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I don't understand how the working class folks "shifted" to Democratic party.
Haven't the democrats been the working class party all along?
Citizens United made bribery legal, and the working class has been broken down for decades and forced into poverty.
There is no American "working class" party, because they can't afford to bribe any of the parties. Democrats sorta kinda pretend to care, occasionally, so they are currently wearing the mantle.
Citizens United made it worse, but we were fucked before then. Lobbying is just legalized bribery. We need to repeal Citizens United but then we need to keep going and rework the whole campaign finance and lobbying systems too.
Working class people tend to be less-educated, live in more rural areas, be a part of less-diverse communities, and be prone to accept authority figures. And the GOP has spent a half-century trying to convince that exact group that every problem they're experiencing is actually the opposite. So they vote against their best interests in election after election, and then the people they voted for successfully convince them that the Democrats actually torpedoed it all and they could've actually made everything better if they just had one more term...rinse and repeat across 25+ election cycles.
I think the working class is much broader than that, and part of our problem is this perception.
It's definitely getting broader than that, with the way that wealth stratification continues to skyrocket. But I don't mean "actually rural," I really do mean "more rural." A good amount of city real estate prices have priced lower-income folks out of the urban core in many (most?) cities, gentrifying the downtown and resulting in a reversal of 1980s White Flight as the working class move to now-cheaper suburban and rural communities.
I didn't mean just farmers or whatever. I just mean people who haven't got the money to live in the Trader Joe's district.
People that make enough to "live in the trader Joe's district" but have to keep working at their job to keep living in their apartment have way more in common with people that make less than them than they do the people that don't have to work at all.
We know that, but decades of Republican propaganda has got the small business owners, who get absolutely wrecked by Republican policies, thinking they're on the side of the rich against the employee class.
A large portion of the working class....
I think we overemphasize education and should talk more about people's ability to act and think independently.
That is the goal of education.
Historically, the goal of education was to have a productive labor force. And even if our education system was to teach independence, it cannot deliver the ability, that comes from economic and social liberation.
Education means people can't think independently is a real dumb argument.
I think we overemphasize water and should talk more about people's hydration.
Sounds like something the CEO of Nestle would say.
Education doesn't make people act independently, often to the contrary.
Right-wing propaganda nonsense. Education teaches you how to evaluate sources and interrogate assumptions.
My "source" on education being a tool of Hegemony is Micheal Foucault, not exactly a right-wing propagandist. The right has a tendency to take arguments from others and twist them to accomplish the opposite.
My apologies, I thought you were making the opposite argument. But I still disagree.
All other things being equal, educated people are statistically less susceptible to disinformation and fallacious arguments. If they weren't, the fascists wouldn't be trying to eliminate public education, and the electoral map wouldn't correlate so strongly with education.
Foucault wasn't wrong about right-wingers using educational systems for indoctrination, but that's not the current GOP playbook. Their strategy relies on people being too anxious and uneducated to separate fact from fiction, and to provide the propaganda another way (specifically, via carpet-bombing media, social and otherwise, with disinformation). Why bother wasting time at the school district level when there are nationwide platforms where people line up voluntarily to get their ration of AI-generated, foreign-actor-crafted lies delivered straight into to their eyeballs?
Yeah, we've gotta fix the education system. And yeah, we've gotta get people to recognize where they're being controlled. But I don't think that eliminating the former is going to accomplish the latter; and clearly the other side knows it, too.
Wasn't trying to argue we should abolish public education but that we can't rely on reforming education to fix our political system. It flows the other way. Which means we also need to find ways to cultivate independent thought outside of traditional education. This comes in many forms, mutual aide, potlucks, new art, community workshops, etc but the through line is you are offering people more independence to be well.
I'm terms of policy, yes. But a lot of dipshit blue collar workers believe the propaganda from Fox News and adjacent outlets, and their propaganda says that the republican party is the party of the working class, so a lot of the working class votes republican. These people believe what they're told instead of using critical thinking skills to observe and analyze the actual actions taking place. Some of them are finally starting to wake up, but they'll fall back asleep the moment somebody more palatable than trump rises up and keeps the pain focused on marginalized groups instead of leaking out to hurt rural whites so much and so obviously.
I hope that AI development makes the internet and social media so dogshit that it pushes people to spend less time in online echo chamber spaces and more time in person with actual people face to face. We're radically divided due to algorithms slapping us with culture war bullshit, so we're forgetting that so many of us are united in wanting comfortable homes, affordable food, leisure time and money to enjoy with our families, and peace of mind that we're safe and secure. Crying about trans athletes does nothing for my family, but my father in law being furloughed during this shutdown due to an insistence on taking healthcare away from my sister sure as shit impacts my family.
Of course I don't want people to suffer, but some people will just never see what the fuck is actually happening until it affects them or people close to them. And those of us who already know are just that much more pissed off when these people only just now start to figure it out and cry for help now that it's hurting somebody other than the out group. And it's gonna be extra infuriating when they forget all about the pain they were finally exposed to and turn around and vote for it all over again. Mark my words, trump is not the last fascist these people will have sold their decency to support. They will forget where it got them within weeks.
I sure would love that to happen, but my more cynical self sees the incel broligarchy-loving types and how they look forward to the day when females will be put in their place by having a compliant robot wife instead, not having to worry about a woman "taking all their money" and so on....
They can have their advanced waifu bodypillows, and I'll still make fun of them like I do the weebs with their regular waifu bodypillows.
But realistically, the broligarchy manchildren are the exact people who worship Elon Musk, and Elon Musk is the exact guy championing the idea that white birthrate decline is a horrible tragedy and we need to have more white babies. These losers will need to choose between their robo waifus and their techbro visionary prophet, and musk will have to choose between making the product in demand by his fans or his Nazi white genocide ideology.
I think they're most likely to agree on trying to making all women into free use breeding objects that "real alpha men" are allowed to stake claim on without consequence. In other words, legalize rape for white men. It sounds absurd, but five years ago you wouldn't have believed me if I'd told you that he'd do some public sieg heil Nazi salutes within a few years.
Not since at least the Clinton years. The US doesn’t have a mainstream working class party.
Hasn't been one in the anglosphere in general for a long time. The NDP is the closest but they've given up their working class cred years ago. And labor, well, if Blair didn't convince you they were a lost cause Starmer will. I'm not familiar enough with auspol but I'd imagine the trend holds.
There was also Carter using Taft-Hartley to shut down the coal strike.
Relatively speaking, at least...
Even with W, there was a huge "smart sounding" = coastal elite narrative going with their: he looks like a guy you could have a beer with. Which apparently is more important than not kneecapping your union, demolishing the economy, or starting illegal wars
Theoretically. In, practice, not so much, but far more than the Republicans, and that's the problem with the neo-liberal Democrat party.