> CN was measured in Wave 4 using a five-item version of the Collective Narcissism Scale (Golec de Zavala et al. 2009; Golec de Zavala, Cichocka, and Bilewicz 2013). The items were: “If the United States had a major say in the world, the world would be a much better place,” “The United States deserves special treatment,” “It really makes me angry when others criticize the United States,” “Not many people seem to fully understand the importance of the United States,” and “I will never be satisfied until the United States gets the recognition it deserves.” All items used a seven-point scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7).
I dunno, that doesn't sound sound to me, and people tend to draw bold conclusions from such matters.
I've seen quite a lot of such papers, proving that "conservatives are knowing liberals better than vice versa" or similar, but diving into methodology it seems like people are trying to exacerbate what the data says.
People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.
> People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.
I agree with this, but there’s a bit that I don’t understand about their mindset. If they think they’ve lost their job to an immigrant who’s willing to work harder for less money, how does less government involvement make it better? You can’t just ban immigrants and solve the problem because the real problem is a system that allows exploitative labor practices. By American standards those immigrant workers are also getting a bad deal and the people doing the exploiting aren’t going to stop unless someone forces them to.
I think the reason you see people latching on to Trump is because they think all politicians want to maintain the status quo and they think Trump will break it. I understand the sentiment, but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them. All he seems to do IMO is assign blame and talk about how things should be. It’s easy to say “we have the greatest plan” or “everyone should live in a mansion”, but it’s really hard to actually have the greatest plan and to implement it or to build everyone a mansion.
It’s really sad because I think middle class America is being disenfranchised and there’s a near majority of people who’ve been convinced it’s the fault of poor, “lazy moochers” rather than the wealthy capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years.
I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. It’s just a matter of understanding the sides are wealthy vs everyone else, not right vs left.
> If they think they’ve lost their job to an immigrant who’s willing to work harder for less money, how does less government involvement make it better?
I'm not sure they want less government. Walls are built by governments, tariffs are protectionist measure. They want neo-mercantilism, which Trump is embodiment of.
> but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them.
Oh, he started a big trade war with the gravest enemy stealing their jobs. I think he also imposed more strict immigration policy, but I'm not sure.
> capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years
I think that's wrong. Your productivity gains are mostly due to technology and rise of Asia. Asians and tech companies reaped the productivity gains accordingly. I mean, even eastern europeans like myself saw an extraordinary increase in standards of living.
> middle class America is being disenfranchised
> I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy
I don't think that's your problem, and I don't expect american future to be good.
First, I think your political system is broken due to Duverger's law. Hence you have a political system where people have to adjust their views according to politicians' stances, and not vice versa. Lack of competition leads to corruption, regulatory captures etc etc, and I doubt that such system would find a will to reform itself.
Second, your wealthy already pay quite a lot of taxes, unlike Europe, where there is regressive VAT and high income tax for the middle class, and middle class is the main fiscal contributor. Hence your politician more concerned about well-being of those who affects budget the most. There is nothing strange here, and this kind of corporatism wouldn't heal itself as well.
I think that the root of your problem is not malicious rich whom Americans like to demonize so much, but broken beyond repair political system and unfair tax burden: politicians are more free to act as they will facing no pressure and competition, politicians strive to please big biz which is the main contributor to the budget. I'm really curious how you'll deal with that, if you'll manage to.
> I think that's wrong. Your productivity gains are mostly due to technology and rise of Asia.
IMO the average person hasn’t gotten enough of the gains from tech and it’s one of the things that worries me. As automation accelerates we can’t tolerate a handful of elites reaping all the benefits from that.
I don’t know much about the USA tax system. I’m Canadian. We pay high taxes and I don’t have a problem with it. In general though, I think the wealthy elite in the world have been capturing a disproportionate amount of the wealth / productivity gains since the 80s.
I also think the rewards for “success” are way too high for CEOs, etc.. They claim to be irreplaceable, but whenever something bad happens and they get called before Congress they act like they barely know more than the janitor. I think their only real value is in knowing all the other rich people.
I believe in capitalism and think hard work needs to be rewarded, but that the rewards are skewed too much. Once you have 100x the standard of living of the average person in the wealthiest countries in the world I think that should be enough. Everything else is just pure greed.
> People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.
Noted:
> Of course, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Both may have some validity. Moreover, as Michael Tesler has argued, economic anxiety and discontent among white voters in 2016 appear to be closely connected to racial resentment. His analysis of survey data indicate that many white voters, especially those without college degrees, believe that racial minorities and immigrants have been favored by government policies while their own communities have been neglected, especially during the Obama years (Tesler 2016b). The Trump campaign explicitly connected these issues by arguing that illegal immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens and reducing wages for American workers.
> To sort out these competing explanations, we test the hypothesis that Trump’s surge among white working class voters, compared with previous GOP presidential candidates, was due to his explicit appeal to white racial resentment and ethno-nationalism. Thus, Trump’s campaign may have helped to politicize these attitudes, identifying them with a political party, especially among less educated white voters who tend to be less attentive to political campaigns and therefore less aware of differences between candidates on racial and other issues (Tesler 2016c). To test this hypothesis, we can compare the correlations between scores on the racial resentment scale and relative ratings of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates on the feeling thermometer scale over time among white voters with and without college degrees.
> The racial resentment scale has been criticized for not separating racism from ideas like conservatism or individualism. Some political scientists have attributed Republicans' higher resentment scores to the fact that they typically favor less government intervention
Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.
>> Some political scientists have attributed Republicans' higher resentment scores to the fact that they typically favor less government intervention
> Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.
"Government intervention" may be a codeword for social programs, which are often viewed in a certain way:
> Here, we integrate prior work to develop and test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare policy. We argue that when whites perceive threats to their relative advantage in the racial status hierarchy, their resentment of minorities increases. This increased resentment in turn leads whites to withdraw support for welfare programs when they perceive these programs to primarily benefit minorities.
> Wetts and Willer are hardly the first scholars to argue that racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution in the US. Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare in 1994 and Martin Gilens’s Why Americans Hate Welfare in 1999 credited racial factors — in particular, stereotypes of black people as lazy and overly dependent on government aid — with substantially reducing support for welfare spending since the war on poverty began in the 1960s.
>"Government intervention" may be a codeword for social programs
Yeah, are you sure that racism is about opposing welfare and quotas? Not thinking that other people are inherently inferior or malicious due to their race, but that there should be no affirmative action.
That sounds like a ill-minded umbrella term to me, invented to call people you don't like racist.
> racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution
It's not a surprise if you define racial animus as being against welfare.
> Consistent with the expectations of new racism researchers, resentment accounted for racial bias in support of the experimental college scholar-ship program examined in this study, reinforcing its role as a measure of racial prejudice. But these effects were confined to self-identified liberals. Racial resentment did not explain racially biased program support among conservatives and was not linked to other negative racial attitudes among them. This leaves the concept of racial resentment in real doubt. If resentment measures prejudice among liberals but not conservatives it cannot function successfully as a broad measure of racial prejudice.
anti-black racism has (and continues to be) woven into the fabric of American society. That's not an understatement, our cities are often built in ways that harmed racial minorities. When there are, quite literally, "racist bridges" in the US, not to mention the anti-black histories of everything from Central park to the US highway system, it's not clear why that is a bad definition.
it comes almost from an angle of "not enough empathy" and painting individualism as a byproduct of broader narcissism complex
america want to succeed but only if every moral decision is followed. realistically this is almost never enforced and people act amorally all the time even if doing so somewhat altruistically
I dunno, that doesn't sound sound to me, and people tend to draw bold conclusions from such matters.
I've seen quite a lot of such papers, proving that "conservatives are knowing liberals better than vice versa" or similar, but diving into methodology it seems like people are trying to exacerbate what the data says.
People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.