Hey, WMS. That post was pretty angry in tone and I apologize. I understand days before the election the trolling here was rampant and I was pushed to the crazy left; just as you've clearly been pushed to right since the days when we were agreeing with each other on most everything around 2004-07 on this forum.
Fair enough, apology accepted and I withdraw my own harshness. And that's why I take this forum in small doses.
Hmm...I think foreign policy has pushed me to the right, because I
intensely dislike Obama's FP, especially, at the moment, in Syria. But that is another long topic perhaps for another time. Yeah, that was kind of the Golden Age around these parts, eh?
I was just trying to point a statistical truth. Blue collar whites are declining in population share, rural culture is declining, advances in technology will make the working class virtually non-existant in America by the end of the century. I guarantee it. Some can't fathom this, but the West and perhaps the world shortly after it is ascending beyond blue collar.
Ah, but it was the attitude behind your comments (and the comments of others, to be sure) that spurred the criticism. It is one thing to say a group is declining in share, it is another to imply that this is a good thing and that these people should be trodden into the mud. And liberals imply that a
lot. For proof, see the rest of this thread.
Any political ideology that is looking to preserve the blue collar worker and win their votes is looking backwards. They're not bad people and they need to be helped in the present through policy but they don't know what is right for this country because their views are to preserve something that cannot be saved.
To further continue along these lines, what are they being replaced
with? It sure as hell isn't by the upper-middle class bourgeois types that infest this forum - or are we going to ignore all the statistics the Dems use in pointing out growing inequality and the decline in real income? And who gets to decide 'what is right for this country'? Based on what standards? Also, as Al and several others (and from my perspective I am a strange bedfellow to several of them
) have pointed out, liberals aren't
really interested in 'helping' them. So their not voting for liberals isn't 'not voting in their own interests', it's a very cynical and rational response to a system that discards them as unworthy. At least the Republicans
try to win their votes.
I guess I'm a classist because I recognize that there is less need for laborers with each passing year. I've been told I'm a lot of smug elitist things because I happen to enjoy looking at data instead of feelings and tradition to see what will happen in the future. That kind of thinking gets you called a lot of things, especially with smug Santa Fe asses who believe in natural medicine voodoo. The numbers never lie though and last night was just another drop in that bucket.
Less need for laborers? Actually, your class just shipped those jobs elsewhere so you can get your shiny toys cheap.
iPads, anyone? >
Most of the laborer jobs left are the scut work done for a pittance no one else wants to do. Again, it's attitude - bourgeois liberals (yes, yes, conservatives too, but let's stay on topic) love to stand on their pedestals and talk about how much better they are than these horrible proletariat types. And yes, I've run into this attitude in person from liberals, repeatedly. Usually this is accompanied with their talking about how wonderfully tolerant and progressive they are.
Unlike what most liberals seem to think, you know what, the white working class, rural or not, can detect BS quite well. At least the conservative Reps are honest about who they are.
And if you let your attitudes influence your analysis, your data isn't as certain as you may think it is. What is now may not necessarily be in the future, and extrapolating trend lines based on their variables not changing is getting on shaky ground - are you
sure Hispanics will continue to vote Democratic in the same percentages as they did this time? If the Reps ever stop being the party of Grover Norquist and Tom Tancredo, that could shift those percentages, and class plays a role amongst Hispanics like with everyone else (well, except American blacks and Natives, who are lock, stock, and barrel Democratic voters).
Or then again, perhaps the two useless packs representing the ruling class will continue to run us into the ground per the usual.
