On one side of the debate, a rather old-fashioned brand of centrist liberals advocate a sort of operatic pity towards his disproportionately white and male supporters who were sold a working-class agenda on which Trump will never deliver. On the other side, many angry liberals openly celebrate Trump-supporting coal miners potentially losing their health insurance under the GOP’s ill-fated American Health Care Act. Serves ’em right, the thinking goes.
.. The thought that poor whites are poor because of their bad decisions has a brother: that poor blacks are poor for the same reason, as Williamson has also argued.
.. Or, one could weave some sympathy for poor whites into a stark moral condemnation of white racism precisely because “prejudice and blindness” has put poor whites “into the position of supporting your oppressor,” to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.
.. Lack of uncomfortable talk about more taxes also helped with fundraising and a general party strategy of rolling up votes in wealthy suburbs. Her advertisements had the least policy content of any presidential campaign going back until 2000 at least, and by far. All that implicitly allowed Trump to own the issue of trade and jobs.
Why Don’t Wealthy Conservatives Who Promote Marriage Marry the Poor?
the argument that declining economic prospects for men near the bottom and improved economic prospects for women across the board has facilitated more relationship quits than before.
.. If the best arrangement you can put together says the 25th percentile broke even in a period where the economy more than doubled (which based on my series would suggest that below-25th percentile saw declines), it’s still clear that the economy left these men behind, which is perfectly adequate for the declining-attractiveness theory since mate attractiveness is relative to the society you find yourself
.. All of which is to say: Behind the veil, you’d prefer an institutional regime that didn’t effectively imprison you in bad relationships, lest you find yourself in one as a child or adult.
.. Douthat’s paragraph speaks of marriage and relationships in general terms, but in fact they are very specific things that contain within them very different people. Of late, conservatives have rallied behind the pithy line that people need to “preach what they practice” regarding marriage. But, in fact, people of Douthat’s ilk do not practice what they preach. They preach the importance of marrying poor and working class people, but they don’t actually marry any of these people.
They certainly could marry someone from those classes. Many a person would take up a spouse who makes six figures banging out a few blog posts each week. But they choose not to.After rigging the institutions to capture the majority of the national income and basically all of the national wealth, segregating themselves residentially, intermarrying almost solely in their rich enclaves, and even sealing off their schools from being accessed by the unwashed masses, these rich social conservatives turn around and implore others to marry people that they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, people they can’t even bring themselves to make even the most minimal of community with.If this all was really that important to them (the most pressing issue in the entire country by their accounts), why don’t they marry any of these people? What is it about them that they find too unattractive to couple with? One really has to wonder.
A sociologist realized that if she were ever going to understand global inequality she would have to become one of the people who helps create it. So she trained to become a wealth manager to the ultra-rich.
A sociologist realized that if she were ever going to understand global inequality she would have to become one of the people who helps create it. So she trained to become a wealth manager to the ultra-rich.
.. Few outlets, however, noted the professional interventions that made that happen: Mitt Romney employs at least one wealth manager to create and maintain those offshore shelters.
.. Without breaking any laws (for the most part), they enable their clients to sidestep many laws and policies—especially those designed to prevent the kind of neo-feudal concentrations of wealth emerging now.
.. In designing my own research strategy, I was particularly inspired by the work of John van Maanen—now a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—who famously did his doctoral research on a California police department in the early 1970s, not long after the Watts riots.
.. Like van Maanen, I disclosed my real name, institutional affiliation, and research aims throughout the research process; I did not, that is, go “undercover.” Whether I was attending classes or professional society meetings, I always wore a name tag that included my place of work, so it was clear that I was a scholar linked to a research institution.
.. Finally, people in a technically complex profession—especially one that carries some degree of social stigma—don’t have many opportunities to vent about their work lives with anyone: Their family and friends are unlikely to understand the nature of the work, and with professional peers, there would always be concerns about giving away “trade secrets” or violating client confidentiality.
.. a domain of libertarian fantasy made real, in which professional intervention made it possible for the world’s wealthiest people to be free not only of tax obligations but of any laws they found inconvenient.
.. Looking at a costly divorce? No problem—just hire a wealth manager to put your assets in an offshore trust. Then the assets are no longer in your name, and can’t be attached in a judgment.
.. No litigant on earth has been able to break a Cook Islands trust, including the U.S. government
.. virtually all of them saw themselves as misunderstood good guys.
.. they portrayed themselves as protectors of elderly clients from rapacious heirs, facilitators of development finance to emerging markets, and quasi-family members to wealthy parents seeking advice on how to prevent their children from being destroyed by idleness and easy access to drugs.
.. “The secret point of money and power is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake…but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.”.. the professionals ensure privacy for their clients. They keep the wealthy out of the newspapers and off the radar of regulatory authorities as much as possible... make it possible for the wealthiest people in the world to gain all the benefits of society, while flouting its laws.
The Silence of the Hacks
So what do Republicans in Congress, who have the power to investigate the situation, believe should be done?
Nothing.
Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, says that Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador were “entirely appropriate.”
.. Why?
Well, Senator Rand Paul explained it all: “We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans.”
.. you can’t understand the mess we’re in without appreciating not just the potential corruption of the president, but the unmistakable corruption of his party — a party so intent on cutting taxes for the wealthy, deregulating banks and polluters and dismantling social programs that accepting foreign subversion is, apparently, a small price to pay.
.. Republicans didn’t worry so much that holding a lawless president accountable would derail their hard-line agenda.
.. Now we know that even as the F.B.I. was creating the false appearance of scandal around his opponent, it was sitting on evidence suggesting alarmingly close relations between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.