As a resident of Maryland (that famous swing state), I find restraining corporate power appealing. But as an erstwhile Republican, I’d suggest making the case for it in more patriotic, capitalist terms: Make our markets free again! Big corporations buy off the refs so they don’t have to compete. Freedom isn’t free; we need police in our markets as much as on our streets, and sometimes you have to wage a trade war abroad to secure free markets at home.
I asked five of my PhD colleagues, and four of them agreed this is an appealing pitch. Since they all own vacation homes in West Virginia, I’m confident 80% of Appalachians would back it, too.
I knew Romney in 2012 was doomed when he refused to play up the fact he was wealthy and independently wealthy many times in excess of the huge starting bankroll he had from his Dad. He had accomplishments in every part of American business life, like flipping companies with Bain, even in non-profit type activities like organizing a winter Olympics. He tried to stick to some Country club demure attitude when he should have been making it very clear that he had good ideas about how to make it in America. Why not? It isnt like you can hide the fact you're a billionaire when you are that in the public eye. Romney never seemed to figure out that American politics likes odds defying winners. Even if you want to angrily claim that this or that President was all fake (go ahead, do the Reagan thing or Nixon or whatever), it doesnt change the fact that winning elections in popular Democracies (structured to operate like a modified Roman Republican system) means you have to do some selling of image. Of the vision you have.
America is a huge place, and winning an election for anything anywhere will involve a little cat hearding. The American voters you will seek to lead will have some natural divisions based on a myriad of factors. I see the most important of these as being Color, namely, Green. You are selling Greenbracks, green pastures and new growth. I dont think Green is an important color because there is some native soil thing about America, but just because this an electoral reality of getting voters to pick you.
Stories save time.
Trump voters are persuaded to act in ways that benefit Trump (voting for him and who he tells them to vote for) because they have an idea where they fit into the story he is telling about America. The point has been made that all voters often believe things that are contradictory and wrong, and often at the same time. Trump though is open and loudly proud about how successful and wealthy he has been. Voters arent stupid. They also know that he has had failures and humiliations. Everyone has those. Why they vote for him is because they like where they fit into his story. The Trump Voter gets to feel something that is directly unifying behind the idea of being An American.
Romney failed at this. He didnt embrace being who he was, meme jokes and all, and he didnt have any sort of story to tell about who his voters would be in the America that he would run and make for them. He seemed vaugely ashamed of the fact that he bought failing companies and turned their inevitable deaths into some sort of salvage. He didnt want us to know that he had other emotions besides aw schucks, and he didnt defend his people (like Palin) and always seemed to want to find agreement with people who attacked them. Tarriffs, trade wars, currency fluctuations, all of it can be elided in your campaign if you have a story that you believe in and that has a nice role to play for the people who you ask to vote for you. Going forward in Presidential elections you will have to have a Trump level story to tell, full of drama and rousing excitement, or you will find yourself losing one election after another.
Really good point here. It really is all in the marketing. What I’ve been hearing since the election over and over again (and here in many of Jeff’s posts) is that the Dem’s turned off a large amount of voters based solely on how they talked about their policy solutions. Their baseline rhetoric really does seem to talk down to the general public and comes across as out of touch with close to 70% of the population.
Your solution does remind me of Bernie’s ‘16 run though. I get that the socialist tag wasn’t helpful for him but his way of explaining what he wanted to do with government was much more “populist” (how about that term getting used and abused the last month eh?) in tone. That is, until the “great awokening” really took over the entire political system. (I hate using the term woke, but this isn’t the place for my normal hand wavy bs)
Unfortunately for the Dems, there is almost no chance they learn this lesson. Even to suggest such a change would bring down condemnation and calls to exile from the always level headed left wing of the party.
Speaking as a lifelong Independent, rabidly anti-Trump, viciously anti-MAGA, and since 2016 absolutely anti-Republican voter and a now-retired working class / union guy, born and raised in an Appalachian state and having spent 5 decades of his adult life making a living as a journeyman skilled tradesman in a Rust Belt state both directly in and sometimes around the domestic American auto industry...
The Democratic Party in general and those in it like Chris Murphy in particular are as blind and tone deaf as a fucking rock at the bottom of a very deep well when it comes to them recognizing what rural and / or working-class people think about Democrats in general and the elites in the national party in particular these days and why they think that way.
Identity politics, blatantly woke bullshit, academic social theory and cultural clap trap doesn't play well either in Appalachia or on the factory floor, or in some steamy big city / small town restaurant kitchen that's somewhere in between. And neither does thin-to-vanishing lip service to working class ideals like fairness and merit, self-reliance and individual responsibility.
Are there racists and bigots and malign actors in Appalachia and in the working class? Well, duh.
But when a working-class stiff looks at another working-class stiff, or when an actual hillbilly, and not some faux version that writes about them in best selling media-dazzling scams, looks at another hillbilly, the first thing he sees is a goddamned working-class stiff or hillbilly, not someone with a different dose of melanin in their skin cells or a different sex drive in their trousers, or cultural heritage in their id or more or less formal education than he might have himself. He sees *himself* before - and sometimes even more - than he sees "the other".
Until he looks and listens to someone like Chris Murphy, who soon becomes something other than relatable and believable because he's too far removed from the realities of the everyday working-class world and rural life and tries to bridge the divide with language that plain-talking working-class / rural schmoes largely like me largely do not understand nor relate to in the least.
So. My advice to Murphy et al would be to climb out of the fucking well and go and get not your hands and fingernails but your ears dirty for a good long while by actually *listening* to working-class and rural people tell you what's important to *them*, all the while refraining from indulging the overpowering urge for you to tell them what *you* think is important.
Until you're willing to do that and to actually learn from it, Chris my boy, the working-class and hillbillies everywhere are going to continue to tell you to kiss their collective asses.
What is so hard to understand? We have exported hourly wage jobs to the third world and imported the third world into the US to fill jobs that can't be exported. The effete seem to have assumed citizens would find other jobs ( like programming? ) and that everyone would prosper with lower prices. Perhaps at the beginning, that was somewhat reasonable, but the current result is that the relative wage level of workers has been lowered and more people are out of the job market completely. When someone came along to say "Enough", they were elected. All the imperfections in the US society that Democrats want to fix, do not carry as much weight as not being able to support your family.
These concerns makes sense to me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were widespread. What doesn’t make sense to me is electing Donald Trump to address these concerns. After all, he was very much the president for an entire term from 2017-2021, yet he did dick-all to fix these things, so why on earth would voters expect him to do so *this* time?
Absolutely, this times 1000. Interestingly, the only commentator I have seen even get close to an answer to this question is Jeff, in his "...people don't know shit" column last month.
I actually do reckon a smart, genuinely charismatic Dem could make "fuck those rich dudes" work for 'em. Combined with a sensible, non-stupid economic policy -- it wouldn't even have to be that radical.
Trouble is, "those rich dudes" include a whole lot of Dems who have strong opinions about whether or not to call those people they don't want in their neighborhoods "unhoused" or "homeless". And people are gonna notice a schmuck who pretends these ideas exclusively belong to underpaid service economy workers. No idea how to thread that needle.
Jeff, I do think Murphy has a point that the country generally is a lot more left economically on traditional issues like minimum wage, support for public schools, tax the rich etc. than one might expect. Look at the referenda that just passed, many in deep red states.
Three referenda to stop the government from giving state revenues to private schools, a backbone conservative objective failed in blue, CO but also in red KY and NE. Minimum wage was increased in AK, MO, and NE. Ranked choice voting was preserved in AK.
It is not that Dem economic populism is unpopular, it is that culturally Dems have become the party of LGBTQ, illegal immigration, homeless encampments, soft on crime, and lecturing the world on how racist and sexist they are.
The most successful candidate against the Republicans in terms of how much more a vote they got than Harris was the Independent Osborne in the NE Senatorial. He was a union leader and working class liberal who didn't have the albatrosses of the Dem cultural baggage and was a secure border advocate. He came within 6% of unseating an incumbent R in a state that Trump won by 20%.
But for Dems to do as Murphy says, they have to reject all the cultural nonsense that Dems support. And not just ignore it like Harris did, but reject it. She certainly didn't put taxpayer funded transgender surgery for prisoners in her ads and platform. But she ignored it, so she bought it, after all she did say it.
Jeff nails it. I’ve been puzzled by Murphy’s brand change, because it’s cringe and sounds scripted. Almost an SNL parody. Chris should look at Ruben Gallego in Arizona.
Ruben ditched his leftist Twitter warrior persona (slamming Buttigieg as a neoliberal) to fully embracing his combat veteran biography, patriotism, and being tougher on the boarder. That pivot helped Gallego become Senator, along with a *big assist* from psychopath Kari Lake.
Appalacia is coal country, and a lot of people make their living off of it. The Democrat Party wants to see their livelihoods eliminated (yes, there is a difference between thermal coal and metallurgical coal, but the point remains).
That's an oversimplification. From what I can find, roughly 15K people in WV work in coal mining and the total employed population is ~750K, so it's not like it's a state of nothing but coal miners. That's just the narrative. And yes, you can start adding in ancillary industries to inflate the number, but that becomes tenuous pretty quickly.
Besides, it cracks me up when people talk about "bringing back" these jobs like they were so wonderful - do you listen to this blog's podcast? Jeff has specifically mentioned that mine collapses were so common 100 years ago that it was barely news anymore...do you really think it's so terrible for the economy to evolve to create different jobs where the likelihood of being buried under a billion tons of rock are lower? I don't.
Thoughtful piece but I’m not certain it’s the economic policies so much as the politicians pitching them and the sales pitches themselves. If Trump advocated for single payer healthcare and made a coherent argument to his base why they would benefit enormously (I know, stop snickering please), I think the concept would have traction. Very much the same for significantly raising the minimum wage. It’s worth keeping in mind that broad-based socialist-adjacent government programs like Medicare and social security are still so popular that Trump vowed to protect them during the campaign.
Your Connecticut word cloud is cute, though I’ll bet places like Bridgeport, Hartford, and Willamantic weren’t surveyed, else “abandoned factories,” “despair,” and “violence” would have registered. Also (and I speak as a one who grew up in a New Jersey white-flight suburb and remembers his middle-school classmates going gaga for George Wallace in 1972), the good people of Appalachia’s abandonment of the Democratic Party is part of a process that began with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964/65 and more or less ended with the election and re-election of Barack Obama in 2008/12 (not the only reasons, but let’s not kid ourselves, either).
But yes, Chris Murphy seems to be transitioning from effective legislator to Bernie Sanders Mini-Me right before our eyes; at least (for now) he doesn’t delight in backstabbing.
What you describe has a long history. Thus Orwell on England in the 1930s:
“The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.”
You make a sweeping and hugely damning statement about the people of the region based on your recollections of middle schoolers in 1972. Who's kidding who?
I think you’ll find I used the qualifiers “part of the process” and “not the only reasons.” But if you don’t want to believe that racial animus played a part in this transformation (of which my classmates from half a century ago, and their parents, were a tiny part), that’s your right.
Since we are granting "rights" here, explicitly calling a very large group of people racists but using little qualifiers while doing so is "your right." It doesn't change the fact that you are calling a very large and diverse group of people racists. Ironic that the general topic here is out of touch Progressives.
Let us stipulate that all people of good will and keen minds agree with Mr Maurer that "active antitrust policy and narrowly-tailored consumer protections are good, and . . . trade restrictions and price controls are bad." I fear that sterling wisdom is not all that helpful in forming actual policy because cui bono and whose ox.
This whole student loan forgiveness thing was a train wreck waiting to happen. The easiest thing was to make student loan debt eligible for bankruptcy while loosening bankruptcy restrictions but no!
Why? See my previous note about Biden and big banks.....
Well, the government guarantees principal and interest on these loans, so the holders of student loan debt don't care about bankruptcy. They are getting paid no matter what. The government eats the loss, which is why they aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy (just like tax debt isn't).
And without the government guarantee, the student loans wouldn't exist. Nobody is going to lend money to a college student with no income, allow them to defer interest until graduation (i.e. indefinitely), and then let them limit their payment if their income is low. Let alone at the prime rate of interest.
So let the parents cosign. Or work and save up the money. Demonstrate your trustworthiness in Community College. The government shouldn't be into loan guarantees. Let banks do that, they know who is a risk and who isnt.
Now for those truly deserving students who are poor and demonstrate hard work, yes, those are grants and I support them, or allow loan guarantees for areas that the country needs and that guarantee a job- teachers, nurses, physical therapists.
But to carte blanche give a loan to anybody at an expensive private school taking a major that rarely pays off, that is stupid.
Doesn't the government directly hold most student loan debt at this point anyway? There's little functional difference between forgiveness and making the debt dischargeable, except that the latter procedure I guess introduces enough friction that not everyone will take advantage.
It is owned by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, income funds. All that would happen is that the government would make the payments to the investor that instead of the student.
Yea that hasn't been true for probably a decade. I just looked it up and the amount of federal direct loans (i.e., those held on the Department of Education's own books) surpassed FFEL loans (i.e., privately-made, federally-guaranteed) sometime in 2012; today, DoE hold about $1.4 *trillion* in outstanding student loan debt compared to just $165 billion held by private lenders with a federal guarantee.
Murphy meh. Hard to take him seriously when Clinton hollowed out America with NAFTA, Biden took orders from big banks to make bankruptcy worse for working families and the Great Recession/COVID solutions saw shareholders reap BILLIONS while working families got pennies and 4 free masks. This happens over and over and I'm done with it!
I’m just not sure government healthcare is correctly put in the same bucket as the rest of this stuff. It requires much less explanation: voters at least *think* they know what it means. And it’s big and juicy and attention worthy unlike most of the rest.
If dems don’t do much new with the welfare state and the GOP doesn’t take away much, there is no actual reason for the conservative poor to vote with their class: because we’ll just trundle along with Medicare for Some and a random assortment of stuff for single mothers, like we’ve always done.
As a resident of Maryland (that famous swing state), I find restraining corporate power appealing. But as an erstwhile Republican, I’d suggest making the case for it in more patriotic, capitalist terms: Make our markets free again! Big corporations buy off the refs so they don’t have to compete. Freedom isn’t free; we need police in our markets as much as on our streets, and sometimes you have to wage a trade war abroad to secure free markets at home.
I asked five of my PhD colleagues, and four of them agreed this is an appealing pitch. Since they all own vacation homes in West Virginia, I’m confident 80% of Appalachians would back it, too.
I knew Romney in 2012 was doomed when he refused to play up the fact he was wealthy and independently wealthy many times in excess of the huge starting bankroll he had from his Dad. He had accomplishments in every part of American business life, like flipping companies with Bain, even in non-profit type activities like organizing a winter Olympics. He tried to stick to some Country club demure attitude when he should have been making it very clear that he had good ideas about how to make it in America. Why not? It isnt like you can hide the fact you're a billionaire when you are that in the public eye. Romney never seemed to figure out that American politics likes odds defying winners. Even if you want to angrily claim that this or that President was all fake (go ahead, do the Reagan thing or Nixon or whatever), it doesnt change the fact that winning elections in popular Democracies (structured to operate like a modified Roman Republican system) means you have to do some selling of image. Of the vision you have.
America is a huge place, and winning an election for anything anywhere will involve a little cat hearding. The American voters you will seek to lead will have some natural divisions based on a myriad of factors. I see the most important of these as being Color, namely, Green. You are selling Greenbracks, green pastures and new growth. I dont think Green is an important color because there is some native soil thing about America, but just because this an electoral reality of getting voters to pick you.
Stories save time.
Trump voters are persuaded to act in ways that benefit Trump (voting for him and who he tells them to vote for) because they have an idea where they fit into the story he is telling about America. The point has been made that all voters often believe things that are contradictory and wrong, and often at the same time. Trump though is open and loudly proud about how successful and wealthy he has been. Voters arent stupid. They also know that he has had failures and humiliations. Everyone has those. Why they vote for him is because they like where they fit into his story. The Trump Voter gets to feel something that is directly unifying behind the idea of being An American.
Romney failed at this. He didnt embrace being who he was, meme jokes and all, and he didnt have any sort of story to tell about who his voters would be in the America that he would run and make for them. He seemed vaugely ashamed of the fact that he bought failing companies and turned their inevitable deaths into some sort of salvage. He didnt want us to know that he had other emotions besides aw schucks, and he didnt defend his people (like Palin) and always seemed to want to find agreement with people who attacked them. Tarriffs, trade wars, currency fluctuations, all of it can be elided in your campaign if you have a story that you believe in and that has a nice role to play for the people who you ask to vote for you. Going forward in Presidential elections you will have to have a Trump level story to tell, full of drama and rousing excitement, or you will find yourself losing one election after another.
Really good point here. It really is all in the marketing. What I’ve been hearing since the election over and over again (and here in many of Jeff’s posts) is that the Dem’s turned off a large amount of voters based solely on how they talked about their policy solutions. Their baseline rhetoric really does seem to talk down to the general public and comes across as out of touch with close to 70% of the population.
Your solution does remind me of Bernie’s ‘16 run though. I get that the socialist tag wasn’t helpful for him but his way of explaining what he wanted to do with government was much more “populist” (how about that term getting used and abused the last month eh?) in tone. That is, until the “great awokening” really took over the entire political system. (I hate using the term woke, but this isn’t the place for my normal hand wavy bs)
Unfortunately for the Dems, there is almost no chance they learn this lesson. Even to suggest such a change would bring down condemnation and calls to exile from the always level headed left wing of the party.
Speaking as a lifelong Independent, rabidly anti-Trump, viciously anti-MAGA, and since 2016 absolutely anti-Republican voter and a now-retired working class / union guy, born and raised in an Appalachian state and having spent 5 decades of his adult life making a living as a journeyman skilled tradesman in a Rust Belt state both directly in and sometimes around the domestic American auto industry...
The Democratic Party in general and those in it like Chris Murphy in particular are as blind and tone deaf as a fucking rock at the bottom of a very deep well when it comes to them recognizing what rural and / or working-class people think about Democrats in general and the elites in the national party in particular these days and why they think that way.
Identity politics, blatantly woke bullshit, academic social theory and cultural clap trap doesn't play well either in Appalachia or on the factory floor, or in some steamy big city / small town restaurant kitchen that's somewhere in between. And neither does thin-to-vanishing lip service to working class ideals like fairness and merit, self-reliance and individual responsibility.
Are there racists and bigots and malign actors in Appalachia and in the working class? Well, duh.
But when a working-class stiff looks at another working-class stiff, or when an actual hillbilly, and not some faux version that writes about them in best selling media-dazzling scams, looks at another hillbilly, the first thing he sees is a goddamned working-class stiff or hillbilly, not someone with a different dose of melanin in their skin cells or a different sex drive in their trousers, or cultural heritage in their id or more or less formal education than he might have himself. He sees *himself* before - and sometimes even more - than he sees "the other".
Until he looks and listens to someone like Chris Murphy, who soon becomes something other than relatable and believable because he's too far removed from the realities of the everyday working-class world and rural life and tries to bridge the divide with language that plain-talking working-class / rural schmoes largely like me largely do not understand nor relate to in the least.
So. My advice to Murphy et al would be to climb out of the fucking well and go and get not your hands and fingernails but your ears dirty for a good long while by actually *listening* to working-class and rural people tell you what's important to *them*, all the while refraining from indulging the overpowering urge for you to tell them what *you* think is important.
Until you're willing to do that and to actually learn from it, Chris my boy, the working-class and hillbillies everywhere are going to continue to tell you to kiss their collective asses.
What is so hard to understand? We have exported hourly wage jobs to the third world and imported the third world into the US to fill jobs that can't be exported. The effete seem to have assumed citizens would find other jobs ( like programming? ) and that everyone would prosper with lower prices. Perhaps at the beginning, that was somewhat reasonable, but the current result is that the relative wage level of workers has been lowered and more people are out of the job market completely. When someone came along to say "Enough", they were elected. All the imperfections in the US society that Democrats want to fix, do not carry as much weight as not being able to support your family.
These concerns makes sense to me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were widespread. What doesn’t make sense to me is electing Donald Trump to address these concerns. After all, he was very much the president for an entire term from 2017-2021, yet he did dick-all to fix these things, so why on earth would voters expect him to do so *this* time?
Absolutely, this times 1000. Interestingly, the only commentator I have seen even get close to an answer to this question is Jeff, in his "...people don't know shit" column last month.
Sssh you are spoiling it for all the consultants and gurus that have to sell their own exotic theory.
Seems to me that a flaw in Jeff's analysis is that it heavily conflates economic populism with socialism and those are definitely not the same thing.
I actually do reckon a smart, genuinely charismatic Dem could make "fuck those rich dudes" work for 'em. Combined with a sensible, non-stupid economic policy -- it wouldn't even have to be that radical.
Trouble is, "those rich dudes" include a whole lot of Dems who have strong opinions about whether or not to call those people they don't want in their neighborhoods "unhoused" or "homeless". And people are gonna notice a schmuck who pretends these ideas exclusively belong to underpaid service economy workers. No idea how to thread that needle.
Jeff, I do think Murphy has a point that the country generally is a lot more left economically on traditional issues like minimum wage, support for public schools, tax the rich etc. than one might expect. Look at the referenda that just passed, many in deep red states.
Three referenda to stop the government from giving state revenues to private schools, a backbone conservative objective failed in blue, CO but also in red KY and NE. Minimum wage was increased in AK, MO, and NE. Ranked choice voting was preserved in AK.
It is not that Dem economic populism is unpopular, it is that culturally Dems have become the party of LGBTQ, illegal immigration, homeless encampments, soft on crime, and lecturing the world on how racist and sexist they are.
The most successful candidate against the Republicans in terms of how much more a vote they got than Harris was the Independent Osborne in the NE Senatorial. He was a union leader and working class liberal who didn't have the albatrosses of the Dem cultural baggage and was a secure border advocate. He came within 6% of unseating an incumbent R in a state that Trump won by 20%.
But for Dems to do as Murphy says, they have to reject all the cultural nonsense that Dems support. And not just ignore it like Harris did, but reject it. She certainly didn't put taxpayer funded transgender surgery for prisoners in her ads and platform. But she ignored it, so she bought it, after all she did say it.
Jeff nails it. I’ve been puzzled by Murphy’s brand change, because it’s cringe and sounds scripted. Almost an SNL parody. Chris should look at Ruben Gallego in Arizona.
Ruben ditched his leftist Twitter warrior persona (slamming Buttigieg as a neoliberal) to fully embracing his combat veteran biography, patriotism, and being tougher on the boarder. That pivot helped Gallego become Senator, along with a *big assist* from psychopath Kari Lake.
Occam's Razor.
Appalacia is coal country, and a lot of people make their living off of it. The Democrat Party wants to see their livelihoods eliminated (yes, there is a difference between thermal coal and metallurgical coal, but the point remains).
That's an oversimplification. From what I can find, roughly 15K people in WV work in coal mining and the total employed population is ~750K, so it's not like it's a state of nothing but coal miners. That's just the narrative. And yes, you can start adding in ancillary industries to inflate the number, but that becomes tenuous pretty quickly.
Besides, it cracks me up when people talk about "bringing back" these jobs like they were so wonderful - do you listen to this blog's podcast? Jeff has specifically mentioned that mine collapses were so common 100 years ago that it was barely news anymore...do you really think it's so terrible for the economy to evolve to create different jobs where the likelihood of being buried under a billion tons of rock are lower? I don't.
Well, the left is like the woman who walks into someone's house and demands to rearrange the furniture.
And is oblivious that this might piss off the homeowner.
Congrats, you win the award for Worst Metaphor of the Day.
you might want to google the difference between a metaphor and an analogy.
You missed the point.
While I disagree with you substantially, I also disagree with you procedurally. He used the work "like", so it's a simile, not a metaphor.
My point stands.
Thoughtful piece but I’m not certain it’s the economic policies so much as the politicians pitching them and the sales pitches themselves. If Trump advocated for single payer healthcare and made a coherent argument to his base why they would benefit enormously (I know, stop snickering please), I think the concept would have traction. Very much the same for significantly raising the minimum wage. It’s worth keeping in mind that broad-based socialist-adjacent government programs like Medicare and social security are still so popular that Trump vowed to protect them during the campaign.
Your Connecticut word cloud is cute, though I’ll bet places like Bridgeport, Hartford, and Willamantic weren’t surveyed, else “abandoned factories,” “despair,” and “violence” would have registered. Also (and I speak as a one who grew up in a New Jersey white-flight suburb and remembers his middle-school classmates going gaga for George Wallace in 1972), the good people of Appalachia’s abandonment of the Democratic Party is part of a process that began with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964/65 and more or less ended with the election and re-election of Barack Obama in 2008/12 (not the only reasons, but let’s not kid ourselves, either).
But yes, Chris Murphy seems to be transitioning from effective legislator to Bernie Sanders Mini-Me right before our eyes; at least (for now) he doesn’t delight in backstabbing.
What you describe has a long history. Thus Orwell on England in the 1930s:
“The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.”
"let’s not kid ourselves"
You make a sweeping and hugely damning statement about the people of the region based on your recollections of middle schoolers in 1972. Who's kidding who?
I think you’ll find I used the qualifiers “part of the process” and “not the only reasons.” But if you don’t want to believe that racial animus played a part in this transformation (of which my classmates from half a century ago, and their parents, were a tiny part), that’s your right.
Since we are granting "rights" here, explicitly calling a very large group of people racists but using little qualifiers while doing so is "your right." It doesn't change the fact that you are calling a very large and diverse group of people racists. Ironic that the general topic here is out of touch Progressives.
One more (an anecdote): Being Hispanic from South Texas I heard
"I hate being called LatinX by those Democrats" and "too much immigration it's bad" over and over!
I'm French and I can save scrupulous fact-checkers some effort: I had to Google what Old Milwaukee was, and the result still didn't ring any bell.
Let us stipulate that all people of good will and keen minds agree with Mr Maurer that "active antitrust policy and narrowly-tailored consumer protections are good, and . . . trade restrictions and price controls are bad." I fear that sterling wisdom is not all that helpful in forming actual policy because cui bono and whose ox.
This whole student loan forgiveness thing was a train wreck waiting to happen. The easiest thing was to make student loan debt eligible for bankruptcy while loosening bankruptcy restrictions but no!
Why? See my previous note about Biden and big banks.....
Well, the government guarantees principal and interest on these loans, so the holders of student loan debt don't care about bankruptcy. They are getting paid no matter what. The government eats the loss, which is why they aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy (just like tax debt isn't).
And without the government guarantee, the student loans wouldn't exist. Nobody is going to lend money to a college student with no income, allow them to defer interest until graduation (i.e. indefinitely), and then let them limit their payment if their income is low. Let alone at the prime rate of interest.
So let the parents cosign. Or work and save up the money. Demonstrate your trustworthiness in Community College. The government shouldn't be into loan guarantees. Let banks do that, they know who is a risk and who isnt.
Now for those truly deserving students who are poor and demonstrate hard work, yes, those are grants and I support them, or allow loan guarantees for areas that the country needs and that guarantee a job- teachers, nurses, physical therapists.
But to carte blanche give a loan to anybody at an expensive private school taking a major that rarely pays off, that is stupid.
IMO, the schools should pay for the credit wrap as a condition to allowing students to borrow.
And any mass loan forgiveness should require schools to cough up some of their endowments.
Treat it the way we handled cigarettes and asbestos.
Doesn't the government directly hold most student loan debt at this point anyway? There's little functional difference between forgiveness and making the debt dischargeable, except that the latter procedure I guess introduces enough friction that not everyone will take advantage.
It is owned by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, income funds. All that would happen is that the government would make the payments to the investor that instead of the student.
Yea that hasn't been true for probably a decade. I just looked it up and the amount of federal direct loans (i.e., those held on the Department of Education's own books) surpassed FFEL loans (i.e., privately-made, federally-guaranteed) sometime in 2012; today, DoE hold about $1.4 *trillion* in outstanding student loan debt compared to just $165 billion held by private lenders with a federal guarantee.
Source: https://studentaid.gov/data-center/student/portfolio
Murphy meh. Hard to take him seriously when Clinton hollowed out America with NAFTA, Biden took orders from big banks to make bankruptcy worse for working families and the Great Recession/COVID solutions saw shareholders reap BILLIONS while working families got pennies and 4 free masks. This happens over and over and I'm done with it!
I’m just not sure government healthcare is correctly put in the same bucket as the rest of this stuff. It requires much less explanation: voters at least *think* they know what it means. And it’s big and juicy and attention worthy unlike most of the rest.
If dems don’t do much new with the welfare state and the GOP doesn’t take away much, there is no actual reason for the conservative poor to vote with their class: because we’ll just trundle along with Medicare for Some and a random assortment of stuff for single mothers, like we’ve always done.