A great article explaining why white working class voters hate Democrats:
And who does the WWC take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn’t matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That’s because they’re closer to it. For them, the poor aren’t merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They’re the folks next door who don’t do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars. For a lot of members of the WWC, this is personal in a way it just isn’t for the kind of people who read this blog.
This is so true, my friends. I talk to the working people in my county – which went overwhelmingly red in the recent elections – and none of them have the slightest interest in gay marriage or abortion. What they are obsessively preoccupied with are “those folks who sleep until noon and then go shopping and partying on the government dime while I haven’t had a vacation in five years.”
The only way of appeasing this large group is by shredding the last remains of the welfare system. Do you remember how we discussed the state’s imminent withdrawal from providing a social safety net for the people? The people themselves are trying to hasten this process with every means at their disposal.
The Republicans will have to drop their opposition to gay marriage and reproductive rights if they want to inscribe themselves successfully into the logic of the post-nation state. The Democrats will have to drop welfare to fit in with this logic. The people are turning their backs on the state even faster than the state is doing it to them.
Clarissa's Blog 
It is interesting that this talk of abolishing welfare is taking place at a time when we have historic levels of income inequality. What’s the end game here? Keep squeezing the poor until..?
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It isn’t simply interesting, it’s a direct consequence. I will write about the reasons for this a little later.
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This sentiment of “lazy welfare cheats who do no work while I bust my tail so get rid of welfare” is nothing new among white working class workers, at least not in my lifetime.
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Yes that’s true, the only problem that they don’t think about the time when they will be in need of support. Most working class people will meet unemployment at a point of their lives. Cognitive dissonance sucks then.
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\\ The only way of appeasing this large group is by shredding the last remains of the welfare system.
After the shredding is done, won’t they experience a “buyer’s regret” when lack of any help bites them?
You talked about the growing number of eternally unemployed in some countries and said that their number will only continue to grow in the future, but since everybody has food and Internet (bread and games), it’s OK. If the welfare system disappears, what will they live on? Begging on the streets?
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It is fashionable to believe that “the working poor” are brainless idiots who vote against their own interests because they were brainwashed by Fox News.
But what if we accept as a working hypothesis that they aren’t that stupid? What if they have an inkling that this new world is coming and don’t want to be stuck with the bills of this significant underclass?
Today, the “folks who sleep until noon” are largely an invention. I believe, however, that it won’t be one for long. The question now is: who will be paying? The working class seems to be saying loud and clear, “Not us!”
Let’s see how other groups respond.
Of course, there is still a chance to avoid the creation of a huge lumpen class. But the time is running out and no moves are being made in that direction. Moves are being made in the opposite direction, actually.
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\\ The question now is: who will be paying? The working class seems to be saying loud and clear, “Not us!”
But what happens when a huge lumpen class is created from formerly working class people (right?), who today refuse to pay only to find themselves tomorrow unpaid and unemployed? It seems a bit like refusing to buy a health insurance, despite knowing you are at high risk of getting the disease yourself quite soon. Or, even if not you, then your children.
If nobody pays and significant number of people become desperate, it will affect everybody except the super-rich.
// Of course, there is still a chance to avoid the creation of a huge lumpen class.
How? Which moves should be made?
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To answer the last question first, people need to be prepared for the demands of the new job market. Blue collar jobs in developed countries are gone. Service Jobs are mostly gone, too. All of the people who formerly would have worked in these jobs will either be lumpenized or will acquire skills to do more highly qualified jobs.
But when Obama speaks to these people, he promises them jobs in manufacturing and service. And then goes on to sign immigration reform that will ensure such jobs disappear even sooner. Of course, people are angry and say, “To hell with you all.” My handyman who is barely literate is saving for his son to go to college. He says, “Of course, my kid won’t be able to continue in my line of work. Now everyone needs a degree. ” And he chose only to have one kid because he can’t save enough to put 2 kids through college.
The working people are not in the least stupid. When I talk to them about the collapse of the state as we know it, the response is powerful and insightful.
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“Today, the “folks who sleep until noon” are largely an invention. I believe”
Not entirely. There are large swathes of the American underclasses that are simply unemployable (there are no jobs they can do that justify employing them).
How many rejected secretary applicants (in your recent search) would bring enough value through their labor to any employer?
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I think the argument here is mostly about the meaning of the world “large.”
I don’t want to be a panic – monger and I’m sick anyway which makes me morose. But I’m afraid of a situation where up to 60% are unemployable because there are just no jobs for their skill set.
The problem with this is not that anybody is going to starve or begin a revolution. This won’t happen. The problem is that this is an enormous group of people simply to discard as rejects of a civilization that has ran away too fast.
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“There are large swathes of the American underclasses that are simply unemployable (there are no jobs they can do that justify employing them).”
I agree with this absolutely. It’s true not only in the US, but also in other western countries e.g. in Britain. This kind of people bring zero value to any company. The welfare states actually created this demographics by their “forever welfare for nothing” politics.
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Interesting.
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“Now everyone needs a degree.”
When everyone has a degree, noone has a degree. I see a bigger future in starting flexible and innovative small businesses (especially in the United States which is the homeland of entrepreneurship), but maybe I’m just projecting my own situation onto others.
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The problem is that American high schools graduate people who are functionally illiterate. I’m not exaggerating here. I work with these kids every day and let me tell you: they can barely read, don’t know how to send an email, don’t know how to open or save a Word file, can’t edit text files at all, have no idea how much 10% of 100 is, think that Africa is a country in South America, etc. What business can such a person possibly start? They need college to learn to function on a basic level in modern society.
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“They need college to learn to function on a basic level in modern society.”
I believe it, but it still sounds morbid. Then what do they do during the primary and secondary education? That’s 12 years. That’s a lot of time.
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This is consumer society at its extreme: parents refuse to be parents, the society imposes no responsibility for parenting, they expect the schools both to educate and parent, and the result is uniformly bad. And whenever I suggest – in the privacy of my blog – that maybe parents should parent, I encounter such extreme outrage that it’s better not even to broach the subject. So it all falls on teachers who are overextended and overworked as it is.
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“Then what do they do during the primary and secondary education?”
A lot of them spend a lot of time monitoring teacher behavior for signs of ‘disrespect’ that will allow them to rebel. Much more fun than trying to learn anything.
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@clarissa @cliffarroyo
So do you claim that primary & secondary education resemble to a kindergarten today in the US? Because from what you say it seems those institutions just guard kids while their parents are working.
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American schools try very hard. The teachers work a lot and with great dedication. But not even the best teacher or school in the universe can stand in place of a parent. Children whose consumer parents don’t want to parent will always be at an enormous disadvantage, no matter what efforts the heroic teachers make.
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In the last business I worked for, it was extremely difficult to find good workers for the going rate. So many were either 1)largely illiterate, 2)fairly innumerate and 3)did not show up on time or at all. And 3) was not due to transportation difficulties. The owners tried to schedule people fairly and consistently, which is not something that happens in retail.
I do not believe any of them could have gone through a typical online employment kiosk at a big box retailer. The literal requirements were to ring up purchases at the correct price and clean the store as needed.
Clarissa, how do kids who can barely read manage to get into a non-community college? (I’m not talking about legacies or student athletes on scholarship.) The paperwork alone to apply and get financial aid is staggering. The technology knowledge I can explain away as access to actual computers with an internet connection. However I was absolutely terrible at math when I graduated from high school (I tend to reverse numbers and I’m terrible at math in my head) but I knew how to do simple fractions.
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“Clarissa, how do kids who can barely read manage to get into a non-community college?”
– We are making a conscious decision to take them and do a lot of remedial teaching. I think it’s a noble goal. And we are successful in quite a few cases. And unsuccessful in other cases, of course. This is our mission and this is the reason why I love our university and why I never considered leaving. Can you imagine what it feels like to see a kid like that come into your office 5 years later and address you in fluent Spanish, saying “Professor, I was rereading Unamuno last night and I’m wondering if his approach to religion stems from a rejection of modernity that is more profound than even that of Ortega y Gasset?”
Being part of something like this is a very very potent experience. It’s like being on drugs but in a socially productive way. 🙂
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The K-12 teachers I know say most of their time is taken up with non teaching tasks, due to lack of parenting of children. So people get to college in essentially a state of readiness to start school. Some, I note, are not really school ready yet. But that is why we are now teaching skills I learned in elementary school.
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“If the welfare system disappears, what will they live on? Begging on the streets?”
Or on the Unconditional Basic Income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
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Unconditional Basic Income is welfare and somebody needs to pay for it. The same problem, only under a different name.
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@el
It’s not. All citizens would get it without any consideration on their income or financial situation. For welfare people have to apply, and someone decides whether they get it or not. That wouldn’t be the case in the case of UBI.
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I believe the harsher people are treated, the more they turn to fascism. Give people enough of what they need, and they won’t care about seeking out the “Jews” (literally or figuratively) in their midst. Punish them, torment them and take away some of their essential services and they will start bleeting for the mposition of a stricter, harsher regime and for the purification of their culture.
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The economic preconditions of a successful fascist country are not given any more.
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\\ The economic preconditions of a successful fascist country are not given any more.
One can have something like today’s Middle East: a few rich and masses of poor, lots of violence, etc. Of course, there are many differences between the West and the Middle East, but I wanted to point out that “a successful fascist country” vs something-not-horrible are not the only two possibilities existing.
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Nobody said that fascism was a rational or achievable proposition. That was not entailed in my statement.
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@musteryou
Yes I’m aware of that. I just added the experiment most likely won’t have the same results as it had had in the 20th century.
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I agree! That’s why I doubt the idea of “many will stay behind but everything will be fine.”
Wait, what about democracy in this brave new world? I doubt those 60% of unemployable would decide on anything. What if they vote for welfare f.e.?
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there are always going to be counterforces. Sometimes these are awakened counterforces, but the more dangerous by far are the sleeping ones.
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\\ The problem with this is not that anybody is going to starve or begin a revolution. This won’t happen.
Why not starve, if nobody will give money to feed them? Working class is against helping, who will then?
And, even if people don’t literally die from hunger, they may live in horrible conditions and in general have horrible lives: money only for just enough calories, w/o money to pay for heating in winter or any health care, dying at young ages because of the former, etc.
You formerly talked about everybody still having a cell phone, but who will foot the bills?
\\ ut I’m afraid of a situation where up to 60% are unemployable because there are just no jobs for their skill set.
What about their children? How will they get good enough education to escape poverty, if government stops supplying that? Many lost jobs because of Industrial Revolution, but their children adapted to the new world. How will the same happen today?
Your descriptions frighten me more than Middle East conflict already. Will there be a need for f.e. math teachers in the new world?
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I’m not trying to freak anybody out. I apologize if that is what happened. I believe we need to know what is coming. It’s better to be prepared.
Sadly, the conversation is not progressing very well because people understandably reach back to the past to explain the future to themselves. And it’s not going to work. This is a very new era. Forget these Dickensian pictures of starving bodies littering the sooty streets of London. That’s gone, it’s not coming back. Fascism is not coming back either.
This will be an era of enormous opportunities. However, as I keep saying, there is a risk of leaving a huge group of people behind – not to starve or freeze to death, but, rather, to eat themselves into complete immobility, in every sense of the world.
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“However, as I keep saying, there is a risk of leaving a huge group of people behind”
I don’t think it’s a risk, it’s a certainty.
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Cliff Arroyo : you be the panic – monger now. I’ve had my turn. 🙂
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No need to apologize. However, you still haven’t mentioned whether school teachers will be needed. 🙂
And haven’t explained where the food will come from. Especially if you believe in climate change badly affecting harvests.
\\ Forget these Dickensian pictures of starving bodies littering the sooty streets of London.
What about not Western countries? F.e. Russia, Middle East, Africa? Not everybody will reach America and get this Unconditional Basic Income or whatever it’ll be named.
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Food is extraordinarily cheap in the developed countries. Especially since the kind of food fed to the underclasses doesn’t depend on harvests because it’s manufactured.
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As for teachers, we are at the point of deciding who manages to jump onto the departing train and who doesn’t. Teachers help people jump onto it. I wouldn’t worry about teachers right now.
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In terms of employment, the best thing is what aglaonika suggests: a highly mobile small business. Or alternatively, highly mobile skills. A law degree, for instance, is a horrible choice because the mobility of the degree is nil.
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“What about not Western countries? F.e. Russia, Middle East, Africa?”
– I’m not a specialist on Africa, but in Russia this already exists. I forget the percentage right now, but there are tens of millions of people in Russia right now who don’t work, don’t want to work, and are drinking themselves or drugging themselves into a stupor on the pittance they get from social assistance.
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Will they eat themselves to death? I wonder…
By the way, what I meant by fascism is a mental state — a lower, middle-class, small change counting mentality. If people are complaining resentfully about not having a holiday they need to organise by joining their unions, so that they can obtain holidays for themselves. If they don’t do this, they will fall into a mode of passivity that leads to psychological fascism – the blinded hostility toward those who have more or think differently.
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Unions are dead, organized labor is dead. I grieve for their passing but they are done for. In the world where any employee can get anything manufactured 100 times cheaper in China, there can be no organized labor. It’s very unfortunate. I used to be a union organizer and I’m very saddened by thus reality. But it’s reality.
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There are always counter-forces. Never just the one force. For the force of globalisation and economic liberalism, countervailing forces will rise up.
In the mean time, those who are currently whining that they do not have any holidays have themselves to blame, since there were many productive years for organising.
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Eat into immobility, on what money (no matter how little, if there is no welfare) … and in which countries? This is intriguing but seems only to correspond to the situation of the global north or perhaps, countries where there is still water…
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@Z
“Eat into immobility, on what money (no matter how little, if there is no welfare) … and in which countries?”
Artificial food can be spread in the poorest countries too. Don’t think about food as something organic any more :).
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Aglaonika, I repeat: what about water, or are we going to get artificial water too?
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“Aglaonika, I repeat: what about water, or are we going to get artificial water too?”
I don’t think that would be feasible :-). However water is different than food. Water constantly circulates, its usage works in the form of a cycle. I don’t want to be very disgusting here, but people can drink their urine without health hazards (what they can’t do with their fecal matter). That’s the documented way some people survived their less fortunate journey to the desert. The methodology of water purification is a well-researched and fast-developing area, however I’m not a big expert of it. I read recently that currently about the 70% of domestical and industrial water can be cleaned up and reused. That percentage can be more in the future. If the used water is always recycled, the waste is minimal. There are also new theories towards more efficient water management like the concept of virtual water. As I said I’m not an expert to say the least, but there are quite serious achievements in this area, just like in the area of artificial food.
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Clean water is an energy issue. If you have the juice, you can run desalinizers and aqueducts and such. The problem here is with getting the juice in sufficient quantities without either polluting the hell out of your environment or getting the world’s most misguided greenpeacers all up in your business.
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My understanding is that water is yet more complicated. Clean water to be imported to global north; energy too so what can be used to clean any dirty water left? S. Paulo is out of water now, and there is of course this, and more problems like it in poorer countries and places. https://nacla.org/blog/2013/6/5/water-wars-water-scarcity-bolivia%E2%80%99s-cautionary-tale
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It is, however, the whites who hate the Democrats, not the rest of the working class. This all has to do with Nixon’s southern strategy, fear of hippies, etc., etc., very careful work done after the civil rights movement and more radical movements of 60s to roll things back in as many ways as possible. The important goal from what I can tell was to neutralize the left-of-democrat crowd, but all but the most conservative of Democrats had to be discredited as well. *It really has a lot to do with race* — that is why the immigration uproar, and it is why people are so upset that Obama is President.
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Yes, there is a lot of racism. A lot. However, the last time I heard a heated discussion of how unfair it is that some lazy layabouts get all of the welfare while deserving working people get nothing, the discussion was held by a group of my black acquaintances.
I don’t think it is productive to dismiss these concerns as those coming from stupid hick racists. It’s more than that. Even though stupid racists exist in abundance.
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But that isn’t how racism works. I am not talking about individual prejudice or bigotry but white supremacist thinking which can manifest as US exceptionalism and be expressed by Black Americans. And I would strongly disagree that racism (or prejudice, or bigotry) is limited to “stupid hicks.” Es más: it is precisely not, because it is a world system (see da Silva, Winant, other CRT and CRT related scholars). And yes, Black Americans, especially now, often complain about welfare queens, and can be as xenophobic as white Americans.
Nonetheless hating the Democrats really is a white thing much more than it is a working class thing.
Here are some things about the current juncture, related to race and xenophobia: 1. US will soon no longer be majority white, and that is one thing that scares people; 2. 9/11. Before that, one could fantasize that whiteness and/or Americanness (and Americanness and whiteness in the popular imagination most commonly overlap) conferred safety. Afterwards, they did not.
This, I think, is also why the “legality” of immigrants matters so much right now. People are afraid of those law-breaking terrorists and all disorder, so “illegality” is yet more scary and un-American and ungodly than before. Follow rules above all, so we can feel “safe” (i.e. immune, in control, entitled, etc.).
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Also, @musteryou, above: I agree, it is the mistreatment that makes people so full of hatred. Not brainwashing by Fox, but mistreatment. And it is much easier to scapegoat someone like you or less powerful than you than it is to recognize the mistreatment and its source. I realize this is not a very original thing to say but I still think it explains a great deal.
Meanwhile, *of course* if you are close to poor and you see what the super poor can get from welfare as it is now, it is disheartening. I have a high school classmate who has lost a foot and cannot get disability insurance to kick in even though she really needs it because she has only lost one foot. With loss of two feet, or with HIV, or with a criminal record, or record of drug abuse, things would be disastrous enough for some kind of reasonable help to come in. I can totally see (some) people with this kind of situation, or with a situation close to it, resenting the aid that does still exist.
I say that is an argument for making help easier, not harder to get, but stingier people than I say the opposite, and people less informed than I do not realize which candidate (or party, etc.) supports which policy or what the policies in question actually are.
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Good phrase:
has lost a foot and cannot get disability insurance to kick in
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I also think there is an eco-disaster coming, and that it is going to kill a lot of people.
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I detest WordPress. If you have a problem with logging in after writing a blog response, you lose everything you have written. Stupid.
Two points:
(1) People who complain about the “undeserving poor” typically are those with next to no direct contact with them. Or they may know one or two. Or they listen to the media hyping examples of those misusing welfare. That’s like the Russians hyping the occasional Ukrainian who is pro-Russian. The exception does not represent everyone.
(2) The movement to a post-nationalism environment cannot be done on the basis of neglect. The economic condition of individuals is linked both to political legitimacy and to violence. When people are pushed too far, legitimacy vanishes and violence skyrockets.
The Zetas are the ready-made example for what could develop in the US. A population of skilled, out-of-work veterans is their labor source. We have plenty here.
Arguably, Mexico and Colombia are no longer nation states. However, instead of rising to something better, they have devolved into fiefdoms reminiscent of 500 years ago. In the Columbia example, there are three armies — national, cartel and Communist — each of which controls a portion of the country. There is no real national government; what has replaced it is closer to tribal in nature.
The Russians are rooting for something like this to happen in the US. I suspect Putin dreams of the day when he can enter Washington as a conquering hero.
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Brilliant comment and I would like to underline your point 2.
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\\ The K-12 teachers I know say most of their time is taken up with non teaching tasks, due to lack of parenting of children.
“non teaching tasks” = “discipline problems”?
Or something else too?
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They do say “discipline problems” but they mean life management problems. Perhaps life is now harder to manage?
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\\ They do say “discipline problems” but they mean life management problems.
Could you give some concrete examples? How are “life management problems” different from “discipline problems”?
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Life is now easier to manage but the idea that parents are in no way responsible for the results of their parenting is creating a very heavy burden for teachers. If I have to be the first person ever to inform a 20 – year – old that trying hard doesn’t count in the absence of results, this means the parents really dropped the ball. These kids often don’t have the basic self-soothing techniques one is supposed to learn by the age of 3. If a 20 – year – old has no idea that it’s important to greet a person and introduce herself before starting on with a litany of what she needs, there is an issue of basic socialization.
The idea that parents are responsible for socializing their children and preparing them for life is anathema to this society. I have no idea when it started but as an outsider I can say that the absolutely unhinged reaction I encounter whenever I suggest that parents, not schools, should be raising children is very culture specific.
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\\ The K-12 teachers I know say most of their time is taken up with non teaching tasks, due to lack of parenting of children.
At which point in the American past were children better parented, in your eyes, and what caused the change? Seems strange to me since I was inclined to believe things only improved with the years.
If indeed there had been a change for the worse, conservatives probably refer to it when they talk about working mothers neglecting children.
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Very good questions and I cannot tell. I do not actually believe there was such a point and surely the change is not working mothers. There is something larger going on, that I am not sure how to characterize. I do remember teachers having time to teach actual material as opposed to get past a series of obstacles to this. I remember that being more possible as a professor as well. Perhaps it is really: everyone, including the kids, having more big weird things cluttering up their day? And is it actually parenting or is it that more people have more problems? I do not remember having as many learning disabilities, autism spectrum management, depression, and general economic pressures to get around and help people get around in the past as now. I do not remember being the first person to get the chance to teach study skills to people as I often am now. What is it really, then?
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“I do not remember having as many learning disabilities, autism spectrum management, depression, and general economic pressures to get around and help people get around in the past as now.”
No, kids were just beaten by both the teachers and the parents, dsylexic kids were labelled as dumb, depressed kids were labelled as lazy, economic pressures were solved by letting people starve or die. Kids were considered as properties, many didn’t even reach adulthood.
“And is it actually parenting or is it that more people have more problems?”
They have less problem for sure. But the zeitgeist changed. There’s a new mindset which highly values the quality of the individual’s life. Parenting is hard for today’s parents, not because there are more problems than ever before, but because most of them don’t have good patterns. Many of them were raised in the authoritarian, abusive way, and now are unsure about how to do it better. That’s also true that many of them choose the other extreme and don’t discipline or parent their kids at all, which puts a huge burden on the school system. I think about this as a learning process of humanity. In our age people have to change the child-rearing methods of millenia.
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Aglaonika : a brilliant comment on parenting. I wanted to day exactly the same but you did it more eloquently.
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As for working mothers. You don’t need 8 hours a day to communicate to a child the simple idea that when you approach a stranger with a request, you first greet them, then introduce yourself, and then express your request while looking in their eyes. My very working father managed to teach me this skill – autism and all – within the space of 3 minutes and I still remember that very vividly. You don’t need tons of free time to do these things. You simply need a consciousness that this is your responsibility.
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Really interesting, Aglaonika!!!! 🙂
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People used to run around physically a lot more, which would help them to iron out their difficulties. A wild rabbit is different from a caged rabbit and in the second case, you need to compensate more for the lack of natural conditions by upping the vitamins and special care regime. Same with contemporary humans.
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As a caged rabbit, I agree completely.
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Yeah, give them special measures of vitamins and special strokes at three pm and let them take one or two bunny hops. There you have it. That is how the contemporary human is brought up.
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At least, when I was growing up, this was still rare enough for me to see that it was wrong.
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Good point. Nowadays people can’t figure it out, but to me it was always extremely bizarre that people will now sit back and demand that you address whatever happens to be wrong with them — and the authorities reinforce this — when they can’t even so much as articulate what they need.
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“At which point in the American past were children better parented, in your eyes, and what caused the change? Seems strange to me since I was inclined to believe things only improved with the years.”
– I have no idea whether it was ever different and whether there was a change. Maybe it has always been this way. Or maybe this is an offshoot of the consumer mentality.
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Mike says he was allowed to run around as a kid and explore the environment freely. It was a rural environment, so he had two near scrapes with death, but seems to have made it out ok (unless the lump in my bed this morning is an illusion). When he was lonely his mother used to say, “Well just go out by yourself then.” My upbringing was pretty similar, but in this regard Rhodesia was still thirty years behind the rest of the Western world, hence the age gap between Mike and I.
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And I was not allowed outside at all under a million of crazy pretexts.
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heh. I’m convinced it is the cure for what ails most people, but has to start young, or ideally so.
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“Arguably, Mexico and Colombia are no longer nation states. However, instead of rising to something better, they have devolved into fiefdoms reminiscent of 500 years ago”
I would argue that neither ever achieved true nation state status. Part of the idea behind nation states is to placing some level of something like familial loyalty to non-family (which helps create social trust which nowhere in Latin America has ever been very strong). How post nation states will function with the greatly reduced levels of social trust that follow multicultural reorientation is yet to be determined.
It’s more accurate to say that both flirted with nation state ideas but have retreated to their societal roots.
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Cliff Arroyo is right. A failed nation-state is not the same as a post-nation state.
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You’re taking something that doesn’t fit the model and labeling it as irrelevant. That’s convenient, but it may not be helpful. If Colombia is a failed nation state, what about Mexico, Brazil, Philippines, Egypt, France, Belgium, Ukraine, China, etc.? Are there any “real” nation states? Or is this an ideal type that doesn’t exist in reality?
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“Failed nation state” is Clarissas phrasing. I would say rather that for a time Mexico and Colombia were evolving towards something like a nation state but they never got all the way there.
My personal definition is roughly: A country that is mostly defined by a single ethnic group or language (or distinct language variety) or culture or political system that isn’t dominant in any other country. (I know it leaks, but we’ll pass on that. The important part is a feeling of separation from other countries at the national level.
Also, in the common understanding nation state tends to correlate highly with the idea of ‘civil society’ (because pretty much only nation states, for all their faults, have achieved that).
By civil society I mean (again roughly): social contacts within the society are not dominated by familial, clan or tribal concerns, there is something like ‘rule of law’, a secular orientation and a fairly high degree of social trust – you don’t assume that people you don’t know want to screw you over. Partly this is achieved by transferring some level of some kind of familial, clan or tribal feeling to other citizens that one does not know and will never know.
Anyhoo, neither Mexico or Colombia have every been characterized by strong civil society. Also, AFAIK neither has cultivated differences in language to disitnguish themselves (Colombia has too many local varieties, Mexico has come closer but now watered-down Mexican has become something like a default “Latino”). Also (AFAIK) neither focuses on its own national canon of ltierature at the expense of other latin american countries.
I’ll look at the other countries separately.
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““Failed nation state” is Clarissas phrasing. I would say rather that for a time Mexico and Colombia were evolving towards something like a nation state but they never got all the way there.”
– It’s the same thing. 🙂 Every country in the world today is either a nation-state or trying to pass as one. If it has borders, a flag, an anthem, an official history, a museum and an archive it’s a nation-state. It might not be an extremely successful nation-state (=a failed nation-state) but it’s still a nation-state. You can’t be anything else in today’s world. It is not possible to exist outside the logic of history. Of course, there are extremely failed nation-states – like the Democratic Republic of Congo – but they are still nation-states. I can be a total failure as a human being, but I’m still a human being. I can’t become a fish, no matter how much I fail at being human. 🙂
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Brazil – Has had its ups and downs but is evolving toward nation statedom. They have the separate part both from the rest of the continent (and other varieties of Portuguese) but have lagged on the civil society front (though they’ve made a lot of progress over the last couple decades). It’s not clear what will happen with countries evolving toward nation stateness – that is nation state is a step that can be skipped on the road to liquidity (for the vast majority of residents). My guess is no.
Philippines – Too many local identities get in the way of a true Filipino one (ironically they seem to become much more Filipino outside their country than inside it). Their status as a former American colony is mostly too lucrative to give up for the sake of local cultural and linguistic autonomy.
Egypt – Could become a nation state (distinctive language variety and cultural heritage and all that) but have consistently chosen to emphasize pan-Arabism and/or pan-Islamism over developing local identity. And of course has never approached anything like civil society.
France – One of the nation stateiest of nation states. And not that far behind the UK in demolishing it by bringing in large swathes of population that cannot or do not want to assimilate to French national identity and are mostly doomed to being an underclass (to threaten the middle class with).
Belgium – An odd case, what distnguishes them (and keeps them together) is the sheer improbability of the whole enterprise. I have direct experience only with the Dutch speaking section but it was very nation statey when I was there. All the people I met were adament that the country will stay together (no matter what they individually thought about the idea. Also following the French model of creating a culturally hostile underclass.
Ukraine – The feeling of separation is there (if our hostess’s posts are anything to go on) but long association with Russian empire hasn’t done them any more good than long association with the Russian empire has done any other group. The whole maidan revolution was about the civil society aspirations of the country (which seem stronger in the parts that have had more contact with other former powers.
China – An expansive dynasty, not a nation state. Chinese politics are still best understood within a framework of changes between dynasties and generational change within dynasties.
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I’ll add here that however optimistic or pessimistic people are about the post nation state world possibly depends on how malleable they believe human nature is (or if you even believe there is such a thing).
I tend toward the “human nature exists and is somewhat, but not infinitely, malleable” camp and I’ve yet to be convinced that that liquidity will work well for the majority of people since it doesn’t seem to …… tie people into any particular social arrangement (a longing for which seems to be a non-negotiable part of human nature).
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What are your views on transhumanism? They say it’s possible for humanity to reach a higher psychological and intellectual level.
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my first replay got et up.
Anyway…. I believe in both individual self improvement and evolution (micro and macro) and t-h (in my limited understanding) seems to confuse the two.
The kind of changes it seems to foresee aren’t available by individual self improvement but only by evolution (and individuals don’t evolve populations do).
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Well my job in in Japan, but that doesn’t make my character fluid. I just use that to consolidate the gains in my character. It means I don’t need to become fluff.
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“The underclass” is a code term for “black”. The wealthy politicians and media owners make sure that white people’s prejudices are reinforced and that only bad stories are told about black people. It serves the “overclass”, the 0.1%, to keep stoking white scapegoating of black people as black people. You have to actually live and work around black people to see all the black people working two jobs, or working full time and going to night school or doing community work. There are a hell of a lot of hard-working black people that get ignored because they work as cooks, security guards, janitors, nurses, lab technicians, etc – the sort of blue collar / pink collar jobs that the media ignores and that keep my hospital, and lots of other organizations, running. The media reports about white collar workers, who are portrayed as overwhelmingly white and male (and non-immigrant).
Tell the white voter that all black women on welfare have 8 kids and drive a Cadillac, and they believe that nonsense. Tell the white voter that the average welfare recipient is white, stays on welfare less than 2 years, and is likely on welfare either because she was abandoned by her man (husband), assaulted by her man (and had to run to save her skin and her childrens’ skins), or she was widowed – the white voter won’t believe you. Tell the white voter that young military families are using food stamps out of necessity – they won’t believe you.
Tell the white voter that the “47% of Americans who are takers” (famous Mitt Romney quote) are mostly white, and those white voters will not believe it. You have to explicitly describe Children’s Health Insurance Programs, Medicare, Social Security for the disabled and for the elderly, military pensions – and tell the white voter that they too were children who could have had some serious illness, and that they will become old and likely disabled to some degree at some point – in other words, that ALL humans were takers and become takers again.
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P.S. There will always be need for service work, whether it pays enough to live or not. One can expect women’s rights to become a thing of the past in the post nation state period of privatization of everything, because women are the major source of unpaid labor for everything, as well as the source of future laborers. In the absence of social security systems, elder health care systems, etc, the entire weight of care-giving for the increasingly aging population will fall on women. Currently, women are responsible for the bulk of such care in the countries with social security systems, but it is possible for women to hold jobs and acquire some savings for their own old age.
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“women are the major source of unpaid labor for everything,”
– “Unpaid” with money but paid for dearly in a variety of other ways. Nobody engages in anything for protracted periods of time unless they get something in return. Let’s not present women as subhuman or extremely idiotic here. Whenever a woman engages in the so-called “unpaid labor”, somebody is paying for the labor. And the payment is much, much higher than if a regular contractual laborer were hired to do the work.
“In the absence of social security systems, elder health care systems, etc, the entire weight of care-giving for the increasingly aging population will fall on women.”
– Identity categories are becoming increasingly fluid. Nobody is attached to the invented category of “women” to this extreme extent any longer. There are rare exceptions in the form of extremely patriarchal families, but they are a tiny percentage.
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\\ – “Unpaid” with money but paid for dearly in a variety of other ways. Nobody engages in anything for protracted periods of time unless they get something in return.
You are probably thinking about housewives here, but what about working women, who are the main caregivers for their children and parents at once? Unmarried women who take care of their parent/s more than their brother/s? The following paper hasn’t looked at enough cases imo, but what if its findings are true?
This paper examines gender differences within a sample of 131 adult children identified as the primary caregiver to an older frail parent. Findings indicate that sons tend to become caregivers only in the absence of an available female sibling; are more likely to rely on the support of their own spouses; provide less overall assistance to their parents, especially “hands-on” services; and tend to have less stressful caregiving experiences independent of their involvement.
http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/6/612.abstract
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There is always a reason and always a payoff. This is a very socially approved way of not having a life of one’s own. This is a very easily available excuse for being professionally, socially and sexually unsuccessful.
Have you heard of that woman who faked a terminal illness for her kid? Yes, that’s an extreme case. But families are complex systems. The alliance between a perennial invalid and a self-sacrificing caretaker is very convenient to both.
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It still hasn’t sunk in that you live in Bible Belt country, has it? I prescribe a course of listening to FM 91.5, the dominant >100K W conservative Protestant talk station featuring the star syndicated preachers and pundits. For the USA as a whole, 20% of the population belongs to conservative Protestant denominations idealizing “extremely patriarchal families”, and women in those denominations pay more lip service to the patriarchy than do Catholic women, who by and large ignore il Papa and his bishops. Expect those extremely patriarchal families to become more and more common should the economy get really bad. If the job crunch becomes bad enough, with educated white males having unemployment rate in the 30 to 40% range or higher, there will be resentment against “double dipper” two income families, and I would expect that sooner or later an attempt would be made to shut women out of labor markets.
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I’m trying to have a serious conversation here. Fantasies about 40% unemployment that will shut women out of the workforce don’t belong in a serious discussion.
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“Expect those extremely patriarchal families to become more and more common should the economy get really bad.”
Yeah, I’ve heard this too. There are some men with low self-esteem who think that women will not marry them because they have a stand in partner in the form of the welfare state. They are hoping that with the demise of this, they will find women with equally poor self esteem who will settle for them. As the Bible says, the arrogant woman was “humbled” — meaning she was raped a few times to teach her to get over herself.
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I seem to be a contrarian, but so be it.
(1) Virtually every service job can be robotized — and people are working to do that this instant. The driver in Japan is a declining labor force; the jobs they can’t fill will be handled by machines. In the perversity that is the US, healthcare cost is driving adoption of robots and other forms of automation.
Where is this happening? We know taxi cab drivers are on the road to extinction. Pennsylvania has adopted a statewide home schooling program based on distance learning: instruction is broadcast directly into student homes via WiFi. Ultimately, this will erase thousands of teaching positions. Robots are being used to kill infectious diseases in hospitals (http://www.connectmidmissouri.com/news/story.aspx?id=1107005#.VHOHvskYXxw). The Japanese have led the campaign to develop robots that can express emotion, enabling robots to serve as companions to the elderly in nursing homes. In business, we’ve seen a shift from traditional marketing and market research with its focus on people to big data and marketing automation, based on numbers and models. It doesn’t work very well, but costs a lot less. There’s also work on automation of human resource and accounting functions. If you think talking to HR people is challenging now, just wait until you’re talking with a robot.
(2) Politics hasn’t caught up with demographics. Hispanics have passed the Black population in size in the US and the major focus in the future will be on Hispanic-Anglo relations, not Black-White. It’s quite possible to envision a time in which Blacks will be the fourth or fifth largest minority, behind Chinese and Indian.
At the same time, intermarriage between all of these groups is breaking down the distinctions between them. Surprise, surprise, the assimilation process in this country actually does still exist.
BTW, I still detest WordPress.
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I’m very sorry for WordPress ‘ s antics. There is no excuse for it to eat up people’s comments. Stupid thing!
I agree with the rest of the comment, too. 🙂
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I’ve learned. Now I copy what I write to clipboard before hitting the post comment button. That way, if it disappears, I can paste it and do it again. And again.
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\\ I agree with the rest of the comment, too.
If so, which jobs will be available still? Not teachers, not cab drivers, not in marketing, not companions… Only 1% of people who have a talent for programming will have jobs?
\\ The Japanese have led the campaign to develop robots that can express emotion, enabling robots to serve as companions to the elderly in nursing homes
Sounds so creepy. If somebody is in his / her right mind yet and is lonely, will a person fool himself to be not lonely because of a robot? Animals, at least, can recognize their favorite people and enjoy interacting with them. A robot … not so.
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Jobs have been disappearing – with new ones springing up on their place – for about 100 years. And we’ve all dealt with it quite well. Why start fretting now about a process that’s been underway for a long time?
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\\ And we’ve all dealt with it quite well.
My relatives and me haven’t had to deal with it yet.
\\ Why start fretting now about a process that’s been underway for a long time?
Imagine somebody telling you “Clarissa, professors and translators won’t be needed soon, but why start fretting?”
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My great – grandfather was a carpenter, making furniture out of mahogany. Relatives on the other side were first peasants then coal miners. These professions don’t exist for their descendants. So the descendants moved on and are very happy working as recruiters and literary critics. 🙂 There are stories like this in all families, and in yours too, I’m sure.
As for me, I’ve had 93 hours of psychoanalysis, so making me feel anxious is extraordinarily hard. 🙂
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@el
Robot teachers already exist, and students seem to like them. I think it’s very important for the current generation of teachers to find out how they can fit into the coming new, automated world. Maybe there will be more time for talent management, or for kids who are lagging behind? Will the scholar experience of students become more customized (which is also a tendency in other areas)? Will the assessment be more elaborated and helpful? Or will teachers supervise and manage the robots? Coaching them? Giving advice to them? Or something else? It’s hard to say, but that’s sure that teachers do have to start to think about absolutely new ways. Good news is that it’s also a big challenge. The teachers who find out the new methods (and they will) will be famous :-).
http://youtu.be/bE4DnQ5GlTc
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The Japanese themselves are not that credulous about the possibility of robots performing human tasks. Actually Abe is trying a different strategy now of demanding that larger companies promote women to higher positions, so that they will stay in the workforce.
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\\ Jobs have been disappearing – with new ones springing up on their place – for about 100 years.
You have yourself written that “new ones springing up on their place” may not happen, about forever unemployed which hasn’t happened after f.e. Industrial Revolution. The more robots develop – the less need for people.
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The fear that robots will replace people has been around for almost 70 years. Since then, unemployment rates on developed countries dropped off a cliff. But people still worry.
Can we at least find a new subject to obsess about? Increasing automatization is a feature of modern existence. Yet our societies have been dealing with it extremely well. It isn’t like anybody is dying to perform the repetitive menial tasks done by robots.
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This isn’t obsession. Rather, it’s a topic that needs attention.
We are already seeing automation producing a decline in the number of human jobs available. An IT industry trade pub, ZDNet, has already published on the decline in jobs in IT (http://www.zdnet.com/it-jobs-big-threat-robots-automation-the-solution-more-humanity-7000033218/).
The NYTimes has an interesting view on the imbalance between worker skills and the jobs available post automation that is growing the class per permanently unemployed (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/business/automation-alone-isnt-killing-jobs.html?_r=0).
There are a number of articles about the fact that we are not now creating new jobs as fast as we are eliminating them. The pattern of the last 70 years has been broken. We see that in the repatriation of manufacturing from Asia. Only one-quarter of the jobs that left are returning. The remaining jobs no longer exist.
Two MIT professors argue that it is automation that is accounting for the lack of economic recovery in the US. (http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/).
The UK actually has a school for training men and women to work as butlers and maids in affluent, largely Asian, households. Perhaps we will get something like that here.
Or we will fully legalize the sex industry and create jobs there. (New York was, after all, originally called New Amsterdam.) I know people who paid for college by dancing in the clubs. That’s still happening.
What do you do with people who no longer have the knowledge and skills for any available work?
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“What do you do with people who no longer have the knowledge and skills for any available work?”
– I educate them, that’s my job. 🙂 It is not up to me whether this society decides to just leave such people behind as it marches on. I hope it doesn’t. I’m doing all I can so that it doesn’t happen. This post alone already has more than 100 comments. That’s good, that’s something. I hope there are more discussions here and elsewhere. I hope people start thinking about these transformations and their consequences.
I don’t want to see either blind dismissal or blind panic as a response to these issues. Neither reaction is productive and leads to anything outside of oneself. The greater is the number of people who are thinking – and not just emoting – about these issues, the better the future will be for all of us.
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“The fear that robots will replace people has been around for almost 70 years. Since then, unemployment rates on developed countries dropped off a cliff. But people still worry.”
It’s been longer than 70 years. The Luddites, a group of early 19th century textile artisans, were smashing the newly invented power looms and such between 1811 and 1817 because they threatened to deskill the field and force the remaining workers into unemployment. Whether or not you’re aware, you’re using the economist’s “luddite fallacy” argument which has been also around for a long time.
You might find Lord Byron’s defense of Luddite speech given in 1812 interesting.
“Can you then wonder, that in times like these, when bankruptcy, convicted fraud, and imputed felony, are found in a station not far beneath that of your Lordships, the lowest, though once most useful portion of the people, should forget their duty in their distresses, and become only less guilty than one of their representatives ? But while the exalted offender can find means to baffle the law, new capital punishments must be devised; new snares of death must be spread, for the wretched mechanic who is famished into guilt.”
http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html
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Fluidity gives back with the same hand it uses to take away. Today’s mobility – physical, geographical, intellectual, class, etc – makes change incredibly more easy to process than in the times of Luddites.
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“Fluidity gives back with the same hand it uses to take away. Today’s mobility – physical, geographical, intellectual, class, etc – makes change incredibly more easy to process than in the times of Luddites.”
Sir Winston Churchill said basically the same thing in the 1900s.
P.S. WordPress has been screwing around with my avatar
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