Debunction Junction

Trigger warning: suicide, racism, classism

David Brooks’ New York Times column for today has already garnered a host of critical responses (most intriguing, in my opinion, this one about his casual equation of Sanders’ and Trump’s support). Let me just quickly hop into the fray to point out a particularly egregious falsehood he lazily propagated: that Trump’s support is being driven by class resentment.

As Brook’s put it:

This election — not only the Trump phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also — has reminded us how much pain there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century. This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows. Trump’s success grew out of that pain, but he is not the right response to it.

The pain he’s talking about there is admittedly as much social as it is economic, but in case the attribution of the Trump (and to a lesser extent Sanders’  too) insurgency to lower economic orders was missed, he spells it out later on – “I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own.”

To be frank, bullshit.

Brooks is a traveler in many circles, overwhelmingly ones that are urban and economically upwardly mobile, but several of them have been epicenters of Trumps ascendancy. Most of his time is in New York City, which Trump carried decisively and was the site of his original announcement that he would be campaigning for president. Brooks is also active at his alma mater the University of Chicago – another city with a Republican primary electorate that overwhelmingly opted support Trump.

Admittedly Brooks holds positions at Duke and a regular spot on the PBS News Hour taking him into the bubbles of moderate Republicans in Durham and Arlington respectively, but that those completely blinded him to the reality of Trump’s support in other places he works is utterly bizarre.

Brooks might claim that it’s a lower order element within New York and Chicago that he doesn’t associate with that support Trump, unlike his refined Republican colleagues. That is also, to be frank, bullshit. The Economist of all sources, a paper that you would expect to be invested in this type of narrative of deluded poor people supporting crypto-protectionism, has compiled data showing that Trump’s support is pretty evenly spread across income brackets but if anything skews slightly towards those with above median incomes.

As I’ve noted here before, Trump’s support is complicated by region and class and a number of factors, but what appears the most consistent to me is that he appeals to people tired of being told to be nicer, to be better, to be respectful to people they don’t consider worthy of respect. That appeals to a lot of less well off people, sure, but most consistently to certain social not economic demographics. It resonates with White Southerns who have wanted vindication for decades. It resonates with conservative traditionalists outside of the South who live in more generally progressive areas and as a result encounter those messages fairly often.

Can Brooks not see that or does he just not want to?

Scary stories, just add campfire

If your day has been anything like mine today you are quickly grabbing together the most important things to bring with you to a Halloween party either tonight, tomorrow, or some other time in the next couple of days. Costumes, candy, and drinks are, of course, the expect items you have to gather together in preparation, but let’s not overlook one holiday-specific must-have: scary stories. Let me link you to a couple of spooky tales to wow people with this weekend.

Zombies… at the polls

The SF Weekly has a bleak portrayal of the emerging voter landscape in one of the country’s largest cities. Although apathy and disengagement have flourished in the midst of an anemic economic recovery and the widespread perception that there are few to no possible solutions to social and economic inequality within the democratic system, the problem appears to have been uniquely stoked within San Francisco.

The longer form piece goes into detail about potential contributing factors – including Democratic Party bungling, flawed election scheduling, and most deeply the ways that gentrification has recreated San Francisco’s communities. Beyond the myriad causes, the message is that democratic governance in many parts of the country is rapidly becoming something run on autopilot. Yikes!

Watching you

From France to the US, a number of countries are now considering even more extensive surveillance regimes that promise to make the system revealed by Edward Snowden look like child’s play.

Access Now released an assessment of the bill now facing consideration in the US Senate which called it “a surveillance bill dressed up as a cybersecurity bill.” Their look into the French bill, just passed by their senate, is even more grim, noting that it mandates “telecommunications companies to install ‘black boxes’ on their networks, which use an algorithm to indiscriminately sweep data for suspicious activity”. It’s worryingly unclear what will be counted as “suspicious” of course.

Not in either France or the US? No problem, these are policies that apply to any data picked up by anyone, citizen or not, in any part of the world.

The end of the world as we know it, and some feel fine

It’s come up on this blog before that climate change is likely to disproportionately damage some of the poorest communities and countries (who are also often least responsible for the crisis). The process of that is complex and combines together the fact that those groups typically have fewer resources to spend on either preparing for the new climate or directly address its impacts as they arise, as well as the happenstance that many of the poorest communities in the world are in climatic areas simply more likely to see dramatic changes.

One recent study from UC Berkeley, however, attempted to quantify exactly how the world’s national economies will be affected and found two startling results. According to it, the lost wealth for many of the world’s poorest regions – South Asia, Africa, and Latin America namely – will be much larger than many have anticipated. For a huge swathe of the world’s population, this means a reduced income and an inherently limited economy. What’s more, there are a few countries that might even see modest economic gains thanks to climate change. They’re concentrated in northern Europe, with a few other inclusions mostly from some other countries with comparatively healthy economies in current day. In short, not only are the pains felt by the world’s poor probably going to be much worse, there’s a number of people disproportionately responsible for global warming who actually stand to benefit from the changed climate.

With these stories you’ll be the toast of the party. That doomed, doomed party.