I whole-heartedly endorse foundational progressive blogger Driftglass‘s response to the self-styled ‘Jacobins’ and their BothSides media enablers noisily calling for a return to the mythical utopia of the WWC Democrat:
In a former life, my span of responsibility was so weirdly far-flung that when people asked me what I did for a living, I would tell them that I was in charge of saving Illinois manufacturing. And while that’s a wee bit of an exaggeration, it is entirely fair to say that working on every aspect of saving Illinois manufacturing took up most of my time and energy and the time, energy and budget of my tiny staff.
So believe me when I tell that even though I was involuntarily retired from the field of battle, my antennae is still highly attuned to items in the news about the struggles of the Rust Belt economy: outsourcing, manufacturing, skills training, the need to retool high schools and community colleges and the various federal, state and local policies and initiatives designed to get at these large and complex problems.
This is why I can tell you that this idea that “better messaging” to the white working class is somehow the royal road back to political majorities for the Democratic party is nonsense. Sure, Democrats always need to work on speaking like mortal human beings… But messaging itself is not the problem. The media is the problem. And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we’re going to go right on losing…
1) For a variety if reasons, white working class Americans have been taking a pounding since the late 1970s. And for a different variety of reasons, a disturbingly high number number of white working class Americans keep voting for the people that fuck them over.
2) Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it’s quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower. In fact, outside of health care (and turkey pardons), I would wager a penny and a fiddle of gold that in the last eight years the Obama administration put more effort into promoting American manufacturing than into any other domestic policy priority.
3) If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.
4) If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels. Email servers and Benghaaaazi. A Republican rebranding scam called the “Tea Party”. Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!…
…[A]sk an “undecided” or an “independent” or an “I just hadda vote for Trump because…” friend if they remember any of this, and I guarantee you will get a squinty, faraway look as if they’re trying to recollect some obscure fact about the Wendish Crusade of 1147, which had been imparted to them by a forgettable history teacher 40 years ago. Sure, some of this might ring a tiny bell, but inside their heads what will be ringing a much louder bell — an iron bell the size of fucking Ceres which drowns out all your little, Liberal tintinnabulations — are years and year and years of the Very Serious People in Americas finest newspapers and cable teevee shows telling them over and over and over and over again that all of this shit is the fault of Both Sides, so by God why not vote for an “outsider” who will disrupt the Corrupt Duopoly!..
Go read the whole thing, and remember: Sharing is Caring!
WereBear
Driftglass be the best, and he has an excellent podcast, too.
schrodinger's cat
Who or what is a Jacobin?
ThresherK
You had me at
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
a member of a democratic club established in Paris in 1789. The Jacobins were the most radical and ruthless of the political groups formed in the wake of the French Revolution, and in association with Robespierre they instituted the Terror of 1793–4
Some comfortable lefties who would shrink from any real fight love to style themselves to be modern Jacobins.
rikyrah
Cannot be pointed out enough.
hovercraft
I keep saying that this is our biggest obstacle over the next four years. Republicans bitching about everything are “raising legitimate questions”, democrats who bitch are whiny losers who are being divisive and unpatriotic. We need to figure out a way to either change that framing, or find a way to get around the useless entity that is todays media.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: OK I knew about the Jacobins of the French Revolution, but failed to see the connection they had to boring Freddie and the like.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Clinton ran on the most liberal Dem platform in memory. Yeah, it directly addressed tons of issues of concern to the WWC, aka the Great White Whale of the Democratic Party. Funny how the Corporate Media never bothered to comment on that.
Of course the WWC either didn’t know about it (see Driftglass) or deliberately ignored it because the source was either a) the Ni*CLANG*, or b) a girl.
80K voters over 3 states, hell, 80K voters over maybe 20-30 precincts determined the outcome of this election, *not* some inability of Dems to run on a platform that spoke to their precious “economic uncertainty”.
But yeah, of course the Corporate Media is Enemy #1. It’s one reason why the Obama WH tried so many different ways to circumvent them when trying to get a message out. Cheetoh Donnie will do that on steroids.
As I read here during the campaign, the only satisfying thing about the incoming maladministration will be the televised executions of our elite national press members.
gene108
@hovercraft:
Get around the media is the only solution, unless you or someone you know has a few billion dollars to invest in a news network or a newspaper.
I look at as a bunch of circles. At the center are very politically active people, who volunteer, knock on doors, get involved directly with campaigns, etc. An outer circle are people, who may donate money and will regularly vote, but are not sure about what to do to get involved, even though they might be curious. The third ring out would be people, who vote regularly, but otherwise are not engaged. The fourth ring out are people, who vote irregularly. And the fifth ring out are people, who do not vote.
There needs to be a way to move people towards one more step towards more active engagement.
The guys, who put together OfA really did a good job in moving people towards more engagement. They gave them a simple way to get involved, without actually having to build something from the ground up, i.e. the people paid to build it from the ground up will tell you what to do and you just have to do it. You don’t need to worry about figuring out where to rent office space, what phone service to use, etc.
I think there’s an desire to support something like this again, but working for Democrats, but the paid professionals need to set it up. People will contribute to financially fund it, and will help canvassing, etc., but someone has to be there to negotiate an office lease, a phone deal, get the utilities turned on, rent or buy office furniture, and all the little things that most people take for granted, when they park their butts down at their cubicles.
slag
Yes indeed. Which is just another illustration that there is no such thing as truth, justice, or reason in this here republic.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s the same connection that the Boston Tea Party has with cosplaying white suburbanites in Medicare-paid scooters.
Chris
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
The only satisfying thing about Republican administrations is when their Very Serious BFFs are thrown under the bus and belatedly realize that they were never part of the club at all.
I am so looking forward to that happening to Mitt Romney.
Gravenstone
O/T but fucking 2016 just claimed another one. Greg Lake, dead at 69. I was literally just revisiting his first solo album yesterday. The song “Nuclear Attack” was going through my head after one of yesterday’s posts.
Stan
@gene108:
That’s right, and for voters under 30-35 or so it’s not even a challenge. They don’t give a rats ass about the media. I can remember Walter Cronkite but, to my kids, he might as well be Charlemagne.
We can dominate social media without spending much money.
The Moar You Know
@hovercraft: Framing won’t change. Someone’s going to have to willing to step up to the plate and lose a lot of money for a few decades like Murdoch has. And I see no volunteers.
SatanicPanic
Maybe something we can do is talk to our own voters. I swear, I heard this from several left-wing people about how the Democratic party didn’t try to help these people. I was like “WTF are you talking about?” (I am bad at saying these things tactfully), but seriously, it’s out there in the Bernie crowd. Democrats are neo-liberal monsters, no matter what agenda they run on. Maybe if we can convince these people to show up to vote we’d make a difference.
Kay
People forget this but the auto bailout was actually really unpopular among “elites”. Part of the reason Democrats and Obama couldn’t shout it from the mountaintops is EVERYONE predicted it would fail and pundits were treating it with disgust.
The auto bailout ITSELF is a validation of Obama’s commitment to US manufacturing. Nationally it was a political loser, he took tons of shit for it, and it didn’t end up helping Democrats in Ohio and Michigan at all.
Grover Norquist predicted disaster- it was one of Obama’s 5000 Katrina’s.
It actually DID save this county. We’re auto manufacturing dependent and when they collapsed we went to 16% unemployment. I will never forget it. It was like turning off a light switch. It just..stopped. Terrifying to watch.
The unemployment rate here is 4% and they’re all working tons of overtime. You can’t tell me they voted for Trump on economics. The economy here right now is better than it EVER was under Bush.
Kay
I keep running up against facts and my personal experience in rustbeltland. The economy is really good. It just is.
My son is an apprentice electrician with a labor union in Toledo- he works on projects in Toledo and surrounding areas- and he is working until 7:30 or 8 in the evening and SUNDAYS. They would not be paying him double time if there wasn’t demand.
i listen to this stuff and it’s contradicted DAILY by what I see. I’M wholly dependent on these people working and we’re busy too. I’m extremely sensitive to their fortunes. When they get a cold I get a cold too- immediately.
SenyorDave
As I read here during the campaign, the only satisfying thing about the incoming maladministration will be the televised executions of our elite national press members.
Wake me up when they get to Chuck Todd, wouldn’t miss that one for anything
Lizzy L
From the NYT:
He is also against raising the minimum wage. Of course, so is T.
Somewhere, George Orwell is drinking again.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@hovercraft:
It will take something along the lines of disruptions of their favorite black tie “charity” networking events.
In other words, there are things that media execs, politicians and kajillionaires go to in order to mingle with celebs. Usually involving homelessness, AIDS awareness, Green projects, a moneyman or media exec can pretend to care about things, drop a check and go on to be a raging asshole. If you disrupt the feel-good nature of the event, you bring attention to the cause and your legitimate gripes about the topic.
Think Pu55y Riot.
Chris
@Kay:
Can I just say this: you have, for years, been one of and possibly the best commenter on this blog when it comes to economic justice, working class/low-income issues, how hard things have become in the last few decades when it comes to that, and how important it is to do better (and you’re a Rust Belter, no less)…
… and therefore I both really appreciate it, and find it revealing as hell, that you haven’t for one second bought the horseshit narrative about how those poor unfortunate souls who voted for Trump aren’t racists, just confused socialists, and it’s all a cry for help. And have, in fact, been as loud as anyone in pushing back against it.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@SatanicPanic:
There are two distinctions to make here. The first one is with some get-out-the-vote groups. It’s anecdotal but there are some stories about how such groups working on either African American or Latino GOTV efforts in such unimportant states like WI, MI and PA, contacted the Clinton campaign for some financial help only to get crickets chirping in response. I’m sure campaigns get bombarded with such requests but sheesh, such campaigns should understand that’ll happen and maybe hire a person or three to coordinate such financial support.
The second distinction regarding outreach to Our Progressive Betters is that they’re so fucking pure, they’re as unreachable as your typical racist, misogynist, WWC voter. In other words, I’m describing half the Booman commentariat. I mean if they haven’t flung the “N word” (neoliberal) around in each comment section, they’re having an off day.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Too many people demand to be lied to – they won’t believe anything that isn’t a lie if it’s something they don’t want to believe. Goebbels understood this, Fox News understands this, and they make the lies really simple and repeat them over and over, knowing exactly which fear and resentment buttons to push. How on earth can you fight that kind of simple message with truth that demands understanding nuance, context, and a rather sophisticated appreciation of how the world actually works?
Kay
I have said this a lot here but Democrats made a mistake with “opportunity” framing. it never connected. It came off as lecturing people because they were slipping out of the middle class. SCOLDING. It came off as finger-wagging scolding. Some of the Obama people were just horrible messengers. I think about Arne Duncan lecturing machinists in Cleveland with free market slogans about “opportunity” in 2010 and I just cringe. He’s horrible! Stop sending him out! :)
I feel like the ‘elites” in the Party were uncomfortable talking about work and wages so they adopted this “opportunity” bullshit that might have well have been a foreign language. They REFUSED to let it go, too. You could not pry them away from it. No more themes. Just talk about work and wages.
FlipYrWhig
This is probably the best thing I’ve read since the election. And the link near the end to The Atlantic, “The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class,” rings true to me too.
liberal
@gene108: OfA? Which recently was putting lots of effort into pushing…the TPP? LOL.
Similarly, everyone is lamenting the state parties dying on the vine over the past few years. Remind me again, who was the nominal leader of the Democratic Party while this was happening?
Obama was, relatively speaking, a very good president. Not such a great leader of the Democratic Party.
Jinchi
A real problem is that this isn’t just confined to the “corporate” media. Look at the headlines on sites like Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Esquire, Slate and Media Matters and you’ll see a focus on exactly the same “shiny objects”. Liberal media seems to exist more to critique the Right wing narrative than to put out the liberal one. The unfortunate result is that you can nearly always read the opinions of latest right-wing lunatic, but will rarely see mention of anything from the left.
Or am I wrong? Anyone know of political sites that don’t obsess about the right-wing narrative?
liberal
@Kay: You’re full of shit, Kay. If everyone would just bother to learn JavaScript, no one would be wanting for a job.
FlipYrWhig
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: Booman’s comment section is quite the spectacle.
Feathers
@schrodinger’s cat: It’s the magazine and website Jacobin, subhed: Reason in Revolt. Basically the house organ of the dudebros, the “it’s about class, not ‘special interests,'” gang. They actually say some sensible things, but… any good is far outweighed by the fact that they actively and passionately shit on ‘special interests,’ to the point of harassment and beyond. There is a place for activism over class issues, but in the past few years I’ve met no one who led with class who didn’t actively try to undermine feminism and anti-racism. Ain’t nothing uglier than being nasty for a good cause.
Miss Bianca
@Brachiator: Of course, ironically, at the same time the Jacobins were promoting the reign of terror against real and imagined enemies, they were also busily promoting reforms to marriage and inheritance laws, as well as general social welfare programs. They were actually doing shit to help people, unlike most of today’s self-styled Jacobins.
SatanicPanic
@hovercraft: let’s go around it. Trump did.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Calling them pundit is a joke. A pundit is a learned person, a devotee of knowledge, one who has dedicated years in the pursuit of a body of knowledge or a skill. Charlatan is more appropriate for the MSM bots.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
Wondering if anybody is done some hard state level drilldowns on WWC voters earning under $50,000 in blue states vs similarly situated WWC voters in red states. I’m willing to bet that the ones in red states – particularly the rust belt – voted heavily for Trump.
Also willing to bet that white voters with incomes above $100,000 in blue states were somewhat more Trump-curious than those earning under $50,000.
Spinoza is my Co-pilot
@Gravenstone: Greg Lake? Oh, fuck! And only 69. Shit. One of my favorite singers ever, such a strong and beautiful voice. I remember how bummed I was when he left King Crimson (playing In the Court of the Crimson King right now). Heard him live 3 times in the 70s with ELP. Great concerts.
And, obviously, everything Driftglass says.
Calouste
@Gravenstone: If you thought that 2016 was bad for aging rock stars, the next decade is not going to get any better. They’re just getting to the age where, well, people die. (Prince of course is an exception, he was too young.)
hovercraft
@gene108:
North Carolina: A Case Study for Resistance in the Trump Era
In forcing Pat McCrory out of office, we proved that we do not have to concede the battle in the South.
By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
Forward Together Moral Movement was able to do something in NC that hadn’t been done before, so perhaps we see what elements of the movement we can adapt to other states. Local movements are more effective than national ones. Perhaps the new DNC chair can spend more time helping to fundraise for local movements that can begin to make progress at the state level so that come 2020 we will be ready to not only take back the White House, but also state legislatures.
We have to go back to our roots, we are the party of community organizers, so lets organize, use social media and the blogosphere to get our message out. The MSM is at this point a lost cause, so lets try to hasten their demise, bypass them. The shitgibbon and it’s minions have already decided to do this, they create bullshit stories online, and then force the MSM to report on them, so lets do the same, but with real news.
Poopyman
@liberal: Horseshit! It’s Python or nothing!
Anyone else notice VDE has been rather quiet lately? This is just the sort of post he’d be all over.
schrodinger's cat
@Jinchi: Nope not one. Balloon Juice does to a tiny extent with Silverman and Mayhew posts but in general its outrage city here too.
Feathers
@liberal: And if by “everyone,” you mean “white, male, and under 30,” this might very well be true. I’m currently in the job market, looking to switch to the computer side of what I was previously doing. When I told the guy I wasn’t looking to become a programmer, he was visibly relieved. He said there was a glut of programmers.
SatanicPanic
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: my own mother went Bernout this year. She was posting links to that garbage Clinton Cash documentary days before the election. I almost chucked myself in front of a train when I saw that. Luckily we’re in California so no harm done, but I realized I don’t need to work on the handful of loser Trump voters I know, I need to talk to the Bernouts. I will try.
Kay
@Chris:
Because I love living here. I am attached to them. I could leave but I don’t because I am attached. But that doesn’t mean they’re a WPA mural. Seeing them clearly doesn’t mean romanticizing or lying about them to make them somehow more noble than people who live in cities or do other kinds of work. There IS racism and religious bigotry and a knee jerk distrust of elites SOME of which is earned but a lot of which is NOT earned. Some of their problems are of their own making. They don’t have to borrow themselves into bankruptcy or not pay child support or fuck up constantly and end up in and out of jail. They can all finish high school. We work SO HARD at our school to help them finish high school. They get help and they get help from college graduates who want nothing more than for them to succeed.
Democrats should value the work that people do, no matter what the work is. It’s no more complicated than that.
Obama helped this county enormously yet this county went 70% Trump. That’s a fact.
schrodinger's cat
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Rich people (top 5%) voting for the Republicans at least makes some economic sense.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: I have a pet theory for this. It’s that purple-state and red-state Democrats learned so well the lessons and rhetoric of the Bill Clinton days that they kept running that playbook for 20 or so years, and they continued to run it instead of the Obama model after 2008, with the exception of Terry McAuliffe in VA. That playbook says to position yourself as reasonable, calm, tolerant, and business-friendly, like Evan Bayh and Mark Warner. Obama did something else, which was great for while, but now the problem is that Hillary Clinton ran the Obama playbook instead of the Bill Clinton playbook AND LOST TO A CLOWN. So no one knows what to do, and they’re copycats. Either they’re going to try to come up with some sort of modified Bernie Sanders/Sherrod Brown strategy because it’s, at least, different, or, because different is risky, they’ll keep the Bill Clinton hulk rolling for long enough to pass the state inspection.
schrodinger's cat
@SatanicPanic: In my old neighborhood, I saw more Bernie signs than HRC ones.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: especially the ones who write at Jacobin.
schrodinger's cat
@FlipYrWhig: We need regional strategies, this is a big country what works in MA will not work in OH.
FlipYrWhig
@Feathers: I have a hipsterish/leftyish FB friend in the Pacific Northwest who’s increasingly aligned with Jacobin for intellectual content and with Chapo Trap House for snark. Between the two of them, like the joke goes about coke, he’s even more of the person he already was, and he was already an asshole.
hovercraft
@Stan: @The Moar You Know:
I’m hoping Stan is right, that we can do it online without too much money, as demonstrated by Current TV, and others like Air America, liberals are not wired to all tune into the same media source to listen to or watch propaganda, we a much more diverse coalition with very diverse interests. Obama had the right instinct in expanding the places he went to reach us where we are, the party needs to continue this, and expand it too. But social media is where we have the biggest opportunity going forward, this is where we must focus our energies to reach the millions who couldn’t be bothered to vote.
rikyrah
So, the CEO of Hardees, a man who believes a person making $18,000/year is making too much, is now the nominee for Secretary of Labor.
uh huh
uh huh
dlm
@Gravenstone: Thanks for this. I just listened to Father Christmas last week. 2016 has really sucked.
Kay
@liberal:
Oh, God. The Ladder of Opportunity. STFU with “coding”. I said it over and over! They don’t listen to me.
The truth is though, despite their horrible messengers and scolding message, the Obama Labor Dept was fabulous for working class. We had programs galore at the community college. I remember one where they put so much thought into it they gave them a gas card. That’s rural white working class! They don’t have a way to GET to the community college. I was so impressed by that. I went to the graduation ceremony for the skilled trades cert they got. 100% white men.
It doesn’t make sense that they hate Obama. Whatever he SAID or didn’t say he DID a lot for them.
hovercraft
@SenyorDave:
So long as Andrea Greenspan Mitchell is next to him, sign me up too.
Iowa Old Lady
@rikyrah: These cabinet appointments are like a bad joke. It’s like Trump is deliberately trolling us.
Tazj
@Lizzy L: Yes, the newly formed Worker’s Party (Republicans and Trumpists)) are all over the Twitter Feed of Matt Yglesias as he tweeted about this announcement. They have their their usual complaints.”You go start a business and pay people whatever they want.”
SatanicPanic
@schrodinger’s cat: One angle I’m going to try to take is- you fucked up your chance to make a difference. Bernie moved Clinton to the left but you didn’t meet your end of the bargain by not following his lead and voting for her (and shutting up about your issues with her). Next time someone tries to get concessions like that they’re going to get ignored, because they know not to trust you.
liberal
@Kay:
It’s not clear that this is true, if you get away from nominal unemployment rates and look at employment-to-population ratios.
Of course, the latter is plagued by the fact that the age structure of the population has changed, but AFAICT that’s not enough to explain things. (E.g. if you take 25-54 years of age.)
The Bush “boom” was stoked by an unsustainable housing bubble, of course.
That said, the economy really has shown signs very recently of strong gains for labor (non-meagre wage increases, etc), and given that voters seem to evaluate the economy based on very recent information…
Jinchi
@Iowa Old Lady: He is deliberately trolling us. It’s what he does.
liberal
@SatanicPanic: Yawn. Might not be true of BernieBros on the internet, but most actual Bernie supporters voted for Clinton.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Tell it again and again.
I just will have no sympathy when it goes to shyt again.
Just like the muthaphuckas in Indiana who were saved by Obama policies, but couldn’t find it in their hearts to vote for him in 2012.
Phuck all these muthaphuckas.
liberal
@Gravenstone: Love “Lucky Man.”
Mike J
@liberal:
It’s true that very few things produce more demand for people fixing things than javascript.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I used to think that “opportunity” framing was defensive — vestigial flinchiness from the Reagan era combined with a desire to co-opt wingnut talking points. But regardless of its origin, it was a crashing failure.
liberal
@Kay: I don’t think looking at electricians in particular is a good read of anything. There’s an enormous shortage of electricians nationally, and it’s not a reflection of how hot the economy is but more that we’re not training nearly enough of them. (Because we’d rather people learned JavaScript.)
NR
For a contrary view, I’ll share this interview with Van Jones, who actually has been talking to working-class white voters in the Rust Belt.
If we don’t talk to those voters, people like Bannon will, and we’ve seen what happens in that case.
SatanicPanic
@liberal: Trump won on the slimmest of margins, and I know people personally who “held their nose” or didn’t vote at all. Is there something wrong with trying to talk to these people?
liberal
There’s essentially one reason. They’re fucking stupid.
Feathers
@FlipYrWhig: There’s a theory that politics (and education) takes up business trends about when business is abandoning them because they were proven worthless. It’s a real problem because once someone builds a career on a certain approach, it is difficult to give it up, even when it is actively and obviously the wrong solution. The canonical example is “rank and yank,” rating employees and then getting rid of the bottom 5, 10, 25%. Repeatedly. Jack Welsh of GE was a huge supporter, it was the hot strategy in the 90s. Well, it was shown to be one of the drivers of the collapse of Enron, and other companies realized it made for all sorts of negative consequences – mostly it made building a good, efficient team hard, because people were too worried about being the bottom person. Also, surprise, women and minorities were more far more likely to end up fired.
So…. going on 20 years later, and developing rating systems for teachers so that we can fire the bad ones is still supposed to be the magic cure that will save education. SMDH!
Chris
@Kay:
Yep, that’s it in a nutshell. I realized at some point in the past year (before Trump won) that the whole picture of “white working class” and “heartland” is essentially this day and age’s version of the Noble Savage mythology from the old days. People admire the watered-down, Hollywood-friendly image of the lifestyle, usually from urban or suburban and coastal environments that’re very far removed from it.
It also strikes me that the popular narrative is, in fact, exactly backwards in at least two ways;
1) People who are saying “try to understand the Trump voters” don’t want us to understand them. They want exactly the opposite: they want us to obfuscate the uglier realities of why people voted for Trump in order to preserve that myth of the Wholesome Small Town Country Folk.
2) “People voted for Trump out of economic anxiety” is one possible narrative; given how much better the economy is now, and especially in places like your area, though, what seems vastly more plausible is “people voted for Obama out of economic anxiety, because the recession slapped them hard enough that they paid attention and voted for the people who were actually promising to help them. Now that the economy’s better, they feel secure and are more willing to vote on their hobbyhorses instead.”
Brachiator
You mean, like how Americans voted for Obama? Twice? Even though he was not the Establishment standard?
There is an anti-Establish sentiment that influences the views of a significant segment of the electorate. And this sentiment has also been reflected in other countries. Even in someplace like weird, tiny Iceland.
The media, as framed here, is not the main problem.
The racist elephant in the room is that some white Americans would watch Obama on mainstream media say “there is no red America or blue America but only the United States of America” and hear “I’m sending personalized iPhones and a welfare check to all my black homies, and I am asking for all lazy illegal Mexican rapists to ease across the border and get on government assistance as soon as possible. And have babies. Lots of babies.”
The Republicans and conservative media sources would do everything they could to exacerbate this and to try to profit from it.
And as other posters here have noted, social media and various forms of pseudo-media are becoming the standard information sources for everyone except a few hold outs.
And clearly, the majority of voters heard the Democratic Party message, and liked it. The challenge is how to best reach out to those who stayed home and those who fell for Republican nonsense.
liberal
@SatanicPanic: No. I’m rather addressing your statement
The “concessions” granted by Clinton, if anything, made her a stronger contender.
I know it’s heresy around here to say so, but if you want to keep losing elections, keep pushing this centrist mush. Like the stuff Kay alluded to above about “opportunities.” We can do this without focusing on winning “back” idiots who voted for Trump.
Kay
@liberal:
He’s commercial construction though – it’s either new commercial or refitting a building for a new use. He’s not like John Cole’s fancy residential elite electrician :)
One thing that’s sort of interesting to me. He and his co-workers told me “tech electricians” (low voltage- data refits) are paid less. They snicker about this because in electrician world those people are “the geeks”. They get paid less! How did that happen? I thought computers was were all the money is! Arne Duncan was wrong.
rikyrah
@NR:
Phuck Van Jones.
liberal
@Feathers:
I think it’s formally called “stacked ranking”.
You could make an argument that it was appropriate in the case of GE. Not saying it was, but the claim is that it’s a good way to get rid of deadwood.
But AFAICT places like Amazon use it, where there’s basically no deadwood, and the whole reason you’d think about applying it doesn’t exist.
Just another data point for my bias that business leaders are, by and large, fucking idiots, particularly when in comes to managing people.
rikyrah
@Chris:
Economic anxiety…
except…
HILLARY WON WHITE VOTERS MAKING LESS THAN 50,000/YEAR.
Just stop with that LIE.
Archie Bunker’s BOSS is throwing Archie Bunker out there to be the face of the Trump Voter, so that his high earning azz doesn’t have to explain why he voted for a RACIST FASCIST.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
There was an actual fight about it. I saw it in Politico at the time. “Elite Democrats” (people who worry about what Tom Friedman thinks, basically) thought “wages and work” was too negative and “opportunity!” was positive. They won. Sadly. It was so CLEARLY a loser and it was a loser for 6 years! Every cycle they’d roll it out and lose some more. What does it even mean? No one knows.
Feathers
@NR: But what the linked article in the post was about is that we DO talk to them. This article by Masha Gessen, The New Politics of Conspiracy, from just before the election, points out that conspiracy thinking is when you have a theory which you then apply facts to. Obama (and Clinton) constantly talked about jobs, manufacturing, and things that would help the working class. The fact that they did this was pointed to as proof that they had no message for and nothing to offer to the white working class.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
This observation is by no means original to me but, ironically, they probably voted for Trump BECAUSE they’re feeling more secure, so now they can relax and look around for people they can look down on.
Jim Crow laws came along when white people were feeling economically secure during the bubble of the late 1800s and 1900s. The heyday of the KKK was the early 1920s, when it looked like the stock market could never go down.
This is who we are as Americans.
hovercraft
@rikyrah: @Iowa Old Lady:
Speaking of terrible appointees:
Peter Thiel Associate Considered For FDA Head
So I don’t think he’s trolling us, he’s trying to break the government, so he can loot it and remake it in his own image. Right now he is rewarding people who were loyal to him back when everyone didn’t think he had a snowballs chance in hell of winning. The fact that they were loyal to the shitgibbon in the first place tells you that they were already terrible people with not moral code, so of course they will be terrible for the nation. The shitgibbon wants to enrich it’s self for real finally, it wants to be admired for it’s smarts and wealth, and it’s trophy wife and daughter (sorry Tiffany), it’s willing to wing the rest, after all it got it elected president. It believe and has always believed since as far back as Reagan, that we are doing it wrong, we need to do it the shitgibbon way, and then we will all be “billionaires” like it. Don’t ask any of the 30, 000 or so people who have sued it how that worked out for them.
SatanicPanic
@liberal: I was using that in the context of talking to specific people who did not vote for Hillary.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: Your theory fails in New England.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
There’s also this. Obama ran a blatantly populist campaign in Ohio in 2012 against Mitt Romney. Textbook populism. 100%. Every ad, every appearance- “he’s a rich elite who is out of touch and I have helped you”
No 2008 hope and change. 100% class war.
They know how to do it. I don’t really blame Clinton for not running the same one in 2016 – I’m still figuring 2016 out- it was bizarre- but DEMOCRATS know how to do it because I saw Obama do it.
Dave
@Mnemosyne: My only comfort is that it seems it’s fewer of us as Americans over time. Though the corollary for that appears to be that the actual policies spite voters end up supporting are growing more destructive. So optimistic side is that they didn’t even achieve a plurality of votes. Pessimistically they did win and are intentionally or not supporting what are almost certain to be terrible policies. I don’t have any great insights here. I’m actually do think the even the medium/short run favors us but the downside is if it doesn’t it’s going to get extremely ugly. So I would posit your theory is becoming less true over time; I’m just unsure if that will occur quickly enough to leave more than a smoking crater.
liberal
@SatanicPanic: That’s cool.
Not voting for Hillary in a swing state is crazy.
I don’t even think voting third party in a safe blue state makes any sense. The right thing to do is for challenges to be made at the primary level. (And the loser of the primary should support the winner.)
I don’t like all of that, but that’s the horrible logic forced upon us by having an idiotic first-past-the-post voting system. And that ain’t gonna change any time soon.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
The auto industry is actually cyclical. They are working a ton but they are also borrowing a ton. There will be a downturn and they all know it and Trump will be blamed. That will happen before the next midterm. They shouldn’t be borrowing as much as they are and what they mostly borrow for is….new automobiles!
Miss Bianca
@NR: Counter-factual: Hillary Clinton talked about the concerns of the white working class *all the damn time*, and she still lost these mo-fos.
So they’re “disturbed but not quite disturbed enough” by Trump’s open racism and sexism to overcome their knee-jerk aversion to actually listening to what an actually-qualified Democratic candidate for President says? Then they’re either lying sacks of shit or dumber than a bag of hammers. I know these people – I grew up among their urban counterparts in Detroit, and I live among their rural counterparts in Colorado. They’re easy to fool because they fool themselves all the damn time about what’s really going on, what’s really important, and who’s really their friend – or not. “False consciousness”? They haz it, in spades.
liberal
Looks like we have a new Sec of Labor…
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: Trouble with that is the Democrats who won unexpectedly in 2006 and 2008 and got bounced since were… the mushy centrists. When there were more Democrats, there were more mushy centrists. If the public sours on Trump and Republicans, seats formerly held by Blue Dog Democrats seem to me more likely to go _back_ to Blue Dog Democrats than to some new breed of fiery populists. Seems to me that the place to get fiery populists into the party is where the the seats are already fairly safely held by Democrats. (To wit, the problem with Joe Lieberman, beyond Joe Lieberman just being a dick, was that there was no great need to have an irksome moderate in a Connecticut Senate seat. There may be a need to have an irksome moderate in a West Virginia Senate seat or a Kentucky governor’s mansion or the like.)
SatanicPanic
@liberal: That’s what I’m trying to get at for some people- Bernie did a good thing by pushing Clinton left, but Clinton going left was based at least in part on there being more voters there. If you didn’t vote, you left Bernie hanging and the next Bernie is going to have a tougher time. I’m not sure this will be convincing, but it’s worth a try.
MomSense
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
Clinton won under 30k by 13 points and 30-50k by 9 points but I’m not sure how it looks state by state.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: Gee, I wonder why Van Jones isn’t having the experience of people telling him that they voted for Trump because someone needs to get those unruly Negroes under control.
Villago Delenda Est
Once again, my nym. Again and again.
Wipe them out. All of them. (Double for Mrs. Greenspan).
rikyrah
@hovercraft:
But, Hillary and emails though….
germy
@liberal:
Somewhat like a cat becoming secretary of mice.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@hovercraft: Boil EVERYTHING !
Dave
@FlipYrWhig: Right I can accept that from West Virginia but not CT. The mushy moderate still votes with your 90% of the time is better than a Republican mushy moderate (to the degree they even exist) voting against our interests 98% of the time. There is however no reason to accept that from say a CA senator.
FlipYrWhig
@SatanicPanic: At a certain point, you have to drop your line where the fish are running. If you withhold your vote on the left, you kinda forfeit your right to complain that the Democrat is trying to win votes in the center, because if the centrists are (potentially) persuadable and the leftists are adamant, it’s time to cut bait.
gene108
@liberal:
In 2008 OfA wAs a force to be reckoned with. It gave people an easy outlet to channel their energy. It helped Obama get around traditional barriers to newer candidates.
Right now a lot of folks are itching to take a stand against Trump. They need an outlet. You could build an organization to rival what OfA was in 2008, for the 2018 election.
@hovercraft:
Local movements are needed. But some national focus needs to
be there. Otherwise you may end up with groups working at cross purposes.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
John Cole got invited to this blogger meeting in DC with Axelrod the summer of 2012. He didn’t want to go so he asked me if I did and I went. At that meeting I was asked about the WWC in Ohio – the Obama people knew a ton. They knew, for example, that rural towns in Ohio have a certain small chain department store AND that Mitt Romney had bought that company and gutted it. We had that store here! I knew EXACTLY what they were talking about. That’s kind of the level of attention- they had thought about this.
They ran a populist campaign against Romney in 2012. That was before WWC were fashionable, but they knew they had to reach them and HOW to reach them.
LongHairedWeirdo
The media is a big player here. I probably mentioned this before, but: I was stunned by how people were saying Trump did *great* during the first 20 minutes of the first debate. Why? Because he named several states hit hard by job losses, and repeated his “I’ll rewrite trade agreements that took many people many years of work to hammer out, because I’m so f’ing awesome!” lines.
Talk about a low bar – they said he did great if all he did was repeat some tired old talking points.
Except… except the GOParty of Layoffs has been working the refs for so long that the refs heard him speak his applause lines, and declared them “great work!” Hell, on “deep background” they’d probably said “just you wait, he’ll call out states that have lost jobs and that’s one of his biggest ways of connecting to people – while Hillary will just drone on and all about boring policy no one cares about.”
Bernie had it right. Forget that your heroes have feet of clay – push back against the narrative. Wait for a *real* issue. Be “sick and tired of hearing about (her) damn e-mails”… and be “sick and tired of a bullsh, er, crap artist who can’t do anything but boast. It’s the big mouth, not the small hands, that make you think he’s got a tiny … uh, brain, and no real ideas.”
NR
@Feathers: Hillary Clinton certainly didn’t talk to them. Yes, she had a platform. Yes, she had policy proposals. But she wasn’t talking to these voters. Hillary didn’t visit Wisconsin at all during the general election campaign. She only visited Michigan at the very end. Trump, meanwhile, practically made the Rust Belt his second home.
And there’s also a nasty elitism from many in the Democratic party about these voters that drives them away. It’s expressed by a LOT of people on this very blog. The idea that they’re all just terrible people who we should look at with contempt. Van Jones also talked about this and noted that we’re buliding Trump’s coalition for him.
The more that people here declare that these voters are horrible, evil, deplorable, the more they push them into the arms of people like Trump and Bannon.
NR
@rikyrah: At least he has the guts to go and actaully talk to these people.
slag
@Kay:
I couldn’t agree with this more. But the truth is that unless EVERYONE values the work that people do, no matter what it is, then we’re stuck in this asymmetrical relationship.
Republicans straight up flattering, lying, and pandering their way to power and then totally failing to deliver. Democrats trying to keep it at least mildly on the level during campaigns and then not being rewarded at all even when they manage to overdeliver.
rikyrah
Jeff Sessions’ record on desegregation draws fresh scrutiny
12/08/16 10:42 AM
By Steve Benen
Shortly after Donald Trump chose Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as his choice for Attorney General, the president-elect’s team put together talking points for Senate Republicans, urging them to sing the senator’s praises. In particular, Team Trump asked GOP lawmakers to say Sessions has a “strong civil rights record.”
Given the senator’s actual civil rights record, it’s a tough sell.
But as Politico reported., the talking points were also more specific in some cases, noting that Sessions also “led desegregation lawsuits in his home state.” Trump’s spokesperson pushed the same line with reporters recently, claiming the Alabama Republican “filed a number of desegregation lawsuits in Alabama” during his tenure as a U.S. Attorney.
But did that actually happen? The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer did some interesting digging into Sessions’ record.
FlipYrWhig
@Dave: I would love to see a big-mouthed, aggressive, crusading liberal getting swept into power someplace like Louisiana or Tennessee or Arkansas because she or he is promising to kick the ass of capitalism and for that reason is just so amazing with the White Working Class or whatever. Nothing that’s happened since the 1980s leads me to think that will happen.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@LongHairedWeirdo: The NYT wasn’t ever sick of the email, or Comey for that matter, and that was a big problem. I don’t know why people won’t acknowledge the severe damage the MSM did to us this cycle. Bernie can talk about the emails meaning nothing, but it didn’t matter, and in fact he helped create the atmosphere of Democratic party corruption and Hillary’s crookedness. I will never give him a pass for his contribution to this debacle.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
You can’t talk about WWC men without including sexism. They are my clients. I’m telling you it’s big. THEY would admit it’s big. Ask any woman who works in manufacturing or a skilled trade. This is a fact. No reasonable person who has experience with this group of people would deny it. It’s like racism with Obama. No one would admit that for years either.
artem1s
@Mnemosyne:
this is pretty much my experience too. well off, secure, upper middle class white people who cannot stand it that a black guy did a better job of running the country than their ‘beer buddy’ W. they are selling their kids and their grandkids futures so an even more morally bankrupt, draft dodging, failed businessman, hate mongering, know-nothing can try his hand at showing up the black guy. No way they were going to let a woman finish cleaning up W’s mess. They are cannibals, everyone. And they will end up eating their own before they will admit that they got conned by trickle down and supply side grifters.
Gravenstone
@SatanicPanic: Trump did not “go around” the media. He used their absurd fascination with celebrity culture to his distinct and lopsided advantage. The media granted him several millions of dollars in unearned air time by breathlessly repeating his every twatter and groan. If anything, he went directly through them.
rikyrah
Democrats Drop A Bombshell Report That Exposes Trump’s Planned Devious War On Seniors
By Jason Easley on Mon, Dec 5th, 2016 at 12:43 pm
The first peek at what the incoming Trump administration has planned can be found in HHS nominee Rep. Tom Price’s budget plan, and what the new administration is signaling is nothing less than a war on the nation’s seniors.
The report by the Senate Budget Committee Minority Staff provided a great deal of insight into four areas of Prices’s budget that equal a war on seniors:
Sneaking massive benefit cuts through the back door – The Price proposal includes a devious plan that would likely trigger deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other priorities, while avoiding the need for members of Congress to vote directly for the cuts. The Price plan does this by automatically triggering a process to establish caps on spending and debt levels upon approval of a budget resolution, with the threat of sequestration cuts to enforce those limits. This, for the first time, would allow the Republican majority to ram through cuts to Social Security (among other programs) using a special fast-track process that denies Senate Democrats their normal rights to defend these programs and ensure an adequate opportunity for public input. If Republicans were to pass President-Elect Trump’s tax plan, the resulting increase to the deficit, under this plan, could require cuts to Social Security and Medicare of 13.5 percent, meaning the average Social Security beneficiary would lose more than $2,000 a year. [CAP,10/18/16]
Rigging the budget process to cut earned benefits– Currently, if Congress fails to offset the cost of mandatory spending or new tax breaks, this can trigger across-the-board cuts, or sequestration. However, Social Security is exempt from these cuts, and Medicare is subject to only limited cuts (of 2 or 4 percent, depending on the type of sequestration). Meanwhile, consistent with a previously long-standing bipartisan consensus, most assistance to Americans with the greatest needs is completely protected. By contrast, the Price plan would subject “all programs” to sequestration, “with limited exceptions such as interest payments, Article I judges’ salaries, and intragovernmental payments.” On its face, this could mean that in the future, seniors, the disabled, and others in need could be forced to pay the price, with deep cuts to promised benefits that many earned through a lifetime of hard work.
Unraveling longstanding guarantees to those who rely on Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and other Benefits – Price’s proposal calls for a non-amendable fast track process to end longstanding guarantees to our nation’s middle-class workers, seniors, children, the disabled and millions of others who rely on Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and other benefits. Instead, these Americans would have to fight annually for these benefits in the uncertain appropriations process, with no assurance their hard-earned benefits will be there at the end. Given the Republican Congress’s long record of failure to even consider appropriations bills on time, this could threaten the security of millions who rely on promised benefits. Meanwhile, Price proposes no similar process to eliminate wasteful special interest tax loopholes.
Rigging the budget with a fast-track for billionaire tax breaks – The Price proposal would repeal the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, which imposes fiscal discipline by restricting Congress’s ability to enact deficit-financed tax breaks and direct spending. This would free Congress to hand out massive new breaks for billionaires and large corporations, while driving up the deficit and laying the groundwork for future Republican demands for additional cuts to middle class benefits.
One gets the sense that many Americans went to the polls without the future of Social Security and Medicare in mind. Perhaps, voters took these beloved institutions that help millions of Americans for granted.
Maybe, they made the mistake of believing Donald Trump when he said that he wouldn’t cut the programs, but as Ranking Budget Committee member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pointed out while commenting on the report, Trump is a hypocrite, “Donald Trump asked workers and seniors to vote for him because he was the only Republican candidate who would not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – programs that are of life-and-death importance for millions of Americans. But instead he has nominated Rep. Tom Price for Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has a long history of wanting to do exactly the opposite of what Trump campaigned on. What hypocrisy. Trump needs to tell the American people that what he said during the campaign were just lies or appoint an HHS secretary who will protect these programs from cuts and do what the president-elect said he would do.”
The Price budget provides insight into the incoming administration’s plans for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance. What it looks like the Trump administration is planning for is a destruction of the social safety net while handing massive tax cuts to millionaires, billionaires, and corporations.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: This kind of seems like one step shy of saying that people are voting Republicans because they’re tired of Lena Dunham and hipsters.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
My son has one female in his “class” of apprentices. They put her in the tool trailer- she signs out tools. She’s trying to get out of there and learn something. He’s my son so this got his attention (he thinks it’s terrible and so do some of his co-workers) but the sexism is fact.
Clinton was hurt by it.
NR
@Miss Bianca:
And this is exactly the kind of thing that Van Jones was talking about when he said we’re building Trump’s coalition for him. You’ve decided that the problem is that these people are just stupid and that it’s either pointless to talk to them, or the only way to talk to them is to slowly and patiently explain how the world really works. Do you think people are going to vote for a party full of people who view them that way?
MomSense
Oh FFS. Andy Puzder for Labor Secretary?
Guess we should all practice asking would you like fries with that.
Mike in dc
Guaranteed that there will be scandals/tragedies related to relaxed regulations, because there always are. Hopefully a complete banking collapse can be avoided.
NR
@FlipYrWhig: You realize that you are proving Jones’ point with statements like these, yes?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Kay:
So, Obama goes back to Elkhart again, personally, to the RV plant to connect the dots from his/Democratic policies in 2008 to their manyfold increase in sales in 2015, and guess what? They voted for Trump, because…. white, now that the economy isn’t in freefall.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: They vote for Republicans because they’re Republicans. They like what Republicans say. They like the resentment and the hatred that are the foundation of that party and have been for 40 years. Why expend all this energy figuring out why Republicans vote for the Republican? Why give a shit?
NR
@FlipYrWhig: It’s not about not liking Lena Dunham and hipsters, it’s about not liking people who view you with naked contempt.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: My theory on why Republicans vote for Republicans is that they’re Republicans. And I didn’t have to travel to a remote location to figure it out, either.
Chris
@slag:
Among the many problems here is the number of people (conservatives all) who don’t value their own job, unless they’re doing it. I see this all the time in DC. DOJ, DOD, DHS, and other employees who all completely buy into the notion that government bureaucrats are totally lazy and overpaid parasites draining away the hard-earned money of the people, and how we badly need to trim the fat. “The fat,” of course, means their colleagues. They’re special and different.
It’s not hard to believe that a ton of people in the many fields Republicans love to diss have this mentality going on too.
satby
WTF 2016? RIP Greg Lake
rikyrah
@Kay:
But but but…Hillary and emails though….
FlipYrWhig
@NR: They view me with naked contempt. Naked contempt is the structuring principle of their entire party. It’s the War On Christmas Party, steeped in imaginary bullshit and misbegotten grievances. Fuck them and I hope they suffer. I don’t want their votes. I want them to start by eating shit and finish with oblivion.
ETA: Because the point isn’t to figure out some TOTALLY AWESOME WAY to make a bunch of assholes not be assholes anymore, which is impossible, but to get other people who aren’t yet assholes not to become assholes in the first place. That other category has a future in American politics. This former category, fuck them.
NR
@FlipYrWhig:
Kay
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I actually lived in Mishawaka and I’m all too familiar with Elkhart. I give Obama credit for going there but Elkhart is wingnuts and religious conservatives. Full stop. They’re not getting Elkhart back any time this century.
Indiana has more in common with Missouri than it does Wisconsin or Michigan. The northern belt is rustbelt- they make things- but the similarities end there. You have to remember where a lot of rustbelt workers came from. There was the AA diaspora from the South. There were immigrants. And then there were people from Appalachia. Those are distinct groups. South Bend WWC are different from even Elkhart WWC. South Bend WC were immigrants and AA’s. It’s much more Democratic.
rikyrah
@artem1s:
There you have it.
Truth every word.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Go read up on the Pizzagate guy – he is so instant his fantasy has to be true that when walked into the pizza palor and didn’t find a satanic childer murder ring like he wanted, he threw a scene so he would be ejected and he could maintian his fantasy.
Chris
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
The narrative of “media = liberally biased” is incredibly well entrenched in most of the country. Including quite a few people who should know better.
hovercraft
@rikyrah:
If only we could cast these morons off to enjoy the comeuppance they so richly deserve, I would rejoice. Unfortunately they are an albatross we are stuck with, and these assholes are going to do real damage to real people who didn’t ask for this. For those who bought the shitgibbons bullshit, enjoy the cat food, if you can afford even that, you will probably end up at the soup kitchen, lets see how much dignity you preserve by taking “handouts” from your friend and neighbors instead of the dreaded “big government.”
germy
@satby: And I had no idea Emerson had killed himself earlier this year.
SatanicPanic
@FlipYrWhig: I cosign. This is an odd variation of navel-gazing, but in the end that’s what it is.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: I shocked my old totebagger writing buddy, this Monday, when I told her that NYT could DIAF for their role, this election. I could not keep quiet when she was lovingly narrating how NYT stood up to T.
FlipYrWhig
@NR:
How many people is that? I think it looks like a reasonable number because we can’t tell from the top line the degree to which nonvoter-to-Trump, Romney-to-nonvoter, Romney-to-minor-party, nonvoter-to-Clinton, Obama-to-nonvoter, and Obama-to-minor-party effects contributed. It seems much more important, and I say this with substantial contempt for Bernie Sanders and his campaign, to figure out how to reconnect with people who typically vote for Democrats but didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton (by staying home instead, or by voting for a candidate other than the top two). ETA: And I think _you_ would agree with that in spades.
hovercraft
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Now he can enjoy a new fantasy world, inhabited by real tough guys, I’m sure that he will become intimately familiar with them. Obviously I’m not advocating for anyone to abuse him in prison, but I suspect he is about to come face with a real societal failing, the way we treat our prisoners. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
slag
@Chris: This mentality (Is there a name for it?) fits well into how people view welfare as well. The biggest welfare queens I know are rightwing Republican. (Is there a study on this?)
Maybe this whole election was actually an overcompensation for self-loathing. It would make sense. Though I do wish these people would keep the loathing for themselves and not take the rest of us with them.
Poopyman
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
Well, it worked for my Irish ancestors. Somewhat.
Brachiator
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: The NYT wasn’t ever sick of the email, or Comey for that matter, and that was a big problem. I don’t know why people won’t acknowledge the severe damage the MSM did to us this cycle.
Bernie can talk about the emails meaning nothing, but it didn’t matter, and in fact he helped create the atmosphere of Democratic party corruption and Hillary’s crookedness. I will never give him a pass for his contribution to this debacle.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@schrodinger’s cat: On the right the MSM is the enemy 100% of the time. On the left, for many, no awareness of what’s really going on with the media. Again, I will say the left has a messaging infrastructure problem which no one is strategically addressing. In fact, on this very blog I have been told that social media is the solution to this issue.
satby
@germy: I hadn’t either. This has been a horrible year in all fronts.
raven
@satby: Thanksgiving on 1969 I had been home for a couple of months. My buddies and I hitchhiked from Champaign Urbana to the Palm Beach Arts Festival where King Crimson was the “house band”. I’ll go to my grave with “The Cost of the Crimson King” seared into my head. I wish I cold say it was a happy memory. Now, Janis, the Airplane, Johnny Winter, the Chamber Brothers and Rotary Connection. . .
We are in this picture and, who know, maybe Crimson King was playing.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You know reading all of the above it sounds like the real issue was Hillary got blamed for NAFTA. Perhaps the typical Rust Belt worker was thinking “Times are good under Obama, but Hillary, damn, NAFTA was awful here…” and Trump is a skilled enough liar he convinced he enough of them he wouldn’t do something like that (mostly true after all, Trump mainly out to line him and his family pockets and doesn’t give a shit about anything else. The people Trump appoints though are another matter)
It really sounds like Democrats simply need a new and younger set of messangers.
NR
@FlipYrWhig: And this is exactly the problem. You don’t want to do the work of trying to understand why someone might vote for a person lime Trump. No, you already know. They’re racist. Or sexist. Or “deplorable” in some other way. You can sit and look down on them from afar and pat yourself on the back for being so much better than they are, and you don’t have to think, you don’t have to work, you don’t have to do anything except feel superior. And this attitude is absolutely rampant here. Every comment about Trump voters oozes contempt.
And no, before anyone goes there, I’m not talking about the hard-core racists. I know they exist, and we can’t reach them. But you’ve apparently decided that every Trump voter is equally contemptible. There are a significant number of people who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. We reached them before and can do so again–but not if we let attitudes like yours become the dominant way of thinking on our side.
Kay
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
We have two distinct groups here even now. The people who were German and Eastern European immigrants have done better than the people who came north from Appalachia. You see much more racism and resentment among the people who came north (as opposed to the people who arrived from another country) as a result of that. They know they’re on the bottom so they lash out at AA and Latinos but the thing is they were ALWAYS on the bottom. It’s so clearly defined here you can tell by last names. Right now here they’re mad at Mexicans- people of Mexican descent. THEY (Mexicans) actually started here as ag workers and they have surpassed the Appalachian contingent too.
They have to look at what they’re doing. If German and Eastern Europeans and AA from the south surpassed them in the rust belt last century and now Mexican heritage people are surpassing them in one generation- going from migrant workers to machinists- they have to look at why that keeps happening to them. It isn’t the fault of black people or Mexicans.
germy
Democrats May Run Their Own Eccentric Billionaires in 2018
slag
@FlipYrWhig:
I can’t decide who pisses me off more—Republicans or these people. If the only way to get these people out is to have Obama-level candidates in every election, then the republic is lost. It will never happen.
The won’t vote in midterms; they won’t vote for perfectly qualified and capable candidates over fascists; the list of people they will vote for appears to have one name on it: Barack Obama. That’s useless.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Why would you have contempt for Sanders and his campaign? His near success reveals issues that the Democrats need to deal with.
And I saw this as someone who decided fairly early on that Sanders was not someone I could support. But I did not have contempt for him.
JMG
@Kay: Kay, the very fact they received help from Obama, a black man, struck at their identities and made them more likely to resent him and his party.
satby
@raven: very cool! Some great concerts back then, where are you in the picture?
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: The way I see it, the Sanders campaign was by the end one long keening wail about how Hillary Clinton was corrupt, and Clinton lagged in fertile Bernie Sanders territory like MI, WI, and IA–and, for that matter, VT, where the Democratic margin dropped by 9%–at least in part because a critical mass of Bernie-fan Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to vote for someone as corrupt as Hillary Clinton. I think it was consequential, even if not precisely the ONE WEIRD TRICK that turned the election.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Are these the mythical Scots-Irish that Jim Webb can’t stop talking about.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Brachiator: I wish you wouldn’t put words in my mouth. I said the MSM did damage. I never said I expected anything different from them, I don’t; they are reprehensible in every way.
NR
@FlipYrWhig: And like with Trump voters, this will need to start by listening to these voters and finding out why they didn’t vote for Hillary, not by deciding we already know and going from there.
satby
@Kay:
It would require admitting that being proudly ignorant has held them back, and that’s not going to happen as long as the new Know-nothing party needs them to stay ignorant.
AMinNC
@hovercraft: Yep, this is a great model to export. Dr. Barber started with weekly gatherings in Raleigh and then moved them out across the state – to all many “red counties” as well as the liberal, blue, educated enclaves. Part of the success of this strategy was that it forced local media coverage of liberal issues, because there were local protests focused on these issues. It’s a lot easier for the local paper or TV news to ignore the latest statement from Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid than it is to ignore 10,000 people rallying every week to protest cuts to public education. Most people in NC had no idea what the GOP lawmakers were actually doing (even though they voted for them!) until the Moral Monday protests forced their actions into the light. Turns out people here did not like the GOP agenda once they found out what it really was.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@hovercraft: Well that might discourage him from running around with an assault rifle and threatening people, but it’s only going to confirm in his mind that there is a conspiracy. Heck even the other conspiracy believers now have their excuse why they shouldn’t just take a look themselves (“yes man. You go there and take pictures, the cops will get you!”).
I think far more effective would be to set the guy in the back room of the pizza joint with the cameras on and say “well, as you all can see there is no child murder here and this guy is a what a total buffoon looks like”
I wonder if these people are on prescription drugs.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: Contempt has been mutual since the 1960s. I didn’t see Republicans wringing their hands about how they’d do better in national elections if they could just break their habit of picking on atheists, vegetarians, college professors and public employees. Instead they chose a trash-talking troll, and they won.
raven
@satby: My buddy has the big blonde afro, I still had short hair so I had the headband on. Here’s where I found the picture.
hovercraft
Trump: Madman of the Year
Charles M. Blow DEC. 8, 2016
So, Time magazine, ever in search of buzz, this week named Donald Trump Person of the Year. But they did so with a headline that read, “President of the Divided States of America.”
The demi-fascist of Fifth Avenue wasn’t flattered by that wording.
In an interview with the “Today” show, Trump huffed, “When you say divided states of America, I didn’t divide them. They’re divided now.” He added later, “I think putting divided is snarky, but again, it’s divided. I’m not president yet. So I didn’t do anything to divide.”
Donald, thy name is division. You and your campaign of toxicity and intolerance have not only divided this country but also ripped it to tatters.
This comports with an extremely disturbing tendency of Trump’s: Denying responsibility for things of which he is fully culpable, while claiming full praise for things in which he was only partly involved.
As my mother used to say: Don’t try to throw a rock and hide your hand. Own your odiousness.
But Trump delivered the lie with an ease and innocuousness that bespoke a childish innocence and naïveté. In fact, his words disguised cold calculation.
That is the thing about demagogy: It can be charming, even dazzling, and that is what makes it all the more dangerous.
Demagogues can flatter and whisper and chuckle. They can remind us of the good in the world because they have an acute awareness of the ways of the world. They can also love and be loved. They can reflect our own humanity because they are human, but their ambitions do not bend toward the good.
Their ultimate end is distraction, which allows domination, which leads to destruction.
Trump is running two post-campaign campaigns: one high and one low, one of frivolity and one of enormous consequence.
One is a campaign of bread and circuses — tweets, rallies, bombast about random issues of the moment, all meant to distract and excite — and the other is the constant assemblage of a cabinet full of fat cats and “mad dog” generals, a virtual aviary of vultures and hawks.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Trump had “settled on Gen. John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general whose son was killed in combat in Afghanistan, as his choice for secretary of Homeland Security.”
They also pointed out that Kelly had “dismissed one argument cited by those who advocate closing the military prison at Guantánamo, saying it had not proved to be an inspiration for militants.” The prison fell under his command.
Make no mistake: the prison at Guantánamo is one of the most glaring and enduring moral blights remaining from our humanitarianism-be-damned reaction to the attacks of 9/11.
Trump said of the prison last month:
“This morning, I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantánamo Bay, which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open … and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”
The Times also said that Kelly “questioned the Obama administration’s plans to open all combat jobs to women, saying the military would have to lower its physical standards to bring women into some roles.”
This is disturbing, but Kelly isn’t the only one of Trump’s military picks who has a disturbing attitude toward women.
Last month, The Daily Beast reported that the office of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, “told women to wear makeup, heels, and skirts.” These directives to women were presented in a “January 2013 presentation, entitled ‘Dress for Success,’” which was obtained by a Freedom of Information request by MuckRock. The presentation reportedly made sweeping patriarchal declarations — “makeup helps women look more attractive” — and gave granular detail — “Wear just enough to accentuate your features.” According to the presentation, “Do not advocate the ‘Plain Jane’ look.”
So, in other words, while G.I. Joe is in camouflage, G.I. Jane should be in concealer. Got it. Indeed, on Wednesday, my colleague Susan Chira pondered in these pages: “Is Donald Trump’s Cabinet Anti-Woman?” She went through a litany of anti-woman positions taken and policies advanced by Trump appointees, leaving this reader with the clear conclusion that yes, it is. She closed with this: “One of the few bright spots that women’s advocates see in a Trump administration are proposals championed by Ivanka Trump to require paid maternity leave and offer expanded tax credits for child care.” But, as she notes, there is legitimate criticism that even that is patriarchal because it doesn’t cover paternal leave.
The question hanging in the air, the issue that we must vigilantly monitor, is whether the emerging shoots of egalitarianism in this country will be stomped out by the jackboot of revitalized authoritarianism.
I feel like America is being flashed by a giant neuralyzer, à la “Men In Black.” We are in danger of forgetting what has happened and losing sight, in the fog of confusion and concealment, of the profundity of the menace taking shape right before us.
That is our challenge: To see clearly what this deceiver wants to obscure; to be resolute about that to which he wants us to be resigned; to understand that Time’s man of the year is, by words and deeds, more of a madman of the year.
schrodinger's cat
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: BTW why is Tilda wearing a bald cap. Also too, its brand name for Basmati rice, Tilda.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: I wrote a lovingly foul description of all the things I think about Bernie Sanders, and then deleted it. Suffice it to say that I have known a lot of people who remind me of Bernie Sanders and vice versa, and they’re always horrible.
FlipYrWhig
@AMinNC: Rev. Barber for DNC chair!
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
Hooray! Let’s revisit Thalidomide for morning sickness. There’s the Day 1 agenda.
Amazing that as bad as I thought he’d be, Trump has managed to elevate his game to full-on disaster-in-the-making. Bush II at least pretended to be bipartisan.
Kristin D
I keep seeing Trump voters claim that Obama “destroyed the country” or “destroyed the economy” and other anti-factual nonsense like that. It’s beyond not knowing what he did. They live in an alternate universe in which the Obama you and I know does not exist.
Miss Bianca
@NR: Except that we’re NOT doing that. anyone who took the “deplorables” tag and wears it proudly is doing that for a reason. Anyone who thinks HRC was talking to them and is resentful, well…guess what? A). She wasn’t talking to you, unless you choose to believe she was and B). she said a *lot of other things* as well – things that directly pertain to your economic and social health and welfare – that you chose to ignore because of emails, Benghazi, and, quite possibly, your heads being up your asses.
So, bottom line: Van Jones is making excuses for people who claim they’re going to be outraged when Trump tries to do all the stuff he campaigned on – because they didn’t believe him. And they chose not to vote for HRC when she ran on a platform that was explicitly aimed at helping them – because
Against stupidity and wilful ignorance, the gods themselves strive in vain.
Jesus, I used to think Obama threw Van Jones under the bus when he fired him. Now I’m starting to wonder if there may have been actual reasons for getting rid of him that had nothing to do with optics.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: Also, I have met maybe two and a half kinds of Republicans:
1. Rich people.
1A. Affluent, doctrinaire libertarians.
2. People who tell you anecdotes about Those People who have it too easy, you know the ones, they have fancy nails but they still buy their groceries with EBT cards, and I’m not a racist or anything, but why does every sign in Home Depot have to be in Spanish, this is America, and while we’re at it, maybe this isn’t ‘politically correct’ these days, but we say Merry Christmas in this house.
Chris
@slag:
More than one, I think.
I remember walking past a white beggar in DC once, and when I didn’t give him change, he turned away grumbling that everybody gave their money to Mexicans these days, nobody helped Americans. Then a couple years later, I was working in my grandmother’s soup kitchen in northern Florida, when some cracker spent several minutes rehashing every possible talking point about how outrageous it was that the black people in line were lazy and waiting for handouts and should get a job – while he himself was in line for the very same handouts.
Most of the beggars I’ve turned down have been black (statistics of DC + statistics of American poverty doing their work). Statistically, if this country worked at all the way Republicans say it does, you’d think one of them would’ve Played The Race Card against me at some point. But no – the only people I’ve ever met who feel that they’re entitled to goodies they think other people shouldn’t have because of their ethnic identity have been white, and not trivially, white people spouting Fox News talking points.
JMG
A slice, not all, not most, but a good number of Trump voters did so out of no more than a sense they’ve been cheated and here was someone promising to treat them like kings. Well, in about a year or two they’re still gonna feel cheated, and there won’t be a Democrat in sight to blame. The Republican base and the white racists are beyond reaching, but that slice is not. Resentment is a weapon that points both ways.
Betty Cracker
@NR: I wish someone would produce a statistic of exactly how many voters went from Obama to Trump. It sure as hell ain’t 50% as Jones implies, since Clinton just exceeded Obama’s 2012 popular vote total. Then, after we figure that out, let’s figure out how many of the remainder couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman. Then, let’s figure out how many remaining bought into the 25-year wingnut war on the Clintons and cast their vote accordingly. Then, let’s parse how many are just “change” voters and would have pulled the lever for Kim Kardashian had she been on the ballot. Then, analyze the effect of the FBI-Russia-WikiLeaks shenanigans and segment those voters. Eventually, we’ll arrive at the actual number of voters we’re talking about here — the ones you suggest we rearrange the party / STFU to accommodate. My guess is they fit in a goddamned phone booth, if such a contraption is still abroad in the land.
trollhattan
@FlipYrWhig:
Sanders had two accomplishments. We’re left to ponder which had the greater impact. I can tell you which of them Trump was only too happy to take on for himself.
1. Push Hillary’s platform leftward.
2. Demonize the Democratic Party as corrupt and out of touch.
Betty Cracker
@raven: Cool picture! May I use it in a post — with proper credit, of course?
Calouste
@Brachiator: So you don’t have contempt for someone who lies his ass off?
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@trollhattan: Also, Bernie has helped to create a new myth about the Democratic party. You know like, the Dems are weak on defense, the Dems are weak on crime, the Dems are tax and spend. And now the Dems hate the WWC. Thanks Bernie.
Brachiator
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
Fair enough. Point taken.
@FlipYrWhig:
Sanders didn’t say that Clinton was a thief, but was part of the pro-Wall Street crowd. Which is kinda true. And here Sanders also bashed Democrats in general, including Obama. This was his standard stump speech.
Kristin D
@FlipYrWhig: I have two of those, one in Seattle, one in the bay area. Unsurprisingly, they’re both white guys. They become more condescending (especially to POC and women) with each Jacobin link they post.
mai naem mobile
7.7 earthquake in the Solomon Islands .TsuNami warnings. Telling you all, FSM is trying to warn us about Orange Douche. We aren’t listening.
Hitless
@FlipYrWhig:
Plus also, it’s bull***t that the Dems economic plan was “screw the working class”. Clinton’s platform was progressive. Trump told people what they wanted to hear – he proposed tariffs and trade policies that Clinton wouldn’t because they would fail to deliver jobs and increase the cost of consumer items. And also, he probably won’t do it (look at that tariff he laid on Carrier!).
What do Democrats need to change? They need to lie more. That’s lesson of the election. Full f***in stop.
hovercraft
A possible secretary of state.
Interview With GOPer Up For State Post Goes Totally Off The Rails (VIDEO)
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: I have met more than Bernie Sanders person IRL who did not vote for HRC. It didn’t matter in my blue state, but did in MI, OH and PA. They also said the same stupid shit we hear in the comment sections, and no not all of these people were young. One Bernie sis was well in her 60s.
schrodinger's cat
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: He should not have been allowed to run as a Democrat, since he is not one.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
Did Sanders lie his ass off?
Kristin D
@rikyrah: Agreed. When they say “she wasn’t talking to me,” what I hear is, “she was talking to the working class, but that included brown people and I didn’t like that.” Even his excuse for them just sounds like racism to me.
raven
@Betty Cracker: I’d rather you just used it.
raven
And, upon review, it was 21st Century Schizoid Man that t hey played constantly. It had been so long since I heard it I had to go to the youtube to find it.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Hitless:
This is what I kept saying this whole election- which Dem could have out-Trumped Trump as far as conning the voters?
geg6
@Kay:
I completely agree. Same here, especially now that Shell has committed to the cracker plant here. Help wanted signs are everywhere. There’s a labor shortage, fer chrissakes.
SatanicPanic
@Hitless: I think we just need a simpler message. Maybe.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
I don’t think that Rohrabacher has a shot in hell at becoming Secretary of State. He is despicable. Fingers crossed.
This morning, a CBS news reporter said that he thought that Romney was still the one to watch, even though he could not offer any reasonable explanation for his reasoning. I’m thinking that Romney is just being dangled in front of the media, but has no shot.
Sadly, I think that John Bolton has a good shot at the job.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: The corruption piece was an amalgam of “too close to Wall Street” and “rigged primary.” The latter made the Comey/email stuff much stickier, because it could be matched up with the idea that Hillary Clinton pulls strings and gets away with stuff. I think if Bernie Sanders had been content to keep running on “Hillary Clinton isn’t liberal enough,” he’d’ve gotten most of the traction he did within the Democratic Party, and had the platform planks to show for it, without making it possible for Donald Fucking Trump, gilded billionaire string-puller and con artist, to get away with calling Hillary Clinton the corrupt candidate and styling himself as the populist.
Chris
@hovercraft:
Jesus fucking Christ.
The latest demographic of filthy furriners with ulterior motives that we can’t trust; Cold War era Soviet emigres.
Maybe next week they’ll change their mind about all those nice party donors in Miami, too.
SatanicPanic
@hovercraft: That guy is amazing. It’s like they walked to Huntington Beach pier, looked around for the dopiest burnout and gave him a House seat.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
Seriously. There was a legitimate point to be made about pulling the party further left after its post-Reagan rut (though Sanders portraying himself and his campaign in a way that totally ignored that Obama had been doing exactly that for eight years didn’t exactly endear him to me or, I suspect, to tons of Democratic voters out there either).
But by the end, it wasn’t even about policy. It was a prolonged whine about the Democratic nominating process, and a ridiculously transparent one – closed primaries were undemocratic and bad, but the caucus nominating system that he’d benefited from somehow wasn’t, the Democratic Party was out of touch with the base, but also Democratic voters in the South should count for less because they’re too conservative (this, again, from a guy who hadn’t even been in the party). He richly deserved to lose.
Miss Bianca
@FlipYrWhig: yeah, this. And I’m sorry – parsing the difference between “well, he didn’t say she was a thief, he just said she was part of the Wall Street crowd, which is kinda true” is…kinda bullshit. it’s like saying, “well, I didn’t say you beat your wife, I just said you hang around with wife-beaters!”
The whole Sanders thing is a shining example of what drives me crazy about Democrats. We get into the forest and start bickering about what kind of trees we’re seeing, and whether silver birches are a sign of corruption, and how bad it is that you’ve mistaken a fir for a pine, and as a result we never make it out of the damn forest.
Meantime, the Republicans are already huddling with matches and gasoline cans waiting to burn the whole damn forest down.
Applejinx
@Kay:
Wow. That IS awesome. Good for them, that’s intelligent rather than just clever.
Cosign the ‘oh god not more talk about coders’ part. I’m in a position to see how much of a con that is.
trollhattan
@Chris:
I STILL hear he “didn’t win the nom, because superdelegates.” Ugh.
geg6
@NR:
Sorry, but Van Jones doesn’t live with these people. He doesn’t know them. I do. I have all my life. My PA county could be a perfect illustration of stupid so-called WWC rustbelt America. Trump voters are almost uniformly horrible people. I can’t think of a single exception among the vast circle of people who I know in this county and who voted for Trump. None. Now, will they admit to being racists and bigots? Hell, no. They’ll talk about how they wish Trump didn’t talk like that but then you turn on the local (or even national) news and see them at a Trump rally, screaming the most awful stuff and wearing a shirt saying “Trump That Bitch!” and you know you were right about who they really are. Your romantic notion of these people tells me you know nothing about them and have never encountered them in the wild.
Calouste
@Brachiator: You didn’t pay attention to what Sanders said about releasing his tax returns? He said he’d release them in two weeks for about 3 months straight.
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator: If it’s Rohrabacher, that’ll be payback to Putin.
Kristin D
@Betty Cracker: This is so perfect. Thank you. (And, man, am I being tired of being told to STFU and take a seat on behalf of, like, 6 people in the rust belt. And, ironically, no “liberal elite” has ever been as condescending to WWC as people telling us to do so are to us.)
Chris
@trollhattan:
Oh Christ.
I mean, yes, it does vaguely bother me that we have superdelegates, but it should be pretty obvious that they didn’t tip the nomination. If it had been nothing but the voice of the people (or caucuses or however the relevant state does it), Sanders would’ve lost all the same.
Betty Cracker
@Chris: Amen. I don’t say Sanders cost us the election — there were too many factors to identify just one. But he didn’t help. And I say that as someone who was happy about it when he threw his hat into the ring. Hell, I sent him $50 bucks! Thought he’d drag the party to the left, declare victory and get out. I still believe that was his original intention. But he got caught up in the adulation, not unlike Trump.
Kristin D
@trollhattan: Oh, they’ll be litigating the primary for the rest of time. The cult around Bernie is weird.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
This was a strange election. People who believed too strongly in the polling were sure that Clinton would win, so it is possible that some Sanders supporters thought that they could safely make a protest vote for some other candidate. I don’t see much point in bashing them.
Looking at Wisconsin, I find it interesting that Trump won 60 percent of the white male vote, but only 47 percent of the white women vote. He did not win a majority of women of any ethnic group. But Clinton’s inability to move more white men to her side was a problem, with or without Sanders. Clinton also did more poorly among Latinos in Wisconsin than I would have expected. Trump got 35 percent of the Latino vote.
Also, astoundingly, Trump got 45 percent of the votes of people age 18 to 24, while Clinton got only 43 percent. Clinton did get a majority of the vote of those between the ages of 25 and 39, but her failure to galvanize the younger voters is telling.
matryoshka
This occurs among upper income groups. Wealthy people think they work harder than those of us who slag away for under $50K in one or more jobs. Wealthy people believe the meritocracy has seen their special-snowflake qualities and rewarded their hard work, and that no one works as hard as they do. As one such asshole told me, the reason I wasn’t wealthy was because I made “bad choices.” My education and work experience were vastly more impressive than hers, and I have transferable skills, which she does not. Money changes everything.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator:
Yeah, that’s one of the things I blame the Bernie Sanders campaign for: whipping young idealists into a froth of thinking that Hillary Clinton was part of the problem. Which led to their then sitting out the election, leaving the presidential line blank, or casting a protest vote for Stein or Johnson. IMHO absent the Sanders effect, younger people might have grumbled about how Clinton was a retread, but they wouldn’t have been primed to doubt her integrity. But I haven’t seen this quantified.
danielx
@NR:
Yeah, but I didn’t notice Hillary calling for imprisoning her opponent(s), much less hiring Steve Bannon.
I do not care if they didn’t sign on to the worst stuff Trump said – he said it, they heard it and knew it, and voted for him anyway, and a good many of them are going to get totally screwed in direct consequence. I don’t respect them or their feels and butthurt. Fuck them.
Mary G
@SatanicPanic: Dana is an embarrassment to Orange County even among Republicans, but his wealthy district (Newport Beach) loves him and keeps re-electing him.
danielx
@Lizzy L:
Andrew Puzder for Secretary of Labor and Scott Pruitt for EPA administrator. Sweet Jeebus in a tar pit, it’s like picking my man Charlie Sheen for your sobriety coach.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
I think by this time, I had written Sanders off as a candidate I would support, so I stopped paying attention.
You’re right. It was a lie. But I hate Trump more about tax returns. And other stuff.
Applejinx
@germy:
Can we not have fucking billionaires at all? The millionaires have been bad enough. D:
goblue72
I wouldn’t exactly call the death of some old musician from a prog-rock band front page news (“How do you spell pretentious? E-L-P.”) What we ARE seeing is that Boomers are starting to die off, which includes a die-off of Boomer musicians/actors/semi-famous people from Boomer’s youth and its causing a collective Boomer freak-out over their own mortality. Now Phife Dawg passing away, that was a shock.
Trump presidency is essentially one last temper tantrum furball horked up by the Baby Boom generation before the rest of us finally take over the reigns and clean up this fucking mess. Baby Boom could have voted for first woman President who also happened to be completely sane and not a sociopath. Instead, they voted for the Cheetos-Colored Mussolini.
geg6
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The craziest thing is that NAFTA had nothing to do with the loss of the steel industry around here. The steel industry was nothing but rusted out buildings by the time Bill Clinton got elected, let alone signed NAFTA. The dismantling of that industry was overseen by St. Ronnie.
It’s a lie, and an easily verifiable one, that trade deals like NAFTA hurt the steel industry in Western PA.
germy
@goblue72: Yes, because we all know only boomers voted for Trump. Not a single young person voted for him. All those young men and woman cheering at his rallies? The young ait-right bros? The racist high school kids abusing their minority classmates? They’re just holograms.
Thank god all the boomers are dying. Once they’re all gone, you’ll have a goblue paradise.
Except for all those young neo-nazis marching past your house.
Betty Cracker
@goblue72: Wrong thread, middle-aged ghoul who pretends to be voice o’ the yoots (when not engaged in NBPP cosplay or unconvincingly caping the working stiffs).
FlipYrWhig
@goblue72: Dude, you and I are the same age, and we both know our generation sucks, and its political figures are horrible. Like Ted Cruz and Scott Walker and Paul Ryan. Who’s the best 40-something Democrat in America? If it’s Cory Bo0ker and Julian Castro, lord have mercy.
glory b
@Betty Cracker: His campaign director, Tad Devine, who also worked with Temp Trump campaign director Paul Manafort to install Putin’s guy in the Ukraine, convinced him to abandon that tactic and make a full on, futile at the end, run for president.
Bernie’s ego did the rest.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: Well, that Obama guy isn’t half bad! Or is he one of the boomers blueblows wants to herd onto an ice floe? I can never keep it straight. ETA: Never mind — you said people in their 40s now.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, it’s a thin bench, innit? I was hoping for Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin but they aged themselves out of the candidate pool.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig: RE: her failure to galvanize the younger voters is telling.
Yeah. Bernie was a bad, bad man! How dare he appeal to young voters, how dare he give them a sense of believing that they could actually be agents of change. A sense of, of, what did that Obama guy call it? Hope.
Didn’t they realize that they were just supposed to be quiet, stolid supporters of the Democratic Party, and suck up the stale platitudes like boiled over oatmeal?
And Hillary bears no responsibility. She is solid and wonky. No excitement in her, no sirree. And it was just another example of Sanders’ perfidy in being a lovable old white guy. What a putz.
My sister supported Hillary big time. I don’t know how my college age niece voted in the end, but she thought Clinton was a retread and doubted her integrity long before Sanders rode up on his pony.
Ultimately, it was up to Clinton to wage an effective campaign, not for Sanders to sit it out, which she did for the most part. She won the majority. She just needed to spread it out more.
rikyrah
A Voluntary Army of Union Intimidators
by Martin Longman
December 8, 2016 11:57 AM
Let’s look up Blackshirts on Wikipedia:
So, these folks were nationalists who volunteered to intimidate and use violence against their leader’s opponents, with a particular view toward smashing labor unions. That doesn’t seem too hard to understand. These were the first fascists.
Let’s fast-forward to yesterday.
FlipYrWhig
@glory b: @Betty Cracker: My take on Bernie Sanders was that he got into the race intending to prove that there was an untapped audience for out-and-proud liberalism. And it worked better than he thought it would, and he started wondering if he could just push it a little bit harder he might be able to prove the theory voiced here by NR and others that people don’t vote for Democrats because Democrats aren’t liberal enough to excite them. It was like one of those games in the NCAA tournament where the small college starts hitting threes and puts a scare into the national powerhouse and then, at the end, has to keep committing fouls to preserve their slim chance at victory.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: That’s one of the better analogies I’ve heard to express what happened.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: Sanders made them angry at Hillary Clinton in particular. Obama did that to a degree (the “same Washington players” riff), but Sanders did it to excess, because Sanders’s whole shtick is disheveled integrity, which I found to be bullshit hype when it was Bill Bradley running against Gore, and it didn’t get better with the intervening years.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: That’s why I’m the word-using guy.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
And then when it turned out that he was wrong, that his message didn’t, in fact, have enough voices to put him over the top, he started whining louder and louder that the table was bumpy, the queues were bent, the balls were dented, everybody was distracting him, and he totally would’ve won if the other guys weren’t cheating.
That’s the problem.
ETA: billiard analogy instead of yours, because I’ve never been any good at real sports.
JustRuss
@NR:
Anybody got any data on this? I understand that a significant number of black males switched for Trump…who else?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@schrodinger’s cat: She’s wearing a bald cap for a controversial role.
As always, she was wonderful in it.
gbbalto
@Brachiator: He COULD have presented himself as having better ideas, and inspiring hope on that basis, an avoided suggesting that his primary opponent and much of the party that he claimed to represent (which would include many candidates for other offices) are corrupt, thereby (after losing the primary) depressing the vote for the party’s candidates for this election and beyond. THAT is the opposite of inspiring hope.
hovercraft
@Brachiator:
The media fed this narrative and kept it going with every story they did about her. Even when they were reporting something ostensibly positive, they had to add in that she was untrustable (sic), they made sure that every mention of her reinforced peoples doubts. I find it hard to see what more she could have done to combat a press that had a narrative they wanted to push, especially since the entire GOP and their allies were pushing the same bullshit. In spite of that she still almost won, and she did get more votes. The fact that a whole bunch of liberals chose to approach the election as though they were choosing a life partner, was unfortunate. The election was a binary choice, selecting “someone else”, helped the shitgibbon. Using your vote to register your protest, is everyones right, but you don’t then get to say that it’s the fault of the person you were protesting against that they lost to someone who is worse than she was. You registered your protest, now be proud of the results, we are about to see a corrupt, venal, megalomaniac, autocratic asshole, with every indication that it’s administration will be one long kleptocracy, sworn in as president. Congratulation. You are pure, you’ve not compromised your ‘principles’, you are better than the rest of us.
These people are the same people who were constantly bleating about Obama’s betrayals and failures. Personally I’ve never met a perfect person, or had a perfect candidate to vote for, but hey, these people are saving themselves for that day. Good luck.
The ‘you’ is not directed at you, but at people with this mindset.
FlipYrWhig
@gbbalto: I have wondered about the degree to which the “emails” story carried along with it the private server story, the DNC emails, the Podesta emails, and made it all one big ball of confusion, so that “Hillary Clinton’s email trail shows she screws people and tries to cover it up” could be expanded to cover both “DNC was mean to Bernie” and “something something Benghazi” at the same time.
Ian
@FlipYrWhig:
This statement is neither true nor in light of the ideals we hold ourselves too.
ChrisGrrr
Anne – phenomenal stuff from Driftglass.
It’s hard to rebut “…until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we’re going to go right on losing…”
Thankyew!
gbbalto
@FlipYrWhig: Just my own opinion FWIW – it looked to me like the various e-mails all got rolled together in people’s minds (especially with media assistance) and would definitely have included “DNC was mean to Bernie” for some on the left. I don’t think that Benghazi got mixed up in it, at least for most people who would ever have voted Democratic at all.
NR
@Betty Cracker: You’re doing the same thing other commenters here are doing. You assume you already know the motivations of Trump voters, and you have no interest in talking to them, or listening to people who have (like Van Jones), to see whether or not your assumptions are correct. No, you only want to listen to people who validate the assumptions you’ve already made.
Do we want to try to understand what could make someone vote for a person like Trump? Or do we just want to circlejerk about how horrible those people are (and apparently Bernie Sanders voters too, even though the vast majority of them voted for Hillary in November), and isn’t it great that we’re all so much better than them? If it’s the former, we might be able to help the Democratic party get somewhere in this country. If it’s the latter, not only will we not help bring about a Democratic resurgence, we’ll actually make it substantially less likely.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
If he had been running as a third party candidate, sure. But he was running to be the Democratic Party’s candidate. At some point, he needed to stop punching the party he chose to represent in the election.
Mnemosyne
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
I’ve been saying since about a week after the election that we need a professional propaganda outlet like Breitbart. No more of this amateur shit. And while that strategy would necessarily include social media (since that’s the world we live in), social media alone is not enough.
Where are our liberal hacks who will turn on a dime and support anything a Democrat does without reservation?
NR
@Miss Bianca:
Yes you are. Maybe not you personally, but I’ve seen the sentiment expressed here over and over and over again that every single Trump voter is horrible, racist, stupid, irredeemable, deplorable. Some of you even say that about all of Bernie Sanders’ voters too, even though the vast majority of them supported Hillary in the end. You’re taking what Hillary said during her (losing) campaign and quite literally doubling down on it–remember, she said that only half of Trump supporters were deplorable.
I also think it’s pretty ironic that the same people who have been bashing the left for the last eight years for supposedly wanting “purity ponies” are now the same ones who want their perfect, pure coalition, without any of those icky, bad, “deplorable” people in it. Well guess what? That “pure” coalition of yours isn’t big enough to win a national election, nor make significant gains at the Congressional and state level. So just how far do you want to ride your little purity pony?
Speaking of throwing people under the bus, it must be getting awfully crowded under yours.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Given Tad Devine’s connections to Russia, one wonders if Bernie was getting some goading from inside the campaign as well. This whole thing worked out pretty darn well for Comrade Putin.
Betty Cracker
@NR: I grew up down the road from a little ghost town called Rosewood, and I live in a small town that goes GOP every election. At least 50% of my relatives — probably much higher, actually — voted for Trump. I know Trump voters better than Van Jones ever will — well enough to know they’d refer to him as “the nigger” the minute he left the room.
That’s the Trump base. The point of my comment (which apparently sailed over your head) is that it’s not possible to determine how many people who aren’t racist, sexist, xenophobic knobs voted for Trump for other reasons, a sample of which I listed. You want to chase them? Have at it. But don’t ask us to change when you can’t even prove it’s a substantial number or that the factors that shaped their choice are structural rather than situational.
As for Bernie voters, I’m married to one, so stuff your assumption that I have something against anyone who voted for Bernie. The ones who stayed home in a snit or voted for Stein in the general are self-evidently idiots, IMO, but Democrats who voted for Bernie in the primary and Clinton in the general are a core Democratic constituency, and I’ve never once said otherwise.
dww44
@NR: I am surrounded by Republican voters in a red state adjacent to the one in which Betty lives. I agree with her description of those who voted for Trump and who also voted for Obama in prior elections. They could most likely fit in a phone booth. There aren’t many of them. (Now there are probably more who abstained from voting for a Presidential candidate).
Those around me, which includes most with whom I interact daily, fall into a couple of categories. If they are not stone cold racists, then they are constitutionally unable to vote for any Democrat. So that means they must DEMONIZE candidates like Obama and Hillary in order to justify voting for a Trump. They will never admit they voted for an obvious racist demagogue so they now expend all their effort to get us to quit whining and to own up to Trump being “our” President.
geg6
@dww44:
That sounds just like my little neck of the Western PA woods. But there aren’t many who aren’t really stone cold racists. I’ve watched them operate my whole life. I know them like I know myself.
Miss Bianca
@NR: Fine. Obviously nothing is going to change your mind. So, all of Trump’s voters who aren’t stone-cold racists or sexists themselves are poor misguided souls who just need all of us to listen to them about their “economic concerns” – which have nothing to do with racism or sexism, of course not! – and then someone -preferably white, male and straight, because you know, we want them to feel comfortable, like maybe they could have a beer with him – to be their candidate and persuade them that the Democrats are their best option, despite their icky tendency to insist that people who are neither white, male nor straight ALSO have to get a seat at the table.
I’ll be waiting over here. Have at it, cowboy.
NR
@Miss Bianca:
And this right here is the problem. I don’t view these people as having something wrong with them that I need to fix. It’s sad that you do.
Lots of those people not only have no problem with people who aren’t white, male, or straight having a seat at the table, they helped put a black guy at the head of it for the last eight years. They’re the ones we should be trying to reach. And blanket, sweeping statements that drip with sneering condescension and contempt, like the one you just posted, actively make that harder.
Applejinx
@goblue72:
Lake played bass on 21st Century Schizoid Man, and sang it. He was bass and vocals for King Crimson’s first album, not just ELP.
Fuck you, dead to me :P
Davis X. Machina
@Feathers: TQM, and “No unhappy customers” too…
I’m just glad we avoided ISO 9000 for schools
FlipYrWhig
@NR: Christ almighty, man, your whole shtick is that centrist/moderate/whatevers suck, ruin everything, and should take a back seat. Do you know how many times more centrists there are than Obama-Obama-Trump voters? It has to be 100 times more.
NR
@Betty Cracker:
I should think the fact that you need to change should be self-evident by now, given the fact that you’ve lost the entire country outside the northeast and the west coast to the Republicans. The simple fact is that what you’ve been doing has not worked. In fact, it’s been a disaster. So yes, you need to change, unless you want to be stuck in the political wilderness for the forseeable future.
And no, changing does not mean embracing bigotry of any stripe. It does not mean tossing aside any member of our coalition. But it does mean setting aside the elitism and the contempt that you (I’m speaking generally here, not about you specifically) have for everyone who doesn’t think and believe and vote the way you do. Yes, there are a lot of hard-core racists in this country, and yes, a lot of them voted for Trump. But they are not a majority. If they were, we never would have elected a black man president twice. I won’t pretend to know the situation in your family, but there are a lot of Trump voters out there who don’t think and act the way everyone here is so sure they do. And pushing them further into Trump’s arms with sneering contempt is just flat-out stupid.
For fuck’s sake, Betty, I had a commenter on this blog say to me just yesterday, and I quote, “White people are the problem.” How far do you expect to get with that message in a country that’s majority white?
SFAW
@NR:
No, the problem is that YOU are too stupid, Not Rational.
How are your paranoid delusions today, by the way? The meds helping? I hope so.
@NR:
Or perhaps YOU need to change from being a Trump apologist/acolyte, and stop, as Shakespeare or someone else said, “making shit up.”
Miss Bianca
@NR: Riiiight. You still haven’t managed to make a case for how these all-Americans who voted for Trump aren’t deluded by racism, sexism, or celebrity-worship into kidding themselves that he was the better candidate for President than Hillary Clinton. All you’ve managed to do is say, “oh, but they’re *not*, and you’re a contemptuous meanie for calling a spade a bloody shovel!”
I make about $24,000 a year – which is at least $30,000 a year less than your average Trump voter, and about par with what I was making 30 years ago right out of college. What part of my “economic anxiety” did I see Trump allaying? Uh…none. Pardon me if I remained spectacularly unconvinced that Trump’s appeal to white people was based on economic populism.
SFAW
@Miss Bianca:
See, you’re making the same mistake as I: you’re arguing with something whose nym/nom/numb is its abbreviation for “Not Rational,” and expecting a rational response.
On the plus side, it hasn’t yet — at least, not that I can recall — accused you of having “violent fantasies.” That puts you in a select group of about three to five commenters. So that makes you a One Percenter! Just not income-wise, unfortunately.
NR
@Miss Bianca:
You’re the one asserting that they’re all racists. The burden of proof is on you.
Unless you can provide some actual proof for your blanket assertions, I’ll stick with listening to people like Van Jones who have actually talked to these voters.