Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

gah that should read

if Trump were not racist (or at least, not more racist than any other GOP candidate) (i.e, hold everything else constant but turn off trump's racist appeal) that he would NOT have won?

the way coates elides the differences between whites with and without a college degree is troubling, not only because those differences are so demonstrably apparent but because it calls into question the sobriety with which he approaches data that do not fit his narrative. trump is thought to have won white voters with college degrees by something like 3 points, versus those without college degrees by almost 40. obviously, a 50/50 split in the former group is still unacceptable and evidence that racism pervades every aspect of society and afflicts even the supposedly comfortable and enlightened among them (us, speaking personally). but the fact is that there is a 50/50 chance (maybe less, maybe more, given the imprecision of polling data) that a white person with a college degree will be a trump supporter, and something like a 70/30 chance that a white person without a college degree will be. this gap has steadily increased for several presidential election cycles now. to treat these two groups of people as a homogenous population instead of two populations with different interests is to make a serious and careless intellectual error.

this is not to say that racism does not shape virtually every aspect of american life, or that it was not the primary driver of support for trump. it does and it was, and it should not be apologized for. but, as packer explains, the increasingly disparate voting interests of upper- and working-class whites plays a crucial role in distorting the political map, and if we would like to start winning elections again, we are going to need to figure out how to get some of those votes back without yielding on our commitment to racial justice. it is a fraught, complicated subject that deserves better than what coates offered in this piece

But Coates cites those exact numbers in the piece? He elides nothing.

this is part of a general gripe i have with historians (and people making historical arguments) not seriously grappling with causality and counterfactuals making large parts of their their discourse incoherent

this is a great point, and i agree, though you still get an F for not reading the primary source. don't be part of the problem!

if we would like to start winning elections again, we are going to need to figure out how to get some of those votes back without yielding on our commitment to racial justice

this isn't true though. last week: Unofficial election results from Tuesday's election show Democrat Jacob Rosecrants won 60 percent of the vote over Republican Darin Chambers for the House District 46 seat in west Norman, despite a nearly 3,000 voter-registration advantage for the GOP there.

actually I call bullshit on myself. I should say it IS true and it's more readily doable than we think. Rosencrants won on local issues that matter to everyone.

Also, it's not the subject of Coates' piece. It doesn't 'deserve' anything out of Coates.

fred, the issue is that coates' discussion of the data is incomplete. he notes that all major subgroups of white voters went for trump. he conveniently skips over the implications of the split based on educational attainment, what its causes might be, and its impact on electoral politics (not to mention general discourse). because upper-class white voters being significantly less likely to vote for trump complicates his (still probably mostly correct) thesis that intra-racial divisions are an artificial construct created by the ruling class to pacify poor whites, he declines to discuss it.

xp tom, i'm not trying to be snarky, but i genuinely don't know how to respond to that. i'm not sure how that either supports or contradicts my point you quoted
xxp lol ok

this is a great point, and i agree, though you still get an F for not reading the primary source. don't be part of the problem!

― k3vin k., Sunday, September 17, 2017 3:13 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i only read text screenshotted in tweets and c/p'd into ilx threads

i only read text screenshotted in tweets and c/p'd into ilx threads

― flopson, Sunday, September 17, 2017 2:41 PM (one minute ago)

Kevin, his whole point is that the split is overstated. And since all data shows that both groups are solidly republican, I'd argue that he is right. The idea that, as you write, to treat these two groups of people as a homogenous population instead of two populations with different interests is to make a serious and careless intellectual error. I think that's self-evidently really overdoing it. Again, both groups are solidly Republican.

one was literally 50/50

That is literally not the right numbers.

As you said, Trump won the group +3. And it has voted Republican for decades. The swing of them towards Democrats was also smaller than the corresponding swing of white without a college degree towards GOP. And subsequent efforts to turn them towards Dems has failed (Hi Jon Ossof).

A state that went for the GOP by 3 points would not be considered "solidly Republican"

Bit it would be "colossally stupid"

Several of the 'Blue Wall' states had elections that were much closer. And yeah, that's saying that people have called groups like that 'solid' while they probably shouldn't. So who knows, perhaps college educated whites will some day switch. They haven't yet, though.

frederik b is ... otm

kevin, think about what ideological work your urgent need to dice white ppl up into lil class groups is doing...

if working class ppl of color overwhelmingly vote against trump, and white working class ppl vote for him, doesn't that entirely undercut the 'class matters more than race' theory

for the love of god

so the question is not about whether class "matters more" than race or vice versa.

like what does that even mean?

agreed! thats why kevin's argument is so annoying

we've gone over this like a hundred times: conflating 'class' with 'has a college degree' is a hugely fucked up and wrong logical step kevin makes over and over again

This is probably pedantic but "has a college degree" is really not what "upper class" means to me.
xp!

also, his fundamental inability to see how people who are not white vote against trump at every income level suggests he gives white ppl 'credit' for making rational decisions that he denies to people of color

it depends on the notion of white neutrality

people of color of course will vote against a racist bc every decision they make is determined by their raced-ness, but white people vote based on economic rationale bc they 'lack' a race

(Trump did win among whites who make $100K or more by 14 points, according to the TNC piece, which isn't exactly my definition of upper class but comes a lot closer.)

It's very much one of the important questions of Coates' essay, and he has so many great sentences on it.

"Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion—the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry."

a lot of really uneducated people who are intimidated by well-spoken "coastal elites," especially black ones like the obamas, clear $100k. people can be financially secure and still feel a sense of cultural marginalization or whatever. xp

Does that make it a good definition of class?

Every struggling adjunct prof with a PhD would be in the top 1% by this criterion. I'm sure they'll be happy to learn it.

at what point does this definition of 'class' just end up being anti-intellectualism anywa

And it's surely possible to have a college degree and still feel culturally marginalized?

definitely they can. and feeling culturally marginalized doesn't mean they are. there is a whole giant industry of right wing media that is devoted to making these people feel pleasurable bursts of anger toward the liberal elites.

but anyway, you're right. education is a major dividing line in this country but it doesn't correlate to "class" as it would be understood in a marxist sense

right now should be an amazing time for class solidarity because most of us are "working class" wage earners and precarious employees.

Guys! You're talking about the petit bourgeoisie (college, but not top tier, family business/managerial/not in a trade union, susceptible to bootstraps, 'welfare queens' and blue lives matter talk) vs. the higher bourgeoisie (and on the right, anyone who is in any way not from the pb is characterised as haughty and elitist if they can write a half-decent sentence).

"The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required."

i actually consciously tried to avoid using the word "class" as much as possible for this exact reason, and even used the term "educational attainment" once. i'm aware of the distinction and if i used "working class" it was out of habit.

the fact remains that there is a very real and widening gap between voters with college degrees and those without, and that this is most pronounced in white voters (due to, you guessed it, racism). nate silver went into this a little in the days after the election: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/

In short, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. You can come to that conclusion with a relatively simple analysis, like the one I’ve conducted above, or by using fancier methods. In a regression analysis at the county level, for instance, lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump once you control for education levels.11 And although there’s more work to be done, these conclusions also appear to hold if you examine the data at a more granular level, like by precinct or among individual voters in panel surveys.

But although this finding is clear in a statistical sense, that doesn’t mean the interpretation of it is straightforward. It seems to me that there a number of competing hypotheses that are compatible with this evidence, some of which will be favored by conservatives and some by liberals:

- Education levels may be a proxy for cultural hegemony. Academia, the news media and the arts and entertainment sectors are increasingly dominated by people with a liberal, multicultural worldview, and jobs in these sectors also almost always require college degrees. Trump’s campaign may have represented a backlash against these cultural elites.
- Educational attainment may be a better indicator of long-term economic well-being than household incomes. Unionized jobs in the auto industry often pay reasonably well even if they don’t require college degrees, for instance, but they’re also potentially at risk of being shipped overseas or automated.
- Education levels probably have some relationship with racial resentment, although the causality isn’t clear. The act of having attended college itself may be important, insofar as colleges and universities are often more diverse places than students’ hometowns. There’s more research to be done on how exposure to racial minorities affected white voters. For instance, did white voters who live in counties with large Hispanic populations shift toward Clinton or toward Trump?
- Education levels have strong relationships with media-consumption habits, which may have been instrumental in deciding people’s votes, especially given the overall decline in trust in the news media.
- Trump’s approach to the campaign — relying on emotional appeals while glossing over policy details — may have resonated more among people with lower education levels as compared with Clinton’s wonkier and more cerebral approach.

So data like this is really just a starting point for further research into the campaign. Nonetheless, the education gap is carving up the American electorate and toppling political coalitions that had been in place for many years.

part of the danger in a writer of coates' caliber and influence writing in such a way eschews nuance is that lesser readers (no offense fred and deej) are going to see the word "class" and instantly discredit the analysis. race matters a whole lot; it is the defining lens through which american society should be viewed. but it is not the only significant factor that explains our society's ills. hewing strictly to a race-based analysis without consideration of other factors is not only intellectually lazy, but jeopardizes our ability to come up with solutions

the fact remains that there is a very real and widening gap between voters with college degrees and those without, and that this is most pronounced in white voters (due to, you guessed it, racism).

i meant to add: and this gap partially explains the changing political landscape. which is why it matters

so your argument is that rather than race, america is defined by ... an education gap? lol. could you not maybe see how those might be *related*

its almost as if education might be linked to people's awareness of racism!

can you even read

(searches D-40's post for the word "intersection")

(doesn't find it)

but it is not the only significant factor that explains our society's ills. hewing strictly to a race-based analysis without consideration of other factors is not only intellectually lazy, but jeopardizes our ability to come up with solutions

if you think this is what anyone here is arguing you're clearly the one having trouble reading

part of the danger in a writer of coates' caliber and influence writing in such a way eschews nuance is that lesser readers (no offense fred and deej) are going to see the word "class" and instantly discredit the analysis. race matters a whole lot; it is the defining lens through which american society should be viewed.

coates' piece is making this argument & you're spending hours arguing against it.

but it is not the only significant factor that explains our society's ills

no shit sherlock, no one is arguing that it is

I'd say ye are very close to solving it now

lol