years now: the predominant middle class in 10-20 years is going to be Asian people, because white culture can't stop tripping over itself with a combination of guilt, celebrating self-destructive romantic habits and grappling with its identity (there is both a left and a right component to this). The PoC conservatives are all over here like "who cares? I'm just trying to make more money and support my family. Oh look! These foolish white people are all dropping out of the competition."

Not so much liberal as permissive. The MAGA crowd is almost lily-white, and I would call MAGA many things, but none of them 'liberal'. 

I was doing some searching of the recently-released 1950 US Census, and I got plenty of side information that I was not searching. I was looking mostly in farming areas and in "hours worked" in the week including April 1, 1950, I typically saw '70' or so for farmers. Sure, it was planting season, and that number might have been lower had the Census been taken based on February 1, 1950. Early April is planting season, and there are fields to plow in the North (let us say northern Indiana) and fields to sow farther south (Arkansas).  Well, farming has never been a good way of making a living if one is lazy and a hard way to make a living if one is industrious.   

People permissive about educational failure, promiscuity, drugs and drunkenness, and criminality get horrible results for their kids.  So make sure that the TV, video games, and recreational 'computing' are off before the homework and household chores are done. Such may have been the norm among farm families due solely to the lack of such technology before 1950 due to the absence of technology, which made it easy for farm families to instil a work ethic.. and later due to the economic realities of farming. Of course America used to be much more rural than it once was. Obviously a teenage farm boy knew that he was not going to do any dating, movie-watching, or tooling around in cars during planting or harvest season; on a dairy farm, the milking of cows determined daily life. Schooling was comparative recreation.  

I'm tempted to believe that much of the growth of the suburban middle class was farm kids deciding after World War II that they had better things to do with their work ethic than farming; the work ethic traveled with them to the new post-WWII economy. Sure, there were people suddenly getting recognition that they were no longer a permanent underclass as were Italian- and Polish-Americans before the War. That is part, but employers had impressed the need for putting profit above fun. 

I doubt that liberal WASP types are permissive about educational slacking, promiscuity, toying with criminality, or simple laziness. Not only is such not middle-class; it is all a course into poverty. Hard work has never been a sure escape from poverty, but its absence practically damns one. 

The most reliable exit from poverty was factory work. Such was so obvious that over a century ago Booker T. Washington reorganized education for smart black kids of college age so that vocational training would be an essential part of the curriculum. There just weren't enough middle-class jobs dependent upon the support of poor black people to create such opportunity. Hard toil in a factory in which skin color mattered little because one's productivity could easily be measured was more likely to get a paying job not as a teacher or preacher.  The alternatives were back to the farm or to domestic service, both of which paid abysmally. Pragmatism and realism do not get perfect results, but anything less may damn one to poverty. 

The problem in the current economy is that the factory work, the usual default for people whose high-school learning wasn't so great or whose parents could not aid them in financial support in college, is far harder to get. Retail? Sears and K-Mart are all but dead, and those two used to be big players. Construction work is as seasonal as it can be. Food service? Fast-food companies love to show where a fast-food job can lead, but the desired jobs are well outside of the fast-food business. 

The MAGA crowd acts, so far as I can tell, as if white privilege (the few black and Hispanic tokens excluded) as if the necessity is to Make (White) America Great Again, if necessary at the expense of others. MAGA is tribal, and white people have shown that they can achieve tribal ends only by hurting everyone else.