Small correction: Soros primarily supports pretty mainstream centrist liberal organizations. Stuff like the ALCU, pro-choice organizations, immigrant rights groups, mainstream minority advocate groups, public health and environmental advocacy groups. It is quite a stretch to call it "hard-left" unless your personal Overton window is so far extreme right that you think Jeb Bush is a revolutionary communist.
He definitely funds causes right wingers and Republicans oppose, but let's get the taxonomy correct here.
He is solidly liberal, not left. Think NAACP, not black lives matter. Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders. The Democratic National Committee, not the Democratic Socialists of America.
Yes, BLM is pretty obviously a left organization and not a liberal one. Though hard-left of course has no meaning and is nothing but a smear phrase designed to suggest "extremist" when the positions we are discussing are not particularly extreme at all. They endorse a variety of pretty boilerplate left positions: universal healthcare, state funded college, union rights, anti-imperialism, divesting from fossil fuels and taking other concrete climate action, complete overhaul of the police system. This is why BLM hijacked a Hillary Clinton campaign rally to humiliate her on national television. It was not because they are on her side.
Instead of worrying about potential foreigners competing for your job, you should wonder why there are so few jobs out there: it's because the rich are hoarding them. The money for them, that is. There is so much work to be done, plenty of work for you and your Indian and Chinese friends to all have well-paying jobs. The reason we all don't have them is that we are just extremely bad at allocating resources: we choose the most inefficient method, market capitalism. We, essentially at random, select a tiny group of elite wealth hoarders who centrally plan and distribute nearly all of the world's wealth without any concern for social good or welfare or anything other than their continued accumulation of wealth and power. Then we beg them to give us jobs, to give us their table scraps and we fight each other for them, terrified at any moment our benefactors might take away our livelihood instead of rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.
I completely agree that the main problem is lack of spending money in the hands of people who actually need it. There's plenty of work to be done, if only the people who need it had money to pay for it.
However, capitalism (in the form of Walmart and its suppliers, for example) does seem quite efficient at supplying material things to poor people. More spending power in the right places would go pretty far to fix the problem, along with boosting the economy.
Walmart's profit primarily comes from abuse of monopoly (which is not efficiency) and from government subsidies (they are the biggest welfare recipients in the world, since their workers require government welfare to survive while working so much for so little).
Their profits come from economic coercion and exploiting public subsidies, not efficiency. Walmart's primary competitive innovation historically was union busting.
If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it. The way the word is often used and even the word itself, absolutely that ruffles some feathers and rightly so.
They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their victory.
Recognizing a lot of your success is because of dumb luck (yes you worked hard, but millions of others worked just as hard or harder and weren't lucky) is a good way to stay humble, and to remind yourself to stop pretending you "deserve" what you have -- we all live in a fundamentally (intentionally) unjust economic system where "desert" has no meaning but we try to superimpose it on our lives because of a need to believe things are fair. Privilege is a word that can be a good way to remember that.
It can also be used as a rhetorical weapon to bludgeon people.
The word itself is terrible and I hate it: it is not a "privilege" in my view to be treated decently, to have a chance at success, to not be discriminated against or assaulted by police or have to face anything that the poor, minorities, women face. It is a right. Everyone has the right to be treated the way straight rich white men are and have been for centuries and using the word "privilege" conjures up this notion that they are getting something they do not deserve: rather, they should be viewed as the model, the goal, they are getting something that we all deserve to have as well alongside them.
I think “privilege” because the right is not the norm. Like “black lives matter (, too!)” because being black and having respect for your life and freedom is not the norm, at all.
In a situation where not being exposed to massive dangers and obstacles is a rare occasion, I think it is fair to classify that as a privilege.
White / wealthy / male / educated / citizen of the US, all indicate the top parts of pyramids of oppression and massive obstacles.
The blind acceptance of these structures by the ones standing on top of them, is the actionable part. We (I am definitely amongst the privileged) can’t easily see the nature of the structures, the way we don’t choke on clean air.
But once we’re aware of them, our responsibility kicks in. Not taking actions to actively challenge these structures makes us complicit and defines where we stand.
The anger of the ones living life on “extra hard” so that we can live ours on “quite/super easy” or even “normal”, is fully justified. We are passive perpetrators, there’s no way around it.
There's a good reason many of us dislike current usage of word "privilege", and to your credit, you avoided it. Lots of times the word "white privilege" is thrown around by relatively well-off people in urban areas, and that usage is extremely hurtful and frankly stunning if you're a poor white person living in a small town in say, W. Virginia. You work multiple minimum wage jobs and still barely scrap by, watch friends and family succumb to desperation and opiates, and look around your town as it crumbles in neglect. And you don't feel like you're very "privileged" in spite of being white.
The term is particularly bewildering to rural and small town poor whites when it's tossed out by a 20-something-year old professional in some big city who's making a $200,000/year salary, or by a trust-fund kid protesting in a university where tuition costs more money a semester than your whole extended family makes in a year.
I realize that many people who use the term "white privilege" may not be targeting such people with the term (although many clearly are). However, when the only qualifier someone uses is "white", it's hard to draw that conclusion.
Again, to your credit, you used the term "straight rich white men". But most people fail to make this distinction.
I also strongly agree with your final paragraph. What we call "privilege" is something that all people should have. Instead of working to destroy privilege, we should work to ensure that all people have that same privilege.
> Being poor and white is still an advantage over poor and Latino/Black. Look at conviction rates at criminal trials for example.
No argument, but is that really justification for wealthy urban whites to go around shouting about "white privilege" to poor rural whites? I mean, if you feel that way, continue, but I can guarantee you it won't be a net positive for our country, black or white.
> Being poor and white is still an advantage over poor and Latino/Black. Look at conviction rates at criminal trials for example.
Are there stats for convictions of poor white people vs poor black latino/black, or just all white vs all latino/black? I don't think the latter stats would be particularly helpful here.
However, one thing that I fail to see addressed here is reason for the incarceration gap. The way I see it, it can be partially because black kids are prosecuted more (the "white privilege" argument) and partially perhaps because, for whatever reason, rich black kids just commit crimes more often.
I don't buy the argument that rich black kids commit crimes at higher rates. White and black people smoke weed at roughly the same rates, yet black people are far, far, far more likely to be prosecuted for it.
It's not an argument, merely an unknown. Considering that black people have elements of their own culture that are anti-hard work ("acting white") and pro-crime ("gangsta rap"), I wouldn't be suprised if this culture managed to spoil even the kids from the good homes to some degree.
BTW how do you know that white and black people smoke weed at roughly the same rates?
If you look, Figures 21 and 22 show usage rates to be about the same. However, if you look down at Figure 10, you'll see a huge disparity in arrest rates.
I think white privilege is in contrast to being not white. Statistically, you can think of it as a, for example, 1% effect that gets added to another 1% effect that gets added to another 1% effect and so on. Add enough of these effects and you have a pretty big impact.
Even accounting for the racial makeup of those states, I know far more white people than non-white people from poor states who are now making great money.
The reason people refer to these things as privileges is because they are unavailable to the majority of the population.
It's a very privileged perspective to live in a world where these things are considered normal.
Privilege has to do with the idea that these things are so far from being a reality for so many people that it's evident to them that the world does not consider this to be their right.
It is sometimes used that way, but is (I think more) often used in a much more analytically useful sense: as a means of indexing passive/automatic advantages that some people benefit from, and as a lens into the ways that advantage might be extended to others.
> This seems to imply that those with privilege think their privilege is a right.
That doesn't follow logically (if group A is bothered that the advantages of group B are not considered to be group A's right, it does not follow that group B considers those advantages to be group B's right), or textually (GP referred to "the world" as the thing not considering privilege a right for some people, which I interpreted as a reference to the context/emergent behavior/power structures that confer advantages; not specific people).
> If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it.
I think plenty of people understand it, they just don't agree with it. Why wouldn't humans use every advantage available to them to succeed? It's a tough world out there and people want to thrive and survive, they'd also like to pass along the fruits of their labor to their offspring. That's how nature works.
There will always be a will to be the best, it doesn't matter if the demographics of people with economic advantages shift. I don't imagine we'll ever see people willfully make their lives more difficult and we shouldn't expect them to.
Generally, people don't say you should refuse to take advantage of them, but that you recognize them. That is, right now, you're misunderstanding privilege.
Recognize them then do what? Humans are complex and I see no value in using a one dimensional, subjective metric to make any sort of decision or guide a personal philosophy.
Privilege is a lens through which you look at the world and analyze things. It's more or less an analytical tool developed as a response to various flavors of social darwinism.
The idea behind privilege theory is to say that, when you compare people, you don't say "the more successful one is more successful because they are better", but instead "there are a number of factors, many of which are difficult to quantify, that contribute to the varying levels of success between two people (or especially groups)".
It's not one dimensional, and there's no objective way to measure or compare things as generic as "success". Privilege theory being explicit about this makes it superior to many of the alternatives.
"Do what" is such a broad question that I can't really answer it. Are you an academic, or a company or a government or something else? The answer depends on that. It's a malformed question, like asking "What do you do with Kantianism?" or something. The best answer I can give is "use it as an analytical lens to guide your decision making", which is a bad answer precisely because its a bad question.
A better one might be "What value does analyzing situations/systems via the lens that privilege provides give?" Which is incidentally also a pretty good question to ask about Kantianism.
The answer to that question also depends on exactly who you are and what you're doing, but at least it makes sense. For example, for me personally, I think that looking at things via a lens of privilege helps me to be a more empathetic person, on the whole.
For an academic, it might help you decide whether or not you are asking the right questions in an experiment.
As a very straightforward historical example, for many years in the US, there was explicit bias against African Americans in segregated schools. This was justified in many cases, through a social darwinistic lens: black people are less intelligent, the proof is that they perform worse, and so we should devote fewer resources to their education.
Looking at the same data through a lens of privilege though, one might instead conclude that segregated schools performed worse because they had fewer resources. In other words, the same correlation is explained in two vastly different ways.
I use that example specifically because today the same thing still happens, as a result of most school systems getting funding based on property taxes, and historical reasons so you still have a world where, in practice, predominantly black schools have much less funding. Ostensibly, this is "fair", since you use the same rule to fund everyone, but clearly it isn't actually. Privilege is one way of accounting for how things that are ostensibly fair may not be in practice.
As an aside, in a much more mathematical sense, I think that privilege theory is all about picking the right bayesian priors when doing an analysis.
I think this is a very well reasoned argument that makes sense within your logical and philosophical framework.
What it doesn't take into account is different meanings to the term "fair" or the morality of a system based on staunch individualism.
> Ostensibly, this is "fair", since you use the same rule to fund everyone, but clearly it isn't actually.
I actually find the situation you outlined extremely fair and would find it quite unfair to apply different funding principals to different schools based on demographics.
I suppose one of the problems I have with the concept of privilege is that I find it promotes a very dangerous mindset. Having grown up poor and non-white and achieved success through hard work, more often than not I saw people being held back by their own sense of victimization than any sort of systematic oppression. The concept of privilege exacerbates that and thus is counter productive.
>I actually find the situation you outlined extremely fair and would find it quite unfair to apply different funding principals to different schools based on demographics.
But that "fair" method isn't independent of demographic. And that's what privilege tries to highlight. It's almost always possible to dress up policies that are de-facto prejudicial as independent of the thing that they're supposedly prejudiced against.
If you want to discriminate against women without making it obvious, you can add an unnecessary height requirement. It's only when you take a look at the correlations between those variables, when you realize that women are inches shorter than men that something seems off. (and to be clear I'm talking about an abstract situation where height doesn't matter for whatever it is we're doing). When you take into account the correlations, the non-discriminatory rules suddenly feel a lot less non-discriminatory.
If you really supported a funding principle that was independent of demographics, you should support a system that grants funding solely based on headcount. Otherwise you're implicitly admitting that rich people deserve better education solely because they are rich, which seems discriminatory to me.
Granted, there are flaws to that system too, but what it doesn't do is further disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Your "fair" system leads to the poorest areas (and the least-white areas, and a few other similar things) getting the worst education. The result of this is that I, as an individual, receive a worse education do to things that are totally out of my control. That doesn't seem particularly fair to me.
(And that's ignoring other arguments that there are probably very compelling reasons to fund the least well off schools more, much like a progressive tax system favors those at the bottom. And as an extension of this, I'm curious if you favor a progressive tax system, or something else).
Another user mentioned this study[1], which unfortunately I can't find the paper for, but the video is still worth watching. I'll quote an important bit:
>As a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement and deservingness...increases.
The crux of this is that while you may disagree, its possible, and even perhaps likely, that your success is less "yours" than you believe, and that your mind is rewriting history, so to speak, to make you feel more in control of your outcomes than you actually were. This is by no means your fault or anything, and there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our brains doing this (I say probably only because I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, I can make some pretty good arguments for why this would be evolutionarily good). And there are times when it's probably a good idea to ignore that fact and feel like you're to blame for your outcomes, but there are also times where it isn't.
In any case, I hope you understand that there's more to it than just fake-victimhood and an attempt to make successful people feel bad. And that while you may disagree with the theory, its at least not total SJW nonsense :P
> I'm curious if you favor a progressive tax system
I favor a flat tax if we must pay tax at all.
> The crux of this is that while you may disagree, its possible, and even perhaps likely, that your success is less "yours" than you believe, and that your mind is rewriting history, so to speak, to make you feel more in control of your outcomes than you actually were. This is by no means your fault or anything, and there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our brains doing this (I say probably only because I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, I can make some pretty good arguments for why this would be evolutionarily good). And there are times when it's probably a good idea to ignore that fact and feel like you're to blame for your outcomes, but there are also times where it isn't.
This is the crux of why I think the concept of privilege is extremely dangerous. You have no idea who I am and I've already stated that I fit some of the demographics that you deem underprivileged. Yet instead of listening to what I had to say (which is a quite simple explanation -- work smart/hard == do good) you fit a very elaborate psychological explanation over my experiences (of which you know nothing about).
Do you believe that poor people cannot succeed without help? If the answer is yes, then why would you question someone telling you that's what happened? If the answer is no, then I think you need to reexamine your philosophy as it's fairly dehumanizing to be told that you're not capable of success.
I also find it somewhat amusing that I've seen this pattern repeated over and over. Poor people claim to know what's hold them back. Rich people claim to know what's holding poor people back. Poor people who became wealthy are told they're experience is invalid, an outlier, not useful. Really shouldn't they (we) be the ones that have the most valuable opinion since we've proven it can work?
I'm not just talking about this exchange or my own experiences. You'll see this conversation happen over and over when someone who is self-made tries to discuss how they did it.
>This is the crux of why I think the concept of privilege is extremely dangerous. You have no idea who I am and I've already stated that I fit some of the demographics that you deem underprivileged. Yet instead of listening to what I had to say (which is a quite simple explanation -- work smart/hard == do good) you fit a very elaborate psychological explanation over my experiences (of which you know nothing about).
It doesn't really matter who you are, it's unlikely that you're immune to bias. I absolutely listened to what you said, it's just orthogonal to the point I made, which is that no matter your experience, how your brain works is probably not unique. You're almost certainly subject to the psychological quirks as everyone else. Do you want me to give your experiences special deference because you come from an underprivileged background? I thought that's explicitly what you were arguing against.
>Do you believe that poor people cannot succeed without help? If the answer is yes, then why would you question someone telling you that's what happened? If the answer is no, then I think you need to reexamine your philosophy as it's fairly dehumanizing to be told that you're not capable of success.
No. And I don't think I've ever said that poor people cannot succeed without help. I've said it's more difficult for poor people to achieve the same success as rich people, all else equal, but I don't see anything dehumanizing about that. I'd ask that you take another look at what I'm actually saying, because you're turning my words into something that they very much aren't.
>Poor people who became wealthy are told they're experience is invalid, an outlier, not useful. Really shouldn't they (we) be the ones that have the most valuable opinion since we've proven it can work?
No. Not at all! For the same reason that I wouldn't ask Jeff Bezos for life advice. Its survivorship bias, plain and simple. For every person with your story, there's someone else who had a similar background, worked just as hard, and isn't successful.
The common explanation for this is that a lot of successful people say that a good things is to take risks. They all have this in common. They took risks. But so did tons of other people who ended up broke or bankrupt or otherwise unsuccessful. Only listening to successful people will result in exactly what you're doing now: thinking that [hard work/risk taking/keeping a strict schedule/buddhist minimalism] is enough to do succeed, ignoring the fact that there are many people who did exactly the same thing who have failed.
Just to be clear, are you arguing that you worked harder/smarter than every person from your hometown who has seen less success than you? Because I'd find that highly unlikely. It certainly wasn't true for me.
> Just to be clear, are you arguing that you worked harder/smarter than every person from your hometown who has seen less success than you?
Yeah I'm arguing that. I used to try to help these people. I spent a lot of time doing it in fact. I would try to teach people in my town about computers but was told it was "geek stuff". I would try to get them to read books but again...that's for the nerds. I'd try to tell them there's more to life than football (was told there wasn't). I would tell them that maybe it wasn't a great idea to use crystal meth (this was before they all got hooked on opiods). I'd tell them that joining the military wasn't a path to success. I would tell them that they shouldn't be afraid of people from other cultures and that maybe they could learn from them and teach what was unique to their culture.
It all fell on deaf ears or was met with overt hostility. Even when I started to become successful and it looked like maybe some of this geeky stuff was actually valuable, all I got was anger for "abandoning" my roots. So at some point I just said fuck it. They don't want help. They are lazy and afraid and if you try to help them they will bring you down too.
Fast forward 20 some years and I see very privileged, successful people (such as yourself) making very well meaning but very misguided arguments about how to help underprivileged people. Do they, I and nearly everyone else face some systematic biases? Yes!! I've hit multiple glass ceilings and currently reside at one I don't have the energy to break through. That's not the main problem though. By far the biggest thing holding people back is their own fear of trying to succeed and the lack of strength to stand up to their own community who holds them back.
I don't know your background, but if it were practical I'd suggest actually going to live with some poor people. I think you'll find it's not the "myth of meritocracy" or the "patriarchy" holding them back. It's for the most part their own bad habits. I think most people who have escaped poverty would agree.
>Yeah I'm arguing that. I used to try to help these people. I spent a lot of time doing it in fact. I would try to teach people in my town about computers but was told it was "geek stuff". I would try to get them to read books but again...that's for the nerds. I'd try to tell them there's more to life than football (was told there wasn't). I would tell them that maybe it wasn't a great idea to use crystal meth (this was before they all got hooked on opiods). I'd tell them that joining the military wasn't a path to success. I would tell them that they shouldn't be afraid of people from other cultures and that maybe they could learn from them and teach what was unique to their culture.
And every person in your town was like this? You were the valedictorian of your high school and worked jobs on the side to make money because your parents didn't but you needed to be able to take care of your sister and keep the lights on anyway.
>I don't know your background, but if it were practical I'd suggest actually going to live with some poor people.
Aren't you the one assuming things now? I've lived with and interacted with some very-not-well-off people, more similar to the crystal meth hooked in-and-out of jail people you describe than you might at first think. Some of them are even relatively successful now. And yeah it absolutely took hard work and determination and grit in every case. But that's not all it took, for any of them. They all got lucky breaks, and they mostly admit that readily. I'm not as naive about this as you want to believe.
I mean, to be clear here, you appear to have had reliable access to computers 20+ years ago. That's a huge advantage over many people. And don't get me wrong, I don't mean to belittle your success, success is a good thing. But you seem resistant to recognizing your biases. Biases that everyone has and that are well documented. I don't really know why that is, but the fact that you picked that specific line to target, and ignored everything else I said is revealing. That you think hard work is all it takes is, if nothing else, naive.
Yes, my town was a hellhole and very, very small. I'm the only person who has achieved professional success. Most are dead, in jail or hooked on drugs. My relatives included.
> You were the valedictorian of your high school
No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success.
> worked jobs on the side to make money
There were no jobs in my town.
I admit I'm making some assumptions about you since I've literally never heard a poor person say the things you're saying but many, many middle-upper middle class people say them. I could be very wrong though.
> you appear to have had reliable access to computers 20+ years ago
My school had some very dated Apple IIes. The rest I got from magazines and library books. If there was a privilege there it was that I was alive at a time that booting up a machine dumped you into BASIC.
I'm 100% sure I'm biased. Everyone is, including yourself. Our conversation has drifted far from the original topic but I do appreciate you taking the time to have it. I don't think we could ever agree on many of these issues but its interesting to see them juxtaposed.
>No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success.
See, this is the kind of thing I mean. This is essentially a post-hoc justification of your success. Why did you "know that school had little to do with success". Why didn't your classmates? Did the valedictorian also end up on drugs and in jail? Or did they just end up less successful, despite working hard?
I mean I can actually take this same argument and apply it to some absolutely terrible choices: "I knew school had very little to do with success, so I decided to forgo school and start hustling and selling drugs at a young age, and here I am now an upper ranking member of a street gang, by many measures a fairly successful person". It's not like everyone who does the first does the second. A lot of them end up dead or in jail. But given what you've said so far, you would believe that individuals should follow that advice.
And if that's not the case, I ask what the difference between
> Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and work with computers instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at Bill Gates!
and
> Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and start selling drugs instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at [insert local gang leader or dealer]!
I could be wrong, but it really sounds like you're looking at your past through rose colored glasses. And as a result of this, you ascribe your success more to the "smart choices" you made than to the "lucky choices" or "lucky breaks" or "random opportunities" you got. I'd suggest you go out and look for people from similar backgrounds who made similar choices to you, I think you'll find it will be sobering how many of them didn't find success, despite the hard work, and that you're luckier than you think. Heck, I think if you really try and take an objective look, you'll find that some of the people who you feel like made worse choices than you were more similar to you thank you think, but didn't get the same lucky break.
Just in general, I think it's a good idea spending more time listening to unsuccessful people. It reminds me how they're not so different from me, and that's why I think privilege theory is both important and often correct. I hope you take the time to do that too.
Edit: I also think you're misunderstanding my use of the word bias in this context. I mean "evolutionarily hardwired to view things through a certain, objectively wrong, lens". See my earlier citations for how that reveals itself, but the result is that you, like everyone, are likely to take more credit for your achievements than you objectively deserve. This isn't unique to you, but it means that I basically have to take your entire description of your success and everyone else's failures with a grain of salt.
Your assumptions about me are pretty off base and that’s the problem. You’ll never be rhetorically successful by invalidating people’s personal experience. I have a lifetime of making decisions and viewing their outcomes to draw from. You have theory. I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail.
This is why I think the concept of privilege will never grow beyond the people who already believe in it. It’s just too smug at its core.
>I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail.
And this is the fallacy in your thinking. I can find people who made terrible choices and became more successful than you. I can find people who made similar choices to you and are much less successful.
If that's all you do, then plain and simple, your experiences are invalid. They don't matter. They're not data. And anyway, you're already successful now, so your choices practically don't matter anymore. Success begets success.
To put it simply, you need to accept that there are people who made good choices as you did, and aren't successful despite their hard work and good choices. Because that's fact. That's the world we live in. That's not smug. It's a hard pill to swallow, sure and I don't really blame you for refusing to. But there's nothing smug about it.
Do you really believe that nothing we do matters? That it’s all a roll of the dice or uncontrollably riding the waves of systematic oppression and privilege?
I don’t see how that’s useful. Yeah, life is not always fair but if you don’t believe in free will or that you can actually have some impact on your own existence, then what’s the point of even living it?
And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work.
Like you said though, it doesn’t matter. It worked for me and it worked for millions of other people so whether you think that was luck, privilege or something else it doesn’t impact my success. What you may accomplish is encouraging people who could help themselves to not do so. Probably not even that though because the kind of people who can help themselves are already used to ignoring the naysayers.
>Do you really believe that nothing we do matters? That it’s all a roll of the dice or uncontrollably riding the waves of systematic oppression and privilege?
No, and this is the second time now that you've made a ridiculous strawman out of my statements. I'm saying systematic oppression and privilege matter and have an impact. This is opposed to what you said which, if I understand correctly is "work hard and you'll be successful, no matter the situation". When I say "no the situation matters too", you manage to interpret this as some kind of fatalistic "everything is predetermined" argument, which it is not.
To be clear, I'm not saying that privilege is the only component of success. I'm saying that hard work is not the only component of success. So far you seem to be interpreting the second as the first.
Perhaps if you actually tried to understand what I was actually saying, instead of going out of your way to misinterpret it, you would realize that it wasn't as much nonsense as you think.
>And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work.
There are a lot of people that don't have the means to "become a good developer". I'll agree that good developers can get a good job, but for a lot of people, there aren't enough hours in the day to do what you handwave away as a given.
>the naysayers.
What, specifically, am I doing that is naysaying? Is saying "your success is a product of both your hard work and your circumstances" naysaying? Really?
> To put it simply, you need to accept that there are people who made good choices as you did, and aren't successful despite their hard work and good choices.
I 100% disagree. If you make good decisions and work hard you'll be more successful than you would have been without doing that. If you study something with economic value, you'll get to participate in that value (if you're good).
I've never seen someone who is actually good at what they do (if it's something that's valued economically -- I've seen plenty of poor but skilled musicians for instance) live in destitution. Not once.
> There are a lot of people that don't have the means to "become a good developer".
There are people who don't have the mental capacity to do it yes, but I accept that and have no problem with it. We can't all be successful, utopias are a fantasy. I'm talking about the people with the capability to be successful. They should work hard and not give a moment's thought to anyone telling them to "check their privilege". It's a pointless exercise, you don't owe anyone an apology for doing well.
>If you make good decisions and work hard you'll be more successful than you would have been without doing that.
Sure, but relative success is not particularly relevant to what we've been discussing. I'm sure that many people from your hometown are relatively more successful than others. But you've already said that they aren't successful in a concrete sense.
My point is that
>study something with economic value
>someone who is actually good at what they do
is not an opportunity available to everyone. The opportunity to study something with economic value is a privilege. There are many people who don't have that privilege either due to economic or time constraints. If you're argument is that "people who had the opportunity to study something of economic value are able to be successful with only hard work", then I'd agree.
But those people already got lucky/privileged/an opportunity that isn't available to everyone when they had the ability to spend time and study something of economic value.
You can't "work hard and study something of economic value" if you have to work two jobs to keep the lights on. There aren't enough hours. It doesn't matter what your mental capacity is. Your physical capacity is too small.
>you don't owe anyone an apology for doing well.
And I never said you did. Please, again, listen to what I'm actually saying, and don't continue to make things up. I get that you disagree with me, but that means that you should be careful to read what I'm actually saying, not be biased by your predispositions. Remember that this conversation began because I said you misunderstood what privilege was. Responses like this make it look like you're not engaging in good faith and simply want to argue against privilege because you've been told you should disagree with it, and that you're unwilling to learn what it actually is.
Edit:
>I'm talking about the people with the capability to be successful.
Right, and I'm simply saying that the capability to be successful is not solely your innate intelligence or whatever, but also your in part your circumstances.
To give a simple example, which is more likely: that your children will get accepted into Harvard Law, or that Malia Obama's eventual children will?
> There are many people who don't have that privilege either due to economic or time constraints.
This goes back to my early statement about school not teaching valuable skills. I told you I was a poor student, that was because I spent my time learning about computers instead of the curriculum I saw as wasteful of my time. You have to have the strength to make those types of decisions. Was it easy? Absolutely not, I paid all kinds of prices for doing such a thing. I stood by my convictions though, and thus have little sympathy for those who don't.
> You can't "work hard and study something of economic value" if you have to work two jobs to keep the lights on.
As mentioned above, if you're just starting to think about these things when you're old enough to work two jobs, you've already made bad decisions that are going to be very hard to reverse.
> Responses like this make it look like you're not engaging in good faith and simply want to argue against privilege because you've been told you should disagree with it, and that you're unwilling to learn what it actually is.
I'm arguing with you (neither of us are convincing each other of anything at this point) because you literally told me that my life was invalid and my philosophy as defined by my experiences are due to my own cognitive bias. You have no idea who I am yet feel totally comfortable saying such a thing.
If you take anything away from this it should be that if you're going to tell someone that their life experience is invalid, you're not going to convince them of anything. In fact they'll just entrench their positions. I'd eliminate that from your rhetorical bag of tricks if I were you.
And with that I'm done. We both learned nothing, and I'm still convinced that the core of your message is routed in smugness. Maybe you'll have better luck if you avoid making assumptions about people you've never met.
>As mentioned above, if you're just starting to think about these things when you're old enough to work two jobs, you've already made bad decisions that are going to be very hard to reverse.
I mean, I know people who were working multiple jobs in their early to mid teens. Are you suggesting that middle school is when you really need to be making choices about your career prospects? Its this kind of comment that really convinces me that you had a lot more "privilege" than you want to admit. A roof over your head, a stable home, and access to technology and resources are privileges that you appear to have had, and are not as universal as you seem to believe.
>my life was invalid
What does this mean? I'm absolutely willing to say that its inane to base your entire moral philosophy on a single person's experience. But that doesn't mean that your life or experiences are invalid, just that generalizing them to everyone is ridiculous. That's the entire point though not everyone's circumstances are the same as yours. That's the whole central point of what privilege is about. That doesn't make your life "invalid", again, I don't know what that means. Its real, I'm sure it happened. It worked for you. That's great. That doesn't make it generalizable. But you seem to once again be misinterpreting my statements that your experiences are not generalizable as your experiences not being real. That's completely untrue, and I don't know why you feel the need to so completely misinterpret my words.
I'm not making any assumptions about you beyond that you are a human being, a human being who suffers from the same cognitive biases as every other human being. In the absence of any compelling evidence to the contrary, that absolutely seems like a sane assumption to make.
>I am tired of seeing issues framed this way: "Despite all objective evidence, my ideology drives the view that it must be making men brutal and compromising women's power"
The paragraph you quoted is literally saying "although evidence suggests porn does not increase assault, no matter what you believe about it it helps shape the views of people who watch it on sex and gender" which is the most obvious, tepid, noncontroversial statement that is devoid of any framing at all. You are literally complaining about an example the author uses of an opinion she does not have. The primary complaint you should have about this paragraph is how contentless it is, not some weird claim about how the statement that media effects culture is somehow malicious framing.
>Seriously, NYTimes? This is activism, not inquiry. I'm disappointed.
Yes, how dare someone who writes about a topic have actual experience with it that informs their opinions. I think it's actually far worse to have a "detached, impartial observer" (which of course does not exist) writing about a topic on which they have zero relevant experience. Which is pretty much standard operating procedure with NYT. How many articles are there in NYT from media elites pretending they understand the poor? Countless. This article is a refreshing positive change.
In general intuition is a tool that can be used to help uncover things, but should not be used as a basis for a view by itself. You might be inclined to call the following the most "obvious, tepid, noncontroversial statement" "It's self evident that you shouldn't expose people with bacterial infections to something that comes from the blue green mold that emerges on rot." Of course as you might know, I actually just described penicillin. Our tendency to think our knee jerk intuition is something that can stand alongside data is undoubtedly a big part of what caused it to take years for penicillin to come to be accepted, even after the results were published and shared.
Oh I certainly agree. And in general, beware anyone who uses the phrase 'common sense' - it turns out it is often not so common, not so sensical, or both.
But the notion that media influences culture (for which there is overwhelming evidence not only scientific but in the form of every for-profit organization that has a marketing division, and which is even a truism - media IS culture) being stated in the New York Times in 2018 is like taking a paragraph in a Nature article to explain yes, the moon exists.
>But current screening measures are not unconstitutional.
That really depends on what nine partisans in fancy robes think, a group whose makeup changes over time and who can change their minds.
I think what GP was getting at is that it seems so fundamentally unjust that it should be unconstitutional (which is what anyone who is not a constitutional law scholar means when they say unconstitutional), not a claim about legal opinions of powerful judges.
There isn't much of an articulable case for these rules to be unconstitutional. It's not analogous to freedoms people have in their personal life.
They're using the Federal aviation system, public property airports, being routed by the FAA, and so on. It's much more analogous to requirements for auto safety and licensing.
The government can't mandate the color of your shirt in your own home, but they can mandate the exact shade of your turn signals when you're on public roads.
I'm not a fan of our current security state, it's insane. But air travel isn't a private act, it's important to calibrate the conversation to the issue actually at hand.
I’ll jump in here. I believe the constitution does provide a right to travel both domestically and internationally.
When I choose flight as my mode of transport, and I choose to do business with a private company, (entering into a private contract with that company to convey my body from one location to another), I believe the government demanding that I be searched and inspected and scanned in order to allow the private company and I to conduct our private business of providing me with transportation is unconstitutional. The federal government does not have an affirmative grant of power over my right to travel, and two because I have the right to travel. All powers not granted to the federal government are reserved for the states or the people.
I feel like this fallacy that travel is a privilege comes from the whole “driving is a privilege” concept. But keep in mind, while driving is a privilege (under STATE law), riding isn’t a privilege, it’s a right. I may need the blessing of a STATE government to drive a car across state lines, but I don’t need the blessing of state or federal government to ride as a passenger in a vehicle across state lines. In the case of the flight, I’m not engaged in a regulated activity of flying a plane, I’m merely a citizen exercising their right to travel.
Sure there is, I'll articulate one: the federal government is giving preferential treatment to people who waive their constitutional privacy rights (and pay money) and going out of its way to intentionally inconvenience those who don't pay up and give up their rights. The government giving explicit preferential treatment to people who waive their constitutional rights and punishing those who don't is a clear violation of citizens' constitutional rights: if the government can do whatever it wants to make you miserable until you waive your rights, you don't really have them.
It's analogous to a state government monitoring citizens' speech, picking out anyone who criticizes the governor's political party, and banning them from using the freeway.
Would my argument pass legal muster? No, I'm not a lawyer and I thought of it in 3 minutes on a Friday afternoon. Is it articulable? Yes. Could the court rule in my favor if it were explained better by someone with esquire at the end of their name? Sure. Judges often accept or make any argument they like no matter how bad so long as it fits in with their political ideology.
>> It's much more analogous to requirements for auto safety and licensing.
There are clear constitutional Bounders here, a Police Officer can not simply pull you over, search you, question you, and detain you with out a clear articuable reason to believe you have or are about to violate the law in some way.
We have no destroyed the 4th amendment to that point yet, but I know people like you continue to try.
>> But air travel isn't a private act,
People like me believe it should be, No Public Airports, not Public anything. It should be a private transaction where me a Private citizen contract with a Private company to transport me from A to B,
If you believe this you will always get a technocrat with a great resume who has spent years enforcing the status quo, and, once elected, will do nothing to change it. If you want anything to be better you need to move away from gatekeeping "qualifications" because they are always bestowed upon proponents of business as usual by proponents of business as usual. What does "smart" mean? They went to Harvard and are therefore best buddies with the ultrawealthy and elites of society? The pundit class says they're smart? Rarely, once in 200 years, you'll get lucky with this approach and land on a class traitor and hero like FDR, but you're actively selecting away from that on purpose.
For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.
Oh yes I agree strong leaders like I've described with the power to change society can be bad. Change is not always good. But a qualified technocrat will not ever change anything much, for better or for worse. Why change a system that worked perfectly for you? That you thrived in? Where you can do a bunch of spreadsheets in your off time comparing private insurance plans and cleverly pick the best one for you and save money, and if you screw up, your child's hospital visit isn't covered and you are instantly homeless! How fun! If you want change, don't pick the Harvard valedictorian "wonk".
They will suggest policies like: what if instead of feeding the hungry we define a specific income bracket adjusted dynamically to the purchasing power parity of... and in the first three words you've already lost 99% of the population who thinks it's unnecessarily complicated because it is: they're turning a moral issue into a technical one because they've been trained to do technical analysis and to not see things in moral terms, rather, to shift numbers around in spreadsheets. They are wholly incapable of stepping back and recognizing that the spreadsheet itself is wrong, not technically wrong, but morally wrong: that simpler is better, that universal programs (like roads, NHS) are better than means-tested ones, that these things which are simple moral imperatives should be able to be explained simply.
Yeah, it's a good thing that the world isn't all that complicated and that all of our problems can be solved with simplistic, well-intended platitudes.
I voted for clinton, would describe myself as almost neoliberal, and love technocrats... but was kaiser willhelm really the kind of leader you describe, or was he more of the "elite club of eliteness" kind? (I am genuinely not familiar with the history, but I suspect the conventional narrative on the rise of fascism overplays the importance of the demagogue in plunging the entire world into war)
It is terrifying how this power is being wielded. Cities try to compete to see who can be more obsequious and subservient to corporate interests in the hope that they win some "victory" -- the company moving to their town -- which in the end does very little for the actual city or the people in it. It is just an impressive line item on the mayor's resume when they try to move up in politics, "I got Amazon!"
Seattle hates Amazon and what it has done to the city. They provide nothing for the city, do nothing to help ameliorate the problems they create, they overcrowd every area with ultrawealthy out of towners who push actual Seattleites out of the neighborhoods they've lived in for generations, replacing local culture with bland silicon valley tech-ennui. And the jobs they offer aren't even good. They create new white-collar sweatshops in their office buildings to mirror their blue-collar sweatshops in the warehouses.
If they are paying attention, people in all of these cities should be praying to god that Amazon doesn't choose their city. If they can, they should protest, riot, refuse to let it happen.
If you want a left-wing prospective on this general issue (which is called "lotteryism") there's a great podcast that does media analysis on this and issues like it. As it turns out, for example, reporting describing the supposed 'benefits' Amazon could bring to a city are literally copied without attribution or further investigation from Amazon press releases. There is a reason Jeff Bezos bought a huge newspaper, and it's not charity.
You act like the highly paid people you are whining about dont pay taxes. They do.
You are also acting like you and the other "actual Seattleites" have an ancestral claim to the region. Are you a Native American? Doubtful. Your ancestors stole the land and now you act like your entitled to say who gets to live there?
What a hypocritical, provincial attitude to have. And honestly, greedy as well.
My family came to this country in the 1600s. If I had your attitude, I would hate everyone. But I'm not entitled enough to think that my earlier arrival means I earned privileges.
Welcome to America, where effort and talent win over "I was here first"
<< Welcome to America, where effort and talent win over "I was here first"
This is an utterly vacuous and false statement. There are mountains of empirical evidence to prove it if you could spend a few minutes in your favorite search engine.
It's not greedy to protect the area you're from; it's human nature. I'm sorry, but Amazon's tens of thousands of out-of-town employees don't need to live in Seattle. Most of them could work remotely or find jobs at other companies.
>Converted an un-safe warehouse district into prime, central real estate and a thriving neighborhood (South Lake Union)
SLU was not un-safe. The idea that there is a seriously unsafe neighborhood in the city of Seattle is laughable. I remember SLU before Amazon. It has become extremely expensive and gentrified, that's it.
>Grown a progressive, thriving economy that has in turn supported development of mass transit (ST2, ST3 - citywide light rail)
Has massively inflated the population with wealthy transplants over a short period of time, pushing non-tech workers into the suburbs and requiring the citizens to pay for the added infrastructure costs due to Amazon-caused overcrowding without chipping in to help the city.
>Pushed the median household income up 13% over the last decade
You don't actually believe this is due to Amazon? I'm sure they helped a little.. mostly by pushing the poors out...
>Seattle ain't perfect, but there is no question in my mind that we'd be worse off without the thriving local tech economy.
Agreed, and Seattle has always been home to a thriving tech sector which is great. But other companies behave better with respect to their local community. Microsoft set up shop across the water, with a big campus so that employees could head into Seattle but didn't invade it and has adopted the culture of the area fairly well. Employees are treated well.
Are you a software engineer in one of these cities struggling to find a job?
Would you take one at Amazon, knowing that it's one of the worst software jobs out there because of horrible working conditions?
Would you last significantly longer than the average 1 year turnover rate at Amazon?
If you said yes to all these questions, your response makes sense. Congratulations, you are the .25% of the population that my argument doesn't apply to and I'll gladly note you as an exception and admit my argument was a generalization, though a reasonable one.
edit: It's also worth noting that I don't blame Amazonian transplants to Seattle themselves, I find them wholly sympathetic and I think it's sad these people are blamed for the state of affairs: rather, the company, that draws so many from outside, makes no effort to acclimate them to local culture, works them to the bone so they have no time to do so themselves, and provides nothing for the city to aid in the overcrowding, traffic, and housing crises they have created is to blame.
> It is consistently ranked as one of the better places for software engineers to work
Where? By whom? I looked for a while and I couldn't find a single source to suggest this. There are plenty of lists of good software workplaces, Amazon shows up on none of them.
People like working there because it is a great resume-booster. Work a couple years at Amazon, kill yourself for work, then move on to a real company with that on your CV.
>despite NYT hit pieces
Or as everyone else in the world knows it, "accurate reporting".
Here's a quote from an article from an employee that I think captures it:
“Amazon is a culture of self-driven workaholics”
If you join the cult and agree it's a good idea to work yourself to death, it's a good place to do that. It's not a good place to go if you want to be a Seattleite, participate in a community or have a life at the same time.
>Here's a quote from an article from an employee that I think captures it: “Amazon is a culture of self-driven workaholics”
You are quoting a subjective statement from an article, in support of the article's veracity? That makes absolutely no sense.
Amazon employs tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands have worked there over the past 20 years. The NYT article was a collection of anecdotes.
"Accurate reporting"? Lol, I for one am shocked that out of the hundreds of thousands of current and former employees they were able to find a handful that had bad experiences. I mean, what are the odds? Amazon must be the worst.
"Accurate reporting"? From what I remember, not a single individual references worked in software development, they were exclusively in marketing and bureaucratic levels.
>If you join the cult and agree it's a good idea to work yourself to death, it's a good place to do that
Again, based on a few anecdotes you've reached the conclusion that it is a cult? It's really obvious that you've decided Amazon is evil a priori, and are using circular logic to rationalize this, because your evidence so far is anecdotal (from an article based on anecdotes).
>It's not a good place to go if you want to be a Seattleite, participate in a community or have a life at the same time.
I work 40 hours a week, average. So does nearly every engineer I know here. I love Seattle and my work-life balance is awesome.
Young adults necessarily occupy space in a way that hasn’t yet been legitimized by the passage of much time. Populations that need to work for a living must go where there is work. Many of the consequences of this set of facts are dire and inhumane, and responsible public policy manages their impacts as best it can. A world with no new households is one that has stopped reproducing. A world where people are confined to their economically depressed birth cities is another kind of dystopian hellhole.
Half of this wouldn’t even matter if we let housing become a positive-sum game.
You could always refuse to participate in the social and economic destruction of communities by simply not working at places that have a disproportionate impact on the surrounding community.
Yes, it's that easy!
<< A world where people are forced to leave their community of origin because rich tech workers can outbid them for housing is another kind of dystopian hellhole.
The size of your employer has nothing to do with your contribution to housing demand. A million employees of two-person startups have the same effect as a million Googlers, assuming similar budgets.
Interesting argument strategy. You pose something that will never happen in Seattle (a million employees of two-person startups) with something that actually has happened (Amazon).
If you're a transplant who works for Amazon, then it's because of a choice. You came from somewhere where you lived in a community with people you knew and who knew you. You don't need to be in Seattle.
People who are from Seattle need to live in Seattle. A lot of us don't want to leave our families or watch while our communities (or surrounding) communities are destroyed by waves of outsiders who know nothing about the area and who are only here for career/money.
Is that so hard to understand? How much should we have to accommodate? How many people? Should we sit idly by while people drive us out of our own neighborhoods?
>You came from somewhere where you lived in a community with people you knew and who knew you
Sure. College, which ends. After that, returning to your hometown is only possible if you're privileged enough to be born somewhere with a decent local economy, and even then, chances are you'll be moving from family-oriented suburbs to an "up-and-coming" urban neighborhood with other young adults... same set of issues. Or you got priced out of the Bay Area, or your hometown's economy finally shrank to below the level where it can sustain you, etc.
> A lot of us don't want to leave our families or watch while our communities (or surrounding) communities are destroyed by waves of outsiders who know nothing about the area and who are only here for career/money.
There is nothing an American city can do to privilege its natives relative to other Americans. Privileges and Immunities Clause. What you can do is rent control + plan and zone for growth so that it's an increase in population, instead of a displacement.
TIL that people own the neighborhoods they live in by virtue of being there first, without any form of payment, deed, title, or record of ownership.
I should point out that the arguments against gentrification are identical to the arguments white ethnic urban neighborhoods made against blacks moving into their neighborhoods in the mid 20th century.
"They are ruining the character of our city! We were here first!"
Gentrification disproportionately affects communities of color. This is quite exactly what's happening in Seattle.
<< TIL that people own the neighborhoods they live in by virtue of being there first, without any form of payment, deed, title, or record of ownership.
I hear this argument a lot and it's really like saying "only people who own property should be allowed to vote". You're saying that only property owners belong in the community.
That's just sad and wrong - not to mention racist in the context of this discussion - and it truly exemplifies the attitude that myself and many other natives are pushing back against.
This attitude, which I see in so many tech workers, is why Amazon has gotten such a cold reception from many people in Seattle.
No, I'm saying that nobody is entitled to anything. I love how you bring up the race card.
Please explain to me the system of who gets to suddenly stop a city from changing, and when? Your attitude is based on emotion and illogic. So if I'm talking about South Boston, where it is white Irish Americans being booted out by a much more racially diverse professional class, am I bigoted against whites?
Again, you have an emotional argument and nothing else. Take that same argument, apply it at a national level, and you are in anti immigration territory. If Trump ran for mayor of Seattle and said he'd build a wall to keep newcomers out, it would help your agenda.
People who have been in an area for a long time have every right to fight back against overwhelming changes that have incredibly serious long-term implications for their quality of life.
It's a sign of your argument's inherent weakness that you equate people's heartfelt sentiments about feeling overwhelmed by cost-of-living increases, and the resulting destruction of their communities, with Donald Trump's agenda.
The reverse side of the incumbent and established having unlimited rights to protect their quality of life is that the young have none.
The young are also feeling overwhelmed by the cost of living, and are starting to question whether tenure really confers a special moral status that makes the most superficial elements of your quality of life (perception of crowding, architectural taste, ease of parking) more important than the fundamentals of ours (access to employment, housing cost burden, ability to start families).
Socioeconomic vulnerability justifies additional protection, sure, but any community against any change? Come on.
I know, I know, kids these days are entitled. It would be fine to arrange housing as a delayed-gratification, wait-your-turn sort of thing. But the economic cards are stacked in my favor about as well as they can be, and I don't see any such path. So excuse me, but I'm going to fight for a world in which my generation plausibly gets jobs and shelter at the same time.
This isn't about age, and I'm not sure why you're even framing it that way.
The crowding, costs, and congestion in Seattle have increased very significantly with Amazon. There have been very ugly social side effects as well.
Amazon's employees, most of whom are out-of-towners, don't need to live in Seattle as much as the people whom they're displacing. Basically, a lot of the Amazon transplants could work remotely or find jobs in other cities.
The reasons this sort of thing happens are the reasons humans organize themselves into cities at all. Turning off the growth spigot while maintaining everything else in working order isn't a lever that policymakers have.
What they do have are ways of dealing with population growth that lead to drastically less displacement.
Sure, no out-of-towner needs to live in Seattle specifically. New entrants to the workforce do need to live in a city with job growth in their industries, and all of those (for software development) are having this conversation. Could change if remote work becomes more available.
It’s a cycle. Tenants need more rights => the economics for landlords are less attractive => the supply of rental housing dwindles => tenants need more rights.
Rearranging the deck chairs can only get us so far in the face of scarcity. The experiment in a distributed and suburban country is over. The population is urbanizing, as it has throughout human history. Whether it wants to or not, that's where jobs are going. That presssure will always show up in some form or another unless the housing supply grows to meet it.
Whether it’s the market or the government, someone needed to be building on a massive scale, yesterday. That’s not incompatible with protecting long term renters, but when we make it less lucrative to build we must also give more of a push to build anyway.
With far-right racist and anti-immigrant sentiment rising and taking power in the US, as a brown immigrant even if you can get a visa wouldn't you be concerned about moving your life here?
Just an aside, Trump supporters are NOT poor or the working class, this is a myth. The poor are non-voters and if they vote it's mostly Democrat by and large. Trump voters for the most part were middle class suburbanites or exburbanites.
Do you have a source for this? Historically, republican voters are both poorer and less educated (which in and of itself has class implications).
However, none of those demographics are relevant if they are all located in solid red states. Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries, the swing implies it's due to jobless (poor) and/or working class voters, the exact demographic you say was not the determinant.
Every income group over $50k voted Trump. If you scroll down you see that rural voters did indeed go for Trump, but they are much smaller proportion of the population than city folk or, the largest group, suburbanites (who went for Trump solidly as well).
I don't have a source handy for the poor being largely non-voters but I've seen hundreds over the years, it's well-established fact.
>Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries
Most people might make this attribution but it is not correct.
That article doesn't support your assertion. Those are overall exit polls, not polls of swing states. The swings states are the only
meaningful measure of comparison as to "why he won". The middle class are doing very well in red states like Iowa and Nebraska, but they are just as irrelevant
as a billionaire in manhattan or a welfare recipient in the bronx.
In Ohio, the state that has voted for every president to win since 1964, trump won across every level of education and every level of income except the MOST poor according to exit polls.
Okay, if you will only accept extremely specific tailored data on tiny fractions of the population you are perfectly capable of finding it yourself. I'll be happy to review it with you when you do.
The other responder to you has already done this for you, in fact, and the data there backs up my claims.
Plus, my main claim is that Trump voters are not the poor, they are middle-class suburbanites. My source absolutely backs that claim up.
Also, I'm not sure you understand the electoral landscape very well. Iowa is one of the more purple states, it was VERY blue for Obama and almost exactly dead even on Bush both times.
The makeup of Iowa is actually very similar to nearby Wisconsin and Michigan, which were the surprise red states that took the election for Trump.
A lot of the swing states are controlled by Republican state governments who impose draconian racially targeted voter suppression measures yes, but this is true in every election. 2000 was won for Bush first by deep and massive illegal voter suppression in Florida (taking people who had the right to vote off the rolls because they had a black-sounding name, for example) and only second by the Supreme Court.
The Republicans have less support nationally and in states almost every election and it is getting worse for them as time goes on, voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are the only things keeping them in office.
