Berkeley sociologist crosses over to Trump’s America

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I'm on board with keeping the conversation going.

Saw on the news that one of the co-founders of Twitter said he wishes he had never invented twitter, since it has been said his vehicle helped elect Trump.

When I heard that I just shook my head. Don't want to judge him in entirety because i don't know him but what he said could be interpreted as "Shut up if I don't agree with you."

Seriously?

I have not read her book, but she may just be explaining to the Berkeley progressives why the dumb rednecks think the things they do. Sort of the Berkeley "bless their hearts" approach.
But I'd much rather have someone visit than throw stones from afar.

Oh, and Jeff Sessions is doing as much damage as the liberal media ever did. IMHO

Right or wrong, our family has always avoided topics that might serve no purpose in the end. Religion and politics are subjects that you hardly ever change people's convictions. My SIL is a rabid Trump supporter based on one issue. Abortion. That is the reason she votes like she does. I guess you could call her a one issue voter.
I think very few of us support a candidate hook, line and sinker on all beliefs but rather pick the one that feels a little closer to what we believe. The problem as I see it, is in this last election, both candidates had very little to offer character wise.
IMO most people voted on the one they considered less evil. I'm not sure that this will ever change.

Well, dialogue is good. I don't support Trump but do understand where some of the feelings that lead to his support comes from. Still, (and I realize I'm guilty of this as well) she seems to be looking/talking down to her "subjects", even judging their efforts as ignorantly self-defeating. Maybe it's like family and you can't do it because you're not a part of it and I am, but there's a smugness to her approach that irks me.

NationalTitles16 said:

Well, dialogue is good. I don't support Trump but do understand where some of the feelings that lead to his support comes from. Still, (and I realize I'm guilty of this as well) she seems to be looking/talking down to her "subjects", even judging their efforts as ignorantly self-defeating. Maybe it's like family and you can't do it because you're not a part of it and I am, but there's a smugness to her approach that irks me.

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Yep! NT16, always on point.

What she is doing is not bad in itself. It's great to go somewhere and truly learn about people. But it's also funny to me that her "study" is so closely tied to the idea of people voting for Trump. If that's her theme, then she's not there to learn about these people, but to learn only how they can be "deceived" into voting for Trump. She did not "discover" that all people have a "deep story." First, that's just common fare for a sociologist. And second, that had to be her anticipation, it must be these folks having to have a "deep story", aka, a mythical way of thinking disconnected from facts and such. And so she went all the way to La. to find these folks.

Why? If she wants to study people who voted for Trump, why not just go east from Berkeley 2 hours? After all, Trump won Butte Co., CA. That's Sacramento, the state capital.

She should analyze her own deep story, and realize her audience is Berkeley and that their expectations frame her approach. Somehow I don't think the people in Sacramento fit the narrative she wants to tell about Trump voters as well as the Evangelicals speaking in tongues. You need some reason to tell the people in Berkeley they are superior, that if they went where she bravely went, they, too, would "think I'm in a mental hospital."

Edit: I don't want to seem all negative. I think plenty of good can come from a book like this. I just see where NT16 is coming from. I cross over both worlds too.

I felt like she was earnest and sympathetic - much in the same way that Chris Arande and Saleza Zito have been. If you're not following either of them on Twitter, you should.

But as one with a fair amount of sympathy for the forgotten Trump voter, I'm still going to accuse that voter of making a very poor choice.

My problem isn't the project, it's the utter condescension associated with it that never seems to cease.

"Let me go down in Louisiana as a purportedly 'objective' source and let me in bigger words basically say that the people
of south Louisiana are racist and sexist and so stupid they vote against themselves and thus keep themselves in poverty."


How can Louisiana be in such poverty with the Democrats helping them when they were one of the few Southern states to vote for Bill Clinton TWICE? Did all the great things he did for America NOT reach into the backwater of America?

Simply ask yourself what ASSUMPTIONS are driving any endeavor. In this case there is an AMAZING assumption underlying this project: "if we just educate these people (looking down our noses at them), they will vote the way we want them to."

Why didn't this sociologist go do this research when you had OBAMA voters in 2008 who were asked why they were voting for Obama and the reporter recited MCCAIN'S positions to them and they were saying "yeah, because he's (name of McCain position)."

Let's be blunt: the average voter in this country does not even know the name of ONE of his/her senators much less what each candidate stands for. I understand we have more information now than ever, but we also have less comprehension than ever before, too. The Trump voters wherever being psychologically analyzed by amateur sleuths (all it seems whom voted for Hillary) could be done in ANY election.

Maybe some folks need to accept the fact that nearly 1/2 the country (that voted anyway) made a binary choice and voted AGAINST Hillary. I knew several people in Arkansas who voted for Bill Clinton MANY times for governor AND voted for him twice for President and hated his guts. Yet they considered him either better or 'lesser evil' than the opponents. I've found the same thing here in Texas in regards to GW Bush.

And this whole "voted against their interests" nonsense comes out every election the Left loses, too. Maybe Obama's health care policies shouldn't have kicked in and raised their health care premiums (but I'm sure that's just because they're racist and they would have LOVED a white guy raising them).

I always think it's funny when someone living elsewhere thinks they know someone's checkbook better than the voter does. People in NYC who don't even own cars LOVE the idea of a gas tax of say 25 cents a gallon. It doesn't affect them that much. The guy in Montana doesn't really like the idea of his car fuel going up $3 every single time he fills up, either.

I feel like there is no other way to understand a Trump voter other than:

1) They just want to watch the world burn

OR

2) They are angry at the system and lashed out by choosing Trump over the "most qualified candidate"




The modern Democratic Party does not understand economic or social inequity that doesn't involve race, gender, or sexuality so many people who want real progressivism are left with no other choice than to just see if the GOP candidate who talks a bit progressive is true to his word unlike Obama who similarly promised a cultural revolution but instead provided a palatable Dubya. Until Democrats can tap into the hot and bothered sentiment of the American people with substantive economic progressive politics, they will be doomed to lose out to shills like Reagan, Bush 2x, and Trump.

rgw said:

I feel like there is no other way to understand a Trump voter other than:

1) They just want to watch the world burn

OR

2) They are angry at the system and lashed out by choosing Trump over the "most qualified candidate"




The modern Democratic Party does not understand economic or social inequity that doesn't involve race, gender, or sexuality so many people who want real progressivism are left with no other choice than to just see if the GOP candidate who talks a bit progressive is true to his word unlike Obama who similarly promised a cultural revolution but instead provided a palatable Dubya. Until Democrats can tap into the hot and bothered sentiment of the American people with substantive economic progressive politics, they will be doomed to lose out to shills like Reagan, Bush 2x, and Trump.

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'

You just lumped four very different men together as shills. Come on.

Shills can come in all sorts of packages. Clinton was a shill. I don't think Obama was a shill...he's the hardest to explain in my opinion. Very competent, eloquent speaker, but didn't do much with it.

Like with Obama, if he would've accomplished half of what people who's brains were rotted out by Drudge Report and Fox News said he was going to do or had done...he would've maybe accomplished something other than save private healthcare from the inevitability of universal state-ran healthcare for another decade or two.

rgw said:

Shills can come in all sorts of packages. Clinton was a shill. I don't think Obama was a shill...he's the hardest to explain in my opinion. Very competent, eloquent speaker, but didn't do much with it.

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Because ​he was a shill...

TideEngineer08 said:

Because ​he was a shill...

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Part of me wants to blame the party for being so immutable and generally antagonistic towards the progressive wing of the party but then again if the sitting president from the party can't remake the party in his image as Bill Clinton did then I suppose he was complicit and in fact a shill.


HE COULDA BEEN A HERO THOUGH

rgw said:

I feel like there is no other way to understand a Trump voter other than:

1) They just want to watch the world burn

OR

2) They are angry at the system and lashed out by choosing Trump over the "most qualified candidate"




The modern Democratic Party does not understand economic or social inequity that doesn't involve race, gender, or sexuality so many people who want real progressivism are left with no other choice than to just see if the GOP candidate who talks a bit progressive is true to his word unlike Obama who similarly promised a cultural revolution but instead provided a palatable Dubya. Until Democrats can tap into the hot and bothered sentiment of the American people with substantive economic progressive politics, they will be doomed to lose out to shills like Reagan, Bush 2x, and Trump.

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Your points amount to the same thing. But that is not how you understand people. What you list are just the simple fact. To understand people you have to try to grasp why they feel resentment that strongly or desperation that severe. That was the positive aspect of the sociology book, it tries to give a degree of understanding to the condition. The downside was the understanding was not neutrally situated and showed a bias. But just saying someone is lashing out explains nothing and actually alienates people.

I would argue that none of our past Presidents since Reagan were shills, however one defines the term.

Reagan was a committed conservative who had been reading and promoting conservative policy and philosophy for nearly twenty years by the time he took office. He counted Bill Buckley as one of his closest friends.

George HW Bush was Republican though not necessarily a conservative. He had a mountain of experience as businessman, Congressman, CIA chief and VP. His outlook on the world was well-explained in this piece on the Republican establishment by John Podhodertz:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/...ives-republicans/no-republican-establishment/


Bill Clinton was something of a huckster but he was a solid New Deal Democrat. I'll give him credit for that, although I always chuckle at Vincet Gallo's allegation that Clinton was huckster but Nixon was an intellectual. He managed to work relatively well with a GOP Congress.

GWB was hard to read - his staff really respected him and he was broadly conservative but not overly so - see his insane nomination of Harriet Myers. He was content to outsource foreign policy to the competing Scowcroft/Wolfowitz camps. Reminds me of Tommy Tuberville in a lot of ways - not a strategic genius but a better coach than people often credit him for being.

Obama did a fine job on a functional level - and he was a committed progressive. He was not a pragmatist who "just wanted to get stuff done" - he's a progressive and its better that everyone be up front about that so we can have an honest debate. I loads of issues with his staff - Rice, Rhodes, Holder - but I believe he was well-intended in his actions - I just disagree with him at the root philosophy.


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