Oral Culture vs Print Culture and the divide between poverty, systems, and Leftist theory · 10:46pm Jul 21st, 2020
One of the things I frequently harp on my friends who identify themselves as Leftists is the large divide between needing to read 87 books to understand a ten-page Leftist joke, and the fact that there’s often a struggle within academia and in leftist politics to condense information down to people that, quite frankly, don’t have time to read said 87 books. My friend RoMS was asking what I meant by that, as one of the topics I frequently point toward is the difference between the oral culture of poverty and the print culture of the middle-class of the western world, and specifically the intellectual elite, especially on the left. He understood what I meant by not having time to read 87 books on Leftist theory, but me mentioning oral culture was something he hadn’t really heard about. So here’s a few definitions:
Oral Culture - Put simply, oral culture means that people prefer to seek information on living their lives through their interactions with other people and through verbal means rather than through printed materials. This does not mean that oral culture is illiterate culture, but merely that the preference for verbal communication wins out over the use of printed works. Oral culture also tends to adjust values toward interpersonal connectedness, spontaneity, an orientation toward the present moment, and is more likely to find comfort in the expression of one’s emotions.
This is contrasted by:
Print Culture - Print culture prefers the gathering of information through reading, be it books or online text. Interestingly, this has given rise to some cultural nuances in print culture that has allowed for things like being able to engage in: delayed gratification more easily; forward thinking leading to planning and making goals; being able to alter behaviours to adjust toward reaching those future oriented goals; and in some ways, develop a sense of separation and disconnection from those around you in order to further develop ideas in isolation from further input from those around you.
So to summarize:
Oral Culture - Tell me about it so I can learn from this relationship.
Print Culture - Refer me to the book so I can read and think on the subject.
I think this can easily be seen as possibly two different styles of personalities, but it is important to note that individuals who are considered to live in poverty live within an oral culture. Unfortunately, most of the present society of the US, Canada, and the EU revolves around the middle class’ print culture, which often means that those in poverty are left culturally in the margin.
Or, again, put simply, there are two styles of communication in the world, and due to the risks and struggles and perpetual stress of poverty, those living in poverty rely on oral culture and struggle to break into the print culture of the middle class because it functions on rules and systems that are not a part of oral culture.
I always have a hard time with this on a personal level because I’ve always been a child of two worlds in that regard. My parents were both college educated, and while we lived in poverty for a rather significant period of time in my early childhood, we tended to maintain a lower-middle class living when I became an adolescent. However, I grew up in a very rural area, and as such picked up on the oral culture of the kids of the (generally) poorer families in the area. School was steeped in an oral culture. It’s also where I picked up a more rural dialect, which I had to more or less learn how to not use because I lived in a literate culture at home. I learned to adapt.
Sort of.
Kind of?
I still fuck it up on occasion, and I swear to god it’s not all just because I have ADHD.
Because the difficulty in living in between two worlds is often finding yourself preferring one over the other. Don’t get me wrong: I love reading. I love writing. I learn a lot of information by taking my meds and proceeding to lose 18 hours on wikipedia.
But the more natural way that I tend to retain information is by forming relational connections with people, and having them more or less walk me through their thoughts on the matter. By relational connections, I mean I have an easier time learning from someone if I know about them. I tended to learn better from professors I got to know as people, than I did from professors who were entertaining lecturers. I’ve learned more things about various subjects from my friends after I got them to open up to me. This probably makes me a super good therapist, but at the same time, I recognize that it can seem like I don’t know how to function unless I do the social.
Which can also be a struggle because sometimes I don’t do the social goodly, and/or will default to trying to learn about a topic on my own. I love reading, and if there’s a really good book on something I’m interested in, I’ll devour it. But it isn’t my go to source for information. Being able to sit down and talk to other people, even if the discussion is non-linear, spontaneous, and may wander off on tangents, will always be a superior way for me to learn and more importantly retain novel information.
Characteristics of an Oral Culture and how it relates to poverty
Oral culture by and large is locked into the present moment. That means it can also do an excellent job looking at the ‘big picture’, even if that is sometimes a bit overwhelming. But at its heart, the priority is on verbal communication, emotional expressiveness, and interpersonal relationships. This can mean that oral culture comes across as a bit more physically aggressive than print culture, but often that ties into the value placed upon emotional genuineness. It just happens to break the rules of order and social nicety that print culture prefers.
In modern times, Oral culture also represents a class divide. In the US, oral culture is pretty much exclusive to the lower class. It’s the culture of poverty, and there’s a lot of reasons why this makes sense!
First and foremost is that living in poverty is a struggle. You live in your own personal warzone of stress, frustration, not making enough money to make ends meet, having to leave bills left unpaid and to rely on very little support system outside of those close to you. No time for extras. You learn very quickly that no one cares about you, except maybe your family and a best friend. Your focus becomes trying to provide whatever support you can muster for those people, and it often means things like school and reading and the dumb rules associated with print culture are meaningless in light of the big picture of living in poverty.
One of the biggest divides that shows up in print vs oral culture is the fact that print culture will tell you that you need a five-year plan and that the reason to finish school is to get a job. To an individual living in poverty, who has grown up in an oral culture that lives in the now, it’s a load of malarkey. First of all, no one can plan that far ahead. Second of all, getting a job means stress. Jobs are stressful for parents, so children born into generational poverty learn that all money really does is make you stressed out, and make you have to stay away from home.
Donna M. Beegle is an anti-poverty advocate who wrote an excellent book called “See Poverty, Be the Difference” in which she discussed her life of growing up in generational poverty. One of the things she pointed out was how little relationships matter in print culture, and how detrimental this can be to students who are living in poverty, as well as how massive of a divide it can wedge between those who have lived in generational poverty, and systems of higher education. Without an emphasis on getting to know their students, it can be hard for higher educators to understand why this ‘flighty, emotional, layabout’ (yes, this was a quote from a professor talking about a first generation college student who came from a background of generational poverty) learned better once they took the time to let the student get to know them. Again, if you don’t have a relationship, an individual who has lived in an oral culture all their lives is going to struggle learning because we’re dealing with a cultural divide.
Oral Culture and how it relates to issues interacting with Anti-poverty Systems
The issue that exists within modern social work is often one that the social worker themselves is not a member of an oral culture. As such, they tend to think in the ways of print culture, which, to someone who is in crisis and/or living in poverty (which is basically a constant crisis, ngl), this means you aren’t reaching your intended audience. Let me run you through two examples (one based on a coworker’s interaction with a client, and one based on my interaction with them. The client is an amalgamation of several individuals I’ve worked with over the last 8 years):
Marie entered the social work clinic on Tuesday. Tammy was the clinician of the day, and took Marie into her cubicle that was assigned to her. Tammy’s cubicle basically had no personal effects in it, and was fairly bland to sit in. Tammy asked Marie a lot of questions about her needs, and ended up giving Marie a piece of paper with a list of 12 places to call or walk to. She asked if Marie had any questions, and when told no, sent Marie on her way.
Marie came back to the clinic on Wednesday, when I was the clinician of the day. I greeted her, invited her back to my cubicle (which I had decorated with nick-nacks and stuff to make it feel like someone liked working there), and asked if she needed some water or coffee before we started. I also asked if she had any questions for me, and she asked a few things to generate rapport (where was I from, how long had I been doing my job, etc). After chatting for a few minutes, I asked her a few questions to figure out her needs. She told me she’d met with a social worker the day before, but that she’d lost the piece of paper she was given. Marie and I discussed what resources were closest to her house, and talked about what bus route would be needed to get there. We wandered off topic a bit, then discussed the two resources a second time and repeated how to get to them. I asked her if a reminder address or phone number would be helpful, and gave Marie a sticky note with the addresses of two possible resources for her, as well as my card so she could try to contact me if she wasn’t able to access the resources I gave her.
Now… I don’t write this to toot my own horn. It… probably looks like Tammy was uncaring as a person, but she really wasn’t. The issue was that she was trying to function from the print culture of ‘here is the information, here is how you use it to improve your future, here you are, here is where you should go.’ She missed that there is an aspect of repetition as memory retention in oral culture, and had also missed the opportunity to explain what the resources were and why she recommended them. She also tried to give a rather lengthy list to someone who was already overwhelmed by the ‘big picture’ of their lives, and so her effectiveness in making appropriate referrals was reduced. Tammy’s method of information-sharing worked really well for people who were in temporary poverty, and had come from the print culture. My method didn’t work so well for those in temporary poverty, as they wanted all the information now and would follow up on their own. Which is why I would often have a list of printed resources for clients who were experiencing temporary poverty vs. those who had been experiencing poverty all their lives.
Being able to identify the difference between the oral culture of poverty and the print culture of the middle and upper classes is super important in attempting to tailor your message. Which gets me to my point about how critical it is to be able to disseminate your message in a variety of ways.
In Which Heartshine Bitches About Needing to Read 87 Books to Understand Anything Culturally Left of the Core Social Values of Portland, Oregon
I have a very vague understanding of how politics works on a global scale, which admittedly puts me ahead of most Americans in realising that Democrats in the US would be considered Centre-Right anywhere else in the world. The global existence of the pony community has put me in touch with people who believe in and have done a lot of thinking (and reading) on a whole variety of subjects related to political thought. This has pushed my own personal views more left than they were before (I do this thing where I like viewing people as people and hate how capitalism tends to not do that so I really can’t get behind Conservativism), but also ran me smack dab into the issues of oral vs. print culture.
I look up to and respect a variety of people who have done tons of reading on subjects like trying to implement better social policies to telling the difference between Liberalism and Progressivism (I did not know these were two different things) to the finer points of Cultural Marxism. Those of you who don’t know me are probably like ‘wow, you sound smart.’ Those of you that know me know I just parroted several words/phrases I’ve heard repeatedly without complete context, and are probably running your hands down your face like ‘Heartshine why are you like this?’
And the reason is that I’m a super busy, hyper-stressed, underpaid social worker who doesn’t have time to read 87 books, but the few times that I have been able to get to know people who understand these things and are willing to take the time to explain it to me, means that I am slowly but surely learning stuff, and drifting my personal Overton Window to the left in the process. Unfortunately, not all of my friends has the time (or patience) to put up with my stupid, uninformed ways, and I’m referred back to books, and usually end the interaction feeling like I am yet again being fucked by my default culture being oral culture.
Which isn’t to say that my friends haven’t talked with me or haven’t tried. They have, but what I am getting at is that one issue I’ve been running into frequently with the divide between Leftist theory and the practice of said theory: there’s a difficulty in being able to reach below the middle class. I don’t know my history on the cultural Left very well, but every time major figures are mentioned, they are always professors, high ranking military officers, or people who already lived within a print culture. Very rarely are they part of the oral culture of poverty, though the end goal of leftism is to do away with poverty entirely, it seems to struggle to try to get that point across.
When talking to RoMS, I did note that I thought that one of the things that has been working out for Leftist theory getting disseminated to those living in more oral cultures is the advent of things like YouTube. The issue is not everyone in poverty has access to YouTube. While YouTube videos offer a nice, bite sized way of providing information while also allowing their viewers to get to know them in at least a parasocial way, we still get back to the fact that having access to the internet is a privilege.
Which gets back to the fact that if the Left wants to get its message across, it may have to try grassroots campaigns. Which is going to be slow going, is going to run into lots of resistance, and is still going to be a gamble of time and energy of being able to break into the oral culture. But I also worry that, without being able to reach into the oral culture of poverty, Leftist Theory is going to just stay as ‘theory’ and never be put into actual practice.
Huh, hard thinking with this one. I may need to read it a few times to fully get it. But I do get some of it as well. Hmmm.
Huh. Helps explain why so many of my peers preferred to learn almost any other way besides reading.
I must admit: I never would have thought of the idea that a personal connection is helpful, even vital, in getting oral information.
Thanks for these insights, Heartshine!
Thank you so goddamn much for writing this.
Part of my problem, even as someone familiar with "print culture" who grew up comfortably middle class, is the extremely-online left's tendency to alienate anyone outside their cultural sphere. Like, people make jokes about the way rich liberals are out of touch and they're often true, but if I need to crack a history book to understand half the references then linking me "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" does not translate the spirit of left criticism well.
I've kind of focused my writing on giving people with similar backgrounds to mine more tools to start learning about left politics, but I absolutely agree that for the left to do anything, grassroots campaigns are a must. Being able to translate left ideas into a form people can actually do something with is goddamn crucial, and part of why I tend to embrace anarchism over other left models is that getting people involved in direct action to some extent is always going to require a grassroots component.
This was something I really hoped to see someone write about on here.
There's definitely a huge disconnect between leftist theory and those who'd benefit most from being educated on it. Even going into the culture of gatekeeping leftism behind reading theory, which directly excludes impoverished people. Goes back to the long-held belief that leftism is a privilege, and something you need to go out of your way to learn about even when you have the means to learn about it.
YouTube and sites adjacent to it have done well to close the gap, but the gap still does exist. Education is liberation, and as someone who grew up in what has been called the "welfare suburb" of town, it was good to have that touched on a bit in this blog, as far as theory goes.
Thanks for posting!
EDIT: To add, I do read theory now, since I've been introduced to it, but it remains that there is quite the barrier to entry to those political positions.
Heart, some of it may sound like "Oh, Heartshine, what are you doing?", but you presented a really important point.
I can relate to that split between using oral and print culture and preferring oral culture, I'm a person who needs people walking me through an education process rather than leaving me to lectures and books. Which makes me prefer to leave reading for short reads (articles, studies, analyses) and fun.
Honestly, I don't really know what can we do. YouTube and grassroots action are the way to go, but so many people are still caught up in the air of print culture.
Thank you for putting this into words. I've experienced this exact feeling a bunch, but always felt slightly guilty for doing so.
Great, yet one more barrier to actually communicating with people that I never knew about until now. :(
All I know is if I lived in a purely oral culture, I would have died a long time ago, because I hate talking to people and I can't remember anything unless I've written it down. Thank goodness for being just not-poor enough to grow up in a print culture, huh?
I lack the spoons to respond properly right now, so I'll just say thanks.
Yeah, this is not a problem with an easy solution. The best one I can come up with off the top of my head is libraries. Many public libraries have internet-equipped computers now, as well as books, and are generally free to those in the area. But to my admittedly limited knowledge, people in poverty don't tend to visit them frequently, for whatever reason.
For those of you here, I recommend Second Thought's YouTube channel. He leans heavily to the left, and so do I, which you probably could have guessed if you've logged onto Fimfic at all over the past few days.
This is the specific video I was trying to encourage people to watch, though I'm fairly sure literally no one actually bothered.
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It occurs to me that the most famous and successful (recent) campaigns for left-of-center ideals and policy were because of grassroots movements, such as Indian Independence, Civil Rights, and LGBT rights.
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The promotion of libraries is only a half-measure at best. Reading Heartshine's piece, the problem is that just throwing print media over and over at people is not going to give them connections needed to communicate left ideas. There are two ways to get around this:
1) In communities where people have internet access (which is thankfully becoming more common due to the proliferation of smartphones), youtube can be used to fill the gap, as can other forms of social media - but they have to be explicitly crafted to be welcoming, fun environments that don't require a lot of explicit knowledge of left language and in-jokes to appreciate.
2) In communities where people have infrequent, slow, or unreliable internet access (read: Every rural community, many low-income urban communities), these things will not help and sometimes even if there is a local library, it won't be equipped with the proper connections. In these communities, left ideas are going to require investing resources in going to people's doors and making contact. It's going to require a lot of people able to do a lot of one-on-one work.
There are models of this being successful. While he ultimately failed to take the primaries needed, the Sanders campaign actually had a great model in the states he did win in for mobilizing working class people who otherwise aren't often motivated to head to their local polling place. Tristan Brock-Hughes, who did organizing for the campaign in Iowa, actually has a fascinating autopsy of its successes and failures here that's worth reading.
You can also look at organizations like Black Lives Matter, which depend heavily on local organizers and connections within the local community to build mass protest actions. BLM has had growing pains as an organization, but in 2020 it's arguably one of the catalysts of a new civil rights movement.
Tl;dr, the left is really good at talking to ourselves. Now we need to learn how to people who aren't ourselves.
This is a lot of food for thought for a middle-class normie like me. Thanks for sharing!
Also, yes: When Speak?
Man we really do live in a society don't we.
As someone who lived in poverty for... a non-trivial amount of my life, I never really understood how some people could just open a book, absorb the information, and move on. It was incredibly alien to me that people do that.
I've gotten better at it over the years as I've taught myself various things that I really could only learn from books, but it's still bizarre. I always want to talk about things once I learn them, and it definitely helps me understand them.
And yeah, being exposed to all manner of people on the internet definitely pushed me further left. More left than I already was, anyway. Reminds me of something my high school US History teacher once told us: If you want to make the world a better place, get out there and talk to people about it.
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I suppose the online version of oral culture is when you’re only reading the posts from your friends and family. And watching the opinion videos from people you’ve agreed with before.
On Fimfic, I think print culture is reading blog posts by people like Bad Horse and Scarlet Weather; people who actually studied how to pen things, and may have actually turned it into a career for things outside the fandom.
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I learned a lot better when I got to talk to teachers one on one. I did form personal relationships with them yes, but I think my learning style just relies on asking a ton of specific questions. Having the teacher to myself or just a few people helped me feel I could dig down into minutia, and not feel like I was slowing down the group.
I also typically need repetition as memory retention for new fields... I guess it’s weird to think that my Aspergers/Wingers (or just the stress from adjusting to it) would shift me towards impoverished styles of learning. Even though I come from an upper-middle family, and loved reading from a young age.
Interesting; thank you for explaining that. :)
If you think that there's some group of people that is acting against its own interests, and that you know better, and that the only thing holding them back is lack of understanding, the best thing for you to do is to think of yourself as a white settler talking to Native Americans about how you know what's best for them.
90%+ of the time, the actual reason why they're "acting against their own interests" and "don't understand" is not because they're acting against their own interests, but because you have made up some reason in your head why they should be agreeing with you, and you have created a list of reasons why you're right, and not at all really thought about what it is that motivates them as people. You are engaging in motivated reasoning to try and justify getting what you want from them.
People's "reaching out" is almost always in the form of trying to convince other people to do what they want, rather than trying to build an empathetic understanding for other people. It's the same reason why both the Republicans and Bernie Sanders have a very hard time reaching out to black voters - because they're engaging in motivated reasoning about why black people should support what they want, rather than actually thinking about what black voters want themselves. That's why Biden won with them - he's a much more empathetic person and is actually capable of connecting with them as a person.
Also, FYI: the Democratic party being "center-right" elsewhere is not really right. The US is much more liberal (in the actual sense of the word, meaning "in favor of individual civil rights") than anywhere else in the world is. This results in our parties being very difficult to classify on the scales elsewhere, as both parties tend to adopt much more liberal policy positions than people in other countries, which makes things weird when you try to put them on a "left-right" scale. The US is very, very pro-trade, individualistic, and pro-civil rights, which results in weirdness when you compare us to other countries.
This is why the US has the seemingly bizarre "You can't tell me what to do!" thing going on with masks and social distancing to a much greater level than any other country - Americans tend to get very upset when the government tells them what to do.
Heck, we still drink coffee because the British dared to try and tax our tea. That was like 250 years ago.
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[Citation Extremely Needed]
U wot m8.
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That makes sense. I figured that, like, a couple of guys would go read up, then share via dialog to the rest of their communities.
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Yeah, that's not really how that works. If that were the case then people from rural communities who get university educations and end up leaning further left than their parents or surrounding communities would just come home, explain everything, and we'd have isolated left bastions all over the place. If someone's from an oral culture, even the oral culture of poverty, then your conversation needs to be more than just "go look at this resource". Again pointing to Heartshine's piece, it's not about whether people are lliterate, building relationships has to be a starting point, not just pointing someone already in that community to their local library.
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Hmm. Well, then I have no clue how we're ever going to get out of this nightmarish cluster of a society.
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Don't you have a convention to get kicked out of, Failson McPhrenology? This indulgent sermon is so smmothbrained-bad that it gave my cat the 'rona.
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The grim reality of "oh I woulda fuckin died back then" is always a fascinating thing to contemplate. I've thought about how screwed I would have been before a certain point with how awful my eyesight is and just, geeze.
(has to look up Overton Window)
Huh. Interesting.
Cultural Marxism. Hey, I’ve heard of that.
(looks up Cultural Marxism)
That’s...a whole lot of internet yelling.
Conservatism, Progressivism, and Liberalism. Aha! I know those already.
(looks up several references just for fun)
Oh.
(keeps reading )
I guess I only kinda understood.
Confound you, Heart. You drive me to research when I'm supposed to be studying other things! And I love it.
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To be fair I only really kinda understand a lot of this, but I do understand psychology and working with individuals in poverty, as well as how it feels talking to folks who very clearly know what they're talking about, and feeling lost as part of the process. I'm... glad I at least got people thinking?
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In fairness, I didn't have a good answer either. :<
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Dude, shut the fuck up. Who are you even citing?
I can point you towards a farm if you want. You read like you're soon gonna have a shortage of straws.
Thank you for this post, it really helps put some things into perspective and it meshes and fills some gaps in a Culture history lecture I had. Which is poignant, I guess.
Edit: I've just been assailed by the doubt that my comment may have sounded dismissive. It was not. At all. I really, really appreciate what you've done here and it gave me a ton of things to think about.
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It's not even a 'back then' thing, if this still persists and promotes inequality today. c.c I've always struggled to communicate with people, and learning something like this means I'm back to square one. :C
Plus, this being the first time I've heard of such a divide in any kind of context, I have to wonder... are people even aware of this? Like, did that woman who walked into the wrong social worker's office have any sense of why her approach and advice didn't work? Would anyone, if they weren't aware of the oral vs. print schism?
I have so many questions, and poor Heartshine is just one person. ._.
This is a very good explanation of something I've only been vaguely aware of. As an Autistic Spectrum person, I'm hardline textual, my learning comes almost entirely from studying references and applying principles. I really like to have things written down. I do not function well in an oral culture; something which has been repeatedly brought up to me at work lately, particularly in the context of training n00bz.
I have to admit, that's a really interesting thing you wrote here.
huh. Honestly, i don't remember ever thinking about such topic. Time to change that!
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To answer briefly but not completely: most people aren't super aware of this. In the US education system at least, there's a lot of work that has been done that tries to push people toward print culture and norming themselves to print culture. Honestly if I hadn't read Donna Beegle's book, I wouldn't've been able to articulate the difference as well as I have without someone actually doing some social work research on the matter.
The thing is that a lot of people aren't aware of this divide. It's been studied since as early as the late 1960s, when social workers were wondering why there appeared to be a poverty of language that existed in low social-economic status students. There's... a lot going on that makes this complicated, because as it turns out, trying to pigeon-hole people into one category or another without looking at all of the factors going into their lives holistically is a terrible idea.
...Yet policy makers do this constantly.
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Which... yeah also raises other issues as well when you have people who grow up in poverty and are on the Autism spectrum and really struggle in an oral culture. There's a lot to these issues that go farther than the limited scope that I discussed. And I don't have good answers for it...
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Well, glad to help!
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Oh no, you're fine. It came across as 'this is interesting!' and not dismissive. I am glad it was at least entertaining!
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I can't see very well either, so the thought of trying to survive prior to like 1940 makes me go 'oh god I would totally have died.'
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No problem!
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I think learning styles also play into a lot of this as well. I just... was going to try to speak to generalities and point out something that has been bugging me a little when I've talked theory vs practice with my friends. ^^;
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I'm glad this was another 'oh this is relatable' post, because honestly sometimes it feels weird to be like 'AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES THIS ISSUE!?'
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Yay brain food. Also Soon(TM)
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I don't think we need to feel guilt for doing so. It's... a weird issue that not everyone really knows about/knows how to articulate that well. I don't think I've articulated it perfectly, but I'm glad this has been helpful!
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I mean, honestly thank you for writing your 3am primer on leftism, because it was informative, but also makes me feel less crazy for writing stuff like this at 4am. XD
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Yeah... that's... my hope for more grassroots things. It was why one of the things I found encouraging was that my home state of Oregon was starting to look at internet access as a right, which would mean that programs that offer assistance with bills would be able to assist with offering access to fast, reliable connection to the web.
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Oh definitely. I mean, I think most people understood that I was joking about needing to read 87 books, but there is definitely a component to theory that makes it... hard to engage if you don't have the time/energy/effort/spoons. And when we're dealing with things like a global pandemic on top of social unrest, a lot of people start to default back to their primary culture. Which means while now would be a good time to push more leftist policies (and I want to note that there's a distinction between leftist and 'liberal', though the terms are often used as being synonymous in the US), when people are stressed and those who grew to function in print culture but are actually form an oral culture are going to have a hard time engaging people wanting to use times like now to push those policies due to the cultural divide.
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No problem! Glad it's been informative!
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Finding yourself so devoid of arguments that you must resort to insults is a strong indication that you're wrong.
The split here isn't so much print / oral as urban / rural. Urban centers of poverty voted strongly Democratic in 2016. The urban poor are already on the left. In the 2016 election, the only big city in the US whose downtown area voted for Trump was Colorado Springs. The only rural areas that didn't vote for Trump were Native American reservations, majority-Hispanic areas near Mexico, and majority-black areas in the cotton belt.
As someone living in a rural area, I think that the reason rural areas aren't leftist isn't that they don't understand print culture. (TD's comment about white settlers is relevant here, and I note in passing that the heavy downvoting of his long thoughtful comment, together with the heavy upvoting of Cynewulf's brief childish response to it, proves we're in an echo chamber.)
The reason is that the left has an urban context and a rationalist, urban way of thinking. They demand absolute satisfaction of a few abstract ideals, rather than trying to make practical compromises between many values. They regard policies that make sense in cities, like banning guns, centralizing government, and heavy regulation of business, as being universally right, even if they don't work in rural areas and force rural businesses to close. They demand toleration of all cultures and all cultural values except rural American ones. They look at the cultures that rural Americans have painstakingly constructed over generations, and slate them for destruction for being cultural constructs. They ignore any values that are important to rural people but not to city people, like land ownership, self-sufficiency, and rootedness.
Also, the left has a strong prejudice against rural people. The right doesn't. The left continually damns rural people as oppressors of blacks, Hispanics, LGBTs, and more, instead of speaking out against the marginalization of rural people, who are less-represented in movies, on TV, and in print (and more stereotyped when they are) than any of those groups, and are so discriminated against in hiring and in academia that they must learn to suppress their accents, as you yourself did.
If the left wants to win people over, they should start by not hating them so much.
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This is also an print/oral divide, as urban culture tends to promote print culture.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know this as well as I should (and I have admitted as much several times in the blog), however, I kind of get the impression that this is overly generalized toward the more authoritarian leaning left than the libertarian leaning left. Scarlet had a good primer that noted that differences between the two sides, and I do know that there's a lot of folks on the left that are pro-2A, would like a much more decentralised government that favours local authority over federal, and would really like to break up large conglomerates that tend to push small rural businesses like farming and ranching into going under. From what I can gather from the authoritarian left, what you're saying is dead on. From the libertarian side of it, eh, not so much. But I think that also gets into the issue that any issue involving politics runs into in that often there's a huge disconnect between theory and achievable practice. I can speak to things like working from an anti-poverty, anti-oppression point of view because I work in the field and have a better grasp on the situation 'on the ground' as it were. If you're not on the ground, there's a lack of understanding of that perspective.
This has been something I've noticed and will agree with you on. Maybe there's a book on it that I haven't had time to read cause it's part of the 87 needed to get the joke, but that definitely has been something I've been meaning to ask about and admittedly haven't as I've been doing talking with people about these sorts of things.
I actually got more of this from my very conservative parents, who didn't want their kid to sound like 'she just done fell off the turnip wagon and got runn'd over by it', as well as from a super conservative catholic professor of Geology of all things who could not get over that I used the word 'crick' to describe a stream or a brook. I also wonder if that's more of an urban vs. rural thing than right vs left, however, considering that I got more shit for my slightly Rowan County drawl and vocabulary in Western Michigan (also very conservative and home of Betsy DeVos) than I did when I moved out to Portland. Then again, right now I live in Clatsop County, and any drawl blends into the background of the very rural north coast, so folk don't notice as much except for the fact that I didn't grow up memorizing tide charts.
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Something you and TD have largely missed is that this blog isn't about the left-right divide. It isn't even about the content of leftist theory. Leftist theory has merely been a backdrop to what Heartshine has experienced in her line of work: i.e. how class and the involved mental burden of being poor affect social relationships and information retention. Only at the end do you have a tie-in with how leftist theorists could better effect their theories in the world. And leftists are well-aware of it.
TD's message, in view of the content of the blog, is so out in the left field that it leaves the impression that he's read the title and right away started commenting. That's why he's being downvoted. Heartshine speaks oranges, and TD humps on rotten apples.
You have quite an oriented and biased view of what people on the Left want, and it shows in how your relate to a concept such as a "cultural construct." Here, I am guessing you're using the term interchangeably with "social construct." The belief that something is a social construct and thus isn't real or that it shouldn't exist is a recurring talking point propagated by pundits on the right who don't understand social sciences. Something being a social construct doesn't imply that it is some dangerous relativism or that it underpins some deconstructionist political aims.
It doesn't and it could be dispelled very easily by a google or youtube search: such as this 10-minute video on the topic.
EDIT:
An ad-hominem doesn't mean it's wrong. A fallacy doesn't indicate falseness. TD's string of comments in the past couple of months has shown he's quite ready to spill falsities and twist data to push his opinions onto others
but they're facts apparently. So as far as it stands for me, TD has earned his terrible reputation and epithets.Bougie leftism is a fandom with an extensive canon and if you get a single point of it wrong, you get kicked out of the club.
(This is an improvement over getting shot or sent to the Gulags, but the consensus nowadays is that those were just problems with Alicorn Stalin)