This. They're not nostalgic for factories. They're mad that--unlike their parents/grandparents--they can't afford to live in a "nice" house in a "nice" neighborhood, get married, raise kids on one income, and retire at 65 *unless* they also take on mountains of student loan debt. Of course, this was never a universal reality. But, there was a time, post-WWII, when it was true for many White families in the US. And that's the dream they're chasing when they say they want to make America "great again."

Let's just be clear about this--Reagan was not in any way a good president. And without him, we wouldn't be in this whole mess right now. 🧵1/ Reagan cultivated distrust in government. He spread the belief that we don't need government to take care of us. Which led to ambivalence toward (or even celebration of) the dismantling of the social safety net. And opened the door for the DOGE destruction we're seeing now. 2/

Why don't right-wing billionaires generate more resentment? Because they promote a version of the meritocracy myth that gives people: 1) hope, 2) agency, and 3) permission to adopt racist and sexist beliefs that justify stepping on others as they try to get ahead. 🧵1/ They tell people: I deserve this power and status because I worked harder/smarter than everyone else, and I didn't let the government get in my way. If you work hard/smart like me, you can also get power and status, so long as you help me keep the government out of our way. 2/

Two things I'd change, based on canvassing this year with @WisDems:
1. Qualitative methods training for canvassers (eg, rapport-building, probing, fieldnote writing)
2. A text box in the app to share open-ended insights (for qualitative analysis later)

A short 🧵 1/ For context, I'm a Sociology professor, ethnographer, and interviewer. I've been teaching qualitative methods for more than a decade and coauthored a book on Qualitative Literacy. 2/
ucpress.edu/books/qualitat…

It's easy to judge women who stay with men they can't trust to know their vote. But these women have often looked at their conservative community and realized that 1) there aren't enough good men to go around and 2) even the women may turn on them if they try to go it alone. 1/🧵 In Holding It Together, I tell the story of Audrey, who was sexually assaulted by her husband, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy. Audrey thought about leaving him and getting an abortion, but she knew neither her family nor her "church family" would support those choices. 2/

Billionaires buy media companies not to make money but to peddle the myth of meritocracy. 🧵

https://twitter.com/lindyli/status/1849671862797615226

That myth treats wealth as the product of effort and intelligence, and billionaires promote it to delude people into thinking that we don't need to tax billionaires, because people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps without the support those taxes could provide.

If men and boys are struggling with rage and hopelessness, it's at least partly because we've eroded the meaning and joy of paid work without showing men how to find meaning and joy in the unpaid work of care. 1/ We've eroded the meaning and joy of paid work by tying people's dignity and social value to the amount of money they make. This incentivizes us to take jobs we hate just for the money and/or to exert so much effort at work that we end up burning out in jobs we once loved. 2/

This is basically how we got Milton Friedman, how we got Ronald Reagan, and how we got the up-by-your-own-bootstraps, winner-take-all, profits-over-people economy that's leaving so many Americans (and especially women and moms) still struggling today.

Let me explain... 🧵 1/

https://twitter.com/emanabdelhadi/status/1839309088397639860

In the 1930s, and as Oreskes and Conway show in their book The Big Myth, wealthy business owners didn't want to pay for Roosevelt's New Deal. So, members of the National Association of Manufacturers set out to persuade Americans we could get by without that support, instead. 2/

Move over, Fox News, there's a new conservative propaganda machine in town--one directed squarely at kids. And its propaganda is subtly hidden in ways that might lead families not to notice what their kids are being taught. Let me explain. A🧵... 1/ Tuttle Twins is a YouTube cartoon and book series. At first glance, it seems like progressive media. The twins have a diverse friend group. They love science. They time travel to learn lessons from history with their Latina grandma, who has a PhD in physics. But... 2/

Reflecting on last night's debate, I keep thinking of Michela Musto's work, which shows that teachers tend to let White boys dominate class discussions, and that how much they talk--not what they say--leads their peers to see them as more brilliant than everyone else. 1/ Essentially, students treat teachers' willingness to let White boys dominate the conversation as a proxy measure of the White boys' brilliance. Which makes sense because kids aren't usually in a position to know better than the teacher when it comes to which answers are right. 2/

Maybe because forcing a woman to have a baby before she's ready is the fastest way to push her into economic precarity and leave her with little choice but to settle for a less-than-ideal partner or take a less-than-ideal job. Take, Brooke, one of the women I profile in Holding It Together. She never wanted to be a mom because she'd grown up with a lot of volatility. But she got pregnant in college, and her conservative Christian parents pressured her to have the baby. 1/ penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697130/h…

Vance might seem like a walking gaffe. But his "women are just happier at home" message appeals to men who don't want to feel like "bad guys," even when their wives are carrying all (or almost all) of the caregiving and the family's mental load. 1/
theguardian.com/us-news/articl… And Vance's message also appeals to women who've been pushed out of the workforce because of the high cost of childcare, and who've redefined their identities around motherhood because they don't want to feel bad about the decisions they've been forced to make.

It's important to note that she's a conservative evangelical Christian. As I show in Holding It Together, these moms are taught that their salvation depends on joyfully accepting the "difficult seasons" of life (and parenting). Which leads them to deny the stress they face. 1/

https://twitter.com/jesshardie/status/1828217927989858375

Take an evangelical stay-at-home mom I call April. Her husband makes only $30K/yr as a pastor, and she sometimes eats only her kids' leftovers for meals. Yet, she insisted that her family doesn't need more government support, because God will reward her faith and frugality. 2/

White Evangelical Christian churches offer moms support they can't get from our current policies. Then they weaponize that support to dissuade moms from fighting for policies that would better support us all.

Take for example, a stay-at-home mom I'll call Kristy... 🧵 1/ Kristy became a stay-at-home mom because her job paid so little, and childcare cost so much in her community, that she and her husband would have lost money if she continued working for pay full time. 2/

The Right wing hates the idea of universal programs--from free school lunches to free healthcare to free tampons--because making support universal and easily accessible eliminates the stigma they use to vilify the people they want to exploit. Keeping whole classes of people stigmatized--whether for needing menstrual products or help paying for their healthcare or their kids' lunches--makes it easier for big corporations and billionaires to exploit them. Because stigma forces people to take jobs no one else will fill.

There's a growing gender divide in politics, and it's being driven by young men's movement to the Right. In 2020, most men under 30 voted Biden. Now, most support Trump.

Why? It's partly that young men are growing more sexist, but there are also bigger forces involved

A🧵... 1/ Polls show that young men are increasingly embracing sexist attitudes. Rising numbers say, for example, that it's best if men work for pay and women stay home, that efforts toward gender equality have gone too far, and that feminism is hurting men. 2/
ipsos.com/en-us/millenni…

The Christian Right already has lots of practice restricting divorce--just using norms instead of laws.

In #HoldingItTogether, I tell the story of an Evangelical mom I call Audrey who considered divorcing her husband after he sexually assaulted her. 1/

vox.com/today-explaine… Audrey can't take birth control, but her husband doesn't like condoms, so she asked him to always pull out during sex, as she wasn't ready for another child. He didn't, and she became pregnant.

At first, Audrey considered terminating the pregnancy and leaving her husband. 2/

It's easy to think of this kind of fear as inherent to motherhood. But it's actually manufactured doubt. As I show in #HoldingItTogether, there's a long history of fear mongering aimed to guilt moms into staying home or gaslight them out of demanding support to work for pay. 1/

https://twitter.com/HilaryMatfess/status/1795805332108706032

Take the Satanic Panic around childcare in the 1980s/90s. Conservative pundits and policymakers used wildly inaccurate stories to stoke parents' fear of childcare providers and create the perception that mothers should only work for pay if they have no other choice. 2/

Of course, if a student struggles with spelling/grammar/writing, it can affect how effectively they convey their substantive knowledge.

But, that's not a reason to punish students. It's a reason to give students the opportunity to submit drafts for review and revision. 2/ Over the past 12 years, I've taught more than 3,000 undergrads, and many of those students arrived in college with very limited writing experience. Some had never written anything longer than a page, and most hadn't learned to write research papers with arguments and evidence. 3/

"Other countries have social safety net. The U.S. has women."

That quote is the beating heart of my new book, HOLDING IT TOGETHER, which will be out June 4, 2024 with Portfolio/Penguin, and which I can't wait to share with all of you.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697130/h… HOLDING IT TOGETHER reveals how we force women to be America’s social safety net, what the weight of that responsibility is doing to women, and why so many Americans believe the myth that we’re doing just fine without the kind of security a real social safety net would provide.

Last week, I asked the first-year undergrads in my Kids and Society class to tell me about the upsides and downsides of remote learning. Their responses might surprise you--particularly for what they reveal about students' attitudes toward chatGPT, cheating, and AI. 1/ The first downside they identified was that remote learning makes it "easy to cheat." Note here that I said *downside.* Which should already be making us question standard assumptions about "kids these days."

Intrigued, I asked them to elaborate. 2/