There’s a lot of talk about the White Working Class (WWC) but I thought this piece by Joan Williams, who’s written a couple of books about the work life of women, and who teaches at UC Hastings School of Law, was worth a read. I’m not going to excerpt it, but her explanation of why WWC members resent the poor, and why class trumped gender, are worth reading.
Here’s a DNC member writing to Josh Marshall about why the new DNC chief needs to be full-time. I think it makes sense.
Baud
Consensus BJ view also.
Corner Stone
Joy going to do a segment on the role post-VRA had on this election if anyone wants to bloop in for a minute. Didn’t say who her guests would be so I’m still tense.
Ahhhhh…good guests. Joy seems to have gone anti R bleaters since the election.
WereBear
Listening to Olafur Arnalds because no one makes bleakness bearable like an Icelandic heavy metal drummer turned composer/performer :)
Larkspur
@Corner Stone: Yes, thx for the tip. This is good stuff on AM Joy.
Betty Cracker
At least a couple of reporters at The Washington Post are on the case:
The article says it’s unclear whether the shit-gibbon or his people had contacted the actual heads of state before reaching out to ultranationalist loons. It also mentions that Russian banks funded Le Pen and will do so again in the upcoming election, when Marine Le Pen will oppose Hollande.
Maybe Putin can orchestrate a hack of the incumbent party’s email server. I’m sure WikiLeaks will be glad to publish it to grease the skids for another fascist because transparency.
Things like this are the reason I’m still not able to wholeheartedly join in the argument about who should lead the DNC or how to tweak the Democrats’ messaging to appeal to Rust Belt whites, who are supposedly alarmed by “identity politics.”
Just when I’m all set to join the fray, I get distracted by this white nationalist-allied authoritarian putsch bugaboo. That’s the “identity politics” that worries me.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: If anything good can come out of this election, it’s that it hopefully woke other countries up to the threat.
JMG
@Betty Cracker: French politics doesn’t work quite like here, because LePen has her own party, and there’s a center-right party. The parties hold primaries, then there’s a multi-candidate first round and top two make the runoff if nobody gets 50 percent. If LePen comes in second or first, the right and left parties will unite behind the other candidate, even if it’s not their party. That’s how LePen’s Dad got beat about a decade ago.
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker:
On AMJoy yesterday Malcolm Nance as well as Nina Krushcheva were saying that Merkel in Germany is next and then France.
Starfish
@Betty Cracker: Here they are reaching for more loons.
MomSense
I for one do it want anyone from the Sanders coalition. It was overwhelmingly white and Sanders’ positions on issues was an insult to our intelligence. And despite the #notallbros nonsense, the abuse that was directed at people of color and especially women of color was horrific. It is fundamentally anti-progressive to build an overwhelmingly white movement.
If anyone is watching AM Joy, the fact that the margin of victory was 27,000 votes and the number of disenfranchised voters was 300,000 tells me that the loss there is something a bit more than the way the Sanders wing is trying to portray it.
JMG
@Baud: I’ve posted this before, but at the wine distribution company where my daughter works, her co-workers, usually very snotty about the US, were both sympathetic to her and frightened by our election. They are as bourgeois a bunch as you can find. I believe fear of Russia may cause more European unity, just as the Brexit vote increased support for the EU on the continent.
Another Holocene Human
@MomSense: I agree about the Sanders bros. If they’re happy with Ellison, though, I am. My aunt who is very politically active and lives in Chicagoland loves him. She’d be happy with Dean again too. She said Dean only left because Rahm forced him out.
Betty Cracker
@Starfish: Saw a shot of that scene from another angle on Twitter. Just two men of the people in a gold-plated elevator, looking out for the little guy.
ruemara
Um, fuck the WWC Trump voter. I’m sorry it shatters people’s hearts so, that Uncle Ben and Cousin Lily are so bigoted, they voted to burn the country down rather than share it with gays and browns. Stop telling us this is class. It isn’t. That article had some fucking nerve letting cops off as just making poor decisions. It’s not smug educated elites when Trump can win rich, poor, young and old white people. Why the fuck are progressives incapable of dealing with this election? What is this pathology that it must be class and economics?
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
Add to that the simple fact that Sanders was never a Democrat, never worked to elect Democrats and refuted the party the minute he didn’t get the nomination. If there is someone that supported him but is not of that stripe, you know a real Democrat interested in the betterment of the party then lets get to know them. There are plenty of liberals who could fill the role but Bernie gets no voice unless he is a Democrat. Maybe we could get gary Johnson and ill Stein for input too
geg6
Read the article and, I’m sorry, but she is mainly full of shit. I live among these exact people and have all my life. She gets a few things right, but the idea that this isn’t pretty much all about race and misogyny is complete and utter misreading of exactly who these people are. All of the things she cites as their overriding issues come back around to bigotry. They hate trade, not just because of any economic disruption it creates, but because the “chinks” and the “wetbacks” are stealing their jobs (even though the vast majority of them around here have jobs and good ones at that). They are against unions because unions finally integrated and started championing minority member concerns. They hate social programs because they feel minorities are the only ones using them, even though the facts show that poor whites are the majority of recipients. They hate childcare and equal pay and reproductive rights because they see women as lesser beings who should be at home, barefoot and pregnant. Around here, they aren’t fundies. In fact, they rarely darken any church’s door, so you can’t blame it on religion. Every policy/political issue comes down to, at root, their racism and misogyny. I know these people, I have known them all my life. This. Is. Who. They. Are.
GrandJury
I don’t know why anyone would be concerned by what is happening in Europe when you have your own political Chernobyl right here.
The mainstream media is already normalizing Prez Elect Shitstain like it’s just business as usual. Like that behaviour and the things he says about people and his history of how he has treated people is acceptable.
That person and their behaviour should not be accepted as business as usual. The protests that are still going on are about the ONLY thing that makes sense to me. I think it should just be non-stop protests. Protest everything everywhere. Protests make a difference. Not waiting till he is inaugurated and starts shitting the bed on everything. Now is the time.
If you are talking about Europe. They have general strikes in France all the time where everything gets shut down. Greece had massive protests. They make a difference. The politicians and the media take notice of those things. If there are not massive protests then politicians and media go back into this business as usual nothing to see here mode. It’s not business as usual. What Shitstain has said and (don’t kid yourself) will continue to say is not acceptable for commander in chief.
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: There were four people representing these groups at Trump Tower on election day:
http://heatst.com/politics/donald-trumps-troubling-ties-to-europes-far-right/
Ludovic de Danne (Putin lackey and Le Pen apparatchik)
Denis Franceskin (Front National Member of European Parliament)
Harald Vilimsky (Austrian far right Member of European Parliament)
Laurentia Rebaga (neo-Nationalist Romanian Member of European Parliament)
All are member of the Islamophobic, neo-nationalist, Putin supported, Le Pen and Wilders led Europe of Nations Freedom Group.
MomSense
@Schlemazel:
We mock the Laffer curve and rightfully so but tell me how paying for Medicare for all with 8% GDP isn’t just as absurd?
Barbara
The article identifies one thing that has seemed obvious to me, and that is a lot of people really hate the idea that they are working for people who came from their own backgrounds but managed to do better. Whereas, rich people are so remote and their success so removed from their daily lives that they don’t tap the deep well of resentment with nearly the same level of imaginative satisfaction. It’s the difference between feeling something (rock and roll) and appreciating something (classical music). I am not going to distance myself from equal protection and liberalization because at bottom I don’t really think that’s the issue. And while she might be right about minimum wage, she is totally wrong about paid family leave or subsidized daycare. Maybe she hasn’t priced daycare recently. But her dad also falls within the class of people whose entire existence has become redundant as a result of the economy changing. The fact that she sees being a police officer is one of the only jobs where someone with a high school education can still get benefits tells me that someone needs to up their game for setting educational requirements for police officers. It doesn’t tell me that I should feel pity for police officers because they couldn’t succeed at doing anything else. For one thing, I don’t believe that. It sells these people way short.
Adam L Silverman
The book you all want, or, at least one of them, is David R Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class:
https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Whiteness-American-Working-Haymarket/dp/1844671453/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479051277&sr=1-1&keywords=the+wages+of+whiteness
5x5
What do you think about Labor Secretary Tom Perez for DNC chair? He has expressed interest.
I like him. He was making the rounds when he was being considered for the VP slot.
Also, I recommend the Joan Williams article linked to in the OP. It cut through my anger for the WWC dopes.
(I now hate the word “elite” more than I hate the word “neo-liberal”.)
geg6
@ruemara:
If it means anything at all, I completely agree with every word you wrote.
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: And I said it here on Friday.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
Healthcare spending in the US is 17.5% of GDP currently so spending less than half that is absurd? Interesting notion.
WereBear
Thank you, mistermix. But know what?
I am sick to flippin’ death of the flippin’ white working class.
Mind you, I come from there, so I can say — with confidence and without rancor – that they are a band of brawling Morlocks who cling to their ancient culture past all reason and sense. That one of their few virtues in their fierce loyalty, and they manage to turn that into a detriment because they use it to shield abusers and petty tyrants. They fear losing their children to changing times, so they either force the children to effectively leave the family to have good work and good marriages and happy children, OR they make them try to make their dysfunction family culture work, fail, and sink into pools of avoidable misery.
They are the only American immigrants who never acculturated. Far from their conceit that they are the True Amurricans, they have been shamelessly using their default cultural dominance to spit on truth, justice, and the American way,
We have been working out behinds off so they won’t suffer and die, and now they are loud and proud about what they want: blood and pain.
I’m with Kay. They wanted this so bad, let’s heap their tables with the consequences until they choke on it.
Adam L Silverman
@MomSense: And there’s this too:
https://twitter.com/frodofied/status/797761184292360192
Larkspur
@Baud: This morning, I’m feeling like I want a super-power that allows me to give deserving persons secret blocks of time, like short little pocket universes. I’d give Keith Ellison eight secret hours a day so he could get some good sleep, while devoting 24 hours a day to both jobs. I’m counting on him to be able to fit family time into those 24 hours. Even with an eight hour pocket universe, that’s a lot of work. But I like the guy.
Adam L Silverman
@JMG: I’ll have more on this later, but the leader of the free world is now Angela Merkel. And her most trusted agent in another nation-state is Francois Hollande.
Barbara
@5×5: When I read articles like this, part of me screams at the idea that somehow these professionals live in some kind of bubble with no family members who are part of this other class. Maybe that is increasingly true, which I for one attribute to the massive disinvestment from education that has occurred over the last 50 years at the same exact moment in time when having education means a lot not just to personal achievement but to continued economic progress. It’s not like people in Japan and China are going to stop educating their children to compete with us. We are big — that’s our only saving grace. We can drop quite a few people into the dustbin and still have enough left over to keep propelling us forward. THIS attitude makes me sick. This is the anti-egalitarian ethos where people are looking down at fly over country, shrugging their shoulders and saying, who cares if some brilliant kid in Kentucky doesn’t get a good education. The cost benefit for mining everyone’s potential isn’t worth the increased tax rate and I can send my kid to private schools. I guarantee you that is not the attitude of better off than average professionals who are not going to be leaving a big inheritance to their kids.
Kay
Meanwhile, life under the regime begins:
Is it normal now to issue threats to your political enemies?
Just want to chronicle how fast we’re sledding downhill. Wheee! Banana republic or bust!
sloan
I’m trying to imagine inauguration day. And how many swastikas and Confederate flags will be proudly displayed by the deplorables as John Roberts swears in the Cheeto as President. Or the Klan. In full regalia, white hoods and all. If there’s anything like that it will be on every front page in the world.
Then I imagine the protests. After all, Obama is the most popular President in decades, and we’re about to swear in a man-child President who will enter office more unpopular than George W Bush was when he left. Think about that!
MomSense
@Schlemazel:
No he was saying that we would have 8% growth to pay for it. We’ve been at 2% except for a brief period of 3% when the stimulus was putting tons of money into the economy.
WereBear
They HATE strivers. They undercut their own children, lest they leave; and wind up making sure at least some of them do.
bemused
@Corner Stone:
Which AM Joy segment was Nance on? Hoping the video is on the website.
mistermix
@MomSense:
Well, #notallbros was pretty much true: 43% of young black people voted Sanders in the primaries. Support for Sanders in early polling among 18-29 women was greater than for Clinton.
If you line out the Sanders coalition, enjoy losing the next few elections.
GrandJury
I think Dems should stop pretending the the US is still a democracy. Repubs control all 3 levels of gov,t most state govt’s..and most of the judiciary. That is NOT a democracy by any measure. With voter suppression it’s only going to get worse.
Why is everyone talking like “we need new blood”, “we need better messaging” or whatever. It doesn’t matter when you no longer have a functioning democracy and losing more elections with your “better messaging” is not going to change that. You think 2016 is bad just wait till 2018. It’s gonna be worse. There will probably be 10 few Dem Senators and a lot fewer in Congress so what little influence Dems now have will be watered down much more.
Wake up people. It’s not the messaging or the people. It’s the system.
Adam L Silverman
@bemused:
https://twitter.com/amjoyshow/status/797473292923699200
OzarkHillbilly
@ruemara:
Myopia.
MomSense
@mistermix:
Saying I don’t want it in charge of the DNC.
geg6
@WereBear:
Yup. I will take great bitter pleasure in watching these mother fuckers suffer. I want it to hurt them badly and I want them screaming from the pain. Fuck them. I come from that demo and got extremely lucky with my parents, who were anomalies in our community–liberals who supported minorities and they be of the few mothers who got a degree late in life and worked as a journalist the rest of her life. But I grew up with and still live among these people. The majority are petty, hateful, vindictive people who wanted to strike back at the uppity women and minorities around them. I can’t wait for them to realize that their hero cares for them in the same way he cares for women and minorities. Which is not a fucking bit.
GrandJury
@mistermix: Lol…you Sandernistas are hilarious. You are so blinded by your one dimensional issue man that you can’t see the big picture.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@GrandJury: The Constitution and our institutions have rendered us incapable of having majority rule in this country.
Betty Cracker
@ruemara: Williams accurately captured how many white folks view it, but what pissed me off is that she treated it as it were a legitimate POV. It’s not. Tamir Rice? Just the cost of doing business. Jesus.
@5×5: Perez sounds like a great choice. I was hoping Clinton would choose him for VP, not that I think it would have made a damn bit of difference.
JMG
@Kay: She’s super, that one. Picked up her boss’s habit of making empty lawsuit threats, too.
Larkspur
@sloan: I hope inauguration day is very windy. That red trucker cap isn’t going to do it for inaugural attire. And I hope only his supporters show up, so I can remember the 2008 inauguration and feel comforted.
MomSense
@bemused:
I couldn’t find it.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
Ah I see. Still does not negate the fact he did not have & does not have the interests of the Democratic Party on his agenda. He wants to be an allie? Fine, get in line, we need all we can get. He wants a voice in the party? Well then why not actually, you know, join the party and try to increase its representation.
sloan
@GrandJury:
Hell yes. No honeymoon for that asshole.
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker:
Adam L Silverman said here on Friday that Merkel in Germany is next and then France.
Davis X. Machina
@JMG: If LePen comes in second or first, the right and left parties will unite behind the other candidate, even if it’s not their party
@Corner Stone:
Germany’s had a Red-Black coalition gov’t for a while now. It’s the dam holding PEGIDA/AfD/NDP back.
Merkel’s job may personally be at risk, but the coalition isn’t.
FlipYrWhig
Remember when there would be earnest pieces from people like Will Saletan about how Democrats and liberals could, and really ought to, find common ground with anti-abortion religious people, such as by conceding that abortion is icky? Eventually, we gave up trying, because it was foolhardy to think it would work. This is where I am with the so-called white working class. Just give up trying with these people.
A student of mine said her grandfather wrote her about the election and that he said “I bet all those liberal professors are chagrined about this victory for the common man.” I just saw a high school friend(ish) write on Facebook about “whiny safe space liberals.” There is no appealing to these people. They hate liberals and pluralism. We’re not changing that about ourselves. Consider them the other side and make a coalition sturdy enough to grind their bones into dust.
MazeDancer
Gutting Medicare and Social Security will not be popular with Trump’s fans. There is an opportunity for Dems to push back hard on Ryan’s efforts. It will be a test of how well Dems can organize to do that.
It is possible Trump is planning to kneecap Ryan. That Trump will let Ryan keep lying about Medicare and Social Security and then come out against Ryan. Trump’s base doesn’t like Ryan. Trump likes to punish.
OTOH, Trump’s team is going to be so desperately trying to hire 4000 people, they may not even be able to have someone answer the telephones while Ryan harnesses the press’s love of his blue eyes and lies.
Kay
@JMG:
that’s the future attorney general of the US speaking there- busily lowering the bar for Trump with a media blitz- preparing the ground.
Now we’ll spend the next six months denying these people mean what they say.
errg
I think the article is mostly crap. As one little point, the WWC is strongly anti union, but why do policeman “get solid wages, great benefits…”? Because they have very strong unions.
And you can’t explain the results of this election without thinking hard about racism and sexism.
sloan
@Larkspur: The thought of Obama being booed out of office on national television makes me sick to my stomach.
Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.
@geg6: Amen. Hillary didn’t lose the working class, she lost the *white* working class. She didn’t lose women, she lost *white* women. And when Trump talks about NAFTA and the war on coal, he’s explicitly emphasizing the loss of jobs done predominantly by white people.
I won’t disagree that the Democrats should have done more to appeal to white working class voters on the merits, but their approach was focused on the whole working class as it should have been. Anyone who sees governance as a zero-sum game organized along racial lines, who hears “an economy that works for everyone” as “more free stuff for lazy brown people” is maybe not worth the effort to reach.
Larkspur
Ooh, Joy is talking about how well the post-LBJ Democratic backlash (moving to the center-right) didn’t work.
gene108
@Barbara:
Most people I have met, who are police officers have at least gone to community college, though not an official requirement.
In NJ state troopers are required to have a bachelors degree.
I know people, who were trying to become fireman, who went to community college to get the necessary education to pass the required exams.
There are not many jobs left that pay well, which do not require a bit of education beyond high school, whether vocational training or college education.
Corner Stone
I, for one, am 100% not going to watch the 60 Minutes tonight. But I simply can not wait for CBS to do their best to completely normalize this disgusting attempt of a human being.
And even though I want to support Joy Reid and usually like her show (I felt the same for MHP), I may have to dial back on tuning in. It simply makes me too angry to think about all we’re going to lose, and what this country has done.
Davis X. Machina
@ruemara:
Vulgar-or-demotic Marxism. Deeply ingrained in the American left. The more education, the more likely you are to find it.
Aimai
@mistermix: the sanders coalition was smaller than hillarys coalition. Thats why she won the primary.
Phylllis
@sloan: I’m thinking it will make Andrew Jackson’s Inauguration look like a Downton Abbey tea.
MomSense
@Larkspur:
How ’bout windy and rainy?
Davis X. Machina
@Adam L Silverman: Don’t forget When Affirmative Action Was White….
There was a time not long ago when class-based remedies were race-based remedies.
Poopyman
@Larkspur: NO! I want the Mall filled with people who turn their backs on him in total silence.
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear:
That is EXACTLY what my step-daughter’s father did to her. She hasn’t seen him in years.
Bill E Pilgrim
Let me just say this right here: There are many things you can point to as the reasons this election came out the way it did. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had known what was going to happen in the rust belt and focused there earlier, or focused the campaign in general more on making promises about union jobs rather than banking on Donald Trump’s negatives turning enough people off, then it might have made a couple point difference in those states enough to change the entire election outcome.
There’s also plenty of evidence now however that FBI head James Comey’s interference in the election, so nearly universally-condemned as improper, and I mean even by some Trump supporters, was more than enough to change the race by the couple of points needed to give Trump the win.
Even if these other things stayed exactly the way they were, it’s pretty evident that without Comey’s meddling in the election Clinton would now be President and the conversations would be entirely different. And yes, even with his interference, if some of these other factors were different that could have changed the outcome also. With a strong enough showing in the rust belt, she could have survived Comey’s dragging the numbers down somewhat.
The difference, and I can’t believe I have to even explain this to people, and by “people” I mean all of those imagining that the properly wise, jaded posture to take when addressing this is to say oh come on, that’s just an excuse, she wasn’t a “change candidate” or the Democratic Party as a whole has failed — some of which I entirely agree with — the difference is that not correctly guessing exactly what would win the rust belt or not being a change candidate are not freaking improper violations of policy and potentially even illegal actions by a law enforcement agency meddling in a Presidential election.
There are two massive flaws with these clearly fashionable arguments, one a basic error in logic that I can only paraphrase with “If there are several factors that contributed to the outcome of the election, then any one of them was not a factor”. The other is that, as I say, if there are several factors and one of them was widely, nearly universally-condemned as improper meddling in the outcome of an election, that one matters a lot more than factors having to do with failings in running a campaign.
Kay
The President of the United States:
70 year old people who inherited a business and have never had to take direction or correction FROM ANYONE don’t change. It’s silly and childish to believe they do. they better rein him in now or it will get much worse
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: I don’t think it’ll work the same way in Germany and France. The systems are different. And unlike in the US, which has never done the formal, hard, institutional work to reconcile ourselves with our past (societal reconstruction), Germany has.
delphinium
@WereBear: Yep. How many times do we have to essentially keep asking this girl out? We have tried to develop polices to help the WWC and make their lives easier. They have said no to our party. We have tried to provide them safety nets, they have said no. And they will keep saying no because frankly they just aren’t that into us. Can we move on already? Multiple commentors here have posted excellent ideas to try and reach out to people who may actually be receptive to us.
Mary
In other words, “I don’t defend police who kill innocent people, but let me go ahead and defend the right now.”
There are a few interesting points in this piece, but there’s a whole lot of garbage, too.
Davis X. Machina
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s already sturdy enough to win Presidential elections.
WarMunchkin
@WereBear:
This only works if we have a messaging arm, that exists outside of cities, that is capable of making sure people blame the Rs for the consequences.
Look, nobody is saying that the vote suppression, Comey and Russia wasn’t a factor in this election. It is clear and supported by data that Comey dropped Clinton’s numbers like a hot rock and we never recovered. But the difference in making up the 100k votes we needed to grab a win and building a commanding majority of seats in the Senate and House of Representatives may be related to messaging across broad geographic areas. I spent the last two days eating MemberBerries watching Obama 2008; it really was different, not just in rhetorical style, charisma or execution.
Larkspur
@Poopyman: Yup, upon further review, that scenario is way better.
Davis X. Machina
@Mary: Jesus. No one’s ‘demonizing the police’. Is asking law enforcement officers to follow, and not just enforce — or ‘enforce’ — the law that big an ask?
If I want hired muscle, I’ll talk to some of my Rhode Island friends. What I want are peace officers.
OzarkHillbilly
@GrandJury: I recommend suicide.
Kay
@Kay:
i was listening to punditry say Trump will become a statesman because now he feels the ‘weight’ of the presidency.
they now have to ignore what he has spent the morning doing- attacking a newspaper
Adam L Silverman
@Davis X. Machina: That’s a good one too.
MomSense
@mistermix:
I have a couple of questions for you. For several months after Sanders had zero chance of winning the nomination Sanders kept campaigning on a message of Hillary and the DNC are corrupt based on the stolen/ hacked emails made public by a Russian agent. Did that harm Clinton’s chances in the general? Did Sanders’ refusal to release his income taxes normalize that or provide an assist for trump?
ETA It was Sanders who first started pushing rigged primaries. Trump used that narrative frequently.
gene108
One thing Williams fucks up in her HBS article is the idea that only working class people want a steady paying job, from which they retire after 30 years of service.
Bitch, most college educated people want that too. They’d love to be able to be an engineer with Big Evil Corp for 30 years and not worry about getting laid off all the damn time, when a project finally ends.
This hire-and-fire economy has been hard on everybody but the rich for the past 35 years.
Miss Bianca
@ruemara: Oh, don’t forget it was also our shitty candidate with all her baggage. Who still managed to win the popular vote.
I’d include the snark tags, but my heart is too full of fury. I’d listen to some of the bros if they’d stop trashing HRC – ooh, she just wasn’t *inspiring* enough. She had too much *baggage*. The fact that it was all manufactured BS doesn’t stop them for a minute. Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: Yes, it really isn’t that we don’t understand the WWC.
It is that WE DO.
FlipYrWhig
@mistermix: Is there any reason to think the “Sanders coalition” has anything to it besides a desire to vote for Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton? I think there’s been a tendency to view it as “the left” and “youth,” but Sanders was winning a lot of state primaries where there isn’t much of a left presence even among Democrats. My hunch is that the amount of Sanders support arising from point by point ideological affiliation is not that strong. I could probably conceptualize it in terms of baskets but, well.
Davis X. Machina
@gene108:
That’s why it’s been pivotal to split that ‘everybody’ into mutually-antagonistic pieces to the maximum feasible extent for the past 35 years. It’s the only thing between them and us turning into a nuclear-armed Denmark.
ThresherK
Ugh. I’m taking this comment back because I can’t edit to add links, and I’d care to add too many things re Bernie talking “corrupt primary” and “emails”, as pointed out by a number of regulars here.
mistermix
@MomSense:
I want a greater emphasis on economic populism added to the mix. I don’t want Sanders allies in charge of the DNC either, but I want them to be heard.
@Aimai:
Agreed.
@FlipYrWhig:
Saletan was full of shit because he was saying that you should find common ground by changing a core (winning, I might add) position of the Democratic party. That isn’t what those advocating more economic populism in Democratic messaging are saying. If you concentrate on positions that happen to resonate with persuadeables in the WWC (the group of WWC voters who voted for Obama), and if those positions are also important to the rest of our coalition, you bring that small but important group of WWC voters back into the fold. And whether you agree with everything Williams is saying, a lot of it resonates with my experience of growing up in a red state among a lot of WWC members.
Roger Moore
@ruemara:
This. If it’s class rather than race*, then why are we talking about white working class voters as completely distinct from minority working class voters? They obviously see themselves as a separate group, which tells anyone paying attention that race is a vital part of the equation.
*Though bear in mind my refrain that the whole point of white supremacy is to make class race based, so they can’t be separated so neatly.
Taylor
@Adam L Silverman:
Funny. I was talking to a German work colleague about Merkel and he launched into a tirade about how she was “worse than Hitler” and there are areas of Germany that it used to be safe to walk in….. I quickly changed the topic of conversation.
If he is representative (he is from East Germany), then Merkel is toast.
Ironic that, according to Varoufakis, Grexit was all about Schauble trying to put Hollande in a box.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: I’ll add to that one to the tottering pile that is Mt-To-Be-Read. After I’m done with my first draft. Should make nice cheery December reading!
MomSense
@Adam L Silverman:
Yup. That was telling for me too. Can’t say I was surprised but then I’ve heard a few things about his oppo file. He’s not the working class champion we are looking for.
kindness
I have a question/wager:
How soon into the Trump administration will we hear from a Trump voter ‘That’s not what I voted for’?
I give it a month.
Betty Cracker
Just throwing out a random thought: I don’t think anyone who is pushing back on proposals to retool the party’s message to focus more on economic issues is objecting to that per se but rather to the implication that the party should be less vocally anti-racist and anti-misogyny. I honestly think that’s the deal-breaker for most of us who are saying fuck off, BernBros.
But it doesn’t have to be either or. In fact, Clinton’s campaign included both, and so did Sanders’. You can say she was the wrong messenger or that he was the wrong messenger, wevs, 2016 is over. But we are not going to triangulate on racism or sexism. We can’t do that.
JMG
@kindness: Democrats should be telling them it’s not what they voted for from day one.
FlipYrWhig
@MomSense: I have to think that Bernie Sanders’s bullshit about rigging and corruption did a lot to fuel the third-party vote. Meanwhile Team Trump wants to undo Dodd-Frank. Argh.
mai naem mobile
The quote that needs to go around is the Martin Niemoller one – First they came for the socialists and I didn’t speak up, then they came for the trade unionists …. Here it’s going to be First the muslims, then public sector unions followed by the non RW reporters,then the gays and trans’,the blue state elected officials, and the Dems.
Davis X. Machina
@Taylor: The Landestag elections this spring yielded less-than-impressive results, Mecklenberg/Vorpommern excepted. The CDU/CSU now has its own Green problem. basically
The AfD will need a coalition partner, and they’re not getting one.
Miss Bianca
@WereBear:
First of all, whoa. I’m not getting on the wrong side of your battle-ax, BerserkerBear! ; )
Second of all, being of Albion’s Seed myself, I say yeah. It’s time for us to go as the dominant cultural force in this country. It won’t be without a ferocious battle.
Third, I would be down with “heaping it on them” – I’m just not sure how you screw the screwers without screwing everyone else in the process.
Davis X. Machina
@mai naem mobile: That was the quote for the day in my German classes this week.
mistermix
@MomSense:
That hurt Clinton’s chances, of course.
Again, I am not a die-hard fan of Bernie Sanders. The fact that a candidate as weak as him could do so well in the Democratic primary is due to a few factors.
– Sanders economic positions caught on, especially with younger voters that are feeling the brunt of our weak recovery and crushing college debt.
– Clinton had some weaknesses that Sanders exploited, just as Obama did in 2008.
– Sanders had a simple message of change that he articulated well. Clinton’s messaging was not as crisp as his. A lot of people in 2008 voted for Hope, Change and Yes we Can.
CarolDuhart2
@OzarkHillbilly: And they have to leave. How many jobs are there for say, a cardiologist in those places? A town of 800 isn’t going to have many jobs unless those 800 happen to be very rich folks with mansions who need help around the house.
People aren’t building factories out in the cornfields anymore, folks.
Miss Bianca
@Larkspur: And I want Keith Ellison to just keep his day job. Period. That’s actually more important than who the head of the flipping DNC is. They can find someone else.
WereBear
I see this insight as a very large part of the WWC grievances. They want to barely graduate high school and get a good job with benefits and a pension that does not require them to think any more.
It’s the 21st Century. That does not exist.
Which is why they were so vulnerable to “Trump will bring manufacturing back to the Rust Belt” con. What will they do when it does not come about?
I am sure they will blame women, POC, gays, and those pointy headed intellectuals. Because they never do learn anything new.
FlipYrWhig
@mistermix: See, I think the group of white working class people who voted for Obama has wicked buyers’ remorse. It seemed cool to have a black friend. Then that black friend made everything too black, and black people started making a big deal about getting shot, and pretty soon it’s not so cool to have this particular black friend. Again, these are hunches, but I think it’s rather likely that the people voting for Trump in the Midwest aren’t the people giving Obama high approval ratings.
Corner Stone
Not a big fan of Krystal Ball.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Hear, hear. And I’m surprised how many people I’m hearing say that. We (multiculturalists in big cities) aren’t the ones in a bubble, the people who refuse to accept that America is changing, as it always has, are the ones in the bubble. Stephen Chapman, very conservative but very consistent conserva-tarian (anti Iraq War, anti Trump, relentlessly pro-gun and “pro-life”) says this in his most recent column
@Betty Cracker: and hearty “hear, hear” to you, too. I was very surprised to hear Krystal Ball just now on the Joy Reid show seething that Democrats have offered nothing to working people on the edge. Like health insurance reform, regulation of Wall St, and jobs bill and infrastructure program, the Stimulus that saved the economy, the auto industry rescue, improved support for child care costs and college debt? the other professional Dem, Chris Koufinas, I think, was just as angrily talking about messaging, and I agree with him, but that’s the age-old bumper sticker vs position paper problem, and he offered no solutions, which is kind of his job. Ball was just whining, and got no pushback.
Kay
media and Republicans will now throw the entire duty to govern on Democrats, although the far Right holds all 3 branches;
they refuse to hold Republican adults accountable so there are zero incentives for them to behave like adults
This won’t get better. Nothing changes if they keep doing the same things.
GrandJury
@OzarkHillbilly: Be my guest. BTW, what sort of person would say something like that to anyone ever for any reason?
lamh36
Sunday morning, read and discuss:
“Dear White People, Your Safety Pins are Embarassing” by @keeltyc https://medium.com/@keeltyc/dear-white-people-your-safety-pins-are-embarassing-7f4d393450ee#.cq6jmz1tr
Cthulhu
My friend had posted that article previously. Two major problems with it:
Yes it is an article about the WWC but seems key to at least mention the working class as a whole is 40% minority. The MWC voted for Hillary. But they experience plenty of the same economic pressures as the WWC. Tis a puzzle about their different voting patterns.
I have a problem with presenting poor shaming on the part of the WWC as somehow honorable. It is in fact monstrous.
MomSense
@mistermix:
Well it may have been hard to hear through all the email coverage but I don’t think our party and candidate has ever had a more progressive agenda or slate of issues than Hillary Clinton did. And I think you are missing the point because no one has benefited more than the white working class from the Obama administration and Democrats. ACA, Medicaid expansion, SCHIP, auto bailout, Medicare, SS, restoration of peak grants and student loan and assistance reform, tax breaks, stimulus spending, extension of unemployment insurance, food stamps, increased benefits from Medicare, closing the prescription drug loophole, and much more!
ETA. Two years of free community college, student loan debt forgiveness and debt restructuring and relief, paid family leave, paid maternity leave, covering birth control in insurance plans. BC is fucking expensive. I paid for it for years out of pocket.
Corner Stone
@MazeDancer:
When Kushner asked how many WH staff would be staying after the transition I don’t think he was thinking about carry over of competent and professional people. I think he was looking for where he could cut costs and reduce headcount. I have zero, zero, confidence that the Trump administration will properly staff up the WH and put the bodies in place that are critical. The people that do come onboard will be crony and B or C team level talent like his campaign was. And after Trump overturns the EO mandating a certain level of pay for federal employees I bet he drops the wage paid for those staffer positions.
It’s going to be a total shitshow.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
by telling them he was going to get free college past a Paul Ryan congress by shouting about billionaires. The people who believed this simplistic over-promising were hopeful and naive. The man who over-promised was, to be charitable, disingenuous.
Did Obama spend several moths calling her corrupt? I don’t remember that.
FlipYrWhig
@WereBear: I wish the media had dogged Trump to explain HOW IT WOULD HAPPEN and HOW IT WOULD BE PAID FOR. At any point. It’s lunacy that he never had to do that, and never suffered for resisting doing it.
LAC
@ruemara: I know – but why are we surprised by this mistermix – he has got an agenda to flog. Mighty whiterbro of him.
WereBear
Ha ha ha ha. That was sarcasm, right? Because he can’t be reined in.
There’s a reason narcissists have so very few long-term relationships; and none without some form of coercion to them. They cannot be shamed, or appealed to, or recognize that they do and say things that hurt someone’s feelings.
The ONLY person that is really important is themselves. You either beat yourself bloody against the brick wall of that fact, or you get away from them.
There’s dozens of Victim of Narcissist Recovery forums out there and they all agree on that.
Adam L Silverman
@Taylor: Merkel is from East Germany too. She grew up under the Stasi and the KGB (Putin’s KGB assignment was in East Berlin for a good chunk of his career). She personally knows what’s at stake. She knows how to speak to the former East Germans in language they understand about the all to real fears they grew up with. She’s boring. She’s technocratic. She often seems humorless. But I don’t think she’s done by a long shot.
As for Hollande, he too knows the score. And the French system is designed in such a way that the normally, ideologically/politically opposing parties will band together to prevent Le Pen and the Front National from coming to power.
There were some limited attempts to do this with the #NeverTrump folks, but far too many couldn’t bring themselves to go far enough. So you got “I’m opposing him, but I won’t, for the good of the Republic, make a temporary alliance with the Democrats to save us all”. Half measures may have allowed them to sleep at night and look themselves in the face in the mirror, but they are, and were, ultimately futile. I do not know much about Schumer other than what’s reported in the news. I know that Harry Reid considers him to be a master of Senate minutiae like LBJ. If he is, and he is as good as Reid thinks he is, he should be trying to peel off Flake, Graham, Sasse, and a few others. Compromises will have to be made, their core interests will have to be considered and acted upon to demonstrate good faith, but if it can be done, the chamber can be flipped. They don’t have to change parties. They don’t have to become Democrats or Independents. All they have to do is agree to work with Schumer on key things: not changing the Senate rules to get rid of the filibuster. Holding up the most noxious/dangerous nominations and proposed legislation.
I’m not saying it will happen. I’m not sure it could. But if Schumer is smart he will try. And if they are the patriots they claim to be, they will do what needs to be done.
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
One big shift in the Democratic Party during the Obama years is a firm position on where Democrats stand on social issues, whether gay marriage or police brutality or gender equality. Democrats now have a clear position staked out from which there is not much for them to go back on.
Now to focus on economic issues.
The question is how to be honest with people because telling them you’ll slap a 40% tariff on imports and thus we’ll have to make everything here is sweet, sweet nothings whispered into their ears, even if it is a lie.
Gavin
It’s all economics, and it always was. “It’s the economy, stupid” was the slogan that delivered an actual presidency to Big Dog.
Racism? Sure, <10%. But the VAST majority of it is in fact economics.
How/why Democratic elite ignored that… I'll never know. Probably because when they looked around at everyone riding the Acela, they couldn't see it.
frosty
@Miss Bianca: Since you mentioned Albion’s Seed … three of the cultures that came over from Britain are still here and still fighting each other. Two of them (Roundheads and Cavaliers) caused the Civil War.
But if there’s one that hasn’t acculturated I’d say it’s the Borderers, Jim Webb’s Scots-Irish. They went west, their culture went with them, and more or less became the default American culture.
IMHO of course. Any historians among the BJ jackals are welcome to weigh in. (Or anthropologists).
OzarkHillbilly
@Miss Bianca: We don’t have to screw the screwers, they are screwing themselves.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Everyone loves to give Dems advice. No one seems to be able to do the deed themselves. If the WWC is primed for an economic progressive message, why do I not see more economic progressives being elected in struggling WWC areas? Economic progressives who get elected seem to do so from states and districts that are already safe D. All the talkers need to show us how it’s done without throwing our social values under the bus.
Davis X. Machina
@FlipYrWhig: That’s the 2008-Obama voter-who-voted-for-Trump right there.
FlipYrWhig
Is there some company out there thinking, “let’s start a factory in a depopulated town and staff it with the most ignorant people for miles around? Then, profits will roll in!”
ruemara
@mistermix: So we can finally be exactly like them? Fuck your Sanders promotion as well.
Gvg
Trump supporters were white middle class not working class. Clinton won whites under 50,000. Don’t demonize the poor, this is being misframed deliberately I think so we anger our own supporters.
There are a lot of middle class still though due to decades of trickle down tax policies a lot of middle have slipped to poor and the ones that haven’t fear it more.
The thing that should have doomed him is his policies are all smoke and wishes. Well one of the things. It’s hard to reach out to voters I think are idiots. We need to take and keep the education boards everywhere. No charter schools no buying untested crap from cronies and no withholding money from poor schools to punish them into doing better. Oh and put schoolhouse rock back on.
WarMunchkin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yup.
and
and
That’s just off the top of my head.
OzarkHillbilly
@CarolDuhart2: The long commute is a way of life out here.
George
@geg6: I agree that the writer of the piece is full of shit.
An anecdote is not data, but then again she provides only anecdotes herself. Here is my anecdote: My family came from the white working class. Most of them still are. The men went to work for decades. The women largely stayed at home and raised the kids because they didn’t have to work. They all own their own homes, even if they are modest ones. They all have their own vehicles. They all are overweight to obese, so they aren’t lacking food.
And yet despite that comfort, they are the most unpleasant people I have in my life, to the extent that they are still in my life. They harbor racial resentment and economic resentment. They have a much higher opinion of themselves that is merited by anything they every have accomplished on their own. They direct their rage against minorities, even though none of them has ever “lost” a job to a minority.
Even if they think they have been forgotten or passed by, they would not be able to tell you a way in which the government could have done something to help them, and yet they have benefited from minimum wage and social security and Medicare and other government programs. All they have is a malingering belief that their lives would be better if only there were no blacks or Latinos.
If the white working class is pissed about being “forgotten,” all they did was take it out on the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, not on the downballot races. People in Michigan hated on Clinton in 2016 and voted for Trump, but they sure as hell were okay with re-electing Snyder as governor in 2014. He–and Walker in Wisconsin and Kasich in Ohio and Scott in Florida–are much better situated to help the constituents of their states than either Clinton or Trump will be.
If the white working class anger had manifested itself in electoral rage against their state and congressional representatives, then the Williams piece would make sense. As it stands now, though, until I see evidence to the contrary, the results in the Great Lakes region are most likely due to racism.
mistermix
@Betty Cracker: I agree with this. I’m concentrating on what we didn’t do and asking us to do more of it, not go back on our other (good) positions.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
The news is hiding in plain sight. From the Guardian, a day or so ago.
Farage Le Pen and other Euro right wingers are trying to see Trump as representative of a global white nationalist movement.
Farage also took time to insult Obama in racially charged terms, calling him “loathsome” and “a creature.”
That Trump naturally gravitates towards these people is troubling, no matter what soothing words he may offer.
And too many Americans refuse to believe that racism is a problem. They are also certain that constitutional checks and balances makes us immune to a fascist takeover.
We may see this being put to the test very soon.
WereBear
So much useful for the upcoming holidays, from the awesome Captain Awkward:
How to be the party pooper at the bigot party.
Davis X. Machina
@Gavin:
It delivered it to Big Dog — a white southern working class man. In a three-way race. Where there’s a colorable claim that all three candidates were southerners.
schrodinger's cat
@FlipYrWhig: Sounds like my friend who is into yoga and Indian food and voted for O twice but now wallows in Brietbart News
Baud
@WarMunchkin: Those aren’t examples of allegations of corruptions.
And since Obama won, we can only speculate as to whether his primary campaign against her would have harmed her in the general election.
amk
and just like that ‘mister’mix normalizes vile misogyny. fuck wwc.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WarMunchkin: that’s not the kind of “corruption” I’m talking about, that’s timidity and/or being too conservative and/or an over-wilillingness to compromise. I”m talking about Sanders’ obsession with WALL STREET SPEECHES, which was “Crooked Hillary” by another name. The idea that she was enriching herself personally at the expense of the greater good.
FlipYrWhig
@Baud: This, exactly. Economic populists aren’t coming out of the places people claim as ground zero for economic populism. Why? Because the people in question really hate liberals. Hate them more than bosses and banks.
Larkspur
@CarolDuhart2: There aren’t even many of the non-cardiologist jobs any more. Smaller cities and towns used to have lower-status, lower-wage jobs that still managed to provide employment and a modest standard of living for their residents. I’m talking about old-fashioned jobs like pumping gas at the local gas station, working behind the counter at a variety of brick-and-mortar stores, being a secretary or a stenographer in the pool at a law firm. Jobs like that have disappeared due to technology combined with out-sourcing.
I used to know a woman, a few years ago, who was really angry at Hispanic immigrants, documented or not, because she was convinced that they had stolen he son’s job, that the immigrants were the reason he was unemployed. I asked her what her son’s last job was, and she said he’d been a sales clerk at The Sharper Image. Yeah, right: The Sharper Image is now totally staffed with smallish brown people who mostly speak Spanish.
I’m not sure how seriously she and her son are considering how to break into the landscaping, ditch-digging, jack-hammering, house-cleaning sphere of work, and why he feels that those jobs or any jobs should be his white lower middle class natural right. I walk dogs; I see those workers every day, and it is fucking hard work. Which is not to say I don’t have sympathy for her son, because I do, but please, let’s identify the real impediment.
Это курам на смех
@GrandJury:
Deja vu, man. That was me saying that back in fucking 1972. It’s a meaningless phrase that excuses you from ever having to do anything but flap your gums. Grow up.
I’m not new here. Formerly I was a food product made from old people.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Это курам на смех: Spam ? Velveeta?
MomSense
@mistermix:
Have you looked at the Pew Center analysis of the coverage he received? He didn’t get as much coverage but it was universally positive. You can contrast that with the negative coverage she received.
The big thing that we have to grapple with, which would be much more productive than the racist bemoaning of the WWC (yes I do think it has largely been racist) is to figure out WTF we do about our “free press” who have normalized Reoublican obstruction, failed to report basic information for decades, and promoted a kkk endorsed white nationalist because it was profitable for them.
OzarkHillbilly
@GrandJury:
The kind of person who is sick of people who say things like, “It doesn’t matter when you no longer have a functioning democracy and losing more elections with your “better messaging” is not going to change that. You think 2016 is bad just wait till 2018. It’s gonna be worse. There will probably be 10 few Dem Senators and a lot fewer in Congress so what little influence Dems now have will be watered down much more.”
If you aren’t interested in fighting back get the fuck out of the way.
WereBear
@gene108: Glad I didn’t read it. Picked up a vibe that I knew would get me all ragey and stabby.
Methinks they all protest way too much.
FlipYrWhig
@Gvg: “Working class” is so imprecise. But it certainly seems like the white people who _see themselves as the hardworkingest_ are a big part of the Trump vote.
John S.
Democrats need to come to grips with what happened last week if we want to survive and hope to win future elections.
I was at a children’s birthday party yesterday in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Besides the hostess, my wife and I were the only people of European descent. Everyone else was of South American, Central American or Caribbean descent. My wife and I were also the only people at the party who voted for Clinton. That is not a typo.
Amongst a group of dozens of people who voted in ultra-blue Broward county, only the two middle-class white people voted for Hillary Clinton.
bemused
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m not on twitter so not working for me. Thx anyway.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: “If the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” –Trickus Dickus
mistermix
@MomSense:
I think a lot of it is racist, too. We just need to pick up a few percent of that vote. (ETA: I mean we need to pick up a few percent of the WWC vote, for those who weren’t motivated totally by race/misogny, and also those who stayed home.)
The press has normalized obstruction, but neither Clinton nor Sanders talked as much about Congress’ obstructionism as I would have liked. The do-nothing Congress was ripe for the picking and we didn’t hear enough of it. I think that was a major failing in Democratic messaging.
gene108
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Whatever flaws Sanders had as s candidate, such as offering simplistic solutions to hard problems, does not negate the fact a lot of voters are unhappy with where they are economically and want change for changes sake, whether liberal or conservative.
Hillary adopted much of Sanders’ platform after the convention, but it did not register with voters.
Democrats need to keep pushing that platform about economic issues and taxing the rich to pay for them.
Baud
I’m sure there are people saying Hillary lost because she was too strong on abortion, social justice and other social issues, or that she lost because she wanted to raise taxes and regulate more. I’m not sure why that’s objectively less correct than the post mortem we are engaged in. I know where my heart lies, but that’s not objective evidence.
D. Mason
The Joan Williams article in the OP resonates so much it’s kind of frightening.
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: The law currently mandates them at 2010 levels. All the EO did was provide a COLA work around. He can pull the EO, but it will cause more problems than solutions for them because the political appointees salaries are based on the same 2010 law and the EO workaround.
As for Kushner, it was pretty clear he was trying to figure out if they were inheriting anyone who would maintain continuity until replaced with loyalists.
FlipYrWhig
@John S.: Judging by voting results, you appear to have been at an anomalous party.
Another Holocene Human
I see the thread about getting people birth certificates is dead. Count me in.
Mary
@mistermix:
I’ve been really struggling with this, because I honest-to-God don’t understand what it is we were supposed to have done. I hear lots of people telling me that we should show more empathy for the WWC, that we shouldn’t ignore them or whatever, and that’s all well and good, but I still don’t really understand what that means in practical terms. Trying to come up with concrete solutions to complex problems? We’ve tried that and we’re told that people don’t care about policy. Short of out right lying about bringing manufacturing jobs back, what are we supposed to do? Trump’s approach was two fold: 1) Lie about adopting policies that would bring back the old economy, and 2) Promise to punish the scapegoats. I”m not really on board with Dems using either strategy, so what do we do instead?
Adam L Silverman
@frosty: There’s about 11 different regional cultures. They don’t really mix and match well. Except under times of great extremis. Additionally, there have been concerted efforts to subvert these differences, specifically by pushing Southern, white evangelical Christianity, and the socio-cultural mores and beliefs that are attached to it, as far into the other regions of the country as possible.
Another Holocene Human
@Baud: I think that for whatever reason people did tie abortion to Hilary more than they did to Obama. I guess because she’s a woman? One thing I noticed is that she wasn’t quiet at all about her feminism whereas Obama always rationed the blackness. Obama has been very, very careful with his public image. Hilary didn’t seem to have a knack for that at all. FWIW I think it did make a difference. (FTR Bernie was shit with that so this is not a pro Bernie post here.)
Elizabeth
It did actually. That is why Bill Clinton won. It wasn’t until an absolute disaster of a economic meltdown that liberal ideas were welcome again.
WereBear
@Miss Bianca: First of all, thanks for picking up on how I got my nickname. :) Yes, I am a sweet person whose mission in life is turning out to be cat advice, but that is not all I am :)
You can’t. That is what we have been trying to do; shield and care for everyone. They are the ones who have been saying they want others to suffer; in the wonderful BJ parable,
Well, now they are at risk of bringing that down on themselves. I will not look forward to, but will nonetheless do my duty, of reminding them at every new outrage and terrible event: THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR.
THIS IS ON YOU.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@gene108: I agree, but it doesn’t help to have a loud voice bellowing that we must have a $15/hr national minimum wage, and anyone who says it should be $12/hr is a Goldman Sachs whore.
Clinton’s defeat has a thousand parents, and she and her campaign are two of them. Giving those speeches and tying herself so tightly to the CGI, which was as bloated and sloppy as the man who founded it, were two. Not campaigning personally in Wisconsin (which I heard this morning and still can’t believe– hell, I don’t like Russ Feingold either, but we knew that was an essential Senate seat) was another. But just to take Michigan, where Stein got five times her 2012 vote and IIRC 80,000 people left the top line blank, it’s hard for me to believe that Sanders feeding the fuel of not just wrong, but corrupt didn’t hurt her in the GE.
JMG
What kind of people will work in a Trump administration? 1. Hard and alt-right ideologues. 2. Grifters seeing the chance of a lifetime. 3. A very few plain old Republicans whose sense of patriotism leads them to do what they can. The latter group will be fired/resign by July 4.
Baud
@Mary: Duh. The WWC cares about email integrity most of all.
@Another Holocene Human: Then it’s our fault. We’ve been pining for an unapologetic Dem for a long time, and we could enforce our desires when the time came.
John S.
@Baud:
The group of minority and women voters I heard from yesterday voted for Trump because they were sick of the status quo and wanted change. Unfortunately, the change they wanted (more jobs, more business regulations, infrastructure, changes to immigration policy, fixing Obamacare, etc.) are not things I think they will get from a Trump presidency.
But even if Trump fails them, and I spent hours speculating why he will, they will not vote for another establishment Democrat. These were all people for voted for Obama twice.
Miss Bianca
@frosty: With regard to your insight on the Scots-Irish in particular, I’d say you’re right on. My tribe, my tribe…I love ’em out of cultural identity, hate ’em for the immense amount of damage their pathological belligerence and their peculiarly authoritarian brand of anti-authoritarianism has done to this country, and will continue to do.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@lamh36: Agreed. Also, I’ve seen mention of the fact that the neo-Nazis are going to start wearing them to f with people so, caution may be in order.
Another Holocene Human
One thing I think that was politically the opposite of astute was the assumption that just because Hilary is a woman, women need to vote for her. This is like all those claims that Blacks should vote for whatever Black candidate gets coughed up. Of course some people do vote this way but most people find it insulting. I see it even in the post mortem “How could white women vote for Trump?” Most people find the implication they vote for someone based on identity insulting even if it’s true (eg, white guys always voting for white guys).
Another Holocene Human
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Those folks are much more prominent on the intertoobs than in real life. A handful of trolls can be reblogged a million times but it doesn’t mean there are a million of them on the streets. So keep that in mind.
Brachiator
@MomSense:
Don’t worry. By the time you come up with a solution for the “free press,” the last newspapers and magazines will have died out, and tv will have been supplanted by empty headed social media. There will still be Fox Fascist News and other Murdoch properties, but not much else.
But there are and hopefully will continue to be alternatives. The UK Guardian is also dying, despite doing consistently good reporting. But even though the site is popular, people don’t support it with their dollars.
Adam L Silverman
@bemused: You don’t need to be on twitter. I’m not on twitter either. That’s the link I pulled off my desktop web browser.
Another Holocene Human
@John S.:
If they live to regret their vote they may very well vote for an establishment Dem. The conclusion does not follow from the premises.
John S.
@FlipYrWhig:
Really? Because the strong minority turnout for Clinton didn’t happen in Broward. And Clinton underperformed Obama. Remember on election night they didn’t call Florida early because they were waiting for a wave of liberal votes out of Southeast Florida that never materialized.
But by all means, bury your head in the sand and pretend these people are just anomalies.
Baud
@John S.: And what are we supposed to do with that info? Only nominate outsiders? Treat our base as second class members of their own party?
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman:
Why would anyone think that matters at this point?
And the Kushner part was sarcasm leading into my point about properly staffing up.
mai naem mobile
@Kay: I am all for Schumer cooperating with the GOP but I want construction of high speed rail directly between the cities of Chicago,NY,SF,Boston,Austin,LA,Miami,LV,Seattle,Portland and SD. It also needs to be done using all fully benefitted Unionized labor with American Vets having first dibs on jobs,all material needs to be American sourced and all products sold on the rail need to be American sourced. Schumer should not compromise an inch on that proposal. If President CamaCho doesn’t go along with that he’s a dirty filthy pro-Mexican anti American job killing machine. Also too, there should be free pet daycare on these high speed trains. I am not totally in serious about this.
Mickee
Has anyone ever tried to quantify Rupert Murdoch’s culpability in destroying Western democracy? An awful lot of the rise of the nationalistic right can be laid at the feet of his news empire.
Another Holocene Human
@Baud: I mean maybe that’s true. I don’t think Hilary was a very skilled politician. I think the observation that Clinton, Bill and Obama could win where Gore, Kerry, and Hilary could not is an astute one. Obama went around kissing babies. He did his best to manipulate the press. He had political chops, and overcame the giant BLACKITY BLACK handicap. A less skilled pol couldn’t have pulled it off. So maybe a woman does need to be 2x as good as a man. We nearly won with an unapologetic Dem. I personally think that we didn’t get a simple message out to lower income people as to what a Dem president was going to do for them. They got the message she was for Wall St and the elite and stayed home.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Holocene Human: also, Obama is not Clinton who is not Whoever-Comes-Next. I like her, but I would never deny she was at best a mediocre retail candidate who made a lot of unnecessary problems for herself. The next “Establishment” candidate probably won’t be as good as Obama, but s/he’ll have his/her own strengths, and weaknesses.
Davis X. Machina
@Adam L Silverman:
The rural north, which once had its own locally-sanctioned ways of being white, and working class, has sucked this up with true convert fervor.
I routinely see Confederate battle flags on vehicles in towns where one male in seven never came back from the Civil War.
We’ve got big-box non-denominational evangelical churches of southern origin, a phenomenon that never existed even 15 years ago.
I remember when we got our Cabela’s and our first WalMarts, how happy people were that they could finally shop like the rest of America.
I’ve got children in class who spend their days badmouthing Mexicans. I wonder, do the children in Eagle Pass, Texas, badmouth French-Canadians?
John S.
@Another Holocene Human:
Nope, I went down that road. They legitimately feel the system is broken and were speaking a populist (liberal) message.
Look at Elizabeth Warren. She does not get identified as just another career politician who is a member of the DNC establishment. And she doesn’t act like one, either. We need to replicate our successes.
schrodinger's cat
@lamh36: I had a similar reaction to the safety pin business. Apparently now you can get one in sterling silver. Fashun statement!
ThresherK (GPad)
Neal Gabler I found while diving into some great movie history books.
He’s proved himself to be a well-rounded man who can more than hold his own on politics.
Davis X. Machina
@Another Holocene Human: If your turn-out/electoral strategy is to have an Obama every four years, you might as well take your house off the grid, and run the coffee-maker and the microwave off lightning strikes on your chimney.
bemused
@Adam L Silverman:
Hmm. Not getting anything from the links. Oh well.
Another Holocene Human
@John S.: Clinton underperformed all across Florida. Her GOTV machine was anything but. I blame Florida loss on GOTV, because I was there. I don’t think Comey or any of that other crap had anything to do with it.
Aleta
@mai naem mobile: Please sell bento boxes, containers of hot tea, and regional delicacies along the way.
John S.
@Baud:
To be honest, I’m not really sure how to process the information myself. I was a bit taken aback.
I just know that what the DNC has been doing in Florida isn’t working. Running Charlie Crist (opportunist, establishment) or Alex Sink (banker, establishment) isn’t the path to victory.
MomSense
@mistermix:
Clinton talked about it a lot. Sanders didn’t because the promises he made depended on a completely cooperative Congress. You seem to be missing the point however that messaging must be more than the Presidential candidate. We have tons of media now that can either amplify a message or drown it out. People know what is reported and that is our biggest problem not just with this election but with things like trying to get people to sign up for healthcare in the exchange.
Another Holocene Human
@Davis X. Machina: Obama is only human. We can recreate what he did. Step 1 I think we need a real scrum of a primary, Step 2 we need to figure out what works in GOTV and what doesn’t and do that, Step 3 we need a simple, emotional message to reach people past the media wall.
Winning elections is complicated and multifactorial. Technically we did win this election but not the EC. Obama in 2008 had a laser like focus on the EC. I don’t understand why Hilary and her team did not.
schrodinger's cat
@Aleta: That sounds like Indian railways! Hot chai, coffee, regional delicacies right on the train.
Miss Bianca
@Another Holocene Human: “How could white women vote for Trump” is a legitimate question when one of the things Trump has advocated is punishing women for having abortions. When one of the things he has boasted about is his abillity to get away with sexual assault. Last time I checked, white women were getting abortions and getting their puzzies grabbed same as everyone else. If black people were voting for black candidates who endorsed voter suppression and a return to Jim Crow, we’d probably be asking the same question about them.
Tripod
@CarolDuhart2:
They are building new factories in the cornfields – out by the four lane divided; by the new WalMart and tract McMansions. They hired 95 people. Most of whom are doing the long distance, rural American commute from a couple of towns over.
Davis X. Machina
@schrodinger’s cat: Can we skip the whole riding-on-the-roof-and-clinging-to-the-windows thing? That makes me nervous.
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: It will make a difference because many of the people he’s going to try to entice in to taking these jobs are going to be taking a huge pay cut to do so. So making it an even bigger one makes them less appealing.
As for the sarcasm and Kushner comment: all sarcasm tags matter!!!//
Baud
@Miss Bianca: A lot of people tell themselves that the Dems are lying about the risks. Just like they tell themselves that Trump might not be do bad.
John S.
@Another Holocene Human:
I agree with your points. I hope the people running the Democratic Party come to the same conclusion.
Davis X. Machina
@Tripod: It’s hard to square the circle of a 600-mile-a-week commute, a 16 mpg. truck, and $5.00 gas.
Hence the need to take it — the gas — from the ragheads.
Adam L Silverman
@Davis X. Machina: It always ticks me off to see folks in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana – home to the all volunteer regiments of the original Iron Brigade, parade Confederate Naval Ensigns around on their trucks and cars and put them on their houses.
Another Holocene Human
@MomSense:
One of our problems on the left is this consumerism/identity attitude towards politics. We have a local radical healthcare group and rather than sign people up for Obamacare or help drive a push for Medicaid in Florida they spent over a year throwing an extended tantrum about Obamacare not being awesome enough, single payer, single payer. And I doubt they were alone. Medicaid expansion is an obvious easy win and they walked right past it and spat on it.
(Another missed opportunity was when SEIU brought a bunch of activists together from across the state on Medicaid and the baby organizer on SEIU’s payroll did such a shitty job of facilitating that the experienced activists who were part of huge organizations all got disgusted and basically walked away. Way to go.)
Another Holocene Human
@Adam L Silverman: Nothing lasts forever.
tobie
@Corner Stone:
I never scream at my TV but when the Nancy Pelosi comment came up, I screamed, and now I’m shaking.
Another Holocene Human
@Davis X. Machina: That’s an 11mpg truck to you and living in too big a house with too big an energy bill in the exurbs is The American Way of Life!
eta: oops, didn’t mention white flight but it’s implied
Miss Bianca
@Baud: Shorter Jill Stein/lefty purity ponies: “Nach Drumpf, uns!”
Adam L Silverman
@bemused: I’m going to include it in a post I do later today, so you should be able to see it then. How’s that?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Adam L Silverman: Did you see the confederate flags a veterans parade in No California? it was tweeted by the local Dem congressman
D. Mason
@Roger Moore: They are a separate group, separate by location. That might honestly be the missing link here, and it hadn’t occurred to me until reading some of these comments. Everyone insisting that it’s race isn’t taking something into account. The democrats focus on middle class/working class issues but primarily in larger population areas. I understand this is because it has the largest impact where the most people are but rural areas have been neglected for a long time now. Yes some 50+ year old programs still play a big part in those areas but it’s not enough anymore, not by a long shot. These are predominantly white areas and yes some of them are probably pretty racist but I bet the folks at BJ would be surprised to see just how many of them would be happy, even ecstatic, to work alongside their minority neighbors in decent paying jobs. The resentment might be about location, good paying jobs for people in urban centers, arranged by Democrats doesn’t help their families eat. Insisting they’re racist because they want to have a stable future isn’t going to help them see the Democratic vision as including them at all.
socraticsilence
@Kay:
Kellyanne must have missed the part where the Mob tried to blow up Reid with a car bomb if she thinks he’s going to back down.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I didn’t. Doesn’t surprise me.
mai naem mobile
@Aleta: Vento Boxes are Japanese. I just said it’s got to American guddamnit! American Beef burgers,Pizza and Apple Pie. You can have Indian Fry Bread because they were here first. No hot tea. Only southern iced tea with American cane sugar.American Kona coffee.
delphinium
@Baud: Nope, we apparently are supposed to keep trying to get them to vote for us with even more policy proposals and programs that they don’t care about and won’t vote for. Or I guess take a page from the book of Trump and lie about bringing jobs back and making their life more hugely better.
gogol's wife
@ruemara:
I made it about two sentences into the article. Pure b.s.
Davis X. Machina
@Another Holocene Human: A large house, on a large lot. Good, clear field of fire for when They come boiling out of the cities to take our women and our wide-screens.
D. Mason
@WereBear: The reality is that a whole lot of people in this life are not suited for work in the financial sector. They’re not just going to lay in a ditch and die somewhere, they have needs, and a vote too. Just expecting them to get over it doesn’t do anything for anyone.
waysel
Bin Laden won.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
our president-elect tweeted (christ, what a combination of words) this today
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
Wannabe chumps.
WereBear
@FlipYrWhig: LOL! Thanks, I needed that.
The people with brains and ambition can’t wait to leave. There’s your problem.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
@Adam L Silverman:
Why don’t we display the U.S. Civil War flag more?
Another Holocene Human
@mistermix: Just goes to show young people lack the political history and discernment to tell when they’re being sold a bag of goods, and that’s all Bernie ever was.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: You mean the square battle standard?
Baud
@Adam L Silverman: Whichever flag is appropriate.
Lizzy L
So Paul Ryan is now saying that Trump has a “mandate.” Fuck him.
And Kellyanne Conway is saying that Hillary Clinton and President Obama need to “calm their supporters” and encourage the peaceful transfer of power. Bless her heart, I don’t see that happening.
Just when I think I’ve reached some sort of emotional equilibrium, Giuliani or Ryan or Conway speaks up, and my rage blazes all over again.
Davis X. Machina
@Baud: There are some shot-to-hell ones in the state house in Augusta that could use an airing.
Baud
@Davis X. Machina: I’m surprised LePage hasn’t burned them yet.
Matt McIrvin
@Mary: I’m starting to think part of the real answer is “shut up about black lives mattering.” Which I’m not going to do, so I guess that’s a loss.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Akilah Hughes @ AkilahObviously Nov 11
Donald Trump won’t say “radical white nationalists.”
Another Holocene Human
@D. Mason: The Dems were offering them all kinds of things to help them. Hilary had some job placement program thing for Appalachia. And they threw it back in our face. Plus the data show Trump voters were employed, at good jobs. This isn’t about economic insecurity at all.
Juice Box
@WereBear: Yep, Trump’s going to bring back the good jobs; mining with a pick axe, hand sewing clothes and shoes, four guys heaving auto bodies onto chassis without robots, hand carving mass produced furniture, scything hay and grain, making those buggy whips. Big, beautiful, fantastic buggy whip factories.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ha!
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: Other than for a specific, period commemoration, they aren’t. Unless you’re flying every former US National flag, which is the case on some military installations and government facilities where they have a historic section or a hall of flags type of thing, you fly the current US National flag.
As for the square battle standard, you’d only fly that if you were planning on freeing the Dunker Church at Antietam or holding the high water mark at Gettysburg or taking Vicksburg in the Western Theater.
Baud
@Another Holocene Human:
Thanks, Obama!
Central Planning
@Lizzy L: Someone needs to remind her that people told Trump to calm down his supporters when there was violence at his rallies. He didn’t do it, so he is responsible for this too.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human:
Also, Obama had zero loyalty to any staffers or appointees who were touched by the faintest whiff of scandal, even if it was some bullshit thing cooked up by James O’Keefe. It seems like a vice, stated that way, and it pissed me off over and over and over. But it kept him looking clean as a whistle. Hillary is loyal, to a fault.
Baud
@Adam L Silverman: Wait, so the people who lost the Civil War have greater rights than the winners when it comes to flag waving?
MomSense
@Another Holocene Human:
Yup but the brogressives are gonna keep fuckin that chicken.
Lizzy L
Interesting report by Katie Reilly in Time this morning. Trump is saying (in an interview which will be on TV tonight) that he plans to deport 2-3 million undocumented immigrants; specifically those w/ criminal records. Paul Ryan, meanwhile, said to CNN, “We are not planning on erecting a deportation force. Donald Trump’s not planning on that.”
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Hey did you all see this one. In the WaPo. A muslim immigrant woman who voted for Trump. Here’s a quote.
More than anything else, I think we have to admit that many people are easily conned.
Tripod
@Davis X. Machina:
I was waiting on a dealership oil change yesterday and admiring the tanks – $60K for a new SUV? Are you fucking kidding me? There is NO fucking way they can continue to assemble that lifestyle in the US. Yet there is the (white male natch) head of the UAW mush mouthing platitudes at Trump.
Renegotiating NAFTA = enjoy your Mexican assembled F150s you stupid fucks.
Baud
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Every group has their share of the 27%.
D58826
@Baud: YES FULL TIME. Congress critters have other things to do. Notice GOP RNC chair is not in Congress
tobie
One parallel I see to this election is the gubernatorial election in 2014 in Maryland. This was the Democrats race to lose and they did lose it with a lackluster candidate. But I don’t think that’s the most important lesson to learn from the debacle. The really telling thing was that the GOP candidate was able to convince voters that their economic lot was terrible and that their taxes had risen dramatically, when in fact all economic indicators in the state were good. I think what’s important to see here is that the economic grievance comes not so much from immediate hardship but from a sense of vulnerability. I sort of have the feeling that the trauma of the economic collapse in 2008 didn’t manifest itself until 2014 and 2016 when conditions were getting better. This may sound like psychobabble, but the point I’m trying to make has nothing to do with trauma or healing. It’s about how to deal with economic insecurity at a time when things are improving. This is tougher than you would think.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: That’s how it’s always been with flag-waving, as far as I can tell.
Aleta
@schrodinger’s cat: I want a ticket to ride.
WereBear
What in the everloving name of all that is complicated and unholy did THAT accomplish? Every single thing they want is IN THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM. Why didn’t they vote for it!?!?!?!?!?
Do these people actually think with their actual rectums? Is that what is going on here?
Tripod
@Lizzy L:
He owes too much to too many, and by his history, and nature, will try to burn them all. I got a really bad feeling about where this is headed.
D. Mason
@Another Holocene Human: Not trying to start an argument but economic insecurity is exactly why I didn’t vote. I am a small manufacturing business owner, I’m the only employee, and competing with China/India is putting me under. I’m one of those people I mentioned who isn’t suited for the financial sector, I’m good at making things, working with my hands etc. I’m hanging on right now business wise but I felt like neither candidate had anything for me. On social issues I’m pretty divided but normally lean Dem. I believe in Abortion rights and Gun rights, though neither would get me out to vote for bad economics ever. I didn’t vote because of Hillary’s economic stances so telling me that wasn’t a factor for anyone is pretty far off base.
Miss Bianca
@Another Holocene Human: With regard to your remark about thinking about making assumptions that white women would vote for HRC over trump…I am struggling with some thoughts (they are far too inchoate to be called “insights” at this point) about why race trumps (so to speak) sex when it comes to issues of perception of oppression and grievance. Why a white candidate who was advocating equality and justice for all goes down, while a white candidate who wants to Make America White Again manages to eke out a vote. You’d think it would be women’s self-interest – regardless of race – to gravitate toward the candidate who makes women and children-friendly policies the center of her campaign. But there are plenty of women who see safety, comfort and advantages in sexist, patriarchal policies that keep ’em barefoot and pregnant – where almost no people of color are prepared to accept that second-class citizen status based on their skin color or religion is somehow OK, or part of God’s plan. ‘Tis still a bit of a mystery to me.
For white people voting for trump, regardless of what he says or doesn’t say – and I do think a lot of people are as guilty of thinking, “oh, he doesn’t really mean what he says!” as they are of thinking the exact same thing about HRC – I’m sorry, people can dress it up as much as they like, but Weissheit Uber Alles is, in fact, what they were voting for. It doesn’t matter that there’s no practicable way in hell for him to bring back all the manufacturing jobs to this country that have gone to China – not without gas going to $20 a gallon – which is pretty much the opposite effect that “drill baby drill!” and “coal mining jobs!” promotion is going to tend towards. It.doesn’t.matter. It doesn’t matter that the Democrats are the only ones offering practicable solutions to their economic woes. it doesn’t matter.
Corner Stone
@WereBear:
I first read that as “people with brains and ammunition can’t wait to leave”. And I was like, hmmmm…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
that’s quite a shift, and very believable
D. Mason
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I can change that if you like, it’s super easy to shit up threads around here.
Peale
@WereBear: because even had Hillary won, she couldn’t fulfill those promises unless she had a congress that she didn’t have.
Tripod
@Adam L Silverman:
Copperheads
FDR lost Michigan in 1940 – the idea there ever was some inherent white industrial labor, Democratic Party, New Deal compact is bullshit.
chopper
@mistermix:
young people? I’d rather build a coalition around people who actually vote.
Matt McIrvin
@Miss Bianca:
While this was not always the case, in today’s world, oppressive relations between men and women are typically far more intimate than oppressive relations between white people and POC. It’s within the family.
pamelabrown53
@Schlemazel:
I agree. And Sander’s minions didn’t wait until the next day(after the election) to start their own white coup. Others have used DailyKos as an example. It’s a fracking train wreck. Now, a lot of Juicers don’t care about DKos and the only reason I bring them up is because in the dem. social media universe they’re so huge. These were people that hung out on reddit since Hillary won the nomination. They linked to every right wing site and Russia Today and advocated for Jill Stein. Then when the worst happened, they swarmed and started delivering kicks to the solar plexus to people reeling from disbelief, revulsion and fear. I am astonished: white authoritarianism with a “populist strain”,regardless of whether it’s left or right is still authoritarianism…and patriarchal. Odd thing is that before Bernie, I always considered myself as “leftier” than the average democrat. No longer…too many absolutely eschew the building of coalitions because of their 100% righteous certitude.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: No. You can, technically, fly whatever you want from a private flagpole (barring any specific HOA or zoning considerations). Officially, you fly the current US National Flag.
The people that fly what is commonly referred to as the Confederate flag aren’t actually flying the flag of the Confederate States of America. Rather, they are flying, depending on the color blue in the saltire, the Confederate Naval Jack (a rectangular flag) or no flag actually ever flown by a Confederate military or governmental element – if the color blue is too dark or too light. The orange-red flag, with dark/navy blue saltire and red stars, when done as a square, was the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It was only flown by that Army. The most commonly flown Confederate flag is the 2nd Confederate Naval Jack, and was flown by Confederate Naval vessels from 1863 to 1865. The saltire in this is a lighter blue than on the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia. I’ve never seen anyone fly the first Confederate Naval Jack (navy blue flag with a circle of 7 white stars in the center) or either the first or second Confederate Naval Ensigns (1) a rectangular version of the Stars and Bars – blue canton with seven white stars in a circle, three stripes, in descending order, red, white, red and 2) a white field with the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia as the canton). Occasionally someone flies the various “national” Confederate States of America flags in order from first to last: the Stars and Bars (blue canton with either 7, 9, 11, or 13 stars, a field of three stripes in descending order: red, white, red), the Stainless Banner (white field with the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia as the canton), the Blood Stained Banner (white field with the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia as either a square – the actual official flag – or rectangular canton – on most commercially available versions – with either horizontal red stripe at the right edge of the field).
bemused
@Adam L Silverman:
That would be great. Was Naveed Jamali on Am Joy also?
FlipYrWhig
@D. Mason: You didn’t not vote for Hillary over her “economic stances,” because those are great on everything you profess to care about. You didn’t vote for her because you decided to believe a lot of bullshit instead.
Corner Stone
I fervently, sincerely pray/hope/wish/chant that Obama never once gives a speech to “his supporters” advocating they moderate their behavior and embrace Trump.
Obama has done all that he should do, what he had to do. He told us all he believes in this country, no matter what disgusting things they have done to him and his family, and the peaceful transfer of power according to the will of the people will be observed.
That’s it. That is what he had to do, and I understand and thank him for his grace. But god damn I swear to Christ I never want to see President Obama tell me/us to work with Trump and otherwise normalize his bullshit.
Baud
@Adam L Silverman: No wonder they lost!
WereBear
@D. Mason: Nope, sorry. They gotta get over it. Brute force had its low-paying, limb-destroying, black-lung day, and now it is over. There are very few jobs that don’t require some kind of keyboarding, or computer expertise, or the ability to handle some kind of robot/machine/tech skills.
For heaven’s sake, McDonald’s had to have special cash registers built, with pictures and the ability to tell them what change to hand over, because so many of their employees could not perform this simple function that a million women in beehive hairdos once did as easily as breathing.
They have to get over their fear of learning and intellect and maturation and being a grownup. They have to get over their fear of thinking.
D58826
Very interesting article. A couple of points did jump out for the irony
1.
The parents-in-law hate know it all college elites. But they struggle to send their kids to college and maybe even become a ‘quack’ doctor. And the kids will probably move to the big city to put that degree to work.
2.
And the police are government jobs with civil service and union benefits/protections.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think there’s a certain breed of upperish-middle class white liberal, one I lump in with what DougJ long ago termed as “tote-baggers” who broadly agree with Dems on the environment, choice, gay rights, maybe foreign policy, but the issue they actually vote on is their own tax bill, telling themselves that McCain, Romney and to a lesser extent Trump ‘don’t really mean that’. The phrase I’m seeing is “take Trump seriously, but not literally”. I think you can lump a lot of TV-VSP types in with that– less with Trump than with McCain and especially Romney. Who actually didn’t mean most of it, except that he and people like him were overtaxed.
Corner Stone
They are already saying that laws do not matter. Rules, regulations, norms do not apply to this administration. Believe them. Believe what they are saying. This is what is coming.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@D. Mason: what an odd goal
John S.
@WereBear:
After picking my jaw up off the floor, the only explanation was that they are highly susceptible to marketing and packaging.
They were willing to buy the box full of shit with the pretty wrapping and bow rather than the brown paper bag full of food. Having spent over 20 years in product marketing, I am disappointed, but not surprised. It often reminds me of this great quote from The American President:
tobie
@D. Mason:
Thanks for weighing in on this discussion. My neighbor is a widget manufacturer so I see the pressures he’s facing. It would help you could explain which policies Hillary Clinton promoted that would be damaging for your business.
Adam L Silverman
@Lizzy L: Which is interesting because the actual number is under a million.
Adam L Silverman
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Or stupid.
FlipYrWhig
@pamelabrown53: it’s always interesting to see how big people think “the left” is. And the people who overestimate it most are the people in it.
D. Mason
@WereBear:
As this election has shown, they actually don’t. Not saying Trump will actually do anything for them, but the fact that the party telling them to get over it lost, clearly shows that they don’t have to get over it.
MomSense
@Corner Stone:
I do believe them. I have no illusions and no intention of making nice.
Bailey
@delphinium:
They don’t want the safety nets, they want the jobs.
FlipYrWhig
@Juice Box: I lol’ed at “pickaxes.” Well played.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
oy, who put up the batshit signal. can Daulnay and Applejacks be far behind?
Adam L Silverman
@Tripod: Yep.
Bailey
@John S.:
The problem was, the Dems weren’t selling the brown paper bag full of food. At least not in this election cycle.
Adam L Silverman
@bemused: Yes, yesterday. If I can find his clip I’m planning on including it too.
jenn
I think it’s counterproductive to engage in too many circular firing squads. I disagree with some folks, and agree with others, about how to interpret what happened in this election. But I think the most important thing is to concentrate on the vision of America that we want to advocate, and then get all hands who agree that that vision is preferable to Donald Trump’s, to go work towards that. I don’t care if those persons voted for Hillary or Bernie or didn’t vote at all. That’s the past, and isn’t going to help. It is going to take all of us working together to get the job done. Let’s go win some state houses, let’s take back Congress in 2018 (which is going to be a tough slog – even in the Senate, there’s far more Democrats up than Reps), and let’s win the Presidency in 2020. Let’s work towards a kinder, fairer country for all – because, yes, we are stronger together.
FlipYrWhig
@Bailey: They want jobs to come to them. Who wants to hire these people? Why would some entrepreneur think that was a winning proposition? “Let’s go deep into the boondocks and find some talent amid the meth and disability checks!”
Juice Box
@WereBear: But they will tell you that the Democrats have been in charge for eight years and there’s been nothing but gridlock. They voted for the party that they believe has been out of power.
D. Mason
@tobie: Her full throated support for the TPP before it became unpopular to do so. I know she reversed her stance but I didn’t find her reversal to be credible. Like I said, China and India are putting me under already and Hillary wanted to grease the skids for them to do it more and faster. Not that Trump will do any better so he didn’t get my vote either. I’m not some dumbass who can’t work a cash register btw but I don’t feel like I should have to work at McDonalds when I’m actually good at doing something of value.
FlipYrWhig
@jenn: No circular firing squads? But I’ve been saving up all this ammo!
Another Holocene Human
When we discuss this election, there’s a difference between necessary and sufficient condition. Necessary means it wouldn’t have gone down without it. Sufficient means the outcome goes down by that alone.
I’m not sure there was a sufficient condition to this loss. I’m willing to be convinced that voter suppression was a necessary condition. It was not a sufficient condition. We know this because of previous elections post voter suppression that Dems won. I’m not willing to avoid all introspection and latch onto the “we wuz robbed” train. It does us no good and doesn’t help us win next time. We have to do more of what we do right, and less fucking up.
George
@D. Mason: Your reasons for not voting are the most insane I’ve ever read. People who use those reasons either are trolls or they are so irrational that they have nothing to contribute to a political debate.
There is no reason not to have voted in the recent election. No reason.
If China and India are putting you under, and yet you can’t find a rationale to vote, I recommend that you find a new line of work.
Corner Stone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: You mean they are not all the same person? Or netbot?
Another Holocene Human
@Juice Box: This is a serious issue. Of course, if it’s true, it spell doom for the GOP very shortly.
Davis X. Machina
@tobie: Paying the help.
Another Holocene Human
@jenn: You say vision (I agree, btw) but somebody will take that as an attack on their position, whatever that is. Some of this argument is just inevitable because reasonable people disagree.
Another Holocene Human
@Bailey: Bullshit.
Matt McIrvin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Well, you can’t take him literally because the things he literally says are logically inconsistent; it’s an unending stream of bullshit. But I don’t see any point in giving him the benefit of the doubt when interpreting his lies. It seems as if they’ll always interpret them as more benign rather than less.
Lizzy L
@Adam L Silverman: Adam, Trump makes up numbers, so I would never expect statements of this kind from him to be accurate. What interests me here is:
a) he started by claiming he wanted to deport 11 million people. How is his “base” going to react when they realize he doesn’t plan to (or can’t) keep that promise?
b) Ryan and his president-elect are NOT working from the same playbook. This has been evident for quite a while. So my question is, who’s gonna be Speaker when Ryan resigns or is pushed out, and what does Ryan do when that happens?
Another Holocene Human
@FlipYrWhig: You’d think losing all the time would clue them in that they’re the minority.
Worse, some of them successfully use Alinsky tactics in their organizing but apparently believe what they are attempting to convince others of. Kind of funny not funny.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Juice Box: on NPR this am they interviewed a two time Obama voter in WI who switched to Trump, and said exactly this. Democrats can’t seem to get Things Done. Trump will get Things Done. What things? How? the reporter didn’t ask.
Another Holocene Human
@Lizzy L: Ryan sleeps soundly on his bed of cash-for-life. Dude’s been a welfare baby from the beginning. If he gets kicked out of leadership (likely) expect him to start up a “totally sick” crossfit box at the Capitol.
Adam L Silverman
@Lizzy L: Chaffetz will jockey for it. Jim Jordan runs the Republican Study Group and the Tea Party Caucus in the House. If Trump’s folks are able to push their own person forward, his first endorser and most loyal advocate from the House is Duncan Hunter, Jr.
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: A lot of people who voted Obama wanted a dictator. I recall that vividly. Trump has promised to be a dictator. Be careful what you wish for.
Brachiator
@Baud:
The base is neither static, nor a monolith. A recent Twitter message noted that had millennials alone voted, Clinton wins 504 electoral votes to 3.
Trump cultivated his own base. Some here want to insist that all Republicans are alike, but this is manifestly untrue.
But it is also clear that Democrats are a wild bunch. Democratic voters defected to Trump. And many millennials loved Bernie more than they loved Clinton. And this may also be true of the other darling of older Democrats, Elizabeth Warren.
The Democrats have rebuilding work to do. But it is a false dilemma to suggest that widening an already broad base means that you are alienating any core group of voters.
D58826
@Bailey: Those jobs are gone. They are not coming back. Globalization and robots has seen to that. They would not come back if NAFTA never existed (most of the jobs died in the 1980s a decade before NAFTA). They will not come back no matter what happens with TPP.
@D. Mason: From what I’ve read one purpose of TPP was try and build and economic wall against Chinese expansionism. I’m not saying TPP is perfect or even should be ratified, but the world will not automatically be a better place without it and your business issues with China and India will not go away.
And just a general point about rural vs urban. The jobs, culture, etc concentrate in the cities because that is where the people are, the talent, the schools and the money. Cities have the critical mass needed in a 21st century economy. Small town America with towns 20-30 miles apart made sense in the farm based horse and buggy era, they don’t make sense today.
Another Scott
@WereBear:
Not to pick on you, but I think your understandable anger is causing you to go too far in your arguments.
There are some people like that, sure. I’ve known PhD scientists who wanted to “get a good job with benefits and a pension that does not require them to think any more”, too.
Everyone wants to be treated fairly, and when one sees that things these days are so much harder than they were for our parents in so many ways, then it makes people angry.
We’re furious that our parents and grand parents were able to go to good private schools and graduate without debt while we, or our kids or neighbors, have tens of thousands of school debts that will take a decade to pay off. Are we just whining with petty grievances that don’t recognize the changes in the 21st century? I don’t think so.
The way our economy has changed isn’t something that “just happened” – it changed as a result of choices our government made.
There is legitimate anger out there about the way the growth in the economy has not benefited those who actually work for a living (including masses of people with PhDs and MDs and JDs). I don’t think it explains why Hillary lost (I think misogyny was a much bigger reason), but its something that needs to be addressed (not just for the WWC, but for the poor and WC and the rest of the 99%). I think tribalism played a big part too – the GOP rarely seems to have any responsibility in the changes over the last 35 years, to hear the conventional wisdom.
Everyone wants to be able to have a job that pays more than their expenses so that they can treat themselves or their kids once in a while and save for better things (a reliable car, a house or a better apartment, college, etc.). There are still millions of “mindless” jobs out there that need to be done, need to be valued, and need to pay a decent wage. There always will be (even if robots run everything, we’re going to need people to fix the robots for a long time).
We’re going to be in even more trouble if we don’t find a way to bend the curve so that people feel that we’re on the right path for a sustainable income.
I actually think that Hillary had good plans to address these things, but for lots of reasons, she didn’t carry the electors she needed over the finish line. Maybe nobody could these days, given the structural obstacles put up by Roberts, the GOP, Comey, the press, and all the rest.
Finally, as Atrios says, blaming the voters is never a winning approach. I believe in a fair contest we would have won, but it should have been a landslide for Hillary and we need to figure out and fix why it wasn’t (to the extent that we can).
My, too long, $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Holocene Human
@pamelabrown53: Take heart in the fact that these people are not going to get what they want.
The Dem party won the popular vote … by a lot. It’s going to come back stronger.
These Russian dupes will stay on the outside looking in.
Juice Box
@Another Holocene Human: There is not one single cause for the loss — how often is there ever a simple solution to a complex problem? Comey, voter suppression, candidate charisma, misogyny and racism, the tendency to vote for alternating parties, poor quality mass media, Putin and Assange, paid speeches and charities (which were honorable activities for previous candidates!), yadda, yadda, yadda, all contributed to the loss. There’s no “one, true cause”.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: So Mitch McConnell is pretty much the political genius (or lucky) of our times.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Holocene Human: This has always been my understanding: that a significant portion of those claiming to be conservative, to love freedom and liberty, are actually small “a” authoritarians. For whatever reason – nature, nurture, a combination of the two – they are perpetually scared and afraid. They can’t handle rapid change, some can’t even handle incremental change. And they cling to these phrases and terms as security blankets while hoping/yearning for someone to come along and assert, impose, and enforce order. Others are large “A” authoritarians and simply seek to dominate everyone else.
As the Taoist teaching states:
Miss Bianca
@D. Mason: So, you’ll give people a pass who take trump at his word that he can somehow magically deliver a trade agreement that gives them all the ponies they want, even tho’ a), there’s no way he can deliver on it, and b), has no experience or patience to deal with the sorts of things he would need to be *able* to negotiate in a world trade agreement, but you WON’T take Hillary Clinton at her word when she saws she sees flaws in the TPP and would work on getting a better trade agreement, because you don’t “trust” her?
I think I understand why you can’t seem to make it in your business ventures. And it has nothing to do with competition from China or India.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: Don’t look now, but there are trolls out there on Dem sites advocating right now to screw over Black voters in favor of this mythical WWC vote (white dudes making $70k and above, so proletarian, such salt of the earth).
Adam L Silverman
@D. Mason: If you’d like send me a brief description to what it is you make and a link to where/how anyone here who might like those products might purchase them. I’ll throw it up in a post or comment as appropriate.
Lizzy L
@Another Scott: Thanks for this. As others have said, there are multiple reasons for why Hillary lost and Trump won. I’m willing to say (though it’s painful) that Hillary was the wrong candidate — though most of that has to do with 30 years of Republican propaganda. As Bill said, the Republicans created a cartoon of Hillary Clinton, and they got the country to believe that the cartoon was real, and the person was not. I don’t think Sanders would have been the right one. But the issue of the economy needs to be addressed squarely and simply, and I think Sanders came closest to doing that. As we go forward, we need to take that lesson to heart.
How we deal with the racism and the politics of spite, I have no idea. Still thinking about that.
D. Mason
@Miss Bianca: What do you mean give them a pass? I didn’t vote because I thought both sides were toxic in only slightly different ways. I’m here trying to discuss things with liberals because I tend to lean liberal and because what would be the point in trying to figure out what went wrong by talking to the side that won?
D58826
@Another Scott: My 30 something nieces are in this bucket. And my 70 year old baby boomer self agrees with a lot of what they are saying.
I do have one nit to pick though –
The changes are a lot more complicated than the choices the government made. In fact I would argue that the choices the government was NOT allowed to make by GOP obstructionism has resulted in the failure to help the folks left out by the changing world economy. I would also argue that most of these changes have had a positive impact on the world in general and the country in particular. Any one want to go back to the pre-internet era? Or back to vacuum tube TV’s and crank handled cars. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are beginning to move into a middle class life style. Where they are going to find the parking places for 2 billion chinese with cars is anyone guess. Now this is cold comfort for the guy working minimum wage at WalMart because his 25-30 dollar an hour job disappeared but ‘a beggar they neighbor’ trade policy only leads to 1929. We have to figure out a way that that guy who lost his 30 dollar an hour job in the steel mill has the training/skills/etc for a 30 dollar an hour job in the 21st century economy.
I don’t know that any one has the answer to that one.
Kryptik
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Those who decry platitudes the most are so damn often the ones that fall for them the most as well. Obama couldn’t get things done…so let’s just believe the guy that says he’s the only one that can, and not actually vet his ability to do so.
No matter how much hangwringing there is about these folks, some of them are just completely fucking unreachable because they will make excuses for begging for scraps from the people stomping them to the floor time and time again.
D. Mason
@D58826: I understand that avoiding the TPP will not fix the problem but I feel that adopting it would have made things much worse. As I’ve said before I felt like there was no good option. I understand that many here like people who feel completely without recourse should have held their noses and voted for the Democrat, but they would feel that way wouldn’t they? I felt like either candidate would exacerbate an existing problem which I feel is the biggest problem we have right now, a problem which overshadows all else. From an objective view what should I have done?
Bailey
@D58826:
I know that. But the fact that those types of jobs won’t be coming back does not replace the need for other kinds of jobs to take their place. Jobs that can sustain a person and their family.
Neither party has an answer on this. But neither party—and that includes the Dems—are even having an honest conversation. How can we really expect voters to make good choices if both parties are trying to assuage them dishonestly?
Timurid
@WereBear:
I’ve also had enough with concern for the ‘white working class’ being used to mask or enable racism. But any policy intended to punish the white working class for its misdeeds is going to cause a lot of collateral damage. Send more jobs to China or wherever, because fuck them that’s why? Then you’re forgetting that many more minorities by proportion are ‘working class.’ There are also still remnants of the working class union Democrat old guard out there. And don’t forget that the white middle class was even more supportive of Trump. Not to mention the white elites who see this election as just the next step in the long con that impoverishes everybody.
If you really need to punish people, punish them explicitly for their conduct, not for their status. There’s an especially toxic strain of ‘progressive’ thought that assumes “The kind of savage, war to the knife meritocracy that fiscal conservative Republicans advocate is great in theory, but their version is rigged and unfair. Our version of that contest will be absolutely, scrupulously fair. So the losers can expect no quarter.” That’s already the default state in academia. We really, really don’t want to see that strain getting loose in the wild…
WereBear
Yes, yes, this a thousand times. It doesn’t matter if the republicans lie to their voters, because they can just blame their failure on the Democrats who wouldn’t let them do it.
Davis X. Machina
Or failing that, and more probably, to subsidize him at a level north of ‘box under an overpass’, for years at a time, without grumbling, or checking his skin color, or his morals.
In a country where you are what you do, that’s tough. Because people who aren’t doing anything (profitable) cease to be. The next step is disappearing them, literally
FlipYrWhig
@Lizzy L: I don’t remember Bernie Sanders making a big point about factory-worker kinds of jobs in small towns. I remember him being mad at Wall Street and wealth and college debt. I tend to think that the things that people liked about Sanders were that he was angry and had a big mouth… and wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Facing off with Trump, his not-Hillary-ness would have been negated, but he’d still be an aging hippie who wants to raise your taxes to dole out free goodies.
D58826
@D. Mason: It’s not a question of ‘getting over it’. It seems like it is the 5 stages of grief and they haven’t gotten past the anger stage because the way of life they knew and loved has died. You don’t ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one but you do have to work thru the 5 stages and then move on. Somehow, and I have idea how, the left has to help with that process and give them something to move on to. I know that is wildly over simplified
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: Do you think Warren’s base is mostly older Democrats? I remember her as a darling of the Occupy crowd, and the Draft Warren movement basically transforming into the core of Sanders for President.
WereBear
@Juice Box: As is well known, you can’t fix stupid.
Their entire life is about standing around and being told what to do, or, in their leisure time, sitting down and being told what to do. My first crack at higher education was English lit and I can’t balance my checkbook without a calculator, but when W happened I went online and found out how I can put two and two together to make four. Anyone can.
The truth IS out there. It’s not on CNN and it’s not the email forwards from your crazy uncle, but it is pretty simple to find out actual facts these days, to seek out sources, see if they are being truthful, and use the good ones to find more sources.
But some people want to sit in their high chair, the one with the strap to keep them from bashing their brains out on the floor that some liberal made them put on the chair, and have lies spoonfed to them while a happy life is dangled just out of their reach to make them realize they can get out of the flippin’ chair.
And they won’t.
D. Mason
@D58826: Sorry but the stages of grief don’t really apply to an ongoing circumstance. They’re not upset over the loss of their job at the steel mill because they just love the smell of slag so darned much. They have a burning need to provide for themselves and their families which isn’t being met by today’s economy. They’re not dumb, they’re not lazy they’ve just been priced out of the market and there are millions of them.
D58826
@Davis X. Machina:
And since his/her pride is wrapped up in providing for family that is going to be a very tall order. Just think for a moment, and this applies to all of us, you meet a new person. You exchange names. What is the next question that is almost always asked ‘What do you do?’. This is short hand for what job do you do. Now being early 20 something and the answer of student is acceptable. Being on the north side of 60 and retired is acceptable. But anywhere in between and answer of well ‘I lost my job and am living on a government check (no matter how well meaning that check/program is ) is not going to cut it. Now maybe if all of the rest of us re-order our list of acceptable answers and ‘I’m in a job retraining program and hope to get into the green energy field’ for example becomes ok then things will change.
Lizzy L
@Adam L Silverman: Duncan Hunter — oh great. He advocated using tactical nukes against Iran, and IIRC, he wants to ban birthright citizenship. (Which won’t happen, because we still have a Constitution.) Jordan is an anti-abortion fanatic, and Chaffetz would no doubt do his best to put Hillary Clinton in jail. Fuck.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t know that Warren could really be said to have a base yet. And overall, I don’t see the same enthusiasm for her that I saw for Bernie.
Also, millennials are not a monolith, and by the time 2020 rolls around, there will be another group of first time voters to consider.
Bailey
@Another Holocene Human:
Yes, a very common reflexive answer around Balloon Juice.
On the other hand, I have been doing quite a bit of reading and analysis of what our missing voters are actually saying. Perhaps before just dismissing out of hand with no evidence or inspection whatsoever, we should try to see where we missed what was previously our low hanging fruit. Wa Post did a round-up focusing on otherwise consistent rural Dems who Trump ran up the score with:
and
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/13/why-these-rural-white-gun-owning-guys-didnt-vote-for-trump/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_wb-voters-1016am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
frosty
@Adam L Silverman:
Same thing for me, 30 miles east of Gettysburg.
D58826
@D. Mason: Maybe stages of grief is the wrong analogy but simply being angry, lashing out at the OTHER and following the first pied piper who will make America great again isn’t going to correct that either.
WereBear
@Another Scott: I always find your comments thoughtful and well-reasoned, but I also just want to point out that a great many people apparently voted for Trump because he promised to bring manufacturing back to the Rust Belt.
And, I might add, in the same form and structure as the ones they so fondly remember their daddies and grand daddies had. Or so many people across the net have reported by asking their Trumpy friends and relatives and who report this without the filter of the MSM crying over the WWC.
They don’t want 21st Century jobs. I’ve hired and fired and I have seen it up close.
They want a time machine to bring them back to Mayberry. They have the lunchbucket loaded and ready. That is what they heard Trump promise them.
Because that is what they want.
Bailey
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes, way to dismiss millions of ex-urban / rural people under the same broad brush. Certainly everyone is meth addicted and on disability. Thankfully, you’ll not be in charge of any campaign’s electoral strategy.
D. Mason
@D58826: For sure it won’t. I think that’s why voter turnout is so depressed. Of course I would think that. I hope both political parties read into the reason so few people showed up this year, even if my reason turns out to be different from everyone else’s.
D58826
@Lizzy L:
If the GOP picks up total control of one more state legislature they will have 34 – the number needed to call an Article V constitutional convention. We only have had one constitutional convention in 1787 (obviously not article V) so who knows what the result would be but I’m pretty sure that it won’t be pretty
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: Just make sure you have a reservation and then you are all set. Also too, ride in first class.
tobie
@D. Mason: Thank you for answering back. We’re all frazzled right now and that means we’re kind of hot-tempered, but I don’t believe anyone wants to attack you. I’ve said it so many times in this blog that I’m a little embarrassed to say it again, but I think how to revive manufacturing in an age of automation and globalization is the biggest challenge facing advanced economies. I was impressed with HRC’s know-how on this issue. You felt otherwise.
One of the things that contributed to my impression was my experience at factories in India. (How I got there has more to do with family and happenstance than anything else. I’m not a business person nor someone who studies business, so I don’t have any financial stake in the manufacturing plants I’ve visited.) What’s struck me, though, about these plants is that even in those which have the best conditions for their workers (good pay by Indian standards, free medical care, bus service to and from the plants, mortgages for the workers, free canteen, etc.) and for the environment (e.g., expensive water treatment for cleaning waste water) the total operating costs are a fraction of what they would be in the US. Shipping is cheap, too, so not even the distance the goods have to travel makes a difference. We could slap massive tariffs on these goods but that in the long run won’t help the economy. So what can we do? Protection of patents and intellectual property is something really important that TPP does. Focus on “advanced” manufacturing that cannot be done in the developing world is another one. And infrastructure spending here of course creates local jobs. I really wish we could have had this discussion here and elsewhere before the election. Now it’s water under the bridge. And no one knows what Trump will do. He was never forced to articulate a real trade policy.
glory b
@mistermix: And you think they’re sheep who will follow along as Bernie works with the white nationalists?Perhaps they (and note he didn’t win a majority of them, Kacie Hunt of msnbc said Bernie’s campaign events were about as white as Trump’s) are as loyal as the white ones when it comes to that.
young voters are fickle, and they aren’t the base.Maybe we should say good luck winning an election without US.
D58826
@WereBear: I have read in a couple of places that employers are having a hard time finding good workers for well paying jobs like machinist or welder. That there are thousands of these jobs going begging for some reason. One problem is the jobs are not in the same place as the people. Another seems to be that the skill set of a machinist today requires the computer skills that the older generation lacks. I have a cousin who is a draftsman in the nuclear industry. He had to learn CAD/CAM technology or he would be unemployable, The drafting table, some sharp pencils and a t-square are pretty much relics of the past.
liberal
@D58826:
Yes, the world will be better without it, because it would be one fewer treaty with ISDS.
liberal
@tobie:
Yeah, it’s important, if you’re on the side of monopolistic rent collection.
Timurid
@Adam L Silverman:
You made one mistake in that post. The last national flag of the Confederacy actually looked like this.
D. Mason
@tobie: I looked into the TPP because I wanted to find it acceptable but I felt it gave far too many protections to foreign companies. I don’t believe “Advanced” manufacturing to be the source of jobs everyone promises because it only takes a handful of people to run those machines and the facilities are still too expensive so the moment foreign workers are up to speed those jobs will float away too. I don’t know what the answer is but I’m pretty comfortable another broad trade deal wasn’t going to help the working class American. I’m under no delusion that Americans are uniquely skilled over foreign workers, but they need to survive and until they either die or their needs are met they will keep voting for whoever they think might help them. Hillary didn’t even bother to pay lip service to them until the last few days of the election.
FlipYrWhig
@Bailey: Fuck them. They hate people like me. It’s mutual.
Timurid
@WereBear:
Compared to last century’s vast armies of agricultural, industrial and even white collar (anyone remember typing pools?) workers… there are very few jobs that do require all of that. The vast and growing labor surplus is going to be a problem no matter who’s in charge.
D58826
@Brachiator:
but apparantly hasn’t met with anyone from the governing party.
Bailey
@liberal:
Or you’re no longer interested in having all of your R&D and intellectual property ripped off by nations with lesser standards.
Bailey
@FlipYrWhig:
I guess math isn’t your strength. Okay. (It’s weird that these people didn’t hate you four years ago, though. Huh.)
FlipYrWhig
@D. Mason: Ridiculous. She had great plans for everything, because at heart she is a decent person. The people who didn’t vote for her weren’t waiting to hear her say something different; if she had said something different they’d just say she didn’t seem like she meant it because she’s so calculating. Fuck it. Fuck the whole process. Let them get what they want from the Republican politicians they do vote for. Why is THAT not part of the bargain? Why is it ONLY rage at Democrats for not doing stuff WHEN REPUBLICANS DON’T DO SHIT FOR THEM EITHER? Why is there no story about how electing Republican governments locally and state-wide for the past several cycles has them disenchanted with THEM? You don’t defeat this with reason and results. Those don’t enter into it. Just find someone else to vote for you instead and let these places be the US equivalent of Ungovernable Tribal Regions.
tobie
@D. Mason: I agree she didn’t pay enough attention to this issue. Immediately after the Democratic convention she did her first two campaign stops in industrial plants. One was in western Pennsylvania and the other in Youngstown, Ohio. I was impressed with those two visits. I don’t know if the relentless attacks on her for emails starting July 5 changed her campaign course or if they dropped the ball. It’s a shame. She had a lot to say on these issues and obviously it wasn’t heard. I wish I had a time machine.
FlipYrWhig
@Bailey: I am a college professor from the Northeast. They have hated people like me for 100 years.
D58826
The entry on yesterday’s thread word cloud that overshadowed almost everything was e-mail. So no it wasn’t heard because by and large it wasn’t covered
Suzanne
@WereBear: I am in 100% agreement with you. The group that we’re calling “white working class” (because we don’t have a better word for it–many of them aren’t really working class) thinks that they are in a culture war with the rest of us, and they are PISSED AS HELL at the rest of us. This isn’t about economic position or religious freedom or views on issues or even really primarily about race or sexual orientation or any other identity and never has been. It is about an overall sense of decline in their cultural power. The aspirational culture of this country used to be from rural areas. Now, the people that are the gatekeepers of culture (media outlets and artists and innovators and the people that fund them) find them vaguely backward and gross. I mean, look at People of Walmart, and Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty and bro country, and Chili’s and Texas Roadhouse, and etc etc etc. The tastemakers have deemed that whole swath of the country to have and to be in poor taste. They know this, and they hate it. And I am just as guilty of this. The Dems have come to be associated with urban, educated, modern, secular, global, diverse branding, and so they went with the angriest, douchiest dude they could find to flip the bird at us. Trump winning the primary was no accident. None of the rest of them were proud of their douchiness like he is.
J R in WV
@JMG:
That wasn’t a lawsuit threat about Harry Reid, it was a “Put him in JAIL!” threat. Without an indictment, without a trial, just dragged away at 2 am – destination unknown. National Security Acts, for use against our own leaders.
The Black Sites of the CIA are already being warmed up for use by Trump’s minions. Gitmo is too open, with too many honest members of the military. They will be using basements in Turkey, most likely.
I’m pretty scared.
Another Holocene Human
@Miss Bianca: Same as it ever was, some white women believe those statements don’t apply to them, just like the “my abortion is different” crowd. They don’t feel any solidarity with other women.
Bailey
@FlipYrWhig:
Did you look at the WaPo article I posted above? Despite being a professor, your mistake is grouping all the white ex-urban / rural voters into the “meth and disability” category. The voters that usually vote Dem and did not this year are not that at all.
Roger Moore
@D. Mason:
Maybe it’s you who’s missing out on an important point: those racial patterns are not random. If white working class people live in different places from minority working class people, it’s not happenstance. It’s a result of white flight, i.e. whites deliberately segregating themselves from minorities.
George
Sooner or later the self-described losers in the white working class are going to have to grow a pair of gonads and tell the rest of America what exactly they want.
Because up till now all I’ve heard is a lot of whining from them, but zero substance.
“No one listens to us!” they say, as their GOP governors turn away billions of dollars of infrastructure funding from the federal government.
“We have been forgotten,” they say, as they continue to re-elect Republicans to state-level and congressional offices, all the while blaming the Democratic Party and that party’s nominee for all their worldly woes.
I can’t believe that more people aren’t picking up on that–the notion that state-level politicians and GOP congress people are just as complicit in “not listening to the white working class” as Democrats are accused of being. That’s why I think any white working class complaints about economics are likely just camouflage for racism.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@D. Mason: And here it is, folks, in a fucking nutshell. The statement about how “I shouldn’t have to work at McDonalds” explains a lot of white people. They feel they are too good for McDonalds when they are so uber special and they are “makers” yet can’t compete with China or India on whatever it is they are making. They are the ones that look down on POC, women, and immigrants because they work at McDonalds. And yet liberals are the “elite snobs.”
No. Wrong. Liberals and Democrats want to make life better for the folks that work at McDonalds because they have to, or are there temporarily on their way to something better. Fuck D. Mason’s mentality. I’m not here for it.
George
@Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire: Bingo.
Would it not be great if we all were guaranteed a job or a career doing exactly what we wanted, exactly where we wanted, for as long as we wanted?
Some of us professionals and “elites” have to constrain our careers because we have families or health needs, or because we want a certain quality of life. The thing is, though, that we don’t harbor class-based resentment because of it.
I think most of the whinging white working class loves capitalism and the notion of free markets as long as those things don’t result in their jobs moving across the state, across the country, or across the ocean. Then, suddenly, instead of accepting that as a result of the capitalism they profess to love, they begin complaining that no one is listening to them.
People who preach capitalism should be willing to practice it.
Adam L Silverman
@Lizzy L: And not one of them will become Speaker either. None of their fellow members of Congress like them enough to put them in in place of Ryan.
Adam L Silverman
@frosty: I was 30 minutes North and West and it drove me nuts the couple of times I saw it in Carlisle. That said, I’ve been to Gettysburg almost a dozen times since 2010 and every time – Summer, Fall, Winter, or Spring – at Major General Lewis Armistead’s marker just next to the High Water Mark, on the north side of the marker is a small, American Flag. And its always in good shape. So someone is coming on a regular basis and putting it there. I can’t prove it, but my guess its either a descendant of his or of Lieutenant General Hancock’s. And to my mind, even if its not true, that’s a damn good explanation.
Adam L Silverman
@D58826: That’s an inaccurate piece of information. The Democrats control enough chambers of state legislatures, either outright or one chamber even where the Republicans have the other and the governorship, is enough to hold the line.
Adam L Silverman
@Timurid: Cute.
Adam L Silverman
@J R in WV: The CIA’s black site are not being warmed up to be used by Trump on his domestic opponents. I’m not going to defend, nor would I try, the enhanced interrogation (formerly and currently known as torture) program, but the Agency is not proud of how they came out of it. And the operators and analysts, logisticians, techies, and scientists that work there all take their oaths and their responsibilities seriously. As for GITMO, that’s under control of the military and they do the same. Don’t go borrowing trouble.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: Hope you’re right, Adam. Trump seems to have a bunch of friends in the FBI, though.
And there could be the same kind of thing going on as in the DoD in which a bunch of people are just going to resign in disgust, and be replaced by Trump loyalists, maybe after they throw out the civil service laws. But that will take a little more time.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Here too, we do not need to borrow trouble from the future. They aren’t going to get rid of civil service laws so quickly or easily. And what I’ve read so far is that the national security professionals are going to be professionals.
Big Picture Pathologist
@Adam L Silverman:
That’s not a useful comparison by that tweeter. With Trump, Bernie is looking to influence him as she shapes his cabinet and policies, early on to remind him of his obligations to his least well off citizens.
With Clinton, he was making sure – prior to the election – that the values he championed would persist in her platform.