American Civil War 2.0, Deaths of Despair Among Working Class Whites, Democratic Party Propaganda Networks, and and End to the War in Ukraine - Dinner Table Digest № 26
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This week’s Dinner Table Digest brings us talk of another civil war in the United States, an analysis of deaths of despair and economic depression among working class whites, and an exposé of Democratic Party operatives who write political content for local news websites set up specifically for the purpose of hosting progressive content in important swing states. Timothy Snyder, who I have plugged here before, reminds us that for all of Vladimir Putin’s words about nuclear strikes, we really needn’t worry too much about them. Finally, I link to three assessments of the conservatism of Israeli thinker Yoram Hazony.
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After Mar-a-Lago Search, Talk of ‘Civil War’ Is Flaring Online - Ken Bensinger, Sheera Frenkel - The New York Times
One of the interesting aspects of the class on Online Speech that I’m sitting in on is the focus on words, phrases, and expressions that move people to political action without actually explicitly demanding or requiring political action. The prof, Jennifer Saul, has done a ton of work on this kind of language use; much of her recent work looks at some of the differences between Fig Leaves and Dogwhistles, both of which are specific instances of the kind of speech that I mentioned above. This sets up the quote from this very important piece:
In August, a single tweet stating “I think civil war has just been declared” managed to reach over 17 million profiles despite coming from an account with under 14,000 followers, according to Cybara, an Israeli firm that monitors misinformation.
“Ideas go into echo chambers and it’s the only voice that’s heard; there are no voices of dissent,” said Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies how terrorist groups radicalize and recruit.
Mr. Braddock said he did not believe these posts indicated any planning for a war. But he worries about what academics call “stochastic terrorism” — seemingly random acts of violence that are, in fact, provoked by “coded language, dog whistles and other subtext” in statements by public figures.
Mr. Trump is adept at making such statements, said Mr. Braddock, citing Mr. Trump’s April 2020 tweet reading “Liberate Michigan!” Less than two weeks later, mobs of heavily armed protesters occupied the state capitol in Lansing. He also pointed to Mr. Trump’s speech before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when he encouraged thousands of supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol and, later in the same remarks, told them, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
“The statements Trump makes are not overt calls to action, but when you have a huge and devoted following, the chances that one or more people are activated by that are high,” Mr. Braddock said.
‘There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without’ - Thomas B. Edsall - New York Times
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected there were two competing theories as to why the bulk of white, working class America threw their lot in with Trump’s Republican Party. At first, the leading theory was economic in nature, suggesting that many Trump voters had been economically alienated from the Democratic Party, and in the process, had been convinced that Trump and his policies would return to these same white, working class voters the resources they felt had been unfairly taken from them through two decades of globalization. The second theory, which eventually won out in most left-wing circles, suggested that racial resentments, exacerbated by 8 years of the Obama presidency, and ‘fear of being replaced by The Other’ drove support for Trump. We have only seen increasing evidence for this view, particularly with the rise of increasingly militarized Christian Nationalism. However, there is still something to be said for the economic losses that white, middle-aged America has felt over the past 20 years. As this piece notes, Deaths of Despair (suicide, poisoning by drugs or alcohol, etc.) are up sharply among middle-aged, economically vulnerable white men.
Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:
From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.
Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”
None of this suggests, of course, that racial resentments, ideological commitments, and increasing demonization of The Other were not the main reason for Trump’s victory, nor does it suggest that they are unimportant to the current political conversation. As you know, I’ll be the first person to raise the red flag when I see elements of Christian Nationalism pervading public policy. But these stats, in addition to numerous others presented in the piece, do suggest that economic malaise, and in particular, a distinct despair about the future for lower-middle class white men, is significantly co-related with voting for Trump’s Republican Party.
While there is much to be gleaned from this piece, I found the last few paragraphs to be somewhat suspect. The author tries to tie the plight of exurban and suburban working class whites to the “series of economic dislocations similar to those that had a devastating impact on Black neighborhoods starting in the 1960s,” suggesting that it would be “easy … to apply [the] description of extraordinary rates of black joblessness,” disordered lives, family breakdown and substance abuse to the emergence of similar patterns of disorder in white exurban America[.]” This reading of the situation fails to mention, let alone implicate red lining, a form of institutionalized segregation prevalent in the 1960’s that relegated Blacks to the poorer, less desirable, and more environmentally polluted parts of town, all while opening up the more idyllic ‘exurbs and suburbs’ for the white middle class.
RIP Loretta Lynn (1932 - 2022)
Here is one of my favourites that always makes for a good earworm.
Democrats' swing-state local news ploy - Lachlan Markay, Thomas Wheatley - Axios News
Lest we think it is only the right wing that manipulates the media for its own partisan purposes, Axios News reveals a network of 51 branded news sites that seem to be journalistic fronts for Democratic Party political content, all running in highly contested states. By further distorting the line between what is news and what is sponsored political content, Democratic Party operatives, specifically those employed by The American Independent, contribute to the decline in democratic values in the United States.
What's happening: A network of at least 51 locally branded news sites has popped up since last year under names like the Milwaukee Metro Times, the Mecklenburg Herald and the Tri-City Record.
The sites are focused on key swing states with elections in 2021 and 2022: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Each follows a similar template: aggregated local news content and short write-ups about local sports teams and attractions — interspersed with heavily slanted political news aimed at boosting Democratic midterm candidates and attacking Republican opponents.
The intrigue: "About Us" pages for each of the sites say they're run by a company called Local Report Inc., which was formed in Florida last year.
Their mastheads indicate involvement by another entity: the American Independent, a Washington-based progressive news outfit.
Six American Independent writers have each contributed to most or all of the sites in the network, according to an Axios review of bylines on the sites.
While all of the sites aggregate content from other sources, all six of those authors regularly write stories directly for the Local Report network, with numerous articles appearing exclusively on those sites.
The American Independent was launched by Democratic operative and fundraiser David Brock — also known for founding the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America.
How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end? - Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder, Yale historian and expert on Russo-Ukrainian affairs, suggests that worries about nuclear strikes on the part of Vladimir Putin are misplaced, if only for the reason that said strikes would end up affecting his own people.
Assuming that Russia did want to detonate a small nuclear weapon in Ukraine and succeeded in doing so, despite all of this, this would make no decisive military difference. There are no big clusters of Ukrainian soldiers or equipment to hit, since Ukraine fights in a very decentralized way. If there were a detonation, Ukrainians would keep fighting. They have been saying so for months, and there is no reason to doubt them.
There is also the problem of motive. Putin wants us to sympathize with his situation, which is of course a highly suspect move in itself. But is what he says even credible? We say that "Putin is backed to the wall. What will he do?" That is how we get ourselves talking about nuclear weapons: Putin gets us into what we are to supposed to believe is his own psychological space. But this is all just feeling. It is not really a motive.
If sheer emotion resulting from defeat was going to motivate nuclear use, it would already have happened, and it hasn't. Little can be more humiliating than the Russian defeat at Kyiv, a month into the war. The collapse in Kharkiv region last month was also a shock. As I write, the Ukrainians are making significant gains in regions that Putin just claimed would be Russia forever in a giant televised ceremony; the official Russian response has been to say that their borders are not defined. The Russian reaction to superior force has been to retreat.
Finally, a trio of pieces by philosopher Eric Schleisser on the conservatism of Israeli thinker Yoram Hazony. On his conception of conservatism, loyalty and honour play a big role, as does the Traditional Family, which is, importantly, not the Nuclear Family.
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