by liberal japonicus
The discussion has shifted in the comments a bit to what it takes to move the Maga base, so I thought I’d put this up.
I’m a fan of the NYT daily, (and Michael Babaro’s vocal fry!) but this one is rather depressing. Entitled Why Trump Voters Are Torn Over Minneapolis, after suggesting that Trump voters find themselves stuck between loving the enforcement of immigration but decrying the government overreach, it interviews a few of them. Don’t know if the Daily is available written, but if it is, please let me know and I’ll add the link here.
I realize that editors often title these things, but I’m not sure ‘torn’ is the word I would use. Torn implies, at least to me, a real struggle. To be sure, some of the people interviewed are ‘torn’, but others are just self-repairing, reminding me of the Latin legal term restitutio in integrum. No matter what the event or incident, they are able to return to their original state. No matter what, these voters return to their MAGA state.
One woman says:
I supported Donald Trump in the last three elections, but now I regret my vote. I feel bamboozled. My community has “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, but when Renee was killed, their reply was “Just comply.” So which is it? Don’t tread on me, or just comply?
The word ‘bamboozled’ is interesting and to me, it means being cheated out of something and being tricked with a performance. She was just minding her own business and was captivated. Step right up, you know the pea is under this shell, this is easy money. But the key aspect of a con is finding a mark who thinks they are wise to the world, because they are the easiest to trick.
The second person says this:
I voted for Trump in ’16, ’20, and ’24. I agree we have too many people here illegally, but there is a right and wrong way to do things….When the news broke that federal agents killed Alex Prey, I watched every video. I saw that the narrative from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was an outright fabrication. She claimed he was brandishing a firearm; I slowed the video down and didn’t see it….I’m a Second Amendment absolutist. Was he allowed to carry a gun where he was? Yes. FBI Director Kash Patel and Kristi Noem were clearly wrong. It says the Second Amendment is in danger of being violated by this administration. I am 100% against undue force being perpetrated by the federal government.
I’m not a reporter, so my follow up would be ‘100%? So exactly how are you expressing that?’
The piece ends with a longer interview with a man who seems to embody that stubborn inelasticity. He was interviewed just before Alex Pretti was murdered and here is what he said
To be kind of simple, I move mass with my body. I’m a laborer at the very root of what I do. I move things. I pick things up. I put things down. And that kind of work has been compromised by illegal immigration greatly. I got into construction purely as an accident. I was sort of a juvenile delinquent a bit and my cousin Ted worked for me in Nantucket for a landscape construction company and I went down there and I worked as a laborer. Then as I did it, I became a pretty good laborer. Later I worked for other companies and I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, “Well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back.” And I was getting paid less and less because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them. That bothered me. And then when I became a mason and I started building, I found that I was competing with companies that did that practice. And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it. And I’m competing against them. And you notice it by just simply seeing the crews that are going out there. And when you give a price to somebody to do work, you’re not even close to the lowest or the mid price. You’re always the highest price. And I’m never going to get a certain percentage of jobs. And then I can’t increase my rate because it’s an unfair marketplace.
That laser focus on the ‘illegality’ of brown folks doing the back breaking labor but total inability to consider that the people who are hiring them are doing something illegal is amazing to me. Again, if I were the journalist, I’d ask if he thought the companies that were doing this were breaking the law, but I guess that’s why I never became a journo.
They went back and interviewed him after Alex Pretti and he gave this response
I voted for Trump in ’16, ’20, and ’24. I believe I was given the option to eat shit or drink piss. In all three cases, I drank piss. That’s how much passion I have for the man…I move mass with my body. I’m a laborer. That work has been compromised by illegal immigration. My bosses would hire illegal aliens because they didn’t have to pay workman’s comp or insurance. I’m competing against an unfair marketplace. I can’t even hire a laborer now because I can’t pay them a living wage while competing with those prices.” One life should be too much, but people are getting themselves involved in actions that are inherently risky. If everyone just stayed home and let the agents do their jobs, there would be no deaths. You can’t yell fire in a packed movie theater. Stay on the sidelines and protest, but don’t get involved in federal operations.
In the PBS Newshour, they thankfully had Amy Walter and Tamara Keith (I thank god whenever I don’t hear David Brook’s gueule go on and on) and Keith said this:
On Air Force One over the weekend, we reporters asked him a lot of questions at one point. He said something about his base that I think really stands out. He is so focused on his base. And with his base, the narrow base, the titanium piece of the pie that he has had since the beginning, he has strength still. And what he says is “My base has never been stronger. My base is me.” And then let’s put an ellipsis to get to the end of what he said. “You could call it the America first base. They couldn’t be more thrilled.”
In my experience, titanium doesn’t tear…
As a palate cleanser, here is Ian McKellen’s turn on Stephen Colbert, doing a speech from Sir Thomas More, which I was unfamiliar with (it was held back because it was considered seditious and only performed in 1964 so, as the article notes, McKellen got to originate the role) It’s cued up for you.
lj:
In fairness to the interviewee, I took this to be referring to the people doing the hiring, not the workers.
And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it.
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
looking the other way might be the only way to keep construction and ag sectors afloat.
hsh beat me to it! That’s what I understood it to mean too.
On bamboozled, I always thought it meant thoroughly confused, but I see that both meanings are possible. You live and learn.
Which was obvious. But the folks in rural areas across the Midwest (and elsewhere, e.g. rural California) managed to avoid noticing that they were shooting themselves in the foot. Using a gun rest on the knee for better aim actually.
If you raise crops like vegetables, which need to be harvested by hand, how do you not realize that all your workers are speaking Spanish? If you’re raising animals, how do you not know that pretty much all the workers in the slaughter houses are illegals?
But they managed. And now, they have crops rotting in the fields. And they can’t sell their animals — slaughter houses aren’t going to buy animals when they have no workers to butcher them. Even if you aren’t prosecuting the employers for hiring illegals, their businesses are getting trashed because they can’t hire anyone else — turns out that those folks complaining about “illegal immigrants taking our jobs!” aren’t willing to do those jobs.** (Don’t have the skills either, but that’s a separate discussion.)
The construction industry doesn’t have the same immediately-trash-the-economy-of-the-whole-community impact. The company owners are still in trouble because they can’t get workers with the skills they need. But the impact on other businesses is, as a percentage, lower. Which only means they will take linger to be felt.
** If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it’s the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It’s no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
Gutting consumer protections, environmental regulations, and financial rules to benefit your billionaire donors while blaming the commoners’ problems on poor immigrants is quite the trick. PT Barnum would be proud.
Another neat trick is justifying an intrusive and violent crackdown on immigration based on the purported criminality of immigrants while at the same time taking credit for declining crime rates – a decline that preceded the crackdown and was ongoing during the previous administration’s “open border policy,” during which all the rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and drug dealers were supposedly flooding into the country.
environmental regulations?
Republicans are on it !
loved this phrase:
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he’s happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
Many years back now, the Colorado General Assembly was considering a bill, introduced by rural Republican members, that was basically a license for the sheriffs’ departments in rural counties to hassle short brown ag workers. Once word got out, the eastern plains wheat farmers began getting calls from the custom cutters** saying they were just going to skip Colorado if the bill passed. Typically something like, “All my crews are legal, but I’m not going to put them at the mercy of your sheriff’s asshole deputies.” The bill died.
** Custom cutters are groups with one or more big combines and a bunch of trucks who harvest vast wheat fields when they’re ripe. It’s migratory work, starting in Texas and moving north as the summer progresses. Really erratic work. If it rains you can’t harvest, and sometimes getting the job done in time means working by headlights all night long. Farmers, or even small groups of farmers, can’t afford big combines. These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
Combines, like cars, are computers on wheels. Or tracks. And almost autonimus. Though the custom cutters may not have cutting-edge equipment, their customers may not have digitized field layouts.
If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
Makes me recall a now-humorous memory. One summer my father sent me to spend a week with one of his cousins who owned a family farm. What did I get from that week? A life-long determination to acquire skills that would let me work in a climate-controlled environment where I didn’t have to lift heavy things. Or put my fingers in the near neighborhood of rotary machinery with blades and no safety cover.
One thing about doing farm work. Nothing else you will ever do qualifies as “hard work.”
People support Trump for reasons that have little to do with matters of fact in any social or economic or even political sense. It’s tribal. They are on Team Trump.
I don’t talk with Trump supporters about Trump. Or if and when I do, it’s very brief, I just say that I think he’s a crook and an asshole, and leave it at that. Oddly enough, they are also generally happy to leave it at that.
I have a friend who suggests talking with Trumpers about what motivates them, but without bringing Trump into it. For example, why is it necessary to deport people who have been here for decades. I haven’t really tried that, but I guess it’s an option.
The mason in the article has a valid complaint. People who live in southern border communities have valid complaints. People who were concerned about inflation had valid complaints. Whether they are looking in the right places for either causes or solutions is a different story, but the things they are unhappy with are not always unreasonable. They’re just (IMO) looking at the wrong villains.
So, talking to the mason about undocumented labor and how that affects him could be useful. Etc.
But I really do think that Trump’s base – the more or less 27-ish percent hard core – are basically unshakeable and there is nothing I’m gonna say or do that will move that.
If bad things happen to them, personally, or to someone in their family or close circle of friends, it could make a dent. Other than that, it ain’t gonna happen.
Oddly, the nearest thing to really undermining his base support that I can think of was Trump et al saying that people shouldn’t carry firearms to a protest. If there’s one thing that might pry some of his base away, it’s any hint of weakness around the 2nd A.
The paranoid style has always been a significant factor in the US. They aren’t going away.