I think what’s emerging from the aftermath of last week’s election is that we underestimated the breadth of American racism, and that we failed to realize how damaging the aloofness of the Democratic party establishment was. We should have realized from the strength of the Sanders campaign that something was rotten up top. I hope that establishment listens to Bernie Sanders and his recipe for reform.
In the coming days, I will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party. I believe strongly that the party must break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor. We must open the doors of the party to welcome in the idealism and energy of young people and all Americans who are fighting for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. We must have the courage to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, the drug companies, the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.
I have this fear that the Democrats will bunker up, keep doing the same old thing, and continue to treat Republicans gently and with civility (or, more likely, servility) and slide further into irrelevance, while the Republicans are now digging in deeper into lunacy.
Of course, if the electorate was rejecting the corporatization of the Democrats to go for an outsider, boy did they get conned.
An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?
The answer is, anyone who was paying attention. Look at the people Trump is considering for his Cabinet, and you won’t find any outside-the-box thinkers burning to work for the little guy. It’s a collection of Republican politicians and corporate plutocrats — not much different from who you’d find in any Republican administration.
It’s going to be worse than we ever imagined. Stop deluding yourself. Stop pretending that Trump can’t possibly be serious about the stupidities he has promised — he is packing his administration with the worst possible people, because he is compounding his own incompetence with the fact that he is a terrible judge of character who is surrounding himself with terrible people.
Like this.
That just says it all, doesn’t it?
Or are they more likely to slide to the right in order to try to capture right-wing votes?
From the outside, it looks like USA has jumped the shark.
The Harvard Business Review seems to take a similar view to Sanders, https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class You cannot just dismiss a large group of people as ignorant racists and expect them to vote for you next time. From Europe, Clinton’s campaign came across as ‘Trump lite’; much the same corporatism but with less lunacy. By the way, now that you have Nigel Farage, please don’t let him leave.
Rather than sit helpless, I plan to sign up to canvas (and whatever else I can do) for our local get out the vote orgs.
There’s more to my agenda than just working for the Democrats; I want to connect to as many people as possible to see what the potential is for extra-party organization and mutual protection. And if canvassers are sitting on their hands waiting for the next election, then we should be canvassing right now to recruit more canvassers.
I have to take some of the blame for this election. If we’d all been doing this in October then more liberals would have voted.
“But but but…..this is why trump won”
Not only does Trump’s friendship with Farage reflect badly on him, and Farage’s friendship with Trump badly on him, we now have idiots saying it would be good for the UK to use Farage as a go-between for UK government contact with Trump: http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/uk-news/nigel-farages-meeting-donald-trump-12171205
It’s like saying Dennis Rodman gets on well with the Kims, so the US should use him for North Korean relations.
I have to admit I don’t know who the guy on on the right side of the photograph is.
The guy on the right is Nigel Farage.
@7
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage
There you go
That is Nigel Farage, former leader of the UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), a right-wing party with a platform that’s basically xenophobia in many forms, some misogyny, and not much else. Farage was one of the main proponents and campaigners for the British departure from the European Union. (He was as surprised as everyone else when his side won the referendum.) Ironically, he’s one of the 78 representatives of the UK in the European parliament; his performances there are painful to watch (in a way that would be familiar to you now, post-Trump).
On a more personal note, Farage smokes a lot and thinks that the risks of that have been greatly exaggerated by the medical profession.
Oh thanks. I know who Farage is, just couldn’t make the face with that expression.
His fingers are really long.
Please read this and sign if you find it as convincing as I do. Journalist Greg Palast presents evidence that the GOP may have illegally scrubbed over 1 million people (mostly minorities) from swing states to protect us from ‘double or triple voters’ (who would actually do that?). This whole thing stinks to high heaven, and at the very least requires an investigation. maybe Americans aren’t as awful as we think: http://thebestdemocracymoneycanbuy.com/petition/
Please read this and sign if you find it as convincing and disturbing as I do. Journalist Greg Palast presents evidence that the GOP may have illegally scrubbed over 1 million people (mostly minorities) from swing states, allegedly to protect us from the threat ‘double or triple voters’ (who would actually do that?). Sounds more like massive voter suppression to me. This whole thing stinks to high heaven, and at the very least requires an investigation. Maybe the average American isn’t as ill-informed and bigoted as we have been led to think: http://thebestdemocracymoneycanbuy.com/petition/
All I hear from the media are explanations such as the Democrats lost touch with their base; a lot of people are suffering economically; Hillary was a flawed candidate (trust issues, high negatives, too close to Wall Street, not Bernie, etc.). All that may be true, but I haven’t heard anybody mention other factors that I think are also very important, such as the Republicans’ 30-year campaign of slander & libel against the Clintons, voter suppression, & the mainstreaming of far-right political ideas.
Good grief, that’s a stupid and obnoxious article, as I would have suspected from HBR. Of the author’s father: “He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return.” Of Clinton (who is from a working-class background, as opposed to silver-spoon Trump):
Of Trump’s male voters:
This isn’t news. It’s exactly what we’ve been saying all along about male privilege and sexism (which certainly isn’t limited to the working class). It doesn’t show that Clinton or the Democrats “just dismissed” working-class people. In fact, her policy proposals and the Democratic platform would have been unimaginably better for working-class people, including white men, concretely than what Trump and the Republicans have in store. (The Republican Party and its megarich propagandists have been the primary drivers of growing wage stagnation, inequality, and economic destruction over the past several decades. That’s the reality.) “Basic human dignity (male varietal)” is not a thing. It just means retention of their hierarchical position and the privileges it entails. They’ve now shown themselves willing to vote for a fascist to do that. It will cost them, and everyone else.
Sanders:
I’m confused. Is he still a Democrat?
When are we allowed to judge those people and what they did? The threats against black and latin@ populations are already happening, the violence will follow. WHEN are we exactly allowed to call out the racism? WHAT exactly must happen before we’Re allowed to say something.
Also, fuck “male dignity”. Needing to be constantly reaffirmed that you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread by groveling women and racial minorities or you’ll teach them a lesson isn’t dignity, it’s supremacy and abusive.
It is not simply economics. If you look at farmers, who overwhelming went for Trump they truly voted against their known economic interests. A group of folks who will have huge gains with the passage of the TPP are America’s farmers. The opening of markets for America’s corn and soybeans will have a huge impact and the farmers know this. However, they still voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Thus don’t short sell the maintenance of white male privilege as a core concern for a large number of rural voters.
Cross-posted in the Moments of Political Madness thread:
I’ve completed my post about Hans Miklas, a fictional character in Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel Mephisto. He’s an avid Nazi supporter who believes they’ll bring down the elites; in the end, he’s bitterly disappointed and crushed by his own movement. (The post includes a compilation of several articles about Trump’s and the Republicans’ economic plans.)
At first glace I thought the photo was Trump standing next to Jimmy Fallon. Nearly as bad.
ethicsgradient #6:
Yeah, this idea has been pretty categorically rejected by the government.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-third-person-theresa-may-donald-trump-downing-street-us-elections-a7416406.html
Oh, if you think that’s bad, meet our new Minister of Propaganda.
Honestly, am I the only one who’s kind of glad Trump is packing his team with run of the mill corporatists? That’s something we can deal with and have dealt with in the past. I was terrified we would be up against something a lot crazier.
@petrander wrote this in another thread, and it rings true to me:
The article is titled: “How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind”
that idea is the most delusional idea currently going around. It has with some modification been used by the forces of cowardice and greed within the democratic party to try and appease the the reactionary right wing for years. The only thing it has accomplished is making the democrats republican light. It is the voice of go slow!
how long will you continue to advocate it how many times must you test it to see that it has never ever delivered the desired results of a progressive outcome. You can bend over backwards to get the votes but you will accomplish nothing if you also abandon the goals because they are too controversial. you are never going to get the votes of conservative voters unless you become conservative. so you might as well admit defeat now and be done with it.
uncle frogy
Oh fuck that poor forgotten white middle class. The white middle class put a sexist, racist, ableist bully into power. I am white middle class for fuck’s sake and I don’t blame the black, the latino, the feminists, the gays and the liberals for my fears and sorrows. Just to mention a few who really have reasons to feel poor and forgotten.
rietpluim #27
Lots of white middle class don’t blame the black, the latino, the feminists, the gays and the liberals for their fears and sorrows, either, why should they all be labelled as racist/sexist?
goaded, #28
(If they voted for Trump) Because they voted for Trump.
Trump didn’t lure them in with promises of riches and then just now sprung the misogynist white supremacy trap on them. Trump opened and led with misogyny and blatant white supremacy. So they knew what they voted for.
@goaded #25
The exit polls indicate, that the decisive force behind Trumps victory were votes of religious white people with above average income.
So while it might be true (and it seems to be true) that there is a rural/urban divide that is also republican/democrat divide, the voices of those alleged desperate rural people who votet for trump are not those who put him in office, because they are a minority among his voters. Majority of his voters are pretty well-off.
There are probably some rural people who get screwed over by the lack of social network and decrepit infrastructure in US, who voted for Trump as a protest.
If so they are still possible idiots and sure racists, because they voted for a racist who was never going to do anything to help them. Quite the opposite – he loudly promised to dismantle even the little help they could get from the system (like Obamacare). They voted for him, knowing his policies will hurt them, because they knew those policies will hurt POC even more. That is racist.
@goaded #28
Because I have had it with the whining self centered poor white little men who first vote people into office who put them in their misery and then vote for a sexist, racist, ableist, narcissistic, incompetent, arrogant, fascist fuck of an excuse for a human being “as protest” – and do not give a fuck about the people who are literally everyday victim of sexism, racism, and ableism.
If you are one of the decent white middle class people, who neither voted for Trump nor are racist, sexist or ableist, then why do you care more about my post than about Trump?
I am sick and tired of how the white middle class is the measure of all things. So fuck you, and fuck your non-sexist not-racist white middle class friends too.
How about all the people who didn’t vote?
Voting turnout was over 60% in the 50’s & 60’s, and only got close to that again in the 2008 election when people had something hopeful to vote for. It only dipped under 50% in the 1920’s and in 1996.
Why didn’t anyone run on having everyone being required to vote (or pay a $20 fine if you don’t have a ‘valid and sufficient’ reason for not voting) like Australia? Better turnout = Democratic wins, in general.
Yes, those white people who had the opportunity to vote but didn’t are racists and bigots too.
goaded, If USA were a civilized democratic country and not a parody thereoff, there would be no voter registration. Everyone eligible to vote would be automatically registered to do so and would get ballots automatically prior to vote. Polling places would be in every district and every town, in walking distance from most of the electorate. Votes would not be “winner takes all” according to gerrymandered districts, but popular, every vote would count towards total. Voter ID’s would not be necessary, because every citizen would automatically get state-issued citizen ID that would work as such. Voter fraud would be therefore impossible and no half-assed algorithms would be needed. Also USA would have more than two political parties, and after each election multiple parties would have to cooperate in order to build functioning government, because only rarely one single party would get such a majority as to be able to decide all and everything.
IF USA were functioning democracy. It is not.
And that is, to me as an EU outsider, the main reason why so many young people do not vote – some resigned on the disfunctional system, some really cannot vote due to the institutional obstacles, and some genuinely cannot choose (although the choice between Clinton-Trumb was easy, such simplistic binary choices should never have been fostered on the populace in the first place).
I was shocked when I learned how voting in USA works and how voter IDs and registrations are just obstacles with the purpose to make it difficult for POC to vote. I personally do not wonder that the turnout is what it is. And making it for people obligatory to vote in such a system does not help the democracy.
The system needs to be replaced by something else. Only not with what GOP and Trump want to replace it with, because they want to dismantle even the pretence of democracy and replace it with pure autocracy.
Oh puh-leaze goaded, didn’t you get my message? I don’t give a fuck about the precious little feelings of white middle class people anymore.
If you would only care a bit less about people being called racist and some more about people suffering from racism then you’d find me much more pleasant company.
Until then: not interested. Go whine to somebody else.
rietpluim #35 I was replying to #29, your post came while I was writing it.
For those who care about our Democracy
I am forwarding this petition again. Not because I want Hillary Clinton to be President. Rejecting her militarism, I voted for Jill Stein (yes, liberals, throw your digital tomatoes). However, like you, I take our democracy seriously. I want our votes to count. If investigative journalist Greg Palast is right, it doesn’t. At all. Trump was correct when he said the vote was rigged. It was rigged against minorities in swing states (who would obviously have voted, for the most part, against him, and for Clinton). This is no conspiracy theory, it is Jim Crow rearing his ugly head in the digital age. Look into it. Trump must have enjoyed a good internal chuckle when he told the nation that the vote was rigged, knowing it was rigged to cost up to a million minority votes. The primary mechanism that brought him into power (working in tandem with 8 other voter suppression tricks): the Crosscheck Program. Look into it, at the link below. Since the election, progressives have given themselves over to blame-throwing: it is Clinton’s fault. It is Podesta’s fault. It is Jill Stein’s fault, Gary Johnson’s fault. Putin! Wikileaks! The Russians! Glenn Greenwald. The racist American proletariot. Hypocritical evangelicals. Minorities, for not bothering to vote. But what if it is none of the above? What if the vote was sabotaged? Unfortunately, finding out the truth probably won’t effect the current situation: Trump will be sworn in, and then spend 4 years doing everything he can to impose his disturbing mix of decadent hedonism, racism and militarist Christianity onto the nation and the world. But if you give a damn about the election in 4 years (and it may be very important for our future), please at least sign this petition, so we can rule out the possibility that we were all taken for a ride: http://thebestdemocracymoneycanbuy.com/… For those of you thinking: ‘conspiracy theory’, ask yourself what would be so fantastic and improbable about minority votes being erased from ballots, especially in (but not limited to) southern states. The ‘Powers that Be’ in the USA spent over a hundred years perfecting such schemes. This may be their modern ‘piece de resistance’.