Why Academics Leftists and Elitists Need to Treat Ordinary Americans With Respect

sturg33 said:
Since mqt is the only remaining liberal on the board willing to defend his ideals in good faith (also thethe when he comes back)..

I'm curious why he might think leftists are so miserable?
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Honestly, I’ve got nothing man. If I were to go full Devil’s Advocate, I’d suggest it’s entirely possible that in the social media age and the current political environment that there is some overlap between the numbers and the fact that the liberal “team” is losing so soundly. The world is just that little bit more depressing when you’re a progressive who’s watched the past decade see Donald Trump elected President twice, Republicans take control of the Senate and SCOTUS, and pass a bunch of bills all over the country you find objectionable at the very least, more so if you’re one of those people being legislated “against” (spare me the debate on gender, I’m genuinely not interested in having one, but I think it’s reasonable to suggest when discussing the subject of depression amongst people who vote Democrat, the direct actions of the government would drive this specific metric up without it meaning anything different for the gender debate. Whatever your beliefs on the trans debate is, it is statistically relevant when you can healthily assume those that are directly affected by the policy count in the sample size of liberals).

Critically though, this is not a defense of the left. Though there are some small amounts of those people directly affected by something directly done by Republican policies, it’s certainly not even close to the whole gap. And even if it were correct that the political landscape is driving the result, there’s a lot to condemn there on every level. It’s a lack of leadership on behalf of the Democratic Party for not offering a cogent vision for America, and it’s in part because Democrats don’t know how to grapple with the fact that they’re going to have to raise taxes if they want any of the things they want, and because they often present no real vision at all on the national level for an alternative to Trump. Instead they’ve embraced forgoing a coherent base of political support based around shared ideology and policy support and instead opted for a coalition of identities. But the issue is that they’re fucking cowards. They won’t meaningfully engage with certain citizens where they are because any association with someone who could risk losing a demographic could shatter their base.

I lean pretty hard on some progressive ideals, but I do think the left, and the mainstream Democratic Party specifically, often forgets that civil rights just aren’t going to matter a whole lot to the daily lives of large swaths of the electorate, including in many cases the same segments of the population they aim to protect. That doesn’t mean you abandon civil rights and social policies, but for the vast majority of the country the effect those social policies have on them personally each day is pretty minimal. For any one individual the effect can be profound, but people struggling to make ends meet in Alabama don’t have the privilege of worrying whether or not trans kids have healthcare or who the government is deporting. Unlike others on the left, I don’t actually think you need to leave those folks behind. The rural poor aren’t a monolith, and the gap would be less severe in rural areas if Democrats just embraced focusing on how to win the working class. Christ, Donald Trump already got many of them to believe very firmly in Central Planning and a double digit increase in duties, so nobody can tell me the Dems couldn’t possibly find a way to win voters over with progressive economic policies.

My problem personally is I don’t actually think the Democratic Party of 2025 is any more economically literate than MAGA and I think they often focus on “solving” the wrong problems. I think the left expects a certain quality of life for all citizens that we cannot afford and most of the same people who make that a key component of their economic worldview would very much object to the cost to meaningfully fund it all. I think there are some things we could do with taxation that wouldn’t have the overwhelming chilling effects some worry it would, but the number one thing that needs to happen is it *needs* to be inexpensive to employ people, particularly for small businesses that can re-invest into the communities they operate in. But we do need to embrace government efficiency on the left. I also think Democratic voters need to stop letting rich celebrities get away with free publicity with videos deploring the cut to social services without asking them what they’re personally doing with the money we didn’t tax of theirs to fund solving those same problems. But Democratic lawmakers largely don’t understand what they actually want economically. The same people lamenting tariffs on the left will turn around and propose a $15 minimum wage.

So all that is to say, it’s not necessarily any specific thing the left is doing to cause this disparity, and instead what it’s not doing. For all the bluster from the Republican Party and its media ecosystem about the tyranny of the left, they don’t cultivate the same response in their approach. Whereas Democrats fish for sympathy and support, Republicans often fish for order and freedom in their messaging, even if the issue at hand has nothing to do with that. I do think the Democratic messaging resonates more with the type of voter who perceives themselves as a victim of oppression, whether that’s accurate or not in a given situation. And ultimately I see a large percentage of the right slowly shifting toward that same mentality. Every one of those MAGA grifters has embraced the culture war and victimhood, but from the right. And because Donald Trump apparently conducts economic and foreign policy this term through a Oujia Board that keeps switching between Chaiman Mao and Henry Kissinger and Congress is composed of nothing but feckless rodents who won’t legislate, my hope is the movement will suffer a similar political fate as the Democrats right now. People in Appalachia won’t care about immigrants in Los Angeles or trans kids in Texas any more for the right than they did for the left, and they’ll vote for the person with a plan to make their lives better.
 
^ since you took the time to actually engage, ill respond in kind when I have the time.

in the meantime
Gt1wA8MXQAARpx8
 
And yet it is the middle-aged white men without college educations suffering the deaths of despair. What gives? The suicide rate for that group is 4 times as high as its female counterpart. It has risen from about 25 per 100,000 to about 40 per 100,000 over the past 25 years. I point this out not to argue that these men are weak or failures in any way. They deserve our compassion and help.

It is an interesting thang to see so many folks on the right self-soothing themselves with the notion that their ideological adversaries are somehow crazy. Mirror mirror on the wall....
 
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nsacpi said:
And yet it is the middle-aged white men without college educations suffering the deaths of despair. What gives? The suicide rate for that group is 4 times as high as its female counterpart. It has risen from about 25 per 100,000 to about 40 per 100,000 over the past 25 years. I point this out not to argue that these men are weak or failures in any way. They deserve our compassion and help.

It is an interesting thang to see so many folks on the right self-soothing themselves with the notion that their ideological adversaries are somehow crazy. Mirror mirror on the wall....
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When presented with real world data about leftists reporting 2x higher mental illness and 2x rate of unhapiness.. our academic has offer no curiosity or perspective. Instead, deflecting to discuss dental records of Alabama and suicide data he is projecting in his own mind

Skip college kiddos
 
I offer for your consideration the possibility that those who don't stigmatize depression, angst, unhappiness are more likely to get help than those who stigmatize it as a weakness and are loathe to report it. The latter are more likely to end up dead or in an emergency room.
 
nsacpi said:
I offer for your consideration the possibility that those who don't stigmatize depression, angst, unhappiness are more likely to get help than those who stigmatize it as a weakness and are loathe to report it. The latter are more likely to end up dead or in an emergency room.
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I'd offer that the typical customer of a therapist is a leftist, and after a decade of therapy report being miserable across the board compared to their voting counterpart

I'd love to invite a curious PhD to analyze this and figure out what's going on. Do you know any?
 
Imagine a college grad 100k in debt with a mediocre job being chewed up by AI, remembering that your uncurious econ professor laughed at your curiosity to buy bitcoin, back when bitcoin was 5% of today's price?

Ooof!
 
Tapate50 said:
Do the leftist in Chicago killing each other daily qualify as mentally ill or deaths of despair?

or both.
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I'm not the one self-soothing on misbehavior or illness by someone I'm not aligned with. If it makes any of y'all feel better who am I to judge.
 
nsacpi said:
I'm not the one self-soothing on misbehavior or illness by someone I'm not aligned with. If it makes any of y'all feel better who am I to judge.
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lol self soothing... what a snowflake term

Everyone still remembers when you were cheering on people losing money on bitcoin lol
 
Our least well-educated states are indeed a beacon for the rest of the country. The ones with the lowest proportion of college-educated adults: Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma. Think of how fabulous our country would be if we emulated them.
 
nsacpi said:
Our least well-educated states are indeed a beacon for the rest of the country. The ones with the lowest proportion of college-educated adults: Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma. Think of how fabulous our country would be if we emulated them.
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College educated kids are about to elect a Marxist to run the most important city oh the planet
 
nsacpi said:
make America more like Oklahoma (which btw has a higher homicide rate than NY city)
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I understand your inability to analyze a situation in isolation. But I don't care about dental records of Alabama. I want to understand why our supposedly brightest young people are compelled to elect to Marxist.

Perhaps mqt can weigh in as I know our academic isn't capable
 
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