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I actually agree with this, but I think that this is true of any large political movement. There are plenty of people in the democrat base who are utterly thoughtless and pick their vote/political allegiance based purely on tribal instinct as well - this isn't something unique to Trump. though his personal charisma likely means he has a larger number of these people than other politicians.
I disagree with this reading of the article - you don't seem to have grasped the point actually being made, which is that Trump has been using this tendency on the part of the left to ingratiate himself with his base. He knew that he'd be able to get the talking heads to talk shit about him in ways that would make people who dislike those talking heads support him as a result, and so he went out of his way to get the media to attack him. This is stated explicitly in the article so I'm not sure if repeating it here will do any good, but that's what you're meant to take away from that particular section.
You think the economic anxiety narrative is bullshit? Do you have any kind of argument against the claims he makes?
Where's the bullshit here? Are you living in another America that doesn't have a massive fentanyl crisis and didn't outsource huge swathes of productive industry to China? I (and Greer, based on the quote) can understand not wanting to talk about it or admit that it happened, but there's a substantial amount of fire beneath the smoke of economic anxiety. Is there an element of vicarious remediation of humiliation? Absolutely! But to pretend that's the only motivating factor strikes me as absurd.
What is very distinctive about Trumpism is that the loyalty is to Trump, specifically. Non-personalist political movements can and do regularly replace leadership figures when they become a liability, while their duller supporters are usually the least motivated and exert minimal influence over leadership selection.
I was never disputing it it. It was central to my claim: "they are attracted to Trump because he promises to vicariously remediate their sense of humiliation." My point there is that the "grievance" is hollow. There's no material injury. Trump supporters have an inferiority complex and feel humiliated when college-educated liberals look down on them. (They, of course, have never been shy in their own hatred for CELs, but nobody seems to regard this as a reciprocal grievance. Nobody is visiting yoga studios to do pop-anthropology of Hillary voters or hand-wringing about how they might start a civil war if we prosecute her.) To the extent that these people have been abused (referring primarily to rural conservatives, rather than affluent exurbanites), it has generally been by their own leaders who they continue to support. The reason the town's factory closed down wasn't because of snooty Democrat journalists from NYC. Though in fairness to the Republicans, even a maximally protectionist industrial policy isn't going to fix competition on the international market.
The socio-economic composition of Trump's voters and the economic (and political for that matter) history of the United States. Like,
is prime bullshit - a politically expedient claim made with no regard for the truth. I won't go so far as to call it a lie, because while I think Greer probably knew it wasn't true he wasn't so much willfully misrepresenting facts as making an... emotionally satisfying statement. Nevertheless, the fact that he says this with a straight face makes it hard to take him seriously. It is both an overly rosy portrait of life in 1966 America and a comically pessimistic one of life in 2016 America. Single income couples with children are still common in the US and are overwhelmingly not homeless, as I'm sure he knows. They're not as proportionally common as they used to be, but that's mostly due shifting social norms around women working, not because modern America is such a wasteland that there's no other option. And let's say nothing about the legal status quo in 1966.
You don't have to think the US is a utopia with no economic issues to doubt the claim that Americans are worse off now than they were in 1966. At least on grounds of material abundance like Greer appears to be making. If you want to make a normative argument about the desirability of segregation and women's labor force participation, I'm going to have to pass on that discussion.
For Trump's die hards? It's the sine qua non. They have other concerns, but they are either standard Republican things (tax cuts, abortion, nativism) that most Republican candidates would deliver on (and thus don't really explain Trump's particular appeal) or at odds with the reality of policy under the Trump administration (e.g. the Republican Party continues to be anti-labor).
This is really in "fiery but mostly no material injury" territory. What is there to even say to it other than we know the material injury is intentional because we can watch them gloat about it? Even just by reading your comment history?
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I feel that a part of this is the sheer non-presence and lack of authenticity behind most modern politicians. Contrast him to any other conservative politician in the last two decades and it isn't exactly hard to understand why he does so much better in this regard. The fact that he is actually the best vehicle for that inchoate rage and sense of resentment that has taken over so much of America adds to that as well - there's no way that his base would accept another empty suit who gives off the impression that he will immediately betray them once he gets into power.
Where's the US manufacturing sector? Do you live in some kind of alternative universe where there's no fentanyl/opioid epidemic? I think that there's actually a serious case to be made that a lot of the people in Trump's base are noticeably poorer than they were before, and the exact policies that Trump has made clear his opposition to were responsible. You're the first person I've encountered who claimed that the economic problems his base have been talking about just don't exist.
I feel like this is extremely uncharitable - this is the mirror image of the argument that Trump haters are simply immature people who hate their fathers, and that sense of childhood grievance is what actually informs their opposition to him. Deep down people who don't like Trump know that he's right and correct, but because they can't get over their daddy issues they just can't accept an authority figure who can tell them no.
Is there some yokel in a trailerpark somewhere who looked up from the crackpipe to vote for Trump due to some university educated SJW looking down on him? Sure, that dude probably exists somewhere, but you're doing yourself a disservice when you base your view of the world on people like that.
Their own leaders who they continue to support? No, the policies that have destroyed these communities were passed with bipartisan agreement. I think that the Republican leaders prior to Trump were corrupt ghouls who pursued policies responsible for untold suffering in order to enrich themselves and profit from the public purse, but it isn't like the left had anything better to offer. Many people in the Trump base actually voted for Obama because they believed in the message of change - and then they saw what they actually got (policies identical to another 8 years of Bush).
I honestly don't know how much this can be fixed - the big mistake was in growing China into the industrial and manufacturing powerhouse it is now, and it isn't like Trump could just hit the "undo" button on policies which lead to China having 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US. The promise of Trump is that he at the very least would be trying to improve things as opposed to just taking a nice cut from the people making the problem worse.
I don't think that he's lying, but I'm perfectly willing to just go and ask him the next time he opens up for questions. He actually spent quite a while living in the areas he's talking about, and he's old enough that he actually has childhood memories of the 60s. He was actually there! While I'm open to the claim that you have a better understanding of the situation than he does, I'd want some actual evidence rather than just waving your hand in the direction of the evidence (especially seeing as how your opinion is conflicting with someone who was there at the time).
Not at all - if you're familiar with the rest of Greer's work, the actual reason (I think) he gives for this would be the combination of vast fossil fuel reserves, WW2 destroying the US' competition and the proceeds of empire all feeding back in to the prosperity enjoyed by America during those years. He's not advocating for some kind of GLORIVOS RETVRN, and he even explicitly makes the point elsewhere that he's not suggesting going back to the social values of those years.
Trump famously didn't give a shit about abortion and gave answers which embarrassed his base on the topic. Other republicans also don't give a shit about immigration (they make a lot of noise about it to get elected, but they don't actually do anything to solve the problem because too many of them financially profit from the illegal immigration situation). The strongest point you make there is talking about things that were "at odds with the reality of policy under the Trump administration", but the general belief in his base was that he was hamstrung by a Republican establishment that hated him as well as a deep state that was actively fighting against him at every turn. There's a decent amount of truth to those claims as well, enough that these people can maintain their faith in him.
I am saying the problems afflicting the rural working class and poor (as distinct from the suburban conservatives who make up much/most of Trump's base and who are generally doing more than fine) are not the product of the urban professional class, immigration, or free trade as Greer hints. These people have, by and large, chosen to side with political leaders who favor economic and labor policy disfavorable to them for social/values reasons. Insofar as this represents their priorities, fair play, but to turn and blame low standards of living in the rural midwest or deep south on the urban professional class is nonsensical.
I don't know if you are accurately representing the body of Greer's argumentation, but if the way you characterize it is accurate, it's sort of giving away the game. US manufacturing dominance in the mid 20th century was a bubble of anomalous circumstances that was never going to be sustained. Europe was always going to rebuild, East Asia was always going to industrialize, economic growth was always going to make American manufacturing less competitive internationally, automation was always going to make manufacturing less labor intensive, etc... Even a maximally protectionist policy regime wouldn't fix this (ignoring the harm inflicted on the rest of the economy in the name of manufacturing fetishism), because it wouldn't fix the fundamental issue of a world that had grown beyond US manufacturing. Japanese and later Chinese industry frequently ended up beating US industry on both price and quality.
I'm not going to say that nothing can be done about the US' relative position in global manufacturing, but it isn't what Trump is promising and it isn't what a bunch of 60 year old ex-factory workers from Ohio want. It probably means more immigration, not less, more international partnerships and less protectionism, more capital/automation-intensive facilities, and more federally directed industrially policy. It also requires acknowledging that no, the US is not going to go back to manufacturing most of the world's steel or cars.
A major distinction is that Trump haters don't say this, whereas many Trump supporters cite the arrogance, condescension, and judgment of 'coastal elites' as a reason for supporting him. They frame it more sympathetically than I do, but it's coming from their own mouths.
He was literally four in 1966. If he has any expertise on the socio-economic conditions of the 60s, it is purely incidental to his personal life. (TBF, it wouldn't be appreciably more credible if he was ~20 instead, though he could at least cite a singular adult perspective).
As I said, I don't think he's lying. I think he's bullshitting.
Apologies for the delay in replying - life can get busy sometimes.
I disagree but neither of us have provided evidence here. I agree with Greer's position that choices about the costs of these changes were not equally distributed across society, and they were the inevitable consequences of the choices that were made.
Greer actually agrees with this and it is a large theme in his work - though he also throws in the energy factor, which I think is a significant element as well. The point actually being made is that the reaction to those changes and shifts involved making decisions that profited some sections of society at the expense of others. Neither me nor Greer are claiming that the managerial class/salary class just decided to fuck over the rural poors for no reason - but that the decisions made in response to crisis hurt those groups to advantage others. All of the factors you identified are real reasons as to why the US would not be able to maintain the success they did and neither me nor Greer would disagree (I think, at least).
I think that those policies and ideas, the same ones that have been put in place for the past several decades, will continue to have the same impact they have had for the past several decades. If you want to have that argument I would love to, but I don't think this moldy old conversational thread is the place.
I actually think "arrogance, condescension and judgement" coming from someone is a valid reason to hate them and work against them - I know that if I act arrogantly and condescendingly to people while negatively judging their lifestyle it doesn't tend to lead to us becoming best of friends. But that's actually very different to the original claim, which was "Trump supporters have an inferiority complex and feel humiliated when college-educated liberals look down on them."
And he also lived in Appalachia and other parts of the country hit by the economic conditions we spoke about later - he's been following these stories for quite some time. The reason I brought it up is that he ha actually lived through all the changes that he's describing.
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I think this is a stretch. How many have been fired for not hewing to CEL social mores? How many have been threatened with firing to force them to do so? How many have been banned from social media for their political views?
The reason for the asymmetry of "resentment" vs. "contempt" is that the primary ways these classes interact are power relationships, and the power almost always goes the same way; the sneering bureaucrat autowins on most levels of escalation except for the two highest ones - electoral politics and violence.
Extremely few. Especially once you factor out instances of nonconformity that boil down to things like "don't sexually harass your coworkers so badly that even HR can't ignore it".
Does it, though?
Alternative theory: the asymmetry of "resentment" vs "contempt" is because the mean things liberals say about conservatives cut significantly deeper than vice versa. When conservatives call liberals godless degens, liberals' response is generally something to the effect of "hell yeah we are 😎". This is because they fundamentally don't care about the accusations. There's also a degree of reactance, especially for LGBT individuals, but there's no sense of shame or humiliation. Its like accusing a Christian of being a bad Muslim. On the other hand, almost everyone in the US thinks bigotry is bad and education is good. So when liberals call conservatives ignorant bigots, that actually lands. Notably, conservatives tend to get way more riled up about being accused of racism than homophobia (and don't care at all about being called things like gun nuts).
The actual power asymmetry is that educated liberals can make uneducated conservatives feel bad about themselves, whereas uneducated conservatives can merely scare educated liberals.
To take just one example, I used to work next to a small woman with a high-pitched voice who decided one day that 'she' was now 'he'. I had to interact with her on a daily basis, lying literally every time I referred to her with a pronoun, knowing that if I ever slipped up once and accidentally used 'her' in the office then my impeccably liberal employer was almost certainly going to fire me. It was stressful and humiliating, and I don't think she even meant to put me in that position. But that's the reality when you're surrounded by HR machinery that is willing to enforce liberal social mores at any cost.
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