THE GUY IN THE BOAT, DAVID David Brooks' whole schtick is "but I like rich people, therefore they can't be evil" and since he's been on NPR the average wish-I-went-to-Woodstock yuppie has been able to go "but look I have a diversity of ideas I listen to NPR's pet conservative!" There are a few unassailable, anthropological truths that lolbrooks is just whiffing right over: -Urbanization is a 200-year trend. It reflects the network effects of industrialization and mechanization. lolbrooks can blame it on people who make fun of his sandwich but - the "supermanager" class is a post-war American construct whose roots lie in the Marshall Plan. - The richer you are the more Republican you are. So lolbrooks can want that college professor clearing $90k a year to be the true elite? But Charles Koch earns more than a billion a month. And that's not gonna change no matter how many times lolbrooks says "bobo."So who’s of a higher social class? The guy in the boat, or the kid with the fancy words?
Ok I’ll bite. Yes lolbrooks guy doesn’t exactly have a great reputation. Urbanization isn’t a new trend and super managers have been breeding for a while. But class stratification between red and blue is real imo. These days Red folks and Blue folks seem to have stratified pretty hard and red folks of all classes think that they are under attack. That perception allows rich red folks to consolidate power and not spend as much effort keeping poorer red folks down. They can then use that consolidated force to strike down blue values in a somewhat coordinated fashion.
I believe you mean "identity politics." 'cuz when I talk to the reddest of red people I know, I have a much easier time getting 'em to agree with socialism than supply side economics. Republicans have been populist since Barry Goldwater. They've been getting votes through dog whistles and wedge issues. That doesn't make it a red vs. blue problem, it makes it a vote-your-hatred problem. Pinning the world's problems on intellectuals has been the populist play since Julius Caesar or before and "yes, yes, the problem is the people who look down on my lifestyle choices" is hardly groundbreaking political analysis.But class stratification between red and blue is real imo.
Along with class sorting, geographic sorting is a gigantic problem, in my opinion, because it means we don't have a two-party system in most places. We have two separate one party systems in most of the country. So instead of competing to to the middle, we're competing to the extremes, since in one part control you always have to out compete the other guy on purity and loyalty. Denunciations await for non-conformers. You see that hugely in the Trump controlled red areas, but increasingly among the woke set, too. For all the flak that people throw about a two party system, in theory it's supposed to be a moderating influence. by contrast, one party systems are always self-reinforcing in the worst way. I'm not sure how you roll back that trend. My hope was that Trump would make the GOP implode, the democrats would take over everything and then split in two to rebuild the middle. Clearly that was a pipe dream.