Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

like we can quibble about what is the underlying cause of this but for ourselves we can be honest and say that right-wingers are mostly full of shit and believe things that are misaligned w/ reality.

the levels of support don't necessarily - almost certainly don't - reflect an accompanying upsurge of prosperity tho. places receiving the most support are the most economically and socially barren, there aren't people looking around going "look at this pleasure dome the EU built for us"

right-wingers are full of shit, sure, but disenfranchised and impoverished right-wingers are not really ignoring the blatant evidence of their day to day experience i don't think

Yes there is economic support in the sense of unemployment benefits or the subsidising of bad jobs, keeping people just around the poverty line, and economic support in terms of creating lasting employment opportunities and thriving communities. It has most been the former in the places voting to leave. London has boomed beyond all historical measure at the same time. When the recent round of cuts came in, it was the poorer communities disproportionately affected.

what day to day experience tho? who knows how to judge this shit objectively - it's not like their homes are being bombed out, or they're starving bc food hasn't been sent to the city in weeks, or they've run out of toilet paper. their serotonin levels more-or-less self-correct and like i said from a historically (or global) perspective they're all doing pretty okay. it's not like if they were doing 10% better they'd necessary feel differently. this kind of thing i don't think actually arises from a real phenomenology. and even if it did, it's not like it's particularly rational to cut off your nose to spite yr ugly face.

people are starving, people are living in shitholes, people are struggling to gain access to basic services like a GP

there is no pleasure dome under a different system. a. they are choosing the solution that leads to worse results for them and their family and b. there isn't a right choice they could make that would make their lives a pleasure dome. we don't live in the pleasure dome world.

it's almost as if voters in a representative democracy are sometimes mistaken as to their own best interests

We literally have hundreds of thousands of people who can not afford to feed themselves while the government's subsidising a semi-private garden bridge across the Thames to the tune of tens of millions of Pounds. It is like parking Dubai next to Banja Luka and wondering why people are angry when you keep building empty skyscrapers.

how dare these peasants not appreciate their good fortune

is it really that dire? by hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford to feed themselves you mean who are relying on social services to feed themselves? bc the NYT has stories about 94% of Venezuelians haven't eaten today. i haven't seen similar horror stories about dire food shortages and starvation coming from the uk.

a semi-private garden bridge

where alph the sacred river runs

https://www.trusselltrust.org/what-we-do/

The Trussell Trust’s 400-strong network of foodbanks provides a minimum of three days’ emergency food and support to people experiencing crisis in the UK. In 2015/16, we gave 1,109,309 three day emergency food supplies to people in crisis.

nothing to see here

This is not Venezuela. We have the money to cover basic human dignity. Social services do not cover food bills for everyone so people have to use charity food banks.

anyway, i'm still not clear that these are the ppl who voted en masse for leave, and there were still very many people who were doing significantly better who voted leave which still leaves you wondering what they're hoping for. it would be easier if this were a movement of simply the most impoverished dire situations (at least bc it would mean that remain would've won). but it's not - it's also ppl who should know much better.

Yes, there are lots of wealthy older political conservatives who did not want to join in the first place.

they are not solely the people who voted to leave. many of them will be the people who didn't vote at all. when the right has power it's always as a coalition of the cynical powerful and the misinformed poor

even if you accept that millions of brits are starving to death, why would leaving the EU make that better?

and if holes in the social safety net are the problem, why do poors keep electing conservative governments?

http://www.fabians.org.uk/brexit-voters-not-the-left-behind/

say what you will about the US at least we never left a decision like his up to a fucking referendum

trolling aside this is basically about xenophobia/racism not economic self interest, right

in the united states its the same thing bc americans sit around saying 'why do poor people vote against their self interest' but it only actually applies to poor *white* people (actually: white people in general) if you look at the numbers & they vote against their self interest bc racism

oh i see mordy argued against this pov earlier and i missed it, now he'll get mad at me.

i do think its actually about xenophobia and racism more than you do, theres an argument going on in academia right now that the notion of 'western man' depends on the existence of a slave class for its sense of self-determination which i find p compelling, suggests that a lot of what mordy's talking about re: absurd expectations of Happiness is true but also intertwined inextricably with race

theres an argument going on in academia right now that the notion of 'western man' depends on the existence of a slave class for its sense of self-determinatio

lol rly? hasn't this been obvious for hundreds of years

idk seems to me the notion that we can 'reform' our way out of racism instead of seeing it as a cornerstone of the philosophy of our very conception of man is pretty dominant

cf all the 'progress' we've made, or the utopian vision of civil rights 'i have seen the mountaintop' etc., part of the reason Coates has struck such a chord is bc his POV is pretty insurgent on both the left and the right for taking a more pessimistic pov

americans sit around saying 'why do poor people vote against their self interest' but it only actually applies to poor *white* people (actually: white people in general)

The right wing tries to do the same thing in America re: minorities, esp. African-Americans, but it usually blows up in their faces. (e.g. "Why do blacks keep voting for the Democrats that want to keep them on the plantation," etc.)

I'd be surprised if the public has become organically more racist than it was when successive Tory leaderships under Hague, Howard and Duncan Smith tried to turn general elections into referendums on immigration and got their hides tanned. We have had a massive economic crash and austerity programme, with political and press scapegoating, since.

I've been under the assumption for a while that at least some white people are undergoing an existential crisis about the fact that they might live to see themselves become a minority population. About which, I know, boo hoo, but I can see where that mindset might account for an uptick in racist sentiment.

In democracies, there is always some insecurity over minority status. Even rich people worry about the fact they're in a minority, which is what motivates them to spend so much money on politics and propagandize so fervently about how horrible it would be to raise the marginal tax rates on them.

Some of the strongest leave pockets were places that have next to no immigration and this stuff was further below the surface when non-existent migration was higher. There is a racist element to a lot of it and it was probably the single biggest issue for most voters but there is a lot more going on.

Non-white *

Some of the strongest leave pockets were places that have next to no immigration and this stuff was further below the surface when non-existent migration was higher. There is a racist element to a lot of it and it was probably the single biggest issue for most voters but there is a lot more going on.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Friday, June 24, 2016 1:13 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the most racist white ppl tend to live far away from nonwhite people, this is not a surprise

Or what I said like four posts earlier.

Durham, which was Tony Blair's area, voted leave. Doncaster, which was the last Labour leader Ed Miliband's constituency, voted leave by a huge margin. Places that will probably vote for the most pro-immigration of the two main parties forever more voted to leave. There has been a big swing to the far right in a lot of areas and both parties have actively courted the racist vote but if they wanted to vote for flat-out fascists they have had every opportunity to do so In the past. Farage, who has been the face of the leave campaign for much of the time, has repeatedly failed to get elected as an MP in some of the most deprived areas of the UK.

the most racist white ppl tend to live far away from nonwhite people, this is not a surprise

^^^ is this really a thing that needs to be restated

not that I am going to pretend to understand UK politics

It's pretty counterproductive to foreground frothing nativist racism, which does exist, and not look at the underlying economic issues that underpin hostility not just to immigration but to metropolitanism, 'experts' and politics in general.

ie

@ggreenwald
Maligning everyone who is dissatisfied with internationalist institutions as dumb & primitive is part of the cause.

Yr boy in 'wildly oversimplifying to make a point' shocka.

i guess people on your FB wall don't like Andy Borowitz then

1). Yes, it is unconstructive to treat people who disagree with you politically as if they're dumb rubes because you will never ever persuade anyone or find any middle ground with that approach (looking at you, Morbsy). 2) I'd be super interested to know how many 'leave'-ers had considered and nuanced objections about remaining with the EU vs. how many were just like '___ go home!' Guessing the former is a paltry number and that there isn't much overlap.

There's a fairly large constituency who just wanted to kick the political class in the nuts as well.

The area I live in voted to leave by a margin or two to one. It's 93% white British. You can write them off as unsalvageable if you like but at a local level, you can't outnumber them and they're always going to have a voice.

Alternatively, you can look at the history of the place, how the docks which were the main employer closed and the cluster of towns and cities became a warehouse for the economically marginalised pushed out of London when the slums came down and continued to be used to relocate the unemployed and 'problem families' away from parts of the country they were lowering the tone of, how the army took over as the core non-public-service employer , how entire streets that had served as social hubs were boarded up or turned into a string of threadbare charity shops and gambling outlets, how pockets have some of the best schools in the country and twenty minutes down the road there's a secondary where 94% of people fail to meet the government mandated benchmark of five GCSEs, how substance abuse became rife and was left largely unaddressed, etc, and ask why people might want to carve an ugly scratch in the political machine.

And this is basically a very decent place to live for a lot of people! You can commute into London at vast expense in 35 minutes if you are lucky enough to have a job there

If the response to the rise of a muscular right is 'some people are bad and let's just hope we outnumber them' rather than 'let's rethink how we distribute money and opportunities' we really are doomed.

i dont think saying race is central to this dynamic means that degree of expressed resentment doesn't change over time. it just means that they can pull that lever whenever they need to accomplish something

like, of course when economic security feels threatened ppl are more apt to respond but that state of racial resentment is a constant

People who say that members of the US White working class vote against their own economic self-interest need to read this

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/includes/kansasqjps06.pdf

and never say that zombie Thomas Frank meme again.

i dont think saying race is central to this dynamic means that degree of expressed resentment doesn't change over time. it just means that they can pull that lever whenever they need to accomplish something

Underlying racial / national anxieties have always been there and unquestionably played a major role in a lot of individual decisions to leave. They have been manipulated by the press and by politicians to achieve exactly this result. Growing up in a hugely multicultural part of London, though, I do have to be optimistic that this stuff isn't terminal. It can be fought where the will to do so, and the economic circumstances, align.

(looking at you, Morbsy).

you mighta misspelled his name

and never say that zombie Thomas Frank meme again.

― hamqueen (bamcquern), Friday, June 24, 2016 3:02 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well you can argue that white upper class people are voting against their interests on things like the environment or w/e but the point that white people vote against their interests in greater numbers than everyone else *to some degree* is true of the poor, too. but yes, in general, poor people are more apt to vote left