Nothing is different today except now you know. If you didn’t know before, you weren’t paying attention.
A politicized supreme court meant you didn’t have a democracy anyway.
This is my fault and I’m not even American. Why do I teach my daughter to believe in a monster who divides people into groups and says which is worthy and which is not (i.e. Santa Claus)? Why do I feign belief in economic theory to maintain civility? Why do I vote for political parties that ought to be 100% disqualified based on their disdain for the public because they aren’t as bad as the other totally disqualified party?
Trump ran on making america great again, Clinton ran on keeping it great. By winning, Trump proved america was not great. That’s some fucking irony.
When you bring up the median income of Trump supporters you are supporting Trump. You are buying into the idea that everyone who voted for Trump did it because they wanted something for themselves. We’re not goddamned homo economicus. Like no one voted for Trump because they were concerned about what was going on in their communities. Do you know who has economic anxiety? People who are doing okay themselves but look around them and see all kinds of problems. Think about what the word anxiety means. Same shit as when people say, “Those jobs were never coming back” like nothing could be done. How many miles of poisonous pipeline need to be replaced in the hundreds of first world counties that have lead in the water? How many people need jobs? Why can’t you put those things together? Oh right, because in America (and in fucking Canada, and half the rest of the fucking world) public policy is solely about making already rich fucks more rich, and no one is trying to change that.
How did answering bad speech with more speech work for you, you fucking freedom of speech fetishists?
Even though Trump supporters are largely racist, blaming Trump support on racism is stupid. The racist vote would have been his whether he was racist or not, and a vote for Trump was logical for a shitload of reasons other than “Durr hurr racism.” For example, your piece of shit country was bound for feudalism one day, when it comes, do you want to be in a state that voted for your petty king or against him?
Hey Obama, are you glad you are handing Trump an extra-judicial kill list?!? I hope he puts your fucking name on it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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…”.
