“Instructions on Living in a Broken World
lean into community
seek out love
applaud the good you see
keep paying attention
talk to your neighbors
dance to the music and embrace art
look for love and small joys
take breaks and relish in nourishing your body
donate what you can
linger at the dinner table with friends
check in with your people
let yourself grieve
love one another as deeply as you canthe storm is upon us and we must hold on
don’t give up, we’re here together.”
Credit: “still we rise”
Trump’s re-election is a disaster, but anyone who claims to understand with certainty exactly why this happened (and how it could have been avoided) is
1) far too confident, and
2) almost certainly pushing a narrative that affirms whatever their ideological preferences are.
I’m going to give it time before I come to any conclusions about why this happened. I want to read some analyses based on better data and more thought than anything available right now.
In the meanwhile, my best advice is to please take care of yourselves and those around you.
This relates to something that I’ve been thinking about the last few days. I was listening to Obama give a campaign speech and he said something that stood out to me. He said that he could not understand how anyone could vote for Trump. That really jumped out at me. How can you hope to defeat someone when you don’t understand why people vote for him? Because if you don’t understand what the reasons area that people vote for your opponent, how can you counter those reasons?
I’ll be interested to see what you come up with. I will offer one factor. I suspect that the GOP did a much better job of actually getting their supporters to vote than they did in 2020. I know that in a major reversal they especially emphasized participating in mail-in and early voting. Several State-level and municipal-level GOP organizations did the same. The GOP’s ground game has famously (infamously in some people’s regard) been inferior to the Democrats’. They upped their game this time around. The test will be to see if the overall vote levels for Trump were higher this year than in 2020.
Four days short of eight years ago, I tried to link this here. It got lost, for some reason. I guess neither I or Johnathan Pie (a fictional character of Tom Walker) qualify as leftists, we are too… something.
It is just as relevant as it was then.
Please, as you listen, replace “Clinton” with “Kamala”.
Petar:
I don’t like most YouTube political videos – it’s not a format that I find helpful. If there’s a prose link you can provide, I’ll look at it. Eventually.
I don’t think you’re a leftist. You’ve had over 300 comments approved under your current email address. Corso has also had hundreds of comments approved, and I don’t think of him as a leftist either. Ron, who is to the right of both of you, has written thousands of comments that have appeared on “Alas.”
The logical conclusion is that comments here aren’t approved, or not, based on whether or not I think people “qualify as leftists.” Which you must know.
Obviously I don’t remember some comment you allegedly left here eight years ago. It’s not in the trash (which has comments going back to 2011), and it’s not waiting for approval; most likely it wound up in the spam trap (there are a few ways that can happen, but usually it’s because the spam filter mistook a legit comment for spam) and then was automatically deleted after a month.
I don’t think “a computer glitch occurs” is much of an indication of what someone thinks about someone else’s politics. Computer glitches happen all the time every day in pretty much every system. You aren’t special because you fell victim to a computer glitch, nor are you being discriminated against because a computer glitch occurred (computer glitches happen to everyone all the time).
And now, here’s what I’ve been posting everywhere today.
Senate candidates who supported trans people, like Tammy Baldwin, won.
Senate Democratic candidates who threw trans people under the bus, including Sherrod Brown and Colin Allred, lost.
The propaganda lobby that pretend to be news publishers are going to try to tell you that Democrats lost because they didn’t hate trans people enough, but the evidence shows the opposite.
Remember that in 2004, Republicans ran a single-issue campaign of opposing gay marriage. When they won, the propaganda companies told us it was because Democrats needed to hate gay people more. But 11 years later, a Republican Supreme Court justice cast the deciding vote for gay marriage, and 16 years later, two Republican Supreme Court justices voted for employment nondiscrimination. Republican politicians were afraid to talk about gay people.
In 20 years Republicans will tell us that of course they’ve always supported the rights of trans kids to get health care and play sportsball, it’s just those pesky asexual people they’re concerned about.
In the short term, things are bad, and many of us will die. But in the long-term we will win.
This is an imperfectly cleaned up copy of the You Tube auto-generated transcrip Petar linked above:
Three things I think:
1) I think worldwide, rising economic inequality and the insecurity this brings is motivating a lot of people. Incumbents are losing everywhere (even Japan!) and no matter what you think about Trump, he is certainly different than most other politicians.
2) We can never know how much racism and/or sexism factored in to people’s decisions on who to vote for or whether to vote at all, since many people will not say so, and can justify their decision to themselves in many different ways. I know many people in real life who are sexist in the attitudes they voice (and sometimes the way they treat people), but who would never think of themselves as sexist and would be horribly offended if called out.
3) I am happy I don’t live in the US.
It seems clear that the three biggest reasons this happened are:
(1) People don’t understand how inflation works and blame the party in power. Inflation was high around the world because of supply shocks caused by COVID and (to a lesser extent, probably) COVID stimulus. Although inflation has decreased recently, prices are still higher than they were before COVID.
One thing that really clicked for me in understanding the disconnect between voters and elites on inflation is that when voters say “inflation,” they mean “high prices” and when economists say “inflation,” they mean the rate of change of prices. And economists think that the “ideal” inflation is the 2% fed target. That’s where inflation is “supposed” to be to show a thriving economy.
So, when economists say, “Inflation has been decreasing for the past year and is now right where it should be,” what they mean is that “the rate of upward change in prices has been decreasing for the past year and prices are now increasing around 2% a year.” But what voters hear is: “Prices are going down!” When they can see with their eyes that that’s not true, they feel angry and lied to.
Of course, all of Trump’s major policies are inflationary (particularly, tariffs and mass deportation). But people remember that prices were lower when Trump was president, and that’s that.
(2) Because of social media and Fox News, people have become more xenophobic. Trump has anti-immigration vibes, and Kamala has pro-immigration vibes. I think this is a little different from racism because people of all races can be anti-immigration, unfortunately. After all, there’s early evidence that Trump gained among all demographic groups. I think immigration is awesome, and my views on immigration are far to the left of the Democratic Party. But I’m out of step here with the (brainwashed) American people. (For what it’s worth, I live in a high crime area of a big city in a border state, and immigration has had nothing but a positive impact on my life.)
(3) Gaza was a major demotivator for left-leaning folks, including me. (I don’t think this is a “cause” of the loss in the same way as the first two because I don’t think this would have changed the result of the election if it had been different.) Anecdotally, my Muslim friends are extremely left-wing, but I don’t know a single one who voted Harris. (They didn’t vote Trump either.) Harris lost Dearborn, Michigan for crying out loud. It’s simply not exciting to vote for genocide even when the other side wants to genocide harder.
Well, I would rather go with:
Things are getting worse, for Western working class people, mostly due to the effects of the pandemic, warmongering politicians, climate change, globalization and of course, inequality due to the political power of corporative interests.
No major party has a solution. That’s because there is no easy solution, especially no solution that does not come without a lot of hardship, which is of course going to be born primarily by the working class.
The parties that are willing to lie to people, both about the causes of the problems, and about the availability of solutions, will prosper, as long as the voters are uneducated. And all major parties, at least in the US, have agreed, since at least the Reagan administration, that an educated proletariat is dangerous. Education is getting less and less accessible, and the ability to critically think and freely discuss controversial topics seems not to be valued much.
In the US, in my experience, working class people voted for Trump, because they are tired of the slow descent into stressful poverty and powerlessness, and because things were better under Trump. Yes, they were. We were all eight years younger, his cuts to essential government programs had yet to ruin a lot of things, and the effects of the pandemic, wars of conquest and genocide had not been felt yet.
As for the Democrats, they kept saying that things were not that bad (false) that the US was doing better than the rest of the world (true) and that most of the crap was due to Republicans ruining and sabotaging everything (mostly true)
But… the Democrats have nowhere the propaganda machine the Republicans have, and what they have, they use to push issues that do not threaten the bourgeoisie’s interests. So the “Left” failed to convince many that they are crazy to feel neglected, that they are delusional to think it is harder to feed their kids… Hell they certainly failed to convince me that Democrats have any ideas that they can actually push trough apart from “be GOP-lite” on things like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, immigration policy, or police reform.
Trump is a disgrace to the human race. He, as far as I know, got slightly fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020. Kamala ? She got about 80% of Biden’s 2020 votes.
Biden could afford to run on “end the insanity, return to normalcy”. Harris could not afford to run on “things are fine, stop whining”, and she could not sell “this time around, the Nazi will really screw us beyond recovery”
So, if I’m reading that screed Petar linked correctly:
The left is responsible for Trump because they focus too much on sexism and racism.
The Democratic party is responsible for Trump, because Democrats are too beholden to corporate intersts.
We should have nominated Bernie Sanders and he would definatly have won because what all those Trump supporters really want is old fashioned, class-based, socialism.
I think JaneDoh and Schroeder4213 are making more sense.
There is an infinitely higher probability that Sanders would have beaten Trump in 2016 and that a random person selected by lottery would have won last Tuesday, than the probability that Clinton and Harris won their elections.
There is an even higher probability for the hypothetical victory of a Democrat who was selected in a primary untainted by outright false reporting, articles changed years after publication so they reflect poorly on candidates, or one candidate winning 94% of all coin tosses to resolve ties.
Democrats are responsible for the popularity of Trump with working class people, because of the outright disdain some Democrats show towards their plight, and because of how seldom the rest of the “Left” goes after the offenders.
When one person is lying to you to make you believe that he cares about you and will make your tomorrow better, and the other insults you make to you understand that you do not have it so bad, just worse than yesterday… well, I guess we all know what the voters will do.
I actually speak to working class people. By the standards I was taught in school, I myself am working class, because I sell my labor, and own no means of production. I can tell you that people who voted for Biden did not vote for Harris, and for all I know voted for Trump, simply because they were having a hard time. And they did not give a rat’s ass that the inflation is higher, the economy worse, and the unemployment higher pretty much anywhere in the developed world.
They also did not care much about where transsexual athletes compete, nor whether all cops but Harris are bastards.
On the other hand, they did care whether their daughters will die due to untended miscarriages, or whether recent immigrants will be de-naturalized, etc… but they were POSITIVE that it would never happen in California, or at least not to them.
And no, they were not ALL white males. Not even most, considering where I live.
I doubt that makes you unusual in this forum.
Could you clarify, what is your job? Because I can think of a lot of people I wouldn’t call “working class” who’d meet that standard. (For instance, a doctor or lawyer who is well off but doesn’t themselves employ anybody.)
Are you aware of how smug and disdainful your own tones are? Is that something you’re doing on purpose?
“. By the standards I was taught in school, I myself am working class, because I sell my labor, and own no means of production.”
By the standards you have established I am pretty much sure 99% of the people here are also working class. So you are speaking to working class people right now. As am I. As is everybody. Congratulations!
I really do hope you’ll give this one a go. It’s just six minutes long, and you can skip the first 25 seconds.
In the US, I have worked almost exclusively as an IT professional. While on salary, I worked mostly in manufacturing. I have scars from both burns and cuts that I have acquired at work (and bullets and knives, but that was in a different career, in a different country)
Today, I get most of my income from straight out programming, and while I mostly work for law enforcement and academia, I still do plenty of work with my hands, as when someone asks for a custom solution to a problem, it seldom stops at writing code. I still get burns, but they are mostly from sparks and arcs, rather than from counter-pressure casting leaks.
I am sure that to some of you, that makes me something else than working class. I know people who think that education, or savings, or whatever, can disqualify you. Similarly, some people do not think I am on the Left, because I think that the Democrats are Right of anything anyone would call Center, and their main raison d’être is to distract the working class with causes that do not threaten the super-rich, while suppressing people like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, in whom I can see something good besides their voters.
If you think that I am disdainful, that is subjective. I think that calling me “not Left” is offensive, but then I remembered a few of the articles on this site, and where it used to link back in the day, and I decided that I should not take offense.
But I am definitely not surprised that not one, but two people decided to question not the reasons I suggest for the Democrats losing the trust of many working class Whites, Muslims, Latinos and Latinas, etc. but whether I am working class.
I am not saying that this attitude will make me change what I do. I would not piss on Clinton, either of them, if they were on fire, but I still went to fucking South Carolina for two weeks to volunteer for her. I dislike Harris significantly less, so I will not bother you with how I volunteered for her.
But not everyone will work and vote for someone whom they dislike, and who despises them. As demonstrated.
Kate:
I don’t think you are.
The Democrats lost because of what they didn’t do, not for what they did. They didn’t engage with the typical working-class trump-supporting voter. They didn’t listen. They didn’t offer solutions to the problems that matter to them. They didn’t offer change.
And the fact that the video seems as relevant today as it did seven years ago is a testament to something else they didn’t do.
They didn’t learn anything from their loss in 2016.
You’re exactly as working class as I was in my last job as Business Operations Director, Petar. I, too, did custom coding. That custom coding involved me being out on the warehouse floor to test. That job required me to work on forklifts and refrigeration systems with my own hands. Nobody in their right mind would call that “working class” or even “blue collar”. “Working class” is about income level, not type of work, afaik. Union plumbers, for example, are blue collar but rarely working class.
I absolutely agree that I am exactly as working class as you are.
When I was growing up, only in the United States had the running dogs of the ownership class managed to blur the lines and render completely meaningless the terms “working class”, “blue collar”, “middle class”, etc. From personal experience, in the Eastern Block, and in at least France and Germany, that was something people commented upon as one hell of a trick. Clearly, today, just like everything else, the US definition, or utter lack thereof, is spreading unopposed.
By socialist definiton, “working class” is neither about what you do, nor about how much you make doing so. It is about selling your labor, not having access to the means of production, and thus not skimming profits from the labor of others.
Were you on a salary? Were you sharing in the profit generated from someone else’s labor? Did you own the warehouse? Could you restrict laborers from using the means of production they needed to profit from their own labor?
Those are the questions that would define your class, to anyone who insists on using categories as a way of analyzing and changing the world, as opposed to dividing the proletariat so that it can be better exploited.
Income? By your definition, a oil rig worker can be middle class, while the owner of a small diner who is employing ten people, but barely making any money, can be low class. That is, to me, absolutely useless… except to make people feel good about themselves. Sure, I sell my labor for exactly the amount it would take to replace me and someone else pockets most of the value I create, but I am firmly middle class, because I make X dollars, and that loser who is working on the floor, and is the exactly in the same boat as me, but makes 10% less, is lower class.
Back when I was young, before the US politicians figured the danger of educated proletariat, blue collar described the work you do, working class describes who keeps the profits.
By my definition, someone who owns a plumbing company is part of the ownership class, even if he also gets his hands dirty pumping septic tanks. The latter makes me respect him more, and also makes him blue collar. The people who work for him, go out and do the exact same job using using the first guy’s trucks? They are just as blue collar, but they are working class.
This is the point where, if I was a Real Leftist™, I would sneer at you, and tell you that it is not my job to educate you, because clearly my definition is right, and you are salvageable if you not only do not know that, but refuse to accept it without question.
But I am just a faux (or fossil, I forget which) foggie, so I am absolutely willing to hear why you think that it is better to use income (or education, or race, or religion, or whatever) instead of access to power and resources. All of these have been used in the past. To quote from Wikipedia:
Clearly, I am not the only idiot who believes that using access to means of production, media, politicians, etc. is a better way to group people, and determine their standing, interests and ways to improve their situations.
By your definition, class is a function of income, and we have the super rich (higher class), well-off (middle class), and poor (lower class). I think that everyone here can agree that:
1) The higher class mostly supported Trump (I will come to super rich people like Taylor Swift later, if I have the endurance)
2) The middle class was split, with most of the professionals supporting Harris, but most of the business owners supporting Trump
3) The interests of the lower class would have been better served by Harris, but an awful lot of them supported Trump.
By my definition, there are only two classes.
The ownership class, i.e. the super rich and the business owners share interests, and support Republicans. Some of them were anti-Trump, because they are not idiots, know their history, and understand that he may ruin the economy to the point where the only thing preventing collapse would be to go hunt for resources beyond the borders of Germany, I mean the US.
Then there is the working class, who is divided by education, as since the 70s, their access to higher education has been deliberately restricted. It is also divided by religion, race, gender, sexuality, and yada, yada, well played, whoever did it.
And the interests of the working class are the same. Higher corporate taxation, progressive income brackets, with the money going into government programs that promote equal access to resources.. I.e. education, health care, food and lodging assistance, and fucking feed the kids at school, as opposed to corporate bailout and oppressive apparatus to push the interests of the ownership class, like military, police, etc.
————-
And at point, I am trying to remember why I am arguing who is working class, when my point was the Democrats failed to engage with a huge segment of the working class, because that segment is uneducated, whiny, and frankly kinda yucky and low class.
So I will stop arguing. And hope that I have not made more typos in this post than I can fix in 5 minutes.
May I say that this website’s editor is less suited to proper text entry, formatting and editing than bloody Discord? And the 5mn time limit for editing is aggravating, especially since it kicks you out if you fail to commit?
Please feel free to drop this post on the floor, whoever is “moderating” it.
@Petar: You know I wrote a long form reply but I realised that what it boils down to is actually non-political. You frequently use whatever political question is being discussed as a pretext to talk about yourself, your life, your work, your education, your experiences, etc etc. You don´t usually show a comparable interest in the details of anybody else´s life.
I am sure your mother told you you are a special boy, but that may not apply in this situation.
I would argue that my first post on this topic did not have ANY mention of personal details, and the second had one. That one details was attacked by more than one poster. It happens, on this website, and I will not try to explain why.
As for me not paying attention to other people’s details, that is a baseless accusation. If most of my posts were not being held for hours or days or forever, I would try to show you in real time how much I know about the history of this website, or about the personal history of the owner, and many of the users. Not yours, but there are at least seven people here who have spoken a lot about their experiences, although at different times in their lives, it has been more and at others, less.
I do not know whether it is a coincidence (I strongly doubt it) but I know quite a bit about the life, career, partner, and personal experiences, both professional and medical, of the poster I respect the most around here. And that is one of the reasons I have seldom argued with her for long – because her experience supports her arguments.
And it is my personal rule that one does not probe and pry. If people want to share, they do. I may share overly much. As for being a special little boy? We are all the main characters of our life stories. Some collect more careers, state/national/world titles, bullet scars, comic books, sports car, etc. than others. Now, some may lie about who they are, and what they have been through. I am always willing to put serious cash in escrow when someone accuses me of making up something about myself, as long as the other person matches the amount.
By the way, don’t you guys have some rules about personal attacks?
OK, if the “change” he’s referring to isn’t encapsulated by Bernie Sanders style socialism, then what is it? What do you think these voters want?
I think they want to feel cared about. I think they want to feel loved.
That’s a 100% serious answer. I don’t believe that Trump really loves or cares about them, or anyone else other than himself, but he pretends to. And in the absence of any love from the Democrats or the progressive left, that’s going to be enough.
The one thing I take from the discussion about who is or isn’t “working class”, is that there’s no general agreement about what the phrase means, which suggests to me that it probably isn’t a useful term to use. Instead, let’s focus upon what we know about Trump supporters: They’re typically white (though a large number of Latinx joined them this time), typically male, typically un- or undereducated.
Petar,
This promise to attack this website / me / the owners / other users makes me feel certain that I made the right choice when I banned you, Petar. (For those who don’t know, people who have been “banned” on Alas can still post, but their comments require individual approval.)
It can take a while for me to approve comments (as I almost always do), because I have work and I have a life. If you don’t like it, perhaps you should stop posting here.
I’ve more or less given up on enforcing this, other than saying “please stop” now and then. I’ve said over and over that it really makes it hard for me to deal with this site, and many (not all) people have told me, through their behavior, that they don’t care how uncomfortable they make me. Since I like most of the people here, and I’ve put years into this site, I’m very unwilling to ban people, and I’m not willing to close down the site. So I think we’re all stuck with status quo.
By the way, having reviewed a bunch of your comments in the last couple of days, I admit I’m wrong. You are a leftist, imo.
Avvaaa, Petar’s a total hypocrite asking for consideration when he’s certainly not held himself to any such standard. But I still wish you wouldn’t say things like “I am sure your mother told you you are a special boy.”
Serious or not, that’s not a useful answer. Because it’s not actionable. There’s nothing Democrats can do to make Trump voters feel like the Democrats love them.
I’m not a programmer and I don’t have the ability to change how the comment-editing function functions.
But I can control the timer setting. I’ve changed it from 5 to 30 minutes, and we’ll see how that goes.
Clearly this is about emotion. I don’t think that they’re daft enough to think Trump loves them. But, he makes them feel good about themselves.
Trump actioned it.
If you’re publicly calling them “deplorable” and “garbage”, then yeah, there probably is nothing you can do to make them feel like you love them.
My MIL lives in rural/ex-urban Trump country, and even before Trump many people there (all white, straight presenting and Christian) would long for the good old days to return. This is one of the reasons MAGA appeals to them. There is no argument that Democrats could make to attract these voters other than lying about a return to the past.
Public events, county fairs, etc with MCs/announcers are often full of racist and sexist humor, which I find very off-putting. They absolutely would not find anything unusual or objectionable to many racist or sexist remarks made by candidates this election cycle because that is what they commonly experienced day to day.
This is my personal experience, not a detailed analysis of rural America. And of course, not everyone who lives there is like this. Just most of the people I interact with. Ironically, many of these same people lament that their children moved far away.
Wait. What? The former is a callback to 8 years and 3 elections ago while the latter is what the fascists called Puerto Ricans at their Make America Nazi rally at MSG.
JaneDoh – longing for the good old days. I think we see a lot of that in Trump’s messaging as well.
He’s clearly just trying to twist us up. I’m through engaging with him.
Yep, that would be the election loss they learned nothing from.
No, it’s what Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Ricans. It’s also what Joe Biden called Trump supporters, the apostrophe bullshit notwithstanding.
The Latinx vote as a whole, it appears, went to Trump, and it would be interesting to find out whether there is any evidence that Hinchcliffe’s remarks had any effect on Puerto Rican voters or Latinx voters generally. I expect it probably did, and not in the right way for Trump. How much I don’t know.
But none of this alters my original point which is that Trump supporters don’t feel that Democrats care about them, and they do feel that Trump does, however misguided that feeling is.
I’m not trying to twist anyone up, and I’m baffled as to why anyone is getting twisted up. As far as I can tell, with the possible exception of RonF whose position I don’t know, we’re all in agreement on the most important point: Trump’s re-election is a disaster.
Some of us have chosen to opine on the subject of “why this happened (and how it could have been avoided)”, which would appear to be on-topic for the thread. Sorry if that twists you up.
Dudeler, no! Hinchcliffe was invited to speak at the Rally for the Extermination of Undesirables and his speech was vetted beforehand and displayed on the teleprompter for him. This is the fascists calling Puerto Ricans “garbage.” Your historical revisionism has been noted.
Nobody who’s not already in the bag for the coming fascist administration could possibly have seen Biden’s comment that way – especially since he clarified his meaning in his very next sentence. It’s interesting that you give the non-fascist POTUS a lot less leeway than you give an actual fascist rally. Interesting in the sense that you are shouting who you are at the top of your lungs.
Since I have no interest in engaging with people with explicitly pro-fascist politics, I’ll add you to the list of folks with whom I will no longer interact.
And perhaps this comment will correct my nym going forward…
Here’s what Biden said:
I think Biden is a fucking scumbag genocide supporter. I also think he mostly likely lost his verbal place while saying “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s demonization of Latinos.” Or possibly “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter. His demonization of Latinos…”
Now, maybe he was actually trying to call all Trump supporters “garbage” in the middle of a paragraph that was – before and after those two words – unambiguously about Tony Hinchcliffe. That seems less plausible to me, but not impossible. People do wander verbally sometimes, and Biden is certainly prone to that. I think my interpretation is more likely the truth than yours, but neither one is impossible.
But by dismissing any alternative reading to your preferred reading as “bullshit,” you’re implying that you know for certain something that, logically, you can’t know for certain.
This really proves what I said; what you’re asking is basically impossible. There will always be a verbal stumble said by some Democrat that the people who hate Democrats can use just as you’re using it, refusing to give any benefit of the doubt because giving the benefit of the doubt doesn’t serve their ideological beliefs.
Between Harris, Biden, Walz, and various Democratic Convention speakers, there are thousands of hours of Harris campaign people talking in front of cameras since Harris was nominated. If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else that FOX news screamed proves that Democrats hate Trump voters. What you’re demanding – that no Democrat, ever, say anything critical about any Trump supporter that could be misinterpreted by idealogues as hatred – is impossible.
So like I said, not actionable.
Also, do you imagine Trump voters are saying “I was going to vote for Harris, but then I saw Biden say something about Trump supporters so now I’m voting for Trump because I’m a Trump supporter?”
Like so many people, you look at politics as if conservative voters – in this case, Trump supporters specifically – have no agency of their own. If they vote for Trump, that can only be the Democrats’ fault. I don’t think that’s a reasonable way to interpret things. I think that Trump voters, much as I disagree with them, are sentient and do have agency and are responsible for their own choices.
And you know what? To imply that if only Biden hadn’t said that, and if only Clinton hadn’t said this eight years ago, then Trump wouldn’t have won, and that’s actionable advice, is ridiculous. If Biden hadn’t said that, it is overwhelmingly likely Harris would have still lost. The entire election didn’t come down to two words that very few people outside of the chronically online ever heard.
What’s your source for this?
The only post-election statistic I found on a brief search was this from the AP. They found that Harris won Latino men 50% to 48%, and Harris won Latina women 60% to 38%. So Harris didn’t do as well among Latine voters as Biden did, but she did better than Trump.
That’s just one survey, so maybe other surveys found other things. But I’ll be very surprised if any survey finds that Latines as a whole went for Trump, as opposed to just Latino men.
Wait hold on
Wasn’t it MSM/Republican orthodoxy that the word “Latinx” is woke virtue-signalling and the reason real Americans hate Democrats?
Daran made an excellent point yesterday (I think it was yesterday?) that the definition of “working class” is changing and is no longer useful. I think there are several definitions floating around, and it’s still uncertain whether usage will eventually settle or whether the term will just be abandoned.
But “working class” can mean people who support themselves by their labor and do not own significant property (what we used to call the proletariat);
Or it can mean people whose income is moderately low, but not desperately low (this definition is often used without regard to wealth);
Or it can mean a style of job people who work with their hands in the type of job that used to be unionized (this definition is often used without regard to owning property or income. It almost always excludes low-income teachers and includes very high-income electricians who own medium-sized businesses.)
Or it can mean a set of lifestyle choices, that a person can keep even as their work or financial situation might change. Class is complicated.
Yes, I agree with you and with Daran on that – “working class” is too plastic a term to be useful, unless people start the discussion by carefully defining terms. And even when defined, often “working class” isn’t measurable through ordinary surveys of voters.
I think the way that the term “working class” is used (and has been used for at least the entirety of this century) in mass media designates members of that class as blue collar workers who earn enough to be above the poverty line, but just barely. The only places I’ve seen the term used differently are in either academia or by folks who fancy themselves socialists or communists.
When I see the term, I assume that it means what mass media uses it to mean. I’ll continue to do so unless it’s defined otherwise from the get-go.
Digby posted a screenshot of a tweet by Wajahat Ali which I think sums it up:
Jacqueline Squid Onassis:
Ampersand:
When I first read this, I thought you were responding to JSO’s attack on me, and I was surprised that you would support me against her. Then I realised that no, you were responding to me, and that her comment (which dismissed an alternative reading to her preferred reading and implied that she knew or certain something that, logically she couldn’t know for certain) got a pass. And I’m not surprised.
My reading of Biden’s remark is”The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”That’s two grammatically correct sentences, the first of which is entirely congruent with the similar remark by Clinton. To obtain them, I changed none of his words, other than to omit the repeated “his”.
Your second interpretation changes a word: “supporters” to “supporter”. Your first interpretation omits all of the “his” after “supporter’s”, not just the repetitions. And you either have to omit everything from “is unconscionable” onward, or retain it, in which case you end up with the following: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” That’s an ungrammatical shambles of a sentence with two active verbs and “his supporter’s demonization of Latinos” doing double-duty as object of the first verb and subject of the second.
Could he have meant that? Certainly he could. People do mangle their sentences, especially when speaking off the cuff, and there are plenty of other disfluencies in the passage. But to prefer this interpretation over the simple “he meant what he actually said” interpretation is, I suggest, more likely to be ideologically motivated.
No.
But I can imagine an undecided voter thinking “Those are my friends he’s talking about, and I know they’re decent people”.
Most of the rest of your comment extrapolates absurdly from what I said, so I won’t comment specifically, but I did want to respond to this separately:
Ampersand:
I am raging at the Democrats right now, irrationally moreso than at Trump or the Republicans. I feel like Nucky from Broadwalk Empire who was angry at the warehouse operator for leaving it unlocked, but not at the thief who robbed it. (He still had the thief killed.)
Why do I feel this way? I think it comes down to emotional energy. I’ve only had to get angry at the Democrats twice in eight years. To get angry at Trump/Republicans I’d have to be angry every day.
By my reckoning, if three percent of those who voted for Trump in the seven swing states had instead voted for Harris, she would have gained four of the states, and the election as a whole. Twice that number of those who didn’t vote for either candidate would also have worked, or some combination of the two.
Was that really impossible? Was there literally nothing that the Democrats could have done which would have gained them those votes? And if there was a path to victory, then whose fault was it, that they didn’t take it?
I’m not saying that there was no possible path to victory. But, if there was one, it was really narrow and hard to find. Harris didn’t make any obvious, glaring mistakes. Biden made one gaffe – and his increasing tendence to do that was why Harris took over in the first place.
So, let’s say Biden had stepped down, and we had a competative primary. What if all the Democrats had been running to the left like they did in 2020? What if the party was torn apart by a debate over Israel/Palestine? We might have come out stronger in the end, but that’s not the way I’d bet.
A huge problem, which I don’t know the solution to, is that the Democrats get held responsible for all sorts of positions of campus leftists, like defund the police, and supporting Hamas, which they do not and have never supported. Whne lies like these are repeated often enough, people believe them and when you try to fight back you look like you’re the one who’s a liar.
Honestly, I wish there was something we could point to and say “That’s the thing that’s in our control that we can fix.” But, I just don’t see it. Biden was the most pro-union president ever. He brought manufacturing jobs to the U.S. – Trump lost manufacturing jobs. Yet, the working class voters who claim to want manufacturing jobs still think Trump is better on the economy.
But this is what drives me nuts. Clinton balanced the budget. Bush deregulated the economy into a ditch. Obama got the exonomy out of the ditch. Trump crashed it in record time. Biden has just managed to get it back in shape. Now, the first years of Trump are going to be seen as a time of prosperity, even though they were created by Biden. And yet, Republicans are trusted more on the economy. It makes no fucking sense.
I find that I am pretty much done contemplating the election and what might have been. Americans picked Trump, and now they have to live with him. Many of my friends and family who live in the US feel the same. We just don’t want Trump to live rent-free in our brains for 4 years. Living outside the US, last time most people I know chalked up Trump’s victory to the moment, or to people wanting an outsider, or to people hating Clinton, but this time most of my friends are saying “Meh Americans will have the government they deserve. Hope the international spill-over isn’t too terrible.”
I don’t think Harris could have won no matter what – personally I don’t think that there will be a female president in my lifetime. I think she ran a good campaign and generated a lot of energy. The Democrats had fewer gaffes, mis-speaks, and unforced errors than the Republicans in my view, and still lost. My ideal candidate would be far more anti-corporation than anyone we are likely to get soon, but I was happy enough to vote for Harris. Most voters only pay attention at the end before they vote, and it looks like the difference this time was that many Democrats stayed home. Choosing not to vote is still a choice. This time around, my activist friends plan on working primarily locally. They are too tired to fight for people who won’t fight for themselves.
The election went the way it did because the billionaires, who own most of the information sources, wanted him to win. I was pretty sure it would go this way as soon as I saw the coverage of the Biden-Trump debate. Biden gave a lackluster performance. Trump was outright demented and spoke in word salad laced with racism. The coverage all claimed that Biden lost. How could you look at the two of them and possibly conclude that Trump looked the more competent? So that said to me that the coverage was heavily biased and going to remain that way. So people hear that Trump is better for the economy, that he will make us safe, that he will restore manufacturing jobs, etc and they believe it because “neutral” news sources are telling them so. What else would they think?
Things I haven’t seen since the election: Someone who voted for Trump–anyone who voted for Trump–saying something like, “The election is over, now let’s work together for the good of the country.” Not one person. Not even a random Trump supporter, much less from Donnie himself or any of his proposed cabinet or appointees. Nor even any Republican congressperson, not even the old style Reaganites. Perhaps they’re out there, but they sure aren’t making themselves heard.
So really, it’s impossible to conclude anything other than that the point of the election–presidency, senate, reps, locals–was to hurt people they consider lesser than themselves.
So you can imagine an “undecided voter” voting for Trump because of Biden’s comment? But even when Trump vilified Harris supporters as “garbage” and “scum” and disparaged legions of other people as “poison” and “vermin” and cannibals, this hypothetical “undecided” voter didn’t care one whit or feel some trace of solidarity or empathy with the many “decent people” Trump slandered throughout his campaign.
It was only when Biden possibly said something unkind about Trump supporters that stirred these imagined “undecided voters” to outrage.
It’s strange that even imaginary “undecided voters” would give Trump a total pass for repeatedly defaming entire classes of people with his own mouth and yet one unkind word about Trump supporters from somebody other than Harris will make up their minds.
One unkind word provoked by a Trump supporter calling an entire island and implicitly all its people “garbage”. And one that was pretty clearly, if you read the actual transcript here for example referring to the “comedian” who made the original insult.
Three possible explanations occur to me:
1. The most charitable is that the media only briefly mentioned the “comedian’s” original insult and amplified and misquoted Biden enough to convince some people that he really did call Trump supporters “garbage” without provocation. This might be true for at least some people. The Republicans are clearly trying to take us back to the 1850s, so a little gaslight is consistent with their positions.
2. Other people might realize that Harris was clearly more qualified, proposing policies closer to their own wishes, and part of an administration that improved life in the US, rather than massively damaging it, but their sexism and/or racism didn’t allow them to quite make the commitment to vote for her. So when they got an excuse, they jumped on it hard.
3. Republicans are just sensitive snowflakes and any slight makes them want to clutch their pearls, faint, and then go shoot someone.
@Dianne
I suspect all three of those are true for different Trump voters.
@bcb: Sometimes I think the whole election was an elaborate murder-suicide plot that the entire country is carrying out.