US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception
Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2018 6:51 pm
There have been a number of events and articles the last couple of weeks that I find meaningful in what they say about the state of politics in the United States. In large measure these articles and events highlighted what to me is a gap between how we perceive ourselves and those we view as the political "other". And this gap between perception and reality is, in my opinion, largely the responsible force pushing the partisan divide wider and wider apart like two magnets that have aligned their same poles to one another.
The Atlantic's article on the 9.9% should be credited for providing structure around which my thoughts have organized. Below are a few links covering the variety in preference for either watching videos or reading articles:
Magazine article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... cy/559130/
YouTube video:
http://www.stashmedia.tv/atlantic-the-a ... istocracy/
From the article (and left out of the YouTube video):
These special forms of wealth offer the further advantages that they are both harder to emulate and safer to brag about than high income alone. Our class walks around in the jeans and T‑shirts inherited from our supposedly humble beginnings. We prefer to signal our status by talking about our organically nourished bodies, the awe-inspiring feats of our offspring, and the ecological correctness of our neighborhoods. We have figured out how to launder our money through higher virtues.
Most important of all, we have learned how to pass all of these advantages down to our children. In America today, the single best predictor of whether an individual will get married, stay married, pursue advanced education, live in a good neighborhood, have an extensive social network, and experience good health is the performance of his or her parents on those same metrics.
We’re leaving the 90 percent and their offspring far behind in a cloud of debts and bad life choices that they somehow can’t stop themselves from making. We tend to overlook the fact that parenting is more expensive and motherhood more hazardous in the United States than in any other developed country, that campaigns against family planning and reproductive rights are an assault on the families of the bottom 90 percent, and that law-and-order politics serves to keep even more of them down. We prefer to interpret their relative poverty as vice: Why can’t they get their act together?
While anecdotal, this reflects my own experience as a professional whose peer group is largely other college educated professionals who aren't wealthy per se but are doing well. There is a lot of concern regarding where one sends one's kids to school. One couple who is so left leaning it sometimes feels like a caricature to me is so concerned with ensuring their daughter is raised among the right kinds of people that one could replace very few words in a typical conversation with them and it could easily be converted into the most racist ranting imaginable; or the most aristocratic bourgeois "let them eat cake" disdain for white-bread eating 'Mericans imaginable. Idiocracy the movie is practically a documentary to folks in this demographic. It doesn't matter that it's one of the dumbest lowbrow movies made, and to sit through it almost requires one to be or become the subject it is mocking while overtly saying if you are laughing at this then you are safely in the know. It's targeting the right people so that makes it ok that it's a crappy lowbrow movie. Religiosity is the opposite of sophistication in this paradigm; where and what one eats are important social indicators; corporate America is divided between the bad Walmart-types from the need-to-own Apple and Whole Foods branded products.
In effect, there is an accepted, almost definitional, level of disdain for low-income white Americans who lack refinement, live in the wrong parts of the country, are not sufficiently cosmopolitan, are uneducated, and who are viewed as the reason Trump won the Presidency and are therefore to blame for what is not right. 'Mericans are their parallel to Trump's Mexicans. And this morally justifies enforcing further division and the lack of interest in understanding what is really driving lower income whites to vote how they vote or believe how they believe.
This then leads to a second article on Slate I read this morning and with some dismay:
https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/miche ... on-tv.html
I am a defender of free speech, particularly that of comedians being necessary if offensive in shining a light on things we might otherwise never look at with clear eyes. This isn't about Michelle Wolf. It's about a particular comment in the article that I think captures the shift in the public discourse:
It’s thrilling to watch Wolf take aim at media outlets upstream of the late night talk show entertainment complex, just as it was when Jon Stewart took down Crossfire. But Stewart’s bit—“it’s hurting America”—depended on the earnest idea that there was an America that needed, wanted, or was worth protecting. That’s the kind of unearned presumption of good faith that leads to missteps like having John McCain on your show or hosting some kind of “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and it’s refreshingly absent from Wolf’s closing:
"That’s how these beautifully-crafted news dramas come together: You invite someone on your show because you know they’ll say something crazy, and then they say something crazy and you get to act outraged and we all watch it and talk about it. It’s like one long brothel orgy from Game of Thrones where you’re all getting paid and we’re all getting screwed. Imagine if these shows just reported the news. They wouldn’t need any of these guests at all, all they’d have to say is “Immigrant children have been ripped from their parents due to Trump’s policies. End of news.” But that’s so boring! Sure, you guys aren’t nearly as bad as the racist catheter-peddlers over at Fox News, but you’re still an accomplice if you’re giving a megaphone to a liar. Hey, but as long as you keep doing it, we’ll keep watching it. That’s entertainment!"
There’s something more interesting than simple misanthropy going on with Wolf’s pivot at the end to condemning the audience for watching news-as-entertainment, given that a considerable part of the “we all watch and talk about it” phase of the Meet the Press strategy is talk shows clowning on whatever ridiculous thing Kellyanne Conway said on Meet the Press. The only way to get enough distance and perspective to be on firm ground issuing that kind of blanket condemnation is to move further downstream, maybe to a website that covers the talk shows that covers the news shows that invite Kellyanne Conway to lie on TV. Or maybe Wolf has figured out something important here: Since everyone is part of this rotten system, no one is disqualified from helping tear it to the ground. Your move, Chuck Todd.
While I agree with the target of Wolf's joke, I was taken aback by the dismissive description of Jon Stewart's belief in, "an America that needed, wanted, or was worth protecting."
I was struck by the almost nihilistic message the author of the article used to frame the joke, taking as a given that Stewart may have been well-meaning but ultimately misguided by assuming "good faith" existed among all parties such that concern for what was good for the nation could be a viable rally cry.
Add to this the debate around what is going on at the border, the tariff wars, the Russia investigation still rolling forward despite being on the backburner of the news except for the IG report, graffiti jacket wars, and the discussion of whether or not it is effective freedom of expression to refuse to serve the President's media spokesperson and it seems that our perception of one another is quite abysmal.
In short, the assumption appears to be those who do not share our political views do not deserve to be understood as having valid reasons for their positions that should be taken into account in any debate. Good faith has been brushed aside in favor of the whole system being rotten to the core and unsalvageable.
And that leaves one to wonder: If this is truly where we are right now, where do we go from here? If our perceptions of ourselves and others is so divorced from reality (and I argue that it is reality that both sides have much more in common and much more to gain than to lose were we to go back to assuming good faith) then without any overlap in our perceived realities where does one begin to reestablish good faith?
I think the article in The Atlantic gets back to this by pointing out that class divides and income inequality are a recipe for civil unrest. And as unpleasant as this sounds to many progressives, I believe the ball is really in the court of those who aren't in the 0.1% or the lower income demographics to effect change with any hope of avoiding anarchy. Middle America is the ball being played by the political operatives who have been very effective in protecting the ever increasing wealth migration we've seen over the last few decades while pinning it on boogeymen like taxes and immigrants. But in the name of protecting our cosmopolitan beliefs we aren't exactly putting out a counter message other than to put, "You're voting against your own interests!" on repeat while signaling we firmly believe we are better than their backwards selves.
The Atlantic's article on the 9.9% should be credited for providing structure around which my thoughts have organized. Below are a few links covering the variety in preference for either watching videos or reading articles:
Magazine article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... cy/559130/
YouTube video:
http://www.stashmedia.tv/atlantic-the-a ... istocracy/
From the article (and left out of the YouTube video):
These special forms of wealth offer the further advantages that they are both harder to emulate and safer to brag about than high income alone. Our class walks around in the jeans and T‑shirts inherited from our supposedly humble beginnings. We prefer to signal our status by talking about our organically nourished bodies, the awe-inspiring feats of our offspring, and the ecological correctness of our neighborhoods. We have figured out how to launder our money through higher virtues.
Most important of all, we have learned how to pass all of these advantages down to our children. In America today, the single best predictor of whether an individual will get married, stay married, pursue advanced education, live in a good neighborhood, have an extensive social network, and experience good health is the performance of his or her parents on those same metrics.
We’re leaving the 90 percent and their offspring far behind in a cloud of debts and bad life choices that they somehow can’t stop themselves from making. We tend to overlook the fact that parenting is more expensive and motherhood more hazardous in the United States than in any other developed country, that campaigns against family planning and reproductive rights are an assault on the families of the bottom 90 percent, and that law-and-order politics serves to keep even more of them down. We prefer to interpret their relative poverty as vice: Why can’t they get their act together?
While anecdotal, this reflects my own experience as a professional whose peer group is largely other college educated professionals who aren't wealthy per se but are doing well. There is a lot of concern regarding where one sends one's kids to school. One couple who is so left leaning it sometimes feels like a caricature to me is so concerned with ensuring their daughter is raised among the right kinds of people that one could replace very few words in a typical conversation with them and it could easily be converted into the most racist ranting imaginable; or the most aristocratic bourgeois "let them eat cake" disdain for white-bread eating 'Mericans imaginable. Idiocracy the movie is practically a documentary to folks in this demographic. It doesn't matter that it's one of the dumbest lowbrow movies made, and to sit through it almost requires one to be or become the subject it is mocking while overtly saying if you are laughing at this then you are safely in the know. It's targeting the right people so that makes it ok that it's a crappy lowbrow movie. Religiosity is the opposite of sophistication in this paradigm; where and what one eats are important social indicators; corporate America is divided between the bad Walmart-types from the need-to-own Apple and Whole Foods branded products.
In effect, there is an accepted, almost definitional, level of disdain for low-income white Americans who lack refinement, live in the wrong parts of the country, are not sufficiently cosmopolitan, are uneducated, and who are viewed as the reason Trump won the Presidency and are therefore to blame for what is not right. 'Mericans are their parallel to Trump's Mexicans. And this morally justifies enforcing further division and the lack of interest in understanding what is really driving lower income whites to vote how they vote or believe how they believe.
This then leads to a second article on Slate I read this morning and with some dismay:
https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/miche ... on-tv.html
I am a defender of free speech, particularly that of comedians being necessary if offensive in shining a light on things we might otherwise never look at with clear eyes. This isn't about Michelle Wolf. It's about a particular comment in the article that I think captures the shift in the public discourse:
It’s thrilling to watch Wolf take aim at media outlets upstream of the late night talk show entertainment complex, just as it was when Jon Stewart took down Crossfire. But Stewart’s bit—“it’s hurting America”—depended on the earnest idea that there was an America that needed, wanted, or was worth protecting. That’s the kind of unearned presumption of good faith that leads to missteps like having John McCain on your show or hosting some kind of “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and it’s refreshingly absent from Wolf’s closing:
"That’s how these beautifully-crafted news dramas come together: You invite someone on your show because you know they’ll say something crazy, and then they say something crazy and you get to act outraged and we all watch it and talk about it. It’s like one long brothel orgy from Game of Thrones where you’re all getting paid and we’re all getting screwed. Imagine if these shows just reported the news. They wouldn’t need any of these guests at all, all they’d have to say is “Immigrant children have been ripped from their parents due to Trump’s policies. End of news.” But that’s so boring! Sure, you guys aren’t nearly as bad as the racist catheter-peddlers over at Fox News, but you’re still an accomplice if you’re giving a megaphone to a liar. Hey, but as long as you keep doing it, we’ll keep watching it. That’s entertainment!"
There’s something more interesting than simple misanthropy going on with Wolf’s pivot at the end to condemning the audience for watching news-as-entertainment, given that a considerable part of the “we all watch and talk about it” phase of the Meet the Press strategy is talk shows clowning on whatever ridiculous thing Kellyanne Conway said on Meet the Press. The only way to get enough distance and perspective to be on firm ground issuing that kind of blanket condemnation is to move further downstream, maybe to a website that covers the talk shows that covers the news shows that invite Kellyanne Conway to lie on TV. Or maybe Wolf has figured out something important here: Since everyone is part of this rotten system, no one is disqualified from helping tear it to the ground. Your move, Chuck Todd.
While I agree with the target of Wolf's joke, I was taken aback by the dismissive description of Jon Stewart's belief in, "an America that needed, wanted, or was worth protecting."
I was struck by the almost nihilistic message the author of the article used to frame the joke, taking as a given that Stewart may have been well-meaning but ultimately misguided by assuming "good faith" existed among all parties such that concern for what was good for the nation could be a viable rally cry.
Add to this the debate around what is going on at the border, the tariff wars, the Russia investigation still rolling forward despite being on the backburner of the news except for the IG report, graffiti jacket wars, and the discussion of whether or not it is effective freedom of expression to refuse to serve the President's media spokesperson and it seems that our perception of one another is quite abysmal.
In short, the assumption appears to be those who do not share our political views do not deserve to be understood as having valid reasons for their positions that should be taken into account in any debate. Good faith has been brushed aside in favor of the whole system being rotten to the core and unsalvageable.
And that leaves one to wonder: If this is truly where we are right now, where do we go from here? If our perceptions of ourselves and others is so divorced from reality (and I argue that it is reality that both sides have much more in common and much more to gain than to lose were we to go back to assuming good faith) then without any overlap in our perceived realities where does one begin to reestablish good faith?
I think the article in The Atlantic gets back to this by pointing out that class divides and income inequality are a recipe for civil unrest. And as unpleasant as this sounds to many progressives, I believe the ball is really in the court of those who aren't in the 0.1% or the lower income demographics to effect change with any hope of avoiding anarchy. Middle America is the ball being played by the political operatives who have been very effective in protecting the ever increasing wealth migration we've seen over the last few decades while pinning it on boogeymen like taxes and immigrants. But in the name of protecting our cosmopolitan beliefs we aren't exactly putting out a counter message other than to put, "You're voting against your own interests!" on repeat while signaling we firmly believe we are better than their backwards selves.
