Morning Ed: Politics {2016.02.15.M}
Adam Eisenstate talks about his time as Donald Trump’s ghostwriter.
Will Trump win the nomination on the strength of the Hispanic vote?
Kevin Drum explains why Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about welfare reform.
This is why Republicans can’t have nice things: Jeb targets Rubio over the disconnect between his taste in music and his concern for culture. There’s… really a tension here between the kinds of entertainment that culturally conservative (or “culturally cautious” since many would be loathe to use the “word “conservative”) worry about their kids consuming, and what they actually want to consume themselves.
Rebecca Nelson writes of The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley. I can’t speak of Silicon Valley, but I will say that there was no place I kept a tighter lid on my heterodoxical beliefs than when I was in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone in Deseret assumed – for the most part – that I was a radical liberal. But that was okay, because I was not as alone as a radical liberal in Deseret as I would have been a conservative where I was working. (The team leader adjacent to us was a Paulite. He was treated more as a gadfly than a villain, though, so there’s that.)
Greta Christina argues that being socially liberal but economically conservative isn’t enough. Some good points, though #4 and #5 assume a disagreement that may not exist, assuming that aggressive policing and the war on drugs are economically, rather than socially, conservative positions.
Here’s an interesting interview with Leah Wright Rigueur, who wrote a book called The Loneliness of the Black Republican, which looks at the history of the group and the party.
Sanders and Welfare reform: Probably a combination of both. There is an old saw that programs for the poor are poor programs. Sanders might be making a calculation that many of his ideas might help more if they have a wider net. I will also note that a lot if Sanders supporters are relatively middle class or higher educated liberals. They like Sanders primarily because Wall Street hates him.
Rubio and Bush: History might have been different if the GOP sincerely focused on saying “somethings are not okay for children” but they did not. The Moral Majority wing spent decades rallying against any pop culture that was racier than Pat Boone. There is also a weird mental gymnastics that goes on when younger GOPers talk about how hip-hop is “really conservative” but don’t seem to realize that Fuck the Police is does not mean entitlement reform. Plus these guys usually end up as scandalous and I always think their moral conservatism is because they need to remove fun for everyone to avoid their own feelings of shame and temptation.
Silicon Valley Republicans: There are plenty of Libertarians in the Valley like Peter Thiel and others less rich and powerful. A lot of Silicon Valley types see the Democratic Party as another thing to disrupt. That being said, there is a white Evangelical church near my apartment and I am curious about the politics of the place and the parishioners. I went to the website once, they seem “wholesome”. That being said, there are more areas in the country where being LGBT is a dangerous act. I don’t have much sympathy for young Republicans who say “Oh no! I can’t be skeptical about same sex marriage in San Francisco!”Report
If you reduce it to wearing t-shirts that say “Gays are going to burn in hell” then sure.
Every four years I do the 7-Election thing (you get a cup of coffee at 7-11 bearing the name of your preferred candidate). In 2008, I was working at a large software company. I did my 7-Election duty and got the cup, but I ended up pouring it into a used cup and tossing it. Not that I would have been fired or anything ridiculous like that, but… being on the outs of almost all of my coworkers would have been a distinct possibility and not a fun one.
I can’t think of a single instance where the reverse would have been a problem. Certainly not in Deseret, where everyone assumed I was a lefty anyway because of the issues that tended to get discussed (gay rights, pot, etc) and I was non-LDS and I was a smoker on top of that. Even in Colosse, when I worked for the fundamentalist, where within a certain context it was mostly “bygones.”
None of this is to say that “Liberals are the real intolerant ones!!!!” or that the two are really even comparable. The Deseret employer fired its legal counsel for being gay and didn’t even make up another reason to do so. I’m not actually sure the fundamentalist would have fired a gay employee, but the culture would have made their work life a whole lot more uncomfortable than needing to toss a coffee cup.
But places have a culture, and in techworld that culture really isn’t represented by Peter Thiel. And it’s not one you need to wear a homophobic t-shirt to be on the wrong side of. I mean sure, tiny violins and all that, and I wouldn’t hesitate to go back to that job with those people if life circumstances allowed it, but there is definitely a thing there.Report
I think 4chan has a different culture than most techies.
(Did you wonder where I get the cussin’ from?)Report
I pretty much stopped discussion of politics at jobs since getting into a lunch break argument with a coworker over the Iraq war that got so heated that everyone else stopped eating and started staring at us.
That was in 2007.Report
“A lot of Silicon Valley types see the Democratic Party as another thing to disrupt.”
I like DailyKos. I like netroots nation. and Bernie Sanders is a great guy.
I think the SV types are doing a damn fine job at disrupting the democratic party, and it’s turning out for the better the whole way round.
But then again, it was a “SV type” who made the best commercial in 2006 (the one you saw and missed the punchline), and that Mike Gravel campaign ad last Presidential.Report
Economically conservative/socially liberal: This article left me unimpressed. Its really just another liberal against libertarian article. I’m sure I can find a libertarian against liberal article easily. The debate is really just on what is the best way to reduce or eliminate poverty. The economically conservative side believes that the focus should be on increasing absolute wealth but any wealth distribution mechanism besides the market will have negative consequences. Economic liberals argue that you need to have a wealth distribution mechanism and regulations to restrain the more aggressive instincts of business people and corporations. I lean more towards the economic liberal side but I’m a lot more friendly towards market economics than most of them.
Entertainment and politics: What @saul-degraw said. I’d also like to point out that the Anglophone world always had this belief that you need to control the content of entertainment to keep people moral. There was always a fear of corrupting influences, especially on children but even with adults. Its one reason why the Culture Wars are thought or that people fight for family values in entertainment. Other developed countries, most notably Japan, seem to have a belief that kids and adults can watch some really violent entertainment without any moral damage.Report
That Rawstory post is pretty terrible. Not enough? Not enough for what? The implication is that people’s personal political and ideological preferences and beliefs can be measured against some objectively true set of principles to which this woman believes that she has a unique claim on adjudicating.
I suppose that it is real comforting to believe that eradicating poverty is something to which we have an obvious and unequivocal set of answers. Unfortunately, anyone who has spent anytime actually working on anti-poverty issues or on economic development knows this just isn’t the case. And about the dumbest thing you can do in tackling any problem is to immediately declare a whole range of possible interventions off the table for petty ideological reasons.
But Rawstory isn’t about debating what is and what is not good policy. It exists so partisans can post self-righteous clickbait on their Facebook walls.Report
My feelings on the Rawstory as well. It was Blue meat for the faithful and utterly fails to convince.Report
Respect to Drum for actually showing that chart. So many on the left keep repeating the lie that welfare spending has been cut to the bone, when the reality is that it’s shot through the roof.Report
Drum is a good egg.Report
That the spending makes such continuous rise while the poverty persists in being stubborn looks like an indication that the structure of the programs is ridiculously inefficient.
Edit: this is not to defend “old welfare” either, mind. If asked to set aside my own principles & recommend a pragmatic tweak, that tweak would be to replace much of the bloated system with a UBI.Report
Clinton says we are all mixed race. Where were his minders? Hillary needs a better leash.
http://gawker.com/we-are-all-mixed-race-people-says-an-unchaperoned-bill-1759078582Report
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and still visit there frequently. You are experiencing the urban part of the PNW, no doubt. I hail from Whatcom County, from Blaine, WA, no less. The politics there show the usual urban-rural split, with the more rural parts of the county – Lynden in particular – breaking very conservative and evangelical, and the more urban parts – Bellingham, home of Western Washington University – being much more liberal. Blaine is a very odd place, since it is a fishing village, a port of entry, and does (did?) a lot of trade based on the fact that the bars are closed in Canada on Sundays (and an hour earlier other days, if memory serves). So it’s more libertine, with a bad reputation in the rest of the county. I’m now in a position where that bad reputation amuses the hell out of me.
If by the PNW you mean greater Seattle and greater Portland, then you are probably correct. I just want to represent for my homeland, and a place I still love dearly.Report
I work in Bellevue, where we have some most excellent political discussions in the break room.
No echo chambers or ideological shaming.Report
My last workplace was in the I-5 corridor halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. Half the staff was ex-military, ex-law enforcement, or both – and the other half were standard techies. People tended to only discuss politics in depth only after the lodge had been tyled, but I can’t recall any rancor or anyone getting even a cold shoulder.
In addition, one of the most senior PMs was an evangelical christian and hardline conservative, and they PM in the office next to him was a self-described socialist who had basically zero fishes left to give. When things got slow, they had a long tradition of bantering in one or the other office, without closing the door, not necessarily using their indoor voices. Much fun was had by all who could overhear.
In my previous job, it was even more stratified – literally everyone in a management role retired from the military as at least a light colonel, and with the exception of me and one other guy, literally every techie was a long-haired T-shirt wearing (there was an official dress code) anarchist. The guy who headed up the place eventually became a multi-term Republican mayor of a Tacoma suburb. Political expression was, if anything, even freer than the other place.
So yeah, I don’t see it either – or at least I haven’t yet. The only ideological shaming I’ve ever seen was the guy who grew up in CA and was a Niner fan at the 2012-2014 height of the rivalry. And even that was 95% in fun.Report
Anyone from eastern Washington can probably parse where I was from from this post. I only had one job at one employer while I was out there, and it may have been made worse by the fact that it was right-smack in the middle of the 2008 election. The whole time I was there, the only non-Democratic people were either H1B’s and that Paulite. There was another guy I suspect was a closet Republican, but he never said anything directly. The 2008 wave and such lead to an atmosphere where Obama support was just generally assumed, which likely fed into my perceptions. The talk was never “mixed company” talk, so to speak.Report
As somebody who grew up in Puyallup and then moved to Seattle as an adult, it’s definitely been a bit odd; in Puyallup I was regarded as basically a communist, but in Seattle, although I’m still fairly left on most things, I’m often viewed as basically a right-winger due to my disdain for the crunchy-granola-ecohippy types and my skepticism toward much of the modern left’s tactical orientation.Report
I feel much the same. I am still a bit uncomfortable about self-identifying as a liberal (although I’ve drifted far enough from being just a libertine to make it fit), specifically because of my derision for the wooly-headed second-generation hippies that were smotheringly all around me and my posse. Literally so, since they were the ones who really started pushing the campus speech debate toward the current state of affairs.Report
Kinda funny, as I have moved from being a fairly conservative Democrat to pretty hard core libertarian, Berkeley seems to see me as some sort of baby eating right winger. So, I totally get where you are coming from.
Oh, and I was born in Pullman.Report
When I was in college, Berkeley would see you as a baby-eating right winger if you were a liberal Democrat. No exaggeration: there were two local political parties, of which one was the local Democrats, and the one further left routinely called them fascists.Report
Oh, I know, that is the family stomping ground. And even earlier than that (’50’s) I had some family members who found Berkeley too conservative, left and ended up in East Germany.Report
My co-workers call me a left winger.
It keeps things in perspective.Report
Kanye loves white folks but doesn’t think they should comment on black music.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kanye-west-asks-white-publications-865664
Reminds me of the post about interpreting black pundits and who should do that.Report
I can’t decide if you’re saying that you were wrong about the former, or Kanye is right about the latter.Report
I think the idea that only race x can interpret race x is BS brought about primarily by liberal identity politics.Report
Good thing no one argued that.Report
Kanye West is wrong, which happens a lot, but he is also on to something, which also happens a fair bit as well.
I feel something similar most times I read a rock or pop music critic review a rap album. It doesn’t have all that much to do with being white, though, except that being black increases the odds that you have a history of meaningful engagement with black music.
I don’t know if @notme is white or black or whatever, but I generally think that he shouldn’t comment on anything.Report
Ha. You should hear my friend the music critic (and composer) critique the rap genre.
It’s rather brutal, actually.
(not that he’s any nicer to electronica, and he’s composed stuff in that genre.)Report