.
Professor Krugman’s looking for one, in “Fast Food Damnation“:
… What I see a lot, both in general political discourse and in my own inbox, is a tremendous sense of resentment against people like Hillary Clinton or, well, me, that isn’t about policy. It boils down, instead, to something along the lines of “You people think you’re better than us.” And it has a lot to do with the way people live.
If populism were simply about income inequality, someone like Trump should be deeply resented by the working class. He has gold toilets! But he gets a pass, partly — I think — because his tastes seem in line with those of non-college-educated whites. That is, he lives the way they imagine they would if they had a lot of money.
Compare that with affluent liberals — say, my neighbors on the Upper West Side. They aren’t nearly as rich as the plutocrats that will stuff the Trump cabinet. What’s more, they vote for things that will raise their taxes and cost of living, while improving the lives of the very people who disdain them. Objectively, they’re on white workers’ side.
But they don’t eat much fast food, because they believe it’s unhealthy and they’re watching their weight. They don’t watch much reality TV, and do listen to a lot of books on tape — or even read books the old-fashioned way. if they’re rich enough to have a second home, it’s a shabby-chic country place, not Mar-a-Lago.
So there is a sense in which there’s a bigger cultural gulf between affluent liberals and the white working class than there is between Trumpkins and the WWC. Do the liberals sneer at the Joe Sixpacks? Actually, I’ve never heard it — the people I hang out with do understand that living the way they do takes a lot more money and time than hard-pressed Americans have, and aren’t especially judgmental about lifestyles. But it’s easy to see how the sense that liberals look down on regular folks might arise, and be fanned by right-wing media.
The question is, what do you do? Again, objectively those liberals are very much on workers’ side, while the characters who play on this perceived disdain are set to betray the white working class on a massive scale. Is there no way to get this across other than eating lots of burgers with fries?
Yes, a big chunk of the Trump/GOP’s appeal is old-fashioned all-American racism (and misogyny). But there are people of color (and plenty of women) who voted for Trump, under the rubric that he’d “shake things up” or similar. How does the Democratic sane Party appeal to voters who would rather punish themselves and their loved ones than be — in their minds — looked down on?
***********
Apart from that ongoing dilemma, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?
CarolDuhart2
Build liberal media We can’t counter if we don’t even show up. Instead of relying on Rachel, how about funding at least some syndicated material, some movies, some tv? Right now the few options there are are on a shoestring compared to Fox or even AM Radio. Yes, the owners are conservative, but how about buying up a few distressed stations and having at least some of a voice? And online radio is a vast field yet to be explored-less real estate purchases needed-just a proper studio and talent that can work full time.
Even the blogs could use a little scratch. What would happen if enough could afford to work full time on this stuff and boost the activity?
Restart the Democratic Clubs anywhere there’s enough people to hold a meeting, where people can talk face to face about these issues.
Xenos
I agree with Krugman about the sneering – you will very rarely, if ever, hear liberals sneer at WWC types. We do, however, sneer about the cultural and political signifiers that stand for normative WWC culture –
-Evangelical Protestantism / authoritarian Catholicism
-machismo (now I live out of the US I can see for the first time how bizarre, really, American masculinity is)
-pop culture such as wrestling, reality TV,
-Nascar, guns, goldbuggery
-casual, if not necessarily very intense or dogmatic racism
–not so casual sexism
What I do not get is why they are so sensitive about these sneers. They can sneer at me for eating quiche or failing to buy a gun, or whatever, but it does not even occur to me to be offended by this. Will they listen to my political opinions if I start validating their culture at every opportunity? That would be transparently patronizing, I think.
Maybe the answer is to do what that liberal redneck guy on youtube recommends: just lie to them. These people have demonstrated that they prefer to be lied to, so maybe we should just figure what lies they want to hear and really start treating them like the lumpen-proletariat that they think we think they are.
gene108
@CarolDuhart2:
Who has the money? I have bills and a mortgage to pay, as do many people.
You need a billionaire dedicated to “Movement liberalism” and they just do not exist.
Some billionaires have pet causes that are overlap with the overall liberal agenda, but none of them will fund media solely for the express purpose of advancing the liberal agenda.
gene108
@Xenos:
They want to be revered for their ignorance and stupidity, and drag everyone else down to their level.
Both Trump and Bush, Jr were mocked for the way they spoke. I bet it reassured a lot of WWC folks those guys were on the level, because they did not talk in a way that made WWC think they were smarter than the WWC.
rikyrah
Morning, Everyone ???
CarolDuhart2
@gene108: Meetings can be done on a shoestring-just need a place and some coffee. Alex Jones isn’t a billionaire-just a loudmouth with a lot of people willing to pay for a subscription. And online radio is very cheap.
And we can always give more to our favorite bloggers. And podcasts. And I’ve seen AM radio stations online advertised for $25k these days. Yes, those are in upper Siberia, but they exist.
Don’t Forget TWIB, Free Speech TV, and the others who already exist. If you can, give to them so they can grow larger and larger.
And how do we know nobody’s available? Have they been asked and said no? And even the no’s might be good for some startup money.
Air America got some funding, but just mismanaged the effort.
Do you know Kos brings in 8 million a year?
raven
Every Sunday morning I take the dogs go see a buddy. He’s half-Hawiann, college educated, retired from his work as a construction project superintendent, has multiple myeloma and drinks way too much. Yesterday I had to bang a good bit because he’d really tied one on Saturday night. This is not a dumb dude but I continue to be amazed at how he is steeped in Fox news and Trump bullshit. He voiced a real concern about all these “protests” and when I said “what protests” he mumbled about the Women’s March. He said he was just sick of this PC bullshit but couldn’t really tell me exactly what he was talking about. He also told me how sad he got during the Army-Navy game because he said “so many of those guys and gals are going to die because are going back in”! I asked him to explain how Trump can babble on abut staying out of shit where we don’t belong yet threaten all this military action”? He had nothing. I’m just at a loss with him but I feel as if he’s window into how “these people” think.
rikyrah
Leave the people of color out of it. The amount of Blacks is the same pitiful group that usually vote GOP. More Black men, but I account that to sexism. He got historic lows with Latinos, only 18%. I find that 18% offensive, but it is what it is.
rikyrah
I don’t even think about them. I am living my life. Why waste time looking down on them.
CarolDuhart2
And a lot of the Latinos were told by the church to vote Republicans to “save the babies” by their church. I’m a believer, but I beginning to wonder if Thomas Paine wasn’t right at times about the influence of the church in political affairs.
OzarkHillbilly
It is rare that I would call Krugman clueless, but here he is just being flat out willfully blind. Take it away Kevin Drum:
Let’s not lie to ourselves.
balconesfault
The Dems have done a crappy job of defending an “establishment” … Which has for decades protected Social Security, Medicare, clean water, public lands available for hunting and fishing and taking the family or scout troop out for a weekend, labor rights, the right to sue if some corporation screws you over, public utilities that don’t rate gouge, etc.
Is the establishment always perfect? Hell no. But it takes a long time to build an establishment of politicians and knowledgeable bureaucrats and public institutions that are fundamentally dedicated to improving the lives of people in a world filled with competing interests.
We’re going to get to see how short a time it takes to blow all that up … And how much what replaces our current establishment is responsive in any real way to the WWC voters who invited in the bombers.
Not to mention the Bernie backers who did their best to soil the term establishment during the primaries, with no politically realistic formula for improving on what Obama had rebuilt after the neglect of the Bush years.
Baud
I plan to increase my sneering. Voting for Trump is inexcusable.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: We’re not the ones who made Rush Limbaugh a millionaire. Where’s both sides when you need it?
Baud
@rikyrah: Agreed.
Baud
@rikyrah: Morning, rikyrah.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: I sneer at the black churches very night on the news when this or that Atlanta murder story has some one exclaiming shit about the lord.
Baud
@CarolDuhart2: Don’t know how to do it, but I was saying we need to build our own media even before election day. Blogs are irrelevant to outreach, however.
Baud
@raven: I’ve seen black ministers that have made me cringe. But bad black churches don’t have the political muscle that white evangelical churches do in making bad things happen.
raven
@Baud: That’s true but it wasn’t my point.
CarolDuhart2
Blogs have their place. A lot of the media has moved online, and blogging is a part of the media. Does anyone think Breitbart.com irrevelant when they could get Kellogg’s to advertise? I looked at the list of companies that withdrew the sponsorship, and all I could think of was that hate paid well. Breitbart did well enough to have correspondents full-time covering political events.
Blogs may not be outreach, but how about working on a little unity with those already on board?
Baud
@raven: No, I was making a different follow on point.
I don’t sneer at religious people because my mom was deeply religious.
raven
@Baud: I’m not asking anyone to feel the way I do.
Baud
Remember when Obama won, and all these GOP voters were chided about how they need to treat liberals better.
Me neither.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Hopefully this attempt at media will work better than Air America*.
ETA: It was such a clusterfuck that Al Franken had to run for Senate to pay the bills.
Citizen Alan
@OzarkHillbilly:
Personally, I think there’s a substantive difference between white mega churches and black churches. The latter are far less likely to be a multi-million-dollar buildings but by a preacher who makes millions of dollars a year and has his own plane.
Terry Buckalew
I sneer at Kevin Drum.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Terry Buckalew: Well, he does live in Errrvine*.
*As the kid calls it.
Keith G
One way to start to to realize that quote such as this ^^^ one gives a voice to “looking down” by massively oversimplifying what has happened.
Another start would be to spend the vast amount of time talking about policy and it’s implication no time on the personal characteristics and foibles of Mr.Trump – this includes the nicknames. Lastly, for now, declutter messaging/marketing. Keep it bumper sticker simple and consistent.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: I have a tendency to sneer at mega churches -especially the “Prosperity Gospel” types, they make me hope there really is a Hell- but I don’t sneer at the religious impulses nearly all human beings have or the varying expressions there of. I figure life is hard and if it helps to get you thru the day, what is wrong with that?
NotMax
What better way to start a fresh week than with some classic comedy regurgitation?
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: I’m not hopeful. But maybe someone will surprise me.
Keith G
@OzarkHillbilly: There is a Lefty Blindness that has similarities to, but is in many dimensions very different than RWNJ Blindness. It is not troubling that such exists (since it is part of human nature, IMHO), what is troubling is when folks are willfully unaware that they are waist deep in it, but claim they are not.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: If people want to believe the “lord” picks and chooses what happens to them that’s fine. I think it’s bullshit.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: I do dislike Evangelicals in general too. I do not like it when people try to push their religion on me.
Terry Buckalew
I don’t sneer at religion. As we all know, the Flying Spaghetti Monster moves in mysterious ways. Who am I to judge?
Waldo
When you sneer into the abyss, the abyss sneers back.
Mustang Bobby
Having been persecuted both personally and as a member of a group by evangelicals, I have no use for them, and trying to make nice with them or get them to come around to our point of view is like trying to explain gravity to a chicken.
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly:
You know who else was like that?
Bill Clinton. Maybe not Bill Clinton today, but Bill Clinton back in ’92.
And he caught hell for it in Washington, acting like a stupid hillbilly. But it probably got him elected twice.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: There was this ad from Club for Growth from 2004.
FlipYrWhig
I don’t remember right-wing people being implored to stop sneering at the various targets of their ire and resentment when they lost elections. And “those wussy liberal elites are mean to us and use stereotypes when they don’t know anything about us” is self-refuting, or should be. Fuck this. They were either played for fools or enjoy being played for fools.
Matt McIrvin
…that was where the pejorative “The Village” actually came from, didn’t it? “And it’s not his place.” Washington insiders culturally sneering at Bill Clinton. The Lewinsky investigation was all part of it, and the relief that adults were finally taking over when George W. Bush came in. He talked like the common people but he wasn’t dirty white trash like Bill was.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
That G. H. W. Bush wasn’t laughed out of town when he expressed a love for pork rinds remains a puzzlement.
Immanentize
I am seriously considering changing my nym to “Sneery”
Baud
@Waldo: Not even the abyss would have voted for Trump.
BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: He was from a “good family” so that excuses quite a bit.
ETA: He’d also been a Congresscritter, RNC Chair, Ambassador to China and CIA director, he was a made man.
Immanentize
@FlipYrWhig: added — what the right wing folks do to people they disagree with (Dixie Chicks examples) is offer death threats to them and their families. But it is not sneering!
OzarkHillbilly
@Matt McIrvin: Bill’s big sin was rising above what he was born into, just trailer trash. Same for Obama, an uppity ni**er.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Their big sins are that they are Democrats. Just like Gore, Kerry, and Hillary.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: IOKIYAR
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: That’s the original sin, they haven’t been saved yet.
Botsplainer
Y’all do realize that the CEO hires are about inflating a stock bubble, right? And that when it pops, it’ll be like the Great Depression times 3?
Thing is, you can’t inflate a stock bubble, engage in a trade war AND do reckless things in the Middle East in order to drive energy costs into the stratosphere at the same time without crashing your plot.
I’m encouraged by the Chinese show of force – they’re not going to give him a chance (like so many of my right wing friends are begging me to do).
debbie
@raven:
He’s definitely a window. He’s pissed, but he can’t explain why. That’s why it’s been so easy for Trump to win their support for the Russian-style oligarchy he’s planning.
MomSense
Kevin Drum should try living with these assholes for a week and then he’d change his tune.
Patricia Kayden
@CarolDuhart2: That’s what our side needs — media to counter the lies pouring from the other side’s media machine. The so called liberal mainstream media simply amplifies Rightwing lies without any pushback. We need alternatives to Fox to counter the lies. MSNBC and CNN are useless.
BillinGlendaleCA
@MomSense: Kevin lives in the OC, I’m sure he has no problem finding RWNJ’s; Newport Beach is just to the west.
MomSense
@Botsplainer:
The first thing Republicans do when they become governor and take over a state legislature is to make a big show of cutting taxes. Of course they cut taxes for the wealthy. The next thing that happens is that we end up with a budget crisis. I know you are shocked, shocked to hear that slashing taxes leads to a budget crisis. Next thing you know they are cutting school funding and eliminating services for the needy and disabled. Finally they start raising the fees and the municipalities raise property taxes. Everyone is pissed off and struggling and all they seem to remember is that the Republicans cut their taxes and tried to get rid of wasteful spending.
I fully expect Trump and the Republicans to create a crisis. They always do.
OzarkHillbilly
@MomSense: Drum telling the truth about us does not mean he doesn’t recognize their sins. He does.
Waldo
If only Hillary had stood up and declared her love for the poorly educated. Or done a zany impression of a journalist with a disability. Or called out the rapey wetbacks. Or joked about shooting people on 5th Avenue. Or played footsie with white supremacists. Etc.
On some level, these people earned the sneers.
Patricia Kayden
@OzarkHillbilly: Drum knows that Rightwingers sneer at liberals and Democrats, right? Do Rightwingers need safe spaces because the mean libtards are mocking them?
Iowa Old Lady
There’s a lot of casual liberal sneering about people who live in places like Iowa. It balances off the casual conservative patronization about The Heartland.
Basically both are signs that the people in the press or political power don’t live here.
Barbara
@Botsplainer: I am hoping for sanity before Great Depression let alone times three, but you are essentially correct. Trump is the magic pony president: the one who will serve Putin by keeping oil costs high, except for American drivers and industry. He will do this while America dominates the world militarily without actually engaging in combat. Meanwhile, Senator Quisling and Speaker Vichy plot to redirect as much wealth as they can to their donors. All because people like me eat too much kale.
Gindy51
@OzarkHillbilly: He’s right, we sneer at them all the time we just won’t admit it to ourselves.
Brachiator
Tyrants, old style, were always aristocrats who appealed to the lower classes, and who promised to be their friend.
This fits Trump to a huge T. You see it in the way that he vanquished the Bush family and slapped Romney around.
Krugman is a bad or lazy historian.
satby
The sneering I heard when I lived in rural SW MI for 8 years was all toward the “city people”. The vacationers from IL were called FIPs (fucking IL people) even though their spending and construction of vacation homes was a large portion of the economy there. The locals resented that the IL people had the kind of money that would allow them to build expensive summer homes and pay inflated prices for good restaurants and farmers market stuff. But not too many of the locals were likely to encourage their kids to go off to college and get the kinds of education that landed them the jobs that could afford those things.
James E Powell
That reads like Krugman just got back from brunch with David Brooks. One stereotype piled on another.
Is there any doubt that a generic white male Democrat saying exactly the things Hillary said would have beaten Trump easily?
Baud
@Gindy51: It goes both ways. I object to the insinuation that our side is worse or that it is us that needs to capitulate.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
Are you serious??
Baud
@James E Powell: A male wouldn’t have faced the sexism, but I’m not without doubts that such a candidate would have necessarily won.
Mr Stagger Lee
In his book Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissenger talked about how George H.W.Bush lived in Odessa/Midland in the 1940’s and had an understanding of the area.(in the mind of the people there) Michael Dukakis on the other hand was an egg-head who import some liberal mish-mash that would destroy their way of life according to the locals.
Barbara
@Iowa Old Lady: I grew up in the Midwest and I get tired of being told I don’t understand or am looking down on them. I never wanted to move. I know many people like myself. Except for climate change I am getting to the point of just agreeing that people should get what they are asking for.
satby
@MomSense: @OzarkHillbilly: @Gindy51:
Some behavior has earned the sneers. And there is an essential difference, liberals tend to look down on behavior, which can be altered. Conservatives look down on people’s intrinsic characteristics, like race or religion, which can’t or aren’t changeable.
debbie
@James E Powell:
I think all of the perceived Clinton baggage hurt her more than her gender.
Barbara
@James E Powell: This, exactly. There is peril from overthinking the situation.
Barbara
@debbie: Except that the baggage had a lot to do with gender as well, you are probably right.
danielx
I couldn’t care less about their tastes; to each his own etc etc – though I could wish that the ownership of Barrett rifles and Trump voters didn’t overlap so completely. (Rule of thumb: the greater the density of .50 cal rifle owners in a given geographic area, the redder the area.) I look down upon them because they have allowed themselves to believe the stock market has fallen and unemployment has gone up in the last eight years, these among a huge amount of misinformation they’ve ingested without a blink. All of which they consider to be Obama’s fault, naturally. Chiefest and most recent delusion: that somehow Donald Trump is going to look after their interests in some fashion, as if Donald Trump has ever looked after any interests but his own.
So no, I don’t look down at them because they eat at McDonald’s, I look down on them because they are willfully ignorant and misinformed and those traits have put them, and all the rest of us, on the road to hell. I cannot and do not respect them, or their feels, or their butthurt. Life is too short to spend trying to convince people that water is wet, plutocrats are inclined are inclined to rape and pillage and, yes, that Republicans will fuck up things that those very same people like and need – on ideological grounds alone.
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
I doubt it. Trump whipped all the generic white male Republicans.
Hillary was probably beaten in part because she was a woman, and also because she sold herself as a continuation of the Obama administration. But her policy message, when she could get it out in between emails and Benghazi, was unconvincing to just enough people to make an electoral difference.
Baud
@Iowa Old Lady: Trump called Iowa stupid after he lost the primary, and they still voted for him.
OzarkHillbilly
@Patricia Kayden:
Of course he does. He never even intimates otherwise. He was merely responding to Krugman’s statement that liberals by and large do not sneer at “rural working-class folks”, which as this comment thread has shown in spades is an assertion based on pure fantasy.
We do. And we justify it (with a few good reasons)(and more than a few ridiculous ones). Let’s not pretend we don’t think we are better than they are.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
Educated/upper income Republicans sneer at them too, though. They sneer at them for making poor financial decisions- I cannot tell you how many times I have heard them castigated for buying shit they don’t need and can’t afford or paying too much interest- trucks, big houses, motorcycles. They sneer at them for bad grades and low scores on college entry exams and how their kids run wild. They sneer at them for having the police at their houses all the time to adjudicate their family/neighbor disputes and they sneer at them for low self-control: how they’re always fighting with each other and how they smoke and are overweight. This county went 70% for Trump- the sneerers and the sneered-at, both. Middle class conservatives are INCREDIBLY snobby towards lower class conservatives. I’m sometimes shocked at how mean and personal it is- it’s contempt.
Iowa Old Lady
@Barbara: I grew up in the city of Detroit, so Iowa feels like a foreign land to me. I certainly hear the sneers, but then I never heard anyone say wonderful things about my home town either. Basically, I do believe voters are adults and have to accept the consequences of their own actions.
MomSense
@satby:
I totally sneer in a blog because I have to deal with these people. it’s called venting. They will talk trash about LGBT, black people, immigrants, women to my face. They really hate the immigrants and black people who according to them would rather get handouts than work. They are in my office and I am trying to help them access state and federally funded services.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Drum is correct factually, but it’s also a distraction, as this thread also indicates.
CaseyL
The RW earned my sneers by making a conscious choice to be part of the Anthrax-N-Tire Rims coalition 20-odd years ago. They decided to believe whatever Fox told them, even when that made no plausible sense. They opted to tune out points of view that didn’t agree with what they already believed, and allowed themselves to become believers in misinformation and disinformation.
I don’t sneer at them for eating fast food or liking blood sports like NASCAR. I sneer at them because they sold out – cheaply sold out – their future, their children’s future, and all our futures in service to an ideology that sees them has nothing more than fodder.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
They blame them for the financial crisis here. They don’t “understand” interest or they don’t read or understand the contracts they sign or they never should have believed they could buy a house anyway- they didn’t deserve real estate. Blaming lower class people for making poor decisions is absolutely central to conservative economic and deregulatory theory. It’s like a manta. If they get screwed it doesn’t mean there should be more regulation- it means they’re stupid and they shouldn’t enter into contracts.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
I see a strategy for Baud!2020!.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby:
An Arkansas buddy of mine calls them “cidiots” and for good reason. Some of the things they do when they get out in the woods and rivers… (has nothing to do with politics, a liberal to the left of Marx living in AR, he gives me hope that I too can survive these dark times in Misery)
amk
shorter kevin – can we haz moar pillows & cushions for racist ignoramuses? and these are the pos who whine 24×7 about “PC culture”
sunny raines
Although the racism/sexism/bigotry of many in WWC is the point, the looking down upon them is not the key problem and talking nice to them will not change their ways. The key problem is that they (racist/sexist/bigoted WWCs) do not want people not-like-them, being equal to them. They would rather do worse themselves as long as “the other” gets an even bigger shaft. They are people stupid beyond words.
There is very little sane people can do to appeal to such imbeciles. And yes I talk down to them – because they truly are idiots, incapable of rationally evaluating the world around them. It is particularly problematic of white men – they need a complete psychological overhaul.
Alesis
I think the question of sneering is something that applies to a narrow band of liberalism which has been taken to represent the whole coalition.
The resentment of heartland conservatives is directed at non whites who many of them gleefully sneer at and the white upper middle class who they regard as self satisfied and superior.
The irony of this is often lost. Kevin Drum’s post is a great example of this. Maybe he’s channeling his impression of a heartland conservative but the suggestion that liberals would never dare sneer at the “black churches” is a pitch perfect example of what conservatives hate about political correctness.
As they see it they are naturally superior to the non whites and should be regarded as such by other white folks. It’s basically the old southern idea of “honor.”
sunny raines
time to lose the red
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Fuck you, vote for me! Baud! 2020!
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: Agree completely. They are the mark at the table and don’t even know it.
sunny raines
@Alesis: agreed, the WWC “problem” has nothing to do with them being left behind and everything to do with their racism/sexism/bigotry. Democrats will never attract WWC votes by making a more worker-friendly platform – they’re already leagues better than the republicans that will only shaft the WWC. But they don’t care as long as republicans shaft non-whites even more.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud:
When the truth becomes a distraction one needs to ask, from what lies?
PIGL
@danielx: thank you. There’s more…somebody said “you can’t cheat an honest man”. Similarly, when people are so profoundy wrong about almost everything, there’s something wrong with them or with the culture that raised them. i’m going to go with racist fundamentalism, myself. And I will not apologize for sneering at that.
Weaselone
@OzarkHillbilly: Drums also lying to himself. About of the third of the stuff he lists deserves to be sneered at. Another third he mistakes what liberals are sneering at. I don’t sneer at blunt patriotism, I sneer at trashing the 1st amendment to prevent protest flag burning while using the flag as buttfloss or to sell crappy used cars.A final third us liberal elite don’t care about. tchotchkes? Seriously? It’s not liberals that obsess about what’s on peoples countertops or said countertops composition.
Having gone through that, the sneering does exist, but it’s not the voice of the people on the packed subway with me that’s in the papers they read, the news they read, or the shows they watch.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: Yep.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: There are many truths to choose from in deciding what to talk about.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I love it!
satby
@MomSense: yeah, that was a big tell for me too: the local people exempted me from their generalized contempt (and Kay is right about how personal and mean it is) because I was an honorary member of the club. But the stuff I would hear them say about city people, minorities, immigrants, hell anyone who wasn’t them was surprising both in levels of ignorance and hypocrisy. Too many collecting government benefits to count bitching that minorities got all the government handouts; if I would point out their own collection of the same benefits I would hear that they at least “deserved” them because reasons. Way too many who couldn’t be bothered to hang on to a job of any kind complaining about how what I did as an IT manager wasn’t really work because I did it from home, even though my workweeks were usually 60 hours long.
I know all the challenges of being poor in America, I went from making $8k a year as a single mom to making almost 10x as much before I got laid off, but I had to go to school and work and raise my kids alone all at the same time to get there. I’m sympathetic to anyone’s struggles, and I understand not everyone has the sheer cussedness I had to get that done. But too many times I had to listen to whining about how the latest job that lasted a month was unfair, or unreasonable because they couldn’t get time off for something minor or whatever. Some beds are made.
Kay
It is inherently patronizing to believe “the WWC” are this passive lump waiting for cultural outreach from educated liberals. It assumes they are these wide-eyed innocents open to everyone and it’s just a matter of “reaching out”.
They MOVE. They have agency. They CHOSE Trump.
This whole “blame liberals for Trump” assumes liberals are running the fucking universe,”bringing people in” or “pushing people away”. Obviously they’re not or we wouldn’t have Trump and a far Right one-Party government.
OzarkHillbilly
@amk: He said nothing of the sort.
prob50
I only sneer in a well-meaning manner. If only these folks knew better they would understand. It’s such a heavy burden to not look down upon them, but I try really, really hard.
And sometimes I eat crappy fast-food, but not so much lately.
Cermet
Let’s get this right – pointing out that many “heart land” people (ignoring the inner city people with the same issues) are eating too much fast food that is causing them health issues is sneering!? What a load of shit. So, sound medical advice is sneering …right. OK, that bull shit is laughable.
Now lets address what and why they really feel we “liberals – read better educated – causes them to think this; the average school their children attends can’t offer even a small fraction of AP courses, computer access and even level of teachers that the average East/west coast suburban school offers; hell, most inner city schools can offer more. They know this and it is something that has been around a long time but has gotten far worse; they know were the wealth is and that this allows the schools to be superior (even in many of their States they have the rare but well funded school.)
This is the source of much (but far from all) their belief that we look down on them because they know that they, and their children have had very inferior education opportunities and they, and their children are trapped in this endless cycle of low education that condemns them to continue to live in area’s with no real jobs or opportunities; these people are ignorant but not stupid (unlike so many wealthy repug-thug voters.)
amk
@OzarkHillbilly: Nice false equivalence. While the left may (or may not) sneer at these willfully ignorant racists, the left sure aren’t hell bent on harming them, unlike these thugs, who would like to see the left harmed and actually dead.
amk
@Kay: It’s all the usual rw projection bs.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
We do a lot of general advising at the law office. Once they come to you for one thing they have someone they trust so they ask general questions- “is this a good deal on kid’s college, is this a good interest rate, read this contract, should I buy this, sell that?” etc. The general consensus in the conservative legal community is I’m wasting my time. They’re stupid, they’ll stay stupid and they deserve to lose because that’s markets.
Puts liberals making fun of them for eating fast food into perspective.
satby
@Cermet: But it’s like the chicken or the egg: schools are locally funded in most of this country, and in red states the majority has voted for legislators who promise to cut the taxes that fund the schools, the roads, all the services they don’t get and feel they deserve.
MomSense
I’m also really sick of all these think pieces about Dems winning over people who are lost. This election came down to 76,000 votes in three states. We lost MI by 10,704 votes or some such and now officials have admitted that more than half of the vote counting machines in Detroit were broken. There are over half a million voters in Detroit. Where are all the people who were up in arms about privacy rights when it comes to voting rights?
Another Scott
Meh.
Some commenters sneer on some blogs. On both ends of the spectrum.
The Teabaggers and the GOP enablers will use and try anything to get support and votes. Those on the left, not so much (but some).
Drum makes some good points sometimes, but sometimes he presents things ala Jon Stewart at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear – there’s a mountain on one side and a few noisy posters on another (posters that nobody outside the blog listens to unless the RWNoiseMachine digs them up and puts them in a video. Yeah, Krugman has a bit of a blind spot in this piece, but so does Kevin.
Some people are convinced of the righteousness of their views and will look for examples to prove them, even if they have to dig up the Rockies to find them…
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@Weaselone:
The trashing of the 1st amendment to prevent protest flag burning while using the flag as buttfloss or to sell crappy used cars, is exactly the kind of blunt patriotism he is talking about…. And you sneer at it. For the record so do I. As to countertop arrangements….
Again, all Drum is saying is we sneer at the rural white working class, for a lot of reasons, some good, some ridiculous. People here seem to be offended by his pointing out that simple fact, and want to argue with him by justifying the sneering.
I find the juxtaposition very humorous.
Iowa Old Lady
Krugman is right that taste is an issue with Trump though. At first, I was just horrified how tacky he and everything about his was. And that’s because I was raised to appreciate middle-class restraint in matters of décor, dress, etc. It’s also why some people think he’s self made. He talks and chooses like someone born poor who suddenly had money.
Now, of course, the stuff coming out of his mouth and “very good brain” horrify me enough that I don’t have time to worry about taco bowls or gold plating.
prob50
@Immanentize:
Sneering is more a manner of passive disdain. Death threats, while rarely actually carried out, indicates the threatening party thinks his beliefs or lifestyle are in some way seriously threatened. “If these liberals have their way they will take away our guns AND make us eat arugula.”
matryoshka
I grew up WWC, and I don’t overtly sneer at the tastes of my homies but I don’t share those tastes at all. The thing that made me different was that I got an education and those things do not satisfy me. When someone in this thread (maybe even Drum) mentioned the “reading habits” of the WWC, I laughed. They don’t read anything more demanding than romance novels and they don’t like people who do.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: And Krugman decided to bring up a blatant falsehood/delusion. I love Krugman, he’s better than that, and he needed to be called out on it.
Chris
None of this is all that mysterious: the Trump-voting electorate, going all the way up to Donald on his gold plated toilets, suffers from a massive inferiority complex, and like everything else in their lives, they “resolve” it by projecting it onto liberals and ill-defined coastal elites and the like. We can avoid talking down to them all we want, but they will continue to hear it, because it’s not fundamentally about anything we’ve done.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: It wasn’t the centerpiece of his post, however. It was Drum’s. It’s a question of emphasis.
Weaselone
@satby:
Simple solution. Just attach strings to federal school funding that are so toxic that no blue state will touch them. Red state school funding issues solved. Well, at leat until the next round of state or federal tax cuts.
OzarkHillbilly
@amk:
Bullshit. Try addressing what he actually says instead of what you want him to have said.
Alesis
I guess what galled me about Drum’s post (I read it some time ago) is that he assumes that Orange County or upper east side liberalism represents “liberalism.”
Let’s not forget that most of the working class consists of liberals (or at the very least people who vote consistently for democrats).
Sneering is not a condition of liberalism it’s a condition of being middle class and a bit too pleased about it.
Baud
@Alesis: Right. The racial divide has once again disappeared from the discussion.
Alesis
@Baud:
It’s a real problem that keeps happening over and over and over….
I always remind people that about 40% of the Mississippi electorate voted for Hillary. It wasn’t for the arugula.
Kay
@MomSense:
I really like Drum and I think he’s fair but this whole analysis veers into how conservatives analyze the African American vote. Conservatives believe that conservative policy is better for African Americans, but African Americans remain on the “liberal plantation” because Democrats pander to them on “cultural” issues. They don’t believe African Americans evaluate- they respond only to appeals to emotion and culture. It seems like this whole line of argument does the same thing to white working class- we can’t appeal to THEM on rational grounds- instead we have to eat fast food in front of them. That’s what the lower classes respond to.
It just seems to veer immediately into one group of liberals patronizing these people in a slightly different way.
What about just talking to them without all this bullshit parsing? Democrats should try that.
MDC
@Citizen Alan: Google “Creflo Dollar”.
rikyrah
@Botsplainer:
Yes, we do realize it, which is why we are all worried.
rikyrah
@satby:
This this this.
Listen to them.
They sneer at the kids smart enough to get the hell out of there. They seem to just want the kids to stay and be miserable too.
If you were a phucking coal miner, why the hell wouldn’t you want your kid to do something else so that they wouldn’t do that shyt?
Chris
@Xenos:
To the extent that there’s any truth to this, it’s this. (Although I still quibble with the use of “white working class” given the sheer number of people who are excused and included in the label who have nothing working class about them).
Conservative voters are correct to believe that I have nothing but contempt for them. They are wrong to believe that this contempt has anything to do with what their ethnic/tribal group is, or where they live, or whether they go to church, or what music they listen to, or what sports they enjoy, or what kind of food they eat. (My own answers to half these questions are the same as theirs, and I have exactly as much contempt for the tenth-generation New York WASP aristocrats that vote Republican as I have for any stereotyped Appalachian). When what it actually has to do with is their own actions (if only at the ballot box) and their own stated beliefs about the kind of universe they want to live in.
And, again, that belief is textbook projection on their part. Who stereotypes people based on their food choices (latte-sipping, sushi-eating elitists)? Conservatives. Who judges people based on their lifestyle choices (being vegan, driving hybrids, having jobs like “teacher” or “public employee” or anything else they think “isn’t a real job” because reasons)? Conservatives. Who hates certain geographic areas of the country so much that their most famous preachers think nothing of responding to the 9/11 attacks by gloating that it’s God’s judgment on wimminz and Teh Gheys? Conservatives. Who condemns people based on their religious affiliation to the point of demanding religious ID lists and bans on entering the country based on religion? Conservatives. Yet again, the whole “you just hate us cause we’re white/cause we’re rednecks/cause we go to church on Sundays/cause we’re heartlanders/cause we’re not fancy and coastally elite like you” is simply them, assuming that everybody across the aisle views them that way for those reasons, because that’s the only frame of reference they understand.
Forgive me if I’m getting exceedingly tired of being responsible for their personal issues.
rikyrah
@MDC:
Prosperity Gospel Preacher Hustler.
Victor Matheson
@OzarkHillbilly: I lived in Chicago for 8 years and frequently traveled to the rural Midwest. I never once heard myself referred to as a FIP – fucking Illinois person. FIB – fucking Illinois bastard, on the other hand…
rikyrah
@Kay:
Yet, they won’t see that, and think that some Black Urban person like me has the time, or the inclination to even give them a second thought- positive or negative. Folks in cities are too busy living their lives to be concerned about them.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@OzarkHillbilly: and I will one up Drum – a lot of us rejected that lifestyle in an effort to improve ourselves.
Anyway, Krugman and Drum or overthinking it – it’s Frat boy rules; anyone different than you is making fun of you and is EVIL!
Anyway – Trumps approval is like 33% and he lost the popular vote. Who the frak do we need to appeal too?
MomSense
@Kay:
I do that. I talk to them every single day. They aren’t infants. They make choices.
wvng
@Patricia Kayden: Yes, rightwingers DO need safe spaces because the mean libtards are mocking them, plus trigger warnings. I don’t know of any group more sensitive to perceived slights than the WWC, and less sensitive to the real abuse other groups routinely face. This was the butthurt election. .
Cermet
@rikyrah: Exactly and they do but realize that their schools offer shit education; as for moving, takes money they don’t have. Raise taxes for better schools? Again, they are poor and taxes on purchases do eat into their small incomes and property taxes are already too high compared to the small income they get by on. This trap has been going on for well before the 1930’s! Roosevelt did try and address these issues but too little and never enough effort. As fellow Amerikans, we should consider a Federal mandate to help these school districts – not by requirements but money. Focus on all schools offering enough AP courses and good teachers at all levels so the playing field is more even. Offer this and I bet Dems would start picking up more rural votes and even some red states.
rikyrah
@CaseyL:
If I do sneer, it’s because they have, for generations, fallen for whatever shiny object the GOP throws at their azzes to vote against their own economic self-interest.
From the baby Jesus, to abortion, to the second amendment..to gay marriage…it never phucking fails…
I honestly believe that they despise Black people so because, overwhelmingly, we don’t fall for shiny objects and vote our economic self-interest. They always try and diminish that by saying that we are on the ‘Democratic Plantation’….every other group can be seen voting their self-interests, except for Black folk.
amk
@OzarkHillbilly: Or you could try addressing what I raised. Else, gfy.
Alesis
I’m trying to think of how the “sneering liberals” idea gets propagated. Not so much as to whether it exists but why is the idea so popular. I hear pop culture refeerences a lot (Lena Dunham hates whitey!) but are rural folks tuned into what HBO is saying about them?
Barbara
@Iowa Old Lady:At least in my experience, there are as many urban dwellers who romanticize rural areas as there are who look down on them. Whether it is the U.S. or Europe or even Russia, the economic significance of rural areas has been declining for 100 years or more. The dislocation has quickened because transportation and communications make it a lot easier to serve a wider area from fewer locations. You can take the simple example of car dealerships. American manufacturers set them up when most people didn’t drive and so have a lot more dealerships per automobile sales (at least until 2008) than foreign companies, which started setting up dealerships in the 1960s. Now, people will drive 30 or 50 miles without thinking too hard about it for a large or sometimes even a small purchase. So goodbye local automobile dealers in a lot of smaller communities. I don’t know anyone who is rejoicing at these developments or indifferent to their consequences.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
The WWC does not, by and large, like us for many reasons, most of which are absolutely ridiculous and for that fact we sneer at them and make fun of them and their lifestyles, including pointing and laughing at their fondness for Applebees, which if anyone had ever driven I-44 in Misery and tried the alternatives they would soon come to the conclusion that Applebees is better than starvation… or not. And then they would go ahead and make fun of people for eating at Applebees anyway.
To all:
From all the complaints I am hearing, I get the feeling that my real sin is not in making a simple statement of fact, but in not muddying it up with wholly unnecessary praise for how good we liberals are to assuage all the hurt feelings we have over our most recent rejection. Well, the WWC hates us. We hate them. They sneer at us. We sneer right back. They are petty, vengeful little people. We aren’t all that much better.
The fact that despite all that we try and do the right thing for everyone hardly needs to be said by me to you. If you think I am going to say that, every time I point out that we aren’t…. I know this is shocking, absolutely shocking…. perfect in every way, well it ain’t gonna happen.
Alesis
@OzarkHillbilly:
And I respect that self awareness while at the same time reserving the right to say “we who?”
I eat at Applebees’s
Chris
@OzarkHillbilly:
All of my liberal friends know I love fast food. None of them have ever given me shit for it. All of my liberal friends know that I’d much rather listen to country than rap. None of them have ever given me shit for it (and half of them agree with me). All of my liberal friends know I’m a Christian. None of them have ever given me shit for it except one, a militant atheist who went full Sam Harris and yes, of course he judges black churches just as much (though he doesn’t single them out like the right wingers do).
Again, are Brad and company sure that we’re actually sneering at those things? And that we’re not “sneering,” whatever that means, at them for being racist, sexist, homophobic, religiously intolerant, and, yes, elitist? In other words, the same thing we judge people for regardless of their income or where they live?
Barbara
@Alesis: Since I am not much of a popular culture vulture I don’t always feel qualified to have an opinion. For instance, I have never watched Lena Dunham or Girls but I do know what it is. At any rate, I started watching the move “Fargo” a few weeks ago because it was on, and I do have to admit that I didn’t like the broad brush stereotyping of the Frances McDormand character and the insistent use of “you betcha” and the Upper Midwest accent, like “hoose” for house. I have actually been to Fargo, and spent a fair amount of time in Minneapolis. However, Hollywood does the same thing to everywhere. Movies made about Pittsburgh, where I grew up in the suburbs, tend to trade on the most awful stereotypes imaginable, whether it’s “The Deer Hunter,” or “Flashdance.” Especially the latter. People from Long Island who watched “The Unbelievable Truth” probably had the same reaction to the depiction of their home base. I can’t even imagine how anyone from New Jersey feels about the depiction of their state in popular culture.
OzarkHillbilly
@prob50:
Heh.
TriassicSands
There is no hope. Jeebus. I was just reading a NY Times piece about how wonderful it was to see Jake Tapper push Mike Pence for an answer to a question about RWNJ Michael G. Flynn. The author, Jim Rutenberg, wrote a piece called:
WTF? Why in the “Trump Era?” Why not all the time?
Mr. Rutenberg extolled the virtues of Tapper’s aggressive journalism, but like every other article that appears in the NY Times (with exceptions for authors like Charles Blow and Paul Krugman), this one had to add that all important sentence:
Because the biggest problem we face is Trump’s opponents using “falsehoods” to go after Trump. It should be obvious to Rutenberg and everyone else at this point that Trump’s opponents don’t have to resort to using falsehoods to criticize Trump. With the never ending stream of outrageous lies coming out of Trump’s mouth every day, Trump’s opponents have more than a full time job just trying to deal with those lies. They hardly need to make up stuff to attack the Liar-in-Chief. But Rutenberg had to add that sentence to show that he is an open-minded guy who’s got his eye on those sneaky lefties, too.
If Rutenberg and Tapper and others had discovered the importance of aggressive journalism — that is, journalism more interested in eliciting reliable information than in currying favor for future access — when they became journalists, we might not be dealing with president-elect Trump.
OzarkHillbilly
@matryoshka:
Yeah, that was Drum, and it made me laugh, too.
Kay
Laugh so you don’t cry:
1. Because Hillary Clinton’s emails were so vitally important all other issues were ignored
2. Hillary Clinton did bring it up- she said you were Putin’s puppet to your face while tens of millions of people were watching. Correctly, as it turns out. She was ignored because everyone knows she’s a lying, scheming female who can’t be trusted.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Heaven forbid that a person would nitpick at something someone else said!
Belafon
City and rural people sneer (where, I’m assuming, sneer means “Why in the hell would they like/do that?”) at each other for a lot of things. And city and rural people talk past each other a lot. But that’s not what caused the rust belt states to vote for Trump. It was straight up black people demanding to be treated as equals. And I’ll offer this as proof: The entire point of relaxing gun laws was designed so that whites could intimidate those around them.
rikyrah
@Kay:
And heaven forbid government makes it easier for people to understand said contracts. Or goes after bankers who purposefully lead applicants who qualify for better loans into higher rate subprime loans, as was done to hundreds of thousands of qualified Black applicants during Shrub’s years. Yet, you still have those muthaphuckas who want to blame the housing crisis on Black and Brown people, who were ‘unqualified’ getting loans.
No, you sonuvabitches, they were sold loans that they shouldnot have been. Scammed. Frauded.
Oh, don’t get me started
Then we get something like the Consumer Protection Agency, and they rail against that, because it goes out of its way to make things understandable to the common man.
Barbara
@OzarkHillbilly: There is no such thing as traditional “gun culture.” People in rural places do a lot more hunting and so actually do use guns. But people who fetishize and collect guns are not usually or not necessarily the kind of people who are running homestead farms in rural counties. They are as likely to be urban or suburban and for whatever reasons guns give them a sense of purpose and power that nothing else does. When I go to the small farm my in-laws own, you see many people out on the road on the first day of hunting season, but when we have a family reunion and we allow some target shooting, it’s the crazies from the city that show up with high powered rifles and hand guns. And it’s the military types who raise the most objections about the safety of what is going on and the “need” for such high firepower.
Kay
Wikileaks could prove they’re not captured, BTW. They could release something on Trump. They’re either incompetent or captured. The least transparent world leader in modern history and Wikileaks either doesn’t have shit or won’t release it.
Until they do they working assumption should be they’re Trumpsters. Christ almighty this guy has to have a decades long paper trail. Nothing.
It’s also amusing how media and Republicans accused the IRS of bias. The IRS has plenty on Trump. Not one shred leaked.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
she wasn’t the only one
Barbara
@Belafon: Actually, I think gender explains a lot of what happened better than race, which is not to disagree with you that people who want “open carry” laws are doing so in part to intimidate the “others.” They are, but especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, there are people who did not vote or could not vote for Democrats because of gender. I wish it were not the case, but I have lived too long as a female.
OzarkHillbilly
@amk:
I’d love to, but nothing I’ve said contradicts any of the above so I feel no need to address it. Why did you feel the need to interject it?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m sure they will, when Putin decides it’s useful, or just amusing. It’ll be interesting to see if anything comes out of those RNC hacks when/if McCain and his sidekick get snotty about Tillerson
Kay
Are we ever going to get any transparency on this Trump/Russia thing or is this just going into the Trump taxes category?
I don’t understand why Clinton was basically stripped naked and we still don’t know the first fucking thing about the President-elect. The difference between these two people on transparency is astonishing.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes, precisely. And who was it that he caught hell from? Was it mostly, or even at all, the stereotyped coastal elites? Cause I’m pretty sure it was the same Official Washington of the Village et al that we here hold in high disregard for the extent to which it bends over backwards to try and please conservatives.
Which gets at another point –
@Kay:
I’d like to know how much of the sneering they hear about their lifestyle is actually coming from liberals.
The “mainstream media” meme is a case in point here – they’re correct to sense that the punditariat looks down on them, though at least as much with well-intentioned patronizing condescension as actual dislike. Another case in point, Republican elites in Washington and on the coast – they correctly perceive that these people look down on them as lesser. In both cases, though, because they live in a binary universe where things are either “good” or “liberal,” heartland conservatives mistake this for proof that the media and the Republican Party elites are in fact “liberal” and in cahoots with the enemy, when in reality they’re nothing of the sort.
MomSense
Hope Rick Perry installs the latest updates on his smart glasses. Energy Secretary? He couldn’t even remember this agarncy on his list of five he wanted to get rid of.
GregB
So it is all about emotions and tender, sensitive feelings after all?
I know there was a Trump shirt that expressed this issue to a tee.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Weird, right? Donald Trump is 70 years old and has business all over the world. Nothing. Not one thing he himself hasn’t released. I feel like the public should pass the hat and hire a private detective. It’s not too much to ask to have SOME information on the President. This is ridiculous. No one has ever gotten this much deference in my adult life. Are they afraid of him?
cmorenc
@danielx:
THIS.
The reason it used to be much harder for RW politicians to sustain bamboozlement of the WWC was that we had national media e.g. Walter Cronkite who were widely trusted, and the RW had not yet succeeded in luring them into an epistemologically walled-off information bubble by playing on their resentments, even in the old confederate states where they did successfully play off racial resentments.
Alesis
The fact is the sneering has nothing in particular to do with “liberals”. It only seems that way when viewing life through a mighty narrow lense. I was raised in a theologically conservative household in the Deep South. We occasionally lashed out at people who were too “sophisticated” to appreciate our way of life.
We never thought of such people as liberals. Because we were black. This is centrally and issue of race. Lingering resentments for outside agitators and the federal government butting into “local affairs”
OzarkHillbilly
@Barbara:
The traditional gun culture is dead. The NRA killed it. I do not know where you live, but out here, everyone has an AR-15/AK-47/SKS/etc. or at least everyone but me (it feels like, I know I’m not alone). There is a gun range just a couple miles down the road from me and many’s the day I hear people unloading clip after clip. Sometimes I wonder where these people get the money. Ammo ain’t cheap.
MomSense
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The only thing we didn’t get was a bipartisan statement because McConnell and the unnamed Repubkucan are assholes who put personal power above country.
I know that treason requires being at war but does it require a formal declaration? It seems to me that the Russians launched a cyber war against us and the Republicans chose their side.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: I keep waiting for Anonymous to hack them. I suppose that will be a long wait.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
jharp
“You people think you’re better than us”
If by “you people’ he means me he is right.
I do think I’m better than Trump supporters.
Woodrowfan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: one of the signs of fascism, preference for action over thought.
Weaselone
@OzarkHillbilly:
They get the money from selling the soda they purchase with government food stamps.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Speaker Vichy is a traitor. My fantasy over the weekend was for three or four Republican senators to combine with Dems and announce that they will be acting as independents and caucusing with Dems until the issue of Russian interference is investigated and dealt with. There is no commitment to vote with Dems on anything substantive, but it’s a show of loyalty to the nation that this issue transcends party and Senator Quisling by his actions has shown that he is not above acting as the stooge of a foreign government. In addition to Graham and McCain, the natural candidates are Collins and Sasse. But Collins is a coward and Sasse is too much of a maverick, so I don’t hold a lot of hope. But seriously, this really is outrageous and it is probably their only hope to show Trump that he can ‘t get away with appointing obvious puppets of Putin like Flynn. And we should all remember that Russia’s main aim here is to weaken Nato. I don’t think it is anything more complicated than that.
OzarkHillbilly
@Weaselone: Could be, could be, tho my bet is from the back child support they haven’t paid..
FlipYrWhig
@Chris:
This is why the term du jour is “elites.” Because if you say “elites,” you can lump together liberals and mass media like TV ads and awards shows. They’ve been moaning for years about “Happy Holidays,” pushing one for English, and biracial couples eating Cheerios, so they feel like their whole culture is under assault. Which is stupid. Which deserves neither empathy nor sympathy.
MomSense
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Maybe we should play a game that I’m calling “let’s guess what dirt the Russians have on the Republicans”
Obviously this is all uninformed speculation but what do we suppose Ryan is up to that he wouldn’t want released publicly?
Chris
@Barbara:
They’ve spent their entire life increasingly prime themselves to hate liberals and consider liberals to be the real ultimate worst enemies of the country. Even if they could resist the peer pressure from inside the GOP, I doubt if they’d even be able to talk themselves into it. A lifetime of this kind of bias reinforced by increasingly convoluted doublethink isn’t something that’s going to be lifted even by something like this.
Alesis
I want to expand on this even more because it occurs to me this is the same critique of “limousine liberals” that arose in reaction to desegregation busing.
It’s projection.
SWMBO
Something has been picking at me during this thread. Trump had a well known hatred for the Bushes. Especially after 9-11. Now the FBI has chosen sides in the election. Giuliani and Christie probably have friends in the NY FBI office. Is Trump’s visceral hatred for the CIA because of GHWB being the head spook? Is it possible that it comes back to Bush hatred all over again?
liberal
WashPost’s MonkeyCage has a great rundown on why Trump’s opening his yap on the Taiwan issue is so dangerous.
Barbara
@OzarkHillbilly: What I meant was that “gun culture” was just culture that required facility with guns for purposes of hunting and, occasionally, killing animals in non-hunting situations, e.g., rabid dogs or animals that preyed on livestock. There is no cultural need for guns beyond that in rural locations, where crime is traditionally very low.
Chris
@SWMBO:
I doubt if he even knows that GHWB was the head of the CIA. He hates the CIA because someone there leaked something he didn’t want to dwell on, namely that the Russians did what they could to help him get elected.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MomSense: I doubt it’s any personal corruption– his wife is rich and I’ve never quite bought into the idea that he has no relation to/interest in Ryan Int’l– but there might be some frank discussions of the Great Radian Dream with Reince, or others.
Belafon
@MomSense: My response to this from now on is “What do the Russians have on you?”
Chris
@MomSense:
Why would one need any dirt on Ryan? Ryan doesn’t want any investigations that call into question the legitimacy of the recent election, because he, and every other Republican in Congress, realize this is a godsent opportunity for them to fuck up the nation as God intended, which they were afraid they might never get again in their lifetime. And they’re not about to let anything as trivial as the interference of a foreign superpower with the electoral process get in the way of that.
Over the weekend, Adam said his fear was that they’d somehow managed to “compromise” the Republicans. Like I said: My fear is that they didn’t and they never needed to.
Belafon
As for the sneering, yes some liberals do it, and a some don’t. Krugman may be part of a group that doesn’t. I don’t. When Pence went to the Chili’s after Trump picked him, I had to tell a lot of people on the sites I go to that there are lots of people that like those places, in part because they know what they are getting every time they go into one. I also had to laugh at Trump’s lame picture of trying to show that he ate KFC. Trump was trying to convince people he was one of them, but you could tell he hadn’t eaten any of it.
Major Major Major Major
@Belafon: there’s definitely a culture of smugness and sneering on the left (among many other cultures!), but I never see it much put forth by the media so I’m not sure where bubble-based conservatives are seeing it other than their fever dreams. What I see in the media are out of touch elites of all stripes. Am I supposed to imagine Paul Ryan at a KFC? The people I can are like… Howard Dean.
Alesis
@Belafon:
Sure. But there is no close connection between liberalism and sneering. There is absolutely no reason to believe it is the “liberals” who are sneering at the “working class” unless we are viewing things thorough the lens of the Civil Rights Movement.
Debbie1
The writer stated, “There are a lot of people of color (and some women) who voted for Trump.” I think you have that backwards, according to the results, there were a LOT of White women who voted for Trump. This surprised many people, in light of his well-publicized female rating system & bragging about groping & the then-pending rape case. Trump got more White women’s votes than Rmoney did. So while some misguided people of color may have voted for The Groper, it was the White women who made his election possible, unfortunately. I think you have the emphasis on the wrong group, sister.
OzarkHillbilly
@Barbara: That is the gun culture I was brought up in, and it is dead, dead, dead. Now it is all about protection from the ‘other’ even tho the other is miles away. It has become another tool of RW projection: Fear.
Major Major Major Major
@Alesis: eh, lots of us sneer at rural white culture. It’s a conflating of “working class” with “white people in rural Illinois” of course.
Belafon
@Major Major Major Major:
@Alesis:
Both correct. Sneering doesn’t mean liberal. The wealthy Republicans are sneering at the rest of their party, and laughing when they hear a poor white person talking about how Democrats are not listening to them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Major Major Major Major: I think i anything there’s a kind of “noble savage” quality to the Beltway discussions of rural/WWC America, due in no small part to people like Russert drawing a fault line around “Faith”. We mustn’t challenge anyone motivated by their “Faith”, whether its Gee Dumbya or Kim Davis or the Hobby Lobby goons using the Little Sisters as a front for their war on birth control.
Alesis
@Major Major Major Major
Us who? I was born and raised in central Alabama. Rural white culture was the rung above us. Liberalism isn’t a project of San Fran gentrifiers.
Debbie1
@Baud: Thank you!
Alesis
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Unless they are swarthy. Like Rev. Wright. Or a Muslim or something.
Major Major Major Major
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: we need to get better about talking over the media when it comes to the faith narrative. Tim Kaine on abortion for instance is a good, complex, personal stance that makes an important liberal point about how your feelings don’t get to dictate policy. It cuts through the abortionplex caricature.
But we definitely talk about the WWC in a way usually reserved for the residents of a country we want to invade.
@Alesis: Us = liberals? A group that includes San Francisco residents? But you knew that?
rikyrah
@Barbara:
Say it.
Barbara
@Belafon: As I understand the marketing strategy of restaurants like Applebees, they have focused on medium sized markets where there are not as many restaurants per capita, local or otherwise, that you would find in larger urban areas. So, Richmond, Virginia versus Washington D.C. They are nice restaurants for where they are located and because there aren’t as many locally based restaurants, they generate repeat business. In larger urban areas, they tend to be in the outer suburbs. For one thing, land costs a lot in urban areas, and parking is always a problem. There is no Applebees within an hour of where I live right now. So this particular divide is really a function of the marketing strategy of the restaurants themselves to go where they have the best chance of being successful. I eat at Applebees all the time when I am in those areas too. I think it’s the best of that category.
Alesis
@Major Major Major Major:
There are sure plenty of middle class folks who turn up their noses at the “rednecks”.
I’m just not at all sure why we think this is a “liberal” issue.
OzarkHillbilly
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’ve never heard it put better.
Chris
@Barbara:
I’ve heard that the salad bar is to die for.
FlipYrWhig
@Major Major Major Major: Meanwhile, they think we’re feminized ni99er-lovers. And yet I don’t remember pundits stroking their chins and speculating about why the Republican Party just hadn’t TRIED hard enough to UNDERSTAND the tribe of city folk.
Chris
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yep. I’ve used that exact analogy myself and I still think it’s the best description of the reverent-yet-patronizing way that many on the coasts view heartland conservatives.
Debbie1
@Chris: I think the point is the same as it was when Hillary was polling well before the election: that Democrats, liberals, and progressives should be mindful of conservative feelings and customs, for their vines have tender grapes, you know. In addition, Hillary was also prematurely advised to reach out to the GOP and all those who did not vote to elect her. On the flipside, conservatives have no similar duty to knock-off the “sneering” at liberals for trying to eat healthy, so they can feel free to mock someone for being educated, eating arugula or Grey Poupon mustard, or for not hunting & fishing regularly. And I have yet to hear Trump be advised to reach out to Dems or those who did not vote for him. See how that works?
sigaba
@OzarkHillbilly:
The WWC never wanted our money, they wanted “respect.” Which is to say, they wanted the untrammeled right to decide what America was and shall be. It also seems to mean they didn’t mind starving to death in a hole, just as long as they can convince themselves they deserved it.
Maybe that’s the problem with the New Deal, it implied that poverty was undignified and abnormal, after poor Europeans had spent centuries building up meaning and pride in “their lot.”
Would Tom Joad have voted for Trump? I suspect so, but then again he had a felony.
Alesis
@FlipYrWhig:
Bingo!
Because as always when we say “White working class” what we mean is “race race race race race”
Major Major Major Major
@Alesis: I at least never said it was. But examining it in republicans ain’t gonna do me a lot of good.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @OzarkHillbilly: Yup. It’s directly out of Rousseau. Civilization makes people acquisitive and emasculated, and here are some charming, robust holdouts who’ve been unspoiled by it all.
Barbara
@Chris: You think I am kidding or something? Applebees doesn’t have a salad bar. It does, however, have a woodfire grill option for meat, chicken and fish so you can get plain cooked dishes if you want them. I have probably eaten at Applebees six times in the last year, which is more often than I have eaten at just about anywhere else other than my neighborhood trattoria that, truthfully, is only somewhat better than Applebees, mostly in the area of dessert and wine options.
Alesis
@Major Major Major Major:
Fair Point!
I think liberals should confront classism in the movement with the same vigor we confront racism. We shouldn’t sneer at Walmart shopping burger eating mega church goers because in addition to being morally wrong it also describes a whole lot of liberals.
NA
@Kay: This is completely and utterly my experience. Genuine sneering and contempt from middle and upper class conservatives, not from liberals. When I do hear jokes about Iowa (where I was born BTW) it is generally from liberal midwesterners or former midwesterners who are also laughing at themselves.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Alesis: also “gay, gay, gay, gay”. There was an interview in the Washington Post with a Dem county chair from IIRC the Youngstown area, complaining that Clinton never came through town (the article pointed out that she had been to Youngstown again IIRC twice since the convention as had Bubba) and Democrats need to stop talking about who uses what bathroom. I know HRC talked about transgender rights, but if she ever mentioned the North Caro law, I never heard it, and it wasn’t Democrats who started that conversation. But that’s what this guy, a WWC tribalist, wanted to hear.
Barbara
@FlipYrWhig: No, the problem is that people in these areas want the best of both worlds and either can’t, don’t know how, or are unwilling to get it by leaving where they are currently located. People forget or maybe never knew how good it was for many people for a long time — to be able to make well above median income without going to college and without moving. That’s a pipe dream for more and more and more places and people. Punishing people who left is just a recipe for a faster slide for everyone.
Alesis
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Co-sign
OzarkHillbilly
@Barbara: Around here if it ain’t fried or Mexican, it’s Applebees. If my wife and I go out for dinner (very rare, more likely breakfast) it’s usually Applebees.
@Alesis:
It’s not that we think it’s a liberal issue, it’s that they do. And there is enough truth to the accusation that it sticks.
Chris
@sigaba:
This can’t be said enough.
Ask most of the liberal demographics of poor and/or disenfranchised groups what their problem is, and you’ll usually get a reference to an actual tangible problem. Like “we’re being shot by cops and no one’s holding them accountable,” like “we’re being locked up in massive numbers for victimless crimes that are a rite of passage for suburban white kids,” like “we need access to the health insurance we can’t afford so we don’t either die or go broke.”
But for conservatives? Ask them what their problem is and the answer is invariably “I just know that that latte-sipping Volvo-driving West-Wing-watching college-educated liberal elitist is laughing at me from behind his copy of the New York Times, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Alesis
@OzarkHillbilly:
But that “truth” basically boils down to the fact that liberals tend to congregate in urban areas where they experience life around non whites and gays and the like and basically come to the conclusion that they are also human. This intersects with the fact that urban ares are also economic centers thus “limousine liberals”
Those two are basically inevitabilities. I’m all for getting PC about classism among liberals but that particular weapon forged against us isn’t going anywhere.
Barbara
@OzarkHillbilly: The rise of Mexican restaurants in small towns and more rural locations is part of a story that is all but invisible when Fox News goes to places like Southwestern Virginia.
Central Planning
@sigaba:
I think the need for “respect” leads to the WWC not wanting any assistance at all. They can’t stand the fact that they need help (funding for schools, roads, healthcare), and then they feel beholden to those who give it, even though resources are given without any expectation of anything.
Major Major Major Major
@Alesis: @NA: I had an illustrative example yesterday. I was at a housewarming holiday whatever party (it was a Christmas party lol) and they had some Christmas songs and stuff on a YouTube playlist in the background. I remember watching a couple of the videos, one of them was in a church, and thinking that it was nice, reminded me of growing up, etc. I’m an atheist now but I still have fond memories of religious experience. Later after we’d left one of my friends makes a crack about “zombie Jesus” and how all religions are stupid and within two sentences is ranting about how Hillary didn’t talk about economics enough and that that’s why we lost the Midwest.
I’m a hardened San Francisco queer atheist and *i* was turned off the rest of what he had to say after that beginning.
Barbara
@Chris: Well, maybe for some people, but these grievances also seem to have escalated at the same time the economic underpinnings of their community began to crater more and more.
schrodinger's cat
@Major Major Major Major: You need better friends.
Chris
@Barbara:
Sorry. It was an obligatory, if probably obscure by now, reference to an idiotic statement by David Brooks a few years back. (Click here and scroll down to “Applebee’s Salad Bar…”)
Alesis
@Major Major Major Major:
I think all of us religious (or formerly religious) liberals have had the “militant atheist” moment and sure it’s annoying. From a lot of these folks it comes from a sense of personal pain and bitterness they experienced in their own religious lives. My agnostic wife is a lot more disdainful about religion than I am and from where she is coming from I can’t blame her. People are prickly. A favorite religious book of mine describes them as porcupines who nevertheless want to be held.
No doubt as liberals we should hold ourselves to a high standard of humanity.
Barbara
@Chris: It figures that David Brooks did not know that. Just like he assumed that people who shop at QVC are not from tony suburbs when, in fact, most of them are or that you couldn’t spend more than $20 at Red Lobster in York, PA, which showed mostly he had never been to Red Lobster, York, or either of them within the last 20 years.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodinger’s cat: everybody has annoying qualities. His (and many others’ out here) is mocking the faith of billions of humans.
ETA: I guess what was interesting for me is I’m so far removed from that part of my life now but it still felt like an aggression. We’re not supposed to be bothered by them and I wasn’t really, he loves my family and whatnot, yadda yadda but if I was on a trip out west and kept overhearing snippets like that I’d be resentful for sure.
Plus it’s just rude. We could all be more polite.
Iowa Old Lady
Here’s an example of what people here hear and process all the time. It’s from Jennifer Rubin who I’d call conservative but who does seem to be horrified by Trump.
She was dissing his cabinet picks as unqualified. She listed Carson, DeVos, Pruitt, and then went on to say and as ambassador to China, Trump named Terry Branstad, who’s governor of Iowa. That, apparently, was evidence of his disqualification. Now I have no great love for Branstad, though he could be worse. The kind of R gov he is shows up in the fact that he accepted Medicaid expansion but privatized it. But he’s been to China multiple times and Chinese officials have been here because there’s a mutual interest in agriculture. So Rubin shouldn’t assume he wears bib overalls and a straw hat and couldn’t find China on a map.
Neldob
@Keith G: yep
Jim, Foolish Literalist
You can drop the name. How long have you been hanging out with Bill Maher?
I like most of the music but I get so bored during the talking and chanting, and having been raised Catholic, family weddings and (these days, mostly) funerals are like a confusing aerobics class in uncomfortable clothes– stand, sit, kneel, turn around shake hands kneel…. How are you supposed to be able to nap
OzarkHillbilly
@Alesis: Oh we sneer at them in more ways than we know. When we tear down their philosophical leader Rush RedundantTreeBranch, they take it personally. When we go on and on about how it is too easy for people who have no business even owning a gun to carry one in public for no reason at all (here in MO, come 1/1 you won’t even need a CCW permit), they think we mean them. AND WE DO. When we say, “Black lives matter” they think we mean their lives don’t because in their minds, it’s one or the other.
I don’t know how we get around the cultural divide between ‘real America’ and that ‘place full of people who don’t look like me’ that has been built up by conservatives.
Alesis
@OzarkHillbilly:
Sure but that isn’t sneering even if they take it that way. I’m black. When I say “Black Lives Matter” I mean “Don’t shoot me please.”
I think we have to acknowledge that a lot of the divide is just recurring facets of a conversation about race (and gender, and sexuality, and religion) that some of “us” really really don’t want to have with them because it ruins Thanksgiving.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
a small point, but one of the funniest things about I ever read about Limbaugh, friend of the Forgotten Regular (White) Guy, was a piece in a long write-up of him from years ago, maybe all the way back in the nineties, that Limbaugh’s driver calls the housekeeper at a given point on his ride home so that the scented candles are lit in time for Master to get his aroma therapy as he enters the foyer, just like Alice and Edith used to do for Ralph and Archie.
Barbara
@Iowa Old Lady: Actually, all things being equal, Branstad stood out as being not singularly horrible. It’s like Obama appointing Huntsman.
OzarkHillbilly
@Barbara: Every small town around here has one (Sullivan has 2) and half the employees can’t speak English. They live in these small enclaves of trailers off in the woods on private land that most around here don’t even know exist.
I fear what is going to happen to these people on 1/21.
bystander
The gals on The View are uniformly up in arms about Trump’s connections to Putin.
Joy: “Do we have to wake up and see the hammer and sickle on the American flag before somebody stands up to this guy?”
OzarkHillbilly
@Alesis:
That’s how you see it. That’s how I see it. Too many of them see it as “The fucker deserved it.” I’ve had these conversations. I say Eric Garner, and they say “He shouldn’t have been evading the cig tax!” I reply, “So tax evasion should be a capitol offense? Hell, you’d be on deathrow!” but they don’t see that. I say Michael Roberts and they say “He was a thug! He stole cigars!” I reply, “Weren’t you bragging just last week about how the cashier didn’t charge you for your beer at the gas station?” but they don’t see that.
And on and on it goes.
Kay
You guys, I think I found out what happened to the NYTimes :)
It’s Politico! It makes so much more sense now.
Kay
This isn’t transparent enough, especially because we already know at least one Senate Republican hid this from the public until after the election.
Here’s the relevant question for the public: what does Russia want from Trump and why do they think they can get it when they didn’t think they could get it from Clinton? They have to answer that question. The rest is politics.
Barbara
@Kay: This is a small thing. Maggie Haberman has a twitter account, and in her profile she lists first that she is a mother of three great kids. So am I but if I put it on my CV or even my LinkedIn account no one would take me seriously. I had visions of her sitting at home reading AP reports and putting some kind of theoretically intelligent political spin on the events of the day. The NYT political desk did zero investigative reporting on Donald Trump.
Brachiator
@Iowa Old Lady:
Jebus Freaking Christ! How can Rubin be so stupid?
The Chinese government praised the selection of Branstad. He has visited the country on trade missions and is well known to some of the high government officials.
And there is this:
The only thing worse than fake news is the profound ignorance and laziness of pundits. I knew about Branstad’s Chinese connection, and found the wind turbine story with an easy google search.
Barbara
@Kay: They want first and foremost to weaken NATO to make their military incursions into Baltic and other traditional client states much more convenient and consequence free. Secondarily, they want energy costs to go really high. The problem with that is that hurts most people in the U.S. in a visceral way so that’s going to be pretty tricky for Putin’s Puppet even if he doesn’t know it yet.
D58826
I suspect that folks think I’m a press agent for Jane Mayer’s book ‘Dark Money’ but it is a pretty good explaination on where that money is coming from.
I’m adding to my ‘client list’ today given the news over the weekend of the election hack. Malcolm Nance’s book ‘Plot to Hack America’ goes into all of the details that a newspaper article doesn’t have the space for.
Brachiator
@Kay:
The sad decline continues. They want “stars,” not journalists.
Muck Jagger
@rikyrah: I’ve got a buddy back home who once posted something about frequent executions in the Mideast, and why we weren’t doing that. I responded something to the effect of “so you think we should be more like those countries? Got it.”
His response? Well, we should be more like those countries in some ways.
D58826
@Iowa Old Lady: She is very very conservative. She was in the tank for Romney in 2012 with her commentary. Forget which clown she backed last spring but I suspect it was JEB!.
That she is horrified by der Fuhrer is evidence of just how bad he really is and how it will get much worse.
Botsplainer
@Barbara:
I’m going on record as predicting $3.40 a gallon by August, $4.50 a gallon by February 2018.
Major Major Major Major
Daily Kos has a top diary about what Dems need to do written by a Stein voter right now.
Don’t know what it says, since I stopped reading after that part. But I just thought you should know.
ETA: and NPR just interviewed an Israeli journalist who says that Bibi was dependent on using “Obama won’t let me” as an excuse/foil to hold back the right wing. So the whole damn world ran on hating democrats and now everybody’s about to find out what it’s like to have what you think you want.
Iowa Old Lady
@Major Major Major Major: Talk about voters who need to accept the consequences of their actions!
OzarkHillbilly
@Major Major Major Major: Gee thanx.
Kay
@Barbara:
And he’s a NYer! In their backyard.
I expected interviews with associates, reams of documents, a review of his 30 year record of making shit up and promoting himself and there was….nothing. It requires an explanation at least! What happened to them? Why didn’t they do any investigative reporting into THIS political candidate?
Think of how Obama was vetted and compare. We don’t even have to go to how Clinton was treated.
The Moar You Know
@Cermet: That well has already been poisoned. There aren’t enough good teachers, or for that matter any teachers, to fill the current vacancies and that problem is about to get a lot worse.
Which was totally expected and by design. Did you know teachers don’t get Social Security? Yeah, if they don’t get that pension they get nothing. So shit pay, topped by nonstop abuse from parents, crowned with nonstop abuse from society and no retirement. Would you take that job? You’d have to be a FUCKING IDIOT to take that job.
Yes, I’m the spouse of a teacher and I can’t even talk about the profession rationally. If you’ve ever considered it as a career: just don’t.
rikyrah
Moving Backwards
by D.R. Tucker
December 10, 2016 3:00 PM
POLITICAL ANIMAL BLOG
Did anyone seriously think Donald Trump would change his mind on climate change?
Apparently, former Vice President Al Gore’s highly publicized efforts to convince the Addams, er, Trump family to give efforts to reduce CO2 their due were for naught, as the apparent President-elect went ahead with plans to hand the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior over to climate-change deniers Scott Pruitt and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers. (Trump is also reportedly leaning towards nominating ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State; Tillerson’s company, of course, is viciously opposing any effort to hold the fossil-fuel behemoth accountable for its decades of deception on climate change.) Why did Gore think that the addled minds of the Trump family could be changed?
Granted, Gore wasn’t the only climate hawk to fall for the malarkey that the Trump family would ever agree with Sen. Ed Markey. Last month, Fisher Stevens, the director of arguably the greatest climate documentary ever made, Before the Flood, told entertainment blogger Jeffrey Wells:
Yarrow
@bystander:
That’s interesting. Guess the story has legs.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Oh my god. Carly Fiorina gushing about her meeting with Trump. He has great memorabilia… “Shock” O’Neal’s big shoe!
We’re gonna turn this economy around. So I guess she’s predicting a stock market crash and rising unemployment.
Kay
@Brachiator:
Here’s the one and only way we’ll find out anything about Trump. He will piss someone powerful off, in government or not, and that person or persons will leak it. That’s what we’re relying on.
rikyrah
States Can’t Stop Electors From Voting Their Conscience
by Carolyn Shapiro
December 9, 2016 12:23 PM
Earlier this week, in a New York Times op-ed, Texas presidential elector Chris Suprun announced that he would not be casting his vote for Donald Trump. Even though Texas voters chose Trump, Suprun—along with a small group of electors from around the country calling themselves “Hamilton Electors”—will vote for a yet-to-be-identified compromise Republican. As Suprun explained in his op-ed, and as I and others have detailed elsewhere, Donald Trump’s conduct since the election has demonstrated that he is dangerously unqualified and unfit to be president.
Can electors legally do this? While the nearly universal expectation is electors’ votes will reflect the popular vote in their states, the Constitution doesn’t require them to. As others have explained, Alexander Hamilton’s justification for the Electoral College in Federalist No. 68 shows that the Framers intended for electors to exercise their own judgment when necessary.
Many states, however, have laws that prohibit these so-called “faithless electors” (perhaps a better term would be “conscientious electors”) from bucking the state popular vote. This week, two electors filed suit in federal court arguing that Colorado’s version is unconstitutional. (Hillary Clinton won Colorado, but the plaintiffs hope that a victory in their lawsuit will effectively invalidate all such laws, allowing electors in Trump states to defect.) In addition to arguments based on the Framers’ intent, there is a strong argument based on constitutional structure and text, and on Supreme Court precedent, that these electors should prevail.
Yarrow
@Kay:
Makes you wonder what the Russians have on whoever is head of the NYT.
rikyrah
Waking Up to the Con Job
by Nancy LeTourneau
December 12, 2016 10:50 AM
With the news that Donald Trump will nominate ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, it is clear that the president-elect continues to feed the swamp rather than drain it. But that’s not the message his supporters are hearing. Here is how Kellyanne Conway described the nominee on Fox News:
Conway isn’t lying. Tillerson is not a typical politician. But to get a sense of who he is, it’s helpful to read what Steve Coll has written about him. Coll literally wrote the book about ExxonMobil. It’s titled, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. Here’s how he recently summarized what he learned:
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: NYT helped elect him as much as Vlad did. May be he has dirt on them too.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s hysterical in a way. It’s like interviewing celebrities after an event. It’s also sad. It’s so fucking shallow and petty and cynical. My biggest kind of existential fear is regular people will give up. They will just drop out. Can you blame them? This has NOTHING to do with them.
Yarrow
@Kay:
Or he’ll do something the Russians don’t like and they’ll leak something to get him to fall back in line.
rikyrah
Who’s Looking Out for You?
by D.R. Tucker
December 11, 2016 3:00 PM
Are they going to whine four years from now, too?
Let’s say that in 2020–four years after Donald Trump has used the Constitution as a placemat, ignored incident after incident of police brutality, gutted every last element of President Obama’s carbon-cutting efforts, proclaimed that Vladimir Putin was virtuous and pure, and allowed corruption to contaminate the country–the Democratic presidential primary comes down to another contest pitting a perceived “establishment Democrat” against an undisputed progressive. Let’s say that, due to missteps, gaffes, lack of coverage from the mainstream media, or just plain old bad luck, the progressive hopeful fails to secure the Democratic nomination.
Will the same folks who went on and on about Hillary Clinton’s alleged flaws, her supposed cautiousness, her “uninspiring” nature, and her ties to the “Establishment” resurface to again assail the Democratic nominee as “not progressive enough”? Will they again exaggerate the nominee’s perceived policy flaws? Will they again suggest that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic nominee and the demagogic incumbent?
As I noted in February, back in the summer of 2013 I was horrified by the rhetoric of progressive radio host Sam Seder, who chased after then-Democratic US Senate aspirant Cory Booker with a rhetorical chainsaw. Seder was repulsed by the prospect of Booker defeating then-Rep. Rush Holt in an August primary to replace the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg in an October special election. I also preferred Holt’s vision, especially his strong advocacy of a federal carbon tax to combat climate change, but it was fairly obvious that Holt was not going to win the primary–and I could not figure out why Seder kept on promoting the idea that Booker was only marginally better than Steve Lonegan, the Koch Brothers-backed Republican contender for Lautenberg’s former seat.
The same reasoning Seder used in that 2013 New Jersey Senate primary was on display during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary–and beyond. How many times did you have conversations with nominally progressive acquaintances who insisted that Clinton was a crypto-Republican, that her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a hoax, that she couldn’t wait to sell out to Big Fracking and Big Pharma and Big Ag and Big Big?
If a Democrat who has, by some odd metric, been deemed “not progressive enough” wins the presidential primary in 2020, we’ll likely hear this same rhetoric again. Nothing will have been learned.
Yarrow
@rikyrah: Another elector in California filed suit as well. The thinking is if California’s law binding electors gets overturned it sets precedent. California has a lot of electors. That in turn provides cover for electors in other states to change their votes.
The hearing for the Colorado case in the article you linked has been pushed up to today.
Alesis
I remember buying “Who’s Looking Out for You?” (actual title of a book by Bill O’Reilly when I was a young conserva-curious kid.
This con that the right has been pulling about the Democrats failing to care for “working people” is an old old game that has been paying off consistently since the 1960s
Kay
@Yarrow:
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WikiLeaksVerified account
Guffaw. So Russia, what? Bought them? What do Wikileaks get out of this deal?
Chris
@Kay:
Well, a fuckload of them already have. Hence the half of the population that doesn’t even vote.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Yarrow: Sooner or later, I can’t imagine Putin won’t do something to hit Trump just to let everyone know he can, kind of like Trump floating his rivals’ potential cabinet appointments after they come to the Tower to kiss his ring, to show everybody he can make them come, and if they do get anything, it’s because of his magnanimity. I think MSNBC just said Carly Fiorina is “being considered” for DNI. I’d go ahead and bet against that one, but who the fuck knows, maybe she complimented his big hands, or long, long tie.
Elie
Trump is definitely rattling the wrong cage when he insults the spooks at the CIA. They have probably seen a lot of stuff he doesn’t want seen and know all the soft spots. He really better ease up… he really may not know who his real friends and enemies are and his attacks will just make folks more covert….
schrodinger's cat
The thing I don’t get about the smug liberal argument is that the people who vote for Republicans are cutting their nose to spite their face. Unless they don’t work for a living they are going to lose out. How do they not see that.
One does not jump off a ledge just because someone else is smug and looks down upon them. The premise that smug liberals made sainted WWC vote Republican does not pass the smell test, even if we accept the premise that liberals are a smug condescending bunch.
germy
Yarrow
@Kay: It’s not Wikileaks, it’s Assange. If Trump is president he’s probably protected. Wikileaks = Assange = Russia, as far as I can tell.
Poopyman
etc., etc.
Well, if you’ve lost Mitch McConnell ….
Kay
@Chris:
I was opposed to the electors protesting or whatever they’re doing because I’m a “process person” but I changed my mind. We’re a lawless country. I don’t know why they alone have to follow the rules. No one else does.
Have at it, faithless electors. Godspeed.
bemused
@raven:
Rightwing zombies have been eating their brains for decades.
Major Major Major Major
@rikyrah:
By virtue of winning the primary a democrat becomes not progressive enough. Remember how obama kept selling us out in 2008?
Of course we’ve learned nothing, the professional left doesn’t want to learn.
Yarrow
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yep. Putin owns Trump. I’m sure he’s been flattering Trump and so Trump feel’s he’s the smart one. At some point though, Trump will overreach or refuse to do as told. Then Putin will send him a message.
Poopyman
Etc., etc.
The steam, she is picking up.
Barbara
@Poopyman: I am convinced that some of McConnell’s constituents are genuinely shocked that he knew about hacking and refused to say anything, and the fact that it looks like he is getting rewarded by his wife getting a cabinet level post is not a good thing. This is a guy who is 100% about his own political survival.
germy
@D58826:
Yarrow
@germy: Oh, they’ve got something on McConnell too…. He’s going to try to do the thing where investigations start after Trump is inaugurated. Then slow walk the investigations. Take a year or to to be “thorough.” Hope people forget about it. Maybe toss out some bread and circuses. Then at some point issue a heavily redacted report saying it was all terrible.
We need to keep up the pressure. This is working. President Obama is doing the right thing by making sure the report is done before he leaves office.
The Moar You Know
@OzarkHillbilly: Last time I was at the range – and I gotta get a new card as that was over four years ago – it was just me and some clown. The clown was the reason I haven’t been back since. White, early thirties, full camo, pistol strapped to each leg, AR ripoff rifle, unloading mag after mag into a target less than four yards away. My fucking dog couldn’t miss at that distance. He blew through at least 500 rounds of 5.56 while I was there, and even at Walmart prices that’s about three hundred bucks worth of ammo.
At that kind of rate, he could have worn the barrel out in 20 sessions.
Dude freaked me out. Guys working the shop didn’t say shit, and they’ve seen worse, but I knew ’em pretty good at that point and could tell – he was making them very nervous.
germy
Major Major Major Major
@The Moar You Know:
There’s a sentence for you.
Last time I was at the range had a couple similar folks all the way at the end, plus I’m pretty sure I was getting weird looks for bringing in Asian people.
Elie
We’re thinking about this too much. We are gonna be struggling to liberate our country from authoritarian control and we will make friends and lose friends along the way. I think its too simplistic to think in this dichotomy long term. Trump will shake things up all right but not in the way he or even many of his followers think. He thinks that he can tear down just the stuff that won’t hurt him, but he is mightily wrong. People aren’t going to stay lined up in the same positions that they are in right now — the choices are gonna be quite different (IMHO)
bystander
@Yarrow:
I’ve been whingeing about this like Mary McCarthy’s Kay spotting enemy aircraft in The Group. When the Times published the article about the supposed imminent arrest of Clinton on criminal charges on the strength of an anonymous source, why did they not identify the source after the Times was left with egg on their face? Why would you protect a source who deliberately gave you misinformation?
Chris
@Kay:
I’d love to see the electors fuck Trump because there’s really no argument against it. What are they supposed to do? Vote the way the people did because a just government should derive its powers from the consent of the governed and we’re supposed to be a country of the people, by the people, for the people? That means vote for Hillary. Exercise their prerogative and deny the presidency to Trump despite the fact that he won the electoral vote because we’re a republic not a democracy and that’s their right? That means vote for Hillary.
The main problem as I understand it is that the House would have to approve the decision, and they won’t.
I’m a process person too, in that I think a functioning government needs to let the process run its course regardless of my preferences. However, I should point out that “the process” has been seriously fucked at least twice already in my lifetime – once in the 1990s when Republicans tried to use the impeachment mechanism to overturn the result of an election for what was plainly not a high crime or misdemeanor, and once in 2000 when the Nine decided to throw the election to Bush in a move so transparent they had to add a “you may not use our decision here as precedent ever again” clause to their ruling. That’s not the start of the story, either. “The process” has been under constant attack for what seems like ever now.
D58826
@The Moar You Know:
I’ve never understood that attitude other than as a way to get his rocks off. I can understand skeet shooting opr duck hunting where it takes some skill to hit a moving target. I can understand target shooting, like high school rife teams, that require a fair degree of skill to hit the target. But using an AR15 semi-automatic to shred a paper target. What have you proven – that you can turn a sheet of paper into confetti? Pair of scissors will do that an d for a lot less money.
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer: I’m mostly wondering how the timing of the bust relates to the election cycle, and whether it will be exploitable. Bush’s first recession was covered by 9/11 and the second was at the end of his second term.
sigaba
@Poopyman: McConnell just wants to make sure it’s Republicans doing the investigating. Best to be out in front.
We know how these things go; by the time they’re finished, everything Russia couldn’t hack from the DNC, the senate committee will have leaked. And the final report will characteristically find lots of smoke but no fire, as all congressional investigations do, but the emphasis will be on the lack of fire this time.
PIGL
@Iowa Old Lady: The difference between the pseudo-arriviste taste of Trump and—let’s say—the Django of celluloïd fiction is that Django wised up by Act 2, if not before.
PIGL
@Chris: Bingo. More “projection”
Monala
@rikyrah: Yeah, and someone mentioned that 20% of Black men voted for Trump. That’s not true – 80% of Black men voted for Clinton, but only about 10% of Black men voted for Trump (which is the amount of Black men who typically vote GOP, outside of the Obama elections). The other 10% either voted for 3rd party or left it blank, I assume.
Larkspur
I grew up in a family that considered itself middle class. My father had a post-WWII GI Bill college education; my mother dropped out of college when they got married. My father never really got into the higher income bracket his siblings did (and that he felt he deserved) and my mother was disappointed that the more comfortable lifestyle she’d anticipated never quite happened. There were lean times, but nothing truly dire – mainly because my blue-collar immigrant grandpa (my mom’s father) would faithfully bring over bags of groceries during the week before payday.
Years after I left, they moved to Florida and their go-to restaurant was Olive Garden because they liked it and they always knew what they were getting. Their retirement was long and comfortable, due to my father’s decent government pension. They didn’t travel much. They had season tickets to DisneyWorld and loved Epcot. They said they didn’t need to go to Europe because they had Epcot. None of this was because they were idiots – they were just very insecure and wanted things to be known and familiar and predictable. It wouldn’t have been my choice, but I honestly understood and respected it.
But here’s the thing: if you ever wanted to listen to sneering and contempt, you should have come to visit me as a youngster. They carried on endlessly about the “hillbillies” who came north to Detroit during the war, and never left. They trotted out all of the stereotypes: toothless, ignorant, sloppy, inbred. They were more restrained about black folks because two of their closest friends from college were black. (Those two people, husband and wife, were so much better educated than my parents, so much more sophisticated, so dedicated to continuing their teaching jobs in Detroit throughout some of the roughest times. That is to say, they were higher-status in terms of qualities that count…and yet my parents never recognized this. They considered themselves totally equal in status to their black friends because their black friends were among the “good ones”: they qualified to be my parents’ peers, by being over-qualified.)
My folks also had contempt for snotty rich folks, including some of my father’s siblings who had done much better financially. He attributed their success to some nebulous theory that he’d been cheated out of the advantages they got. They had a decent, comfortable life, especially in retirement, but they were always angry, they always felt like they’d been short-changed, that other, less deserving people had got stuff that should have been theirs. Of course they were Republicans, of course they hated unions, of course they hated JFK (“direct line to the Pope”). (They considered themselves Christians, but didn’t go to church and made fun of “Holy Rollers”.) They envied wealthier people, but mostly they hated the people a few rungs lower than they were. It was all about insecurity and an innate sense of entitlement and I think it was a foundational part of their characters, not something they would ever change their minds about. They were basically scared of falling, and it impinged on their ability to enjoy and appreciate what they had.
I fully acknowledge that I’m very fortunate, more fortunate that most people in the world. I eat kale, and live on the left coast. I don’t have much money, don’t go out to restaurants enough to have a favorite place, and am grateful that I have an apartment of my own, a car, and access to health care through the community clinic. I’m always at the library (and this is because my mom took us to the library early and often: thank you, thank you, thank you, mom). I only watch TV when I’m house-sitting (I love TV and can’t wait to watch the new season of “The Man in the High Castle”)… and I’m the fucking privileged elitist who’s out of touch with the good solid salt-of-the-earth heartlanders. I know the term “flyover country” but I don’t use it because why would I? I don’t hardly ever fly over anything, and anyway I grew up there. Sometimes I can’t comprehend all this shit because I don’t exist in the popular categories, but I get put in the elitist lefty snob category anyway. I just want to live a quiet decent life, and not fuck up everything for the younger folks. At this point, I know none of the younger folks will be sending me any thank-you notes.
PIGL
@rikyrah: That may be what hurts the most. Someone observed that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather indifference. I think they may discover what indifference really means as the country fragments and the coastal states—the economic powerhouses—become less and less willing to finance their fever-dreams. People will accept a great deal of economic disparity within a nation or state in terms of the sources and uses of tax revenues. The problem arises when the recipients insist that only they are the real nation, but the rest must keep paying. And kiss their asses. That will only work for so long.
PIGL
@Cermet: that would be a fine thing. I’m sure the Secretary of Education they elected will get right on it.
Larkspur
@bystander: I love you for the Kay comment. Now you be careful: don’t lean out too far.
Suzanne
We don’t use the term “white trash” anymore, but let’s be real—most of the tastemakers don’t like being around the people that Krugman is describing. (I am just as judgey about this, so I’m not throwing stones.) The people we are discussing used to see their lives reflected back to them in an aspirational way, but that has changed over the last 20 years or so. They hate it. Globalization isn’t just an economic system, it’s a mindset. American exceptionalism is not just a national position, but a personal one. They may not have had money, but they had respect. But now the people commanding the respect are global in their taste and the aspirational image of America they see has diverse people in gleaming cities eating ethnic food and working for global companies. Meanwhile, we mock them with Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo. So there is deep resentment.
But, to be honest, I don’t care. They want to be politically correct? They’re not going to like it if I (and others) say what I really think, which is that their culture is dysfunctional and gross and they can take their Hardee’s and that I have no interest in helping them perpetuate their lifestyle with my tax dollars.
NW Phil
@Barbara:
Forcing the EU to rebuild their armies is going to be such a big winner for Putin. They have the money, people and manufacturing capability. Russia has…?
bystander
@Larkspur: I’ll be careful. But I’m going to keep shrieking about the Times involvement in the false news war on Clinton.
Jacel
@BillinGlendaleCA: And Rachel Maddow had to get a side job on MSNBC. Lizz Winstead and Chuck D had to go back in time to start up The Daily Show and Public Enemy in a futile attempt to dig Air America out of its financial hole.
Jacel
@bystander: Latest word is that before the NYT published a story poo-poohing Russian involvement they interviewed Harry Reid who reinforced what he said earlier about the hacking. But the story dropped any mention of what Reid had to say. Hey NYT, GTH!
Barbara
@NW Phil: I didn’t say Putin is wise in his desires. Rather the opposite. Indeed, he seems to be a singularly short-term strategic thinker, or at least one who can only weigh one or at most two dimensions at a time. Let’s say he weakens NATO, almost certainly Germany, France et al. would have to seriously consider their options militarily. As would Japan. And, as you say, they all have stronger economies than Russia does. Russia under Putin has squandered whatever vitality it has to become an actual economic player. It has stifled entrepreneurs in favor of kleptocracy and plutocrats. Without a spike in oil prices, average Russians are worse off. Like a lot of people who can only see the future in terms of a lost, presumed better past, Putin is undertaking the impossible task of trying to recreate prior glory with the near certain outcome of making the future less prosperous. I just wish Trump and his minions weren’t carbon copies of his world view.
Suzanne
@Alesis:
Even if they aren’t specifically aware of Lena Dunham, they know what we are saying. Because it has been said in some way in all media. Turn on the radio—you will hear hip-hop and rock and pop all mixed together, but not country, not really. They’re portrayed as simple and backward on TV. Their towns are depicted as places from which to escape. To use the parlance of the young, they are portrayed as basic.
And I fully admit to this. When I go visit my in-laws and my MIL asks us, AGAIN, to move there, it takes everything I have not to go off on her and tell her that that will NEVER HAPPEN because I think her town is trashy and boring and full of people with bad taste who think that “wash” has an R in it and that raising children there is how you ensure that they come out ignorant and low-class and overweight and unable to support themselves. She is a nice person, and not stupid, and not conservative, not even a little. But she doesn’t get that I think the lives people lead there are uncreative and uninspiring. That the minute she dies, we want to sell her farm that she adores and use the proceeds to live in the city and send our kids to college.
Larkspur
@Barbara:
Oh, this this this. I just finished reading Masha Gessen’s book The Man Without A Face, about Putin. Before that, I read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and both sharply detailed this catastrophe. “Secondhand Time” was a bit beyond me, and is in a difficult format – a diffuse series of interviews of a range of Russian citizens. I wish I’d read Gessen’s book first. I can’t say I know all about current Russian events, but I now know that my previous ignorance wasn’t because I was stupid – everything happened really fast, and really subversively, and people are still dazed about the events.
liberal
@Barbara:
Huh?
While Putin is horrible in many ways, including economic policy, do you have any idea what was happening in Russia economically before Putin came to power?
It doesn’t mean what he’s doing economically is the right thing to do, but compared to what was happening before…
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: A thing that right-wing media figures like Rush Limbaugh are really good at is what I call the “reverse dogwhistle”: you say something that sounds completely racist to liberals, but like just plain folksy common sense to your fans. Then when liberals predictably freak out, you say “see, they think they’re better than you, there’s nothing you can say they won’t think is racist.” Repeat 100X. The freakers-out won’t take it as a prejudiced cultural smear, but your audience will.
grumpy realist
@OzarkHillbilly: You should hear what those of us in Upstate New York say about people from NYC….
It’s not a conservative–progressive thing. (Ithaca’s very blue.) It’s a “damn fool doesn’t know not to shoot a gun within 200 ft of a house and thinks that deer == cow” sort of thing.
Larkspur
@liberal: I need to know this stuff, so this is a legitimate, straight-up honest question: which particular period of time before Putin are you referring to? The Soviet economy? Or that weird in-between time, after perestroika and before Putin became the chief kleptocrat? Again, please note I am not challenging you. I really just want to learn stuff.
This is a bit of conversation from the book Secondhand Time that I found particularly sad:
Barbara
@liberal: Educated and trained people who might have been liberated from the stranglehold of Soviet anti-capitalism find it not much easier to start and run new companies or market inventions in post-Soviet Russia. That’s called squandering an opportunity to make the most of what you have. Compare Russia to China if you really need to think about how Russia could be doing. And I don’t think I am exactly novel in my thinking here.
ChristianPinko
This post relates to a lot of things I’ve been thinking about since the election. First, I think it would be foolish to constantly be on guard against sneering at blue-state Americans. Going around biting your tongue all the time won’t fool anybody, because eventually you’ll slip up and let people know what you “really” think. Even if you don’t, giving off a repressed, calculating vibe is a big turn off—one of the things that people didn’t like about Hillary is that you can always tell she’s being calculated in her public speech, because she’s always so careful not to offend anyone. Second, liberals need to realize that politics is a popularity contest, not a debate. We can’t win by coming up with policy ideas that people like. The public prefers liberal ideas and has done so going back to the 1980s. I still remember how it drove Democrats crazy that the public liked Ronald Reagan even though polls indicated that they disliked pretty much everything he wanted to do. But they liked him, and thought he was on their side. They thought he was one of their tribe. We’re not part of the tribe, and everyone knows it.
So I think the answer is, grow our tribe. We simply must get more people to think of themselves as liberals or at least liberal-friendly. And the only way I can think of doing that is actually making friends among receptive constituents. Whenever I go to a Democratic group where I live, in southeastern Louisiana, the only people who show up are well-educated white people. That has to change. We need to get less-educated minorities, and white people who are receptive to the ideal of multiracial democracy, to become politically engaged on a more-or-less permanent basis. And that means going out into the community and meeting people without graduate degrees, and getting to know them on a personal basis, and addressing their local concerns with liberal ideas. You’ve got to show that you care about people’s actual concerns and that liberal politics can be something that helps to address them. But as long as the true Democratic base remains people with graduate degrees, we’re stuck, because there’s simply not enough of us to overwhelm the deplorables and the deplorable-friendly. So we’ve got to create those local on-the-ground networks of people, something that could do what labor unions used to do: provide a broad-based sense of group identity and pride.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep. And that’s because their vision of their culture is deeply steeped in racism, and has been probably since the first English plantations were built.
debbie
@Kay:
Sorry I wasn’t here for your post. The real irony is that many of those sneering are the ones who sold the bogus mortgages to them in the first place!