Came here on the Mayflower or a slave ship

Yesterday I wrote about companies loudly complaining about now being able to find workers. In the article I quoted Laura Clawson of Daily Kos suggested perhaps they should pay more. A day later Clawson reported that it works! She discussed a few companies that raised the starting wage and were swamped with applications. A sign of a tight labor market is rising wages. Such people as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell doesn’t see that in the data. It seems odd that wages aren’t rising yet raising wages bring in lots of applications. There’s a difference between a tight labor market and stingy (and loud) employers. Clawson concluded:

There’s no labor shortage. Unfortunately, there’s also no shortage of business owners whining about how too-high unemployment benefits are letting lazy bums stay on the couch rather than getting to work, and no shortage of credulous reporters willing to write those stories.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported a little tidbit from Moscow Mitch:

100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration ... 100% of my focus is on standing up to this administration.

Yeah, Mitch, we figured that out a long time ago. Thanks for verifying it. Eleveld reported some of the things Biden has recently said. I’m delighted he’s saying things like this:

The bottom line is this: My Republican friends had no problem voting to pass a tax proposal that expires in 2025, that cost $2 trillion—none of it paid for—increased the deficit by $2 trillion; gave the overwhelming percentage of those tax breaks to people who didn’t need it: the top one-tenth of 1%. They didn’t need it.

That’s the kind of talk common people can understand. Global Trends is a report from the National Intelligence Council that takes a look at the world 20 years in the future. It has an impressive track record. Global Trends 2025 (written about 2005) waved a red flag over a possible global pandemic before that year with a discussion that looks a lot like the last year. So pay attention. Ian Reifowitz of Kos discussed what is in Global Trends 2040 released last month. One of the big warnings is around

the hateful white nationalism and white identity politics—practiced by the likes of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the right wing—that threaten to tear our country apart.

Wrote Reifowitz:

The GT 2040 report describes, in general terms, how reactionary movements like the Trumpist right develop. “Many people who feel displaced by rapid social and economic changes resent violations of age-old traditions and perceive that others are benefiting from the system at their expense. These perceptions also fuel beliefs that economic and social change is damaging and that some leaders are pursuing misguided goals.” As we saw in 2016, those who fear change can be subsequently drawn to someone who promises to bring back the good old days and make their lives “great again.” Such people, the report argues, identify themselves as members of groups who stand opposed, sometimes violently so, to the interests—or even existence—of other groups in a society.

What Reifowitz doesn’t talk about (and perhaps the GT 2040 doesn’t either) is the mismatch between those who cause the perception of “others are benefiting from the system at their expense” and those other groups in this society who are the ones being violently opposed. The first is rich, mostly white, mostly men who have engineered the society to take money away from the poor and middle class and give it to them. The second are the poor, mostly black people. The rich are the ones benefiting at the expense of others. The poor are being blamed. Another aspect is these aggrieved people do see the country helping black people with their tax dollars. But the cause of their pain is not the black person desperate for help, but the rich who make the poor and middle class so desperate. Going on with Reifowitz’ discussion:

To apply this analysis to our own society, Trumpist white nationalism grows out of white racial and cultural anxiety around demographic change. Put simply, we’re talking about people who fear losing the disproportionate power and status they receive simply from being white in America, even if they are poor and/or economically vulnerable themselves. W.E.B. Du Bois called those benefits the “wages of whiteness.” Such people are certainly disadvantaged economically—living paycheck to paycheck or, worse, not knowing when one will work again is never easy, even for white Americans—but they still benefit from white supremacy in that they avoid the disadvantages that system imposes on BIPOC Americans.

Note the “power and status” – they’re afraid of losing their place in the social hierarchy. The country would be so much better if we didn’t worry about a place in a hierarchy. Reifowitz went into a discussion of what holds a nation together. For some countries it is a specific ethno-cultural identity. There is exclusive nationalism, where some people have a special status. Their status is based on such things as race, religion, culture, language, and a few more. They are afraid of losing their status and want leaders to help them maintain it. There is also civic nationalism. According to Reifowitz, it is in a country where:

The members identify themselves as a community of citizens—unified by a commitment to basic democratic ideals—who share not only membership in a political system but who also recognize obligations to one another and to a common good that benefits the whole national community.

They aren’t worried about a hierarchy and their place in it. Reifowitz believes Obama tried to guide the country towards civic nationalism. There are a few quotes to show the point. This is from Obama’s commencement address at Miami Dade College in April 2011:

Whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower or a slave ship; whether they signed in at Ellis Island or they crossed the Rio Grande: We are one people. We need one another. Our patriotism is not rooted in ethnicity, but in a shared belief of the enduring and permanent promise of this country.

There have been lots of examples of exclusive nationalism over the nasty guy’s tenure and many more since then. An example is the attempt to start an Anglo-Saxon caucus in Congress (which, thankfully, didn’t get very far). That attempt prompted Rep. Ted Lieu to tweet:

Dear @mtgreenee & @RepGosar: I have some questions about your Anglo-Saxon caucus: Will non Aryans be allowed to join? If so, do we have to sit in the back of the room because we’re not white? Can we have fried rice and nachos during the meetings? Asking for a friend.

Obviously, the exclusive nationalism and the civic nationalism are in conflict. Reifowitz wrote that an important part of GT 2040 is that it shows the intelligence and national security leadership of the US government recognize the threat extreme right movements pose to the nation and world. White supremacy isn’t confined to America. Yeah, we’ve known about such threats for quite a while now, though several previous reports (not GT reports) have been prevented from being published. And then there was the nasty guy. But Biden has been talking about taking this threat seriously. He has talked about what is acceptable and what is not. The exclusive view means more injustice for BIPOC Americans. It means a weaker, less stable America, affecting all Americans. Which version wins? The Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government conducted a poll of young people asking the question whether they are more hopeful or fearful about the future of America. They, especially black and Hispanic youth, are much more hopeful now than they were in 2017.