While we're at it, I would like to tweet about two recent NYT pieces on Trump's marginal gains among non-white/people of color/working-class immigrants.
Taking them in chronological order, I appreciated this piece from @jbouie, who can always be counted on for a thoughtful entry. nytimes.com/2020/11/18/opi…
First, Bouie's contextualizing of these marginal gains are invaluable. I don't think left/liberals need to be in freakout mode. Also, he offers a plausible explanation of what happened. People know who runs the government and they understand what benefits them.
This is an extremely salient point about the stimulus under Trump:
"Personal income went up and poverty went down, even as the United States reported its steepest ever quarterly drop in economic output."
"Personal income went up and poverty went down, even as the United States reported its steepest ever quarterly drop in economic output."
As Bouie suggests, it makes you wonder why liberal governments have not done more of this in non-pandemic times (though I will concede that some of the answers, such as divided governments, are obvious).
I also very much enjoyed reading @jaycaspiankang's clarion call for rethinking the way we conceive demographic political groups and how to approach these groups for political gain. nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opi…
I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask that "people of color" be jettisoned as a political category, but I hesitate to throw it out altogether.
It's a useful term, as far as I'm concerned, because I believe white supremacy is a pervasive force in American life and the systems of white power see themselves in opposition to a vast non-white cohort.
Those are shitty systems and I hope we rid ourselves of them eventually, but for the meantime it is what it is and I think we benefit from shorthands that we can use to describe their effects. The descriptor is not inherently good, it's just an easy way to describe things.
That said, I agree with its failings as a political category, especially in electoral politics.
This gets back to Bouie's point: Material benefits are what matters and, that being the case, Kang is right that you have to think about different demographic and geographic groups in more specific ways to figure out how they can matter to people.
"Working-class immigrant" is indeed a more useful, less broad category.
Anyway, it's all good food for thought. Glad we have smart people thinking this stuff through and publishing their thoughts.
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