Analysis from the writer behind âWhatâs the matter with Kansas?â
Potatoe Secretary?
Holy fuck. America elected an Internet troll.
Generally a good article. Nice to point out that pandering to bankers/CEOs/wealthy white collar does bring in campaign funds, but this election illustrated that you canât just buy elections. Still thereâs this focus on the âwhite working classâ thatâs part of the problem. The Dems. need to focus on the âworking classâ and get back to their roots as a pro-labor party, not the âwhite working class.â The working class arenât just white people, and members of the working class will feel the same disaffection for the Dems. not doing enough for labor even if their skin toneâs darker.
I read the mentions of the âwhite working classâ as being in the context of winning these voters back from the Republicans.AFAIK, non-white working class people donât need to be won back, they need to be persuaded to turn out.
But I do agree that the Democratic party has to become a party of ordinary working class people if it wants to win. Thatâs why it was so frustrating to see âwe are the 99%â fade so quickly from political discourse, and why Iâm so frustrated at the ease by which people are persuaded to divide along âracialâ lines instead.
I was reading a few articles on minority turnout that Iâve lost now, but one of the things that Iâd taken away from them was that fear of the racist authoritarian wasnât really as great a motivator as one might imagine and working class minorities were not willing to work to turn out this time around since they saw little reason to vote for a Dem. they assumed wasnât going to do anything for them. Taking any voting bloc for granted is a bad idea.
THIS!!! 
Is it still a âRed Scareâ when Russia admits theyâre involved?
Pretty much if one is a white supremacist, the âbrilliantâ goes right out the window. No one can believe that shit and be smart.
Christ, the article has the only female specific attributed quotes glosses over her saying that her entire section from the stadium seating fear for the country because his attitudes towards women, while the article ends with a (male) student saying he thinks Bannon is playing it up to cater to his consumers - and treats that as a good thing.
See, I agree- but thatâs dangerous.
Because there are people who are empirically smart who believe that stuff, and theyâre working hard to convince everybody else that theyâre right. And because theyâre smart, theyâve (clearly, judging by the election) making headway.
Donât underestimate the enemy.
Well, they can be smart, but they canât be both smart and honest and a white supremacist (see Derek Black for details). Itâs a trilemmaâintelligence, integrity, bigotry. Pick two.
Iâm not, of course. Being able to manipulate the political situation is one thing. But anyone who believes the easily disprovable pack of lies that make up the white supremacist world view just isnât smart. Theyâre not believing different opinions from me, but complete and utter lies about oneâs skin color.
I guess I just donât agree.
Maybe itâs me who isnât smart?
Disagree. Youâre clearly smart.
I want to believe that these dirty and disgusting people donât actually believe this stuff, and that itâs just a method by which they can seize power (to use for their own purposes). But it seems unlikely thatâs true for all of them.
I dunno. Maybe thereâs some wording around smart vs. intelligent vs. bright or whatever thatâd describe all this better.
Or maybe itâs just the thought of so many people actively believing this shit is too depressing for me to contemplate at length.
In touch with reality, maybe?
[quote=âPurplecat, post:1939, topic:65103â]
it was so frustrating to see âwe are the 99%â fade so quickly from political discourse
[/quote]This is an obvious one, and itâs also why the TEA Party did not fade away quietly - and is in fact what brought populist conservatism into the mainstream. The teabaggers were mostly middle and upper-middle class white men and women who purposely said they didnât care about anything but giving them more money in their paycheck, and it was easy to cater to that when they were so goddamn easy to dupe into investing even heavier in Reaganism which they felt worked for some reason even though there is literally no proof. Occupy on the other hand, suffered from having zero leadership (even leadership abusing their anger to make money) and fought against any sort of organization to turn it into a lasting movement despite the message being on point. The Occupy movement also was considered to move votes - or worse didnât draw in more voters.
It is a global protest movement that only seems to have taken root by young leaders creating different movements with the same dissatisfaction in countries - like in Hong Kong. I never went to big US cities at that time, but I did see Occupy protesters in Taiwan for a lot longer time than I did in Houston.
