The Liberals Thread

[slomo]

I'm saying that the "identity politics" of rednecks includes some real issues of economic justice.

Rednecks are not monolithic. Some of them are hard-core racists. But many many others are just people who feel downtrodden and are not being heard.

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?

[Joe Hillshoist]

So this two-bit right-wing talk radio rant from Mason, whoever the fuck he is, has no special authority by virtue of his also getting to speak in classrooms. Of course, if he had anything credible to say, that would authority.

But Mason is wrong. Trump is another win for the single biggest identity politics group: angry, older, male white people (and a smaller majority of white women). Fact.

The same group that has been the beneficiary of identity politics for most of U.S. history. The same identity group that has been voting for the Republicans consistently since 1968. The group that Mason probably belongs to, I figure.

I agree with you that Mason's diagnosis was bullshit and that white identity politics won the day because of Clinton's uniquely powerful voter suppression qualities.

However, I do think that identity politics drives American politics because it diminishes class consciousness.

As Jack mentioned "black people" in the US are a class, or more accurately an underclass.

I'm betting most people saying "identity politics must end" wrt to the left are white. Fuck - the term "identity politics" was probably coined by someone on the right as a way to devalue and shit on the way individuals who were discriminated against (by being shot or denied jobs or marriage rights) because of their identity stood up for their rights and tried stopping such identity based discrimination.

[slomo]

The odd thing that happens when you actually ask Trump’s supporters about mass deportation

No issue has defined Donald Trump's candidacy as has immigration. He announced his campaign last year by describing immigrants from Mexico as "rapists," frequently talked about violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants on the stump and called for temporarily barring Muslims from entering the country.

When it comes to specific immigration policies, however, the Republican president-elect is at odds with many of his voters, who are surprisingly divided on the issue. Polls suggest that pluralities or even majorities of Trump's voters reject his proposal to deport all undocumented immigrants and instead favor eventual citizenship for those who are here illegally.

The data does not suggest that Trump's voters ignored his rhetoric on immigration. They do have more negative views of immigrants than the country as a whole. Their attraction to Trump's punitive positions on immigration, however, appears to be symbolic as opposed to substantive. When asked about specific policies, their views are more similar to those of other Americans.

You can read the rest of the article at WaPo. But here again, we see that Trump's supporters are characterized as hard-core racists who favor a Final Solution (and tbh some of them are), but many more of them are simply in favor of deep reforms to immigration policy. Some of this sentiment may be racist, but much of it could also be characterized as economic concern. This is another issue that was not addressed by HRC.

[dada]

I think some white males might feel marginalized as the structure of society becomes a more level playing-field. Misogynist liberal gamergaters would fall into that category. Distributing power equally feels like robbery to them. Other white males are fine with it. I am.

I have a pretty wide video game social group that is wondering where the fuck I am recently. Classic/retro scene. I actually have the world record on qbert. (Not something I'm proud of, but it's true. I'm on trading cards, in the guinness book, and everything) I understand you're saying that the disaffected white male gamer represents a larger trend in society. I'm not so sure about that. Video gamers think they're much more important than they are in the scheme of things. All of them. Consumers in niche hobby echo chambers. When I step away from the internet, it's obvious to me.

There's lots of people on the left, not just white or male, that said 'no' to Clinton. Making it about 'white male identity' is ignoring that. I think it's probably a larger issue, people on the left of all kinds, rejecting the system.

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.

I think you're talking about consumer behavior. The consumer may even know they're being manipulated, and allow it. Human behavior is not as easily manipulated.

[Morty]

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.

You don't get any points for not voting for Hillary in a safe dem state.

I don't care that much if the racists voted for Trump - racists get to vote too, if they wish - but it does concern me that there are people who care more about the racists voting for Trump than they do about Hillary being a mass murderer. (And even more that the vast majority of Clinton voters are oblivious to the situation*.) In the emails she claimed it as a badge of honour that she was pivotal in bringing the US on board with the attack on Libya. Many thousands of people are dead in Libya as a result of the attack on it. Call me quirky but I am more concerned about the real dead Libyans (and Syrians), and the future victims of US sponsored and engineered conflicts, than I am about any anticipated crimes committed by racists who voted for Trump.

I am concerned by the way the Trump admin is shaping up, for sure, but that isn't about Trump, that's about GOP control of the government (e.g. it's not great to hear that pharma shares have gone up). Trump is the least of your worries in that regard - he's the quasi-conservative who swiped the leadership of the GOP. What he has said he'll do vs what the GOP will let him do are two completely different things, and I imagine a lot of his stated plans will never come to fruition. It's likely that a lot of what he said, he said to get elected, and now he's been elected they'll fall by the wayside. We'll have to wait and see.


*Here's Amy Shumer:

People who voted for him you are weak. You are not just misinformed. You didn't even attempt information. You say lock her up and you know something about the word email but what was in the emails? You have no clue. Well I'll tell you if you were able to read this far through the holes in your sheet. They said nothing incriminating. Nothing. She dedicated her entire life to public service and got our children Heath care and education without discrimination. he didn't pay his workers. Started a fake college. Ripped people off. Never paid his taxes and sexually assaulted women and on and on

[stickdog99]

So this two-bit right-wing talk radio rant from Mason, whoever the fuck he is, has no special authority by virtue of his also getting to speak in classrooms. Of course, if he had anything credible to say, that would authority.

But Mason is wrong. Trump is another win for the single biggest identity politics group: angry, older, male white people (and a smaller majority of white women). Fact.

The same group that has been the beneficiary of identity politics for most of U.S. history. The same identity group that has been voting for the Republicans consistently since 1968. The group that Mason probably belongs to, I figure.

I agree with you that Mason's diagnosis was bullshit and that white identity politics won the day because of Clinton's uniquely powerful voter suppression qualities.

However, I do think that identity politics drives American politics because it diminishes class consciousness.

As Jack mentioned "black people" in the US are a class, or more accurately an underclass.

I'm betting most people saying "identity politics must end" wrt to the left are white. Fuck - the term "identity politics" was probably coined by someone on the right as a way to devalue and shit on the way individuals who were discriminated against (by being shot or denied jobs or marriage rights) because of their identity stood up for their rights and tried stopping such identity based discrimination.

Yes, most straight Christian white males hate all identity politics other than the identity politics of SCWMs.

On the other hand, the pain is quite real for most of the bottom 90%, no matter what identity. So what to do? Blame previously entitled but now beaten dogs for growling? Call me naive, but I would rather help as many as possible develop a sense of class consciousness rather than the race, religion, and sexual orientation consciousnesses that now reign.

[MacCruiskeen]

I'm saying that the "identity politics" of rednecks includes some real issues of economic justice.

Rednecks are not monolithic. Some of them are hard-core racists. But many many others are just people who feel downtrodden and are not being heard.

Yes. Thanks, slomo. It's starting to annoy me the way stereotypes like 'redneck' and 'racist' and 'stupid' and 'white-christian-male' are being thrown around, here and elsewhere, post-TrumpShock.

Very relevant in this context: Maybe the greatest documentary ever made, certainly one of the great films: Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U.S.A (1976). How to sum it up briefly? Well, it's a film about non-college-educated-southern-white-christian-rednecks, half of them women and many of them black.

Trailer:



Full film: Harlan County U.S.A, Part 1

http://documentaryheaven.com/harlan-county-usa/

Part 2:

http://documentaryheaven.com/harlan-county-usa/

(Maybe Amy Shumer will be involved in the 2017 remake, which is rumoured to be entitled Stupid Rednecks.)

[Morty]

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.

I should have added, Jack is the one making the claims so he should be able to point you to the statistics that support his argument.

I do recall hearing that Trump had a higher black vote than Romney. I'd like to know how they gather these statistics. Is it a social security number thing? Whatever it is, it's surely a hit with the D.C. wonks

As far as voter turnout goes, I'd like to see a graph of proportion of total population voting for each candidate over say the last 10 elections. That would give us an idea whether turnout this time around was particularly low or not.

[RocketMan]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... are_btn_fb

It was the rise of the Davos class that sealed America’s fate

Naomi Klein

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.

People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.

Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.

Bernie Sanders’ amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.

That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are “leaderful”, as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.

So let’s get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let’s set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.

[coffin_dodger]

Reflections on a Democracy in Crisis - The Archdruid 10 Nov 2016
Well, it’s finally over, and I think it’s fair to say I called it. As I predicted back in January of this year, working class Americans—fed up with being treated by the Democratic Party as the one American minority that it’s okay to hate—delivered a stinging rebuke to the politics of business as usual. To the shock and chagrin of the entire US political establishment, and to the tautly focused embarrassment of the pundits, pollsters, and pet intellectuals of the mainstream media, Donald Trump will be the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.

cont - http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/reflections-on-democracy-in-crisis.html

[dada]

the pain is quite real for most of the bottom 90%, no matter what identity. So what to do? Blame previously untitled but now beaten dogs for growling? Call me naive, but I would rather help as many as possible develop a sense of class consciousness rather than the race, religion, and sexual orientation consciousnesses that now reign.

I still don't see a good reason why not both. I'm not the only one saying this, it's in that guardian article RocketMan posted above, Sanders' statement which was posted earlier in this thread.

I think it's an important point, and needs to be cleared up. Do both. Class consciousness, and dismantling structural racism and sexism are not mutually exclusive.

edited to add:

Archdruidreport said: "Well, it’s finally over, and I think it’s fair to say I called it. As I predicted back in January of this year, working class Americans—fed up with being treated by the Democratic Party as the one American minority that it’s okay to hate—delivered a stinging rebuke to the politics of business as usual."

Isn't the working class the majority, though?

Congratulations on your superpower of prophecy, though, Arch-Druid. Did you cast runes, or use a crystal ball.

[Luther Blissett]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

[slomo]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

That is not how she is perceived by the folks that voted in Trump (either actively or indirectly by not voting at all).

[NeonLX]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

Who the hell is that? I did some googling but could not fathom why she is anyone to be reckoned with. Maybe it's my fault for not paying attention to the bullshit leading up to the "election". I'm sorry to be at a loss here.

[slomo]

Keep in mind, it is not you who makes the definitions, it's the folks in power. Their candidate won. It's a new reality, and they are creating it, not you.

It seems necessary now to say that this fact brings me no joy, but it doesn't help to avoid the facts on the ground.