So, Kyle Kulinski of secular talk covered this recently, and since it's something I've talked about on this blog before, I felt like I should discuss it briefly. Essentially, he covered a study by students at Yale looking at public attitudes toward progressive issues, with three different forms of framing. They looked at class framing, racial framing, and class+race framing, and while the results did not seem particularly statistically significant, they did find a fairly large bump in support toward the class only framing of issues. Racial and race+class framing seemed fairly close. The results varied across subgroups, with some racial groups responding a bit more favorably to racial framing relative to the status quo, but not really enough to justify using it.
When I look at this stuff, I only really have two words: "no crap." I mean, really. We have a history of racial politics in this country being used to divide and conquer the country. Racial issues are some of the most toxic and divisive issues we face, and it seems to just be a way to turn the lower classes on against themselves in order to prevent real change. Even I tend to feel a lot more alienated when issues I advocate for and champion on this sub are framed in a racial way. I don't mind the class + race framing myself much, as I am a bit of a social leftie even on those issues, but I'm a sane moderate leftie, not a SJW. Those politics have a place, but they shouldn't dominate the discussion. But often times race does. Social progressives love to talk about forgiving black student loans for example, while not forgiving white student loans because it's a way to solve racial equality. I've seen people talking about distributing covid vaccinations to minorities first because of privilege based politics. I've seen people equating UBI with reparations. It just baffles me. As an ex conservative, it is literally the most cringey way to sell an issue, and of course you're causing a lot of division and sparking a race war doing it.
I'm not even sure if this stuff is in good faith. As I keep saying I keep feeling like the democrats are explicitly trying to derail and sabotage a broader sense of class politics by pushing this racial stuff and appealing to moderate Bush and Romney supporting republicans to avoid running on progressivism. I mean, there's no real reason to frame issues like this. I'd argue the democratic obsession with doing so is a huge reason our politics are in the toilet for the past 6 years or so. They could've done the class framing in 2016 with Bernie Sanders. They opted for the identity framing with HRC and people flocked to the openly racist demagogue instead. They could've gone with Bernie or alternatively, Andrew Yang, who seemed fairly popular with some truck drivers in Iowa (despite low actual vote totals) but instead we ended up with a Biden/Harris ticket. And Trump almost won again.
I'll be getting to Biden's speech and the republican counter response later to make my points a bit more well defined here, but really. I really don't know why democrats keep insisting on this specific framing of politics. It's not 1992 any more. People want new bold ideas (or at least what appear to be new and bold ideas, will get to that later). If they really tried, they could crush republicans like a bug and they would never be able to win an election again until they reinvent themselves. Really, I believe that. The democrats' greatest enemy is themselves to be perfectly honest.
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