[Discussion] What comes next? Liber-all

American liberals and progressives now face their biggest challenge in a generation: What do we do with 4 years of a trump presidency, a republican congress, a likely conservative supreme court and most states under complete republican control?

This thread is not meant as a forum for discussing HOW or WHY democrats got destroyed in the 2016 election. It's meant for finding a way forward.

bekkilyn wrote:

So sure, it's possible Comey was the reason Hillary lost whatever electoral votes she needed to win, but he wasn't really *the* reason for the loss because it shouldn't have mattered. She should have been far enough ahead despite any one thing, but she wasn't. What Comey did was vile, but it's a scapegoat to the bigger problem that there would have been no landslide.

As I've said, Comey's email didn't exist in a vacuum. It had the effect it had because the GOP has spent 20+ years sowing the seeds of distrust for the Clintons. Dems had maybe a bit too much faith that voters were able to see through all the Republican witch hunts.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Dems had maybe a bit too much faith that voters were able to see through all the Republican witch hunts.

The Dems also had faith that reality would still exist and that a presidential candidate who insulted large swaths of Americans, crowed about sexually assaulting women, and couldn't hold a coherent policy position on most topics for more than two minutes would have their campaign rightfully fall apart.

Stengah wrote:

Also that by being so ready to mock them, you're priming yourself not just to not help them, but to vindictively work against them.

Excellent.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

I really wish we had an eyeroll emoji. That's a whole lot of words boiling down to "white people fee fees"

Yeah, I get why it was removed. I understand. But damn if it isn't really useful sometimes.

MrDeVil909 wrote:
Stengah wrote:

Also that by being so ready to mock them, you're priming yourself not just to not help them, but to vindictively work against them.

Excellent.

Not just work against them for the benefit of others, but work against them solely for the sake of seeing them suffer. If that's "excellent" to you, and you think compassion and empathy are negative traits, you and the racists deserve each others.

Stengah wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:
gore wrote:

I can't recall if this was posted in this thread before, but it's probably worth revisiting this piece from the Primary season entitled The Smug style in American liberalism.

They really don't bury the lede, here's the opening paragraph, but the whole thing is worth a read - especially for those inclined to blame "the voters."

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.

I really wish we had an eyeroll emoji. That's a whole lot of words boiling down to "white people fee fees"

True, but more along the lines of "if you mock white people fee fees, you have no right to act surprised when they vote against you to get even."
Also that by being so ready to mock them, you're priming yourself not just to not help them, but to vindictively work against them.

You know, re-reading that, I realized that its not just the proverbial Kansas that works against it's own interests. It's everybody. Self-destructive behavior in the political realm is the norm, not the exception. Why? Because when it comes to 'sticking it to the man,' it feels good no matter who you are. Not the actual 'man': nope, he's got enough power and money that he always makes off through the loopholes when progressivism becomes a grudge match. We liberals may be smarter, but we're not wiser.

Stengah wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:
Stengah wrote:

Also that by being so ready to mock them, you're priming yourself not just to not help them, but to vindictively work against them.

Excellent.

Not just work against them for the benefit of others, but work against them solely for the sake of seeing them suffer. If that's "excellent" to you, and you think compassion and empathy are negative traits, you and the racists deserve each others.

Compassion and empathy aren't negative. White supremacy is, and that includes the supremacy of white feelings over real human lives. People whose heads are so easily turned that they need their feelings coddled are a threat.

what's particularly cute about the whole 'empathy' narrative is that the majority of Trump voters are financially comfortable. The narrative around the poor people who just can't help their racism because they're broke is false.

MrDeVil909 wrote:
Stengah wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:
Stengah wrote:

Also that by being so ready to mock them, you're priming yourself not just to not help them, but to vindictively work against them.

Excellent.

Not just work against them for the benefit of others, but work against them solely for the sake of seeing them suffer. If that's "excellent" to you, and you think compassion and empathy are negative traits, you and the racists deserve each others.

Compassion and empathy aren't negative. White supremacy is, and that includes the supremacy of white feelings over real human lives. People whose heads are so easily turned that they need their feelings coddled are a threat.

what's particularly cute about the whole 'empathy' narrative is that the majority of Trump voters are financially comfortable. The narrative around the poor people who just can't help their racism because they're broke is false.

If they aren't negative why are you so resistant to trying to understand why people who don't support a white nationalist agenda voted for Trump anyway. You don't seem even slightly interested in being empathetic, which will only further the cycle. You see them as a threat because they'll elect a racist to feel financially stable (The narrative isn't that they're poor and racist, it's that they're financially well off, but feel shakey, and condemning racism was less important than the promise of being financially secure), and they see you as a threat because you'll gleefully screw them over in your rush to condemn a racist. You're both right, but neither approach is particularly useful.

Edit - We don't have to actively help them, or stop working against them for the benefit of others, or even actively court their support, but we need to, at the very least, stop driving them into the arms of the racists. Being vindictively against them is making it so the racists only have to pay lip service to caring about their concerns to get their support.

Stengah wrote:

resistant to trying to understand why people who don't support a white nationalist agenda voted for Trump anyway.

As much as the left needs to reassess, stuff like this that lets people off the hook needs to end. They did support a white nationalist agenda in the most important way one can--by voting for it. Accountability.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Stengah wrote:

resistant to trying to understand why people who don't support a white nationalist agenda voted for Trump anyway.

As much as the left needs to reassess, stuff like this that lets people off the hook needs to end. They did support a white nationalist agenda in the most important way one can--by voting for it. Accountability.

They're totally on the hook for it. Seeking to understand ≠ condoning.
Edit - Examining why they did it can help us do a better job of preventing it from happening again. We might learn that there was nothing extra we could have done and our efforts would be better spent elsewhere (I highly doubt that though), but that shouldn't be our starting position.
Edit Part 2 - Honestly understanding them is going to require getting them to account for why they voted for him. Why they thought he wasn't serious about it, why it didn't matter to them if he was. It's their fault no matter what their reasons, but it helps us plan our strategy for next time. It's for our benefit, not to soothe their conscience.

Maybe looking at how Obama won all those places is a good place to start?

And explaining and campaigning on the things that he tried to do for them, but was rebuffed by the Republicans(https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/co... )?

Maybe she should have just shown up once in Wisconsin? Maybe she should have asked Obama to campaign more in Michigan?

http://www.freep.com/story/news/poli...

In Wisconsin, where Clinton didn’t make a single stop during the general election campaign, she won voters under 30 by just 4 points. Obama won them by 23 points four years ago. The state voted Republican for the first time since 1984.

“The vote among younger voters dropped off appreciably” for Clinton, said Tom Holbrook, political scientist for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Clinton’s margin in the ultra-blue city of Milwaukee was 27,000 votes smaller than Obama’s. That was roughly the size of her statewide defeat.

While Clinton may not have put a ton of resources into Wisconsin, her campaign peppered Michigan with visits by her and her surrogates during the final weeks.

Still, in Detroit, she won roughly 50,000 fewer votes than Obama did in 2012.

“It’s is nothing short of malpractice that her campaign didn’t look at the electoral college and put substantial resources in states like Michigan and Wisconsin,” says Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. Neither President Barack Obama nor the first lady was dispatched to Wisconsin, either.

Maybe she shouldn't have called 25 million people irredeemable.

Yeah, they totally would've voted for her if only she hadn't done that!

Stengah wrote:

They're totally on the hook for it. Seeking to understand ≠ condoning.
Edit - Examining why they did it can help us do a better job of preventing it from happening again. We might learn that there was nothing extra we could have done and our efforts would be better spent elsewhere (I highly doubt that though), but that shouldn't be our starting position.

Where's the counter call for conservative whites to have the compassion and empathy for people not like them and to take the time to understand why those people feel endangered by today's GOP?

That's my problem with your position. It's heavy on letting Trump supporters avoid having to examine themselves and their behaviors because it might cause them to get upset and very light on asking them to think about anyone else besides themselves (and people like them).

We're already at a point where 60% of Republicans think too much attention is paid to racial issues. Where fewer than one in five whites think institutional racism is a big thing.

Hell, we've actually reached the point where half of white Americans—including 60% of white working-class Americans—think that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The only real path forward in our country is for a lot of white people to be made to understand that as bad as they think they're getting f*cked over now, PoC have been getting f*cked over far worse and for much, much longer.

NormanTheIntern wrote:

Maybe she shouldn't have called 25 million people irredeemable.

You know, you're right. One of my major takeaways has been from this election is that you can gravely insult every demographic except white men, who will bring down punishment on you for even the mildest transgression.

NormanTheIntern wrote:

Maybe she shouldn't have called 25 million people irredeemable.

I think I understand why I don't get along with most liberals on political issues. It is my staunch belief in moral relativism within a fundamentally apathetic universe.

Many liberals seem to believe in some kind of vague higher power that has blessed their moral worldview. They believe their morality is superior in some kind of objective way that all humans should immediately recognize. Their failure to embrace moral relativism results in a complete lack of understanding when other humans come to different conclusions.

In my worldview, "right" and "wrong" are flexible concepts. The definition one uses is based on how one's meat machine was constructed; both by the dumb luck of your parents, and by the various inputs that were subsequently fed by chance into that machine over its lifetime.

It's well and good to disapprove of racist and homophobic ideas. I do, but I've had the luxury of considering these issues and knowing diverse groups of people who made the decision obvious for me. But you have to understand the origins of these memes; racists have different meat in their heads, and they have had different lived experiences. They didn't have the privilege of positively interacting with people of different races or beliefs at formative times, or they lacked the privilege of being educated in a way that teaches them the values of equality.

How do you convince somebody that your morality is superior? Especially the drive-by Trump voters, the normal GOP people, trapped in a no-win scenario of either voting for a racist jerk they really don't like or a politician whose platform they have been taught their entire lives to despise? If your plan is to feed their meat computers hostile input, tell them they are deplorable, and blame society's ills on voters being too dumb to recognize how right liberals are, then guess what: their computers will return "f*ck you liberal assholes." Your message will simply not compute.

* edit: trying to correct initially lumping all liberals into the same group, sorry about that, I know not every self-professed liberal is in this bucket

oilypenguin wrote:

Also, how are we supposed to fight this:

Just an outright lie. They aren't beholden to anything like journalistic integrity. What can we do about this?

Dems aren't going to win over Breitbart readers. Breitbart readers go there to get their worldview validated, not for news. (This is why, for instance, it was the de facto official news site of Gamergate.)

Breitbart readers are still a minority. Unfortunately, voters were still getting hammered with stories, articles, and discussions about Hillary's email problems and the FBI investigation from just about every news media outlet.

OG_slinger wrote:

The only real path forward in our country is for a lot of white people to be made to understand that as bad as they think they're getting f*cked over now, PoC have been getting f*cked over far worse and for much, much longer.

Helping people who have been f*cked over isn't a 0 sum game. Especially when a lot of the economic concerns of rural people(college tuition costs, stagnant job perspectives, etc.) are very much the same with poor urban PoC.

gore wrote:
NormanTheIntern wrote:

Maybe she shouldn't have called 25 million people irredeemable.

Liberals seem to believe in some kind of vague higher power that has blessed their moral worldview.

Like some kind of a, I don't know, god?

gore wrote:

It's well and good to disapprove of racist and homophobic ideas. I do, but I've had the luxury of considering these issues and knowing diverse groups of people who made the decision obvious for me. But you have to understand the origins of these memes; racists have different meat in their heads, and they have had different lived experiences. They didn't have the privilege of positively interacting with people of different races or beliefs at formative times, or they lacked the privilege of being educated in a way that teaches them the values of equality.

At what point do these people need to take responsibility for themselves, though? I was brought up in a racist household in a fairly racist community in Florida. Those people for the most part weren't illiterate or uneducated. Lots of them had plenty of access to libraries and educational materials, and interacted with minorities on a regular basis, and were still extremely racist.

The fiction that all of these people just didn't have any opportunity to be not-racist isn't much better than the ivory tower liberal talking about "flyover country" IMO.

gore wrote:

A bunch of good stuff.

Don't misunderstand me; my retort to Norman was just that; a snarky retort to snark. I wasn't offended by him, and I hope he wasn't offended by me.

But my snarky retort was not meant to be an endorsement of Clinton's disparagement of a portion of the voting populace. I may agree that the actions of a disturbing plurality of Trump's support were deplorable, but I don't necessarily agree that those people were inherently so. And I certainly don't agree that anyone is irredeemable; people can change, in surprising ways and at unexpected times.

Of course, even though I voted for Clinton I was a Bernie supporter until the DNC which apparently makes me responsible for Trump winning, so I'm sure I'm lumped in with the Deplorables by some people. *shrug*

cube wrote:

Helping people who have been f*cked over isn't a 0 sum game. Especially when a lot of the economic concerns of rural people(college tuition costs, stagnant job perspectives, etc.) are very much the same with poor urban PoC.

Barring a radical shift in social priorities and associated spending the need for government assistance for the poor (both urban and rural) far outstrips available resources.

And that means that helping people who have been f*cked over is absolutely a zero sum game. More money for rural whites means less money for urban PoC.

It also doesn't help that a lot of those rural white folks (and suburban white folks) largely thing that they deserve government social programs and benefits, but think that PoC who use those same programs and benefits are lazy takers who are soaking up the taxes of hard working (white) Americans.

Am I the only one weirded out by this "rural white people", "suburban white people", "urban people of color" conversation? There are plenty of white people in the cities. There are more people of color outside "inner cities" than in them.

*grumble*

Signed: urban middle-class white person who grew up an urban poor white person on the government dole for a good chunk of my childhood

“The vote among younger voters dropped off appreciably” for Clinton, said Tom Holbrook, political scientist for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

A lot of this is because young people are struggling terribly in the Obama economy. They have titanic levels of college debt, which they cannot escape, and a scarcity of jobs that pay anything much. Their perception, and it's probably very accurate, is that their elders have pulled up the ladders behind them.

Clinton was just promising more of the same. They weren't interested.

Malor wrote:

A lot of this is because young people are struggling terribly in the Obama economy. They have titanic levels of college debt, which they cannot escape, and a scarcity of jobs that pay anything much. Their perception, and it's probably very accurate, is that their elders have pulled up the ladders behind them.

Clinton was just promising more of the same. They weren't interested.

Erm. Clinton had a specific plan to address existing and future college debt. It was one of the bigger policy areas being talked about by her campaign. How was that promising more of the same?

OG_slinger wrote:
Stengah wrote:

They're totally on the hook for it. Seeking to understand ≠ condoning.
Edit - Examining why they did it can help us do a better job of preventing it from happening again. We might learn that there was nothing extra we could have done and our efforts would be better spent elsewhere (I highly doubt that though), but that shouldn't be our starting position.

Where's the counter call for conservative whites to have the compassion and empathy for people not like them and to take the time to understand why those people feel endangered by today's GOP?

That's my problem with your position. It's heavy on letting Trump supporters avoid having to examine themselves and their behaviors because it might cause them to get upset and very light on asking them to think about anyone else besides themselves (and people like them).

The counter call is kind of baked into the liberal "default" call, isn't it?
We need to know why they were comfortable voting for Trump from their own mouths so we can know how to make them uncomfortable enough to not re-elect him. Did they not believe he's a danger to minorities and women or thought that "checks and balances" would limit what he could actually do? Or do they not care because they want those groups to be afraid. The latter group is a lost cause, but the other groups we might be able to convince otherwise. Knowing how big each group is and where they're located will help immensely when figuring out what areas to focus our efforts in, whether we'd be better served by pushing the counter call, or invigorating the existing supporters in the area to shore up against those that would never listen to it anyway.

OG_slinger wrote:

The only real path forward in our country is for a lot of white people to be made to understand that as bad as they think they're getting f*cked over now, PoC have been getting f*cked over far worse and for much, much longer.

Agreed. We absolutely should not coddle them or tiptoe around their feelings. But if we're particularly vindictive about it, they're just going to dig their heels in and put on their blinders out of spite.

Farscry wrote:
gore wrote:

A bunch of good stuff.

Don't misunderstand me; my retort to Norman was just that; a snarky retort to snark. I wasn't offended by him, and I hope he wasn't offended by me. :)

No offense at all - I think your initial response was wrong though. The point wasn't that the die-hards would have somehow voted for Clinton if she hadn't insulted them. The point is that those die hards are friends and family with many of the more moderate blue collar types who voted for Clinton twice, then Bush twice, then Obama twice, and then for Trump. Because people close ranks when you write off their friends and family. It might be possible to win without those people, if the demographic composition of the rust belt changes, but I wouldn't bet that happens in the next 2 cycles.

Well, the largesse of an extra USD 5,000,000,000,000 looks to be invested in your military over the next two terms so it can flex muscles to Russia and China's arms race in the Atlantic and Pacific. It's not like you can't raise finance if your leaders felt like it - but they want to posture on the global stage instead of turning their attention to what's happening inside the country. You've had that problem since Nixon, Bush v 1.0 etc.

Malor wrote:

Ten million Democrats failing to vote is a damning indictment of the product on offer.

You're right about the indictment of the product on offer.

You're wrong that the product was Hillary. The product was government.

Stengah wrote:

We need to know why they were comfortable voting for Trump from their own mouths so we can know how to make them uncomfortable enough to not re-elect him. Did they not believe he's a danger to minorities and women or thought that "checks and balances" would limit what he could actually do? Or do they not care because they want those groups to be afraid. The latter group is a lost cause, but the other groups we might be able to convince otherwise. Knowing how big each group is and where they're located will help immensely when figuring out what areas to focus our efforts in, whether we'd be better served by pushing the counter call, or invigorating the existing supporters in the area to shore up against those that would never listen to it anyway.

Again, I keep thinking back to that This American Life about how people in a small town in Wisconsin viewed Somali immigrants. While there were some legitimate and ugly racists in town there were also a lot of nice little old ladies who went out of their way to claim it was everything but race when it was precisely about race. They just couldn't bring themselves to say it (and admit that, maybe, they aren't nice little old ladies after all).

We aren't going hear everything we need to hear from Trump supporters own mouths. They are going to be like those little old ladies and hide behind code words like "economic anxiety."

Stengah wrote:

But if we're particularly vindictive about it, they're just going to dig their heels in and put on their blinders out of spite.

They're going to dig in their heels and put on blinders because of white fragility, not because the left is being vindictive.