You write well, but in politics I find that your roots are anchored deeply in a substrate of typical Cali-Lib presumptions. That leads you to some serious blind spots.
Trump is a self serving clown, but Joe Biden is better…
We must be very wary of JD Vance, but Kamala gets some benefit of the doubt because the Moral Atheist Clergy find her to be less threatening.
Abortion is still an existential crisis for the nation, worthy of the airtime it receives, even though it is now a state issue; many years after even Ruth Bader-Ginsburg said that Roe v Wade was an unconstitutional decision.
Yes, JD is dangerously pro life, and corrupted by power, but Knees Harris is a very serious politician who definitely didn’t abuse her position and destroy lives so she could make a name for herself as DA.
Yea, we must all be wary of conservatives, because many of them are religious, unlike all of those sensible atheist liberals who cheered as Stalin’s progeny and BLM burned the country to the ground, and wished death on Joe Rogan for being the face of vaccine hesitancy.
Sorry if not all of those shoes fit you man. I know you challenge the far left commies, but you seem to be holding onto some belief in the inherent superiority of character in the mainstream left, and frankly, as a fellow atheist who left the church a long time ago, I think you need to get over it. Try looking at politics through a new lens.
Thanks for the critique and feedback. I think you misunderstand my views and aren’t granting them/me the nuance it/I deserve. I started out fairly left of center in my political life. Starting around 2016, that started to shift when I saw the crazy fringe left becoming unmoored from reality, common sense and fairness. (Not to mention the attacks on free speech.) I still consider myself small-l liberal, but I can’t call myself a Democrat anymore. I’m one of those now-not-uncommon “politically homeless” people. If I come closest to any label I think it would have to be some sort of “left-Libertarian,” but that doesn’t quite do the job, either. I am not going to vote this time around, not that my vote matters anyway given that I’m in CA. I think Trump is a total buffoon and a pathological liar, but I have plenty of issues with Biden, who also lied and who failed us in many ways, and I do not like Harris; she has a lot to answer for. I don’t think I fall neatly into the boxes of either side. That’s the problem: We all want our views and the views of others to perfectly align with Side A or Side B. I’m not as worried about Trump as many Democrats. I think he’s a jackass but not a serious threat to Democracy. I think lefties have a LOT to answer for in terms of lying about Biden’s cognitive condition, the obsession with identity politics, conspiracy theories on MSNBC, and much more. (Ditto the Right with Fox, Trump’s lies, etc.) In short: I don’t really pick a side; I reject both. Were I forced to choose one candidate at gun point, I’d probably clamp my nose and choose Harris. But I wouldn’t enjoy it, that’s for sure. We need better candidates on both sides. And I absolutely understand and empathize with the vote FOR Trump. I get why so many are going that direction. A lot of it is a rejection of Dems, and that makes sense to me.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. And thanks for subscribing!
Fair correction, thanks for getting back to me. I knew I was making some assumptions, but I don't know how to approach this anymore. I feel the strong urge to understand people, to find out if we're really mostly on the same page, and I think most of us would be if we just went issue by issue and sorted it out.
By polling we really are mostly on the same page, until the politicians and their rotten cabal of "journalists" start talking.
Abortion; let's just stop crushing conscious fetuses with forceps but before that point, keep the government out of it, and almost everyone agrees on the exceptions. That is what most people, regardless of state, think.
Medical marijuana has over 80% approval and has for decades, but DC just keeps that fascistic relationship with BigPharma stomping down on our necks.
Etc.
Again. I'm sorry for making assumptions about your views. I think the main reason why I misunderstand people is simply that my level of fear has run well ahead of everyone's choice of words. Everything looks like soft pedaling or party preference to me.
I don't think the Democrats just have a lot to answer for. I think they attempted to overthrow the system more than one time in the last 8 years. I think we're on the brink.
I think they are currently pumping non-citizens into the country and trying to make it possible for them to vote. I think they want to kill the Senate filibuster, pack the courts, slam through legislation that would make the ABC Soup impervious to all three branches of government so they can implement their Green New Deal without our consent, and ultimately turn us into some kind of Bolshevik-Nazi bureaucratic-corporate mutation that would, per the many telegraphed sentiments of their friends in the WEF cabal, someday, kill most of humanity off and put the rest in 15 minute cities.
Just look at 2020. The Great Economic Reset of the Covid19 era was just a false start that smarter members of the blob were smart enough not to jump on board. But I think they all agree on the destination. And I think the end of scarcity, as they often champion it, is about THEIR system being freed from US and our penchant for choices and freedoms.
The climate cult is another arm of the blob. I think there is a reason why the climate cult sounds so much like Mao and Lenin; note the attempt to seize control of food production in The Netherlands. It isn't about climate, it's about control. I'd vote for Dr. Evil's hairless cat to strip them of power, and unfortunately I think the Democrats are fully inside the blob at this point.
Don't worry. After we stop this strange blob of Neo-Bolsheviks, Corporatists, and Neo-Eugenicists, I will also gladly show Dr. Evil's hairless cat the door.
I won’t try to edit that for clarity. I was under time constraints, though, and the current state of politics shocks my system, so I’m sorry if that post is convoluted. I chopped a bunch out and tried to condense a 12 page rant. 🤷♂️
I grew up in poverty on my tribe's reservation. I personally found shared ground with Hillbilly Elegy. Our reservation is surrounded by failing mining, timber, and farm towns so I was peer, friends, and family with many poor white people and had common ground with them. And I think JD Vance, the politician, has betrayed the principles of JD Vance, the writer.
Spot on. I grew up not far from where Hillbilly Elegy took place. For the past 30 plus years, I’ve lived in deep Blue SoCal. The casual contempt and ignorance I’ve heard directed towards rural Red America by otherwise intelligent and educated people has been remarkable
Yes. The contempt is real. I live also in a deep blue city, San Francisco. My sister in-law ( college educated) says "Trumpers don't know how to read". It took every ounce of my being not to clap back at her.
Agreed. Nothing will change if the culture doesn't change, and I don't think it's going to. But Democrats don't see that culture is the problem, it's all about government solutions for them. I think neither party is very good but to me Republicans are better. And yes, what Democrats don't understand is a vote for Trump is specifically a vote against them.
Indeed, Vance's book anticipated Trump's appeal. I wrote about this recently, how there are no panaceas. And I agree with Vance's premise that a few generations of unemployment creates a toxic legacy that can't be overcome by a sudden new wave of jobs. Culture accretes over time, and the path to restoring rural communities is a long game, not a quick fix. I disagree with his take in one respect: investing in quality public schools can make an enormous difference in the life of working-class kids. It was the only thing that tipped the scale for me.
There is another asterisk to this book, however, which Julianne Werlin pointed out on Inner Life. Friends joked with me that if I'd waited a couple of years, my book might have been the "Hillbilly Elegy" of that cycle, because I come from hillbillies, too (though we Montanans don't call ourselves that). But I think that's wrong. Vance's story got wide appeal because it feeds a kind of fetish that goes all the way back to fairy tales. Folklore never showed a pauper doing "pretty well." The pauper had to turn into the prince to complete the tale. So you won't hear about kids making it out of poverty into state universities and middle class lives. They have to go to Yale and serve with the Marines for their story to be market-worthy.
That is one reason why America knows Tara Westover's and JD Vance's story. But they both relied just as much on lucky breaks as on innate grit to get where they did, so their stories change nothing for the average person growing up in those shoes. Tobias Wolff once told a story like that, too. It became a classic "This Boy's Life." No one would publish that same story today.
You make a very good point as how the pauper has to turn in to a prince in order for the story to become inspiring. Rob Henderson who just released his book "Troubled" is the exact person you describe...poverty, trauma, military, Yale etc...
Yeah. I think you're largely correct here. Vance does talk about luck being a big factor, whether genetically and/or environmentally. But I do still think that too many in this demographic have probably been incentivized in various ways to rely too much on government. Government can help, no doubt, but until individuals begin to do what they can with whatever it is they've got (even if it's only ambition and smarts), I can't see a real way forward.
There's no using what you've got without quality public schools. Growth in abandoned places must begin there. Homeschooling is not the cure, not for kids whose families struggle with addiction, etc. I get why some choose homeschooling as an option, because it fits the narrative of self-starting and personal responsibility. But it weakens the "commons" by removing ambitious kids from the peer group and it magnifies privilege gaps because only kids with competent (and likely wealthier) parents are going to have that escape hatch. Many good things can proceed from renewing a quality K-12 system.
It's a structure that needs to be completely - and I mean completely - restructured. It remains incredibly similar to what it was a hundred years ago. I don't mean the teachers or necessarily all curriculums - both of which, in fact, have been the only major changes - but the main structure has not changed. It is still a structure of creating factory workers, but updated to appear modernized. The people "at the top", those who aren't in classrooms, deal with the money going into it, etc, etc, absolutely don't want it to change because it would start with them being gone.
Homeschooling, in my experience, is mostly performed by people who can afford it. It can be good, it can be horrible. Homeschooling is complicated, as is the voucher system touted by conservatives and feared by liberals.
I’m glad you’re open to comments this time.
You write well, but in politics I find that your roots are anchored deeply in a substrate of typical Cali-Lib presumptions. That leads you to some serious blind spots.
Trump is a self serving clown, but Joe Biden is better…
We must be very wary of JD Vance, but Kamala gets some benefit of the doubt because the Moral Atheist Clergy find her to be less threatening.
Abortion is still an existential crisis for the nation, worthy of the airtime it receives, even though it is now a state issue; many years after even Ruth Bader-Ginsburg said that Roe v Wade was an unconstitutional decision.
Yes, JD is dangerously pro life, and corrupted by power, but Knees Harris is a very serious politician who definitely didn’t abuse her position and destroy lives so she could make a name for herself as DA.
Yea, we must all be wary of conservatives, because many of them are religious, unlike all of those sensible atheist liberals who cheered as Stalin’s progeny and BLM burned the country to the ground, and wished death on Joe Rogan for being the face of vaccine hesitancy.
Sorry if not all of those shoes fit you man. I know you challenge the far left commies, but you seem to be holding onto some belief in the inherent superiority of character in the mainstream left, and frankly, as a fellow atheist who left the church a long time ago, I think you need to get over it. Try looking at politics through a new lens.
Thanks for the critique and feedback. I think you misunderstand my views and aren’t granting them/me the nuance it/I deserve. I started out fairly left of center in my political life. Starting around 2016, that started to shift when I saw the crazy fringe left becoming unmoored from reality, common sense and fairness. (Not to mention the attacks on free speech.) I still consider myself small-l liberal, but I can’t call myself a Democrat anymore. I’m one of those now-not-uncommon “politically homeless” people. If I come closest to any label I think it would have to be some sort of “left-Libertarian,” but that doesn’t quite do the job, either. I am not going to vote this time around, not that my vote matters anyway given that I’m in CA. I think Trump is a total buffoon and a pathological liar, but I have plenty of issues with Biden, who also lied and who failed us in many ways, and I do not like Harris; she has a lot to answer for. I don’t think I fall neatly into the boxes of either side. That’s the problem: We all want our views and the views of others to perfectly align with Side A or Side B. I’m not as worried about Trump as many Democrats. I think he’s a jackass but not a serious threat to Democracy. I think lefties have a LOT to answer for in terms of lying about Biden’s cognitive condition, the obsession with identity politics, conspiracy theories on MSNBC, and much more. (Ditto the Right with Fox, Trump’s lies, etc.) In short: I don’t really pick a side; I reject both. Were I forced to choose one candidate at gun point, I’d probably clamp my nose and choose Harris. But I wouldn’t enjoy it, that’s for sure. We need better candidates on both sides. And I absolutely understand and empathize with the vote FOR Trump. I get why so many are going that direction. A lot of it is a rejection of Dems, and that makes sense to me.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. And thanks for subscribing!
Fair correction, thanks for getting back to me. I knew I was making some assumptions, but I don't know how to approach this anymore. I feel the strong urge to understand people, to find out if we're really mostly on the same page, and I think most of us would be if we just went issue by issue and sorted it out.
By polling we really are mostly on the same page, until the politicians and their rotten cabal of "journalists" start talking.
Abortion; let's just stop crushing conscious fetuses with forceps but before that point, keep the government out of it, and almost everyone agrees on the exceptions. That is what most people, regardless of state, think.
Medical marijuana has over 80% approval and has for decades, but DC just keeps that fascistic relationship with BigPharma stomping down on our necks.
Etc.
Again. I'm sorry for making assumptions about your views. I think the main reason why I misunderstand people is simply that my level of fear has run well ahead of everyone's choice of words. Everything looks like soft pedaling or party preference to me.
I don't think the Democrats just have a lot to answer for. I think they attempted to overthrow the system more than one time in the last 8 years. I think we're on the brink.
I think they are currently pumping non-citizens into the country and trying to make it possible for them to vote. I think they want to kill the Senate filibuster, pack the courts, slam through legislation that would make the ABC Soup impervious to all three branches of government so they can implement their Green New Deal without our consent, and ultimately turn us into some kind of Bolshevik-Nazi bureaucratic-corporate mutation that would, per the many telegraphed sentiments of their friends in the WEF cabal, someday, kill most of humanity off and put the rest in 15 minute cities.
Just look at 2020. The Great Economic Reset of the Covid19 era was just a false start that smarter members of the blob were smart enough not to jump on board. But I think they all agree on the destination. And I think the end of scarcity, as they often champion it, is about THEIR system being freed from US and our penchant for choices and freedoms.
The climate cult is another arm of the blob. I think there is a reason why the climate cult sounds so much like Mao and Lenin; note the attempt to seize control of food production in The Netherlands. It isn't about climate, it's about control. I'd vote for Dr. Evil's hairless cat to strip them of power, and unfortunately I think the Democrats are fully inside the blob at this point.
Don't worry. After we stop this strange blob of Neo-Bolsheviks, Corporatists, and Neo-Eugenicists, I will also gladly show Dr. Evil's hairless cat the door.
I won’t try to edit that for clarity. I was under time constraints, though, and the current state of politics shocks my system, so I’m sorry if that post is convoluted. I chopped a bunch out and tried to condense a 12 page rant. 🤷♂️
I have not commented on your posts before (I don't comment on very many substacks except fif), but I loved this. Really well done, Michael.
I grew up in poverty on my tribe's reservation. I personally found shared ground with Hillbilly Elegy. Our reservation is surrounded by failing mining, timber, and farm towns so I was peer, friends, and family with many poor white people and had common ground with them. And I think JD Vance, the politician, has betrayed the principles of JD Vance, the writer.
I, sir, think you have said it best.
Thank you.
Agreed. My guess is he's using Trump as a vehicle for power. Power corrupts, as they say.
Spot on. I grew up not far from where Hillbilly Elegy took place. For the past 30 plus years, I’ve lived in deep Blue SoCal. The casual contempt and ignorance I’ve heard directed towards rural Red America by otherwise intelligent and educated people has been remarkable
Yes. The contempt is real. I live also in a deep blue city, San Francisco. My sister in-law ( college educated) says "Trumpers don't know how to read". It took every ounce of my being not to clap back at her.
Yes. My encounters have been along a similar vein
Agreed. Nothing will change if the culture doesn't change, and I don't think it's going to. But Democrats don't see that culture is the problem, it's all about government solutions for them. I think neither party is very good but to me Republicans are better. And yes, what Democrats don't understand is a vote for Trump is specifically a vote against them.
Indeed, Vance's book anticipated Trump's appeal. I wrote about this recently, how there are no panaceas. And I agree with Vance's premise that a few generations of unemployment creates a toxic legacy that can't be overcome by a sudden new wave of jobs. Culture accretes over time, and the path to restoring rural communities is a long game, not a quick fix. I disagree with his take in one respect: investing in quality public schools can make an enormous difference in the life of working-class kids. It was the only thing that tipped the scale for me.
There is another asterisk to this book, however, which Julianne Werlin pointed out on Inner Life. Friends joked with me that if I'd waited a couple of years, my book might have been the "Hillbilly Elegy" of that cycle, because I come from hillbillies, too (though we Montanans don't call ourselves that). But I think that's wrong. Vance's story got wide appeal because it feeds a kind of fetish that goes all the way back to fairy tales. Folklore never showed a pauper doing "pretty well." The pauper had to turn into the prince to complete the tale. So you won't hear about kids making it out of poverty into state universities and middle class lives. They have to go to Yale and serve with the Marines for their story to be market-worthy.
That is one reason why America knows Tara Westover's and JD Vance's story. But they both relied just as much on lucky breaks as on innate grit to get where they did, so their stories change nothing for the average person growing up in those shoes. Tobias Wolff once told a story like that, too. It became a classic "This Boy's Life." No one would publish that same story today.
You make a very good point as how the pauper has to turn in to a prince in order for the story to become inspiring. Rob Henderson who just released his book "Troubled" is the exact person you describe...poverty, trauma, military, Yale etc...
Good catch. It’s the meritocratic fantasy. Not a replicable model for many.
Yeah. I think you're largely correct here. Vance does talk about luck being a big factor, whether genetically and/or environmentally. But I do still think that too many in this demographic have probably been incentivized in various ways to rely too much on government. Government can help, no doubt, but until individuals begin to do what they can with whatever it is they've got (even if it's only ambition and smarts), I can't see a real way forward.
There's no using what you've got without quality public schools. Growth in abandoned places must begin there. Homeschooling is not the cure, not for kids whose families struggle with addiction, etc. I get why some choose homeschooling as an option, because it fits the narrative of self-starting and personal responsibility. But it weakens the "commons" by removing ambitious kids from the peer group and it magnifies privilege gaps because only kids with competent (and likely wealthier) parents are going to have that escape hatch. Many good things can proceed from renewing a quality K-12 system.
It's a structure that needs to be completely - and I mean completely - restructured. It remains incredibly similar to what it was a hundred years ago. I don't mean the teachers or necessarily all curriculums - both of which, in fact, have been the only major changes - but the main structure has not changed. It is still a structure of creating factory workers, but updated to appear modernized. The people "at the top", those who aren't in classrooms, deal with the money going into it, etc, etc, absolutely don't want it to change because it would start with them being gone.
Homeschooling, in my experience, is mostly performed by people who can afford it. It can be good, it can be horrible. Homeschooling is complicated, as is the voucher system touted by conservatives and feared by liberals.
I agree. Solid public school structures are important.