2754

I expect it to be some sort of nativist minimum basic income- especially if the nativist aspects of Trumpism stay (it is possible to be nativist and non-racist, and I expect a branch of the Dems will push for that)

As for why sentiment is down when we had a boom- it comes down to a combo of income inequality and uneven gains, where much of the country got nothing, and the cities got most of it.

This also led to a brain drain to the cities. A long-term solution to the problems is going to have to include some effective wealth transfers to rural America, as well as including them through broadband expansion into the 21st century.

2755

I mean… that’s basically the Rust Belt in a nut shell.

If no one has read it Hillbilly Eulogy (there was a thread about it around here) is a good look into that mindset. These people don’t want help (even if they need it), they want the lives they used to live back. But those lives are gone, replaced by robots and Chinese/Indian slave wage workers (but mostly robots). You can’t dial back the hands of time and a lot of these people will never fit into a modern economy. You can’t teach most 50-60 year old’s shit they should have learned in high school. They didn’t care about it the first time because they knew they were going to be factory workers anyway. Imagine teaching your parents to use the internet. Now imagine they’re a stranger that doesn’t even want to learn it. You might as well just set yourself on fire.

The problem is: there is no solution. I mean we can retrain some people. We can move them to newer industries, but the sheer volume of jobs no longer exist. Without some sort of Communist revolution where the government takes over, shuts down the robots and starts having people build things we don’t need (and then maybe pays other people to melt them down again so we can keep doing it), it just isn’t going to happen. Manufacturing isn’t a growth industry. And the service industry requires a wholly different skill set. I went to school with a whole class of guys from John Deere. You don’t want them anywhere near a customer for the most part. Even the nicest guys would probably be canned in under a year. They could build you a fucking tractor from blocks of steel, but they aren’t going to serve you coffee. Part of it is just who they are, but a lot of it is who they see themselves as. They aren’t servants. They’re working men who fucking make things.

I honestly don’t know what the solution is. Bernie Sanders is the closest hope I think we have, mostly because he gets the issues and isn’t naive about how things get done in government. The next crop of Democrats seems to be far too much of the social justice wing. I’m all for that, but the reality is that they don’t understand or really care much about the problems of the dying working class. The problem is that Bernie is old. Real fucking old. Biden is the next best bet after him and Joe is a gaffe-machine goofball, who is also old as fuck. Neither is likely to be running in 2020.

The nation needs some old pre-Clinton Democrats, preferably who aren’t racist as fuck, but we’re pretty much out of those. And the Republicans certainly wont do anything other than blame the Democrats for everything that’s happened while systematically making things worse for the working man and counting the money they saved by throwing them under the bus.

I get what got us here, but I’m not sure where the way out is. Of course we have to protect the fucking republic first, so that doesn’t exactly help. If we turn into another Russia none of this will matter. It will be like it is now, only shittier and without our rights.

2756

I believe Bernie is trying to raise up a new gen of those pre-Clinton style Democrats without the racism. I hope he succeeds. If needbe I plan to soldier even if I’m not qualified.

2757

He is, but you can’t turn a 20 year old into a 35 year old in 4 years no matter how much you try (not that anyone would ever elect a 35 year old to be POTUS anyway). The reality is that there is a gap. A big one. If we make it 20-25 years, things will likely sort themselves out. But that’s a looooong fucking time to be sidelined.

I think a good damned start would be to just boot out Pelosi. No one likes her, she’s been there forever and having her as the figurehead of the Democrats does no one any favors. But it’s the Democratic party so that isn’t going to happen.

2758

What makes you think when they’re 35 and many of them have a living wage, some of them have homes… have something worth trying to keep they’d be so willing to give up what they have?

I think it’s a mistake to think a 35 year old is going to think like a 20 year old just because they thought one way when they were twenty and in school. Maybe don’t assume the current 30 year olds are a lost cause? That around 60 years of voting and not necessarily a vote one way for life kind of group either.

2759

It is interesting as an exercise to see how sometimes sci-fi gets things wrong because of how there is very little attempt to connect the dots. Maybe someday in the far-off future, we’ll have robots doing everything menial, and basic universal income or we’ll do away with money entirely Star Trek style, but we’ve got a long way to go to get there and there’s going to be a lot of pain associated with the change. No one thought about how we’ll go from a largely capitalist world economy to everyone goofing off with hobbies while robots toil at everything.

2760

The problem is that GenXers are a lost cause because of pure demographics. There literally aren’t enough of them to matter until the Boomers die off… at which point they still wont matter because the Millennials outnumber them anyway.

At best they can tweak things when they’re close, but they’ll never be a force unto themselves. They can edge things one direction or the other being a counter balance to the Boomer vs Millennial tug of war for a little while, but even there the margins tend to be close. They voted for Clinton, but not by a ton. They’re more or less an inverse of their parents, but they’re also outnumbered by them and their parents as a group vote more on top of that.

2761
2762

I read that book. I thought it was good (and fascinating!) but I really didn’t understand the conclusions the author was drawing from his own life.

2763

Well a lot of it was that he dodged a fucking bullet by going in the military. But seeing the mindset of the people he got away from and his family is the big take away.

2764

Absolutely. Much the anti-intellectual attitude he escaped (not quite as much the violence) reminded me of where I grew up in northern England, where the old mines and shut down and the industry had declined.

I don’t know what policy makers are going to do. There seems to be a crisis that is being ignored, has been ignored for too long, and it’s producing political instability across the west. There are not easy answers, and certainly no quick ones. But nobody even seems to be talking about it.

(Except, arguably, and depressingly: Trump.)

2765

Sykes again? Is he the asshole who was an accomplice with this problem and when he finally realized this took his cushy life and said I’m out?

The next few years will be a test of that thesis.

I believe the election itself has already proven this. They don’t care about facts.

Perhaps just as important, it will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.

Fox News isn’t going to change. They don’t care about facts either. They care about ratings and advertising dollars. They kept the Canada Morrocan bullshit up for how long again?

Some of the today’s thirty year olds are in the Millennials, depending on how dice it… and I still think it’s a mistake to think that a 20 year old will only care about free college for everyone when they’re not in college. It’s an easier sell to the younger generation but still an important conversation for everyone to have.

2766

Yep. Still, it’s important to have voices that are conservative. Especially the ones who got us here, imo.

I’ll take the Becks and Sykes of the world speaking out if it opens even a few minds. Having sources no one can say “well of course he thinks that, he’s a liberal” against can be big.

2767

Except they already turned on Sykes the first time around he wrote his coming to reality piece. They turned on him because he and his clan trained them to do that very thing. Don’t like what someone says, make them the enemy and dismiss them.

2768

Sure, you aren’t going to win with a lot of people, but the rational ones you can show the light to.

Optimism or something. Hell, I almost believe it myself.

2769

Hah, this is good.

More of the American right needs to have a ‘coming to reality’ moment or revelation.

2770

Oh right Optimism.

Well I am glad one of them came around, basically too late. He needs to stop writing pieces that his listeners and his previous audience won’t actually read. He needs to get out in the public, witness how some of these people respond to “others” in person.

I keep hearing about talking to Trump supporters in person, and how much better it is. Maybe if you’re not an “other,” that could be true. When someone screeches they’re a Trump supporter to your face and tells you to leave the country or get on the other side of the wall… this quiet and calm dialogue and don’t look down on them so you can talk to them claim is just different.

2771

Zuckerberg 2020!

2772

If Democrats won and got their way, then problems in rural America would start to be addressed pretty quickly.

  • Increased minimum wage which would require big chains like Walmart - which have since driven small businesses out of many of these areas - to actually pay people a living wage, giving residents more money to invest back into the local economy

  • Increased funding of public education, and free or significantly subsidized college, so people who grew up in rural America are afforded more opportunity to become self-sufficient in today’s economy

  • Funding for alternative energy sources, especially in areas of rural America where plants have shut down (and are never coming back), so displaced workers can start working on something new

And on and on and on.

2773

Tulsi Gabbard is currently in her 30s, if she ran in four years she would get some support even if she’s a longshot.

BTW increased minimum wage wouldn’t help unemployment- the folks who had jobs would be better off- but you would see a quicker push to automation- you need UBI instead.

The elephant in the room is automation- I don’t think good jobs are coming back period- the value of human labor and even average human thought is declining rapidly. It’s why I’m trying to get my money while I can- automation will make many things cheap, so if you cut expenses down you can be ok.

Also the Gen X crowd to me are Bernie’s hardest backers- even moreso than millenials. In general, politically the Gen X crowd is less social justice oriented than the millenials, but they’re against the boomers.