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Anne Helen Petersen Profile picture
@annehelen
Oct 1, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
1/ This morning, a friend directed me to the Instagram Stories of a popular southern lifestyle blogger who goes by the name "Charleston Blonde" (she was also a SURVIVOR contestant, of course)
2/ This blogger is never, according to this friend, political. The closest she's come is a single post in response to BLM about being actively anti-racist. But in a poll in her Stories, she asked her followers who they were voting for. At first, the tally was split.
3/ But Trump began to climb into the lead. She asked her readers to anonymously submit their reasons for voting for Trump or for Biden. The answers are a mix of what you might expect: a bit of abortion, a bit of God, a bit of QAnon "Save the Children"
4/ But the thing that came up again and again: The economy. My 401k.
This blog is *deeply* bourgeois aspirational. When these women talk about maintaining "the economy," they are talking an economy that has largely rebounded for them as (white) bourgeois women

Stats here: washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
Oops I missed 5/ but here's 6/

All of this, combined w/the now-deleted tweet from this morning about how "Trump voters like his debating style because it reminds them of their working class homes," highlighted just how dominant the image of the Cartoonish Trump Voter remains
7/ For these women, all the other bullshit about Trump just doesn't *figure.* They ignore it the same way this blog ignores the "political." What they care about is preserving the status quo and their positioning within it — in terms of class, racial hierarchy, religion, etc
8/ This isn't hard to understand! In fact, it is very transparent! But this sort of woman is often elided from the profile of the Trump Coalition. Not by POC, who keep reminding readers how white women actually voted. The people ignoring her: white, educated, middle class pundits
9/ The only way I can explain this = white liberals are intent on disavowal: I'm *nothing* like them. I'm not close with a single Trump voter.

But if you're middle class & your extended peer group is middle class, you almost certainly know someone who voted for him
10/ But it also has to do with something deeper and darker, I think. I wrote about that — with more specifics about the Lifestyle Blog Trump Voter — here:

annehelen.substack.com/p/the-lifestyl…

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More from @annehelen

Anne Helen Petersen Profile picture
Aug 31, 2022
I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to talk about debt cancellation in a way that might get through to the "I worked my way through college/I made better choices" crowd.

Wealth is the missing piece:

annehelen.substack.com/p/wealth-is-th…
We’re accustomed to talking about stories about need/absence of student loans as stories of privilege. But a better way of thinking of them, particularly in the context of student loan forgiveness, is as stories of *wealth.*
Wealth is the floatation device that spreads vertically & horizontally through your family, buoying all those close enough to gain access

The size of that device—& how many people it can keep afloat—depends on how many are bolstering it & how many people need its support
Read 17 tweets
Anne Helen Petersen Profile picture
Aug 24, 2022
10k-20k in debt cancellation isn't enough. But it is the beginning — and sharing stories of how it is dramatically changing people's lives helps garner the support to push the movement further.

Here are just some of those stories:

annehelen.substack.com/p/the-beginnin…
"For my family, an enormous financial and trauma burden is lifted today. I can't stop crying."
"No loan payment means more fresh fruit and veg in our fridge, more books for our boys and now I can afford to get new clothes too. I'm in total disbelief!"
Read 21 tweets
Anne Helen Petersen Profile picture
Aug 10, 2022
For @Bloomberg, I spent a lot of time talking to women about the realities of their WFH/flex arrangements — which most people are pretty happy with! — but that society is still set up in a way that forces them to become one-woman safety nets:

bloomberg.com/news/features/…
When women get flex, they get space. But that space is is quickly filled with responsibilities that were once more equally distributed: between partners in a relationship, but also between citizens and the society of which they are a part
This is *particularly* true in cis-het relationships where the woman has flex/WFH and the man does not/doesn't take as much of it, because of gender expectations.

Who does the dinner prep? Shuttling kid from school to practice? The person with the flex
Read 7 tweets
Anne Helen Petersen Profile picture
Aug 9, 2022
Watching the reaction to this cartoon was so wild — people out there disbelieving the stubborn 65/35 unpaid labor split in cis-het marriages, yes even ostensibly "progressive" ones
Just some very simple stats from the OECD re: division of labor of additional unpaid labor during the pandemic:

- 61.5% of mothers of children under age 12 say they took on the majority or entirety of the extra care work, vs. 22.4% of fathers

oecd.org/coronavirus/po…
Or the hall-of-famer from @clairecm: "Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3 Percent of Women Agree"

nytimes.com/2020/05/06/ups…
Read 4 tweets
Anne Helen Petersen Profile picture
May 25, 2022
I process by writing. And right now, it feels like the sorrow is unending. There is nothing we can do, with our country as is, from stopping it from happening tomorrow.

This is what happens when you live under minority rule:

annehelen.substack.com/p/this-is-what…
To suggest someone channel their rage into voting feels like a laughable insult. I don’t mean we shouldn’t vote — of course we should. But voting will not, at least for the foreseeable future, effect substantive national change.
The United States has always, in some capacity, been governed through some form of minority rule. But the last 22 years (and the last six in particular) have underlined just how difficult it is for the will of the majority to translate into policy or governmental action.
Read 5 tweets
Anne Helen Petersen Profile picture
May 22, 2022
The last two months I've watched something curious happen: very Covid-conscientious people, people with paid time off, people who can work from home.....testing positive for Covid and then, unless they're hospitalized, insisting on working through it:

annehelen.substack.com/p/the-normaliz…
This is a group that has the most privilege in terms of the ability to take paid time off to truly recover from Covid — and, in many cases, the least willingness to actually do so
And I get it: those of us who can work from home have worked through SO MUCH SHIT these last two years; a Covid case seems relatively small compared to, I dunno, working through an attempted coup, or a climate catastrophe, or lack of childcare
Read 9 tweets

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