“if everyone would shut up about their own struggles and pretend that the blue collar white man is the universal subject, we could win” always reliably leads to an alliance with outright bigots and charlatans.
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this is why i was so angry in 2016 about the "bernie woulda won" crowd and the post-election articles about the left-behind white working class as if the working class doesn't include poc and as if no other group of citizens mattered.
They don’t even care that much about the specific people. But making it all about the blue collar white man is much easier because they can project their own subjectivity onto everyone else. Understanding people when you don’t find that easy to is WORK. Then YOU are not the center of ‘the struggle.’
...And now you know why Bernie didn't win, because he and his supporters tried to mainline these kinds of ideas in a party where black southern voters existed.
I saw a man who is supposedly on the Left express that this was the appeal of Jordan Peterson. he speaks to the part of men that feel there was some destiny they were promised as boys that life never gave. like reality doesn't let them be "heroes". I wanted to smack the shit out of him
…that’s just entitlement tho? I don’t understand how anyone could say something like that seriously & not realize how whiny it sounds let alone demand it be taken for real political commentary.
entitlement is at the core of a lot of this. they're entitled to power, status, access to women they're attracted to and on and on. it's only serious because they know too many of them are crazy enough to get violent over it
no one ever asks or cares what "destiny" we're feeding to anyone but white men. but if we don't lay out a 10 point plan for how white men can be the best then there's a flaw in the system
I'm sorry, but this comment is, to my mind, part of the problem. Trump support among Latinos is up to 45%. Among black voters he's up to 20%. Trump lost support among whites in 2024. Trying to explain the situation with a framework of race, pure and simple, is ignoring what's really happening.
To be the core (good) insight of Carter-Clinton-Obama neoliberalism was that government cannot create meaning and purpose in your life. Politics can’t replace family, church, work, community, etc. It seems arnade really hates this idea but it’s unclear what an alternative would be
Democrats are what a political party without any real ideology looks like (there’s an obvious “say what you will about white supremacy” but it is an ethos! It’s the ideology that the right has used to great success for decades while dems embraced markets)
still, to see the concern about kids in cages in 2019 to continuing that policy for 5 years and then to attack republicans on immigration *from the right* is a big example of the party just not having principles
In fairness the edibles were just coming up when I read the post and responded. My brain just jumped ahead like ten inferences and that’s what I typed out
It’s so fuckin grim to have a party that’s completely unwilling or unable to do even the performative stuff like shutting down the camps (or Guantanamo). What do you think you were elected to do?
Um, “from what I’ve observed, in my years of walking cities from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, the bulk of members of a society choose to, and would rather, play a stock character.”
I have reservations about hero worship but did not jump to a racial interpretation reading this.
oh i forgot that i represent the entire new york times. everything you hate about the nyt, that is me. i either personally did it or i am personally responsible for it.
When I used to subscribe to The Globe and Mail I would often see debates back and forth in the op-ed section. I understood there was not some sort of hive mind in the opinion section. Some columnists were great and some...
You came to my my husband’s uni for a talk/lunch once and the profs all asked really boring questions, so I said, “Hey, who do you hate at the NYT?” And while you did not name names (which I respect of course) it was clear the number was not zero.
Blue collar white men don't know about class struggle they've been lied to by john birch into thinking anything that isn't billionaires getting a lot richer is stalinism. Idpol strugglers are kind of mean to white men, that alienates them. Class strugglers are themselves a kind of reducer.
When I moved to TN I realized that racism is waaay more powerful than class, it became clear as day to me. It's not that I was unaware of its effect further north, and I'm certainly aware of its existence in northern states, but wow... anyway I don't doubt some leftier-than-thous have, uh, blinders.
this was also what “do popular things”/shorism always was. what they really meant was “don’t do things that intrude on the social dominance of white men, who we are assuming represent the median American”
either either you recognize that civil rights and political rights are the very core of liberal democracy and must be defended directly, or you’re not really a believer in liberal democracy
also, if i can be petty, it has always annoyed me how this crowd of ivy leaguers and prep schoolers have claimed the mantle of working class authenticity. whereas i am constantly being told that i am an elitist for having a (public) college education.
I come from Oklahoma farmers on both sides of my family, grew up vaxxing cows and bringing in the wheat harvest, but I have 3 degrees across 2 STEM fields so I am The Enemy
Hawley, Cruz, Cotton… these men stood up to the brazen infidels indoctrinating our poor defenseless youth at those faux populist institutions like (checks notes)…
For this crowd, working class implies hard working class, and only white men put in the hard work, while others are either gifted status or cheat code their way to it; either way, it’s undeserved.
This is a key point because it goes back to physicality and that gross old racist belief that PoC (particularly Black people) don’t feel as much pain and have some inherent physical prowess in a less-than-fully-human way.
The prime example of this for me is foghorn leghorn Senator Kennedy from Louisiana. Fulbright scholar pretending he is a yokel. Hawley, Cruz and the rest talking about working class city folk as the elite.
You're an elitist because you're a liberal. Hell, among the red-brown group white male bigotry is seen as some sort of evidence of being untouched by capital and working class, while those who respect pronouns and whatnot are tarnished by liberal elitism.
right. and politically one must indulge that bigotry. never-mind that the actual chief obstacle to social democratic politics in this country has been and remains racism of various stripes.
Kinda weird as someone who teaches future first responders- who are seeing our funding and jobs decimated - being told that it is the Libs who just won't allow men to be heroic.
You’re also an elitist because you write for the NYT.
This means you know how to write for one which intimidates them. For two, they still think of NYT as is “the liberal media“ and not the way that the rest of us here do.
I mean I don’t think that’s petty, that’s the core of it. They see themselves as working class whisperers because they are white men, like the normal American. You’re not, because, well
Whether or not they realize what they think, their actions reveal that they believe themselves to have a mystical link to the American unconsciousness you will never have
If anything, they claim working class status by redefining it as based not on income, job, or level of education, but by culture war stances.
So a BLM protestor and a barista with pronouns on their nametag are elites, while rich, highly educated people who complain about wokeness are working class.
Yeah, I said in a different thread how aggravating it was for him to lecture me, an “elite” due solely to being a coastal liberal, on not knowing what it’s like in Prestonsburg, Kentucky - a place that, by amusing coincidence, I have spent FAR more time in than he ever did.
The problem one of the cores of conservative masculine ideals is that asking for help signals you are a failure. Therefore any mass movement dedicated to helping people out who are in bad spot is inherently suspicious.
I don’t see a problem with Arnade’s essay. It’s not very good—he freelances off thinkers he hasn’t digested—but the idea that (especially young) men are driven by a need for recognition through public sacrifice and that a healthy society finds ways to channel this away from destruction is fine
The initial anecdote is about guys smashing themselves into a bar bathroom door to try to help a woman check on her passed-out husband. True this is a kind of dumb short-term physical model of “sacrifice” which he ridicules a bit; he doesn’t look at virtues like consistency, dependability, humility
I have no idea. But nothing in the essay seemed objectionable to me. I would however have preferred to see more of the recent point people are making that Trump/Vanceist masculinity is adolescent: it has lost older adult masculine ethics of conscientiousness, responsibility and care for the weak.
Arnade’s explicit thesis, which is the raison d’etre of the Free Press, is “progressives are to blame”
He asserts the supposedly universal drive to masculine virtue embodied in hero archetype is valuable to society but is being *smothered by progressivism* because of pluralism
The observation that peoples often look for emotional attachments & meaning beyond material comfort has some explanatory value but it doesn’t really address or explain why fascism flourishes when & where it does
Or maybe they can grow up and realize they aren’t Luke Skywalker and it’s perfectly ok to work and provide for your family and feel validated by their appreciation.
Way back when I was an economic libertarian who believed that civil & political rights were the CORE of liberal democracy. My views haven’t changed that much… but since Republicans don’t actually care about civil & political rights, I’ve always been extremely comfortable voting Democratic.
My hope is that we are leading to a point where being white, or being male, or being American, is just one thing to be among many - not the ultimate thing to be.
Democratic leadership is stuck trying to rerun Clinton's campaign from 1992, with "kitchen table" talking points (inflation, tax cuts).
But right now it's *not* "the economy". It's preserving democracy, stupid. And the public at large doesn't realize it because Schumer et al. refuse to act like it.
("yes, and")
What's really interesting to me is the idealized subject is a blue collar guy but like, it's never an *actual* blue collar guy. THOSE guys might do distasteful things like "join a union" or "use SNAP". So it's all white collar guys imagining how cool they'd be if they were blue collar
💯 The right always has to have costumes for everything & whenever they wanna cosplay working class that costume is always Al from Home Improvement for some reason
I grew up in blue collar families and eventually went to college and became white collar, working as a software engineer. I’ve been shocked over the years when other white collars employees are super impressed by my hanging a fan, or, gasp, remodeling my own kitchen. Like it’s magic or something.
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58438592-fight-like-hell
still, to see the concern about kids in cages in 2019 to continuing that policy for 5 years and then to attack republicans on immigration *from the right* is a big example of the party just not having principles
I have reservations about hero worship but did not jump to a racial interpretation reading this.
Hawley, Cruz, Cotton… these men stood up to the brazen infidels indoctrinating our poor defenseless youth at those faux populist institutions like (checks notes)…
Oh.
My bad. As you were.
That's why JD Vance gets an easy pass despite having spent significant time in Silicon Valley.
https://bsky.app/profile/adamserwer.bsky.social/post/3k67qmmv6zx2m
This means you know how to write for one which intimidates them. For two, they still think of NYT as is “the liberal media“ and not the way that the rest of us here do.
So a BLM protestor and a barista with pronouns on their nametag are elites, while rich, highly educated people who complain about wokeness are working class.
He asserts the supposedly universal drive to masculine virtue embodied in hero archetype is valuable to society but is being *smothered by progressivism* because of pluralism
https://bsky.app/profile/islandofreil.bsky.social/post/3lhriedwdws2n
The observation that peoples often look for emotional attachments & meaning beyond material comfort has some explanatory value but it doesn’t really address or explain why fascism flourishes when & where it does
But right now it's *not* "the economy". It's preserving democracy, stupid. And the public at large doesn't realize it because Schumer et al. refuse to act like it.
What's really interesting to me is the idealized subject is a blue collar guy but like, it's never an *actual* blue collar guy. THOSE guys might do distasteful things like "join a union" or "use SNAP". So it's all white collar guys imagining how cool they'd be if they were blue collar
Blue collar =/= taking the bus to your job at a factory and then your job at a grocery store