The Liberals Thread

[norton ash]

Shoulda been Bernie.

https://www.facebook.com/senatorsanders/?pnref=story

Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer.

To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.

[JackRiddler]

I included words with the numbers in the first post above. Try reading those. Otherwise, you're just trolling so that the actual post gets lost in your bullshit and my counter-bullshit.

So here it is again, since people tend to read the last couple of things posted.

Candidates in the last three presidential elections, ranked in order of vote totals:

1. Obama 2008: 69.4 million
2. Obama 2012: 65.9 million
3. Romney 2012: 60.9 million
4. McCain 2008: 59.9 million
5. Clinton 2016: 59.8 million
6. Trump 2016: 59.6 million


Gentlepeople. This is RI, so just in case you want to argue those numbers are fabricated by machines: Fine. Then you have nothing to say on what or who Trump may or may not have "won."


You want to ignore those numbers? Fine. Then at least know that whatever you say is pulled straight out of your ass, and you know shit about what who Trump may or may not have "won." You're just participating on the lowest level of the spin and counter-spin machinery.


Trump didn't win shit in votes. I don't only mean that he got FEWER votes than Clinton, which is true. I mean that he did not gain any votes on prior Republicans. He did not win more of your precious white identity-politics voters than before. What happened is, millions of people who voted for Obama did not bother to vote at all for Clinton. This is not Trump's win. It is Clinton's loss.


Candidates in the last three presidential elections, ranked in order of vote totals:

1. Obama 2008: 69.4 million
2. Obama 2012: 65.9 million
3. Romney 2012: 60.9 million
4. McCain 2008: 59.9 million
5. Clinton 2016: 59.8 million
6. Trump 2016: 59.6 million


Cumulatively, about 10 million voters appear to have abandoned the Democrats since 2008. Republican vote totals have also declined but remain more stable, and still lower than the Democrats'. Only a small part of this can be blamed on vote suppression measures. The reality: More people are staying home than before, and more of them used to be Democrats.

It is not true that working class voters in the Midwest or elsewhere shifted toward Trump. That is a pernicious myth. It is being crafted right this moment and has two functions: For liberals, it shifts the blame for the DNC's self-made disaster on to "populist" sentiment. For Trump supporters, it legitimates the billionaire con artist's image as a man of the people.

What did Clinton have to offer to the working class voters of the Midwest, who are now falsely blamed for Trump? More of the same shit. More of them therefore stayed away from the ballot box.

Trump won these battleground states without getting more votes in any of them than Romney did when he lost the same states in 2012.

In any case, out of the last six "major party" presidential candidates, Trump 2016 ranks sixth out of six. Dead last. He won because we do not have a democratic system in the United States. Rather, some long-dead rich guys from 1787 are still playing a joke on us.

(You can check state numbers for 2012 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St ... tion,_2012 and compare these to 2016 numbers.)


Remember the U.S. electorate has grown in the last eight years, so I'm adding the following info for reference and framing, since of course we do not have the exact same people alive or eligible to vote in the three elections:

Voting age population (over 18), 2008: 227 million.*
Voting age population, 2016: about 255 million.*
Number of people in U.S. who turned 18 since 2008: about 31-34 million.
Who died: something under 20 million.
Naturalized citizens since 2008: about 5.6 million.
* - Resident aliens make up about 6% or 7% at any given time and cannot vote.

[coffin_dodger]

I assure other members I am not trolling. Could someone else please direct me to the figures for the 2016 election that show the breakdown of voting for the candidates by racial affiliation, because I can't find any reference to them on that wiki page runaround that Jack links to. I won't hold my breath.

[Morty]

For what it's worth:

He certainly did "thread the needle" to win the electoral votes. Though that graph is a little misleading the way it leaves out the bottom 50,000. Makes it look like Obama got over twice as many votes in 2008 as Trump got in 2016, whereas the numbers say that Obama got around 15% more votes than Trump.

Coffin Dodger, they do seem to have good racial/age/education profiling data on the vote - they were reeling it off on the election coverage I saw. Dunno where to access it though.

[dada]

I don't see why we can't be against the military industrial complex, the Donald, and stand up for all races and sexes at the same time.

Because when you characterize your movement as being against Trump and for BLM, you lose 80% of the angry white male identifiers, most of whom are angry about the same things you are, or at least would be if you stuck to a strictly economic argument.

Again, I don't know the answer here, but I don't think "big tent" identity politics and partisanship are effective tools for generating class consciousness.

I'm class conscious and against racism and sexism. I'm not tailoring a revolutionary platform, I'm just an example.

Any movement I can get behind will grow naturally, not by design. I'm just a simple gardener:)

Why insist on being against the Donald from the outset? It does little else besides alienate you from his supporters. He said he'd govern for all Americans, and those who doubt it are in a weak position, because he just got voted in. The best thing you can do is try to hold him to his word.

No, I'm anti-authoritarian. I don't even like anarchists. I don't respect the system, or its figureheads. I'm just not a pecking-order type person. I'm sure there's a Howard Zinn quote worth adding here, but I don't feel like looking for it.

[Morty]

Why insist on being against the Donald from the outset? It does little else besides alienate you from his supporters. He said he'd govern for all Americans, and those who doubt it are in a weak position, because he just got voted in.

Actually, no. He just lost a close election by about 200,000 votes.

Of course, 130 million voters don't count.

The "president" is actually to be installed by the vote on December 19th of a group of 538 persons known as "electors." That, apparently, the con-man from my borough of Queens is going to win.

I insist on being against Trump from the beginning because I have been subjected to him since the late 1980s, and know well what he stands for. It is not your interests. I am against him because he said Mexicans are rapists, 11 million people should be rounded up into concentration camps and deported, a wall should be built on the border, and "Muslims" as such should be kept from entering the country. Also, the U.S. should occupy the oil-producing regions of Iraq. All elements of an explicitly racist and imperialist program. Apparently what you support. But your thinking seems to be the most racist thing one could possibly do is mention racism.

The best case scenario you can make out of this guy is that he is lying about his core statements. Nice wishful thinking.

By the way, if we had some kind of basic intelligence test for posting at RI we wouldn't have to deal with people seriously saying shit like this: "He said he'd govern for all Americans." Oh, okay then. Great. I gotta shut up if he said that.

People are not born TRump supporters, sir. That is a choice they make. They can unmake it.

In January 2015, Donald Trump had very few supporters.

By January 2020, it will be about as many.

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Jack, Hillary Clinton is a mass murderer, just like Henry Kissinger is a mass murderer. Do you see where I'm heading with this? My idea is, I'd sooner negotiate with a known racist than I would sit down with a known mass murderer. Whereas from what I can gather from your attitude, your the complete opposite, at least in this particular case, and sanctimonious about it to boot. I can't really comprehend it.

[JackRiddler]

You seem to think I voted for Clinton, which I did not.

You also seem to be operating well within the personalized rendering of the presidential election as a matter of choosing among two individuals based on their rap sheets, as though no politics are involved. The "mass murder," for which Clinton is one responsible party among many Republicans and Democrats who should be prosecuted, belongs to a vast apparatus of state, not to any one person. Trump has promised to maintain that apparatus through increased military spending, promised to break the Iran deal, made many bellicose noises including "TAKE THEIR OIL," which he described as a literal occupation of oil fields. Insofar as they have stated explicit politics, Clinton's are odious, Trump's are worse. For me, a preference between these two plagues served up as the choices in a rigged system (the rigging is in the duopoly, not necessarily the vote count) was based on the belief that one provided far better conditions for the "battlespace," for the fight that must happen regardless no matter which of them won.

I challenge you to read the following and a) accept that each sentence is factual, and b) state whether it is a fair rendering of the news. A is true, b is my opinion.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/9/headlines

Donald J. Trump was elected 45th president of the United States on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton in a stunning upset that reverberated around the world. Trump carried at least 279 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 218, although Trump appears to have narrowly lost the popular vote. Around 2:50 a.m., Donald Trump took the stage at a New York City victory party, saying he had received a phone call by Hillary Clinton congratulating him on the win.

President-elect Donald Trump: "To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I am reaching out to you for your guidance and your help, so that we can work together and unify our great country."

The contest pitted the two most unpopular candidates in modern presidential history against one another, with a majority of Americans viewing both Trump and Clinton unfavorably. Donald Trump has never held elective office. He opened his campaign in 2015 with a speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. Trump has proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States. He openly mocked his opponents, reporters, Asians, African Americans and the disabled. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault, and he was heard in a 2005 videotape boasting about sexually assaulting women. Throughout the campaign, Trump drew the enthusiastic support of white nationalists and hate groups. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana, cheered the outcome of the election. Duke tweeted, "This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MAGA.”

I submit the Ku Klux Klan is smarter in understanding what Trump actually said and intimated a lot better than many people on this board, who have been supporters of what he and Alex Jones stand for, or else in denial, or influenced by a personal hatred of Clinton that obscures the political story, or basically welcome the apparent upheaval to "the establishment" that he pretends, but in no way embodies. What's guaranteed is an acceleration of neoliberalism, regardless of which trade deals are passed.

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[slomo]

Again, breaking from my self-imposed self-ban...

I basically predicted this almost a year ago, in that thread that got me labeled a "psychopath": the tone-deafness evident in the rhetoric from the left was going to result in violent swing of the pendulum to the right. In the meantime, I see a number of RI members have come over to basically the same kind of thinking.

It's not exactly a full swing to the right, but it's telling.

Jack, as you know I love numbers, but my interpretation is that they only reinforce the dynamic I predicted. Many voters checked out because although HRC could not / would not speak to their core issues, they were not quite racist enough to vote for Trump. It's as much a failing of the DNC as it is the rottenness of Trump's core base.

[OP ED]

My bad. Sorry. Our fault.

Everyone I know in Michigan went Green. No biggie for me, I been Green for ages. I did very very briefly consider. In the end I couldn't.

Fuck the DNC. Fuck the complacent entitled liberals who took me for granted. Fuck them and their banker cohorts who want an endless paradise of status quo. Fuck the lying cheaters what took the best chance for their supposed policies and shat on him in the name of the Establishment. Not that I would have voted for him either, but I would have considered it longer.

But I couldn't. I decided that I would rather live in Hell than vote for a devil.

Maybe the DNC will consider their position more carefully next time. They're running out of other options aside from subjecting themselves to Monsieur Guillotine's deciding vote.

[JackRiddler]

Again, breaking from my self-imposed self-ban...

I basically predicted this almost a year ago, in that thread that got me labeled a "psychopath": the tone-deafness evident in the rhetoric from the left was going to result in violent swing of the pendulum to the right. In the meantime, I see a number of RI members have come over to basically the same kind of thinking.

It's not exactly a full swing to the right, but it's telling.

Jack, as you know I love numbers, but my interpretation is that they only reinforce the dynamic I predicted. Many voters checked out because although HRC could not / would not speak to their core issues, they were not quite racist enough to vote for Trump. It's as much a failing of the DNC as it is the rottenness of Trump's core base.

Of course the numbers say it is more a failing of the DNC than anything else. Clinton should have never been nominated, or have been anointed the nominee years in advance.

But there simply has NOT been a "violent swing" when Trump can't outpoint Romney or McCain, but basically captures even lower proportions of the same demographics (eight years on, for the whole 31 million turned 18 and <20 million died, so these numbers are all against a larger electorate). And it's ludicrous to blame it on the "tone-deafness in the rhetoric from the left." Which left? Who's tone-deafness, when we have the power to choose anyone we prefer to be our "representative." There is no controlling what 10 or 20 million people say on the Internet. Others can choose to hear what they like, social media makes it more possible than ever, so they can form whatever picture they like of large ideologically labeled agglomerations (as opposed to individuals). Did you vote for Trump because I was mean or tone-deaf to you? (I presume you didn't vote for Trump, but you see what I mean?) Notwithstanding this place, in r/l I sound a lot more like Bernie Sanders. And Sanders is much more indicative of the left in r/l than whatever image you -- we all -- are free to construct by selecting whatever statements we feel like, out of millions. So if you want to pretend Lena Dunham and Rude Pundit are "the left," and their "tone-deafness" makes the Trump supporters hate "the left," : no problem. None of that makes anyone vote for Trump, it's just an excuse. Anyway, what kind of kid gloves are we all supposed to put on for these delicate white flowers intimidating by every sign of deviance from some nostalgic norm that never was? Talk about a form of political correctness run wild!

(Oops, I violated my own self-promise again. Idiot. Henceforth I'll remember: I'm only posting about the election in the "Congratulations, Stupid" thread.)

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[slomo]

I will grant that there is no monolithic left in real life, but there tends to be a centralization of a "progressive" message amplified by what is (has been) considered to be the legitimate media. This message has tended to downplay the concerns of the shrinking middle class, including (in particular) white men who are feeling marginalized. Whether or not the concerns of this demographic bloc are valid (some of them are, in my opinion as a mixed-race gay guy, but some of them are not), they have been left unaddressed by the major Democratic presidential candidate of 2016.

Lena Dunham is a symbol of that messaging, she is symbolic of the tone-deafness of this (somewhat artificially constructed) brand of "progressivism", and she is the symbolic target of the ire of many (possibly reluctant) Trump supporters. She is not the only symbol, but she's a pretty rich one (in many senses of the word "rich"). Dunham is the symbolic poster-girl for the DNC this election cycle.

Human behavior is largely based on emotion, and emotion is based on symbols and archetypes. This is particularly true of elections. So to discount the effect of symbols on the outcome of this election, simply because the symbols don't quite align with a complex and prosaic reality, is kind of, I don't know, either ignorant or disingenuous.

[slomo]

Another interesting look at your numbers Jack (which I have confirmed independently BTW, so that I could distribute to my social network outside of RI) reveals that the numbers were huge in 2008 and 2012. This is also explained in part by the symbolic messaging. For all that we here at RI were critical of Obama's "hopey-change" messaging, it resonated with large numbers of Americans, hollow though it might have been when judged in the cold light of reality. Contrast with "I'm with her". Honestly, if the best and only reason to vote for your candidate is that she's a woman and it's her turn, then there's a problem. (Speaking as someone who would have been OK with Stein if she had had a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning.) My FB was full of accusations of misogyny against those who were not sufficiently unequivocal in their support of HRC, when the real issue was that HRC was completely uninspiring as a candidate.

[JackRiddler]

Answer to slomo here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40146&p=618308#p618308

[stickdog99]

I basically predicted this almost a year ago, in that thread that got me labeled a "psychopath": the tone-deafness evident in the rhetoric from the left was going to result in violent swing of the pendulum to the right. In the meantime, I see a number of RI members have come over to basically the same kind of thinking.

So was it the tone deafness of the economic justice warriors of the left or the tone deafness of the DNC & DWS Republicrats toward economic justice?

Or are you simply suggesting that the left did not kowtow enough to the identity politics of rednecks?

[slomo]

I don't believe Lena Dunham was directly responsible, no.

But she is one of maybe 10 symbols that are representative of a larger dynamic that is responsible. I've been lurking on r/kotakuinaction (and similar places) for about a year and seen what motivates the folks there. I would characterize that place as largely consisting of the kind of people who would have voted for Obama in 2008, who were cautiously supportive of Sanders, but felt completely alienated by Clinton. You may dismiss them as simply misogynistic GamerGaters, but their views represent the shift in the national mood that led to the results of yesterday. And dismissing them is part of the point of this whole thread, isn't it?

No, of course HRC is not "left", whatever that means anyway. But any election has its dualism, and right/left is as convenient a way to characterize this one as any.

And, no, we probably aren't disagreeing on too much. The distance between us is probably smaller than the distance between myself and just about anybody in my real-life social network, though I tend to keep my mouth shut when real relationships are at stake. (Sad to say, most people can't handle the truth, even those I care about.) I even took your numbers and distributed them to my "peeps", after confirming that I could source them independently.