Betty Cracker writes:
As I’ve said several times in comments in response to folks who want to make it all about economics and the working class in the aftermath, I’m willing to listen, as long as proposed changes in messaging don’t include downplaying the party’s commitment to justice for non-whites, women and the LGBT community.
I agree. Here’s what I don’t know — and look I know a lot of you are sick of Grand Strategy posts so I apologize in advance — how do we get away from talking about the “white working class” versus “non-whites”? A huge chunk of the working class is non-white. Navigating our fucked up health-care system is a pain for everyone, regardless of our skin color. White and non-white members of the working class alike worry about paying for their kids’ college education.
The heirs of Jay Gould have convinced one half of the American middle-class to shit on the other half, so that the our Galtian overlords can rob both halves blind. How do we undo this? I don’t know.
Timurid
I’m fine with opening a dialogue based on economic issues… trade, jobs, education, whatever.
But there can be no concessions made on race, religion, gender or other identity issues. None. We must behave as if their ‘concerns’ about race and identity do not exist. If they’re upset about TPP or somesuch, there is room for negotiation. If they’re upset because we want a black guy as head of the DNC, we didn’t run a white male for some office or we’re not going to shut up about police violence or voter suppression… the proper response is “What? Were you saying something? I can’t hear you. Speak up!” That or a simple “fuck no” will suffice.
WereBear
When they said it was about economics, they lie. They all lie. The corporate media cobbled up this economic anxiety issue to cloud the waters.
We already gave the fabled WWC everything we could to help them join the 21st Century. They don’t want to.
RinaX
You’d have to start with our own Democratic surrogates. It’s pretty clear to me who they’ve been referring to when they talk about having to reach out to working-class voters.
Amaryllis
From a recent Jonah Goldberg column, yet another “why they lost” piece:
“One obvious example is diversity. There’s nothing wrong with placing a high value on racial, sexual and gender inclusion. But Democrats have earned the reputation of being obsessed with it to the exclusion of bread-and-butter issues.”
Like, the equal inclusion of non-white, non-male, non-straight people isn’t a “bread-and-butter” issue?
I don’t know either.
debbie
I think the past few decades have shown the foolishness of the concept of community. Anything resembling the common good gets shot down (metaphorically or not) time and time again. This country is no less tribal than the Balkans or the Middle East. I have no solutions because there are none.
rikyrah
You can’t.
I wrote on Friday that I wanted someone to point out to me where the policies that the Democrats put forth for the working class were NOT going to apply to the White Working Class. I wanted to know what policies that we proposed wouldn’t help ALL the working class.
And, therein is the rub.
The White Working Class DOES.NOT.WANT. policies that work for ALL the working class.
IF they did, they would have been voting Democratic all these years.
Yet, they continue to vote against their economic self-interest, and for people who enact policies that hurt them.
When you point this out to them, then they come up with the little baby Jesus, and abortion, or the second amendment as to why they vote GOP.
When, the bottom line is, they don’t want policies that would work for ALL of the working class, because that means that being WHITE is no longer special.
This isn’t something you can get around.
They long for the time where all you had to be was WHITE in order to get a decent job that could support a family.
Please note – I didn’t say Educated and White. JUST WHITE.
And, they wanna party like it’s 1948. And, nobody has time for that. And, Nobody is playing with them.
DCF
Who’s To Blame For Hillary Clinton’s Loss?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNZmXhxuThU
A candid and incisive breakdown of the 2016 voting patterns and percentages….
NCSteve
I repeat: THE EXIT POLLS ARE USELESS FOR DETERMINING WHAT HAPPENED!!!!!
The question isn’t why people who voted for Trump voted. He won with fewer votes than Romney got. The question, the ONLY question, is why millions of Democrats didn’t vote! That’s what we have to find out. And while we’re at it, we have to find out why they didn’t vote in 2014. This is the second election in a row where major turnout efforts were made and yet we massively underperformed with every demographic.
trollhattan
Maybe they’ll support if they will simultaneously be freed from the shackles of political correctness. I heard that used as a unifying concern in dozens of interviews. They miss saying sp*ck out loud.
LAC
@Timurid: and what will go long way here is a lot less of mistermix sucking up the air here with his “think of teh poor white working class” bullshit posting.
Betty Cracker
I just have to quote Kay from an earlier thread:
Truth! Also, to paraphrase my own comment from the thread below, I think it’s entirely possible that we’re overthinking the fuck outta this thing and that the so-called “persuadables” are in truth a panicky herd that zigs and zags between party candidates for entirely irrational and dumb reasons like “would like to have a beer with him” or “he has no filter.”
MomSense
@rikyrah:
You said it so much better than I ever could. You are exactly 1,000% correct.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
We won’t have another progressive program in this country until we fix racism and stupidity, but as we like to point out, you can’t fix stupid. These people are just mean, deeply stupid and their whiteness is all they have left.
germy
@rikyrah: Exactly.
Did you see how Van Jones was treated on ABC?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS2zaEILahg
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
I think Bill Clinton won the first time because HW said read my lips and had a bunch of tax Republicans abandon ship for crazy pants Perot.
I think Barack Obama won the first time because the economy was so fucked up and he was so level headed that people decided they had nothing to lose.
Iowa Old Lady
@rikyrah: This seems true to me. I grew up in the WWC. The people around me were racist but they weren’t children. Some of them changed as the world changed. A lot of them didn’t. They’re responsible for their own actions. Frankly, I have no sympathy for them other than what I feel for working people in general.
Betty Cracker
@DCF: Bad sportsmanship to send people to a Cenk Uygur video with nary a warning. Ten points from Hufflepuff!
Roger Moore
I think an equally important point is that lots of things went wrong to get us here, so no single solution is going to fix things. Sure, maybe we need to talk more about economic issues, but that isn’t the one solution that will guarantee future success. We also need to work harder at motivating occasional voters and deal with voter suppression and reform the primary system so we get a better slate of candidates and figure out how to deal with hostile media and … and … and … What we can’t afford to do is to get fixated on a single thing that caused all our problems and ignore everything else that went wrong.
RinaX
@rikyrah:
Thank you. And again, it seems that people of color who are of the working class get that the Democrats actually are looking out for their interests. Even when they disagreed on things like abortion and gay marriage, economics overwhelming won out when it came time to vote. So, yeah, why don’t white working class voters get this? This post nails it.
I don’t know if it was here or where I read it, but this is more of a civil war between white people. Many of you post all of the time about the family members and friends that you have to put up with that spout this kind of stuff, and just mute on Facebook and the like.
People of color have gotten this for many years. Most of us aren’t the ones you have to convince.
Betty Cracker
@Roger Moore: Absolutely true.
Amaranthine RBG
As are a lot of latino, black, and asian members of the working class.
Starfish
I know that Balloon Juice is the land where people like to pretend that there are/were no Libertarian issues, and they are all Republican clowns. This view is not quite right. When the Libertarians get on the national scale, they immediately get eaten by Republicans because who is going to turn down money and power?
The police militarization and expanded police powers are things that can be larger than Black Lives Matter. Who wants to get their dog shot by a police officer? No one. Who wants a police SWAT vehicle cruising through their neighborhood? No one. No knock raids need to be gone. Asset forfeiture needs to be gone. These are issues that can cross the color line.
Marijuana decriminalization is being considered in some places that are red states. Who is going to allow these businesses to have access to banking?
Maybe we don’t want, “Fuck you, I got mine, do away with all my taxes” libertarianism, but there are parts of their platform that are really popular that no one is picking up. And you know that Republicans are screwing up in their steal ideas from Libertarians effort because “freedom for everything except a woman’s right to choose.”
greengoblin
How do you respond when what they want they can’t have? Trump claimed he would bring back lost jobs (Carrier and Ford and coal) which won’t happen. Carrier has already said as much. A commenter here wrote how manufacturing jobs being created don’t pay like the old ones. Trump lied. What do we do? WWC don’t want to accept the changes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve got MSNBC on mute, and they keep showing clips of that Lesley Stahl interview with That Family, and just seeing them all sitting there in those ridiculous gilt chairs…. In an Idiocracy-type parody movie that setting would seem too on-the-nose.
Major Major Major Major
@debbie:
The phrase “tragedy of the commons” was coined in 1833. It’s been going on a little longer. A community bigger than “you and yours” is perhaps the ideal state of humans but not the feral state. As ever we must rage against the darkness.
Jado
Uggh. You have the single hardest conversation in US history – “Hey, Billy Bob! Ernesto and Tyrone over here have kids who play the drums just like your kids. Yeah, and they live in a piece of crap apartment as well, just like you. And their kids take karate lessons just like little Bubba. Seems you guys have a lot in common. Maybe you should get to know each other; you might be able to help each other.”
Elapsed time for Billy Bob’s ears and mind closing after hearing the words “Ernesto and Tyrone” can be measured in picoseconds.
And the only thing that’s going to change that is ugly harsh experience. In my opinion.
Jeffro
@Betty Cracker:
“Overthinking the fuck out of this thing” – ding ding ding =)
Talking more about “hard working American families” and “paycheck issues”, without giving up any ground on equality issues, is a flat-out winner. We can co-opt the Rs talk about freedom and opportunity (and hey unlike them, we don’t have to lie about it!)
This was an extremely close election, once where (once again) the popular vote was won, where there were a million ratfucks going on, tells us we’re mostly on the right track. Give me a Booker, Castro, Harris, Gillibrand at the top + a fired-up electorate, take no state and no group for granted, and we’ll be right as rain. Fired up, ready to go!
Hal
Hillary Clinton did not lose in a landslide. She won the popular vote and Trump won by tens of thousands in the swing states they both needed. Minnesota by 13,000! Those are not insurmountable odds.
LAC
@rikyrah: bless you for this. Until this becomes a working class discussion, I am all out of fucks to give.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Layered on top of that is that a lot of the people who are suggesting the single simple solution to all our problems are doing it defensively. Maybe not random blog posters, but just about anyone with a position- official or unofficial- in the party who’s saying that we just need to fix one thing is pointing the finger of blame so nobody will look at what part of the project they screwed up. We can’t let them dodge responsibility that way, so we should give extra scrutiny to the people doing the most finger pointing.
Ella in New Mexico
Ok, so here’s the thing about the “white working class got left behind” crap.
Every single person I personally know who voted for Trump has a six figure or (close to it) income. Or is young enough that they have their whole lives ahead of them and are just getting started, and quite frankly, are doing fine. Or don’t work at all because they’re retired. Most of them are pretty financially stable, too, with no expectations of any future job loss or business income decreases.
The rest of us voted for Clinton. And we’re a lot more motley a crew financially than the Trump voters were. Lotta people struggling in my group, even after decades, many in low-paying professional jobs like teaching or public services.
Now, I have relatives who never bothered to get an education cuz that was “uppity” and who’ve been voting Republican since they developed the strategy that flipped the party from conservative Dems in the south and rural areas. They might be “working class” on the surface, but they did pretty well over the years, certainly no worse than my own family’s losses and recoveries over the past 30 years. Racism and anger are they’er biggest Facebook likes and shares, along with totally made up conspiracies about how Michelle Obama made sure her mother get’s the same retirement her husband does. THEY VOTED TRUMP TO A SINGLE ONE.
So please, whatever we do: IT’S NOT THE MONEY. IT’S NOT THE MONEY. IT’S NOT THE MONEY.
debbie
@rikyrah:
I’m with you. We at heart are an ugly species. No matter the advances or refinements, we are beastly brutes.
Suzanne
@rikyrah: You are correct. The group that we’re calling “white working class” (but isn’t really working class) have lost cultural supremacy and they are pissed. Not interested in their problems. Their shitty culture can die.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I said below that there’s a theory that Clinton should have Romeny-fied Trump. She also should have Pence-ified him, hung his anti-LGBTQ nuttiness on the ticket. I think even people who are not necessarily for gay marriage find people like Pence and Kim Davis more than a little creepy.
Chyron on muted -MSNBC says Trump said last night he’s “fine” with same-sex marriage
tobie
Thank you, rikyrah and roger moore, for your wise comments.
I don’t think I have the energy to continue reading discussions of why we lost based on the scant data we have and which each of us uses to bolster pre-conceived ideas in any event. It gets nowhere. I would, though, be grateful if we could have thread devoted to people posting links for actions, big and small, in their regions. I think activism is the only thing that will save me now from complete depression. I’ll try to gather some myself.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish: I think this is the opposite of a winning issue. Police militarization and expanded police powers are popular, especially with working-class white people. They love fascist head-smashing cops more than anything! They’re sure it’s not going to happen to them.
liberal
@Jeffro:
But this is EXACTLY the problem: Booker has been a shill for Wall St. I don’t know about the others…Gillibrand I’ve heard good things about, but she’s in NY, so that ups the likelihood she’s attached to Wall St.
D. Mason
Make it about location. Rural Working Class instead of White Working Class. There are minorities in rural areas too even though the percentages are very different from more populated areas.
liberal
@Ella in New Mexico:
That’s fair enough, and not inconsistent with what I’ve heard re post mortems.
But you’re leaving out an entire group of people: the people who didn’t vote.
Major Major Major Major
@Suzanne: even the good parts of their culture like bacon have now been overtaken by coastal elites!
Cain
Betty Cracker writes:
As we have noticed this cycle, nothing is a stupid move when it comes to Trump. The man can apparently get away with anything. He might very well do that and he already has the support of members of the FBI as we saw. I guess I don’t know where the stupid is. I think we need to be careful about what the boundaries are because it doesn’t seem there are any when it comes to this man.
artem1s
identity politics aren’t going to matter if they strip everyone who doesn’t own property of the right to vote. Every Dem campaign since I can remember has started millions in the hole because they have to spend their money on voter rights lawsuits right off the bat. And there is no guarantee that the idiots you just spent millions on to protect will care enough that you won for them to actually vote.
you want a policy initiative that crosses identity politics? you have to start with getting people enraged about their right to vote. Too many people are completely disengaged from the process. The GOP and Libertarians have been telling too many people that their vote doesn’t count and won’t matter. Assholes who get people enraged and then taunt them with fundraising emails about how the system is rigged for ‘insiders’. The GOP has painted everyone who cares about the process as a shill and dope. Not just liberals, but RINOs too now.
The rich white folk who won for the hair piece have been working toward limiting voter rights since 1963 and they are poring money into their fight. Less whites voted GOP in this election than 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. They just happen to be standing in the right places. If they limit voting to a property class, it’s over.
SenyorDave
There can’t be any WWC, there is working class. If white people consider themselves to be WWC, they are probably unreachable. I hope to hell the DNC does two things for 2018 elections:
1. Builds a big war chest to take them seriously
2. Approaches them from a cost benefit basis.
I believe there has to be a 50 state strategy, but it has to be measured. You aren’t going to get WY or WV to flip blue in my lifetime, or even before our sun goes supernova. You have to spend more money on the swing states, but you have to have a unified message. I don’t see how you can try to appeal to the WV voter who is worried about his/her job, but more pissed that “those” people are getting benefits (just like he/she does).
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
Spoken like somebody who has never had real country bacon. The version most coastal elites are eating is the tasteless imitation of the real thing.
liberal
@greengoblin: Well, for one thing, instead of cheering on the loss of American jobs, we can promote policies that don’t actively export jobs overseas.
Think I’m full of crap? Then why do cacti and Martin think favoring American workers (in the abstract, not re a particular policy) over, say, Chinese workers is “selfish”? (BTW, “American worker” isn’t “White American worker”; it’s “American worker”.)
You want to keep losing elections? Then go the cacti/Martin route.
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: everybody is attached to Wall Street or lobbying or whatever. There will always be something ‘disqualifying’ unless you’re picking random people off the street instead of high-power politicians.
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: Can you or someone else define “working class” for me? Is it the group we used to refer to as “blue collar”? Is it anyone who works, including people making $400k and up? Is there an income range? Is it limited to people whose jobs do not require a degree?
Because, honestly, I do not know who we are talking about when we say “working class”.
liberal
@D. Mason: Yawn. Still an obvious code word for “white,” even if what you say is true.
amk
@NCSteve: Yup. Dems shot themselves in their collective foot and face, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They lost the plot entirely in 2010 and 2016 was the ugly climax. A party and the candidate could do only so much to ‘enthuse’ its fucking base. If you don’t fucking value your fucking vote, you fucking suffer.
Ella in New Mexico
@rikyrah:
THIS.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: If you don’t want a Democratic candidate who has ties to Wall Street because _you_ don’t like that, that’s one thing. If you don’t want a Democratic candidate who has ties to Wall Street because you think salt-of-the-earth working-class people won’t like that, I really think your concern is overblown. They don’t hate Wall Street, they hate Democrats and liberals and latch onto whatever negative thing is being said about them as the polite version of the real reason, which is that they think we’re all ni99er-lovers.
liberal
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, with that attitude, we might as well vote in Romney.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
Branding. Obama had a great image — he’s cool, he’s funny, he’s smart, he makes public life look effortless, and he was fairly young. His competition was an angry old man and a moron, followed by a bland CEO and a moron that looked like a smackable little boy. Whose clothing label would you rather wear? Whose car would you rather drive?
The policy, whatever it is, will be accepted if the candidate is cool enough.
It probably won’t be anyone who currently has any kind of national profile, because he or she is already a known quantity. But I’d get to work on finding that person and creating his/her brand right now. Trump had years on his TV show to do it — we have to play catch up.
Suzanne
@liberal: NO ONE CARES (except liberals) about Booker’s closeness or distance to Wall Street. None of that matters. According to NPR, Trump is looking at Jamie Dimon to run the Treasury Department. The “WWC” wanted a bomb-thrower, they wanted to be excited, they wanted someone riveting.
Seriously, if we ever want to win at anything ever again, we need to get over this. People vote, at the basic level, the way they buy clothes: to project something about themselves back to the world. Trump reflects the depth of their butthurt. We need to appeal to this same lizard brain. Obama was young and energetic and beautiful and we could all feel great about ourselves casting our vote. We need to can and bottle that energy.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: Lots of people hate Wall Street. Lots of people hate Silicon Valley. They’re not all Republicans and racists. Some might be less-informed Democratic voters who are sympathetic to the party, but would be even more so with an anti-Wall Street message.
“Create a populist message” isn’t the same thing as “create a populist message that will appeal to the WWC.”
Finally, “anti-Wall St” is good policy.
Again, if you think you can win at the national level with the current path of “identity politics plus crypto-neoliberalism,” you’re wrong. And please, spare me the current BS shibboleth about neoliberalism not meaning what it indeed means.
D. Mason
@SenyorDave:
Are people actually self-identifying as “WWC” or are they being labeled by the media because it’s an easy sound bite? The only scenario I can envision where I would identify myself as “white working class” involves a series of check boxes on a form.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: The people we are discussing are those that used to be called “WT”, but now we don’t say that, and yet everyone knows who I’m talking about. And of course, there are plenty of those people with lots of money.
Emma
I am cutting and pasting my message from the earlier thread. We need to cut them off from each other.
I do not believe for a moment that the majority of the pro-forced birthers care a rip about the fetus. I think it’s mostly about keeping women in their place. This is especially true of women, by the way. Nothing says misogynist like a conservative woman.
I propose an organization calling itself The Coalition for Responsible Fatherhood. It would try to work with religious organizations and other political groups to insert into restrictive abortion laws an amendment (for existing laws) or a section (for new ones) as follows:
As soon as it is safe, the child’s DNA will be collected and tested. If the father is identified, the state will garnish wages and/or property as necessary for the support of said child. If the father is a minor his parents will become responsible for the upkeep of said child until the father is of age.
They won’t do it. And we can promote the hell out of that.
———————–
Also, we need to punish the media. That’s what the conservatives have done; they scream and scream at the media until they’re cowed and then they replace them with Fox. We need to destroy CNN and Fox News.
FlipYrWhig
@amk: What’s the “base,” though? From my perspective, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2010, 2014, and 2016 are all more or less the same. 2006, 2008, and 2012 are different. 2008 and 2012 are different because Obama seems like he may have been sui generis and unreplicable. That leaves 2006. I guess if the other party’s president fucks up a war and a hurricane, we have a fighting chance, or if our party nominates a wunderkind. Yay us.
liberal
@Suzanne: again, false dichotomy. There are more people in the world than pro-Trump racists and committed Democratic voters who will turn out in every election.
Besides, why _not_ be anti-Wall St?
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: being your usual charming self, I see. Never mind.
opiejeanne
@Jeffro: I heard Hillary speak to those exact concerns. There was not a thing more she could have done.
Barbara
I really do blame people like Thomas Frank for continuing to talk about the white working class as if the concept of being “white” in the workforce has some special significance for policy. Whites do tend to be better paid and so may have less focus on the minimum wage and more focus on — let’s say — affordable education and health care. But still, to focus on the difference between white workers and other workers is, in my view, to capitulate to the notion that whites have a reason for being aggrieved at non-whites when they don’t. They have good reasons for being aggrieved at the massive disinvestment from education that has made it harder for their kids and everyone else’s to get through college without debt, or the unwillingness to attack health care costs that operate as one of the single biggest downward forces on wages in the U.S. (it’s one reason that some kinds of jobs are outsourced and can never be done efficiently in the U.S.).
Diana
http://www.theonion.com/infographic/what-can-americans-expect-under-trump-presidency-54689
Betty Cracker
@Amaranthine RBG: Yeah, and the minute we’re told they banded together to elect a fascist and we’re supposed to figure out how to attract them to the Democratic coalition, your comment will become relevant to the discussion.
@liberal: I think there’s a sane medium between what you describe as the Cacti/Martin view (can’t vouch for the accuracy of your description) and Trump’s vow to restart trade wars, which Sanders has all but endorsed, sight unseen.
Obama has tried to walk that sane medium, and I was one of the folks who criticized his policy of relying too much on corporate influence in the negotiations and giving labor short shrift. Honestly, it seems quaint to recall it now.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: 99% of the people who use the word “neoliberalism” mean “claims to be liberal but isn’t really.” They think “neo” means “pseudo.” Hillary Clinton never once has spoken in favor of market-based solutions for anything. The only thing that’s even close to “neoliberal” about her is that she likes the idea of building the American economy with exports.
Suzanne
@liberal: I’m not saying that we should look for someone anti-Wall Street. I’m saying that the vast majority of people don’t truly care, and that there are more important criteria if we want to win elections . Youth, energy, cool.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: or we could put the guy who ran the committee for 2006 and 2008 back in charge.
WereBear
THIS /// a thousand times.
Round up a random hundred people, and how many them know or understand anything about policy on the level routinely discussed on this very blog?
ONE is possible. FIVE would be a miracle. That is what we are dealing with.
sherparick
Dean Baker, at the conclusion of his blog post “Surviving the Age of Trump” points out that the MSM and the Conservative Movement both want to paint this election as a “white working and middle class” v. “the Others.” I don’t completely agree Dean (or Thomas Frank) because they both tend to look on “white” identity as “Real Americans” as a “false consciousness” that people can be disabused of and not something that provides substantial privileges, both tangible and intangible.
“….Anyhow, those are some cheap thoughts on how we can best get through a Trump presidency. Hopefully they are helpful. I will also toss in a word about how we got here. There has been to my mind a very silly debate about whether Trump supporters are driven by racism, xenophobia, and misogyny or whether they are driven by economic factors.
I consider this debate silly since both are obviously important in my view. Racism, xenophobia, and misogyny are deeply rooted in society and few of us can claim to be completely devoid of these sentiments. The question is how these hatreds can come to be the defining feature of political life for large numbers of people and here I think the economic policies of the last four decades have played a crucial role.
I would argue that we have pursued policies that have been deliberately designed to shift income upward over this period. (Yes, this is the topic of my book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Market Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer, which I don’t mind plugging, since it’s free.) It is understandable that the losers from these policies would be looking to lash out at the (perceived) winners. Voting for Trump was a way these people could spit in the face of the people who they see as wrecking their lives.
It’s not pretty, but the best way to respond is to give them real ways to improve their lives and stop having all the benefits from growth go to those at the top. Trump is not going to help the people who have been left behind, and we have to make this fact as clear as possible. But we should also be showing them policies that will have substantial and direct effects in improving their lives.” http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/surviving-the-age-of-trump
Barbara
@FlipYrWhig: Trump is also sui generis and cannot be replicated. I doubt if anyone is going to be able to get away with the crass appeal to race that so excited his voters.
liberal
@Jeffro:
I agree, but you’re not going to be able to back that with much in the way of policies if you think deferring to Wall St. is the right way to go, like almost everyone on this thread seems to think.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Lots of people hate ISIS, and the Deficit, doesn’t mean they know what those things are. Lots of people think crime rates are soaring and unemployment is at an all time high. Lots of people think climate change is a hoax. Lots of people think Obamacare only benefits black people. Lots of people probably still think Saddam Hussein did 9/11.
Ella in New Mexico
@liberal:
The point I was trying to make–but obviously didn’t– is that I live in a rural area, and all the whites I know who voted Trump are not having economic difficulties. My relatives and others I know voted for Trump also live in rural areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. None of them, most in the 40’a, 50’s and 60’s or older, are doing poorly right now.
All of us usually struggle financially in our early years. Some go to college, others don’t. Some change careers or get new training or education later in life. My husband and I have struggled like hell financially my entire adult life, never really ever making any decent money until I changed careers and went into nursing, so here I am in my mid-50’s trying to catch up for retirement while paying back my own student loans and helping my remaining two kids thru college. I get it–it sucks to not have all the financial freedom we’re told we should have during our early to middle years.
But none of these people are doing poorly now, and most never have. So I guess what I’m saying is, why the hell are they so angry, so bitter, so ready to wreck the country? Why do so many of them still believe bullshit conspiracy theories about Obama and Clinton, or think things like outlawing abortions or gay marriage or killing Social Security and Medicare won’t ever happen?
Because it’s not about economic insecurity. It’s about a whole lot of other, far uglier and harder to reach things. If people didn’t vote, personally I don’t think it’s because they were angry, disaffected white working class people. I think they are either just lazy, disconnected or don’t really care.
Maybe my snapshot is warped, I don’t know.
liberal
@sherparick: Nah. Don’t take advice from Dean Baker, who was one of the very few people who predicted the housing bubble at an early date.
Much better to rely on Wall St. dollars, Silicon Valley, identity politics, and last but not least celebrate open borders. There’s our ticket to success!
D. Mason
@liberal: Maybe, but wasn’t the question in the OP about how we move the discussion away from “white” without excluding those individuals? For whatever reason those voters feel left out of the Democratic platform. I recognize the need to leave our references to a specific racial group, so I tried to find a variable that wasn’t tied to color. There are rural minorities, the number is much smaller than urban areas but it’s still important and they’re being neglected just like their white neighbors so honestly what’s the problem?
gvg
@Cain: Yes, I do think he may try to prosecute Clinton. He is stupid about the people who don’t like him. He hasn’t been conditioned by prior politics, he has been conditioned by reality TV. I really think he might go after lots of people. Other republicans and media are also on the list. Even Obama.
I think if his after election rallies turn out to be duds from his point of view he will look around for ways to get that attention again. The attention a president gets isn’t really like the candidate attention. He isn’t going to like this and will try to change things.
I wonder how NYC is going to react to the closing airspace around all the return visits of Trump who doesn’t seem to want to leave home. Actually I have been dreading imagining his redecorating the WH. He has been the bad taste example I think of since the 70’s and it also less seriously horrifies me that some people actually think he has taste. gold plating everything and making it Rocco is not taste.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: Also, do people who are pissed that the factory closed attribute blame for that to “Wall Street”?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@liberal: the candidates who defer to Wall St won in 2010, 2014 and 2016.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Trade wars started the Great Depression. That’s what we got the last time Republicans controlled all three branches of the government.
Suzanne
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: You’re exactly right. I have been kvetching about “the brand” for a long time. Trump is really good at this. He is a master of this. Obama is also great at it, without effort. We need a grand story of what it means to be a Democrat and passionate, amazing people to push it. Not policy specifics and getting wrapped around the axle about shit no one cares about.
liberal
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yawn.
Another Holocene Human
Want to rant about what I’m seeing and hearing today.
Bernie Sanders is on daytime talk. St Bernie is going to be the John McCain of TV. I revile him.
Looked at the student newspaper to see where the students were at. A lot of pain. Talk about protests. A Black Lesbian wrote a giant rant about what Trump winning means to her which included an aside about how it was a fact that Hilary Clinton harmed communities of color in the 1990s. Thanks, Bernie Bros. You have successfully propagandized the youths and allowed a real white supremacist to win.
The student newspaper’s official op-ed said something that resonated with me: which was, no more talk about how it’s a politician’s “turn”. Indeed. It was Ann Romney’s “turn” and Mitt lost embarrassingly. It was Hilary’s “turn” so all of the party’s leading lights stayed away from the primary … and here we are. Obama is not the only politician who can turn out votes. Tired of the black/white thinking.
Diane Rehm show led off with the zombie lie that the “white working class” handed Trump the win. This is just white supremacy on steroids, claiming against evidence that working families bringing in less than 50K$ a year have solidarity with well to do contractors and such making over $70K a year just because they both happen to be white. Not. True. And while working families of color vote differently than working families who are white, they both vote majority Democratic and they’re about 20pts apart, not 50pts apart in voting habits.
To the OP, use the language of the labor movement: working families. Hilary’s campaign–I don’t fault Hilary the person, but the campaign failed here–did not speak directly to working families. Whether it was wavering on TPP, whispering on fight for $15, or just failing to give canvassers and phone bankers some sort of coherent programme to share with targetted households, no message got across to working families to motivate them to vote.
trollhattan
@Starfish:
IDK. Having read their platform Libertarians are interested in getting rid of federal government and those lawyers not actively working on their cases. And some other stuff but mostly getting rid of federal government.
liberal
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Great. You wanna continue sucking up to Wall Street because you think it’s just or winning, fine by me. Me, I think it’s neither just nor winning. But you go on supporting the people who love celebrating upwards transfer of wealth.
DCF
@Betty Cracker:
ALMOST Everyone Was Wrong About The Election
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZhjp3hDIJQ
The Young Turks (including Cenk Uygur) have been warning of this electoral outcome for months; I feel it makes more sense to warn others away from the likes of MSNBC, CNN, et al – unless one only feels comfortable residing in an echo chamber….
liberal
@Another Holocene Human:
Huh? How could that be? Hillary is a tribune of the people, as is Barack “soon to be venture capitalist” Obama!
jenn
@schrodinger’s cat: Where on earth is this false factoid coming from? I’ve seen it elsewhere, too. Not arguing Republicans controlling all 3 branches isn’t bad, but they controlled that for much of Bush 2’s administration.
FlipYrWhig
@Major Major Major Major: We could, but while we’re doing it, we should remember that the Democratic majority was never a liberal majority. The romanticism around Dean seems to imagine that by being more like Dean we’d have a more liberal party. The majority Dean delivered included a fair number of Heath Shulers and Mike Arcuris. I’d gladly take that now myself, but it wasn’t a majority based on liberalism or populism, that’s for sure.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: WT? White trash?
People making less than $50k voted for Hillary. People who make more voted for that orange thing.
liberal
@Suzanne:
I don’t think he’s “good” at anything. It turned out he had a winning shtick. That was just luck. It’s not like he had a different shtink and cleverly adapted himself to the environment after reading various signals.
Suzanne
@liberal: NO ONE THINKS deferring to Wall Street is a great idea. We are saying that most voters DO NOT CARE and that they make their decisions based on other criteria. Do you want to win again ever? EVER? Then I suggest we figure this shit out.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: The point is to have the most liberal candidate that can win.
Take Tammy Duckworth. Americans for Democratic Action rated her an 85%. That piss fucking poor for someone who’s going to represent IL, which isn’t exactly deep red.
Peale
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Again, I don’t know. I know I know, you can’t trust exit polls, but the one I saw that came out for the LGBT voters said it ended up 84% vote for Hillary. You can’t really get higher than that.
Jack the Second
There is, or was, absolutely a white (male) working class, independent of the rest of the working class.
The WWC was always materially different from the rest of the working class, in that it used to be possible to earn a good, respectable living with a job you got straight out of highschool. You’d earn three, four times minimum wage, you’d get a pension, your wife probably wouldn’t need to work and you could pay for your kids to go to college.
A lot of it is nostalgia, but insomuch as the working class used to do alright, it was only available to white men.
The white working class was also always culturally separate from the rest of the working class — they carefully guarded themselves, and a lot of these old unions were none too happy to let women, blacks, or immigrants in. They never saw themselves in solidarity with the rest of the working class, they always saw themselves as separate, good people, upstanding people, white people.
You can claim there’s no white working class, just working class, but a lot of them don’t feel that way.
liberal
@Suzanne: Uh, a lot of people here at Balloon Juice either think Wall St is a great idea, or they’re so ill-informed that they think the likes of Dodd-Frank was some kind of death blow.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
But getting liberals on board is still important. Poor turnout was one of the things that hurt us in this election, so it’s still possible that picking a candidate who looks like Republican Lite will be a loser strategy.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: Yes. I am aware that most of the real working class voted for HRC. But there is a “typical person” that we are really discussing here, who clings to guns and evangelical religion, drives a big truck, eats at Chili’s, etc etc etc. (Yes, I know that there are exceptions and this is a broad brush.)
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: I don’t really think people are pushing Dean for anything other than the pragmatic reason that he delivered congress and the presidency to the party. The people who want Ellison are the ones hoping for ideological clarity.
@Another Holocene Human: this is something that’s been bothering me. Who was saying it’s “Hillary’s turn”? Nobody I’ve met. I wanted Hickenlooper to run but he didn’t. She was the best candidate available.
RinaX
@RinaX:
To my point:
liberal
@Suzanne:
I’m saying that if you have a neoliberal, Wall-Street connected Dem, it’s going to be very hard for them to craft a truly populist message, regardless of what policies they propose.
liberal
@Major Major Major Major:
LOL. You’re out of your fucking mind.
Fair Economist
@schrodinger’s cat:
Total myth. The Great Depression was started by a financial crisis (like most depressions). The trade wars that free-trade economists like to blame cost less that 1/10 of 1% of the economy – rounding error, basically.
tobie
@Another Holocene Human: My partner said yesterday that Sanders broke the Democratic party and I think he’s right. If we become the protectionist party, we will have lost all intellectual legitimacy as a party. Smoot-Hawley, here we come. The consequences will be devastating.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@liberal: is campaigning against the carried interest rule “sucking up to Wall St”? Is proposing increases in marginal tax rates “sucking up to Wall St”? Why did the floor of the NYSE start chanting “lock her up” during Clinton’s concession speech? Didn’t they get the memo from Dimon and Blankfein that she was their candidate?
facts mean nothing to you.
Peale
@FlipYrWhig: The Democratic Majority in New York isn’t really all that liberal. Christ, we have 7 Democrats in the state senate who bolted the Party, Kept the label because it gets votes, but vote to keep a Republican senate. Were those Democrats punished by voters? Nope. They are all back in office again and now they have even one more new member. And these are all “update Dems trying to hang on in deep red districts.”
Suzanne
@liberal: Wrong. Trump is a master at self-promotion, about having an instinct for what people want to hear and how they want to feel. It is the only thing he is good at. Underestimate it at your peril.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@RinaX: Is he talking about Vermont or Brooklyn?
WereBear
@D. Mason: Hi, I know I’ve been hard in you in other threads, and have wanted to apologize about any heat in our discussion. Emotions running high.
If it helps, you are not going to compete with mass manufacturing from places like the rising Third World, at least not until we are all also making a nickel an hour or the like. What will work is retooling your business into some kind of attractive niche, like hand-worked cabinets or custom hobby stuff or even, for the luvaallthatsholy, an item crafted to actually work longer than six months. You said you liked to work with your hands, I remember.
My disgust with the current trend of crappy manufacturing is to buy an electric kettle and a French press instead of a coffee-maker, buying vintage and used clothes I could never afford new, buying Apple with maxed memory because they last 2-3 times as long and also have trade-in value, and if it comes to that, putting our mattress on the floor because the bedframe we bought is made of powdered crap mixed with white glue and put together with screws half the size and grip they should be.
We will buy quality if it is offered.
You can’t do it on quantity. You have to do it on quality.
liberal
@Major Major Major Major:
No, the people who criticize Ellison do so because they like the fact that the Dems currently are the liberal wing of the business party. The people pushing Dean are too stupid to understand that the fact he was a lobbyist for the terrorist group MEK should be disqualifying.
gvg
@liberal: where are you getting that deferring to Wall Street bull? Not agreeing that this election was economic does not equal Wall Street isn’t a problem. As a matter of fact Hillary had some good ideas about regulating shadow banking and other issues that related to what really went wrong as opposed to everybody always hates the bankers emotion without having a clue how to actually fix it. for that matter, not all of Wall Street is causing or caused our problems. Having a stable banking system that doesn’t crash and take everybodies savings every few years really does benefit us all. I happen to think our tax policies are a lot of the cause but it is complicated. Not a sound byte, reality. Trump demonstrated he doesn’t have a clue and won’t be able to help even slightly but the emotional chose to project their incoherent desires on to him. Nobody that hangs around here actually likes Wall Street. They need regulation AND we need better tax policy. She had those ideas. Bernie and Trump don’t.
schrodinger's cat
@Fair Economist: It is not a myth. Hoot Smalley act was the initial catalyst. The financial crisis was the culmination.
tobie
@RinaX: OMG. The guy is such a vain, self-righteous prick. He’s in Trump’s league.
liberal
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Fuck you. Get back to me when people start advocating taxing capital gains at the same rate as wage income, plus a transaction tax on trades.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Peale: right, but how many of those voters had cousins or co-workers who figured “Trump doesn’t mean all the really bad stuff” who would’ve thought twice if they heard more about Pence’s policies. Again, we’re talking about margins> Clinton died the death of a thousand cuts
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: well that citation wouldn’t even get you through a paper in middle school.
JMG
Democrats have won the so-called white working class in 3 of the last 17 Presidential elections. We are talking about improving a minority share of a demographic (Obama won 40 percent of it and won handily). So I don’t think sweeping generalities are useful. A specific targeted message that some might hear and consider is what is possible. I would guess (what would I know) that the message of Republican betrayal after you trusted them might ring a bell for some.
Suzanne
@liberal: If we can’t figure out how to sell a story (even if it isn’t true), then we will never win elections again. Trump figured it out, by saying that “it takes one to catch one”. Turn your negatives into positives. Because he is GOOD AT THIS.
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: what a convenient theory: everybody who isn’t you is evil and/or stupid. Now I remember why I stopped reading your comments. Go fuck yourself.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@liberal: go have your juice and take a nap
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
Could we make Election Day a paid national holiday? Perhaps that could put a dent in the number of people who didn’t vote? Not all states have early voting or mail in ballot, and as some else has pointed out, mail in ballot can cause “patriarchs” to control the votes of family members, women in particular.
MazeDancer
Thank you @rikyrah
It cannot be overstated how much the church binds white society in the South in toxic, patriarchal ways. All kinds of privileged, white women like to talk about how “the Lord” will tell them what to do and “the Lord” will handle it.
No church, no society, no community.
“Emails!” made it worse. Heard lots of “I just don’t trust her.” When asked why – emails.
Two other things cannot be overlooked.
1) Hillary won.
She ran on the most open, loving, egalitarian platform in history, against the FBI, Russians, and the patriarchy, and millions more Americans said “Right on, Girl!” There is hope.
2) We have to face the racism and misogyny first.
First the emotions, then the economics. GOP is based on racism and misogyny. But Dems got our own.
Bernie’s power grab about economic issues will only destroy us more. The rot in America is about emotions.
Democrats are mostly Black and Brown people and some white women. They matter first. No matter how much the media likes to overlook those groups. We cannot dump them now for some pampered white people’s ideas of priorities. (And it is only being on Twitter engaging with wise Black and Brown women that taught this white girl that. Helped me understand why they so loathed Bernie.)
Yes, Comey intervention and Bernie trashing Hillary and media smearing Hillary are big part of why 107K people in the rust belt got to call the election. But what that technicality revealed is not that we need to instantly reach out to more racists.
Bernie is asking women and people of color to line-up behind him like every member of the patriarchy has for centuries. And using the “it’s not the time to fight ourselves” malarky. Yes, it is. It is time to be real with ourselves. We have to face our own issues or we won’t be able to fight the GOP.
Apologies for the long rant. Thanks for the therapy.
bluefoot
@rikyrah: It’s the difference between interests and values. People are willing to vote against their interests (e.g. economic improvement, safety net, etc) if the vote aligns with their values (e.g. anti-abortion, white supremacy). And you’re right, there are many whites – those who voted for Trump and many who stayed home since they couldn’t be bothers to vote against fascism, xenophobia, etc – who do not want policies that work for all. Consciously or not.
Also a side note: there has been a lot of pixels spilled about how people can’t be racist because they voted for Obama. Well, a lot of things have changed since 2012. I personally know many white Obama voters who think his empathy for Trayvon Martin (“it could have been my kid”) was step too far, who see Black Lives Matter or even football players taking a knee during the national anthem as an existential threat. As I’ve said before, their comfort/feelings are more important to them than actual lives at risk or lost.
The Moar You Know
@Timurid: Not saying it’s OK, but can you deal with permanent minority status? Because that may very well be where such a stratagem takes us.
Last Monday I’d have laughed and said we were on the right track. I no longer take anything I have previously thought for granted, including whether the Dem party can be a truly inclusive party and survive. I frankly no longer believe this to be the case, even though it is unquestionably the right thing to do.
Me, I’d rather go down being right than wrong, and my study of Nazi history reveals that, whether you fought them or did what you were told, you died anyway. So might as well fight ’em.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire: my fear there is that people make it into a four day weekend. I’d rather see a focus on early voting and VBM
tobie
@MazeDancer: Don’t apologize. Rant on!
Patricia Kayden
@RinaX: Great point. Why is the term working class being equated to White workers? How does it exclude workers of color in a multicultural, multiracial and increasingly diverse country?
@Timurid: Exactly. Zero tolerance of racism. Let racists stick with the Repubs.
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I saw some numbers that way more people blame Washington for their problems than Wall St right now.
Barbara
@Another Holocene Human: It’s never anyone’s turn except the voters. That’s my new response to anyone who thinks that a political party is the equivalent of the PTA or a country club. Too many people are affected by the decisions of this particular club for it to be trying to hand the prize to its favorite contestant. I supported Clinton the whole way and I think she was better than any of the other three for a variety of reasons. But she is not necessarily the best that could have been running and to the extent there was any clearing of the decks, it should cease now and never be repeated. Every primary should be a boxing match.
NorthLeft12
Being a plus 50, middle class white male up here in Canada, I would probably fit into the profile of the most common Deadbeat Donald supporter, except for the uneducated part. From my understanding, a very large segment of the educated whites voted for Trump, too.
On one level I understand the anxiety of job insecurity. I have changed jobs three times in my career, and narrowly avoided a fourth in 2009 when my company went broke and was saved [yes saved] by being bought for pennies on the dollar by a Middle East country. No Canadian, US or European corporation would step in and buy us. Not every company or employee was so lucky back then.
However, I never turned my anxiety into anger towards my government, or minorities, or immigrants. I just have a complete disconnect with those people on that issue. Perhaps that was because I had a more portable and marketable skill [Chemical Engineering], or perhaps I just have a different belief system? I really can’t say, but I have very little/no compassion or empathy for people who would embrace ignorance, hate, bigotry, and selfishness so eagerly and passionately.
Good luck with the future, you have provided a valuable lesson for us up here in Canada that yes, it can happen here.
gvg
By the way, I think the reason people want Dean is he is credited with the 50 state strategy. I know he didn’t really invent it and didn’t live up to it from people here with more detailed knowledge, but he definitely said it in a way that got repeated and lived on. Democrats generally think that is a good idea and most aren’t plugged in enough to know all the caveats about the strategy nor Dean. Non swing state voters always feel neglected and local voters get annoyed when they don’t have a Dem to vote for.
I think he is too old and wasn’t actually that good, but I read his name coming up as people wanting to fight back everywhere. So who has actually been good at getting candidates for all areas? Who is a good manager?
germy
All this puzzled head scratching. “Where did we go wrong?? WWC… wrong ads? Didn’t schedule enough wisconsin appearances? Where did we go wrong?”
The RealAmericans™ have been bombarded since 1988 by propaganda. Our good friend Lush Rimbaugh was just the beginning.
Several years ago we had a gas leak in our old house. I called the emergency number for local utility. It didn’t take long for a utility truck to show up. Older white guy in uniform. And Lush Rimbaugh was blasting on his truck radio, full volume. I was standing outside our house and I could hear the fucking talk, something about “what the liberals want to do to us.” The man was polite and professional, but I knew if I asked him his opinions, he’d repeat word for word what he’d just heard.
I spend a ton of time on the road. I go up and down the radio dial, and every talk radio station is syndicated hannity, or a bunch of local radio talkers who spout the same line. That nice contractor you hired to fix your roof? He’s listening. That nice lady who trims your hair? She’s listening.
And at night it’s even worse. I worked the night shift for two years. While driving to and from work I’d see what was available on my car radio. One guy (he’s nationally syndicated; I can’t remember his name, he’s the one that got caught coming out of a gay bar) was playing some outrageously racist shit; a white man imitating a black woman on welfare. Our neighbors are listening.
I need an oil change or my brakes relined; I sit in the waiting room. Guess what TV station is on? And guess what they’re saying about HRC and Obama? Accusations and theories that would have made balloon-juicers laugh their asses off two weeks ago. And the guy fixing my car is listening.
The narrative has been framed. It was framed thirty years ago, thanks to Rupert and Rimbaugh and the rest of the talkers. They’ve been talking non-stop for decades, and our neighbors and the good folks who leave their “opinions” on our local newspaper online comments under the name “TruePatriot” or “REalAmerican” repeat every word they say.
Air America and safety pins aren’t going to reverse that tide.
D. Mason
@WereBear: I agree wholeheartedly and in fact make things in the way you describe. Higher quality both in terms of function and durability and more aesthetic products. I also put great care into my sales presentation and follow up so that my customers know I will be a reliable vendor in the future which is a problem they struggle with. It keeps me afloat but I also know that any inch of ground given to the foreign competitor might be the last inch for me. That keeps me up at night.
Another Holocene Human
@The Moar You Know: Way to set yourself on fire. We aren’t a minority. We did a crummy GOTV and bungled campaign and didn’t win the EC. The state houses lag what happens with the POTUS vote so we are hitting the high water mark for GOP control of state houses. Hardly permanent minority status.
If you listen to folks who didn’t vote for us they felt like the Dems didn’t articulate a plan to make their lives better. Poor people’s economic insecurity is the story here, not employed contractors making $70K. They’ve always been GOP. Fuck them.
Jeffro
@Suzanne:
Seconded. And in the meantime, we need to get busy – it’s only 50 days ’til 2017, and 2018 is right around the corner.
Barbara
@rikyrah: I don’t know that you can say that the people who consider themselves to be the white working class are voting against their economic interests. This is a trope that is repeated without examination. The specifically white working class tend to be older, better paid, and so on than their younger and non-white cohorts and they may feel better served by low taxes than by other things. Yes, I agree that they are voting their racial resentment as well, but nobody ever said the two could not go hand in hand. I also think that people are discounting the thumb on the scale here because there are some people who are unlikely to ever vote for a woman for president.
GrandJury
I don’t think Dems need to change a thing. A lot of people are going to read that and say WTF?!
Repubs have now been given a lot of rope and they are gonna hang themselves big time. Just give them more rope. They actually have to govern now and like always they are gonna fail.
A spectacularly idiotic prez making outlandish promises and outright lies is probably going to been seen as a phony (to all the morons who voted for him) a lot quicker than a more moderate person who didn’t go as far with their rhetoric.
He is already walking back a lot of his bullshit about getting rid of Obamacare and deporting millions of immigrants. He doesn’t know how to govern so I don’t expect them know how to navigate the politics.
It’s gonna a be a spectacular fail that will happen much sooner than usual for a new administration. At least that is my hope. A lot of things are out of the ordinary with this situation so perhaps the speed and depth of failure will be too.
So just give them more rope. Dems and their policies are the right ones and don’t need change. Tweaking, yes, fresh blood, absolutely, different policies….no.
WereBear
@D. Mason: Do you promote your products yourself? Not just to vendors, but to potential customers who can be channeled to vendors?
RinaX
It won’t be the first time. Giving us civil rights kind of sank the Dems in the South. I mean, thanks for that, but it is what it is.
President Obama actually gave focus and value to various struggles that black folks have been dealing with for decades, such as police brutality. Joe Biden gave much-needed focus on rape victims. And to that end, there has been a significant rise in hatred spewed on all sorts of blogs. I love pop culture, but you can barely get through any article on sites like People.com without running into people going on about BLM, and women playing the victim, it’s just sick.
It will most likely take yet another series of disasters to uproot the current administration and their lackeys. And most likely, once yet another Dem president does their best to fix things, these types will go right back to voting against their interests.
Another Holocene Human
@germy: I’m listening to WCPT right now. I believe you can get it on Sirius? Lots of folks I know got satellite radio and never looked back and I’m looking into joining them.
Barbara
@Jeffro: Well, hell, here in Virginia, the governor’s race is less than one year away!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
??
the people being interviewed or writing? or the people in the comments section?
patrick II
Racism and economics has been historically linked — slavery to start with. Then by the fact of the lesser economic conditions of minorities in the aftermath of slavery. Instead of opting for a more balanced economy, the republican party has kept that alive by using minorities as scapegoats while they steal both white and black blind. They have been adept at giving themselves huge tax cuts while blaming the worsening economic conditions on welfare for minorities. So, as long as we talk either/or we won’t get at the crux of the problem — the long con being played by right wing media than links white (particularly male) wage stagnation with minorities and foreign trade with foreigners.
Another Holocene Human
@GrandJury: Yup yup yup
Jim, Foolish Literalist
don’t forget Reagan. Government isn’t the solution, government is the problem. Which led to this;
@Another Holocene Human: I saw some numbers that way more people blame Washington for their problems than Wall St right now.
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It is the age of the internet troll
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@Another Holocene Human: If they are so mad at Washington, how come they never punish the Republicans? Oh yeah, they hate blacks/browns, women, LGBTQ, and Muslims more.
They don’t want a fix to their problems, they want superiority.
germy
@Another Holocene Human: Satellite radio?
When I voted, I stood in line with some guys who looked like they were voting straight GOP. I suspect it was their first time voting, because they tried to feed the big cardboard folder that covers their ballot into the scanning machine. They needed help, they’d never done it before.
They don’t have radio satellite subscriptions. AM radio in their trucks.
Lots of folks I know got satellite radio
And the rest of the folks are listening to Hannity or their local right wing talker on their AM/FM dial.
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: MBF. It’s not DC it’s the damn GOP!
CaseyL
No, no, no, no, NO. This is not about WWC or any of that nonsense: Hillary won the popular vote and would have won the EV if not for low turnout, and the low turnout was at least partially due to voter suppression.
The ONLY question is how do we fix low turnout? how do we fight voter suppression?
Forget about a national movement because we do not not have national elections. We have state elections, where each State determines whether and how its inhabitants can vote.
FOCUS ON THE STATES. Take back the governorships and state legislatures. Have Democrats as Secretaries of State overseeing the election process.
Don’t fight the wrong battle. That’s a misuse of resources and will fail.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
I love, just love, how the same people who say government is the problem are the first ones asking for government assistance after a natural disaster, and will then fight tooth and nail against aid for blue states in the same situation.
How Jesus-y of them.
Another Holocene Human
@germy: Don’t disagree, just see no reason I or we need to subject ourselves to Shmannity just bc everyone else does.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Holocene Human: MBF?
D. Mason
@WereBear: Honestly not really, I use Facebook and Instagram and do get an occasional hit from there, but even then it’s usually a wholesale thing. My plate is pretty full and I rely on my shops to sell my products, which might be the wrong strategy I acknowledge, but it’s the route I chose and I wouldn’t know where to begin with a strategy shift.
Another Holocene Human
@Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire: Trent Lott’s house.
RinaX
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The comments sections.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Norm Ornstein was on Brian Beutler’s podcast (highly recommended, btw) and he recalled that when he and his co-writer published their book about asymmetrical polarization, aka the Republicans are the problem, they also published a long op-ed in the Washington Post that the Post gave the headline (something like) Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem. It was at that time the most read piece ever at the Post’s website. Ornstein and Mann were expecting to be invited on the Sunday shows, they weren’t. Ornstein watched them all and waited for the subject to come up. It didn’t. He later heard that a friend who was on the CBS panel with Shieffer asked the host why he hadn’t brought the piece up. Scheffer brushed it off, his brain just couldn’t process the idea that Both Sides Are Equally To Blame is not the baseline for any political discussion.
germy
@Another Holocene Human: I can’t listen to him for more than thirty seconds; he’s vile. I’m just saying he’s all over the radio dial in every market. And exactly when the assholes are driving home from work, or on their way in the morning to their next landscaping job.
Larkspur
I can’t help feeling that the real problem is that this country doesn’t want or need a huge section of its population, including people like me who are oldish and low-income and don’t provide essential services. If we just disappeared, a big problem would disappear with us, because we’re running out of what value we’ve had up till now: we’ve been consumers, we buy things. But our buying power continues to drop (although I may be an outlier because I don’t have a credit card and I don’t have children whose needs I’d be compelled to go into credit card debt for), so if we’re not needed as workers and can’t provide value as consumers, then what are we for? We could simply disappear and we wouldn’t be missed. I’m aware that this comment doesn’t contribute to the discussion, but this feeling of being superfluous, even burdensome or detrimental, is pretty strong in me, and I’m nearer the end of my life than the beginning or middle. What it must feel like to a younger person is chilling.
Another Holocene Human
@MazeDancer: FUCK that self righteous crank, Bernie SAnders. Even his initials spell BS.
GrandJury
@Another Holocene Human: SirusXM is worth the subscription just to get rid of the commercials. For most channels anyways.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne:Hey now, I eat at Chili’s when I get a chance. Their Southwestern egg rolls are divine. We have a pickup that my white husband drives; it’s bright yellow, so I think you mean big, black trucks (for some reason the assholes drive those, but not all who drive them are assholes). And I have my great-grandpa’s guns as well as a number of other tools of his (I’d be afraid to try to fire them). And we made more than $100k when he worked, and we have a nice retirement aside from SS, and money in the bank, and we used to be Republicans.
I think the only differences are that we are not Evangelicals (and that term has been co-opted to mean something far different from its original meaning), and that these people are bigots.
germy
No, no, no, no, NO. This is not about WWC or any of that nonsense: Hillary won the popular vote and would have won the EV if not for low turnout, and the low turnout was at least partially due to voter suppression.
The truth.
I was hoping the DNC would address that problem. I thought they had a strong GOTV effort going on. They need to double down. Is Keith Ellison the person to address that, or is Howard Dean? Whoever heads the DNC, the number one effort should be to reverse voter suppression.
Otherwise, say hello to President Cruz in four years. Followed by President Cotton, President Mike Savage, and President Lewandowski.
germy
@WereBear:
And we can’t compete with countries with full government-sponsored healthcare.
rikyrah
@germy:
Man…..I would have cursed that bytch out.
Denali
@MazeDancer,
This, a thousand times
@Germy,
This, a thousand times. Saw the original Machurian Candidate recently. A significant part of our population has been brainwashed.
germy
@opiejeanne:
did you see the story about the Black veteran who had his meal taken away from him at Chili’s?
http://www.businessinsider.com/chilis-refuses-black-veteran-a-free-meal-2016-11
They’ve since apologized, so I guess no harm, no foul?
I won’t be eating there.
Joel
@Betty Cracker: A lot of people have no fucking idea what they’ve done. This is true in every election but the consequences are direr than ever before.
tobie
@Another Holocene Human: My fear is that he and his minions are actually buoyed by the loss and are trying to take over the party with the usual assist from the media that love a Dems in disarray story. Sanders’ maneuvers are dangerous. The vainglorious fool doesn’t care if he destroys the party. It’s all part of the march of dialectical materialism. Cold comfort for the rest of us.
Kay
Don’t go along with any of it unless you want to join the ranks of people who have been suckered and robbed by the Trump Family. don’t volunteer for that! you’ll get robbed anyway just as collateral damage but there’s no requirement to play along .
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: Mrs Carville? I can’t bring myself to watch it but I saw the clip tweeted out. I read the book she and Caravelle published after the 92 election (I was young, just taking the steps into full political junkie-dom), and he said the reason he’s a Democrat is that he saw the South under Jim Crow and he saw who was right, and who was wrong. If he meant it, he’d have taken his kids as far away from that hate wraith twenty years ago.
Another Holocene Human
@Major Major Major Major: Nobody credible ran because she was running. She took all the oxygen out of the room.
I don’t know where the “it’s her turn” meme originated but we’ve all heard it.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@germy: or countries that finance the education of their people, from early education through college/vocational training. I’m thinking of Germany, specifically.
FoxinSocks
Good afternoon, BalloonJuice!
I’ve decided that I’m really not OK with an anti-Semitic, misogynist, white supremacist being named as Trump’s chief advisor. If this is allowed to stand, it sets a dangerous precent for our country. I’ve started calling my senators and congress critters. Knowing they can’t legally do anything, I nonetheless ask them, “Are you against anti-Semitism? If you are, then what are you going to do about this?”
Most of them say they can’t do anything. They’re powerless (both GOP and Dems). I tell them, no, you’re the most powerful people on earth. Hold a press conference. Raise hell. Speak out. You’re against white supremacism, aren’t you?
Had one office tell me they’re getting a lot of calls on this. Make them uncomfortable. Make them realize it doesn’t have to be this way. If Obama had announced Farrakhan as his chief adviser, the GOP would rightly freak out and make him take the pick back. We need to do that too.
http://www.senate.gov
http://www.house.gov
Keith G
@germy: Yeah, I seldom eat at Chili’s (yuck), but really – royally fuck them to hell after that bit of utter stupidity. Yup it was just one manager, but the whole corp needs to bleed a bit. No excuse.
WarMunchkin
@germy: 100% this. Rush is the establishment media for 47% of the population now.
opiejeanne
@MazeDancer: Applause!
NR
@Another Holocene Human: 2016
2009
Bernie Sanders is not responsible for the decline of the Democratic party, no matter how much you want to scapegoat him.
Another Holocene Human
@NCSteve: Totally agree. For example, higher %age of Black and Latino voters going for Trump (and there are serious questions of the Latino numbers are even accurate, once again) would reflect lower turnout by working class and poor families. It’s not that Blacks and Latinos swung to Trump but that infrequent D voters stayed home this time.
It seems that infrequent D voters in the bottom 40% of all races stayed home in large numbers. That’s where we need to focus. (And yes, some of them were turned away b/c of lack of ID, which we need to address, but more of them could have voted and chose not to.)
germy
@NR: No matter how many times he accused it of corruption.
Another Holocene Human
@NR: Bernie ratfucked our candidate and is now swanning around offering his supposed “answers” which only get us in more trouble. Fuck that guy with a rusty garden weasel.
GrandJury
Dems, Sandernistas (not really the same people as Dems), and most importantly Repubs, don’t have Obama and Hillary to kick around anymore.
So that shit is history. Go find some new scapgoats. Better yet just watch Repubs try govern and blame everything on Dems. We have all seen this movie before. Eventually, even the rubes figure out that it’s not the Dems when there are no Dems running things. So it will be a replay of the Bush Jr years. Only I think (more like hope) they will screw the pooch much bigger and faster, so a much faster crash and burn.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@Larkspur: Actually, I’ve read arguments that the entire world economy is driven by American consumption. Having lived in Europe, I kinda believe that: Europeans aren’t nearly as spendthrift as we are here. I’m sure the emerging upper and middle classes in China and India will pick up our slack, though.
And for what it’s worth, I think you have value, no matter how much you spend, or don’t.
germy
@NR: And if only he’d won the nomination! I’m sure our friends at NBC/ABC/CBS nightly news wouldn’t have mentioned his wife’s college career, or his taxes, or whatever Rupert’s properties would have invented.
WereBear
Okay. And there is your problem.
–You acknowledge it might be the wrong strategy.
–You are clinging to the route you chose in the beginning even though you are starting to be apprehensive about where it leads.
–You don’t know how to shift it. Does that mean you are unable to learn?
Here’s a link that describes how you can do it in mere minutes a day. There are free websites and apps like HootSuite and Bufferapp that will let you schedule a whole week’s worth of tweets and Facebook posts and the like while waiting for the timer to ding on the microwave.
I’m not talking about selling online and undercutting your vendors. I’m talking about how you can get people excited about your products and seek them out at the fine vendors you have listed on your website. You have more business, they have more business, happy customers.
This is how it is done. In the 21st Century. Join us.
Kay
Why do i have to show respect for a president who loathes and disrespects women? why do I have to sacrifice my self respect for Donald Trump?
He has not given one thing, hasn’t moved one inch, so why I a being ordered to move towards him?
He doesn’t hate my “positions”- he hates WHAT I AM. I’m supposed to put that aside and discuss and infrastructure bill? I refuse. That takes something from me. and gives it to the person who insulted and demeaned me.
NR
@Another Holocene Human:
Bullshit. Hillary ratfucked herself in a myriad of ways, and the neoliberal leadership ratfucked the Democratic party for the last eight years, as the data I provided shows.
Set aside your irrational hatred of Bernie Sanders and put the blame for this disaster where it belongs. Or you’ll find yourself in search of new scapegoats for similar disasters in 2018 and 2020.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: I know. Look, this isn’t about specific things. It’s about cultural markers, and please don’t take personal offense. (I used to work in marketing, so I got some insight into how those people think.) I grew up in some genuinely economically precarious situations, but yet I am not in this group, because we are using “WWC” as a shorthand because we don’t have a name for them, like “hipsters” or something else. We are referring to a group of people who are typified by living in urban and rural areas, tend to have higher levels of evangelical church attendance, are more white, are less likely to be college educated. I bet that each of us could come up with at least fifty cultural markers we can associate here.
NR
@germy: Way to completely ignore the real problem that I illustrated in my comment.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Word!
Betty Cracker
@DCF:
Fixed it for you. Just a heads-up next time you post a link is all I’m requesting. Please and thank you!
germy
@WarMunchkin:
I saw this in the comments section at LGM:
Thanks to BiloSagdiyev.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: and the neoliberal leadership ratfucked the Democratic party for the last eight years, as the data I provided shows.
Sometimes you’re so stupid it’s almost endearing, like a baby rhino is so ugly it’s adorable.
But shut the fuck up anyway.
germy
@NR: She’s a neoliberal tool!
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve come to expect such immature responses from you when you’re unable to address the real issues being discussed. If nothing else, you’re consistent.
opiejeanne
@CaseyL: Thank you! Amen to everything you just said.
Kay
@schrodinger’s cat:
He has successfully shifted the responsibility for “bringing the country together” from him to the people he loathes and demeans.
It gets worse every day. This 70 year old man is held accountable for nothing.
Mai.naem.mobile
Jeezus Christ. The Dems and Dem leaners sat on their fat asses at home because Obama was essentially too fucking competent. Yes,everything else contributed to the loss but the Dems don’t get a foot in the door nationally unless you have the Republican fuck up royally. I personally know 5 work related morons who didn’t bother to vote because they were lazy and I am pretty sure they would have voted for Hilz. It’s not like Camacho won in some landslide. You want to change stuff : you need the equivalent to the Breitbart disinformation machine. This may be distasteful to people but you aren’t going to win with just correcting RW garbage. You have to put out your own garbage. Also, I’ve been saying this at least since 08. You need a church equivalent to the evangelicals. I know people who go to those churches and it’s a community,not just a church. I have a friend who is from a liberal LDS family(yes,they exist.) His mom hangs out with the other women not because she agrees with their political views,its because they are her friends. It’s her community. Lots of lonely people out there who go to these churches for friendship not for politics but then get sucked in by the RW propaganda. And it’s not Christians. My older sister is heavily involved in our temple. I am not so I go there once in a blue moon but i noticed recently their little newsletter almost always seems to have pics of a Republican elected official coming in to chat up the higher ups in the Temple. This is a Hindu temple. Most of these people probably think we believe in false idols etc. but they are there to get there votes. I hardly see pics with Dems. I don’t know why.
D. Mason
@WereBear: Thanks for the link, I’ll look for ways I can put some of those ideas into what I’m doing right now. The app for scheduling social media posts seems especially useful to my work. I’m a kind of hermity sort… perfectly willing to learn but I don’t have a natural instinct for the social stuff. Something like that would let me treat that aspect as another work task instead of a lifestyle change. Honestly, thanks.
WarMunchkin
@germy: If we want to extrapolate this further, I think I’d argue that humanity has never come to terms with the concept of objective reality. It’s just that from the Enlightenment to the 70s, one clique of people had their truth and way of discerning truth dominate public life. There is no such thing as truth; there is only whose media and version of truth is dominant and uncontested.
Some other commenter talked about samizdat in rural areas, and that’s where I’d like us to go. I have ideas. And I want to research the history of modern newspapers and why they became the eatablishment.
SatanicPanic
@Emma: One thing I thought of that I’d like to see is getting National Enquirer off the shelves at the supermarket. The paper is offensive right-wing propaganda and I have to look at it every time I go to the store. I’m going to write to mine to tell them to take it down, and I’ll try to get others to do the same.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“neoliberal” is not an issue, dumbass, it’s a meaningless shibboleth thrown around by hysterical emoprogs. And your little map is not “data”
germy
@Mai.naem.mobile:
opiejeanne
@germy: I did see it. It was the manager of that Chili’s who is to blame for this, and should have been fired immediately, but I don’t know what action was taken about his behavior. Do you know what was done about him? The last I heard, the day after the nastiness, upper management was trying to find the victim to apologize to him personally.
We don’t have Chili’s here, so that particular food craving is only rarely satisfied.
I sure as hell will not patronize the Chili’s in that Texas city.
schrodinger's cat
@Mai.naem.mobile: There were Hindus for Trumps, my husband even got forwarded videos from Brietbart.com from his fundie Modi bhakt cousin in India.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It most certainly is, but it’s not surprising that you don’t understand this.
WereBear
@D. Mason: You are honestly welcome :)
rikyrah
@MazeDancer:
Amen for your rant
WereBear
Damn. You are right and that is depressing. It’s a fringe movement.
rikyrah
@Kay:
FIST IN AIR.
WITH MY ANGELA DAVIS WIG ON!!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
hee hee
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: It’s fine, I’m not offended. It’s just that there’s so much overlap with so many good people but I think I do know what you’re getting at.
The people directly across the street are our age: 66+69, white,etc. They live in a multi-million dollar 17,000 sq ft house with a guest house that’s bigger than our house house. They belong to a church whose pastors have little theological education (Assembly of God), and they voted for Trump. The people next door to me live in a more modest house, 2200 sq ft; the owner ran a paving/cement company for many years after her husband died (she poured the foundation for our house in 1995). Her housemate is her ex-employee, a man who owns nothing beside a pickup. He listens to Rush Limbaugh every day, and we can sometimes hear it because he has the volume up so loud. This guy rails against people who have retirement plans, health plans through their work, thinks the trash collectors are making $80k a year (they’re not) and it infuriates him. He has no education, and he is a veteran of the Vietnam war. I know he voted for Trump, and she may have left that space blank. The really old guy next to her living in the single-wide with his also very old girlfriend voted for Trump. The lawyer and his family who live across from them all voted for Clinton, although their adult kids may have been for Bernie for a while.
The people on the other side of us may not have bothered to vote at all despite being very liberal: he may not be a naturalized citizen of this country, and she’s kind of looney tunes.
Starfish
@Matt McIrvin: Their rural police departments do not have the money to buy helicopters, SWAT vehicles, and bomb deploying robots.
gvg
Some of the so called Sanderistas have been so personally offensive lately and again back at the end of the primaries that they are enraging us to shouting how much we hate Sanders etc. I am seriously wondering if they aren’t what are called ratfuckers or paid agents or useful idiots. They are counter productive and are blocking off any examination of certain ideas related to economics.
If you guys are sincere, you need to learn manners. And for every reply that we are yelling back, yes people are snapping at you after you come at us over and over like rabid yappy dogs. You as a cohort are also insisting on a total economic problem and won’t look at how big and nasty the racism sexism problem is being demonstrated this whole campaign not to mention the last 8 years. Most of us also will not listen to all out attacks on the democratic party. They are the only defense too many people have.
I am trying to not blame Sanders for ya’ll. He annoyed me himself, but it lets you off too lightly to push it all on him.
Bailey
@JMG:
Yes, finally a sane comment on this. No one is suggesting that the Dems go full white power mode in the quest to capture some additional white votes necessary to win an election. How about let’s just concentrate on not losing the type of white voters that we can actually get if we talk to them even slightly?
cokane
I do think it’s possible to advance policies that disproportionately impact PoC without making PoC the central thrust of your arguments — Obamacare is a perfect example of this btw. Like it or not, there seem to be something to working class whites being turned off by identity politics. Maybe, I’m wrong, but if you want to win races that tilt even more heavily in favor of white voters such as statehouses, governorships and our congress, this might be the smart tactic.
tobie
@cokane: Do infrastructure spending, free community college, apprenticeships, debt-free college, paid family leave, early enrollment in Medicare, free pre-school for all, raising the minimum wage count here? Or is that more identity politics? Really…this thread has left me bewildered. The infighting’s intense.
Mnemosyne
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:
To this, and also what Suzanne said (and others, too), what we need is a news feed/website of exclusively happy shiny news about what Democrats are doing. We know our voters like positivity, so let’s give it to them in an unending stream like Breitbart gives them an unending stream of hate.
You need propaganda to fight propaganda, and we don’t have to lie any more than the Allies had to lie in WWII.
Mnemosyne
@cokane:
The WWC voted to end Obamacare.
They. Do. Not. Vote. On. Policy.
cokane
@tobie: it’s important to recognize that many voters were not paying as close attention to politics as the readers of this blog. none of those domestic issues got as much play in the national media as say black lives matter. i mean seriously, early enrollment in medicare? did that even make the front page of NYT or WaPo even once this year? Much less cable and network news.
I’m not trying to infight. I’m just talking about some realpolitik here. Statehouse elections are not favorable territory yet for Obama coalition demographics.
cokane
@Mnemosyne: you’ve really brought nothing but despair since the election. i get mourning this defeat, it’s warranted. But staying like this for much longer isn’t helping anything.
pamelabrown53
@D. Mason:
I do believe that it’s the WWC that have self identified as opposed to “working class”.The media harping on it is nothing but a majority of white anchors and their assembled panelists elevating their “concerns” as separate and more important. It’s both a patriarchal and a condescending mirror.
Amaranthine RBG
@Betty Cracker:
1) More latinos voted for Trump than Romney, 2) blacks didn’t band together to elect Trump, but a lot of them stayed home, 3) adjusted for education, low income Asians voted more for Trump than white working class.
So yes, in fact, we do need to figure out how to attract more of these folks to the democratic coalition.
Also, white women went more for Trump than Clinton, so we need to work on getting them in the democratic coalition, too. Apparently Katy Perry themed campaign commercials are not enough.
LAC
@liberal: and another thread gets shit on by fauxgressives fucktards shining up their credentials. You done with your “told ya so” dance?
D58826
I would correct that as 1/4 of the electorate shitting on the 1/4 that voted against Trump and the 1/2 that didn’t bother to vote at all.
I’m not sure if there is anyway to tease out the numbers but would love to know how many of the angry Trump voters are getting medical insurance thru Obamacare and will lose it if the program is repealed.
Beyond that I am exhausted by the what went wrong and how to fix it analysis.
NR
@Amaranthine RBG: Quiet you. The Democratic party’s only problems are racism and Bernie Sanders. Don’t you dare stray from the BJ approved narrative again.
LAC
@cokane: are you fucking kidding me here? Working class whites did not “like” identity politics and that is what the problem is? After this 2016 campaign? Jesus Christ on a crystal meth binge. There is zero hope for this blog having any impact on where we go if this the mentality here.
LAC
@NR: you can stray the fuck off a cliff, frankly.
jl
I think economic dislocation and decline in Midwest had a lot to do with HRC’s defeat, but it is silly to say that it is ‘all about economics’. Who is saying that? I think Trump’s support is a mixed bag. A lot of it is bigotry, no denying that. Lot’s of bigots would like to return to the old bigot days where whites got a special deal. That has to be resisted. Others, I think are so angry, they are liable to make foolish decisions, but even there the picture is mixed. I suspect some bigotry, perhaps subliminal, would push a person to go over to the GOP primary rather than the Democratic primary. Point is, if they had not taken such an economic hit, whatever bigotry was there would be less likely push them in the wrong direction. They would be too busy running their own more successful lives to fret about it.
On the other hand, dismissing economics as having nothing to do with it is, I think, denying reality. It may be true that, on average, Trump supporters have higher than average incomes. But two points. As indicated above, to reach some Trump voters who gave him a protest or anger vote, looking at average over all Trump supporters isn’t helpful. Second, what mos people feel the most, in their lizard brain, is the change in their own circumstances over time. It is true that 2001 and (especially) 2007-9 recessions hit middle class far harder than previous ones, and had very disappointing labor market recoveries. That hit to their own welfare is what angered them. It would nice if human being would take a broader view, but they don’t.
Who uses ‘white working class’? It is a crummy way to look at it. If I have ever used it, it was a slip of the keyboard, and I will try to never use it again.
I do think Sander’s economic message is as important as racial justice and equity message. Need both.
NR
@LAC: You seem nice.
LAC
@Bailey: let’s talk. “hey, I know those blacks, Jews, and Spanish people get to you, right? Always being so blaaaaack and Jewish and speaking in Spanish. But if we can, like, tell them to ,like, you know, not be up in your face so much, can you kinda consider us?”
That kind of talk?
LAC
@NR: you bet. I will even wave goodbye.
NR
@jl: What people here don’t want to talk about is that the problem is much bigger than Trump. Look at comment 177. The simple fact is that the Democratic party has been wiped out as a political force in America outside of the west coast and the northern part of the east coast. It didn’t used to be like this. Back in 2009, things were very different. But then the neoliberal party leadership had its way, and now here we are.
What’s baffling is that people here think that the party leadership that presided over this apocalypse deserves their continued support.
goblue72
Betty and smug liberals like her need to get off their high horse. You can’t even suggest the need to widen the voting coalition of the Democratic Party to re-capture downwardly mobile white households (because they VOTE), without immediately being met with howls of “I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN IF YOU DON’T PRE-AGREE TO AGREE TO EVERYTHING I WANT”, or, the “IF YOU EVEN DARE SUGGEST WE DUMP X OR Y GROUP FROM THE PARTY, I AM OUT OF HERE”. That’s not listening. That’s passive-aggressive pouting.
Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick. Nobody is suggesting figuring out how to talk to downwardly mobile whites automatically means shitting on racial minorities or other minority groups. (Well, actually, we did have a candidate that did that once, and his name was Bill Clinton.) I hear 10 times as much accusations of that than I have actually seen anyone suggesting we do that. Its the Berniebros thing all over again. For every one actual BernieBro seen in the wild, there was 100 smug liberals accusing claiming somebody was a BernieBro. Great fucking strategy there hoss – piss off part of your voter coalition with smug condescension. That always works.
I am sorry to puncture your little bubble, but you fucking lost. And I’m not talking about the White House. I’m talking about the country. Minnesota is controlled by Dems statewide (no gerrymandering, no vote suppression), and Clinton won by a mere 2 points (roughly 45,000 votes). If that doesn’t put a chill in your knickers, I don’t know what will. Almost 3/4 of state legislatures are controlled by the GOP. That is insane. That is the complete collapse of a party’s ability to get voters to vote for candidates under that party’s banner. You can’t blame that shit on Comey, because this has been a slow but continual problem that has festered for long enough that its now turned into a black hole about to eat the entire country. And I am sorry, but recycled Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition shit ain’t it. We ran that play in a white pantsuit and it blew up on us. Its one thing to NOT dump on various groups in our coalition. Its another thing to push the “the U.S. is changing so you’d better just accept it NOW” stuff. Nobody likes to change. Trick is getting folks to change without them feeling like they are being forced to.
And “waiting for Trump to implode” is not a strategy. Just as “pointing out what an a-hole he is” was not a strategy. Market analysts are already predicting a short term boost to the economy from the tax cuts and deficit spending, so hoping for a downturn in 2018 isn’t something to rely on. And we need a 2018 beachhead because re-districting is around the corner. It might already be lost. We needed to make gains in 2016 to get a head start, and we lost.
mai naem mobile
@schrodinger’s cat: there was a Trump ad running on one of Dish Networks Indian stations. There was also another one I saw which did not specifically mention Hilz but it had a Sarah Silvermans 08 schlepping ad vibe to it. A bunch of young people asking their parents to vote against hate.I very rarely watch Indian teepee so I have no idea how often either one ran.
mai naem mobile
@LAC: stop feeding the troll.
NR
@goblue72: This, a thousand times over. I don’t know how many here will face facts, but thanks for trying.
LAC
@mai naem mobile: which one? Seems like BJ is full of them and this blog seems to be content to be a warehouse for them now.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@goblue72: you post on that Greyhound bus on your way to goddam Illinois to start that Revolution, Dwight? Are you feeling Malcom-y today?
NR
@goblue72: One other important point here. Whenever anyone brings up the massive political failure of the Democratic party in this election and for the last eight years, peope here bleat “Well what’s YOUR strategy???!?” Which completely misses the fucking point.
When a CEO drives his company into a ditch, loses a billion dollars, and has to lay off half the workforce, you don’t go to the guy working in the mailroom and say “What’s YOUR strategy for fixing this?” You sack the CEO and his leadership team and bring in someone new. And you sure as hell don’t pick someone who says he’s going to do the exact same stuff the last guy did.
So that’s my strategy. Get rid of the party leadership that has proven it can’t win elections and replace them with leaders who can. Start listening to the people who have been right all along. Pretty simple.
Mike in dc
An example of how to tailor policy to those of the SEC willing to listen:
1. A rural redevelopment bill, with things like rural broadband and incentives for small businesses and small factories to locate and hire in rural areas. Maybe some education grants too.
2. A farm bill, directed more at small farm owners
3. A general jobs and infrastructure Bill, aimed at the working class more broadly.
Then you have something you can point to, while you’re tailoring your rhetoric to a WWC audience. No need to neglect other core constituencies, either.
jl
I;m not even sure the problem in the Democratic establishment is the relative priority of economic versus civil rights issues.
The BIG problem with HRC, to me, and one of the reasons why I supported Sanders in the primary, is that her initial proposals were extremely status-quo on some important issues, as if everything was OK with the tax structure, income inequality, and the PPACA and minor tinkering would be a great plan. I didn’t think it was. I wondered if Obama were able to run again, if he would have run on such a status quo program himself, on issues that were very prominent and important.
HRC would have been a great technocrat in gradually incrementally improving policy, both in economics and civil rights. The problem was that many in the country were not in the mood for that. It was enough to get her the popular vote, but major parts of the Democratic coalition, especially in the Midwest, were in no mood for that.
Would be nice if ‘moods’ did now sway so many voters, but they do, and we need to deal with that fact.
HRC didn’t understand the mood of the country, at least in terms of getting a majority in the electoral college, which is how the election is decided.
And, growing up on a farm, the loss of rural America to Democrats in many areas of the country (though not by any means all of it in California) does bother me.
cokane
@LAC: i love how the suggestion that democratic messaging is sub-optimal is met with such sanctimonious vitriol (but no actual substantive argument). look if you think 100% of trump voters were either misogynistic or racist, you’re not paying attention.
LAC
@cokane: ok. If a Louis Farrakhan ran for president and won and I voted for him, fully noting and pushing in the back of my head his anti Semitic comments, would you understand that? Or would you question my principles.
My vitriol, as you put it, is because I am being told in so many ways in this site that despite being viewed as a monolithic welfare baby mama job stealing affirmative action dirt under some person’s shoe by a fucking campaign, I need to get over that and focus on some fucking campaign to rehabilitate some white voters because they voted for trump. Really?
NR
Here’s one more fact for you guys to chew on: If the Democrats lose control of just seven more state legislative chambers, they will fall below the threshold required to block constitutional amendments.
But go ahead and keep thinking that we don’t need new leadership and a new direction for the party.
Bailey
Listening to Obama’s live press conference and he is basically saying that:
1. Dems have the better ideas
2. Dems have not been communicating them well in local areas.
Which is pretty much what those of us have been saying about crafting this right message and delivering it to targeted areas which was a huge fail of this campaign.
We can probably stop beating each other up about cannibalizing one aspect of the base in favor of another.
jl
@LAC: If I were a politician who wanted to win elections and was worried about the country, and a person like you voted for Farrakhan, but had never voted for people like that before, or maybe had voted for Gore, Kerry or Obama, I would try to understand why you voted for a person like Farrakhan. I would not dismiss you as antisemitic immediately.
NR
@Bailey: Except that the Democratic party has been putting the wishes of its corporate donors ahead of the needs of working Americans for years now. That’s the reason they’ve lost so much of the country. If the Dems decide that all they need is some messaging tweaks, get ready for the Republicans to have a free hand to rewrite the Constitution in 2019 or 2021.
The Dems have a messaging problem because they have a policy problem.
glory b
@Another Holocene Human: I have Sirius radio, I don’t believe wcpt is on it.
However, it has Sirius progressive, urban view (everyone knows urban means black, right? Although it does have Armstrong Williams, the black conservative), insight and 2 national public radio stations, if you’re still into them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: You just said your only idea about politics is “someone else”.
Shut the fuck up, Dummy.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Go away, adults are trying to have a conversation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: Shut the fuck up, Dummy.
NR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: No.
Bailey
@NR:
They have both.
Although without dispute, HRC’s “plan” was probably better for the Midwest than Trump’s fantasy, even though he acknowledged their discontent.
Policy does need to sharpen, but even half-ass communication this campaign might have moved enough numbers.
LAC
@jl: oh really? That is mighty big and white of you. And if I told you that Jews are taking my jobs away because some news organization said so, etc and you just tilt you head and what? Show me facts and data which I will dismiss as lamestream liberal media propaganda? Those people will never be reached. and it going to take a lot more than some simpering fetishizing of WWC to change that story. Some conviction and courage of our beliefs would be nice to see around here once in a while.
History is full of the deadly results of cowardly tolerance and normalization of this nonsense. But here we go again, I guess.
Keith G
I was really hoping we had gotten passed the Bernie is good, Bernie is bad : Hillary is good, Hillary is bad debate. I mean the election is over and all that.
As for the loss….This failure most certainly is not an orphan. There are many sets of parents and countless aunts and uncles. Bernie is low on the list on who is responsible. As with any campaign loss, among the most responsible are the candate and the candidate’s team. But above them, I certainly will rank a collection of voters who do not care about truth and common sense. Their “So what?” attitude will bring much harm as we being to learn “That’s what.”
cokane
@LAC: it’s crucial to understand that the messaging came up short in allowing some folks to be persuaded to vote Trump but also, and most importantly, in allowing some disaffected democrats to sit it out. again, blaming everything on -isms may feel good but offers no viable path forward.
jl
@LAC: You are misunderstand and misrepresent my comment.
I have consistently and very clearly in my comments above stated the importance of separating those who voted for Trump mainly to further the cause of racism and bigotry, and those who may have tolerated it but did not vote primarily on that basis. Where did I say anything that indicates we should tolerate bigotry in Trump policies or in his supporters? There is no point in trying to reach the voters who are committed to bigotry racism, prejudice and white nationalism.
But if you reject everyone who voted for Trump, regardless of their voting history, then you will have trouble winning elections. If you want to live in that kind of world, go ahead.
I think anyone who voted for Trump is, at the very least, a complete fool. I would like to yell at them that they are complete fools. But complete fools, and there are a lot of them, have the right to vote. That is problem to be solved.
Edit: Even HRC did not reject every Trump supporter in the campaign. Was she lying or was that ‘mighty white’ of her as well? I am surprised anyone would vote for HRC, who shamefully normalized fascist Trumpism. That is where your reasoning leads.
cokane
@LAC: Lemme also add that I’m not talking about a big share of trump voters. 1% of them persuaded is all it would have taken in this last election. and the idea that people cannot change, that people cannot awaken to new ideas, that people can become less ignorant, is absurd. The proprietor of this blog was a lifelong republican once upon a time
Deborah
@Fair Economist:
The Great Depression started because US productivity outstripped wages in the 1920s. The 1920s began a consumer society, and people began buying on credit (the installment plan) because their wages were not rising in parallel with the number of products being churned out by US companies. Eventually, people with consumer debt reached a level of satiation and could no longer buy as they had been. When sales slowed down, companies began to lay off workers which created more people who could not buy. In addition, just as before the Great Recession, people borrowed to buy stocks, believing that they would keep going up forever (like house prices). The farmers were already in the trouble before the 20s, and the Smoot-Hawley tariff (which imposed high tariffs) made it harder for them to sell their surplus abroad. Plus the Fed tightened monetary policy (raised interest rates) when it should have lowered them.
agorabum
Angry white people feel disrespected by the multi-cultural, diverse, and wealthy big city folk. They are used to everyone kissing their ass, and now its all ‘black lives matter’ and ‘the growing power of the latino demographic’? Fealty must be paid to the ‘heartland.’ So they’ll vote for the guy who called them real America and that those damn city liberals hated.
That’s pretty much this election. It’s not rational; it’s spite.
Monala
@NR: That’s also true of Republicans (including Trump). Why have those voters turned to them?
LAC
@jl: you know who also has the right to vote – the fucking democratic base. How about we start there instead? More of a plan about outreach to those folks and protecting their voting rights and less whitesplaining trump supporters. You and Cokane want to perhaps try that?