A Sociological Eye

  Credit for this familiar image goes to KC Green. The Orange Man has yet to take office, but already it feels like everything is on fire. So I am here to remind you what to do! Remember: this chaotic spew of announcements and speculations is intentional. It is called "flooding the zone with sh*t." The theory goes that setting multiple things on fire, day after day, will have the following effects:  1. It will paralyze a sector of the populace, who won't know which fire to put out first, and will just freeze, going, "I can't believe this is happening!" 2. It will divide and conquer those being attacked, because they will each want the fire at their house to be put out first, and will have screaming fights over priorities while everything burns. 3. It will make a whole swath of people act like mythic ostriches and shove their heads in the sand, singing "La la la, everything's fine! If I don't see the news, it can't hurt me!" 4. It will s...

 What You’ve Heard Before This has been a very difficult week for those who voted for Kamala Harris. Harris lost the Electoral College by a lot (226-301), and over on the right, they’re calling it a landslide. It’s probably true that she lost the popular vote as well—but by a much, much smaller margin than the electoral vote gap, and one that continues to shrink as votes continue to be counted. (Thirteen states are still counting their votes as I write, the weekend after the election, and that includes the massive state of California.) The reaction of those who voted Republican has been predictable. If you looked at the rightwing news or social media, you saw a lot of exulting about the joy of “drinking delicious liberal tears.” Scenes of Democrats looking shocked or depressed and hugging one another were looped with gloating and laughs. That’s how things go today: when MAGA voters win, they taunt their opponents, and when they lose, they rant that the process was rigged and th...

    Yesterday, I posted on social media the graph you see here. It shows current levels of support for the presidential candidates according to gender for Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. I asked folks reading the post for their theories about what is going on with Gen X, and got a lot of responses. So here is my report on what people had to say! First, to summarize what this chart shows you: Millennials and Baby Boomers are nearly identical in their views, despite having a generation between them with different political preferences. About 70% of both Millennial and Boomer women support Harris, while only about 38% of men in those generations say they support her. That’s a striking binary gender gap of over 30 points. (The survey does not consider the preferences of nonbinary people.) Generations Z and X show different patterns. Gen Z voters are in the youngest voting age bracket, and for decades voters in that bracket have held more progressiv...

  This is a portrait of Elihu Yale and his intimates being served by an enslaved boy wearing a padlocked collar. I’m showing it to you because I want to talk about Yale Law School, and specifically its graduate JD Vance. A funny thing about Vance's Hillbilly Elegy book: the man believes he had a unique experience, because he felt like an outsider when attending an Ivy League university. He didn't come from a background of wealth and prep schools and world travel. He was at a loss as to how to handle his cutlery when taken out to a fancy restaurant by a potential employer, because the place settings included a salad fork and dinner fork, a soup spoon and teaspoon, a steak knife and a butter knife. And when he went back to his hometown, he found he did not want to brag to strangers about going to Yale. If they were the kind of people who would disrespect him unless he shared that credential, then they weren't people he wanted to bootlick, and if they were ordinary locals...