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Nativism is a reaction to the decline of the middle classes prospects. Half of America is not doing well and has been overlooked. The better educated amongst u

Nativism is a reaction to the decline of the middle classes prospects. Half of America is not doing well and has been overlooked. The better educated amongst us are blinded by their own progress and weren’t looking inward. We will see more focus on nativist policies in our lifetime as automation continues to eat jobs.

jasonlotito 7y ago
> Half of America is not doing well and has been overlooked. I wasn't aware they were looking for government handouts to fix their own failings. Instead of waiting for the government to give them government jobs, they should instead take some personal responsibility for their current state. > The better educated amongst us are blinded by their own progress and weren’t looking inward. Seems to me like the better educated among us were busy taking ownership of our lives instead of doing the bare minimum and hoping nothing ever changed. > We will see more focus on nativist policies in our lifetime as automation continues to eat jobs. This has been well known for decades know, and at least for the past decade, people have been made well aware that this is coming. The previous President made this very clear that these jobs aren't coming back. This leaves people with a choice. Either life themselves up by their own bootstraps and take some personal responsibility in their lives, or give up more freedoms to government control. Seems a shame that these nativists seem to want things for free without doing the work to get it.
- dang 7y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines. Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jasonlotito 7y ago
    That must be newly introduced in the last few days, considering the comments and posts I still see presented here frequently. Nevertheless, I'll take it to heart and flag things that break it.
    - dang 7y ago
      You might have a mistaken idea of how much we're able to process here. HN gets many more comments and submissions than we're able to look at. Moderation amounts to spot checking.
refurb 7y ago
Yet the middle class in the US is far wealthier than most countries’ middle class.
- pixl97 7y ago
  And? If you had $150,000 last year then only $50,000 this year you're relative situation is worse. You don't take how well someone in Africa is doing.
  - didericis 7y ago
    Yeah, for a lot of people it's more about trajectory than the numbers. Even going up doesn't necessarily mean anything with inflation. And it's very hard to find essentials like housing here if you don't have a lot of money. I'm not very educated on the details of all this, but something about using long term mortgages as investment vehicles seems to be screwing with the market. I don't really understand why a low end house costs something like $100,000 but a top of the line phone costs $1,000. The education, infrastructure, and materials required to make a house are all generally speaking a lot easier to come by than all of what's required for a phone. I know you can factory build phones and you need labor for a house, but you can factory build most of what a home is made of, too, and it's not like there isn't a lot of labor involved in all kinds of parts of a phone's journey (design, marketing, manufacturing, transportation, sales). I guess most of it has to do with land being finite and all the parts that make up a house? But something about that argument doesn't sit quite right with me either. It's very weird that a basic shelter, which is something people have been building themselves for thousands of years without any of the sophisticated tools we have now, is 100x more expensive than buying one of the most sophisticated, hard to design and manufacture things yet devised by man. I know houses have heating, cooling, plumbing, electricity, etc and aren't as simple as they used to be, but the price difference still seems wonky. For a while I fantasized about building an obscenely simple house and living like a monk to save money and see how minimal I could get. I've done some camping and feel like I'd be happy living in a tent with a YMCA membership. But that's really not an option. There's no where to put up a tent or even a very modest little shack without paying tens of thousands of dollars for a strip of land to put it on, and you're never going to find much other than apartment buildings close to most of the places the work is. So even without the social stigma of living in a tent, you can't really do it. I'm not saying life for the average person in Africa is better, and I generally agree with the sentiment that most Americans under-appreciate all the comforts of modern life. But what's frustrating about the whole thing is there's not really a way to opt-out, and the entry price here for "being a normal part of society" seems to require most middle or lower class people to go into debt. It's a wonky, unnatural set up.
bloopernova 7y ago
Correct. A lot of people wanted an "outsider" and to "drain the swamp". In other words they don't feel represented by their elected officials, or treated fairly by the government, and they want things to change. Despite this desire being co-opted and twisted by Trump's campaign and Fox News, the underlying feelings are valid for a lot of people across the USA. The Democratic party should have realized this back during Obama's "Hope" campaign. A message of change, of saying "what's happening right now isn't right and we need to fix that", that message really resonates with a lot of people. Of course, as Obama found out when he became president, "the swamp" has its own interests at heart. All that good energy and hope broke like a wave against that huge political cliff, and had far less impact than everyone needed. If you ask a lot of people to articulate this sort of feeling, they'll have difficulty. Hence the easier to understand populist rhetoric coming from Trump. He steered that behemoth of public opinion towards xenophobia and other negative feelings. It's easier to blame the other than to look deeply at your own life. The Democratic party has to understand this or Trump will easily win his second term. Back when Trump got the Republican nomination, I had a deeply unsettling gut feeling about the election. Trump was entertaining, Clinton was not. In the same way, Obama was entertaining, McCain was not. Bush was entertaining, Kerry was not. Gore was not. I unfortunately don't really see any entertaining people on the Democratic side. As for the automation question, I think Trump, or his Republican successor, could pivot very easily to saying that robots are going to take Good Old-Fashioned American Jobs(tm) and a lot of people will follow that message.
- godelski 7y ago
  > As for the automation question, I think Trump, or his Republican successor, could pivot very easily to saying that robots are going to take Good Old-Fashioned American Jobs(tm) and a lot of people will follow that message. I think this is interesting, because there's a Democratic candidate, Andrew Yang, gaining popularity because of this (relatively, considering he's coming out of nowhere). Though taking it with a different attitude. But I think this kinda goes to show that the message resonates across party lines (like with what you said about Obama and Trump).
- humanrebar 7y ago
  > All that good energy and hope broke like a wave against that huge political cliff, and had far less impact than everyone needed. He seemed happy enough with the party-line vote in the Senate on the first major bill of his presidency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... And he wasn't too concerned about bipartisanship when it came to passing the ACA only a year later, arguably the biggest bill of the decade. There were several forms of procedural hardball happening in the process of passing that. It was certainly passed narrowly and along party lines. And, partly because of the lack of bipartisan agreement, not all of it survived court challenges. If it's true that Obama was genuinely optimistic and down on cynicism during his 2008 campaign, he must have wised up quickly. Otherwise, maybe people read some things into the "Hope" message that weren't actually there. He came from the Chicago school of politics, though, so I'm skeptical that the narrative of broken good energy really fits. And I think this sort of thing feeds into the Trump narrative of a "swamp" that needs draining. Obama certainly didn't come up with Washington partisanship, but the hard landing after all the Hope posters probably increased cynicism on the whole and gave Trump a chance. Remember, he didn't exactly win his election by a landslide.
justinjlynn 7y ago
> has been overlooked You mean exploited?
- chillwaves 7y ago
  By whom exactly?
  - justinjlynn 7y ago
    One doesn't ask a question to which one already knows the answer. It's just bad form.

jasonlotito 7y ago

> Half of America is not doing well and has been overlooked. I wasn't aware they were looking for government handouts to fix their own failings. Instead of waiting for the government to give them government jobs, they should instead take some personal responsibility for their current state. > The better educated amongst us are blinded by their own progress and weren’t looking inward. Seems to me like the better educated among us were busy taking ownership of our lives instead of doing the bare minimum and hoping nothing ever changed. > We will see more focus on nativist policies in our lifetime as automation continues to eat jobs. This has been well known for decades know, and at least for the past decade, people have been made well aware that this is coming. The previous President made this very clear that these jobs aren't coming back. This leaves people with a choice. Either life themselves up by their own bootstraps and take some personal responsibility in their lives, or give up more freedoms to government control. Seems a shame that these nativists seem to want things for free without doing the work to get it.

dang 7y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jasonlotito 7y ago
  That must be newly introduced in the last few days, considering the comments and posts I still see presented here frequently. Nevertheless, I'll take it to heart and flag things that break it.
  - dang 7y ago
    You might have a mistaken idea of how much we're able to process here. HN gets many more comments and submissions than we're able to look at. Moderation amounts to spot checking.

refurb 7y ago

Yet the middle class in the US is far wealthier than most countries’ middle class.

pixl97 7y ago
And? If you had $150,000 last year then only $50,000 this year you're relative situation is worse. You don't take how well someone in Africa is doing.
- didericis 7y ago
  Yeah, for a lot of people it's more about trajectory than the numbers. Even going up doesn't necessarily mean anything with inflation. And it's very hard to find essentials like housing here if you don't have a lot of money. I'm not very educated on the details of all this, but something about using long term mortgages as investment vehicles seems to be screwing with the market. I don't really understand why a low end house costs something like $100,000 but a top of the line phone costs $1,000. The education, infrastructure, and materials required to make a house are all generally speaking a lot easier to come by than all of what's required for a phone. I know you can factory build phones and you need labor for a house, but you can factory build most of what a home is made of, too, and it's not like there isn't a lot of labor involved in all kinds of parts of a phone's journey (design, marketing, manufacturing, transportation, sales). I guess most of it has to do with land being finite and all the parts that make up a house? But something about that argument doesn't sit quite right with me either. It's very weird that a basic shelter, which is something people have been building themselves for thousands of years without any of the sophisticated tools we have now, is 100x more expensive than buying one of the most sophisticated, hard to design and manufacture things yet devised by man. I know houses have heating, cooling, plumbing, electricity, etc and aren't as simple as they used to be, but the price difference still seems wonky. For a while I fantasized about building an obscenely simple house and living like a monk to save money and see how minimal I could get. I've done some camping and feel like I'd be happy living in a tent with a YMCA membership. But that's really not an option. There's no where to put up a tent or even a very modest little shack without paying tens of thousands of dollars for a strip of land to put it on, and you're never going to find much other than apartment buildings close to most of the places the work is. So even without the social stigma of living in a tent, you can't really do it. I'm not saying life for the average person in Africa is better, and I generally agree with the sentiment that most Americans under-appreciate all the comforts of modern life. But what's frustrating about the whole thing is there's not really a way to opt-out, and the entry price here for "being a normal part of society" seems to require most middle or lower class people to go into debt. It's a wonky, unnatural set up.

bloopernova 7y ago

Correct. A lot of people wanted an "outsider" and to "drain the swamp". In other words they don't feel represented by their elected officials, or treated fairly by the government, and they want things to change. Despite this desire being co-opted and twisted by Trump's campaign and Fox News, the underlying feelings are valid for a lot of people across the USA. The Democratic party should have realized this back during Obama's "Hope" campaign. A message of change, of saying "what's happening right now isn't right and we need to fix that", that message really resonates with a lot of people. Of course, as Obama found out when he became president, "the swamp" has its own interests at heart. All that good energy and hope broke like a wave against that huge political cliff, and had far less impact than everyone needed. If you ask a lot of people to articulate this sort of feeling, they'll have difficulty. Hence the easier to understand populist rhetoric coming from Trump. He steered that behemoth of public opinion towards xenophobia and other negative feelings. It's easier to blame the other than to look deeply at your own life. The Democratic party has to understand this or Trump will easily win his second term. Back when Trump got the Republican nomination, I had a deeply unsettling gut feeling about the election. Trump was entertaining, Clinton was not. In the same way, Obama was entertaining, McCain was not. Bush was entertaining, Kerry was not. Gore was not. I unfortunately don't really see any entertaining people on the Democratic side. As for the automation question, I think Trump, or his Republican successor, could pivot very easily to saying that robots are going to take Good Old-Fashioned American Jobs(tm) and a lot of people will follow that message.

godelski 7y ago
> As for the automation question, I think Trump, or his Republican successor, could pivot very easily to saying that robots are going to take Good Old-Fashioned American Jobs(tm) and a lot of people will follow that message. I think this is interesting, because there's a Democratic candidate, Andrew Yang, gaining popularity because of this (relatively, considering he's coming out of nowhere). Though taking it with a different attitude. But I think this kinda goes to show that the message resonates across party lines (like with what you said about Obama and Trump).
humanrebar 7y ago
> All that good energy and hope broke like a wave against that huge political cliff, and had far less impact than everyone needed. He seemed happy enough with the party-line vote in the Senate on the first major bill of his presidency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... And he wasn't too concerned about bipartisanship when it came to passing the ACA only a year later, arguably the biggest bill of the decade. There were several forms of procedural hardball happening in the process of passing that. It was certainly passed narrowly and along party lines. And, partly because of the lack of bipartisan agreement, not all of it survived court challenges. If it's true that Obama was genuinely optimistic and down on cynicism during his 2008 campaign, he must have wised up quickly. Otherwise, maybe people read some things into the "Hope" message that weren't actually there. He came from the Chicago school of politics, though, so I'm skeptical that the narrative of broken good energy really fits. And I think this sort of thing feeds into the Trump narrative of a "swamp" that needs draining. Obama certainly didn't come up with Washington partisanship, but the hard landing after all the Hope posters probably increased cynicism on the whole and gave Trump a chance. Remember, he didn't exactly win his election by a landslide.

justinjlynn 7y ago

> has been overlooked You mean exploited?

chillwaves 7y ago
By whom exactly?
- justinjlynn 7y ago
  One doesn't ask a question to which one already knows the answer. It's just bad form.