I thought that article was very well done (and sent the link to Heebie).
The most recent of Tim Burke's posts, which he put up two days after the election, has also stuck with me:
It is cause for despair and anger, but it is also the environment we are in. If you are in a plane crash in the Antarctic, you are permitted a few moments of despair and fury at the desperate situation you are in. It's cold, it's bleak, it's a long ways from anything. You can get up and swear if you like. But if I'm in the crash with you, when you start doing stuff like angrily throwing all the food in the wreck out into the snow because you're frightened, or you start to stomp off in a random direction because you want to get started on the journey to an outpost, I am not just going to say, "Hey, I understand." Our mutual survival is at stake. We need each other. We need everyone alive on the plane to work together and we need a plan that acknowledges that we are in a crash in the Antarctic.
If you want to win the next election and build a political system that is not every two or four years on the edge of being a plane crash, you have got to start understanding better that you are not in charge of making policies right now except in those lifeboats of blue. Talking constantly about the steak dinner you're going to eat when the survivors get back to McMurdo Base is not helpful when everybody is eating dehydrated egg powder. What can you do with what you have, right now? What do you need to understand about the properties of cold, of snow, of shelter, of food, of signalling, of navigation? If you get back to McMurdo, then you start asking: how can I avoid ever being in a crash again. Right now you are crashed.
I think some of the analogies may also have further analogies. It's true, it's imperfect. But that's the point: we've crashed... into... a lost continent... of analogies. You go to war with the dehydrated egg powder you have.
I thought Tim Burke's position was that we really had to understand the engine failure or something.
The worst truth about the engine! I think his point is that you do what you can from a position of powerlessness, attacking any targets in reach, and right now for me that thing is to find a Trump voter who complained about "Hillary's Goldman Sachs speeches" and... man, what would be a fitting punishment? Squid ink down their shirt?
That's like, thirty goddamn analogies.
Well, this is what happens when you allow people to violate the analogy ban at will.
Anyway, I'm glad the OP writer is planning to be a better pundit -- the piece was indeed thorough -- and (unsarcastically) I was surprised by the relief I felt at reading the simple statement "Non-urban white man and wife has become a powerful identity." Less catnip-fresh for the Marxists when you put it that way, huh? But of course those are the men everyone has been mismeasuring, and oh God the endless "if there is hope, it lies in the proles" dithering over the WWC has driven me to extremes of uncharitability, AIMHMHB5000000T.
Also, semi-seriously: did people here see "Zootopia" with the kids? I thought it captured the (reactionary) zeitgeist impressively, but maybe it was too subtle?
Nah, that article was poop. It's not hard at all to figure out why areas if the country that remain economically depressed from 2007 vote against the incumbent presidental party. especially when only one candidate is running on everything is fine.
Thanks for posting; I thought it quite good and was meaning to link it in a comment
I agree that that was about as good a summary as I've seen, and I especially like the little bit of perspective granted by knowing that slightly over 100,000 votes out of 135,000,000 were what made the difference.
It's not hard at all to figure out why areas if the country that remain economically depressed from 2007 vote against the incumbent presidental party.
This makes it hard for me to believe you actually read the article.
1: I was just about to post it! It is a good article.
2: Neb, guest posts are gifts from the reader, thanking us FPP for our dedication and service. They aren't a substitute for that d&s.
As for ATMs, honestly I give the best advice.
Even if we grant that it was specifically economically depressed areas that threw the election, there is nothing we can do with that information. The Democrats passed the largest expansion of the welfare state since the 60s, and this earned them zero political credit -- if anything it only hurt them. They don't want charity. They want someone who will kick the ass of the immigrants, Muslims, and Chinese who are stealing from them.
14: It's easy for you to say, now that we know that NickS likes you better.
It's good, but it's less disciplined than the Ramachandran tweetstorm it links to halfway through, which makes more or less all the same points and does better work foregrounding misogyny as an umbrella explanation.
Sybil! We're having some kind of unplanned reunion here. You're all suicidal, aren't you?
Fits of crippling nostalgia for when I had optimism about the potential of progressive anger. Hence, our reunion.
At least Unfogged is gearing up for another golden age.
The return of incompetent, mendacious, and cruel government will usher in a new golden age of blogs and blog-like things like tweet storms. It'll be all 2003 up in here again.
Heard a quote on the radio this morning from a guy they caught setting forest fires in North Carolina. "I was bored and I wanted to see something burn."
I wonder who that guy voted for?
Clinton's popular vote margin is smaller than those of recent Democrats, but it's bigger than those of many past winners, bigger than Bush's in 2000, Carter's in 1976, Nixon's in 1968, or Kennedy's in 1960.
"Bush in 2000" there is jarring. Does he mean Bush in 2004, or Gore in 2000?
OMG 22. I am so fucking enraged at this asshole.
A negative number is still a margin.
This seems like the right thread to report, with despair, the following anecdote. I am have an acquaintance--not friend--who is a significant Republican fundraiser. (Not for Trump, who he thinks is a dangerous national disgrace, but for down-ballot Republican candidates this year and in years prior.) All that is background to the fact that he had a private dinner with Mitch McConnell (which is not unusual for him) the week prior to the election. (The first week of November.) He shared with me that, as of that dinner the week prior to the election, McConnell's candid view was that there was nearly zero chance that Republicans would hold the Senate. (The presidency was hardly even discussed as that had long been assumed to be out of reach.) McConnell said his all internal data and intelligence had the odds of Democratic takeover higher than public polling was generally indicating. McConnell said that he and his staff were spending 100% of their time busily making plans and preparations for operating as the minority party post-election.
We were all suicidal. Now that we're dead we're being punished for our sin.
This is petty bullshit, but one of the many things that enrages me about this election is all of the leftists who were too good to vote for Clinton are going to get to indulge their "speaking truth to power" fantasies for the next four years.
15: well, around here id say, they don't think the republicans are actually going to roll-back Medicaid. Also, Trump is a really garbage candidate, so they might off been open to voting for someone else who was credibly promising to do something for them, or they didn't hate for independent reasons.
They weren't all journalists. It just seems that way.
17: it was good but so infuriating in format. Waiting for the tweets to load... ugh. Bring back the blog!
The killer graph was the one that showed that being better educated doesn't make you less likely to vote Trump once you control for the fact that being better educated also tends to make you less of a bigot.
foregrounding misogyny
It's notable how little play the misogyny angle has received. I sent something to K-Drum about how misogyny and fascism have always gone together, but even the liberal Kevin Drum didn't do anything with it (or even respond to me, the dog).
32: He still remembers when you took over for him that week.
being better educated doesn't make you less likely to vote Trump once you control for the fact that being better educated also tends to make you less of a bigot.
Well, clearly the best way for Democrats to win would be to end bigotry. How do we do that?
28: Trump in the course of a year managed to take over one of the political parties in opposition to much of its elite, and then won the general election in a stunning upset, finding votes where no one thought there were votes to be found. What does he have to do to prove he's not a garbage candidate?
[A]ll of the leftists who were too good to vote for Clinton are going to get to indulge their "speaking truth to power" fantasies for the next four years.
The best part is going to be the squabbling over one another's cosplay choices: "Abraham Lincoln was racist!" "Susan B. Anthony worshipped the Carthaginian deity Moloch!" "Fuck you and fuck Emma Goldman! She couldn't dance for shit!" "You know who else supported universal healthcare? That's right!"
Govern without destroying the country or the party he took over.
37: We all loved Zork, Moby, but you may be asking too much of its parser.
...but one of the many things that enrages me about this election is all of the leftists who were too good to vote for Clinton are going to get to indulge their "speaking truth to power" fantasies for the next four years.
Man, who cares? There's hardly any leftists in the country at all, and even fewer who engage in purity voting. If you're going to be mad, you'll need to ration it more sensibly.
39: Unfortunately, those folks are wildly over-represented in the various online media that I consume, and I'm not inclined to cut them off (though I may have to).
I thought the article was well done. I like that it didn't scold me.
My experience is the same as Mr. real. I see them online about as often as I see Trump voters.
And come on. They threw the election to Trump. We can blame lots of different people for lots of different reasons, but they're one reason. And this is the second time they've done it. It wasn't enough that they threw the 2000 election to Bush and millions of people died in the Middle East. They had to do it again.
Ugh, stuff like 26 is so fascinating/baffling. It really does make it easy to believe that all along, Trump never meant to win, the tories never saw Brexit coming, etc. That the whole of the establishment can be caught unawares, repeatedly, is just... I don't know what to make of it.
30: I've read some pretty good tweet storms since the election, but none good enough to make me warm up to the tweet storm format. What a pain in the ass.
There's hardly any leftists in the country at all
I always get a perverse chuckle out of it whenever I hear right wing bloviators carrying on about the "hard left." If only we had one.
It's pretty easy to see what to make of it. There is a largish group of elites that knows certain things need to happen to keep the country functioning and that many of these things are not inherently popular with a majority of the public. Say, for example, taxing at level necessary to provide a basic level of sustenance to all or not telling everybody who talks funny to go fuck themselves. This subset of elites is to publicly and repeatedly argue against policies that they know are needed in order to get political power for themselves on the assumption that somebody else will pay the political price necessary to keep the country working.
There's hardly any leftists in the country at all
You should talk to Academic Lurker who just opined, in the other thread, that it would be better for the Democrats to implode as a political party so that a genuinely left-wing party could take their place.
Still reading Vox, eh. I didn't think catastrophic failure for a decade would have many real consequences. Pelosi got re-elected. Jesus, is she 90? Hoyer, Clyburn. Kill this party with fire.
But Vox has just the facts! The "facts" have an establishment bias, if what you read is the Establishment.
Drum, WaPo, NYT, Slate...you would think after 2008 + 2016 credibility was just a little damaged but heck those guys just feel so comfortable and all my friends and I understand their arguments because they agree with me.
Watching without hope for those who change sources or even add just a few.
I would like them to be replaced by a party capable of winning elections.
so that a genuinely left-wing party could take their place.
I'd be willing to amend that to "so a genuinely effective party can take their place."
When congress and statehouses are taken into account, it becomes evident that the Democrat's problem is bigger than just Hilary Clinton's failed presidential bid.
32: I'll remain convinced I think forever that the country's extreme relief, media included, at being licensed to indulge in populism-packaged misogyny is the single biggest explanatory force in this election cycle. So, from that perspective, it's not at all surprising how little attention it has received.
That word bubble in the link in the OP--the one with "Emails" swamping everything else in the blue chart--makes me so viscerally outraged (still!) that I spilled my coffee when it scrolled onto my screen. I feel grateful I didn't throw my phone across the room.
54: I have to literally block out that graphic from my mind.
I agree with urple. The media and FBI both did that. And the Russians.
It's good, but it's less disciplined than the Ramachandran tweetstorm it links to halfway through, which makes more or less all the same points and does better work foregrounding misogyny as an umbrella explanation.
Just reading that tweetstorm now (and, agree that it's a lousy format); really interesting but I don't know that I'd call it "more disciplined" than the article in the OP, it seems even more sprawling (including, for example, a reference to an article about the role of national security in the 2014 congressional elections) but with a bunch of good points.
As the article says, there are a lot of things that came together to create the result that we got, but some of them are more despicable than others, and the media is near the top of my list for fucking up absolutely inexcusably.
I mean, sure, Hillary made some tactical choices that are dubious with the benefit of hindsight, but there was very little opportunity for her to improve her message given a media that refused to transmit that message.
58.2 is really true. People keep saying how Clinton was running without doing this or that and what she should have done differently. She was doing it differently, but you wouldn't see it if you weren't getting her TV commercials or talking to people who went to see her in person.
I'll remain convinced I think forever that the country's extreme relief, media included, at being licensed to indulge in populism-packaged misogyny is the single biggest explanatory force in this election cycle.
One of the best things I read during the campaign was a post (by, I think, Kevin Drum) early in the year, which I am unable to locate, talking about the mismatch between the Democratic party/coalition and Democratic/liberal political pundits. The former is mostly women and people of color, and the latter is mostly* white men.
That meant that there's a bit of a tug-of-war about what issues should be emphasized and how they should be talked about. Liberal pundits are, based on demographics, going to be receptive to different framing than the actual voters.
As soon as I saw that point, which is obvious when you think about it, it changed the way that I saw the entire campaign. Going into the election, when I was confident in a Clinton victory, part of my pleasure was the feeling that, after Obama and Clinton presidencies perhaps we as a country would finally realize that white men are not the only people who matter when it comes to deciding what gets talked about, and what is part of the "national conversation."
After the loss that is still part of the disappointment -- I'm ready to move on from white men for a while and the country isn't, and has decided to express that in (what seems to me to be) the worst possible manner.
* At least a plurality. I have no idea what the actual breakdown would be
51.3: The Democrats' problem was that they put a black man in the White House.
"The Democrats' problem was that they put a black man in the White House."
Obama won 2 times and would have won this year if he could have ran again
62: That's because Obama voters turned out in 2008 and 2012. they didn't turn out in 2010, which allowed the Republicans to win, and build themselves a big advantage.
Bush won in 2004, but that didn't stop the Democrats from kicking Republican ass in 2006 -- in fact, it caused it. (I'm hoping the same thing happens in 2018.)
Just read that tweet storm and sorry it's not great. In part the stuff about the dem party losing support from the white working class is based on a hilariously bad/misleading Brookings institute chart. Where's 1996?
Yes, everyone hates Hillary Clinton she is the least popular national political figure other than Donald trump in political life, this wasn't a surprise that got sprung on us out of the blue. Part of everyone not liking her, is that the media doesn't like her either.
You know how voters and focus group subjects refuse to believe that Republican's policies, when accurately described, are supported by Republican politicians? I have this crazy idea that if the Democratic party hadn't spent the last 30 years extolling the virtues of bipartisanship and compromise, implying the Republicans are worthy partners in governance, and instead had consistently, truthfully described the opposition and the tactics they use to make good governance impossible then perhaps people would be better informed and more skeptical of Republicans. How fucking hard is it to demonize literal demons?
Democrats don't have to be stridently leftist (though the Republicans have shown there's plenty of space to embrace the fringe without losing the center), but they do have to demonstrate a willingness to fight the existential threat that is the Fox News Republicanism.
And come on. They threw the election to Trump. We can blame lots of different people for lots of different reasons, but they're one reason. And this is the second time they've done it. It wasn't enough that they threw the 2000 election to Bush and millions of people died in the Middle East. They had to do it again.
Yep, but the left's lack of enthusiasm, the inconsistent electoral turnout, and the willingness of liberal states to elect Republicans are facts that need to be addressed.
66: Right. On those occasions that I talk politics with republicans who aren't obvious maniacs or Nazis, the "of course they don't really mean what they say" effect is very strong. I have no idea how to counter it.
The perfect is a much more vicious, implacable, and unscrupulous enemy of the good than any earnest liberals, of either sex, are taught in school.
66: The Dems have been wimpy on this stuff because people who favor compromise and conciliation tend to be Democrats.
The one little ray of hope I have drawn from this election is that Trump is such a cartoonish figure that maybe Democrats will come to publicly revile Republicans in the manner that they deserve. (I mean, I ain't holding my breath or anything, but a guy can hope, right?)
68: People who regard themselves as sophisticated Republicans have always understood their coalition to consist of themselves and the dupes. Public dishonesty is baked into Republicanism.
64: Obama probably would've won a third term, but as long as people are doing election analysis by anecdote/incomplete parsing of a still-incomplete data set, consider the NYTimes example of a woman who voted for Obama and hoped he would usher in an era of racial healing, but then turned on him when he commented that looking at a photo of Trayvon Martin he felt like that could have been his son: this was deemed "choosing a side." I think there are a LOT of people like that.
Bush won in 2004, but that didn't stop the Democrats from kicking Republican ass in 2006 -- in fact, it caused it. (I'm hoping the same thing happens in 2018.)
I have this sense that 2006 was the result of anemic Republican turnout more than Democratic enthusiasm. Anyone know?
The Dems have been wimpy on this stuff because people who favor compromise and conciliation tend to be Democrats.
Probably, but catering to this hasn't been working. Republican voters view every election as a threat to their way of life and they show up to vote.
Speaking of parsing of a still-incomplete data set, some uncounted portion of Philly votes just came in bringing PA down from being in the 60K range to 46K. The universe is just fucking with us. Post election night Wisconsin, Michigan, and PA have all shrunk by margins that are appreciable portions of the margins but does not look like any will reverse.
It also reduces the 2012 to 2016 Philly margin deficit from ~35K to 17K.
Maybe a lot of people are (correctly) dissatisfied with the way things are, big picture, and (correctly) see Democrats as either complicit in it, or unwilling to exert themselves too much against it. I mean, assuming for the sake of argument that were the case, how would that play out? Basically what we got on election day.
20, 21: similarly, Yglesias has been getting better again.
Only I called him Sausagely, so you probably didn't know who I meant.
so you probably didn't know who I meant.
Yes, as a n00b, I am unfamiliar with local internet traditions.
I have a bunch of itemized thoughts that I should maybe break up into separate tweetlike comments, but I'm lazy, so we'll see.
1) The thing the Dems screwed up in 2016 were the downticket races. That was a catastrophe. The presidential election was incredibly close, not a failure anywhere near the scale of the Congressional or state government losses (but as in 2000, they don't get to run it again under the same conditions; the scale of the loss gets immediately, massively amplified). This is a big fucking deal and it will get relatively ignored because Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump. I think I get to repeat myself on this point a few more times given the number of Trumps in the way.
2) The sexism thing didn't get played up in the media, and won't, because OMG "sexism" is LITERALLY the most boring thing ever, complaints of sexism have always already been made and made boringly; misogyny doesn't bleed (by definition, amirite?) so it doesn't lead. (Not true, I know, but.) It's virtually impossible to foreground. It's anti-news. Racism stirs up more passionate responses on all sides, in part because "racist" has apparently become one of the few live offensive slurs you can direct at a conservative white person (the r-word, if you will), in part because it's more narrowly tied to violence and eliminationism than is sexism, in part because of our old enemies the Nazis and the KKK. But there's nothing sinister about sexism. It is and always will be trivial, a dessert on the social justice table (and even now you've heard this complaint so many times that it's dropped to inaudibility, hasn't it?).
3) The mainstream media has discovered the alt-right, and noted that it is racist, but the redpill/MRA end of things is just off limits for discussion? Is there an actual reason for this? Have I missed something?
The thing the Dems screwed up in $YEAR were the downticket races
FTFY
Giving a nod to all of the factors* above, to me the like results-relevant contingent fact that is just out there in WTF-cubed land is that HRC had an aide married to former congressman who sexted a 15-year old and lived in a place where an HRC-hating contingent of the FBI had jurisdiction. If Weiner sexts an 18-year old HRC is probably President-elect. (He probably did that as well...)
*(Yes, I completely understand it never should have been that close yada, yada, yada.)
80.2 is pretty right, but not quite right. Sexism is salient for people when you're talking about spousal abuse and rape. Those are violent, those bleed, etc. Both minorities and women have a lot of trouble getting traction for anything about whether they should be trusted with power, with a bank loan, etc.
82: Maybe. But it's also possible that if you've pissed off a faction of the FBI to the point that they're willing to use this completely bogus Weiner thing, they would find some other completely bogus thing. Remember, there was never any reason to suppose that the Weiner e-mails had any relevant content whatsoever.
84 is all correct; I should have chosen my words in a way that made clear that I was talking specifically about the election. I don't think sexism is universally regarded as un-newsworthy, really; although I do think certain contexts, not only this one, make it hard to highlight.
85: This seems right. Nonsense scandals aren't contingent on specific events.
80: The sexism thing didn't get played up in the media, and won't, because OMG "sexism" is LITERALLY the most boring thing ever, complaints of sexism have always already been made and made boringly; misogyny doesn't bleed (by definition, amirite?) so it doesn't lead. (Not true, I know, but.)
There's also something really hard to wrap your head around with this kind of sexism. Like, if I had to describe what seems to have happened, it's that a lot of voters perceived the possibility of a competent, authoritative older woman in charge as so enraging that hating her (a) made them suckers for nonsense stories about her and (b) drove them to the polls. Lots of people feel this way.
And I look around in my life and think that I'm not that far off that category of person, and I don't think people are enraged by my existence? Is this another regional bubble thing? Or am I just missing it? It's disturbing to think about, in a way that I sort of have trouble saying anything coherent about.
A couple of responses to comments in which I think I agree with the general goals -- it would be nice to have a Democratic party which is both more electorally successful and more confrontational -- but (think that I) disagree with the diagnosis of what forces are driving the status quo.
Republican voters view every election as a threat to their way of life and they show up to vote.
First, Republicans tend to be older, whiter, wealthier (and more male) all of which correlate to higher turnout. The two parties aren't symmetrical.
Secondly, it's true that, notably, conservative religious groups have been a big source of energy and passion for Republicans for the last thirty years, and it's hard to think of a similar counter-weight on the Democratic side (arguably that used to be organized labor but that's been waning for forty years). That is a problem, but it's also not one that would change in one or two election cycles even with a more populist candidate.
Thirdly, I'm really convinced that, if you want to change this, the place to work is recruiting candidates for state-level (and lower) races. I have no particular appetite for that work because it seems difficult and thankless but that's precisely why I have some sympathy for the people who are working on that, even when I disagree with them. This is where the time that, say, Teo is putting in to the Young Democrats meetings seems most helpful -- as a way to encourage people who have a more appealing voice to run (or get involved with campaigns).
Forth, if you take my 60 seriously, I'm not sure who in the Democratic coalition has the power and authority (moral and otherwise) to be a clear agenda-setter right now. I feel like Republicans, as the more authoritarian party, are always going to be better at presenting a unified front, but I am also very sympathetic to some reasons why there's a feeling of competing agendas within the Democratic party. Think of this as the "hack gap" writ large -- there is less motivation for people within the Democratic party to suppress their own viewpoints and echo the party line, and that may be an electoral weakness, but it isn't necessarily a sign of a weak party, it's also a sign of a complicated set of relationships between different factions.
The thing the Dems screwed up in $YEAR were the downticket races
Worth repeating, Democratic House candidates received more total votes than Republican House candidates. The Democratic party is doing terribly at winning state level races (and see point three above), but has a base which should be enough to do okay in Congressional races -- given better electoral fortunes overall.
Maybe a lot of people are (correctly) dissatisfied with the way things are, big picture, and (correctly) see Democrats as either complicit in it, or unwilling to exert themselves too much against it. I mean, assuming for the sake of argument that were the case, how would that play out? Basically what we got on election day.
I'm convinced that 80% of what was awful about the 2016 presidential compaign/election was a direct result of the increased polarization of American politics (what the article in the OP calls a, "rising tide of mutual antipathy." I think that drove a lot of the nastiness and also the fact the Republicans eventually fell into line behind Trump. Your comment reads to me like it imagines a bit of a "silent majority" who is quietly suffering and voting for the most outsider candidate possible, but I feel like that story isn't completely compatible with the levels of polarization. I feel like if the primary motivation for Trump voters was a vague dissatisfaction I would have expected to see lower turnout and less enthusiasm than we saw.
How would you reconcile that (or do you not see a conflict between the two positions)?
This is your reminded that we're all fucked anyway.
Quickly to 87: it's not just that they voted against Hillary, it's that they voted FOR TRUMP against Hillary. That's as stark a choice between gender ideologies as you are ever likely to see.
90: Right! If there's a gender statement, it's "Fuck you, women are only supposed to be disposable sex toys, and we feel really really strongly about that."
And I'm exquisitely oversensitive, I thought, and I would not have guessed that that was an ideology that was still driving statistically important voting behavior. And I really really want to know if it's a regional bubble, or if it's men I interact with but they're just stealthy about it.
My dad, who is a horrified spectator to Trump voters who talk to him, generally thinks this is a big part of the story: men who get their sense of importance from being in charge, in a family context, over women who are often smarter and harder-working than they are, and are incredibly threatened and resentful about any suggestion that they're not entitled to a female support-staff.
And here I thought 89 was going to be about climate change...
91.2: well, Clinton got 86% of the vote in Manhattan, so.
85: This seems right. Nonsense scandals aren't contingent on specific events.
There still needs to be a news hook, though. And, frankly, as bad as the email coverage was all year, it was the Wiener catnip that guaranteed blanket coverage.
That is, if they'd come up with some other nonsense scandal, the coverage would have been toned down, if only a little.
92.last: Online dating belongs in the other thread.
89: I was just going to post that. It's astounding. I'm completely unable to interact well with people like the woman in the front who does most of the responding.
I really really want to know if it's a regional bubble
The pollsters now all seem to agree that college degree/ no college degree was by far the clearest correlate of voting behavior this year. So maybe an education bubble instead of a regional bubble?
Because there are no sexist men with college degrees...
It's like somebody decided to make Flannery O'Connor characters come to life.
In support of 92 and further to 91 and 94, the only Manhattan-dwelling Trump voters I know of are law firm partners who literally *actually* have all-female support staffs (staves?).
I feel like if the primary motivation for Trump voters was a vague dissatisfaction I would have expected to see lower turnout and less enthusiasm than we saw.
Yeah, exactly. I keep coming back to the huge increase in GOP turnout in PA. Those 300k people were excited to vote for Trump, and Trump stood very clearly for a lot of ugly things. The idea that this excitement was an expression of underlying leftist politics is nothing but wankery.
88: I feel like if the primary motivation for Trump voters was a vague dissatisfaction I would have expected to see lower turnout and less enthusiasm than we saw.
How low do you want to see? Turnout was the lowest since 2000. Also, they don't necessarily need to vote for Trump; they could just not vote for Clinton.
Or like Flannery O'Connor paid more attention to assholes than I'm ever going to.
Flannery O'Connor I think liked the idea of a fallen world. I don't know that she agreed with the idea of secular progress. This owrldview led to an accurate, vicious, and socially hopeless depiction of the american south.
102
It was not. Total turnout was higher than 2012, and the third highest since 1968. Only 2004 and 2008 were higher.
How low do you want to see? Turnout was the lowest since 2000
I don't know how much the number of registered voters increased but, according the OP, turnout was up by 5.5M votes relative to 2012 (and up by 3M votes compared to 2008).
I'm not sure I'd put it quite like 91. I think it's more about priming effects and a gut-level discomfort with female authority, even a not-very-enthusiastic discomfort. The vote says "all that outrageous stuff Trump says and does is okay, and it's at least marginally better than having a woman in charge, which... just, no. They're never any good at anything. My wife is a terrible driver. I can't... not the damn country. Not the USA!" There's sometimes hatefulness behind it, and I'm sure the Breitbart audience is lousy with MRA rhetoric and overlaps considerably with all those We Hunted the Mammoth dudes; but it's also inertia. And hopefulness that the lifelong yearning for patriarchy will usher in a golden age for them. I imagine it's actually quite naive, especially for younger men.
Of the big fights ahead, education is going to continue to be a huge one, and the urgency will pale next to climate change and reproductive rights and anti-racist organizing, including immigration stuff (those are the big three, right?). The Trump ideology is going to be very readily reproduced. If it seems the slightest bit illegitimate now, with the popular vote gap rising all the time, that illegitimacy will vanish soon.
101: Agreed. Whenever people say that there wasn't a Trump wave, I say yes, nationally there wasn't, but there certainly was where it mattered.
102: Turnout was lower than the last three elections, but it's also well within the historical norm, and maybe a little on the high side. The Obama elections were unusually high; 2004 was as well--because of Iraq, I suppose? The data:
2016 54.0% (provisional) 2012 54.9% 2008 58.2% 2004 56.4% 2000 51.2% 1996 49.0% 1992 55.2% 1988 50.2% 1984 53.3% 1980 52.6% 1976 53.6% 1972 55.2%
Before 1972 turnout was in the low 60s, which I'm going to ignore as it doesn't help my point. I'll blame the 26th Amendment. But of the last 12 elections, it had the 5th highest (or 8th lowest) turnout.
I'm debating taking my daughter (and mom) to protest the inauguration. Is anyone here going? I think she would likely feel miserable standing outside in the cold for very long -- as would I, with my Raynaud's syndrome feet -- but hey, history in the making.
110 before seeing 107. Presumably my numbers disagree because I was going off of Wikipedia pages and might have mixed something up.
105: Of course it's right; it's a straw man.
111: My wife and I are going to the march the next day.
The vote says "all that outrageous stuff Trump says and does is okay, and it's at least marginally better than having a woman in charge, which... just, no. They're never any good at anything. My wife is a terrible driver. I can't... not the damn country.
I'm channeling my father talking about Trump voters here -- I really don't get this sense from men I know in person -- but I don't think it's a belief that women aren't competent, exactly, but more a belief that competent or not, they're supposed to be in service to men. Think the sort of sitcom family men's rights weirdos complain about, with competent sensible wives and moron husbands, but also with generally subservient competent sensible wives. It's okay for women to be bright and good at things so long as they're kowtowing to the male head of the household. When they're in charge, it's not that they're stupid or incompetent, it's that it's an offense against the rightful order of things where men have the right to be on top.
I am going to the march on the 21st with my neighbor. My sister and her friends are going. My ex-step-mom and her wife are going. Tix bought; housing arranged. We are trying to think what to put on our signs.
111: Provisionally planning to, yes (that is, I was going to the march the next day, but will probably go down for the whole weekend.)
You need to express it as a percentage of eligible voters, not raw votes, since every four years there's more eligible voters, generally.
And hopefulness that the lifelong yearning for patriarchy will usher in a golden age for them. -- hello, amazingly mangled sentence! I meant something like "And hope, amid lifelong yearning for stable unquestioned patriarchy, that voting for Trump will usher in a golden age." But also punchier, less wordy, and more manly.
The idea that this excitement was an expression of underlying leftist politics is nothing but wankery.
Right, it's not that. And the article in the OP does a nice job of gently-but-firmly disposing of Bernie Sanders' critique of the Democrats.
But Trump is a result of a very real failure on the part of US elites, left and right. Let us not forget that the first people thrown under the bus were Republican elites.
Iraq was a joint Democratic-Republican fuckup, as was the economic crash. In addition to the substantive damage done, these events were national humiliations.
Obama did okay in the aftermath, and most of the biggest government failures were a result of Republican intransigence, but why is nobody in jail? Where was the mortgage relief for actual borrowers? Why couldn't the US liberal elites at least make that much happen?
Remember that to explain Trump, we don't have to explain all 46% of his vote -- just the 20% above the normal background crazification factor.
People were driven to Trump by hatred, and they are justified in some of that hate. The implicit deal was that the proles were willing to give up a certain amount of democracy if the elites agreed to not fuck things up too badly. The elites broke their end of the bargain.
Using the Voting Eligible Population (excluding illegal immigrants, felons and prison population):
2016: 58.8
2012: 58.0
2008: 61.6
2004: 60.1
2000: 54.2
1996: 51.7
1992: 58.1
1988: 52.8
1984: 55.2
1980: 54.2
1976: 53.3
Clinton's percent of Voting Eligible Population will be 28.3, which is the sixth highest for any candidate since 1976. Trump's will be 27.1. The average for all major party candidates since 1976 is 26.7
Let us not forget that the first people thrown under the bus were Republican elites.
Sometimes, that's the only thing that cheers me enough to get a smile.
105: Of course it's right; it's a straw man.
Someone isn't reading John Emerson, among others.
122: and yet, the republican elites will make out just fine.
There's a Bernie argument that he would have generated more enthusiasm among Dems (and lefty independents) who would thus have turned out, and there's a Bernie argument that he would have actually won over people who voted Trump instead. Every reference to the WWC is the latter. It's bullshit, but it's not a strawman.
121: OK, so Evil Clown vs Personification of the Establishment got middling turnout.
If there's a critical mass of people coming to DC to protest we should meet up. Or even go to the march together with "Fuck You, Clown!" signs.
Third highest in the modern era and 3pp higher than average is "middling". OK.
125: sure, but that wasn't being argued in the thread where it came up.
How low do you want to see? Turnout was the lowest since 2000. Also, they don't necessarily need to vote for Trump; they could just not vote for Clinton.
I feel like you're not answering my question. Do you (a) not think that increasing polarization is one of the most salient facts about American politics right now (b) not see any tension between increasing polarization and a "silent majority" view of politics or (c) Not think that it's fair to characterize your position as a "silent majority" position?
I'm genuinely curious, because for me those pull in different directions (and I think that increasing polarization is significant more important, as a dynamic, than long-running dissatisfaction) but recognize that we may have different intuitions.
To keep my sanity I have to believe that 125 is bullshit on any national scale, but (ANECDOTE) I have multiple "independent" fb friends who have said all along that their ordered preference of the last four candidates was Bernie/Trump/Cruz/Clinton (with possibly Clinton and Cruz switching places in some cases).
131: Their criteria must be -- President should be a man and the older the better.
123: Emerson's dopiness on this has been a particular disappointment.
130: a) No, not anymore, I think the seams are starting to come apart b) n/a, and c) No, it's not a silent majority argument. It's that there are many people who may be inclined to vote Democrat, but are not, because they're broke, miserable, and have no expectation they'll be helped, whoever wins. Mostly they probably disengage, but some vote for Trump. It's enough to lose a few swing states.
Let us not forget that the first people thrown under the bus were Republican elites.
During the primaries, the right wingers I occasionally interacted with were especially gleeful at watching Trump stomp on and humiliate Jeb! Bush, who they seemed to particularly despise.
137: In my darker moments I believe that right-wingers just generally love watching people be humiliated (and supporting the humiliator).
Oh wait, there is one other thing that wasn't in the OP: asymmetrical use of technology. You have one campaign that is hounded night and day for incompetent information security policies, hacked repeatedly by different international agents, and endorsed by every dead-tree newspaper except Jared Kushner's; and another campaign that spends millions on seekrit boutique in-house data analytics, gets massive assists from fake online news sites, gets endless free advertising using Twitter, and gets endorsed by Peter Thiel, AND appoints Steve Bannon chief of staff. I don't know how much real effect all that had, but it has unsettled me to no end.
138: unsurprisingly, your darker moments are my light-to-normal moments.
123, 135: He's fundamentally still on the right side of everything, mostly, but yeah, I think his reaction to this election is poorly thought out.
Lurid Keyaki's theme song, or possibly the same-named tune by Oren Ambarchi and Johan Berthling is more her speed.
131/134- there are so many awesome ways you could overfit that dataset.
138: I think there's a fundamental part of the right wing mindset that's pro-bullying. There are actual bullies like Chris Christie and there far, far more who are hangers-on, the penumbra of toadies bullies tend to surround themselves with. I think these people overwhelmingly voted Trump in the primaries because he's both the biggest bully of the lot (which is saying something) and he's the one most amenable to including people he just met in his toady circle, so you could imagine having a beer with him after a rousing session of pushing someone weaker around.
I have multiple "independent" fb friends who have said all along that their ordered preference of the last four candidates was Bernie/Trump/Cruz/Clinton
Thats certainly my impression. Bernie/Trump supporters are a "burn shit down" caucus independent of the left-right Democrat-Republican dynamic. I think there is a percentage - high enough to swing some states - of the burn shit down caucus that would take Bernie over Trump based on a) not billionaire vs. "billionaire" b) does not eat babies vs. eats babies, and c) uplifting messages vs. hatefulness.
But at the end of the day it ended up being a choice between hatefulness vs. establishment, and a lot of people went with hatefulness. If the contest had instead been hatefulness vs. socialist hippy shit, I think it would socialist hippy shit would have taken a meaningful chunk of the not-establishment vote.
80, 81 -- Here, we re-elected our Dem governor by nearly 4%, against a pretty significant headwind: (a) 24% Trump win (b) zillionaire who spent a whole lot of his own money on the race, way way more TV, pushing standard Republican themes.
Gov. Bullock isn't flashy, or some kind of wild leftist. His politics kind of matches mine. A whole lot of Trump voters went for him.
The other 4 'land board' positions were a wipe-out. Republicans won Sectrtary of State, Supt Pub Instr, State Auditor, AG. We had good candidates for all the positions, but they didn't have the cross-over appeal, or the record, of Bullock. Or the money.
Held our own in the state house, lost a few in the state senate (including my district, which was close, but the national ticket was enough of a drag to go the wrong way.)
We'll be working on ways to improve our position with exurbanites, obviously without turning our backs on anyone.
143: right, it's the newspaper-vs-comments line. It's not even fantasy or playground memories; bullying is something millions of people do, to millions of other people, in a low-key way every single day. There's a whole generation who are like Digital Trolling Natives, maaan.
141: is it wrong for me to play them at the same time, with the first one kinda low in the mix?
136: Why is it hard to believe that open racism isn't an attractive feature in a candidate?
What I get from the Vox post strangely harmonizes with the stuff I have been hate reading at V/ox De/y for a few years.
If you promote identity politics as the one true way, there is a danger white people will start to take their identity as white people seriously.
If you hate them and call them racist and stupid, no matter how right you are that they are racist and stupid they will hate you back, and draw strength and solidarity from the hate.
If V/ox is right since you can't change the color of your skin eventually most of the people here will find themselves on the 'white people' team.
Fuck. I meant "is an attractive feature".
Political correctness is over. If you don't want me to call you racist and stupid, then don't be racist and stupid.
I have been hate reading at V/ox De/y for a few years.
You, sir, are made of sterner stuff than I. I can't make it through a single post by that sociopath.
I've had the thought that Barack Obama couldn't have been elected if there had been an active Black Lives Matter movement when he was running.
135, 140: I don't know; his commitment to his position on this election, which flatters his traditional positions but doesn't actually suit the facts, has really made me question whether he's been as insightful as he seemed. That is, I was always interested to hear his pro-[P/p]opulist take on things, but now it really is veering dangerously close to what Hofstadter called it all along. Yesterday he said he didn't know how to fix American economics, but he first step was killing the Fed, which is a position that has been held by exactly 0 correct people in American history, from Jefferson* (who was correct about some things, but not even a tiny bit of economics) to Jackson to Mellon (I think?) to Paul and the 21st C goldbugs. The Fed is the only portion of the government that has done its job mostly correctly over the past 8 years, and even in the '90s did better than most.
Not saying I love the Fed**, but IMO saying "abolish the Fed" pretty much marks you as someone whose abstract political preferences have left objective reality far behind.
*for these purposes, Fed=US national bank
**obviously it's too beholden to anti-inflation people, but so are the House and Senate
149: David Roberts writes for Vox and that is where this piece published, but in my experience he is generally an independent voice.
Here in IL, the results were pretty good. Duckworth moved up to the Senate, and Ds held her seat. One of the North Shore seats which has gone back and forth went D. Cllinton won the state by just short of a million votes.
What we need is a viable candidate for governor, to unseat Rauner and try to raise taxes to their 2008-2014 (temporary increase) level—our rate is lower than many neighboring states which are less D. Biggest hole in our lineup.
I did voter protection in Milwaukee, because we weren't worried about IL. I'd been waiting to compare my experiences with our absent commenter's in NV, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen.
151- I guess I am obligated to say don't descend to their level. Or as Michelle Obama memorably said,"When they go low, we go high."
If the contest had instead been hatefulness vs. socialist hippy shit, I think it would socialist hippy shit would have taken a meaningful chunk of the not-establishment vote.
I think this is misguided liberal-bubble self-delusional nonsense. When in the history of the US post-1965 has that happened? Has hippy punching become less of a national pastime in any meaningful way, especially in the "heartland"? What makes you think that suddenly people have changed their minds?
I'm increasingly thinking that Presidential elections are almost entirely about choosing a new "outsider" every 8-12 years.
I've had the thought that Barack Obama couldn't have been elected if there had been an active Black Lives Matter movement when he was running.
I think that's true. I also absolutely think that Black Lives Matter is a positive force in US politics.
*shrug*
I'm also not ready to say that there's a tension between those two positions.
If you promote identity politics as the one true way, there is a danger white people will start to take their identity as white people seriously.
Which do you think is a more accurate description. That the cause is, "identity politics as the one true way" or what I quoted two days ago: "We have a lot of evidence that reminding white people of rising racial diversity makes them more conservative in the moment. This campaign did that constantly."
If the latter is the case, that what we saw wasn't a change in the way that people talked/thought about "political correctness" but, instead, a contest in which, because of the nature of Trump's candidacy, race was constantly a topic of the campaign, then sign me up on the side of reminding white people about race.
150: it isn't hard at all. That was totally a part of what was going on.
157: I know this makes me an outlier among liberals, but I've hated that quote all election season. When they go low, I want to go even lower. I want to dig a ditch and push them in.
I think this,"If you promote identity politics as the one true way, there is a danger white people will start to take their identity as white people seriously," is practically the same statement as this," "We have a lot of evidence that reminding white people of rising racial diversity makes them more conservative in the moment. This campaign did that constantly."
The Vox piece identified HRC's campaign as doing that (constantly). I think it might make sense to be careful about that.
I also think that blaming Trump's voters for anything up to and including the genocide they deep down had to know they were enabling makes 'sense,' but isn't productive in this moment.
If we want to claim to be enlightened, that carries with it the burden of trying to act in an enlightened way.
I don't hate the quote or the method, so long as we win in the end. Right now I'm pretty frustrated with Pres. Obama's sense of decency, which I think hobbles him.
161- I'd be right there with you, but we don't have the guns, the money, the facility with violence, the self sufficiency, or the fortitude to actually win at the fight we'd rather be having.
I don't see another real choice available, which sucks for me because I expect to die in prison or in a camp.
When democratic norms and the rule of law break down, the people with the guns take over. In the US context I don't think that means military coup. (I don't think.) I think that means right wing organized violence. (Of exactly the sort Trump is encouraging, while he's busy breaking down democratic norms and the rule of law.)
156 last -- There are other places, you know. Places you don't go.
I'm always on team decency, but here's no reason to act like people got tricked, or had no choice but to take the pro-bully side. Every single Trump voter has agency, and none can claim ignorance about what they've visited on the world (and especially the least among us).
And spare us all the lectures about identity politics. The Democratic party is, and has been since its founding, wide open to white people. The position is that you don't get to be an asshole based on race. People with a problem with that, who want to identify as assholes and bullies -- well, we're never going to get their votes, and don't want their votes.
The idea that whites are demonized by liberals or democrats is the biggest strawman of all. Only the fringiest of fringes engage in that sort of thing, but all the identity-politics apologist/revisionists buy into it for rhetoric's sake. Democrats don't care about straight people, which is proven by their support of gay marriage. Say it out loud and feel your IQ just slipping away.
Anyway, we'll be the ones with the outsiders in all those governor's races in '18, and the WH in '20.
I am very curious about how the declining faith in democracy (apparently) is responding to the current election. Do people feel that their votes counted? Do they think the current system is worth preserving? Do they think it's bullshit? We do basically regard every Hillary voter as implicitly a creature of the establishment, just like us, right? But it's not so.
166.last: I console myself with that, but in my more morose days I still expect we'll find a way to fuck it up.
I want to dig a ditch and push them in.
Who are "they"? Hard core Trump supporters? Plain old republicans who voted Trump purely because he was the party's candidate? People who voted for the New Guy just because? Erstwhile Clinton supporters who didn't bother to vote?
We don't need all of those people, but we do need some of them, assuming we want to win. Politics does involve actually convincing people to vote for your candidate, which may sometimes require forgoing the pleasures of calling people stupid.
So suppose I video a black guy getting shot by a cop. What do I do with the video? Suppress it and testify that the shooting was justified? Insist that the same thing would have happened to the guy if he had been white, and demand that everybody else say the same thing?
In a country in which race is such a salient issue, to what degree must we suppress honest discussions of race? And once we do that, what is going to happen to the minority vote? And what happens to our own integrity?
The idea that whites are demonized by liberals or democrats is the biggest strawman of all. Only the fringiest of fringes engage in that sort of thing, but all the identity-politics apologist/revisionists buy into it for rhetoric's sake. Democrats don't care about straight people, which is proven by their support of gay marriage. Say it out loud and feel your IQ just slipping away.
I am really glad to hear other people saying this.
We don't need all of those people, but we do need some of them, assuming we want to win. Politics does involve actually convincing people to vote for your candidate, which may sometimes require forgoing the pleasures of calling people stupid.
I find the OP reasonable (if not completely decisive) on that question:
Clinton's coalition seems likely to triumph in the long term. Teixeira has claimed that "because of demographic changes alone, if Democrats in 2020 garner the exact same share of every racial group that they got in 2016, they will win Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida -- and come close in Arizona."
But as FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten argues, if Republicans can keep increasing their vote share among whites -- get 90 percent of white voters in the Upper Midwest like they do in the South, say -- they can hang on to their geographical advantage for a long-ass time.
It's a delicate dance, as two demographic ships pass in the night. Republicans will eventually need more minorities to win, but Dems needed a few more whites to win this November.
172: Like black black or maybe the light's not good and he could have been Iranian?
In the wake of the election, seeing things like this just fucking kills me. (A majority of the population in every single state is in favor of increasing taxes on people making $250k+. Every single state! In most states, the support is overwhelming.)
172: You shouldn't have been filming in the first place.
178: Dealing with some of these ethnic types, the blood tends to run a little hotter. That's just science.
if the story is an economic one, we'd expect shifts from Obama to trump in demographics and regions that economically are doing poorly. And... That's basically what we see. I think this is obscured in the big picture vote totals because lots of R leaning independents in educated and wealthy demographics voted for Hillary because trump was a total shit show.
Also where is Emerson posting these days I would like to read his election stuff thanks.
166: Oh, sure. Next you're going to tell us there is no War on Christmas.
180: Emerson is in the Other Place, and yeah, you're really echoing the kind of thing he says there. Emerson, like you, thinks that the small minority of Trump voters is the dominant explanation for the Trump phenomenon, and that the overwhelming majority of Trump voters are incidental.
Not until I'm treated to a raft of articles from our worthless press about how maybe we should stop the war.
Actually, I guess that's really what we're already seeing with all those stories about identity politics.
urple, I think 175 was riffing on 167 as well as 172 (and contradicting 168!). Not saying I laughed out loud, but it wasn't completely random.
184: I've also been looking for ways to set up the line in 179, which for the sad unenlightened sacks out there, is straight form the Better Call Saul episode, "Pimento".
in demographics and regions that economically are doing poorly.
Pittsburgh and environs handled the recession better than almost anyplace in the country. There was no foreclosure crisis to speak of*, the local unemployment rate was better than the national for something like 100 months running, and, since the 2009 G20 conference here, the city has become a cliche of Rust Belt revival. Yet Trump doubled Romney's vote totals in adjacent suburbs where Romney and Obama had run about even (Clinton matched Obama in those places). That includes both affluent streetcar suburbs and solidly middle-class suburbs. Practically Trump's entire margin in PA came from places exactly like I've described (I have a list).
Now, I can't account for all of Trump's 300k vote gain in PA, but my point is that we see 80-100% gains in places that aren't even a tiny bit like what you describe, so it seems really weird to say that your description captures his victory. 0% of his surge in Affluent Suburb can be ascribed to doing poorly economically, so how meaningful can that factor be?
*because the market had never gotten heated (due to 25 years of decline) and, weirdly, local lending norms mattered--banks with branches in Cleveland and Pittsburgh made bad loans there and good ones here
Well it seems he has his head on straight then. Most Trump voters are Republican partisans, no one except Hillary Clinton is trying to figure out how to get them to vote for the Democratic Party. They're not going to, either because their racist or have hallucinated a world where voting republican makes sense.
I don't understand 187 at all.
Anyway, I'm finally looking at the Ramachandran tweetstorm, and I got to the word cloud thing. Not only is the email aspect infuriating, but look at them again: in addition to email, there's "lie" and "scandal" in 2nd-biggest type, as well as "health, pneumonia", and "fib". On Trump's? The only negative word I can even make out without squinting is "negative". Squinting a bit, I see "Russia" and "Russian" listed separately; combine them, and perhaps it would reach 3rd tier status.
So basically, Trump was effectively given a complete pass ("foundation" literally doesn't appear on his cloud; it's a 2nd tier word on Clinton's). If the press had any self-respect, they'd all jump off a bridge.
Just got to the end of the Tweetstorm. Lots of good stuff, but my key takeaway:
Among WWC, Obama was preferred over Clinton (in 2016), and Biden was preferred over Obama. As a reminder, Obama's policies and positions are more pro-trade and pro-Wall Street than Clinton's, and Biden's are more so than Obama's. It's really hard to say that the WWC could have been won over with a more economically populist message when their stated preference order is white male anti-populist=>black male non-populist=>white female populist-curious.
What the hell is "The Other Place" I wanna read me some Emerson wisdom. Not. If it's twitter, I can't be bothered, and anyway, I see hints hilzoy hangs there, which would keep me away.
Y'all are doing great, micromanaging excuse mongering as we head toward apocalypse.
Notivce the cold front, cause jet stream is forced south, which means warm spot over the Pole?
Arctic Goes Bonkers ...Counterpunch, an alternative to smug Vox blankies
"Meanwhile, and only very recently, extraordinarily bad news is coming out 0f the Arctic: The Siberian Times d/d October 4tth has an article about an expedition to the Laptev Sea (Arctic) bringing forth awful news, simply awful, as scientists discover severe underwater permafrost degradation. Dr. Igor Semiletov of Tomsk Polytechnic University led the charge on the research vessel Academic M.A. Lavrentyev on a 40-day mission."
I think this is how the world ends, wow there are big methane bubbles, how come...oops up 3 degrees F this year? Holy Fuck? Then, bombs away.
Spike will fade fast, but a couple years of zero food production...probably in Trump's first term.
Maybe Bob's been watching Interstellar again.
Hah, over at LGM there is a "Bernie is making sense" post by that son of a bitch Lemieux. Get the fuck away from my party, asshole. Dan Nexon, the new guy, wow.
All the Clinton backers after viciously trying to destroy Sanders and a entire young generation of his support are now seeking redemption by help old ladies across the street and makin phone calls. So dedicated. So compassionate. Gave the world to Hitler for identity politics, but they are the serious persons working n the world.
Kill the Democratic Party with Fire.
No, FBI, a metaphor and allusion, not a plan.
130: a) No, not anymore, I think the seams are starting to come apart b) n/a, and c) No, it's not a silent majority argument. It's that there are many people who may be inclined to vote Democrat, but are not, because they're broke, miserable, and have no expectation they'll be helped, whoever wins. Mostly they probably disengage, but some vote for Trump. It's enough to lose a few swing states.
Following up on this, even though it's a fairly boring disagreement.
One piece of evidence that I'd offer for polarization being a major story of the election is that vote splitting hit an all-time low. It's been trending down, but if there was ever an election in which you would expect the trend to shift it would be one between two of the most unpopular candidates ever.
You would think that there would be some Democrats who just wouldn't be willing to vote for Clinton (but would vote for Democrats for other offices) and some Republicans (including many of the Republican leadership) who wouldn't vote for Trump but would support down-ballot candidates. But, that didn't happen at all, the trend continued.
That makes it seem like there aren't many people who are open to both parties -- most people have an ideological or emotional connection to one or the other.
Given that premise the reason why I call your argument a "silent majority" claim is that it suggests that there are a significant number of people who may vote Republican but don't have a strong emotional tie and could be Democrats if they were just targeted with the right attention. I just don't see that as a significant group in American politics right now.
Of course, as the title of the thread points out, in a close election everything matters. And, considering that Republicans are now completely public in their support of voter suppression it's clear that both Republicans and Democrats think that higher turnout benefits Democrats. So there's plenty of reason to try to get marginal voters to the polls -- and that's not lost on campaigns; that's a major focus of time and energy.
What seems strange to me is to identify that as a factor which is either crucial or definitive explanation for this election or to identify it as one that should come as a surprise to the Democratic establishment. I don't find either of those claims convincing.
I think this is pretty much correct. The extra votes to elect a Dem in 2020 will come from people who stayed home this time, not from Trump voters who changed their minds because of some faux or real populist message from Democrats.
Time to find the next D "outsider"
As long as I'm disagreeing with things, I figured out what pisses me off about 162.
I agree that the frequent discussion of race was probably, on balance a vote loser for the Democrats in this election. I also don't think it was a mistake*. I think that campaigns don't have complete control over what issues will be prominent in an election, but they have to be willing to fight even when they may be at a tactical disadvantage on a given issue -- and I would think that any supporter of a more confrontational party would agree with that.
Calling out the Trump campaign on its race-baiting was important! It's important to defend anti-racism as a norm in American culture and, even more importantly, to be running against Trump and not talk about race and racism would very much be abandoning people of color who were rightly scared and pissed off.
Seeing it as purely a tactical decision of the campaign ignores the fact that there were important values at stake and that Democrats had an obligation to defend them. To think otherwise is to be just as spineless as people accuse the Democrats of being in other cases.
* Or being driven by the Clinton campaign, a view that rtcb mistakenly attributes to the article I quoted.
196: Ahh, the noble sacrifice for high ideals story of election. We lost, but had no moral choice but to stand for the downtrodden and vulnerable. What could we do?
Katha Pollit...well no one will be surprised by Pollit. Much the same as nicks, except sexism instead of racism was the "Lost Cause"
Notmyfaultnotmyfaultnotmyfaultnotmyfault
Atrios has turned on Clinton in three weeks. As the consequences of grotesque failure start literally beating kids on the head, gradually HRC's name will become a curse, and soon after Obama will join the ranks of Worst Prez Evah.
I keep waiting for the fucking shame and guilt.
not from Trump voters who changed their minds because of some faux or real populist message from Democrats..
1) Don't discount the Trump voters who will survey the wreckage and corruption four years from now and consider "holy shit, what have I done?" There will be dozens of them.
2) Its not so much the populist messages that would have benefited Democrats, its that policies that could have actually improved peoples lives over the last eight years but actually didn't happen, contributing to their anger (I'm looking at you, TARP). Instead, the best we could offer was Obama care, which many people resented because it forced them to pay a crapload of money for a shitty, high deductible insurance policy that doesn't actually pay out most times you try to make a claim. Making Democrats the party of health insurance companies was maybe not the best idea.
198.1 We need more than dozens. And a Democrat capable of exploiting that remorse skillfully. Unfortunately Sanders will be too old by then.
Who do we have in 2020 that's not old? Gillibrand? Booker?
That's what I was thinking. Obviously a bright young thing in their late 30s would be great, but you play the hand you're dealt.
I get the impression that the Democratic bench is kind of shallow. The right has tons of fresh young faces in the pipeline while the left has a bunch of superannuated coots. The right has also been doing a bang-up job of taking legislatures at the state level (which is part of their farm team strategy for ensuring they have a deep bench). This is the fruition of decades of work by right wing activists and billionaire funded think tanks like the various Koch entities. The Democrats on the other hand seem to have no coherent strategy. Perhaps a good whuppin' under Trump will get them to start thinking strategically.
We shoulda had George Soros buy us some state legislatures.
86, 87: Nonsense scandals aren't contingent on specific events.
Sure there were going to be nonsense scandals, and if the email thing had not been there more aspects of the Clinton Foundation would have certainly been more front and center. "Lock her up" for something, surely. And that all was part of why it was even close. Jroth has it right in 95, it is hard to dwnplay the very specific timing and the impression of official sanction that the Comey letter represented in an election now down to 79K votes spread over 3 relatively large states. And timing could hardly have been worse.
This election did swing on several contingent events on top of a a lot of substantive rot in the country. its people, its media and its politicians. Other contingent results would have swung it the other way.
Who do we have in 2020 that's not old?
There have been 27 US presidential elections in which an incumbent ran for re-election; in 18 of them the incumbent won. 2024 might be the one to focus on.
208: Yeah. If he keeps doing stuff like the Carrier deal, and Democrats keep bringing their usual weak bullshit, he'll get his eight years.
I think the Democrats need to attack him on the Carrier deal.
196- From the original Vox article: "Clinton's problem is that she couldn't rely on her identity to tell the story of intersectionality, so she had to tell it out loud, paying rhetorical fealty to all the subaltern groups the Democratic Party represents."
The clear implication is that HRC's campaigning was feeding into the sense of tribal identity Trump was trying to create.
Reminding people of their racial identity has both a short term and a long term effect. In the short term it may make people slightly more conservative. In the long term if you remind people enough they stop forgetting and regard it as a lesson of some importance i.e. they vote tribaly from then on.
211: Carrier is still moving more jobs to Mexico than it's keeping. Attack.
And, also, lie about it. Just say "he gave them a massive tax deal, and it didn't save a single job. They're moving all the jobs to Mexico." Lie and keep lying. Keep pushing the smoke into the air. Get some message discipline going and the message has to be "Trump was outsmarted. Carrier got a great deal on taxes and he didn't save a single job."
I guess I could boycott Carrier, especially since I just bought a new air condition and furnace this summer.
214,215: No one gives a shit. A thousand people were going to be out of work, and now they're not. This "Well, actually" stuff has never worked before, and it's definitely not going to start working now.
215: I don't think lying about it is necessary here and I don't think the Democratic coalition will hold together under that kind of tactics the way the Republicans one can. The problem isn't what to attack about. The problem is getting the attack in front of people who might otherwise support Trump.
217: It's not "Well, actually". It's "Carrier is moving 1,200 jobs to Mexico after Trump said he cut a deal with them."
It's very hard to manage how the puke funnel works. Bailout Detroit and save hundreds of thousands of jobs bad, bribe Carrier and save a few hundred good. Mainstream press will not go full oppositional (unlike Fox) so they will subtly reinforce those RW narratives at every turn.
But we all should admit we do not really have clues as to how to fight it. There's been a 20-year slow-motion right wing coup in the US of which this may not be a culmination but just another stage.Institutions like the NYT news and politics desk have aided it immensely. I can't even turn this into a rational argument--my hatred of everyone and everything has rendered me even less coherent then usual.
Looking forward to watching us all make our micro-adjustments and accommodations.
220: I think they (the portion of the Democratic Party that works full time at being a Democrat) need somebody (or multiple bodies) to just go on the attack about everything in every media outlet that will air them. It's not at all about rational arguing (except in the sense that the gatekeepers of the media seem to be unwilling to air complete bulshit when it comes from a Democrat). It's about making sure the rebuttal hits before the message sinks in.
And doing that while sending out as few pictures of your balls as you possibly can, with none at all going to teenage girls.
210. Yes. ANALOGY WARNING. In the wake of the Brexit vote, the Lib Dems, who are effectively leading the damage limitation exercise in the absence of Corbyn, went after the government over the terms it had offered Nissan not to relocate. Turns out it will likely cost billions, and still be insufficient to persuade anybody else to invest in the country.
This seems to have done them a great deal of good electorally.
Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts. And so Mr. Trump's tweet, amongst a certain crowd--a large part of the population--are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some--amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and that there are no facts to back it up.
Maybe instead Democrats could come up with an ambitious, far-reaching plan to facilitate the creation of good jobs in the US, craft a simple, persuasive message to sell it, and get candidates and leadership that people find credible to repeat it over and over again.
Great idea. Somebody should do that.
It's "Carrier is moving 1,200 jobs to Mexico after Trump said he cut a deal with them."
Exactly. Attack him on his strengths. And his strength (supposedly) is that he is a great dealmaker. It needs to be, every day, "well, Bankrupt Donald got outsmarted again."
It's all well and good to point out that what Trump is doing is mostly for show, but it won't be effective unless people first believe you're able and willing to do something about it properly.
It's not pointing out that what Trump is doing is mostly for show. It's pointing out that he's failing. His defenders know he's an asshole doing things just for show.
This seems to have done them a great deal of good electorally.
I'm going to wait for a by-election outside of London before jumping to any conclusions about that.
I'm waiting for the discussion of the impact of Brexit on Wales, but only if it is called "Welshit."
Democrats shoulda. The Green Lantern theory of government again. What WWC friendly policies could the Democrats have passed in the 2 years they controlled the government that would have materially improved people's lives *and* be perceived to have done so by that crowd? Because Obamacare was the best possible health care bill passable by that crowd of legislators, it actually did improve people's lives substantially, and yet it still failed to be perceived that way. Tell me again what was achievable that wouldn't have had the same thing happen to it under attack from the Mighty Wurlitzer?
Lowering the Medicare age, maybe? Probably wouldn't have passed, but it would've been harder for the Republicans to maintain unified opposition to it.
See also: today's announcement of an unemployment rate of 4.6%, quite near historic lows in 1969 (3.5), 2000 (4.0), and 2007 (4.5), and lower than anything achieved during the Reagan years.
And that doesn't even count me working two jobs now.
230: You don't have long to wait. Lincolnshire is deep Brexit country, and the Conservatives had a huge majority in that seat at the GE, but if the Lib Dems are picking up remainers from both them and Labour they should increase their share of the vote significantly.
Tell me again what was achievable that wouldn't have had the same thing happen to it under attack from the Mighty Wurlitzer?
Nothing. Let's all quit and go home.
Because Obamacare was the best possible health care bill passable by that crowd of legislators, it actually did improve people's lives substantially, and yet it still failed to be perceived that way.
The thing is that the people whose lives it improved most are poor, and they are not = WWC, who are non-college whites who are mostly middle class but less securely middle-class then they used to be.
How about instead we relish the opportunity to not have to defend actual plans and attack what is put forth by the other side?
238: Also, old people tend toward shitheadedness and plenty of people argued that expanding healthcare coverage to poorer people (without doing like Medicaid and paying less than Medicare) would make it harder for old people to get appointments.
this seems important to the overall story (and pushes the story in an emersonian directipn). Republicans picked up some working class rust belt votes, but not really that many--the pickup was swamped by working class votes that Democrats lost. (Mostly people who stayed home.) Which means this loss (or the next win) isn't about appealing to working class Trump voters. The problem wasn't even the Trump voters! It's about getting those disaffected working class Democrats back to the polls.
The cynical answer to that is probably "find a candidate with a penis."
241: I saw that article and then I saw that Nate Cohn tweeted that it was the worst article yet.
242: How are we going to do that if we're also ruling out people that send penis-selfies?
244: Testimonials from non-party witnesses, like Bill Clinton had.
244 it's a delicate balancing act.
241 is correct though, at least for OH, WI, MI, MN. In 2012 36.5% of eligible voters in those states voted for Obama. In 2016, only 31.1% did. Meanwhile, the R share went from 31.8% to 32.2%.
The enormous caveat is that this is not what happened in FL and PA.
5% of the voting eligible population abandoned the Democrats in a wide range of states, mostly in the midwest: IA, ND, ME, OH, RI, SD, MI, MO, WI, HI, VT, MN, MT
The cynical answer to that is probably "find a candidate with a penis."
I don't think a penis is necessary. As impossible as it is to disentangle hatred of Clinton from generic misogyny she is despised beyond what one would expect for the typical female politician.
I don't know about Florida and I don't want to know about Florida. But PA I think will revert back to its usual passing acquaintance with sanity if (when) Trump fails to bring back coal. For all the talk about collapse of the Democrats here, we elected Democrats for three state offices that same election as Trump won and have a Democratic governor elected in 2015.
249: Having seen the attacks on Pelosi, I don't buy that. Any woman who comes across as somehow threatening to men who what Fox is going to get the same treatment.
251: Have the attacks on Pelosi been effective? I mean, of course republicans hate her, but I thought she has been consistently popular with democrats. With Hilary Clinton, on the other hand, even a fair number of democrats appear to be affected by the weird derangement field that seems to activate whenever her name comes up.
Anyone excited to vote for Trump is not worth strategizing over. It might be possible to win some anti-Clinton voters in future elections by not running Clinton, or at least get some of them to abstain, but not by policy choices.
I don't think there's any way to directly compare as running for president (plus being first lady) are basically in a class with only being president when it comes to name recognition. But I'm of the opinion that Clinton was widely vilified because she was seen as the most likely Democratic candidate, not because she's Hillary Clinton.
I remember studies showing that once women get nominated they aren't less likely to get elected but I have no idea how robust that result, if it's changed over time, and, critically, what effects a dedicated, misogynist campaign could have (that is, I could imagine Republican women being unaffected but Democratic women being hurt as right-wing media targets them). Regardless, the election was close enough that the average female Democrat would've won.
Nothing. Let's all quit and go home.
Right? I swear to christ I'm just about there. I'm not seeing much to make me think the Democrats are actually going to do some introspection and try something different.
BTW, the only places where new voters turned out for Trump in any significant quantity were WV, ME, KY, PA, RI, IA, ND, and IN. That smells like coal/oil to me.
254: I don't think many other candidates would get the same establishment media buy-in, especially over such a long time and with so much glee.
I suppose this marks me as a horrible person -- maybe even a neoliberal! -- but I sure did admire the way that Hillary ran her campaign.
In the end, she couldn't match Trump for his ability to gain attention, but she crushed him in three debates in a way that was so obvious that even the American people figured it out. The Democratic convention was genuinely moving and beautiful.
I had been afraid that she was going to retreat into a conservative campaign - both in the sense that she would take no chances, and in the sense that she would pander to the center. I think the choice of Tim Kaine played into both of those things, but mostly, I think she exhibited an entirely appropriate outrage for the genuine outrages that Trump committed.
To cite one example, calling birtherism a "racist lie" was dead-on correct, important to say and politically beneficial. There were a lot of other examples.
I wonder if she could have run against the media in a direct way. They hated her anyway; what did she have to lose by telling them to go fuck themselves (as Trump did)?
I think the key trait of the next successful national Democrat is going to be anger, but that may be pundit's fallacy on my part. I'm certainly mad as hell.
296.last is my thinking also. And I arrived at that conclusion after introspection.
It's not "Well, actually". It's "Carrier is moving 1,200 jobs to Mexico after Trump said he cut a deal with them."
This is living in a fantasy world but personally I think D should pick up where scraps left off and hypocrisy. So yes on the failure of 1200 jobs still moving to Mexico carrier trump got hosed. But also you can't let him take credit for tech ones saved. So we need loud and public outcry EVERY TIME A MANUFACTURING JOB IS LOST IN THIS COUNTRY. Why is Trump doing nothing to help these workers? Doesn't he care about these jobs? He struck a bad deal with Carrier but at least he did something... Where is he now??
But I'm of the opinion that Clinton was widely vilified because she was seen as the most likely Democratic candidate, not because she's Hillary Clinton.
She's been widely vilified since 1992. You think that has been the reason all along?
Yes. In 1992 through 2000 I think she was widely vilified as a means of attacking Bill Clinton.
262: It's hard to remember this but there was a brief period when she was Sec. of State that she got a lot of good press, and even some Republicans compared her favorably to Obama.
264: She periodically has gotten non-hateful press, and that's all she ever needed.
I do worry that NickS's point that raising the salience of race and sex makes white voters more motivated by racism and sexism is right, but I agree that backing off "identity politics" is a terrible idea. Criticisms should be constructively targeted and care should be taken to emphasize common problems (eg, don't fault the WWC for feeling entitled to a middle class lifestyle, lament that it's becoming harder for everyone). Identify common threats and enemies to unify people to address real problems, because otherwise demagogues will be happy to manufacture them for less beneficial ends.
The reason conservatives so despise "political correctness" is that it works. Responding to public displays of bigotry, making unrecalcitrant people pay a social penalty, and getting others to apologize and disavow such attitudes makes it harder for them to transmit their virulence to the next generation.
Personally, I think anger is the key. The media has revealed that it will treat you better the more it is afraid of you (or your supporters). And you need the media to at least be neutral if you want to get the weakly-aligned Democrats and independents who aren't actually Republicans to the polls.
256: Even if they did try something different, I'm not seeing anything to make me think it would help. It's too late, the damage is done. Tend your garden and make sure it's well above sea level because on a macro level, we're screwed.
"Tend your garden" is a metaphor; I'm not talking about climate change. (Although, you know, that's also relevant.) How are Democrats supposed to make a difference at the state level with all the gerrymandering we already have, which Trump's Supreme Court and other appointees are fairly likely to uphold? How do demographics change anything if the Republicans can make it as hard as they want to vote? Does anyone think the media will actually be significantly better while Trump is in office, just because a few people in it have worn hair shirts for a few weeks? The president is almost completely unfettered on foreign policy; how do we keep any allies or treaties at all?
At this point I'm hoping that Republicans screw things up - but in specifically recoverable ways, e.g. not completely repealing Obamacare or overturning Roe v. Wade, just hollowing them out - to an incredible degree in just 20 months and we get a historic wave in 2018, even bigger than their sweep in 2010, at all levels of government, just in time to have a meaningful opposition party and some degree of input in redistricting in 2020. (I realize that 2020 is the relevant election for redistricting. However, four years of full Republican control of government would be too much at this point, and like someone else said incumbent presidents have good chances.)
If that doesn't happen, I'll expect America to go the way of the Ottoman Empire. Sorry to go all bob, but optimism seems unrealistic.
Clinton's approval ratings were pretty good back before she ran for President, so I wonder how much of it because she ran for President.
Also, it doesn't take long for the media to smear a Democrat. How long did it take for the media to invent whole-cloth the smear that Gore was a serial liar? There was a point where even I believed that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, and it was entirely because the media spent months priming me to believe it. I think that's why the Comey letter was so damaging -- the media spent a long time priming everyone to believe that the emails were a real (yet incomprehensible) scandal, so that when the head of the FBI announced new evidence it was deadly.
270: I think this causation is backwards. These bullshit media attacks don't hobble viable candidates; they're what happens to non-viable candidates because there's nothing worthwhile to say about them. What was Gore's campaign about? Never had a clue. How about Clinton's? Going by the slogan she picked out, it was apparently about her. This stuff never stuck to Obama because he was actually running on something people gave a damn about. Same for Bill, too, IIRC.
271: I completely disagree. Hillary's slogan was "Stronger Together". Obama's was "Hope and Change". Bill was building a bridge to the 21st century. It's all bs.
272: Wasn't it "I'm with her"?
Did you even see what the American media did this campaign? I mean, I'm sure the internet works, but it's not like Johnstown, PA voters are reading the Guardian.
269: Don't you watch action/sports movies? We'll win because we have to.
Personally, I think anger is the key.
I sure do like Elizabeth Warren. Were it not for her, I'd say that anger can't work politically for a woman, but she seems to do okay with it.
She's old, but she's younger than Trump, and in four years, she will still be just as much younger than Trump.
In the general election, Obama ran on nothing. People acted like universal health care was a shocking bait-and-switch, even though he'd been running on it since the primaries.
In '92 the media liked Bill. (They turned on him after he was elected, for reasons I still don't understand. The fact that "Primary Colors" exists documents that the media loved Clinton before they hated him.) They liked Obama all through his Presidency.
I suppose this marks me as a horrible person -- maybe even a neoliberal! -- but I sure did admire the way that Hillary ran her campaign.
Thanks for 259, I appreciate it.
There are always things to second guess, and it's worth talking about them, but I also thought that there was a lot that I appreciated about the campaign, and it's good to note that as well.
has everyone seen this news about the fact that republicans in congress are now in talks with insurance companies about shoveling money towards the insurance companies to offset their losses in the event of an Obamacare repeal? Because of course they fucking are. Of course, poor and sick people harmed by the repeal will just have to suck it up. Fuckers.
Democrats had a supermajority in congress, they could of passéd any healthcare bill they wanted, what they wanted was this garbage plan because they are garbage.
Going by the slogan she picked out, it was apparently about her.
"Stronger together" conveys "all about her"? That's fucking nuts!
To say that Hillary lost because the campaign was "all about her" is also blindingly oblivious to the nature of the campaign of the guy who actually won.
And to say that Al Gore didn't have issues is fucking insane. This was a guy that was a decade out in front of the rest of the world on global warming in the most public way possible.
Yes, I know, it doesn't exist if the media don't focus on it, but that's not Al's fault and it's not Hillary's fault.
These bullshit media attacks don't hobble viable candidates; they're what happens to non-viable candidates because there's nothing worthwhile to say about them.
What's the word for this? I don't think "tautology" quite gets it, and it's not "self-fulfilling prophecy."
"Blaming the victim" comes close, but that's not what I'm looking for either.
Begging the question! That's it. We know that Al and Hillary were non-viable because their lack of political whateverness ensured that the ELECTORAL FUCKING COLLEGE wouldn't vote for them.
And yea the FBI thing hurt her, because it was her own political party talking shit about her and so couldn't be spun as partisan bickering.
Warren has a weird talent for being angry without being off-putting.
280: This may surprise you, but liberals are not in fact a majority in the United States. It's either compromise, or pass nothing. Anyway, the Democrats lost the ability to modify the bill in the middle of the process when Coakley lost, and had to pass it through reconciliation.
282: That argument can go in the other direction equally well. A candidate who gets bad press because they suck will always be able to say it was a groundless vendetta because just look at the coverage they got.
I'm for anger as well. Or extremely strong moral indignation. Very pointed, clear moral indignation.
This stuff never stuck to Obama because he was actually running on something people gave a damn about. Same for Bill, too, IIRC.
LOL. Obama ran on "hope and change."
Just wanted to see this.
I cannot believe I am not cynical enough. (I thought I was cynical!) Twitter says Trump owns stock in Carrier.
271 is such bullshit. What was Bill Clinton running on that people gave a damn about? Compare and contrast with what Hillary Clinton was running on that people didn't give a damn about? And Obama? Utter nonsense.
Who were they compromising with, it passed entirely with democratic votes. They had 59 senate seats they could of passéd what they wanted but preserving the bullshit rules of the senate was more important to them then winning elections, I hope it pays off for them now that it's all that is standing between us and untrammeled republican rule, but I doubt it.
Christ on a bike, fine. Sure. The media has it in for Democratic candidates (HRC, Gore), except for the equal number of times they don't (Obama, BC). It was destiny for us to lose all three branches, and most of the state governments. Nothing to be done about it. Nothing to learn. Hillary can never fail, she can only be failed.
I can't believe I have to re-calibrate AGAIN. I thought it was just a bad-policy publicity ploy. I didn't even think of self-dealing corruption. Now I have to add blatant, old-school, bags-of-money corruption into everything he does.
293: Saying that the media knifed Hillary and Gore isn't excuse-making, it's just true. That doesn't mean nothing can be done about it, but the things that need to be done are 'come up with a plan to respond to incredibly unfair media coverage' rather than 'be the kind of person who can't be attacked'. I don't know why the media loved Bill and hated Gore, but they demonstrably did, and not on the basis of anything objective.
280 is garbage too. Remember that the filibuster was still strong. Obamacare had to please all 60 D senators. Including Mark Pryor (AR), Blanche Lincoln (AR), fucking Ben Nelson (NE), Joe Manchin (WV), and Kent Conrad (ND). Flaming liberals, all of them.
Manchin is supposed to be under consideration for a Trump cabinet position.
165: When democratic norms and the rule of law break down, the people with the guns take over. ... I think that means right wing organized violence.
I live in a blue state near a large Midwestern city filled with, as gswift tells it, murderous heavily-armed minorities. Here I feel safe from the Yokel Peril.
289/294: the subsidy was too small to make a difference to the financial results of the company overall. (Unless the subsidy is bigger than we realize.) So, it probably really was just p.r.
Also, democrats had 60 votes for a grand total of 5 months.
And the Supreme Court found they had one clause wrong and fucked up half of it which wasn't fixable because of the very short time frame with control of Congress.
The fact that sitting democratic senators are terrible isn't really an arguement against my position that the Democratic Party is garbage. Remember when they went all-in on reseating Liberman after he was primaried.
I don't know why the media loved Bill and hated Gore, but they demonstrably did
Nope, nope, nope. The media fucking hated Bill. Hated him. His coverage was in the same general ballpark with what Hillary got.
What was the underlying scandal associated with Whitewater? There was none. As with the e-mails, everybody knew this in realtime. But the media found scandals.
Bill, it's true, had genuine charisma that Al and Hillary lack. And Obama has every bit of that charisma. But it shouldn't be necessary to sell basic decency via extraordinary charisma.
Liberman aside, you looked at the new Ben who replaced Ben Nelson? He's far from being as bad as he could be (consider the governor, who is worse than the disease he is named after), but there's no way anybody could have voted for something like single-payer health care and kept a seat for the Democrats.
296: Right. Describing "the Democrats" as being functionally identical to Joe Lieberman is insane.
303.last is right. But it also means find somebody with charisma next time.
303: The campaign/presidency distinction was a big one for Bill. You're right that once he was president, they were on an insane witchhunt, but they liked him in 1992.
But it shouldn't be necessary to sell basic decency via extraordinary charisma.
I don't see this principle leading to anything but permanent minority status for the Democrats. Of course you need charisma to win elections.
306: This really does not seem as if it should be so hard. Isn't electoral politics selecting for charisma? Is it really that rare that we can't consistently come up with one or two superstars who are also substantively competent and good on the issues, out of the entire country?
302
And who would have been in those Senate seats if not for the Democrat? A 100% loyal Republican. The Democratic party is garbage because in order to win a majority, in order to, you know, govern, they have to win with the median voter. The median voter is fucking conservative. Democrats can have loyalty and be a permanent opposition party, or they can compromise and occasionally govern. Depressing but true.
That didn't have any content, I just fundamentally do not get what the problem is. I'd sort of think that almost anyone who made it to the top levels of electoral politics would be compelling on the Bill/Barack level, but this apparently isn't the case.
310: There is something going on there in terms of party discipline, though. Joe Lieberman was always willing to screw the Democrats much harder than Olympia Snowe was to screw the Republicans, despite being in parallel situations.
The fact that, on top of losing nearly a supermajority of state governments, and both houses of Congress, losing the presidency to goddamn Donald Fucking Trump hasn't prompted the Democratic Party to undergo a pretty goddamn radical shake up is just maddening. "It was a very close call, lots of bad breaks, better luck next time." IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN CLOSE. And even if the presidency had gone the other way, we'd still be playing defense the whole time, because we lost everywhere else.
I have no idea how you find charisma. Apparently, I don't experience it like other people do. I found Al Gore easier to relate to than I found Bill Clinton.
You're talking to a woman who found John Kerry personally appealling, so I feel your pain.
that the emails were a real (yet incomprehensible) scandal
Not incomprehensible! Everyone with a brain knew that shit was a horrible idea. Have you read the exchanges between Podesta and Neera Tanden after that broke? Brief paraphrase "who in the FUCK let Hilary do that". IIRC Tanden then says the person responsible should be drawn and quartered.
314: Politicians seem fairly charismatic, but then they run for President and lose, and everyone realizes they didn't have any charisma.
OTOH, Trump appeared to be a repulsive sack of shit, but now I'm forced to conclude that he is an extremely charismatic sack of shit.
312: Agreed. But I think it's because Snowe was more conservative than Lieberman was liberal.
Last congress, the median Representative was Shelley Moore Capito. The median Senator was Mary Landrieu.
The median voter is fucking conservative.
This may be true in Nebraska (I really don't know), but it's absolutely not true nationally.
I mean, come on. Does Mitch McConnell have charisma? Does Bernie Sanders? How are we defining charisma?
Yes to 293 and 308.
You're talking to a woman who found John Kerry personally appealling
I liked him too but he campaigned with all the appeal of a wet paper towel.
313: Exactly. If the Democrats were looking good overall and Clinton's defeat was some kind of fluke, then "We just need to keep doing what we've been doing" might be an acceptable conclusion. But given the electoral wasteland the Dems are looking at right now, it's not acceptable at all.
309, 311: I wouldn't think it would be hard to find someone charismatic, either. But apparently it is, judging by who the Democrats have nominated in the last 45 years. You don't have to be very charismatic to win a primary.
And 318.last has it right. If HRC had been running against Scott Walker or Ted Cruz, she would have been the more charismatic one. But she wasn't.
317: You're the problem on this one -- there was no substantive reason at all to treat it as a huge deal, and your belief that there was means you got suckered.
Doesn't mean you're stupid -- lots of people vaguely believe there was something to Whitewater, after all -- but you got lied to and you're sticking with believing the bullshit.
... hasn't prompted the Democratic Party to undergo a pretty goddamn radical shake up
Okay, but who is "the Democractic Party" which is supposed to go through a shake up? It isn't like a business in which the CEO can start cleaning house, firing people, and announce a new strategy.
There are Democratic voters (us) who can make noise (and support challengers in primaries?) but I still think the most important factor is the pipeline for grooming and recruiting candidates and that can lead to major changes but it may take decades, it isn't going to happen overnight.
Unless there's some major shift in the political landscape. this article (which is critical of the democratic party) talks about how the Vietnam War and Watergate pulled a bunch of new faces into politics, including this excerpt:
The class of '74 in the House of Representatives was a remarkable group, and it had a remarkable impact on Congress. "We had a real sense of urgency," George Miller told me. "We thought we were special. We thought we were different. We came here to take the Bastille." At first the class had two major goals, several members recalled. One was to end what remained of the war in Vietnam. The other was to reform Congress. "We found that almost all of us were talking about the seniority system, the fact that Congress had been dominated by Dixiecrat Democrats," Les AuCoin said. "We needed to shake things up."
They did. By April of 1975 the war was over, although it is hard to argue that the new Democrats in Congress were primarily responsible. What they clearly were responsible for was casting the votes that revolutionized congressional procedures. New members made up more than a quarter of House Democrats in 1975. Veteran reformers finally had the votes to end the seniority system and make committee chairmen responsible to the party caucus.
"We realized we were a large enough group to make a difference," Tom Downey told me. "The older, more experienced political hands molded this very large lump of clay into the effective tool they wanted to modify the seniority system." Toby Moffett recalled, "When I walked into the first meeting and started raising points of order my first day there, Bella Abzug looked over and said, 'My God, reinforcements have arrived.' I'll never forget it as long as I live."
That was a major shakeup, and it didn't come from losing elections it came from having a while bunch of new candidates win elections.
So how do we get there?
I wouldn't think it would be hard to find someone charismatic, either. But apparently it is, judging by who the Democrats have nominated in the last 45 years.
Republican Nominees in the last 45 years:
Gerald Ford
Ronald Reagan
George HW Bush
Bob Dole
George W Bush
John McCain
Mitt Romney
Donald Trump
That's hardly a Charisma Hall of Fame.
Y'all pay way much more attention to the mainstream media than the average person, or even the average Republican. Fox has an audience, nowhere as large as the nets had 50 years ago, but CNN and MSNBC and the newspapers address coastal elites and are otherwise a blip. I don't think they turned the election.
That's the good news and worse news.
People are on Facebook, and you're unfriended in their networks, or don't even know where to find that grandma or cousin's network, so they and we and everybody is pretty much invisible to each other.
People's networks and contacts and sources look like Unfogged, around 15-20 who link for each other. Sometimes to fake news and breitbart, sometimes to ezra yggles and wapo.
The good news is if we do like Repubs and evangelicals do, we can find the influencers on each block, the activist schoolteacher, black female fer instance, and help her reach out in her neighborhood and set up a facebook page and very gently talk football and movies and have you heard and will you come vote with me?
Need a million.
People are on Facebook, and you're unfriended in their networks...
That's so not true for me. I've hidden them, they may have hidden me, we're still "friends."
325: Fine, setting up a private server in her basement for State Dept business in 2009 was perfectly fine and Podesta and Tanden are morons for being shocked and angry when they found out.
327: True---I didn't mean to suggest the Republicans were a lot better off. But I still think they're a little better off. Neither list has as much charisma as we'd expect from the selection effect mentioned in 309.
I'm glad we agree the Democratic Party is garbage. I'm not so sure that it was the necessity of appealing to conservative voters that caused Ben Nelson to accept all that money from insurance companies, sabotage his own party, and then leave the senate for a million dollars a year no responsibility job in the health insurance industry, but I submit its a possibility.
You guys keep talking about the empty pipeline, but it is an embarrassment of riches in CA. We'll likely have half a dozen good gubernatorial candidates. I wish they weren't all men, though.
Ben Nelson was an insurance company man since he graduated college.
Neither list has as much charisma as we'd expect from the selection effect mentioned in 309.
This may explain some of the appeal of outsiders. Reagan / Obama / Trump were all* people who built a power base on their ability to connect through media, whereas some of the other candidates built up their base within the party establishment which requires a different set of social skills.
* Reagan might be the exception, he'd been a party figure for decades
True story: The only close election I ever voted in was Ben Nelson's first primary when he was running for governor. It was decided by 51 votes. I voted for the runner-up.
Hey I guess that's what the conservative median voter wants.
That was also the first election I ever voted in.
330: Fine, setting up a private server in her basement for State Dept business in 2009 was perfectly fine
Pretty much, yeah. You can't tell me what law or regulation it violated, or what actual harm it did -- all the excitement about it was pure raw bullshit.
The Republicans in cooperation with the media have really weaponized 'no smoke without fire', and I don't know how to combat it.
The good news is if we do like Repubs and evangelicals do, we can find the influencers on each block, the activist schoolteacher, black female fer instance, and help her reach out in her neighborhood and set up a facebook page and very gently talk football and movies and have you heard and will you come vote with me?
Need a million.
That's actually a pretty damn good description of how politics works.
or what actual harm it did -- all the excitement
Podesta and Tanden got excited because they're dupes or Republican shills? And as to harm, enjoy the Trump years.
303: Have you read "Primary Colors", or seen the movie? It's like a documentary of the media being in love with Clinton, and then become disillusioned because he's sleazy. The most telling detail is that it was written by Joe Klein, who is the Platonic ideal of brainless media conventional wisdom.
In '92, they clearly thought Clinton was the young idealist from central casting. It was the media who made Clinton "the Comeback Kid" after the Gennifer Flowers scandal.
I don't know who Tanden is, but isn't Podesta an idiot?
342: I don't know the context of the line you're quoting, but I'll bet that it's after the press started tearing her to shreds about it. Wishing it hadn't happened because the press had turned it into the bullshit scandal of the day isn't equivalent to a sober evaluation that it was any kind of importantly bad thing in itself.
I don't want to go down this road too far, but here at the end of all things, can we maybe admit that it is a possibility that the reason the media universally thinks the Clintons are sleazy is because they're sleazy.
346: The problem is that the media universally thinks the Clintons are sleazier than the average politician at their level, and they aren't. They're some sleazy, and there are certainly politicians who are way less sleazy, but the coverage isn't anywhere close to evenhanded.
In the 1992 election, we had two adulterers running against each other, and the media knew about both of them but only wrote stories about one. Sure, Bill was sleazy. But GHWB wasn't?
They are also much, much less sleazy than Trump.
Right, and non-sleazy candidates Gore and Kerry won in landslides.
My favorite part is how the Republican Speaker of the House during the Clinton impeachment turned out to have been paying somebody for silence about his pedophilia.
I realize that isn't a great defense, but it's important context.
They theory that I've heard about why the media went after Clinton so strongly, which makes some sense to me, is that none of them took Trump seriously as a candidate*. So they weren't looking at her in comparison to Trump (or in comparison to any of the Republican candidates) but in comparison to some platonic ideal.
That isn't a complete explanation; there's also personal animus, but I think that explains a significant amount of the nit-picking by the quote-unquote liberal media.
* Or took Sanders seriously either; so the same dynamic would apply in the primary.
348: I had no idea. There was this, but it looks like Bush was able to effectively shut her down.
Oh, FFS. Good to see that the NYTimes is still in the bag for Trump. Trump Sealed Carrier Deal With Mix of Threat and Incentive
Like, the email thing got sold as crooked. Crooked Hillary.
And even taking the gswift line that it was bad bad bad stupid how could she oh my god a _private_ server? There's no indication at all that there was anything remotely corrupt about it in any sense that involves hiding wrongdoing. Paranoid, maybe, secretive, sure. But there's no story at about it having been used to hide any particular scandal.
So if that's adding to your sense of Hillary as 'sleazy' rather than as a paranoid secretive control freak (which is not the same thing), you too have been suckered.
I've always assumed that they come off generally sleazy in private rather than as people with integrity that have a few vices. Certainly, bill Clinton is sleazy he sleeps with interns.
275: The action movies that come to mind at the moment are Inglorious Basterds and The Hunger Games. I don't think there are teachable lessons there.
333: Good for CA. I'm sure the same is true in Vermont, New York, and the other 10 states that just elected Democratic state legislatures. What's the path to making it true in the 34 that don't? I know someone who's talked seriously about moving to a purple state to help. I'm not opposed in principle but it would be a big leap.
I've always assumed that they come off generally sleazy in private rather than as people with integrity that have a few vices.
Oh for fuck's sake. You've been reading people telling demonstrable lies about the Clintons since 1992, and your take on it is that they must be generally sleazy in private? Why on earth do you think you know a damn thing about how they come off in private, and why on earth do you think it's important?
Gore did win. John Kerry was running against bad fundamentals and had a stupid unconvincing position on the war. Also was totally the wrong person to run as an anti-war? candidate as his biography hurt him rather than helped him on the issue.
I swear to God. I'm coming back to the 1992 election because the parallelism is so clear, and sure, being an old-money Yankee having a quiet affair with a White House aide is much classier than being trailer trash banging a nightclub singer. But if that distinction in 'sleaziness' levels means anything important to you, there's something really broken about how you're evaluating the situation.
Gore did win.
By that standard, so did Clinton. And yet, we're still doomed.
Man, I am going to take a short break from phone banking from Foster Campbell to express my deep belief that people's inability to understand Hillary Clinton as a person with her own agency, goals, and beliefs separate from her husband, who is not morally responsible for all her husband's actions, even though it made sense for her to be allied with him, even though she loves him, is ...
wait for it ...
really fucking sexist.
Now I'm going to totally disengage so I don't get upset! Back to phone banking!
Wait? What was so bad in John Kerry's biography?
Gore did win.
The popular vote only counts in horseshoes. If it wasn't razor thin in Florida, it couldn't have been stolen the way it was.
364: The Swift Boat Veterans? Another insane bullshit media nonsense.
Hmm, it's almost as if perceptions of sleaziness are unrelated to actual sleaziness. Nah, that couldn't be it.
being an old-money Yankee having a quiet affair with a White House aide is much classier than being trailer trash banging a nightclub singer
Is this going to be on the test?
It's not important to me, I'm just trying to figure out why a class of people that have spent a lot of time with them (the media) seems to think they're corrupt as hell. It's also possible it's just classism.
It's the section right after how to use a fingerbowl.
Remember Somersby? He was a bit much to take after a while, but his narrative of the press as "The Cool Kids" in high school and the puerile lunch room judgments and antics of the press was just spot on.
368: The media vendetta really is kind of mystifying. Like, there was never anything at all to Whitewater, and that should have been apparent from the beginning. I have speculated that it was a combination of a couple of important actors who were literally corruptly serving Republican political goals, and a whole lot of sheep following them and keeping the frenzy going, but I don't know.
But recognize that the story you're telling yourself is that the media has secret knowledge (or well-founded opinion) that they can't reveal about the Clintons' corruption levels, and they react to that by telling factually false stories about the Clintons' corruption so as to accurately convey the total level of corruption: they can't tell the truth, so they make up similar lies. That's not a story that makes me want to rely on the media's beliefs.
Guys I'm not a republican and I don't believe their nonsense trash about democratic candidates. The problem with Kerry is that: when your biography is you volunteered to murder people in a war, and later realized that war was a unforgivable atrocity, it means you have really bad judgement about if wars are good ideas.
373.1: It was Richard Mellon Scaife's project. The rest of the family funded a medical school, so it's disrepute all around.
375: The fuck? What do you think your options were in 1966?
I get heated about this, not because there's any reason to care that the Clintons have been personally maltreated, but because if we're looking how to avoid that sort of thing happening in the future to Democratic candidates, avoiding running people who are unusually corrupt won't help. The candidates we've been running really weren't unusually corrupt in any objective sense.
There has to be tactics that will help, but being too pure to be attacked isn't one of them.
Somerby really did do yeoman's work talking about how the press regularly and intentionally misread and misinterpreted facts about Clinton, Gore and Kerry in a million different ways. It was just so exhausting to read it day in and day out.
374 My provisional view would be closer to: when you spend time with Bill he comes off as a really gross person, even if he isn't objectively grosser than other politicians, so stories about him get filtered through a "he's gross filter" even if the specifics of his gross affect are not really reportable. Hillary's probably collateral damage
The problem with Kerry is that: when your biography is you volunteered to murder people in a war, and later realized that war was a unforgivable atrocity, it means you have really bad judgement about if wars are good ideas.
This seems to rest on the assumption that the only valid reason to oppose any way is across-the-board radical pacifism. Given that there about a dozen consistent pacifists of that type in existence at any time, that doesn't hold out much hope for peace.
Have you tried visualizing it first? It's greener than you'd think.
332: I'm glad we agree the Democratic Party is garbage. I'm not so sure that it was the necessity of appealing to conservative voters that caused Ben Nelson to accept all that money from insurance companies, sabotage his own party ...
I think this really shows the incoherence of the leftist anti-Democratic view. If you're going to claim that Nelson is typical of this "garbage" party, you can't claim that he demonstrated this by sabotaging the party. You have to pick.
The latter is correct, by the way. He sabotaged his party.
Say what you will about Obamacare, but we're seeing that Obama passed a plan whose essential elements might survive even in a scenario that is worse than anything he could have conceived of at the time.
when you spend time with Bill he comes off as a really gross person
How much time have you spent with him?
380: Well, certainly if people have been telling malicious lies about him for decades, he must have deserved it somehow.
377 well at his age I didn't volunteer for Iraq so I'm going to but a check mark in the win column. When the biggest thing in your political biography is "I by my own standards, made a terrible descision that involved me killing people for shitty reasons", that might be understandable, but it is a reason to not trust you on these issues. You already fucked up.
62: Obama won 2 times and would have won this year if he could have ran again
Part of the reason Obama is currently popular is that the Republicans have stopped spending so much energy attacking him to refocus on attacking Hillary. If he were running again, his favorables wouldn't be as high as they are now.
And for those who consider Hillary inherently unpopular, you might want to consider this, from before the Republican noise machine started focusing on her so exclusively.
Of course, she won that the same way Trump won the early Republican primaries: by getting a plurality in a wide field. But it ought to give pause to those who think that Clinton was/is inherently unlikable.
372 - Somersby is still at it, fwiw.
386: You do realize that "Not Volunteering" wasn't a thing in 1996, right? It was either volunteer (which let you have more choice), wait to be drafted, or dodge the draft (legally or not).
389: Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted.
By that standard, so did Clinton. And yet, we're still doomed.
True enough, but in diagnosing what went wrong, you have to pay attention to what actually happened. We know Hillary won the popular vote for the presidency, but (and I haven't checked), I'll bet the Democrats also won more votes in the House and Senate, too. (Maybe not the Senate, because more incumbent Republicans were running. As I say, I haven't checked.)
There are problems with the Democrats, but the big problems - the ones that cost the Democrats three branches of government, are institutional problems. Of the problems for which there might be a solution, I reckon the malfeasance of the media is at the top of the list.
386: The experiences of young men--especially young men with prospects--who, had there been a draft, would have been draftable for the Iraq War is incomparable to those of the Vietnam generation.
Bill Clinton is gross, he probably did rape that woman.
381. I'm not critiquing what Kerry did when he came back. I 100% agree with, and support what he did when he came back, he's a hero. I'm critiquing the way his position looks when you are running for the president of the United States on a maybe-kind-of-but-not-really anti-war position.
It's not important to me, I'm just trying to figure out why a class of people that have spent a lot of time with them (the media) seems to think they're corrupt as hell.
If, at this stage, it isn't crystal clear to you that the media is corrupt as hell, I don't think we have enough shared experience to have a conversation about this.
Asteele's contention that Kerry's volunteering, serving heroically, then actively opposing made him unsuited to criticize Iraq War is... unusual. Certainly, Rove and the Republicans viewed his biography as a strength. The Swift Boat nonsense was an attempt to attack his strongest points in typical Rovian style.
Because Bill Clinton and George Bush were so widely lauded for having dodged the draft.
Asteele is a fucking idiot and you should all refrain from adding fuel to the idiocy dumpster fire. Also, everyone's IQ is in grave peril if this thread continues. Jesus fuck. Four more years of this version of Squabbling Opposition Unfogged is more than anyone should have to endure. Also, bison steak, stat, for all.
It'd be more traditional to be OPINIONATED TIGRE.
Clinton was beat up all campaign season for emails and Clinton Foundation nonsense. Trump right now is offering cabinet spots to donors in between meetings with foreign leaders about his overseas properties. He's also thinking about giving Petraeus a job.
Look, campaigns have to be won and politicos should take no solace in noble losses, but how someone could watch 2016 and walk away thinking that elections are morality plays is beyond me.
I still call him "Halford" in my head.
R'tigre fuck you for not posting under your regular name so I could just scroll past it like usually do, you are an abusive shit, and have literally the worst political instincts of any one I have ever met.
401: Same here. Occasionally leads to head takes, like when I heard someone on a podcast discuss "Rob Halford's Christmas album."
398 is, indeed, well-enough executed that Asteele's assumption in 402 seems reasonable. Well done! (Unless it really is Tigre, in which case, welcome back!)
I can't tell if the bison steak is the touch of authenticity, or an over-the-top giveaway of an imitation.
Where "head take" is apparently a combination of "double take" and..turning your head, I guess? Idioms are hard.
I think it is Tigre, as that's appropriately Kaufmanesque.
405: Don't exclude the middle: it could be an over-the-top imitation to hide the true authenticity.
Also, everyone's IQ is in grave peril if this thread continues
Probably true but, just for the record, I'm quite happy with some of my contributions to the thread. 60, 194, 196 (and, somewhat 326) were all attempts to put in writing ideas that I've been mulling over for a while, and I'd like to think I did so reasonably well.
It's true, I did say on here that I thought Hillary was going to win, please forgive me.
Anyway, where did I see the chart that showed that HRC got the majority of press coverage exactly 5 times through the entire general: the first Comey statement, the DNC, the actual FBI report, pneumonia, and the final 2 FBI fuckovers. Literally every other moment of the campaign, the press spent their time talking about Trump. And of course, only one of those moments was positive for Clinton, and it was 55/45 (whereas the others showed up as big spikes).
It's actually possible the press was shittier than it was to Gore. I bet that guy comes off as sleazy in private.
The point of 313 is: the catastrophe is not that Clinton lost. (Although that is, independently, a catastrophe.) Because after all, Clinton almost won, indeed actually won the popular vote, and it's easy to imagine a world not meaningfully different than ours where she also won the electoral college. But even if Clinton had won, we'd still be looking at Democrats as a minority party overall in the government, especially at the state level. And that has nothing to do with Clinton's personality or lack thereof. That has to do with the fact that the Democratic Party no longer has a message that speaks to almost anyone outside large cities. That's the catastrophe. And, for better or worse (worse), we have a political system that weights votes heavily by their geographic spread. That intensifies the catastrophe. And, amazingly, the party seems uninterested in doing anything to address this.
313- Was pretty great in its entirety.
Can anyone tell me what happened to ~30 comments in this thread?
194 makes a good point-- few split-ticket votes this year is saying something.
I can't tell if the bison steak is the touch of authenticity, or an over-the-top giveaway of an imitation.
I had a bison steak at the Native American History museum on the Mall in DC last week. It was pretty good, especially for museum cafeteria food.
I'm sure this is purely because Clinton is more of a sleaze than Trump. There simply is not other explanation.
413: I actually blame the press entirely--entirely--for the independent catastrophe that is Clinton's loss. You could say they had an assist from Comey, but then you might as well also say they had an assist from Trump. Both are true! They should never have taken the bait.
I'm just trying to push back on the idea that Clinton's win would have avoided the catastrophe. It would have avoided a catastrophe. (Which will lead to a lot of catastrophes over the next few years.) And it was close. And avoidable. But the underlying catastrophe of Republican national political dominance was *not* a close call, and was not nearly avoided.
418 is the chart 413 referred to.
Literally every single Farenthold article about the Trump Foundation involved more substantive wrongdoing, including outright illegality, than anything related to the Clinton server. It's breathtakingly mindless to look at that fact and say that the media was basically justified in its coverage of the emails, or that HRC deserved it.
the Democratic Party no longer has a message that speaks to almost anyone outside large cities
And what should that message be?
Republicans' message that speaks to people outside large cities is guns, coal, social conservatism, and fuck the government. It isn't economic in any meaningful way.
422: no, it isn't economic in any meaningful way. The Democrats' message should be.
Personally, I say fuck it on the guns. Let people blow themselves away* if it helps keep Trump's supporters from bothering to vote.
* And others, of course. But it still seems like fewer expected deaths than other reasonably predictable outcomes of more Republican wins.
422. Here's healthcare and competent civility until the drone factories come to your town, basically the message now. Except that the people delivering the message should be charismatic, younger, and not that interested in making Wall St. happy.
Won't get people who want the past back, won't get people who want a cartoon character in charge, but more likely to pick up everyone else than a party of elderly connected people.
Just outside the city, a couple of days ago, a 14-year-old shot his sleeping mother and younger brother. That's easier not to worry about if you figure it's just unavoidable.
But the underlying catastrophe of Republican national political dominance was *not* a close call, and was not nearly avoided.
Basically true, although without the press fucking over Clinton, the Dems probably retake the Senate and narrow the House margin to the point where DC becomes a bit functional (but the Senate would go away after 2 years again, so).
I dunno. It's hard for me not to look at 2010 as semi-unavoidable, and everything that's followed preordained. I mean, an Obama backlash was 90% unavoidable, and fantasies that the Tea Party, which was energized by a rant about gov't bailouts of underwater mortgages, could have been coopted by gov't bailouts of underwater mortgages strike me as ill-founded. Stipulate that the Dems could have done something to avoid the worst of the 2010 wave, and you still get the same effective outcome: strong House margin, non-filibuster-proof Senate margin, and a big lead in the states.
And then the GOP engaged in a brazen attack on democracy. And I really don't see what the Dems could have done to stop that. Even if they'd been smarter in recognizing the weakness of norms, there's just no leverage. Perhaps they could have gotten ahead of things starting in 2000 with a huge push on voters' rights that would have somehow preempted the BS voting fraud claims, but I think that, in that timeline, we'd just be debating whether the GOP could have pushed so many voter ID laws if the Dems hadn't been talking about voters' rights so much.
I mean, yes, it's their job to find a way to win. But to me statements like that always smack of blaming Ralph Branca for failing to overcome the Giants stealing signs (and thus telling Bobby Thomson when to swing to win the pennant, win the pennant). I mean, all the Dems do is win more votes with policies that poll better and also, incidentally, improve the lives (at least a bit) of nearly all Americans. I feel as if that shouldn't be a recipe for being a weak minority.
I wasn't going to burden Unfogged with this horrible but well-observed tale of a gun tragedy, but, well, it's Moby's fault. He started it. The story does a nice job of detailing the absurd nature of people's attachment to guns.
I am as anti-gun as anybody - considerably more so than Moby, I suspect - but yeah, in the end I think we have to give the yahoos that one. Maybe if we let them kill themselves that way, they'll let us keep them from killing themselves in unnecessarily hazardous jobs or with substandard healthcare.
I mean, I keep guns in the house. They have trigger locks in them since I have kid.
That's easier not to worry about if you figure it's just unavoidable.
Frankly, I am tired of caring more about the hostages than they care about themselves.
Giving up on guns doesn't mean the yahoos won't still vote as if the Democrats were going house to house seizing them. I'm fine with not pushing gun control, but this strategy was tried for about 20 years.
I'm not saying we need to have an "Arm your sixth grader" day. I'm just saying we should consider supporting it.
The Democrats should adopt mandatory guns, just so the Republicans don't have an advantage in the upcoming civil war.
BTW, I guess this belongs in the prior recount thread, but I skipped that one:
Obviously, winning the recounts and putting HRC in office would be the best thing ever, but failing that, all I really want is to flip one state and bring the total gap down below 50k, while HRC's PV margin tops 3M. I think the former would spotlight the latter two, and really shift the whole conversation*. It would also drive Trump literally insane.
*because right now the press just wants to stick with the storyline established at midnight on 11/9. AFAICT, they're pretty much ignoring the ever-growing PV gap, and treating the recount story as an oddity. But flip a state, and the whole situation becomes real news. Granted, they were weasels about the Bush-Gore thing, but that was razor-thin by both margins; this one really, really isn't.
423:
422: no, it isn't economic in any meaningful way. The Democrats' message should be.
Their message should be economic on the merits, sure, but I wouldn't expect it to win elections. Russ Feingold ran a more populist campaign than Clinton and did worse than her. A good fraction of Americans don't care about or actively opposed to good economic policy, racial equality, and democracy. What kind of policies should the Democratic Party adopt to get their support?
the fact that the Democratic Party no longer has a message that speaks to almost anyone outside large cities
This makes my head explode. The Democratic Party has a great message for those people, but they're too busy with their fingers in their ears saying lalalala I can't hear you to know about it. All the polls show that nearly everyone agrees with us on most of the issues.
Fox can say that Dems are out of touch with ordinary people, but we shouldn't be repeating it.
435. Change the messsenger, the message is OK. Well-connected establishment faces who have been known quantities for decades are not working well.
What kind of policies should the Democratic Party adopt to get their support?
Legalize the weed.
Free meth and free trailers. Because freedom.
437
?? Russ Feingold was a popular senator in Wisconsin, elected to three consecutive terms. He voted against NAFTA and the Patriot Act for fuck's sake.
Feingold was running against an incumbent in a republican state.
Also, anecdotally, liberals in WI were lured into the same false complacency about Feingold as about HRC. This includes me -- I should have made the phone calls. I would express more regret but it's an unaffordable stupid luxury at this point, soothing only to vanity (also true, bob, of the "shame and guilt" you've been calling for).
Enough EVs to dispute the presidency are within 1%, now that Trump's margin in PA dropped to 0.76%.
What does 443 mean? Torture is being prolonged?
I love the recounts and wish they were getting even more coverage.
but they're too busy with their fingers in their ears saying lalalala I can't hear you to know about it.
"The voters are unworthy of us" is not the correct attitude for a party that wants to win elections.
I'd never say that they are unworthy. Never.
But that doesn't mean that they aren't voting for people espousing positions they reject, and voting against the people advancing positions they support.
The margin of victory is more than made up of people who do not and will not believe that Republicans would cut Medicare. I keep hearing that we need a better massage, but when 'we're not going to cut medicare and the other people say they will' is a bad message, where do you actually go?
444: Not "torture." "Enhanced counting."
Thanks to a nagging fear of error and Wikipedia, 448 was not from me.
And no 'we're going to expand medicare to cover those other people' is an absolutely proven loser of an argument.
[Wordlessly consumes dove whole]
414: But even if Clinton had won, we'd still be looking at Democrats as a minority party overall in the government, especially at the state level. And that has nothing to do with Clinton's personality or lack thereof. That has to do with the fact that the Democratic Party no longer has a message that speaks to almost anyone outside large cities.
I'd say it has to do with the fact that what speaks to most of the people who vote Republican is tax cuts. Cutting government spending that goes (in their estimation) to people unlike themselves.
Ok. You're right. The democrats' messaging is spot on.
Never forget this. The economic message that the Democrats could (and do) run on, namely, let's help economically disadvantaged people, are only popular with white people if it only helps white people.
Pretend I'm capable of subject verb agreement.
The truth is that overall the democrats' messaging about their policies isn't actually that bad. It's their policies that are the problem. "We won't let them steal your Medicare" is not an inspiring policy. I don't actually believe 455. What people are tired of is hearing empty words about how the government will help them, while their lives get tougher and tougher and the "help" they keep getting is insufficient and half-assed at best, while the government is giving handouts to corporations and tax breaks to billionaires. No fucking wonder people are pissed off at the government. I'm pissed off at the government. And when you have one party saying "you should be pissed off at your government" (which long predates Trump, btw) and the other party only saying "vote for us because we're better than those guys", it's not hard to figure out why one resonates more than the other.
Inronically, Clinton was one democrat with better than average policies and worse than average messaging about those policies. Oh well.
Regardless, this is by far the best article on the whole fiasco that was this election. Fuck everything indeed.
If only Democrats had a better economic message they would have voted for Clinton.
A better economic message wouldn't have helped Democrats, but better economic results would have..
Ok better policies would of helped too, but I don't think the messaging on the policies she had was the problem. Also ~40% of people for whom the economy was the #1 issue voted trump that's a lot of people.
Trump just spoke with the President of Taiwan, first President or President-elect to do so since 1979.
I actually like the idea of reaching out to Taiwan, as far as policy goes, but I'm concerned because also it ain't no small thing and who the fuck is even advising him on foreign affairs right now?
Like, shouldn't he at least wait until he gets settled into office before picking a fight with China? There is some weird multi-polar world shit emerging right now and he needs to be frickin' careful.
Actually, what appears to have happened is that the President of Taiwan called him, and he didn't know enough to not take the call. He may not even be aware that he is picking a fight with China.
Republic, People's Republic. How can you keep them straight?
I assume that kind of thing is like asking the president of Austria about the kangaroos . Every president probably does it.
China should sell a bunch of its US Treasury Bonds on Monday. Enough to just rumble the markets a little bit.
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Oh fuck me, I just saw something about that new Jackie O movie and it appears the screenplay was written by this total dildo from my little high school in Tucson. A conservative dildo. The main thing I remember was that we all had a chance to give readings at the morning school assembly our senior year, and his choice was some in-defense-of-elitism tract, whatever people would have been reading in the nineties, the pull quote from which was something on the order of "We are better than them, why not admit it?" God I hate that guy.
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I have a question: is Trump in the habit of cheating on Melania? Obviously he hits on women a lot, and obviously he's cheated in the past, but it wasn't ever mentioned over the past year.
If he is in the habit, he is obviously not at all subtle about it, and would obviously get caught red-handed, and would goof-shrug-blame-the-Mexicans and no one would care. I'm just curious.
Wasn't that, heebie, part of the deal with the journalist he hit on? I think it definitely came up a lot.
And 468 = ugh, sorry. And eww.
And I know Moby was talking about getting more involved with local politics now that the apocalypse has begun, but how hard would it be for us to get him elected president? You know you can have a beer with him, obviously, and the public could grow to love puns, right?
A conservative dildo.
"The neo-con dildo is different because it's circumcised."
NYT: "Mr. Trump told the British prime minister, Theresa May, 'If you travel to the U.S., you should let me know'"
This may be one issue on which the press tell it like it is. When it's Trump vs other Americans, they feel comfortable enabling Trump's craziness because of the assumption that the counter-party will want to compromise and salvage a least-worst result for the country as a whole. Whereas the Chinese have interests, but if they can shaft the US to achieve them there's no reason why they wouldn't.
467
Who says they haven't already? Treasuries are down 5% since the election.
470: but that was sexual assault, described by an unwilling victim. I'm curious about consentual adultery. That never came up.
I saw that article and then I saw that Nate Cohn tweeted that it was the worst article yet.
Nate Cohn has also tweeted some stupid shit about the electoral college that ignores the winner-take-all problem.
468 I'm heading to Dubai for the film festival in a few days and that's playing. I was already inclined to skip it because I dislike biopics but I'd say that seals the deal. Thanks for the warning. If any one asks me for my opinion of it when I'm there I'll tell them don't see it, the screenwriter was a total conservative dildo in high school.
ually, what appears to have happened is that the President of Taiwan called him, and he didn't know enough to not take the call.
Actually it appears that Trump's staff set up the call. (Probably call itself was placed from Taiwan).
This is what happens when people start taking all the bs about disruption seriously
Disruption and building hotels. It's like a game that's a mixture of Monopoly and Diplomacy, but only one player.
I'm ok with Trump starting a pissing contest with the Chinese, because it might make him less likely to sell them global hegemony for a hotel concession. The possible downside being, you know, WWIII.
And it was close. And avoidable. But the underlying catastrophe of Republican national political dominance was *not* a close call, and was not nearly avoided.
This cannot be said enough. The Democratic Party in its current form is a disastrously failed organization.
I am so in the opposite camp. I'm blaming Russians, Comey, the rat-fucking media. I'm full of anger and rage, but I think Clinton and the DNC ran a basically competent campaign. In hindsight they should have done things differently, but in real time I didn't have any major complaints.
They ran what would have been a basically competent campaign in an entirely different election, but they had no answer to what their opponent was doing in the election they were actually fighting.
What are the odds of a major international incident sparked by Trump sexually assaulting a foreign diplomat or other important foreigner?
487 is exactly the problem. It doesn't even matter if Clinton ran a good or bad campaign. What matters is that the Democrats are systemically running campaigns bad enough that they have lost Congress and most states. Winning those things is enough to negate any losses at the presidential level, as the Republicans have ably demonstrated for the past six years.
The downticket races are multi-causal. Are we talking about how the House is gerrymandered? Are we talking about the utter incompetence in letting the governors get collectively hijacked by Republicans? Are we talking about the senate? I thought the senate ended up being determined by straight-ticket voting, in which case it's a catastrophe connected to the Clinton campaign. Are we talking about state legislatures? In which case I have no idea about most states.
If [Obama]were running again, his favorables wouldn't be as high as they are now.
This did not happen in 2012. They shot up during the campaign and went down once he went back to governing.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html
Yes, the downticket is multicausal, which is why I'm calling it systemic failure. The Democrats are chronically losing the game, right across the board.
I blame Clinton and the DNC for making sure primary voters had few choices and for hiding the debates. They took it upon theirselves to push a weak candidate through and should accept some responsibility for the consequences.
The Democrats are chronically losing the game, right across the board.
Figuring out what, exactly is going wrong still matters. The reason that people keep mentioning the fact that Democrats won more votes than Republicans in Congressional elections (as well as the presidential race) isn't (just) a way of making excuses. It's also a reason to think that messaging and campaigning may not be the primary problems.
For example, if you think the largest problem is that Republicans have a significant financial advantage in state-level races* then complaining about poor campaigning may be trying to solve the wrong problem.
* I'm not sure this is the primary problem, but it's certainly a legitimate contender.
497 is fair, but it's not the feeling I'm getting from most people here.
It's also a reason to think that messaging and campaigning may not be the primary problems
Specifically, it suggests that the Democrats have let themselves be gerrymandered into oblivion. Incompetence.
You can't say that a. bad result was caused by incompetence without addressing the context a whole lot more. What were Democrats in Pennsylvania supposed to do in 2011 to prevent gerrymandering? What are Texas Democrats supposed to do right now?
We're getting killed in rural areas by the combination of people who disagree with us on the issues and people who hate us because we don't hate people they hate. It's not about competence.
Our House candidate lost. I guess you can say we were incompetent to nominate an out lesbian Native woman with a Harvard degree.
497: It's also a reason to think that messaging and campaigning may not be the primary problems.
Indeed whatever problems there are with those things, it seems most likely to me that Democrats simply aren't offering anything people want, or not nearly enough of it.
16 points. Better than Clinton who lost by 24.
499.2: But this leads right back to "the voters are unworthy of us". And that's only an acceptable conclusion if you're not interested in winning elections.
Yes, the US is a racist country. But I don't think there's a convincing case to be made that it's more racist now than in the past, and yet the Democrats weren't always such chronic losers.
As noted, this is the exact electorate that went for the Dem governor by 4.
Turnout over 74%.
499 speaks truth. And you can say that Democrats aren't offering anything that people want until the cows come home, but there's no new magic message that is going to change that. It's going to be the same story as it has been since 1980: how much of the Democratic platform are you willing to disguise, abandon, or compromise away to get a majority of votes where our system says it counts.
Going back to my discussion about race with rtcb yesterday -- I know most people don't really care, but it's still bugging me, I felt bad that I didn't have time to write a long response yesterday, and I'm a little disturbed that nobody else felt moved to speak up*
First, the obligatory disclaimer, I agree that, calling people racist isn't a good way to reduce racial bias. There's a legitimate conversation to be had about the best ways to talk about race.
For example, I recently say this response to a Kevin Drum post and thought, "that wouldn't convince Drum of anything; they're just talking past each other." But, at the same time, Drum probably wasn't the target, and that's fine. It's also worth keeping in mind that there's a long history of people taking the position, "you can be angry, but you have to be polite about it" as a way to suppress protests**
Having said that let me go to rtcb's statement:
Reminding people of their racial identity has both a short term and a long term effect. In the short term it may make people slightly more conservative. In the long term if you remind people enough they stop forgetting and regard it as a lesson of some importance i.e. they vote tribaly from then on.
It disturbs me that you've gone, very quickly, from citing V/ox De/y (as "hate reading") to accepting some of the assumptions that it makes.
What you're saying makes some intuitive sense, but I don't know that it's accurate. I think your intuition may be wrong. Since (at least) the Civil Rights moment, the assumption has been that it is useful for progress for members of minority groups to share their experiences. It can and will discomfort people in the short run but is a key part of building understanding and sympathy in the long run. For example, I just saw this line, "in order for things to evolve, the people who aren't affected by the problem need to be enlightened and enlisted for the cause." You seem to be pushing for the opposite of that -- that disturbing people too much will push them into a sense of identity based on opposition. That is true of some people, but I think it's deeply disturbing to assume that will the most common or primary reaction.
To the extent that the dynamic might be changing, in a way which would make white people more likely to gravitate towards a "white identity"*** I don't think it's because of "political correctness." but because the minority population in the country is growing. That is both a good thing**** and going to happen regardless of whether we talk about it or now.
Again, I'm all for being polite and considerate. But this is where the anecdote about "white fragility" applies. You can try to be respectful but you can't avoid saying anything out of the fear that a white person is going to feel like they're having a heart attack.
I think it's important for white people to be a little self-conscious about whether they are either (a) overstating the negative impacts of talking about race or (b) understating the reasons and motivation for doing so, and I think rtcb is doing both of those things.
Speaking of which, in addition to the moral case, I want to touch on the practical case for making discussions of race and racism a significant part of the campaign. I said before, and I still think, that it's completely spinelessness to try to evade race and racism as an issue, and that it genuinely bothers me to see people who are, on one hand, complaining that the Democratic party is spineless say, on the other hand, that they wouldn't want to risk offending anybody on the subject of race.
Part of what it means to be a non-spinelss party is to be willing to take stands on behalf of the interests of the people that make up the party. I don't have exact numbers but here are some approximations which will work well enough for these purposes. 49% of total voters are white Christians. Of those just under half are men. So, approximately, 2/3 of Democratic voters are not white or Christian and 85% of Democratic voters are either female, non-white, or non-Christian.
We may want to talk about "marginal voters" who are white but it's worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of the people who vote for Democrats are "minorities"***** in one sense or another. Many of those people are white, but that doesn't mean that they don't have an interest in how the campaign deals with racial issues (see point 17c in the tweet-storm that's been discussed in this thread).
People correctly think that when Bill Clinton attacked Sister Souljah that it was a pretty shitty thing to do. It may have been good short-term politics but it was also a slap in the face of the black community and an example of Democrats taking black voters for granted.
There was complaint up-thread about Democratic voters being less likely to turn-out in midterms. Plenty of people are willing to say that it's harder to get people to turnout if they don't feel like they can trust Democrats to stand up for their issues. So, by the same logic, it matters for Democrats to stand up on racial issue.
Going back to rtcb
The Vox piece identified HRC's campaign as doing that (constantly). I think it might make sense to be careful about that.
I think that misstates the dynamic. I think that the Clinton campaign was happy to bring up race in the primaries -- and for good reason. But during the general election I thought that the fact that Trump was the candidate (and, on the other side of the spectrum, that Black Lives Matter has been a key news story) did a lot to put race in the spotlight. And I still think it's really important that the Clinton campaign stepped up.
When you have, after the election, Kellyanne conway saying, "Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacy had a platform?"
It's really good that Palmieri can say that she was "more proud of Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech" -- the August address in which Clinton accused Trump of promoting bigotry -- "than any other moment on the campaign." The advantage of taking a public position is that it does let you plant a flag that you can come back to when other people want to blur or muddy the issues.
And, even in the primaries, I'll remember that this was a genuinely feel-good moment for me in a cranky primary season.
And, at that, I've probably gone on too long already, but hopefully I've made my point.
* Only a little, it's a long cranky thread and I understand why people might not speak up about something that's a bit of a side discussion but, still . . .
** I like the quote from Julian Bond used in that piece:
"What will be needed, in addition to an experienced and agitating group of young activists, will be more than just the confluence of people of mutual interest and mutual concern coming together. What will be needed is what the great black man, Frederick Douglass, called for in another speech about 116 years ago. "It is not the light that is needed," Douglass said. "but fire. It is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened, the conscience of the nation must be startled, the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed, its crimes against God and man must be denounced."
*** And, as Marlon James pointed out the idea of white identity politics is hardly new.
The irony here is that it's Republicans that pushed for identity politics, and they picked it up from racists who created it. What is a whites only toilet, if not identity politics? Under what other justification would a white guy need his own shitter? Civil rights was asking for equality, not special treatment. None of these groups were talking about some kind of identity secession. All of them from civil rights (hell, workers rights even) down, were pushing for a seat at the table. The fight over gay marriage wasn't the fight for some third category, it was fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was Republicans, alarmed by these movements who began to declare whiteness as some identity under threat and embarked on a decades long strategy that culminated this October. Also, how is "build a wall" not identity politics? Say republicans do it better if you must, but don't act as if Republicans didn't win with that very same thing.
**** Indulging in a light-hearted, positive link in a fairly serious post.
***** Women are, numerically, a majority of voters, but that's somewhat besides the point.
499: Utter nonsense. There's a practically inexhaustible list of things that are 1) doable for a wealthy country, 2) extremely popular, and 3) not even being attempted by the Democratic party.
Since (at least) the Civil Rights moment, the assumption has been that it is useful for progress for members of minority groups to share their experiences. It can and will discomfort people in the short run but is a key part of building understanding and sympathy in the long run.
This is simple aggression. They share who can get away with it. I am not being judgemental here, I look at this almost in a psychoanalytical Lacanian sense. It is attempt to gain control or dominance in the immediate conversation. Some do it with command, some with supplication and appeals to empathy. It's all power.
Having said the above, I have absolutely no illusions about changing the above, and don't want to. I find it annoying, but that's my problem, so keep to myself, "away from the pushing and hauling."
What matters is history as embodied and external circumstances and conditions. "They" say Marxists want to change human nature, no, we want to radically change external conditions because we are skeptical that human nature can be changed, if there is such a thing.
Racists are dangerous if they have lawyers, guns, and money. Rather than try to make them not racist, take away their guns lawyers and money.
Where was I? I'm high. Shame on me
I'm sure that appealing to fans of Lacaian psychoanalysis and people who live in Berlin is the key to future of the Democratic party.
Having said the above, I by no means want to shut up the identity groups, now including white non-college rural males. I would prioritize the economic messaging and performance while delivered by our Rainbow Party.
Keith Ellison talks to whites in rural Wisconsin and promise and delivers jobs and futures. I trust the younger generation to be more socialist and less neoliberal than the geriatrics they should replace.
The problem wasn't a woman at the top of the ticket: the problem was that the woman was Clinton.
Perhaps surprisingly, I agree with part of 510. "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story" is very much about politics and power. It is not a neutral thing.
That is precisely why I wanted to push against attempts to minimize the importance.
511: Whatever, dude. Everyone likes nice stuff, wherever they live.
I forgot to mention !Japan!
Where 100 million people went* from murderous racist Imperial hawks to radical peaceniks in ten years. To whatever meaning people or person may have, fact is the broad discourse changed when conditions and possibilities changed. I mean, fire and ruins and starvation can broaden the mind, when you have an army occupying you**. Plenty of other examples.
*to a significant degree
**why did we end the occupation of Dixie? What aren't we still there or going back? Civilian carpetbaggers welcome in Texas.
Since this is the thread for being cranky, what's making me particularly cranky recently is this conversation, which seems to be taking place all over the intertubes:
Person A: Wow, the Democrats have lost all 3 branches of government and most of the statehouses. Not to mention they lost the presidency to a deranged clown with no qualifications. We really need to look at our strategy and figure out what we're doing wrong.
Person B: What?! You're saying we should abandon all of our principles and start catering to racists!? That's terribleterribleterrible! How can you say that?!
This equation of taking a painful look at why we constantly lose with caving in to racists is just self-congratulatory BS. It's a convenient excuse to avoid examining why the major ostensibly left part seems to be chronically incompetent at doing its job, a job that includes "winning elections" as a major component.
507:You seem to be pushing for the opposite of that -- that disturbing people too much will push them into a sense of identity based on opposition. That is true of some people, but I think it's deeply disturbing to assume that will the most common or primary reaction.
It is indeed disturbing, but I see no reason to believe it isn't true. People are shits, for the most part. I think tribalism in various forms is natural to humans to a degree that it can never be gotten rid of and must somehow be accommodated. What that means for progressive strategy in the short term I have no fucking idea.
486: The Democratic Party in its current form is a disastrously failed organization.
This is getting annoying, Mossy. (Where do you reside, by the way, that you consistently mention how awesome it is?)
243: Did Cohn indicate in his tweet why the article linked in 241 sucked so much?
One thing about pushing people into a tribal identity is that "Not a shithead about race and gender" is an available tribe, and we recruit pretty successfully. All those members of the WWC have family members who defected from that tribe and joined the latte-sipping coastal elites. We're not winning elections on the basis of tribalism outside of our strongholds, but there's nothing fundamentally impossible about that -- intensifying tribalism doesn't automatically mean we lose.
499.2: But this leads right back to "the voters are unworthy of us". And that's only an acceptable conclusion if you're not interested in winning elections.
Yes, the US is a racist country. But I don't think there's a convincing case to be made that it's more racist now than in the past, and yet the Democrats weren't always such chronic losers.
This may be... overoptimistic. The democratic new deal coalition underpinning Democratic dominance from 1932 to 1968 was a coalition of populists and southern racists. When LBJ signed the civil rights act, he was doing the right thing, but he fractured the coalition. Subsequently, between 1968 and 1992 (6 elections), Democrats won a grand total of one presidential election. And that was the election immediately following a Republican president literally resigning office in scandal and disgrace.
Clinton finally found a new winning coalition, but its not clear the racism ever subsided.
(If you consider WJC and Obama to merely be Republican-lite, as some on the left do, then a real Democrat hasn't won a presidential election since 1964.)
why did we end the occupation of Dixie?
Because of some electoral college bullshit. Its the gift that keeps on giving.
521: its not clear the racism ever subsided.
True enough, but I'd venture that it's not clear that the libertarianism ever subsided.
You can make a strong argument that even Bill Clinton was a gift from Perot. The first time definitely, the second time more questionably. The Democrats at the presidential level didn't really become popular again until 2004.
525 is a good point. I'm going to crawl back into bed now.
357: I worry that we don't have good pipeline in MA. We elect Republican givernors here, because we never elect legislators to the governorship - business people and lawyers. The average legislator here is not so hot. We have a pipeline, but it isn't good. I mean, I dislike the Speaker of the House so much. Pro gambling as economic development. Ugh.
They are good at enforcing discipline most of the time, though.
Thanks for 507. I feel like I'm not going to do it full justice in my reply, but I appreciate the effort.
Yeah V/ox is definitely a mimetic prophylactic required kind of site. I had actually promised myself I would never pay attention to him again if HRC won. He was predicting a 'Trumpslide.'
There are times when it makes sense to take a constituency for granted. They may resent you for it, but sometimes it makes a lot of sense. As a Muslim I'd be pretty happy to be taken for granted by the Democrats. The fact that they don't want to round me up and kill me is enough for my vote on my religious identity.
As someone interested in economic justice I am offended by a lot of the top of the party, but I understand why people think that say Rahm Emmanuel's or Cuomo's level of corruption is something we have to put up with.
I think in a general election environment tolerating some corruption is going to bite you in the ass. Being seen as doing special favors to minority groups isn't going to do you much good overall.
But if the other party wants to screw minorities as hard as they can I think it treats you pretty well just to be fair.
And if you really want a reason to crawl into bed, you look at this graph and you realize it's just a long cycle in the tides of history and that we aren't due for a flip back to the Democrats until roughly 2060.
How could you make engagement with the party a more regular thing, instead of something that crazy activists do? We rely a lot on messaging, but what if there was more organizing?
I understand why people think that say Rahm Emmanuel's or Cuomo's level of corruption is something we have to put up with.
I might understand if they weren't both terrible on other dimensions.
Thanks for 528, I'm glad to know that we're communicating.
I don't think of the Democratic party as "doing special favors [for] minority groups," but I understand that perception is out there.
I also, just to be clear, don't think that calling Steve Bannon a spokesperson for White Supremacy a "special favor" I think of that as just stating the obvious.
No I don't think that is a special favor either. There are unfair perceptions, but I think there is a degree to which they are based in reality. Affirmative action certainly is perceived in that way.
So... Sleepy Ben Carson for HUD. Yay! Because nothing teaches you the ins and outs of urban planning quite like med school.
I just saw 494's response to me:
(Me): If [Obama]were running again, his favorables wouldn't be as high as they are now.
This did not happen in 2012. They shot up during the campaign and went down once he went back to governing.
Actually, looking at that graph, it looks like the surge in Obama's popularity started around October 31st, a week before the election, and really surged post-election before coming back to earth a few weeks later. So without getting into a detailed analysis of the news coverage in that final week, I think that supports my point: Obama's popularity surged around the time that Republicans stopped talking smack about him for a while, because they were too busy talking about what just happened to Romney.
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