Would someone at Persuasion do some fact checking. The biggest working class loss of the Democrats occurred between 1964 and 1972. It dropped from 67% for the Dems to 30%. The Hard Hat riot was in 1970. The reasons were very similar to today. The extreme left did it and I helped. Nov 1972 was the day I woke up to what we had done.
And please stop repeating the nonsense about how the working class left due to Civil Rights. LBJ arm-twisted and rammed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He signed it four months before the 1964 election and that struggle was headline news for over a year before that. Everyone took that into account and that's when we got 67% of the working class and LBJ won the largest landslide in the Democrats' 200 year history! Someone at Persuasion needs to look this up.
Then what happened? The Black Power movement trashed King, derailed LBJ's proposal for actual economic equality; the Black Panthers got violent; Hillary Clinton took notes at the NJ trial where the Panthers were seen as political prisoners until the Court played the tape they made themselves of torturing their own 19 year old innocent Panther before they executed him. Angela Davis bought the four guns for the Marin Courthouse kidnapping. Her shotgun blew out the brains of the judge. The Black Liberation Army started assassinated police, and all the big cities had riots that Black Power and Whit radical approved of.
Then in 1972 for the only time ever a majority of union families voted against the Dems.
Also, of course, all of this was made possible by the support of White radicals, including University presidents. Plus the whole radical left became super anti-American, like the pro-Hamas nuts today.
Black power eventually evolved into CRT and here we are. The problem has always come from the far-left "revolutionaries," who are NOT progressives. Dems get sucked in, as do the R's by their extremists.
The black power movement of the period 1966 to 1972 had its excesses, but it also made important contributions: expanding global anti-colonial consciousness in the USA, advocating for community control of urban black communities, and pointing toward a national unity based in cultural pluralism. In contrast, the CRT of the last decade has absolutely nothing positive to contribute. It ignores the insights of both the nationalist and integrationist strains of the African-American movement of 1917 to 1988, while it pays no attention to empirical facts. It racially and ideologically divides the American people in a time of multidimensional crisis, when unity is needed. CRT certainly is an important factor in the electoral triumph of the MAGA movement. But it is not an evolution of black power; it knows neither King nor Malcolm.
Anti-colonial consciousness? Are you talking about Carmichael, Mr Black Power himself, visiting Cuba and saying, "“We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities. … It is going to be a fight to the death." NY Times Oct 7, 1968. I think you're mistaking the consciousness of a few on the far left for the views of the working class.
As for community control, Consider LBJ's June '65 initiative:
"We seek not just legal equity … but equality as a fact, and equality as a result." —President Lyndon Johnson, June 4, 1965, Howard University Commencement Address
Johnson called it "the greatest civil-rights speech of my life." “Never before,” read Dr. King’s telegram, “has a president articulated the depths and dimensions of the problem of racial injustice more eloquently and profoundly.” Johnson was launching “the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights."
So what did Black Power do? They used propaganda about the Watts riot to kill John's proposal because it would have completed with their plans to control urban Black communities, which are consequently still in dire straights.
But your entirely right about CRT (which got it's main ideas from Stokely Carmichael's BP movement).
Yes, LBJ gave a good speech at Howard University in 1965, and it was very much in accord with King’s thinking at the time. By 1967, however, King had evolved further in his thinking on both the domestic and international fronts. The later King, however, certainly would not have dismissed what LBJ had said in 1965, and neither would I today.
The idea of black community control was best articulated (repeatedly in addresses to all-black audiences) by Malcolm in 1964: black control of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the black community. He called it black nationalism. It was picked up by SNCC and other black power groups and tendencies. It was given practical expression by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in local community control of schools, ended by a strike of the New York City teachers’ union. It was forgotten by the black middle class by the 1980s, which preferred to take advantage of gains in civil rights to move out of the traditional black neighborhoods and establish separate middle class black neighborhoods. That phenomenon perhaps provided a social context for the evolution of CRT, which is an ideology that defends the interests of the black middle class.
Malcolm in 1964 and King in 1967 were formulating the rudimentary expressions of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist consciousness. They were not speaking of some kind of infantile concept of urban guerrilla warfare in the USA. They were putting forth a notion of U.S. support for anti-imperialist states and anti-colonial movements in the Third World, which were (and are) struggling for their sovereignty, for the purpose of attaining a more just and equal world. The idea was developed further by Jesse Jackson in his presidential candidacy of 1988, when he called upon the nation to turn away from a foreign policy of East-West confrontation and embrace a foreign policy of North-South cooperation. This concept remains a fundamental principle today of the nations of the Global South.
We are in agreement that CRT has nothing to recommend it. It knows nothing of Malcolm, King, or the historical and contemporary demands and hopes of the Global South.
To paraphrase an old pundit: "it's the issues stupid." What this election has shown is that it's a mistake to talk about Party allegiances and coalitions. In our two party system allegiances are entirely fluid. People vote the issues and the Trump victory is the inevitable result of failed policies of the Democrats: in the economy, at the border, in the arena of cultural sensitivities and in international affairs. Find the right policies and the effective communicators of that policy and guess what: you win elections.
One very much doubts that the Woke Progressives with their stranglehold on the MSM and main broadcasting outlets, will meekly just change tack in their media coverage of Trump and not just lambast him once again, like what happened in 2016. When such a disaster of this magnitude happens to the leftists, their modus operandi is to just double down, double down an double down again. The excuse this time by the Dems and Progressives will be along the lines of.... " we are altruistic and ready to sacrifice much of our current cultural epistemology for the good of the American people. We have asked Americans to embrace and understand that what the Dems have tried and will continue to try for, as they must be seen as being good for Americans an our society. But you haven't. Our ideology was not and is not at fault. It's just the American populace were not ready to embrace our teachings and it is the American electorate who have let us Dems down... It is the American people that are to blame not us nor our political nostrums. America is not ready to embrace a black, female President, and we must fight to preserve democracy in America which Trump, the fascist will destroy....". This is what the suits of the Dems are thinking as we speak. "there will be no surrender, no going back. " And their puppets in MSM will have to go along with this narrative. There is just too much face to lose, too much to explain to the American electorate... Likely it will be "plus ca change plus c'est Le meme chose" for the Dems when all the dust has settled, and an all out assault on Trump from every negative angle they can conceive.
Beyond these political tendencies, Trump presented himself as an anti-establishment candidate to a public that had lost faith in the established institutions of the nation. The 2024 Republican Party Platform is clearly an anti-establishment document. You can dismiss this as nothing more than a con, but it really is too soon to know. The true qualities of the MAGA movement in power will be demonstrated in practice during the next year or two.
“Factors driving the Trump phenomenon: The MAGA movement now looks to the future with hope,” November 7, 2024
Oh boy, do I agree with this. But actually more than a decade. Start with the great financial collapse of 2008 and the next six years of Obama's jobless recovery.
The Democrat coordinated BLM and Antifa riots. Remember the cities burning, the property damage, the death of cops like the five in Dallas, etc.? Remember the statues being torn down?
Remember Buying Big Mansions? Remember ActBlue.com
The pandemic. Remember the Democrat control authoritarianism? Remember schools being shutdown and school children harmed? Remember the massive hit to small business while large Donor corporations expanded?
Remember prior to the Great Recession the decades of working class economic opportunity destroyed by globalism?
Remember that fantastic transfer of wealth to the already wealthy from the working class and poor?
Remember the media big lies... Russia-gate, Hunter's Laptop is disinformation, Joe is mentally sound?
Remember all the Democrat Regime law fare... the abuse of legal and government power to destroy democracy?
And then the madness of wokeism being force-fed society. Yeah, we love the term "Latinx" and agree that men can get pregnant and young school girls should be encouraged to chop off their breasts and take boy hormones without telling their parents.
Yeah, it was not just that Joe Biden is a vegetable and Kamala Harris is a ripe piece of fruit. Frankly without the mail in ballot harvesting in 2020, the Democrats would have had a 100% track record of getting spanked for their Regime plus radical positions since Obama pissed of the electorate to vote for Trump.
Republicans are now the party of Trump, the man who has pulled off the greatest con job of any American president. That con is that he cares anything for anyone but himself, that he knows the truth about anything, that his policies are anything but self- aggrandizement and self preservation. The bill is going to come due.
You think his supporters don't know that, but they mostly do. I know a lot of (working class) people who voted for him, and they pretty much uniformly find him to be a loathsome loser of a human with whom they would never have a beer or invite inside their homes. They believe that Harris is worse. They believe that both candidates are stupid, lying, incompetent blowhards who were handed their positions. They believe that Harris is worse. Much worse. Mostly because she would also do exactly as she is told, and the ratchet only ever tightens one way. You could have put a camel in a suit and run it against Harris, and the camel would have won.
They utterly, utterly despise Harris and everyone like her. They don't believe Trump will do a single thing to help them in any way, or make their lives better, but they reason that it is better to suffer a bad flu than to catch bubonic plague. Harris is bubonic plague to them, and she could not lie her way out of that.
This is the one of the classic MAGA ploys which they have been promulgating for years now - whatever Trump is, the other side is worse. They have been as successful at it as Josef Goebbels was. They have spent years providing lie and distortions and simple solutions to problems that sometimes never really existed or are far from simple, but of course doing so is the meat and potatoes of demagogues everywhere.
Even if what you say about their beliefs is true, and I’m not at all sure it is because I’ve talked to not a few of them myself, ’they believe’ is not proof of anything. But there’s nothing to ‘believe’ about Trump. He’s right out there in the open. He has no utter cause to empathize with anyone like the people he claims to care for because he’s never experienced anything like their lives.
Kamala Harris does know a good deal about where they are, but she was caught in bind largely created by Biden’s demand to run again and then to stay in the race far longer than he should have. She did not have the information machine necessary to counteract that which Trump and his myrmidons have had in place for years.
If, as you say, so many of his supporters voted for him because they despise them equally, perhaps it is largely due to the influence of that machine, because she is not nor ever has been anything like him, and anyone with an honest eye or an ear has to know that.
No one can know what kind of a president Ms Harris might have made. The Oval Office puts its own stamp on those who have occupied it.
But instead, in voting for a certainty of no help from Trump instead accepting the possibility that Harris might actually have done wha she could to help them out, they have in all likelihood cut off their noses to spite their faces. I expect that will be cold comfort.
I’m not actually wondering why at all. I was just giving you a chance to justify the mistake you all have made, but in the end, the loser here is most likely to be the nation we were designed to be. If that’s what you all want, you are well on the way. But when it all starts to go south because of Trump and his myrmidons, don’t come crying to me.
Please address the anomaly here. Democrats are the party that advance pro-working class legislation, from tax reform to healthcare access to minimum wage increases, and a whole host of other stuff. Your opinion, which is the current rage among the post mortems, simply ignores this FACT. There's another reason(s) why Dems lost the working class, and it has nothing to do with policy. I have my opinions, but as they are not based upon research, they're just my thoughts. But I think they're a heck of a lot more valid than this trope going around.
I admire the text general regarding statistics and presentation of results, as well as more sociological findings. At the end, the message is quite populistic for several reasons:
- Elites are also part of the people/population
- Both Dems and Reps have been parties for elites since the 19th century (the roots of the Democratic Party were in the pro-slavery and racist South)
- For many reasons such as regarding tolerance, openness and rights it is better for the USA to have democratic and globalist "elites" than anti-democratic and nationalist ones as around Trump
- The Democratic Party just as other parties needs to understand that less and less people are going to be working class for many reasons such as digitalisation, robotisation, automatisation
- The day more working class individuals have better conditions they are going to transform into something else such as being creative class or middle-class = new voting and political behaviours that for example could benefit the Green Party in the USA
Dems still see themselves as the party of the downtrodden. And they do many things to try to help the poor and the working class. But their image, much of their rhetoric , and many of their policies are all about race and gender, and as they have increasingly been steered left on these issues by their base, they have lost more and more people who disagree on these issues, who believe largely in assimilation and law and order, and most importantly, who are increasingly Latino (not Latinx) and black Americans, and not a few gays, lesbians, Jews and others who refuse to drink from the toxic kool aid of tribalism. Their big mistake, strategically, has always been that minorities, however delineated, are all of one mind’, voting only rival interests and hostile to the larger American project. If that were true, the ethnic demographic shifts in our population in the past three decades would have led to absolute Dem dominance. In fact, the trends are gradual in the other direction. People want to be Americans first, and the Dems did not bank on that.
Your basic point seems robust. However, as a non-political scientist and certified Geezer, I find the term "working class" troublesome. Perhaps it is simply my ignorance, but to me it implies a vision of US society of questionable validity 50 years ago and highly dubious today. Its use in contemporary society connotes an academic and vaguely Marxist worldview likely to annoy and further alienate most so-called "working class" voters. Am I mistaken?
This article is a lot of what and probably something that I could have read on FiveThirtyEight. Ok, they have been these shifts, but why? As mentioned in another comment by Kerry, these shifts are not consistent with the actual message and actions by Dems.
My early theory on why is that the American Christian Nationalists have been able to put together the broad coalition needed. They take a bit of neoliberal for the economics and their message of prosperity then mix in some neoconservative on social values and that works for a lot of immigrants and Christian based voters.
Americans in general, but very much new Americans, expect financial opportunities and growth. The constant surge at the edge of social norms is concerning. The Dems like to show off all their entertainer clout. This doesn’t impress voters and in some cases may be the source of their grief.
The strange shenanigans with Trump holding upside-down a bible after the clearing of protesters. He is the money man representing prosperity and has your Christian back. He’s no Christian but that’s not his service to us.
The Dems keep talking about equity and justice. I suspect many see equity and justice is gained through wealth. And many economic immigrants see the same thing from their former home country. Trump represents this underlying understanding of the world. Mr Teflon with all of the money. I remember hearing after the OJ Simpson trial someone saying that they learned the justice system wasn’t rigged by race it was rigged by wealth.
The more I read and piece together people like Paula White, Trump’s former spiritual advisor, and try to understand how Christians have any affinity for the orange messiah I keep running into these threads back to American Christian Nationalists. This is about culture and values, not exactly religion. The shared values overlap really well. Trump is their prosperity leader and they are fine containerizing.
This is true coalition building not the perfection or your cancelled attitude that we see on the left. The Dems hold high their look and see we clear our ranks with any sniff of wrongdoing. This is in contrast to loyalty and a willingness to work with flawed people to get to our ends.
This not so new class politics has been around for a while but it has gotten more sophisticated and subtle. It isn’t being led with religion but values. The American Christian Nationalists with their prosperity message cleaves nicely with capitalism and Republicans. It allows the merging of the ultra rich with the working class and economic immigrants. It doesnt work for the well educated because it is full of holes and contradictions and their lesser attachment to Christian values.
One of the big issues is respect. In my experience many liberal folks are well educated, as I am. With that education they have developed a feeling of superiority to people with less education. While they will deny this, they exude it, and it is easily perceived by its targets. It would be very healing for the educationally elite to truly understand the intelligence and creativity of those working in areas where advanced formal education is not (yet) a prerequisite. In my experience people working in construction have to creatively resolve far more problems than most white collar folks.
Democrats' dishonesty is what is unraveling their dominance. The dishonesty in poling and their dominance of mainstream media, which has become too dishonest as manifested in almost total loss of the public trust all demonstrate that they have persuaded themselves of their worldview. As is always the case, liars lose their ability to remember what lies they told yesterday. Their message has lost its coherence.
Would someone at Persuasion do some fact checking. The biggest working class loss of the Democrats occurred between 1964 and 1972. It dropped from 67% for the Dems to 30%. The Hard Hat riot was in 1970. The reasons were very similar to today. The extreme left did it and I helped. Nov 1972 was the day I woke up to what we had done.
And please stop repeating the nonsense about how the working class left due to Civil Rights. LBJ arm-twisted and rammed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He signed it four months before the 1964 election and that struggle was headline news for over a year before that. Everyone took that into account and that's when we got 67% of the working class and LBJ won the largest landslide in the Democrats' 200 year history! Someone at Persuasion needs to look this up.
Then what happened? The Black Power movement trashed King, derailed LBJ's proposal for actual economic equality; the Black Panthers got violent; Hillary Clinton took notes at the NJ trial where the Panthers were seen as political prisoners until the Court played the tape they made themselves of torturing their own 19 year old innocent Panther before they executed him. Angela Davis bought the four guns for the Marin Courthouse kidnapping. Her shotgun blew out the brains of the judge. The Black Liberation Army started assassinated police, and all the big cities had riots that Black Power and Whit radical approved of.
Then in 1972 for the only time ever a majority of union families voted against the Dems.
Also, of course, all of this was made possible by the support of White radicals, including University presidents. Plus the whole radical left became super anti-American, like the pro-Hamas nuts today.
Black power eventually evolved into CRT and here we are. The problem has always come from the far-left "revolutionaries," who are NOT progressives. Dems get sucked in, as do the R's by their extremists.
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/help-me-understand-why-trump-won/comment/76518178
The black power movement of the period 1966 to 1972 had its excesses, but it also made important contributions: expanding global anti-colonial consciousness in the USA, advocating for community control of urban black communities, and pointing toward a national unity based in cultural pluralism. In contrast, the CRT of the last decade has absolutely nothing positive to contribute. It ignores the insights of both the nationalist and integrationist strains of the African-American movement of 1917 to 1988, while it pays no attention to empirical facts. It racially and ideologically divides the American people in a time of multidimensional crisis, when unity is needed. CRT certainly is an important factor in the electoral triumph of the MAGA movement. But it is not an evolution of black power; it knows neither King nor Malcolm.
https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/factors-driving-the-trump-phenomenon
Anti-colonial consciousness? Are you talking about Carmichael, Mr Black Power himself, visiting Cuba and saying, "“We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities. … It is going to be a fight to the death." NY Times Oct 7, 1968. I think you're mistaking the consciousness of a few on the far left for the views of the working class.
As for community control, Consider LBJ's June '65 initiative:
"We seek not just legal equity … but equality as a fact, and equality as a result." —President Lyndon Johnson, June 4, 1965, Howard University Commencement Address
Johnson called it "the greatest civil-rights speech of my life." “Never before,” read Dr. King’s telegram, “has a president articulated the depths and dimensions of the problem of racial injustice more eloquently and profoundly.” Johnson was launching “the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights."
So what did Black Power do? They used propaganda about the Watts riot to kill John's proposal because it would have completed with their plans to control urban Black communities, which are consequently still in dire straights.
But your entirely right about CRT (which got it's main ideas from Stokely Carmichael's BP movement).
Yes, LBJ gave a good speech at Howard University in 1965, and it was very much in accord with King’s thinking at the time. By 1967, however, King had evolved further in his thinking on both the domestic and international fronts. The later King, however, certainly would not have dismissed what LBJ had said in 1965, and neither would I today.
The idea of black community control was best articulated (repeatedly in addresses to all-black audiences) by Malcolm in 1964: black control of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the black community. He called it black nationalism. It was picked up by SNCC and other black power groups and tendencies. It was given practical expression by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in local community control of schools, ended by a strike of the New York City teachers’ union. It was forgotten by the black middle class by the 1980s, which preferred to take advantage of gains in civil rights to move out of the traditional black neighborhoods and establish separate middle class black neighborhoods. That phenomenon perhaps provided a social context for the evolution of CRT, which is an ideology that defends the interests of the black middle class.
Malcolm in 1964 and King in 1967 were formulating the rudimentary expressions of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist consciousness. They were not speaking of some kind of infantile concept of urban guerrilla warfare in the USA. They were putting forth a notion of U.S. support for anti-imperialist states and anti-colonial movements in the Third World, which were (and are) struggling for their sovereignty, for the purpose of attaining a more just and equal world. The idea was developed further by Jesse Jackson in his presidential candidacy of 1988, when he called upon the nation to turn away from a foreign policy of East-West confrontation and embrace a foreign policy of North-South cooperation. This concept remains a fundamental principle today of the nations of the Global South.
We are in agreement that CRT has nothing to recommend it. It knows nothing of Malcolm, King, or the historical and contemporary demands and hopes of the Global South.
To paraphrase an old pundit: "it's the issues stupid." What this election has shown is that it's a mistake to talk about Party allegiances and coalitions. In our two party system allegiances are entirely fluid. People vote the issues and the Trump victory is the inevitable result of failed policies of the Democrats: in the economy, at the border, in the arena of cultural sensitivities and in international affairs. Find the right policies and the effective communicators of that policy and guess what: you win elections.
One very much doubts that the Woke Progressives with their stranglehold on the MSM and main broadcasting outlets, will meekly just change tack in their media coverage of Trump and not just lambast him once again, like what happened in 2016. When such a disaster of this magnitude happens to the leftists, their modus operandi is to just double down, double down an double down again. The excuse this time by the Dems and Progressives will be along the lines of.... " we are altruistic and ready to sacrifice much of our current cultural epistemology for the good of the American people. We have asked Americans to embrace and understand that what the Dems have tried and will continue to try for, as they must be seen as being good for Americans an our society. But you haven't. Our ideology was not and is not at fault. It's just the American populace were not ready to embrace our teachings and it is the American electorate who have let us Dems down... It is the American people that are to blame not us nor our political nostrums. America is not ready to embrace a black, female President, and we must fight to preserve democracy in America which Trump, the fascist will destroy....". This is what the suits of the Dems are thinking as we speak. "there will be no surrender, no going back. " And their puppets in MSM will have to go along with this narrative. There is just too much face to lose, too much to explain to the American electorate... Likely it will be "plus ca change plus c'est Le meme chose" for the Dems when all the dust has settled, and an all out assault on Trump from every negative angle they can conceive.
Beyond these political tendencies, Trump presented himself as an anti-establishment candidate to a public that had lost faith in the established institutions of the nation. The 2024 Republican Party Platform is clearly an anti-establishment document. You can dismiss this as nothing more than a con, but it really is too soon to know. The true qualities of the MAGA movement in power will be demonstrated in practice during the next year or two.
“Factors driving the Trump phenomenon: The MAGA movement now looks to the future with hope,” November 7, 2024
https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/factors-driving-the-trump-phenomenon
Oh boy, do I agree with this. But actually more than a decade. Start with the great financial collapse of 2008 and the next six years of Obama's jobless recovery.
The Democrat coordinated BLM and Antifa riots. Remember the cities burning, the property damage, the death of cops like the five in Dallas, etc.? Remember the statues being torn down?
Remember Buying Big Mansions? Remember ActBlue.com
The pandemic. Remember the Democrat control authoritarianism? Remember schools being shutdown and school children harmed? Remember the massive hit to small business while large Donor corporations expanded?
Remember prior to the Great Recession the decades of working class economic opportunity destroyed by globalism?
Remember that fantastic transfer of wealth to the already wealthy from the working class and poor?
Remember the media big lies... Russia-gate, Hunter's Laptop is disinformation, Joe is mentally sound?
Remember all the Democrat Regime law fare... the abuse of legal and government power to destroy democracy?
And then the madness of wokeism being force-fed society. Yeah, we love the term "Latinx" and agree that men can get pregnant and young school girls should be encouraged to chop off their breasts and take boy hormones without telling their parents.
Yeah, it was not just that Joe Biden is a vegetable and Kamala Harris is a ripe piece of fruit. Frankly without the mail in ballot harvesting in 2020, the Democrats would have had a 100% track record of getting spanked for their Regime plus radical positions since Obama pissed of the electorate to vote for Trump.
Roll another one. Just like the other one. You've been hangin' on to it. And I'd sure like a hit.
Don't do that wacky weed as it causes psychosis that can lead to being a Democrat.
Republicans are now the party of Trump, the man who has pulled off the greatest con job of any American president. That con is that he cares anything for anyone but himself, that he knows the truth about anything, that his policies are anything but self- aggrandizement and self preservation. The bill is going to come due.
You think his supporters don't know that, but they mostly do. I know a lot of (working class) people who voted for him, and they pretty much uniformly find him to be a loathsome loser of a human with whom they would never have a beer or invite inside their homes. They believe that Harris is worse. They believe that both candidates are stupid, lying, incompetent blowhards who were handed their positions. They believe that Harris is worse. Much worse. Mostly because she would also do exactly as she is told, and the ratchet only ever tightens one way. You could have put a camel in a suit and run it against Harris, and the camel would have won.
They utterly, utterly despise Harris and everyone like her. They don't believe Trump will do a single thing to help them in any way, or make their lives better, but they reason that it is better to suffer a bad flu than to catch bubonic plague. Harris is bubonic plague to them, and she could not lie her way out of that.
This is the one of the classic MAGA ploys which they have been promulgating for years now - whatever Trump is, the other side is worse. They have been as successful at it as Josef Goebbels was. They have spent years providing lie and distortions and simple solutions to problems that sometimes never really existed or are far from simple, but of course doing so is the meat and potatoes of demagogues everywhere.
Even if what you say about their beliefs is true, and I’m not at all sure it is because I’ve talked to not a few of them myself, ’they believe’ is not proof of anything. But there’s nothing to ‘believe’ about Trump. He’s right out there in the open. He has no utter cause to empathize with anyone like the people he claims to care for because he’s never experienced anything like their lives.
Kamala Harris does know a good deal about where they are, but she was caught in bind largely created by Biden’s demand to run again and then to stay in the race far longer than he should have. She did not have the information machine necessary to counteract that which Trump and his myrmidons have had in place for years.
If, as you say, so many of his supporters voted for him because they despise them equally, perhaps it is largely due to the influence of that machine, because she is not nor ever has been anything like him, and anyone with an honest eye or an ear has to know that.
No one can know what kind of a president Ms Harris might have made. The Oval Office puts its own stamp on those who have occupied it.
But instead, in voting for a certainty of no help from Trump instead accepting the possibility that Harris might actually have done wha she could to help them out, they have in all likelihood cut off their noses to spite their faces. I expect that will be cold comfort.
Keep it up. Keep losing. Keep being baffled as to why. Most of them voted for Obama's first term, but not his second. Keep not wondering why.
I’m not actually wondering why at all. I was just giving you a chance to justify the mistake you all have made, but in the end, the loser here is most likely to be the nation we were designed to be. If that’s what you all want, you are well on the way. But when it all starts to go south because of Trump and his myrmidons, don’t come crying to me.
Please address the anomaly here. Democrats are the party that advance pro-working class legislation, from tax reform to healthcare access to minimum wage increases, and a whole host of other stuff. Your opinion, which is the current rage among the post mortems, simply ignores this FACT. There's another reason(s) why Dems lost the working class, and it has nothing to do with policy. I have my opinions, but as they are not based upon research, they're just my thoughts. But I think they're a heck of a lot more valid than this trope going around.
You're right.
I admire the text general regarding statistics and presentation of results, as well as more sociological findings. At the end, the message is quite populistic for several reasons:
- Elites are also part of the people/population
- Both Dems and Reps have been parties for elites since the 19th century (the roots of the Democratic Party were in the pro-slavery and racist South)
- For many reasons such as regarding tolerance, openness and rights it is better for the USA to have democratic and globalist "elites" than anti-democratic and nationalist ones as around Trump
- The Democratic Party just as other parties needs to understand that less and less people are going to be working class for many reasons such as digitalisation, robotisation, automatisation
- The day more working class individuals have better conditions they are going to transform into something else such as being creative class or middle-class = new voting and political behaviours that for example could benefit the Green Party in the USA
Dems still see themselves as the party of the downtrodden. And they do many things to try to help the poor and the working class. But their image, much of their rhetoric , and many of their policies are all about race and gender, and as they have increasingly been steered left on these issues by their base, they have lost more and more people who disagree on these issues, who believe largely in assimilation and law and order, and most importantly, who are increasingly Latino (not Latinx) and black Americans, and not a few gays, lesbians, Jews and others who refuse to drink from the toxic kool aid of tribalism. Their big mistake, strategically, has always been that minorities, however delineated, are all of one mind’, voting only rival interests and hostile to the larger American project. If that were true, the ethnic demographic shifts in our population in the past three decades would have led to absolute Dem dominance. In fact, the trends are gradual in the other direction. People want to be Americans first, and the Dems did not bank on that.
Last week’s election yielded no “wreckage” other than that of some people’s ephemeral ideological pipe dreams. Perhaps yours, included?
My feedback https://glibe.substack.com/p/feedback-to-michael-baharaeen-regarding
Your basic point seems robust. However, as a non-political scientist and certified Geezer, I find the term "working class" troublesome. Perhaps it is simply my ignorance, but to me it implies a vision of US society of questionable validity 50 years ago and highly dubious today. Its use in contemporary society connotes an academic and vaguely Marxist worldview likely to annoy and further alienate most so-called "working class" voters. Am I mistaken?
This article is a lot of what and probably something that I could have read on FiveThirtyEight. Ok, they have been these shifts, but why? As mentioned in another comment by Kerry, these shifts are not consistent with the actual message and actions by Dems.
My early theory on why is that the American Christian Nationalists have been able to put together the broad coalition needed. They take a bit of neoliberal for the economics and their message of prosperity then mix in some neoconservative on social values and that works for a lot of immigrants and Christian based voters.
Americans in general, but very much new Americans, expect financial opportunities and growth. The constant surge at the edge of social norms is concerning. The Dems like to show off all their entertainer clout. This doesn’t impress voters and in some cases may be the source of their grief.
The strange shenanigans with Trump holding upside-down a bible after the clearing of protesters. He is the money man representing prosperity and has your Christian back. He’s no Christian but that’s not his service to us.
The Dems keep talking about equity and justice. I suspect many see equity and justice is gained through wealth. And many economic immigrants see the same thing from their former home country. Trump represents this underlying understanding of the world. Mr Teflon with all of the money. I remember hearing after the OJ Simpson trial someone saying that they learned the justice system wasn’t rigged by race it was rigged by wealth.
The more I read and piece together people like Paula White, Trump’s former spiritual advisor, and try to understand how Christians have any affinity for the orange messiah I keep running into these threads back to American Christian Nationalists. This is about culture and values, not exactly religion. The shared values overlap really well. Trump is their prosperity leader and they are fine containerizing.
This is true coalition building not the perfection or your cancelled attitude that we see on the left. The Dems hold high their look and see we clear our ranks with any sniff of wrongdoing. This is in contrast to loyalty and a willingness to work with flawed people to get to our ends.
This not so new class politics has been around for a while but it has gotten more sophisticated and subtle. It isn’t being led with religion but values. The American Christian Nationalists with their prosperity message cleaves nicely with capitalism and Republicans. It allows the merging of the ultra rich with the working class and economic immigrants. It doesnt work for the well educated because it is full of holes and contradictions and their lesser attachment to Christian values.
One of the big issues is respect. In my experience many liberal folks are well educated, as I am. With that education they have developed a feeling of superiority to people with less education. While they will deny this, they exude it, and it is easily perceived by its targets. It would be very healing for the educationally elite to truly understand the intelligence and creativity of those working in areas where advanced formal education is not (yet) a prerequisite. In my experience people working in construction have to creatively resolve far more problems than most white collar folks.
Democrats' dishonesty is what is unraveling their dominance. The dishonesty in poling and their dominance of mainstream media, which has become too dishonest as manifested in almost total loss of the public trust all demonstrate that they have persuaded themselves of their worldview. As is always the case, liars lose their ability to remember what lies they told yesterday. Their message has lost its coherence.