These people are not motivated by any legitimate grievances or economic suffering, but instead they are just broken, ungrateful, immoral, hateful, racist, and ignorant.
Those words were used back in June to summarize the British media and establishment consensus on why the Brexit vote succeeded. Similar sentiments are being expressed in the US media, establishment, and here on this site to explain Trump's election.
One of my favorite writers here joined in by declaring white supremacy the winner.
Identity politics can be a powerful tool to increase tolerance and understanding. When used as a weapon, it divides us and decreases understanding.
Conversations based solely on identity politics are not only misguided. They are central to why Trump won.
NOTE: The hate unleashed by Trump is a serious issue and life threatening to many. I understand why so many are insisting this is only a racial issue and has no economic component. I strongly believe this election can only be understood by considering “race, gender, and economic factors”.
Both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very, wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for thirty years.
Identity politics has been used to avoid or dismiss questions about inequality. That left room for an admitted sexual assailant, advocate of Russian intervention in the US election, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim promoter of violence to convince enough men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christian, Muslim, Jew, poor, moderate and rich to elect him President of the United States of America.
If we don't address those facts, the power we have abdicated to him will grow because he is providing answers (even if those answers are disingenuous).
Both the media and our politicians share the blame, but it will take us to fix it by refusing to play their game.
The media is acting like a social club while missing or ignoring critically important parts of the story.
our own version of the high school put-down game, battering nerds and outsiders … while elevating "electable," party-approved candidates …
When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they're going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound …
Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump's campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.
Both political parties currently serve wealth and power before people. This was an election season screaming for change.
There's a classic behavioral economics experiment called the ultimatum game in which one subject is asked to divide a pool of money, and the other subject can choose to take whatever the first one offers (no matter how little that is), or reject the offer and both of them get none. The "economically rational" approach is to take whatever you're given, even if it's just one penny, because one penny is more than you'd get if you rejected the offer. But in experiments, subjects confronted with "unfair" splits overwhelmingly choose to punish themselves in order to punish the person making the unfair offer…
Neoliberal politics have been a long-term, iterated form of the ultimatum game: the capital class arrogates more wealth to itself while it offers less and less to working people, with fewer prospects for advancement, but points to an opposition that would give workers even less, and expects that they'll go on winning as the lesser of two evils …
Brexit shows that in such a circumstance, table-flipping is a viable alternative to playing the game at all.
The Democratic Party has lost an understanding of the dangers of concentration of power.
In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system...
The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century...
Americans have forgotten about the centuries-old anti-monopoly tradition that was designed to promote self-governing communities and political independence...
Hand in hand, a glorification of elites has become standard in media, politics, and in our community forums.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people.
they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
opinion-making elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption.
The warning signs have been there a long time. Back in 2012, Chris Hayes wrote Twilight of the Elites.
Institutions designed to reward merit are being gamed by the privileged, who create a self-perpetuating elite.
When elites break the rules they aren't punished like regular people. They're bailed out of trouble, or spared criminal prosecution for their lawlessness.
There is too much social distance separating the people in charge with the folks subject to their decisions.
I understand anger, shock, and disappointment that Trump won. And I know that we all (or most Kossacks at least) recognize that inequality is a major issue. But when it came to our candidates, a number of Kossacks chose to approach the issue as either identity or economics, denying that both have to be addressed. Worse, the analysis afterwards has been predominantly finger pointing rather than soul searching. There is a very obvious lack of responsibility in the responses.
Who do you think is more responsible? The campaigns, political parties, and media that conducted the election season or the voters driven into the arms of a demagogue?
As presciently noted in Michael Moore in Trumpland shortly before the election:
Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said, "If you close these factories, as you’re planning to do in Detroit, and build them in Mexico, I’m going to put a 35 percent tariff on those cars when you send them back, and nobody is going to buy them." It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives.
And it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin…
And it’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump.
He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.
A grenade wouldn’t have been necessary or attractive if there was a viable alternative to change the current broken system. We might have had a viable alternative if the party and media hadn’t decided who the candidates were before the primaries even started.
The party and the media should apologize for the terrible damage they have done to this country. A good start would be to learn from their mistakes and change their behavior. If they cannot do that, they should not be in a position of power or influence.
By the way, we will not forget.
UPDATE2: Robert Reich nails it.
What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.
UPDATE3: My final argument:
Trump’s campaign was founded on hate. But I don’t think he would have won with only hate. He added concern for the working class and managed to increase the percentage of Blacks, Hispanics, union members, and youth voting Republican.
It was obvious during the primaries that he was triangulating to fit between Hillary and Bernie on economic policy.
Why did more minorities vote for Trump than for Romney? There was an 8% swing toward Republicans by Blacks and Hispanics, yet the white vote swung by only 1%.
The education gap is starker. College grad or more swung 10% towards the Democrats. Some or no college swung 14% away from Democrats.
Let’s not underestimate the importance of class and economic inequality in explaining what just happened, just as we should not underestimate the importance of identity politics in explaining the hate and bigotry that is being expressed by the white supremacists encouraged by Trump.
Regarding the links I’ve included, there are a number of excellent articles that highlight and detail these issues. Of special note are the following:
How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable - Rolling Stone
- fantastic Matt Taibi piece from February, goes into great detail of how the media helped build Trump
How Post-Watergate Liberals Killed Their Populist Soul - The Atlantic
- this is an excellent summary by Matt Stoller of how the Democratic party lost it’s way on the economy
Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit / The Intercept
- an excellent post-election summary by Glenn Greenwald, it also includes the concern that Trump now has the power of the surveillance state created since 9/11.
A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state - boing - Boing Boing BBS
- not quoted in this diary, but a Cory Doctorow piece that has more links to what powers a Trump presidency will have
Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more | Robert Reich | Opinion | The Guardian
- another on point analysis of why we lost (h/t T100R)
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