The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(08-19-2022, 08:51 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-17-2022, 03:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Wyoming has no such Blue Collars who hate "elites". They support Trump Republicans by a 4-1 margin. To support Trump is to support the elite. To support Trump is to support a tyrant and oppose democracy. Wyoming is beyond the pale of any kind of decency or fairness. Wyoming voters just cannot be reached. What we've got here is failure to communicate. So, they need to "get it", and get defeated, and if they rebel to slap them down hard and their guns confiscated.

Just who comprises the elites in Wyoming if not the old-line GOP?  Look at the Cheneys as prime examples.  They, along with others of their ilk, are rich and powerful, and more inmportant, owners of "the means of production".  In Wyoming, that's fossil fuels and ranching.

Now, look at the blue collar types.  They are rightly angry, but they have decided that the elites aren't properly attentive to the GOP shibboleths of God, guns and gays, along with anyone not native to the state.  Thes are the issues more important to them than assuming actual power in the traditional sense.  Will this degrade into low-level chaos?  Perhaps.

It will not benefit the few Democrats, though ... and they know it.

The alliance between the raw laborers (oil-field workers, above-ground miners, and ranch hands) and ill-paid service workers (store clerks, food-service people, motel staff, and the like) and the resource-extracting elites is neurotic at best. But that has been the essence of the GOP appeal. It has told people that instead of the classic struggle between the richest economic elites (especially big land owners, mass employers in low-paying businesses,  and the resource-extractors) and the toilers no longer exist. The economic elites provide the opportunity and the workers provide the toil, and the economic elites decide what is available to the masses. The masses who believe this are still resentful, but the GOP diverts their anger to people of different culture (whether ethnicity or religion, let alone sexuality) and toward "intellectuals" who ridicule mass superstition, a mindless mass culture, and  manipulative media such as FoX Propaganda Channel. The most rapacious pigs in Wyoming point to the "intellectual elite"  as the English teacher who corrects bad grammar in a kid, a science teacher who ridicules such garbage as young-earth creationism. Wyoming seems like the sort of place in which the stupider one is, the happier one generally can be. That is so in much of GOP country.  Note well: schoolteachers may not qualify as intellectuals (the Education school in most universities is mostly the academic low end)  

One of the differences between the R world and the D world is that the R world, however los in income, still has more people living in single-family dwellings. This is not so much a state-to-state issue as an urban-rural divide. This divide exists just as much in strongly-D Illinois in statewide (if not local politics outside Chicagoland) and into until-recently strong-R Texas. People are more likely to be tenants in Chicago or Houston. Go fifty miles away and people are likely to have a single-family house even if it is a dreary shack. If one owns a dreary shack one at least does not have a landlord as an exploiter and has less cause to hate the GOP, one of whose biggest suppliers of funds is urban landlords.  Even if one has a highly-fulfilling and responsible job in a great metropolitan area, one usually has a landlord to exploit one. If one has a highly-fulfilling and responsible job these days one almost certainly has a good college education, and one can recognize that one is getting $crewed badly. 

The GOP is, to put it bluntly, largely the Party of the Stupid, and by now it takes a certain level of stupidity more than it takes belief in free markets and class privilege to be a Republican -- which now almost always means a Trump supporter.  More important now is to uplift mindlessness than to adhere to old standards of legality.  If one can tolerate mass stupidity in the name of maximizing profit or executive competition one can still be GOP. 

Donald Trump is an authoritarian who holds the normal decencies of democracy in contempt. Nobody can now question this. He has taken the GOP, which has had tendencies in this direction beginning with Ronald Reagan, into the neurotic Realm of the Absurd to the extent that legal scrutiny of his misdeeds are traitors to some "Real America". Others, like Gingrich, Atwater, Rove, Palin, and DeLay made their contributions in the political sphere. Religious hucksters such as Falwell, Hagee, Swaggart, and the wealth-cult televangelists have played their roles.     

Marx' class struggle between powerful exploiters and has been a big part of life since the start of the industrial era. Maybe it isn't only between owners of the manufacturing plants and giant (Junker-like) estates and oppressed workers; others, like those who have soft jobs in commercial and State bureaucracies can exploit too. Just look at the executive elite of the USA, the old Soviet nomenklatura, and the successors of the Soviet nomenklatura in Putin-era kleptocracy and crony capitalism.

It is far easier to overpower and exploit people if they are stupid. That is how all totalitarian regimes operate -- in part, ensure that education is reduced to narrow training that neglects the quality of life. If you hear the words "bar talk" out of context in the English-speaking world and think of a Hungarian composer and not "What's your sign, baby?", then you likely ill fit Trump's world.