Oooh, so much stuff! So, Trumpism as a Lower-Class Pride Parade
is a bunch of psychologizing. It is true that everybody wants more if it's low cost or indeed free, but that's as far as it goes. It's also true that there is a great divide in years of education between pro-trumpers and anti-trumpers. Seems to be the new class divide.
But fundamentally, Trump did not make the new forgotten men. The new forgotten men made Trump. The idiots forgot the forgotten men!
I have a memory of Hillary Clinton in a 60-minutes interview with her husband in the 1992 race about some sordid sex stuff. She complained about Tammy Wynette and her song "Stand by your man". Having grown up in New York City and getting shaking hands upon venturing west of the Hudson River, I had never heard of country music. Some years later I listened to some of this stuff. Not my bag, but it didn't hurt me. Leave it alone! Why a vote gathering politician wouldn't says something! That has not changed. They must be thinking something. [My thoughts are for a different occasion.]
I'm a highly educated stiff, but my sympathies have always been with working grunts. So today I mailed my ballot for Trump. I hardly have an in-group [classical liberal], but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)
"but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)"
I discussed that feeling in a recent post. It isn't strong enough, in my case, to make me vote for Trump instead of the LP candidate, but it does affect my emotional response to things happening in the campaign.
And if you live in the 43 states that are not swing states, that is a wholly sensible position.
Would it still be your position if you lived in one of those 7 swing states? Would it be a defensible position in that case?
I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 because I was in a state (CA) where my vote had no chance of affecting the outcome. But had I been in a swing state, I’d have held my nose and voted for Trump, and however deplorable Hillary is as a person, her espoused policies seem positively sane compared to those of the Harris-Biden regime.
I think it would be my position and defensible. Even in a swing state, the chance of my vote affecting who gets elected is tiny, perhaps one in a hundred thousand. That makes the decision of who to vote for much more like deciding what football team to cheer for than like deciding what school to send your children to, a symbolic act not an attempt to change the world, and I don't want to cheer for either candidate.
If I was in a position where my vote had, say, a .5 chance of altering the outcome, I would have to think much more carefully about which candidate would be worse.
To cheer for my team or against people I particularly want to vote against. At the scale of a national election it's a symbolic act.
If I vote for either Trump or Harris and the candidate I vote for wins, I will feel to some degree guilty for the candidate's bad deeds thereafter. I didn't determine the outcome but I did put myself on that team.
“ If I vote for either Trump or Harris and the candidate I vote for wins, I will feel to some degree guilty for the candidate's bad deeds thereafter.”
…despite being aware that the counterfactual quite likely would have been worse? That sounds far more irrational than your other stated reasons.
And we have only to look at the 537 vote difference in Florida in 2000 as counterpoint to symbolism if in a swing state in a close election (again, you get zero argument from me if either of those conditions not met).
Oh yes! I was able to formulate here the cause of my actions only with the help of your earlier post. I feel so good. :-)
Please forgive the emotional stuff, there is some rationality behind it. The closest I feel is from a scene in a movie called Rare Steak Reservations, one and a quarter minutes long:
You never kept WHN on after the Mets game? I grew up out on Long Island, and while I never got to watch the Opry, Johnny Cash was on ABC, and Glen Campbell was on CBS. Tammy was on Hee Haw, and we got that. (WPAC-FM, before it flipped to WBLI had country on Sunday mornings and each week might after 10 pm, out in Suffolk County.)
If a Mexican immigrant is sending money back to Mexico, there's no guarantee (and likely closer to the opposite) that the money is making its way back to the US from there. If they are making purchases, it's most likely local products or Chinese. Mexico has a trade imbalance with China that's about 94% in China's favor. Furthermore, the US has a massive trade imbalance with Mexico, particularly with durable goods. The kinds of things a Mexican family living on remittances would buy is not what the US is exporting to Mexico.
Mexican labor in the US (legal or illegal) is a net positive for the overall economy. I agree with you there. Unfortunately, the benefits are not evenly distributed, and the costs are not either. The benefits go more to the wealthy while the costs go more to the poor. Someone competing with Mexican labor for low skilled jobs is not helped by having more people to do the work, but are often directly and measurably harmed by it. I'm personally helped by this dynamic, though it's diffuse and hard to measure. Someone who mows lawns for a living is almost certainly hurt by it (unless they are the owner who can hire cheaper labor), and that hurt is legible at the individual level.
That doesn't mean Mexican labor is bad in the US, but the political valance is against more immigration so long as the benefits are diffuse and general while the harms are specific and measurable.
The benefits go mostly to people who consume goods and services that are now less expensive.
If the money doesn't make it back to the US in any form, that's fewer dollars chasing more goods, hence lower prices, less inflation, but that isn't likely — neither Mexico nor China wants to accumulate stacks of currency. If it isn't used to buy US export goods it's being used to buy US capital assets, government bonds, stocks, and the like. I discussed this in an earlier post: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ptolemaic-trade-theory
Yes, I agree, but I think it just falls back to the "diffuse and general" against the "specific and measurable." If a TV costs $30 less (which is a big deal on a $200 TV!) chances are I will not notice that and have no point of comparison to measure against. I will notice that I, or someone I know, can't get a low skill job that pays much more than minimum wage. Across the economy I can *know* that those $30 savings are a big deal and totally worth it, while thinking about a friend who's out of work and used to make $40,000. $40,000 >> $30 for an individual and feels more real.
There's a reason that Buy American has been a thing for several generations now. Even as a kid I recognized it as silly - you can't guilt people into buying the more expensive product forever. But, it still makes people feel guilt successfully.
If the dollars never comes back, that's actually ideal. The argument is the same as for other imports: dollars are approximately free to produce. An inflation targeting Fed will just print new dollars to make up for the (statistical) loss of the old ones.
Very similar to people setting dollars in fire or burying them in their backyard and forgetting about them.
The comment on prediction markets was a novel idea to me as well, and I agreed interesting--thanks for sharing. But after some thought I think I believe (with low certainty) it ~more or less cannot happen.
One frequently noted issue with prediction markets is: where does the profit come from? If all participants on the market are smart speculators who are well calibrated, then on net they all make zero profit, and in fact once accounting for fees and internal costs (paying quants) they lose money. This isn't sustainable--even if you are better than I, I'll rapidly lose my money to you and quit playing.
But--in a liquid, scalable market where I can trade in large size, which admittedly I think excludes most of them right now--the presence of hedgers provides an opportunity for substantial profit (with gains from trade from both side.) I, as a speculator, am highly incentivized to sell you insurance: I take on risk you don't want and get paid in expectation.
But once it's profitable to have one speculator, it's also profitable for a second speculator to show up: and once we have two speculators (who, we assume, are well calibrated) the prediction market has to be close to correct or the one will drain money from the other.
People can buy eg put options as a insurance on their portfolio, and professionals can eg 'manufacture' hedges for these options out of regular stocks.
Lots and lots of people engaging in prediction markets in order to insure themselves will actually raise those markets' accuracy in the medium to longer term, because they pay for the profits of the speculators and arbitrageurs.
"The thing is that when I *don't* talk about social justice issues in math, nobody asked me if I was worried about putting off those who *do* care about those issues." That's a terrible argument! (If it is an argument and not just an unmotivated expression of feeling.) We don't ask the same question of thousands of other interest groups because there is no particular reason to think we should pander to them. The people in all those groups do not have any expectation that math classes will specifically address them. (A tiny number of possible exceptions aside.)
She goes on to make a reasonable point about making math relevant to more people. It might also put off at least as many people but at least it is an argument to get to grips with.
>The Effect Of Artificial Wombs On the Abortion Controversy
We don't have to wait for Artificial Wombs. Coincidentally, a private member's bill has just been introduced into the South Australian parliament "requir[ing] women seeking to terminate a pregnancy from 28 weeks to instead undergo an induced birth, with babies to then be adopted." Pretty clearly, in my view, "My Body, My Choice" implies "Not My Body, Not My Choice", which implies that the (now-viable) fetus in question has the same rights (whatever they are) as any other premature 28-week fetus.
>Would there be a lobby of women who insist that their fetuses need to die?
They don't have to insist that the fetus /needs/ to die, just that it should be the woman's right to decide: "Dr Waterfall said decisions around termination should be left to women and their doctors, 'rather than being made by politicians'". And to justify this they can press even harder on the ownership idea, for, after all, the woman in question created the fetus de novo (material and form), so it seems she must own the fetus by right of labor, and so may do with it what she pleases. "My Labor, My Choice"!
Source: ABC [Australia] News Online, "SA abortion law proposal triggers debate, within and across party lines — what's been proposed?" 25/9/24
"I would feel an awful lot better about the world if a forty-odd-year-old alleged comedy didn't keep accurately having predicted modern political situations." I thought he meant Monty Python (specifically Life of Brian) although that's 45 years ago. But Yes (Prime)Minister is excellent and enduringly relevant.
I would not call Trump's supporters lower class. Their core seems to be working class and small business owners. The latter are arguably middle class (though not the upper middle class who support Harris). The former are not middle class, in general, but also are definitely not lower class. Indeed you will find it hard to find any group with more contempt for welfare recipients than working class people; consider the slogan "I fight poverty—I work."
There's a curious inversion in the way we discuss class that I recently noticed.
Marx's distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat was owning the means of production versus having nothing to sell but one's labor power.
Now let's consider the archetypal examples of "lower class prole" and "middle class" in today's America.
The archetypal "lower class prole" is someone like Joe the Plumber. Notice that Joe owns his own small plumbing company and thus his own tools. Thus, he'd be bourgeoisie according the Marxian definition.
Now look at the archetypal member of the "middle class", she works for a huge organization likely in some bureaucratic position. While she'd not what Marx would consider a proletariat, she is relying to selling her "labor power". She also quite likely makes less than Joe the Plumber.
While there are deviations from these archetypes, they do provide an interesting contrast.
PMC bureaucrats aren't selling their labor (which you can tell because they don't earn more by working more hours). They seem to function more like a priestly or courtly class who supply status to a powerful institution through their attendance, and are provided with a modest stipend in exchange.
That's most obviously true of bureaucrats in nonprofits, education and government; but I think it also applies to the various decorative and defensive bureaucracies that spring up within large companies. The host of this blog points out somewhere that while corporations navigate market dynamics in the outside world, the internal interactions between the organization's parts are not market-driven at all (aligning well with the "bullshit jobs" thesis. Thus, in sufficiently large and successful corporations there's no particular reason why any given segment of the workforce would have a clear relationship to economic production.
I think that Marx might have defined it differently. The idea is that factory workers sell their labor, and get paid a certain amount for it, but then they are required to do more work than is needed to generate the income that pays for their labor, by working more hours or by working harder (Taylorization style) or both. And that extra income pays the capitalist their profits. But it's earned because the laborers do more work without getting paid for it, or so Marx says. That is, "don't earn more by working more hours" seems to be intrinsic to the capitalist process as Marx defines it.
I get what he's saying, sure. But in that model, there's still a presumption that a worker's economic productivity flows directly from their hourly labor, even if the bosses keep those profits for themselves. For an industrial worker, X hours worked --> Y units [of whatever] produced. Working 1.2 times harder means 1.2Y units produced, working 1.5 times longer means 1.5Y units produced, etc.
By contrast, possibly excepting lawyers and physicians, for what salaried PMC knowledge workers is it presumed that putting in an extra hour at work means a measurable amount of extra profit for the company? Consider HR staff, compliance officers, DEI officers, all the various NGO and nonprofit report-researchers and grant-writers and policy folks, not to mention the middle management supervisors who coordinate and regulate them. For all of those jobs, having the worker *on staff*, faffing around with email tasks, is assumed to somehow be a necessary part of company productivity - but it's not very clear how that productivity is directly linked to the hourly labor.
To take an example, if a math professor stays an hour late to think through an extra proof, or if a wellness officer at Target stays late to send two more inspirational emails about self-care, this might signal their diligence in some vaguely good way. But does anyone really think that hour of labor will flow through directly to an incremental difference in company productivity? Surely not. Universities hire research professors in order to hand-wavily link the institution with the prestige of knowledge-making. Companies hire wellness officers as a way to generally signal their "care" for their employees. To my mind, these functions bear more resemblance to a vestal virgin's getting paid to perform rituals because it shows your organization's commitment to the Goddess, versus a nineteenth-century millworker's getting paid for co-producing a certain number of marketable widgets?
If the math professor stays an extra hour to think through an extra proof, that produces:
More knowledge, a new proof, if you think of knowledge as the output.
More status for him and his university/
Better teaching, if he is thinking through an existing proof to decide how best to present it to his students, if you think of teaching as the output.
For the wellness officer, his employer presumably believes the output is either better health for the employees, which benefits the employer, or better morale for the employees who feel they are being taken care of. The employer may be mistaken — but the ditch digger who works an extra hour may be digging a ditch that ends up unused due to a change in plans.
Do you assume that the first ten inspirational emails were worth sending? Is your argument anything more than "some employers mistakenly employ people to do things not worth doing"?
I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is simply that your definition of "doesn't earn more by working more hours" doesn't actually make the distinction between classic Marxist industrial proletarians and modern-day bureaucrats or professors. If it counts as evidence that the bureaucrats "aren't selling their labor," then it should also count as evidence that a nineteenth-century factory worker isn't selling their labor, either. But if that's true then Marxism collapses as an intellectual structure, because you've taking out its primary load bearing element. If there's a distinction to be made you need to make it in some other way.
I think technically he is petty bourgeoisie, unless he employs other people, or perhaps unless he spends all his time running the business while other people do the physical labor of plumbing.
If you have an opportunity to pass along complaints to Substack, please tell them how bad their iPad app is. It will not allow me to zoom in on graphics. The diagram included in this post is illegible. This is not the author's fault, but substack's. I would be very surprised if Apple did not make this capability (which most apps have) easy to implement.
That is not how I read the post. Describing someone as bullying and shaming homosexuals is a negative, not a positive, description, and Turok is analogizing the people the Trump campaign is rebelling against to such.
That has nothing to do with what I was saying, have no idea how you are getting that out of what I wrote. You seem to be responding to an argument out of your own imagination.
I assume that pro-Trump people would see bullying and shaming homosexuals as a bad thing, just as they would see bullying and shaming them as a bad thing. Hence that they would see the argument in the quote as, if anything, a sympathetic description of the Trump movement, although obviously a very incomplete one.
"One way to think of the Trump movement is that it is, in part,..."
Perhaps so. Turok and possibly you view President Trump supporters, or at least the majority of such, as 'lower class whites' and why yes I see such as an extremely negative description.
I find the 'classification' extremely objectionable
As you were replying to my comment I, perhaps or probably erroneously, assumed you where noting the crass lower class , President Trump supporters, bullied and shamed homosexuals (Number 2.) as none of Turok's class would be so crude and rude to do so.
Your comments appear to have nothing to do with what I wrote. I already agreed with another commenter that "lower class" was not the right term for what Turok wrote.
I note that Vance wrote: "the most patriotic people, the best and most devoted to the country, whether they’re black, white, whatever, whatever party that they’re in, it’s almost consistently those without a college education."
I tire of the notion that all Trump voters are rednecks, and that all rednecks are morons. Just wanted to say that. I also tire of the notion that D voters are the smart ones. "Half" their coalition are on the government dole first of all. And to be excited about a Kamala presidency doesn't radiate intelligence, just tribalism given her blatant vacuousness. Gender ideology, climate alarmism, DEI/CRT, price controls, censorship and "existential threats to democracy" are not the realm of deep thinkers.
I think you, like Jim, are misreading the post. The point is not that all Trump voters are rednecks and morons, it is that that is how the elite media and a lot of high status people view them and they, naturally enough, don't like it.
A Prometheus Award novel of some time back, Victor Koman's Solomon's Knife, offered a different alternative to abortion: transplantation of an embryo (or perhaps fetus) into a different uterus, that of a woman who wants to bear a child. It was quite well written (I voted for it!) and focused on precisely the issue of whether the originally pregnant woman has the right to have the unborn child killed, or only the right to have it removed. Worth reading!
Interesting. I would be reluctant to donate to a sperm bank because I wouldn't want my child reared by people I didn't know to be qualified to do it. I can imagine a woman who had gotten pregnant and didn't want the child to have similar feelings. Was that the source of the conflict in the novel, the reason some women didn't want to go along?
Oooh, so much stuff! So, Trumpism as a Lower-Class Pride Parade
is a bunch of psychologizing. It is true that everybody wants more if it's low cost or indeed free, but that's as far as it goes. It's also true that there is a great divide in years of education between pro-trumpers and anti-trumpers. Seems to be the new class divide.
But fundamentally, Trump did not make the new forgotten men. The new forgotten men made Trump. The idiots forgot the forgotten men!
I have a memory of Hillary Clinton in a 60-minutes interview with her husband in the 1992 race about some sordid sex stuff. She complained about Tammy Wynette and her song "Stand by your man". Having grown up in New York City and getting shaking hands upon venturing west of the Hudson River, I had never heard of country music. Some years later I listened to some of this stuff. Not my bag, but it didn't hurt me. Leave it alone! Why a vote gathering politician wouldn't says something! That has not changed. They must be thinking something. [My thoughts are for a different occasion.]
I'm a highly educated stiff, but my sympathies have always been with working grunts. So today I mailed my ballot for Trump. I hardly have an in-group [classical liberal], but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)
"but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)"
I discussed that feeling in a recent post. It isn't strong enough, in my case, to make me vote for Trump instead of the LP candidate, but it does affect my emotional response to things happening in the campaign.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/trump-as-fargroup
And if you live in the 43 states that are not swing states, that is a wholly sensible position.
Would it still be your position if you lived in one of those 7 swing states? Would it be a defensible position in that case?
I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 because I was in a state (CA) where my vote had no chance of affecting the outcome. But had I been in a swing state, I’d have held my nose and voted for Trump, and however deplorable Hillary is as a person, her espoused policies seem positively sane compared to those of the Harris-Biden regime.
I think it would be my position and defensible. Even in a swing state, the chance of my vote affecting who gets elected is tiny, perhaps one in a hundred thousand. That makes the decision of who to vote for much more like deciding what football team to cheer for than like deciding what school to send your children to, a symbolic act not an attempt to change the world, and I don't want to cheer for either candidate.
If I was in a position where my vote had, say, a .5 chance of altering the outcome, I would have to think much more carefully about which candidate would be worse.
Thx.
An interesting, decidedly non-utilitarian perspective. [not that I am anything close to a strict utilitarian, to be sure].
Even at a 1 in 100,000 chance, the odds multiplied by the potential impact seem pretty big to me.
I *am* now even more curious, however: given what you say about your chances of your vote affecting who gets elected, why do you vote at all?
To cheer for my team or against people I particularly want to vote against. At the scale of a national election it's a symbolic act.
If I vote for either Trump or Harris and the candidate I vote for wins, I will feel to some degree guilty for the candidate's bad deeds thereafter. I didn't determine the outcome but I did put myself on that team.
“ If I vote for either Trump or Harris and the candidate I vote for wins, I will feel to some degree guilty for the candidate's bad deeds thereafter.”
…despite being aware that the counterfactual quite likely would have been worse? That sounds far more irrational than your other stated reasons.
And we have only to look at the 537 vote difference in Florida in 2000 as counterpoint to symbolism if in a swing state in a close election (again, you get zero argument from me if either of those conditions not met).
Respectfully.
Oh yes! I was able to formulate here the cause of my actions only with the help of your earlier post. I feel so good. :-)
Please forgive the emotional stuff, there is some rationality behind it. The closest I feel is from a scene in a movie called Rare Steak Reservations, one and a quarter minutes long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vtgaAq6ap0&t=1s
You never kept WHN on after the Mets game? I grew up out on Long Island, and while I never got to watch the Opry, Johnny Cash was on ABC, and Glen Campbell was on CBS. Tammy was on Hee Haw, and we got that. (WPAC-FM, before it flipped to WBLI had country on Sunday mornings and each week might after 10 pm, out in Suffolk County.)
I didn't watch the Mets, either! I was, and am, just an all around self outcasted loser. :-)
We all have our media bubbles.😉
If a Mexican immigrant is sending money back to Mexico, there's no guarantee (and likely closer to the opposite) that the money is making its way back to the US from there. If they are making purchases, it's most likely local products or Chinese. Mexico has a trade imbalance with China that's about 94% in China's favor. Furthermore, the US has a massive trade imbalance with Mexico, particularly with durable goods. The kinds of things a Mexican family living on remittances would buy is not what the US is exporting to Mexico.
Mexican labor in the US (legal or illegal) is a net positive for the overall economy. I agree with you there. Unfortunately, the benefits are not evenly distributed, and the costs are not either. The benefits go more to the wealthy while the costs go more to the poor. Someone competing with Mexican labor for low skilled jobs is not helped by having more people to do the work, but are often directly and measurably harmed by it. I'm personally helped by this dynamic, though it's diffuse and hard to measure. Someone who mows lawns for a living is almost certainly hurt by it (unless they are the owner who can hire cheaper labor), and that hurt is legible at the individual level.
That doesn't mean Mexican labor is bad in the US, but the political valance is against more immigration so long as the benefits are diffuse and general while the harms are specific and measurable.
The benefits go mostly to people who consume goods and services that are now less expensive.
If the money doesn't make it back to the US in any form, that's fewer dollars chasing more goods, hence lower prices, less inflation, but that isn't likely — neither Mexico nor China wants to accumulate stacks of currency. If it isn't used to buy US export goods it's being used to buy US capital assets, government bonds, stocks, and the like. I discussed this in an earlier post: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ptolemaic-trade-theory
Yes, I agree, but I think it just falls back to the "diffuse and general" against the "specific and measurable." If a TV costs $30 less (which is a big deal on a $200 TV!) chances are I will not notice that and have no point of comparison to measure against. I will notice that I, or someone I know, can't get a low skill job that pays much more than minimum wage. Across the economy I can *know* that those $30 savings are a big deal and totally worth it, while thinking about a friend who's out of work and used to make $40,000. $40,000 >> $30 for an individual and feels more real.
There's a reason that Buy American has been a thing for several generations now. Even as a kid I recognized it as silly - you can't guilt people into buying the more expensive product forever. But, it still makes people feel guilt successfully.
About immigrants sending money abroad:
If the dollars never comes back, that's actually ideal. The argument is the same as for other imports: dollars are approximately free to produce. An inflation targeting Fed will just print new dollars to make up for the (statistical) loss of the old ones.
Very similar to people setting dollars in fire or burying them in their backyard and forgetting about them.
The comment on prediction markets was a novel idea to me as well, and I agreed interesting--thanks for sharing. But after some thought I think I believe (with low certainty) it ~more or less cannot happen.
One frequently noted issue with prediction markets is: where does the profit come from? If all participants on the market are smart speculators who are well calibrated, then on net they all make zero profit, and in fact once accounting for fees and internal costs (paying quants) they lose money. This isn't sustainable--even if you are better than I, I'll rapidly lose my money to you and quit playing.
But--in a liquid, scalable market where I can trade in large size, which admittedly I think excludes most of them right now--the presence of hedgers provides an opportunity for substantial profit (with gains from trade from both side.) I, as a speculator, am highly incentivized to sell you insurance: I take on risk you don't want and get paid in expectation.
But once it's profitable to have one speculator, it's also profitable for a second speculator to show up: and once we have two speculators (who, we assume, are well calibrated) the prediction market has to be close to correct or the one will drain money from the other.
Yes, exactly like in existing financial markets.
People can buy eg put options as a insurance on their portfolio, and professionals can eg 'manufacture' hedges for these options out of regular stocks.
Lots and lots of people engaging in prediction markets in order to insure themselves will actually raise those markets' accuracy in the medium to longer term, because they pay for the profits of the speculators and arbitrageurs.
"The thing is that when I *don't* talk about social justice issues in math, nobody asked me if I was worried about putting off those who *do* care about those issues." That's a terrible argument! (If it is an argument and not just an unmotivated expression of feeling.) We don't ask the same question of thousands of other interest groups because there is no particular reason to think we should pander to them. The people in all those groups do not have any expectation that math classes will specifically address them. (A tiny number of possible exceptions aside.)
She goes on to make a reasonable point about making math relevant to more people. It might also put off at least as many people but at least it is an argument to get to grips with.
>The Effect Of Artificial Wombs On the Abortion Controversy
We don't have to wait for Artificial Wombs. Coincidentally, a private member's bill has just been introduced into the South Australian parliament "requir[ing] women seeking to terminate a pregnancy from 28 weeks to instead undergo an induced birth, with babies to then be adopted." Pretty clearly, in my view, "My Body, My Choice" implies "Not My Body, Not My Choice", which implies that the (now-viable) fetus in question has the same rights (whatever they are) as any other premature 28-week fetus.
>Would there be a lobby of women who insist that their fetuses need to die?
They don't have to insist that the fetus /needs/ to die, just that it should be the woman's right to decide: "Dr Waterfall said decisions around termination should be left to women and their doctors, 'rather than being made by politicians'". And to justify this they can press even harder on the ownership idea, for, after all, the woman in question created the fetus de novo (material and form), so it seems she must own the fetus by right of labor, and so may do with it what she pleases. "My Labor, My Choice"!
Source: ABC [Australia] News Online, "SA abortion law proposal triggers debate, within and across party lines — what's been proposed?" 25/9/24
"I would feel an awful lot better about the world if a forty-odd-year-old alleged comedy didn't keep accurately having predicted modern political situations." I thought he meant Monty Python (specifically Life of Brian) although that's 45 years ago. But Yes (Prime)Minister is excellent and enduringly relevant.
And done by some of the same people who did the Free to Choose television series.
The bit about who reads which newspaper in Britain is classic, as well as the episode covering appointing a new bishop.
You should link to DSL...
But in case he doesn't, see this and other fun comments at DSL. Come join the best discussions on the internet here: https://www.datasecretslox.com/
I gather that some people on DSL don't want it to be too visible. Maybe we should discuss that there.
I raised the question on DSL. So far a unanimous vote in favor of linking.
I would not call Trump's supporters lower class. Their core seems to be working class and small business owners. The latter are arguably middle class (though not the upper middle class who support Harris). The former are not middle class, in general, but also are definitely not lower class. Indeed you will find it hard to find any group with more contempt for welfare recipients than working class people; consider the slogan "I fight poverty—I work."
I agree that "lower class" is not quite right. Lower status in the dominant elite status system. "Flyover country" expresses it pretty well.
There's a curious inversion in the way we discuss class that I recently noticed.
Marx's distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat was owning the means of production versus having nothing to sell but one's labor power.
Now let's consider the archetypal examples of "lower class prole" and "middle class" in today's America.
The archetypal "lower class prole" is someone like Joe the Plumber. Notice that Joe owns his own small plumbing company and thus his own tools. Thus, he'd be bourgeoisie according the Marxian definition.
Now look at the archetypal member of the "middle class", she works for a huge organization likely in some bureaucratic position. While she'd not what Marx would consider a proletariat, she is relying to selling her "labor power". She also quite likely makes less than Joe the Plumber.
While there are deviations from these archetypes, they do provide an interesting contrast.
PMC bureaucrats aren't selling their labor (which you can tell because they don't earn more by working more hours). They seem to function more like a priestly or courtly class who supply status to a powerful institution through their attendance, and are provided with a modest stipend in exchange.
That's most obviously true of bureaucrats in nonprofits, education and government; but I think it also applies to the various decorative and defensive bureaucracies that spring up within large companies. The host of this blog points out somewhere that while corporations navigate market dynamics in the outside world, the internal interactions between the organization's parts are not market-driven at all (aligning well with the "bullshit jobs" thesis. Thus, in sufficiently large and successful corporations there's no particular reason why any given segment of the workforce would have a clear relationship to economic production.
I think that Marx might have defined it differently. The idea is that factory workers sell their labor, and get paid a certain amount for it, but then they are required to do more work than is needed to generate the income that pays for their labor, by working more hours or by working harder (Taylorization style) or both. And that extra income pays the capitalist their profits. But it's earned because the laborers do more work without getting paid for it, or so Marx says. That is, "don't earn more by working more hours" seems to be intrinsic to the capitalist process as Marx defines it.
I get what he's saying, sure. But in that model, there's still a presumption that a worker's economic productivity flows directly from their hourly labor, even if the bosses keep those profits for themselves. For an industrial worker, X hours worked --> Y units [of whatever] produced. Working 1.2 times harder means 1.2Y units produced, working 1.5 times longer means 1.5Y units produced, etc.
By contrast, possibly excepting lawyers and physicians, for what salaried PMC knowledge workers is it presumed that putting in an extra hour at work means a measurable amount of extra profit for the company? Consider HR staff, compliance officers, DEI officers, all the various NGO and nonprofit report-researchers and grant-writers and policy folks, not to mention the middle management supervisors who coordinate and regulate them. For all of those jobs, having the worker *on staff*, faffing around with email tasks, is assumed to somehow be a necessary part of company productivity - but it's not very clear how that productivity is directly linked to the hourly labor.
To take an example, if a math professor stays an hour late to think through an extra proof, or if a wellness officer at Target stays late to send two more inspirational emails about self-care, this might signal their diligence in some vaguely good way. But does anyone really think that hour of labor will flow through directly to an incremental difference in company productivity? Surely not. Universities hire research professors in order to hand-wavily link the institution with the prestige of knowledge-making. Companies hire wellness officers as a way to generally signal their "care" for their employees. To my mind, these functions bear more resemblance to a vestal virgin's getting paid to perform rituals because it shows your organization's commitment to the Goddess, versus a nineteenth-century millworker's getting paid for co-producing a certain number of marketable widgets?
If the math professor stays an extra hour to think through an extra proof, that produces:
More knowledge, a new proof, if you think of knowledge as the output.
More status for him and his university/
Better teaching, if he is thinking through an existing proof to decide how best to present it to his students, if you think of teaching as the output.
For the wellness officer, his employer presumably believes the output is either better health for the employees, which benefits the employer, or better morale for the employees who feel they are being taken care of. The employer may be mistaken — but the ditch digger who works an extra hour may be digging a ditch that ends up unused due to a change in plans.
Do you assume that the first ten inspirational emails were worth sending? Is your argument anything more than "some employers mistakenly employ people to do things not worth doing"?
I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is simply that your definition of "doesn't earn more by working more hours" doesn't actually make the distinction between classic Marxist industrial proletarians and modern-day bureaucrats or professors. If it counts as evidence that the bureaucrats "aren't selling their labor," then it should also count as evidence that a nineteenth-century factory worker isn't selling their labor, either. But if that's true then Marxism collapses as an intellectual structure, because you've taking out its primary load bearing element. If there's a distinction to be made you need to make it in some other way.
I think technically he is petty bourgeoisie, unless he employs other people, or perhaps unless he spends all his time running the business while other people do the physical labor of plumbing.
If you have an opportunity to pass along complaints to Substack, please tell them how bad their iPad app is. It will not allow me to zoom in on graphics. The diagram included in this post is illegible. This is not the author's fault, but substack's. I would be very surprised if Apple did not make this capability (which most apps have) easy to implement.
If there is a way I can pass that point on I haven't found it.
I was surprised to see Eugenia Chang mentioned here. Her book “The Art of Logic in an Illogical World” was the worst 40% of a book I’ve ever read.
Trumpism a lower class pride parade?
Reads to me like a pompous wannabe needing to create a group to look down upon from his imaginary throne high above the unwashed masses.
But hey, if that's what it takes to get him through the day, t'ain't no thang, I'll dip a pinch of snus and allow it don't make no nevermind. ;-)
That is not how I read the post. Describing someone as bullying and shaming homosexuals is a negative, not a positive, description, and Turok is analogizing the people the Trump campaign is rebelling against to such.
Could be. However I'm not aware of pro Trump folks bullying and shaming homosexuals.
That has nothing to do with what I was saying, have no idea how you are getting that out of what I wrote. You seem to be responding to an argument out of your own imagination.
I assume that pro-Trump people would see bullying and shaming homosexuals as a bad thing, just as they would see bullying and shaming them as a bad thing. Hence that they would see the argument in the quote as, if anything, a sympathetic description of the Trump movement, although obviously a very incomplete one.
"One way to think of the Trump movement is that it is, in part,..."
But you seem to see it as a negative description.
Perhaps so. Turok and possibly you view President Trump supporters, or at least the majority of such, as 'lower class whites' and why yes I see such as an extremely negative description.
I find the 'classification' extremely objectionable
As you were replying to my comment I, perhaps or probably erroneously, assumed you where noting the crass lower class , President Trump supporters, bullied and shamed homosexuals (Number 2.) as none of Turok's class would be so crude and rude to do so.
Your comments appear to have nothing to do with what I wrote. I already agreed with another commenter that "lower class" was not the right term for what Turok wrote.
I note that Vance wrote: "the most patriotic people, the best and most devoted to the country, whether they’re black, white, whatever, whatever party that they’re in, it’s almost consistently those without a college education."
Interesting.
I tire of the notion that all Trump voters are rednecks, and that all rednecks are morons. Just wanted to say that. I also tire of the notion that D voters are the smart ones. "Half" their coalition are on the government dole first of all. And to be excited about a Kamala presidency doesn't radiate intelligence, just tribalism given her blatant vacuousness. Gender ideology, climate alarmism, DEI/CRT, price controls, censorship and "existential threats to democracy" are not the realm of deep thinkers.
I think you, like Jim, are misreading the post. The point is not that all Trump voters are rednecks and morons, it is that that is how the elite media and a lot of high status people view them and they, naturally enough, don't like it.
A Prometheus Award novel of some time back, Victor Koman's Solomon's Knife, offered a different alternative to abortion: transplantation of an embryo (or perhaps fetus) into a different uterus, that of a woman who wants to bear a child. It was quite well written (I voted for it!) and focused on precisely the issue of whether the originally pregnant woman has the right to have the unborn child killed, or only the right to have it removed. Worth reading!
Interesting. I would be reluctant to donate to a sperm bank because I wouldn't want my child reared by people I didn't know to be qualified to do it. I can imagine a woman who had gotten pregnant and didn't want the child to have similar feelings. Was that the source of the conflict in the novel, the reason some women didn't want to go along?
I would have to reread the novel to answer that. It's been a long time, though I've kept it on my shelves, because I thought it was well written.