Distribution of Democrats and Republicans in a 10-item scale of political values
A new Pew study is described in an NPR piece published today. While the NPR piece and the Pew study that it describes are studiously neutral, the attitudes of too many Republicans are repulsive to any civilized person.
I’m not talking about the “usual” GOP lies about government, waste, regulations, and so on.
I’m talking about these (from the study):
% who say …
Poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return
Republicans: 65
Democrats: 18Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition
Republicans: 75
Democrats: 28Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care
Republicans: 44
Democrats: 12
Take a look at that second item. THAT is sheer, unadulterated RACISM (“Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition”) that ignores DECADES of research. That racist view is held by SEVENTY FIVE PERCENT of the Republican respondents.
Maybe we can change these attitudes, maybe not. In my view, we MUST first name them as repugnant. These are deplorable attitudes. At least the last is a minority view even among Republicans.
I, for one, am PROUD of my fellow Democrats for rejecting these lies. I’m GLAD that our nation is polarized. America is under siege from mobs of ignorant, racist, and deplorable voters. It is true that those attitudes have been cemented by decades of lies, ignorance, and racism from GOP candidates and from the GOP communications arm — Fox News — that most Republicans rely on for their “news”.
It doesn’t matter. We MUST start by acknowledging that they are DIFFERENT from us. These voters hold views that are both wrong and revolting.
We MUST change them, not pander to them.
We must change them … how?
I wish I knew. I don’t.
My instincts tell me that this is another darker phase of the continuing reverberations from our evil embrace of slavery in the mid nineteenth century. I think we are learning, the hard way, that the cultural attitudes that allowed slavery to flourish in America for as long as it did are deeply rooted and slow to change.
The only way anyone — northerner or southerner — could countenance slavery in America was by dehumanizing the slaves. Not just in law (3/5 and and all that), but in feelings, morality, and religious beliefs.
Another thing that my instincts tell me is that much of this — especially our growing and growingly profound hostility towards immigrants — is born of ignorance. Not just the lack of knowledge of facts, but a equally profound hostility towards the search for facts and towards those who value knowledge.
America has been dismantling our public education system bit by bit, school district by school district, since the Reagan era. We ridicule, abuse, and underpay teachers. We celebrate ignorance (“The Simpsons”) in our entertainment.
Our American democracy was born during a unique period of history in the crucible of then-new and revolutionary ideology and philosophy. We have discarded those truths in favor of Ayn Rand.
My head tells me that it has taken 40 years (1980-2020) to lose this much ground, and it is likely to take another 40 years to regain it.
We are in a Jihad — a striving — that challenges our deepest spiritual understandings of who we are, who we want to be, and how we move from one to the other.
In my view, the politics of this is largely irrelevant, at least at the national level. The work we must do happens in ourselves, our families, our friends, and our communities.
I suggest that our most urgent political requirement, at the national level, is that we avoid the literal destruction of America and the world while we work this out. When Republicans like Mr. Corker cite Mr. Kelly, Mr. Mattis, and Mr. Tillerson (each of them old-school right-wing GOP stalwarts) as those who “separate our country from chaos”, we are in BIG trouble.
I think we are in an intense existential crisis, decades and generations in the making. Many or all of our institutions have failed us — most especially, the political process that we hold dear. In my view, they have failed us because our reliance on them is rooted in assumptions about ourselves — each and every one of us — that are no longer true.
We have betrayed our core values by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not sought our vision with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
The vast majority of “us” are working class. Heck, even my doctor is not longer the “Marc Welbey type with the home office with hospital privileges. Same with my dentist. Instead of the home office, it’s a franchise. It’s getting that way with lawyers and accounts.
Most of us are working class slobs employed by the .1%. We change Republicans and Democrats by changing the Democratic Party into the party of the Working Class, representing them and primarily them in our message, our fight, and our candidates.
That’s how we change them.
I’m not sure you answered the question Charley asked. I don’t think he was asking “how do change the political affiliation of voters”.
Please reread the three poll questions I highlighted in the thread starter. The point of the diary is the dramatic spread between Republicans and Democrats in their answers to those three poll questions.
Let’s stipulate, for discussion, that we do exactly what you propose (“changing the Democratic Party into the party of the Working Class, representing them and primarily them in our message, our fight, and our candidates”).
How does that bring those three Republican numbers down?
Charlie asked how do we change “them” and by “them” I will assume them to be Republican voters who are not part of the .1% – and we all know that the .1% is what the Republican Party stands for at its core. It’s president is [art of the .1%. It’s rejection of the Estate Tax is in support of the .1%. This has squat to do about black/white male/female straight/gay – all that does is divide us against each other according to a false narrative.
We are all working class. Betsy Devos does not need our support for women. Ben Carson does not need our support for black Americans. And so on.
We are working class. We know no color, gender, religion. We are working class and we outnumber our oppressors in number if we refuse to be divided by our physical likeness.
@johntmay: This answer is non-responsive.
It is true that we are working class. It is also true that our black brothers and sisters suffer much more than we do.
This study shows a third truth: seventy five percent of Republic voters deny that second fact.
I’m not surprised by your eagerness to dismiss this data, you’ve been making this same argument here for years now.
Okay, I see that you still want to fragment the working class and pit what you see as the “privileged white class” against the “oppressed black class”. Why? is it so that we can focus on that instead of the elephant in the room? And I am not talking about the Republican Party, I am talking about the .1%, the rentiers, the rent seekers, the wealthy class that you would prefer to not mention because “the money has to come from somewhere!”
How many Democrats support a $15 minimum wage as a federal standard? Our last presidential candidate did not – not for white working class or black working class.
Are you aware that recently, Dianne Feinstein announced she was running for re-election and she is also NOT behind health care as a citizen’s right? Not for white working class or black working class.
I’m not surprised by your eagerness to dismiss this data, you’ve been siding with the .1% for as long as I have known you.
75% of Republicans agree that “Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition”. Only 28% of Democrats agree. The fragmentation based on race has already happened.
The question Charley asked is what we’re going to do about that.
This thread is not about support for a $15/hour minimum wage (I support it) or “health care as a citizen’s right” (I know of no proposal that asserts that).
This thread is about fragmentation that has already happened. Ignoring that existing fragmentation (do nothing) is, in my view, a non-starter.
derp. Accidentally hit post before, you know, actually writing out the response….
I have very little doubt that should you reverse the question and ask “Blacks who get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own success?” you’d get an answer that cited affirmative action and the numbers likely reversed as well. That too is racism. The two together is would be extreme cognitive dissonance (and would appear that way to non-racists) if the hinge upon which the questions pivot was logic, and not anger (racism).
I greatly appreciate this post and the follow up in the comments linking it to education. I think there is a two pronged approach we have to embrace in order for real change to happen.
The first is to work to end Whiteness’, which I will define narrowly as enjoying the default assumption of what it means to be “american’ and it’s continued existence is the problem. We end whiteness by embracing a multicultural approach to history and civics education that really allows whites to experience and realize the disadvantages of not being white and to become white allies committed to ending whiteness and the systematic advantages that conveys.
The second is to engage disenfranchised communities in civic participation. I am doing a small part by teaching a class full of black and brown students of their rights and privileges as citizens. I am inheriting two very difficult sections and a lot of different learning abilities and styles-but I am committed to having each student leave my class at the end of the year as a kndolwedgable and empowered voter. And I absolutely appreciate that my school allows me to empower them to be black and brown voters who don’t have to accept the false narrative of a progress arc but recognize power is a battle and empower them to seize it. I think the staid and largely lily white, upper middle class Mass progressive universe needs to do the same. Go to these communities and organize them.
Teach whites to reject whiteness and empower black and brown to embrace their power as full Americans. Both/and. I don’t think we can do either by writing off this organizational and educational effort. It is a culture war and as the religious right and GLBT movements can teach us, you plan and play for the long game.
I reject the notion of writing off working class white America as irredeemably racist, but I also reject appealing to their latent racism rather than constructively challenging and dismantling it. I also reject writing off communities of color as not worth organizing.
This election was not decided by 76,000 additional votes for Trump across four states but by the 45% of the electorate that stayed home or was prevented from reaching the polls. There are a lot of white, brown, and black voters in that camp.
To the extent that getting the 1-5% of the electorate we could call Obama/Trump or Sanders/Trump to reconsider us that is part of this broader engagement strategy. A strategy that would revive a 50 state Democratic party and the “left” wing of that party in machine states like MA, IL, or NY that also shut out people of color.
I quickly scanned that as ‘kind of wedgable,’ which gave me quite a chuckle and had to go back to read it again.
I must say, James, I admire the vigor and enthusiasm with which you’ve attacked your new vocation. I’ve done some teaching, when it looked as though I was going to go on and get a Ph.D or two, but life got in the way and I never pursued the higher degrees. It is hard but — importantly — honest work.
LBJ started out as teacher. He knew pretty quickly what he wanted to do, and teaching wasn’t part of it. But he still did it to gain real experience doing a real thing. I think it’s important, practically and morally, that politicians are people who have done something both worthwhile and not directly connected to this amorphous thing we call ‘politics.’ (I feel the same way about writers.) JFK was a journalist for a time, just after the war. Jimmy Carter, famously, was a peanut farmer. On the flip side, Reagan was an actor, a dismal trader in vanities, and little else… and both the Bush presidents were ‘oilmen’ which I don’t particularly regard as particularly worthy.
The best advice I ever got re: teaching came from a college mentor, and seconded by my mother, who was a teacher for many years… Maybe you’ve already heard about this technique: My mentor told me to take time to do a little self-experiment at the beginning of each semester: after the first day of classes sit down, take paper and pen and without reference to anything — that is to say, off the top of your head and as quickly as you can — write down the names of all your students in the class. Once you feel you have completed this task, compare it to the actual, official, class list. Any name on the official list that is not on your list is a student who requires your attention and you need to find out why he/she didn’t get your attention right away and why his/her name didn’t come to your mind during the exercise of trying to recall the names of your students. It might be something about you. It might be something about them. (He also said that if you miss more than five or ten names, it might be your class is too big) It was a good exercise to do. It helped me figure out how I was coming across to students… and some of the surprising reasons students weren’t connecting. Of course for me this was in the context of higher education and not what we used to call ‘secondary education’ so if you try it your experience may differ.
Great advice Peter embedded in a very kind comment!
And teens love catching typos on papers-so I won’t be composing my lesson plans on my phone anytime soon…
” White supremacy is the power to define kneeling as more disrespectful than the murder of black lives.” SAMUEL SINYANGUE
I’m a little bit skeptical here. Someone smarter than me needs to take a hard look at this data.
One thing I do notice is that the charts on issues combine Republican and “lean Republican,” which skews results a bit. I don’t know enough to say much more, but my anecdotal experience says otherwise, and 75 seems like too high a number.
I have certainly met people who believe poor people are at fault for their poverty. I could almost believe 75% of Republicans think that. But when the race angle comes in … I’m just skeptical.
Gun ownership is apparently quite the indicator too. I just saw a graphic that showed in 2016 if only gun owners voted nationwide only VT would have gone Democratic, but if only non-gun owners voted only WV would have gone Republican.