8 ms·

> Britain tried being "open" but it backfired in a big way. Care to elaborate? > the united states continues to be culturally very open and meritocratic. Hmm

by orf 11y ago

> Britain tried being "open" but it backfired in a big way. Care to elaborate? > the united states continues to be culturally very open and meritocratic. Hmm... tell that to Trump, the frontrunner for one of your two parties.

krapp 11y ago
>Hmm... tell that to Trump, the frontrunner for one of your two parties. Trump's politics are reactionary, and play on a fear that the demographics and culture of the US are becoming too open and "meritocratic." His success is actually a sign that this phenomenon exists, and that people are terrified of it.
- orf 11y ago
  Or that there are just "more brown people about". That doesn't mean America is becoming more open as a society, there is still rampant discrimination against blacks at all levels of society. The last lynching/crow laws are within living memory for gods sake.
  - krapp 11y ago
    Incremental progress is still progress.
  - mineshaftgap 11y ago
    It is very common for Europe to believe they are more diverse, they are not. Look we have Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. Very diverse.
- douche 11y ago
  Are Trump's politics actually reactionary, or not? I am not sure I have a good sense of what his actual policies would be. Saying things that he's said about immigration might appear reactionary, but I'm not sure it's not as much a play to Peoria, where the lower and middle class whites that still make up the majority of the electorate are feeling the pain of globalization and the erosion of their traditional economy. As a big business New Yorker, I suspect he'd be a lot more of a centralist on many issues than anyone else in the race right now, possibly on either side of the aisle.
  - maratd 11y ago
    He's not a centrist, liberal, or conservative. He's a populist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Are Trump's politics actually reactionary, or not? His politics are actually reactionary, yes. > I am not sure I have a good sense of what his actual policies would be. Whether his actual policies would be reactionary is a different question from whether his actual politics are reactionary. > Saying things that he's said about immigration might appear reactionary, but I'm not sure it's not as much a play to Peoria, where the lower and middle class whites that still make up the majority of the electorate are feeling the pain of globalization and the erosion of their traditional economy. Sure, its populist; that doesn't stop it from also being reactionary. (Sanders, likewise, is populist, but rather the opposite of reactionary.)
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Reactionaries actually have sort of a program. Trump leans more towards hucksterism-for-its-own-sake. He's brilliant at that but I'm not sure that's right for politics per se. Hucksterism works better when you can fold your tent and move on. Professor Harold Hill hadda leave town for it to truly work. I don't think he's dishonest about it. There's just in general copious amounts of what they used to call "free-floating anxiety" and somebody's gotta exploit it. I think he's sincerely trying to help. I would hate to be him if he ever figures out this won't work. The problem is media in general, and media in general is not incented to report widely on the problems of media in general. I suppose it would be considered too frivolous, but I think teaching some entry-level media criticism skill to, say, junior high kids would go a long way towards making this less of a thing. I at least tried to make sure my kids knew this and had basic algebra skills with an eye towards being able to enforce some degree of rigor. I'm happy with the results, but it really confused them while I was telling them this. At one point, I'd have said Canada does not have this problem but since then, it's started.
mikeash 11y ago
Trump is in no way representative of the country as a whole. He exists as a phenomenon because a relatively small minority really likes him, and because the Republicans have not managed to find any candidate even slightly worthwhile. When you see that Trump is polling at 31% or whatever, keep in mind that 31% of early Republican primary voters is a pretty small number of people. With a more normal candidate you might take that as being in some way representative of the wider population, but Trump is probably not going to gain much more support than he already has, since he's so extremely polarizing.
- api 11y ago
  If by "small minority" you mean "blue collar working class" then yes. These are the losers of globalization and they are seething with rage and would vote for Hitler if it would bring back jobs.
  - hysterix 11y ago
    Blue collar workers would vote for Hitler. Ahh yes, glad to see there is still civil discussion on ycombinator.
    - api 11y ago
      I was being a bit hyperbolic but I think the level of anger is nearly there, yes. For all but the highest skill brackets of the workforce, real wages have fallen since around 1970 while everything else (food, energy, real estate, tuition, health care) has gone up. You can't do that to people and expect anything good to come of it. I think Trump (and to a lesser extent Sanders) is only a preview. We'll see a full-blown fascist or hard-line socialist candidate eventually if this doesn't reverse. I also wasn't meaning to badmouth blue collar folks. On the contrary, I was trying to communicate just how much anger there is out there outside of BubbleLand. Sometimes you have to be hyperbolic to get your point across and get people to wake up and see what's happening. The middle of America has been in a depression since 2000... that's going on 15 years.
- pc86 11y ago
rayiner 11y ago
And yet you the U.S. has birthright citizenship and none of the big EU countries (France, UK, Germany) do. Even those like Trump who oppose it have limited their attacks to illegal immigrants, while in the big EU countries even the children of legal immigrants aren't automatically citizens. Also, consider the shitstorm over Syrian refugees. Just a few years of dealing with the kind of illegal immigration Americans have faced for decades, and Europeans got really racist really fast.
- douche 11y ago
  I'm not sure Europeans are really as open-minded as they seem to be portrayed to be. When I was in Berlin in 2009, I regularly encountered opinions from Berliners regarding mostly Turkish immigrants that wouldn't be unlikely to hear from a good-ole boy in Appalachia talking 'bout them damn Mexicans... But then there were also people drunks I encountered on May Day that were dancing and chanting Obama. Weird contrast. I do believe it's going to get a little ugly dumping that many immigrants into such homogeneous populations.
- tartuffe78 11y ago
  As an American, I would say our illegal immigrants tend to be a lot closer to us culturally than what Europeans are experiencing.
dang 11y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996698 and marked it off-topic.

by orf 11y ago

krapp 11y ago

>Hmm... tell that to Trump, the frontrunner for one of your two parties. Trump's politics are reactionary, and play on a fear that the demographics and culture of the US are becoming too open and "meritocratic." His success is actually a sign that this phenomenon exists, and that people are terrified of it.

orf 11y ago
Or that there are just "more brown people about". That doesn't mean America is becoming more open as a society, there is still rampant discrimination against blacks at all levels of society. The last lynching/crow laws are within living memory for gods sake.
- krapp 11y ago
  Incremental progress is still progress.
- mineshaftgap 11y ago
  It is very common for Europe to believe they are more diverse, they are not. Look we have Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. Very diverse.
douche 11y ago
Are Trump's politics actually reactionary, or not? I am not sure I have a good sense of what his actual policies would be. Saying things that he's said about immigration might appear reactionary, but I'm not sure it's not as much a play to Peoria, where the lower and middle class whites that still make up the majority of the electorate are feeling the pain of globalization and the erosion of their traditional economy. As a big business New Yorker, I suspect he'd be a lot more of a centralist on many issues than anyone else in the race right now, possibly on either side of the aisle.
- maratd 11y ago
  He's not a centrist, liberal, or conservative. He's a populist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Are Trump's politics actually reactionary, or not? His politics are actually reactionary, yes. > I am not sure I have a good sense of what his actual policies would be. Whether his actual policies would be reactionary is a different question from whether his actual politics are reactionary. > Saying things that he's said about immigration might appear reactionary, but I'm not sure it's not as much a play to Peoria, where the lower and middle class whites that still make up the majority of the electorate are feeling the pain of globalization and the erosion of their traditional economy. Sure, its populist; that doesn't stop it from also being reactionary. (Sanders, likewise, is populist, but rather the opposite of reactionary.)
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Reactionaries actually have sort of a program. Trump leans more towards hucksterism-for-its-own-sake. He's brilliant at that but I'm not sure that's right for politics per se. Hucksterism works better when you can fold your tent and move on. Professor Harold Hill hadda leave town for it to truly work. I don't think he's dishonest about it. There's just in general copious amounts of what they used to call "free-floating anxiety" and somebody's gotta exploit it. I think he's sincerely trying to help. I would hate to be him if he ever figures out this won't work. The problem is media in general, and media in general is not incented to report widely on the problems of media in general. I suppose it would be considered too frivolous, but I think teaching some entry-level media criticism skill to, say, junior high kids would go a long way towards making this less of a thing. I at least tried to make sure my kids knew this and had basic algebra skills with an eye towards being able to enforce some degree of rigor. I'm happy with the results, but it really confused them while I was telling them this. At one point, I'd have said Canada does not have this problem but since then, it's started.

mikeash 11y ago

Trump is in no way representative of the country as a whole. He exists as a phenomenon because a relatively small minority really likes him, and because the Republicans have not managed to find any candidate even slightly worthwhile. When you see that Trump is polling at 31% or whatever, keep in mind that 31% of early Republican primary voters is a pretty small number of people. With a more normal candidate you might take that as being in some way representative of the wider population, but Trump is probably not going to gain much more support than he already has, since he's so extremely polarizing.

api 11y ago
If by "small minority" you mean "blue collar working class" then yes. These are the losers of globalization and they are seething with rage and would vote for Hitler if it would bring back jobs.
- hysterix 11y ago
  Blue collar workers would vote for Hitler. Ahh yes, glad to see there is still civil discussion on ycombinator.
  - api 11y ago
    I was being a bit hyperbolic but I think the level of anger is nearly there, yes. For all but the highest skill brackets of the workforce, real wages have fallen since around 1970 while everything else (food, energy, real estate, tuition, health care) has gone up. You can't do that to people and expect anything good to come of it. I think Trump (and to a lesser extent Sanders) is only a preview. We'll see a full-blown fascist or hard-line socialist candidate eventually if this doesn't reverse. I also wasn't meaning to badmouth blue collar folks. On the contrary, I was trying to communicate just how much anger there is out there outside of BubbleLand. Sometimes you have to be hyperbolic to get your point across and get people to wake up and see what's happening. The middle of America has been in a depression since 2000... that's going on 15 years.
pc86 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago

And yet you the U.S. has birthright citizenship and none of the big EU countries (France, UK, Germany) do. Even those like Trump who oppose it have limited their attacks to illegal immigrants, while in the big EU countries even the children of legal immigrants aren't automatically citizens. Also, consider the shitstorm over Syrian refugees. Just a few years of dealing with the kind of illegal immigration Americans have faced for decades, and Europeans got really racist really fast.

douche 11y ago
I'm not sure Europeans are really as open-minded as they seem to be portrayed to be. When I was in Berlin in 2009, I regularly encountered opinions from Berliners regarding mostly Turkish immigrants that wouldn't be unlikely to hear from a good-ole boy in Appalachia talking 'bout them damn Mexicans... But then there were also people drunks I encountered on May Day that were dancing and chanting Obama. Weird contrast. I do believe it's going to get a little ugly dumping that many immigrants into such homogeneous populations.
tartuffe78 11y ago
As an American, I would say our illegal immigrants tend to be a lot closer to us culturally than what Europeans are experiencing.

dang 11y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996698 and marked it off-topic.