So I got on a plane in Texas feeling optimistic, checked the news once the plane landed in Portland, and… wow. I go offline for five hours and everything goes south.
I really think I’ve had too much faith in the intelligence and good will of Americans.
I really hope that, just as I was radically wrong about who’d win this election, I’ll turn out to be radically wrong about the consequences of President Trump.
I really hope that the people who voted for Trump had more in mind than sticking their middle fingers to the establishment.
I really hope that RBG makes it another four to eight years.
I really hope things don’t go horribly for everyone who’s not straight, not cis, not white, etc.
I really hope I still have health insurance a year from now.
George Takei has some good advice about avoiding despair.
Holy Crap this is bad. I was feeling sorry for myself for being alone on a night like this, but then I realized that I’m a gay man in California. So extra big hugs to those in scarier parts of the country.
I am not OK. We are not OK.
Sebastian H, what part of California are you in? You needn’t be alone.
I’m in San Diego. I have lots of friends, just alone for the night.
It’s interesting because I’ve thought this was coming in the last few months but I had talked myself out of it. You’re just a worry-wort. You’re just overreacting. I’ve been super careful in the last 5 years or so to analyze when I’ve worried over nothing. It turns out I worry over nothing a lot. But boy is this going to shoot a hole in managing that!
So do people think it was a mistake to pick Clinton, or would any candidate have lost to Trump?
Wow. Just … wow.
I hope people’s predictions about the Trump presidency are as off as their predictions about this election…
The US has elected someone with barely any policies. That’s the only silver lining here, although it is incredibly faint – we don’t really know what Trump will do. The only “clear” policies that he has stated are 1) Building a giant wall and 2) Stopping Muslims. That’s about it. He hasn’t really said anything solid about anything else (except, perhaps, to oppose the TPP deal). Already, on the “banning muslims” thing, he’s backed down to “extreme vetting”. I don’t know if he will follow through on his “extreme” vetting plans – I suspect a single phone call from Saudi Arabia will fix that. As for building that wall – I honestly don’t think he even knows how to even start that, fund it, or sell it.
He’s coasted to victory on meaningless slogans that I doubt he even believes in – stopping world trade? This is coming from a man who made his merchandise in China – for over a decade. The well being of the Blue Collar Worker is the least of his concerns.
So at best we can hope and pray that his “policies” were just election fluff. At worst, he’s actually concealed his real policies which may include out-and-out voter suppression, abolition of planned parenthood, the banning of evolution in schools and super-aggressive deportation.
The scariest thing is that we don’t know what he’ll do. The thing that comforts me the most is that he probably also doesn’t know what he’ll do and I strongly suspect he has no idea how to do it.
I’m looking at the exit polls and I see that Trump had about the same percent of the Hispanic vote as Mitt Romney.
This destroys once and for all idea that if we just wait long enough, we won’t have to listen to white voters as American demographics change. Just like the Irish, Italian and Jewish before them, the second and third generations are less distinguishable from the American mainstream.
There simply aren’t enough comfortable, well-off whites to join with black voters and recent immigrants to get to 270. Identity politics creates its own mirror image, thus its own destruction.
Going forward, I’m simply not sure what will happen. Clinton was a terrible candidate and her campaign reeked so deeply of smug entitlement that it’s a historic fluke. That may be the most optimistic reading.
Also, Trump outperformed Romney among black voters. Go figure.
Reading the above comment a little while later, especially switching over from social media, I can see how it might be taken as a little mean and a little too soon. Say what you will about the Clinton campaign, many people identified strongly with it. I voted for Clinton and sauntered away from the polling place thinking that it was in the bag. I also wanted to go out into the streets and cheer when CNN called it.
So this is bad. For some more than others. This year, post mortems may have to be a big more gentle for the first few days at least. I regret my tone.
This will be the most disastrously consequential election in modern times. I never believed for a second that this could really happen. Like, I would tell myself it could happen, but I think I was just doing it for the same reason people tell ghost stories.
Amp, I’m not sure. I think we’ll have a better idea in the days that follow. Bernie Sanders was also virulently anti-free-trade, so he probably would have blunted Trump’a success in the rust belt.
Perhaps the scariest thing for me (other than, well, everything) is that Trump will follow through on his promise to prosecute Clinton. I’m a lawyer and that genuinely freaks me out. (Not because there is a case against her, but just because that is not something that happens in the United States.)
I have lost my faith in the
intelligence of the majority of the
American people. NOT only did the give the orange cheeto control of the precidency but also of the HOUSE and Senate. I hope they can control this unpredictable racist bigot. FOUR years is more than enough time to destroy the economy faith and race relations
I’m of a few different minds about this, really.
– To me, at least, it’s clear that part of the problem with Clinton’s candidacy is a problem with the electorate, not with her. She has plenty of flaws, but I also don’t believe for a second that a man with the same flaws would be treated with the same vitriolic hatred & willingness to believe the worst. And this has been compounding over her decades in the public eye, so that the reporting about her has been skewed–I don’t mean that everyone who strongly dislikes Clinton does it for misogynistic reasons, but that the available information about her is skewed by some people’s misogyny. So if I think a different candidate might have done better, it’s because I have very little faith in a large swathe of my fellow voters this morning, not because I think there’s much particularly wrong with Clinton and her policies and actions.
– On the other hand, I think it’s also clear that part of what happened is that a lot of more rural, relatively low-income voters who don’t usually vote actually came out to vote this year because they like Trump, and they were voting straight-ticket Republican, as you can see from the senate races which also got called systematically too Democratic by the pollsters. So a different Democrat would also have underperformed the polls, I think. Whether to a large enough degree to make a difference…who knows?
– And, of course, Clinton won the popular election. Can’t we get rid of the electoral college already?? (Also, I think it’s likely Clinton would have won the popular election by a bigger margin in the case of no electoral college, because there are some people who voted 3rd party in “safe” states who wouldn’t have done that in a nationwide popular election.)
Look at the way Millennials voted, though. While I think we’ll continue to see a near 50-50 split in Democrats and Republicans–that’s the way a two-party system works, after all–I do expect that the Republican Party of 20 years from now will be to the left of the current Republican Party in absolute terms, even if in relative terms they’re still far to the right of the Democrats and the conservative parties of other Western democracies.
Russian hacking on election day?
I think the misogyny definitely hurt Clinton. A lot. I commented that misogyny was slightly stronger than racism this decade and was met with a couple of replies of, “It’s always that way.” I don’t think that any other candidate would have done better for the Dems. Clinton ran a very, very, very good campaign. It’s just that Trump’s gambit of open White Supremacy & Masculine Bravado was a winning strategy. If the GOP had realized that decades ago, this wouldn’t have been a surprise to even the GOP.
But here is where I place a LOT of blame on the media. The NYT’s endless barrage of reports on the Clinton Foundation (investigated by investigative journalists who found no signs of wrongdoing) as a cloud over her as well as endless reporting of EMAILS (investigations of which also found no wrongdoing). All while letting reports about the Trump Foundation (not to mention his history of screwing his contractors, etc.) slide into the ether. I mean, yeah, it was fun to watch the NYT realize that the race was too close for comfort and switch to pounding at Trump’s flaws for that one week in October. But then they thought they’d lost their horse race and it was back to non-stories on the Clinton Foundation and emails. MSNBC wondering whether they should have spent more time on issues and less on email late last night was an amazing moment of pretty dark humor.
This election is disastrous in both the long and short term. I think we can forget about any mitigation of climate change for the next decade (which makes any mitigation far too late to alleviate the coming misery of billions). Medicare and Social Security will not be preserved anywhere near current levels which will lay waste to the decades of retirement planning for millions of Americans. Another 50 years of an extremely conservative SCOTUS doesn’t bode well for civil rights.
In the short term, personally, the repeal of the ACA means that, contrary to my well laid plans, I won’t be able to retire in 4 years. Repealing ACA means that it won’t be possible to get affordable insurance for Mrs. Squid until she’s eligible for Medicare in 14 years. Which sucks but doesn’t really compare to the other harms I’ve mentioned (nor many I haven’t).
Nate Silver deserves a lot of credit for calling this a real possibility. He was an outlier among the poll aggregators and he was right.
I had a Troop meeting right after work so I didn’t even look at a TV until about 9:15 – 9:30. I fully expected to turn it on and see someone breathlessly interviewing Clinton at her victory party. I was shocked.
Amp:
It was a mistake of the Democrats to pick Clinton. What Democratic candidate has had higher unfavorable ratings than she had prior to being elected? But she has been working the Democratic establishment pretty much since her White House days and very strongly after 2008. She depended a lot more on her connections to the Democratic establishment to win than she did on support among the voters, whereas Trump actively flouted the GOP establishment and appealed directly to the electorate. Look to see “superdelegates” get flushed out of the Democratic party’s nominating process.
Frankly, without Clinton on the Democratic side I don’t think you would have had Trump win the GOP nomination. I think Trump won the GOP nomination because the media thought he would be the easiest or even the only GOP candidate for Clinton to beat. So during the primary season they put every word he said on the front page and newscast lead and buried the rest of the GOP candidates. Then, when he got the nomination, they released all manner of deleterious information on him. A lot of people think that this was a deliberate attempt by the media to build him up to the GOP candidacy and then tear him down after he got it, and that the media had all those tapes of him saying crude things about women and people ready to make accusations against him and just sat on it until it could do him and the GOP the most damage. I know quite a few non-millenial women who think this, are not particularly bothered by some crude language from a man and voted for Trump.
What we had here was a non-establishment candidate running against a candidate who was the epitome of the establishment. When Brexit happened Trump told people that it foreshadowed his election, but that was dismissed as rhetoric. Turns out that it was not.
I think that Sen. Sanders would have lost as well. There’s no way that someone who has self-identified as a socialist will win the American Presidency any time soon. The question I’ll ask now is, what’s next for the Democrats? I don’t see Clinton running again (although anything is possible) and Sen. Sanders will be 79. If it’s not Trump the GOP has a long bench. Who’s on the bench for the Democrats? Sen. Warren is the only name that comes to mind. She’ll be 71, so I figure regardless of whether or not Clinton tries for a comeback Sen. Warren will take a shot. Who else?
There is a saying mis-ascribed to various people to the effect that if you are not a liberal when you are young you have no heart and if you are not a conservative when you are older you have no brains. My point is, do you really think that how millenials vote now is the way they’ll vote as they get older?
There’s also a saying that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. A lot of people got mugged in the last two weeks when they had a look at what happened to the cost of their health insurance. No one is talking about that and what effect it had on the turnout of people who work for a living, but I think it was important.
Jake, I think you have this wrong. The investigation of how she handled her e-mails found plenty of wrongdoing. But the director of the FBI announced that he didn’t it rose to the level of requiring a criminal prosecution. “We’re not going to prosecute” != “She didn’t do anything wrong.”, and to a lot of people it looked like the fix was in.
Harlequin:
So tell me this – why didn’t the polls pick up the increased voting by the people you’re talking about?
Not saying I disagree with this analysis but… The Republican FBI Director who announced, “MORE EMAILS TO INVESTIGATE,” breaking all norms of the last 80 years had the fix in to not indict Clinton? I know I’ve said it before, but this is why we can’t have nice things.
Because those people weren’t classified as “likely voters”?
Uh … no. Clinton won the great majority of the Hispanic vote. (And the African American vote, and the Asian vote, and the Muslim vote, etc.) As these groups grow as a percentage of the population, and as the percentage of whites shrinks, Democrats will fare ever better in elections.
Eventually the Democrats will lose votes to a party that does a good job of appealing to a broader demographic. But it’s hard to imagine that party being the Republican Party. The Republican primary voters are still predominantly aging white guys who have an antipathy for multiculturalism (to phrase it politely). Until that cohort dies off, I suspect the Democrats will have a pretty good lock on the loyalties of most of these minority voters. Not all, but most.
In short, time is on our side. Yes, to my surprise, the Republicans found that they could still squeeze a little more juice out of the same ol’ lemon they’ve been squeezing for decades. But if we were to re-run this election after another four years of demographic change, what then? Unless the Republicans get a lot better at voter suppression, I have to suspect that outcomes will change.
Generally, yes—unless they get mugged.
This is a better point—although not about health insurance per se. I’m curious to learn what the Republicans propose to replace Obamacare with, and how the price and coverage will compare.
Rather, Republican voters have been “mugged” by seeing their kids endure circumstances—especially employment circumstances–that are less than they had expected. Here also I suspect that Republicans are better at stoking a sense of grievance than at fashioning remedies. Alas, the harsh facts are that we have moved into a world with less demand for labor. This is an intractable problem. So rather than ameliorate the consequences of the problem (say, via revenue sharing), I expect Republicans will adopt the same policies adopted by demagogues around the world: Find a scapegoat.
If we’re in luck, Trump will bolster his support by rallying the nation against Russia, just as Putin bolsters his support by rallying his nation against the US, and we can simply glower at each other from behind our respective walls. Sure, Trump and Putin may be friends—but plenty of professional wrestlers are friends even as they posture and shout at each other. It’s just theater.
If we’re not so lucky, Trump will blame our woes on people within our borders—Muslims, Hispanics, gays, feminists, “the elite.” That could get ugly fast.
“So do people think it was a mistake to pick Clinton, or would any candidate have lost to Trump?”
It was a world shattering mistake. She was the most disliked Democratic candidate in the history of the modern era. In an anti-establishment mood she was the most towering paragon of the establishment possible. She is a moderately inspiring speaker in an era where electrifying the electorate is important. Her personal history with Wall Street meant that she couldn’t attack Trump on his most obvious weaknesses regarding corruption and the money class. Like Dole on the Republican side, she is an example of why you shouldn’t nominate someone just because it was ‘their turn’.
This election was lost by losing Rust Belt states that Obama won (which greatly complicates the ‘it is all racism’ analysis)–most of them by tiny margins.
It of course is not certain whether Biden or Sanders or someone else could have connected with the Rust Belt voters whom Democrats have been calling “flyover country” for two decades, but Clinton was essentially the worst person imaginable for that. But we know it isn’t impossible, because Obama (a black man) did it.
The Democrats have really dropped the ball with the losers of globalism. Even if you believe that 90% of Trump voters are irredeemably racist, that still leaves 3-5 times the margin of victory in key states in play. I tend to believe that the number of inveterate racist voters is less than that (see for example 1/3 of Latinos voting for Trump in Florida), but in either case we should be finding ways to reach out to those voters.
The good news is that it was ridiculously close. The bad news is that winning it was in reach.
Really? To what end? Bernie would have lost with or without the vote of the Superdelegates.
But moreover, Superdelegates keep the party from nominating a populist demagogue such as Goldwater or Trump. True, sometimes demagogues win—but at the sacrifice of the party’s principles. And more often, demagogues lose. It is far from clear to me that Trump represents something the Republican Party will be able to—or want to—emulate.
Warren is a fine choice, if a bit old.
But imagine you had posed this question in 2012: Would you have named Trump as the Republican’s next nominee? In short, there is no “bench” anymore. Pick any media personality you like. Most of them are Democrats, and most of them would be a more plausible candidate than Trump was. Let’s run Alex Baldwin!
(Speaking of which, will SNL draft Baldwin for the next four years? “It’s pronounced Jina…..”)
See the rest of my comment. People move to the right as they get older partly by keeping to the same ideas as the world changes around them.
I’m not sure how true this is. Most of that increase will be absorbed by subsidies, not the payers themselves (or, would have, if the ACA wasn’t about to be repealed).
Likely voters is a model parameter, not something you can poll. Basically, “will you vote” is one of those questions that people are very unlikely to answer reliably, for a host of reasons; you’ll be wrong much more often if you try to figure it out by asking than if you use demographic data, although you can miss certain effects like this one)
I’d say, rather, a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, and then decided that that meant the entire world was out to mug them. Not everybody reacts like that.
***
As I said on Twitter, I hope the Democrats have been taking lessons in obstruction from their Republican colleagues.
This is a good description of how I feel about why the election played the way it did. Shame doesn’t work when you’re trying it on 50% of the population
I didn’t say he won a majority, just that Trump did just as well with Hispanics as Romney, a guy who kinda-sorta spoke Spanish and never called Mexican immigrants rapists. Trump didn’t have to win any minority group outright, just peel away enough to add to the white vote to get to a majority. The fact that Trump didn’t get much, much less Hispanic support than Romney should say something: namely, that the left can’t count on minority group cohesion as a given, even when faced with what should be more or less a nemesis.
The idea that a minority group will vote the same as the percent of second- or third-generation citizens increases is comforting bunk. Instead of kicking back and waiting for the revolution, Dems will actually have to do some work, and sometimes with people who aren’t primed for to agree out of any sense of solidarity.
Frank’s article is an excellent summation of the situation. Yes, racism and misogyny played a part in this… a minor part. The bigger issue, the one the Democratic Party leadership has failed to address (and may still refuse to confront, even after this debacle), is that Hillary Clinton was another upper-middle-class corporate candidate with nothing to offer blue-collar America.
The Democratic Party used to be the champion of the working class; now, they treat low-income, rural workers as irrelevant, if not the enemy. And it has cost them dearly. The retort “But the Republicans aren’t going to help the working poor either!” doesn’t fix that problem.
Even today, many of the left-side comments have revolved around what this election means for identity groups: how gays will be affected, what will happen to Muslims, what were women thinking, etc. etc. They’re still not getting it. The focus on identity politics is what’s hurting the Democrats–because they have nothing to say to the low-income white worker. Except “Go away.”
Populism could have worked in the Democrats’ favor–and it could have been economic populism, too. But they dumped it in favor of a ‘safe,’ corporate-centrist, well-connected Clinton who ticked all the right ‘social issue’ boxes and said nothing about job security and wages. If they’re smart, Democratic leaders will learn from this experience and start reaching out to the former core of their party: the working class. By speaking the language that matters to them: jobs and wages, not bathrooms and bakeries.
Ampersand @ 4:
Big mistake! I am not sure what other option was there. The Democratic primary was largely a joke. Sanders was tough, but not really viable. Webb? O’Malley? Chaffee? This can’t be the best the Democrats have to offer.
But, had the nominee NOT been Clinton, I would have voted Democrat, because there was no way I was going to vote for Trump. But, she had too much baggage, not the least of which is, from the very outset, I said I did not want another Bush-Clinton election. Of course, my Democratic vote would have meant next to nothing in the Land that Mondale Won.
nobody.really @ 19:
They have had bullet-point strategies, but they may become difficult to implement. For example, they want to allow people to purchase insurance across state lines. Right now, I think there are only 3 or 4 providers in my state. Easing that restriction would increase competition and, theoretically lower prices.
But, here is the problem: the reason why you can’t buy policies across state lines is because each state has its own set of requirements for insurance providers. Allowing purchases to be made across state lines would probably require that those special requirements be eliminated with a uniform baseline of coverage. The problem would probably require federal preemption of the health insurance industry. Not only would this bug the federalist sensibilities of some conservatives, it would highlight the conservative criticism of the ACA that regulating health insurance is not an enumerated power in the Constitution and, therefore, preemption is improper.
-Jut
I really don’t want this thread to be a place for right-wingers to sneer and dance and gloat at democrats and liberals.
Tone it the fuck down, guys.
So women — slightly more than half the population — are an “identity group,” but low-income white workers aren’t? Or do you just want Democrats to add one more identity group to the coalition? All those policies that affect women will absolutely affect my job security and wages.
Clinton’s share of the Hispanic vote beat Trump’s by 35%+. How much disparity do you need before you find “cohesion”?
Great—such as?
Again, I believe we’ve entered an era when there is simply less demand for labor. That’s a real problem. But it needs REAL solutions.
Trump whined incessantly about how America doesn’t produce anything anymore. This is, of course, absurd: US manufacturing has scarcely ever been higher. Indeed, the US set an all-time record for auto manufacturing in 2015—although it won’t be all-time for long, because we’ll break that record for 2016. (And if, by citing facts, I’m engaged in smug liberalism, I beg your forgiveness.)
I acknowledge that Trump may have done more to give people hope. How? By constantly saying, “And we’re going to bring our jobs back. We’re going to have so many jobs….” I’m sure that’s something people love to hear. It’s nonsense, but it’s appealing nonsense.
In contrast, when people would complain about jobs, Clinton would talk about how government policies have created more green-power jobs than have been lost in the coal plants, and that she’s going to pursue rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. And when people complained about wages, she talked about raising the minimum wage and strengthening labor organizing rights.
In other words, she completely ignored white workers. She was such an elitist, she couldn’t be bothered to walk around mouthing the vacuous platitudes that Americans so desperately need to hear.
This sums it up well: Democrats squander their focus on identity groups such as gays and Muslims and women. Why can’t they focus on low-income white workers—which, being a group of WHITE PEOPLE, is in no conceivable way an identity group? Democrats have failed because they failed to pander, pander, pander to ordinary Americans, and instead focused on the mere 75% of people who are women and such.
Remember the old joke that it’s merely the 90% of lawyers that give the rest a bad name? Last night I laughed ‘til I ached for it….
Amp, I don’t know if that was directed at me. If so, my apologies.
I certainly am not sneering, dancing or gloating. I have been genuinely pissed off for the last several months that those two candidates were what the system gave us. I did not like either of them and was not going to vote for either of them. I would have voted for Kaine against Trump or Pence against Clinton. But, not either of those two. I am not happy Trump got elected, except that, if he does not work with Congress, both sides of the aisle will be united against him. That’s a good thing.
I was answering your question honestly. And, I was doing it to give you some insight into what a conservative might think (although George Will and some other may have already given you that insight). Trump would have had me voting Democratic. But, I would not vote for Clinton (actually, Sanders and Warren are probably too liberal for me).
There may have been other people like me out there who would have voted for a different Democrat against Trump. So, I am not convinced that no Democrat could have beaten Trump. My point about the Democratic primary, though, was simply that I don’t know if any of those other candidates could have been the one to do it. I would have voted for Chaffee, but I don’t think he would have beaten Trump. I actually liked Webb the most out of all of them, but he was too conservative to get nominated. I would have voted for him, as well, but I do not know if he would have beaten Trump.
-Jut
Progressives: Avoid the circular firing squad – Lawyers, Guns & Money
Copyleft:
It’s odd that when a candidate overwhelmingly wins among Black and Latin@ voters, but loses the white vote, it’s framed as being about not reaching out to “the working class.” As you know, there are plenty of non-whites in the working class.
But more to the point, do you honestly believe that “Democrat leaders” have not been discussing jobs and wages, and have only been discussing “bathrooms and bakeries”? Because that view suggests that either you are failing to correctly perceive reality, or I am. It seems to me, watching the Democratic convention, reading Clinton’s stump speeches, and looking at things like the Democratic Party Platform, that Democratic leaders talked significantly more about jobs and wages then about bathrooms and bakeries.
For instance, in the platform, there are ten pages about economics (nearly all focused on work and wages in one form or another), and a half page about LGBT rights. Do you consider a half page to be an unacceptable amount of focus?
Where did you come up with the idea that Democratic leaders aren’t talking about work and wages?
No worries, Jut. I’m just on edge today, for reasons I’m sure you can imagine.
I’m not here to gloat. I know a lot of young women and gays and my Facebook page is filled with their shock, despair, anger and accusations (not against me) of racism, sexism, etc. They’re upset and afraid. I’m not saying anything to any of them because analysis of what happened is not what they’re looking for right now. But analysis does seem to be the name of the game in this thread. Hey, I didn’t vote for the guy (in either the primaries or the general election) and I think he’s not suited to be President. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand why he won, reasons that are not the simple claims of racism and sexism that Democrats have been leveling at the GOP for decades now.
Jake:
The norms were broken when the Attorney General had a 3 hour closed meeting with the politically powerful husband of someone she was investigating a couple of days before the results of the investigation was released and then tried to pass it off as a discussion about their grandchildren. They were broken when she forced the Director of the FBI – someone who serves at the pleasure of the President and the Attorney General, both strong allies of the person he was investigating – to make the prosecute/no prosecute decision instead of appointing a special prosecutor, which is what has otherwise been done in such cases since before Watergate. After that it was pretty obvious the fix was in.
And why weren’t they? Figuring that out is one of the pollsters’ jobs. What presumptions did they make, what clues did they miss, what questions did they fail to ask – or what answers did they get that they failed to listen to?
You haven’t been around my company. Sure, there are discounts available at my company if you do certain things. For example, one way I can get a discount is if I permit a 3rd party company to take a sample of my blood and analyze it. Think about that. Let me repeat. My health insurance rates climbed big time. And my company says that one way to get them lowered is to give up A TUBE OF MY BLOOD FOR TESTING. Yeah, everyone thinks THAT’S fine. Everyone believes my company when they say the results will be kept confidential.
When I interview a HS Senior who wants to go to MIT; when I talk to an engineer when we’re hiring; when I talk to a Scout who needs credit for a certain number of months in Troop office before he can move up a rank, I ask them what they’ve done. They rattle off the resume lines; “I was Class President”, “I was a Sr. Network Engineer”, “I was Senior Patrol Leader”. Then I say, “That’s fine. That’s the office you held. Now, tell me what you actually did.” Were they a place holder, or did they actually get something accomplished?
What did she do as Secretary of State? As Senator? There wasn’t a lot there. Titles, she had. Accomplishments, not so much. People saw that. It’s not like SHE talked about her actual accomplishments in office much.
Nobody.really, how is talking about minimum wage and infrastructure jobs “ignor[ing] white workers”?
You can find that info for yourself if you try. First result on google.
At our company, health insurance rates went up 3% at renewal (insurance company mistakenly added a rider so final increase will be somewhat lower). That means that an employee’s contribution for coverage of the employee on the base plan went from $0 to $0. And the employee contribution to cover their entire family (highest possible contribution) on the base plan went from $570.62 to $587.80 per month. An increase of 3% (which will be lower after correction). So I don’t think that actual skyrocketing insurance rates are the cause of Clinton’s performance. Now perceived skyrocketing insurance costs may have added some non-trivial amount of votes for Trump.
The curse of the internet: I’m being facetious. I keep hearing the argument that Clinton/Democrats/liberals ignore the white working class, even though they seem pretty focused on promoting the welfare of the working class as best as I can tell. I chalk this argument up to two phenomena.
1. As I’ve said, however badly the labor market has worked to allocate society’s wealth in the past, it will do an even worse job in the future–simply because society needs ever less labor.
2. And when white people correctly perceive that politicians have not fixed the labor market, and correctly perceive that society IS gradually correcting for undue discrimination, they conclude that society is remedying discrimination AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR correcting the labor market. So they adopt a dog-in-the-manger attitude.
Basically, if someone want to complain that politicians have failed to implement a remedy for the collapsing labor market, let them first state a remedy for the collapsing labor market. Protectionism? Expelling undocumented aliens? Come on–put up your suggestions. But otherwise, all I hear is whining. Understandable whining, perhaps, but whining all the same.
The objection that people had to that recording was not that it was “crude.” It was that he was bragging about grabbing and kissing women without their consent. Do you seriously not understand that?
I’m just appalled that anyone can listen to that recording, and the ones where he’s talking about young girls, and feel anything other than revulsion.
Apparently, it’s not all bad news, Maine has adopted a form of preferential voting. Hopefully that’s a trend that can spread across the country.
“how is talking about minimum wage and infrastructure jobs “ignor[ing] white workers”?”
The ignoring isn’t remedied by talk, it is remedied by action.
The time frame isn’t since last year, or the last four years, but rather is “since NAFTA”. So about 23 years.
The general trend for the rust belt workers since NAFTA has been decidedly negative.
During those 23 years, Democrats have been in the presidency 15 years. They have completely controlled Congress and the presidency twice in that time frame.
So for the Rust Belt Workers “steady as she goes” doesn’t sound good. Tinkering with the minimum wage doesn’t sound like nearly enough. Vague talk about infrastructure jobs doesn’t sound like nearly enough.
Furthermore, it is a little irrational, but people respond to respect. DC politicians have been treating them as mere ‘flyover’ country for at least 30 years. After 20 years of reliably voting for Democratic Presidential nominees (including a black one twice), they decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.
I heard the “they let you do it” part of the tape as a statement that he had their consent. You have to be rather creative and uncharitable to interpret it otherwise, which is why plenty of people don’t. Do you seriously not understand that?
Considering how many women have come forward to say that he did it to them and he did not have their consent, no. Fuck you.
Desipis, I entirely agree with Ruchama – given how many have come forward to say that Trump has grabbed them without consent, calling Ruchama’s interpretation a “creative” interpretation seems both uncharitable and unjustified.
Given how it was part of a highly orchestrated media blitz by the Clinton campaign, you’re right, and I withdraw the “creative” part of my comment.
So you’re saying… what? That Trump’s accusers didn’t actually come forward, but were people recruited to tell lies by the Clinton campaign, who orchestrated their stories? Or something else? Your conspiracy accusation seems conveniently vague.
This sort of thing is why MRAs (or anti-feminists or whatever) have a reputation for bending over backwards to never believe any woman who says that sexual abuse or harassment took place. Do you also claim that it’s uncharitable to think that Bill Cosby may be a rapist?
I’m saying that there’s plenty of cause to be skeptical about the claims of assault and so I think the prudent approach is to reserving judgement until any of the claims actually make it to a court of law. I’m certainly open to the argument that there’s enough of a question about his actions that it was not appropriate to elect Trump (since the future of the country is more important than an individual’s aspirations), but that’s different from claiming to know the truth.
Believing he may be a rapist? Sure.
Believing he is likely a rapist? Sure.
Believing he is without a doubt a rapist, to such an extent you can’t understand someone believing he isn’t a rapist? No, I think that’s uncharitable.
Fifty women’s words are not worth the word of one man.
That’s an impressive bias.
I actually think a big part of it is talk, and in particular language.
Reading through the Democratic Party Platform that Ampersand linked above, it spends quite a few pages on things that may be of specific interest to African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and Latinos. The only reference to specific interests of White Americans is a reference to “white supremacists”. This lack of talk sends a message that the Democratic party is not concerned about White America (even if their other policies would actually deal with the issues White America is facing).
White Americans who are better off might feel comfortable enough in their positive to vote in a more selfless manner, but the working class White Americans who are struggling day in day out are going to be much more likely to vote based on their own interests. A party who doesn’t even go so far as to give them and their concerns lip service is going to struggle to get their vote.
Trump meanwhile, at least expresses himself in a way that suggests he shares some of these concerns (whether or not he has the policies to address them). Not only that but he uses the language of working class. He uses language that focuses on expressing their concerns, not one that drowns such sentiments in political correctness. Working class whites voted for Trump because he made them feel like he would represent them in a way that many on the left, particularly Hillary Clinton, struggle to do.
Fear of the outsiders, despite being politically incorrect and not based on sound argument, is still a very real and human reaction to the issue of immigration, particularly illegal immigration. And the humans who have those fears vote. Responding to such fears with labels such as “racist” and “deplorable”, regardless of whether the use of such terms is academically correct, will drive those voters away.
The left seems very focused on using language that makes women and racial minorities feel included, but seems to have made a taboo of using language that makes men and/or white people feel included. Yet, it seems that achieving the latter is going to be necessary in order to succeed in its goals of social progress in the American democracy.
Lots of people didn’t watch the convention, have only read press reports of her stump speeches rather than actually listen to them, and skimmed over the press reports of the platform. Far more people listen to opinion pieces, rather than read the source that the opinion piece supposedly critiques.
Fair enough. But to be clear, can cite examples of Trump expressing himself in this manner?
Yeah.
Not to mention the comments he made about wanting to date his daughters if they weren’t his daughters. The mentality that with celebrity comes the right to grope women and even girls even if they wanted no part of it.
Trump is an unknown that might serve in office given that he’s not revealed much about his policies and plans in specifics if elected. I think he’ll likely not run again in 2020 and instead the GOP might try to run the VP Mike Pence instead and he’s very much a known entity in terms of his attitudes and treatment of women and GLBT.
Here’s one example.
Identity groups? What you call identity groups include literally all but one of the employees where I work. That’s, let’s see –
(counting happens)
ten people? No, eleven! Eleven people and only one white male! Why do our needs become less meaningful if there’s a bunch of us?
Cripes, my husband (not the white male I work with, but certainly a white male) has issues – plenty of ’em – depression that’s never been satisfactorily treated, arthritis for decades, joint damage, heart attack last year – but he doesn’t expect everything to be aimed at him! Do you know how amazing it was to hear a candidate say that abortion rights are important, full stop? Probably not gonna happen again in my lifetime, so I plan to cherish that moment and bring it out sometimes to cuddle during the long, cold days of winter. Just hearing someone talking like women mattered for themselves – that’s huge. Not mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, but as themselves.
To put it another way: I am a woman; I am perceived as a woman; I am talked about as part of the group “women” by people who know literally nothing else about me. But when somebody refers to me in that way to tell me about things that affect me, that is somehow beyond the pale?
The only way it might be illegitimate to appeal to groups of voters in this way is if those groups truly have no special concerns that are different from those of other groups of voters. Tell me black people, women, immigrants, gays do not have such concerns. Do it with a straight face.
Amp, apologies, I cannot be more polished now. I am not trying to be obnoxious, but I truly cannot tell if I am being. Going to work soon, which yesterday was sorta like a funeral, but without the funny bits.
Desipis @49 is correct. Treating low-income white workers as the enemy, telling them their problems are all their own fault because of how horribly racist they are, is a surefire way to get them to vote against you in large numbers.
The Democratic Party should be reaching out to these voters, not condemning them.
Thanks. And specifically, how does this speak to the concerns of men and/or white people? How does it make men and/or white people feel included?
In the linked talk, Trump calls for a ban on Muslim immigration. And this leads me to the thesis that “speaking to the concerns of men and/or white people” means denigrating some subordinated group. Am I mistaken?
Let’s be grown-ups here: Humans are social animals and, while we don’t like to acknowledge it, envy and status-consciousness are arguably baked into the psyche of most people (much like sexual attraction is baked in). So perhaps it’s just one of those facts of life that whites and men, being at the top of a social hierarchy, cannot help but feel threatened as this aspect of the hierarchy gets flatter. Maybe it’s inevitable that denigration of some historically subordinated group will attract the approval of a large segment of whites and/or men. Maybe politicians inevitably face a choice of engaging in this kind of speech or sacrificing a large share of the white/male vote to other candidates who will.
But I’m open to the idea that Trump found a way to speak to whites and/or men in a way that did not rest on subordinating someone else. Can we find those examples?
The media should take some responsibility. They focused heavily on Clinton emails day after day while going after trump with small needles that they didn’t continue to focus on and just let drop thereby making Clinton into this ghastly person and allowing trump to say it was rigged. As well Clinton should have tried harder to address lower middle class whites. Disastrous
Amp:
Quite right. But now, go back and re-read the commentary aimed towards Republicans and conservatives in 2008 and 2012, and you’ll get an understanding of how you might see some of this out there. I seem to recall a whole lot of people proclaiming the death of the GOP and conservativism in national politics and celebrating their opportunity to dance on the graves.
I normally listen to music on satellite radio on the way to and from work, singing along when I know the words (or even when I don’t …). Sometimes I listen to BBC News. Yesterday I turned on BBC News and fat-fingered the tuning control – and found a whole bunch of political talk radio channels. The first few were leftist. There was a woman on one openly sobbing and frantically worrying about how she could possibly raise her daughter in Trump’s America and claiming that the death camps were going to open. I skipped off of that one after a bit and found someone I’d never listened to before – Glenn Beck.
He was reading a letter he’d gotten from a liberal friend of his. Beck said “We agree on nothing politically, but we’re friends.” With his friend’s permission, he read the letter over the radio. His friend said that he was filled with fear and despair for himself and the country – and then asked “Is this what you felt when Obama was elected?” Beck said “YES! Now you understand.”
He also said that some of the things that Trump claimed he would do are unconstitutional (banning/deporting Muslims was his example) and that he would stand side by side with his friend to oppose it if Trump should try to carry though on that.
Elaine:
It is my opinion that the media should take a huge amount of responsibility. As I said above, they essentially created credibility for Trump’s campaign by covering him wall to wall and burying his primary opponents. I think this was deliberate. First, it was great for ratings. Second, he was widely viewed as the easiest opponent for their candidate to beat.
As far as the e-mail thing went, that was a set of multiple self-inflicted wounds. The end result was to emphasize to the entire country that she was part of a ruling class elite that holds itself above the law and that uses the bureaucracy to insulate them from the normal consequences of breaking it. The media had no choice to cover it. I understand the complaints about the FBI Director’s actions, but she has no one to blame but herself and Pres. Obama for that one. He never should have been in that position in the first place – there should have been a special prosecutor set up for investigating her and for investigating the husband of her closest advisor. What was he supposed to do? Keep secret the fact that the (supposedly) leading contender for President is implicated in a possible breach of security?
Here’s the other reason she lost:
Deplorables
That word – in fact the entire phrase, and the scathing way she used it, got people angry – and motivated. People all over the country who have NEVER voted heard themselves described with unalloyed contempt by the next President and decided it was time to get to the polls. Remember “47%”? Remember “binders full of women”? Remember the huge deal the media made of those? “Deplorables” was worse. People showed up with “Proud to be deplorable” and “Adorable Deplorable” T-shirts to rallies. “Deplorables” may well have lost her the swing states.
I’ll break the “no three posts in a row” rule to make one brief comment:
A huge number of people did not vote for Trump so much as they voted against Clinton. They were well aware of Trump’s many, many faults.
They simply thought she was worse.
And dismissing them as ignorant or deluded is not going to help the left win the next elections.
If a single phrase involving the word “deplorables”, used once and apologized for, was enough to drive huge turnout from Republican-leaning constituencies, I never want to hear another word about PC culture, victim complexes, the supposed fragility and echo chambers of people who want trigger warnings, or any other phrase that can be replaced with “people on the left are whiny children who need to be protected from ideas.”
Harlequin,
I don’t think they are the same. I think the distinction would be this.
She used the word and apologized.
People understood that she was only apologizing for saying what she actually believed: contempt for those who disagree with her. They did not adopt a victim complex based upon supposed fragility and retreat to their safe space. They embraced the insult much the same way the Nasty Women did.
Then they voted.
-Jut
I think it’s impossible to blame a single factor for the result of the election. (Unless, of course, you want to blame the Electoral College System of electing the President. I think we can all agree that without that single thing the results of the election are different.) I can think of 10 different factors off the top of my head, but placing blame on “deplorables” or the media or the candidate or the elites to the exclusion of everything else just seems silly and counterproductive to me.
If I’m the Democrats I’m analyzing every facet of the campaign to see what was positive, what was negative and trying to improve or eliminate the negatives from my next campaign.
What Jake said.
Jut, just for the record, you’re coming off as smug and obnoxious. If calling people “deplorable” is wrong, then so is using smug, cookie-cutter right-wing insults like “adopt a victim complex” and “retreat to their safe space.” But you’re obviously only against one of these two things.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, you sound like you want to rub our noses in it. But I don’t feel like accommodating you in that. So if you’re unable to disagree in a manner that isn’t full of contempt, then take a temporary break from participating here, please.
Anyone who would vote for an ego maniac womanizing racist bigot is deplorable. That is not to say that all of the trump followers are deplorable most are white scared racist follow what my husband tells me TV reality show groupies or just plain if it’s white and has a pens mentallity
Ellaine, I totally understand being upset and mad at Trump voters – totally. But you’re new here, so you may not have read the moderation policy. Please check it out and try to stick to it. Thanks very much.
Amp@64 (wow this thread is long)–in Jut’s defense, I used those phrases first.
Okay, fair point. Never mind what I just said, Jut.
Imma bit on edge, folks.
This is interesting:
So it doesn’t look like the story is primarily one of more voters coming out for Trump; rather, too few voters came out for Clinton. (Which may have been to a degree because of GOP voter suppression tactics.)
They currently fear being blown up by Muslims. They currently fear being shot by Muslims. They currently fear their wives and daughters being raped by Muslims. They fear the nature of their local community being undermined and changed by Muslims.
It doesn’t matter how rational or how politically correct these fears are, if politicians don’t talk about those fears, if politicians call such fears racism and bigotry, then those politicians will not get those votes.
It doesn’t have to be. That was how Trump chose to do so, and so got their votes at the cost of others.
A good leader would be able to speak to the concerns of both groups of people and bring them together under a common vision, which is perhaps why Obama’s ratings are so high. Clinton seemed more concerned with being right, than with being a leader.
I’d be interested in finding examples of language that speaks to the concerns of men and/or white people that did not rely on denigrating a subordinated group. Any suggestions?
I’d be curious to know Obama’s approval ratings among white working-class men, and how those ratings changed over time. Recall that Trump previously rose in national prominence by leading the challenge to Obama’s birth certificate. Trump was apparently speaking to the fears of some constituency; any idea who that constituency might have been?
Clearly it’s possible to speak to a constituency by pandering to their fears. And clearly Obama achieved a measure of public approval without doing so. I’m skeptical that he actually achieved this approval among white working-class men. And I suspect that he achieved his approval by persevering rather than pandering. He realized there were some people who would not approve of him no matter what he did , and he proceeded nonetheless.
I’m reminded of the movie Bullfeathers. It featured a civil-rights-promoting congressman who had gradually found that in order to be a leader in his district, he had to engage in ever more demagoguery. The film opens as he’s reviewing his own campaign commercials—and weeping in shameful realization of what his ambition had driven him to become.
Some compromises are necessary for political success. But for all her ambition, Clinton found there were some lines she wouldn’t cross, even at the expense of the election.
Compare and contrast.
RonF,
I don’t think anyone considers Trump voters to be “ignorant or deluded.” “Bigoted and evil” is more accurate. They knew exactly what they were doing, which, in effect, is to try and destroy me and my family, among others. So I will not be extending them any olive branch.
Ampersand @64:
I was very angry and frustrated at what you said.
Harlequin @67:
Thank you. While irritated with what you said, I hoped my response was at least a fair one.
Ampersand@ 68: no worries. Thank you. Just try to understand: I don’t like Trump, I don’t like his rhetoric, but I don’t like the fac that this lifelong New York liberal has tarnished the ‘pubs, (but worse, conservatives). I don’t want to defend Trump, but I don’t like getting lumped in with him because I am a conservative. And, for what it is worth, I hope the toxic aspects of his rhetoric will be ineffective, not the least of which because conservative (I hope) hold to their principles and temper some of the worst implications of his rhetoric.
So, I know you don’t like him; when you read my comments, assume I don’t like him either. I am just trying to be fair, because I feel like conservatives and Republicans are being unfairly attacked because of him.
-Jut
Ampersand @ 69: That graph doesn’t look right to me, comparing it to other data I’ve found online. Where did that graph come from?
David Simon@75: as far as I can tell, it isn’t–or rather, 2012 is wrong and the other two look okay. According to Wolfram Alpha,
’16: Clinton 59.4 million, Trump 59.2 million
’12: Obama 62.6 million, Romney 59.1 million
’08: Obama 69.5 million, McCain 59.9 million
Wolfram Alpha is wrong for 2012, or at least it disagrees with the FEC’s official election results [pdf].
Obama: 65.9 million.
Romney: 60.9 million.
Graph looks fine.
When Pres. Obama was elected in 2008 it was widely publicized as the death of the GOP and of conservative influence in politics. We were entering a new era.
If the Democratic party adopts this attitude (and I doubt it will), the election of Obama will be seen as a one-time thing, an anomaly due to the uniqueness of electing the first black President that will not be duplicated. Certainly electing the first female President did not get blacks OR women to come out compared to the draw of Obama. There may well be a woman who can appeal to other women the way that Obama appealed to blacks/minorities. But Hillary Clinton wasn’t that woman.
Harlequin:
Oh, the anti-Clinton voters already knew what she thought of them, and they were going to turn out anyway. But that slap in the face was very possibly enough to turn out the extra few 10,000’s that, combined with the decided lack of enthusiasm for her reflected in the drop in turnout for her among the Democratic constituency, pushed them from a narrow win for Clinton to a narrow win for Trump. Her apology was a well-crafted tactical statement. But her original statement was from the heart. This year people paid attention to the difference.
RonF,
So the solution you’re suggesting is to try and appease these white, working-class voters who supported Trump, right? Well what if their wants and needs are that other people remain second-class citizens forever, or simply disappear? Because I grew up in the South, and let me tell you that is what a lot of white voters want. I cannot imagine any way that trying to appease them would actually work.
JutGory,
You realize that “I hope ‘real’ conservatives will rein Trump in” is cold comfort when you’re talking to people for whom the “real” conservative platform is equally harmful, right? And anyway that is expecting a bit too much from cowards like Ryan, Cruz, and the entire community of white evangelicals.
Treating low-income white workers as the enemy, telling them their problems are all their own fault because of how horribly racist they are, is a surefire way to get them to vote against you in large numbers.
Emphasis mine.
I have literally never seen anyone saying this. Well, unless you count cases that attract widespread social media attention such as Brendan Eich or Justine Sacco, but there aren’t enough of those to explain big swathes of Trump Country, and neither of those people exactly fit the Trump voter stereotype. But I have seen a fair amount of people say that liberals are saying this.
But I have seen plenty of people stereotype low-income whites as being racist (which is almost certainly more important in alienating them than whether their low-income status is attributed to their racism).
For many if not most Trump voters, I’m not sure that’s wrong–though I am skeptical that the racism has much to do with income levels, given that college-educated whites voted for Trump as well. I don’t assume that the small disparity in Trump support for college-educated vs non-college-educated whites is due to a disparity in racism.
So why do people such as Copyleft and Emmet Rensin think that people are saying this? (Well, I guess in Rensin’s case his assertion is that liberals are saying “people deserve to be poor because they’re racist”, not that racism is the reason they’re poor.)
One possible reason–I see people saying the reverse of this causal explanation: “They’re racist because they’re poor” (vs “They’re poor because they’re racist”). I have seen a Lyndon Johnson quote getting a lot of play in leftwing circles this election: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
All the thinkpieces about how Trump voters are poor and angry and have economic anxiety–unless you also assume that racism/xenophobia do NOT partially explain Trump’s appeal–also imply “racist because poor”. And then there was Obama’s remark, which I was remembering as being something to the effect of “they cling to guns and religion because economically they’ve lost hope”, but looking up the full quote it’s even more similar: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Another possible explanation: the standard Democratic solution, at least among establishment/elite/insider types, is to make college more affordable/available and/or have job retraining programs. I think this could be seen–maybe not unfairly–as blaming people who don’t go to college for being poor. (So although they don’t think they’re poor because they’re racist, they do think it’s they’re fault for being poor.) (And I definitely agree that the idea that everyone will/should/can go to college is unrealistic.)
***
The context of the “deplorables” comment was the need to reach out to the roughly half of Trump supporters who were NOT “deplorables”, who could plausibly be reached. Is the lesson from this, never acknowledge that any significant faction of your opponent’s supporters are bad people, no matter what? Is the lesson, anything you say can be taken out of context, so HRC should have been even more scripted? Or, anything you say can be taken out of context, so there’s nothing you can do about that? That, as conservatives like to point out (and sometimes I even agree with them!) some people are just looking to be offended, and there’s not much you can do about it? That thinking that any significant faction of supports of a candidate like Trump, a candidate who fellow Republican Paul Ryan has criticized for his racist statements, could actually be racist will be interpreted as beyond-the-pale contempt for his supporters, so we’d either better run a candidate who doesn’t think racism actually exists except in literal Klan members, or focus on turning out our base and write off those voters?
***
Could a different candidate have won? Maybe Sanders could have won, given the anti-establishment climate, given his beating the polls in Michigan, given his better showing among low-income white voters. I’m not convinced by the “would never vote for a Jewish socialist” argument, given the slew of “would never vote for a candidate who did X” rules that Trump has broken. (In particular, even ones that are more associated with objections from the right, such as insulting veterans and sexual crudeness and promiscuity apart from sexual assault).
But, especially given that the results seem to mostly come from a lack of turnout of Democratic voters, I wonder how much it really mattered what candidates the parties ran. I heard one story on the radio about 12 factors (that did not use polls) that predict whether the party currently in power will remain in power, and there’s also a this piece from 2014 looking at how much support for the incumbent party typically slips when the candidate is not an incumbent:
Again, the above piece is from 2014, when the author’s example of a candidate who might be so exceptionally flawed as to break this rule was Rand Paul or Brian Sandoval.
So that chart I posted before was horribly flawed – because it was a picture of the number of votes that had been counted up to that time. Here’s a picture of the current data, from Angus Johnson, using data from Nate Cohn, the New York Times poll reporter. And this too can change.
Sorry for posting that earlier chart, everyone! I’m was over-eager for info. The truth is, it’s going to be at least a month before the data and analysis of what happened in this election even approaches being reliable.
I have to walk back my previous comment a bit, because although at the time it was true, I have found an article that seems reasonably widely shared, and while it doesn’t exactly blame lack of jobs on racism, it does blame both lack of jobs and racism on insularity/closemindedness, which I’d say is close enough.
I’m a coastal elite from the midwest: the real bubble is rural america
I don’t think that it’s fair or accurate to blame the people living in economically depressed areas by saying their economic situation is due to “resistance to change”.
(I do think it’s good to push back against the emphasis on just one group of people living in a bubble, and the pedestalization–with sneaky accompanying condescension that is an echo of how women are pedestalized–of the rural white working class.)
Is it a sign that political rhetoric is out of control when the outcome of a democratic election is causing children on the other side of the world to experience emotional distress?
From Nate Silver: Turnout wasn’t down.
Desipis, that depends on how terrible the candidate elected is, surely.
So we’ve gone all cartoon villain. Top advisor is a Nazi, prominent anti-climate change crank heading up environmental policy, a racist as AG and Wall Streeters for finance. I’m sure there’s a bunch more that I’m forgetting. It’s amazing how the swamp is being drained and replaced with what was drained. It’s gonna be a bad, bad, bad next bunch of years for everybody who isn’t pretty well off. OH, and long term, the biosphere is screwed.
So, I ran a google site-limited Breitbart search for “jew” and “israel.” It was the first time I spent a lot of time on breitbart.
Here are the results.
Here’s a 1/2012-1/2016 (pre-election) result for “jew” and it looks pretty much the OPPOSITE of anti-semitic.
Here’s the same result for “Israel” and again, it looks pretty much the OPPOSITE of anti-semitic.
Is this right wing? Yes, as in “Israel shouldn’t hesitate to shoot people who threaten them” or “Obama is not pro-Israeli.” Is this antisemitic? No, not even close.
In fact the actual posts are so at odds with the reports, that is is hard to reconcile them with the various “Nazi” folks.
g&w,
I don’t think I’ve seen people claim that breitbart.com is an antisemitic site, so you seem to be off on a pointless tangent. I’ve seen Bannon claimed as being an antisemite (based in part on his ex-wife’s affidavit from their divorce and in part on who breitbart’s audience is). I’ve seen the alt-right claimed as being an antisemitic movement (I mean, they are basically just a rebranding of neo-nazis and the Klan, so…). I’ve seen breitbart.com being claimed as being popular with antisemites (Bannon brags that it is the platform of the alt-right). So you seem to have found counter-arguments to an argument that isn’t the one that people are making or to an argument that actually matters.
When Ben Shapiro quit Breitbart, he claimed that Bannon had turned it into an organization rife with antisemitism, and Breitbart fans attacked him relentlessly in obviously antisemitic terms. The alt-right conference today included Nazi salutes and a founder of the movement questioning whether Jews are people. The KKK is planning a victory march in NC. There has been a massive rise in swastika graffiti. The alt-right loves breitbart.com, and the alt-right is seriously antisemitic.
Also, strong pro-Israel positions are a characteristic of antisemitic evangelical Christianity (who need a Jewish Israel for their Apocalypse). There is also a strongly pro-Israel tendency in the Islamophobic wing of the Right (the enemy of my enemy etc), which has extensive overlap with the antisemitic wing of the Right.
But sure, breitbart.com itself does not publish openly antisemitic pieces (just pieces that argue that antisemitism in the alt-right is no big deal and just intended to be shocking, pieces that refer to Bill Kristol as a “Renegade Jew”, and pieces that refer to Jewish reporters as part of a globalist conspiracy). And?
[edited to fix spelling errors]
Nazi, White Supremacist. Potato, Potato.
From a JTA article:
Many of the people who have criticized Bannon for fostering anti-Semitism have specifically noted that his support for Israel isn’t a “get out of jail free” card. There are a lot of relevant links in this post on The Debate Link, as well as the post itself.
a) I take this to mean there isn’t any actual evidence of antisemitism, just a whole lot of hand-waving and presumptive inferences.
b) Are left-wing ideologues (socialists, communists, etc) who see corporate mainstream media on the same side as the banks also considered antisemitic, or is this presumption only brought out to judge the right?
I’m conflicted by this. You’re right it’s an anti-semitic trope. But on these other hand, it has to be okay to raise the issue of conspiracies by generic not-particularly-Jewish elites – I mean, we all agree someone is meeting up at Davos… don’t we?
And it’s also not really a “conspiracy theory”: Clinton was giving secret speeches to banks and these weren’t being fully reported on by the corporate media before or after wikileaks broke them. That’s just a fact, isn’t it… seriously, this is Salon reporting on the subject, not Stormfront:
http://www.salon.com/2016/10/14/leaked-email-hillary-clinton-campaign-proposed-manipulating-media-by-selectively-providing-wall-street-speeches/
It is absolutely horrid this anti-semitic sounding stuff is now out there; but frankly if progressives don’t want the campaign full of conspiracy theories involving bankers, secret meetings and media manipulation the easy way to get this is not to nominate a candidate who’s conspiring with the media and giving secret speeches to bankers. We have to be clear who’s fundamentally responsible for this.
Care to defend this?
“He just paraphrased the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, how dare you call him anti-semitic. After all, he didn’t say that he hates the Jews who control the banks and the media.”
I’m glad you made your position clear.
As I’ve said elsewhere, when I was a child I always wondered how the Germans let the Nazis take power. And now I know.
Wow. Just wow. Honestly your whole comment leaves me dumbstruck and depressed but this quote goes to another level. The Clinton campaign (or progressives) are responsible for the influence of Nazis in the Trump campaign/administration? By secretly speechifying at bankers, anti-Semitism is justified in response? Did you mean to say this out loud? Your whole comment reeks of anti-Semitism and your equation of bankers (ETA: and the media) with Jews is shameful.
I’m trying to be civil here, but you make it nigh fucking impossible.
First, I would genuinely like to apologise for any offense. I realise how shitty things are for a lot of people right now, and I’m sorry if I added to that through poor writting.
The majority of people on the left (I’m thinking specifically of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders) focus on the banks and corporate mainstream media as structures which need to be changed, and on the need to hold specific individuals accountable for their unethical and illegal actions according to the rule of law. I’m all for both of those approaches.
The people on the right who I object to (and not all people on the right do this) are focused on bankers and corporate mainstream media as a groups of people with collective guilt. They are making no moves to change the structure of the system (except to deregulate it further, which doesn’t make sense if they really are concerned about corruption), or to hold individuals accountable for illegal actions in court.
desipis,
There are certainly people on the left who engage in antisemitism and who engage in “global elite” arguments that end up being tinged with antisemitism (a lot of arguments about “banksters” seem to highlight Jewish bankers) or even explicitly antisemitic (googling Ajamu Baraka, I ran across a friendly interview with him by an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theorist). People on the left who do that aren’t in positions of significant political power (unless you count the Green Party as significant power), and none of them would have been senior strategy advisor to President Clinton, and few of them have explicitly endorsed movements that explicitly question whether Jews are people (I guess the closest would be people on the left who have endorsed Hamas, but while there are certainly leftists who do that, they are very marginalized in the US).
If you actually are interested in complaints about antisemitism on the left, rather than just interested in using your ignorance as thought it were an argument (as you have done here), it is really easy to find discussion of it.
This, I think, is key here. Antisemitism is a problem in western culture writ large, and no point on the political spectrum is totally immune. However, a huge swath of self-proclaimed white supremacists have identified Trump as their leader, and are celebrating his election as an opportunity to mainstream their ideas. That wasn’t random. Trump’s rhetoric spoke to them. Trump, in turn, has responded with less outrage for neo-Nazis calling out “Hail Trump” and raising their arms in a Nazi salute, than he shows for Saturday Night Live making fun of him.