The point is, which Black Lives Matters have been making. That racism in America is not restricted to your garden-variety wacko’s, but is systemic and ingrained into the American psyche. Given the history, this is rather unsurprising.
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The people are the Democratic Party.
My apologies. You are literally the first person I’ve ever encountered who makes these hypothetical Sanders-woulda-won arguments and who understands that.
but fundamentally people are trying to reflect on why the democratic
voters picked a candidate that, in retrospect, looks like such a bad
choice for the national political environment.
Democratic voters like Hillary Clinton. This should be a surprise to absolutely nobody. And sometimes parties choose people who lose elections; happens roughly half the time, in fact.
And note that she won the popular vote. She was more popular than Trump. That’s mooted by the idiotic Electoral College, of course (as it was for Al Gore). But, she wasn’t a bad choice. She just wasn’t a terrific choice. And Democratic primary voters are hardly the only people who misread the electorate this year; look at all the polling - they all got it wrong too.
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Okay. If we follow that narrative then the votes that Hillary lost were the voters that didn’t turn up to vote for her, even though they did turn up to vote for a black man.
Either way, racism is a necessary but insufficient explanation. There was a “whitelash.” Racism is a tremendous element of this campaign. I don’t know that it was any bigger here than it was in 2008 or 2012, though - and the right folks won both of those races.
I don’t think that would’ve made much difference. HRC is and has been political elite regardless of that position. She’s done good work, she’s good at what she does, and she deserved to be president, but when the work of pragmatic politics for the last 20 years has lead to fear and stagnation, yeah, there’s a lot of folks who don’t want the best-qualified person to win, anymore - they want to re-define the qualifications.
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America wants an authoritarian leader right now (and it helps if he’s white). Nobody could beat Trump. He insulted veterans, and they still voted for him. He insulted HIspanics, and they still voted for him. He’s unbelievably misogynistic, and women still voted for him. If Trump couldn’t defeat Trump, then neither Clinton nor Sanders had a chance.
When the pendulum swings back toward the left, A Sanders-type candidate has a chance.
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I am a German national, and if anyone is going to defeat a trade deal it will be the German Population opposing TTIP. I don’t consider trade deals to be irrelevant.
But, I am not convinced that opposing a trade deal is as strong a motivator as hating the guts of someone who you perceive a threat because they are/ look different.
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It is, and ingrained racism shows up every day in who is arrested and who receives a job and which schools are funded well and who gets a smile walking down the street.
That racism tends to operate on margins though, it’s not the sort that takes you to a KKK rally. I’m personally not at all convinced that Trump voters were primarily driven by anger at minorities. Some certainly were, and that inherent racism helped, but the electoral map follows economic contours more than any other.
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Yeah, well the conservatives don’t give a shit about them either.
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OTOH what does it say when the KKK has been consistently more engaged in supporting Trump than they were in supporting McCain or Romney even though those candidates were running against a black man?
Certainly those who do have overtly racist leanings seem very, very keen on Trump.
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The thing is that in neither of those elections was the race card played by the opposition. Romney & MacCain were not endorsed by the KKK. It would have been very un PC to play the race card and the Republicans didn’t except some targeted attacks on Michelle Obama–but she was not the candidate.
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It’s all anecdotal evidence. When I see hate crime statistics go up after the election, then I can safely say it’s a Brexit-like backlash. If there’s a statistical trend I can compare against another statistical trend, I will have something to go on, but in the meantime, the plural of anecdote is not data.
If the hate crime numbers are going up against the groups Trump is speaking out against in the run-up to the election, then that could indicate a serious problem. I haven’t seen this yet, not to say that it doesn’t exist.
It’s easy to look down on us when you’re not even here. But we won’t devolve into a third-world country, at least not while those of us who are good people and who actually care about our society have any semblance of control over the matter.
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But notably, not based on the votes of the thousands of people in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who ended up not voting for her in the national election.
I mean, clearly - we have President Trump!
But, that technicality obscures the reality. What happened in the Democratic primary had nothing to do with this fact.
One of the big explanations for me is Authority Bias. If all the folks around you who Know A Lot About Politics think HRC will win and that Sanders is unelectable and whatnot, and they’re all operatives and senators and chairpeople and whatnot, sure, you trust their opinion.
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That’s because he didn’t condemn them, which in turn lit a fire for their support. After years of politicians staying as far away as they could with a ten foot pole (at best) - any affirmation - even if it’s just the absence of a negative - was picked up as support.
And rightfully so - it was as good as tacit approval - we all knew it - but never outright enough to turn people off.
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Let’s not forget that winning the popular vote means that she got 24.9% of eligible votes. We already know that another 24.9% hated her enough to vote for Trump. That leaves half of all eligible voters, plus everyone else in the country who is in the country (immigrants, temporary foreign workers, teens, lazy people who don’t register, etc) largely silent on the election.
His “mandate” is tenuous at best.
I can’t wait for more protests. It’s gunna be an interesting for years for the hard left.
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[quote=“ben_ehlers, post:43, topic:89110, full:true”]
The one thing that gives me hope is that Canada has been actively promoting meaningful multiculturalism, plurality, and preservation of intangible cultural heritage, even during the Harper government.[/quote]
Another amazing thing about Canada is that it’s incorporated universal single payer healthcare into that cultural heritage, to the point where it’s become a political third rail that even conservative ideologues like Harper can’t touch. That situation is not unrelated to the multiculturalism you describe.
Not only the media, but a lot of the citizens. I distinctly remember being in Toronto on a bus when a passenger apparently made some kind of racial slur against another, who broke down in tears. The other passengers (whatever the colour of their skin or their accent) didn’t just stand by quietly or shrug the comment off as consequenceless “free speech” – en masse they supported the victim and berated the racist to the point where the driver stopped the bus, radioed security, and kicked the harrasser off.
Canada is far from perfect, as its aboriginal population will attest. But I doubt things would have played out like that on a bus in Boston, let alone Birmingham.
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I think it’s important than we don’t lose sight of what “neoliberalism” actually is.
Milton Friedman. (1951) “Neoliberalism and its prospects”
There’s a tendency for various pressure groups to put a whole host of evils under the “neoliberalism” umbrella. (The most blatant being those who regard it as “Atlanticist.”) Sometimes, these same groups, having laid out a parade of horribles, go so far as to drop the “neo” prefix, so as to smear the Democratic left in this country. This is quite odd, since the Republican party has been “neoliberalism’s” foremost exponent.
“Neoliberalism” as a nefarious scheme reminds me, in some ways, of the “internationalism” that Henry Ford attributed to Jews.
It’s certainly worthwhile to argue, for instance, that neoliberalism has changed how we as a society view monopoly power, but an incisive critique needs specifics.
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McCain or Romney would certainly repudiate their support. Trump has no such compunction.
Overt racists would tend to support Trump, but we didn’t see an increase in his turnout over Republican turnout in previous elections. More like vastly decreased turnout for the Democrats.
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That’s false. White people in the Midwest overwhelming crossed the aisle for Trump. Democrats didn’t not come to the polls, white democrats changed who they have voted for their entire lives… for Trump.
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I don’t look down on you. I studied American Studies (in part in Massachusetts) and not out of contempt. But, good people like you can easily underestimate what is happening, because it’s anecdotal, not real. I would recommend that good people in the US should start reading up on German history, because the vast majority of German’s were also good people, back in the days.
There are some incredible first hand accounts of how ordinary German’s experienced the political landscape in the 1930s (not sure if translated).
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Honest question: during the primaries, it was reported at the time that many of the superdelegates within the DNC were registering their votes for Hillary even though the people they represented had voted for Bernie as a majority. Was that not true? If you could, please send a citation. It would be nice to start unraveling all of the truths and half-truths from this election.
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Yeah, I think this is a very important element to understand about this election. But I don’t think that KKK members or people following their lead make up more of the voting populace than “people who just didn’t vote” this time, but did in previous elections. In the search for decisive factors in the election, I think this plays a role, but I don’t think it’s the most significant role. HRC’s the Status Quo - and people don’t like the Status Quo enough.
Where the hate plays a more significant role is in what is now normalized AFTER his victory. Now all of this is OK. Now the super-racists believe, like you, that they can decide elections, and so they can do whatever they want. I don’t think that’s actually true. I don’t think this election represents mostly active support FOR Trump. I think it more represents a lack of support for Hillary.
It is possible that I’m being naively optimistic, but given the convos I’ve had with Trump voters in the last few days…they support the idea that crazy-ass racists are still a minority and that most people would be very happy to not have to hear from them ever again and the fact that Trump is supported by the KKK and the alt-right loony bin is a problem.
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