The people honestly offended by his comments are really telling on themselves. He's 100% right in the divide, and the :LIB: s are the only ones bothered by it. It's the same as the "brunch" dunk people did during the election results.
It's not anti-intellectualism. It's anti-credentialism, the radical, non-aristocratic idea that your class position shouldn't be private property.
This isn't necessarily as new a thing as you make it sound. White non-non college educated [edit:male] voters have voted R for President a rate of roughly 60-70% since at least 1980, with the two Clinton elections being the only exception.
Which honestly lends credence to the argument that many such voters aren't necessarily super motivated by material concerns; given that Clinton supported NAFTA, and was hardly pro-labour. He was however; anti-immigration, "tough on crime", and eviscerated welfare.
True, however the tough question is what should Clinton receiving unprecedented degrees of support from the "white working class" tell us. He destroyed what remained of its Great Society/New Deal legacy over the Democratic Party, embraced the same sort of racist messaging/policies as the Republicans, and was seemingly rewarded by a majority of them for it.
It's why I'm somewhat pessimistic towards the common idea in socialist circles that if only Bernie won, if only the Democrats embraced M4A and other progressive policies, that the white working class would turn out in droves for the Dems.
I swear a lot of people are suffering from some form of collective amnesia and forgot what the political climate looked like before 2001.
I mean, I was like six in 2001, the only concrete memories I have of that period are toonami, Pokémon and colored ketchup
Oh man I used to beg my mum for the green ketchup, we were never allowed it :sadness:
I swear I remember eating that once at a friends house and it turning my shit green
Matt is correct, and by far the Chapo with the best takes. Modern colleges are nothing but neoliberal cesspools that enforce liberal identity politics to push against class politics. His previous rant was 100 percent correct, liberals and colleges are so entangled in identity politics because they can't acknowledge that class and economics play just as big a role as social issues.
Liberals and conservatives are at a crossroads - they can't actually address class issues, because their donors :capitalist: don't like that. So to explain the abysmal state of the world they direct you to (bad) idpol, things like, if they're liberals "we just need more black and gay drone pilots."
I'm not trying to say "oNlY cLaSs maTtErs" because that obviously isn't the case. But it is by far the leading factor in the shit state of the world today. And because the "establishment" can't acknowledge that, they have to shift to bad, recuperated versions of identity politics.
Maybe for the most part. But they do allow some radical elements. I took a class in college called Global Inequality, that talked about slavery, colonialism, and neoliberalism, and that had a somewhat large class size and counted for a 'diversity' graduation requirement. It definitely radicalized me more and got me really angry. I took another class on the History of the Modern Middle East and the professor was one of those classic young Marxist dudes. I did also take an International Relations class that was taught by someone who did foreign relations for NASA though lol and she basically repeated the "sweatshops are good for poor people" lie.
Of course, I mean college as an instituion. Ofc they are individual exceptions
Im doing my degree in Industrial Control System security...
Seems like you could apply that to whatever ideology you want... The left needs also needs to know technically HOW to take over the means of production if we ever reach that point.
There's plenty of USEFUL knowledge that is completely separated from ideology/politics. Maybe social science is fucked - but the future still needs people who know who to make bridges, and vaccines, and fertilizer.
Until we can completely retructure the work system to allow for long-term apprenticeships in advanced fields, college is still the best option for someone who wants to dedicate years of their life to studying a specialization.
...but if you go spend 8 years studying politics, economics, sociology, or some other degree completely entrenched in neoliberal worldviews... yea... you're learning how to fit in, not how the world works.
i dunno, if he's right you'd expect this response because as he keeps pointing out basically everyone who talks about the left online went to college. i think brace is basically the only lefty of any influence in that circle who didn't.
And Brace is genuinely the one with the best politics. The most free of mental liberalisms
He's right though. The universities indoctrinate you into the manners of the bourgeoisie. That doesn't make education inherently bad though.
I dont watch these is he being anti-intellectual? I heard that he had a shit take on relieving student debt and there is always the critique of elite universities shitting out neoliberal climbers, but I'm pretty sure Matt literally describes himself as "bookish".
I wanna preface this by saying I don't necessarily agree with his thesis but I do think there is something to it
Basically his idea is that since US politics is purely cultural the Democratic party will appeal to one cultural group and the Republicans the other. This cultural divide is caused by going to college where certain norms, mannerisms, and ideas are taught to people, ideas like white guilt. Thus the Democrats will become the party of college educated people who accepted the social norms put upon them in their college education. Since the liberal ideas about oppression offer very little if nothing to the mass of the working class (saying they should be happy with their white/male/hetero/cis privilege even though their lives suck) and most people who don't go to college are working class so they aren't even exposed to these ideas, the voting working class will begin to vote for Republicans because the Republicans at least offer external explanations of why things suck. Neither party will offer anything good.
He said "the Republican party will be the party of the working class" which was poor phrasing because he meant that those working class people without a college education who are politically invested will find the Republican party more appealing while college educated people will generally find the Democrats more appealing and people latched onto it.
His basis for this is Trump's and Biden's performance among the college educated and Trump's better performance with racial and ethnic minorities.
Thus the Democrats will become the party of college educated people who accepted the social norms put upon them in their college education.
Ah ok, thanks for writing all that out. I’ve always considered Matt to have the best grasp on politics in the group, and was cringing at the idea that he was using college education as the dividing line for class.
That's still kind of a dumb take. You really can only believe that if you ignore all minorities. Working class POC still support the Dems out of having no better alternative, non-college-educated whites are going hard for the GOP because not only do Dems offer them nothing but the GOP promises to protect what they do have.
I think his argument is that this is the case for now, but you're already seeing a small portion of minorities breaking for the GOP. I think his vision is a future where the GOP is 90% of non college educated whites, 20% college educated whites, and 30-40% of minorities, including asian, latino and black.
I don't think he's predicting a massive blexit from the Dems
I could see that playing out. The GOP sees that they can't sustain themselves demographically and are spending lots of money trying to shave off minority support from Dems even in small amounts. That Kim Klacik lady who gets joked about a lot of a prime example. The GOP knows she can't win but having a well-funded black Republican challenging the Democrats can chisel away at Democratic hegemony in the black community. It's the same logic of Dems spending tens of millions to run no-chance candidates against prominent Republicans (Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham) except they're actually good at propaganda and cultivating ideology in the masses.
It's more that the Democratic party is becoming the party solely of college-educated professionals who want to feel bad about social problems and the Republican party is the party of not-necessarily-highly-educated petit bourgeois who prefer to believe that everyone who is suffering deserves it (or the college educated people who react in opposition to the liberal culture war). Neither are working class parties, but the Republican pitch is easier to extend and expand to lower classes because it doesn't require learning special terminology or anything and because nobody who's already struggling wants to get told they should feel more guilty.
He's fundamentally pessimistic about Americans broadly relearning class consciousness enough for mass nationwide political organizing along those lines and so hypothesizes that mass organization will continue only to assemble based on cultural signifiers, and follows logically from that point. That's the main part that I think you can take or leave; I'm inclined to agree with his assessment that secondary education is one of the biggest cultural sorting mechanisms in this country.
He isn't. He's basically saying that the way American society has developed up to this point the only people who become conscious of structural, systemic injustice are those who have gone through higher education. The college-educated are those who have received the necessary context along with the critical thinking skills to analyze things further.
It's additionally building off earlier theses on the post-WWII development of American infrastructure - ie suburbanization and deindustrialization - and the evolution/realignment of the political parties, in that these developments have suppressed the further development of class-consciousness in America and decimated the industrial proletariat. Basically that the American working class has been fragmented, atomized, and alienated from each other and all politics now revolves around culture- and identity-based single issues. So for a lot of working-class Americans, their outlooks are extremely reactionary, they're handicapped in developing a class-consciousness and workplace comradery, and their political concerns largely revolve around immediate gains or what they interpret to be "left to their own devices". In this way the extreme-right "libertarian" ideology of the Republican Party is increasingly gaining traction among working people, or as Matt frames it, the non-college-educated. In this desolate political environment the anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, anti-cosmopolitan, grievance-based identity politics of the Republican Party is more appealing to the non-college-educated than the intellectually vain, smug elitist, cosmopolitan but fragmentary identity politics of the Democratic Party, which caters more to the college-educated who are much more conscious of their own privilege.
Obviously this is an oversimplification, because both parties as representative of bourgeois class interests mean they represent different factions of the college-educated. Obviously, there are plenty of college-educated rich bourgeoisie and well-off petty bourgeoisie among the ranks of the Republicans. But in broad strokes, at least in my experience, Matt's thesis that the Republicans appeal far more to the non-college-educated than the Democrats is correct. Pretty much every working-class person I know is consumed either by conspiratorial thinking/religious mysticism, knee-jerk hostility to government (due to their interactions with government being solely negative), or both.
Yeah all us people that didn't get no book learning in college actually love to taste the boot-heel of capitalism.
Fuck off. This is classism and you should feel bad for agreeing with it
That's not what I'm saying and you know it. I know firsthand that Marxist ideas are so powerful precisely because they appeal to the lived experience of working people.
I'm saying that for the vast majority of American working people, defeatism and/or apathy are the order of the day when it comes to politics. They see no material gains for themselves by participating in bourgeois politics, and as a result retreat into pop cultural consumption and social media like opiates.
American economic and social infrastructure has been deliberately constructed to destroy the ability for workers to organize and achieve class-consciousness. It is a very deliberate fomentation of reactionary political impulses. This is essentially what Matt's thesis is. Because all "legitimate" American politics have retreated entirely from the economic into the realm of the purely cultural, the reactionary brand of the Republicans has more appeal to the non-college-educated. And in my experience that's correct - the biggest obstacle to the Republicans becoming a legitimate working-class party is their all-but-explicit white supremacy.
I think it is probably bad to broad strokes the "working class" based on education level.
I was responding to this bit you dropped:
Pretty much every working-class person I know is consumed either by conspiratorial thinking/religious mysticism, knee-jerk hostility to government (due to their interactions with government being solely negative), or both.
Which comes across as pretty out of touch and unhelpful.
Otherwise, both democrats and republicans are incredibly reactionary. I'm not sure I see the point here.
I definitely don't think democrats are even kind of aware of their white privilege outside of knowing what the terminology is. They just elected Joe Biden for Christ's sake lol
Is there a benefit to creating another dividing line between college educated and non when talking leftist politics?
Is there a benefit to creating another dividing line between college educated and non when talking leftist politics?
This is where you're missing the point. This isn't discussing "leftist politics" it's discussing American politics, as it actually exists.
Fair enough then. American politics are definitely classist.
Still we shouldn't be looking at this under the idea that all non-college educated working class are stuck in backwards ideas.
Like I don't see the benefit of even platforming that kind of assumption.
I do not enjoy those streams. For every salient point he makes there is an equal and opposite dumb take. It kinda concerns me if anyone is using these as some kind of serious ideological education, it’s just a dude doing stream of consciousness rambling.
Admittedly I’ve only listened to two but I feel like four hours is enough to decide whether I’m into it or not.
(Not to say the take “organised education is an indoctrination tool of the ruling class” is wrong. Then again you can say it in one sentence not two hours.)
I like them but I think it would be bad if you listen to them and take everything he says as gospel. The purpose with them for me at least is to listen to what he says and then think about it for yourself and decide what you think is true or not.
Yeh that’s fair, they’re plenty thought provoking even if you disagree with some stuff
the take “organised education is an indoctrination tool of the ruling class”
that is not even the take. He is working out the idea that the focus on culture wars is turning the Democrats into the party of manners, which you learn in college
I don't think it's anti intellectual to say that much of present day higher education is focused on making money. An education that is available online or at the library...
University is about class formation: networking, signaling, revealed wisdom, ethos formation, the ability to follow a multi-year narrative, stuff like that. Outside of some of the physical sciences, the material instruction is secondary.
This is one of those critiques that are half wrong and half right. I have no idea where I stand other than Matt while has a point but also is wrong.
“Matt has a point but also is wrong” could be the title of this vlog series tbh
