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1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Bubbles
This essay struck a chord with me. When returning to Pennsylvania for the Thanksgiving holiday I reconnected with some friends and cousins. I endured some good natured ribbing about living in "Taxachusetts", and listened to some much less good-natured talk about San Francisco liberals, condescending college professors and unamerican elites.
It struck me that these folks, while attacking Coastal America, The Amtrak corridor, etc and contrasting it The Heartland, Real America etc,,,,,,,
,,,,, were oblivious to the fact that they live in their own bubble too.
If only we could break down the barriers and talk. Yes, the Harvard Professor, and the Chester county family live in a bubble.
But so does the Indiana Farmer, and the York Countian.
Trump lives in a gilded bubble.
So, here we go.
‘Real America’ is its own bubble
By Richard Cohen Opinion writer December 12
This column is for Bernard Gibson, a good man from the state of Indiana. Late last month, NPR went out to Vigo County there to explain why it flipped from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Gibson was one of those interviewed, and here is what he said: “These are real people here. These are not New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles. You know, these are real people that live every day from hand to hand, just have to work to make a living and everything else.”
Oh.
There are some things you ought to know, Mr. Gibson. I served in the Army. I worked at blue-collar jobs. I washed dishes and bused tables. I went to college at night and worked during the day for an insurance company (as the legendary “Cohen of Claims”). My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the “elite.” If so, I damned well earned it.
I do not mean to pick on Gibson, a real person after all, but I am tired of being told by him and others that I am not quite a genuine American because I did not vote for Trump or because I live on one of the coasts. I want to point out to Gibson that there are more of us than there are of him. At least 2.8 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump. That does not mean Clinton won the election — she lost the electoral college, and that’s what counts — but it is nevertheless true that Clinton was the candidate not just of the limousine set, but of most voters.
After the election, I was repeatedly told that I live in something called a “bubble” and, because of that, I know nothing about my fellow Americans. Well, in the first place, my bubble is bigger than theirs — size ought to matter in this instance — and in the second place, I know plenty. Among the things I know is that Trump voters were played for suckers. After lambasting Clinton as a tool of Wall Street, Trump has so far named four Wall Street figures to his administration — three from Goldman Sachs alone — and an oilman is under consideration. And for the Labor Department, Trump has chosen Andrew Puzder, a fast-food magnate (Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.) who is opposed to a decent minimum wage. This is fast shaping up as a Cabinet of billionaires and, just for leveling, the occasional millionaire. So far, ain’t no one who works with his hands.
Ever since the days of Jefferson and Madison and their veneration of “yeoman farmers” (some of whom owned slaves), we have been a bit gaga over our rural cousins, associating acreage with wisdom. Whatever the case, Americans have so totally fled the farm that now only 2 percent of us till the legendary fields. The country has not had a rural majority since 1920. Nevertheless, our electoral system favors the country mouse. The city mouse can vote or not vote — it often amounts to the same thing.
As it happens, Mr. Gibson, I have plenty of sympathy for typical Trump voters. (I exclude the alt-right and other menaces to the public good, such as Rudy Giuliani.) I have written about cultural dislocation and I understand the corrosive effect of diminished expectations. Clinton talked about the glass ceiling, but too many American workers — or former workers — had to contend with a cement one: jobs that were gone and not coming back. We in the bubble understand. Truly, we do.
But I will not concede that a greater wisdom exists in what is known as “flyover country.” It has voted for a charlatan, a blinged ignoramus who has promised the past as the future. Trump, who lives in a gilded bubble of his own, cannot reverse automation, replace robots with people or blunt American businesses’ compulsive search for the cheapest workforce.
Gibson is one thing. I understand. What I cannot understand is fellow bubble dwellers who tell me, with an air of impeccable condescension, that a vote for Trump was such proof of their own superior wisdom that it eclipsed all doubts about his qualifications, his temperament, his honesty in business and his veracity in speech. These people live in a bubble of their own. It is one that excludes the lesson of history and the demands of common sense. It will burst.
Last edited by Goose (12/15/2016 4:31 pm)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Re: Bubbles
What dangers are created when a nation separates, geographically, politically, and ideologically into bubbles?
What happens when we start to have not just different politics, but different goals and visions?
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Re: Bubbles
Many authors and pundits have opined on the separation of american communities, by income, by educational achievement levels, geography, and now by the sources we use to get news, creating self reinforcing echo chambers. A troubling development for sure.
Two interesting - and disturbing - studies delve much deeper, and might be of interest.
They are Coming Apart, by Charles Murray, and
Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance
Coming Apart is a very Scholarly work describing how a large swath of America - poor and working class whites - has lost ground over the last forty years as most of the economic benefits of the new economy have passed them by. Along with economic loss has come disillusionment with traditional politics, and the rise of populism and nationalistic sentiment.
The WSJ writes:
So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in "Coming Apart," are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, "the state of white America, 1960-2010," Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.
Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.
Hillbilly Elegy is a much less scholarly and personal story of one man's childhood in that bubble. It reads fast and is informative.
While ostensibly about the particular culture of the West Virginia Scots-Irish underclass, anyone that has seen white poverty in America's flyover states will recognize much of what is written about here. It is a life on the very edge of plausibility, without the sense of extra-family community that serves as a stabilizing agent in many first-generation immigrant communities or communities of color. Drugs, crime, jail time, abusive interactions without any knowledge of other forms of interaction, children growing up in a wild mix of stoned mother care, foster care, and care by temporary "boyfriends," and in general, an image of life on the edge of survival where even the heroes are distinctly flawed for lack of knowledge and experience of any other way of living.
Last edited by Goose (12/16/2016 6:59 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- •
Thread Starter