Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Tanner,
I seem to have lost a long reply I just wrote.
td;dr:
– Raleigh was and is less (pre-)Woke. It’s one point of the Triangle, with Durham, Chapel Hill. Raleigh much bigger, more inertia. Durham higher black %. RTP is zoned non-residential, so it’s a wide local political boundary between Raleigh to east, Durham & Chapel Hill to west. Chapel Hill is smaller and wealthier.
– 90s long-term trends were already qualitatively like today’s, with Clinton just a pause in native whites’ switch to Reagan-Helms, + moderate & liberal non-southern in-migration. Reagan-Helms and successors successfully lean on cultural wedge issues, Helms famously against affirmative action in 1990s “white hands ad.”– Jeff
Tanner,
tl;dr: Raleigh less Woke; 90s trends were already qualitatively like the present.There used to be clearer cultural distinctions across the Triangle than now, but distinctions remain (Raleigh is the eastern point of the Triangle, and in-the-middle RTP zoning excludes residential development). Voting weights very different, Chapel Hill smallest, Raleigh biggest, and the bigger, the higher % inertia, e.g., old-South political culture, Durham higher % black. All three much more populous today than fifty years ago, in excess of state growth rates, I think more from out-of-state than in-state rural-to-urban. In recent years, my outings to some local malls felt barely-to-nil southern (albeit a $ difference there, mostly excluding many at sub-median-incomes).
My family was typical of what was happening, having moved south from Ohio in 1976 (after moving north from western NC and elsewhere in 1910s-20s), college-educated parents. In smaller numbers, others were moving in from overseas for jobs at the big three universities or at RTP companies. Demographic distinctions at 1980s high school athletics, music, and academic interactions were prominent and interesting, in overall racial and non-South balances, incl. intra-Durham and intra-Wake.
The non-original white families like mine were more likely to vote Dem (my parents were mostly moderate and not 100% either party), and it was more this than generational churn that fueled predictions of a permanent blue shift, even against the R shift of many white natives. Biggest-city Charlotte and the “Triad” (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point) did not have nearly as many non-South arrivals fueling their own population growth.
So the 1990s patterns and predictions were already more like today’s, in my memory. Native white side-switching from Old South Dem to latter Rs was largely locked in with Reagan and Helms, although Clinton’s charisma appealed successfully to some Reagan voters, and Jim Hunt’s four non-consecutive governorships felt very similar to Clinton (but lower-key). (Hunt came close to defeating Helms in 1984. Helms’s reverse-reverse-racial politics incl. the “white-hands ad” in 1990 swung many middle voters.)
The 1990s predictions were predicated: on statewide and national Dem candidates continuing as Clintonian moderates (mostly held true for statewide nominees), hence retaining significant if minority of native white voters; + on left-leaning out-of-state in-migration continuing to increase as % of voters (true). I think the Dem failure to hold and create as many white voters as a predicted was a combination of national Dem political-media Woke cultural shifts (followed by some NC local Dems) and of Fox News hammering that wedge hard and effectively.
Today, local Dem politics in the three Triangle counties is mostly local issues + local Woke posturing. Definitely less Wokeism in Raleigh-Wake, but some. I do not live in N.C. any more, and I do not have insights into pre-public Dem nomination maneuverings for Congressional and statewide primaries, which transcend the respective local Dem political cultures.
– Jeff
I’m a 52yo native of NC, and I believed this flipping analysis in the 90s (1990, Jesse Helms barely won reelection). And then the aughts. I became more skeptical with R victories in 2012, 2016.
Maybe this time it really is different, and maybe that will be in part because of what Greer cites, the lower rates of political shifting rightward with age.
But maybe the Dem leadership in DC, in Chapel Hill, in Durham, and increasingly in local-politics Raleigh, will maintain its hard push nach vorne and keep leaving a lot of the middle for Rs, which I think is why prior decades’ predictions have not panned out.
After such a long haul of NC seemingly on the brink of bluer shades of purple, I’m no longer believing that prediction. I’m not disbelieving it necessarily, but I was wrong several times earlier, so I’m pretty agnostic about it now.
Final note: A lot of middle class families in urban counties have schools as leading concerns, and once having opposed charters and school vouchers, many Dems now rely on them — they do not want their children in the default publics where they have purchased homes. Too, the continuing growth of urban counties means very frequent redistricting, including some year-round options. The Wake (Raleigh) school board elections are still back and forth with long busing potential — that alone could make the difference in a given year on a thin statewide margin.
FYI on numbers of Harvard History majors. (There, major=concentration, majors=concentrators.)
Harvard College also offers “History and Science” (used to be History of Science) and “History and Literature.” They each probably include some people who would have chosen History absent those hybrid options, and some who would not have.
2011-15 data (graduating year): https://oir.harvard.edu/fact-book/degrees-awarded-college
2013-22 data (all current undergrads who have declared): https://handbook.college.harvard.edu/files/collegehandbook/files/harvard_college_fields_of_concentration_22_-_23.pdf
If we blend the data mismatch, 2011-22, we get a 35% decline in the number of Harvard history majors over those 11 years (not counting Hist-Lit, Hist-Science).
Related Harvard STEM-HASS trends, history excluded: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/11/6/concentration-data-analysis/Whatever is happening with falling birth rates, it’s almost all-OECD. In other words, it’s civilizational, including Japan and S. Korea.
France is somewhat of an exception, and they do have a something like a publicly funded guarantee of childcare until schooling starts, and the quality sounds good.
Jeff Vanke, Interested in everything, from humanities to math and military science. Ph.D. in European history (EU origins in the 1950s-60s) with some Amazon-searchable publications, before I dove into parenting and then moved post-divorce to career recovery as a high school history and math teacher. Now 52, moving to DC-NoVa in 2023, and I have resumed writing in my summers.
Short-/medium-term project: World History since 1200, in 120+ pages. More comparative studies than globalization, emphases of happiness through material prosperity, stability, philosophical-religious systems, and solidarity systems.
Long-term cluster of projects: A short book and a collection of online summary learning-by-quizzes across the liberal arts and social sciences, 1000-2000 questions and answers <b>per subject</b>, about 12-20 subjects, with emphases on top 10 then top 100 questions-and-answers per subject.
Very good French, German, and Spanish skills (can teach and research in all three), with some Italian and Dutch. I’d love to get into Mandarin and Ancient Greek, but those are presently just dreams, not priorities.
Politics: For a basics (only) social welfare safety net and collective goods like schools; against affirmative action (anti-Bakke); pro-choice; and increasingly given to electoral write-in’s. I ran an independent protest campaign for Congress in 2010, mostly focused on balanced budget specifics, and I worked a short while after that in Federal budget policy.
I’m currently expanding my formal teaching credentials, and teaching is already an overtime job, so my attentiveness here might come in streaks.
