As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward, pundits want us to believe she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out.
None of that matters to me. You can be conservative and give renters a break. As long as they’re the right renters. This idea of in groups and out groups that is the core of conservative ideology is gaining ground.
Edit to add - It’s struck me that the article and I are actually talking about two different things. Their real complaint is that the Democrats are moving towards servicing the donor class more than their constituents. My complaint is that the constituents are getting too cozy with the idea of in groups, as long as they believe they’re on the inside.
The donors – the domestic owning class – were always a self-aligned ingroup, and it’s been that way since before the country was founded. The fact that they have gotten complacent in just green-washing and rainbow-washing their marketing instead of allowing actual concessions to be made is not really a change in their ideology so much as their strategy. They still have the same goals that they’ve always had, it’s just that the tiny little check on their power that the left and the working class more broadly represented has been systematically dismantled.
It’s not a matter of what the owning class “believes” as though these conditions are a highly subjective thing, because ingroups are not just a quirk of psychology or social perspective, they can be and often are interest groups, people who share a common material interest. The owners are correct that it benefits them broadly to crush the power of labor so they can maximize profits, just like they know it benefits them broadly to do other things like scapegoat minorities, use drug policy as a pretext for mass-incarceration, and so on.
None of that matters to me. You can be conservative and give renters a break. As long as they’re the right renters. This idea of in groups and out groups that is the core of conservative ideology is gaining ground.
Edit to add - It’s struck me that the article and I are actually talking about two different things. Their real complaint is that the Democrats are moving towards servicing the donor class more than their constituents. My complaint is that the constituents are getting too cozy with the idea of in groups, as long as they believe they’re on the inside.
The donors – the domestic owning class – were always a self-aligned ingroup, and it’s been that way since before the country was founded. The fact that they have gotten complacent in just green-washing and rainbow-washing their marketing instead of allowing actual concessions to be made is not really a change in their ideology so much as their strategy. They still have the same goals that they’ve always had, it’s just that the tiny little check on their power that the left and the working class more broadly represented has been systematically dismantled.
It’s not a matter of what the owning class “believes” as though these conditions are a highly subjective thing, because ingroups are not just a quirk of psychology or social perspective, they can be and often are interest groups, people who share a common material interest. The owners are correct that it benefits them broadly to crush the power of labor so they can maximize profits, just like they know it benefits them broadly to do other things like scapegoat minorities, use drug policy as a pretext for mass-incarceration, and so on.