I am sorry: this man sounds like an “elitist” of a special British blend. He looks at his country with his nose in a twitch. Boy his superiority comes through. Bullshit will always be bullshit.
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He comes across as a prototypical mid-2000’s corporatist, firmly believing in the righteousness of the company and that people who want a less inequitable society are muddled headed. He’s basically what a lot of people accused (wrongly) Clinton of being.
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You are such a coward, carlos. What do you do - hide over here? I haven’t seen you in months on any of the regular threads.
I guess your job is officially over. Not getting paid for trolling anymore - this was a busman’s holiday.
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Hey now…
No need to be sorry. With his DNA of such illustrious ancestors such as Sir Philip Goodhart and Mayer Lehman in addition to being steeped like a bag of bad tea in the halls of high finance there should be little wonder about his “elitist” stance that immigration can undermine national solidarity and be a threat to his social democratic ideals, that is to say his perspective of the negative aspects of the welfare state.
And keep in mind, the most obnoxious invariably control the megaphone.
~OGD~
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I’d read it with a grain of salt. Trump’s main demographic was white males with above average income – that means a fair number of them had to be professionals. Goodhart’s analysis isn’t completely wrong, but it’s flawed. There’s certainly a culture-gap thing going on here, but his somewhere/anywhere dichotomy doesn’t adequately describe it.
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The somewhere/anywhere split isn’t thus everywhere. “Sense of place” and “place making” are popular ideas among the best-traveled Americans. The attitude is intense loyalty to place blended with broad awareness of the world; local culture as both unique contributor to and microcosm of world culture. This is the preponderant attitude in much of New England, as well as the entire West Coast northward of LA, most particularly Portland and Seattle. Also, much of Brooklyn.
Its also fairly evident in at least parts of Europe: the Netherlands, Switzerland, and throughout Scandinavia. It’s what international sophisticates learn: there are many special places of particular value in this world which must be tended and defended. It’s more often, at least in America, the lower middle class who have less sense of this, and could care less where they park their trailer aside from the weather.
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He boils down his analysis to somewheres and anywheres. Your an anywhere and you find fault with the some wheres. I’m shocked to find gambling going on here.
America has only one governing principle: free contract. That means bargaining power is everything. What you earn is a function of that.
Here’s the problem: anywhere’s are policy and economic elites. They’ve been trading away jobs and allowing foreigners to enter the country all of which undermines the bargaining power of workers and undermines the stability of their communities and families.
When I was 17 (1977) I got a summer job as unskilled construction labor that paid $20 an hour. That’s at least $80 an hour in today’s money. Now part of the reason unskilled construction labor was paid so high was because they couldn’t expect to work all the time. But it allowed them to live something close to a middle class existence, house, clothes, feed and educate their families. That kind of social contract did not destroy America - in fact it made it great, it made it a great country. The America I grew up in was a far and distant country which I have fond memories of. That country was destroyed by elites who shipped jobs overseas and flooded America with immigrants driving down the lifestyles of working class America. Remember it’s their country too. They do most of the fighting (when there’s war) dying and working in the country. They have a right to rising expectations for the future (as we all do). My father was a talented machinery maintenance supervisor for a large brewery, a role similar to Michelle Obama’s father’s, and similarly paid, then $55,000, today that’s $255,000. Meanwhile I have 15 years as a highly skilled business analyst designing information systems for large heavy manufacturing companies and a law degree from a tier 1 university, yet I spent over a decade nominally employed, lost everything and only recently gained anything close to decent employment, and I must say the America work place today is a massive stressfest because, among other things, losing your job means no insurance and so people are increasingly neurotic in the workplace. All of my experience, training and education nets me a job that pays less than I made as an unexperienced unskilled construction worker in high school. That’s what I’ve gone through, I can’t be sure what’s happened to others, but I can see the working class on my visits to Walmart and they are positively broken, broken by the anywhere’s that run the country.
Obama created 10 million jobs. But during the Obama administration 10 million people immigrated into the United States - legally. 10 million legal immigrants. (I don’t have a problem with illegal immigrants, I have a problem with excessive legal immigration). In a country without enough jobs for the people who live there already. Why? It wasn’t the somewheres who live in local communities, it was the anywheres creating public policy.
This is the thing that broke this election. One of my friends parents are doctors. They have a good union. When I was a kid his father made only about 30% more than my dad. But doctors have a strong union. They have maintained their bargaining power and maybe enhanced it. Doctors make huge amounts of money - because they have bargaining power. There are no factory maintenance supervisors making $300,000 a year these days. In the 70s it was common place and its what created the middle class. By flooding America with immigrants we are undermining the bargaining power of the working class that already lives here, our friends and neighbors. By shipping jobs overseas, we are doing the same. At some point you can’t expect these people to fight and die for a country that has impoverish them. At that point the country isn’t a country anymore. Trump made that point tons of times on the campaign trail saying “we aren’t a country anymore”.
BigMoney types are anywhere types. Hillary was one of them. Hillary didn’t care about working people, about manufacturing, about the life bread that sustains communities. She knew and the working people knew it. That made them easy pickings for Trump. She didn’t even visit places like Wisconsin. She hoped a coalition of identity minority voters would give her a majority. And it would if she had had any credibility at all with the working class - but Minorities are still, ahem, minorities and election wins require a majority. Now I see she is having second thoughts about going away, perhaps wants a third bite at the apple. Good grief. If she got a job in a factory then I might think about it.
Give me Bernie. Give me demand side bias economic policy bias. Stop shipping jobs overseas. Stop shipping more immigrants here than we can absorb. Remember, all politics is local, or at least it used to be.
Well, you could, of course, actually check my posting history instead of spouting off accusations based on nothing. I have multiple posts every month, I´m ashamed to say. I stopped posting so much because I have new work hours and a sick family member, and, most of all, I´m sick of the numerous centrist Dems here who seem hell-bent on repeating the same mistakes made in the last election - you know, like putting down the people who historically have supported the party,
I assume that whatever ethical code you follow frowns on lying. If you want to see a troll, perhaps you should look at the literary stylings of @jw1. He disappeared right after the election, and unlike us ¨berniebros¨, HRC really did pay people to ¨correct¨ her critics. Now that´s paid trolling.
Loss of jobs is not the fault of immigration. It is the result of automation. The next great wave of automation is just starting, and this time it’s going to sweep through white-collar jobs.
I don’t think Democrats know what to do about this (the Obama WH was at least starting to talk about the millions of trucking jobs about to disappear), one-note Bernie Sanders has given no indication that he thinks about it at all, and the Republicans just don’t give a shit.
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Not defending the article or anything, but the second part is something I see thrown around a fair bit. What is the basis for it? If a fair number of American’s are afraid of cultural change and that was a big part in putting Trump in office than isn’t it somewhat valid?
Why are Dems considered elitist and have to do various things. Like reaching out to voters etc. When the GOP lost they did not do that. Not at all, they went with the basal fears and got enough votes to win the electoral college and other places. And one can argue that they are arguing from a similar position as this claim. Extreme nationalism. Many at this point will claim that liberals or similar are not American’s proudly. They will pretty much go out of their way to insult those that think differently or believe differently.
However it is Dems that are being elitist and that is the problem? People accept bad things sometimes. Trump won in the system we have and the GOP held to power, but at the same time. That does not necessarily make their claims correct either.
Judis finds a UK Judis with equally bogus analysis. The idea that the Tories were running on a communitarian Christian social democratic platform is on par with the theory that Trump voters wanted to punish the Democrats for failing to support labor unions.
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Ha! I also would not characterize the Republicans as the party of the working class.
The United States used to have free college. The United States did not allow insurance for profit. Neither concepts are “far left.” Advocating for economic justice and renewable energy progress in a society that has extreme wealth inequality should be expected, not insulted. This author is a neoliberal apologist, and seems to be a white supremacist/xenophobe. Many Trump voters DID want to punish Democrats for selling out to corporate interests–for growing the cities and letting “fly over” country rust. When was the last time Democrats talked about Education? Why are Democrats defending outdated, polluted energy sources, when new ones create new jobs? If Democrats don’t understand how lost they’ve become, and led by lobbyists, they should step aside and let the people with new ideas lead.
I think he means ‘unattractive’ in an electoral and leadership sense rather than physical appearance FWIW.
Not a great choice of words, but I don’t believe there’s intent there.
They are cursed with Blairites, we are cursed with Clintonites. Once those curses are lifted the Tories and the Republicans can be defeated.
The Tories had actually gone for a more egalitarian position on elder care in which older people who could afford to do so would have to expose at least some of the part of their property wealth if they were hospitalized for a long term.
This is the Great Trauma of the Tories. Ever since Churchill, they have been looking over their shoulders that the UK would go ahead and finally implement a land-value tax (a term so odious to the Cons that Cameron could not bring himself to say it in public). It has not just been a Tory bugaboo, either. Blair steered clear of it. Now, finally, Labour is rethinking the issue and we may yet see Churchill’s “best worst tax” implemented. Denmark, which was afraid of foreign real estate buyers (Germans), bit the bullet in 1961 – much to their benefit. And unlike gloomy predictions, real estate prices did not crash. There is no “Green Zone” for oligarchs and oil sheikhs like you have in London. There is no credit downgrade of your country. There is no insane real estate market. Moreover, passing an LVT would remedy some of the divided UK problem. Denmark’s non-Western immigration has been extremely expensive and many live on welfare and never bother to learn Danish, which has resulted in a similar backlash as in the UK. However, with massive capital outflows from China and Russia, the UK’s common law property traditions add another layer that makes the country ripe for exploitation. For years, it has been the preferred destination for Russian oligarchs and their families.
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Multinational corporations and politicians mostly from the right in US and UK designed the the globalization system that some whites in the west are said to be rebelling against and blaming brown and black immigrants. The same people who voted for Trump have been voting overwhelmingly for GOP that primarily serves the interests of corporations like the massive tax cuts for the rich they are now trying to push. Even if there was no immigration, corporations would still find a way of cheapening unskilled and semi-unskilled labor as they are doing with automation and outsourcing because they can manipulate and even buy politicians. The world has always been changing and it is changing almost every where and that is something you can stop unless you want to turn your country to North Korea.
As Goodhart points out, many citizens of England found it galling that rulings affecting England were being made by a committee of bureaucrats in Brussels, made up often of people who had been exiled there by their governments because they were not first-rank in their home countries. The galled reaction is understandable in England, a country where representative, democratic government, by and for the people has been a developing goal for centuries.
Well then, what about the Scots and the Irish? Although they have a certain amount of autonomy, they too have the galling feeling that important things affecting them are being decided by faceless civil servants and posh politicians in London. The biggest example of this for them is the Brexit vote itself.
Both the Scots and the Irish object to the way the English voted to throw them under the bus while celebrating a restoration in ye olde English supremacy over the UK. The Scots’ government is now working to keep Scotland in the EU in some way. Or: they can have a second referendum, one aiming to stay in the EU while leaving the UK, something they have just as much right to do as the English did in forcing a Brexit referendum.
While Eire, i.e. the independent part of Ireland, will remain in the EU, Ulster (Northern, “English” Ireland) does not want to be pushed by London into a position of having to erect English trade barriers against Eire while being forced to obey non-EU, London-based rulings which they do not want.
In Mr. Goodhart’s terms, the Scots’ Somewhere-people and the Scots’ Anywhere-people may just get together and tell the English to take their Brexit and shove it somewhere, or anywhere but not down the Scots’ throats. And could a reborn English semi-colonial, nostalgic death-wish - MNIEA - make Northern Ireland English Again (and NOT EU) - could this not lead a good many Ulstermen and women to prefer a closer union with EU-member Eire rather than subjugation to an English imperialism now resurrected from the grave of history? More guerrilla war in Ireland? Time will tell, if not Mme May and Mr. Corbin. Shades of Oliver Cromwell, the historical Lord Protector of England, and “pacifier” of Ireland, who famously told his troops, “Put your faith in God and keep your powder dry.”
“In your country, the traditional party of property and the middle class, the Republican Party, is becoming the working class party and the Democrats are becoming the party of the progressive middle class and the minorities.”
I am not young by any stretch of the imagination but this stikes me as old thinking. A lot of these words don’t mean what the once did. To me anyway.
In any case, I think the second part is truer than the first. Republican voters may be more working class i.e. poor, I guess, but the republican politicians themselves and their (real) platform?
I agree with everything you said. I spent most of my life in New York City and the last 30 years in rural Pennsylvania. I qualify as an anywhere and a somewhere.
My family was lower middle class. My father was a salesman and my mother a housewife. I never lacked for any of the basic necessities and I was the only one who went to college–and the only one who bought a house. I was smart, ambitious and never lacked for a job. Those were the good old days…
In rural PA, decent jobs are scarce and if you don’t have a car or truck, you are dead meat. Almost no one has the money needed for a down payment on a car so they pay outrageous car loans or buy clunkers. It used to be cheap to live out here; now very few can pay the school and property taxes or even the electric bill–and this is still a depressed area. I’d say 90% of the people are Republicans and have no idea what the hell is really going on, only that they don’t like it.
Personally, between global warming and the stupidity and denial of Americans, I believe there is no solution–so just hunker down and try to ride out the storm.