Here is a group of Trump voters, expressing their economic insecurity and deep frustration at being forcibly compelled to listen to NPR. I would have thought that the inability to change their radio dial to “AM” would have been because of the grievous injuries done to their hands by liberal enemies of the working class, but gee those right hands they are raising seem pretty healthy.
Please share widely!
1) Every American Nazi voted for Trump
Unlike any other Republican in history, something about this candidate and his policies has attracted these folks and made them think they won the election. Remember Obama and the Wright controversy? The media is totally giving Trump a pass and he has far deeper connections with these folks and has done little to denounce them, renounce them or kick them out of his movement. Obamas pastor, the man who married him and baptized his kids, said some kooky stuff about AIDS and Israel and the media flipped a shit. Openly racist Nazis are endorsing Trump and nobody is asking him for comment. Bannon isn’t normal, this isn’t normal and the media can’t just argue it’s another opinion for “balance”. It’s a legitimate threat to human rights and the American way of life and we should call Trump out on it!
2) Most Trump voters are not American Nazis
It’s not just working whites who deserted the Democrats, but working class blacks too according to a gut wrenching piece in this Sunday’s Times. They and Latinos voted for Trump at higher numbers than Romney and their turnout levels were lower. Something about Clinton rubbed them the wrong way and they felt this choice was lousy and more of the same. The existential threat of Trump was not enough, they needed to vote for an affirmative agenda that raised their standard of living which has been stagnant under Democrats and Republicans.
Compton, Detroit, Akron, Scranton, and yes coal country and rural farm country need a truly Democratic Farmer-Laborer Party again. We need a second New Deal to rebuild this country in the hinterlands that aren’t hip as aren’t accessible to the global economy.
It’s called both/and and I’ve been making this argument on this board for nearly three years. When will any of you listen? After eight years of this extremist as President? America can’t afford that change.
… yikes.
Somehow, the thought of delivering an ‘I told you so” while being herded into a cattle-car to be transported to some far off concentration camp in Montana isn’t as remote as I once thought it might be… Still and all, it’s better than the alternative.
Though, for the record, I’ve never thought of Donald Trump as Hitler. I’ve always thought of him as Ernst Rohm and likely to meet the same fate at the business end of a long knife wielded by a putative ally.
Time to update the To Do list to include ‘Learning how to successfully hide entire families of [insert population here].”
It seems like your attitude is that the fix is “for everyone to think as I do”. If that’s not correct (or if it is), what is your plan to move forward? Or is it enough for you to be “right” ™.
I can see why you might put it that way. But I think there is a difference between ‘for everyone to think as I do” and “for everybody to recognize some common boundaries,” which is where I thought we all were, right up until last week.
There is a great deal of re-contextualizing that goes on when a breach of norms occur. The most common effect of this is to normalize, if not the breach itself, then then results of the breach. This is not, necessarily, a bad thing. If a storm wipes away your house, homelessness is your new normal and you have to adapt to that. But you can adapt poorly and reject, entirely, the previous norm of living in a house or you can rebuild.
The norm that existed previously was that the very idea of Trump as president was a ridiculous and implausible notion that only irrational people would make. We all thought it. Even Trump himself thought it, else he would not have made hay about the vote being ‘rigged.’ Well it happened. People voted for it. Instead of saying straightforwardly that people voted in an irrational way for a ridiculous and implausible candidate, efforts are undertaken to re-contextualize the entire vote and say it was this that and/or the other, entirely rational, and above-board process. It was not. Trump was a ridiculous candidate and he is going to be a ridiculous president.
The danger, as every parent knows, is that when one rule, or norm, changes all the others come under challenge and are tested. The video above is an example of this in action. We’re going to see re-defining (likely downwards) the norms around speech and race relations.
So, I guess, my ‘plan’ (such as it is) is to try to remember that the norms we held before last week were sane and it is the breaching of them that is irrational. We should try to hold on to the way we’ve lived and not treat the breach of one norm as the destruction of all… and we should not let other take that advantage either. I don’t know if that’s ‘plan’ enough for you. But it’s all I got right now.
How does this help anyone who is being targeted now by those encouraged to take their hate out on the “others”.
How does this help to minimize the damage Trump and the Rs will cause over the next two years?
How does this help to ensure that we get better electoral results 2, 4, 6… years out?
All I can do is say that unacceptable behavior is unacceptable behavior and stand against it when I see it. I certainly don’t think it helps to give up on prior norms and behaviors and allow them, and their consequences, to be normalized as acceptable. Like I said: Trump was a ridiculous candidate and he’s going to be ridiculous president. This is just a way of asking that since nothing, materially, has changed why should we act like it has? The irrational has happened. That doesn’t make our previous logic wrong. We must remember this or make the unthinkable normal and lose our way.
I don’t know that such damage can be minimized. That’s the horror of the sheer irrationality of it. It’s going to be what it’s going to be and the boulder has crested the hill and is on trajectory…
By reminding us that the people who are going to fix this thing and govern well are going to look a lot like Hillary Clinton. We can dance around that fact. We can pretend the answer is some future messiah who’ll Bern the infidels to the ground. But we really know, and must remember, that the people who are willing to stand up and run, and who are going to end up doing the job well, are going to be people like Hillary Clinton. The electoral results 2, 4 and 6 years out are going to be made under the same circumstances and logic and context as the last few and Hillary Clinton wasn’t just an acceptable default, she was an excellent choice. If we accept the irrationality as normal we must, therefore, reject the candidate. But if we reject the irrationality, we realize that the candidate lost on terms other than merit and ability. And so, in 2, 4 and 6 years out… and beyond… the choice will be presented to us again.
Us? We’re not the ones that matter.
And meanwhile you throw bombs at people here who are trying to figure out how to make a difference. To paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, “You run an election with the voters you have, not the voters you might want or wish to have”. Somehow, a black man won the presidency twice, convincingly. There are voters out there who can be convinced to vote for a D candidate (and enough that could have been convinced to vote for Clinton) without normalizing unacceptable behavior or any other nonsense you are accusing us of.
“Blame the voters” is a losing proposition.
… you are, no doubt, thinking that by running candidates like Clinton, we are ‘doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.’ My point is that we are engaging in this insanity by rejecting the candidate “over and over again and expecting different results.” I find little substantive difference between Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, all of whom have lost a presidential election to a blustery, oft racist, demagogue and/or buffoon. They are serious sober-minded wonks who care to do the right thing and to do it right. The electorate has been on the other side of that choice time and time again. Insanity indeed.
And where has that got us? I think Barack Obama is a good man, perhaps the best of men… but his administration has been, overall a disappointment. Though it pains me to say it, the Obama administration is largely a failure. Winning the election is not enough.
I’m not sure how to respond to this.
On the one hand, that one phrase “blame the voters” is as good a shorthand definition of ‘Democracy’ as any I’ve heard. I can’t remember where I heard it recently, else I’d make proper attribution, but somebody said “Democracy isn’t about freedom, it’s about accountability.” We talk around that, trying to come up with theories about the forces and circumstances that purport to shape the vote, without ever actually admitting that somebody, somewhere, on their own two legs, walked into a booth, shut the curtain behind them, and in the company of only their conscience, pulled the lever.
On the other hand, I suspect you already knew all that, and are only shy of blaming a certain segment of voters because a lot of those voters get downright nasty and even more irrational if they think they are being blamed… even if they are deserving of blame. When you challenge their positions they dig into ‘fuck you’ mode. It’s not enough, for example, to vote for George W Bush over John Kerry, they have to excuse a distinct lack of courage, moral and physical, on the part of Bush and attempt to corrupt Kerry’s demonstrated courage in an aggressive attempt at inversion of reality. The party of ‘support the troops’ actually publicly displayed ‘purple-heart bandaids’ at their national convention in support of a dodger and in opposition to a soldier. That’s the terms of the debate. Of course blaming those voters is a losing proposition, their only going to go deeper into ‘fuck you’ mode, if you do so.
At some point, however, refusing to blame those voters becomes excusing their behavior and, eventually, normalizing it. Which is where we are at now.
I don’t know who you were hanging around with, but everyone I know was nervous as hell about the election and the possibility that Trump could win. I was shocked, saddened, but not surprised. My “we” knew that this country was capable of this outcome.
So I’m looking for things that can be done, especially given that I can’t do a Vulcan mind-meld with everyone in the country to make them see “the errors of their ways”, in order to realize what I wrote in that above comment.
…I was “nervous as hell” also, same as they. Why would we not be?
You’ve have fairly well encapsulized what anxiety is: the pain of being strung up between the unthinkable and the unknown; the nervousness didn’t just derive from thinking Donald Trump unacceptable, but in concert with not knowing how many fellow citizens could be irrational… Turns out, quite a lot.
This much hasn’t changed: Trump is still an orange buffoon. Refraining from pointing out that a significant portion of the electorate voted for an orange buffoon doesn’t seem all that productive… and actively seeking alternate theories that couldn’t possibly be true seems downright counter-productive.
You have to find the truth of the problem before you can do anything. That’s a thing that can be done…
No one here has actually defended voting for Trump. I am simply trying to ascertain why a substantial number of voters stayed home or defected from the Democrats to the Republicans this time. I think asking that question and determining an answer is essential to regaining power for the progressive movement, which after all, is a goal we all share and the best way to prevent President Trump from causing too much damage.
I also would say there are generally two camps on BMG here:
1) Clinton did everything right and the voters are more racist, sexist and stupid than we thought
2) Clinton ran an inept campaign that allowed her to be outflanked on the left by Trump when it came to the issues of trade and helping the white working class.
I think 2 so far has been proven correct. Particularly since Camp 2 warned about this possibility to which Camp 1 shrugged it off with ‘trump will never win’, ‘most voters arent that racist, sexist, or stupid’ and ‘we don’t need white working class voters, the southwest and west will offset any losses in the rust belt, and besides the rust belt is just fine’.
Thomas Frank was mocked and dismissed here, including by me a little bit since I think he is unrealistic in his goals and how to achieve them, but he has a strong ready made point for predicting this outcome. So did Michael Moore, Rick Pearlstein, Alec MacGillis, and many other stories I linked to from the earlier Carrier piece to the stories about voters torn between Sanders and Trump in the primary. The Sanders/Clinton divide in Michigan that allowed him to eek out a win mirrors the Trump/Clinton divide in the general.
I said at the time even if it isn’t a problem for Clinton winning the nomination, it does show a real serious problem she has to address in the general.
So no, we were ignored and our assumptions were dismissed. We were proven right and your side, the Clinton campaign, and all it’s arrogant assumptions were proven wrong.
Insisting that calling the voters racist, stupid, and sexist is the way to stop Trump or regain power is a recipe for electoral suicide. Insisting that our analysis somehow excuses Trump or justifies him or is an example of us being racist, sexist, or stupid or ignoring the real terrifying dangers of a fascist revival on our shores is putting words in our mouth we didn’t say!
Trump is a facist, racist, dumbass dangerous asshole. I will do everything in my power to stop him. Anyone who voted for him did so because they too think this way OR because they ignored it and thought his other promises were appealing. It’s a combination, not one or the other as you and John T May keeps insisting. I’m analytically in the middle.
I’ve consistently said there is a Venn diagram of racists, folks in between, and folks who say ‘aw fuck it i need help, he’s my man’. Only that later third is persuadable, but losing that third was enough to sink Clinton and regaining it rapidly is essential for any future Democratic majority or administration.
I’ve always accepted your Venn diagram.
Here are my two quibbles:
1. I am sick and tired of being attacked as a “wall street sellout” or all the other lies because I don’t genuflect at the altar of angry white men that johntmay erects.
2. I fear that your analysis of the vote understates the role that “passive” misanthropy plays in times like this.
When we see a gang of thugs terrorize a scapegoat, and we silently walk by because we have “more important things to do”, then we are complicit in their thuggery by our silence.
I remain unconvinced that this election was won or lost by the third you are focused on. I think that, instead, CMD and paulsimmons are likely to be on the right track:
1. We Democrats alienated or at best did not adequately support our campaign efforts among black and minority voters — too many stayed home.
2. A substantial number of white racists sat out the 2008 and 2012 election because they could not and would not vote for either GOP candidate, and of course would never vote for Barack Obama. I think the GOP spent the entire Obama administration pandering to those voters, and I think Donald Trump energized them more effectively than any other candidate in US history.
I think that the above item 1 is complicated by the success of voterID and other GOP-led voter suppression efforts in the key battleground states. I’m not disagreeing with Paul, I’m saying instead that these laws raised the barrier higher and the Democratic Party did not respond.
I think America is in far worse condition than your analysis suggests. I think things will get far worse before they begin to get better. My prediction is that it is only after the people who are already suffering endure even more pain that they will begin to open themselves to the revolutionary premise that their chosen scapegoats are not the source of their pain.
More fundamentally, I suggest that classical American democracy is a disaster in a post-truth society. An electorate that values emotion over fact and that rejects rationality, courtesy, and intellectual discipline will follow each and every demagogue that appears — there is an endless supply of such demagogues.
The only solution to this latter problem is to change our society, while waiting for the “post truth” generations to age and die. We are talking about 20-50 years here. I see very little likelihood of any positive change in the next decade.
I think that current events in Turkey foreshadow our most likely immediate future. I think the likelihood is that BLM protests will kill more police, and Donald Trump’s government will mount an all-out race war against black America with the full-throated and enthusiastic support of all those red states. Alternatively, and just as likely, Donald Trump’s government will mount an all-out religious war against Muslims across America after the next terror incident, again with the full-throated and enthusiastic support of all those red states.
Scenarios like the two I painted above are made more certain because Donald Trump’s administration will be eagerly looking for distractions from the suffering of millions of Americans whose medical expenses will skyrocket after the repeal of Obamacare or whose jobs are lost after his disastrous foreign policy blunders destroy our competitiveness in world markets.
The world is going to get MUCH worse before it gets any better.
You really clarified all your viewpoints and it makes it a lot easier for me to respond to them and see where you’re coming from going forward. So I really appreciate the thoughtful commentary.
I also hope it’s been clear I reject the pessimism of conceding that the racists have won or the binaries that John May argues that we are either class conscious or race conscious and can’t be both simultaneously.
I also reject the idea that emphasizing class economics is somehow standing down from confronting the bigotry of Trump and his bigoted supporters. I honestly haven’t proposed that and don’t see anyone else here arguing that. It seems like a strawman to me.
You’re awfully similar in age and disposition to my father which makes it easier to understand. He’s been saying since NH that Trump would win, Bernie’s a waste of time, and Hillary was our only hope but she would be rejected. He’s also a lot less hopeful about the future and thinks my generation is making the same mistake as his by focusing on purity of purpose rather than fighting to win.
It’s hard to argue with the last point as we see the left eating itself, and eating it’s young, in the aftermath of this election. I hope my commentary has helped us stay cautiously optimistic or cynically idealist. I am under no illusions about how bad it is and how bad it will get.
But I also strongly believe that things can get better if people organie, or aside their minor difference and focus on the major issues. Mitigating become inequality is the single best thing we can do to solve all our other social and cultural problems.
Empowering out of work black males who didn’t vote in Milwaukee and out of work whites who voted the wrong way in the Rust Belt can be accomplished by the same program. Going back to the New Deal and putting shovels in the hands of men and women to rebuild this country instead of Syria is a key lesson of this election. And I think running in it allows us to beat Trump at his own game while also advancing our own agenda.
Sanders had the right message but as a flawed messenger. It’s doubtful he would’ve kept the POC needed even if he gained in the Rust Belt. Clinton was the more qualified candidate but ran on a flawed message. I think we should all concede that both candidates and campaigns made mistakes and we need new leadership going forward that learns from both.
You guys give me a million dollars and use it to go get help.
Who’s with me?
Denouncing racism and fascism and the rubes supporting Hitler was all fun and games until they won a majority of seats and forced their way into government. The folks who voted for them hoping to get jobs could still be pulled back from the cliff in 1933, by 1938 it was too late.
So I am suggesting driving a wedge between Trumps soft supporters who voted for him on jobs and trades by simultaneously denouncing the racists openly heiling him while also figuring out where our program needs to be modified.
I am in total agreement with you we can’t let this people stay in government, and we have to stop them in two years and then four years, and running the same playbook that failed so miserably in 2016 is the surest way to ensure 8 years of this government.
Not all of us have the luxury of escaping this country if shit really hits the fan. The Philippines is going in a worse direction so my in laws are struck here, we can’t afford to go to Europe or Canada, so this is the only country we got. I don’t want to see it go over to racists anymore than you do, which is why I want to help Democrats win again. You, and sadly the more reasonable CMD are hopeless nihilists viewing any outreach as collaboration or acts of futility. If St Hillary can’t slay the dragon no one can.
Well, there are plenty of younger leaders ready to fight and take on the corporate establishment the voters rejected while simultaneously fighting the new order they let into government in their rage.
Weimar didn’t fail because because some people supported that new guy because of his economic policies, despite the violent racism. It failed because people supported the new guy SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE he gave them a neat scapegoat upon which everything could be blamed, and made it OK to go ahead and take those frustrations out.
Maybe I will come around some day, as I have been irritated in the past with the cultural Starbucks/NPR/Williams Sonoma Democrat attitude. But for now, I am simply stunned at the sheer lack of basic human decency in a huge portion of the population.
Party people are eventually going to do as you suggest because they aren’t complete morons. But I have doubts at this point if there can be any effective strategy. The evidence of the last 2 weeks is terrible: these voters are angry about the power of big money, but care about that less than Mexicans. They are the “Hands off My Medicare” people, but don’t care about converting Medicare to a block grant because Muslims.
It sure looks like any appeal made will fail, because these voters will go for the racist BS just like a dog will always go for the guy with some meat.
Bernie supporters have been warning about this for months and we have been ignored. And now that our theories of the electorate have been proven right, Clinton supporters are doubling down on the same failed messaging, rhetoric and strategy. And we can’t afford to make the same mistake twice.
Obama won over these voters in 2008. It can be done. He won them again in 2012 by specifically running against an outsourcer and running in a record of saving hundreds of thousands of auto jobs in Middle America. The guy who sold me my Buick a lifelong Republican who went for Obama since he saved his dealership.
A lot of these folks didn’t know about the Nazi connections since Glenn Beck was the only one talking about them, not Clinton. They didn’t know that Trump’s businesses were failures. They knew he said a lot of mean things to people. The sex assault attack ended up being a wash, fairly or not, cause Bill isn’t an angel in that department either.
But some of these really desperate people figured he could be a liar who didn’t do what he said he would do, but they knew Hillary wasn’t going to help them. She didn’t run on saving Peoria from boarding up, she ran on saving Planned Parenthood, NATO and Alicia Machado. Stuff important to the country but irrelevant to these particular voters.
So we got two problems. The hate groups walking around like they run the country now and the people in the swing states who voted for that and have to live with the consequences. The second group deserves our empathy and our outreach, the first group deserves nothing but the strongest possible fight we can muster.
While it fit the narrative nicely that particular anecdote was a two-day story. Also, I’d like to see more evidence on the counties that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but Trump in 2016. Do we know that THOSE particular voters actually voted Obama-Obama-Trump or did the counties flip because the turnout rates and electorate composition were different? I strongly suspect it is more the latter.
…please don’t tell me you think that she shouldn’t run on things like PP and NATO because they are less obviously relevant to a certain segment of the electorate. Sometimes leadership means precisely telling voters what issues they should care about and why.
Hard to call it leadership when you lose the election of leader.
To see if anyone is following them.
‘Women’ were supposed to be upset about any threat to PP, and would prioritize it in voting. Except millions of them are pro-life.
‘Blacks’ were supposed to want to continue Obama’s Legacy with the Wife of the First Black President. Except millions asked themselves, “Waddaya got to lose”?
And so on. Voters are actual people, not identity blocs.
It IS leadership to take a stand, sometimes especially when it is unpopular.
and she did not. That was beneath her and not in line with her identity politics. Even Obama remarked that she should have spent more time in VFW Halls and union halls and less time speaking in front of bankers…
That “Obama won these voters” fudges the numbers a bit for optimism sake. There are 1000 of them. In 2008 and 2012, 200 of them voted, and 102 of those for Obama. In 2016, those same there were 598.
It isn’t so much that Obama won this vote, so much as McCain and Romney failed to win them by not explicitly advocating white power nationalism.
These folks haven’t voted Dem in 50+ years. Either they stay home and dens win or they come out and dems lose. What changed 50+ of course.
The number of xenophobes, misogynists, bigots, racists and all the deplorables has always voted Republican. They voted for McCain. They voted for Romney. They voted for Trump. We won two of those fights.
White laborers who voted for Obama twice decided that after another eight years of zero advancement, let’s give Trump a shot. Minority laborers who voted for Obama twice decided that after another eight years of lip service and no results, it’s time to stay home.
This attitude of Democrats that we lost the election because WE are so moral, upright, and proper in a world that has become all too sinful and vile is a nice emotional comforter to soften the blow of the shellacking we took on election day, but it is time to put emotions aside and look at reality, even though that might sting.
It goes both ways. I reject the idea that white nationalism didn’t make Trump’s support more potent in the primary or in the general. It certainly brought people out of the woodwork who don’t regular vote or participate in politics. And he was their candidate.
It also brought some Perot and Bill Clinton voters into the booth, some Pat Buchanan voters, and yes many Obama voters in the particular states in question who likely voted for Obama twice. Both Trump voters I know the best who are neither racist nor stupid voted Obama-Obama-Trump fwiw.
My racist side of the family we don’t talk to anymore definitely voted for Trump because he was a racist, but they also didn’t vote for Obama twice for the same reason.
It fits your narrative, but the narrative advanced by folks like Thomas Frank has also been backed up by independent journalists like Alec MacGillis, the New York Times, and even Nate Silver. What data do you have that proves this point? I have linked to countless sources that back up my claims, I have yet to see anything credible backing up yours or petr’s claims that white nationalism is exclusively the missing formula behind Trump’s success in the Rust Belt.
I am happy to look at them though-this is a conversation to discover what the truth is and how we can advance progressive goals in the future. I worry that under your scenario we are in a far deeper mess than I thought. I refuse to believe the conclusion that an agenda of racial inclusion an economic populism are mutually exclusive.
…that Weimar was never that healthy a democracy to begin with. Germany’s political tradition had been authoritarian going back pretty much to Teutonberg Wald. President Hindenberg pined for a return of the Kaiser. Throw in a horrific recovery from the Great War aided and abetted by vengeful victors along with the Great Depression and democracy doesn’t look so great to a population not democratically inclined to begin with.
As an opposite example, free institutions have largely worked for us since the beginning because we DID have democratic political DNA, at least relatively speaking. The American Revolution began simply as a call to restore lost rights of Englishmen harkening as far back as Magna Carta. Colonies and communities therein already did a lot of de facto self-governing and Britain itself may well have been the freest and most representative polity on the planet at the time.
Our system in many ways was designed to prevent someone like Trump from getting elected, he scored the 1 in 4 chance to shatter this notion. We now have a constitutional system theoretically designed to reign him in, though I do fear the accumulation of power in the executive is about to put that to it’s severest test in our history.
We need to be constitutionalist and civil libertarian in our opposition making common cause with Republicans who share those values.
1. The Nazis never won a majority of votes. They never won a plurality.
2. Trump hasn’t won a majority of votes. He didn’t win a plurality.
The issue is to defend against a vocal minority from taking over government. To see the apotheosis of this plan, check out what’s happening in North Carolina
… the ‘vocal minority’ used to be the clear majority. They have already ‘taken over.’ Now they are not a clear majority and believe… for lack of a better phrase… that it is oppressive to them that they can no longer be oppressive.