Focus group of one here. As a wealthy person, inflation was less of an issue for me because I had so many assets that shot up in value. Wealth effect totally overshadowed the inflation impact, especially when my biggest expense was a mortgage I locked in around 3%.
Not trying to brag, just giving the mechanics of why inflation maybe wasn't so stressful for richer Americans. Who actually knew the prices of eggs and milk anyhow? Groceries aren't that big a share of my monthly spending.
Isn’t the point of this meme though that wealthy people have always been out of touch with the working class. It seems like Noah is trying to explain something new, but the idea that the folks at the country club don’t understand what’s going on down at the coal mine seems like the oldest thing on earth (also genuine lol at the idea that 50 years ago, there were a lot of working class people at Yale to let the patricians know what life in the sticks was like— back then half of the incoming class was from Andover and Exeter).
Yeah but 50 years ago very few people went to college, and many of the ones who did voted Republican. Back then Republicans knew they were out of touch—by the end of 1974 Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for twenty years straight and had just won another term. Republicans mostly focused on winning the White House, but the education divide didn't cleave society in half like it does nowadays.
That's why conservatives during that age, particularly the country club Republican type, developed an attitude that fewer people ought to be voting. In retrospect, I can somewhat sympathize, although back then that would have meant *very few* black people voting.
The point is not that wealthy people have always been out of touch, it's that the Democrats used to be the party of working people, the party that understood their problems, and are now the party of out-of-touch wealthy people.
Well, or perceived that way due to media and perception. The actual Democrats are very spread out across the wealth spectrum - and there are plenty of wealthy Republicans as well. The "country club" didn't all of a sudden become a bunch of Democrats.
But definitely agree that the Democrats did some dumb things and didn't emphasize helping wage earners and rather stupidly allowed themselves to be painted this way
The place where the well-off are still pretty miffed is people with decent money (not really rich) who are looking to buy a home but don't have one to sell. I was looking in late 2021 or so, saving my money up, and decided to wait a bit longer to have more savings, and then when I went back in 2023 home prices in my area shot up by 30% over less than 2 years, a 2 years in which interest rates more than doubled. Suddenly I was in a much less good position to buy a home than I'd been two years before, after adding to my pad of money for a downpayment.
That's sort of irrelevant when the dealership gets the tax credit and puts it towards the financing deal for the rich person that can get paid off nearly immediately.
Fair, but I believe there's a decent correlation between age and income, so I bet many of those wealthy people did have a home to sell. And hey, the chart does have SOME of those high income folks claiming significant impact from inflation.
Am in the same boat in terms of asset appreciation. But my wife has knee injuries, and so I do the shopping. And the rise in the cost of groceries has been simply astounding.
If I was still dependent upon wages for survival, I'd be mad as hell and willing to give Trump a shot. Despite the fact that all his policy proposals will likely further ignite inflation, and result me having to learn Mandarin/Russian within a decade.
Noah finally gets it: "So although Biden did beat inflation, crime did go down, and Biden did eventually crack down on the border, I can understand why the traumas that working-class Americans had to suffer in 2020-2022 couldn’t be expunged just by some encouraging charts."
AP says that concerns about the economy were number one for voters in 2024. Biden made light of inflation pain for years and his ratings as a president did nothing but tank. Few people realize that 9 MILLION who voted for Biden in 2020 simply stayed home in 2024. This is the obvious reason why Harris lost. For more, see:
Hi Kathleen, I actually just left a comment on your blog. The vote count is ongoing and I think you'll find that in the end the reduction in vote totals will be small. Nate Silver's estimate suggests Harris will be about 5m behind Biden 2020 and Trump's total will have increased by ~4m. (The pandemic election was a huge outlier and I don't think we understand much about the underlying dynamics of 2020 turnout. . . . Well, I don't, anyway.)
Yes, large swaths of California remain uncounted, due to the acceptance of mail-in ballots up until a week after election day (and no urgency to get them counted).
Absolutely, there was a tweet going around to the effect of “I can’t believe Americans will vote for fascism because the price of eggs went up”. Well only one of those things (price of eggs) is going to affect your day to day life if you’re poor! The ability to worry about the long term health of the American project has always been an elite luxury.
That’s very true. Those who have enough disposable income rarely think about groceries or gas (assuming that there’s anyone left who doesn’t drive an EV) We talk about how ordering from DoorDash or Uber Eats has become much more expensive than before. That’s for a different reason though.
1. It’s so much cheaper to fuel an EV than a gas car that increases don’t mean much. If I had a 20% increase in my energy cost, it would cost me like $3 more to fill my “tank”. If gas prices went up 20%, I’d feel it more.
2. Your fueling costs of an EV are obfuscated as it’s just embedded in your overall electricity bill. Contrast to gas when a cruel LED screen is showing you exactly how much money is being extracted from your wallet in real time.
I couldn’t even tell you how much it costs to fuel my EV in a year, it’s too small and too much effort to track. I can tell you exactly how much we’ve spent on gas for our X5 and I can’t wait to replace it with another EV.
#2 is an important point. It’s hard to keep track of EV charging costs because it’s not significant enough to make a dent in your overall bill. You can do a rough estimate using the kwh of the battery, annual mileage and electricity cost per kwh. So many people charge at work that even that is not a good estimate.
We will probably get an EV for our next vehicle. I have rented them, and I like driving them. Last time I checked, buying one "slightly" used was a pretty good deal compared with new, but I tend to only buy new vehicles (and I don't buy them that often). When we visit our former (and long time) neighborhood in California (Saratoga) there seem to be more Teslas on the road than any other vehicles. Our former neighbors have his and her Teslas, and they love 'em.
I'm a numbers nerd (probably why I like Noahpinion) and I know my mileage cost, on average, has been 7.7 cents per mile for my Tesla.
It's fairly predictable, since electricity rates are regulated and my marginal home rate (21.87 cents per kWh) only changes once a year, sometimes up, sometimes down (2023 was 24.67 cents per kWh, so 2024 is DOWN by 11%).
It is higher when I have to use superchargers on a road trip, but I see no wild fluctuations like you see with gas prices. 3 cheers for a regulated electricity market!
EVs are cheaper to charge because electricity is cheaper. Also, a lot of offices have free charging in the parking lot as a perk. You can also get solar panels to inflation proof electricity costs to some extent.
I live in California. I bought into the whole EV thing being cheaper per mile plus the tax credit (plus pre-owned EV rebate). My EV charging costs gave me sticker shock. Instead of paying a gas station I'm paying PGE the same or more in electricity costs, even after the whole EV plan they have, and my insurance is through the roof.
I do not have hope that the costs will go down, PGE will only raise rates.
I think you underestimate the power of supporting unions. After 40 years of neoliberalism, Joe Biden’s efforts were too little and much too late. But in the long run, either workers get a larger share of national income though higher wages, we institute a UBI (unlikely in this environment), or the discontent of wage earners will continue to fester. For now, Trump is their champion, but I don’t see Trump supporters like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Tim Mellon, or Tucker Carlson becoming big supporters of unions and workers’ rights anytime soon. I don’t see blue collar support for Republicans becoming intrenched, especially after Trump leaves the scene. Instead, I can imagine unstable politics until one party both gives voice to the needs of workers and does something to give them a larger share of national income.
If the nominal value of your assets rises with inflation, then it's not actually rising in real terms.
On the contrary, it's people in debt who benefit from unexpected inflation, because their debt was denominated in a currency whose value has gone down. (You mention your mortgage, which is an example of this: you literally owe less due to inflation.)
But it wouldn't surprise me if educated professionals are more likely to have debts than working-class folks; aside from mortgages, I'd also mention student loans. Working-class folks are probably more likely to have medical debt, but if they don't expect to ever be able to pay off the debt anyway, then they may not perceive a decrease in its real value as meaningful or relevant? Likewise high-interest loans, like credit card debt and payday loans. (The latter are on too short a timescale for inflation to help, anyway.)
The S&P 500 has nearly doubled in 5 years. Tech stocks have more than doubled in 5 years (Nasdaq 100, Amazon, etc). If you want to get really silly, Bitcoin is like 7x what it was pre-pandemic. So I think the asset appreciation has actually exceeded inflation.
Plus, psychologically, it just feels good to see those numbers go up. Weekly/monthly spending is just boring cash flow that's not as noticeable. So even if I'm not 100% sure I am ahead with the inflation, I am definitely not stressed about it. (Yet - we'll see if this next round of foolishness changes my mind.)
> So I think the asset appreciation has actually exceeded inflation.
Oh, sorry, I guess I misunderstood your post — I thought you were saying that the inflation was fine for you because it inflated your assets.
> Plus, psychologically, it just feels good to see those numbers go up.
Yeah, the psychology of inflation is going to be a bit different from the economic theory of it.
And for that matter, the individual experience of inflation will be a bit different from the aggregate experience captured in statistics. If prices go up all year, but you get a raise only once a year — or only when you change jobs — then the price increases are harmful even if the wage increase is technically more than enough to cancel them out.
We are in the same group. Enough income to not pay attention to prices. I never look at the price of gas or what is charged at the grocery store. What did bring me back to reality was when we started to look at downsizing from this two acre horse property. We had sold our rental in San Jose for an astounding amount. I thought the house price explosion was focused in the Bay Area. NO!!! It has happened even in the Gamma Quadrant where we live.
This and the concurring comments drive me bonkers. I also saw my assets shoot up in value, I also was delighted to see my mortgage turn into "free money" when the risk-free rate dwarfed it, and (wait for it) I am keenly aware of how much eggs and milk cost and extremely irritated when grocery prices increase. Just because the marginal analysis affects me differently does not mean that I am not alarmed when the nominal price of life's necessities increases. C'mon people. Do you really conflate all prices and say gee whiz I guess some things are more important than others? This is bloody obvious and not an insight into the missteps of high-level political strategy.
I am also little impacted by inflation. However, I've kept a spreadsheet of expenses for the last 15 years and over the past five years and groceries have ticked up maybe by 5%. But we are a family of two with kids out of the house. I suspect for families it's much more of an issue.
So, basic economics... Think about the supply of eggs. The supply was constrained by bird flu and was short-term inflexible. All the eggs produced were being sold. The price rose until some marginal buyers reduced their egg consumption - so there was an equilibrium between price and supply.
Some hamfisted intervention that forces prices lower means what? That whoever gets to the grocery store first gets cheaper eggs, and whoever gets there later finds empty shelves? Or do you want the govt to give people ration cards for their egg allocation? That seems extreme.
I'm working today so I'll just pass your argument to Claude for consideration (one shot answer):
----- edit: formatting fixed
This argument has several misconceptions that I'll break down:
1. Comparing gasoline to Big Macs is problematic because they have fundamentally different market structures and input costs. Gasoline is a commodity with prices primarily driven by global supply and demand in a highly liquid market. Food service involves multiple sticky input costs like labor, rent, and various ingredients
2. The argument misunderstands what Econ 101 actually predicts about price behavior. Economic theory doesn't predict that all prices should fluctuate like commodities. It predicts that prices respond to underlying costs and market conditions. Some costs, particularly wages and rent, tend to be "sticky downward" due to contracts, laws, and social factors. This stickiness is well-understood in economics and doesn't indicate gouging.
3. The existence of "sticky prices" that rarely decrease isn't evidence of price gouging. Price gouging refers to temporary excessive price increases during emergencies or supply shocks. Long-term price trends reflect underlying cost structures, inflation, and market conditions. If a business's costs (wages, rent, ingredients, etc.) increase and stay high, prices naturally would too
4. Some moderate inflation is normal in most economies. We should expect nominal prices to generally trend upward over time. The relevant question is whether price increases exceed what's justified by cost increases and normal inflation. Looking at nominal prices across long time periods without accounting for inflation can be misleading
A more accurate framework would be to examine whether specific price increases exceed what can be explained by changes in input costs, market conditions, and general inflation. Evidence of gouging would come from examining profit margins and market power, not just the observation that prices tend to rise over time.
National Service! If someone can explain why there is so little discussion of national service (non military, non mandatory technically but practically mandatory eg tied to high school graduation requirement etc) as a new social glue institution, I would appreciate it.
Parties have talked about doing this elsewhere (e.g., Germany, the UK), and politically it has gone down like a fart in a lift. The draft has been gone for so long in the US that even if you brought national service in tomorrow, a sizeable chunk of the population would have never been conscripted, or faced it as a possibility, and never will. Even in Germany the idea has not gained much traction, and that's despite national service having been ended relatively recently.
To those who have to do it, it will seem less like a rite of passage and more something that their out-of-touch parents are imposing on them. Rather than advancing social cohesion, national service would seriously damage it because one part of the population would have new obligations that their parents never did, for mostly arbitrary reasons.
Yes these countries all introduced conscription in the first place for military-related reasons, and the ones who slowly abandoned it or watered it down also did so for military reasons. In France, Emmanuel Macron reintroduced what he called national service. But it’s voluntary, and lasts for four weeks in total.
Was the main reason why a lot of western countries abandoned conscription was because weapons systems were becoming too technically sophisticated for conscripts to learn them properly during their terms of service?
I think it's not so much that conscripts *can't* learn so much as you get better returns from a smaller number of motivated soldiers than a larger number who resent being there. Also, the cost of equipping and supporting a soldier are much higher than they used to be.
sorry for the late comment, but i was surprised not to see it
being compelled to register for the draft when you turn 18 is very much still a thing for all american men, and failure to register is a crime
i remember this being the topic of quite a bit of discussion during "register with selective service" week amongst my high school senior friends, who had grown up in a feminist culture where not a single woman had ever lost a fight to a man in any hollywood movie they had ever seen
it was genuinely shocking to most that women were exempt from this, it seemed like a bizarre anachronism from a past age before we knew women could be just as capable soldiers as men (just look at black widow!), and i saw quite a bit of rightward movement among my peers' political beliefs that week
everyone seemed to have forgotten about it a few weeks later, but the reaction and mood stuck with me, and i'm always surprised it isn't a bigger talking point in the culture war, it seems like a point that could easily be leveraged by either side's narrative for cheap points
either way, for a population that 'never faced the possibility of conscription', they sure made us sign up to be conscripted and threatened those who objected with serious criminal charges
This is a huge factor no one talks about. I think in my life that 20 years spent in the Navy was more important than college. My life experience has been enriched in ways one can't capture in a poll or survey. I recommended to both my kids to serve out of High school. Nothing like boot camp to clear the mind and focus the individual.
We have that now for affluent children, and it's called the National Honor Society, and it mostly takes the form of sham service projects that look good on college apps. If we're going to have national service, it should be a low-paid, full-time year of community service before college or work, end of story.
Yes, but at the same time, you do see working class, economically deprived areas of the country (inner cities and rural America) talking about how there's no jobs for their kids and asking for programs like this...so maybe it's one of these rare things where it's both, and we're mostly in agreement.
Communities can declare what they want, and elites can send their out-of-touch children to go fulfill these public works projects. It doesn't have to be the sort of thing where D.C. think tanks tell 'black and brown' communities the kinds of things they need, and sit there collecting piles of funding just thinking about it.
What I've never understood is who pays these young people? Seems like it would mean some sort of tax increase to pay them to do work that otherwise would go undone; or else they would compete with people who want the jobs at full pay.
It'd be incredibly low paid, and your compensation would mostly be in-kind room and board. It'd be a bit like boot camp, as well, like you'd do your work and be back in the dorms at night. You'd only have certain times where you could go 'off-base' for holidays and breaks and such.
There'd be tax increases, but I also think you'd increase the tax base by making all kinds of economically unproductive communities who export need into the kinds of places that can support economic development and investment from the private sector.
It can be related to what you want to study/do, AND it should humble you. If you want to work in healthcare, you should have to go (figuratively) eat shit working in a state psychiatric hospital for a year--they do this kind of thing in Germany! If you want to work in musical theater, you should have to go (literally) mop shit in the bathrooms of a community theater or arts center somewhere in middle America, no matter how beautiful and talented you are. If you want to work in finance, you can tutor kids in math in the working class high school two towns over.
OR you can just serve in the military for a year.
But I'm with you; it's good to serve your country, and you should probably have to put skin in the game. It would've benefitted all of us.
Not sure if that would work. Mass conscription during the world wars and there after didn't reduce class polarisation in UK elections in the mid 20th century.
Nor did soviet conscription make the new leaders of the Russia Federation kind hearted Democrats.
Quite. Also I struggle to think of a country that introduced it in the first place purely to foster social cohesion, and not because of war, or the threat posed by hostile neighbours. Generally speaking, I think it's very hard to engineer social cohesion - the institutions Noah talks about arose organically for other reasons, and any communal harmony they brought was a side-effect.
Well college replaced the military and that hasn't worked out well. Certainly divided us more socially and financially. For a national service to work there would have to be greater change to follow on employment opportunities like not requiring college degrees at entry level.
> there after didn't reduce class polarisation in UK elections in the mid 20th century.
It kinda did, didn’t it? The large vote for Labour post war even after the victory attributed to Churchill and the support for socialist and Keynesian ideas were often universal, particularly Keynes. The Tories went along with it until thatcher.
1. Didn't even veterans in Finland (which had been allied to the Nazis for most of the war) end up overwhelmingly voting for socialist parties in the first postwar elections there?
2. Wasn't it the 1970s stagflation that undermined Keynesianism in Britain to the extent that Callaghan's Labour government was trying to abandon it (thus triggering the Winter of Discontent)?
Then the Tories regained ground in 1950 and took power in 1951.
The UK had one of the most class polarisation in the democratic world thereafter. Tory victories were built on overwhelming support from the middle classes, plus a a slim majority or plurality of the skilled working classes plus a substantial minority of the semi and unskilled working classes. Basically, the middle classes had a far strong class identity than the Tories.
Voting for Labour until it all fell apart didn't _reduce_ polarization, as can be seen by the way British leftists chanted "ding dong the witch is dead" when Thatcher finally died, even though she'd been out of politics for decades by that point.
You are clearly confusing different eras here. I said “until thatcher” - you counter with post thatcher. Of course the left hated Thatcher, until the left changed, and replaced socialism with liberalism. Blair loved her
Britain still had a liberal party throughout this time: the Liberal party of Gladstone and of Lloyd George.
They got c.20% of the vote in 1974 under Jeremy "I totally didn't hire a contact killer" Thorpe. He ran a populist platform that called for industrial democracy, devolution, electoral reform, the redistribution of wealth, and opposition to further nationalisation.
Thatcher often claimed to be an inheritor of Gladstone, but Gladstone's own party ended up allying with Labour defects, and whatever sympathies some members had with her were dashed by the late 1980s (with former Liberal leader and fan Jo Grimond denouncing her government as fascist).
Blair was no liberal, but a third way social democrat (e.g the SPD's Schroder), found himself in conflict with the Liberal Democrats (the successors to the Liberal party), over social policy, taxation, foreign policy, and privacy rights.
Ya I love this idea, I'd love to see 2 years of public service after high school. Send them to different parts of the country, interacting, and seeing how we are united and not that different from each other.
It would be extra awesome if democracies would offer an optional 1 to 2 year program to send people to each other's countries to build bonds.
So...spend a lot of taxpayer money on projects which will almost certainly be left-coded and/or approved by left-leaning politicians? This is exactly the disconnect that Noah is talking about in the first place.
Wealthy whites would never support this. Remember they threw rocks at school buses during forced integration. The military is willing to go a lot harder to push integration than most people today could tolerate, but it's all volunteer.
I think we need to train kids how to work, how to be dependable and organized. Our young don’t work as much anymore (who needs kids when illegal aliens are available and more reliable?) and have unrealistic expectations.
I’d like to see lots of internships, co-ops, work-study, apprenticeships sponsored by US companies for American citizens (teens, high school graduates). Also would like to see US companies sponsor manufacturing and tech oriented programs at state universities ( why are we hiring Indian project analysts on H-1bs when we can train our own citizens?).
Of course, the union donors backing Dems oppose this.
I also like the idea of mandatory military training for 5 months after high school (June til Thanksgiving). Basic training and fitness (would have to tier it for the disabled or the overweight) and then some exposure to practical skills. No exemptions- make Freshman year of college start in January for those going the academic route.
Would be very expensive, though, and over time the Dems would ensure it evolves from discipline and work to a sort of woke PlaySkool. So probably untenable .
It is not that university and college professors are disconnected from American society. It is that they have disdain for American society and have tried to fix it with racially and culturally divisive policies. They have even tried to change the language, like the recent attempt to change the word mother to birthing person.
They strictly enforced speech and thought, punishing anyone who doesn’t adhere to the rules of intersectionality. Colleges and Universities have been downright hostile to America. The contempt for those men who gave us our nation and constitution is well known.
These are the people who obviously “hate” America. It is where anti-semitism thrives and assaults on free speech are encouraged.
Their education in the humanities is crap, as far as I am concerned. They have been subject to propaganda and reprogramming. You can see employers' difficulty figuring out how to operate their businesses. I hear about it all the time. Yes, our young are different than prior generations. They are privileged and have no idea what work had to happen to give them this economy of abundance.
Why in the world would you program children to have contempt for America and its institutions for some political goal is incomprehensible. It is not a way to build a cohesive society.
Finally, crediting Biden for lowering inflation is factually wrong. Our deficits are, in fact, stimulative. At almost 2 Trillion dollars, how could they not be? It is the job of the Federal Reserve to manage inflation. The President's fiscal policy was working against the monetary policy that was designed to lower inflation.
Your cabbie was telling you something, but you were not listening. I am actually trying to help you understand. The cabbie was using the word inflation to describe the high prices of things.
The cost of food, rent, car insurance etc. He was describing the state of his daily expenses.
Telling the American public that inflation is down does not resonate because they are dealing with huge increases in the costs of goods and services. This is what Biden, Harris and you don’t understand. Car insurance costs well over 30%. If you are a cabbie, did your TLC give your cabbie a rate hike? Likely not. Labor costs at dealerships are now upwards of $150 an hour, probably just a bit lower at local privately owned garages. Either way, bringing your car in for service can be a soul-crushing experience.
The other component of higher costs is supply chain issues. I hope you don’t believe that there is a magic wand in the WH that solves those issues. The President has nothing to do with those problems.
Inflation translates to the cost of goods that people are complaining about. The inflation rate coming down doesn’t solve the sticker shock Americans have in their daily lives.
Do you think the disdain flows any less the other way? The wealthy Trump-voting car dealership owner who sets those $150/hr rates has just as much disdain for the "childless cat lady" driving in in the Subaru as you describe here.
And the Democratic party is much more vocally pro-America than the Republican party at the moment. Trump's constantly harping about how awful America is - heck, MAGA implies America isn't great right now.
And charging "anti-semitism" is exactly the same as the leftist charges of "racism" you decry here. They're wrong and you're wrong.
Yeah, this is what I don’t get, my rural cousins are allowed to talk all day long about how much they fucking hate city slickers, but if we say the reason we left the sticks is because they’re bunch of morons we’re the bad guys. I understand why I wouldn’t say that if I were running for office back in flyover country, but just let me read the New Yorker in peace.
I think it's worse from their side. I'd guess part of what your cousins like about Trump is that he's a thumb in the eye of us city slickers. The love of "liberal tears" or whatever.
This does not flow the other way. I don't know anyone who voted for Harris because they *want* to piss off rural Nebraskans or whatever, and Dems policies (which we support) are much more aimed at helping those rural Nebraskans than vice versa. Dems are constantly worrying about how to persuade (and help) the other side; I can't imagine Trump talking about how to learn more about, respect the needs of, and actually help people like me.
"I think it's worse from their side. I'd guess part of what your cousins like about Trump is that he's a thumb in the eye of us city slickers. The love of "liberal tears" or whatever."
Fair observation. I agree.
"Dems are constantly worrying about how to persuade (and help) the other side"
Why would “anyone who voted for Harris because they *want* to piss off rural Nebraskans or whatever anyone who voted for Harris because they *want* to piss off rural Nebraskans or whatever” be so inclined? It would be so déclassé to react to the opinions of (pick your pejoratives).
Also another issue is that liberals seem to have significantly more *institutions* that disdain America, whereas with conservatives it’s generally the people.
The college campuses and their pro-palestine protests are indirect surrogates for the institutions
The media talks more about what happens on the Campus of NYU then they do for every community college & non flagship public school combined. That is the problem, Noah equates Stanford & Michigan to every college in America.
Ok, not sure what to do about your whataboutism screed. I was talking about College and University Professors. The construct of the Noah series is on “Why Harris (or Democrats) lost”. Not on who has disdain for Democrats.
So, having worked with and around car dealers and dealerships, I can tell you your characterization of them is wrong. Not that they might have voted for Trump. I am sure many did.
Many employees are minorities, and car dealers care about money, and they will sell cars to anybody. Subaru dealers happen to love childless cat ladies, dog lovers, gay Americans...the elderly, environmentalists.....Outdoorsmen and nature lovers.
They might have disdain for people like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Neither has ever had a job in the private sector. Neither knows anything about a small business owner having to make payroll or hit a sales number. Yet, they believe they know how business should work? Nonsense.
My wife, among a great many pundits, has disdain and contempt for the people who voted for Trump. They believe them to either be ignorant or ill-moral. In discussion with her, when I suggest many voted their pocketbook. Based on the old Reagan question, "are you better off now or four years ago.” They voted for their pocketbook, to which my wife decried they voted for money...Yes, honey, they did.
Now I don’t like Trump economic plan as I currently understand it. I think many will feel disappointed. Trump cannot lower prices. We are already pumping a bunch of oil.
I digress. So, I would have been with you criticizing my post had is countered with facts why I am wrong. You choose to write and say, Ya but...and point out that many who voted for Trump has disdain for many on the Left....Yes, that is true....but hardly even worth a post.
Fine, it's a Ford dealership then, not the point. And your post is much more of a screed than mine - mine is a response. That's how internet comments work.
It's absolutely worth pointing out - when there seems to be a huge discourse on both the center left and right that there's some kind of problem with disdain on the left for the right - that this is not at all a one-way phenomenon.
The entire right wing media ecosystem is build around disdain (and often hatred) for urban cosmopolitans - this doesn't seem to have cost them many elections.
"Subaru dealers happen to love childless cat ladies, dog lovers, gay Americans...the elderly, environmentalists.....Outdoorsmen and nature lovers."
We bought a new (2019) a few weeks after I turned 57 - my wife was 59 t the time. Since we do not meet any of other of the other categories (maybe "nature lover"? who doesn't like nature?), I suppose 57-59 must be "the elderly". Tough pill, thanks pal. I was just looking for something that handled well in winter driving conditions.
So you not only hate these people (as if you needed a reason) but you hate them because you think some of them are haters. And anti-semitism isn’t an issue. Got it. Nice to see there are still party loyalists out there. Be strong
Yeah this is a good point--the disdain. Many times I've pointed out that working class people, or even (maybe especially even?) black working class people, generally disagree with my progressive, college educated friends, only to be told the reason for the disagreement stems from class/race betrayal, internalised racism, etc...but increasingly they bypass their usual patronising and just tell me that, to some degree or another, America and its capitalism are fundamentally an evil, fascist, oppressive, heteropatriarchal, white-supremacist, neocolonial empire which must be dismantled through intersectional, isolationist, genderless anarcho-ecosocialist revolution.
I say to some degree or another because some literally believe this, while some, like my boomer Clinton Democrat parents, have been parroting some suprising stuff lately from their NPR, NYT, MSNBC media diet despite maintaining a deep resistance to socialism.
The weird lefties, downwardly mobile PMC, and tankies and gender absolutists have been on about the extreme versions of this for a decade, but normie PMC dems are coming around to it with ideas like white supremacy culture, Chomsky and America bad, the 1619 project, Hassan Piker, Bernie in 2015-2016, COVID hawkism, DEI stuff, and all sorts of other pseudo-historical, pseudo-intellectual far left nonsense entering the mainstream.
The one fundamental issue is the lack of recognition of how far America has come. They are talking as if if was 1964 rather than 2024.
Another problem with groups is they become an entity. What would a civil rights activist do if they acknowledged that the only barrier to joining the mainstream economy is being properly trained or educated?
People who are involved want to preserve their lifestyle and profession. In other words, it is a grift of sorts. They don’t know what to do unless they are screaming injustice. Think of them as blacksmiths in 1912 trying to hold on to their job....I’m am 100% sure, that some blacksmith said to someone who bought a car, how are you going to get to the doctor or dentist when your car breaks. You’ll need a backup, a horse.
Great first point, and sometimes they're literally talking about it like it's still 1864, when it comes to some of the CRT stuff. They believe America has not changed its racist institutions but just shifted them slightly to make them more socially acceptible.
To your second point, absolutely. I'd never thought about that before, and it strikes me as true.
To your third point, oh, 100%. They'd lose their livelihoods and status.
I agree with almost all of this but I have to defend Bernie Sanders. He's not woke. I don't agree with his politics, but he's a reasonable person who isn't part of the self-hating loser left.
The word "inflation" should be retired by economists and politicians. That concept needs a new technical name; I propose CPRC, current prices rate of change. This is because the average person uses "inflation" to mean current prices relative to prices over the past 5 years or so (and that lookback period is MUCH longer than most economist believe), not current prices rate of change.
Let me put a pin in your comment. It was more than in the last decade when this was a real number. It may still be. The average age of used car on the road was 11 years.
Imagine the cost of a used car in in 2013 vs today.
And prices, also yes--the rent (and the groceries, the bills, the childcare, the credit card payments, gas prices, basic necessities, and so on) is too damn high.
Do you actually know what a professor makes? Doesn't seem like it. And do you know what percentage of college students are at state schools and community colleges? Do you really think most people who go to college are going to Yale?
You are making all sorts of grand pronouncements that aren't connected to the reality of going to college. And if you really think students can get brainwashed by their college professors, you really have a dim view of the intelligence and independence of a 20 something.
Not to mention that woke professor probably gives a shit about his job, so even if he is WOKE, at least he is engaged and challenges students. Versus an adjunct at a community college that knows he won't be brought back next semester.
I had kids who went to college; I went to college. The number I gave you was E Warren's salary at Harvard. Our closest friends kid went to Brown.
My kids both went to state school in New Jersey. They complained about the stifling of speech. They were nervous in some classes to say anything, so they said nothing. After watching elite colleges burst into spasms of anti-semitism, after watching the same reaction to George Floyd and that professor who was caught after asking for some “muscle over hear” to throw a school journalist out...I am pretty sure my view of colleges and universities is more in line with most Americans' views of colleges and universities. Shaping minds is a phrase that colleges and universities have used for decades....My guess is that most Americans are disgusted by the shaping that modern education is going through.
And guess what - the salaries at state schools aren't what Warren makes at Harvard. And guess what as well, go to a state school in lots of red states as a "liberal" and see how much you hold your speech back. Heck, that was true when I was a kid in Texas and still is.
Your "view" of colleges may be in line with what Americans have been told about "colleges" - but not so in line with what actually happens for most students.
Nuff said - nothing I can tell you will convince you otherwise - I do have a lot of gripes about colleges and what they teach, but it isn't about "shaping" - do you really think college students are really that dumb and easily manipulated? In this day and age of social media? Do you really think their views are so driven by some professor (that they probably don't care about) vs influencers on social media? Not in the world my college age son lives in. Ask a college student (even your own) about whether they are easily "shaped" by a professor? (even one they agree with).
Prices are not the same as inflation. I get that folks are using the word inflation to mean prices, which still hurt, especially in housing costs. But at some point psychologically, we reach a point of price acceptance and don’t expect things to cost the same as they did a decade ago.
Yes the Federal Reserve manages inflation and they were way too slow to respond to it. Most folks had money saved up during the pandemic and started spending, driving up prices due to limited supply. It happened (inflation) in most developed countries. And though other factors were involved beyond the control of the heads of states, leaders, one by one, are being voted out.
I don't mean this stuff no longer exists, I just mean the Democrats won while it was at its peak, which I think casts doubt that it is their primary problem now, as the above reply suggests.
Each election is different. Trump's 2016 victory is different than his 2024 victory.
Times change, people change. I still believe that Inflation (prices) and Biden allowing hordes of illegals crossing the rivers and the busing in to cities across America with the problems they bring were two major reasons Trump won.
Separately, Kamala had an issue. That Trans Ad showing her saying she would give illegal immigrants in prison sex changes at taxpayer expense just reminded the voter she is a far-left SF liberal. The woke crap that the far left of the Democrat Party spouts freaks most people out. I don’t think you reading history right. Obama was not extreme, no matter what GOP politicians said. He didn’t force colleges to allow men to compete with women.
Your history is a bit muddled, possibly. GW Bush won twice, Obama won twice, Trump won, then lost to Biden, who was so unpopular that Trump won again. Joe Biden didn’t run as the Progressive that he governed as. He ran as a moderate caretaker. A transition from Trump.
I wonder how long it will take for surveys to show that inflation is lower/has been tamed and that the overall economy is doing well once Trump becomes President? I figure one month. I don’t disagree with the explanations here, but lower income people also had higher real wage increases the past four years. Misinformation/disinformation is real and a huge part of this.
This is true, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Trump's economic policies, if implemented, are guaranteed to result in ruin. No amount of misinformation will paper over 400% tarriff induced price spikes.
I agree with that. Overall, I feel like Harris played a bad hand pretty well, but I wish she had been more fluid in talking about the economy and the likely impact of her economic agenda vs. Trump’s agenda. It probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome but would have been good to see.
We will see what happens with Trump’s agenda. He wears his policy commitments lightly. On the economy, true populist working class hero that he is, he cares about the stock market more than anything else. Between that and the pressure from slightly saner voices in his circle, I suspect he will not go full bore with massive tariffs, deportation of all undocumented people, extraordinary pressure on Fed chair to resign (though Powell at this point seems intent/resolute on staying, regardless what Trump would like to see.) And if AI/other factors continue to improve productivity, the economy may keep rolling along fairly well, even with some bad policy.
I worry more about Trump’s impact on global affairs/foreign policy since there are fewer shackles/inhibitors there (and the stakes potentially very high.)
And there will be the retribution/grifting, both foreign and domestic, making people less likely to get in his way this time.
In the alternate reality where Biden pressures the Fed to raise interest rates earlier, cuts spending, thereby causing a recession and higher unemployment, and cracks down on the border as soon as he got into office, and knocks off whatever woke stuff his admin might have been doing… Does Kamala win?
I doubt it. The messaging to the non-educated professional class would be different, but instead of inflation it would be about Biden causing a recession and unemployment, which still hit the non-educated professional class harder; they would still say the Biden admin was soft on the border and crime, despite the evidence. They would still say that the Biden admin was too woke. And the non-educated professional class is still going to believe all of it.
This 100%. I completely agree with Noah’s summary and the the many subsequent comments, but here’s a question.
Is one aspect of this argument simply that being educated allows one to process information more effectively? And there is a massive media machine that is dedicated to spewing disinformation on a constant basis which is very difficult to critically appraise if you don’t have those tools to fall back on?
I feel like the only way to win is to have a better propaganda machine than your opponent, or if your opponent reeeeally screws up, like Bush and the wars in the Middle East. Which is just a bummer. What’s the point of even trying to implement good policy? No one is going to know or remember when it comes time to vote.
Controlling the Narrative is mostly what elections are about. Remember that folks on this blog, etc. are probably way off the norm in terms of processing information, aggregating information, and interest in all this. To most people, this is simply irrelevant.
But Narrative, Perception and various kinds of media do matter (a LOT). We knew this way back in the 60s with various books on how "selling" (with lots borrowed from the marketing/ad folks) had come to dominate the policy issues.
We all need to stop belittling the noncollege educated as some sub human group.
Maybe they voted for Trump with their eyes completely open?
like how did highly successful non college educated vote? The business owners, the people who worked their way up through the ranks with hard work, etc. I bet they voted for Trump as well and that shows this isn't an education thing. Its a class thing.
Sorry, Noah, "out of touch with America" is a REALLY bad way to say it. Aside from the fact that 43% of America (let alone the 48% who voted for Harris) is hardly insignificant, and aside from the fact that the claim that "liberal elitists" aren't Real Americans has been a right-wing trope for decades, talking about any group of Americans like they're not really part of the country is not something we should reinforce, especially as a time like this.
I think you raise a good point. A better way to say it would be out of touch with the rest of America. In either case, the core problem is that it seems the Democrats really don't understand how to appeal to the people who have lost trust in them and in most national institutions.
But I think there’s still a question - are the white collar professionals any more out of touch than the small business owners, or the rural working class, or whatever other group you pick? It’s good for us to learn the ways in which we are out of touch. But part of that has to involve learning the distinctive ways everyone else is out of touch as well.
Yes, they are just as much out of touch as we are. We're all in bubbles that feed us what we want to hear, for the most part. However, given that they just won, I doubt those other groups have much impetus to try and learn what makes any of us tick (even though it would be in their interest to do so, if only to allow them to take actions and craft messages that will enable them to continue to win).
The only way I see out of these bubbles is to start talking to each other again, and I don't mean through media. I mean to form friendships or institutional relationships again.
This was my reaction, too. I could live with, “out of touch with the REST of America.” It’s just as true that the UNeducated class is out of touch with reality.
It’s probably true that some people know that Trump and the right wing media lies about so many things and votes for them anyway, but one big problem that must be solved is how to break through the misinformation wall to get at least some voters to make a better informed choice. If we don’t solve the three problems Noah identified, this won’t be enough, but it’s probably also true that even if we do reorient the actions, it won’t help if the message doesn’t get through.
The argument isn't to believe false things The argument is to re-examine the facts from a different perspective.
Also. To maybe acknowledge, as Noah pointed out, that the progressive movement believes plenty of falsehoods too. "Sex is only socially constructed." "All students' performance can rise to the college level if only we would put in enough money / get the right teaching methods." "There has been little progress on racism in the past 70 years." "Hyperfocusing on identity is an effective way to reduce racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia."
Okay some of the falshoods you mentioned that the progressive movement believes are out of context or simply being misrepresented. I think everyone wants a lot of simple answers but the answers are way more varied and nuanced.
> "Sex is only a social construct"
You are mixing up sex and gender. Progressives tend to say sex is fixed and it is gender that is a construct. Again it was something that started in Academia and became more mainstream in conversation. Just because you don't think gender is a social construct or can be viewed through a social lens doesn't mean it can't be.
> "All students performance can rise to the college level if only we put in enough money / get the right teaching methods"
I think the goal of most high schools and Western societies to push everyone to get a 4 year degree isn't reasonable isn't possible, however continued education, trade schools, internships, work programs etc should be on the table. It's also clear that smaller classroom sizes are better and a lot of kids learn differently. However for what we do spend on education you'd expect mostly better outcomes all things being equal. Both things can be true.
> "There has been little progress on racial progress over the last 70 years."
Who is saying this? I don't see any leading members of the Democratic party saying this or pushing this, I vote Democrat like 85% of the time and have never thought this. I think people mix up the loudest voices of the social justice warriors online with actual Democratic policies because that makes it easier for them to frame the discussion and our social media algorithm keeps reinforcing that believe. Every metric shows there has been a lot of positive progress on the racism front.
> "Hyperfocusing on identity is an effective way to reduce racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia"
I may be wrong but I think what you are trying to say is that too much power around messaging, funding and general public policy stances have probably been given to special interest groups and people who want to specifically address inequity or inequality affecting the groups affected by the above and in turn it is turning off a major part of the electorate. In my experience a lot of groups are more socially conservative privately than they may appear in public, or at least they don't want to be reminded of how they might have privilege when they are struggling like everyone else. That said, you'd be surprised how the social media algorithm shows us stuff to upset us just to keep us engaged on wedge issues like this too.
I get where you're coming from, but this is one case where you are overstating the pushback.
We democrats do a lot of "coalition management." We try to keep our coalition together and not cause anyone to drop out.
Do the vast majority of elected and regular democrats believe that biological sex is real? Yes. Do they believe that much of gendered behavior is ingrained/instinctual and socially 'modulated' rather than constructed out of whole cloth? Yes. Do they want to pick a fight with the loud and passionate people who think that all gendered behavior/roles are socially constructed? Hell no. That attitude has unfortunately made it so the loudest voices on left about gender are the minority of people on the most extreme end and that's what gets filtered to the general public as the Democratic brand.
The race relations issue is another area where there are people who make their bones talking about the problems of current race relations. In left leaning spaces, there is a bias against saying something like, "This problem is actually ok and or moving in the right direction." With 340 million people, there will always be instances of egregious racism and even compelling evidence of systemic racism. A lot of democrats also put this at lower priority than say, healthcare, or, abortion rights, but no democrat wants to be the jackass who publicly says, "Actually, I think race relations are ok and moving in the right direction." This, again, cedes the floor to the more extreme voices. You will get more opprobrium in left spaces for writing an op ed saying that reparations for slavery, while moral, are unworkable, then you will for writing a very implausible pro reparations piece. So while most sitting democrats do not believe that race relations are worse than the 1960's, the "talking about racism" space in the party is dominated by those who think it's the biggest problem and those pushing against that prioritization do so at a handicap.
>Do they believe that much of gendered behavior is ingrained/instinctual and socially 'modulated' rather than constructed out of whole cloth? Yes. Do they want to pick a fight with the loud and passionate people who think that all gendered behavior/roles are socially constructed? Hell no.
That's the thing though. The loud passionate people spent a lot of time punching down on common people who didn't have the aptitude to have an academic understanding of these things. People deserved to be defended from these attacks, not shunned from society for not understanding, even when the facts were on the academics' side. The silence was pretty deafening to the people.
I agree with most of what you’ve written, and apply the same reasoning to republicans. I read multiple sources on the conservative side that condemn the Hannity/Carlson/MTG crowd, though I’ll happily concede that most republican politicians opted winning over confrontation. As did the democrats.
Perhaps you can direct me to progressive sources that condemn Sharpton/AOC/Harris (2019 version). Yglesias and Smith will step out of line on their particular concerns, but I know of no equivalent to Goldberg or French, as examples.
Fair point and well stated. I agree with you. I think too much of this discourse is happening online or behind screens and not with people speaking directly anymore. A lot gets lost when we aren't having face to face conversations or we've built up organizations and people that are monetized to keep us distracted from working together.
I don't know how representative this is but I have definitely seen claims circulated on Tumblr that biological sex is in some way constructed or illusory.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about this because it's hard to come up with a precise definition of sex that gracefully handles all the edge cases. But I think some people get carried away with that and take it as license to throw out the whole concept.
Agreed. Intersex is a real thing. I understand nuance makes people u comfortable but people see things on Tumblr or Twitter from a leftist and thinks that is representative of all Dems or something
I could've sworn in started in 2015 in Academia discussions before becoming more a trans activism thing that was adopted by progressives to support genderaly trans and gender non conforming type folks over the last few years. Thanks for the context
Good point... The left wing hippie to alt right wing pipeline is not talked about nearly enough. It's almost like they are both just reactionary groups that want to see the entire system burn but also not be negatively impacted at all by it
COVID migrated it right. It started more left / hippie, but the right has embraced it as "a(nother) thing that progressive institutions are probably lying to us about."
My memory is that prior to Covid, vaccine resistance was (is?) centered on college educated white elite females. Suggesting that stupid resides with the right/poor on this issue, not with the good left as well, doesn’t compute. Perhaps the automatic attribution of ignorance of objective truth to those with whom you disagree shouldn’t be good, left, or right.
It's not that the left should compromise on the value of objective truth. It's that they already have to such a massive degree that it's laughable to hear them complain about the other side doing it.
Uh huh, was it experts who told you what's "balls out false" by any chance?
The epistemological problems in the Democrat camp are still there, and still deep. Anyone familiar with the data and science knows that the COVID vaccines were neither safe nor effective. Measured effectiveness was being reported at around -300% by the time the last holdout (England) stopped reporting the actual data. This is why so many COVID vaccinated people complain about getting COVID again and again, most famously including Dr Fauci.
In case it needs to be spelled out more clearly, taking a vaccine and then getting the disease repeatedly is NOT what the word "effective" means. It never was.
You know who didn't keep getting it? Unvaccinated people. The Uber driver was correct and Noah was wrong. The underlying immunology of why that happened is well understood within the field, and it was known to be a possible risk factor for deploying vaccines against respiratory diseases long before 2020 came around; they just don't like talking about it. Yet, the Democrats still aren't listening. Nice well aligned people at their local government bureaucracy tell them that all their dashboards say things are going great, and the map is the territory so if Fauci complains on TV about getting his third COVID infection then it just doesn't register. Line goes up and to the right!
Just out of curiosity, how do you think smallpox was eliminated?
On the larger sense, we do influenza vaccines every year. We have never had a 100% effective flu vaccine. From 2009 - 2023, the best effectiveness was 60% and the worst was 19%. In all cases, the vaccine was worth getting.
I am curious about this -300% effectiveness statistic. Is this arguing that having a Covid vaccine made a person 3x more likely to get infected? How did the researchers get around response bias? (Presumably, someone who gets a vaccine would also use home covid tests, while someone who said no to a vaccine may only show up as Covid positive upon death/hospitalization).
4x more likely (0% effectiveness equals multiply the likelihood by one, 100% effectiveness means multiply it by zero, -100% effectiveness means double base likelihood, -200% means triple it, -300% means quadruple it).
The numbers come from UK government official data. Unlike most other countries, they published the actual data, allowing people to see that they were not reporting the real numbers but rather heavily adjusted numbers using a very dubious (wrong) set of controls. Most other countries simply never published the raw data at all, and only published adjusted numbers. Getting data was no problem. There were plenty of places where mass testing was still a requirement during the vaccine period, and where government reporting was mandatory even if you used a home kit. They were also doing regular test panels. You can look at the old UK HSA reports to see what they did with the data to try and remove or explain these numbers, if you like. The short story is they tried to control for many different factors - mostly behavioral - but eventually gave up, stating that they don't know why vaccinated people were so much more likely to get infected.
Now, that's not because nobody knows. We do know why, and so do they (assuming minimal competence at least). They just can't say it officially.
The flu vaccine has never been worth getting. Try and find any vaccine signal in the death counts and you'll find there is none. Flu vaccine rollouts don't reduce the number of people dying. This is true even though flu vaccines are routinely advertised as being highly effective against death, and flu is one of the leading killers of the elderly.
The reason this can occur is displacement: the flu vaccines provide protection against the specific virus they target but simultaneously make you more susceptible to other kinds of flu, and the net result is no improvement. The health authorities know this (there are some good papers and investigations into the problem), but do nothing because they view any admission of ineffectiveness of vaccines as a kind of class treason. Criticizing vaccines would make them "anti vaxxers" and be used by their enemies, so it all gets swept under the carpet. And of course it would mean layoffs at the health agencies if they stopped running these programs. So they take misleading numbers from trials, take out critical context, and then advertise them directly to the elderly.
Displacement happens because respiratory viruses of all kinds are effectively impossible to vaccinate against due to their rapid rate of evolution. Training your immune system against one variant simply makes it misfire when presented with a mutated variant, producing anti-bodies against the vaccinated strain that don't dock correctly against the mutated strain. This is also why the COVID vaccines failed. Although mRNA tech was initially advertised as being so flexible a new vaccine targeting a new variant could be whipped up in weeks, that never actually happened and the vaccines people were being given years later were still targeting the wild-type spike antigen, which had mutated many times by the time delta came around. So the more vaccines people took the more trained their immune system became on the wild-type spike, long since extinct. That harmed the learning mechanisms in the body because evolution is selecting for mutations that reduce antibody docking whilst still matching B-cell memories. The immune system produces memorized antibodies thinking it's doing a good job but they don't work, and it takes a while for the body to notice by which point the infection is out of control and requires deployment of T cells to kill the infected cells. That's a much more damaging and risky response.
If you have genuine curiosity, go to Google Scholar and search for immune fixation or OAS to learn more. The immune system is a fascinating thing.
None of the numbers from the CDC were even close to being informative, as they were produced with the goal of getting people to take the vaccines. That's why they started out by telling you it was 95% effective against disease and then had to keep moving the goalposts as it became clear to the naked eye of even the most stupid people that this couldn't be true (in fact, it was never true). Much harder to gut check those hospital numbers, isn't it?
But see, this is the meta-level problem that should be being discussed now.
COVID is in the past. The election is in the present. What happened this year is similar: the left were repeatedly blindsided by sudden revelations that their understanding of the world was far off reality. Everyone outside the USA knew Biden was senile, it was repeatedly and casually mentioned in the foreign press, yet the moment he got on stage millions of Americans were shocked by his state. This should caused most of them to re-evaluate how they learn about the world, and for some it did, but for too many it didn't.
Then they were told that Harris was a strong contender in a tight race that a surge of women would win, only to be blindsided again by the massive scale of the victory. The knowledge that the polls and media narratives were wrong was out there, which is how that French trader was so confident to bet $40M on the outcome.
And now they're asking "where did these 13 million voters that appeared once, in 2020, disappear to" ... setting themselves up for yet another shock revelation in future. "Did Biden steal 2020" is likely going to end up the same way the lab leak theory or "lockdowns didn't work": attacked for years as a terrible conspiracy theory by evil people, now something that everyone just sort of knows and accepts, right up to presidents and prime ministers.
The institutions you guys are trusting to tell you about the world aren't reliable. The CDC isn't reliable, the pollsters aren't reliable, CNN/ABC/MSNBC aren't reliable, academics aren't reliable. They tell you whatever will make you comply with their wishes, and if you start to sniff out what's really true they tell you that only evil conservatives believe those things. Again and again, the left are falling for the same old tricks.
I agree with your point 100%. People can also be contrarian and will double down on being wrong as well because they don't like to feel like they are on the other end of condescension. If we can't agree on the same facts and reality anymore it's tough to solve problems, let alone govern and plan long term. Either people are saying things in bad faith, or they genuinely believe all of a sudden that Presidents have magic buttons to reduce prices and the Overton window has shifted. I'm not sure...
I think the main reason why this has happened and why it's so hard to solve are one and the same: the proportion of university-educated people in the population has gotten way bigger, not just in the US but across the western world. When 15-20% of people had a degree, as was the case a generation ago, they had to find political allies to get their way. If 30-40% have a degree, they are more capable of acting as an independent voter bloc.
Additionally, outside of college/university towns like Cambridge or Ann Arbor, places where graduates made up most of the population were pretty rare. Now, not only in the US, they are very common. It is very hard to convince people they are out of touch when most of the people in their city, and almost everyone they meet, agrees with them. Interestingly too, there is a pronounced educational voting divide even in countries where the earnings differential between graduates and non-graduates is lower than the US.
I'm also not sure this is, in the long run, such a bad thing for Democrats. They have basically swapped a larger, but lower-propensity, voter coalition with a smaller, but higher-propensity, one. Although you'll lose in higher-turnout contests, I think you want the higher-propensity voters every day of the week. We can already see, for instance, the Democrats outperforming their presidential popular vote in congressional elections, and without someone as galvanising as Trump the GOP could be in more trouble in the future. Anxiety about this seems, to me, to speak more about a desire amongst the left to be popular rather than a desire to win.
Even in places like Ann Arbor, a generation ago when you were past city limits you were almost instantly back in “Real ‘Murica.” I’m from Dexter, a bike ride from UMich campus, and I remember when we were best known for our Buck Pole, local RW nutjob, and getting annoyed at cyclists from Ann Arbor on backroads. Prom was in the gym and most people didn’t go to college; if you did you went to a state school. I knew one girl who went to a Jesuit university out east and that was absolutely exotic.
Today Dexter is a habitat for UMC professionals and their children. It has beautiful amenities, restaurants, gas lamps, and a high with an AP and IB program ranked comfortably in the top 1000 in the country.
It still has its rural charm, but even the horse farms are more dressage than 4H these days.
It’s beautiful, I’m not complaining. My whole family still lives there, and we are planning on relocating with our kids in the near future because it is such a nice place to live.
It’s notable that Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, but that the Democrats in the senate races in those states got approximately the same number of votes as Kamala Harris, and won. The differential between the people who voted Republican for senate and the people who voted Republican for president was more than enough to swing the election. (At least, it is close to that - there is still some counting in Arizona and Pennsylvania that might change that, and there weren’t Senate races in Georgia or North Carolina to compare there.)
Yes, and that suggests the problem was perhaps tactical rather than policy/fundamentals based. The Democrats ran a "stop Trump because he's a danger to democracy"-style campaign that was designed to mobilise its already high-propensity voters. Maybe they should have run a "where's that wall Trump said he'd build"-style campaign to try and dissuade lower-propensity Trump voters.
Maybe, although an awful lot of Trump voters have long since ignored the fact that he didn't actually deliver on much of anything for them (except removing abortion rights if they are strongly of that political belief). Tax cuts didn't help, the wall was an expensive sham, etc...
But all that is forgotten easily - and Narrative wins out... The Democrats have a long tradition of not having a clear and concise message and it shows over and over - lots of good working class actions by Biden and almost no solid consistent sales job about that (long before Harris). Many other examples of Dems wanting to be corporate, working class, professionals, and so many other groups without any clear message (rightly or wrongly, blaming "other" immigrants is a clear message that stuck).
It’s very common. I would like to see comparative data about how common it is in various years. It looks like several hundred thousand people did that in several of the swing states.
Yes, this is the Rosetta Stone understanding all of this. The idea that elites are out of touch with the common people is a tautological statement— that’s what it means to be elite, we *always* looked down on the plebes for not reading the right books or appreciating difficult art—it’s just different now that the elites is a much larger group now.
They occasionally valorise plebes too but that's worse. Which is where I'm worried this Democrat hand-wringing will end up. I'm hardly JD Vance's biggest fan. But one thing I did appreciate about Hillbilly Elegy was how unsentimental he was about the people he was raised by, and grew up around.
Excellence in one’s field yields elite status. Credentialism equals a credential. And being very good at one thing doesn’t qualify one as exceptionally perceptive in another thing.
You say 40% of the population is elite. If only I had attended a college and focused my courses on those whose syllabi read, for the jocks we need to retain to attract alumni bucks, I too would be elite. And thus have attained a grasp of TRUTH that causes me to march in lockstep with my peers in favor of every new and fashionable certainty. Com’on, man.
Remember too that most college graduates (or college attendees) in this country are Not going to Yale, etc. A lot of the overall conversation (not your comment) seems to assume that college is Yale or MIT or Harvard and all those folks go on to make tons of money. Simply not the reality of college education.
As you noted, the educational voting divide exists in countries where there is even a smaller earnings differential. An awful lot of college grads out there are just as "working class" as the non-college educated.
Great post, Noah. My two cent addition would be to stress that the Democrats, media and academia knowingly and intentionally tried to distance themselves from half the country’s values. For a political party, this may be reasonable, as it adapts to its constituents, giving them what they want, even as it decides who is in and who is out of the target market.
Where this is especially perverse though is with the media. For whatever reason, the media allowed itself to be taken over by a narrow tribe of thinkers, even as it alienated over half of the country. This eliminated the mainstream news media as a unifying force, even as it contributed to the demise of its power, and it also generated resentment in those not to the left. The vote isn’t just a message to our leaders, but to our media and other institutions to not abandon them.
"The second reason is pretty obvious: Having less money makes drops in purchasing power harder to bear. If my cost of living went up by 10%, it would be a minor annoyance; to a working-class person that could very well be ruinous.... So while educated professionals like myself were able to put the post-pandemic inflation behind us fairly quickly after it subsided in 2023, regular Americans probably felt a more lingering hurt."
There is also a psychological component that it's very easy for me to understand. Back in the early 2000s, when healthcare costs were really exploding, where I work we'd get our annual merit increases in the fall, and then at the end of the fall, our annual health care share increases. So my salary would increase by 2.3%, and then my healthcare costs would go up and that 2.3% raise would have about 50% of it eaten up by healthcare cost increases. Sure, I was still technically ahead by 1.15%, but that healthcare cost increase *hurt*. It felt like a dagger killing the joy of earning more.
The other more obvious fact I'd point out is that "beating inflation" is only half the battle. Yes, if inflation returns to normal levels, the prices of things do not. We are all still stuck paying more, and that hurt is something we see every time we're at the grocery store, every time we pay the monthly rent.
You’re absolutely right on both counts. When economists say that wages keep up with inflation, what people experience is a year’s worth of higher prices, then an annual pay bump. But that’s still a year’s worth of pain!
And for both immigration and inflation (and possibly crime rates) democrats had good messaging around the velocity of the metrics, but not the distance traveled. Inflation stopped going up? Cool, eggs are still twice as expensive as they were in 2020. You stopped taking low-quality asylum claims? Ok, you’ve already let in 4m extra immigrants, any plans to deal with them?
Remember too that people attribute gains in wages to something they did and inflation or health care costs are viewed as something done to them - Big Psychological difference.
The right loves to say "facts don't care about your feelings". But maybe we should consider that the people who went to college are simply smarter than the people who didn't, and are using that intelligence when choosing whether or not to vote for a fascist.
There's a lot in the rest of the article which softens this, but I just had to say it.
Got it, so you would vote for someone not because they would make the best policies for the nation but just to piss off some random person on the internet?
The democrats are done for for the foreseeable future. As birth rates are an important trend as well. The religious and uneducated have about .2 higher birth rates. The future looks religious and uneducated; as it's an exponential. I believe there are three religions competing for dominance in the US. Christianity, a new right-wing darwinist anti-establishment religion, and the left-wing idealists that you are part of which I would call a religion as well. The religion the idealists are part of could be called the religion of 'progress': "everything is always going to get better forever through human effort, and we can live in utopia peacefully together. We also believe all peoples are equal in making this progress come about". None of this is true of course, but it's perhaps good to believe in.
We should also recognize that the last religion has no future people however as they are all the most urbanized and their birth rates are the lowest.
Because of plunging birth rates overall and immigration from latam, hispanics are going to become a large part of the electorate who are mostly Christian and working class. The counties next to the texan border who are majority hispanic voted overwhelmingly republican this year.
That data just shows exactly how much this has been a sales job - how the party's are portrayed vs reality. As always, Narrative and Perception drive elections and the Dems have been horrible about having a coherent message since at least Clinton.
Liberal humanism has been the fastest growing religion of the last 250 years, by far. Advantages in birth rates for more traditional religions don't even make a dint into that. Every new generation, when growing up, starts to make their own decisions - provided they have basic access to information.
But in the US classical liberal humanism has been hollowed out by the parasite of lazy progressivism. It's not the first time that humanism has created a weird amalgam of superstitions trying to imitate it. Communism also claimed inevitability and scientific foundations and progress for free. I've been to communist countries, I've seen the results. And I've seen a whole generation - continentwide - rejecting those superstitions, when they crumbled under the onslaught of reality.
Sooner or later the pox of misinformation (including left-wing misinformation) will bring us back to the founding question of the early enlightenment: What the hell is actually real? A new generation who grows up believing that everything you read/watch is misinformation is bound to rediscover the basics. Not unlike the great doubters of the 17th/18th century. But for that to happen, progressivism needs to die. The sooner, the better.
Wait! You mean that Haitians aren't eating Americans pets? But both the President-elect and Vice-President-elect insisted quite strongly upon this in numerous public statements.
There may have been misinformation coming from some Left-wing media sources; but their media power is virtually non-existent. FOX News by comparison, is the information source of some 85% of conservatives, and the most popular national news channel: https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/cable-news-ratings-september-2024/
The flood of current media disinformation and misinformation is overwhelmingly pro-Republican and anti-Democrat. And it is getting worse. Let's call a spade a spade.
I think it's a mistake to think that high-birthrate religious folks are likely to "take over" because of births as much as it was a mistake to think that mass immigration would hand the Democrats a permanent majority. There is something about modern life that's driving people away from churches, and being born devout Christian does not appear to resolve that problem.
Calling right wing politics or left wing politics a “religion” like Christianity is a tempting association to make but ultimately is wrong. Memetic movements maybe but there is nothing Divine about them
I guess I use religion as a blanket term for 'believing in falsehoods'. Leftwingers have become as delusional to me as rightwingers and christians.
This whole post of noahpinion is like a memo explaining he's discovering that he was partly entirely deluded about the state of reality. Noah literally writes he's for the first time discovering that there exist human beings that run shops and have a problem with theft and that there are uber drivers that don't have PhD's in economics.
If you went to harvard and are a millionaire, you don't live on planet earth, you live on Mars. And all they have to do is put themselves into the shoes of the less fortunate, but they aren't able to (but pretend to do so, for virtue signalling points, without actually helping them)
I find this set of falsehoods more damaging than any other religion, because people run policy on it. Like 'don't lock up criminals'
I really like Noah, but you are right that this reads like he's suddenly discovered that the poors aren't just an abstract category in a textbook. To give a sympathetic reading, maybe he's trying to give cover to his more sheltered readers.
Buddhism is universally considered a religion. There's nothing Divine in Buddhism, there isn't even a belief in a soul ( that's "anatvam", i.e. no soul, in the original texts).
But religion is definitely more than politics. It needs to deliver identity and meaning in a way that makes it upstream from culture, with culture being upstream from politics.
I feel ya and also agree to an extent however Christians in the US can't even agree on what version of Christianity is the "right one" and they don't even follow their rules half the time. It's like they only do it for the social element / pressure and the moral superiority of it half the time.
The progressive class and their Allies (to adopt the jargon de jour) support trans rights, especially notable are those in competition with girls and young women, they denigrate America, they denigrate religion, especially Judeo-Christian church goers, they trash the military and they both denigrate families or work to establish policies which militate against strong families. In effect they denigrate traditional institutions.
I have elderly friends who live on modest pensions and social security and working class friends who are scraping by. They are deeply affected by inflation. Some are bitter.
I'm not going to address the transphobic part of your comment since most people who lean left can support trans rights but also want an equal playing field for girls. Additionally, denigrate America, you do know that people can love their country and criticize or look for ways for it to be better. I love my country. That doesn't mean that I'm not above saying we should improve infrastructure and healthcare protections.
Regarding denigrating religion... Calling out the hypocrisy of people who are religious and support Trump is not the same as denigrating religion. Most Democrats are still identifying as Christian, and support the right for everyone to worship the way they want. They just don't want it forced on everyone. I feel like you are reaching a bit ish that take.
You mention that they trash the military... What policies have Democrats passed that have trashed the military? They've raised the budget and given raises under every administration run by Democrats. Most of us have service members in our family tree or may have even participated. You are speaking in generalities and talking on feelings but not facts, it seems like you have a vibe but can't really back it up.
You mention how Democrats and Progressives denigrate families or work to establish policies which militate against strong families. Can you please provide an example of some of these policies? The policies that come to mind for me that show Democrats care are supporting access to IVF, the ACA, the price cap on insulin, wanting Medicare for all, the childcare tax credits, infrastructure projects that replaces lead pipes, paid and protected family leave, support of the violence against women act, etc. So again please provide the examples to support your claims...
If you have friends and family who are on social security and Medicare/Medicaid then you do realize that the majority of Republicans including Vance but outside of Trump believe it or not want to cut or see those programs shrunk right? The economic recovery has not been equal and affects people on the lower income side worse obviously but all the other stuff you've said seems all vibes based and standard conservative talking points based around identity or decades long propaganda.
Democrats are not all trans activists. Not all trans activists are Democrats. A lot of self proclaimed trans activists are self proclaimed leftists and supported the uncommitted movement over Gaza. Again conflating social justice warriors on Twitter with the majority of Dem voters and politicians is part of the issues.
What is transphobic to disapprove of a policy that allows person, who as a male was a moderately talented swimmer, to self-declare female and crush all born-female competitors? Do you hold that the born-females have no interests, feelings, and rights?
One of the worst parts of “wokism”, at least for college educated women, was the absolute grip that “woke” women had on social life and discourse for several years.
I live in upper Fairfield County, CT, in a town with a GOP state rep that split right down the middle in the last few presidential elections. We are a relatively conservative town by Southwestern Connecticut standards.
But 4 years ago, if your views did not conform to the Credo on your progressive neighbor’s Lawn Sign of Belief you knew to keep your mouth shut, especially at PTA events or around other women. If you expressed dissent from any Doctrine of the Moment, and you were not still in sufficient mourning for RBG with a digital altar pinned on your Facebook feed, you would be denounced and told to shut up in the most condescending, humiliating way and you and your children would be marginalized.
Things have changed. Yesterday a mom woke-scolded me on Facebook for sharing a Jonathan Chait article and then continued to follow me around to other mom’s feeds to keep scolding until she could extort an apology.
She went through all the greatest hits. She labeled us with the litany of “internalized misogyny” and “choosing the price of gas over basic decency” (remember this started with an article by a liberal from NYMag and I didn’t even vote for Trump) and telling me “your family is safe so you are free to intellectualize politics” (my disabled daughter was just bullied out of the private school this woman sends her own child to).
She then reminded us that “at least I care about people’s basic rights.”
She was finally just told to F off and her posts deleted by another mom.
She got mad at us for deleting her “emotional labor” (yes, she called posting on Facebook “emotional labor.”). But no one gave a sh*t about her “emotional labor.” I have a feeling this was a first for her.
Even white women in Fairfield County think this stuff is ridiculous now.
Guess what, the same thing happens if you are a progressive living in a red city or region (perhaps worse with death threats). And guess what, exactly the same thing happened if you weren't the proper religion when I grew up in Texas.
It's the same old thing -whether from the left, right, Evangelicals, Catholics or whatever. Calling it "woke" by one side but somehow "fine" from another side is just a result of a very effective sales job.
Don't get me wrong - I find it stupid no matter which group is doing it
If you wish to understand why a growing majority hate cosmopolitan elites, look no further than the condescension dripping from Noah...
"America, fundamentally, is an incredibly rich country with a sick society. We have higher consumption by far than people in any other country on the planet, and yet by and large, except for the few people who were lucky enough to receive the blessings of community and health from our one remaining functional institution, we’re a bunch of unhealthy socially isolated drug addicts."
Criticizing the left is fun. Noah's done it a lot.
Criticizing the right poses a dilemma - how to make true statement like the one above without getting called out by the right, whose media is 24/7 disdain for urban cosmopolitans, who still somehow whine constantly about being the targets of (a more subtle) disdain going the other way.
Not sure why you think this is condescending — if anything, it reads as a populist take. As a critique, it pales against the dark vision Trump placed at the center of his campaign.
The construct that “cosmopolitan elites” are out-of-touch leftists is one of the great long cons in American political history dating. The establishment has been headed by conservative white males since the founding of the Republic. They dominate the ranks of management in businesses large and small, hold most of the key positions in most state governments, head most religious denominations, own far more wealth and property than any other group, run our sports and media operations and have funded the Republican party for generations.
You only need to look at the wealthy and corporate interests — who benefited most from the Trump tax cuts in 2017 — to see who are the real elites. They’ll also profit most from the second Trump term.
The same phrase struck me. If colleges are “our one remaining functional institution,” we’re in big trouble. Language police, intimidation of those holding unsanctified opinions, job applications and statements of loyalty to the current and ever evolving set of beliefs deemed acceptable, creation of “affinity” housing (e.g. segregated by race or religion), and much, much more.
This bastion providing “the blessings of community and health” is there for you provided you are careful about what you disagree with, bite your tongue, or continue there as a social pariah. As fundamentally an old-fashioned liberal, I think this is abhorrent.
The phrase “we’re a bunch of unhealthy socially isolated drug addicts."
Is hyperbole but there’s no left or right to it. I could easily imagine a preacher making the same point. Or a conservative bemoaning the drop in religious attendance.
I find it distressing that information as become so monetized. If you are going to be well read your going to have to pay for it. That of course means you spend what little money you have on stuff you want to read that confirms your bias. We have just let the market balkanize us then market and advertise to our segment. Not encouraging for the future.
Could that be the fundamental problem: that right-wing oligarchs were able to spend trillions of dollars over decades to build up a propaganda media ecosystem, while the liberal enemies of oligarchy don't have comparable financial resources?
I'm also reminded of one of the main reasons why centralized social media platforms exist in the first place: they provide a place where content creators can upload very large data files (such as videos) where potentially thousands or millions of viewers could view them for free at a time in a way that was timely for them.
If such files had been uploaded to one of Usenet's alt.binaries.* groups then they would only be accessible to people who were willing to pay to use a Usenet server that offered those high-bandwidth groups, while uploading them to a personal web server would either cost the uploader a large amount for high-bandwidth hosting, or give the viewers an unacceptably slow loading time.
Centralized social media platforms pay for this very high-bandwidth hosting by selling their users' eyeballs to advertisers, which sets in motion the downward spiral of surveillance, enshittification and ragebait.
Focus group of one here. As a wealthy person, inflation was less of an issue for me because I had so many assets that shot up in value. Wealth effect totally overshadowed the inflation impact, especially when my biggest expense was a mortgage I locked in around 3%.
Not trying to brag, just giving the mechanics of why inflation maybe wasn't so stressful for richer Americans. Who actually knew the prices of eggs and milk anyhow? Groceries aren't that big a share of my monthly spending.
How much could a banana possibly be? $10? I don’t really know…
Isn’t the point of this meme though that wealthy people have always been out of touch with the working class. It seems like Noah is trying to explain something new, but the idea that the folks at the country club don’t understand what’s going on down at the coal mine seems like the oldest thing on earth (also genuine lol at the idea that 50 years ago, there were a lot of working class people at Yale to let the patricians know what life in the sticks was like— back then half of the incoming class was from Andover and Exeter).
One possible difference is the PMC doesn’t think it’s rich. They aren’t really aware of the economic gap.
There's nothing more American than the upper class pretending to be middle class.
Yeah but 50 years ago very few people went to college, and many of the ones who did voted Republican. Back then Republicans knew they were out of touch—by the end of 1974 Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for twenty years straight and had just won another term. Republicans mostly focused on winning the White House, but the education divide didn't cleave society in half like it does nowadays.
That's why conservatives during that age, particularly the country club Republican type, developed an attitude that fewer people ought to be voting. In retrospect, I can somewhat sympathize, although back then that would have meant *very few* black people voting.
The point is not that wealthy people have always been out of touch, it's that the Democrats used to be the party of working people, the party that understood their problems, and are now the party of out-of-touch wealthy people.
Well, or perceived that way due to media and perception. The actual Democrats are very spread out across the wealth spectrum - and there are plenty of wealthy Republicans as well. The "country club" didn't all of a sudden become a bunch of Democrats.
But definitely agree that the Democrats did some dumb things and didn't emphasize helping wage earners and rather stupidly allowed themselves to be painted this way
The place where the well-off are still pretty miffed is people with decent money (not really rich) who are looking to buy a home but don't have one to sell. I was looking in late 2021 or so, saving my money up, and decided to wait a bit longer to have more savings, and then when I went back in 2023 home prices in my area shot up by 30% over less than 2 years, a 2 years in which interest rates more than doubled. Suddenly I was in a much less good position to buy a home than I'd been two years before, after adding to my pad of money for a downpayment.
Any home a young person was looking at in 2020 now costs more than double in terms of monthly nut.
Cars have had a similar issue (no more zero pct financing), including used cars, which impacts ordinary people.
Meanwhile we pay $7500 to rich people to buy EVs
There’s an income limit for EV tax credit. Rich people are not eligible anymore.
That's sort of irrelevant when the dealership gets the tax credit and puts it towards the financing deal for the rich person that can get paid off nearly immediately.
I’m not sure that’s true unless they’re leasing.
Fair, but I believe there's a decent correlation between age and income, so I bet many of those wealthy people did have a home to sell. And hey, the chart does have SOME of those high income folks claiming significant impact from inflation.
What you say about age is true, but divorce and later starts to building a family drive those decisions later.
Am in the same boat in terms of asset appreciation. But my wife has knee injuries, and so I do the shopping. And the rise in the cost of groceries has been simply astounding.
If I was still dependent upon wages for survival, I'd be mad as hell and willing to give Trump a shot. Despite the fact that all his policy proposals will likely further ignite inflation, and result me having to learn Mandarin/Russian within a decade.
Noah finally gets it: "So although Biden did beat inflation, crime did go down, and Biden did eventually crack down on the border, I can understand why the traumas that working-class Americans had to suffer in 2020-2022 couldn’t be expunged just by some encouraging charts."
AP says that concerns about the economy were number one for voters in 2024. Biden made light of inflation pain for years and his ratings as a president did nothing but tank. Few people realize that 9 MILLION who voted for Biden in 2020 simply stayed home in 2024. This is the obvious reason why Harris lost. For more, see:
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/vanished-into-thin-air-where-did
Hi Kathleen, I actually just left a comment on your blog. The vote count is ongoing and I think you'll find that in the end the reduction in vote totals will be small. Nate Silver's estimate suggests Harris will be about 5m behind Biden 2020 and Trump's total will have increased by ~4m. (The pandemic election was a huge outlier and I don't think we understand much about the underlying dynamics of 2020 turnout. . . . Well, I don't, anyway.)
Yes, large swaths of California remain uncounted, due to the acceptance of mail-in ballots up until a week after election day (and no urgency to get them counted).
Absolutely, there was a tweet going around to the effect of “I can’t believe Americans will vote for fascism because the price of eggs went up”. Well only one of those things (price of eggs) is going to affect your day to day life if you’re poor! The ability to worry about the long term health of the American project has always been an elite luxury.
That’s very true. Those who have enough disposable income rarely think about groceries or gas (assuming that there’s anyone left who doesn’t drive an EV) We talk about how ordering from DoorDash or Uber Eats has become much more expensive than before. That’s for a different reason though.
I do not drive an EV. I also do not think about groceries or gas. If I did drive an EV, wouldn't I be thinking about the cost of electricity?
It’s different for two reasons
1. It’s so much cheaper to fuel an EV than a gas car that increases don’t mean much. If I had a 20% increase in my energy cost, it would cost me like $3 more to fill my “tank”. If gas prices went up 20%, I’d feel it more.
2. Your fueling costs of an EV are obfuscated as it’s just embedded in your overall electricity bill. Contrast to gas when a cruel LED screen is showing you exactly how much money is being extracted from your wallet in real time.
I couldn’t even tell you how much it costs to fuel my EV in a year, it’s too small and too much effort to track. I can tell you exactly how much we’ve spent on gas for our X5 and I can’t wait to replace it with another EV.
#2 is an important point. It’s hard to keep track of EV charging costs because it’s not significant enough to make a dent in your overall bill. You can do a rough estimate using the kwh of the battery, annual mileage and electricity cost per kwh. So many people charge at work that even that is not a good estimate.
"So many people charge at work that even that is not a good estimate."
Using "free" electricity is obviously helpful. Not too many employers provide free gasoline.
We will probably get an EV for our next vehicle. I have rented them, and I like driving them. Last time I checked, buying one "slightly" used was a pretty good deal compared with new, but I tend to only buy new vehicles (and I don't buy them that often). When we visit our former (and long time) neighborhood in California (Saratoga) there seem to be more Teslas on the road than any other vehicles. Our former neighbors have his and her Teslas, and they love 'em.
I'm a numbers nerd (probably why I like Noahpinion) and I know my mileage cost, on average, has been 7.7 cents per mile for my Tesla.
It's fairly predictable, since electricity rates are regulated and my marginal home rate (21.87 cents per kWh) only changes once a year, sometimes up, sometimes down (2023 was 24.67 cents per kWh, so 2024 is DOWN by 11%).
It is higher when I have to use superchargers on a road trip, but I see no wild fluctuations like you see with gas prices. 3 cheers for a regulated electricity market!
EVs are cheaper to charge because electricity is cheaper. Also, a lot of offices have free charging in the parking lot as a perk. You can also get solar panels to inflation proof electricity costs to some extent.
I live in California. I bought into the whole EV thing being cheaper per mile plus the tax credit (plus pre-owned EV rebate). My EV charging costs gave me sticker shock. Instead of paying a gas station I'm paying PGE the same or more in electricity costs, even after the whole EV plan they have, and my insurance is through the roof.
I do not have hope that the costs will go down, PGE will only raise rates.
I think you may be right. It costs around the same. I pay less because I have solar and I charge for free at work.
You must not live in California
I do live in California.
I think you underestimate the power of supporting unions. After 40 years of neoliberalism, Joe Biden’s efforts were too little and much too late. But in the long run, either workers get a larger share of national income though higher wages, we institute a UBI (unlikely in this environment), or the discontent of wage earners will continue to fester. For now, Trump is their champion, but I don’t see Trump supporters like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Tim Mellon, or Tucker Carlson becoming big supporters of unions and workers’ rights anytime soon. I don’t see blue collar support for Republicans becoming intrenched, especially after Trump leaves the scene. Instead, I can imagine unstable politics until one party both gives voice to the needs of workers and does something to give them a larger share of national income.
If the nominal value of your assets rises with inflation, then it's not actually rising in real terms.
On the contrary, it's people in debt who benefit from unexpected inflation, because their debt was denominated in a currency whose value has gone down. (You mention your mortgage, which is an example of this: you literally owe less due to inflation.)
But it wouldn't surprise me if educated professionals are more likely to have debts than working-class folks; aside from mortgages, I'd also mention student loans. Working-class folks are probably more likely to have medical debt, but if they don't expect to ever be able to pay off the debt anyway, then they may not perceive a decrease in its real value as meaningful or relevant? Likewise high-interest loans, like credit card debt and payday loans. (The latter are on too short a timescale for inflation to help, anyway.)
The S&P 500 has nearly doubled in 5 years. Tech stocks have more than doubled in 5 years (Nasdaq 100, Amazon, etc). If you want to get really silly, Bitcoin is like 7x what it was pre-pandemic. So I think the asset appreciation has actually exceeded inflation.
Plus, psychologically, it just feels good to see those numbers go up. Weekly/monthly spending is just boring cash flow that's not as noticeable. So even if I'm not 100% sure I am ahead with the inflation, I am definitely not stressed about it. (Yet - we'll see if this next round of foolishness changes my mind.)
> So I think the asset appreciation has actually exceeded inflation.
Oh, sorry, I guess I misunderstood your post — I thought you were saying that the inflation was fine for you because it inflated your assets.
> Plus, psychologically, it just feels good to see those numbers go up.
Yeah, the psychology of inflation is going to be a bit different from the economic theory of it.
And for that matter, the individual experience of inflation will be a bit different from the aggregate experience captured in statistics. If prices go up all year, but you get a raise only once a year — or only when you change jobs — then the price increases are harmful even if the wage increase is technically more than enough to cancel them out.
Most wealthy people have a ton of debt for leverage. They are invested in real estate, private equity funds, etc.
We are in the same group. Enough income to not pay attention to prices. I never look at the price of gas or what is charged at the grocery store. What did bring me back to reality was when we started to look at downsizing from this two acre horse property. We had sold our rental in San Jose for an astounding amount. I thought the house price explosion was focused in the Bay Area. NO!!! It has happened even in the Gamma Quadrant where we live.
This and the concurring comments drive me bonkers. I also saw my assets shoot up in value, I also was delighted to see my mortgage turn into "free money" when the risk-free rate dwarfed it, and (wait for it) I am keenly aware of how much eggs and milk cost and extremely irritated when grocery prices increase. Just because the marginal analysis affects me differently does not mean that I am not alarmed when the nominal price of life's necessities increases. C'mon people. Do you really conflate all prices and say gee whiz I guess some things are more important than others? This is bloody obvious and not an insight into the missteps of high-level political strategy.
I am also little impacted by inflation. However, I've kept a spreadsheet of expenses for the last 15 years and over the past five years and groceries have ticked up maybe by 5%. But we are a family of two with kids out of the house. I suspect for families it's much more of an issue.
5 percent?
So, basic economics... Think about the supply of eggs. The supply was constrained by bird flu and was short-term inflexible. All the eggs produced were being sold. The price rose until some marginal buyers reduced their egg consumption - so there was an equilibrium between price and supply.
Some hamfisted intervention that forces prices lower means what? That whoever gets to the grocery store first gets cheaper eggs, and whoever gets there later finds empty shelves? Or do you want the govt to give people ration cards for their egg allocation? That seems extreme.
I'm working today so I'll just pass your argument to Claude for consideration (one shot answer):
----- edit: formatting fixed
This argument has several misconceptions that I'll break down:
1. Comparing gasoline to Big Macs is problematic because they have fundamentally different market structures and input costs. Gasoline is a commodity with prices primarily driven by global supply and demand in a highly liquid market. Food service involves multiple sticky input costs like labor, rent, and various ingredients
2. The argument misunderstands what Econ 101 actually predicts about price behavior. Economic theory doesn't predict that all prices should fluctuate like commodities. It predicts that prices respond to underlying costs and market conditions. Some costs, particularly wages and rent, tend to be "sticky downward" due to contracts, laws, and social factors. This stickiness is well-understood in economics and doesn't indicate gouging.
3. The existence of "sticky prices" that rarely decrease isn't evidence of price gouging. Price gouging refers to temporary excessive price increases during emergencies or supply shocks. Long-term price trends reflect underlying cost structures, inflation, and market conditions. If a business's costs (wages, rent, ingredients, etc.) increase and stay high, prices naturally would too
4. Some moderate inflation is normal in most economies. We should expect nominal prices to generally trend upward over time. The relevant question is whether price increases exceed what's justified by cost increases and normal inflation. Looking at nominal prices across long time periods without accounting for inflation can be misleading
A more accurate framework would be to examine whether specific price increases exceed what can be explained by changes in input costs, market conditions, and general inflation. Evidence of gouging would come from examining profit margins and market power, not just the observation that prices tend to rise over time.
National Service! If someone can explain why there is so little discussion of national service (non military, non mandatory technically but practically mandatory eg tied to high school graduation requirement etc) as a new social glue institution, I would appreciate it.
Parties have talked about doing this elsewhere (e.g., Germany, the UK), and politically it has gone down like a fart in a lift. The draft has been gone for so long in the US that even if you brought national service in tomorrow, a sizeable chunk of the population would have never been conscripted, or faced it as a possibility, and never will. Even in Germany the idea has not gained much traction, and that's despite national service having been ended relatively recently.
To those who have to do it, it will seem less like a rite of passage and more something that their out-of-touch parents are imposing on them. Rather than advancing social cohesion, national service would seriously damage it because one part of the population would have new obligations that their parents never did, for mostly arbitrary reasons.
Places like S Korea still have it, I think (Switzerland definitely does), and not too long ago so did Greece, Italy, France, and much of Europe.
It wasn’t so much that mandatory conscription was an issue, it was an army filled by conscripts that was the issue:
Yes these countries all introduced conscription in the first place for military-related reasons, and the ones who slowly abandoned it or watered it down also did so for military reasons. In France, Emmanuel Macron reintroduced what he called national service. But it’s voluntary, and lasts for four weeks in total.
Was the main reason why a lot of western countries abandoned conscription was because weapons systems were becoming too technically sophisticated for conscripts to learn them properly during their terms of service?
I think it's not so much that conscripts *can't* learn so much as you get better returns from a smaller number of motivated soldiers than a larger number who resent being there. Also, the cost of equipping and supporting a soldier are much higher than they used to be.
You don’t think it could be made cool like where young people get super fit and have a lot of fun too?
sorry for the late comment, but i was surprised not to see it
being compelled to register for the draft when you turn 18 is very much still a thing for all american men, and failure to register is a crime
i remember this being the topic of quite a bit of discussion during "register with selective service" week amongst my high school senior friends, who had grown up in a feminist culture where not a single woman had ever lost a fight to a man in any hollywood movie they had ever seen
it was genuinely shocking to most that women were exempt from this, it seemed like a bizarre anachronism from a past age before we knew women could be just as capable soldiers as men (just look at black widow!), and i saw quite a bit of rightward movement among my peers' political beliefs that week
everyone seemed to have forgotten about it a few weeks later, but the reaction and mood stuck with me, and i'm always surprised it isn't a bigger talking point in the culture war, it seems like a point that could easily be leveraged by either side's narrative for cheap points
either way, for a population that 'never faced the possibility of conscription', they sure made us sign up to be conscripted and threatened those who objected with serious criminal charges
This is a huge factor no one talks about. I think in my life that 20 years spent in the Navy was more important than college. My life experience has been enriched in ways one can't capture in a poll or survey. I recommended to both my kids to serve out of High school. Nothing like boot camp to clear the mind and focus the individual.
We have that now for affluent children, and it's called the National Honor Society, and it mostly takes the form of sham service projects that look good on college apps. If we're going to have national service, it should be a low-paid, full-time year of community service before college or work, end of story.
It can be things like:
- Teacher aids
- Trail building
- Building houses for homless
etc, tons of great ideas out there already
At least 6 months of it must involve physical labor.
Of course national service isn't happening. It's just another top-down elite idea from a dissident faction of elites (us), but elites nevertheless.
Yes, but at the same time, you do see working class, economically deprived areas of the country (inner cities and rural America) talking about how there's no jobs for their kids and asking for programs like this...so maybe it's one of these rare things where it's both, and we're mostly in agreement.
Communities can declare what they want, and elites can send their out-of-touch children to go fulfill these public works projects. It doesn't have to be the sort of thing where D.C. think tanks tell 'black and brown' communities the kinds of things they need, and sit there collecting piles of funding just thinking about it.
What I've never understood is who pays these young people? Seems like it would mean some sort of tax increase to pay them to do work that otherwise would go undone; or else they would compete with people who want the jobs at full pay.
It'd be incredibly low paid, and your compensation would mostly be in-kind room and board. It'd be a bit like boot camp, as well, like you'd do your work and be back in the dorms at night. You'd only have certain times where you could go 'off-base' for holidays and breaks and such.
There'd be tax increases, but I also think you'd increase the tax base by making all kinds of economically unproductive communities who export need into the kinds of places that can support economic development and investment from the private sector.
Yeah!
It can be related to what you want to study/do, AND it should humble you. If you want to work in healthcare, you should have to go (figuratively) eat shit working in a state psychiatric hospital for a year--they do this kind of thing in Germany! If you want to work in musical theater, you should have to go (literally) mop shit in the bathrooms of a community theater or arts center somewhere in middle America, no matter how beautiful and talented you are. If you want to work in finance, you can tutor kids in math in the working class high school two towns over.
OR you can just serve in the military for a year.
But I'm with you; it's good to serve your country, and you should probably have to put skin in the game. It would've benefitted all of us.
Not sure if that would work. Mass conscription during the world wars and there after didn't reduce class polarisation in UK elections in the mid 20th century.
Nor did soviet conscription make the new leaders of the Russia Federation kind hearted Democrats.
Quite. Also I struggle to think of a country that introduced it in the first place purely to foster social cohesion, and not because of war, or the threat posed by hostile neighbours. Generally speaking, I think it's very hard to engineer social cohesion - the institutions Noah talks about arose organically for other reasons, and any communal harmony they brought was a side-effect.
Well college replaced the military and that hasn't worked out well. Certainly divided us more socially and financially. For a national service to work there would have to be greater change to follow on employment opportunities like not requiring college degrees at entry level.
> there after didn't reduce class polarisation in UK elections in the mid 20th century.
It kinda did, didn’t it? The large vote for Labour post war even after the victory attributed to Churchill and the support for socialist and Keynesian ideas were often universal, particularly Keynes. The Tories went along with it until thatcher.
1. Didn't even veterans in Finland (which had been allied to the Nazis for most of the war) end up overwhelmingly voting for socialist parties in the first postwar elections there?
2. Wasn't it the 1970s stagflation that undermined Keynesianism in Britain to the extent that Callaghan's Labour government was trying to abandon it (thus triggering the Winter of Discontent)?
Then the Tories regained ground in 1950 and took power in 1951.
The UK had one of the most class polarisation in the democratic world thereafter. Tory victories were built on overwhelming support from the middle classes, plus a a slim majority or plurality of the skilled working classes plus a substantial minority of the semi and unskilled working classes. Basically, the middle classes had a far strong class identity than the Tories.
*than the working classs
Voting for Labour until it all fell apart didn't _reduce_ polarization, as can be seen by the way British leftists chanted "ding dong the witch is dead" when Thatcher finally died, even though she'd been out of politics for decades by that point.
You are clearly confusing different eras here. I said “until thatcher” - you counter with post thatcher. Of course the left hated Thatcher, until the left changed, and replaced socialism with liberalism. Blair loved her
Britain still had a liberal party throughout this time: the Liberal party of Gladstone and of Lloyd George.
They got c.20% of the vote in 1974 under Jeremy "I totally didn't hire a contact killer" Thorpe. He ran a populist platform that called for industrial democracy, devolution, electoral reform, the redistribution of wealth, and opposition to further nationalisation.
Thatcher often claimed to be an inheritor of Gladstone, but Gladstone's own party ended up allying with Labour defects, and whatever sympathies some members had with her were dashed by the late 1980s (with former Liberal leader and fan Jo Grimond denouncing her government as fascist).
Blair was no liberal, but a third way social democrat (e.g the SPD's Schroder), found himself in conflict with the Liberal Democrats (the successors to the Liberal party), over social policy, taxation, foreign policy, and privacy rights.
Labour changed, temporarily, but the left didn't. Not really. The labour of 2024 owes more to Kinnock than Thatcher intellectually.
Ya I love this idea, I'd love to see 2 years of public service after high school. Send them to different parts of the country, interacting, and seeing how we are united and not that different from each other.
It would be extra awesome if democracies would offer an optional 1 to 2 year program to send people to each other's countries to build bonds.
So...spend a lot of taxpayer money on projects which will almost certainly be left-coded and/or approved by left-leaning politicians? This is exactly the disconnect that Noah is talking about in the first place.
Wealthy whites would never support this. Remember they threw rocks at school buses during forced integration. The military is willing to go a lot harder to push integration than most people today could tolerate, but it's all volunteer.
I think we need to train kids how to work, how to be dependable and organized. Our young don’t work as much anymore (who needs kids when illegal aliens are available and more reliable?) and have unrealistic expectations.
I’d like to see lots of internships, co-ops, work-study, apprenticeships sponsored by US companies for American citizens (teens, high school graduates). Also would like to see US companies sponsor manufacturing and tech oriented programs at state universities ( why are we hiring Indian project analysts on H-1bs when we can train our own citizens?).
Of course, the union donors backing Dems oppose this.
I also like the idea of mandatory military training for 5 months after high school (June til Thanksgiving). Basic training and fitness (would have to tier it for the disabled or the overweight) and then some exposure to practical skills. No exemptions- make Freshman year of college start in January for those going the academic route.
Would be very expensive, though, and over time the Dems would ensure it evolves from discipline and work to a sort of woke PlaySkool. So probably untenable .
Wouldn't that technically violate the 13th amendment?
How would we pay to support 8 million kids? That's the part I don't get.
this idea that college as a melting pot is hilarious. Just completely not true now and hasn't been for a while.
I have issues.
It is not that university and college professors are disconnected from American society. It is that they have disdain for American society and have tried to fix it with racially and culturally divisive policies. They have even tried to change the language, like the recent attempt to change the word mother to birthing person.
They strictly enforced speech and thought, punishing anyone who doesn’t adhere to the rules of intersectionality. Colleges and Universities have been downright hostile to America. The contempt for those men who gave us our nation and constitution is well known.
These are the people who obviously “hate” America. It is where anti-semitism thrives and assaults on free speech are encouraged.
Their education in the humanities is crap, as far as I am concerned. They have been subject to propaganda and reprogramming. You can see employers' difficulty figuring out how to operate their businesses. I hear about it all the time. Yes, our young are different than prior generations. They are privileged and have no idea what work had to happen to give them this economy of abundance.
Why in the world would you program children to have contempt for America and its institutions for some political goal is incomprehensible. It is not a way to build a cohesive society.
Finally, crediting Biden for lowering inflation is factually wrong. Our deficits are, in fact, stimulative. At almost 2 Trillion dollars, how could they not be? It is the job of the Federal Reserve to manage inflation. The President's fiscal policy was working against the monetary policy that was designed to lower inflation.
Your cabbie was telling you something, but you were not listening. I am actually trying to help you understand. The cabbie was using the word inflation to describe the high prices of things.
The cost of food, rent, car insurance etc. He was describing the state of his daily expenses.
Telling the American public that inflation is down does not resonate because they are dealing with huge increases in the costs of goods and services. This is what Biden, Harris and you don’t understand. Car insurance costs well over 30%. If you are a cabbie, did your TLC give your cabbie a rate hike? Likely not. Labor costs at dealerships are now upwards of $150 an hour, probably just a bit lower at local privately owned garages. Either way, bringing your car in for service can be a soul-crushing experience.
The other component of higher costs is supply chain issues. I hope you don’t believe that there is a magic wand in the WH that solves those issues. The President has nothing to do with those problems.
Inflation translates to the cost of goods that people are complaining about. The inflation rate coming down doesn’t solve the sticker shock Americans have in their daily lives.
Do you think the disdain flows any less the other way? The wealthy Trump-voting car dealership owner who sets those $150/hr rates has just as much disdain for the "childless cat lady" driving in in the Subaru as you describe here.
And the Democratic party is much more vocally pro-America than the Republican party at the moment. Trump's constantly harping about how awful America is - heck, MAGA implies America isn't great right now.
And charging "anti-semitism" is exactly the same as the leftist charges of "racism" you decry here. They're wrong and you're wrong.
Yeah, this is what I don’t get, my rural cousins are allowed to talk all day long about how much they fucking hate city slickers, but if we say the reason we left the sticks is because they’re bunch of morons we’re the bad guys. I understand why I wouldn’t say that if I were running for office back in flyover country, but just let me read the New Yorker in peace.
I think it's worse from their side. I'd guess part of what your cousins like about Trump is that he's a thumb in the eye of us city slickers. The love of "liberal tears" or whatever.
This does not flow the other way. I don't know anyone who voted for Harris because they *want* to piss off rural Nebraskans or whatever, and Dems policies (which we support) are much more aimed at helping those rural Nebraskans than vice versa. Dems are constantly worrying about how to persuade (and help) the other side; I can't imagine Trump talking about how to learn more about, respect the needs of, and actually help people like me.
"I think it's worse from their side. I'd guess part of what your cousins like about Trump is that he's a thumb in the eye of us city slickers. The love of "liberal tears" or whatever."
Fair observation. I agree.
"Dems are constantly worrying about how to persuade (and help) the other side"
By calling them garbage? The Persuader in Chief!
Why would “anyone who voted for Harris because they *want* to piss off rural Nebraskans or whatever anyone who voted for Harris because they *want* to piss off rural Nebraskans or whatever” be so inclined? It would be so déclassé to react to the opinions of (pick your pejoratives).
Also another issue is that liberals seem to have significantly more *institutions* that disdain America, whereas with conservatives it’s generally the people.
The college campuses and their pro-palestine protests are indirect surrogates for the institutions
show me one community college that had protests.
The media talks more about what happens on the Campus of NYU then they do for every community college & non flagship public school combined. That is the problem, Noah equates Stanford & Michigan to every college in America.
Ok, not sure what to do about your whataboutism screed. I was talking about College and University Professors. The construct of the Noah series is on “Why Harris (or Democrats) lost”. Not on who has disdain for Democrats.
So, having worked with and around car dealers and dealerships, I can tell you your characterization of them is wrong. Not that they might have voted for Trump. I am sure many did.
Many employees are minorities, and car dealers care about money, and they will sell cars to anybody. Subaru dealers happen to love childless cat ladies, dog lovers, gay Americans...the elderly, environmentalists.....Outdoorsmen and nature lovers.
They might have disdain for people like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Neither has ever had a job in the private sector. Neither knows anything about a small business owner having to make payroll or hit a sales number. Yet, they believe they know how business should work? Nonsense.
My wife, among a great many pundits, has disdain and contempt for the people who voted for Trump. They believe them to either be ignorant or ill-moral. In discussion with her, when I suggest many voted their pocketbook. Based on the old Reagan question, "are you better off now or four years ago.” They voted for their pocketbook, to which my wife decried they voted for money...Yes, honey, they did.
Now I don’t like Trump economic plan as I currently understand it. I think many will feel disappointed. Trump cannot lower prices. We are already pumping a bunch of oil.
I digress. So, I would have been with you criticizing my post had is countered with facts why I am wrong. You choose to write and say, Ya but...and point out that many who voted for Trump has disdain for many on the Left....Yes, that is true....but hardly even worth a post.
Fine, it's a Ford dealership then, not the point. And your post is much more of a screed than mine - mine is a response. That's how internet comments work.
It's absolutely worth pointing out - when there seems to be a huge discourse on both the center left and right that there's some kind of problem with disdain on the left for the right - that this is not at all a one-way phenomenon.
The entire right wing media ecosystem is build around disdain (and often hatred) for urban cosmopolitans - this doesn't seem to have cost them many elections.
"Subaru dealers happen to love childless cat ladies, dog lovers, gay Americans...the elderly, environmentalists.....Outdoorsmen and nature lovers."
We bought a new (2019) a few weeks after I turned 57 - my wife was 59 t the time. Since we do not meet any of other of the other categories (maybe "nature lover"? who doesn't like nature?), I suppose 57-59 must be "the elderly". Tough pill, thanks pal. I was just looking for something that handled well in winter driving conditions.
I had several Subaru dealers as clients through the years. Lots of flannel and lots of 50 to 70 year olds. Young couples, newlyweds as well. Sorry,
OK, but if 50-70 are "elderly," what do you call 80-90? Corpses?
My future
My future
So you not only hate these people (as if you needed a reason) but you hate them because you think some of them are haters. And anti-semitism isn’t an issue. Got it. Nice to see there are still party loyalists out there. Be strong
I didn’t say I hated them.
Switch out “anti-semitism” for “racism” and this sounds exactly like a progressive tweet from 2021. That’s my point.
The car dealership owner has minimal power to set rates. I doubt he even knows who his customers are.
Well, you would be wrong then.
Yeah this is a good point--the disdain. Many times I've pointed out that working class people, or even (maybe especially even?) black working class people, generally disagree with my progressive, college educated friends, only to be told the reason for the disagreement stems from class/race betrayal, internalised racism, etc...but increasingly they bypass their usual patronising and just tell me that, to some degree or another, America and its capitalism are fundamentally an evil, fascist, oppressive, heteropatriarchal, white-supremacist, neocolonial empire which must be dismantled through intersectional, isolationist, genderless anarcho-ecosocialist revolution.
I say to some degree or another because some literally believe this, while some, like my boomer Clinton Democrat parents, have been parroting some suprising stuff lately from their NPR, NYT, MSNBC media diet despite maintaining a deep resistance to socialism.
The weird lefties, downwardly mobile PMC, and tankies and gender absolutists have been on about the extreme versions of this for a decade, but normie PMC dems are coming around to it with ideas like white supremacy culture, Chomsky and America bad, the 1619 project, Hassan Piker, Bernie in 2015-2016, COVID hawkism, DEI stuff, and all sorts of other pseudo-historical, pseudo-intellectual far left nonsense entering the mainstream.
The one fundamental issue is the lack of recognition of how far America has come. They are talking as if if was 1964 rather than 2024.
Another problem with groups is they become an entity. What would a civil rights activist do if they acknowledged that the only barrier to joining the mainstream economy is being properly trained or educated?
People who are involved want to preserve their lifestyle and profession. In other words, it is a grift of sorts. They don’t know what to do unless they are screaming injustice. Think of them as blacksmiths in 1912 trying to hold on to their job....I’m am 100% sure, that some blacksmith said to someone who bought a car, how are you going to get to the doctor or dentist when your car breaks. You’ll need a backup, a horse.
Great first point, and sometimes they're literally talking about it like it's still 1864, when it comes to some of the CRT stuff. They believe America has not changed its racist institutions but just shifted them slightly to make them more socially acceptible.
To your second point, absolutely. I'd never thought about that before, and it strikes me as true.
To your third point, oh, 100%. They'd lose their livelihoods and status.
I agree with almost all of this but I have to defend Bernie Sanders. He's not woke. I don't agree with his politics, but he's a reasonable person who isn't part of the self-hating loser left.
He's not, and he wasn't in 2016...but his 2020 campaign was trying to be. We have him to thank for Brianna Joy-Gray.
The word "inflation" should be retired by economists and politicians. That concept needs a new technical name; I propose CPRC, current prices rate of change. This is because the average person uses "inflation" to mean current prices relative to prices over the past 5 years or so (and that lookback period is MUCH longer than most economist believe), not current prices rate of change.
Let me put a pin in your comment. It was more than in the last decade when this was a real number. It may still be. The average age of used car on the road was 11 years.
Imagine the cost of a used car in in 2013 vs today.
And prices, also yes--the rent (and the groceries, the bills, the childcare, the credit card payments, gas prices, basic necessities, and so on) is too damn high.
these woke professors are not the normal professors that a person would see at a state school or community college.
Oh hell no....they pay those assholes who are not normal like $400K a year...LOL
Normies are adjunct and get nothing.
Do you actually know what a professor makes? Doesn't seem like it. And do you know what percentage of college students are at state schools and community colleges? Do you really think most people who go to college are going to Yale?
You are making all sorts of grand pronouncements that aren't connected to the reality of going to college. And if you really think students can get brainwashed by their college professors, you really have a dim view of the intelligence and independence of a 20 something.
Not to mention that woke professor probably gives a shit about his job, so even if he is WOKE, at least he is engaged and challenges students. Versus an adjunct at a community college that knows he won't be brought back next semester.
They have tenure, they are not worried about anything.
I had kids who went to college; I went to college. The number I gave you was E Warren's salary at Harvard. Our closest friends kid went to Brown.
My kids both went to state school in New Jersey. They complained about the stifling of speech. They were nervous in some classes to say anything, so they said nothing. After watching elite colleges burst into spasms of anti-semitism, after watching the same reaction to George Floyd and that professor who was caught after asking for some “muscle over hear” to throw a school journalist out...I am pretty sure my view of colleges and universities is more in line with most Americans' views of colleges and universities. Shaping minds is a phrase that colleges and universities have used for decades....My guess is that most Americans are disgusted by the shaping that modern education is going through.
And guess what - the salaries at state schools aren't what Warren makes at Harvard. And guess what as well, go to a state school in lots of red states as a "liberal" and see how much you hold your speech back. Heck, that was true when I was a kid in Texas and still is.
Your "view" of colleges may be in line with what Americans have been told about "colleges" - but not so in line with what actually happens for most students.
Nuff said - nothing I can tell you will convince you otherwise - I do have a lot of gripes about colleges and what they teach, but it isn't about "shaping" - do you really think college students are really that dumb and easily manipulated? In this day and age of social media? Do you really think their views are so driven by some professor (that they probably don't care about) vs influencers on social media? Not in the world my college age son lives in. Ask a college student (even your own) about whether they are easily "shaped" by a professor? (even one they agree with).
Prices are not the same as inflation. I get that folks are using the word inflation to mean prices, which still hurt, especially in housing costs. But at some point psychologically, we reach a point of price acceptance and don’t expect things to cost the same as they did a decade ago.
Yes the Federal Reserve manages inflation and they were way too slow to respond to it. Most folks had money saved up during the pandemic and started spending, driving up prices due to limited supply. It happened (inflation) in most developed countries. And though other factors were involved beyond the control of the heads of states, leaders, one by one, are being voted out.
Didn't the phenomenon you describe exist in even greater force in November 2020?
You mean idiotic college rules? They still exist. if you want to get mad read this. It also may be on a google search
this may be paywalled... https://www.thefp.com/p/law-student-pace-university-title-ix-prop-1-expulsion?utm_source=publication-search
I don't mean this stuff no longer exists, I just mean the Democrats won while it was at its peak, which I think casts doubt that it is their primary problem now, as the above reply suggests.
Each election is different. Trump's 2016 victory is different than his 2024 victory.
Times change, people change. I still believe that Inflation (prices) and Biden allowing hordes of illegals crossing the rivers and the busing in to cities across America with the problems they bring were two major reasons Trump won.
Separately, Kamala had an issue. That Trans Ad showing her saying she would give illegal immigrants in prison sex changes at taxpayer expense just reminded the voter she is a far-left SF liberal. The woke crap that the far left of the Democrat Party spouts freaks most people out. I don’t think you reading history right. Obama was not extreme, no matter what GOP politicians said. He didn’t force colleges to allow men to compete with women.
Your history is a bit muddled, possibly. GW Bush won twice, Obama won twice, Trump won, then lost to Biden, who was so unpopular that Trump won again. Joe Biden didn’t run as the Progressive that he governed as. He ran as a moderate caretaker. A transition from Trump.
I wonder how long it will take for surveys to show that inflation is lower/has been tamed and that the overall economy is doing well once Trump becomes President? I figure one month. I don’t disagree with the explanations here, but lower income people also had higher real wage increases the past four years. Misinformation/disinformation is real and a huge part of this.
This is true, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Trump's economic policies, if implemented, are guaranteed to result in ruin. No amount of misinformation will paper over 400% tarriff induced price spikes.
I agree with that. Overall, I feel like Harris played a bad hand pretty well, but I wish she had been more fluid in talking about the economy and the likely impact of her economic agenda vs. Trump’s agenda. It probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome but would have been good to see.
We will see what happens with Trump’s agenda. He wears his policy commitments lightly. On the economy, true populist working class hero that he is, he cares about the stock market more than anything else. Between that and the pressure from slightly saner voices in his circle, I suspect he will not go full bore with massive tariffs, deportation of all undocumented people, extraordinary pressure on Fed chair to resign (though Powell at this point seems intent/resolute on staying, regardless what Trump would like to see.) And if AI/other factors continue to improve productivity, the economy may keep rolling along fairly well, even with some bad policy.
I worry more about Trump’s impact on global affairs/foreign policy since there are fewer shackles/inhibitors there (and the stakes potentially very high.)
And there will be the retribution/grifting, both foreign and domestic, making people less likely to get in his way this time.
In the alternate reality where Biden pressures the Fed to raise interest rates earlier, cuts spending, thereby causing a recession and higher unemployment, and cracks down on the border as soon as he got into office, and knocks off whatever woke stuff his admin might have been doing… Does Kamala win?
I doubt it. The messaging to the non-educated professional class would be different, but instead of inflation it would be about Biden causing a recession and unemployment, which still hit the non-educated professional class harder; they would still say the Biden admin was soft on the border and crime, despite the evidence. They would still say that the Biden admin was too woke. And the non-educated professional class is still going to believe all of it.
This 100%. I completely agree with Noah’s summary and the the many subsequent comments, but here’s a question.
Is one aspect of this argument simply that being educated allows one to process information more effectively? And there is a massive media machine that is dedicated to spewing disinformation on a constant basis which is very difficult to critically appraise if you don’t have those tools to fall back on?
I feel like the only way to win is to have a better propaganda machine than your opponent, or if your opponent reeeeally screws up, like Bush and the wars in the Middle East. Which is just a bummer. What’s the point of even trying to implement good policy? No one is going to know or remember when it comes time to vote.
Controlling the Narrative is mostly what elections are about. Remember that folks on this blog, etc. are probably way off the norm in terms of processing information, aggregating information, and interest in all this. To most people, this is simply irrelevant.
But Narrative, Perception and various kinds of media do matter (a LOT). We knew this way back in the 60s with various books on how "selling" (with lots borrowed from the marketing/ad folks) had come to dominate the policy issues.
We all need to stop belittling the noncollege educated as some sub human group.
Maybe they voted for Trump with their eyes completely open?
like how did highly successful non college educated vote? The business owners, the people who worked their way up through the ranks with hard work, etc. I bet they voted for Trump as well and that shows this isn't an education thing. Its a class thing.
Sorry, Noah, "out of touch with America" is a REALLY bad way to say it. Aside from the fact that 43% of America (let alone the 48% who voted for Harris) is hardly insignificant, and aside from the fact that the claim that "liberal elitists" aren't Real Americans has been a right-wing trope for decades, talking about any group of Americans like they're not really part of the country is not something we should reinforce, especially as a time like this.
I think you raise a good point. A better way to say it would be out of touch with the rest of America. In either case, the core problem is that it seems the Democrats really don't understand how to appeal to the people who have lost trust in them and in most national institutions.
But I think there’s still a question - are the white collar professionals any more out of touch than the small business owners, or the rural working class, or whatever other group you pick? It’s good for us to learn the ways in which we are out of touch. But part of that has to involve learning the distinctive ways everyone else is out of touch as well.
Yes, they are just as much out of touch as we are. We're all in bubbles that feed us what we want to hear, for the most part. However, given that they just won, I doubt those other groups have much impetus to try and learn what makes any of us tick (even though it would be in their interest to do so, if only to allow them to take actions and craft messages that will enable them to continue to win).
The only way I see out of these bubbles is to start talking to each other again, and I don't mean through media. I mean to form friendships or institutional relationships again.
"Out of touch with the rest of America" would be fine, and much of what Noah said is valid.
This was my reaction, too. I could live with, “out of touch with the REST of America.” It’s just as true that the UNeducated class is out of touch with reality.
It’s probably true that some people know that Trump and the right wing media lies about so many things and votes for them anyway, but one big problem that must be solved is how to break through the misinformation wall to get at least some voters to make a better informed choice. If we don’t solve the three problems Noah identified, this won’t be enough, but it’s probably also true that even if we do reorient the actions, it won’t help if the message doesn’t get through.
So in the case where the right / poor believes something that is balls out false. "Vaccines cause autism"...
How much should we good left people compromise in the value of "objective truth"?
The argument isn't to believe false things The argument is to re-examine the facts from a different perspective.
Also. To maybe acknowledge, as Noah pointed out, that the progressive movement believes plenty of falsehoods too. "Sex is only socially constructed." "All students' performance can rise to the college level if only we would put in enough money / get the right teaching methods." "There has been little progress on racism in the past 70 years." "Hyperfocusing on identity is an effective way to reduce racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia."
Okay some of the falshoods you mentioned that the progressive movement believes are out of context or simply being misrepresented. I think everyone wants a lot of simple answers but the answers are way more varied and nuanced.
> "Sex is only a social construct"
You are mixing up sex and gender. Progressives tend to say sex is fixed and it is gender that is a construct. Again it was something that started in Academia and became more mainstream in conversation. Just because you don't think gender is a social construct or can be viewed through a social lens doesn't mean it can't be.
> "All students performance can rise to the college level if only we put in enough money / get the right teaching methods"
I think the goal of most high schools and Western societies to push everyone to get a 4 year degree isn't reasonable isn't possible, however continued education, trade schools, internships, work programs etc should be on the table. It's also clear that smaller classroom sizes are better and a lot of kids learn differently. However for what we do spend on education you'd expect mostly better outcomes all things being equal. Both things can be true.
> "There has been little progress on racial progress over the last 70 years."
Who is saying this? I don't see any leading members of the Democratic party saying this or pushing this, I vote Democrat like 85% of the time and have never thought this. I think people mix up the loudest voices of the social justice warriors online with actual Democratic policies because that makes it easier for them to frame the discussion and our social media algorithm keeps reinforcing that believe. Every metric shows there has been a lot of positive progress on the racism front.
> "Hyperfocusing on identity is an effective way to reduce racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia"
I may be wrong but I think what you are trying to say is that too much power around messaging, funding and general public policy stances have probably been given to special interest groups and people who want to specifically address inequity or inequality affecting the groups affected by the above and in turn it is turning off a major part of the electorate. In my experience a lot of groups are more socially conservative privately than they may appear in public, or at least they don't want to be reminded of how they might have privilege when they are struggling like everyone else. That said, you'd be surprised how the social media algorithm shows us stuff to upset us just to keep us engaged on wedge issues like this too.
I get where you're coming from, but this is one case where you are overstating the pushback.
We democrats do a lot of "coalition management." We try to keep our coalition together and not cause anyone to drop out.
Do the vast majority of elected and regular democrats believe that biological sex is real? Yes. Do they believe that much of gendered behavior is ingrained/instinctual and socially 'modulated' rather than constructed out of whole cloth? Yes. Do they want to pick a fight with the loud and passionate people who think that all gendered behavior/roles are socially constructed? Hell no. That attitude has unfortunately made it so the loudest voices on left about gender are the minority of people on the most extreme end and that's what gets filtered to the general public as the Democratic brand.
The race relations issue is another area where there are people who make their bones talking about the problems of current race relations. In left leaning spaces, there is a bias against saying something like, "This problem is actually ok and or moving in the right direction." With 340 million people, there will always be instances of egregious racism and even compelling evidence of systemic racism. A lot of democrats also put this at lower priority than say, healthcare, or, abortion rights, but no democrat wants to be the jackass who publicly says, "Actually, I think race relations are ok and moving in the right direction." This, again, cedes the floor to the more extreme voices. You will get more opprobrium in left spaces for writing an op ed saying that reparations for slavery, while moral, are unworkable, then you will for writing a very implausible pro reparations piece. So while most sitting democrats do not believe that race relations are worse than the 1960's, the "talking about racism" space in the party is dominated by those who think it's the biggest problem and those pushing against that prioritization do so at a handicap.
>Do they believe that much of gendered behavior is ingrained/instinctual and socially 'modulated' rather than constructed out of whole cloth? Yes. Do they want to pick a fight with the loud and passionate people who think that all gendered behavior/roles are socially constructed? Hell no.
That's the thing though. The loud passionate people spent a lot of time punching down on common people who didn't have the aptitude to have an academic understanding of these things. People deserved to be defended from these attacks, not shunned from society for not understanding, even when the facts were on the academics' side. The silence was pretty deafening to the people.
I agree with most of what you’ve written, and apply the same reasoning to republicans. I read multiple sources on the conservative side that condemn the Hannity/Carlson/MTG crowd, though I’ll happily concede that most republican politicians opted winning over confrontation. As did the democrats.
Perhaps you can direct me to progressive sources that condemn Sharpton/AOC/Harris (2019 version). Yglesias and Smith will step out of line on their particular concerns, but I know of no equivalent to Goldberg or French, as examples.
Fair point and well stated. I agree with you. I think too much of this discourse is happening online or behind screens and not with people speaking directly anymore. A lot gets lost when we aren't having face to face conversations or we've built up organizations and people that are monetized to keep us distracted from working together.
I don't know how representative this is but I have definitely seen claims circulated on Tumblr that biological sex is in some way constructed or illusory.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about this because it's hard to come up with a precise definition of sex that gracefully handles all the edge cases. But I think some people get carried away with that and take it as license to throw out the whole concept.
Agreed. Intersex is a real thing. I understand nuance makes people u comfortable but people see things on Tumblr or Twitter from a leftist and thinks that is representative of all Dems or something
Actually it’s trans activists who conflate sex and gender, that’s what the phrase trans women are women means.
I could've sworn in started in 2015 in Academia discussions before becoming more a trans activism thing that was adopted by progressives to support genderaly trans and gender non conforming type folks over the last few years. Thanks for the context
“Vaccines cause autism” was more of a Left/hippie thing
It was 20 years ago, but it flipped Right
Good point... The left wing hippie to alt right wing pipeline is not talked about nearly enough. It's almost like they are both just reactionary groups that want to see the entire system burn but also not be negatively impacted at all by it
Horseshoe theory is real.
COVID migrated it right. It started more left / hippie, but the right has embraced it as "a(nother) thing that progressive institutions are probably lying to us about."
My memory is that prior to Covid, vaccine resistance was (is?) centered on college educated white elite females. Suggesting that stupid resides with the right/poor on this issue, not with the good left as well, doesn’t compute. Perhaps the automatic attribution of ignorance of objective truth to those with whom you disagree shouldn’t be good, left, or right.
It's not that the left should compromise on the value of objective truth. It's that they already have to such a massive degree that it's laughable to hear them complain about the other side doing it.
Uh huh, was it experts who told you what's "balls out false" by any chance?
The epistemological problems in the Democrat camp are still there, and still deep. Anyone familiar with the data and science knows that the COVID vaccines were neither safe nor effective. Measured effectiveness was being reported at around -300% by the time the last holdout (England) stopped reporting the actual data. This is why so many COVID vaccinated people complain about getting COVID again and again, most famously including Dr Fauci.
In case it needs to be spelled out more clearly, taking a vaccine and then getting the disease repeatedly is NOT what the word "effective" means. It never was.
You know who didn't keep getting it? Unvaccinated people. The Uber driver was correct and Noah was wrong. The underlying immunology of why that happened is well understood within the field, and it was known to be a possible risk factor for deploying vaccines against respiratory diseases long before 2020 came around; they just don't like talking about it. Yet, the Democrats still aren't listening. Nice well aligned people at their local government bureaucracy tell them that all their dashboards say things are going great, and the map is the territory so if Fauci complains on TV about getting his third COVID infection then it just doesn't register. Line goes up and to the right!
Just out of curiosity, how do you think smallpox was eliminated?
On the larger sense, we do influenza vaccines every year. We have never had a 100% effective flu vaccine. From 2009 - 2023, the best effectiveness was 60% and the worst was 19%. In all cases, the vaccine was worth getting.
I am curious about this -300% effectiveness statistic. Is this arguing that having a Covid vaccine made a person 3x more likely to get infected? How did the researchers get around response bias? (Presumably, someone who gets a vaccine would also use home covid tests, while someone who said no to a vaccine may only show up as Covid positive upon death/hospitalization).
4x more likely (0% effectiveness equals multiply the likelihood by one, 100% effectiveness means multiply it by zero, -100% effectiveness means double base likelihood, -200% means triple it, -300% means quadruple it).
The numbers come from UK government official data. Unlike most other countries, they published the actual data, allowing people to see that they were not reporting the real numbers but rather heavily adjusted numbers using a very dubious (wrong) set of controls. Most other countries simply never published the raw data at all, and only published adjusted numbers. Getting data was no problem. There were plenty of places where mass testing was still a requirement during the vaccine period, and where government reporting was mandatory even if you used a home kit. They were also doing regular test panels. You can look at the old UK HSA reports to see what they did with the data to try and remove or explain these numbers, if you like. The short story is they tried to control for many different factors - mostly behavioral - but eventually gave up, stating that they don't know why vaccinated people were so much more likely to get infected.
Now, that's not because nobody knows. We do know why, and so do they (assuming minimal competence at least). They just can't say it officially.
The flu vaccine has never been worth getting. Try and find any vaccine signal in the death counts and you'll find there is none. Flu vaccine rollouts don't reduce the number of people dying. This is true even though flu vaccines are routinely advertised as being highly effective against death, and flu is one of the leading killers of the elderly.
The reason this can occur is displacement: the flu vaccines provide protection against the specific virus they target but simultaneously make you more susceptible to other kinds of flu, and the net result is no improvement. The health authorities know this (there are some good papers and investigations into the problem), but do nothing because they view any admission of ineffectiveness of vaccines as a kind of class treason. Criticizing vaccines would make them "anti vaxxers" and be used by their enemies, so it all gets swept under the carpet. And of course it would mean layoffs at the health agencies if they stopped running these programs. So they take misleading numbers from trials, take out critical context, and then advertise them directly to the elderly.
Displacement happens because respiratory viruses of all kinds are effectively impossible to vaccinate against due to their rapid rate of evolution. Training your immune system against one variant simply makes it misfire when presented with a mutated variant, producing anti-bodies against the vaccinated strain that don't dock correctly against the mutated strain. This is also why the COVID vaccines failed. Although mRNA tech was initially advertised as being so flexible a new vaccine targeting a new variant could be whipped up in weeks, that never actually happened and the vaccines people were being given years later were still targeting the wild-type spike antigen, which had mutated many times by the time delta came around. So the more vaccines people took the more trained their immune system became on the wild-type spike, long since extinct. That harmed the learning mechanisms in the body because evolution is selecting for mutations that reduce antibody docking whilst still matching B-cell memories. The immune system produces memorized antibodies thinking it's doing a good job but they don't work, and it takes a while for the body to notice by which point the infection is out of control and requires deployment of T cells to kill the infected cells. That's a much more damaging and risky response.
If you have genuine curiosity, go to Google Scholar and search for immune fixation or OAS to learn more. The immune system is a fascinating thing.
You live in an alternative vaccine reality. If you got a vaccine in 2021 you were 70% less likely to be hospitalized e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7217a3.htm
None of the numbers from the CDC were even close to being informative, as they were produced with the goal of getting people to take the vaccines. That's why they started out by telling you it was 95% effective against disease and then had to keep moving the goalposts as it became clear to the naked eye of even the most stupid people that this couldn't be true (in fact, it was never true). Much harder to gut check those hospital numbers, isn't it?
But see, this is the meta-level problem that should be being discussed now.
COVID is in the past. The election is in the present. What happened this year is similar: the left were repeatedly blindsided by sudden revelations that their understanding of the world was far off reality. Everyone outside the USA knew Biden was senile, it was repeatedly and casually mentioned in the foreign press, yet the moment he got on stage millions of Americans were shocked by his state. This should caused most of them to re-evaluate how they learn about the world, and for some it did, but for too many it didn't.
Then they were told that Harris was a strong contender in a tight race that a surge of women would win, only to be blindsided again by the massive scale of the victory. The knowledge that the polls and media narratives were wrong was out there, which is how that French trader was so confident to bet $40M on the outcome.
And now they're asking "where did these 13 million voters that appeared once, in 2020, disappear to" ... setting themselves up for yet another shock revelation in future. "Did Biden steal 2020" is likely going to end up the same way the lab leak theory or "lockdowns didn't work": attacked for years as a terrible conspiracy theory by evil people, now something that everyone just sort of knows and accepts, right up to presidents and prime ministers.
The institutions you guys are trusting to tell you about the world aren't reliable. The CDC isn't reliable, the pollsters aren't reliable, CNN/ABC/MSNBC aren't reliable, academics aren't reliable. They tell you whatever will make you comply with their wishes, and if you start to sniff out what's really true they tell you that only evil conservatives believe those things. Again and again, the left are falling for the same old tricks.
Tell me you don't know Covid viruses work without telling me.
I agree with your point 100%. People can also be contrarian and will double down on being wrong as well because they don't like to feel like they are on the other end of condescension. If we can't agree on the same facts and reality anymore it's tough to solve problems, let alone govern and plan long term. Either people are saying things in bad faith, or they genuinely believe all of a sudden that Presidents have magic buttons to reduce prices and the Overton window has shifted. I'm not sure...
I think the main reason why this has happened and why it's so hard to solve are one and the same: the proportion of university-educated people in the population has gotten way bigger, not just in the US but across the western world. When 15-20% of people had a degree, as was the case a generation ago, they had to find political allies to get their way. If 30-40% have a degree, they are more capable of acting as an independent voter bloc.
Additionally, outside of college/university towns like Cambridge or Ann Arbor, places where graduates made up most of the population were pretty rare. Now, not only in the US, they are very common. It is very hard to convince people they are out of touch when most of the people in their city, and almost everyone they meet, agrees with them. Interestingly too, there is a pronounced educational voting divide even in countries where the earnings differential between graduates and non-graduates is lower than the US.
I'm also not sure this is, in the long run, such a bad thing for Democrats. They have basically swapped a larger, but lower-propensity, voter coalition with a smaller, but higher-propensity, one. Although you'll lose in higher-turnout contests, I think you want the higher-propensity voters every day of the week. We can already see, for instance, the Democrats outperforming their presidential popular vote in congressional elections, and without someone as galvanising as Trump the GOP could be in more trouble in the future. Anxiety about this seems, to me, to speak more about a desire amongst the left to be popular rather than a desire to win.
Even in places like Ann Arbor, a generation ago when you were past city limits you were almost instantly back in “Real ‘Murica.” I’m from Dexter, a bike ride from UMich campus, and I remember when we were best known for our Buck Pole, local RW nutjob, and getting annoyed at cyclists from Ann Arbor on backroads. Prom was in the gym and most people didn’t go to college; if you did you went to a state school. I knew one girl who went to a Jesuit university out east and that was absolutely exotic.
Today Dexter is a habitat for UMC professionals and their children. It has beautiful amenities, restaurants, gas lamps, and a high with an AP and IB program ranked comfortably in the top 1000 in the country.
It still has its rural charm, but even the horse farms are more dressage than 4H these days.
It’s beautiful, I’m not complaining. My whole family still lives there, and we are planning on relocating with our kids in the near future because it is such a nice place to live.
But man, has it changed.
It’s notable that Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, but that the Democrats in the senate races in those states got approximately the same number of votes as Kamala Harris, and won. The differential between the people who voted Republican for senate and the people who voted Republican for president was more than enough to swing the election. (At least, it is close to that - there is still some counting in Arizona and Pennsylvania that might change that, and there weren’t Senate races in Georgia or North Carolina to compare there.)
Yes, and that suggests the problem was perhaps tactical rather than policy/fundamentals based. The Democrats ran a "stop Trump because he's a danger to democracy"-style campaign that was designed to mobilise its already high-propensity voters. Maybe they should have run a "where's that wall Trump said he'd build"-style campaign to try and dissuade lower-propensity Trump voters.
Maybe, although an awful lot of Trump voters have long since ignored the fact that he didn't actually deliver on much of anything for them (except removing abortion rights if they are strongly of that political belief). Tax cuts didn't help, the wall was an expensive sham, etc...
But all that is forgotten easily - and Narrative wins out... The Democrats have a long tradition of not having a clear and concise message and it shows over and over - lots of good working class actions by Biden and almost no solid consistent sales job about that (long before Harris). Many other examples of Dems wanting to be corporate, working class, professionals, and so many other groups without any clear message (rightly or wrongly, blaming "other" immigrants is a clear message that stuck).
How strange, then, that the Biden administration moved to building a wall.
How likely is it that people would vote for President Trump while entirely ignoring all the downballot races?
It’s very common. I would like to see comparative data about how common it is in various years. It looks like several hundred thousand people did that in several of the swing states.
Yes, this is the Rosetta Stone understanding all of this. The idea that elites are out of touch with the common people is a tautological statement— that’s what it means to be elite, we *always* looked down on the plebes for not reading the right books or appreciating difficult art—it’s just different now that the elites is a much larger group now.
They occasionally valorise plebes too but that's worse. Which is where I'm worried this Democrat hand-wringing will end up. I'm hardly JD Vance's biggest fan. But one thing I did appreciate about Hillbilly Elegy was how unsentimental he was about the people he was raised by, and grew up around.
And how incredibly condescending he was to them - talk about looking down - yikes
Excellence in one’s field yields elite status. Credentialism equals a credential. And being very good at one thing doesn’t qualify one as exceptionally perceptive in another thing.
You say 40% of the population is elite. If only I had attended a college and focused my courses on those whose syllabi read, for the jocks we need to retain to attract alumni bucks, I too would be elite. And thus have attained a grasp of TRUTH that causes me to march in lockstep with my peers in favor of every new and fashionable certainty. Com’on, man.
Remember too that most college graduates (or college attendees) in this country are Not going to Yale, etc. A lot of the overall conversation (not your comment) seems to assume that college is Yale or MIT or Harvard and all those folks go on to make tons of money. Simply not the reality of college education.
As you noted, the educational voting divide exists in countries where there is even a smaller earnings differential. An awful lot of college grads out there are just as "working class" as the non-college educated.
And 35% who don't vote at all (larger than Trump or Harris got in terms of eligible voters)
Great post, Noah. My two cent addition would be to stress that the Democrats, media and academia knowingly and intentionally tried to distance themselves from half the country’s values. For a political party, this may be reasonable, as it adapts to its constituents, giving them what they want, even as it decides who is in and who is out of the target market.
Where this is especially perverse though is with the media. For whatever reason, the media allowed itself to be taken over by a narrow tribe of thinkers, even as it alienated over half of the country. This eliminated the mainstream news media as a unifying force, even as it contributed to the demise of its power, and it also generated resentment in those not to the left. The vote isn’t just a message to our leaders, but to our media and other institutions to not abandon them.
I suspect a significant proportion voted for Trump mostly to give a big middle finger to the media.
"The second reason is pretty obvious: Having less money makes drops in purchasing power harder to bear. If my cost of living went up by 10%, it would be a minor annoyance; to a working-class person that could very well be ruinous.... So while educated professionals like myself were able to put the post-pandemic inflation behind us fairly quickly after it subsided in 2023, regular Americans probably felt a more lingering hurt."
There is also a psychological component that it's very easy for me to understand. Back in the early 2000s, when healthcare costs were really exploding, where I work we'd get our annual merit increases in the fall, and then at the end of the fall, our annual health care share increases. So my salary would increase by 2.3%, and then my healthcare costs would go up and that 2.3% raise would have about 50% of it eaten up by healthcare cost increases. Sure, I was still technically ahead by 1.15%, but that healthcare cost increase *hurt*. It felt like a dagger killing the joy of earning more.
The other more obvious fact I'd point out is that "beating inflation" is only half the battle. Yes, if inflation returns to normal levels, the prices of things do not. We are all still stuck paying more, and that hurt is something we see every time we're at the grocery store, every time we pay the monthly rent.
You’re absolutely right on both counts. When economists say that wages keep up with inflation, what people experience is a year’s worth of higher prices, then an annual pay bump. But that’s still a year’s worth of pain!
And for both immigration and inflation (and possibly crime rates) democrats had good messaging around the velocity of the metrics, but not the distance traveled. Inflation stopped going up? Cool, eggs are still twice as expensive as they were in 2020. You stopped taking low-quality asylum claims? Ok, you’ve already let in 4m extra immigrants, any plans to deal with them?
Remember too that people attribute gains in wages to something they did and inflation or health care costs are viewed as something done to them - Big Psychological difference.
The right loves to say "facts don't care about your feelings". But maybe we should consider that the people who went to college are simply smarter than the people who didn't, and are using that intelligence when choosing whether or not to vote for a fascist.
There's a lot in the rest of the article which softens this, but I just had to say it.
College educated people might want to relearn the definition of fascism.
Gee, surprisingly enough, those of us who had family go through the Holocaust know exactly what it means......
Buzen might want to elaborate if they want their critiques on the use of "fascism" to be taken seriously
and this line of thinking is why Democrats lose. I almost wish I voted for Trump after seeing how smug this article and comments are.
Got it, so you would vote for someone not because they would make the best policies for the nation but just to piss off some random person on the internet?
If i think it is the best interest of me and my beliefs then yes.
Clearly Noah and the Elites and his ilk have disdain for the noncollege crowd and it definitely changes my thinking process.
The democrats are done for for the foreseeable future. As birth rates are an important trend as well. The religious and uneducated have about .2 higher birth rates. The future looks religious and uneducated; as it's an exponential. I believe there are three religions competing for dominance in the US. Christianity, a new right-wing darwinist anti-establishment religion, and the left-wing idealists that you are part of which I would call a religion as well. The religion the idealists are part of could be called the religion of 'progress': "everything is always going to get better forever through human effort, and we can live in utopia peacefully together. We also believe all peoples are equal in making this progress come about". None of this is true of course, but it's perhaps good to believe in.
We should also recognize that the last religion has no future people however as they are all the most urbanized and their birth rates are the lowest.
Because of plunging birth rates overall and immigration from latam, hispanics are going to become a large part of the electorate who are mostly Christian and working class. The counties next to the texan border who are majority hispanic voted overwhelmingly republican this year.
Well, I don't think they're *done*, because the Republicans will screw up, and people will get mad. But yeah they definitely have headwinds.
According to pew, in 2024, upper earners and lower earners both identify more as Dem. Overall, however, there's not a lot of correlation with income and party affiliation: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-family-income-home-ownership-union-membership-and-veteran-status/
You might want to keep that in mind the next time you parrot the GOP's Coastal Elites meme.
That data just shows exactly how much this has been a sales job - how the party's are portrayed vs reality. As always, Narrative and Perception drive elections and the Dems have been horrible about having a coherent message since at least Clinton.
Liberal humanism has been the fastest growing religion of the last 250 years, by far. Advantages in birth rates for more traditional religions don't even make a dint into that. Every new generation, when growing up, starts to make their own decisions - provided they have basic access to information.
But in the US classical liberal humanism has been hollowed out by the parasite of lazy progressivism. It's not the first time that humanism has created a weird amalgam of superstitions trying to imitate it. Communism also claimed inevitability and scientific foundations and progress for free. I've been to communist countries, I've seen the results. And I've seen a whole generation - continentwide - rejecting those superstitions, when they crumbled under the onslaught of reality.
Sooner or later the pox of misinformation (including left-wing misinformation) will bring us back to the founding question of the early enlightenment: What the hell is actually real? A new generation who grows up believing that everything you read/watch is misinformation is bound to rediscover the basics. Not unlike the great doubters of the 17th/18th century. But for that to happen, progressivism needs to die. The sooner, the better.
Wait! You mean that Haitians aren't eating Americans pets? But both the President-elect and Vice-President-elect insisted quite strongly upon this in numerous public statements.
There may have been misinformation coming from some Left-wing media sources; but their media power is virtually non-existent. FOX News by comparison, is the information source of some 85% of conservatives, and the most popular national news channel: https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/cable-news-ratings-september-2024/
The flood of current media disinformation and misinformation is overwhelmingly pro-Republican and anti-Democrat. And it is getting worse. Let's call a spade a spade.
i don't think liberal humanism is growing very much anymore.
Your analysis makes some sense, and I hope you're right.
I think it's a mistake to think that high-birthrate religious folks are likely to "take over" because of births as much as it was a mistake to think that mass immigration would hand the Democrats a permanent majority. There is something about modern life that's driving people away from churches, and being born devout Christian does not appear to resolve that problem.
Calling right wing politics or left wing politics a “religion” like Christianity is a tempting association to make but ultimately is wrong. Memetic movements maybe but there is nothing Divine about them
I guess I use religion as a blanket term for 'believing in falsehoods'. Leftwingers have become as delusional to me as rightwingers and christians.
This whole post of noahpinion is like a memo explaining he's discovering that he was partly entirely deluded about the state of reality. Noah literally writes he's for the first time discovering that there exist human beings that run shops and have a problem with theft and that there are uber drivers that don't have PhD's in economics.
If you went to harvard and are a millionaire, you don't live on planet earth, you live on Mars. And all they have to do is put themselves into the shoes of the less fortunate, but they aren't able to (but pretend to do so, for virtue signalling points, without actually helping them)
I find this set of falsehoods more damaging than any other religion, because people run policy on it. Like 'don't lock up criminals'
I really like Noah, but you are right that this reads like he's suddenly discovered that the poors aren't just an abstract category in a textbook. To give a sympathetic reading, maybe he's trying to give cover to his more sheltered readers.
Buddhism is universally considered a religion. There's nothing Divine in Buddhism, there isn't even a belief in a soul ( that's "anatvam", i.e. no soul, in the original texts).
But religion is definitely more than politics. It needs to deliver identity and meaning in a way that makes it upstream from culture, with culture being upstream from politics.
I feel ya and also agree to an extent however Christians in the US can't even agree on what version of Christianity is the "right one" and they don't even follow their rules half the time. It's like they only do it for the social element / pressure and the moral superiority of it half the time.
If those are the three religions, it seems clear that Christianity is the only one that is losing members.
The progressive class and their Allies (to adopt the jargon de jour) support trans rights, especially notable are those in competition with girls and young women, they denigrate America, they denigrate religion, especially Judeo-Christian church goers, they trash the military and they both denigrate families or work to establish policies which militate against strong families. In effect they denigrate traditional institutions.
I have elderly friends who live on modest pensions and social security and working class friends who are scraping by. They are deeply affected by inflation. Some are bitter.
I'm not going to address the transphobic part of your comment since most people who lean left can support trans rights but also want an equal playing field for girls. Additionally, denigrate America, you do know that people can love their country and criticize or look for ways for it to be better. I love my country. That doesn't mean that I'm not above saying we should improve infrastructure and healthcare protections.
Regarding denigrating religion... Calling out the hypocrisy of people who are religious and support Trump is not the same as denigrating religion. Most Democrats are still identifying as Christian, and support the right for everyone to worship the way they want. They just don't want it forced on everyone. I feel like you are reaching a bit ish that take.
You mention that they trash the military... What policies have Democrats passed that have trashed the military? They've raised the budget and given raises under every administration run by Democrats. Most of us have service members in our family tree or may have even participated. You are speaking in generalities and talking on feelings but not facts, it seems like you have a vibe but can't really back it up.
You mention how Democrats and Progressives denigrate families or work to establish policies which militate against strong families. Can you please provide an example of some of these policies? The policies that come to mind for me that show Democrats care are supporting access to IVF, the ACA, the price cap on insulin, wanting Medicare for all, the childcare tax credits, infrastructure projects that replaces lead pipes, paid and protected family leave, support of the violence against women act, etc. So again please provide the examples to support your claims...
If you have friends and family who are on social security and Medicare/Medicaid then you do realize that the majority of Republicans including Vance but outside of Trump believe it or not want to cut or see those programs shrunk right? The economic recovery has not been equal and affects people on the lower income side worse obviously but all the other stuff you've said seems all vibes based and standard conservative talking points based around identity or decades long propaganda.
> most people who lean left can support trans rights but also want an equal playing field for girls.
This isn’t what many democrats and all trans activists believe.
https://x.com/ACTBrigitte/status/1855095025190797453/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1855095025190797453¤tTweetUser=ACTBrigitte
Democrats are not all trans activists. Not all trans activists are Democrats. A lot of self proclaimed trans activists are self proclaimed leftists and supported the uncommitted movement over Gaza. Again conflating social justice warriors on Twitter with the majority of Dem voters and politicians is part of the issues.
Your twitter link is broken. Can you provide an actual data source that shows Democrats on the whole support your claim?
What is transphobic to disapprove of a policy that allows person, who as a male was a moderately talented swimmer, to self-declare female and crush all born-female competitors? Do you hold that the born-females have no interests, feelings, and rights?
One of the worst parts of “wokism”, at least for college educated women, was the absolute grip that “woke” women had on social life and discourse for several years.
I live in upper Fairfield County, CT, in a town with a GOP state rep that split right down the middle in the last few presidential elections. We are a relatively conservative town by Southwestern Connecticut standards.
But 4 years ago, if your views did not conform to the Credo on your progressive neighbor’s Lawn Sign of Belief you knew to keep your mouth shut, especially at PTA events or around other women. If you expressed dissent from any Doctrine of the Moment, and you were not still in sufficient mourning for RBG with a digital altar pinned on your Facebook feed, you would be denounced and told to shut up in the most condescending, humiliating way and you and your children would be marginalized.
Things have changed. Yesterday a mom woke-scolded me on Facebook for sharing a Jonathan Chait article and then continued to follow me around to other mom’s feeds to keep scolding until she could extort an apology.
She went through all the greatest hits. She labeled us with the litany of “internalized misogyny” and “choosing the price of gas over basic decency” (remember this started with an article by a liberal from NYMag and I didn’t even vote for Trump) and telling me “your family is safe so you are free to intellectualize politics” (my disabled daughter was just bullied out of the private school this woman sends her own child to).
She then reminded us that “at least I care about people’s basic rights.”
She was finally just told to F off and her posts deleted by another mom.
She got mad at us for deleting her “emotional labor” (yes, she called posting on Facebook “emotional labor.”). But no one gave a sh*t about her “emotional labor.” I have a feeling this was a first for her.
Even white women in Fairfield County think this stuff is ridiculous now.
Guess what, the same thing happens if you are a progressive living in a red city or region (perhaps worse with death threats). And guess what, exactly the same thing happened if you weren't the proper religion when I grew up in Texas.
It's the same old thing -whether from the left, right, Evangelicals, Catholics or whatever. Calling it "woke" by one side but somehow "fine" from another side is just a result of a very effective sales job.
Don't get me wrong - I find it stupid no matter which group is doing it
Gave you a like for "She went through all the greatest hits." Gonna have to steal that one.
Agree with you that AWFLs can be insufferable.
If you wish to understand why a growing majority hate cosmopolitan elites, look no further than the condescension dripping from Noah...
"America, fundamentally, is an incredibly rich country with a sick society. We have higher consumption by far than people in any other country on the planet, and yet by and large, except for the few people who were lucky enough to receive the blessings of community and health from our one remaining functional institution, we’re a bunch of unhealthy socially isolated drug addicts."
Criticizing the left is fun. Noah's done it a lot.
Criticizing the right poses a dilemma - how to make true statement like the one above without getting called out by the right, whose media is 24/7 disdain for urban cosmopolitans, who still somehow whine constantly about being the targets of (a more subtle) disdain going the other way.
Not sure why you think this is condescending — if anything, it reads as a populist take. As a critique, it pales against the dark vision Trump placed at the center of his campaign.
The construct that “cosmopolitan elites” are out-of-touch leftists is one of the great long cons in American political history dating. The establishment has been headed by conservative white males since the founding of the Republic. They dominate the ranks of management in businesses large and small, hold most of the key positions in most state governments, head most religious denominations, own far more wealth and property than any other group, run our sports and media operations and have funded the Republican party for generations.
You only need to look at the wealthy and corporate interests — who benefited most from the Trump tax cuts in 2017 — to see who are the real elites. They’ll also profit most from the second Trump term.
The same phrase struck me. If colleges are “our one remaining functional institution,” we’re in big trouble. Language police, intimidation of those holding unsanctified opinions, job applications and statements of loyalty to the current and ever evolving set of beliefs deemed acceptable, creation of “affinity” housing (e.g. segregated by race or religion), and much, much more.
This bastion providing “the blessings of community and health” is there for you provided you are careful about what you disagree with, bite your tongue, or continue there as a social pariah. As fundamentally an old-fashioned liberal, I think this is abhorrent.
Good question. I should have composed my comment with alliteration by saying "deep disdain dripping from Noah..." to expose my elitism.
The phrase “we’re a bunch of unhealthy socially isolated drug addicts."
Is hyperbole but there’s no left or right to it. I could easily imagine a preacher making the same point. Or a conservative bemoaning the drop in religious attendance.
I find it distressing that information as become so monetized. If you are going to be well read your going to have to pay for it. That of course means you spend what little money you have on stuff you want to read that confirms your bias. We have just let the market balkanize us then market and advertise to our segment. Not encouraging for the future.
Could that be the fundamental problem: that right-wing oligarchs were able to spend trillions of dollars over decades to build up a propaganda media ecosystem, while the liberal enemies of oligarchy don't have comparable financial resources?
I'm also reminded of one of the main reasons why centralized social media platforms exist in the first place: they provide a place where content creators can upload very large data files (such as videos) where potentially thousands or millions of viewers could view them for free at a time in a way that was timely for them.
If such files had been uploaded to one of Usenet's alt.binaries.* groups then they would only be accessible to people who were willing to pay to use a Usenet server that offered those high-bandwidth groups, while uploading them to a personal web server would either cost the uploader a large amount for high-bandwidth hosting, or give the viewers an unacceptably slow loading time.
Centralized social media platforms pay for this very high-bandwidth hosting by selling their users' eyeballs to advertisers, which sets in motion the downward spiral of surveillance, enshittification and ragebait.