I’ll add that double wides, even though they’re people’s actual houses and not just expensive toys, cost a lot less than some of those fancy RVs.

For my entire elementary school life, we lived in a double-wide.

Yeah, they were the main form of housing where I grew up, and it’s funny how you never, ever see them in Austin.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t crazy right wingers dwelling in double wides.  There are.  But statistically, that’s a socioeconomic group that skews more to the left than the McMansion dwellers.  There’s a real sense in a lot of these heavily Republican places that the upper classes are indulging in a form of playing peasant—-they actually think their expensive hobbies somehow make them “rednecks”, therefore tougher, sexier, more masculine somehow.  It’s a weird kind of slumming.

True enough, purple.  There is that kind, too.  It’s even more different than the expensive RVs that we saw in the video, though, and the people who live in those are even less likely to have the disposable income to spend a weekend at a McCain rally a few hundred miles away from home.

Part of the confusion may be because the right wing meme has worked so well. “Conservative” somehow DOES equal “poor hard-working American” for a lot of people, even on the left. Decades of propaganda by the upper-middle class, wealthy and super-wealthy among the right- including corporations & politicians- has injected it into all of our brainstems. Even with evidence to the contrary, like our own lives.

My own experience of poor hard-working Americans is of my hippie parents and their wacky, lefty, arty farty/gay peers. I grew up poor, first rurally then urban, and never met a Republican until I went to college. We lived in a trailer for years. And still this meme is seductive to me.

The places you show in pictures are a lot nicer than many of the trailer parks around here. Think single-wide, old.

It’s an important point from the previous thread, though, that lots of the RVs are financed or rented. Doesn’t mean that the people who drive them are badly off, but it does mean that they’re financially insecure as all getout. They’re a little better off than the two-paychecks-from-the-street types one usually thinks of as imperiled, but a lot of that is because of how long it takes to foreclose and repossess. And that fear, combined with the feeling that someone in a big house and an RV or a boat ought to feel secure, is a vulnerable combination.

I’ve been thinking about this since a relative died suddenly a couple years ago: upper management, great income but all spent. No vested pension, no equity in the house to speak of, toys all financed and way underwater. Even with the savings and the life insurance policy, his widow had to get the heck out of the house and cut back to essentials.

Ok, I put up a “manufactured home” for the retired parent a decade or so ago.  Cheaper, maintenance free, decorated at the factory right to the curtains so there were no cost overruns for someone on a fixed income.  3 bedroom, two bath, 1400 sq ft. one-level.  Great for the elderly.  Pretty good in warmer climes, too.

Downside - everything in it was chosen for lightweight - now sold with a couple with two young kids living in it - one put his walker through a wall! So, they deteriorate quickly.  And unless it’s special ordered, the insulation can be questionable in more severe climate areas. 

Another downside is that many gov’t entities do their best to make it rough to get manufactured “placed.”  I had one electric inspector (county) try to make me tear out walls, even though the state had inspected it at the plant. So there’s definitely a prejudice/stigma which these folks may be bucking, too. 
 
Trailer parks for mobile homes generally have a lot of restrictions that keep the trailers and grounds decent.  There are also a lot of the old flat roofed tin can mobiles out there , like in Appalachia and rural Michigan - some with roofovers -  places that have zip zoning and where the “trailers” become tin coffins when one catches fire. 

There’s another category, too.  That’s prefabbed/modular houses - the components manufactured offsite.  Some stigma with these, though they can be 2-story and as big as you want.

That’s true, paul, that a lot of professionals are living way beyond their means.  But yeah, they’re still not the people that they’re made out to be.  They eat up anti-working class rhetoric because they are not members of the working class.  Obviously, they have a complicated relationship with the working class, who they demonize as lazy and then emulate for street cred.  But that’s always been the relationship between labor and management, no?

I haven’t seen Pelosi’s film yet, Amanda, but I’ll take your word on the description of the subjects.  Greater Phoenix is full pseudo-rednecks in McMansions.  Many of whom have MBAs but are also as apt to be engineers or have vocational tech degrees.  Same hostility and defensiveness and ignorance worn like a badge of pride.  Same phony salt-of-the-earth posturing.  RW techies are the worst when it comes to overcompensating for their sedentary jobs with machismo.  I worked for a big high-tech company here and had to get out because I couldn’t stand being around them anymore.

I lived in a triple-wide until I was eight, albeit one placed on top of a fully finished basement.

One thing I don’t get is, if working class rural whites are still voting their interest, why is it that places like West Virginia and Kentucky have gone Republican in recent years? Historically Appalachia and the Upland South was a strongly Democratic region, it was the coastal South that was Dixiecrat/Republican. Now, the only southern states that went for the Democrat were three coastal ones.

I take Amanda’s point.  But I think it’s a mistake to assume that because some person possesses a built house or a fancy toy, that person is well capitalized.  For lots of loans out there, people have not had to prove their income at all.  So those guys may be wealthy or they may not be. 

I think the point is better stated in terms of lifestyle.  Those guys, whatever their capital position, do not live in poverty or hardship or anything like it. If they get sunburns at all, it’s from their extensive leisure activities.

Ben, Republicans exploit the hell out of the fact that while Democrats outnumber Republicans—-in no small part because labor outnumbers management—-poorer people vote less.  It’s part because they feel left out and part because they can’t get the time off work to vote.

Two things I’ve noticed through experience. First is—growing up on a farm in the sixties and seventies, I noticed a big difference between actual farmers and small-town people. Farm people seemed in general like nice, quiet people that tended to mind their own business and stayed busy with work. Small-town people were the ones more likely to have an attitude and speak up with the racist and ignorant views and get into everybody else’s business. The people in the film clips seem similar with all that projecting they do.

Second—there’s a lot of trailer courts here in New England that don’t fit the stereotype either. There’s a typical one right down the street from me. Old trailers with retired people, but incredibly well-kept and neat.

And another thing:  They have $50000 millionaire syndrome.  They leverage themselves up to their eyeballs to buy all those toys while convincing themselves that a) their ship will come in and they’ll be able to pay for them and b) that voting Republican is a shrewd preemptive move to ensure that they won’t be overtaxed on all that future income.

The confusion of RVs with trailer homes is bizarre. Purpleshoes seems to have it about right. This is not a “red state” phenomenon, either. Plenty of trailer parks and trailer homes in the rural areas of the Blue States, too. I’ve lived in rural MA and NY, and have seen a number of trailer parks in places where the zoning laws will permit it - and keep in mind that the uppermiddleclass “rednecks” with their RVs might just be the very people who try to block the zoning to keep the real “trailer trash” out of their communities.

Because trailer homes lack many important structural elements, that they are permitted to serve as homes at all strikes me as another way in which workingclass Americans suffer from laissez-faire policies. As trailers have no foundations, in the northern states they are apt to suffer from frost heaving. And as they are usually flimsily built, in tornado- and hurricane-prone regions, they lead to much higher death rates. Maybe in desert areas they are OK.

One of the most fascinating trends of the past few decades is how the middle to upper middle class of the South (and of the Midwest now) has started to front like they’re just a bunch of working class folks, and how the rest of the country seems to buy that hook, line, and sinker.

Maybe that depends on where you are, or whether they’re old or new money…here in Mississippi as soon as somebody gets a little money, they can’t WAIT to disassociate themselves from “rednecks.”  Nice houses, nice cars, they even try to speak more “correct” English.

... to me doublewides trend towards the “nice” end of mobile homes.

Agreed.  The vision of a “trailer” I grew up with, and the kind of trailer most people back home who are genuinely poor as opposed to working/middle class still live in, is more like the one in your photo. 

A double or triple wide is really not very different from a flimsily constructed smallish tract house, aside from the fact that it doesn’t come with the land to put it on.  Which I think is why they’re so popular in south Louisiana—you can plunk it down back behind pawpaw’s house until you save up the down-payment on your own chunk of land or finish college or do whatever totally bougie thing your parents instilled in you, because 22 year olds who buy double-wides are generally not poor. (Let’s not talk about the fact that there are a lot more people who’d help buy their 18 year old a double wide than would pay anything toward their 18 year old’s college education…)

I guess what I’m rambling about here, really, is the fact that, in the version of Teh Heartland where I grew up, class gets all twisted around with tradition/heritage and really bizarrely aligned values about work, education, and lifestyle in a way that isn’t necessarily equivalent to the way those concepts correlate to class “in the north” or, more accurately, on the coasts.  There are very wealthy people who will not pay for their kids to get college educations.  There are people who don’t blink at the purchase of expensive toys like a motor bike, but who sneer at the idea of paying taxes that will go to local infrastructure.  Or who’ll happily pay an exorbitant fee to keep their kid at what amounts to a segregated school, but refuse to be proactive in any way about making sure the school does anything schools are supposed to do (I mean, aside from having a spectacular football team, of course).

This is, I think, at the heart of the growing pains of the Republican party.  All these rather well off people who still have the values of what is basically an American peasantry, and for complicated reasons REFUSE to bring their worldview in line with reality.

Bravo, Amanda.  I see this shit all the time.  I work as a firefighter in Chicago, and a disturbingly high percentage of my well-paid, publicly funded colleagues would fit right in with these fake salt of the earth wingnuts.  Many of them have lucrative side gigs (some off the books) to supplement their generous gov’t. incomes, and many of them buy rural and semi-rural plots of land and engage in expensive fake salt of the earth activities like hunting and fishing.  They rail against welfare, brown-skinned criminality, “million-dollar nigger” athletes, etc.; and they vote Republican.  It has nothing to do with income and everything to do with culture war self-identification. 

The fire department here (much like the police dept.) was for a long time the privileged preserve of working class, white ethnic males.  With the rise of the Civil Rights Era this demographic (particularly those employed in these two jobs) became a backwater of reactionary right-wing politics in Chicago.  I imagine that many of my colleagues once joined their parents in throwing rocks at MLK and the open housing marchers.  It’s an apocryphal image, but I think it’s fitting.

southpaw, my sympathies for people who make many times more than a living wage but who are fucked because they live well beyond their means because they’re keeping up with the Joneses is indeed small.  Fuck ‘em if they voted Republican and trashed people who don’t have their privileges.  A lot of these people like to paint themselves as the only people in the country who work hard, and they assume that if you genuinely live in a trailer or an apartment and live paycheck to paycheck because you have to (and not because you keep buying expensive toys) , it’s because you’re a bad person.  Which isn’t to say that I think all middle class people who buy expensive toys are bad people. But if you do that and trash people down the ladder from you?  Then you should fuck yourself.

Amanda:

I think that (playing milkmaid at versailler notwithstanding) the relationship between labor and management—or more precisely bourgeoisie and prole—was somewhat simpler in the past. Part of it is that (thanks in large part to decades of democratic/liberal policies) you have a lot of middle-aged people who did move up both the social and economic ladders. There are a lot more people in the professional classes who got there without a “liberal education” than there were 40 years ago, and that’s a good thing, but it also has a different set of cultural/political pitfalls than the old regime.

The other thing is that these folks are “management and professional” in the labor-law sense without necessarily being in charge of anything. There are layers and layers above them, and a whole system of manipulation that no one told them about when they were on the way up. So it’s much easier just to blame the blacks and the democrats.

Thank you for the explanation. I’ve been telling this to friends for a long time now. My local example is the guy who rides his Harley on the weekend in Dickies & leather vest, but is clean shaven and OBVIOUSLY not “working class” (or really, even sympathetic to the working class). He just wants to try & look cool because he never was when he was younger, so now he spends money on trying to look cool. It makes me feel sorry for the guys who actually are working class & ride Harleys because that’s their ONLY mode of transportation.

Sam, my dad’s a firefighter, and I know what you mean.  It’s probably a bit different—-the starting salary isn’t so great, and we were pretty close to fucked when I was a little kid.  But it seemed the more money firemen made, the more “redneck” they got.  I think it’s wise to pay firemen a solid, middle class income, of course, but it does create some weird dynamics.

I don’t understand how one could be any kind of public employee and be conservative, seeing as they’d like nothing better than to gut your employer!

here in Mississippi as soon as somebody gets a little money, they can’t WAIT to disassociate themselves from “rednecks.” Nice houses, nice cars, they even try to speak more “correct” English.

Perhaps, but if your part of Mississippi is anything like my part of Louisiana, they don’t want to disassociate themselves in ways that are meaningful beyond “keeping up appearances”.  They aren’t interested in setting up their kids with good educations and trust funds.  They don’t travel.  Their tastes don’t extend much beyond ordering the Thai Peanut Oriental Salad at Applebee’s.  They don’t give to charity, except perhaps to a megachurch. 

This isn’t to enshrine more traditional class values.  More to point out that these folks want to have it both ways, and in the end they’re not helping anybody but the ATV manufacturers and the Republican party.

Texas is completely covered in Harley aficionados.  Austin even has an annual biker rally called the Republic of Texas Rally.  It has nothing in common with biker movies of the 60s.  Most bikers who come to rallies are pretty well-off, middle-aged people who are cutting loose now that their kids are out of the house, it seems.  And it would largely be harmless if there wasn’t this air of right wing nuttery that goes right back to the name—-remember that the Republic of Texas existed only because Mexico banned slavery and Texans who had mostly immigrated from the U.S. rebelled.

The big joke is that the ROT rally tends to happen the same weekend as Pride every year.  But it’s only funny because nothing bad ever happens.  Right wingers ceded Austin a long ass time ago, and I think part of the allure of the ROT rally is getting the exotic tourism feel.  Our right wing brethern who come to Austin for football games or the ROT rally are, in this sense, a lot like the same folks going to Times Square and Broadway.

I don’t understand how one could be any kind of public employee and be conservative, seeing as they’d like nothing better than to gut your employer!

Then again, I work on a network TV show and don’t watch television, think that the era of big network TV is over, and personally think the show I work for blows chunks and is a total anachronism.  In terms of my ideals, I would be happy to see my employer crash and burn.  Then again, paychecks are also good. 

I think it’s a little disingenuous to imply that only people on the right feel this disconnect between conscience and material needs, and that either all people on the left work perfect lefty jobs that go hand in hand with their politics or are sheep who mold our values to whatever’s best for the boss-man.  Though it does occur to me that maybe we should all just swap them their hated government jobs for our hated corporate hell jobs…

The thing is, though, I don’t think corporate workers are lazy parasites while conservatives regularly portray government workers as such.

I also don’t want corporations to go away, I just want them to play by fair rules and give their fair share in tax money. Conservatives want to literally starve the government to death.

Where I grew up (Nebraska) double wides like you have pictured here were for the more economically stable. People that owned their own land, or who farmed and put these on a plot of their farm land. Some double wides are really nice and quite spacious.

Most of the poorer people lived in the small one or two bedroom single-wides, about 9 feet across. Then they rented a plot at a trailer park with usually no yard, just about 10 feet of gravel in between usually used to park their car. These things were packed tightly. They were usually used and in crappy condition. I lived in one in college for a time and at one point my bed FELL THROUGH THE FLOOR. They were usually drafty as hell in the winter.

But you are right, those big RVs cost as much as a small home and are usually NOT the primary home for these folks. I suppose it depends on where you live, but a double wide owner on their own land would be pretty average middle class. It was the single-wide rental folks who got the name “trailer trash.”

You’d put a cheap, secondhand, small RV behind your double wide for a teenage kid who needs a little more room and privacy, perhaps.

Oh boy, is this a totally romantic notion!  If you have a double wide, maybe you can afford an RV for extra space ... having grown up with 4 people and no privacy in a 12x58 single wide, this sounds sooooo very spacious and plush to me.

There’s a place not far from where I live now that could be an apt emblem for this phenomenon of the affluent poseur-redneck:  Dixie RV Superstore, emblazoned with Confederate battle flags, selling what look like rather high-end vehicles.

“I don’t understand how one could be any kind of public employee and be conservative, seeing as they’d like nothing better than to gut your employer!”

...I’m “lucky” enough to live among several current and retired firemen.  They are also without exception “conservative”.  In a general sense they’re all solid, middle-class Americans, and by the standards of the White Middle-Class Patriarchy they’re good people.  And every one of them is living an upper-middle class lifestyle (RV’s, quads, frequent vacations at The River - the Colorado between CA and AZ - sand-rails, NASCAR, etc.)

(I also have a high percentage of construction people as neighbors too.  And they’re the same way.)

Most of them remind me very strongly of many of my relatives (most now deceased) in overall temperament and political leanings.  As long as you stay away from anything racial, or overtly liberal, you can talk to them and appreciate their basic decency.  But I’ve heard most of them say enough to know there are a whole lot of wingnut talking points bubbling under their even-tempered facades. 

Part of me would love to know what they really think about President Obama (whose skin tone is a pretty good match for my wife)...but at the same time, I really don’t want to know, ‘cause it probably wouldn’t be pretty.

I’ve learned to be very wary about openly discussing politics, just about everywhere.  Many years of living in Red California, which as already mentioned is not so very different from red states all over the country, have taught me to keep most of my radical opinions to myself lest I shit in my own nest.

...sad…

and it’s funny how you never, ever see them in Austin.

There are thousands of trailer homes in Austin. Not really in the Oltorf to 183, 35 to Mopac area (although there were in South Austin until fairly recently when they were pushed out by development), but especially south and east there are plenty.

You are very right about the men in the video, though. I as they were explaining what a redneck is, I was waiting for Pelosi to ask them if they did that kind of work and was a little disappointed when she didn’t ask them.

At the same time , they are probably one or two generations removed from real “rednecks” and I can understand their wanting to claim and redefine an insult that was surely hurled at their parents and quite possibly at them as children.

Ben, you make a great point.  At first I was puzzled by that, too.  But one of my colleagues explained the rationalization to me once, and he wasn’t being ironic.  I paraphrase: the city needs firefighters and cops to maintain order, so our jobs are untouchable.  I know, it’s not true, but it fits the mode of thinking.  Many of my colleagues will rail against, say, the teacher’s union, because most of them put their kids in Catholic schools and resent paying property taxes to support public schools.  I guess it’s easier to be a hypocrite when you don’t think you’ll ever have to face the consequences of your own bullshit.

The thing is, though, I don’t think corporate workers are lazy parasites ... I also don’t want corporations to go away,

Yes, this is because you are a relatively moderate liberal. 

For those of us further to the left, we do want corporate capitalism to go away.  We don’t think corporate employees are lazy parasites specifically, but we do make rather nasty insinuations about them, for instance that they are a bunch of sheeple/drones/shlubs who work against their own interests.  Again, even though by and large even most leftists have to get a paycheck somewhere, and that money generally comes either directly or indirectly from big corporate behemoths.

“Conservative” somehow DOES equal “poor hard-working American” for a lot of people, even on the left.

I was just going to say this. For conservatives, it’s the values that make them hard-working, not their productivity. So a migrant worker who gets paid $10 a day to pick soybeans in the heat doesn’t work hard because if she had voting rights, she’d probably vote for Democrats. But the CEO who spends his days lining his pockets with the people’s money while defrauding his customers from his air-conditioned corner office is hard-working because he probably voted for Bush twice. It makes no sense.

I lived in one in college for a time and at one point my bed FELL THROUGH THE FLOOR.

Yeah, that’s pretty consistent with my understanding, too.  I don’t think I’ve ever been in a single wide that didn’t have at least one significant hole in the floor that required maneuvering around.  Usually in the bathroom, hallway, or some similarly tight spot.  And moving around the space despite hole in the floor is the least of your problems when you have a hole in your floor…

Then again, I’m not sure that used single-wide trailers are really much different, in a structural/shelter sense, than the tiny (much tinier than even the teensiest single-wide) half-way-falling-down shack my grandfather grew up in.  In a way, prefab trailers are probably better because you at least have a certain degree of control of the condition they start in.  In the shack era, you were really at the mercy of your own construction skills and/or the social resources to get the help of someone with said skills.

they are probably one or two generations removed from real “rednecks”

Yep.  In my totally uneducated opinion, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about is the direct result of the booming economy of the second half of the 20th century (thanks, New Deal!), and how people who were raised in poverty or a generation removed from very real poverty handed down a certain kind of archaic horizontal hostility tainted worldview to later more prosperous generations.  The focus on toys and outward status without the accompanying change in either tastes or material values (e. g. college educations, investing well, giving to charity…) is a function of trying to preserve this weird socio-political limbo, and especially trying to keep people who benefited from 20th century affluence from losing that sense of horizontal hostility or getting too good a foothold on prosperity.

and I can understand their wanting to claim and redefine an insult that was surely hurled at their parents and quite possibly at them as children.

Sure.  And I have this, too, and will often refer to certain parts of my family as “redneck”, or to myself as “basically a redneck mutt”, “half Cajun and half Redneck”, etc. etc. etc.  To me there is a HUGE difference between reclaiming the term in a value-neutral way to describe certain cultural signifiers, whether class-based or not, and reclaiming the term as some sort of “salt of the earth” fiction. 

I also think there is a GIGANTIC difference between the terms “redneck” and “white trash”, and that while the former is OK as a descriptor of a certain kind of American culture, the latter is a slur.

The place I work had revenue of $62.9M last year. We had expenses of $57.9M. Total income before taxes was $7M, and we paid $2.3M in taxes, for a rate of about 32%. Ben D., is that fair in your estimation?

Are you trying to do a Joe-the-Plumber on me?

Short serious answer: no, it isn’t. The corporate rate should be raised, and no tears should be shed for them since they did very very well under Bush while middle class incomes stagnated.

The term “redneck” actually comes from the West Virginia coal miners and their efforts to unionize because they wore red bandanas around their necks.

Yeah, I guess there are plenty in the outskirts that I never venture out towards, due to the fact that I have no real reason to leave my direct neighborhood ever.

I pretty much guarantee that’s apocryphal, Svlad.

Knowdoubt, I never said all poor people were wise to their own self-interest.  If Republicans had to rely solely on upper middle class and rich votes, they wouldn’t win shit.  But the majority of people under certain income levels still vote Democrat. Not all—-never said all.  But most, yes.

I think election day ought to be a holiday or some other sort of consideration to ameliorate that influence.

A lot of people who work in service jobs have to work holidays, anyway, so I’m not sure that would do much to GOTV among genuinely poor people.  I think we basically just need the ability to enforce (and possibly expand/refine) the laws already on the books about the fact that employers are REQUIRED to allow employees time to vote.

Or we could just try a national effort at early voting (and making early voting a lot more convenient), where people have a large window of time to fit in time to vote.  Or just go with mail-in ballots.  Or some other mechanism that doesn’t require people to be at a certain place at a certain time on a specific date.

I don’t understand how one could be any kind of public employee and be conservative, seeing as they’d like nothing better than to gut your employer!

Where I live, police and fire are the last to get gutted, being as they’re tough manly public safety occupations that have high public support.  This, of course, exascerbates the insular and hypocritical attitudes of some of the people who do that work.  There are cops and firefighters here who make over $100k a year while experienced teachers are lucky to be making $50k.  That’s because education is squishy social spending and teaching is for girls.

Federal election days should be federal holidays. When was the last time we added a national holiday to the calendar? Worker productivity gains since we got MLK Day have more than covered an extra day off every two years. I feel like just getting paid time off to vote might actually disadvantage the working poor more than nothing. It basically means that people with decent jobs and decent bosses will vote, and people with really bad jobs and evil bosses won’t.

The worst part was the end of the clip, watching that fat, white, RV-owning NASCAR fan blubbering about how “the immigrants get all the rights and we get nothin’!” It costs $1000 to park an RV at a NASCAR race! That motherfucker has more money than I’ll ever see, and he’s complaining about having NOTHING? What a load of shit!

One of the most fascinating trends of the past few decades is how the middle to upper middle class of the South (and of the Midwest now) has started to front like they’re just a bunch of working class folks, and how the rest of the country seems to buy that hook, line, and sinker.

I’ve noticed this with increased frequency since I moved to Saint Louis three years ago. My early thoughts were to ascribe such behavior to STL having both Midwest and Southern elements, as well as being overall a poorer metro area than Chicago (where I had grown up). As I’ve lived here longer, I see most of the slumming people are those who live in the far-flung suburbs on either side of the Mississippi. Many of these locales have genuine culture clashes featuring suburban sprawl bumping into the realm of rural country people (either O’Fallon comes to mind, along with St. Charles, Wentzville, Belleville, Wildwood, etc.). Ironically, the new residents don’t like to associate with the existing residents, yet they don’t mind emulating some of their stereotypical behaviors.

Federal election days should be federal holidays.

To repeat, people who work in the service industry, which is quite a large segment of the American poor, usually have to work federal holidays.

I just wanted to chime in to agree with this point:

“I’m not saying that there weren’t any actual trailer-living people at these McCain/Palin rallies—-there are plenty of working class white people who are dumber than bricks about this—-but they weren’t in the video.  Because it’s unlikely that most of them have the money to blow on camping out for a weekend just to go to a political rally.”

I’ve worked for a few of the local courier companies here in Toronto, and a buddy of mine has woked for several others. He had a 2 year stint at one place that I won’t mention by name, but its reputation is (or used to be) quite impressive. The reality behind the scenes was somewhat different: The owner was a real piece of work, a religious fanatic of the Italian Roman Catholic brand. This fine fellow seemed to base his personal managerial style on Mussolini (whom he physically resembled in the weight department), seeing as his ‘Employer Mode’ appeared to be permanently set to “Bullying Asshole” whenever he had to deal with the people who were unfortunate enough to work for him.

So, my friend happened to be watching the news a few years back - some time after he’d stopped working at this particular company - and coverage of the then-current fiasco surrounding Terri Schiavo came onscreen. And as my buddy described in vivid detail to me later, his eyes practically popped out of his head when he spied his former Boss, the religious kook, amongst the “Right to Life” protestors, ranting and raving and waving signs. The creep might even have gotten a few sound bites off. I can’t remember if he was “interviewed” or not.

Must have been nice to be able to take the time off of work and jet out to the States just for the sake of this little protest, eh? And wouldn’t you know it: The clown in question was yet another preening rich fuck who liked to put on airs about being jes’ a Reg’lar Ole Plain Folks/ Salt ‘O The Earth type…in his own iminitable fashion, that is. This asshole couldn’t have been more unlike the stereotypical Redneck if he tried. But I guess certain, er, values do manage to cross cultural divides. How heartwarming!

One of the most fascinating trends of the past few decades is how the middle to upper middle class of the South (and of the Midwest now) has started to front like they’re just a bunch of working class folks, and how the rest of the country seems to buy that hook, line, and sinker.

The countertrend is that thanks to the housing bubble, people with professional degrees who happen to make something around the median salary are now, at least in my part of the world, eligible for just enough mortgage to buy a double-wide. That PhD and public-sector job don’t count for shit.

“In particular, a lot of cash was available to homeowners through home-equity credit products which allowed people to borrow against the rising values of their homes.  These loans funded a lot of consumption.  A lot of cars.  A lot of motorcycles.  A lot of RVs.

“

Nice to see the philosphy behind the companies responible behind the ghetto tax being applied to the middle class and then having the middle class expierance the effects of the ghetto being applied to them.

“most, yes.” We must be mis-communicating because that just is not the case in the great Red States of Georgia, Alabama”

I believe she was speaking of the poor blacks. Republicans want them to vote but due to the history of the Republicans of late and how the Democrats did social programs down in the south and throughout the rest of the states the blacks are more in the Democratic pocket then the Republican pocket.

“It makes me feel sorry for the guys who actually are working class & ride Harleys because that’s their ONLY mode of transportation”.  I give up what am I missing here, I rode a lowly Yamaha when I was young and stupid, I couldn’t afford a Harley then, and sure can’t now.  Do you have any idea what a “Harley” costs?

Yep, even old ones.  You can still sometimes find a 35 year old ironhead Sportster for a few thousand- but even at the bottom level on the bike scale, an ancient beater Harley still costs several times what a similar age and condition Japanese bike costs.  But any true biker will tell you that it doesn’t matter what you ride.  What makes you a biker is THAT you ride.  People who ride every day, who keep the bike as their sole means of transportation, are all bikers.  I’ve got more sympathy, class-wise, for the daily biker who rides an $800 decades-old Honda.  Someone who rides a 35 year old Harley is simply devoted to the brand- and I can respect that.  They could be riding a 10 year old Yamaha or even a BMW for the price.  Like the dentist who rides a newer Softail every other weekend, they’re just paying a premium on the brand name.  To each their own.

The culture of the faux-biker is similar to the faux-redneck discussed here, yes?  Same pretense to a “lower” class than they actually are?

Speaking of class and motorcycles… I had to give up daily riding because I can’t afford health insurance.  Even basic car insurance includes personal injury coverage- no insurer writes personal injury coverage for motorcycles and for very good reason, riding in traffic is fucking dangerous- so now my bike is for sale, hardly ridden in the last 2 years. 

(I really loved riding, too.  But I had to give it up after I laid the bike down and was extremely lucky to be uninjured… but as the police were writing the accident report and an ambulance stood waiting to take me to a hospital to be sure, I looked at that ambo and anxious paramedics and could only see several months’ wages going bye-bye- on top of having just wrecked my beloved old beemer.)

I think it’s a little disingenuous to imply that only people on the right feel this disconnect between conscience and material needs, and that either all people on the left work perfect lefty jobs that go hand in hand with their politics or are sheep who mold our values to whatever’s best for the boss-man.

No, we don’t “mold our values” but we do have to suppress their expression.

See, this is one of the many reasons I had to get out of the business I was in- mechanic working in specialty performance shops, with moonlighting doing trackside racecar service.  I liked the work, loved the machines, loved the excitement of the racetrack.  Couldn’t stand the rich bastards I worked for and couldn’t afford to alienate them either, so I’d swallow my opinions when they’d spout off about the latest Krauthammer column or whatever.  And the fact that they’d never pay me enough to join them in the racing.  And that even if I could have owned a car of my own, I’d always be “the help” in their eyes. 

Call it class envy, I’m fine with that.

On class and racing-
Everyone who can afford a racecar of any kind is at least fairly well-off.  But you definitely see the faux-redneck dynamic more in certain classes of racing than others.  Sportscars, vintage racers, autocross, you see a mix of middle and upper classes but very little pretense.  The rich folks don’t pretend to be otherwise- how can they when they’ve got toy Ferraris or Porsches?  And these classes of racing actually have room for some relatively cheap racing- older MGs, Triumphs, Datsuns, street-stock classes. 

Then you look at NASCAR (including at the local club level) or off-road racing (hugely expensive and they break stuff all the time)- where the cars and equipment are no less expensive, with engines alone running 20 large and up- and suddenly everyone acts like a “redneck” even if they’re all millionaires.

Within any racing group, actual class differences are less apparent in the race cars than in the support equipment- battered working pickup loaded with tires and tools in the bed pulling an open flatbed trailer, with tent camping at the track vs. 200k (or more) RV towing fully enclosed custom trailer with everything stowed in built-in boxes and racks, both painted to match.

(Thanks for letting me indulge my inner gearhead… yeah, I know, this is a politics and culture blog.  But hobby racing is an area where these issues are really apparent.  And boats.  Don’t get me started on boats…)

Say what you want about rich people; they don’t hang out in parking lots at NASCAR races.

And as usual, Mitchforth doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.  You see mostly upper-middle class folks among the devoted fans at the track- the ones with weekend paddock passes and RVs in the lot overlooking the track- and also plenty of rich folks there among them. 

The one class you hardly see ANY of at the track for a big NASCAR event are the working class folks- unless they’re taking tickets or selling hotdogs.  Even though the fans you see at the weekend-long tailgate parties DO maintain a pretense to being working class.  Faux-rednecks, the point of this post.

Fans without money can only watch on TV- just like any other sport.  (Though you don’t need a lot of spare cash to play football, basketball or baseball as a hobby.)  Like NFL or NBA, attendance alone is expensive.

NASCAR’s lousy racing anyway.

knowdoubt, I’d check the stats on that.  From what I’ve seen, low income voters are pretty consistent state to state, and what will swing a state red or blue is how conservative the wealthier people in that state are.

What’s kind of funny about the McMansions is that they’re just as prefab and nearly as shabby as trailers.  Sort of deluxe doublewides.  I’ve heard this from more than one person in the construction trades.

I live in a house that was built in 1860, and therefore I have a good idea what it can withstand.  Houses built down the street from me and selling for twice what mine cost per square foot are made with half the bricks, and cheap materials. 

But one of the signs of a healthy economy is defined as building a lot of crap rather than using what we have. 

Conservative my ass.

But any true biker will tell you that it doesn’t matter what you ride.  What makes you a biker is THAT you ride.

True that.  I know a lot of people who own Harleys, and they range from extremely cool to extreme wankers.  Their level of wankerdom is determined by a simple mathematical formula:

(time spent talking about your Harley) / (time spent riding your Harley)

I worked with a guy who kept a picture of his Harley on his desk, and never shut up about it.  I would be shocked if he rides it 1000 miles a year.

Meanwhile, others understand that the coolest way to let people know you ride a Harley is to just pull up on it one day.

To repeat, people who work in the service industry, which is quite a large segment of the American poor, usually have to work federal holidays.

It does help, though, by changing the way the day is looked at. If it’s a federal holiday, then managers are more likely to feel that they OUGHT to let everyone go for half an hour to vote. And yes, I know that it often takes longer than half an hour. I see that it’s not a perfect fix.

I prefer a 3-day voting weekend. Make Friday or Monday a federal holiday, but keep polls open for Saturday and Sunday as well. Increasing the window size makes it more likely people will be able to get there at some point.

I’m wondering how much of the pseudo-redneck thing is a way to participate in the great conservative trend of anti-intellectualism without actually burning books.

Thomas Frank had a great anecdote on this in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” where the guy who writes a righty-populist ‘reg’ler folks’ rant for Guns and Ammo that gets passed around turns out to be the owner of a medium-sized to large business and most likely a millionaire.

This phenomenom is alive and well in Michigan too. You might not be a redneck if you have a garage for your two shiny SUVs.

My favorite example ever is the hugely expensive, unscratched full-sized pickup truck that never hauls anything that wasn’t bought at Lowes on a weekend afternoon.

My favorite example ever is the hugely expensive, unscratched full-sized pickup truck that never hauls anything that wasn’t bought at Lowes on a weekend afternoon.

Funny.  Though a working-class friend who was the first person in his family to attend college may not be genuinely rural, he and his family had used well-worn pickup trucks to haul heavy supplies and tools related to his father/grandfather’s trade and/or monthly groceries.  The few times I saw him drive up, the nearly 2+ decades old truck was so beaten and worn out that it wasn’t too long before it had to be junked because the brakes and engine were shot to the point of being a safety hazard and cost of repairs too prohibitive to be worth it.  He and his family used to make fun of the suburban weekend poseurs you’ve described here. 

For those of us further to the left, we do want corporate capitalism to go away.  We don’t think corporate employees are lazy parasites specifically, but we do make rather nasty insinuations about them, for instance that they are a bunch of sheeple/drones/shlubs who work against their own interests.  Again, even though by and large even most leftists have to get a paycheck somewhere, and that money generally comes either directly or indirectly from big corporate behemoths.

Opo,

The left mentality you described was very much in vogue with the vast majority of my undergrad classmates.  It is also a funny coincidence that they also tended to be from overwhelmingly upper/upper-middle class families and grew up in extremely sheltered upper/upper-middle class all-White/near all-White suburbs. 

As a result of encountering such undergrad classmates and other left/progressive undergrads at other campuses(i.e. Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Berkeley, etc), I have tended to associate such disdain for corporate workers to upper/upper-middle class bourgeois leftists who have the socio-economic privilege, inheritances, and/or trust-funds to not have to work in corporate America…or any privately owned business at some point.* 

The less socio-economically privileged progressive-left classmates, friends, and acquaintances I’ve been around tend to be just as, if not more disdainful of corporate capitalism without necessarily being disdainful of those who work in corporate America as they tend to be more understanding of economic circumstances which may necessitate one to accept employment at such places (i.e. first person in family to attend college, huge school loans, attempting to help family pay down debts due to severe poverty growing up…not due to keeping up with jones, etc).  In discussing this tendency to make disdainful insinuations and to regard corporate workers as a monolithic “other”, we have concluded that this is an unfortunate example of classism among progressives who tend to be socio-economically privileged.

* Not to say that non-socio-economically privileged who are disdainful of those working in corporations don’t exist.  Just that IME, they tend to be an extreme tiny minority who exhibit such attitudes and unlike the mostly upper/upper-middle class bourgeois leftists with such attitudes….actually are willing to practice and accept living in actual penury rather than accept work from corporate employers…or that from any private sector business for that matter.

Sort of how Joe Lieberman fancies himself ‘middle class’, eh?

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001056.html

Late to the party again.

The place I work had revenue of $62.9M last year. We had expenses of $57.9M. Total income before taxes was $7M, and we paid $2.3M in taxes, for a rate of about 32%. Ben D., is that fair in your estimation?

As a Business Major the short answer is “Yes.”

Corporations have used the 14th Amendment since it’s passing to grab rights and privileges as Legal Entities separate and equal with those of real human beings.
Most Americans pay 30 - 36%, so taxing a legal entity at the same rate as every real and existing human being in this country is not just fair, but exceedingly lenient

Motorcyclists have an easy way of knowing who the assholes are. Are they road friendly with “the wave?” No? Asshole.

“The culture of the faux-biker is similar to the faux-redneck discussed here, yes?  Same pretense to a “lower” class than they actually are?”

This was essentially my point. Living here in Orange County, CA, the difference between bikers & “bikers” is sometimes only as evident as the 2 foot ponytail and all the tattoos. Also, the bikers aren’t parked at the Starbucks on Saturday morning. They’re at the bar further down the road.

in the mountains of the northern rockies and pacific northwest, it has for years been a mystery to my friends and me, how people can pull up to a snowpark in a $40K diesel truck pulling a covered trailer with 4-5 snowmobiles inside (several thousand bucks apiece) and look at us in our compact cars (cost: less than their snowmobiles) and our cross-country skis (a few hundred bucks total) - and call US the elitists.  wha????

People who own these have money, usually a lot of it.  They’re the people who bought up the McMansions that blight the already blighted suburbs. These are people with the time and money to camp out for a few days for a McCain/Palin rally.  Occasionally, you’ll see RVs in actual trailer parks, but they’re usually not the nice, big ones you saw in the video.  They’re usually small, older model ones, and they’re parked behind the main house, and are used in lieu of knocking down a wall to add a bedroom.  You’d put a cheap, secondhand, small RV behind your double wide for a teenage kid who needs a little more room and privacy, perhaps.

Wonder if this was what Dana Lyons was referencing with his “RV” song on his “Cows With Guns” album…...