Blue Aint Niggaz Favrit Color

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/demographics-may-not-be-turning-america-blue/article/2558763

NIGGAZ KNOWS BOUT PIGS IN POKES.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Generational, as distinct from ethnic, demographics are going to turn America blue. Millennials seem have little use for social/religious conservatism. Of course, that's not the end of politics, it just means politics will be more exclusively focused on economic issues. Which is a good thing for the progressive side.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Generational, as distinct from ethnic, demographics are going to turn America blue. Millennials seem have little use for social/religious conservatism. Of course, that's not the end of politics, it just means politics will be more exclusively focused on economic issues. Which is a good thing for the progressive side.

Once these Millennials go to work and start supporting families and start paying taxes and rent or mortgages and see a lot of lazy good-for-nothings living off the taxes they pay, the Millennials won't be so liberal any more.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Once these Millennials go to work and start supporting families and start paying taxes and rent or mortgages and see a lot of lazy good-for-nothings living off the taxes they pay, the Millennials won't be so liberal any more.

No, perhaps not -- on economic issues. What matters, however, that social conservatism will lose its salience to Millennials -- and, very likely, to all generations after them -- which means refocusing politics on economic issues to the exclusion of abortion, gay marriage, etc. -- which, in and of itself, is good for the progressive cause, because if people have nothing but economic issues to argue about, the progressive arguments will usually come out ahead.

 

[Libsam]

I knew a male gay couple who owned a bakery, they made gorgeous works of fondant art for weddings and other large and luxurious celebrations.

One night we were all hanging out at this local pub, 2009. He made a comment that I will never forget, he said, "I'm openly gay, but a closet republican." You see, his small business was more important to him than these social wedge issues.

 

[RobDownSouth]

If you think Hispanics are going to vote Republican in any great number anytime soon, you are stupid. We're talking query-class stupid.

Hispanics are hugely in favor of single-payer health care. Recent studies showed something like 65% or more of all strata of Hispanics (1st generation through 3rd generation) in favor.

Couple that with the Vettebigot-demographic routinely demonizing anyone who does not speak English.

Hispanics recognize they are not wanted in today's republican party.

 

[Boxlicker101]

No, perhaps not -- on economic issues. What matters, however, that social conservatism will lose its salience to Millennials -- and, very likely, to all generations after them -- which means refocusing politics on economic issues to the exclusion of abortion, gay marriage, etc. -- which, in and of itself, is good for the progressive cause, because if people have nothing but economic issues to argue about, the progressive arguments will usually come out ahead.

Now, here's where we differ: As far as I am concerned, if two men or two women want to form a marriage contract, that is their business and certainly none of mine. If an adult wants to get drunk or stoned, as long as he or she doesn't endanger anybody, that is also none of my business or anybody else's except the person involved and, maybe, that person's family. I don't like the idea of abortions - who does - but sometimes it is the least bad of several choices and I believe a girl or woman should be able to get one and should have to answer to no other person.

I also believe that, whenever possible, people should be responsible for their own support and that of their families. There was a time when this was so obvious as to be not even something to debate, but that was before The Great Society and other Liberal giveaway programs. I believe that time should and will return and working people will no longer vote for those politicians who want to give the fruits of their labor to those who do not deserve it.

 

[Wrong Element]

Generational, as distinct from ethnic, demographics are going to turn America blue. Millennials seem have little use for social/religious conservatism. Of course, that's not the end of politics, it just means politics will be more exclusively focused on economic issues. Which is a good thing for the progressive side.

This assumes parties don't change, or can't change. Any party that finds itself consistently on the wrong side of the voters has a pretty clear incentive to tweak its message. There's a reason Reagan was yelling "Medicare = Socialism" 50 years ago, while today, with the GOP heavily dependent on white Medicare recipients, that statement is now inoperative.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I knew a male gay couple who owned a bakery, they made gorgeous works of fondant art for weddings and other large and luxurious celebrations.

One night we were all hanging out at this local pub, 2009. He made a comment that I will never forget, he said, "I'm openly gay, but a closet republican." You see, his small business was more important to him than these social wedge issues.

Freak Squad has the ability!

 

[KingOrfeo]

This assumes parties don't change, or can't change. Any party that finds itself consistently on the wrong side of the voters has a pretty clear incentive to tweak its message. There's a reason Reagan was yelling "Medicare = Socialism" 50 years ago, while today, with the GOP heavily dependent on white Medicare recipients, that statement is now inoperative.

I meant it will be good for the progressive cause, not necessarily for the Democratic Party; it might be, if the party changes, or it might be good for some new party to the Dems' left.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I also believe that, whenever possible, people should be responsible for their own support and that of their families. There was a time when this was so obvious as to be not even something to debate, but that was before The Great Society and other Liberal giveaway programs. I believe that time should and will return and working people will no longer vote for those politicians who want to give the fruits of their labor to those who do not deserve it.

Seriously, what reason do you have to expect American politics are trending in that direction? Have you not noticed that, e.g., the Tea Party is a desperate rearguard action, struggling only to delay the loss of ground it will inevitably eventually lose? The majority of public opinion runs the other way -- and has, consistently, for decades now. As Paul Rosenberg notes:

Of course, Americans’ overwhelming support for raising the minimum wage would seem to blow at least one gaping hole in Etzioni’s argument, as a clearcut example of reducing inequality that regularly draws supermajority support, but the problems with his thinking go much deeper than that—and not just because Warren’s defense of preserving and expanding Social Security is where the real action is (see the GOP’s latest move to slash disability benefits), putting her in a much more popular position (79 percent of likely voters and 73 percent of Republicans, according to a poll last August) than anyone else on the national political horizon. In the end, Etzioni’s fact-phobic narrative concludes, “Warren’s rhetoric smacks of equality of results rather than opportunity, which many Americans—including many who are anti-elite—consider un-American.” This is a very popular sort of formulation in elite circles, not least because of all the contradictory facts it glosses over. Unfortunately for them, it’s not just tactically and strategically disingenuous along the way, it’s dead wrong at its very core.

Evidence that it’s wrong goes back at least to the 1960s, when public opinion pioneers Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril published their classic survey, “The Political Beliefs of Americans,” which found that nearly two-thirds of the American people qualified as “operational” liberals, supporting an expansion of government spending programs when asked about them specifically, even as a bare majority qualified as “ideological” conservatives, based on questions about government involvement in the economy vs. free markets, etc. This disjunction was one of the dominant themes of their book, which concluded with a section titled “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology,” in which they wrote:

There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.

Instead of that, the exact opposite has happened. The American people’s basic attitudes supporting government spending have not changed markedly, except that Medicare has passed from proposal to reality, vastly enlarging the size of programs the public supports. But conservatives have poured billions of dollars into building an ideological infrastructure dedicated to attacking these popular programs, among other things. Liberal perspectives that make detailed sense of these views—morally and sociologically, as well as macro-economically—have largely been limited to specialized publications, either watered down or excluded from mainstream discourse, despite the alleged “liberal bias” of the media. It’s a reflection of what George Lakoff described as “hypocognition” when I interviewed him here. “We don’t have all the ideas we need,” he explained, ideas do not simply mirror the world, they have to be discovered, developed, articulated, explained and communicated, and conservatives have devoted far more of their resources to promulgating conservative ideas than liberals have done to promote theirs. Yet, despite that, the underlying liberal value structure of American public opinion has not changed significantly since Free and Cantril wrote.

Vivid proof of that appeared in 2010, when Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University’s psychology department published a paper, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time.” It showed just the opposite of what Etzioni claimed, as I explained at Open Left at the time: the American people—even Republicans—think that wealth should be much more equally distributed than it is today, just as Elizabeth Warren has been “unpopularly” arguing.

As the paper’s abstract explained, the views of ordinary Americans are largely absent from the equation in economically related policy debates with roots in a vision of what an economically just America would look like. Attempting to discover what such an America would be, they found startling results:

First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

In particular, comparing three different distributions of wealth by quintile—the U.S., complete equality and Sweden (using incomes, not wealth)–the authors found that people favored Sweden over the U.S. overwhelmingly, 92-8 percent (“Unpopular,” Mr. Etzioni? Really?), and even favored complete equality by an overwhelming supermajority, 77-23 percent. They favored Sweden over complete equality by a just a hair’s breadth: 51-49 percent.

Breaking things down into different subgroups, the authors presented a graphic combing actual, estimated and ideal wealth distributions, with categories by gender, income levels and 2004 presidential candidate voted for. Commenting on the data combined in that graphic, the authors wrote:

All groups–even the wealthiest respondents–desired a more equal distribution of wealth than what they estimated the current United States level to be, while all groups also desired some inequality–even the poorest respondents. In addition, all groups agreed that such redistribution should take the form of moving wealth from the top quintile to the bottom three quintiles. In short, while Americans tend to be relatively more favorable toward economic inequality than members of other countries (Osberg & Smeeding, 2006), Americans’ consensus about the ideal distribution of wealth within the United States appears to dwarf their disagreements across gender, political orientation, and income.

What Norton and Ariely found clearly clashes head on with the very core of Etzioni’s argument, as well as (perhaps less directly) with the polling data he cites. It doesn’t disprove the results of such polls—welfare is much less popular than Social Security, for example; no one seriously disputes that. But it does seriously challenge the interpretation of the results—from the level of how individual questions are asked all the way up to how Etzioni and others like him choose to group poll results to shape their arguments. For example, Jeffry Will’s book “The Deserving Poor” shows overwhelming support for spending much more on welfare, when the issue is presented in concrete individual human terms, as I touched on last July.