A few remarks on the micro/macro analogy
Oct. 27th, 2024 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI’ve been poking at electorate demographics:
https://whyy.org/articles/swing-states-demographics-electorate/
This is really interesting. I sort of knew all this, and at the same time, I absolutely did not know all this, or spend any time thinking it through. Basically, Democrats put together a coalition of white college voters, black voters and some others while Republicans try to get the largest fraction of white non-college voters they can possibly assembled. This explains several features of Republican strategy from 2000 on. First, the importance of unity. That is literally all that matters, top to bottom, when your group is shrinking. Second, phrases like “someone you’d like to have a beer with”. College is an activity where you hone your ability to argue about a lot of details and how they related to each other. People who do not go to college do not develop this ability as much. (College AND non college folks drink beer, so that’s a little bit of a distraction.) As a result, college educated voters are very demanding of candidates in terms of producing a lot of details, explanations for why those details are important, and how they relate to each other, the voter, etc. Whereas non-college educated white voters do not want things to get worse, and they don’t want to expend a lot of time and energy on a complicated system they really are not that interested in. “Have a beer with” is less about the beer, and more about popping a squat with friends.
I was attempting to convey all this to R. In my mind, it is a powerful observation — a microlevel look at demographics leads inevitably to an outcome in which Republican candidates need to meet one bar (do I think you are enjoyable to socialize with) and Democratic candidates have to meet a completely different bar (can you beat me in a debate in a way results in me falling in love instead of brooding over it for a while and then trash talking you after the fact and maybe engaging in a lettercol feud). R did the expected grousing about how my micro/macro thing is really hard to think about and then starts talking about populism and Andrew Jackson. And I’m like, wtf. I said _nothing_ about populism, and honestly, if you are opposed to populism, that feels anti-democratic. Also, I had questions about when the property requirement for voting went away and pointed out that the electorate for Andrew Jackson bore no particular resemblance to the electorate today. It took a while, but he did eventually engage with my idea. Look, I don’t care if he or anyone else _agrees_ with me. I am, however, interested in thinking about this particular frame. Insulting people with words like “populist” is _also_ a predicted outcome from the micro/macro frame. If you are college educated and white, and someone else is succeeding by saying a bunch of bullshit that is appealing to people who are kinda ignorant and aren’t really making an effort to understand politics, you are going to come up with insults, and they are gonna focus on the number of fans you’ve attracted and their intellectual capacity — populism, basically.
Define populism on google turns up: “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” Sure, it’s populism, but _that’s exactly what appealing successfully to non-college educated white voters involves_.
Anyway. I’ll be continuing to pursue this whole micro/macro thing, because there is so much explanatory power here vs. anything else I’ve used to try to understand why people keep voting in really stupid ways (and to be clear — making bad choices as voters is a non-partisan, equal opportunity activity).
https://whyy.org/articles/swing-states-demographics-electorate/
This is really interesting. I sort of knew all this, and at the same time, I absolutely did not know all this, or spend any time thinking it through. Basically, Democrats put together a coalition of white college voters, black voters and some others while Republicans try to get the largest fraction of white non-college voters they can possibly assembled. This explains several features of Republican strategy from 2000 on. First, the importance of unity. That is literally all that matters, top to bottom, when your group is shrinking. Second, phrases like “someone you’d like to have a beer with”. College is an activity where you hone your ability to argue about a lot of details and how they related to each other. People who do not go to college do not develop this ability as much. (College AND non college folks drink beer, so that’s a little bit of a distraction.) As a result, college educated voters are very demanding of candidates in terms of producing a lot of details, explanations for why those details are important, and how they relate to each other, the voter, etc. Whereas non-college educated white voters do not want things to get worse, and they don’t want to expend a lot of time and energy on a complicated system they really are not that interested in. “Have a beer with” is less about the beer, and more about popping a squat with friends.
I was attempting to convey all this to R. In my mind, it is a powerful observation — a microlevel look at demographics leads inevitably to an outcome in which Republican candidates need to meet one bar (do I think you are enjoyable to socialize with) and Democratic candidates have to meet a completely different bar (can you beat me in a debate in a way results in me falling in love instead of brooding over it for a while and then trash talking you after the fact and maybe engaging in a lettercol feud). R did the expected grousing about how my micro/macro thing is really hard to think about and then starts talking about populism and Andrew Jackson. And I’m like, wtf. I said _nothing_ about populism, and honestly, if you are opposed to populism, that feels anti-democratic. Also, I had questions about when the property requirement for voting went away and pointed out that the electorate for Andrew Jackson bore no particular resemblance to the electorate today. It took a while, but he did eventually engage with my idea. Look, I don’t care if he or anyone else _agrees_ with me. I am, however, interested in thinking about this particular frame. Insulting people with words like “populist” is _also_ a predicted outcome from the micro/macro frame. If you are college educated and white, and someone else is succeeding by saying a bunch of bullshit that is appealing to people who are kinda ignorant and aren’t really making an effort to understand politics, you are going to come up with insults, and they are gonna focus on the number of fans you’ve attracted and their intellectual capacity — populism, basically.
Define populism on google turns up: “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” Sure, it’s populism, but _that’s exactly what appealing successfully to non-college educated white voters involves_.
Anyway. I’ll be continuing to pursue this whole micro/macro thing, because there is so much explanatory power here vs. anything else I’ve used to try to understand why people keep voting in really stupid ways (and to be clear — making bad choices as voters is a non-partisan, equal opportunity activity).