3 ms·
This is the best explanation of the psyche of the white working class I have seen on here yet. Every point in here rings true to me, thinking about the way I g
by douche 10y ago
This is the best explanation of the psyche of the white working class I have seen on here yet. Every point in here rings true to me, thinking about the way I grew up and the people I knew, and still know back home in a dying blue-collar resource-extraction and manufacturing economy.
> Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor
> Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor
> Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography
> If You Want to Connect with White Working-Class Voters, Place Economics at the Center
> Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism
And then this is the real kicker, to me:
> One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,”
- scarface74 10y agoI never thought about the "working class resents professionals but not the rich". But looking back, I've gotten a lot more snide remarks when people find out that I live in the affluent 'burbs "without doing a hard days work" than I do about being Black. All the while admiring Trump....
- schoen 10y agoThe article didn't explicitly say so, but this is counterposed by urban liberals who commonly admire professionals (thinking that they possess valuable expertise that should be respected) and are suspicious of the rich (thinking that they likely became rich by exploiting people, by doing something unethical or illegal, or through cronyism). It's not exactly the same cultural contrast, but I remembered this thing that David D. Friedman wrote back in 1995: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/My_Posts/My_View_of_Oughts.html http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/My_Posts/My_View_o... > I have been arguing politics for a long time. In arguing with people on the left, I find it is very hard to come to an agreement on the assumed facts surrounding the situations we are judging. My imaginary capitalist has capital because he worked hard clearing part of the boundless forest while his employee to be was being lazy and living on what he could gather—so it is entirely just that the capitalist gets part of the output of his land and his employee's labor. But the leftist doesn't like that hypothetical. His imaginary capitalist inherited his capital from a father who stole it. I don't like that hypothetical. I conclude that our moral intuitions are similar enough so that the same assumed facts push both of us in the same direction—and since we want to go in opposite directions we want [to] assume different facts.