Originally Posted by Kinser79

Indeed. Americans are tied to various myths. The fact remains that there are owners and there are workers and never the twain shall meet, except under incredibly special circumstances. But this is an accepted view among most who have bothered to read Karl Marx.

Oh, I have read Karl Marx. He diagnosed the problems of his time (and to a great degree much of history) well enough. His solutions were poor, and failed miserably. The great problem is that none seemed to recognize that the Commuist Party effectively came to own and control the means of production. As long as one elite group has absolute control of the means of production, Marxist theory requires an ongoing need for violent revolution. Thus, the prediction of utopian harmony was absurdly wrong.

I think you will find many people here share similar opinions of Marx. Most of us eschew violent revolution as a solution and would seek an alternative. Such alternatives are very hard to come by, but there are no signs in the real world of a spiral of rhetoric building to a spiral of violence yet, and no one here seems to be advocating such.

If one is making class conflict a central element of one's economic and political world view, yes, you have to clearly define your classes. However, everyone else has a right to define their classes as well. If you come in and say by fiat that your way is correct and other ways are wrong, without an argument, where are we? "Americans are tied to various myths." Statement of fact? Clearly true? No need to provide examples? Who named you God?

My own core point is that most everyone is centered on and obsessed with their own values and world views. All believe their own absolutely correct. All conflicting are wrong. For an adult to change their world view generally requires a traumatic failure of their old one. For a culture to change, the culture, the collective world view of the entire people, would have to traumatically fail. This is my understanding of an S&H crisis. Smoldering Atlanta at the end of our Civil War, the poverty of our Great Depression and Berlin at the end of World War II reflect the scale of the trauma required for a people to change world views collectively.

Which is why our current so called crisis era is fizzing out. We are avoiding real trauma. The wars are small and far away. The almost economic crash didn't come close to reprising the 1930s. Without such trauma, there will be no dramatic culture shift. People will continue to chant their existing world views with increasing volume but have no impetus to change.

Traumas like Atlanta, Berlin and Hooverville generally can't be replicated on an internet forum. Thus, I can accept going in that you will very likely cling to Marxist language, principles and economics, even though I see the latter part of the 20th Century as a large scale experiment proving Marxism as applied in practice just doesn't work.

But meanwhile, even if your idea of how the world works has no meaningful place for the concept "middle class", this doesn't imply that others can't find the idea useful or necessary to understanding US politics. I can disparage Marxist perspectives. You can disparage American perspectives. If all we do is disparage each other, throwing insults, playing with ad-hominum attacks, the conversation isn't going to be very meaningful.

On the other hand, if that's your road, if you are here to assert your personal Truth and disparage all who disagree with you, you'll fit in here fine.

That may be a general association but it remains incorrect. I could go into detail on this issue, but suffice it to say that I'm sure you understand that a nice home does not make one a factory owner, or vice versa. Nor does a certain type of lifestyle indicate class. Reference point Bill Gates, has billions of dollars, owns a huge company, buys his clothing at the same places I do. Conversely, one can also own a nice vehicle and yet still be broke as hell. (Probably because one owns said nice vehicle which is, or should be, beyond their means.) The article I linked to explains my position beautifully. Normally, I wouldn't post on this thread at all, bourgeois politics is to put it bluntly---boring. Brower merely managed to hit on one of my pet peeves by attempting to claim that he is "middle class" because he may have a slightly nicer place to stay than a housing project.

He really cannot help himself really. He is after all a white liberal boomer.

Originally Posted by Kinser79

That may be a general association but it remains incorrect. I could go into detail on this issue, but suffice it to say that I'm sure you understand that a nice home does not make one a factory owner, or vice versa. Nor does a certain type of lifestyle indicate class. Reference point Bill Gates, has billions of dollars, owns a huge company, buys his clothing at the same places I do. Conversely, one can also own a nice vehicle and yet still be broke as hell. (Probably because one owns said nice vehicle which is, or should be, beyond their means.) The article I linked to explains my position beautifully. Normally, I wouldn't post on this thread at all, bourgeois politics is to put it bluntly---boring. Brower merely managed to hit on one of my pet peeves by attempting to claim that he is "middle class" because he may have a slightly nicer place to stay than a housing project.

He really cannot help himself really. He is after all a white liberal boomer.

Yes, he has a strong world view. You don't? You don't have a very firm idea of how things are and how they should be? In what way can you help yourself that he can't? To far too great a degree, most of us here are demagogues.

One very simplistic view of US politics has the Republicans supporting the wealthy, the Democrats supporting the poor, with balance of power being decided by whether the people in the middle consider themselves wealthy or poor. This is absurdly simplistic. Among other things, the rural - urban divide is likely as important just now as class differences. Still, much of US politics is a battle for the folk in the middle. It's just too useful a concept to throw away because it conflicts with the ideas of a discredited philosopher. If one is fighting over a particular part of the electorate, there is going to be a name for that part of the electorate.

Originally Posted by Kinser79

That may be a general association but it remains incorrect. I could go into detail on this issue, but suffice it to say that I'm sure you understand that a nice home does not make one a factory owner, or vice versa. Nor does a certain type of lifestyle indicate class. Reference point Bill Gates, has billions of dollars, owns a huge company, buys his clothing at the same places I do. Conversely, one can also own a nice vehicle and yet still be broke as hell. (Probably because one owns said nice vehicle which is, or should be, beyond their means.) The article I linked to explains my position beautifully. Normally, I wouldn't post on this thread at all, bourgeois politics is to put it bluntly---boring. Brower merely managed to hit on one of my pet peeves by attempting to claim that he is "middle class" because he may have a slightly nicer place to stay than a housing project.

He really cannot help himself really. He is after all a white liberal boomer.

Please pardon PB. PB wasn't talking with Marxist's and must not have realized that there was a Marxist around to offend.

Originally Posted by B Butler

Which is why our current so called crisis era is fizzing out. We are avoiding real trauma. The wars are small and far away. The almost economic crash didn't come close to reprising the 1930s. Without such trauma, there will be no dramatic culture shift. People will continue to chant their existing world views with increasing volume but have no impetus to change.

Give it time; give it time. We may be due for some trauma before 2029. The 1850s may have seemed like fizzing too. But the fizz became a bomb exploding.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Class is generally associated with the value/quality of ones home and the value/quality of ones personal property and the value/quality of lifestyle and the amount of capital that one earns to acquire and sustain them.

Income is the most generally-used standard.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Who automatically links race to welfare and often uses the term racism and applies the term racist every time welfare is mentioned or the issue is brought up? You are the race baiters who are using race, racism and racist rhetoric that is turning off white voters.

The Republicans and conservatives are doing that, yes. I hope it does start to turn off white voters, instead of hooking them. It's up to white voters to wake up to how they are being baited.

I know that the Right has books that accuse the Left of racebaiting. As far as I can tell, you guys say that the Left is race-baiting because we call you racists.

But the Left also has its books that show what's happening from our point of view. Like Dog Whistle Politics by Ian Haney Lopez. Race baiting by the Right is not overt; it is subtle. It works on the subconscious to arouse resentment against minorities. It's not that the conservatives are overtly racist; it's that they find race-baiting a useful strategy.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/1626...d_race_baiting

http://billmoyers.com/episode/ian-ha...itics-of-race/

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Dog whistle politics doesn't come out of some desire to hurt minorities. It comes out of a desire to win votes. It's racism as a strategy. It's cold, it's calculating, it's considered, it's the decision to achieve one's own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. A dog whistle doesn’t sound like much to your ears or mine, but it will make the neighborhood canines come running faster than you can shout Lassie or Rin Tin Tin.

This whistle sends its signal at a frequency only dogs can hear. Which makes it an apt metaphor for this new book, Dog Whistle Politics, by my guest Ian Haney López. He’s broken the code on the racist politics of the last 50 years, as politicians mastered the use of dog whistles to turn Americans against each other while turning America over to plutocrats. The dog whistle of racism, says Ian Haney López, is the “dark magic” by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests.

Ian Haney López is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, after teaching at Yale, New York University and Harvard. Dog Whistle Politics is his third book. Welcome.

So why did you use this for the title of your book Dog Whistle Politics?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Well, think about a term like “welfare queen” or “food stamp president.” On one level, like a dog whistle, it's silent. Silent about race. It seems race-neutral. But on another, it also has a shrill blast, like a dog whistle, that can be heard by certain folks. And what the blast is, is a warning about race and a warning, in particular about threatening minorities.

And the idea that I'm trying to get across here is, racism has evolved. Or, in particular, public racism has evolved. The way in which racism, the way in which racial divisions are stoked in public discourse has changed. And now it operates on two levels. On one level, it allows plausible deniability. This isn't really about race, it's just about welfare. Just about food stamps. And on another, there's a subtext, an underground message which can be piercingly loud, and that is: minorities are threatening us.

And so when people dog whistle about criminals, welfare cheats, terrorists, Islam, Sharia law, ostensibly they’re talking about culture, behavior, religion, but underneath are these old stereotypes of degraded minorities, but also, and this is important, implicitly of whites who are trustworthy, hard-working, decent.

BILL MOYERS When I talk to people, I'm doing a group discussion somewhere, if I ask white people in the audience, if race is still relevant in your lives, they say absolutely not. You know, we're colorblind, is often what you hear.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Right. Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: And they believe that, don't you think?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: They do believe it. And it's important they believe it. And it's important for us to recognize that they believe it and that it's genuine. Look, here's a hard, difficult truth. Most racists are good people. They're not sick. They're not ruled by anger or raw emotion or hatred. They are complicated people reared in complicated societies.

They're fully capable of generosity, of empathy, of real kindness. But because of the idea systems in which they're reared, they're also capable of dehumanizing others and occasionally of brutal violence. And that's an important truth. Most people are not racist out of some sort of a sickness of the soul. They're racist because of the society in which they operate.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: We need to understand that race has been one of the ways in which we’ve explained why certain groups get certain privileges and advantages and why other groups don’t get privileges or are exploited or are excluded from the country.

This operates not just in terms of class relations and group relations, this operates in terms of a common sense understanding of who’s trustworthy, who is decent, who is law-abiding, and in contrast, who’s loathsome, who’s diseased, who’s dangerous. That common sense of race used to be openly expressed through the 1950s, let’s say. Now it’s not openly expressed. And that’s one of the great triumphs of the civil rights movement. We ought not to gainsay that. But on the other hand, it didn’t all go away. It’s still there under the surface. Now it doesn’t, we don’t hear it in the language expressly of race, but we hear it in the language of culture and behavior.

BILL MOYERS There are some assumptions in society, a general proposition, unexamined, that blacks prefer welfare to work, that undocumented immigrants breed crime, and that Islam spawns violence. Those are dog whistles, are they not?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: I think they’re absolutely dog whistles. They’re dog whistles in the sense that they’re stereotypes.

A stereotype is a sort of cultural presumption of minority inferiority: blacks are lazy, Latinos are dirty or filthy, Muslims don’t respect human life. Those are stereotypes. Dog whistles are when politicians use coded language that try and trigger those beliefs. But they’re not the stereotypes themselves. And, it’s important, because dog whistling is not about bigotry. It’s about the manipulation of bigotry. It’s about the manipulation of stereotypes.

BILL MOYERS: So you make it clear in the book, that this is sort of an old sport, politicians communicating with small groups of impassioned voters and a kind of code that only kindred spirits understand. Nothing especially troubling about that. But it's when it comes to the issue of race that you see a real injury.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: What makes race different? Two things. First, the message that politicians are trying to communicate, when they dog whistle in racial terms, is a message that runs directly counter to widely held values and norms of racial egalitarianism. The triumph of the civil rights movement is to teach us, to teach Americans that we're all human, we're all in this together. And so for a politician to come forward and say, I want your support because minorities are threatening and I believe that you ought to vote in solidarity with whites.

No one can say that expressly. That would be the end of a political career. So they use a dog whistle term and they say, I want you to vote in a way that cuts off food stamps and limits welfare and gets tough on crime and slams the border on illegal aliens. It's a racial appeal, but it has to happen in code. That's one difference.

The message that's being communicated is a message that violates core, common moral norms. Second difference, yes, there are lots of different cultural provocations that are expressed in dog whistle terms. Race is one of those. But I want to also suggest it's not just one of those, it's the primary cultural provocation that has been used by conservatives over the last 50 years. Race is special because it does so much damage not only to people of color, but in the way it restructures our society as a whole.

BILL MOYERS: Give me a clear example of that.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: So we know Ronald Reagan used to talk about welfare queens. But he also had this other stump speech that he would give. He would speak to his audiences and he would say, I understand how frustrating it is for you when you're standing in line at a grocery store waiting to buy hamburger and there's some young fellow ahead of you buying T-bone steak with food stamps.

Now the first time he told that tale, it wasn't some young fellow. He said, some “young buck." And a young buck was a racially-coded term that stood for a strong African American man. And so that term, that moved from being a dog whistle to an outright racial provocation. Reagan backed off and he started talking about, some young fellow buying a T-bone steak with food stamps.

Think about the characters in this story. The first character is the person buying a T-bone steak with food stamps. And that's conjuring the image of the lazy minority who's strong, who could work, but who doesn't want to work, and prefers to be on welfare. But the other image is the you in that story, who Reagan's talking to. And the you is ostensibly the voter, the hard-working taxpayer, the law-abiding American. That voter, that hard-working American implicitly has a racial identity. And that's white. So there you can see this racial narrative. You, Reagan is saying to white audiences, you're being taken advantage of.

There's a third character here. Government. It's government ostensibly that is taking advantage of whites, that is taking their money through taxes, and then giving it to these undeserving minorities. So what did Reagan suggest? He suggested tax cuts. We shouldn't, you shouldn't have to pay taxes to a government that's just taking your money and giving it to minorities. And indeed, what did he do? He enacted tax cuts. In the first year of his tax cuts, $164 billion went to American corporations. Over the 1980’s, the Reagan tax cuts transferred a trillion dollars to America's top 1 percent. Yes, voters got the tax cuts they thought were aimed at cutting off undeserving minorities. But in fact, it was a politics that was showering money on the very richest Americans.

We have to understand the way in which something has fundamentally changed in American politics. We used to understand that the biggest threat in a political life was the power of concentrated money. The power of big money and of corporations to hijack the marketplace and to hijack government.

But now, Republicans for 50 years have been telling voters, the biggest threat in your life is that minorities are going to hijack government. That government has been taken over and now serves them. So when white voters vote against the government, they think they're voting against minorities. But in fact, they're voting to give over control of government back to the very rich, back to the big corporations.

BILL MOYERS: Mitt Romney, decent man. 47 percent.

MITT ROMNEY: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48 — he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect.

BILL MOYERS: Was that a dog whistle?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: I think it was. I think it was. And I'm so glad you raised this example, because it's really striking. Here, all of a sudden, you have a presidential candidate who's dismissing 47 percent of the country. What terms does he use? He says, these are people who are dependent on government, who refuse to take responsibility for themselves. Who want free stuff.

Now it's a dog whistle on one level because he's seeming to use the terms that are typically associated with minorities and he's attaching them to half the country. So in a way, you're getting the poor are being racialized. So even when they're white, even when it's half the country, and he's talking about people who don't pay income tax, he's saying, these people are like minorities.

So that's an important dog whistle. But more fundamentally, it's a dog whistle in terms of this larger understanding of the relationship between people and government. He's saying, if you need government help, you don't deserve it. We should all be in this on our own. We should all be rugged individuals. If you make it, you should be celebrated and you don't owe anybody anything. And if you fail, too bad for you, but we can't worry about you.

And that's incredible in the message. How could that message resonate? Now remember, he's going to win a strong majority among whites. How could that message resonate with so many whites? It could only resonate because whites are steeped in the idea that the federal government is only helping minorities, it's only helping losers, and they don't want to understand themselves as losers.

BILL MOYERS I’ve watched that video time and again, wondering if he really knew what he was saying. But is it possible he didn’t think of that as a dog whistle?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: He’s pretty clear that he thinks it’s the narrative that his audience wants to hear. I’d say one more thing about this.

After he loses the election, he gets on a conference call to explain to his major donors why he’d lost the election. And he gives them the same sort of analysis. He says, and he doesn’t understand that the L.A. Times is listening in, he says, Barack Obama promised to give things to people. He promised to give things to poor people, to young people, to black people, to Hispanic people, and that’s why we lost. It’s the same basic narrative. That a government that tries to take care of people is actually the enemy of the country and the biggest threat in our lives. And that, in particular, it’s threatening because it’s taking care of minorities.

Originally Posted by B Butler

Yes, he has a strong world view. You don't? You don't have a very firm idea of how things are and how they should be? In what way can you help yourself that he can't? To far too great a degree, most of us here are demagogues.

One very simplistic view of US politics has the Republicans supporting the wealthy, the Democrats supporting the poor, with balance of power being decided by whether the people in the middle consider themselves wealthy or poor. This is absurdly simplistic. Among other things, the rural - urban divide is likely as important just now as class differences. Still, much of US politics is a battle for the folk in the middle. It's just too useful a concept to throw away because it conflicts with the ideas of a discredited philosopher. If one is fighting over a particular part of the electorate, there is going to be a name for that part of the electorate.

Realistically, the Republicans tend to support the largely taxable, the Democrats tend to support the largely non taxable with the balance of power being decided by whether people in the middle consider themselves as being taxable or not and whether the use of their taxes is considered to be largely beneficial or not. The balance of power is being disrupted by more and more non taxable voting for free stuff and idiots voting to legalize pot.

Originally Posted by Kinser79

That may be a general association but it remains incorrect. I could go into detail on this issue, but suffice it to say that I'm sure you understand that a nice home does not make one a factory owner, or vice versa. Nor does a certain type of lifestyle indicate class. Reference point Bill Gates, has billions of dollars, owns a huge company, buys his clothing at the same places I do. Conversely, one can also own a nice vehicle and yet still be broke as hell. (Probably because one owns said nice vehicle which is, or should be, beyond their means.) The article I linked to explains my position beautifully. Normally, I wouldn't post on this thread at all, bourgeois politics is to put it bluntly---boring. Brower merely managed to hit on one of my pet peeves by attempting to claim that he is "middle class" because he may have a slightly nicer place to stay than a housing project.

Bill Gates is secure enough about himself that he needs not buy status symbols.

A pimp driving a Mercedes-Benz is still a low-life. A bookmaker who owns a mansion is still a low-life. A drug trafficker who owns a fine stable of horses is still a low-life. Someone who buys a yacht with the proceeds of swindles is a low life. Those people are all scum, and they are not the sort with which to build any workable economic order, capitalist or 'socialist'.

An aristocrat of central Europe during WWII who aided the Nazis in the Holocaust showed character, all right -- BAD character.

Sure, character does not bring wealth; one can be of good character and do so proletarian a job as milking cows on a farm that one does not own. Such a person may be better than I am. More power to him!

...If you want a good definition of social class, try the book Class by the late Paul Fussell. He takes jabs at all occupational groups (much of what defines class), and does not praise the two upper classes that he sees as intellectually vapid. One jab that he has at the hereditary elite is that "Chess is upper-middle or lower; the upper classes just aren't smart enough to understand it".

From top to bottom:

1. Top Out-of-sight. This is a secretive and rare class of rich people who generally avoid the limelight. These would be nobility in other countries. Rockefeller, Mellon, Vanderbilt, etc.
2. Upper. They live on the proceeds of inherited wealth from before they were born. Members of the Walton family who remember Sam Walton are not yet upper class. Those who never really got to know him are upper class.
3. Upper middle. This is the class on the make -- they include many of the rich who have made it largely on their own and most people in the highly-regarded professions (law, medicine, architecture). This is as high as anyone can get socially except through marriage.
4. Middle. Generally a white-collar job with a middle income. Accountants, dentists, research scientists, engineers, traveling salesmen, computer programmers, and teachers are here.

-- THERE IS NO LOWER MIDDLE CLASS --

What used to be considered lower-middle class for having a high-school diploma when such was a real distinction and when clerical work paid better than labor. People can no longer make a living on a job as a retail sales clerk or office clerk. Such jobs are typically interchangeable with labor. They typically have college degrees.

There are three classes of the "working class":

5. High prole -- skilled laborers, cops, nurses, technicians, fire fighters, prison guards, letter carriers, supervisors of blue-collar workers. These may be paid better than members of the middle class, but their jobs are not interchangeable. Accountants don't become heavy-equipment operators and plumbers do not become traveling salesmen.

6. Mid-prole: semi-skilled workers -- machine operators and assemblers, truck drivers and cabbies. This is probably the class of the checker-cashiers; they operate cash registers, which takes some modest skill. Their work is usually monotonous... and they typically hate their jobs and show it off the job.

7. Low-prole: unskilled workers like agricultural laborers and janitors. Even if their jobs are seasonal, they are still working-class.

Below this:

8. Destitute: People with disreputable earnings -- welfare, aid from relatives, or crime. If crooks they are somehow able to avoid incarceration.

9. Bottom out-of-sight: Hermits; people institutionalized or incarcerated.

Many people don't fit one of these categories neatly. People who think the class game is a fraud -- often creative people -- might fit a category "X". Creative people are often here.

He really cannot help himself really. He is after all a white liberal boomer.

Would you prefer that I were a Nazi?

Now for a little personal insight: I envy only two things about the super-rich. One is their capacity to travel. The other is economic security.

I'd rather live in a studio apartment in San Francisco than in a mansion in the cultural desert in which I live. I never had much of a taste for sports cars, having lost the lust for speed before I could legally drive. Economic security? Our entire contemporary economy relies more upon fear than upon economic reward, an undeniable indictment of the ugliness of our plutocratic oligarchy. We are expected to contemplate at all times how much worse life can be, how easily things can get that bad and stay that way, and be thankful to the ruling elites that such has not happened yet, so vote Republican and endorse the brutes who make your life miserable.

We are going through a transition, one from a world of scarcity of the basic decencies of life to one in which scarcity is no longer necessary or even suitable for getting adequate productivity. The world without a need for scarcity sounds like Marx' Communism.

Is it possible to go from capitalism to Communism without going through Marxist socialism? We may have no reasonable alternative. The plutocratic elites have often shown that they would return to the brutality and poverty of early capitalism as Marx knew it; such is unconscionable.

BILL MOYERS: What happens if you look at the tea party through the lens of dog whistling?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Two comments I want to say about this. First, I want to go back to this idea that most racists are good people. Because I think that this is incredibly important as we think about the tea party. Who are tea partiers? A lot of liberals have said terrible things about tea partiers, describing them as narrow-minded bigots, and whatnot. I think that's absurd. I think that tea partiers are, in a sense, they're us. They're our constituency. They’re Americans who are struggling, who are trying to figure what happened to their jobs, who are trying to figure out what to do about healthcare.

They're in trouble. They're really hurting like so many Americans. Now in order to understand what happened, the tea partiers have accepted the conservative line that what has happened in their lives is really the fault of minorities. So when you look at what animates the tea party, there are several different hatreds that are core to the tea party.

They hate welfare. Especially, or particularly welfare that's understood as going to minorities. Not social security, for instance, but rather food stamps. Next, they're obsessed about Muslims and Islam. And they really see this sort of threatening, this external threat in the form of the Middle East, but also ostensibly an internal threat of Muslims coming into the United States. For example, this is Kansas passing its law that there shan't be Sharia law in the courts of Kansas. Absurd, except that it triggers this racial fear. Next, they're deeply concerned about undocumented immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Finally, they hate President Obama. And Obama seems to combine both this sense of welfare, of being a Muslim, of being a brown foreign other, right?

So all of these fears that animate the tea party movement at the grassroots level, these are racial narratives. They're racial narratives that say to people, if you want to understand what went wrong in your life, if you want to understand what what went wrong in America, blame minorities.

BILL MOYERS: Sort of a bait-and-switch. You know, the issue's not really race, the issue is limited government.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Absolutely. So, think about what a lot of Republicans are actually doing in terms of their policies. In terms of their policies, they say they're for limited government. But in fact, what they're doing is giving over control of the regulatory state the corporations. They say they want to shrink the federal deficit, but in fact, they're spending massive amounts of money either in tax cuts for the very rich, or in big subsidies that go to corporations, for example the farm bill that was recently enacted.

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Now, you can't get elected going to the American public and saying, I want to cut your funding for your schools, I want to cut funding for your social security, I want to cut your pensions. And I want to shower all that money on the very rich. You can't get elected that way.

But you can get elected going to the American public saying, we're in mortal danger as a country because something has gone terribly wrong with our society. We see it in religion, we see it around gender, we see it around abortion, we see it around same-sex marriage, and we certainly see it in terms of welfare and criminals and illegal aliens. That's the language that a very extreme wing of the conservative, of conservatives has been using to skew American politics, but also to take over the Republican party. Republicans from 30, 40 years ago, would not recognize what the party is today.

BILL MOYERS: It used to be that Democrats were the arch segregationists and racists and the dog whistlers and then that changed. And as you say, it’s no secret that since then Republicans have pandered on race in order to win votes.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: That’s right

BILL MOYERS: That’s the key to their strategy as you say –

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: That’s right. I mean, I think it’s important to understand-- so there’s another term for dog whistle politics, and that’s the Southern Strategy. That term was coined by a Republican Senator, Jacob Javitz from New York. And he coined it not to endorse it, but to condemn it. He said he saw what was happening with the Republican party in l963 and l964. And he says, you folks are pursuing a Southern Strategy. This is going to be disastrous for the party, it’s going to be disastrous for the country.

And indeed it has been. This use of race has allowed an extreme faction of conservatives, those most dedicated to the power of big money, to the power of corporations to not only hijack American democracy, but to hijack the Republican party. And that's what's so democratically destructive. We have a political party that is committed to gaining votes by increasing racial antagonism and racial fear.

BILL MOYERS: You write in your book that there was an important evolution in dog whistling under Democrats, including Bill Clinton. How so?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: So, Democrats have understood, they understood even as early as 1970, race was going to be an effective wedge issue against them. How did they decide to respond? Initally, they decided they’d just wait it out. They would distance themselves from minorities, they would try not to talk about race, and they thought that that would insulate them from these racially-provocative charges. That didn’t work. So then they decided they’d try something different. Rather than confront dog whistle politics, they thought they’d embrace it.

Now this isn't the same sort of egregious dog whistle politics of the Republicans. The Republicans early on realized that they could get elected with white votes alone and didn't feel a particular need to reach out to minorities. Democrats have a different sort of calculus. They look around and they say, we don't think minority voters have anywhere to go because the Republicans are so hostile to minority voters. So we can slap them down a little bit. We can demonize them a little bit. But as long as every so often we show that we value them, they'll continue to vote for us.

And so what you get under Democrats is a sort of moderated dog whistle politics. It's clearly trying to communicate to white voters, we too see minorities as a threat and we're going to protect you. And at the same time, it's saying to minorities, we value you and we want you to keep voting for us.

And so we see that in the person of Bill Clinton and his presidency. Yes, he distances himself from African Americans, for example, by criticizing Jesse Jackson. But even more, he embraces policies like ending welfare as we know it, or ramping up Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs and converting it into a general war on crime that really played to dog whistle themes that said to white voters, hey, I'm a new Democrat. I too understand that minorities are a threat in your life because they're using welfare, and they're dangerous criminals and the state has been coddling them and we're going to crack down on them.

BILL MOYERS: But Ian, some people are going to respond by saying this is a monotone of theory here. That Bill Clinton was considered by many blacks to be the first black president. And they will also say, crime was a problem in the-- and not just black crime, but crime was a problem in the 70s and 80s. And you just can’t attribute all of that to race.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: I don’t attribute all of it to race. But I want to but very clear. There aren't just two alternatives here, either it's all race or race has no effect whatsoever. In fact, what I'm saying is, yeah, there are complicated dynamics going on. But one of the central dynamics in American politics since the civil rights era, has been the use of cultural provocations-- primary among them race, but not exclusively --but the use of cultural provocations to try and advance a conservative agenda that favors tax cuts for the rich and that favors a deregulation of big industry.

In that context, Democrats had to decide how to respond. And when the Democrats responded, they responded not by contesting that politics, but instead by embracing it. And this is part of the story of dog whistle politics. Republicans shift right and the Democrats have tracked rightward, following them.

BILL MOYERS: You say you wrote this book to restore an interrupted future. Explain that.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Well, so I think that this is an incredibly important story. We have levels of wealth inequality today we haven’t seen in a hundred years. Okay, what was happening a hundred years ago? A hundred years ago, we had corporate titans who mainly controlled government.

What happened? Financial boom, financial collapse, the Great Depression and then the New Deal. And what was the New Deal? The New Deal was a sense that government shouldn’t be beholden to big money. That was incredibly popular.

I think the New Deal taught the country that we could progress if we were all in this together and if the government were really on the side of the broad middle class. That the government had an incredibly important role in structuring the economy, in structuring politics, in structuring society in a way that favored everybody.

And this was the New Deal, except it had a fatal flaw. The New Deal coalition depended in part on the Southern Democrats. And the Southern Democrats were, at this time, avowedly a white man’s party. And so the Southern Democrats extracted a compromise. They said they’ll support the New Deal but only if it has certain limitations. If it doesn’t help black farmers, it doesn’t help black servants, it doesn’t help farm workers in the southwest who are Mexican.

BILL MOYERS: If it helped whites.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: If it helped whites they’d support it. And it did help whites. And this is why the New Deal was so popular with whites. What happens? In l964, because of the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson understands that a war on poverty to succeed should be extended to an effort to promote racial justice.

And he’s right. This is the dream we need to pursue. And yet, this creates a window of opportunity. It creates the possibility for Republicans to come in and to tell people, don’t support the New Deal. Don’t support liberalism. Because this isn’t about helping people like you. This is about helping them, underserving, lazy minorities.

And that narrative works. And it works in a way-- not just in a way that this has hurt minorities. But it works in a way that this has led to a systematic dismantling of the New Deal. So that now, 50 years after that politics started we have levels of wealth inequality we haven’t seen since before the Great Depression, right?

When I say that dog whistle politics is about pursuing a dream that’s been interrupted, what we’re trying to recover is FDR and a Second Bill of Rights. What we’re trying to recover is New Deal liberalism. But now a New Deal liberalism that isn’t divided by race. We need to understand that the middle class is not a term that should have a racial signifier.

And that when we get rid of that signifier, when we understand that everybody of every race is a member of the middle class or should have the opportunity to become a member of the middle class, only then will we be at a political place where we can actually pull government back onto our side and we can defeat this sort of negative politics that keeps so many people voting to give control of the government over to the very wealthy.

http://billmoyers.com/episode/ian-ha...race-part-two/

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Give it time; give it time. We may be due for some trauma before 2029. The 1850s may have seemed like fizzing too. But the fizz became a bomb exploding.

How much time? If one doesn't have a blind faith in the S&H generation lockstep, one can start the unraveling around Nixon's time. Through the awakening there was a feeling of American power and invulnerability. We had won every war we fought and forever would. If we wanted to wage war or poverty while spreading civil rights, containing communism and flying to the moon, sure. Why not? Tax and spend, baby! We were ambitious and unfamiliar with the concept of limits to American potential.

Then came the fall of Saigon, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, Stagflation, the Hostage Crisis, the National Malaise and Twilight in America. For me, the feeling of things unraveling started then. The notion that we would pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe and pay any tax in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty... died.

And about time too. America needed a vacation. The fix everything right now urgency of the GIs and Boomers was really rough. Future Shock in spades! Our Greatest Generation might have been able to hold that pace in their youth and in their prime, but what about the rest of us? I can understand why a still exhausted nation doesn't want to return to what it once meant to be American. I can understand it, but I can't forgive certain groups for forgetting about it, for rejecting and scorning what we once had. Admit that we are a lesser nation in a lesser time, sure. Scorn? Make "tax and spend" and "liberal" dirty words? No.

Quite arguably we've been unraveling for a long long time. Great things, tremendous achievements, were there in the 1960s, but the price was equally great. We lost the core of what we were. I've seen no hint of rejuvenation.

Now, was there someone grumbling about white male boomers?

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Please pardon PB. PB wasn't talking with Marxist's and must not have realized that there was a Marxist around to offend.

Ah... Remember the days when we were supposed to offend Marxists?

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

BILL MOYERS: What happens if you look at the tea party through the lens of dog whistling?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Two comments I want to say about this. First, I want to go back to this idea that most racists are good people. Because I think that this is incredibly important as we think about the tea party. Who are tea partiers? A lot of liberals have said terrible things about tea partiers, describing them as narrow-minded bigots, and whatnot. I think that's absurd. I think that tea partiers are, in a sense, they're us. They're our constituency. They’re Americans who are struggling, who are trying to figure what happened to their jobs, who are trying to figure out what to do about healthcare.

They're in trouble. They're really hurting like so many Americans. Now in order to understand what happened, the tea partiers have accepted the conservative line that what has happened in their lives is really the fault of minorities. So when you look at what animates the tea party, there are several different hatreds that are core to the tea party.

They hate welfare. Especially, or particularly welfare that's understood as going to minorities. Not social security, for instance, but rather food stamps. Next, they're obsessed about Muslims and Islam. And they really see this sort of threatening, this external threat in the form of the Middle East, but also ostensibly an internal threat of Muslims coming into the United States. For example, this is Kansas passing its law that there shan't be Sharia law in the courts of Kansas. Absurd, except that it triggers this racial fear. Next, they're deeply concerned about undocumented immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Finally, they hate President Obama. And Obama seems to combine both this sense of welfare, of being a Muslim, of being a brown foreign other, right?

So all of these fears that animate the tea party movement at the grassroots level, these are racial narratives. They're racial narratives that say to people, if you want to understand what went wrong in your life, if you want to understand what what went wrong in America, blame minorities.

BILL MOYERS: Sort of a bait-and-switch. You know, the issue's not really race, the issue is limited government.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Absolutely. So, think about what a lot of Republicans are actually doing in terms of their policies. In terms of their policies, they say they're for limited government. But in fact, what they're doing is giving over control of the regulatory state the corporations. They say they want to shrink the federal deficit, but in fact, they're spending massive amounts of money either in tax cuts for the very rich, or in big subsidies that go to corporations, for example the farm bill that was recently enacted.

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Now, you can't get elected going to the American public and saying, I want to cut your funding for your schools, I want to cut funding for your social security, I want to cut your pensions. And I want to shower all that money on the very rich. You can't get elected that way.

But you can get elected going to the American public saying, we're in mortal danger as a country because something has gone terribly wrong with our society. We see it in religion, we see it around gender, we see it around abortion, we see it around same-sex marriage, and we certainly see it in terms of welfare and criminals and illegal aliens. That's the language that a very extreme wing of the conservative, of conservatives has been using to skew American politics, but also to take over the Republican party. Republicans from 30, 40 years ago, would not recognize what the party is today.

BILL MOYERS: It used to be that Democrats were the arch segregationists and racists and the dog whistlers and then that changed. And as you say, it’s no secret that since then Republicans have pandered on race in order to win votes.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: That’s right

BILL MOYERS: That’s the key to their strategy as you say –

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: That’s right. I mean, I think it’s important to understand-- so there’s another term for dog whistle politics, and that’s the Southern Strategy. That term was coined by a Republican Senator, Jacob Javitz from New York. And he coined it not to endorse it, but to condemn it. He said he saw what was happening with the Republican party in l963 and l964. And he says, you folks are pursuing a Southern Strategy. This is going to be disastrous for the party, it’s going to be disastrous for the country.

And indeed it has been. This use of race has allowed an extreme faction of conservatives, those most dedicated to the power of big money, to the power of corporations to not only hijack American democracy, but to hijack the Republican party. And that's what's so democratically destructive. We have a political party that is committed to gaining votes by increasing racial antagonism and racial fear.

BILL MOYERS: You write in your book that there was an important evolution in dog whistling under Democrats, including Bill Clinton. How so?

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: So, Democrats have understood, they understood even as early as 1970, race was going to be an effective wedge issue against them. How did they decide to respond? Initally, they decided they’d just wait it out. They would distance themselves from minorities, they would try not to talk about race, and they thought that that would insulate them from these racially-provocative charges. That didn’t work. So then they decided they’d try something different. Rather than confront dog whistle politics, they thought they’d embrace it.

Now this isn't the same sort of egregious dog whistle politics of the Republicans. The Republicans early on realized that they could get elected with white votes alone and didn't feel a particular need to reach out to minorities. Democrats have a different sort of calculus. They look around and they say, we don't think minority voters have anywhere to go because the Republicans are so hostile to minority voters. So we can slap them down a little bit. We can demonize them a little bit. But as long as every so often we show that we value them, they'll continue to vote for us.

And so what you get under Democrats is a sort of moderated dog whistle politics. It's clearly trying to communicate to white voters, we too see minorities as a threat and we're going to protect you. And at the same time, it's saying to minorities, we value you and we want you to keep voting for us.

And so we see that in the person of Bill Clinton and his presidency. Yes, he distances himself from African Americans, for example, by criticizing Jesse Jackson. But even more, he embraces policies like ending welfare as we know it, or ramping up Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs and converting it into a general war on crime that really played to dog whistle themes that said to white voters, hey, I'm a new Democrat. I too understand that minorities are a threat in your life because they're using welfare, and they're dangerous criminals and the state has been coddling them and we're going to crack down on them.

BILL MOYERS: But Ian, some people are going to respond by saying this is a monotone of theory here. That Bill Clinton was considered by many blacks to be the first black president. And they will also say, crime was a problem in the-- and not just black crime, but crime was a problem in the 70s and 80s. And you just can’t attribute all of that to race.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: I don’t attribute all of it to race. But I want to but very clear. There aren't just two alternatives here, either it's all race or race has no effect whatsoever. In fact, what I'm saying is, yeah, there are complicated dynamics going on. But one of the central dynamics in American politics since the civil rights era, has been the use of cultural provocations-- primary among them race, but not exclusively --but the use of cultural provocations to try and advance a conservative agenda that favors tax cuts for the rich and that favors a deregulation of big industry.

In that context, Democrats had to decide how to respond. And when the Democrats responded, they responded not by contesting that politics, but instead by embracing it. And this is part of the story of dog whistle politics. Republicans shift right and the Democrats have tracked rightward, following them.

BILL MOYERS: You say you wrote this book to restore an interrupted future. Explain that.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Well, so I think that this is an incredibly important story. We have levels of wealth inequality today we haven’t seen in a hundred years. Okay, what was happening a hundred years ago? A hundred years ago, we had corporate titans who mainly controlled government.

What happened? Financial boom, financial collapse, the Great Depression and then the New Deal. And what was the New Deal? The New Deal was a sense that government shouldn’t be beholden to big money. That was incredibly popular.

I think the New Deal taught the country that we could progress if we were all in this together and if the government were really on the side of the broad middle class. That the government had an incredibly important role in structuring the economy, in structuring politics, in structuring society in a way that favored everybody.

And this was the New Deal, except it had a fatal flaw. The New Deal coalition depended in part on the Southern Democrats. And the Southern Democrats were, at this time, avowedly a white man’s party. And so the Southern Democrats extracted a compromise. They said they’ll support the New Deal but only if it has certain limitations. If it doesn’t help black farmers, it doesn’t help black servants, it doesn’t help farm workers in the southwest who are Mexican.

BILL MOYERS: If it helped whites.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: If it helped whites they’d support it. And it did help whites. And this is why the New Deal was so popular with whites. What happens? In l964, because of the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson understands that a war on poverty to succeed should be extended to an effort to promote racial justice.

And he’s right. This is the dream we need to pursue. And yet, this creates a window of opportunity. It creates the possibility for Republicans to come in and to tell people, don’t support the New Deal. Don’t support liberalism. Because this isn’t about helping people like you. This is about helping them, underserving, lazy minorities.

And that narrative works. And it works in a way-- not just in a way that this has hurt minorities. But it works in a way that this has led to a systematic dismantling of the New Deal. So that now, 50 years after that politics started we have levels of wealth inequality we haven’t seen since before the Great Depression, right?

When I say that dog whistle politics is about pursuing a dream that’s been interrupted, what we’re trying to recover is FDR and a Second Bill of Rights. What we’re trying to recover is New Deal liberalism. But now a New Deal liberalism that isn’t divided by race. We need to understand that the middle class is not a term that should have a racial signifier.

And that when we get rid of that signifier, when we understand that everybody of every race is a member of the middle class or should have the opportunity to become a member of the middle class, only then will we be at a political place where we can actually pull government back onto our side and we can defeat this sort of negative politics that keeps so many people voting to give control of the government over to the very wealthy.

http://billmoyers.com/episode/ian-ha...race-part-two/

It's apparent that neither one of those uppity liberals have a clue as to who the Tea Party folks are and what's driving them politically. If this was intended to teach me how clueless and unknowing liberals are then you didn't have to post this because I know how clueless and unknowing uppity liberals are in general. Btw, they should also know that a catastrophic financial meltdown or a national split is needed in order to recover New Deal liberalism and accomplish a Second Bill of Rights.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

It's apparent that neither one of those uppity liberals have a clue as to who the Tea Party folks are and what's driving them politically.

Fear, fear, and more fear. Fear that the world will no longer be theirs. News for those semi-literate types who put out such placards as "The Zoo has an African Lion -- The White House has a Lyin' African" and "Hands off my Medicare".

New to the Tea Party types -- the world never belonged to the stupid, unimaginative, and deluded. It never will be.

If this was intended to teach me how clueless and unknowing liberals are then you didn't have to post this because I know how clueless and unknowing uppity liberals are in general. Btw, they should also know that a catastrophic financial meltdown or a national split is needed in order to recover New Deal liberalism and accomplish a Second Bill of Rights.

No, we only need to get disgusted with the Koch agenda.

Originally Posted by B Butler

How much time? If one doesn't have a blind faith in the S&H generation lockstep, one can start the unraveling around Nixon's time. Through the awakening there was a feeling of American power and invulnerability. We had won every war we fought and forever would. If we wanted to wage war or poverty while spreading civil rights, containing communism and flying to the moon, sure. Why not? Tax and spend, baby! We were ambitious and unfamiliar with the concept of limits to American potential.

Well, blind faith or not, both I and Howe have assigned 2029 as the end date of the crisis, so it's at least plausible It's the only way to make any sense out of what's going on.

How much time? I believe 2029 minus 2015 equals 14 years.

The Awakening was about learning the limits of American conventional power in all its forms. It was the anti-war movement, decisively beginning in 1965-66 at the start of the Awakening. It was about the questioning of science and materialism as a path to happiness through domination and manipulation. It was about the questioning of established concepts of work, fulfillment, sexuality, relationships, spirituality and religion; you name it. It was about discovery of powerful new and old pathways to human potential, which since the Awakening are now available to anyone interested. It certainly continued through the 70s; whether it ended in 1980 is debatable, but I think I agree with T4T that the early 80s was the last stage of the Awakening, when the malaise continued, the movements continued, and Reagan had not yet established "morning in America."

Then came the fall of Saigon, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, Stagflation, the Hostage Crisis, the National Malaise and Twilight in America. For me, the feeling of things unraveling started then. The notion that we would pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe and pay any tax in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty... died.

That's why 1964-1984 was the Awakening. The 1T was the time when we believed in Daniel Boone and John Wayne and Walt Disney and that America was great and we could do anything. JFK's inaugural address, which you quote, summarized and began the last act of the 1T. The 2T destroyed that notion, between 1964 and 1984. The central destructive act to that 1T consensus was the Vietnam War and the protests against it. The greatest and most-archetypal quagmire of all time turned the "pay any price" ideal on its head forever.

And about time too. America needed a vacation. The fix everything right now urgency of the GIs and Boomers was really rough. Future Shock in spades! Our Greatest Generation might have been able to hold that pace in their youth and in their prime, but what about the rest of us? I can understand why a still exhausted nation doesn't want to return to what it once meant to be American. I can understand it, but I can't forgive certain groups for forgetting about it, for rejecting and scorning what we once had. Admit that we are a lesser nation in a lesser time, sure. Scorn? Make "tax and spend" and "liberal" dirty words? No.

The counter-awakening arose in the 70s, and reached its climax in the last years of the 2T. The last act of the 2T paved the way for the counter-revolution of the trickle-down theory in the 3T, which unfortunately still rules us. But-- it is being challenged now.

Quite arguably we've been unraveling for a long long time. Great things, tremendous achievements, were there in the 1960s, but the price was equally great. We lost the core of what we were. I've seen no hint of rejuvenation.

The only rejuvenation is, and was, a departure from the old America. That will have to come after the 2020s, after we deal as best we can with the challenge to our continuing existence as a nation, and make the changes we will need to survive.

Now, was there someone grumbling about white male boomers?

There's always someone. We are scapegoats no less than the welfare queens.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

It's apparent that neither one of those uppity liberals have a clue as to who the Tea Party folks are and what's driving them politically. If this was intended to teach me how clueless and unknowing liberals are then you didn't have to post this because I know how clueless and unknowing uppity liberals are in general. Btw, they should also know that a catastrophic financial meltdown or a national split is needed in order to recover New Deal liberalism and accomplish a Second Bill of Rights.

These uppity liberals certainly hit the nail on the head. I notice again you make a claim, but do not and cannot support or explain it. Mr. Lopez certainly gave a comprehensive picture of the Tea Party and what's driving them, without stereotyping them or merely knocking them.

But you seem to agree with that boomer liberal Mr. Butler about the need for the trauma. I wouldn't disagree about that either. In my estimation it is more likely to be the national split, but the fear of another financial meltdown (whether we actually have one or not) is also likely to be a major catalyst.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Fear, fear, and more fear. Fear that the world will no longer be theirs. News for those semi-literate types who put out such placards as "The Zoo has an African Lion -- The White House has a Lyin' African" and "Hands off my Medicare".

New to the Tea Party types -- the world never belonged to the stupid, unimaginative, and deluded. It never will be.



No, we only need to get disgusted with the Koch agenda.

Fear, fear and more fear. Fear of a world with limited Democratic support. Fear of me. Fear of a couple of largely unknown billionaires who are aggressively protecting their financial interest. Fear of the Tea Party. Fear of the complete demise of unions.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

These uppity liberals certainly hit the nail on the head. I notice again you make a claim, but do not and cannot support or explain it. Mr. Lopez certainly gave a comprehensive picture of the Tea Party and what's driving them, without stereotyping them or merely knocking them.

But you seem to agree with that boomer liberal Mr. Butler about the need for the trauma. I wouldn't disagree about that either. In my estimation it is more likely to be the national split, but the fear of another financial meltdown (whether we actually have one or not) is also likely to be a major catalyst.

Mr. Lopez gave his lengthy opinion of the Tea Party and who the Tea Party are and what he believes to be the primary motive that's driving them. It is very clear neither of them know and merely speculating and presenting their assumptions. The proof is your post. I assume you can read and comprehend written communications. There has never been a disagreement between Mr. Butler and I on that point or you for that matter. The disagreement if any is over which values survive the crisis. I believe the Yankee values are going to survive. You're so stupid that you don't even associate Yankee values with the Republicans.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Fear, fear and more fear. Fear of a world with limited Democratic support. Fear of me. Fear of a couple of largely unknown billionaires who are aggressively protecting their financial interest. Fear of the Tea Party. Fear of the complete demise of unions.

Looks to me like they're just trying to make themselves feel superior.
It's fascinating to know that Bill Clinton was the first Uncle Tom dog whistling black president. I guess Obama is the second, now that he's talking about "thugs" rioting in Baltimore?

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

I'm familiar with the underclass. A more assertive attitude is needed with the underclass. The underclass severely lacks in self discipline, the ideas of personal responsibility and accountability, interest in education and so on. Sorry, but the generous attitude isn't working and will never work for them. What you need is a million hard nosed red blooded male and female march into a city and stay indefinitely and drastically change the culture from within. The increasing social familiarity with them is having the opposite effect as far as generosity towards them.

Okay, assuming your assumption is correct: if everyone was sufficiently "self-disciplined", as you put it, who would still be around to serve your hamburgers at McDonald's, clean your hotel room, cashier the Target or WalMart you shop at, pick the California strawberries you buy in the wintertime, or do whatever menial low-paying services you might make use of? Or will their increased self-discipline make these jobs that somebody has to do, suddenly pay more?

There are people who work their asses off who are still in the "underclass". I know people like that too. People who work two or three low-paying jobs sometimes. They may not have as valuable skills as others, or have lost the competition for better jobs (or their once-better jobs became obsolete or moved overseas), but they are still disciplined, and still work at jobs that, again, somebody needs to do. Why prejudge and condemn them for merely happening to be that "somebody" that's doing those jobs? That seems rather presumptious and arrogant.

Are there some in the underclass that don't have much discipline in life? Sure. Are there some in the upper class that don't have much discipline in life? Sure. I've seen both.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

We went through a phase in life and we were often viewed and treated/punished as if we were just going through a phase in life. We weren't riffraff and weren't ever considered to be riffraff (disreputable people). We were just immature teenagers who would eventually grow up and become reputable adults or arrogant teenagers who would eventually learn from the consequences of the mistakes that we made as teenagers and not continue to make those mistakes as adults.

"It's a phase...". Yeah, that's nice. Stuff I did as a teen, some of it illegal but at any rate immature, unwise, and sometimes destructive, was similarly regarded as "just a phase" too--I mean, I got disciplined for it when I got caught (as I'm sure you did), but it was forgiven by my elders and society in the long-term. And the fact that they understood these things as "just a phase", and as you put it "treated/punished [me] as if I were going through a phase", did in a subtle way help me to see it as such over time too, that I can change and do better and move on and it would be forgotten, and so I did as I got older. These things didn't become obstacles to opportunities down the line, I wasn't stigmatized for life, or seen as hopeless.

I think what Mikebert was describing earlier here, is that black teens who may also be "going through a phase" just like we did, don't always get that same kind of understanding and forgiveness by authority/society. Indeed some white teens--ones who, say, grew up on "the wrong side of the tracks" in small towns--don't either. In both these cases, their behavior "confirms" a prejudice toward that underclassed group (blacks, or "white trash") by authority or societal figures who may have those biases. There is supposedly no hope for them, this is not a phase/anomaly/whatever, but inevitably "who they are". This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if no one expects they'll get better as they get older, and are thus not treated with the perspective that they will. I will emphasize that this does not excuse anyone from not improving as they get older, as I'm sure you agree--but it does make that process needlessly more difficult than it has to be, and thus less likely to actually happen.

In other words, any teen doing "teen things" should be regarded optimistically as just "going through a phase"--disciplined, yes, made accountable, yes--just as we were for the most part; but condemned as hopeless, no. If you or I were, would it have been as likely we'd "grow out of" our phase, or eventually say "fuck it, that must be the way I am, everyone says so"? The former would be harder, the latter a far more tempting "default" pattern to fall into, at any rate--and that can snowball in terms of a huge rap sheet fairly quickly in the process Mikebert described.

Most of Freddy Gray's rap sheet in Baltimore, it appears, had to do with possession of weed--probably starting as a teen. Stuff that in this case is not only classic "teen stuff", but considered fine for adults in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, etc. now too!

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Please pardon PB. PB wasn't talking with Marxist's and must not have realized that there was a Marxist around to offend.

Perhaps, but he should have known that I was around (and I'm as far as I'm aware the only non-revisionist Marxist-Leninist on this board) as I was/am having a rather lively discussion on racial issues in an other thread. I may not post in this sub-forum often (mostly because the vast majority of posts boil down to Rs vs Ds---which is, like I said, boring) but I certainly do read posts. Well except, Eric's he's been on "conceptual ignore"* since 2012.

*I don't use the "ignore" feature as it actually highlights the content I wish to ignore for me. Yes, I am weird like that, but I don't care.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Mr. Lopez gave his lengthy opinion of the Tea Party and who the Tea Party are and what he believes to be the primary motive that's driving them. It is very clear neither of them know and merely speculating and presenting their assumptions. The proof is your post. I assume you can read and comprehend written communications. There has never been a disagreement between Mr. Butler and I on that point or you for that matter. The disagreement if any is over which values survive the crisis. I believe the Yankee values are going to survive. You're so stupid that you don't even associate Yankee values with the Republicans.

Yankee values also include an insistence upon fair pay for such honest work as one performs. Values consistent with the GOP leadership are either the fatalism on economics of the Mountain South or the plantation-style inequality of the Deep South. The elites want motivated, efficient workers on the cheap who produce solely under the motivation of fear.

That invariably fails.

Originally Posted by B Butler

Oh, I have read Karl Marx. He diagnosed the problems of his time (and to a great degree much of history) well enough. His solutions were poor, and failed miserably.

You may have read Marx, but I'm not sure you understand him if you say his solutions were poor and failed miserably. Marx and Engels themselves offered not a method to make revolution but rather concentrated on critiquing capitalism. The Communist Manifesto is not the end of Marx's writings, and even if it were, it was the writing of a young man, and not the greatest of his works or writings. I find Capital to be far more compelling, even if it is a bit dry (though if you read it in the original German I find it easier to understand: I suppose that the book is so dangerous that they try to find the worst translators possible).

The great problem is that none seemed to recognize that the Commuist Party effectively came to own and control the means of production. As long as one elite group has absolute control of the means of production, Marxist theory requires an ongoing need for violent revolution. Thus, the prediction of utopian harmony was absurdly wrong.

This definitely demonstrates that, even if you did read Marx--which I doubt, you clearly did not understand him. The Communist Party would not come to control the means of production, rather the state would. In the USSR it was essentially the same thing, but I think that has far much more to do with Russian culture than Marx. The State controlled the means of production in Socialist Albania, yet the Party of Labor of Albania (referred to me usually as the PPSH) did not itself become an elite group in absolute control.

I think you will find many people here share similar opinions of Marx. Most of us eschew violent revolution as a solution and would seek an alternative. Such alternatives are very hard to come by, but there are no signs in the real world of a spiral of rhetoric building to a spiral of violence yet, and no one here seems to be advocating such.

If a socialist republic can be built without a violent revolution I'd take it. However, I don't think that is possible, the capitalist class must be liquidated, and that will require violence. As for the spiral of rhetoric building to a spiral of violence, I do not think the time is quite ripe yet--the necessary generational constellation is not present and the prophets are still around to philosophize about alternatives.

If one is making class conflict a central element of one's economic and political world view, yes, you have to clearly define your classes. However, everyone else has a right to define their classes as well.

By that line of reasoning, which would be common for a White Liberal Boomer, one could define the color red to be the color green. After all did you not say that clear definitions were necessary when discussing political and economic issues? I have a clear, coherent and logical definition, everyone else is scattered with their "Lifestyles" and "incomes" arguments. None of which have any consistent objective basis. I can provide examples if necessary, though I think in my future post(s) to Brower I may actually provide them without having to answer you directly.

If you come in and say by fiat that your way is correct and other ways are wrong, without an argument, where are we? "Americans are tied to various myths." Statement of fact? Clearly true? No need to provide examples? Who named you God?

Actually I have argued my points about class, and the absence of a "middle class" (excluding perhaps a petty-bourgeoisie as such may exist still) in great detail. I suggest using the search feature. I should not have to make the same points over and over because some people choose to be boneheads.

My own core point is that most everyone is centered on and obsessed with their own values and world views. All believe their own absolutely correct. All conflicting are wrong. For an adult to change their world view generally requires a traumatic failure of their old one. For a culture to change, the culture, the collective world view of the entire people, would have to traumatically fail. This is my understanding of an S&H crisis. Smoldering Atlanta at the end of our Civil War, the poverty of our Great Depression and Berlin at the end of World War II reflect the scale of the trauma required for a people to change world views collectively.

For the most part we agree on these points. Indeed, I've often argued with comrades that appeals to reason to many of the conservative types is a waste of time. It is often a waste of time with liberal types too. They will only know to change their mind when their world view collapses, which it must eventually even out of inertia. After all the revolutionaries of one century are the conservatives of the next.

Which is why our current so called crisis era is fizzing out. We are avoiding real trauma. The wars are small and far away. The almost economic crash didn't come close to reprising the 1930s. Without such trauma, there will be no dramatic culture shift. People will continue to chant their existing world views with increasing volume but have no impetus to change.

Actually, I don't think the current crisis is fizzing out. It is actually setting the stage for the Mega-Crisis in the US. A whole saeculum that is one crisis after an other until the whole existing order is in the ash heap--much like feudalism ended up in the ash heap after 1789 in Europe.

Traumas like Atlanta, Berlin and Hooverville generally can't be replicated on an internet forum. Thus, I can accept going in that you will very likely cling to Marxist language, principles and economics, even though I see the latter part of the 20th Century as a large scale experiment proving Marxism as applied in practice just doesn't work.

I really don't care what you will and will not accept. I was a Marxist-Leninist before I came to this forum, and I will be one after this forum ceases to exist. As to the latter part of the 20th century, I would say that yes the Soviet Union failed, so did China. Enver Hoxha explained their various revisionisms, and it is those revisionisms that failed, not Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism succeeded in Albania until it was overthrown by outside forces and money after Enver's death. Partly this is the fault of Enver (Autarky states have economic problems, and Enver's passion over rode his country's economic benefit at times) and part of it is the fault of Alia and ideologically weaker figures in the PPSH.

But meanwhile, even if your idea of how the world works has no meaningful place for the concept "middle class", this doesn't imply that others can't find the idea useful or necessary to understanding US politics.

If one finds the concept of a "middle class" based upon income or "lifestyle" necessary to understanding US politics then they have bigger problems than that. They are also probably idealists to start with and idealists are nearly always wrong. (You can see my argumentation against idealism in many threads concerning philosophy. It should be obvious that I am a materialist.) Indeed, the most advanced form of idealism, post-modernism, can be boiled down to "that's just your opinion, man". Naturally such a world view is emptier than a gas can with no gas in it. At least you can go to the gas station and fill your gas can, post-modernist idealism denies the existence of both the gas can and the gas station.

I can disparage Marxist perspectives. You can disparage American perspectives. If all we do is disparage each other, throwing insults, playing with ad-hominum attacks, the conversation isn't going to be very meaningful.

On the other hand, if that's your road, if you are here to assert your personal Truth and disparage all who disagree with you, you'll fit in here fine.

I find a great many conversations here to not be very meaningful, and as such I have always chosen my "battles" with care. That said, my main purpose is to discuss generational theory, and historical materialism (which includes generational theories--though much to the chagrin of some of my comrades).