I stopped caring about the fucking news actors long long ago. Now these comedians and late night talk show hosts are following them down the sinkhole. They pushed a false choice on us and normalized it.
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I don’t mind.
I get what she’s saying, but I was always disgusted with he idea before and I don’t agree with it now.
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I think within the context of a comedy monologue that includes jokes from a variety of styles, it makes sense to include.
No, I wouldn’t use it while speaking to someone face-to-face.
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Is there any kind of reasonable discussion that liberals and conservatives can have in America today regarding politics?
I really try to see things from their side, to come at least halfway, but when I’m told “Obama has divided this country” and “Obama is the worst President ever” I just can’t see it, no matter how hard I try. I know liberals called Bush “the worst President ever” and perhaps it was hyperbole, but I hope conservatives can at least see the reasoning behind it when you consider the Iraq war and the debt and tax cuts that didn’t provide much growth. For all his faults Obama was a pretty competent President, the fact that he didn’t get that much done is as much the fault of GOP stonewalling as his “failure to lead” (and in fact they are proud to brag about that), so I don’t see how we can ever expect anything to change in America.
Case in point: if Trump proves to be a horrendous embarrassment, if he gets caught doing all kinds of nefarious stuff and the economy tanks, will conservatives admit it or make excuses? I think we all know the answer. I admit that liberals are far from perfect, but how can we ever expect anything to change if conservatives live in this made-up dream world where, in the words of Governor LePage, Obama is an “autocrat” who has let the country “slip into anarchy” (?), which is why we need and “authoritarian” like Trump.
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I get it. And please don’t think I’m excusing racism and hatred. It needs to be resisted vocally and relentlessly. But the people living in those economically depressed areas aren’t a monolith of hatred and stupidity. In fact, most are decent people. I believe many of them would have voted for Bernie – and maybe even Hillary – but went with Trump because, for all his deep, terrifying flaws and rhetoric, he knew not to laugh at their fears and lives.
Elizabeth Warren seems to get it. Check out her great speech here to the ACLU:
Not obstructionist, but principled. The way forward.
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It’s also satire. The assholes blaming all Muslims for terrorist attacks are quite serious.
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#Wicked BURN.
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I haven’t watched much tv since Wednesday morning, but I see I need to stream this ep, STAT.
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Well, when it comes to rural/working-class (and formerly-working-class) whites, the left needs to do a better job of appealing to a group that it used to rely on as a voting block.
Just how did the Dems lose working-class white voters? I think a big reason they did is because the Democratic establishment has become all too easy to see as a bunch of limousine liberals, people who also embrace racial others and other Others, while sneering at supposedly gun-clutching, Bible-thumping, racist idiots.
This election was the Dems’ to lose, and it looks like they lost it largely by failing to appeal to a voting block that in general feels that Obama didn’t do much at all to reverse their ever declining and difficult circumstances. They also felt that Clinton would have been more of the same, and that at least Trump offered something different – AND, he was treating them respectfully, at least acting as if he could hear them, and wanted to be a voice for them.
Yes, all sorts of other beliefs and fantasies played a part, but a huge one, which I think Sam Bee is overlooking when she throws a big Blame Blanket on “white people,” is Trump’s economic populism, and Clinton’s lack of it. People growing ever more desperate financially see the Dems as run by a bunch of much-better-off people who not only don’t give a shit about poor white people, but also actively sneer at and spit on them.
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Thanks, white people.
ETA I miss Wonder Showzen so much…
ETA 2 lyrics for anybody that can’t watch the video:
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I’m having different thoughts now about this kind of humor, which I usually enjoy.
Have we on the left who make these kinds of jokes been confirming the other side’s conviction that the real racism now is that [supposedly] against white people? That the left’s only use for white people, and in classist terms, for working-class white people, is as the butt of jokes? Or scapegoated objects of scorn?
I don’t know, I’m burnt out by this week as I try to think through what the hell happened, but so far, it seems to me that the left in general has to learn better ways to reach people it used to count on as voters. It has to find ways to stop coming across as elitist, out of touch snobs. Not, of course, that I think you’re an elitist snob. It’s a perception thing. When it comes to working-class people, and a lot of struggling middle-class ones, Trump captured the hearts of hurting people; the left, at least the establishment left, came across as only interested in further hurting them, or at least not understanding and caring about their economic problems. So jokes about “white people” or “rednecks,” like simply blaming “white people” for Trump, strike me differently now.
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Well, there’s education, but if one says they need to be educated, then they’ll feel that you’ve called them stupid and we’ll be right back where we started…
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True, but there’s also finding convincing ways to say (as I think Bernie did), we feel your financial pain, we understand it, we know what’s causing it, and here are some solutions. That’s basically how I read his campaign while it was happening, and then his statement on the election. He’s not sneering at white working-class (and declining-middle-class) white people and basically dismissing them as “deplorables”; he’s empathizing, or at least sympathizing, with them. Seems to me that establishment Dems have instead fallen into a reflexive habit of demonizing them.
“Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer.
“To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.”
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-trump
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To be fair, I think the young women in the gif don’t come off as working class, but young, college aged, privileged women. But I can take it down or find a different one, if you like.
I understand what you’re saying though. The Democratic party has a huge failure in having policies that help places like Appalachia. But they’ve also failed the black working class, too, just as much if not more.
I grew up in the white working class and have members of my family who identify that way. It hurts me to think that they think because I’m getting a PhD that I’m some sort of elitist who doesn’t care about them. But I know it’s in the back of their minds sometimes.
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The whole political divide of the past was always mostly hyperbole. Even the phrase ‘worst president ever’ at least sets the bar that they are a president. When people were actually saying trump was literally a terrible person, they just threw it back and it turned into typical hyperbole… of which it wasn’t, based on facts.
So now we have lowered the bar for president even more so it includes the worst human beings.
Or am I being hyperbolic?
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Pretty much what’s happening the UK too. You don’t have to actually be the executive if you can persuade enough of the legislature that your sensible ideas are worth pursuing. (The last Tory Chancellor had to embrace the minimum wage, for example, despite that being a policy that they would normally consider to be anathema.)
And that’s why I am such a strong advocate of simple things like writing to your elected representative. Even if they share no policy principles with you.
Because in a representative democracy, the point is that we hold our representatives to account. We challenge them to defend their positions. We don’t just vote for them and then wash our hands of the whole thing. Somehow we have been convinced that we are, indeed, supposed to just sit back and let them loose. (As I have said before, the turkeys didn’t just vote for Christmas. The turkeys are happily sitting pretty in the House.)
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Nah, that’s okay, I was just expressing my (new) reaction to that sort of thing.[quote=“anon61221983, post:36, topic:89213”]
But they’ve also failed the black working class, too, just as much if not more.
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No doubt! All the more reason, I think, for the Dem establishment to grapple with how they’ve come to be perceived as limousine liberals, and how little they’ve been doing to counter that perception.
Ugh, yes. To me, that’s an example of how the Right has succeeded in branding “experts” and the educated as another form of “out of touch elites.” Clearly less warranted than that perception of the Dem establishment, but yeah, another perception to somehow change. . . Shit, there’s SO much of this kind of work to do…
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All of this.
I know Sam Bee is joking, but there are people who seriously blame working class white people for Trump. I voted Clinton, albeit grudgingly enough that I understand those who didn’t. Yet all I hear is racist this, sexist that, and the very real reasons why people would not vote Clinton get swept under the rug.
The coastal elites and the media should have listened and learned from this election, but they show no interest in doing either.
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