When the risk of such a surprise is known well in advance, as it was, absolutely yes.
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There are plenty of absolutely revolting Americans on display today. The problem is they all support Trump.
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Well they liked the establishment until 2008ish.
You already elected GWB. Twice. And he was really fascist. This guy, we’ll see, at the moment he barely has a party.
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Understandable, since the one’s against both Trump and the republican party feared of a holocaust for “minorities”.
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Yeah, but no one will listen to me, cause I’m just a smug asshole. Also, a woman who speaks her mind.
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Did you read the article? Because you should read the article. It’s not coming from a right-wing pundit, but from a leftist trying to explain the failures of the Democratic Party. And make no mistake: the Democratic Party and establishment “Left” are absolutely to blame for Trump’s victory.
The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.
Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. […] The consequence was a shift in liberalism’s intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves.
[…]
Suffice it to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition?
Why did they abandon us?
What’s the matter with Kansas?
The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all.
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Personally and in world events, 2016 might have been the worst year of my life. Yes, worse than the year my dad (at 60) died of cancer.
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Bernie would have won.
The HRC supporters were too terrified of Trump to sit home in protest and would have voted Bernie. The independent vote that HRC shat upon during the primary would have been unchained in the general and turned out in droves for Bernie. The millennial vote that HRC and her insipid supporters shat upon during and after the primary would have turned out in droves for Bernie.
It would have been a landslide victory for Bernie. My hope is that the good people of Boing Boing and elsewhere will learn from this experience for next time. My hope is that flakey liberals will learn to become strong progressives. Be fucking bold. This tepid, failure shit is for the birds.
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They’ve already made “respect for facts and a basic understanding of reality” a liberal trait, so why not?
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Really? In 2008 and 2012 they voted for Obama, and in 2008 Obama was the anti-establishment candidate.
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They recovered by running someone who looked very far from a clintonite candidate. And they lost when they ran again a clintonite candidate.
Besides, I don’t think I said Dems will never recover; it’s the principle of choosing a clintonite candidate that (hopefully) will not recover. Or it will, and they’ll lose again.
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No. Later I will, but can’t I have a fucking moment to feel hurt, angry and scared, please. Can’t I have a fucking second to mourn the last bit of decency draining out of this country?
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Toyg is being a trolley. Best to ignore him.
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I prefer this bit…
If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it’s, Why are they voting against their own self-interest? But no party these past decades has effectively represented the interests of these dispossessed. Only one has made a point of openly disdaining them too.
Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the smug in turn.
The rubes noticed that liberal Democrats, distressed by the notion that Indiana would allow bakeries to practice open discrimination against LGBTQ couples, threatened boycotts against the state, mobilizing the considerable economic power that comes with an alliance of New York and Hollywood and Silicon Valley to punish retrograde Gov. Mike Pence, but had no such passion when the same governor of the same state joined 21 others in refusing the Medicaid expansion. No doubt good liberals objected to that move too. But I’ve yet to see a boycott threat about it.
I don’t have a good answer to that.
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George W. Bush was an absolutely terrible President who got us entangled in pointless wars but he wasn’t an outright bigot. If anything the Bush family is more progressive on things like immigration than the rest of the Republican party. Also, Bush never
- Opened his campaign by labeling Mexican immigrants “murderers” and “rapists”
- Actively encouraged violence against protesters
- Proposed a national religious registry
- Promised to enact a moratorium on all Muslim immigration
- Promised to jail his political rivals
- Said he might not accept the results of the election if he didn’t win
or countless other by-the-book acts of outright fascism that Trump has cheerfully embraced.
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This. Fucking This. It happened less than twelve hours ago, and I’d like a little time to do nothing more than scream “WTF” without having to repeatedly endure 2016’s version of, “well, actually…”.
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Fucking hell how sad is it that this guy makes Dubya look like good times.
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