Congratulations, Stupid.

[dada]

It's got nothing much to do with individuals and everything to do with a feeling of being dominated by a class, 'professional' in character, that purports to know what's best for you but which in practice really doesn't care if you live or die.

I could say, welcome to the world of the black underclass as treated by institutions of poor relief and workfare, public education and health, housing authorities, and the carceral state.

But it's more to the point to say that this feeling of being dominated by a class is successfully misdirected towards hating the likes of school teachers, trade unionists, precarious adjuncts, petty state management, career women, artists, urban "hipsters" and "yuppies," modes of dress and expression, an image of "social justice warriors," etc. And the angry embrace the upper classes in whose interests the system of domination actually works, and many of them now seek salvation from a pirate billionaire and his pirate crew who are a kind of farcical pustule at the top of a one-party right-wing state. Hating on "smart" is poison.

As well we could say, welcome to the fear that the neoliberal agenda spreads around the 'third world.'

As any intelligent person knows, there are many kinds of intelligence. Consumer intelligence - how to build ladders and climb them - is what we value in America. And intelligent consumers hate on emotional intelligence.

If you're intelligent, you don't need to prove it, people know. If you claim you're intelligent, and this means you are special, leaderly even, and you clearly don't know your ass from your elbow, get everything wrong, and then continue spouting your dopey bs without missing a beat, people notice. A person like that is only fooling consumers.

Yes, some people hate on smart.That's poison. Hating on emotional intelligence is poison, too.

[JackRiddler]

Many of the folks that voted Trump into office like the in your face fuck you system of it all even though they likely will not get anything to their benefit save for bragging rights and socially acceptable hippie, gay, and foreigner bashing.

Exactly what we are also seeing among local celebrants at what they think is the bonfire after a win for their team.

[peartreed]

The electorate that voted in a five-decade relapse in human rights and the republic’s democratic descent into demagogy can now endure their new, nostalgic nirvana known as their return to “Happy Days”. The remainder can mourn the lost enlightenment of the intervening years, unless that can be reactivated retroactively too. Perhaps the First Office Fonz can be forced to jump a shark that can also snag an airborne meal trying to fly way over its head. Let’s all go find a hungry shark.

[2012 Countdown]

PufPuf93 » Sat Nov 12, 2016 2:50 pm wrote:
Many of the folks that voted Trump into office like the in your face fuck you system of it all even though they likely will not get anything to their benefit save for bragging rights and socially acceptable hippie, gay, and foreigner bashing.

This describes EVERY ONE (many) Con supporters I know. I am surrounded by petty vindictive, cruel MF'ers who voted for a police crackdown on BLM people, who want Muslems (all of them) out of the country, and give not one whit about women right to her own body. Raging assholes who Love Birther talk, degrading anyone who is different. No, Trump will be stealing and destroying all we hold dear, but so long as he is beating up on someone, these raging assholes are pleased as punch.

[Joe Hillshoist]

But it's more to the point to say that this feeling of being dominated by a class is successfully misdirected towards hating the {wrong people} And the angry embrace the upper classes in whose interests the system of domination actually works, and many of them now seek salvation from a pirate billionaire and his pirate crew who are a kind of farcical pustule at the top of a one-party right-wing state. Hating on "smart" is poison.

That is pretty much it. "They" have been blaming everyone else for so long that people believe them.

[JackRiddler]

On the usage of "liberal" in the U.S., cross-posted from the "Liberals" thread, about the supposed SNL campaign to torpedo Trump by showing him kissing Putin, as opposed to the actual hosting of an SNL campaign by Trump during a key point in the primary campaign:

You may realize this episode of SNL would have involved the candidate Trump rehearsing, co-writing and participating in the skits for a period of one week. Was he being held hostage? Or did this experienced television professional have the understanding that he was receiving invaluable free PR for his campaign and his "brand"? The latter of course, and of course he was right.

And SNL is liberal, is it? Not unless liberal is some kind of term of art for anti-modernists of various stripes to hang on any phenomenon or person they dislike -- and to group often unrelated people and things together. I'm in an academic sector where half the stuff I hear seems to be critiques of "liberalism," defined in the classical way. I think you'll grant me (leftist) radical in my outlook, if hardly my lifestyle (or that of almost any other current Western member of the almost median income precariat). Yet I've grown up and lived with (in the sense of daily experience, not residence) many people who love watching predators like Trump perform for them. Guess by what name they most commonly call me? Radical is not a word they generally allow into their vocabulary. To them "leftist" is just another synonym for liberal.

.

[PufPuf93]

PufPuf93 » Sat Nov 12, 2016 2:50 pm wrote:
Many of the folks that voted Trump into office like the in your face fuck you system of it all even though they likely will not get anything to their benefit save for bragging rights and socially acceptable hippie, gay, and foreigner bashing.

This describes EVERY ONE (many) Con supporters I know. I am surrounded by petty vindictive, cruel MF'ers who voted for a police crackdown on BLM people, who want Muslems (all of them) out of the country, and give not one whit about women right to her own body. Raging assholes who Love Birther talk, degrading anyone who is different. No, Trump will be stealing and destroying all we hold dear, but so long as he is beating up on someone, these raging assholes are pleased as punch.

Note that I edited the original post:

Many of the folks that voted Trump into office like the in your face fuck you system of it all even though they likely will not get anything to their benefit save for bragging rights and socially acceptable hippie, gay, and foreigner bashing and misogyny.

edit to add "and misogyny".


Last edited by PufPuf93 on Sat Nov 12, 2016 1:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[bks]

JackRiddler wrote:

I could say, welcome to the world of the black underclass as treated by institutions of poor relief and workfare, public education and health, housing authorities, and the carceral state.

Of course. Not lost on me, and I'd obviously never suggest that white working/middle class has a remotely comparable history. One important difference for the purposes of this discussion is that the black underclass was never under any illusions the state intended to serve them well or even fairly, and therefore their support of the Democrats stems more directly from a calculation about who means them the least harm. The white working class has a different history with the Democrat party, since they actually enjoyed some real prosperity for a few decades before their prospects were foreclosed on in service of capital. I imagine they feel they've been dispossessed of something that was rightfully theirs.

No one has to sympathize with that. I'm making a descriptive claim here.

JackRiddler wrote:

But it's more to the point to say that this feeling of being dominated by a class is successfully misdirected towards hating the likes of school teachers, trade unionists, precarious adjuncts, petty state management, career women, artists, urban "hipsters" and "yuppies," modes of dress and expression, an image of "social justice warriors," etc. And the angry embrace the upper classes in whose interests the system of domination actually works, and many of them now seek salvation from a pirate billionaire and his pirate crew who are a kind of farcical pustule at the top of a one-party right-wing state. Hating on "smart" is poison.

Their analysis is badly flawed, I agree. Badly. I viscerally despise the atavism. Some of it is directed at people like me. And you. But all of this is well known, or ought to be by the people whose job it is to win elections. They can't be written off.

I seem to recall there was another candidate this cycle making better economic arguments than Trump was, a guy who spoke from the heart, who was very popular, who sounded a little like them and who made economic populism the centerpiece of his campaign. He won the Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and West Virginia primaries. His party, the party of labor, tried to sabotage his candidacy. Think that may have hurt Clinton just a sliver in MI, WI, and PA? That's all it would have taken.

It's basically the opposite of what the professional class ought to be doing if it wants to appeal to white working class types. Consider:

the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.

https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-pe ... king-class

Bottom line: as long as we're going to have elections in the US, there's no way to win political support for a program centered on economic justice without some of the white working class that's prone to racism and these other predilections. If you have another idea, I'm all ears.

[slomo]

Bottom line: as long as we're going to have elections in the US, there's no way to win political support for a program centered on economic justice without some of the white working class that's prone to racism and these other predilections. If you have another idea, I'm all ears.

Yup. Racism of the WWC is a given*, and it won't go away no matter how many "diversity" programs you beat them on the head with**. As mentioned by someone else on this or another thread, the question is whether or not the racism gets activated. Trump has unquestionably activated it. Sanders might have been able to blunt it by building a bridge between the WWC and others. Clinton totally fucking ignored the dynamic entirely.

* Racism over the long march of generations could disappear under relatively prosperous circumstances. A century ago there was great animosity between various European-Americans of different national origins, but for the most part that animosity has subsided to a very low level, especially west of the Mississippi. That would give me hope that a greater acceptance for those of non-European ancestry would be possible, but given the almost certain economic catastrophe right around the corner I don't see that happening any time soon.

** Having observed the effect of top-down imposed diversity programs, I would judge that they actually achieve an effect that is opposite to their stated purpose. They fail utterly to reach emotionally committed racists, giving them more ammunition to spread their hate, while they alienate those who would otherwise be allies by punishing them emotionally.

[JackRiddler]

bks, we agree fully on all that you wrote. That is obvious. All of it. The most important move in this outcome was the DNC/Clinton/Corporate Media sandbagging of Sanders by very dirty methods. (It was a small part of it, since primary rules and likely fixing were involved, but during the primary, who actually got the most fabricated white-baiting and sexism-baiting without any real basis, courtesy of the white sexist David Brock? The "Bernie Bros." This nonsense fed into the strategy that backfired last week.)

One current possible hope is that those responsible will now be displaced, and Sanders will re-emerge as the spearpoint of a neo-FDR party (the 1944 "second bill of rights" and not the authoritarian parts, please), much in the same way that Corbyn has completely turned around Labour and made it something I think we could both vote for in actual good consicence. Good luck! (Said with only a little irony.)

(Sorry, I'm sticking for now with vesting more hope in "evicting the money changers and taking over the building" than in "starting a construction site from a squatted tent in the back yard." If you see what I mean. But avoiding pointless division and fighting on the left first, and in the majority coalition that must be built around it, has to be paramount.)

The immediate issue is the process of normalization of the explicitly bigoted and proto-fascist Trump and the Republican single-party state as just another bad presidency. Clinton, of course, made the first move toward normalization with her despicable, boilerplate concession speech, in which she didn't even bother to mention that the result was the product of the electoral college, not the actual count of human individuals called voters in a system supposedly dedicated to one-person, one vote. She didn't even make a gesture of congratulating her voters and celebrating their winning the popular vote, as a positive aspect for her side. She went straight to the diktat to "move on." It was just the usual: "He's the winner, follow him now."

Part of that normalization is constructing the myth that Trump won the "working class" (he did not, he lost the lower-income segments of the vote). Or that he at least won the disaffected white worker -- and "winning" would mean increasing the vote in that group, not just maintaining the Romney support. On that the jury is out. The cumulative numbers do not support it. But various shifts happened, some to Johnson, many former voters not voting, some non-voters presumably mobilized, and of course the new young voters who (surprise, surprise) overwhelmingly rejected Trump.

A big part of that normalization is the de-misogynization and clearing of Trump and all of his voters en bloc as of course not in the least racist, uber-patriotic, religiously fanatic, would-be controllers of women's reproductive parts, etc. Of course all that is most of the Republican base prior to Trump, which is why they elected him in the primary. There should be no pretending otherwise. It does not mean all Trump voters, but it's crucial not to approach this so diplomatically that Trump (even as he appoints this hellish gangster cabinet) becomes acceptable because we must respect their delicate sensibilities.

Another part of normalization, the one we are seeing being done by some on RI, is this: The blame for the result is not laid only where it squarely belongs -- on the Clinton campaign, DNC, the neoliberal technocrat nomenklatura, and the corporate media who have avoided economic issues and staged identity conflict theaters.

Instead the blame is laid on a culturally defined (and very vaguely defined) grab-bag demographic category under the "liberals" label. The narrative is to cherrypick some examples wherein androgynous city folk, preferably celebrities, were supposedly mean to the hard-working white men, so that the white men in turn would not have voted for Trump, but were so very hurt by the insults to their deeply held religious and cultural values that they just had to! This infantilizes these theoretical white men (and women), obviously.

I just decided to call this move Culture War 3.0. Culture War 1.0 was the early 1990s Buchanan style. Culture War 2.0 was the construction -- by the fucking corporate media -- of "Red" and "Blue" as primary colors signifying static camps on either side of an essentialized cultural divide. The only real culture war was already waged and won by the right in 1968 to 1992, and even more than that it involved an unleashing of many forms of physical violence: drug war, post-COINTELPRO disruption, the carceral state. After the right's ideological hegemony began to wane again, and the lite version of their politics took sway with Clinton I (who managed even to intensify the policy aspects), they went insane with the claim that they were all along persecuted by an omnipresent, educated PC set (and launched the era of bogus scandals to distract from bipartisan atrocities).

This latest "Pepe-the-Frog vs. the Cultural Marxists" version is a redux of the right-wing rhetorical moves we've seen since the early 1990s, now with the additional confusionism that it's been made cool for people who think they are actually leftist conspiracy theorists, like 8bitagent. Of course Gingrich is going to be in the Trump cabinet.

(slomo's latest post, which displayed for me as I hit submit, makes some interesting points about how to address segments of the "WWC," but I'm done for the day.)

.

[Morty]

On the usage of "liberal" in the U.S., cross-posted from the "Liberals" thread, about the supposed SNL campaign to torpedo Trump by showing him kissing Putin, as opposed to the actual hosting of an SNL campaign by Trump during a key point in the primary campaign:

You may realize this episode of SNL would have involved the candidate Trump rehearsing, co-writing and participating in the skits for a period of one week. Was he being held hostage? Or did this experienced television professional have the understanding that he was receiving invaluable free PR for his campaign and his "brand"? The latter of course, and of course he was right.

And SNL is liberal, is it? Not unless liberal is some kind of term of art for anti-modernists of various stripes to hang on any phenomenon or person they dislike -- and to group often unrelated people and things together. I'm in an academic sector where half the stuff I hear seems to be critiques of "liberalism," defined in the classical way. I think you'll grant me (leftist) radical in my outlook, if hardly my lifestyle (or that of almost any other current Western member of the almost median income precariat). Yet I've grown up and lived with (in the sense of daily experience, not residence) many people who love watching predators like Trump perform for them. Guess by what name they most commonly call me? Radical is not a word they generally allow into their vocabulary. To them "leftist" is just another synonym for liberal.

.

Its there in the emails - the DNC game plan was to turn fringe GOP candidates into "pied piper" candidates who would take attention and support away from the mainstream GOP candidates, and they were to encourage their contacts in the media to take the pied piper candidates seriously as contenders. So it's an open question: did Trump get his own SNL show as part of this DNC strategy? It fits.


Edit to add:

WikiLeaks Verified account
‏@wikileaks

Clinton's Pied Piper Strategy (use media contacts to promote Trump) has backfired spectacularly. PDF of our leak: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120 …

9:28 PM - 8 Nov 2016

[/quote]

[dada]

Another part of normalization, the one we are seeing being done by some on RI, is this: The blame for the result is not laid only where it squarely belongs -- on the Clinton campaign, DNC, the neoliberal technocrat nomenklatura, and the corporate media who have avoided economic issues and staged identity conflict theaters.

Yes.

And yet, this neoliberal technocrat nomenklatura doesn't just spring fully formed from Zeus' cracked skull. It's a symptom of something. Do you know what that something is?

We're all going to die. People are afraid of death. It's natural, we're human. So we choose to put our blinders on, and hang our own carrots in front of us. How many people are aware that they're chasing a carrot of their own devising?

This is my world. I'm not in someone else's world. There's things in my world. Groupthink is a thing. I'm not in society's world, society is in mine. Finnegan's Wake is a thing. I'm not in Joyce's world, it's a book in mine.

In my world, there's horrible things. There's beautiful things, too. There's nice, real, living people, and there's robotic consumers. They're everywhere, billions of them.

The left has fought and fought. Changes happen slowly, with many setbacks, many martyrs along the way. We keep going. Teaching by example, subtly guiding, one person at a time, one interaction at a time. There's no other way, and there never has been. The rest is carrot-chasing.

A very clever friend of mine once said to me, "Some of the most intelligent people are some of the dumbest."

What did he mean by that? Hell if I know. Smart is smart, right?

Still, why does a statement like that have the ring of truth to it.

[tapitsbo]

It does have the ring of truth to it and he was incredibly wise to say it, at that moment at least

[8bitagent]

Tonight, SNL hillariously savaged all the HuffingtonPost/Slate reading big city yuppies convinced Hillary would win. The one liner by Chris Rock about Facebook alone was genius

[JackRiddler]

Tonight, SNL hillariously savaged all the HuffingtonPost/Slate reading big city yuppies convinced Hillary would win. The one liner by Chris Rock about Facebook alone was genius

Endorsed. (You'd think it was a hit-and-miss variety show, mostly miss as these things go.) Dave Chappelle, the man. And thanks for the specificity of terminology: Huffington Post/Slate reading big city yuppies. What's with the implication however that America, or (many) Americans, might be racist? Isn't saying that what made sensitive white people vote for Trump? So I've understood from some on this board (not from you).

.