@Clement Rage: I'll try
.
Telling the millions of uneducated white rust belt voters who put Obama in office in 2008 and 2012 that they are evil bigots is not a strategy for winning an election.
The issue is that the government and media is so out of touch leading to huge issues in the country resulting in Trump voters being at least indifferent to his racism and sexism, etc.
Millions of white Obama swing voters voted for Trump. 29 percent of Latinos. 16 percent of black men. 42 percent of women. This was entirely predictable. Outside of mainstream media propaganda, there were some very loud independent voices warning you about this. Michael Moore told you this would happen. Clinton led in the polls, but the most accurate poll aggregator we have--Nate Silver--warned you that because of the enormous number of undecided voters, the election would be highly, highly unpredictable. He gave Clinton a 65 percent chance to win when other outlets simply treated the election as over.
I've yet to read much analysis into why various ethnic minorities voted the way they did. When it comes to the white folk though, if I had information out of one particular rust belt state that only surfaced days before the election, I might have predicted Trump winning. I didn't though, so had Clinton winning <280 at most.
Having said that, I hate people who gloat "told you so", apparently like this author, like they knew what the outcome was going to be. The result was
razor thin. They make it seem like the difference in results was
huge. Such distortions on the representation of facts must be shot out the sky. The right uses such claims as leverage, when in reality they have very little. The left has to know how easy it would be to regain power, but they need to get rid of the corporate shills from the Democratic party.
I watched week after week of articles and reports about how Trump-the-buffoon had imploded and was running a completely inept campaign. None of the actual evidence, including the polling, showed this. There were predictable temporary swings based on the latest scandals. They always settled down. Meanwhile, watching a single Trump rally would show anyone who's not in a partisan bubble what an enormously talented politician Trump is. The left was never honest about this factor, because it already had the same prefabricated explanation for him that it has for everything: racism-homophobia-xenophobia-sexism-misogyny. These charges have been meaningless for years because they are directed on an hourly basis on against anyone who strays ever-so-slightly from the left-wing identity politics narrative.
Trump had a lot of free media. He knows how to be spectacular in the literal sense as well. I liken him to a sleazy used-car salesperson who was simply fortunate enough to have a rich father. If anything, his "-isms" aided him, firing up his core voters, classic appeals to emotion and scapegoating. I'm not sure rally numbers really mean anything though. There's an obvious risk of selection bias involved. Sanders was also pulling crowds, but he lost. Granted, if Sanders had the same media saturation, like was given to Trump from the beginning, and the DNC played fair, he may have beaten Clinton in the primaries. So, who knows.
As for the criticism of "identity politics". Guess who plays in to that just as much, despite claiming to be critics of it?
The Alt-right. Oh, the poor white male. Boohoo. Women trying to achieve equality of opportunity through feminism and minorities doing the same with their movements, etc. Diddums!
. If you don't take identity into account, and become "colour blind' etc, you become like France, and the results speak for itself. Shit'll hit the fan eventually. While focusing a campaign on identity politics probably isn't a smart move, neither is ignoring it.
On my way to vote I was listening to public radio. Basically a series of smug eulogies for the Republican Party. One of the panelists said, "I don't think we need to get rid of Republicans." The other panelists weren't sure they agreed. I could not believe the hubris of this rhetoric. That was the final confirmation of my gut feeling that Trump would win. Why wouldn't working class voters show up in droves? They had just been vilified for a year. They were told they were powerless. They were told that the election was a matter of predestination.
Working class voters showed up in droves all right...
by not showing up at all? I think the author should look at the vote count for both candidates. The lowest turn out in 20 years. Votes only increasing in key states for Trump, but were low over all. People weren't turning out for Trump, they were rather NOT turning out for Clinton. <-- That was the reality of the election. Trump didn't win the election, Clinton and the Democrats clearly lost it.
The left needs to look in the mirror stop it with the sanctimonious, deluded partisan-bubble narrative about bigotry and how America suddenly found millions more racists in its basement after electing Obama twice. Where'd they come from? Did they gestate in a box? The existing electorate suddenly realized that they couldn't stand having a black man as president, after voting for him twice?
As I've argued previously, the issue is not that the public is necessarily bigoted, it is that the government is so out of touch that they are at least indifferent to such behaviour, and not energised enough to vote for other options.
We lost the election because we thought we had our boot on the neck of the white working class and that we could not only ignore their concerns, but ridicule them for having any concerns. We thought that we could make them America's new bad object, to fill the void left by the fact that persecuting black people has fallen out of fashion. We told them they were Nazis for worrying about blue collar job competition from illegal immigrants and wanting to see immigration law enforced. We told them they were thinking about voting for Hitler. That's not what Obama did. He won precisely by reaching out to these voters.
No one is demonising white people. This is about as stupid an argument to make as replying to "Black live matter" with "All lives matter". Misses the point. However, there is truth to lack of correct analysis of why people were voting for Trump, or more correctly, not voting for Clinton.
That's not what Bernie Sanders did either. We were positively allergic to Bernie Sanders' winning message, because we just couldn't deal with the fact that it laid off the identity politics for two seconds. In fact, Sanders supporters similarly became a target of the relentless you're-a-bigot loop that a certain segment of the American left have going on in their heads on constant replay. "Bernie Bros." Every time you think about why this election was lost, I want you to think about the wisdom of the phrase "Bernie Bros." Poll after poll showed Sanders dramatically outperforming Clinton against Trump, precisely because he made the same appeal as Trump to actual swing voters.
Here's a novel way to win friends and influence people: stop calling people names. Stop trying to shame them into compliance. Stop telling your political opponents that they are evil. It's remarkably effective.
I think I largely agree with this paragraph. As I understand it, the "Bernie Bros" thing was practically a nonsense exaggerated or perhaps even invented by the media. I don't think it was really a major factor in the lack of success of his campaign.
Finally: consider the enormous asymmetry in cultural power in the United States, the one the media conveniently never talks about. Ask yourself how you would feel if Republicans had a mortal lock on the University and the media and Hollywood.
As long as the left's hegemony over American cultural power remains unenlightened and devoid of benevolence, we're going to see political power balance it out.
I think the left
should dominate these institutions, and think it is no coincidence they do. The only risk of any institution is being out of touch, and there certainly are bubbles, but I'm sure they'll burst, as they always do.
First off, the establishment news media in the USA is not left-wing
at all, it is centre-right. It is corrupted by moneyed-interests, it serves power rather than questions it.
I don't know why Hollywood tends to be quite leftist, although I have ideas, but I don't see it as the result of shadowy (
and awfully Jewish) puppet masters, as some on the right argue. The phenomenon of these institutions typically being leftist relative to the rest of culture is not just a US phenomenon either.
With academia and the media, I suspect it has everything to do with their codes of ethics. The application of academic integrity and the journalist code of ethics will ultimately result in a left-wing view of the world because rationality just so happens to be found in around the centre-left of the spectrum. One might think of the famous Stephen Colbert quote, but he speaks of "liberal bias" in jest. There is no bias. If I could create a political spectrum with rationality at its centre, I would, but I'm stuck with the pre-existing spectrum
.
If evidence is accurately measured and reported, rather than distorted to fit a conclusion/agenda, especially under a rigorous system of peer review, something close to the reality of the situation is going to be the product. Bad ideas die out, I don't want bad ideas in academia or the media existing in a vacuum without critique.
Why is the centre-left rational? Well, where do anti-scientific positions tend to find themselves on the political spectrum? Alternative medicine and new age bullshit tends to find it self on the far-left, along with unproven political systems that end up doing shit for human well-being in practice (communism, and anarchism). On the right you
generally have increasingly fundamentalist religions, and climate science denial, and nationalism, etc. Cookie-cutter ethnocentric wealth and power concentration will never lead to a stable society. There's also what is known as the "extreme centre". Any institution that points out the flaws in these systems will be naturally somewhere in the middle of them. The middle just so happens to be the centre-left
.
For those conservatives wanting balance though, in wanting to get in the mix with their
baseless ideologies that don't stand up to scrutiny, let's open that flood gate! Let's cut the science departments in half and put in witch doctors and alchemists and flat earthers. Let's cut the media department in half and put in telepaths and hierophants. Let's cut the agriculture department in half and put in those people who think you can survive on just sunlight, or hey, throw in some cannibals
. Let's take them all seriously too, despite the lack of evidence. See how far we get.
The first black president. Gay marriage. The more cultural gains we made, the more the left ratcheted up the rhetoric about how sexism and racism and homophobia are worse than ever and that the rednecks are to blame. If you think you have your boot on the neck of America's cultural peasants, and your conscience can tolerate it, then that's a winning strategy. Grind them into the dirt. But if you've decided on total war, you better be sure you actually have the armaments for total war. Did you forget that the majority of the population is white, and that the majority of whites do not have a college degree? Did you really think that they wanted to hear about their "privilege" from liberal white elites? You thought you could tell the peasants to shut the fuck up and eat their cake, and that they wouldn't come at you with your pitchforks?
This is basically repeating what the author has said already, except with increasingly absurd rhetoric.
The effete delusions of a corrupt aristocracy, of hash-tag courtiers who have abandoned actual policies that help the underprivileged to indulge in conspicuous ethical consumption that displays their moral superiority to the cultural peasants. Screw the diverse mass of peasants: Does the aristocracy have the right race and gender balance? Screw socioeconomic policies that help African Americans; I'm going to a "protest"!
Republican economic policies. A republican healthcare program, straight out of the Heritage Foundation and first implemented by Mitt Romney. Warmongering. Plus the secret ingredient: identity politics! That way we can engage in the delusion that our policies are actually "progressive."
What a winning combination.
I think this is a horribly written paragraph, structurally. Given the quality of the paragraph before, I think they need a tranquiliser dart, perhaps. Seems like they're criticising efforts to have proportionately represented workplaces / governments? I am for such a thing, so naturally disagree. What are they saying benefits African Americans? It is true that Obamacare is a right-wing healthcare system. What would help black folks (and all folks) more is universal healthcare, but that's
socialism! Ohnoes.
)