fought with “sticks and stones”, no doubt?
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If I remember correctly, WWIV was basically the third world nation states collapsing after the first world beat itself to shit during WWIII.
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I agree with some of what he says.
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Thank you for posting that. I’m sick of this myth being perpetuated.
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The article doesn’t say a majority of the working class voted for Trump. It says a majority of working class WHITES voted for Trump. That’s a demographic that wasn’t specifically covered in that exit polling you posted (by the way, what makes us think the exit polling was any more accurate than the pre-election polling?) but the closest thing to it is non college educated whites, 67% of whom voted for Trump.
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Turnout made the difference. The people in key states who voted for Obama, twice, but stayed home are another kind of person from the naifs, bigots, and the greedy who always do what they do.
The people who stayed home weren’t “firing shots”. The people sacrificing their neighbors are always ready to make that sacrifice.
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Nice narrative, doesn’t describe the situation.
They already do. Just look at Texas’s rates of infant mortality.
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LapsedPacifist did not in any way indicate he wanted to ‘move the Dems to the right’. He’s asking those who publicly identify as of ‘the Left’ to stop being snotty, supercilious assholes in public. ie. on publicly open comments sections. Like BBS.
You need to lie like a Persian rug on a rich man’s floor to pretend that these comments pages haven’t reeked of ‘intellectual’ hauteur and contempt for the average man over the past 7 weeks. Moreover, the vitriol and disparaging ‘attitude’ on display here has been mainly in defense of one of the Clintons, a consummate Third Way triangulator.
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I agree; I don’t think that @LapsedPacifist said that either.
However, I do think that the general themes of “we need to be more understanding of Trump voters” and “people voted for Trump because of political correctness” are closely linked to the shift-right-on-race tactics advocated by people like Jim Webb. And I think that doing so would be a mistake both tactically and ethically.
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Are they wrong?
Who is this mythical man? I assume you think he’s white and working class?
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As far as I can tell, no one has released race-by-income crosstabs yet. We won’t know for sure what the white working class numbers are until they do.
However:
(data from 2016 United States presidential election - Wikipedia)
Look at the issue numbers; people who cared about the economy voted Clinton. Trump got the xenophobe vote; folks freaking out about immigration and terrorism. Some of whom, yes, are working class. But not most of them.
See also:
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No, no, no, no. The hell it is. Angry/afraid white people elected the unelectable. They knew he was a monster, they voted for him anyways. The figured that in his rampage, he’d disrupt things in ways that would be good for them. (How exactly varied by voter.) He won’t, but they didn’t know enough to realize that. Education is what they need, but given the current state of America, that’s not likely to happen. But that’s alright because elections can be won simply by making those people irrelevant. Hillary got the second highest number of votes for a presidential candidate in history, after Obama. This election wasn’t decided by 25% of voters - ultimately a relatively tiny number of people (tens of thousands) in three states decided the outcome. But they’re part of an increasingly marginalized demographic, easily overcome by a candidate that excites people sufficiently.
With a few exceptions, not so much. The Republican candidates in recent elections got similar numbers of votes each time (Trump got 0.4 million fewer votes than Romney), it’s just that Obama mobilized millions of voters who hadn’t much been active before - or, sadly for Hillary - since. That is, the total number of voters increased for the elections Obama was in. A lot. Not so strange, given the small number of people who vote in the USA. And that’s the lesson - that Republicans win only when not enough people turn out to vote.
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My state’s had near-universal healthcare in place since 1974, but we changed to accommodate ACA and we have real concern over what will happen now.
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As it happens, @hmclachlan and you are both right. I don’t think that the Dems should move right. Hell, I’m considered left-wing in Europe. From my point of view the Democrats are a right-wing party and the Republicans register as a syntax error.
However, I think that the hauteur, contempt, and scorn that I absolutely have seen all over the internet before and after the election served as the best possible campaign against Hillary and for Trump you can imagine. The preemptive crowing, the gloating about demographics and the inevitability of Trump losing and how his voters were fit targets for ridicule, like, oh, this election-day post.
I want my preferred ideology to win. This is naturally, that’s what it means to have an ideology. My ideology is left-wing, as it happens, and Trump’s nowhere in it. I think that the excesses of vitriol and raw hate that have been all over the 'net recently are strategically unsound and morally grotesque. I don’t care how much you wanted Trump to lose/Hillary to win: proudly wearing your lack of empathy like this is something the right does. And even if you are unmoved by the principles of the left, spitting on people won’t get them to vote for you. And you need a comfortable majority, a political consensus that’s broader than the knife-edge margin elections are normally decided by in America if you want to make meaningful progress in America.
Ah, but what do I know? I’m an old-fashioned crusty lefty, and apparently, all we have to do is wait for the conservatives to all die and everything will be alright. Just get those actuarial tables, set your alarm clock for the year sufficient number of deplorables dies of acute racism, and sleep until then, I suppose.
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Another reason why the “The mean, snarky Left made them hug the racists” meme… Like the video up top… is bullshit. It was the white, middle class, straight, cis, Christian people who realized that they’re losing their dominance over a changing America that put the conman (and now the people who drove the economy into the ground in the first place) into power.
His voters heard the hate and they agreed with it. People should stop trying to absolve them of responsibility.
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Voting for Trump didn’t define you as bigot, but it did define you as a bigot enabler and shows that bigotry is not important enough to you to be a disqualifying trait for your vote. You didn’t have to vote for Clinton, but if bigotry was a primary issue for you, you couldn’t have voted for Trump.
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