When I asked how Mr. Vance defined his political positioning, he abruptly popped out of his chair and hurried over to his desk. He returned with a yellow sticky note on which he drew a large grid. Along the bottom of the paper he scrawled “culture” and on the left side, “commerce.” He started drawing dots as he explained: “I think the Republican Party has tended to be here” — top right quadrant, indicating a mix of strong cultural and pro-business conservatism. He added, “I think the Democratic Party has tended to be here,” pointing to the bottom left quadrant, which in his telling represents a strong liberal take on both. “And I think the majority, certainly the plurality of American voters — and maybe I’m biased because this is my actual view — is somewhere around here,” he said, placing them on the grid to suggest that people are “more conservative on cultural issues but they are not instinctively pro-business.”Plausible, although abortion and gay marriage seem to be a major exceptions, and I would say the contemporary position on for example women's rights would have been radical in 1970. Still, I do see a strong "why don't people get married, settle down and stop whining" party in America. I also thought this was interesting:
voters are fed up that “nothing changes” even when they “elect successive waves of different people."
In other words, people aren't frustrated so much with particular things the government does as with the fact that no matter who they vote for, nothing much changes. I think that is exactly why many Americans are frustrated. I would say, however, that the real source of that frustration is 1) we really don't know of any alternatives to our mixed economic system that would make things hugely better, and 2) politics in America are so finely balanced between competing visions that neither party ever gets a mandate for real change.
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Funny, the message I got from that column was "Vance says a lot of things, most of which he only partly means at best, but Democrats can work with him."
His graph, in any case, doesn't make a lot of sense. Alas, I spent a certain amount of time puzzling over it. The middle position, where he says places most Americans and himself, would _by the parameters of his graph_ seem to be more culturally liberal than not--it's somewhat to the left of the middle position on culture--and more pro-business than not--somewhat above the middle position on commerce. That would make most Americans libertarians, which is not in fact the case, and doesn't seem to describe J. D. Vance either. (Paul Krugman has a version of this graph where the lower right--which in this case is the culturally liberal, economically conservative position, i.e. the libertarian one--indicates very few people fit in that category. He captions it, "There are no libertarians." I love it, but then again I would.)
John, I get the sense that "why don't people get married, settle down and stop whining" kind of fits your position on American life. Would that be correct? No hostility or effort at entrapment is entailed by this question, only an effort to understand. (I say "on American life" and not "on politics" because indeed I suspect we'd agree the federal government actually has very little influence on whether people get married, settle down and stop whining.)
I would say, however, that the real source of that frustration is 1) we really don't know of any alternatives to our mixed economic system that would make things hugely better, and 2) politics in America are so finely balanced between competing visions that neither party ever gets a mandate for real change.
Number 1 is nonsense - we don't have to completely overhaul our entire economic system, we can simply stop letting the rich rob the poor so blatantly. Tax the wealthy, and use those taxes to provide for the poor.
There are plenty of comparable wealthy countries out there which use a mixed economic system just like we do, but which don't have anywhere near our levels of income inequality, lack of healthcare, preponderance of violent crimes, etc. The single most obvious difference is that they tax their rich population more effectively and use the funds to promote the common good, rather than spawning more and more billionaires and corporate monopolies that stifle innovation and breed economic stagnation as they hoard ever greater masses of wealth which they then do not spend, at which point that wealth might as well not even exist.
No, the real problem is Number 2 - the only reason we don't make any progress is the aforementioned political situation. You call it "finely balanced", but I call it "a Mexican standoff" - everyone involved wants the situation to change, but they're so terrified of their opponents gaining any kind of advantage whatsoever that they sabotage themselves just to maintain the status quo. They willingly sacrifice their own chance at creating change in order to ensure no one else gets that chance for themselves.
...or perhaps that makes it more of a "crabs in a bucket" situation? Either works.
@G- it depends on what you mean by a major change in life. I agree that we could do better, but life in the places you and I admire (Denmark, the Netherlands) is, I would say, not fundamentally different from life in the US. Both have billionaires and people who feel poor, and major issues with depression and drug addiction. My sense is that many people are looking for a much more radical change than that, like the utopias promised by anarchists or some such.
@David- My instincts are as you describe, but I am working hard not to impose my vision on everyone else. I have tried to describe here the problems with the model of bourgeois discipline, which I understand feels like an unending torture cage to many and inspires most of us to watch Batman movies. But I honestly do not see any alternative that can work for most people. In terms of whole social groups with millions of memebers, it seems to me 100% true that the more widely and intensely the members of that group embrace a life of bourgeois discipline, the more "successful" they are by all the usual metrics. I cannot see than any other variable matters at all.
I have watched many experiments with polyamory and free love go badly. Most radical ideas are stupid. If there is going to be any radical change in our lives it is going to be created by AI getting smarter than we are, and what that will mean I have no idea.
@John
Err, it seems to me you've changed the terms of the discussion. The question was about "get married, settle down, and stop whining," as a summary of what Vance and his supporters believe (more or less, "in their hearts"). In the 21st century, bourgeois discipline, as we've discussed it here, doesn't seem to have that much to do with getting married--especially when one is talking in the context of a recent post about marriage as a much more reliable way to live a happy life than careerism.
It seems to me that bourgeois discipline today is much more about the kind of behaviors one learns in school, in restaurants, in the doctor's office, on airplanes, in the movie theater (Remember Sarah the movie stewardess? "No talking!"): getting work done, doing what one is told, standing in lines, sitting in one's assigned seat, following doctor's orders, getting to things on time, not displaying anger or carrying weapons or getting in fights, not talking out of turn, not provoking others with insults. One may be married or not--indeed, one may be happy or not--but one must behave in this way.
In terms of politics--and that is also part of what we were talking about--it seems to me the contemporary right has a very complex, ambivalent relationship with bourgeois discipline (and who, I suppose, doesn't?). I think many of them think that, on some level, what they're doing is protecting the right sort of bourgeois discipline they grew up with, which was whiter, more Christian, and allowed more out-of-line behavior from males than we do now. Arguably, one could say we're in a giant debate about what proper bourgeois discipline should be.
But, at the same time, what is a Trump rally if not a giant escape from bourgeois discipline? And the Trump phenomenon is so much about his rallies. And what is open carry, or running on about Replacement Theory or Jewish lasers or whatever, if not ways to say a giant, in-your-face "fuck you" to bourgeois discipline as it has evolved today? Again, in the minds of many of them is probably a wish to protect the brand of bourgeoisdom they think is right. But the global "fuck you, teacher/doctor" element is there as well. Which is dominant in a given instance varies a lot, I expect.
I would add that it seems to me that, on some level, "whining" and the whole trauma culture are not so much a rebellion from bourgeois discipline as the necessary escape valve that bourgeois discipline has accepted as legitimate. These things evolved in part as arguments that could be legitimately used with bourgeois authority as a way to escape some part of bourgeois discipline--and hence, they are part of it. This is not to say they are mere fictions, but that they are in essence really rather tame arguments about excusing oneself. They're not a "fuck you" to bourgeois discipline, but a plea very much within the system to be excused from its harshest demands. (Often they are ways to get excused from work, of course. But a certain modesty is also part of contemporary bourgeois discipline, and claims of trauma are also a way of escaping modesty and demanding attention on what can seem like one's own terms--except that these terms, too, are as conventionalized and as demanding in their way as say, demanding attention by having some great performance skill. And--big sign of participating in the basic discipline culture, this--claims of trauma or long Lyme or whatever are ways to get doctors' notes.)
And now for part 2 (Verloren, I'm catching up!)
I would say that there's merit in that idea that a big debate right now is what sort of bourgeois discipline we should have: the kind we used to have, or the kind now enforced by authorities in areas like school and medicine? And what sort of safety valves should we have? The old way's major safety valve was, one could argue, "boys will be boys." It turned out "boys will be boys" left a lot of other people miserable, and they rebelled. Now authority has in significant part rejected that and turned to trauma culture and psychotherapy talk as our safety valve.
Of course there are other debates that cut across this divide. With meritocracy, we now have a ruling class and especially a middle management consisting of the kids who sat in the front of the class and had oodles of bourgie discipline. And we've got a populist movement of the kids who sat in the back row with their ball caps pulled down, and they're rebelling against the hierarchy established by who's good at bourg. discipline and who's not. Plus we've got extremes on both sides who live by conspiracy theories or fantasize about a world with no police (and remember, the Big Boogaloo is a right-wing version of that) or think accurate measurement is a racist conspiracy, or whatever.
I did go on rather a lot there. Apologies. (I've violated my bourgeois modesty!)
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