Here's what I'm left wondering:
Why Did Even More Americans Vote for Biden?https://t.co/grW4k1bXGX
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 27, 2020
Is there a single diner in the US without a mainstream media member still grasping for understanding of how racism works? https://t.co/cVVdOPcCEC
— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) November 28, 2020
But of course, the thing is, you have to reach out and understand these people, because they're very anxious, and forgotten towns and globalization and shit https://t.co/sfDwbnqhCE
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 29, 2020
they’re just shitty human beings. this is not a mystery to be solved nor a knot to be untied. they are bad, dishonest people. you know this already! https://t.co/Mt5qADLr96
— Normie Transition Team (@CalmSporting) November 28, 2020
Great stuff from @RadioFreeTom here. What's doubly galling is that *even after an unprecedented 80 million people voted to oust Trump,* much of the orientation of commentary is *still* towards understanding why 74 million voted for Trump, not why 80 million voted against him. https://t.co/5UukwfqdQD
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) November 27, 2020
I'm so f*cking tired of people going to rural Wisconsin like anthropologists on a field trip. Take those same people from Oshkosh and put them on a bus to Boston or LA and say: "You better learn about these people. They're your fellow citizens and they way outnumber you." /3x
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 27, 2020
ding ding ding DING DING DING *bell breaks* https://t.co/NU3KxYjS6T
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) November 29, 2020
Miss Bianca
NYT, back in the day:
So What Is It About This Hitler Guy, Anyway?: Why So Many Germans Are So Into Him!
zhena gogolia
I’m still hearing these bogus David Brooks takes from supposedly well-educated people WHO LIVE IN CITIES!
jonas
@Miss Bianca: Or even: Why Are So Many *Americans* into Hitler?
JanieM
From the Normie Transition Team tweet:
Some of them, I’m sure. But watching the videos in the tweets, it sure seems to me that the overwhelming factor at work is bottomless stupidity.
rikyrah
Nate gets on my nerves sometimes.
OF COURSE, MORE PEOPLE VOTED FOR BIDEN.
VOTER SUPPRESSION WAS EVERYWHERE.
STOP PRETENDING THAT IT WASN’T????
Danielx
@zhena gogolia:
It’s a mystery.
rikyrah
@rikyrah:
He can start with everyone disenfranchised in Florida because of the POLL TAX!?
JanieM
@rikyrah: I don’t read him enough to be a good judge, but I thought he was being snarky about the NYT obsession with Clickbait voters. No?
rikyrah
One of the by-products of Dolt45 is that I wasn’t able to enjoy tv or movie entertainment. Haven’t really in almost 2 years. Yesterday, I did my first binge watching in a very long time.
Britbox did a new series based upon the Bletchley Circle series that they did a few years ago.
But, they changed it to San Francisco. Using two of the original British characters, and adding three Americans. I really enjoyed it.
Punchy
I think Sargent is missing The Question. The better phrased, fuller question is: despite his absymmal COVID response, child-like mannerisms, wanton stupidity on global matters, govt-by-Twitter, etc etc, why did so many still vote for him?
IOWs, of course some would vote R reflexively, but Trump did SUCH a terrible job in all aspects yet still found nearly half of voting adults apporoved. THAT is actually a question that the country needs answered if theres any hope (my take: theres not any) of the US moving forward.
Baud
Nate gives the correct response. The problem for him is, he’s part of that media scene now. He should be answering the question instead of asking it.
trollhattan
Jordan Klepper has an uncanny ability to get these critters to open up on camera. Bless his heart for putting himself out there. It must get soul-robbing at some point.
rikyrah
@JanieM:
It’s not just Nate.
it is the matter of factness of how the media just sat around for the most part ( I can make the journalists who defend voting rights on a consistent basis with barely two hands), as the voter suppression mechanisms were set up all over.
rikyrah
No more Cletus Safaris???
jonas
To answer Nichols’ question: Why is it always incumbent on urban residents, college grads, and POC to reach out and “understand” the “economic anxiety” of rural Trump supporters and never the other way around? White supremacy. No, not the Klan-burning-a-cross-on-your-lawn stuff, but simply the unspoken assumption across most American institutions and the media that the rural, white male is the default “normal” American and that the less-than-real Americans in the cities and suburbs have to try to sympathize with why they’re so mad all the time.
JPL
@jonas: The NYTimes reporting on Hitler’s rise to power was atrocious. Students should be taught about MSM support of the Nazi party, and how that might have affected our thinking about Eastern European immigrants. The NyTimes might have been the worse, but they were not alone.
Baud
@Punchy: Because Trump gave hope to them that he could destroy us. Think about what would have happened to us had he won the electoral college.
We’ve speculated about the concept of a Democratic Trump. What would we have tolerated or turned a blind eye to if we believed our guy could destroy conservatism or Republicanism or corporatism for a generation? I don’t know the answer to that because we’ve never had to deal with anyone who gave us that level of hope or who was that rotten. But I’m not so sanguine about our collective character as maybe I used to be.
Suzanne
Agree. There’s been variations of this that I’ve seen going around. One especially notable piece that came across my social media feed was called “Stop Talking About Your Travel”. The thesis was that when “globalists” (who are just Americans who have spent any amount of time abroad, for work or pleasure) discuss how their travel was enlightening or enriching in any way that it makes other people who can’t afford or don’t want to travel feel bad. Like…. why are we spending so much time and effort trying to protect everyone’s feelings about this? Why are we accepting these terms?
Elliott
We have to either punish trump supporters unmercifully or understand them. Why are liberals unwilling to do what’s necessary to redeem the Republic? Until we start hurting them, then the ny times will continue to visit diners.
waspuppet
@rikyrah: There’s some remarkable process by which even writers and reporters who know voter suppression exists willfully forget about it once the election is over. Someday a Democratic presidential candidate is gonna get 150 votes in the entire state of Florida or Wisconsin after polling at 72% and everyone will say “Gee, the polling was so wrong; I guess they were a really uninspiring candidate there couldn’t be any other possible explanation.”
And actually I think we need MORE analysis of the Trump voter. The problem is, the “analysis” of the past four years has proceeded from the assumption that they’re basically good people who believe in American ideals. Which is contradicted by all available evidence, including their own words.
Chris Johnson
@Punchy: QAnon, writ large.
It’s called propaganda. A huge international effort and billions of dollars over a span of decades, for the purpose of spelling out the idea that Democrats eat babies and sold your job to China.
Fact is, post-Keynsian economics sold your job to China and it wasn’t going to take no for an answer, either from Democrats or Republicans. And it wasn’t going to be possible to sustain the post-war America story forever, and nobody wants to get blamed when it inevitably fails.
But the mechanism is propaganda. This is not hard to understand. People do actually believe the Democrats are there to hurt them and take away their shit.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Yep. The language the media uses against them is different from the language they use when talking about us. It was only near the very end where there was some level of parity.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@jonas: slowly, slowly media people are waking up to the notion that “The Heartland” is an incredibly loaded concept. The place where some Americans are more American than other Americans. I’d love to hear the Dems announce that Iowa and New Hampshire are no longer front-loaded in the primary process.
But the underlying, unspoken conceit of all the Cletus Safaris (I believe a Pierce coinage) is that it’s not about race, because nothing is ever about race (another Pierce coinage). Even when the Cleti tell them pretty explicitly it’s about race.
JMG
@JPL: Reporting on Stalin in the ’30s by the Times was just as bad.
MattF
Also, for the record, diners generally have bad food. Inferior ingredients, badly cooked. Awful coffee. Pies that kill. And customers who pay to eat there.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Iowa especially needs to go, since they are a caucus state. Now that they’ve gone hard for Trump twice, there’s no need to protect their feefees on this.
germy
Baud
@Suzanne:
Are we? Seems to me we’re ignoring these terms and they are using that fact to scream “elitists!”
Suzanne
@Punchy:
Because OWN THE LIBS. That’s it. That’s the answer.
I don’t know why it’s so difficult for liberals to grasp this. I think it’s because most of us are at heart nice people. But it’s true.
As much as I agree with progressives on policy positions, it makes me crazy that they can’t grasp this either: the deplorables are never gonna vote with us, no matter what we do for them, because they hate us. Full stop.
Roger Moore
@JanieM:
I don’t think you can easily separate them being stupid from them being bad, dishonest people. They are dumb because they continue to believe what they want to believe, evidence be damned, and they want to believe what they believe because they’re awful people.
Baud
@Suzanne:
It’s because our side is built to fight elites. It doesn’t have the vocabulary, training, or interest to fight ordinary people. It’s been a major weakness in our armor that we still don’t know how to deal with.
germy
Suzanne
@Baud: Nah, I think liberals assume too much good faith to them, because we’re inherently nice people who want the best for others and assume that a rising tide will lift all boats. No. 2016 was about a bunch of crappy white people feeling bad that black people, women, educated people, etc. have more cultural capital than they do. Guess what? That’s true. Tough shit.
Wag
One of the failures that I see my fellow Democrats making is an aversion to negative marketing. Sure, we made all kinds of intellectual arguments that the explosion of COVID was a failure on the part of the Trump administration, but we didn’t market that fact to the down market voters like the GOP would have. We could have been calling it the TRUMP VIRUS in all caps an hanging the deaths around his neck in exactly the same way that they would have done had Clinton been the president.
We need to make them own their failures and rub their noses in the awfulness of their response. Same thing with the deficit. We need to get out in front of the GOP and define the deficit as the TRUMP DEFICIT so we can reverse the trump tax cuts and right the ship of state.
Delk
Four years ago two trump supporters said it far more succinctly than I could ever say: “Fuck Their Feelings”.
Subsole
Most of these media folks want us to redeem conservatives with the magical power of the Family Matters heart-to-heart rap session so they can go on drinking Kellyanne’s drinks and laughing at Tucker’s jokes without being reminded of the boorishness they tacitly enable. That’s all.
They want the rape victim to shut up and smile so they can keep enjoying cocktails with the rapist.
I have a whole set of theories on why. But honestly? Fuck why. There is no magical string of words that is gonna fall out of Joe and Mika’s mouths that will make this all okay.
The question is, how do we find what they are getting out of this dynamic so we can break it into a million pieces.
Omnes Omnibus
I don’t know that I would go that far. I would say that white liberals’ self-conception is based around being the good guy and expecting that the other side will eventually see that and come around to our point of view. I doubt that Democratic POC have any such illusions.
jonas
No, because Trump is functionally illiterate and couldn’t write a two-paragraph (or even two-sentence) letter on his own if his life depended on it.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: I assume that is uttered more as a prayer than as a prediction?
Subsole
@Suzanne: Ayep. You give these people more money, they’re gonna go waste it on more expensive ways to hurt the people they fear.
They damn sure aren’t gonna invest it in their community.
germy
When Trump is gone, he won’t be
writingdictating presidential letters anymore:egorelick
We have to exorcise “when they go low, we go high” until trump supporters are bleeding and begging for mercy. Also, bad people exist on the Democratic side of the aisle. For example, millions of dollars were wasted on this election in Kentucky, that level of futility only happens when bad people are involved (not saying everyone, but at least some had to be grifters).
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I guess what I mean by that is that I think most liberals genuinely believe that government should be used to lay a foundation to create positive ends for people, and that liberals genuinely want most people to be successful. Trump’s voters do not want that. Even if liberals created the best-functioning social democracy and it was stable and everyone had a middle-class lifestyle and the economy was good and healthcare, education, environmental issues were in hand…. Trump’s voters would be unhappy.
trollhattan
@germy:
Fascinating string of letters, I especially like HW Bush’s. I’ll suggest Obama’s was broken into a to-do list for Trump to do the inverse of each and every recommendation. “Mission accomplished, sir.”
Baud
@Suzanne:
If we were inherently nice, we would also assume good faith in our elites. The problem is that people of bad faith aren’t confined to the elites.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I agree.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I did a fairly long comment on this a couple of threads down that ultimately I was able to distill down to one word – Poujadism.
narya
@Baud: You know what? If we’re so f’king elitist, then stop taking our money. I am so tired of that narrative. Yeah, sure, we’re elitist; and we’re building your roads and feeding and educating your kids, and if you weren’t such assholes, we’d be happier to do that. At this point, my bag of fks left to give is quite empty, and there’s a hole in the bottom. It’s only folks like OzarkH who remind me that it’s not just willfully ignorant folks who live in the red states.
Mikeindublin
No reason why Biden should have underperformed in areas Hillary did better in. Dade? SW Texas?
Why and how?
Democrats need to nip this in the butt early. Highlighting Trump basically abandoned Puerto Rico, said Mexicans were rapists and murderers, locked immigrants in cages, lost over 1500 children ripped from their parents while the Republican Party stood by and watched silently doesn’t seem to have worked.
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
I think a big reason people continue to vote for Trump is that their partisanship makes them ignore his flaws. It’s easy to forgive him for COVID if you get your news from a source that presents it as an unstoppable disaster or lays the blame on state-level mismanagement or claims we need to open up and accept everyone getting sick eventually as the cost of keeping the economy growing. There’s a whole field of Republican apologetics devoted to explaining how all our problems are either the Democrats’ fault or something inevitable that nobody could have predicted or stopped. If you are partisan enough to dip into that stream, you’ll happily forgive Trump all his failures because they aren’t really his failures.
gwangung
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah. Particularly the B and the I in BIPOC.
trollhattan
@egorelick:
“Joe Biden, angel of vengeance” is not going to happen. Sorry to disappoint.
debbie
Not just that, dammit. Votes showed up late because the post office managed to overcome Trump’s and DeJoy’s efforts to “lose” them in the chaos they created with mail delivery. If the post office can deal with rain or sleet or gloom of night, they can also surmount anything thrown at them by these assholes.
Suzanne
@Baud: I actually think most our elites (and to me, “elite” is “someone with a high position in business or government”, not just “someone who went to college and has an office job”) genuinely believe that they are doing good for us little people. I disagree with them, but I think they believe that.
Wag
@Suzanne: I agree wholeheartedly that we want to create a society that allows all to rise to their potential. I am quite convinced that in order to get there we need to drop our Pollyanna view of politics, and fight the GOP’s fire with fire of our own.
When they go low, we need to hit them where they lie. It is the only language they understand.
trollhattan
@germy:
The hell is that even referencing? What and who did we blow up–something in Syria?
trollhattan
Happy 87th(?!?) to John Mayall, oldest surviving member of the British blues scene.
germy
@trollhattan:
Here’s some backstory, although I still find it puzzling.
dnfree
@Chris Johnson: excellent summarization.
debbie
@trollhattan:
Wow! His Room to Move was our high school class song senior year.
Bobby Thomson
Nate Silver seriously thinks it’s a mystery why more people voted for Biden?
JMG
@debbie: Excellent choice!
OGLiberal
@Miss Bianca: They actually kind of did that: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8016017/ny-times-hitler
Suzanne
@Bobby Thomson: No, Nate Silver is implying that it is stupid to ask why people voted for Trump when more people voted for Biden.
scav
Oh! Look! Media spends four years highlighting, coddling and front-paging racists and conspiracy theorists and then wonders why there are more racists and conspiracy-theorists!
Steeplejack (phone)
@trollhattan:
Klepper is very good at it. He doesn’t fake-agree with them in a condescending way or get into a confrontation to heighten the comedy. He just keeps paying out enough rope for them to let their freak flag fly. It’s devastating.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Elites exist in smaller cities and towns too. In some small, rural towns, the educated elite may primarily consist of the teachers at the local school and a few others who occasionally go to museums and at least pretend to enjoy classical music.
jackmac
Maybe we need more liberal diners.
Baud
@Wag:
The other side understands the language of losing elections. Yet every four years, we have to make an all out effort to convince our voters to come out. You can’t fight a war with no army, and we have no army.
egorelick
@trollhattan: Not going to happen is obvious. So we will need to “understand” the other side. The railing on about why we keep getting these type of articles is annoying (not as annoying as the articles, but annoying).
Ksmiami
@Elliott: I’m in the cut off the red rural states and take away their technology side but I’m no longer a nice person, nor sanguine about appeasing the fascists among us.
different-church-lady
The biggest lie the hippies ever told was that everyone has worth.
Baud
No one believes me, but IMHO the most effective way to fight them is to promote our own people. But we instead tend to spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on how our people are flawed and imperfect.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Deploarbles to the right of me, purity ponies to my left, here I am, stuck in the middle with you…
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I believe you, Baud. I am not sure how much help that is.
P.S. I am not a crank.
trollhattan
@egorelick:
I’ll be satisfied if we can stop pretending the base is something other than who they are, and stop pretending they can be turned “back to the light.”
Go after the ticket-splitters–I think there’s something to be gained there.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: It doesn’t help. Probably hurts a little. But thank you.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the new elitists are the local level public health officials and front line health workers who are being accused of profiteering conspiracies by their patients, who are also their neighbors
Punchy
@Chris Johnson: I know this. We all know this. It’s existed on the fringe forever. The question (to me at least) is how these fringe thoeries became so mainstream as to infect nearly half of all adults. I know the stupid exists, but I had no idea until 2020 that THIS much of it runs freely in the US. How can a country survive if nearly half its adults cant live in actual reality?
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Dude, if those people are “elite”, then the word has lost all meaning.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: It’s true that people judge others by themselves. If you would never do something, you tend to assume others wouldn’t either.
I think I’ve commented before about a study I saw of a pre-employment questionnaire asking if the applicant had ever stolen anything from work. A number of people confessed they had because they assumed everyone did and if they denied it, the prospective employer would think they were lying.
Roger Moore
@Bobby Thomson:
No. He thinks the media should be thinking about why Biden won rather than continuing to focus their thinking around Trump and Trump voters.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Anti-vaxxers swear vaccines are simply a profit play by Big Pharma and that the entire government structure is in their clawlike grasp.
If you want to have a little fun, ask an anti-vaxxer what kind of bidnez plan begins with the concept of a product that if successful, puts itself out of a mission when the disease is eradicated.
scav
@Suzanne: Doesn’t matter the size of the pond, there’s always a big fish.
trollhattan
@Suzanne:
Can I introduce you to northwest Iowa?
Lyrebird
@rikyrah:
I love field work though! Seriously, how ’bout:
No more of those safaris unless they include more about how the Senate & Electoral College prop up racist feudalist outmoded inhumane patterns of crap in this country.
Nicole
@trollhattan:
Yeah. 2016-2020 taught me how incredibly naive I was to have faith in human nature. And I regret the time I lost, pre-2016, trying to turn some right-wingers in my circle “back to the light.” I was so sure if they would just really think about their positions they’d realize how morally bankrupt they were. But they don’t care about anything that doesn’t benefit them personally. That’s what I didn’t understand, and I do now.
(Not to say there aren’t millions of lovely people in the world; just that not everyone is lovely, and the vast majority of those who aren’t are not salvageable so why waste the time?)
raven
Poetic justice!!!
“Trump on Kemp: ‘I’m ashamed that I endorsed him”
Baud
@raven: See. Trump does feel shame.
Suzanne
@scav: If we’re going to accept the premise that a high school teacher, who probably went to a state university with student loans, is an “elite”, or that a local accountant who goes to a symphony once every couple of years is an “elite”, then that has a different implication than what most of us on the left side of the aisle are implying when we talk about “elites”. Our side (rightfully) usually wants to tax real elites at a higher rate to enable more opportunity and social solidarity. But if we accept the premise that teachers and accountants are elites, there’s not a policy implication there. That’s just resentment that someone is smarter. And to that, I say: tough shit.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Find yourself in a small town sometime and see. Look at the year round residents of a resort town. See who the unofficial civic leaders are. Then get back to me. And, despite you not considering yourself to be a member of that group, by a shitload of people’s views, you are.
Suzanne
@trollhattan:
No thanks, I’m good.
See, I’m being such a coastal elitist.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@raven: I haven’t dared let myself hope that he would own-goal the Senate elections for the Republicans, but who the hell knows…
national political reporter for the Washington Post
West of the Rockies
Part of the dynamic is that Trump–for whatever socio/psychological reasons–has a cult leader status over his followers. No Republican previously touched on 70 million voters.
Racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc explains the rest of the situation (with maybe 2% of voters just being utterly and entirely low-information louts.
Bex
@Wag: Yep. It would have been “Clinton Covid” 24/7 on FB and right-wing media.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: Today, an “elite” is anyone who doesn’t vote for the fascist. Period.
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne: You are correct: It is resentment of ANYONE who is smarter and did better. That is the resentment driving the trump cult. Don’t ask me why they don’t resent trump, I don’t get it either
Eta: and yes, tough shit indeed is my response.
Also too: crab bucket syndrome
KSinMA
@narya:
This.
trnc
DT never had any intention of being “Christ-like,” and his supporters never expected him to be. They only wanted him to pander to the fake out of context religion they practice.
Chyron HR
It’s wild that the self-proclaimed Left has been bitching at liberals for four years straight because we called Trump voters–and I quote–“deplorable”, and now they’re bitching at us for not hating Trump voters enough.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suzanne: trump gets up in front of his howler monkeys and mocks “elites” by talking about his own Ivy League education, his huge apartments and his planes and boats… then remembers who he’s talking to and says, “You’re the real elites!” And they hoot and howl and stamp their feet (I originally wrote “hooves”, but I didn’t want to appear elitist).
You can parse the word six ways of Sunday, it means whatever the person saying it wants it to mean. To a whole lot of this country, believing in evolution not only makes you an elitist, it makes you a tool of Satan to boot.
scav
@Suzanne: The fact that some are using the term elites as a shorthand for identifying a very specific subgroup does not transcend the general definition and use of the word and can lead to confusion when using the term outside the bubble.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: It’s true that elite has a completely static meaning. This is one of the reasons that elite high school athletes are regularly quite competitive with Usain Bolt.
cain
We do tend to do that. It’s how we attack each other – until an outside force forces us to work together.
LuciaMia
Thats willful stupidity.
******
When I first saw this post’s headline, thought, “Mmm, Waldorf salad. Somebody’s finding new ways to use up their Thanksgiving leftovers.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@cain: someone made that point yesterday on twitter: trump’s refusal to quit the stage may provide a political boon to Biden and Democrats, as the focal point of a common enemy
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I am willing to entertain that thought, though I find it hilarious, based on the fact that I grew up middle class at the very best and usually lower. But as I said, if you get to consider anyone with a degree and a job as “elite”, then my assessment is correct: Trump voters aren’t really looking for policy solutions, they just are sad that “elites” have more cultural capital. That’s not a governmental problem.
BTW, something like one third of American adults have a college degree. If one third of people are elite, the word is meaningless.
J R in WV
@JPL:
@JMG:
To the NY Times these two “great leaders” are very nearly equal in their superiority. The fact that one was labeled Fascist and the other Communist didn’t matter, those were just two labels for the same disease: Authoritarianism. Dictatorship. Strong Man Leadership. It is where the right-wing and the left-wing meet together in the back room of politics and become the same dialectical force.
That’s what the NY Times loves, a Strong Daddy who will make people be good little boys and girls. That’s their political stance. I don’t understand it at all.
Those strong man leaders, were they to take total and complete control here, would eventually take everyone writing and editing at the NY Times and put them in a camp, perhaps to be re-educated, perhaps to work them to death, or just execute them upon arrival.
But put away they would be….
They cannot see that, even though it has happened every time one of their beloved strong leaders takes control anywhere. Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Trump, murderers all, every time, if they reach a point where they have total control.
Very lucky Trump didn’t achieve that level of control right here, yet.
narya
@Baud: I believe you. I think in some ways our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses. I keep thinking of the Dems’ roll call during the convention–that amazing panorama of people, of all colors and backgrounds and and and; it has really stuck with me and heartened me. That same diversity also means that achieving anything like consensus is an ongoing project–what one of us supports or loves, another of us finds problematic, and we can both be right in some ways. It’s absolutely, no question, a worthwhile project. It’s also a difficult project, remembering that politics is local and what counts as “local” can vary.
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: Elites demonstrate monolithic behavior too— try to distinguish the voting patterns of titans of industry and Wall Street stockbrokers from those of university professors at upper tier universities.
debbie
@raven:
He just cannot help himself. Just as well.
geg6
@Suzanne:
THIS. They are hateful assholes. That’s it. I understand them perfectly. I don’t need a Cletus safari to illustrate it. I live it every day.
LuciaMia
@germy: If Trump actually does write a letter, it all be in Sharpie. And scrawled like his signature so nobody will know what the hell he’s saying.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: At this point, I think you are willfully choosing to miss the point. The elite in a rural town of 8,000 wouldn’t necessarily elite in the nearly city of 35,000. That city’s elite wouldn’t necessarily among the elite in the big city or capitol of the state. And so on…. It’s a pretty common trope in literature and shit.
trollhattan
@Suzanne:
I’m a recovered soybean belt resident. The struggle is real.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: “Elite” has an implication of rarity. There is an immeasurable gulf between the lifestyle of a public educator or a self-employed professional and, say, a corporate executive in a tech company.
trnc
True, and it was even more overlooked this time because there was so much attention on the legitimacy of the votes that WERE cast. I suspect this was understood by some of the republicans who were propping up DT’s BS. When the talk turns again at some point to voter suppression, expect every republican to conflate voter suppression with the actual voting process and say, “Well, democrats swore up and down that the 2020 vote was legitimate.”
germy
@Suzanne:
In the 1950s, “Egghead” was a popular term.
A college professor with some liberal views was an Egghead. Meaning an intellectual elitist.
An owner of a car dealership, someone with twice as much money and mostly conservative views was simply a real American.
germy
@LuciaMia:
“Is that… brown ink??”
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I get what you are saying, but my point is that if we are considering “everyone smarter or more successful than me” as “elite”, there is no public policy solution for that. And, quite frankly, if someone honest-to-God voted for Trump because of seething resentment at those “elites”…. then those people are fucking dickbags and I don’t really give a shit about them, other than getting their smart kids away from them.
Kent
I would argue that was Bernie. His promises were just as hollow as Trump’s. He wasn’t overtly racist like Trump, but was just as much of a demagogue
I’ve found talking politics to some of my Bernie-faithful associates is about the same as talking to some of my MAGA-faithful family and associates. The willingness to suspend disbelief in favor of rhetoric goes both ways.
JPL
@Mikeindublin: In Berlin, and some of the Jewish population was not concerned at first, because Hitler was only attacking the Eastern European Jews. It’s the same thing. They came into the country legally, and the others tried to cheat.
debbie
@JPL:
That was because they saw themselves as Germans, not Jews.
patrick II
@Baud:
It is a breakdown of trust. We can’t trust that democracy could have withstood another Trump victory. So, how can we trust them with that opportunity again? It is a downward spiral.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kent: I despise him and his cultists, but even I’ll admit his demagoguery (and we can argue about if it’s demagoguery if the demagogue believes it) was well-intentioned demagoguery. As to a Democratic or even more broadly leftist version of trump, I just don’t think “Medicare For All” nor even “eat the rich and take their stuff” will ever gain huge traction in a nation that contains so many temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@JPL: It wasn’t just Hitler, the NYT was also quite the collection of fanbois Joseph Stalin in the day. Fascism or Stalin style boot to the face Communism, the choices that an authoritarian must make.
Kent
No, those aren’t the “elite” Those are the Democrats. Even in the most ruby red counties in the country you still have 20% or so who vote Democrat. That’s who they are. The HS teachers. the nurses at the local clinic (not the Doctors). The social workers who work for the local CPS branch. The occasional educated person who left home for college and career, experienced life someplace more diverse, then eventually returned to open a winery or brew pub or coffee shop or something.
I know. I’ve actually been there and done that in rural Texas. Even in the most red places in the country you still have liberals. But they are hardly the elite.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kent: Apparently the Bernster is warning the Democrats that they might end up a Trump like Demagogue on on the Left. Irony is dead.
Bill Arnold
@Wag:
I’ve been suspecting that the propagandists on the right have been quite surprised that the left did not do so. And that they see this as a weakness, to be exploited. (Correctly, IMO, until remedied, somehow. Which could included active and relentless and competent efforts to destroy Republican narratives.)
Emma from FL
I think that’s because you’re looking for a definition that everyone agrees to accept. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that we as a nation have lost the common political/social language.
(added) which, after reading through this thread I am beginning to believe we never had one.
Kent
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Because Democrats picked the least demagogue-ic candidate of all out of the 20+ who started out in the primary?
Baud
@Kent:
He’s the closest we have. But even I hesitate to put him in exactly the same category as Trump. If Bernie were president, there’s very little immorality we would have had to look past to support him (aside from his treatment of the Democratic Party).
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: ?
Suzanne
@Kent: I would also argue that there is a significant gulf in values between the MAGA agenda, which is the restoration of white supremacy, and looking to create a social democracy a la Denmark.
I agree that Bernie is not good enough at governance to achieve his agenda, and that his diehard supporters are obnoxious AF, but the agenda he represents is orders of magnitude better than the Trump agenda.
Kent
Oh sure, they aren’t the same thing at all. Because what motivates liberals and conservatives are two different sets of values. By definition we could never have a Democratic Trump because he/she would be a Republican.
What we do get are lefties who demagogue lefty issues with equal fury and dishonesty. I put Bernie in that category. Who gave people the naïve hope and expectation that they could simply, through force of will, implement their agenda as a party of one by…I don’t know…marching on Kentucky to demand Mitch McConnell listen to the 99% and implement M4A and free college for all.
J R in WV
@Suzanne:
Don’t forget, a guy named Joe Biden grew up in a middle to working class household. You have technical graduate degrees that you put to use every day. Lots of people have degrees that were passports to a job, and make no use at all of the academic work they did in college — that’s not elite.
Suzanne
@Emma from FL: What I think is that the Cletus Safaris are written by well-meaning reporters who genuinely want to understand others because they think we can find common ground. After all, the leftists they know also have thoughts about elites! But once we scratch the surface and find out that what the MAGAts consider “elite” is just…. everyone outside their social milieu, then I think maximum understanding level is reached, and what I now understand is nothing the MAGAts should be proud of.
The tone of the Cletus Safaris is changing. There was one a couple of weeks ago in the FTFNYT that absolutely dripped with subtle contempt for its subject.
NotMax
Nate had his 15 minutes of fame some years back and needs to STFU.
JPL
@J R in WV: trump isn’t finished and I hope that he lasts long enough to rid us of Cotton. He really scares me. My theory only works if he doesn’t win another election. It took Hitler a long time, before his ultimate power grab. When I read In the Garden of Beasts by Larson, I’d refer back to NYTimes and see how they covered the news.
We all know how they covered Hillary compared to the asshole.
Baud
@Kent:
We couldn’t have a bigot. We could have someone corrupt and incompetent and dishonest.
Kent
Of course they are not the same thing. But “Build the Wall and Mexico will Pay” and “We will mobilize the 99% to march on Kentucky and Mitch McConnell will pass M4A and free college” are equally demagogic.
Both the Trump and Sanders agendas involved equal amounts of magical thinking. You are just arguing about which was black magic and which was white magic.
Suzanne
@Kent: I’m not sure it’s demagoguery if you believe what you’re saying. I think Bernie believes what he says. I mean, I think he’s wrong, but I don’t think he’s a liar.
Trump is a liar.
JPL
@germy: Education beyond high school was for the elites. Until states supported public colleges did the attitude change.
The GI Bill did make higher education affordable though.
dm
@trnc: I’ve always thought Trump was Herod-like, myself (down to the creepy relationship with his daughter). I don’t understand why this isn’t obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the New Testament.
Emma from FL
@Suzanne: This I am in complete agreement with. But you seemed to be searching for a common definition.
JPL
@Baud: The MSM only support corrupt republicans, e.g. Perdue and Loeffler.
grandmaBear
@jackmac: I think we call those taco trucks.
Baud
@grandmaBear: Heh.
Baud
@JPL:
Or as we sometimes call them, Republicans.
germy
Kent
The problem with the NYT is that they can’t decide if they are a national paper or record, or a paper for the urban New York Intelligentsia. These “cletus safari” stories fall into the same category as the usual swill they publish about say…New Yorkers who go buy property in rural America and discover the joys of home maintenance. Like this big feature story from yesterday that no editor in any other paper in the US would ever run with a straight face:
Their cletus safari articles are directed at the same population who is so cloistered that they don’t know to clean gutters or mow a lawn.
germy
@JPL:
The Vietnam war made college extremely desirable.
realbtl
Trying to define elite without establishing group boundaries is like defining the best quarterback. College, Pro, current, all time?
NotMax
@JPL
You want a real nightmare scenario*?
(enable channel Goku mode)Look at the last incumbent Republican president to be denied a second term. Eight years later his son was sitting in the Oval Office.
(disable channel Goku mode)*Which has as much chance of happening as does my being elected Pope.
CaseyL
The RW propaganda apparatus has acted on the US like a supersaturated solution.
A supersaturated solution precipitates crystallization.
RW propaganda took a wide swath of Americans who were predisposed to conspiracy theories, racism, resentment, and ignorance, and fed them all of that until they were glutted. Glutted, but not satiated: they always came back for more. (To add another metaphor, this time using the language of addiction: they became habituated, their tolerance levels went sky-high, and they needed bigger and better fixes.)
The election of Barack Obama may have been the precipitating event: Racists’ worse nightmare came true. Or it may simply have been that any Democratic President would have had the same effect, on people conditioned for over two decades (in 2008) to see any Democrat as illegitimate.
Now the RWNJ is truly crystallized: they recognize no reality other than what the RW apparatus feeds them. They are deliberately, defiantly dumb. Deliberately, gleefully hateful. They create toxic families and toxic communities. People who want no part of that flee (if they can) in droves, heading for less crazy and more livable areas, leaving the toxicity even more concentrated.
They’re completely unreachable. They don’t want to be reached. They live in their cesspools and love it.
And I’m no longer interested in trying. Let them rot.
Kent
Bernie has been in Congress for what? Forty years? Do you seriously think he believes that a mass movement from the outside is going to be able to implement radical change in Washington DC? That “the will of the people” will overcome a GOP Senate and GOP SCOTUS?
As David Frum pointed out in the Atlantic: “Demagogues don’t become demagogues by talking about things people don’t care about. They talk about things people do care about—things that more responsible politicians have failed to address.” Trump on immigration and trade, Sanders on health care and college education.
NotMax
@MattF
Defund the diners!
:)
Yarrow
@Suzanne:
It is meaningless in the context of politics because it’s just another code word tossed around to signify who’s in the in-group and who is not. It’s also a useful pejorative for people in the in-group to hurl at others not in the group. It’s like “liberal media” and “socialism.” For wingnuts/Trumpers those words don’t mean what they actually mean. They’re just useful words or phrases to yell and show others you’re in the club. That’s all “elite” means in that context.
MagdaInBlack
The word elite lost all meaning when Rudy named his “Elite Strike Force”
Sherparick
@Miss Bianca: Actually the 1930s NYT wrote stories like that about Hitler, Mussolini, & Stalin. NYT was very dictator curious in 1930s.
JPL
@NotMax: Nightmares are made of that, though.
Another Scott
@JanieM: Yes, while people do have agency, people don’t become stupid in a vacuum. They’re taught these beliefs by the media and culture they’re immersed in. Bortz and Limbaugh and Bakker and Falwell and the NRA and Ailes and on and on drilled this stuff into them over decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf6ITsjsgk
I’m not sure what we can do about it, other than aggressively shun those with power and authority, voting with our dollars, and voting out the monsters that are pushing this crap. Punching down doesn’t help.
Cheers,
Scott.
scav
@realbtl: Exactly, Elite is a relative term. And thus I’m all the way back at my fish and pond example.
Reification is also a hellova drug.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: No, there isn’t a fucking public policy solution for it. Who said there was?
JPL
@Sherparick: Wealthy industrialists, were enamored of Fascism in general. A friend is reading Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, by Anne Applebaum, which is suppose to be quite good. Applebaum has had several articles in the New Yorker and the Washington Post, that I have read.
Kent
Eight years after Poppa-Bush’s defeat the popular 2-term governor of the 2nd largest state in the country won the GOP nomination and beat a fairly inept Democratic campaign (Lieberman for fucks sake?).
Wake me up when one of the Trump spawn becomes governor or Senator of any state and I’ll start to pay attention.
Feathers
@Kent: If by cloistered, you mean living in a city, go right ahead with that. Moving from a city where you live in an apartment building where all the maintenance is carried out by professionals to owning your own home has a steep learning curve. It has been a source for Hollywood comedies since the silent era. But the suburban and rural folks who go on about how dangerous the city and would never ride public transportation are living in a bubble too.
PS that New York Times article is silly. They will write really good and useful ones about what to do as a new homeowner in the Catskills and then “Trees. They die. Who knew?” the next day. I learned so much from a NYT article on how the new HE laundry machines work and a repairman’s best tips for keeping them happy. Changed a lot of things – if your laundry smells, you are using too much soap. And clean your HE washer regularly.
germy
Fox News never envisioned having its own face eaten…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Feathers:
You use tablets or vinegar?
Omnes Omnibus
@scav: That was the point I have been trying to make. I think that the ship has sailed on that idea in this thread at least.
NotMax
@Kent
Details, details.
Please reboot your snark-o-meter.
:)
bemused senior
@Kent: My husband is a New Yorker who had just moved to CA when I met him in the early 1970s. His family was not wealthy, his mom was a divorced single mom living in a rent stabilized apt in the Bronx. I had a 2 bedroom house in Menlo Park that I had just bought with help on the down-payment from my dad. My MIL referred to my house as being in the country, and my husband had no idea how to fix anything (after all, that was the super’s job). What you are describing is just the unique culture of NYC, and has nothing to do with issues of wealth (eta or education).
Kent
You are missing my point. My point is that the NYT tries to be two things simultaneously. They try to be a national or international paper of record when it comes to national and international events and politics. And they try to be the local community paper for wealthy urban Manhattan sophisticates.
My point is that where they fuck up with the cletus safaris is by confusing those two roles. It is an attempt to create political analysis for their wealthy urban Manhattan audience. When, if they want to be a legitimate national paper of record they should build a fucking firewall between the NYC socialite coverage of weddings, restaurant openings, Met galas, and apartment dwellers learning how to mow lawns; and the national political coverage that has a wider audience and infinitely more at stake.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: funny he doesn’t mention poor Maria Bartiromo, even though he seems to go on her show every weekend.
You think she ever watches Judge Jeanine— who I assume makes more money as a weekend host on the main network– and thinks, “maybe I need to get drunk before going on? “
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: Best I can tell, yes. Recreational grumbling, it is a hobby.
Nicole
@germy: “Endless interviews with Democrats and even worse”? What does he consider even worse? Republicans? Well, that’s absolutely true. Huh. Never thought I’d agree with Trump on anything, but here we are.
germy
I predict Bartiromo and Pirro will be two talents he steals from the Fox network. I’m sure he’ll try to lure Hannity away. I used to think maybe Carlson, but nowadays I doubt it.
The only problem is, people like Hannity… they insist on big bucks. Trump TV will need someone with deep pockets to meet their salary demands.
Suzanne
@Kent: Yes, I actually think Bernie believes what he says. I know a lot of old hippies who believe that shit. He is a very familiar typology.
Kent
The article I referenced was about Manhattanites buying weekend homes in the country. I somehow don’t expect many Dominicans from the Bronx are buying weekend homes in Westchester or the Catskills (or wherever) and discovering that they don’t know how to find a plumber on the weekend or chop wood for their vintage fireplace.
My point is that the cletus safari stories amount to the same thing. It’s national political coverage aimed at the same wealthy urban Manhattan set. It’s not problematic when it comes to things like real estate. But it is problematic when it comes to politics where their audience is national not local.
Kent
Well I’m not sure it matters one way or the other in the end. I think the GOP believes a lot of their own bullshit too.
NotMax
@Nicole
Republicans who wouldn’t blindly, robotically vote for the coo-coomander-in-chief?
//
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: The implicit assumption in the Cletus Safaris, back when they started, was that through them we would gain greater understanding of our previously disregarded fellow countrymen and then be able to respond to their concerns with a policy agenda in the next election. But what I and other elites have come to understand is that they aren’t on board with the common project of making a society that works for everyone. They just want to piss me off. Well, okay. End of story.
Kent
He’ll take the old senile white guys like Lou Dobbs as well.
Feathers
@Suzanne: @Omnes Omnibus: There is a reason for the term “big fish in a small pond.”
It’s important to realize that nurses and teachers as elites is an effect of the hollowing out of rural America. Rural America used to be left, because of the population of farm workers. When the farms mechanized, those workers were pushed out by the landowners and moved to the cities. What is left behind are landowners who are basically landed dynasties of generational wealth protected from the possibility of failure or the need to learn how to properly run their land by government subsidies. These are America’s “small family farms,” who are indistinguishable from “industrial farming.” The rest of the community is just scraping by, dependent on these farms for their living, and thus uncritically supporting them. The “elites” are those who have some financial independence from this almost feudal system. Namely, teachers, doctors, nurses, people who get their paychecks from the government. I remember driving with my ex through a very pretty town in upstate NY. I asked him who lived in all the pretty Victorians. “Teachers, mostly,” was the reply. When teachers are the most visible people able to build up enough capital for a middle class life without inherited wealth, there will be resentment.
There does need to be policy answers for this. Taxing the hell out of Wall Street and hedge funds so that it is not as profitable to drain every penny out of rural America. Use global warming as a way to regain control of rural land. As the climate changes, we can’t have lazy no-nothing landowners controlling our food production. There is so much corruption in farm subsidies, it is a joke. Looking under the hood of the Trump multi-billion payouts is a good place to start. There is a movement to regrow rural America by moving food production and processing back into rural areas, so that the money doesn’t all just go to the landowners and Wall Street.
Need to get back to my laundry. That got long. Thanks for reading if you got this far
ETA James Fallows and Sarah Taber are good people to follow on this.
cain
@Kent:
That makes total sense. Thanks for that – I never saw it that way.
Kent
They don’t want to piss you off. They want to tear up your accomplishments and roll everything back to the 1950s. Not the real 1950s, but the Leave it to Beaver and Norman Rockwell version of the 1950s that lives in their minds. When brown people, women, and “the gays” knew “their place.” And if it pisses you off that’s a side benefit.
germy
Yes. Any Fox person who showed unwavering loyalty, he’ll try to lure away. People like Chris Wallace… NO.
Subsole
@Suzanne: I think Trump’s loathing of and feeling of genetic superiority to blacks is pretty goddamn sincere…
grandmaBear
I think elites might be any people who are wealthier, more powerful, better educated, whatever, but whose lives you wouldn’t really want. So liberals might not really want to be industry tycoons or hedge fund billionaires while RWNJs might not want to be college educated, white collar workers or liberal arts teachers, for example.
Jinchi
And as his post-presidency friendship with the Obama family shows, W. is considered personably likeable by many people who completely disagree with his political ideology.
Don Jr. is never going to get an affectionate hug from Michelle.
cain
@Feathers:
Good stuff! This has been a great Sunday discussion.
Feathers
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m now in an apartment building, so the service that handles the building’s machines cleans them. But I did OK with vinegar. I bought some tablets, but ran out. Cleaned with vinegar and it worked just fine. My experience in cleaning with vinegar and other environmentally friendly methods is that they work great as long as you keep on top of things. Once you have layers of mess, they probably won’t be enough. So I use dilute vinegar and a drop of dish soap to clean the kitchen counters, but I have a bottle of 409 under the sink in case there is anything that vinegar can’t handle.
different-church-lady
@debbie:
I’ve heard theory bandied about that some latinos/as went for Trump for similar reasons. American = conservative in their minds.
J R in WV
@NotMax:
OK, this comment is acute as well as hysterical.
Thanks!!!
Hey, OT, but my cousin has accepted a job with the HI department of education, will be moving to the islands soon. My second cousin to move out there! Must be another visit to the Islands in our future!!!
He was a grad student / adjunct prof of Physical Chemistry at UNLV, applied for a job just because, got it!
Woot! Maybe a sign we should move out there?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Feathers: thanks, I try to use vinegar when I can, but I have noticed that every once in a while you need the real chemicals
I had my sister’s cleaning lady come to my house once and she picked up my vinegar spray bottle, rolled her eyes and gave me a shopping list of “real” cleaning stuff.
Suzanne
@Feathers:
Most public educators in the US are not really able to do this. A generation ago, yes. But now, it’s really hard. Hence the teacher strikes of the last few years. Usually, the only way for teachers these days to have a middle-class life is to be married to someone higher earning.
Shit, here’s a story from the early 90s: my uncle was named the state Teacher of the Year after spending a year (unpaid) researching and writing the state’s curriculum for high school physics and then teaching it (paid). He was interviewed by the local paper and he was quoted as saying that his wife, a nurse, made more money than he did.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: If by “well meaning” you mean “lazy”, then yeah.
debbie
@MagdaInBlack:
Did he have his hand down his pants when he came up with that name?
J R in WV
@Sherparick:
NYT is still very dictator curious, mostly right here in America today. They loved Trump until the instant where it became obvious that he wasn’t going to make it to a second term this election.
Some of them still love him, they’re paid a whole lot to do that, right Maggie?
Feathers
@Kent: Yes, it is a problem. The news industry overall treats commentary as more prestigious and valuable than straight news coverage, despite the fact that hard news is what everything else relies on. So you get a rather snobbish commentary level getting shit totally wrong, while the news machine is doing their own great work. Commentary work really should be treated as a sabbatical for news reporters. Eight years as a report, two doing commentary. Repeat as necessary. You can tell when people have been away from reporting for too long. Maureen Dowd used to write for the Washington Star. Dating myself by remembering that I used to look forward to her byline. But she has been a disaster for a long time.
Suzanne
@Subsole: I would agree with that. But all the shit Trump talked about “we’re gonna replace Obamacare with something GREAT!” and “trade wars are easy to win!” and all the shit about Infrastructure Week…. he never meant any of it. It was all bullshit.
debbie
@different-church-lady:
I thought the same.
Kent
I have spent much of my life in or around rural America. In Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Texas, and PA.
The problem is that to reverse the economic trends that are depopulating much of rural America would take actual socialism of the scale that Norway and Sweden are implementing to sustain their rural communities. That means MASSIVE investments in infrastructure, rural education, health care, and government. And imposing an outside elite onto the top of rural communities. Who do you think would be moving in to do all those new jobs in health care, education, etc? Mostly educated immigrants.
That’s why it is never going to happen. Here in the west you can travel anywhere and discover ghost towns. They are everywhere in the rural intermountain west. But also scattered all over the mountains along the west coast, little logging towns that have completely vanished. I used to explore them as a kid and we’d find artifacts from depression-era logging towns that are long gone. A lot of current rural America is just going to go the same way. It is inevitable.
debbie
@grandmaBear:
When I hear someone referred to as elite, I think of someone who thinks he or she is better than other people. I think less of occupation, education, etc. than of attitude. William F. Buckley, Mitt Romney, etc.
W. Kiernan
I’m seeing interminable boring accounts of “why did 74 million people vote for Trump.” But the reason I’ve heard in person, though never yet in the news or opinion media, is this, and I’m quoting word-for-word: “We’re a Republican family and we’ve always voted Republican.”
I’m not saying there aren’t loads of racists in the U.S.A. I’m not even saying that there aren’t a handful of Americans who are haunted by “economic anxiety,” though obviously not a whole lot of them, as you kind of have to do arithmetic to feel “economic anxiety” and most Americans can’t do arithmetic. But when you pick up the sports pages, do reporters and editorialists tie logic in elaborate knots to explain why most of the people in the stands at a Tampa Bay Bucs home game identify themselves as “Bucs fans”? The majority of the 74 million people who voted for Trump did so because on the ballot they had printed “(R)” after his name. They’re on Team R.
realbtl
@scav: Yup.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suzanne: I’d quibble with trade wars– trump absolutely believes in
“toughness”, and that he’s “tough”, and that he understands trade because he’s a businessman.
Health care? he doesn’t care, he just wanted to say he’s smarter than Obama. He thought “the wall” was stupid until it started getting applause
Feathers
@Miss Bianca: Family used to refer to one of my great uncles as “the Nazi” behind his back I always thought they were just being mean because he was German. When I got a bit older I learned that no, he was a big old Nazi and got deported back to Germany when WWII broke out. My grandfather’s sister and their two sons went with him. Apparently strings were pulled to get them back into the US after the war. I found the whole situation fascinating. They were treated not as evil Americans, but loyal Germans who had done the right thing by coming home. Even though my aunt was actually Irish. She was seen as being a super loyal wife to have followed her husband back to Germany. Have wondered what it was like to be an American kid being bombed by American planes. Never asked because they were kind of assholes.
Kent
Teacher here. Yes, it’s mostly the middle aged and older teachers who are buying up old rural Victorians and that sort of thing. Young teachers have shittier pensions and benefits and for the most part don’t have that sort of life to look forward to unless they are married to a higher income spouse. Especially in red states. For example, in Oregon the pension benefits for a teacher who is 60 and one who is 25 are absolutely stark. It’s not a 2-tier system. It’s like a 4-tier system in which the younger you are the lower and lower you are on the tiers. It’s the same in a lot of states
A lot of young teachers today work 2nd jobs just to cover their rent.
bemused senior
@Kent: You are showing your ignorance of NYC with your reference to Dominicans in the Bronx. Are there Dominicans in the Bronx? Yes, many, especially in the South Bronx. There are also many middle class whites and African Americans living in the throng of apartment buildings there. I know from our friends and family in NYC that many people were terrified by the COVID epidemic onslaught last spring and sought to move their families out of the city…if you could work from home and had to use public transportation (the buses and subways) to do your shopping and necessary errands wouldn’t you choose to move your family to safety (as you saw it)? This was not just the choice of “elites”, but of anyone lucky enough to be able to afford to get a mortgage on a home in a cheap area upstate. I appreciate your comments here, but you frequently over-generalize your limited experience (e.g. your life in Waco explains all of Texas) and in this case your reading of the NYT lifestyle articles with all people who live in NYC. BTW I share the BJ opinion of NYT political reporting and its oped page, but I feel that its lifestyle reporting is no different than any other urban newspaper’s Sunday magazine reporting. They like to take pretty pictures to go with their articles.
Suzanne
@W. Kiernan: I think we’re talking about different cohorts of people. The cohort you are discussing are mostly not fire-breathing MAGAts.
But everyone’s vote counts the same.
Feathers
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I have a box of the good stuff ready to pull out. I may just go back to the Method surface cleaners because I like the lavender scent and I don’t have time to deal with adding essential oils to my homemade cleaning products. Note: Method anti-bacterial cleaners smell have to open windows awful, but their other stuff is very nice.
germy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I saw a clip from one of his rallies where he boasted about his governing philosophy: He’d ask his advisors “What did Obama do?” and then tell them to do the opposite.
MagdaInBlack
@debbie: That’s how it’s used at my working class level. It refers to an attitude .” They think they’re better than us.” (Usually aimed at the corporate team, in my workplace)
Suzanne
@Kent: Mr. Suzanne is a public educator. So I am the “higher-earning spouse”. Red-state teachers are paid absolute crap.
One of my best lifelong friends teaches high school biology. When her husband lost his job, her salary was low enough that they qualified for WIC and SNAP.
Feathers
@Kent: And those pensions are another huge source of resentment. Getting rid of private pensions but keeping public ones was not thought through. Or maybe it was. It is astonishing to go back and see how brazen the theft was. Boards would say that they could no longer afford the pensions, regulators would agree, and then the amount saved would go out the door as executive bonuses.
zhena gogolia
I love this guy.
MagdaInBlack
@MagdaInBlack: …and thats how Trump uses it, as an insult.
NotMax
@Feathers
Old-fashioned enough to still be using Bon Ami and a damp sponge or cloth.
Kent
@bemused senior: I was using hyperbole to illustrate my point. Which is that the NYT is simultaneously writing for two audiences: A national and international audience for all their “paper of record” coverage of national and international affairs and politics, of which they are very good. And a local audience of mostly elite New Yorkers with all their weddings, real estate, and lifestyle coverage. Which I’m guessing is not directed at working class families in the Bronx, whatever their color or ethnicity.
The problem is when they confuse those two audiences and write national political coverage from the point of view of elite Manhattanites. That’s how we get the cletus safari bullshit. If they want to be the national paper of record when it comes to politics then they should be doing just as much political coverage from urban Atlanta, Miami, and Milwaukee. And from the barrios of the Rio Grande Valley and Phoenix. Rather than endless navel gazing from the point of view of wealthy Manhattanites who are curious about that strange foreign species of rural Trump voters.
CaseyL
@Feathers: I think it’s GM that’s attempting to do the same thing with retiree health insurance.
Ruckus
@jonas:
This.
I am a older, white male and I live in Los Angeles county. Sure I see a lot of white faces. I also see a lot of faces with Latino heritage, and if I go not that many miles away I see a different large percentage of black faces, oriental faces, hell I grew up around here and saw all of them over 65 yrs ago. I don’t live in a white world, and I’m much better and better off for it.
Sure Lurkalot
Such a long thread but I agree with propaganda. And like the Star Trek episode with Beverly caught in a warp bubble, the feed lot just keeps getting smaller and smaller.
Had a Zoom call with friends last week. One friend’s 80 something y.o. dad lives in a small town not far from Madison. He was always Republican but she was somewhat surprised he voted Trump in 2016. Since then, his world has just contracted. He voted for Trump again. The election was stolen (which demeans his Democratic wife who has been an election volunteer for half a century) He turned off Fox once they declared Arizona. The shit he reads and listens to now is worse. Oh, he’s a retired college professor.
My own brother, same story. Before Obama, we talked business, politics and his crazy libertarian views, without rancor. As time went on, more and more outlets for info got stricken from his list. He became more and more strident, his whole world black and white. As far as I can tell, he no longer has values just political affiliation. We don’t talk at all, we text only about food and family. It’s the only way we can have a relationship which of course it’s not really. Oh, he’s a retired successful business person.
It’s hard to believe that people like them were so successfully brainwashed by propaganda but they are. It is no different from Isis indoctrination in my mind.
Kent
Yep. If my wife lost her job we’d lose our house (be forced to sell). My teacher salary doesn’t even cover the mortgage much less everything else. And our home is barely above the median for the Portland metro area.
Jinchi
The debate about elites is right wing nonsense which deserves to be treated with the same disdain as the debate about the economic anxiety of Trump voters. Elites are people who control the levers of power, or who exist outside the normal rules that the rest of us have to follow. The local high school teacher simply doesn’t qualify.
Right wingers were perfectly happy to vote for a self-proclaimed billionaire who lived in a gold-plated penthouse, applauded when he excused himself for filling his cabinet with billionaires and nodded along when he bragged to Billy Bush that he was a star who could get away with anything.
We don’t have to take them seriously when they complain about elites.
Feathers
@Kent: The problem is that the wealthy rural landowners of America control most of the state legislatures, and thus have enormous political power. Can we move enough population back in to turn some of that around? Can we beef up the Clean Water Act to force actual stewardship of the land? Rural broadband good enough so that people can actually work from anywhere. One thing that is happening is cities like Portland, ME are filling up with people with online jobs who want to buy a house but can’t afford to in the cities. Maine is a purple state, but more of this will be happening. Enclaves happening and growing.
NotMax
@J R in WV
1) Aloha!
2) Tell them to brace for sticker shock at the grocery store.
3) Also that contrary to what the signage on the bin flaps at McDonald’s might suggest, Mahalo means Thank You, not Trash.
.
rikyrah
I see no lie told
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Yes!
Subsole
@Suzanne:
Eh. I agree, but part of me does wonder if he might actually have believed that, too. At least at first. Mostly under the rubric of “the black guy did it and it looked easy for him. How hard can it be for an actual person?”
Now after the first year, yeah. Straight bullshit. He was just spinning as fast as an industrial centrifuge. Which was not near fast enough.
Hoodie
@W. Kiernan: I was speaking to a 70-something lady down in GA a last week who told me she voted for the first time in 2020 – for Trump. The interesting thing was she told me about how her granddaughter (who is part Filipino and black) was mad at her for voting GOP because of the racism and the homophobia, and she even acknowledged that she understood why her granddaughter felt that way. Her stated reason (or excuse) for voting Trump was almost entirely economic. In particular, she credited him for stock market performance (she’s retired and has income derived from investments) and for somehow helping her husband get some VA benefits. I don’t think economic insecurity is an accurate description of economics motivating Trump voters; it may be more accurate to think that certain things Trump did (or, more accurately, claimed to do) are viewed as of particular value to them personally, even if they are destructive to the country as a whole. It’s not completely irrational; if you own stocks and Trump dumps a bunch of tax cut money into the market via stock buybacks, your portfolio increases, and if you are not one of the people who receive the particular government benefits that get axed, no skin off your ass. Too bad about the world the granddaughter has to face. In other words, selfishness, which isn’t surprising considering our national performance re Covid.
Sister Golden Bear
@Kent:
As a Californian who spent a lot of time in the Sierras and the desert as a kid, ghost towns were just a fact of life. Plus in general, California’s economy in general has had boom/bust cycles over the decades. In the ’60s the low rent that made SF attractive to hippies and other bohemians was due to the collapse of the longshore industry and the exodus of the financial industry that causes SF to loss an eighth of the population. Growing up, I watch the aerospace industry crater in SoCal. I went through the dot-bomb era myself.
For me change is a natural part of life. So I confess I’m a bit mystified by the folks who refuse to acknowledge times change, and keep thinking coal, or logging, or the steel mill,* or whatever is gonna come back some day.
Admittedly, many of the Western boom town were only around for a few years, so people didn’t have the attachment to place found in towns that have been around for generations. And also places like California were created by people willing to move on in search of their fortunes, which has shaped the culture even if there’s now folks like me who’ve lived here for four generations or more.
This isn’t to deny the very real hardship and pain of those in dying towns whether it’s in the Rust Belt or the Great Plains. But towns are born, grow, sometimes decline and sometimes die. It’s the way of the world. Can we, and should we, do something to help those in those dying towns find ways to a better life? Absolutely. But pretending that some of these rural towns are sustainable ain’t realistic.
*I lived in the Bethlehem, PA for a summer doing a newspaper internship around the time Billy Joel’s “Allentown” (which was really about Bethlehem, but it didn’t rhyme) came out, so I got to see some of that attitude first hand.
rikyrah
@Kent:
TRUTH
raven
@Hoodie: I just talked to my 81 year old MIL in Arizona. She told me this was the first time she has ever voted Democratic, “We’re from Illinois, I just did what I was told”! I about fell out.
Feathers
@Suzanne: But what people are seeing is those older teachers and retirees in fancy Victorians. Please don’t let reality cloud your eyes to what the other side’s fantasy actually is. It sucks. It’s real. There is an enormous propaganda machine fueling it.
Kent
Sure, but Portland ME is not rural. It has a metro population of over 500,000. So it’s basically an urban enclave like Boulder CO, Madison WI, Santa FE NM, Eugene OR, Asheville NC, etc. etc. Those cities are all over the country and many are thriving if they have the right combination of geography, institutions, and adjacency to larger markets. Portland ME is less than 2 hours from Boston, for example.
The real rural decline is places like rural Kansas and Nebraska, or even Central PA where my family is from. Where there’s not a city over 50,000 within an hours drive in any direction.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think it was Tom Cole, a Republican Obama was said to have had a good personal relationship with, who was being interviewed in IIRC early 2018 about the growing acceptance of trump by the GOP, and he cited the stock market. “I didn’t see anything like that under Obama”. Cause he didn’t want to.
I think white people’s perceptions of the economy as pos/neg flipped almost perfectly from the autumn of 16 to the spring of ’17
Suzanne
@Feathers: No, I agree with you: the resentment is real even if the underlying facts are not.
But also… fuck them, who cares? If they’re gonna vote in harmful ways because they resent that it was possible to improve one’s station in life and they elected not to do so…. then I have nothing in common with them, they are actively harmful to me and my family, and why would I do anything to promote their interests? That’s different than what the left says about elites. That’s why knowing who we’re actually talking about matters.
Sister Golden Bear
@Ruckus: Back in the late 80s, I was a newspaper reporter when Monterey Park flipped from being white to predominately Asian, so “white American losing their shit about no longer being in power/being the norm” is unfortunately all too familiar with me.
At least in the urban parts of CA, we’ve worked through much of that, and take the diversity, and its benefits, for granted. One the occasions I’ve gone back to the Midwest, it’s felt uncomfortably white to me (even as a white person), and I kind of felt sorry for the locals on what they were missing out on.
NotMax
As it’s Open Thread –
Apologies for blanking out on the nym. To whoever it was concerned about the brined turkey coming out way too salty, how’d it go?
Subsole
@Sure Lurkalot: My mom and I are on the same road as you and your brother. Not as bad, but still pretty intolerable. As you said, the only way to have any relationship is to crop it until it is almost indistinguishable from a coworker. In which case what is it, really?
As one twitter wag put it: “If we ever invent a time machine, y’all go after baby Hitler. I’m going after baby Rupert Murdoch”
laura
@LuciaMia: I had to Stop. Drop. And make Waldorf Salad – so thank you very much!
zhena gogolia
@NotMax:
Bon Ami . . . hmmm . . . I think I’ve seen that advertised during the credits to Perry Mason!
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
LOL.
Still being sold today.
Misterpuff
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Especially when one story was how some small town was losing their Hispanic friend via deportation due to a Trump policy they thought would stop the bad ones. The assumptions of such a statement highlights the mob racism of Trumpism.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I’ve understood that it’s “Own the libs” for a long time. The way I put it is that Trump hates the same people they hate, and gives them permission to hate them openly. Thus the “fuck your feelings” shirts. I live among these people. Just Friday night a regular customer at the pub told me Trump actually won the election, but had zero evidence to refer me to. He really seems to believe this.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: In my small town I was considered snobby by some kids because my dad had a college degree (3, actually, undergrad, masters and specialist) and I was going to college. I’m sure many people in town thought of us as “elite”.
Gvg
@Baud: well we were hoping that what is now called Obamacare would be so great that democrats would win most elections nationwide going forward like Roosevelt democrats after the depression recovery, plus we dreamed that Obama’s fixing the Bush era economic collapse would actually be appreciated.
we thought republican congressmen were fighting it because they “knew” it would give us an advantage in future elections…destroy them.
Not quite the same kind of destroy.