We don’t have the generations of hate to back it, we are at a disadvantage.
Right wing populism is also about business in such a way that left wing populism isn’t, so there’d have to be an odd shoehorning of interests that left wing populists won’t immediately reject.
Nobody cares.
The contempt on these comments pages has been reserved for the suckers and racists who voted for this buffoon, interspersed with praise for decidedly non-wealthy and non-powerful people who were pushing back against the tide of xenophobia and bigotry he enabled (sometimes by supporting a candidate they weren’t thrilled about). If your definition of “the average man” only includes the former group and excludes the latter you might want to consider your own contemptuous assumptions about “the average man.”
And that’s why she lost.
Thanks for playing
I don’t disagree with that. What I do disagree with is the idea that Trump is the creation of the working class.
Clinton losing working class support and Trump gaining working class support are different events with different consequences.
Your baby-shat-his-diapers smugness and back patting does not generate any particular insights and is used exclusively for self-satisfaction.
Stein got 0.8% of the vote? And turned off a HUGE part of disaffected voters. Her crazy isn’t worth courting when we want to win. We don’t need more anti science candidates after Trump.
This is actually the part that is worse. Trump being a product of the white working class has a vein of logic to it (which is why the articles started coming in about it before the election), but Trump has a large appeal across income and even ethnicity. The only common tie I can find at all is religion and hatred of all government.
Yep. As someone who voted Clinton but apparently not enthusiastically enough, I’ve heard plenty of that. I voted Clinton in the general because I felt I absolutely had to, but I don’t blame anyone for refusing to vote for one right winger over the other.
You mean like the “average man” has had contempt for generations for: women, minorities, LGBTQs, more-recent-that-his-family immigrants, etc.?
Does it hurt your fee-fees that we’re not using our indoor voices anymore?
It’s the theocrats out for the court, plus the Klan out to bury Obama, Pretty much just the usual GOP coalition. A touch less trickle-down, a touch more racism.
Trump didn’t draw a radically new electorate. The result was mostly due to depressed Democratic turnout.
Nice to see that after the crushing defeat Hillary’s support base is holding firm on the line that lost the election .(marginalize everyone left of neoliberal)
I bet those marginal votes would have helped in swing states.
I’m not gloating I’m pointing out the base stupidity of that form of rhetoric.
Depressed Democrat turnout is not exactly true either, Hillary not performing as well as Obama while Trump performs as expected shows a more complicated picture when she wins 2+ million votes over him.
Pennsylvania has Trump pulling in Obama 12 numbers (just under 3 million) and Clinton bringing in more than Romney, McCain, Bush Jr, and Gore. Trump absolutely brought people to the polls in Pennsylvania which had above average turnout.
And that’s after Clinton beat Obama and Bernie in the primaries there.
I’m not. I’m actively saying people “voting their conscience” (versus not voting at all) didn’t lose us the election.
Your continued onanistic glee marginalizes yourself, the position that anyone should be proud of you is childish and only self-serving.
Clinton cannot campaign for office on her role as a senior official in her husband’s administration to get into the Senate, tout her experience in the White House as a qualification for the presidency, have Bill Clinton out there stumping for her, and then disown the prior Clinton administration’s policies when it suits her. And it is an act of profound intellectual dishonesty when her supporters try to paint someone as a misogynist when they bring up her last stint in the White House. She embraced, and continues to embrace, the same economic globalism that’s offshored blue collar jobs and enriched a small portion of this country’s populace. This was clearly going to be a big issue this year and yet the Democrats insisted against all sense on committing electoral suicide by backing Clinton’s run.
An argument that could only be made by someone who didn’t bother paying attention to Trump’s campaign beyond the racist comments that made headlines in left-leaning media. Trump campaigned hard and explicitly against the legacy of NAFTA in the places that economic globalism have economically hollowed out. He beat Clinton on her record and she let him.
And what precisely qualifies her for the position? This incestuous dynasty-building should stop. For the love of God nominate Elizabeth Warren. I’d move to America to campaign for her. Have her campaign slogan be something like “I, Elizabeth, the scourge of Wall Street, the sorrow of the Hamptons, command you!” There’s your first woman president.
Homeboy worked for RT earlier this year. Just thought everyone should know: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jul/17/jonathan-pie-switches-channels-edinburgh-fringe
There’s nothing to say. You have a large swathe of the population who both need money and derive their sense of worth from having a job that’s respected. These people, further, can’t have jobs. The jobs they want don’t exist anymore and never will. The technology base has moved and there’s no putting the genie back the bottle.
That’s, really, the curious problem. The votes of middle America are essentially unobtainable because any honest candidate (in case one should show up) can’t say anything more than: You are screwed. All of you. Permanently. The golden years that you remember are never coming back even if you deport everyone and institute even the most fevered imaginings of the right wing. And the left wing won’t help either because their ‘new types of jobs’ amount to coding gigs in the Bay Area and not that many of those, either.
So you have to lie to them and right-wing populists tell the best lies. Oh, sure, America could have saved some jobs if they didn’t institute things like NAFTA and made outsourcing less profitable. Maybe provided a softer landing. But either way, the jobs are gone for good.
The damned thing with global capitalism is that it produces what I heard called ‘The Unnecessariat’ in a rather excellent article. And unlike any other surplus good, there’s simply no way to deal with surplus humanity. Except wait for them all to die, I guess, which seems to be the strategy advocated here with some glee.
Also: we keep quoting how exit polls show that Trump’s base is richer than you think. It occurred to me that in certain quarters of America being poor is shameful, and wealth and prosperity is a measure of social worth. And the people who think this, who cling to the American dream that if you work hard enough you cannot help but prosper, are the most likely Trump voters. Is it not possible they are, in fact, misreporting their income as a way of signaling that they are high-value people?
There are alternatives to lies and con games and mass die-offs. For example, a UBI (which I think is inevitable in the U.S., albeit in a nasty form acceptable to the GOP) or single-payer universal health insurance. For the Unnecessariat, though, that’s all “soshalism” (not the “good kind,” like the disability payments they make use of on a large scale).
It was an especially hard sell for them coming from an crabby old Jewish socialist who wasn’t afraid to be honest and tell people they’re screwed, which is one of the reasons they went for the seller of racist snake oil instead. I’m afraid it would have also been a hard sell for them coming from a woman like Warren. But even if an Aryan male with movie-star looks and charisma was telling them the same things Sanders was there would still be a huge cultural chasm they’d have to leap and many long-held assumptions they’d have to abandon (with exploiters and Xtianist clergy pushing back the whole time).
Oh, don’t worry. They’ll cheer when Medicare gets fully privatized.
