I’m a center-left Democrat with lots of degrees. I’m aghast and frightened by Trump’s victory. But I think it’s due to the opposite of racism and misogyny and transphobia. I think he won because of anti-anti-racism and anti-misandry and love of children combined with acceptance of gays.
Normies not overeducated out of common sense rejected identitarian politics. DEI departments, struggle sessions, Robin Angelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates, quotas limiting Asian-Americans, literacy and math as white supremacy, buying a fixer-upper in a poor neighborhood as settler colonialism, all of it.
Men—a rainbow coalition of them—finally got fed up with decades of rhetoric about toxic masculinity, testosterone poisoning, rape culture, patriarchy. They saw that for most men in this country, the reality was poor results in school, lousy job prospects, inability to form a family, and a culture in which dissing any identity group is a capital offense unless it’s men you’re dissing and then that’s fine.
And regular folks not caught up in the strange mania to over-treat the normal nuttiness of puberty with life-altering chemicals and surgery said stop—confusion is fine, it’s not a disease, and didn’t we recently decide that homosexuality is okay, so why are doctors suddenly trying to cut it out of children?
Revulsion at these things is viscerally powerful, existentially clear. Trump’s unfitness for office is more abstract, more distant. The calculation for many was he will mess up Washington, DC and the rest of the globe but it’s more important to save myself and mine. Voting for more of the same will just lead to more of the same. And enough of that. Enough.
Well said. Agree but there is far more to the story. A review of how the Dem machine attempted to manipulate this election with lawfare is also a huge factor.
The coordinated indictments helped Trump win the primary. He may not have otherwise but the Dems wanted to compete against Trump who was the easiest to beat. Then nominating Biden in obvious mental decline was another middle finger to the public. A whole pocket of fingers came out when they ditched Biden and launched the Harris avatar with the full support of the media. That also backfired spectacularly.
Well, we differ on “lawfare.” I think the Jack Smith prosecutions and the Georgia case are all righteous. Trump’s actions were clearly criminal. My beef is with Merrick Garland for being so pusillanimous for so long, and with Biden for appointing him to make a point about McConnell stealing a SCOTUS seat. But Garland is fundamentally a judge, not a prosecutor, no matter what he was when younger.
There was much more than that though. Bragg's case was one of the most preposterous legal actions I have ever seen. NY State legislature abolishing the statue of limitations so that an evidence free allegation from 30 years ago could cost him tens of millions was another. Not to mention Tish James' case, which was so far fetched she had to reassure the business community that she was just targeting Trump as she'd vowed to do before she was even elected.
"There was much more than that though. Bragg's case was one of the most preposterous legal actions I have ever seen."
You are 100% correct on this, Unset. But the Mar-A-Lago case was the real deal, and despite the DA's mishandling of it, the Atlanta case represented the most egregious violation of a President's constitutional Oath of Office in our nation's history.
Are you referring to the classified documents case that was set up by the Biden team almost immediately after they came into office in 2021? Nothing about that case was "the real deal."
So, let's get this straight. You believe that Trump's possession of Top Secret documents at Mar-A-Lago, even after he had been given weeks (months?) to return them to Washington . . . you don't think that is a legitimate case?
While we disagree on the righteousness of some of the cases, timing of the cases indicates their true intent imo. Keeping Trump front and center worked in 2020 and 2022. Imo this was an expansion of that strategy.
When combined with the timing of 'run out the clock on the statute of limitations for Hunter Biden', it does kind of start to look like a cynical abuse of timing in both cases. If they had filed charges in both cases two years earlier, I would be much more sympathetic to the claims of impartial justice.
The "riming of the cases" was driven in part by Garland's theory that he should start from the bottom and work up, and his general timidness. It's extremely unlikely that he was trying to drag it out to fit precisely into an election cycle.
Beyond that, that timing was in part a result of Trump's delaying tactics, first so he could claim "election interference" and then get past the election and hold himself above the law. And it was a result of Ailene Cannon's shamelessly cynical favoritism, and then SCOTUS's almost equally cynical efforts to help him get elected again.
It was not a Democratic "strategy" to have criminal cases still pending when we went into the election. If the timing had been governed by a political strategy, he would have been convicted already in the most serious cases.
The entire purpose of the lawfare strategy was to time it just right so that Trump would be sitting in prison during the campaign and would be kicked off the ballots in half the states in the country. Then Biden could just stay in the White House and not really have to do anything. This was clearly the plan all along. The classified documents was literally set up by the Biden transition team in early 2021 just to help bring about this result. And there wasn't, and still isn't, any good reason for the Bragg case to have moved forward at all.
You'll notice that the Dems' campaign strategy became increasingly frantic as the year went on and their plans kept falling apart one after another after another.
I'm willing to concede that Garland was being unseemly levels of over-timid.. but he had a clear duty in this sort of situation to NOT be timid. If he had followed his original plan literally, it seems like he wouldn't have filed charges against Trump until Biden's second term, and that's just... not the level of leadership america expects from it's attorney general.
When Garland was eventually successfully hounded into filing charges anyway.... it was pretty obvious that everyone doing the hounding was optimizing their strategy for the specific purpose of making life as difficult as possible for trump during the exact window of his re-election campaign, because they were terrified of what might happen if his re-election campaign wasn't made as difficult as possible. Garland had a clear duty to avoid that entire situation by filing charges early, which he failed at, and if he couldn't do that, he had a clear duty to stick to his original plan and ignore political pressure, which he failed at, and if he couldn't do either, he should have resigned in shame, apologized for the error, and let someone else try their hand and getting a fair prosecution done with fair timing.
I’d like to think if we had a citizen (private or otherwise) accused of what Trump is, it wouldn’t take four years to hual him in - more like six days, regardless of his law team. Truth is these cases dragged their way through election season because there isn’t a serious person in Washington who believes these cases are anything but political. More hysterical is that they didn’t have a plan B for Biden, simply because they didn’t expect Trumps popularity to hold up to the legal onslaught.
There is nothing righteous about using the Criminal Justice System to go after a political opponent. This is supposed to be the USA, not a Banana Republic.
I understand the sentiment. But the principal at stake here, in my view, is the rule of law. I believe Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted for her clearly illegal home brew server which almost certainly exposed US secrets to enemy intelligence. The fact that she was a political opponent should not have given her any protection. I think Donald Trump committed criminal acts (suborning election fraud) in the Georgia election, and (even worse) shredded his oath of office in the process. I don't have a problem with that being prosecuted. This is different than the Bragg case in New York, which was along the lines of a banana republic.
I think it's critical that the same standard be applied...or else people lose all respect for the system as the Dem-Media pontifications on "rule of law" are exposed as hypocritical blather.
Hillary's violations were egregious. She got the kid-gloves treatment. Trump got Banana Republic-style raids on his residence, investigations, indictments, and prosecutions. Meanwhile, Biden was let off for the similar alleged crimes due to...advancing senility. The whole thing is a bizarre circus...late Rome type stuff.
Going back to the main question, however, I don't like Trump personally. I think he's a con man, a carnival barkers, and a buffoon. I also don't think he's a tough guy...but he plays one very well on television.
Still, I voted for him. Three times in fact. And the reason is simple: the Dem-Media Party has gone completely off the rails. It has become a collection of rotten, vicious, hectoring elitists driven by a genuinely sick ideology. In short, Trump is bad. But the alternative is a thousand times worse. I didn't hesitate for a second in the voting booth.
There was this event a few days ago . . . a presidential election. Some of the major news outlets probably have articles and/or video on it. Turns out that Trump is now going to be in charge of the Justice Department. That's why.
Every single one of these cases were obvious attempts to get "The Orange Menace". Not one of these cases would have been brought against anyone else. Even disgraced and resurrected Cuomo said just that. Not one of these cases was legitimate. Everyone involved in each and every one of these cases should be investigated and charged with prosecutorial abuse and at least fired.
Shortly after 1/6/21, many Republicans agreed that Trump's egregious efforts to stay in power unlawfully should be a subject for courts of law to address. J. Michael Luttig calls his actions the gravest crime a U.S. president has ever committed against the Constitution.
Holding him to account for it is not "lawfare." It's rule of law.
Same for his defiance of a subpoena for sensitive documents he willfully stole, which his lawyers told him he could not lawfully retain, and the elaborate shell game he played to hide them.
That too was a serious crime against America. Ailene Cannon knew it was a crime, but she wanted him to get away with it, so she grabbed the flimsy pretext that Clarence Thomas threw her. Protecting the person who appointed her - a favor for which she can expect a reward - is naked corruption.
His allies on SCOTUS clearly wanted him to get away with his criminal acts, so after a strategic delay they invented the novel doctrine that a president doesn’t really have to be constrained by law. That, too, is a corruption of justice and an outrage against the rule of law.
As for the hush money: the Trump DOJ sent Michael Cohen to prison in part for his role in the same scheme, in which he acted at Trump’s behest and for his benefit. Why should Trump be exempt from accountability?
The New York business fraud prosecution is similar to cases that SDNY brings regularly. Why should Trump be exempt? Perhaps his political status brought special attention to his business fraud, but being a politician (or a politician’s son) always brings more scrutiny.
The problem isn’t “lawfare.” It’s that Trump has always been deeply amoral, contemptuous of rules, pushing the boundaries of what he can get away with. “Who would prosecute me?” is what he replied when an aide told them that what he wanted done was illegal.
Luttig also said the attempts to keep him off the ballot were perfectly reasoned and would carry the day... right up until they were reversed 9-0 by the SCOTUS. Your problem is that you are completely propagandized and you don't have the curiosity to begin to ask why the people you listen to are always wrong in the final analysis. Luttig's opinion was destroyed by SCOTUS - utterly destroyed. Yet you still hold him in esteem. Your problem is that no matter how educated you are. No matter how smart you think you are... meh.
Let's take Cohen as an example: He pled guilty to campaign finance violations, but it was never proven that he violated campaign finance law. He pled to the one they wanted, to avoid the really big one which was failure to report millions in income. Cohen never violated campaign finance laws because they are clear that if a payment is made that can also have another impact - he didn't want his marriage to suffer - it's not illegal. Merchon refused to allow testimony from the FEC Chief that would have made this clear.
Nor is there proof that sex took place. No photographic evidence, no corroborating witnesses. Just that she said- and to this day he has said the opposite. There is no proof and the only thing that makes it true in your mind is that the people you listen to are saying it's a fact - but it isn't.
Your hatred hangs on innumerable instances of propaganda and dehumanization that would make Goebbels proud. I personally find you almost dumb however, in that you've been told over and over - a thousand times - "We've got him now!" and you continue to believe them. Yet, comes now, he's won the popular and the electoral and you still are willing to believe the propaganda and you are completely unwilling to cast a critical eye on the people that have been the actual liars.
You're never going to convince anyone the classified documents case had any merit to it when Biden did the exact same thing and wasn't prosecuted for it. The only people who don't see that as a double standard are the ones who were crying last Tuesday night.
Terrible attempt at both-siderism. Biden did not do the exact same thing. He turned over his documents almost the instant they were discovered. Trump fought tooth and nail to keep his, lying and hiding documents all the while.
What crime did he commit? You don't increase the legitimacy of that nonsense by repeatedly spreading the smear. Still waiting for one of you haters to explain exactly how the alleged "insurection" was supposed to work. The real threat to democracy was exploiting covid to steal an election then using lawfare to silence any dissent.
Yes, Trump is amoral and contemptuous of rules and so are an awful lot of Americans. Of course, Trump could not have won without the support of amoral Americans who are quite willing to sacrifice Ukranians and poison the air we breathe and support authoritarians and murderous dictators so they can get reduced prices for food, etc. But with tariffs they will get nothing.
The foundation is abortion? News to me. It is an issue, and both sides have embraced moral justifications. If abortion is murder, then it is immoral. But anti abortion advocates seldom embrace it as murder. Trump embraces Putin who is a murderer, eg, he imprisoned Navalny which led to his death. He has murdered many Russians who questioned his dictatorship He has murdered Ukranians who resisted his terror. But Putin embraces Trump and Trump embraces Putin, two of a kind. So I guess many people voted for Trump so they thought Trump would reduce the price of eggs so that Trump can crack heads. Nothing moral here, I call it moral bankruptcy.
Who cares about Ukraine. Really, who cares? It's half a world away and has nothing to do with our day to day life. Wasting one cent on that boondoggle was too much.
"J. Michael Luttig calls his actions the gravest crime a U.S. president has ever committed against the Constitution."
I've never heard of Mr. Luttig, but this is exactly what I've been saying since January 2021. When conservatives downplay those events, I tell them that I LITERALLY believe that Trump's actions after the election — most notably his January 2 phone call to Raffensberger — to be worse events than Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Unfortunately, most people in the comments sections of most sites can't handle an argument that can't fit on a bumper sticker, let alone an entire paragraph. My argument for this is very long and very nuanced. I guess I should write an article for Persuasion explaining it. But I will say this: Neither Pearl Harbor nor 9/11, as horrific as their loss of life was, ever seriously endangered the Republic. They were attacks from outside enemies, and there was never any question that we Americans would unite and defeat those enemies. Here's the short version:
If it ever comes to pass that most Americans disbelieve the results of our elections, the days of our Republic will be numbered. We cannot BE if we do not agree on the results of our elections. Trump brought us to the point where almost half the people doubted the results of the 2020 election. And when you add in the lesser figures from the Democrats questioning results (Biden and other Democrats lying about black voter disenfranchisement and the like), you have a pot boiling which has a very toxic stew. I am happy that Trump won as convincingly as he did, because if it had been at all controversial (like a repeat of 2000), it could get very ugly, and if no one can agree on who wins, who actually has the legitimacy to govern?
The Democrats lied to the American people. For 8 years they have scolded the Reps with “ how can you nominate someone who is unfit for the office?” Then they did it. They lied about the Presidents mental fitness. I think people went into the polling booth and remembered.
Also has that dude ever been to Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 memorial? You kidding me?
Your guess is wrong. I have not only read the transcript, I have listened to the entire recording. Trump's actions were clearly improper. As the top law enforcement official of the United States government, just making that call was improper, but when he is told by people who are doing their job that they are doing their job, he has NO business seeking anything more from them.
And here's the thing. I would stake everything I own and every dollar I will ever make in the future that the people who are defending Trump's conduct on that phone call would unhesitatingly condemn Biden (or any Democrat) for doing the same thing, because they would properly realize that coercion by someone in the position of the President comes with an implied threat of some kind. It is only because it is Trump's call that his defender's cannot see it. It is one of the worst things about politics, that almost nobody can be objective when it is their tribe that is in the spotlight.
He spent the entire call discussing improprieties in the voting process and then asked them to do their job. The fact that you suggest that call was worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 shows you are so far beyond the point of reason that you can't see reality.
If you haven't been paying attention that case is entirely dead.
By the way is Trump building new concentration camps or just using the ones from his last Presidency?
To Yascha, this is why Team Blue lost: Your side is insane.
The majority of Americans do not want abortion on demand up to time of birth.
The majority of Americans do not want men playing in women's sports.
The majority of Americans do not want social media controlled by the government.
The majority of Americans do not want to be censored.
The majority of Americans do not want open borders.
The majority of Americans do not want runaway inflation from an administration that doesn't know anything about economics.
The majority of Americans don't want a sitting President to try to jail his opponent.
The majority of both men and women do not believe that every man is toxic, and every white person is a racist.
The majority of Americans know explicitly clearly now that the mainstream media is just an appendage of the Democrat National Committee.
The majority of Americans knew that Biden was not well and that we were consistently lied to.
The majority of Americans know that Kamala was/is/and always will be incompetent punctuated by her awesome work at the border, and that she didn't win here nomination through democracy but was appointed and installed by the group that overthrew Biden. They also know that Kamala had the lowest approval rating of any VP until the media declared that she was the best VP of all time.
The majority of Americans now know that most of what came from Fauci was made up from whole cloth, that Russia Gate came from Hillary Clinton's campaign, and that the majority media can't help but print lies all of the time.
If you are so far in a bubble that you disagree or can't see what is right in front of you, there isn't any hope for you to understand, not only the Trump victory, but a basic political realignment that is likely to continue for the next several elections.
This misses the point. The Democrats were trying to do what the Republicans ought to have done but signally failed to do after January 6th when Trump had finally proven beyond any shadow of a doubt how unfit he was to be President ever again.
Bullshit Trump wasn't going to win the primary. The indictments may have gotten some more favor for him, but the GOP has been in lockstep with him since 2016; the criminal issues didn't change that.
What's sickens me is when anyone suggests or implies that no one should have attempted to hold Trump responsible for the crimes he committed. Trump committed crimes, and he needs to be punished for them. The problem is (1) that more than half of this country doesn't want to punish him and (2) those in charge of holding him accountable dragged their feet.
New golden rule: Rich white men rule, no matter what. Let them rape, murder, steal, lie...whatever. They win. I think Biden is a good man, but he won in 2020...and I bet his whiteness and maleness got him over the finish line.
It’s sentiments like this exactly. This is why the Dems lost. Absolutely no one adheres to this ‘golden rule’ yet you continue to claim it has validity. And you blame whiteness for everything, failing to acknowledge the real issues.
In the UK the recent ‘Cass Review’ commissioned by the NHS (national health service) into children with gender problems has totally changed the discussion on all aspects of the trans issue. And basically it says drugs are wrong, probably don’t work, and that talk therapy is the way to go. Google Cass Review.
San Francisco native and lifelong Democrat, this is spot on. The 360 degree messaging from progressives and the media at best was amateurish, and at worse, insulting and demeaning. I am not gay above anything else that I am. My friends are not trans, black, or other simplified categories, yet even companies based in SF were requiring me to pledge I was not a racist and campaign messaging similarly claimed I was if not supporting Janaja. And who are the fascists? Quit making this about Trump, few really like him, but it was the who Democrats lost this election plain and simple by losing its base.
It's about Trump because he gave voice to the frustration in a way that noone else managed to do - and because his obvious flaws made supporting him the most effective middle finger to show in response.
In 2016 Trump wasn't my preferred candidate because of his personality and a skepticism that he would actually get anything done.
In 2024 I voted for him, not only because he ended up being a great President, but more importantly I believed, and still believe, that he is going to take an axe to the nearly wholly corrupt government. Washington D.C. voted close to 93% for Harris, and that is our seat of power. That is horrifying. The faster he moves departments out of DC the better for our country. This has created an unaccountable bureaucracy that believes there are no consequences to their actions because there is no one in their peer group to tell them otherwise.
"his obvious flaws made supporting him the most effective middle finger to show in response."
I've never thought of it this way. You're saying that Trump didn't win *despite* his flaws, but at least in part *because* of his flaws? Fascinating (and plausible) notion.
You've... really never thought of it this way? This has been Trump's whole appeal since 2015. Have you never actually talked to anyone who ever voted for him?
To me this explains a lot of the "base", a good number of the people who voted for him twice before, when he won and when he lost, and voted for him again now. What it doesn't explain is the most recent landslide win as opposed to the previous results, for that I think we have to add voters who resemble what OP describes. I don't believe you can ever win an election with just your base, you need the others, the converts, the defectors and the reluctant supporters etc.
I feel I have understood Trump's appeal since 2015, and I have — more times than I can count — explained to Leftists why Trump has so much appeal. But Duane, I'm not sure if you and I have an actual shared understanding of the point I was making in that comment there. I mean, we might, but I want to be sure. So could you, without using *my* words, could you please explain what you think I am saying in that comment?
1. Trump was/is never as bad as would the Democrat and MSM negative branding campaign against him have the electorate believe. Everything has been hyperbolic and extreme. His comments were consistently taken out of context and made into a perpetual attack commercial against him. And since he is authentic and speaks openly and often, there was always a trove of material to exploit. So those afflicted with the Bluebonic plague got injected with even more TDS... repeating these intellectually dishonest chants, slogans and rhetoric ad nauseum. These under-educated (or non over-educated) voters might be slow, but they are not so dense that they would not put all the fact patterns together to eventually conclude that the anti-Trump cascade from the Democrat-biased MSM was really a bunch of crap.
2. Democrat politics and ideas are still not popular. I am sure many of you have noted the inconvenience of the 2024 election vote counts showing how the 2020 election was a 20 million vote abnormality especially given that 80% of those additional votes when to Hiddin' Biden. Regardless if you believe there was cheating, or if the Democrats leveraged the fortuitous benefits of the global pandemic to push mass mail in balloting that they then harvested within our loose legal boundaries of state's election authority... the fact is that without those abnormalities it was likely that Trump would have been reelected and the GOP held the majority in both houses of the legislature. The problem with the blues is that they lied so much that the public loved them... that the demographics had changed to cancel older and whiter conservatives and moderates... that they believed it themselves. But it was never really true. The Democrat Overton Window had shifted left, while the public values and views had remained pretty fixed except for real civil rights progress related to racial and gender equality and gay rights. If you think deeply about this, the self-lying by blues that Democrats were favored based on their squeak by win in the 2020 election, created this wave of wailing depression like their basket of cats were eaten by a pack of toxic masculinity wolves.
3. It is the economy stupid. But it isn't just the Biden inflation pissing off the American middle class. Brexit happened and then Trump in 2016. Prior to this were was the global financial collapse of 2008, then they bailed themselves out and Democrats in charge proceeded to lead a six year jobless and economic uncertain recovery. The 2024 election was a large dose of anti globalist Regime establishment uprising. Lefties keep up the scolding that MAGA is stupid watching Fox News and mistakenly believing that the economy is in bad shape. The idiocy of this position is lost on the blues as they enjoy their higher incomes and wealth in the security of their coastal and big city liberal enclaves... because their denial of the real situation on the ground for the majority of American families only increases the electorate's ire over the situation. The problem here is that the Democrats and the government are joined at the hip and they have taken to manipulating the economic data to feed a propaganda campaign to attempt to manipulate the electorate. For example, the U-3 BLS unemployment rate is plastered on the MSM, but the real impactful rate is U-6. The U-6 rate was 7.9% in August of 2024. Then there are about 1200 labor surplus areas where unemployment is double-digits... and many high double-digits.
With respect to the economy, blues are living in a bubble of their own making unable to see out to honestly observe or recognize the reality for the majority of American families. This is the worst of the worst behavior of the gilded class... to posture that life is really good for everyone because - look at me! - life is good for the gilded class.
So much here that is wrong. Too much to bother with. I’ll just do two as a tiny sample. In 2008, a Republican was President, did you know that? Also, there is no such thing as “Democrat politics.” Do you mean “Democratic politics?”
LOL. So you say so much that is wrong, but fail to write what it is. And then you show your hypersensitivity to language that your party attempted to corrupt for politics and as you point out above is the reason that the Democrat Party got spanked.
2008 a Uniparty president was in office. He was really no different than the next one that took over.
Now you understand! Calling it the Democrat Party is just as childish! Basic respect is calling people and organizations by their correct name. How the United Stated is governed is not a Kindergarten game. It’s serious stuff. Please act like an adult.
At the moment, Dennis the Menace is the cultural icon for American boys, at least in the minds of leading cultural critics. He is not going to take the frog out of his pocket or apologize for breaking Mr. Wilson’s window with his baseball no matter how many pink-collar role models you show him. His role model is Joe Rogan and his mentor is Jordan Peterson.
It shouldn’t be like that, but for the moment essentialism is shaping the backlash against the attempt to break the grip that the adage “boys will be boys” has on our society.
A better approach would be to get parents to emulate the ways certain Asian-American parents are able to prevent their boys from succumbing to the allure of the Dennis the Menace life. Accepting deferred gratification plays a large role, but that only works if it goes hand in hand with realistic prospects of handsome future rewards.
"At the moment, Dennis the Menace is the cultural icon for American boys, at least in the minds of leading cultural critics." Those critics? They didn't vote for Harris.
I agree with much of what you said. It's great to see dialogue like this. We can disagree with some things but agree to talk about it. We all got tired of being "lectured" too. Thanks and have a great day.
How come you aren't allowed to downvote this whining drivel? For God's sake, grow a pair. And don't worry about DC some of those agencies are going to be spread across this country and break up that elitist attitude and work for the PEOPLE.
Ha, the propaganda will never let anyone see it that away, that would imply abandoning a culture that shrinks the population of those most exposed to it (english speakers).
But they have to shrink that population to make way for an AI based society. The culture meets their needs for a future American society based on machine labor. So there can never be push back on the mind virus, the mind virus must be permanent so that a world in which all tasks requiring thought are conducted by machines can be established alongside a world where all tasks requiring menial but non repetitive tasks can still be conducted by durable and cheap slave ("undocumented") labor.
Human families must be choked off, the number of children in every line reduced until the only child is sex changed out of fertility. Social poison like drug use, petty crime, and general violence must be increased so that lifespans fall as soon as someone loses their job to a machine (lest they become a ward of the state for too long)
Long before the Democrats realize everyone hates their culture (whose purpose is just instituting human suffering and death) establishment Republicans will come to embrace it.
Very well said! I give you a lot of credit for having all of these realizations as a center-left Democrat. The Democrat party needs to look in the mirror with introspection and come to these same conclusions or they will lose more elections in the future.
I agree with your take of what the left focuses on. I would also add that they don't seem to mind American cities turning a blind eye to the huge homelessness, drug addiction, and crime problems. Average people will vote for anything that keeps the local store from having to keep all of their deodorant under lock and key.
Excellent comment. In my old home country of Poland the people rejected EU aligned politicians for a party we all regarded as generally backwards, but the central issue was immigration and the "Law and Justice" party, while leaving a dirty aftertaste in one's mouth on most other issues, was aligned with the public on that issue so they kept winning. This wasn't just the "farmers" and "religious fanatics" voting for them, enough of the "educated" rejected progressive policies to make it happen. Now many years later other parties have relented and shifted their positions to align with the general public so law and justice finally list their grip on power. I'm interested to see if the Democrats do so as well or if they just keep blaming their loss on bigotry and misogyny and just wait for the Trump admin to turn off enough voters to swing enough of the electorate their way.
I am also center-left with a lot of degrees, and I agree with you completely on all these points. HOWEVER, I see no evidence that the kind of cultural stuff that upsets you and me and others like us was of any significance in determining the vote of swing voters, who by and large are very different from us. From all I can tell, it was inflation and immigration that were top of mind, not the special maladies of "educated" spaces which many of the swing voters, especially the increasingly Trumpified working class, don't know much about and care about even less.
Well, yes on inflation—although in fact the economy is in great shape and inflation is a memory, not an active process. I think it’s like the crime narrative, which is also based on a surge that was temporary. My take is that these served as permission structures for voters to respond to their real feelings, which are what I said.
Gender nonsense was on voters’ minds outside overeducated spaces. The proof? Trump ran ads saying “Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you.”
And I’d argue that voters’ reaction to immigration wasn’t really about the border. In fact, it’s all a fake controversy. No cats are being eaten. No jobs are being taken away. Immigrants, even illegal ones, are more law-abiding than citizens are. Immigration is a net positive in that it brings in more taxes than it consumes in services, and has many more economic benefits besides.
The Democratic theory of the case was that identity solidarity would trump Trump’s nativism. But it turned out the opposite way. There was no BIPOC bloc. A lot of Blacks and Latinos were offended by the identitarian assumption that their votes were in the bag. So were a lot of non-BIPOC voters who didn’t like being labeled racist. Not to mention all the Asian-Americans who asked, what about us?
And certainly young men weren’t voting on inflation or immigration. They were voting to reject a society that considers them crap.
Maybe no cats were being eaten, but towns ARE being swamped by illegal immigrants. It's the same point Vance made with Martha Raddatz on ABC--she said that violent immigrant gangs had only taken over "a handful" of apartment buildings in Colorado and seemed completely unaware that she had admitted that, yes, violent immigrant gangs are taking over apartment buildings. To her, it wasn't a problem that this was happening, but that Trump and Vance were talking about it.
Black communities could see as plain as day that these new immigrant groups would replace them as the Dems' major voting bloc if this trend continues. You really think they're happy about that?
Inflation is not a memory! Every time I go to the store I can’t get over the sticker shock. That attitude right there is why the Democrats lost the election. “You plebes aren’t experiencing inflation. It’s just a memory.”
the murder rate may be declining vs. the peak post Floyd, but we still have half the aisles our pharmacies under lock and key, still have tons of public urination/homelessness/encampments in our cities etc. and still, until this very election, were at the mercy of insane DAs in much of blue America (still are in too many places). Specifically i don't think crime explains Trump's victory stricto sensu (as it is mostly aa blue state problem) but it can be factor in Trump's surge in NY and CA (in the former, esp. in NYC possibly also due to likely shift in Jewish vote due to campus antisemitism). This in turn may be a factor in Trump winning the popular vote.
>> The proof? Trump ran ads saying “Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you.”
How is that proof? It merely shows that Trump campaigners are plugged into culture war stuff (as elite Republicans of course very much are!). There is no evidence however that this ad changed anything. Considering that Harris outspent Trump by x2 or x3 times (!) it seems that the best prior should be that ads didn't matter much.
The ad got a lot of media hype because the media, too, is plugged into culture wars. It still doesn't prove people cared too much either about the issue or the ad.
Finally, as for your take on immigration. It is woefully out of touch, on multiple levels. Don't have time to get into now. You seem both ignorant of the many practical problems this current, unprecedented wave of illegal immigration has caused or may cause (overwhleming city infrastructures etc.; potential security risks) AND to have not thought through the problems with this thing as a matter of principle (in short - it doesn't square with any theory of democrcay or the rule of law). You also are almost *certainly* American born, thus blissfully ignorant of the hardships legal immigrants come through and cannot begin to fathom the rage the double standard with illegal immigration is causing among legal immgiraants who made huge sacrifces to respect America's laws (and it is only the legals who vote - at least for now...)
Inflation is not a memory! Every time I go to the store I can’t get over the sticker shock. That attitude right there is why the Democrats lost the election. “You plebes aren’t experiencing inflation. It’s just a memory.”
I will tell you why I voted for Trump. My wife and I are masters/PhD educated Brooklynites who work in academia. Several weeks ago my wife was teaching a class and a student very proudly mentioned they would never willingly collect anything produced by a white man. It’s not that this was said, it’s that this is a common and acceptable position for democrats even though you’ll say it isn’t. I’m tired of the hypocrisy. What the democrat worldview says reality is like is neither true nor morally supportable. I read many NYT comments the other day that said things like “Trump and Musk are the true elitists.” No, guys. No they’re not. It’s not about money. It’s about who gets to tell you what to say and who gets to break “the rules” and who doesn’t. It’s about what you can talk about and what you can’t. It’s about laws for some presented as if they’re for all. It’s about what you’re allowed to see. It is a fundamental, hypocritical rot that is just so clearly there.
Excellent commentary. Fellow brooklynite with multiple graduate degrees, but I’ve left academia for the private sector. Managing a blue collar work force has brought home how out of touch the academic elites who claim to advocate for democracy and the working class truly are. Their supposed advocacy is elitist paternalism, with little interest or regard for the actual opinions and feelings of hourly employees - many of whom are young white men without college degrees. It was enough to swing me to a vote I would have never imagined possible just four short years ago.
Toby, the best education I got was leaving education in 1987, working in manufacturing and construction in management for 13 years then returning to education in 2000.
When you go out and work with people working 2 jobs just to be able to stay in their crummy apartment, it changes your world.
But the question is, when you or I label someone "ignorant", what do we mean by that? I want to believe that I only apply it to people who are uniformed about indisputable facts. But I know I see more and more people (mostly, but not exclusively on the Left) who apply that label to people who merely harbor views contrary to their own. It's almost as if some of our most well-educated people never learned the difference between fact and opinion.
Same - have lived in Brooklyn 25 years, masters degree, work in academia. Lefty credentials go as far back as Nader's MSG rally in 2000, helping start a reform Dem club in Brooklyn, volunteering for Obama, on and on. I voted for Trump too. My liberalism is such that I will never accept anti-male, anti-white hatred no matter how much they think it is fine and normal.
I'm in the same boat. As a liberal, starting in 2015, I seen too many liberals abandon liberalism in favor of some weird statism combined with being in a hate group. I left and became and independent - and will NOT vote for the current iteration of the Democratic party.
I’m a wealthy Democrat and Trump’s 4 years were fine…I got vaccinated but lower educated Trump voters didn’t and died. My Trump supporting family friends had a perfectly healthy 17 year old son die from fentanyl in 2020…and they still voted for Trump. As long as the stock market goes up at the end of the day I don’t really care about working class wages now that the working class voted for Trump because gasoline was expensive for a few months in 2022…f them. Btw, those expensive gas prices were great for America because America produces more oil and gas than any nation in history…I guess my “education” allows me to figure stuff like that out. 😉
does ypur education allow you to figure out that America and the USG are two different things and that what is good for USG and what is good for America do not frequently align?
as likely the only person on this page that has done business with, sued, and won against Trump, I can assure you he does not believe he needs to play by the rules. He aspires to be the only elitist with influence. the particular interaction between your wife and a student is troubling on many levels. I am also a center-right Republican in Silicon Valley and find all of the white European discrediting ridiculous and just say so. perhaps too many of you stuck in academia are there because you have not had to fight in the streets, and don't know how to deal with crazy people. I can assure you that without guardrails, the next four years won't be great for you
Also, I don’t appreciate your assumptions of who I am. I work in academia now but I worked in East Brooklyn for many years before, and not a glamorous work either. I worked in a factory in Detroit making transmission springs before I moved to NYC and eventually got to where I am. I have many, many stories more than those. I know more than enough about struggling and fighting, maybe even more than you. So don’t take me for less than I am. Stop assuming you know so much about me.
Ahh, you have broad life’s experiences. That’s the best education you can get!
I’m very critical of educators, many of them went from being a student to their own classroom with no meaningful experiences to back them up. They teach their subject matter with no clue why it’s important to kids future after school.
Yes, making springs for transmissions is a meaningful life’s experience because it is much more than that. Many people don’t get that.
When the elites who oppose Trump confidently assert they *also* don’t have to play by the rules, it neutralizes their assertion that he is a unique threat.
For goodness sakes, how about the elites that surround the democrats? Harris kept dragging out celebrities to support her. What do they have in common with someone cleaning rooms in the morning and waiting tables at night? Do they think working people are that stupid?
don't get your point. the discussion was about elites playing or not playing by the rules. are you asserting that George Clooney has a plan to do something nefarious?
Across the country we are moving right. Look at The democratic strongholds that flipped like Miami/Dade and Starr County. The solid blue states that had diminished democratic support like New Jersey and (Illinois I believe).
Not sure exactly what said student's comment meant, but may I ask how your wife responded? I am also in academia, also tired of wokeness, but recently am starting to be a bit more hoenst with myself in realizing how liberals like me (the silent majority? the substantial minority?) contributed to all this by keeping quiet for too long. So I decided to simply no longer stay silent. I do not actively seek any fights, but I called out colleagues a few times now when things happened right in front of me. It's always awkward, but so far the sky hasn't fallen, and it made me feel a little bit better about myself and the future of my profession. At the end of the day, Trump won't save academia. It is up to us to no longer stay silent and thereby complicit. We all need to be a little bit braver and each do our humble bit to make college sane again.
Actually it now and always has been about what our country was designed to be, and what nearly 250 years worth of Americans have lived, worked, fought and when necessary died to protect and maintain. Trump is the antithesis of that. Trump is the first President ever elected who has proven to utterly disdain the democratic process, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
Democratic norms such as jailing your opponents, silencing, sacking and de-banking your critics, forcing untested vaccines on healthly men women and children, opting back-room candidate selection over a democratic primary process?
I have to tell you that if this reply is the best you can do in attempting to emulate the sheer level of misinformation with which your Orange Hero has so conned you, you’ve got a ways to go to achieve competence.
How do you propose to bring together a divided nation or at least achieve a respectful dialogue when you refer to Trump as an "Orange Hero" who has "conned" his supporters? Your contempt and disdain for views and opinions you make no attempt at understanding or debating are matched only by your clear hostility to the main reason, I believe, so many people otherwise turned off by his brash personality nonetheless voted for him: Free speech. We have HAD IT with the statist mindset which brands unfashionable views "misinformation" or "conspiracy theory". Whatever happened to Left's dedication to challenging power centers, diversity of thought and tolerance of dissenting views? Do you not see the authoritarian theme which all your deplatforming, cancelling and attacks on political opponents which is so repugnant to everthing a free society stands for? "Misinformation" is a term invented to launder censorship and statism so it sounds like something other than what it is: the inability to defend your belief that certain views are unnacceptable and you will use coercive state power to silence your opponents. For all his faults, Trump engages. He debates, he defends. If you can't handle a free exchange of ideas, that gives you no right to silence those of us articulate and respectful enough to risk a dialogue with opposing opinions.
The reason for what I have said is simple. First, despite what you may have come to believe, Trump’s whole ethos is exactly what you have accused me of being, and more.
Trump has made the Republican Party into a personal cult, whose legislative representatives and other leaders are ruled by fear of people like you who have bought into his endless politics of ignorance, fear, prejudice, hatred, and vengeance and think it is somehow American.
The irony is that he doesn’t care a wit about you. He doesn’t care a wit about America or the office of the presidency except as he can use it to feed his bottomless need for power, adoration, and obedience. He values loyalty over integrity, which means he has neither.
America was founded as the most crucial and riskiest experiment in human government ever attempted. The Founders themselves harbored serious doubts that it could be made to work. Their only hope was that ‘We the People’ could, through time together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the humility, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. They knew that would mean that in the midst of whatever differences we might find among ourselves, we would continue to elect enough legislators and leaders who understood the necessity of operating along those lines, honoring those characteristics, and when needed, rising above the parochial fray to see our national needs.
Ask your self how well we’ve managed to do that. Ask yourself how many of those characteristics Donald Trump has ever shown in either his public private life.
And finally, take some time to read and to understand what Abraham Lincoln said in those two minutes at Gettysburg. If there is any single bit of understanding of who we were designed to be and the task we had in front us in order to achieve it both then and now, I don’t know of it.
Listen to Lincoln and listen Trump side by side. The differences are appallingly clear.
Not hardly. I stopped beating dead horses many years ago. It gets you nothing. You keep trying to pull that rotting nag up.
Stop focusing on TRUMP, BAD! Who doesn’t already know that. He was a jerk back in the early 80’s when he bought the New Jersey Generals and never lost his pace. When he survived President Pussy Grabber (sorry ladies) I realized he was bullet proof. Focus instead on why he won or, more importantly, why the democrats put up two bad candidates. Read what moderate democratic reps in Congress are saying. Bernie was in your face blunt. And honest.
When I was 30 I became very cynical about the American political process. I was an HR manager then, one of my many responsibilities was working with a PAC we were involved with. The short story, voter representation is bought with money. I tell my friends that run in local elections, politics is not for honest people. That’s the truth.
Then the majority of voters simply don’t care about the nation we were designed to be. Lincoln, as always, put it best. “As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time, or die by suicide". Trump is choosing suicide and would happily take the rest of us with him. Sleep well.
The majority of voters biggest concern is if they can survive until the next payday. I know this as fact, both from growing up and my professional life.
There is so much more to 19th century American history than that. I live in NYC so “Gotham” by Burrows comes readily to mind as a suggestion but there are many more.
Of course there is. I lived and taught American history for over 40 years in NYC. It is cliche to note that there were many kinds of Americans around all during the 19th century. I was merely suggesting that Trump was of a certain kind, two examples of which I gave. Many Americans have had problems with the democratic process or the Constitution or the rule of law - but none of them with the level of disdain for all three was ever elected President.
I hear you, but the criticism you gave, particularly the references, were of a type that has become less about accurate criticism and more about signifying in and out groups. Yassine Mekhout had a good piece on this recently. Calling him a robber baron is like calling him a fascist, which is like saying he represents a new, as-yet-unseen form of corruption. None of these actually say anything. Why not call him a Nazi? What about the corruption of deciding who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t based on what party they belong to? If you want to get somewhere you should use your 40 years and not just tell me you have 40 years. What am I supposed to make of that? “Oh, ok… guess I was wrong! Dum dee dum…”
Never got dirt in your nails working with the commoners. Just another academic that went from the classroom as a student to the classroom as a teacher. You are the academics I despise the most.
I love history BTW. Would have taught it but I knew most kids hated it.
I am a retired teacher btw, as is my wife, 4 of our five sisters, my mum, three aunts, my grandmother, uncountable cousins, best friends and many more.
Until you actually go out and get your hands really dirty working with the lower working middle class you will remain out of touch.
Even though I agree with much of what you say, I have trouble believing your are an academic (although you say you "work in academics," which could mean a lot of things.) Why? Because your analysis just doesn't fit the bill. First, you need to narrow your generalizations down a little. If you want to complain about wokeness, reference "progressives," as opposed to Dems. Traditional liberal Democrats are, on the whole, not onboard with the whole woke agenda. They are more like traditional Republicans who can't stand Trump and the MAGA types but have been cowed into silence -- and, yes, just as with so many of the traditional Republicans who secretly despise Trump and Co., the silence of traditional Democrats in the face of wokeness has been a form of cowardice. Another point: re your contention that elitism is not about money. Dude, try a little harder. One of the things that differentiates the two parties, generally speaking, is what they mean when they complain about "elites": Democrats are usually talking about the moneyed, while Republicans are talking about people with cultural power (academics, MSM, Hollywood, etc.). Both types are, in fact, elites. If you honestly don't think Elon Musk is an elite, I don't know what to tell you. You say the "true elitists" are those who get "to tell you what to say and who gets to break the rules" and, somehow, incredibly, fail to see that nobody fits that description better than the head of "X." Oh my.
There are two typles of elites: rich people who hate everyday Americans, true believers of the progressive woke religion (Democrats as exemplified by the utter contempt for America from mainstream leftist media) and rich people who do not despise America and working class Americans (Trump Republicans, and former Democrats who left the party of increasingly, insufferable insanity).
Now, now Claire. Try to get it right. Rich Democrats don't hate working people, in fact, they constantly vote for tax raises on themselves to fund programs that benefit the poor and working class, and even (and wrongly) undermine meritocratic standards in order to give them a leg up in academia and industry. What Dems don't like, generally speaking, are people who worship ("He was sent by God!") a crude, narcissistic authoritarian, insist that military-grade weapons be allowed to flood the country, and bray "Drill, Baby, Drill!" while climate change is literally reconfiguring the planet. See the difference?
David, you couldn't be more correct, working class IS terribly ungrateful, whether they should be or not is in the eye of the beholder.
Wealth cushions the effects of bad policy. Perhaps you might consider that the working class has been hit harder than you and your friends have.
PS
My mama always said ' when you resort to name calling you've lost the argument.'
PSS
Out of curiousity, an honest to goodness couple of questions for you... they are specific, not general questions.
Do you really think human beings can stop or manage the rate of climate change? Is there a direct cause and effect equation where a delta 'x' amount of C02 equals a 'y' direct effect on global temperature, natural disasters and climate events ?
Let’s clarify that a bit. Do you really think that 360+ million Americans can counter the garbage sent into the atmosphere by China, India and the rest of the 3rd world. The answer is no. I taught a class called Energy and the Environment, was educated by Rolls Royce on the advantages of green energy and am ready to take on anyone on this! CO2 poisoning of the atmosphere is something I know a lot about.
Clare, priceless for you to call me out for name-calling. Your assaults on Dems are as insulting as they come -- they also sound suspiciously like ill-considered talking points. As to your questions: (1) It's not a matter of if humans can currently stop or manage climate change, it's a matter of if we can make it more or less worse. There's an old adage: when you are in a hole, stop digging. The response from the right to our current hole is "Dig, Baby Dig!" Do you think that has something to do with fact that much of the Republican Party is in thrall to Big Energy? Nah. I don't see a second question so let me respond to your contention that I am some wealthy elite. LOL. Most of my friends are social workers or teachers. (I actually teach in a huge county jail right now--you know, trying to help druggies and criminals turn their lives around. Such a glamorous, elitist, money-mongering choice.) Many of us graduated from college with honors, but opted for jobs that had high social utility over high compensation. What do you and your hubby do? Don't bother answering.
I think it's only accurate to say that Dems hate Trump and Trump voters - calling us nazis, fascists and garbage. I am not calling Democrats any names, just reflecting back what Democrats say about Republicans non stop. The vitrol is well documented. The 'insufferable insanity' is telling us that men can turn into women, that we should castrate confused kids and that if we all work hard enough, we can stop the climate from changing. I understand that many Democrats really do think all of the above. I believe they are sincere. I disagree. I think that we should of course pursue clean energy in every way possible and feasible because it makes sense on it's own merits, not because we have the power to control the climate, global temperatues and natural disasters!!!!
I mean, the real answer to the student is “yes you will. It’s a breach of federal, state, and city anti-discrimination laws not to.” It’s more that this is not the first time something like this has happened and I’m tired of racism like this being protected.
I mean, sure. But i think the more important and pedagogical response would be to simply ask them "why"? If I were their teacher I'd have challenged them to justify such position. Free speech is the best healer. Let's see if they can actually defend such despicable idea.
FernConcern, first of all, thank you for sharing this candidly and transparently. I read it with interest, and I must admit sympathy for your position, although the ballot box won't help solve it, especially in an unstable era and especially with an opposing figurehead and counterculture which is incapable of modelling better behaviour. Out of curiosity, I would also ask if there are additional reasons for your vote, and if you and your wife made an intentional decision to switch your vote after that incident (or a number of incidents that fit that type)?
Be that as it may, I agree with a different poster who wrote on Matt Yglesias's blog that Trump's genius for making society worse tracks on your specific concern as well, namely suffocating progressive wokeness. By most measures, it got MUCH worse during Trump's first term, from 2016-2020. And the ascendent American right gave it much oxygen, and carried it far. Many would also agree that wokeness and the viral hashtag movements it birthed have slowly started ebbing in Biden's term.
The very basic observation has stood the test of time, and will stand the test of time: everything Trump touches dies or turns to fecal matter. Wokeness, American traditionalism, American Christianity, inflation, the Western security alliance, western civilization itself. Let us verify this over the years to come and return to this issue in 2028, provided that a free and fair election is still on offer by the authoritarian elite the electorate has ushered into power.
I’m similar in background. In the 1990s, a professor handed out an essay portion which stated a goal: change the language and we will change people’s thoughts. I almost passed out from shock, and I’ve never forgotten it. I turned away from that world then turned back again, and my abiding interest has been in how successful that effort has been.
The rights claimed by the nominal left, and the mechanisms for claiming them, hinge on the Enlightenment values that the most lauded academics and their poorly educated grad students savagely reject. The answer to many of our problems, from social to economic to political, lies in revisiting those values and understanding the reasons for their historical imperfect application, and addressing those.
Trump himself understands and promotes those values. Not all of his base do, it’s true. The religious right are only as interested in creating a theocracy as the pseudo-left progressives are interested in creating an authoritarian system based on their ideology, and perhaps less so. (Some of the religious right are willing to accept separate smaller systems, although that’s not satisfying to me, as only a commune doesn’t rule over nonbelievers, and communes are divisive. Still others, though not enough, are willing to hold to the separation of church and state).
The solution to the problem of the religious right cannot be found in a “left” authoritarianism.
I keep putting “left” in quotes because as Marx pointed out, identity politics serves the bourgeoisie. This can be seen in how DEI serves individuals seeking power in existing neoliberal society, while doing nothing to effect class-based politics. Indeed, class interests are derided and actively fought against, with the excuse that poor whites are the problem. This is just another version of the historical use of race to divide the working class and make consensus impossible. Yet as a Bernie foot volunteer in the Rust Belt, I saw firsthand that poor whites are interested in a class politics, and simply want rigorous fairness in its design. Not the “fairness” of punishing them for prior generations’ hostility (itself promoted in the 19th and 20th centuries by anti-class rhetoric expressly designed to fracture labor movements), but fairness now, for the people who are alive and suffering now.
Trump acknowledged this in 2016. The populist right and the populist left have common interests, and the rhetoric from the neoliberal DNC clearly responded to this potential by pushing narratives that asserted that common interests are impossible because of race. That of course is revolting and simply cannot be voted for, in my opinion.
I don’t know how many people made that a central point in their analysis, but I know that some did. They can be found in groups that have “walked away” from the Democratic Party.
I had a secretary that told me I “owed her” because of slavery. I was astounded. Only the rednecks I grew up with said that. The disappointment I had was DEEP! She validated what they had been saying all along. ARRRRGH!
After I went through my family history with her and she finally accepted my family didn’t arrive here until 1863 and none of us moved below the Mason Dixon line until the 1960’s did she tell me I was ‘ off the hook’.
I called my contact at Jet-Prep, the agency we worked with to get women and minorities placed and they yanked her out quick.
What? I was just asking what the student was refusing to collect. I don’t know if the student was a he or a she, but I often use masculine pronouns in the old way—to be inclusive, as in “mankind” or “chairman.” The student’s gender is irrelevant. I was simply asking about what was being collected.
But in makingAmerica great again, it was about taking America back in which there was censorship galore, in which almost all gays were invisible, in which oral sex was illegal, in which divorce was illegal, and masturbation represented a form of insanity, in which women could not vote, and on and on and on.
FernConcern, first of all, thank you for sharing this candidly and transparently. I read it with interest, and I must admit sympathy for your position, although the ballot box won't help solve it, especially in an unstable era, and especially if the opposing figurehead is incapable of modelling better behaviour. Out of curiosity, I would also ask if there are additional reasons for your vote, and if you and your wife made an intentional decision to switch your vote after that incident (or a number of incidents that fit that type)?
Be that as it may, I agree with a different poster who wrote on Matt Yglesias's blog that Trump's genius for making society worse tracks on your specific concern as well, namely suffocating progressive wokeness. By most measures, it got MUCH worse during Trump's first term, from 2016-2020. And the ascendent American right gave it much oxygen, and carried it far. Many would also agree that wokeness and the viral hashtag movements it birthed has slowly started ebbing in Biden's term.
The very basic observation has stood the test of time, and will stand the test of time: everything Trump touches dies or turns to fecal matter. Wokeness, American traditionalism, American Christianity, inflation, the Western security alliance, western civilization itself. Let us verify this over the years to come and return to this issue in 2028, provided that a free and fair election is still on offer by the authoritarian elite the electorate has ushered into power.
Trump's genius was to achieve historic rates in real income growth for working class Americans while protecting our borders and using American strength to keep peace. ie. negotiating the Abraham Accords. His administration was an era of peace and prosperity. The Democrats genius is destroying our cities, flooding our borders, stoking ruinious inflation, dividing americans into identity tribes of race and however many genders and sexualities (take note academia most normies aren't as race and sex obessed as you are) silencing, jailing and debanking critics, and - to top off the insanity -- forcing women and girls to compete against and share their restrooms and bathrooms with men and boys. Wake up!
I have absolutely no fear of transmen, women, boys or girls. I have nothing but respect for their choice to live as they wish.
Academics take note! Transwomen are not women (female xx). It is absurd to have two categories and not be able to define or differentiate between them. It defies logic to insist that transwomen and women are two separate categories and yet the exact same thing.
Society can quite easily acommodate transpeople in single unisex restrooms, changing rooms etc. Transpeople can and should be welcome in all sports. There has never been an issue of trans people competing in sports categories for their birth sex. I do not believe transwomen should to compete in women's sports.
I abstained from voting for president in a swing state after voting Democratic for more than 40 years. Although I fit into the "elite" category (M.A. degree, taught at a university, live in a liberal bubble), I could not vote for either of them. Since you are asking why, these are my reasons in no particular order.
The dominant media lying about Biden's fitness, the clear bias in its reporting on Israel, and its obvious bias for the left turned me off completely. I have no idea anymore what is objectively "true" and what is complete spin.
I personally witnessed the meltdown of an organization that has gone full-on "woke" and abandoned its mission in order to cater to the most radical people in that organization.
I have mixed-race children. The emphasis on how all whites are racist makes my mixed-race son "want to vomit" and infuriates me.
Both my children (a boy and a girl) were college athletes at D1 schools. Don't lie to me and tell me there is no difference between biological men and women.
The slogan "Defund the police" may have been discarded, but the rampant crime that liberal cities ignore is counter-productive for the very people white progressives supposedly want to help.
The absolute inability to tolerate anyone who dares disagree with progressive dogma in elite institutions (academia, publishing, media, and theater) is illiberal and infuriating. Instead of having adult conversations, cosseted progressives who run these organizations believe disagreement is "harm" and literal violence.
I could keep going, but I think you get the drift. I didn't leave the Democratic Party; it left me.
I hear you loud and clear Adrienne! I have had a similar change of attitude. I had been an avid NPR listener from my college years up until about 1/2 way through the Biden years. I found all their coverage so slanted and propagandistic I just had to shut them off. They became an arm of the DNC!
It's funny, because the slanted coverage is clearly meant to increase/retain support for their side, but it did the opposite in my case, as well. I lost whatever sense of loyalty I once felt to that side and now consider myself an independent moderate. Given the options, I chose not to vote for any candidate for president in the last two elections, despite voting in the downballot races.
In late 2016/early 2017, I happened to listen to NPR frequently on my drive (never having done so before that), and they really made it seem like only an absolute monster could be a Trump voter. I found it very difficult to believe that half the country was as morally depraved as all that, so I decided to figure out what the deal was. I tried to find sources where Trump voters explained, in their own words, why they voted for him. Lo and behold, none were the monsters they'd been made out to be. I found the lies, half-truths, and misrepresentations that had been fed to me infuriating and insulting.
I have still never voted for Trump, and never would, because I have too many actual qualms about him. But that said, I deeply resent the way a certain caste of elites seem to think they're entitled to manipulate and condescend to the rest of us. Despite being a college-educated white woman -- supposedly their most reliable demographic -- I can still see through the bullshit and am, as they say, "not here for it."
I deeply feel the fury coming from your comment and vehemently agree. I voted L for the first time despite having your same profile (and formerly being woke) because I couldn't stand the hypocrisy anymore. It was simply too much for me to tolerate the paradox of tolerance.
Adrienne, you have been red pilled. I know it is scary at first, but you realize how much happier you are once you actually open your eyes to the propaganda you have been fed. Please read articles from both sides on Real Clear Politics for a month and you will quickly realize how much the majority media lies. You can follow Taibbi, Sascha, Greenwald, and even to a small extent Maher, in realizing the Democrat leadership only cares about their own power.
great comment. Amazing Dems and media still blame us ignorant voters instead of all the issues you describe. The press hid Biden from us and I hope they all go bankrupt. They reaped what they sewed
Adrienne, thanks for your cogent comment. I’m a lifelong Republican conservative who lost all trust in Trump after Jan 6. I was devastated by his betrayal of the process of lawful transfer of power!
I abstained from voting for president because, as much as I would like to FINALLY have a woman president, liberal Democrats have behaved exactly as you portrayed them. And I could not vote for Trump.
So now we’ll all see what happens. But the good news is that the vast majority of people in the great country will get up each day, love their families and work hard.
The comments so far have done a good job of exploring the main reasons Trump won - a woke decade, a lousy candidate, inflation, elitism, and concern about the border.
But I want to add something I don’t see addressed below: the people who make up the Left have, as a group (one I used to belong to) become deeply unpleasant. I personally know several people who have stopped speaking to family members - including their parents! - based on differences in political opinions. Most recently was a distant cousin who refused to pick up her mother from cataract surgery because her mom voted for Trump last week.
You don’t see this behavior on the Right, at all. And the political differences that caused these rifts were insane - I wonder now if my elementary school friend regrets breaking it off with his parents over Black Lives Matter.
This behavior has a lot of different flavors of screaming which are probably unnecessary to parse out, but it all adds up to “a tendency that I don’t want to lend power to”. It’s ugly and frightening.
Great point, Lasagna (love it!) - perfect moment to share my 'decency' story from election day, as a JOE (Judge of Elections):
We had two R poll watchers there, including a retired woman who had never done this before. I explained to her what she was allowed to do (and what not - she wanted to be a poll worker), and she was grateful and engaged. She made coffee for all of us, she brought donuts - all around a wonderful person. The male R poll watcher left in the afternoon, but not before he found me to shake my hand and thank me/us for our service. On the other hand, the D poll watcher came about an hour before closing. No smile, expensive gray suit - a lawyer, no doubt. As I said to my wife later, "he wasn't the type to make coffee - it is made for him".
A trivial story, I know - but sometimes the truth is revealed through trivial stories...
I ran a polling site as well. We had 6 or 7 official observers (ie people who signed in as such). Also 2 lawyers from the DOJ (for a visit to ask some questions), plus 2 visits from the city DA’s office (not the election commission). All were perfectly well-behaved and pleasant. I gave them the doughnuts I’d brought that my colleagues didn’t eat.
But in our time, the more relevant insight should be: Data are not anecdotes.
Not sure about you, but I am a scientist. Medicine. One key error too many of us make is that we over-rely on data and forget the power of anecdotes. Any sociologist who does deep story research can tell you that...
In my world, left-side-politics friends are longer friends precisely because of politics. There are absolutely zero times this happens with right-side-politics friends.
The other thing Trump did is manipulate the hell out of the media- he got publicity for everything he said or did. I’m beginning to think he figured out when the media took his words out of context and purposely lied about what he said he would make outrageous comments about bloodbath or dictatorship knowing they would spin it against him. Then if people reviewed what he actually said they would realize the media was lying and lose confidence in it. It saved him a lot of campaign expenses 😉
I think this behaviour exists on the anti-woke side. I have a family member who is nearly impossible to talk to because everything is a trans lesbian conspiracy to murder him and his family. He keeps walking out on family events over small things. But overall I agree with what you're saying.
When I was a raging Leftie from 2016 -2022, my deeply conservative mother and longtime friends from college & my semester abroad in Israel (I grew up fundamentalist Christian) were all gracious to me. Their unconditional love meant a lot. It made the behavior I was seeing on my side seem so much worse. When Oct 7 happened and all my Leftie friends started posting anti-Israel vitriol while saying absolutely zero to me about it, I felt painfully betrayed. I turned to my mom, my friends who were right there with me in my pain. Leftism, to me, is a cult where you signal your goodness via your belief system rather than actually being a good person. It is soulless. I voted for Trump.
I beg to differ. Trump personally fired and if not possible tried to fire everyone who told him he lost. In addition he castigated those who dared to criticize him as "weak and pathetic" and "totally degenerate". People like Cassidy Hutchinson who dared to testify against him for trying to overthrow a free & fair election lost their jobs and got death threats.
The problem is that if people truly believe their friends or family members voted for a literal Hitler or Mussolini, they feel justified to shun those who voted that way.
But the step before that, PSW, is the critical one. And the one Lasagna highlights here: Do you negate everything you know about a person, even a loved one, based on a vote? Or does your love or affection, or mere knowledge of a person, inform the way you think about their -in your mind- misguided vote for the next Hitler or Mussolini?
This is the basis for the disastrous conclusion (false but also strategically disastrous) that "the whole country is full of racists and bigots, and they just revealed themselves".
This is a big part of what Yascha and others have called the need to take a long and hard look in the mirror. We liberals, not those voting for what we think is a next Fascist.
In the minds of people who believe that your race, gender, religion or sexuality defines who you are, it’s very easy to make the leap that you politics also define who you are. Thus, the judgment that if you vote for Hitler you are Hitler.
We can talk about opinions with friends and family. But during the third Reich, many men divorced their Jewish wives to save their careers. A few German women did the same, but most had no careers to speak of, and whether they did or not, most stood by their Jewish husbands. Before deportation began, many people including Jews did not believe it would get that bad. They thought it was ok to put "communists", "vagrants", even "elite Jewish bankers" in the camps, but surely not their beloved family doctor, their piano teacher, their wife...
the dems have been fart cupping "_________" is fascist or Hitler for a long time. problem is they eventually believe it but have to go deeper and deeper down the mental rabbit hole to keep it true in their minds. committing to false ideas or opinions as gospel can put your mind in bleak and confused place.
Well, plenty of people on the right believe (insanely) that Biden et al represent the return of a pedophiliac fascist uber state. But I haven’t heard of any of them cutting things off with their families over it
Not that my experience can be extrapolated very widely, but I can attest that both my wife and I have family members who have all but cut off ties with us because we generally lean left (and voted for Harris). We’ve been told we support pedophilia, sex slavery, and infanticide (among other horrific things) all because we see the world a little differently. We both grew up in a pretty high-demand religious community (Mormon) and the fact that we see things a little differently, now, has been enough for certain family members to speak all sorts of ill of us and to cut us out of their lives.
“The left” isn’t alone in its ability to ostracize and demonize.
I didn’t vote for him in 2016. I was disgusted by his rhetoric. I did like his attacks on the corrupt establishment, but found him to likely be a dangerous authoritarian. I didn’t vote for him in 2020; I was a Yang guy in the primary and voted libertarian both in 2016 and 2020. January 6th seemed like confirmation of exactly why I didn’t vote for him.
The Biden administration then far exceeded what I had thought possible in terms of how corrupt and just evil the federal government would be. A full blown censorship apparatus spun up, while the media lied to us they it was happening. Then they forced an experimental medical product on people. I took it without bothering to ask if it was safe, because I didn’t think I had any way of knowing and the social pressure was immense. Then they said “no inflation” when this was obviously not true.
At every step of the way, the “speak truth to power” media did nothing but beat the drum for these abuses of power.
The thing that fully broke it open for me was a friend telling me, in the same way you’d tell someone about your drug habit, was that he and his wife used traditional gender roles and it made them both happier. I asked my therapist about this and he said that the couples he found to be happiest did the same. They both cautioned me that “traditional gender roles” doesn’t meant you disrespect or put your wife down, but that you understand you’re skilled at and inclined to different things, and you should instead support and build her up while not trying too hard to do precisely what she wants.
In other words, being told something which was obviously true for most of human history, but has become verboten to us in the last few decades made me realize that as much as i distrusted the elites, I didn’t distrust them enough.
Then Vivek Ramaswamy demonstrated what a politician could be. With every question he was asked, he’d say, “here’s the principle, here’s the historical basis for it, here’s how it applies.” He made it clear that the executive branch agencies are a fundamental violation of the separation of powers laid out in the constitution. He said he supported Trump and actually gave reasons for it.
And my intelligent friends who lean left couldn’t take him seriously. They didnt have counter arguments or reasons he was wrong; they didn’t engage with anything be said. It was simply, no way someone that smart believes this stuff.
So the last 4 years have made it clear the elites live in their own bubble, refuse to consider anything that doesn’t fit their narratives, and use that bubble to cause incredible damage. Trump stood up to that, against immense personal cost, and I can’t help but respect this. The people who criticize Trump and musk are, I think, rightfully seeing their flaws. But what they miss is, no human being can accomplish anything at scale without also being deeply flawed because to be human is to be flawed. Missing this, they seem to prefer someone “talk corporate to them”, and reject an actual human being who thinks independently.
I agree fully. I would add that Obama went all in on identity politics in my opinion to solidify voting blocs by appealing to matters of race etc. Identity politics are the antithesis of e pluibus unum. We learned this past week that we still have millions of Americans who still believe in and want to live in our beautiful melting pot and not a society that encourages multi culturalism
More than that--the Obama coalition is now the Trump coalition.
Gosh, that's gotta make Obama seethe. He was supposed to be the Prophet who led the world to the Promised Land. This wasn't supposed to be how it ended.
It was always clear -to many writers, and for many years- that the "working class" (initially thought of as the WWC) would be the critical group that either party needed to reach a stable and durable majority. Romney/Ryan Rs failed to do this, and so did Hilary Clinton/Pelosi Ds. I would have bet money that Ds would be smart enough to get there - but they got caught in a Brahmin woke doom loop, and now the rainbow-colored working class is Trump's...
President Obama went all in? NO, America was built on identity politics by enslaving one race and claiming another race was superior. After the Civil War one group of people continued to disenfranchise people based on their race. By doing so a voting bloc was solidified by race. One race could vote the other race couldn’t vote. One race was treated like citizens and the other race wasn’t. Women weren’t treated equally either. People are tired of one group of people treating others like crap. Black people are tired of it. Women are tired of it. The LGBTQ community is tired of it. Disabled people are tired of it. I could go on. People started speaking up and demanding equality. THAT’S what you don’t like. So you try to belittle ALL of the those groups of people by calling it “identity politics” in order to silence them.
Well, too bad. When you stop oppressing people, people will stop complaining about being oppressed. Get it?
You write: ‘The Biden administration then far exceeded what I had thought possible in terms of how corrupt and just evil the federal government would be. A full blown censorship apparatus spun up, while the media lied to us they it was happening. Then they forced an experimental medical product on people. I took it without bothering to ask if it was safe, because I didn’t think I had any way of knowing and the social pressure was immense. Then they said “no inflation” when this was obviously not true.’
Not a single word of that is accurate. What corruption? What evil? Trump made millions out of the presidency. So did his daughter and son-in-law. Biden? Show me anything corrupt he did.
Full-blown censorship? Where? Tucker is in jail for his speech? You are? You mean responsible people trying to tell people the truth about not taking horse medicine for COVID, and to stop believing lies about 2020 being stolen? Doesn’t somebody have to point out the dangerous lies? Look all the lies you obviously believe based on a single paragraph!
No one said “no inflation.” People rightly said it’s worse overseas, but it’s bad so let’s fight it, and now it’s finally down. Do you know what the word means? It doesn’t mean prices. It means how fast they are rising. Try Googling the term.
The COVID vaccine is a huge triumph. It has saved tens of millions of lives. Ask somebody who actually knows something.
At fools “doing their own research?” Yes, you’re probably right. Those kind of fools voted for Trump. He would have won in a bigger landslide if so many of them hadn’t already died from “doing their own research.”
You just can’t help yourself. I DON’T want Trump to be president. But comments like this are why he IS president. Please stop. Please listen to the real concerns. I’m begging you to actually listen to your fellow Americans. If not, I fear our next president will make our current buffoon-in-chief look like George Washington.
Okay. I’ll bite. What are these real concerns, would you say. I was responding to false, inaccurate, nonsensical ones. But please tell me the ones you have in mind.
I know you've commented a lot on this column. I won't pretend to have read them all. But if you honestly want to know what the real concerns are, you only need to read about 3 comments, chosen at random. You will find that every one expresses a disgust with the gaslighting going on. We are told trans women ARE women and therefore should be able to compete in women's sports. We were told the border is not "open." We were told inflation was "temporary." We were told anyone who does not support Harris is sexist and probably racist. We were told the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce inflation. We were told ONLY the unvaccinated get and spread COVID. We were told Biden was mentally competent. We were told women are being treated as second-class citizens because some states have chosen to protect the unborn. I know you are already composing a devastating take-down on each of these points, but that is exactly my point. The correct response is, “You are right. Much of that is indefensible and we should have been honest.” I can already hear the sputtering, “You think Trump is honest?!?” No. No I do not. He is a master-class BSer. But his lies are ridiculous and self-serving. He does not tell you that what you know to be true is not true. Trump won because those who feel gaslit and condescended to HAD NO OTHER OPTIONS. The Democrats refused to say even once, “We hear you and you are right.” (I actually think the comment you made that sits at the top of this thread that Yascha liked it is insightful. For a minute, you got it. But then you went back to "all Trump voters are idiots.") If Kamala had said, "Of course trans women are not actual women, I support common sense regulations on abortion, the border is out of control and that's my fault, inflation is real and we screwed up with the Inflation Reduction Act, we had no business keeping kids out of school as long as we did during COVID, your child will not be "affirmed" in his new choice of gender behind your back, men are not toxic and we owe a debt of gratitude to them for their myriad sacrifices, we were wrong to police "disinformation" and that was deeply unAmerican, our party let fear and panic guide us for too long rather than trusting the American people to be rational humans. We have been patronizing for far too long and we are sorry," she would be President-elect Harris today.
The “horse medicine” to which you are referring was give a Nobel prize because of how many people it’s treated. Again, this total refusal to engage with reality, in favor of fictions peddled by the priestly class.
Ivermectin works in humans to treat parasites that cause River Blindness. That has nothing to do with COVID. Taking it first COVID doesn’t help and is dangerous. The “priests” you refer to are actually called doctors.
Insulin is an excellent treatment for people who have diabetes. If you take it first pneumonia, it won’t help and might even kill you.
Of course it couldn't be deduced from its efficacy against River Blindness that Ivermectin would be of therapeutic benefit against Covid infection. Nor could it be deduced from the same premise that it wouldn't be. Ivermectin was one of several drugs approved for treating other diseases that were experimentally administered to Covid patients within dose levels that had proved harmless to humans in previous trials of their efficacy for other purposes. See, e.g., https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/fulltext. Such repurposed treatment with Ivermectin may have been ineffectual, but what evidence is there that it was dangerous? See https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801827
BTW, Paxlovid, the antiviral approved for treatment of Covid 19, was originally developed for treatment of another disease, namely SARS.
The SARS virus, i.e., SARS-COV, is similar to the Covid 19 virus (aka SARS-COV2), but they are genetically distinct in ways that matter. SARS-COV2 is much more readily transmissible to humans but less lethal to them than SAR-COV, which had a human case fatality rate of 9.6% but hasn't caused any known human infection since 2003. See https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-does-SARS-CoV-2-Compare-to-SARS-CoV.aspx
As I replied to someone else: Let’s leave aside the direct impact of administering unnecessary medicine. All medications have potential side effects and some number of bad reactions. You do a cost- benefit analysis when prescribing. If there’s no benefit why risk any down side?
The bigger issue, as with all snake oils, is that people will foolishly think they can depend on the false promise and neglect real prophylaxis and real treatment. Why take a vaccine if there’s a medicine the internet tells you can just cure you? That’s the big reason it’s dangerous. Misinformed people don’t do what they should do instead.
You clearly don't understand how medication works. It isn't that very smart scientists design a perfect ideal medicine for any given situation that has only ONE use and no other. Medicines are chemicals that can have myriad effects. It is very common for medicines to be used for many different things. My husband and I take the same medication - I take it for a heart problem and he takes it for high blood pressure. The medication works on different parts of the body in different ways, and affects different disease processes as a result.
It is the same with ivermectin - it can (and according to many doctors and researchers, does) have more than one effect. Even insulin is being researched for multiple purposes.
Regardless of how much you believe you value intellect, you are succumbing to magical thinking regarding medications and their uses.
Just a few points here: Biden corruption? 10% for the "Big Man", Hunter's $$ from China and Ukraine (when all he had to offer was access to Daddy in the White House!) Full blown censorship? Matt Taibbi's visit from the IRS, Tulsi Gabbard's harassment by the TSA, Zuckerberg's META suppressing anything anti-vax or deemed Covid disinformation.
I could go on and on. Honestly- do you have your head in the sand???
The kind of censorship that lead people like yourself to believe, even to this day, that ivermectin is "horse medicine". Did selegiline suddenly become an ineffective dopaminergic as soon as the first person gave it to their dog? Yes it does little to nothing against covid but early studies that were poorly done or fraudulent showed promise. Early and even later mask studies showed promise, like the huge one in Bangladesh I think it was, but when you look at the full dataset it shows that surgical masks did nothing either. I bet you never heard that retraction though, did ya. No censorship to see here folks, move along now!
Ivermectin works in humans to treat parasites that cause River Blindness. That has nothing to do with COVID. Taking it for COVID doesn’t help and is dangerous.
Insulin is an excellent treatment for people who have diabetes. If you take it for pneumonia, it won’t help and might even kill you.
Nope, it works in humans to prevent and treat a whole host of parasites. I literally wrote that it doesn't work for covid. You wrote it again so you could feel right? No comment on any counterpoint, just charge ahead obliviously. "Dangerous", he says 😅 Nope, wrong there too. Pretreatment legitimately decreased mortality in huge swaths of the world, possibly due to the incidence of parasites lowering immune response, possibly other factors. You don't know any of this, because your curated feed was censored.
Dude, I read medical journals, not “curated feeds.” You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go to MIT and Penn for a dozen years like I did, then come back and talk to me. And don’t try heart surgery on yourself either. Please.
Argument from authority is a fallacy, didn't they teach you that at MIT either? So you didn't know that many well done studies in Africa and elsewhere showed ivermectin use statistically significantly decreased covid mortality, and even after I've made you aware of this you continue to deny reality and hide behind your degrees? Gee, maybe those "medical journals" you read have some funding conflicts that lead to what some might call censorship? Nah 🙈🙉🙊
New disease comes out. Scientists make recommendations based on what they can figure out at first. They continue finding stuff out. The new information leads them to make different recommendations. Isn’t that obviously the way it would work? What’s your problem?
I’m not exactly sure what you are saying but I do think you and Ramasthwany severely overestimate the “separation of power” issue with respect to regulatory agencies. I sometimes think many Americans simply don’t understand that America is a superpower that is immensely complicated to run properly. America needs nimble regulatory agencies that can operate without having to check in with Congress constantly in order to take initiative in doing their jobs. If Congress tries to rein in the operation of regulatory agencies too much, those thousands of businesses that depend upon agencies in order to know how to do their work, will be slowed down in getting their work done. And this will make America LESS effective and efficient than it was before., all in the cause of some purist notion that agencies have usurped the role of Congress. We need robust regulatory agencies in order for America to operate as efficiently as it has—and that is VERY efficiently, next to other countries of its size.
This is exactly the story the priestly class would tell if they reality that the government was full of corruption and self serving rot. They’d say, “our jobs are so complex, we are doing the best we can.”
What kind of actual evidence can you give me that this is true?
My evidence that it’s false: We spent 20 years, trillions of dollars, and hundreds thousands of lives fighting in the Middle East to accomplish … what exactly? We spent $320 million on a floating pier in Gaza that blew away because of a storm. A shooter was allowed within 150 yards of the opposition candidate, despite numerous advanced warnings. There’s a map of streets covered in poop in major U.S. cities.
Why should I believe that they are actually extremely competent?
Otto Von Bismarck supposedly said that "if you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either being made," and the quip resonates with me in light of my 41 years of experience as a civil service employee in a Federal regulatory agency. To which I'd add that even if you like sausage and trust that government regulations are well-intended you shouldn't assume that having more of either is better.
If you suppose that the rules currently set forth in twenty thousand-some pages in the Federal Register have a net stimulative effect on economic production there's a bridge over the East River I'd be happy to sell to ya for a terrific bargain price!
The irony of you considering a bunch of billionaires not the elite. Voting for a felon and adjudicated rapist is beyond the pale. I wonder what your media diet is? Unconscionable choice. Trump is out for himself, he could care less about anyone else. This is a disaster for the United States and the world.
Trump, clearly. The money is a big problem, but what about the policies, the fascist rhetoric, the threat of rounding up millions of people into camps? What about the women bleeding out in parking lots and dying because they can't get treatment for pregnancy complications because doctors don't want to end up in jail? What about the catastrophe of global temperatures going up 2 degrees and Trump who promised the oil industry unfettered access to public lands? Getting rid of childhood vaccines? Fluoride in water? Two of the greatest public health policies of the last hundred years will cause countless deaths. This is a no brainer.
This is a very typical response from a modern leftist. When you have no answers to the hard questions, declare everyone who has a different opinion is stupid and then run away before you can get called out any more.
Many of us have been trying to communicate honestly and openly with people from the left since 2016. This is the response we have gotten. You're in a bubble solely because you choose to remain there.
I can definitely see how this would be one of the dumbest conversations of your life. Next time you should Google the facts first so what you're saying is actually true, then that wouldn't be the case. Bye!
Most recent billionaire support count I have found is in the low 50s for Trump and 83 for Harris. Harris’ campaign spent 1.7 billion and Trump’s 1.1 billion.
I know! And was E.Jean Carroll a reliable accuser? And were her actions following the $$$ she was rewarded those of someone who had been wronged or traumatized in anyway?
The exact was when? Not seen in your post. First paragraph says late 95 or early 96. Most "crimes " are associated with a SPECIFIC DAY as in "where were you the night of Novembe 10th? Looking forward to the specifics here
Idk if the rape happened or not, but I do know Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything and the MSM lost credibility many years ago. Be careful and way of your sources.
And you’re as unbiased has Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. It was the judge of the case that called it rape. And he was convicted. You and your ilk no longer believe in the rule of law if you ever did. Donald Trump is definitely your man. Good luck America.
What is the name of the prosecutor , you know the person who seeks CONVICTIONS IN CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS? He was found liable in a civil trial and for serial assault not rape. Me and "my ilk" do believe in the rule of law which last I checked includes unbiased judges and juries . I will reask my original question: on what DAY did the sexual assault occur? The day not " in the spring of 1996." To repeat 1996. The law looks to specifics and evidence . You likely view all ny juries and judges as unbiased. So did the citizens of Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. And that's your Constitutional right. BTW I looked up many ofvthe facts I posited above from CNN NEWSWEEK and other sources so if you respond please do the same and with respect to my exact statements. Me and my ilk would be most indebted to you.
Trump is the first American president ever elected who is not just ‘flawed - as. human beings they all have been in one way or another - but utterly disdainful of the democratic process, the Constitution, and the rule of law. His election spits in the face of every American who has lived, worked, fought, and when necessary died to protect and to maintain this Republic.
Millions of years of evolutionary adaption (biological and social) have created "traditional" roles as beneficial for the continued survival of the species. Don't @ me about matriarchal societies - there were none - images of goddesses and women idols speak to a time when mankind celebrated women as life givers before understanding the role of sex in reproduction, and aren't evidence of matriarchy.
Modern feminism is directly responsible for collapsing birth rates and the eventual destruction of societies that promote it.
Evolutionary fact. The thing is, the consequences take a while to hit. They are already biting, though.
Please consider that January 6th was an expression of the values enshrined in our founding documents: a political system that fails to serve its citizens can be confronted, and January 6th was simply a protest confronting a situation which the protesters firmly believed to be a coup by the Democratic Party.
Having become involved in poll watching and then formal election integrity efforts in 2016, I find merit in their concerns. But even if I hadn’t gained knowledge to support that analysis, I would still view that protest as in line with American founding principles. Examine the rhetoric used by the media and politicians who framed it as illegitimate, and I think a person knowledgeable about those founding principles and their implications will agree that that rhetoric undermined the key principle that government is only legitimate when it has the consent of the governed, and that government is required therefore to be wholly transparent, and to respond to inquiries as to its actions with open books and with complete honesty. The government did not respond that way in the days between the election and January 6, and the stakes were the highest. Therefore, citizen escalation of confrontation of the malfeasance is legitimate. I say malfeasance, because that is what government’s refusal to respond to inquiries as to the legitimacy of a vote is.
It may help to understand election law. In many cases, attempts to seek redress for suspect election handling were dismissed for reasons such as “lack of standing”. This does not mean that the vote or its count weren’t suspect. It means that regardless, the law does not permit most citizens to bring the situation to the election authority or to the court to be examined. The law is structured to allow fraudulent actions to go unchallenged, in other words.
When laws are discovered to be written that way, citizens who object are forced to fall back all the way to the Declaration of Independence, which asserts as a justification for the separation of the Colonies from their King that citizens have the right to determine the form of government that suits them. A law that does not allow citizens to inspect and challenge a problematic vote might not be a problem for some citizens, but that doesn’t mean that other citizens lose their “god given right”, or in other words, their innate right to challenge a government that claims it has no responsibility to act as though such a law did exist.
Understanding the election laws that caused claims of election (not “voter”) fraud to be dismissed in 2020 would be a big project and a deep and wide dive, I know. I think it’s necessary, though, for anyone who has claimed that they understand January 6 and deem it an illegitimate citizen action.
Add to that the various ways in which the assembled citizens were led to enter the building, by officials on site and by some individuals who then were not prosecuted by the commission, and I think a reasonable person will begin to question the official narrative. And again, that’s a narrative which as a relative rarity in American history, claims that the American government cannot be inspected by its citizens and cannot be called to account by “assembled citizens demanding redress”.
This is important: those citizens were peaceable against humans, and against the building ( although in any case, permission to enter our legislative buildings has been part of our national identity as a feature of that “by the people, for the people, of the people” credo), until and even after those unprosecuted persons riled and led the crowd to gain energy. With a riled crowd then part of the documented events, the narrative was able to focus on that, and conjoin that to statements describing what’s permitted of citizens as vastly different from how Americans have understood their rights to self-determination heretofore. Examine those statements and I think a reasonable person will see, they assert that the government is immutable and cannot be legitimately challenged in any meaningful way, even if its laws or its processes completely fail to serve the citizens. Keep in mind that the Declaration of Independence did not assert that citizens only have the right to challenge the government in ways permitted by the government. But that is what the new, post-January 6 narrative asserted. That narrative attempted to fundamentally alter the power and duty relationship between the citizens and the government.
That narrative came from the Democratic Party, from unelected bureaucrats, from specific members of the media, and from a set of Republicans thereafter known as RINOs (Republican in name only). This narrative’s rejection of the founding American principles is a key reason that many Americans voted against that party this time around. It’s not that people want to revolt. It’s that they require a government that is in check and fully accountable to the citizens. The government in power at that time fully rejected that notion. The grand narrative that followed January 6 attempted to make a mockery of the very concept of election integrity. Among many watchers of what’s been called “prestige television”, “election integrity” has become a dirty word. This is unacceptable.
Election integrity used to be something that American media and politicians claimed was essential to good governance. Its lack in other nations was used as an excuse for our military presence, and for domineering approaches to international relations. Isn’t it strange, therefore, that it suddenly became a concept to sneer about, when people began pointing out specific American locations where elections had been conducted without any integrity visible? I think a reasonable person should fold that into their contemplation of January 6 and of the events and discourse which followed.
As for the Georgia tape: I listened to the whole thing. Trump wasn’t asking the Secretary of State to go find him a specific number of votes to put him over the top. He was responding to demurrals about the scope and difficulty of a recount. The Georgia SoS was claiming that there was no reason to do a recount and that it would be too large a burden. Trump was pointing out that if that many votes were found, and he was certain they would be, they would prove the necessity. That is fundamentally the premise of any recount. In fact I have observed sample recounts and that is the mathematical relationship which, if unexpected tallies are found in the recount, indicates a problem with the initial count. (This doesn’t mean that election laws require all jurisdictions to do anything about an unexpected outcome of a recount, but again this takes us back to the principle that when a government is found to not meet the needs of the people, and laws that enforce honest elections and inspection of elections are certainly some of the needs of a citizenry, that government can be challenged by the citizens, whose consent is a requirement for any government’s continued existence).
The media and various politicians made a lot of hay out of a decontextualized and misrepresented snippet of what Trump said in that phone call. That misrepresentation was another demonstration of their contempt for the justifying principles of our government, and their intention to retain power while not submitting to evaluation by the citizens or even by their political opponent, who in election law always has the most standing, even though that also is never granted adequately to ensure election integrity.
I hope you will take what I’ve said seriously, and look at the January 6 event and its causes and aftermath with an aim to understanding what hasn’t been acknowledged or discussed by those who use it as an excuse to make enemies of the citizens, including Donald Trump, who found themselves in opposition to the managers of that election, and the politicians who used and defended that election’s, and our election law patchwork’s, lack of accountability and integrity. Thank you for your time in reading this.
To quote Orwell: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
To quote Trotsky: "The Soviet bureaucracy is like all ruling classes in that it is ready to shut its eyes to the crudest mistakes of its leaders in the sphere of general politics, provided in return they show an unconditional fidelity in the defense of its privileges."
To quote Cicero: "To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law."
To quote Sowell: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
To quote Larry McDonald: "We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box".
On every topic, economic and social, the Democrat Party blatantly gaslit the public. They demanded that people publicly affirm statements that they, and we, knew to be blatantly false. They then persecuted (and prosecuted) dissent with shunning, censorship, firing, and lawfare, literally culminating in imprisoning political opponents using entirely unprecedented novel legal theories, while simultaneously exempting themselves and their favored groups from enforcement.
On the issue of "democracy", slightly more people trusted Trump and Republicans. A clear majority of people have said for years that the country is "on the wrong track". Democrats not only didn't listen or course correct, they insulted and attacked the people saying it. When the soap box fails, the people necessarily must deliver their rebuke via the ballot box.
Trump won because conservatives (and non-progressives) have spent years talking to poor and working class people-about gender ideology, inflation, bail reform, etc.
The Left has mostly refused to engage with anyone who doesn’t already agree with them. There are some nimble and heterodox Democrats willing to mix it up, certainly, but Leftists as a whole simply do not enter the spaces I’m in (Substack, history podcasts, warehouse work, contracting) and they try to characterize anyone who disagrees as a bigot. When possible they use stigma or administrative penalty to shut down speech, which we’ve seen again and again.
I love watching debates! There are standing offers to debate a number of controversial political topics which have gone unanswered for YEARS. 3 debates on youth gender transition policy were made… but the ‘pro-‘ side backed out after activists (on the Left) put pressure on them.
The right is now the wing of ordinary working folks willing to respect and speak with anyone. The left is the side of educated folks who believe their graduate education in public health or graphic design entitles them to make policy and they largely avoid interactions and debates with regular people.
Look at all the folks saying this election was a referendum on racism or fascism. Do you think any of them have spoken to even ONE Trump voter? Of course not. They already know they’re right and you’re wrong. Why won’t you see it?! When you combine that tendency with the fact that these people are the richest, loneliest, most mentally ill cohort in human history you’re left with a movement on a slow glide path downwards. The descent is beginning to steepen now…
What would be, in your opinion/experience, the best way for a politician to enter, say, a warehouse space? So as to really hear/see/listen/understand without making it “about them”? I mean if such an environment isn’t a natural extension of their preexisting world (a genuine q)?
I don’t think a POLITICIAN could… but a normal person could! That’s my point. I work with hundreds of men (mostly black) every day and NONE of them buy Leftist ideas. Some probably do in private but everyone agrees: prices are too high; college is too expensive; the border situation is crazy. In 2020 most of them were saying that defunding the police was fucking dumb. This was while educated white people were posting black squares on IG, from their expensive apartments to which police would respond with alacrity if they received a call. THESE IDEAS ARE NOT POPULAR and I suspect that if Leftists entered these spaces and tried to engage with normal folks (many of whom are canny and some brilliant) they would be amazed at how silly they came off. Such interactions would probably result in the Leftists changing… not the masses. Climate change, gender ideology, DEI… we debate these issues and display a range of opinions. But nobody is progressive. The only progressives I know are (for the most part) young ladies with graduate degrees.
I hear you!! Totally. How could a normal person who doesn’t work there actually find themselves in a position to hear all of that directly, from those guys? It’s sorely needed, to be sure. I’m just trying to imagine how it would actually happen, like how do people visit warehouse spaces without obnoxiously interrupting the work day, etc?
Yeah you can’t just go visit a warehouse or a job site or a factory to talk to people 😂. But these folks spend time other places where conversation is easier. Barber shops and bars, definitely. Trucking is the #1 job for men without a college degree. A person could go to a truck stop and hang out all day and just talk to people (mostly-but not all-men). Church is popular among some and anyone can go to a church, as long as you don’t mind a lot of people coming up and asking your name 😂 . My church is as diverse as can be-it’s literally almost a demographic reflection of the U.S. in terms of ages/races. Most people are Trump supporters (just because Biden was considered to be hostile towards Christianity, which I don’t agree with but it’s the general opinion) but some people support Harris (mostly older women). Again, though, nobody wants to dismantle the patriarchy. Everyone loves the US and what it stands for. Nobody wants to hamper small businesses to address climate change or opposes deporting migrants who have committed crimes.
The people are out there (millions of them!), and they’re willing to talk to ANYONE. If you went into these spaces and said you were a Harris voter and you wanted to hear their side they would be completely friendly and honest and happily speak to you for hours. What if I return to the gender studies department at U of AZ or the NYT building or a homeless nonprofit and said I was a Trump voter? What kind of reaction do you think I would receive? Hours of friendly conversation from hard-working and humble people? Or hostility from a group that thinks that I’m ignorant and reactionary? I can make a guess.
You know what really strikes me? All of the journalists and commenters worried about anti-democratic or racist or sexist sentiment among Trump supporters… I bet none of them has ever really spoken to people like these. They’re forming a world based upon Twitter and colleagues and Trump speeches and ignoring 75% of the country. It’s sad, in my opinion. I wish I could tell them: venture out here. It’s pretty nice 🇺🇸
Such a great answer, James. I really appreciate this and I agree in so many ways. I have had a similar experience in heavily R spaces (even recently), experiencing the people as mostly friendly, warm, open, and willing to talk. I have also experienced some assumptions on their part, ie people thinking that they're talking to someone who shares their underlying beliefs about Jesus, for example (though I am Jewish), but that's probably because I didn't announce myself as a Jewish Democrat. I wanted to actually hear what they had to say, what they think about and care about, and not shut down conversation or make it awkward. Which is on me - who's to say that it would have become awkward (and not really the Jewish part; more the Democrat part, to be clear)? I also agree that while there would certainly be exceptions, your point is valid about the reverse: I think there would probably be more fear (in the form of open scorn/judgment/superiority) coming towards you from those places were you to announce yourself as a trump voter. I wonder where you're located?
I haven't spent much time in the South, but I do know the reputation and got a taste of it on a recent trip to Nashville (which I know is more representative of urban environments in general, in terms of political leanings, but still). I loved it. I kept texting my husband that we were moving to Nashville. :) But my point is, there is definitely a vibe difference (I don't think anyone could argue with me!) between, say, Boston (which, don't get me wrong, I love very much) and Nashville. Not necessarily having anything to do with political persuasion, but just in terms of warmth vs a general cultural guardedness. And that guardedness is perhaps only reinforced by the media/academic/gatekeeping cultural institutions that so heavily populate those regions. If I had to come up with a word to describe the culture in the most absurdly generalized way possible, it might be "unrelaxed."
And when people are not relaxed within themselves, it is easier to shut down/shut out others, to let fear take over. I have observed this within myself. This is not to say that I don't agree with much (!!) of what Democrats fear in Trump (as in the man/leader and the things he plans to do); but I think it's really important to distinguish between Donald Trump and people who voted for Donald Trump, and to — just as you suggest — step outside of those disembodied circles of commentary and opinion and actually be with real, unique, individual people. I am grateful for the dialogue.
I'm living in South Florida right now. I moved down here to go to rehab ~6 years ago (I was in Law school in Delaware). I've lived all over though: Alaska, NYC, Arizona, North Carolina, Afghanistan. SoFlo feels like home in a way that few places have, but I'm considering moving to the mid-Atlantic next year to be closer to my parents.
Anyway, I think there are 2 separate issues here: temperament, and intellectual open-mindedness. They definitely intersect and overlap though. Southerners and Midwesterners DO have a kind of natural warmth but the bigger issue (in my opinion) is a rarely-stated assumption: folks with professional jobs and college degrees are SMARTER (better) than others. They never say this outright but I'm seeing a lot of that subtext in the post-election dialogue. Latinos were tricked. "Uneducated" women (the actual commentators verbiage) went for Trump. The "rabble" (verbatim from another exchange) broke for fascism. "People want a strong man" or a "daddy". This is incredibly condescending and I don't actually think these factors are decisive.
I would actually agree that college graduates probably do have higher IQ's than non-, on average. However, working class people have unique skills and experiences that I believe make them BETTER judges of policy outcomes, overall. I would rather consult a restaurant owner or a trucker or a contractor to understand what the economic reality is in America and what kinds of common sense solutions might be found, rather than a college professor or a lobbyist or a graphic designer.
Look at the Left's record on policy: defund the police, Covid lookdowns, decommissioning nuclear power plants... There's a lot of science supporting the fact that fairly smart people (midwits) tend to be particularly easily captured by ideology. They're JUST smart enough to convince themselves that their emotional biases and affiliations are correct. I think there's something to that.
The longer they cling to their psychological class prejudices the more power they will lose.
We could all learn to challenge our own assumptions and listen to others more (you sound very kind and open-minded and I've enjoyed this exchange!). That's a discipline, and it's hard for everyone. However, you will be more receptive to the realities of the world AND more persuasive to others if you approach them as equals. It's ironic that for an ideology rooted in radical egalitarianism, snobbiness should be such an obstacle!
I’ve said before that policymakers and journalists and politicians should HAVE to spend extended periods of time among the following groups: teachers, workers, ex-cons, and the lumpenproletariat (people in rehabs and county jails and DOL offices). THAT’s your country. Without that exposure (JD Vance already has a deep familiarity) you’re just governing for investors and professors and lawyers and corporations. Their lives are already fairly safe and comfortable. They shouldn’t have monopoly control over policy-making as well.
Keep in mind that Trump was a former real estate developer, so he knew how to interact with, say, construction workers. He himself may not have been such a worker, but he dealt with those people for decades and knew how to speak their language.
He was also a salesman, so he knew how to interpret what audiences thought about a product.
In general, it's a good idea for politicians/policy wonks to actually have real jobs. A LOT of Ds simply go straight from academia into the media or some kind of government/administrative job, with no real work experience outside of that.
It's been pointed out lately that journalism, for example, USED TO BE a blue-collar job. Local guys would work their city streets. Today, journalism is an elitist position (and boy, oh boy, can you feel it with every word they say!). There's been a fundamental disconnect away from the "regular people" and towards the safe spaces of the ivory towers.
Trump never interacted with construction workers. He hired their companies, who got the contract because of low wages and undocumented immigrant workers. Then he stiffed the companies.
dont be a politician. be a representative. then you know where you came from and who your people are. ypu dont need to enter that space, because it is your space. the idea that some detached politician should represent these people in the first place is wrong.
I think that's really true on a local level, but if you get higher up and start representing more people (like, say, the Senate), then that becomes more difficult. If you hold a statewide office, it's still really important to stay connected to all elements of your community, but there isn't really a way to achieve that authentically across such a wide geographic region. This is by no means a defense or excuse (and I am not a Senator!), just an articulation of how I am trying to understand the problem of these disconnects.
Four female friends (three former self-described progressives, one former never-Trumper) in blue states told me they were going to vote for Trump. All college-educated professionals with good jobs. Their motivations were antisemitism, corporate ESG excesses, and gender & race ideology in schools. Only one seemed to have gone down what I would consider to be a rabbit role.
They all told me their plans because they knew I wouldn't judge them (I've had my own issues with woke ideology), unlike their other friends, colleagues and even family.
In my view, diminishing people's real "lived experience" concerns while explaining they are missing out on The Real Problems, is a great way to alienate electorate. By now, the majority of Americans - across classes, sexes and races - feel this is what has happened to them.
This sounds accurate for many people I know. If you are already in a blue state, abortion issues are (mostly) neutralized in terms of what your vote can do. Therefore, opposition to woeful education policies, antisemitism, and gender-ideology no longer have to be subsumed to that broader goal.
Yes. Three of the four are mothers, who despite all being pro-choice said they were more worried about their kids (antisemitism, race & gender ideology in schools) than abortion (or Trump's character, which they highlighted as a concern). Based on the strength of their conviction, I would guess that they would have voted the same in swing states. I do take your point on the luxury of a protest vote in a swing state.
Tow big reasons. First, the left moderates walked away from dems. I’m a liberal parent in California and my daughter got sucked into the gender insanity hard. After three years of hitting up against it (the eating clinic insisted on testosterone to treat her ARFID from autism, being told by the dentist to get right with the pronouns, school scolding me, neighbors wanting to take her for a walk to get her away from us), I decided to move our family abroad to get her away from the ideology. It’s EVERYWHERE and SO many kids around us were swept up, even my sister’s daughter (see below). It really is true. Many parents like me have found each other and we are angry.
Second, I’m from the Deep South and most of my family are conservative. The dems have left them high and dry. My sister is more concerned about how to afford filling up her gas tank to get to work than what pronouns she uses or than being scolded for being a ‘cis heteronormative white woman’. The dems have completely lost touch with the reality of most Americans, who are truly struggling, have little savings and are just trying to get through the day without too much stress or hardship. They don’t want to be called racist (most are not!), homophobic, or nazis.
It’s been very revealing the past week watching the sheer amount of hatred coming from dem voters towards everyone, one even slyly posted a picture of a cute puppy and then went on a rant about white men in the description. They refuse to self reflect to their detriment. I had already lost a lot of liberal friends over the trans issue (they walked away, not me), and sadly, I suspect more might walk. My conservative family is eager to talk and I’m eager to listen to them, and they me. Until dems are able to listen to other viewpoints, not much will improve I’m afraid.
Thank you for sharing your story here. Hope that you are finding life in the EU less judgmental and more supportive of parental authority. Our daughter is also stuck in the cult and at a school where all the adults affirm her boy identity. And the parents send scolding looks my way when I “misgender” my own child. It’s crazy-making. My biggest fear is some well-meaning teacher trying to “rescue” her from us.
Aww, I’m sorry to hear it’s a struggle there. It just is unrelenting, right? Everywhere you turn. I will say things are much, much, much better here. The doctors all insist on using her legal name and sex, no one is buying into the narrative, no one encourages, hardly a trans flag seen anywhere, well except certain cities nearby. And we’re seeing a very slow walking away from it all. Tonight she said she really loves it here. Hang in there, I feel like the tide is turning, they say seven years ….. we’re on year three ……
I think there were several problems, and it’s obvious.
1. Kamala is a master at the internal politics of the Democratic Party, but she is not a national leader who can appeal to swing state voters. She comes off as fake. She can’t answer questions directly. She paid lip service to moderation without explaining how she stopped being 2019 Kamala. People can see that. They aren’t dumb.
2. A couple of structural political issues, namely, the economy and the border. People hate inflation. People hate rampant illegal immigration at the southern border. The world feels more unstable now to many. Whether or not it’s true/fair, people blame Biden for these mistakes. She “owns” some of this structural stuff from the Biden admin, much of it she can’t control. And she did an insufficient job distancing herself from the current administration and atoning for what they could control (immigration).
3. The woke stuff is extremely unpopular. Kamala did an insufficient job of disowning these people.
4. The Democratic party is run by a bunch of out-of-touch elitists who come off as having contempt for many ordinary Americans in the middle of the country. Democrats have not been empathetic to the concerns of normal people, especially working class men, for some time. Dems need to fight Trump with actual empathy, not revolution or screaming racism. Empathy is not calling rural white people privileged because they are white while dismissing every concern they have as racist and stupid. It’s listening to and taking these concerns seriously.
5. Trump has been underestimated for far too long. His strategy whittled away at the democratic base, hurting the “turnout is everything” game in key areas. When he gets out of his own way, he can be very effective.
6. There is an anti-incumbent movement globally. These electoral headwinds work against her.
7. The liberal media establishment does two things simultaneously: it eats itself alive with criticism and negativity about everything, and is hysterical about Trump, giving him free ads 24/7.
8. Democrats are not good at building a big tent party right now. If you’re anti-abortion, anti-woke, or against them on some cultural issues, it’s difficult to sincerely be in the party. Too many litmus tests.
9. Elites have lost trust with the public, but Democrats communicate with the public as if this loss of trust hasn’t happened. The “smart” people in the room lost their credibility with Iraq, 2008, COVID, and on culture. You need to govern competently to regain this trust, and it’s too easy to argue that Democrats didn’t do so.
10. There is a genuine appeal to much of Trump’s agenda. If people believe that the political system doesn’t work for them, it’s fundamentally corrupt and filled with those unaccountable to the public interest, or worse, controlled by those who hold them in contempt, then of course they will want to break it and throw out the elites who run things. It’s not disruption for the sake of disruption. That’s what Trump offers.
I’m a college educated middle aged white woman. I’m fortunate that our HHI is high enough that inflation didn’t hurt us. Below are some of the reasons why I voted for Trump.
Democrats as a whole seem to be a miserable group of people. Whether on the national level (tv and magazine/newspaper “journalists”) or local (friends and relatives), many spew hate at every opportunity, at Trump, Republicans, and their supporters. They are condescending, intolerant, and hyperbolic. I did not see this from conservatives.
Illegal immigration - denying it’s an issue, spending millions of dollars to support them, treating them better than US citizens who need help. Ignoring the crimes they committed.
Transgender stuff - the puberty blockers and surgeries on minors is a bridge too far. Everyone should live how they wish…. once they are an adult. And none of it belongs in our schools. It’s clear that social contagion is playing a role based on the number of kids that identify as transgender.
Education - Teachers should not be activists. Teachers should not share or push their political views. Teachers should not keep information from parents. Fill those 7-8 hours a day teaching the basics. No kid moves forward without mastering the material. No one should be graduating high school that doesn’t know how to read! Teach critical thinking. Allow school choice.
Free speech - the Twitter files were a huge reason I voted for Trump. Our first amendment is vital.
Lawfare - get Trump at any cost was the Dem’s strategy. It was clear that some of the suits against him were lawfare. To me, the years spent investigating him and twisting the law into a pretzel just showed there was no there there. Re: Jan 6: because there is little reason to trust our government (or those who report our news) and many reasons not to trust them, I remain skeptical about what actually happened that day and why. I’m not sure we will ever get an entire truthful accounting.
Honestly, I would have forgiven the attempts to charge Trump for Jan 6th, or even the classified documents, if only the Attorney General had done it seriously.
If Garland had come flat-out and said, within 30 days of his confirmation, "I think I have a case against Trump, I expect the appeals to take years, I promise to follow all relevant regulations very carefully, but I have a duty to complete the legal issues as soon as possible, so I'm filing charges right now, and let's see where the law takes us...."
I could have understood that. That would have been a fair fight, and it's arguably the attorney general's job, and he might even have had a case.
Instead.... he avoided the issue for two years for reasons he never explained in any plausible way, and then once the Jan 6th committee essentially hounded him into filing charges, he appointed a special prosecutor who arguably wasn't qualified to receive that appointment constitutionally or under the regulations of the DOJ, refused to fix it when called on it, bungled the Hunter Biden prosecutions too, and overall, seemed to be working really hard to accomplish two goals:
1. Make Trump look bad during the 2024 election.
2. Don't let the DOJ actually accomplish anything actually important or interesting or in a timely way.
That sort of mix of laziness and clear political motivation behind the prosecutions was absolutely ruinous. The democrats would have had far more credibility if they'd actually draw a line between 'fair prosecution tactics' and 'humiliating attempts to ignore the laws and standards for fair procedures'
The Georgia cases might have been defensible if they'd had a better prosecutor. The jan 6th and classified documents deserved a fair trial, with all the I's dotted and T's crossed and multi-year appeals heard. The New York prosecutions were fundamentally unjust. And if Dems wanted to be the 'rule of law' party, they should have SAID those things, not just eagerly cheered for any and all cases, no matter how flawed.
Were you worried, as you voted for Trump, that he could end democracy as we know it?
I agree with much of what you list here - but I could never have voted for him, based on what my German grandparents told me of the years leading up to 1932. I am nauseated by Trump, yet angry at the Democrats for being controlled by over-educated, Brahmin, navel-gazing warriors...
Not at all, in fact the opposite. All the reasons the left gave for why Trump was a danger to democracy were actually things they had done or are doing. Trump is a bloviator, and personally I dont like that, but most people who voted for him know that it’s just talk. And we have four years of his leadership to look back on. He has some very good people along with him this time around. I think it will bring some needed balance. Trump got the better party switchers for sure.
All of what you said mirrors my own considerations. I was also deeply skeptical that the Dems would keep us out of war. I am not willing to let my son die for those joyless scolds who clearly hate this country and its people.
I do not agree with you. In my opinion, populism can develop a terrifying life of its own - that is indeed the lesson of Germany in the early 1930s. I believe our electorate has chosen an unbelievably dangerous experiment - but I agree with you that the alternative was not appealing.
As my favorite NYT writer Bret Stephens put it, before the election: "A Trump win
I beg to differ on Trump supporters being nice, some probably are, but, where I live they definitely are not..I don[t ever insult anyone, not my style, but, I have been insulted and threatened and repeatedly called evil for being a lib..( not a dem, independent)...plus all their nasty signs on their yards in on their trucks...they are not all nice people, and I am not using any isms either...they are just rude and uncvil and some of them are pretty scary
Certainly not all, but a big enough group that I have noticed...hate libs and they only desire is to hurt us, something I would never advocate, yet I get accused of
I generally as to the issues on the left ( though I am a center left anyway) that turned away a lot of people, but, I don't think those are the only reasons all of the people who voted for him have...many do just want to hurt those they disagree with...something I would never advocate but
I think this is a very important aspect, Angie. I agree with you, and I believe many here do: A substantial part of MAGA is exactly what you describe. They are not interested in dialogue, and they want to dominate and/or destroy.
But Yascha's question was; Why did Trump win? And Trump could not win with only those MAGA voters, whatever their percentage of voters is. He needed the decent Rs and former Ds - and that is where much of what has been written here comes into play.
Trump won because of wokeness,the average person doesn't understand tariffs,geopolitics or economic issues,but they understand men punch harder than women.And when elites like you downplay wokeness they think you don't have their best interests in mind
This election was a referendum on who and what is valued in American society. If you truly can't understand DT's appeal, might I gently suggest that you might belong to the favored half, the half whose views are socially acceptable, the half whose work conveys some element of prestige. Surely this was partly about work and respect, and how "marginalization," for most Americans, refers not to any identity but the one you adopt in reference to your work, and to the fact that most of the work that's done by most Americans is not respected.
1. The view of the left/progressives that denigrates those who have a different point of view. Calling people Nazi's. Fascists, Deplorables, Garbage, Liars, Felons, Racists, Misogynists, Toxic (men), Illiterate, Backward, Xenophobes, etc. Very similar to totalitarians of all stripes and there isn't much ground you have to cover to get to start removing the liberties of those you see as less. To paraphrase Lao Tsu, when people don't respond to the moral man, he rolls up his sleves and uses force.
2. Double standards. Exacerbated by the medias failure to call them out and gaslighting those who do.
3. Trust. What has the left done to earn trust? The abortive attempt to set up the Ministry of Truth? Joe's fine and can still function without notes and a teleprompter? We picked Kamala because the earned it? Masks work? We're not going to ban your gas stover? Trumps Charlottesville comments. I can't believe a word they say. Many will point out Trump as a liar, but what about your lies?
4. Distorted view of reality. The 1619 project, DEI, energy policy, immigration policy, fiscal policy. I'm not sure what world they live in but isn't one I know.
Also, I am sorry but as long as republicans talk about “hellhole” and “war zone” democrat cities, they are going to get some heat back. There is a seed of truth to both disorder in cities and country people being uneducated and bigoted.
Urban area don’t have bigoted and uneducated people? Let’s add to the list FEMA instructing relief workers to avoid residences with Trump sign. I guess that person must be from Ohio.
Total moral failure on the Israel/Palestine issue.
A situation where doubling of GDP in a generation has not trickled down to the bottom half of the population.
And the trans kids issue. We all laughed at Trump for saying you might drop your boy off at school and when you come to collect him he's turned into a girl. But this plays on a completely rational anxiety that when you come to collect him he's come to believe that he is a girl. Public policy in the UK is now much more critical of the entire trans-concept, having been influenced by major reviews (Cass Review at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/ and summarised in Wikipedia, British Medical Journal major review, open access, at https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382 which concluded that "The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment") Unfortunately, none of this seems to be noticed in the US, where the Democratic Party is still uttering LGBTQI+ shibboleths.
Trump is a realist. If he hews to a realist foreign policy, he will acknowledge that the conflicts of the middle east have been going on for thousands of years and cannot be solved. They can only be mitigated. Eradication of Iranian proxies in the Arab world will achieve that mitigation. As for the Palestinians, Israel themselves have let it be clear that when they have a trustworthy, competent partner to negotiate peace, there will be peace. It's on the Palestinians to get their house in order.
I do not know how long you have been following the situation. It has been Israeli policy, going back to the old days of the Mapai supremacy, to encourage control of Gaza by the most intransigent representatives of the Palestinians, in order to enfeeble the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, and Hamas was, directly before October 7, responsible under Israeli supervision for the distribution of Gulf States aid in Gaza. From your remarks, you seem to be taking the Netanyahu government's statements at face value. I think that is a failure of logic.
That’s not inconsistent with what I said. But there’s also some spin on it. You’re seeing the situation through western eyes. Don’t. Gaza has been a hotbed since David slew Goliath. Israel wants peace. It wants the Palestinians to be adults. But to the Palestinians, the kind of partner Israel wants is anathema to them culturally. It asks them to be less Arab and more Western. To ignore honor and pride and history. Can’t have it both ways. Israel rules the roost. Eventually, if Palestinians want peace and autonomy, they will have to make the decision to become something they are not presently willing to become. And there’s nothing any western nation can do to expedite that process. It has to happen organically. Best we can do is assist in the deconstruction of Hamas and Hezbollah.
>>it has been Israeli policy, going back to the old days of the Mapai supremacy, to encourage control of Gaza by the most intransigent representatives of the Palestinians, in order to enfeeble the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank
A very curious sentence considering that "Mapai supremacy" ended in 1977 at the latest, whereas the Palestinian Authority didn't exist before the mid 90s...
Indeed, nor did Hamas. Islamic Jihad was played off against the PLO. Good catch. And at that time the PLO was irredentist and terrorist. But still, in retrospect, not a smart move
I’ve been following it for 30 years and this is a very, let’s say *specific* description of Israeli policy that in no way offers anything of value when discussing the current situation. Leveraging various semi and fully terrorist groups against each other to neutralize a hostile territory is normal politics.
Trump has no desire to let this conflict drag on endlessly, and takes quite a bit of pride in his "no new wars" talking point. He will want to end both the Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine wars very quickly. Whether people like how he does that is a different story.
Of course I believe nothing of the sort. He will, if he can, make things even worse. But the question was, why did Trump win, and part of the answer is people refusing to vote for an administration colluding in genocide. I have heard this said by people who would otherwise have been out there actively campaigning for Harris.
This segment of voters is so much smaller and much more inconsequential than you want to realize. The irony is that people on the “other side” also when for Trump, so how did that strategy work out? Protest abstentions are a part of democracy, but on this issue they were pointless. Kamala was the only person that wanted that vote and she lost.
I’m a center-left Democrat with lots of degrees. I’m aghast and frightened by Trump’s victory. But I think it’s due to the opposite of racism and misogyny and transphobia. I think he won because of anti-anti-racism and anti-misandry and love of children combined with acceptance of gays.
Normies not overeducated out of common sense rejected identitarian politics. DEI departments, struggle sessions, Robin Angelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates, quotas limiting Asian-Americans, literacy and math as white supremacy, buying a fixer-upper in a poor neighborhood as settler colonialism, all of it.
Men—a rainbow coalition of them—finally got fed up with decades of rhetoric about toxic masculinity, testosterone poisoning, rape culture, patriarchy. They saw that for most men in this country, the reality was poor results in school, lousy job prospects, inability to form a family, and a culture in which dissing any identity group is a capital offense unless it’s men you’re dissing and then that’s fine.
And regular folks not caught up in the strange mania to over-treat the normal nuttiness of puberty with life-altering chemicals and surgery said stop—confusion is fine, it’s not a disease, and didn’t we recently decide that homosexuality is okay, so why are doctors suddenly trying to cut it out of children?
Revulsion at these things is viscerally powerful, existentially clear. Trump’s unfitness for office is more abstract, more distant. The calculation for many was he will mess up Washington, DC and the rest of the globe but it’s more important to save myself and mine. Voting for more of the same will just lead to more of the same. And enough of that. Enough.
Well said. Agree but there is far more to the story. A review of how the Dem machine attempted to manipulate this election with lawfare is also a huge factor.
The coordinated indictments helped Trump win the primary. He may not have otherwise but the Dems wanted to compete against Trump who was the easiest to beat. Then nominating Biden in obvious mental decline was another middle finger to the public. A whole pocket of fingers came out when they ditched Biden and launched the Harris avatar with the full support of the media. That also backfired spectacularly.
This isn’t complicated.
I forgot to mention one of the most important issues of all, free speech.
And the coronation of Kamala...
Now she can be relegated to the dustbin of history, where she belongs.
Well, we differ on “lawfare.” I think the Jack Smith prosecutions and the Georgia case are all righteous. Trump’s actions were clearly criminal. My beef is with Merrick Garland for being so pusillanimous for so long, and with Biden for appointing him to make a point about McConnell stealing a SCOTUS seat. But Garland is fundamentally a judge, not a prosecutor, no matter what he was when younger.
There was much more than that though. Bragg's case was one of the most preposterous legal actions I have ever seen. NY State legislature abolishing the statue of limitations so that an evidence free allegation from 30 years ago could cost him tens of millions was another. Not to mention Tish James' case, which was so far fetched she had to reassure the business community that she was just targeting Trump as she'd vowed to do before she was even elected.
"There was much more than that though. Bragg's case was one of the most preposterous legal actions I have ever seen."
You are 100% correct on this, Unset. But the Mar-A-Lago case was the real deal, and despite the DA's mishandling of it, the Atlanta case represented the most egregious violation of a President's constitutional Oath of Office in our nation's history.
Are you referring to the classified documents case that was set up by the Biden team almost immediately after they came into office in 2021? Nothing about that case was "the real deal."
So, let's get this straight. You believe that Trump's possession of Top Secret documents at Mar-A-Lago, even after he had been given weeks (months?) to return them to Washington . . . you don't think that is a legitimate case?
He should have returned them at once. That is not debatable. But now we move on.
While we disagree on the righteousness of some of the cases, timing of the cases indicates their true intent imo. Keeping Trump front and center worked in 2020 and 2022. Imo this was an expansion of that strategy.
I don’t think the main purpose of the cases was actually cynical timing, but you’re right—it sure looked that way to many, and that hurt.
Those cases were not the slightest bit righteous. Anyone who thinks so is incapable of clear thinking.
When combined with the timing of 'run out the clock on the statute of limitations for Hunter Biden', it does kind of start to look like a cynical abuse of timing in both cases. If they had filed charges in both cases two years earlier, I would be much more sympathetic to the claims of impartial justice.
The "riming of the cases" was driven in part by Garland's theory that he should start from the bottom and work up, and his general timidness. It's extremely unlikely that he was trying to drag it out to fit precisely into an election cycle.
Beyond that, that timing was in part a result of Trump's delaying tactics, first so he could claim "election interference" and then get past the election and hold himself above the law. And it was a result of Ailene Cannon's shamelessly cynical favoritism, and then SCOTUS's almost equally cynical efforts to help him get elected again.
It was not a Democratic "strategy" to have criminal cases still pending when we went into the election. If the timing had been governed by a political strategy, he would have been convicted already in the most serious cases.
The entire purpose of the lawfare strategy was to time it just right so that Trump would be sitting in prison during the campaign and would be kicked off the ballots in half the states in the country. Then Biden could just stay in the White House and not really have to do anything. This was clearly the plan all along. The classified documents was literally set up by the Biden transition team in early 2021 just to help bring about this result. And there wasn't, and still isn't, any good reason for the Bragg case to have moved forward at all.
You'll notice that the Dems' campaign strategy became increasingly frantic as the year went on and their plans kept falling apart one after another after another.
I'm willing to concede that Garland was being unseemly levels of over-timid.. but he had a clear duty in this sort of situation to NOT be timid. If he had followed his original plan literally, it seems like he wouldn't have filed charges against Trump until Biden's second term, and that's just... not the level of leadership america expects from it's attorney general.
When Garland was eventually successfully hounded into filing charges anyway.... it was pretty obvious that everyone doing the hounding was optimizing their strategy for the specific purpose of making life as difficult as possible for trump during the exact window of his re-election campaign, because they were terrified of what might happen if his re-election campaign wasn't made as difficult as possible. Garland had a clear duty to avoid that entire situation by filing charges early, which he failed at, and if he couldn't do that, he had a clear duty to stick to his original plan and ignore political pressure, which he failed at, and if he couldn't do either, he should have resigned in shame, apologized for the error, and let someone else try their hand and getting a fair prosecution done with fair timing.
I’d like to think if we had a citizen (private or otherwise) accused of what Trump is, it wouldn’t take four years to hual him in - more like six days, regardless of his law team. Truth is these cases dragged their way through election season because there isn’t a serious person in Washington who believes these cases are anything but political. More hysterical is that they didn’t have a plan B for Biden, simply because they didn’t expect Trumps popularity to hold up to the legal onslaught.
Anyone who ways that any of those cases were righteous is a partisan liar.
It must be hard in your world, Mikey. So much hate for someone.
Clearly criminal? If so then they shouldn’t have been dropped. These prosecutions made a martyr out of Trump.
"I think the Jack Smith prosecutions and the Georgia case are all righteous. "
💯
There is nothing righteous about using the Criminal Justice System to go after a political opponent. This is supposed to be the USA, not a Banana Republic.
Pakistan and Zimbabwe do this all the time, jail political opponents. Also try to assassinate them. Oh, and America does all that, too.
I understand the sentiment. But the principal at stake here, in my view, is the rule of law. I believe Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted for her clearly illegal home brew server which almost certainly exposed US secrets to enemy intelligence. The fact that she was a political opponent should not have given her any protection. I think Donald Trump committed criminal acts (suborning election fraud) in the Georgia election, and (even worse) shredded his oath of office in the process. I don't have a problem with that being prosecuted. This is different than the Bragg case in New York, which was along the lines of a banana republic.
I think it's critical that the same standard be applied...or else people lose all respect for the system as the Dem-Media pontifications on "rule of law" are exposed as hypocritical blather.
Hillary's violations were egregious. She got the kid-gloves treatment. Trump got Banana Republic-style raids on his residence, investigations, indictments, and prosecutions. Meanwhile, Biden was let off for the similar alleged crimes due to...advancing senility. The whole thing is a bizarre circus...late Rome type stuff.
Going back to the main question, however, I don't like Trump personally. I think he's a con man, a carnival barkers, and a buffoon. I also don't think he's a tough guy...but he plays one very well on television.
Still, I voted for him. Three times in fact. And the reason is simple: the Dem-Media Party has gone completely off the rails. It has become a collection of rotten, vicious, hectoring elitists driven by a genuinely sick ideology. In short, Trump is bad. But the alternative is a thousand times worse. I didn't hesitate for a second in the voting booth.
So why is he dropping them?
There was this event a few days ago . . . a presidential election. Some of the major news outlets probably have articles and/or video on it. Turns out that Trump is now going to be in charge of the Justice Department. That's why.
Every single one of these cases were obvious attempts to get "The Orange Menace". Not one of these cases would have been brought against anyone else. Even disgraced and resurrected Cuomo said just that. Not one of these cases was legitimate. Everyone involved in each and every one of these cases should be investigated and charged with prosecutorial abuse and at least fired.
Quite so. The nation's largest jury just found Donald Trump NOT GUILTY.
Shortly after 1/6/21, many Republicans agreed that Trump's egregious efforts to stay in power unlawfully should be a subject for courts of law to address. J. Michael Luttig calls his actions the gravest crime a U.S. president has ever committed against the Constitution.
Holding him to account for it is not "lawfare." It's rule of law.
Same for his defiance of a subpoena for sensitive documents he willfully stole, which his lawyers told him he could not lawfully retain, and the elaborate shell game he played to hide them.
That too was a serious crime against America. Ailene Cannon knew it was a crime, but she wanted him to get away with it, so she grabbed the flimsy pretext that Clarence Thomas threw her. Protecting the person who appointed her - a favor for which she can expect a reward - is naked corruption.
His allies on SCOTUS clearly wanted him to get away with his criminal acts, so after a strategic delay they invented the novel doctrine that a president doesn’t really have to be constrained by law. That, too, is a corruption of justice and an outrage against the rule of law.
As for the hush money: the Trump DOJ sent Michael Cohen to prison in part for his role in the same scheme, in which he acted at Trump’s behest and for his benefit. Why should Trump be exempt from accountability?
The New York business fraud prosecution is similar to cases that SDNY brings regularly. Why should Trump be exempt? Perhaps his political status brought special attention to his business fraud, but being a politician (or a politician’s son) always brings more scrutiny.
The problem isn’t “lawfare.” It’s that Trump has always been deeply amoral, contemptuous of rules, pushing the boundaries of what he can get away with. “Who would prosecute me?” is what he replied when an aide told them that what he wanted done was illegal.
Luttig also said the attempts to keep him off the ballot were perfectly reasoned and would carry the day... right up until they were reversed 9-0 by the SCOTUS. Your problem is that you are completely propagandized and you don't have the curiosity to begin to ask why the people you listen to are always wrong in the final analysis. Luttig's opinion was destroyed by SCOTUS - utterly destroyed. Yet you still hold him in esteem. Your problem is that no matter how educated you are. No matter how smart you think you are... meh.
Let's take Cohen as an example: He pled guilty to campaign finance violations, but it was never proven that he violated campaign finance law. He pled to the one they wanted, to avoid the really big one which was failure to report millions in income. Cohen never violated campaign finance laws because they are clear that if a payment is made that can also have another impact - he didn't want his marriage to suffer - it's not illegal. Merchon refused to allow testimony from the FEC Chief that would have made this clear.
Nor is there proof that sex took place. No photographic evidence, no corroborating witnesses. Just that she said- and to this day he has said the opposite. There is no proof and the only thing that makes it true in your mind is that the people you listen to are saying it's a fact - but it isn't.
Your hatred hangs on innumerable instances of propaganda and dehumanization that would make Goebbels proud. I personally find you almost dumb however, in that you've been told over and over - a thousand times - "We've got him now!" and you continue to believe them. Yet, comes now, he's won the popular and the electoral and you still are willing to believe the propaganda and you are completely unwilling to cast a critical eye on the people that have been the actual liars.
Yeah, 9-0 by Scotus. Well said.
You're never going to convince anyone the classified documents case had any merit to it when Biden did the exact same thing and wasn't prosecuted for it. The only people who don't see that as a double standard are the ones who were crying last Tuesday night.
exactly
Terrible attempt at both-siderism. Biden did not do the exact same thing. He turned over his documents almost the instant they were discovered. Trump fought tooth and nail to keep his, lying and hiding documents all the while.
Biden was never entitled to have documents, Trump was, and had a legitimate argument that he was still.
What crime did he commit? You don't increase the legitimacy of that nonsense by repeatedly spreading the smear. Still waiting for one of you haters to explain exactly how the alleged "insurection" was supposed to work. The real threat to democracy was exploiting covid to steal an election then using lawfare to silence any dissent.
Yes, Trump is amoral and contemptuous of rules and so are an awful lot of Americans. Of course, Trump could not have won without the support of amoral Americans who are quite willing to sacrifice Ukranians and poison the air we breathe and support authoritarians and murderous dictators so they can get reduced prices for food, etc. But with tariffs they will get nothing.
Please explain to me how the party whose foundation is abortion is moral? Waiting your response...🙄
The foundation is abortion? News to me. It is an issue, and both sides have embraced moral justifications. If abortion is murder, then it is immoral. But anti abortion advocates seldom embrace it as murder. Trump embraces Putin who is a murderer, eg, he imprisoned Navalny which led to his death. He has murdered many Russians who questioned his dictatorship He has murdered Ukranians who resisted his terror. But Putin embraces Trump and Trump embraces Putin, two of a kind. So I guess many people voted for Trump so they thought Trump would reduce the price of eggs so that Trump can crack heads. Nothing moral here, I call it moral bankruptcy.
Who cares about Ukraine. Really, who cares? It's half a world away and has nothing to do with our day to day life. Wasting one cent on that boondoggle was too much.
"J. Michael Luttig calls his actions the gravest crime a U.S. president has ever committed against the Constitution."
I've never heard of Mr. Luttig, but this is exactly what I've been saying since January 2021. When conservatives downplay those events, I tell them that I LITERALLY believe that Trump's actions after the election — most notably his January 2 phone call to Raffensberger — to be worse events than Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
OMG, you are insufferable. Pearl Harbor and 9/11? You are a deranged lunatic. Get some meds.
Unfortunately, most people in the comments sections of most sites can't handle an argument that can't fit on a bumper sticker, let alone an entire paragraph. My argument for this is very long and very nuanced. I guess I should write an article for Persuasion explaining it. But I will say this: Neither Pearl Harbor nor 9/11, as horrific as their loss of life was, ever seriously endangered the Republic. They were attacks from outside enemies, and there was never any question that we Americans would unite and defeat those enemies. Here's the short version:
If it ever comes to pass that most Americans disbelieve the results of our elections, the days of our Republic will be numbered. We cannot BE if we do not agree on the results of our elections. Trump brought us to the point where almost half the people doubted the results of the 2020 election. And when you add in the lesser figures from the Democrats questioning results (Biden and other Democrats lying about black voter disenfranchisement and the like), you have a pot boiling which has a very toxic stew. I am happy that Trump won as convincingly as he did, because if it had been at all controversial (like a repeat of 2000), it could get very ugly, and if no one can agree on who wins, who actually has the legitimacy to govern?
Kinda easy to doubt 2020 when, like 11 million democrat votes disappear between elections, isn't it?
Naaaah, your argument is just wrong, that's all.
The Democrats lied to the American people. For 8 years they have scolded the Reps with “ how can you nominate someone who is unfit for the office?” Then they did it. They lied about the Presidents mental fitness. I think people went into the polling booth and remembered.
Also has that dude ever been to Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 memorial? You kidding me?
My guess is you have never read the transcript of the call.
Your guess is wrong. I have not only read the transcript, I have listened to the entire recording. Trump's actions were clearly improper. As the top law enforcement official of the United States government, just making that call was improper, but when he is told by people who are doing their job that they are doing their job, he has NO business seeking anything more from them.
And here's the thing. I would stake everything I own and every dollar I will ever make in the future that the people who are defending Trump's conduct on that phone call would unhesitatingly condemn Biden (or any Democrat) for doing the same thing, because they would properly realize that coercion by someone in the position of the President comes with an implied threat of some kind. It is only because it is Trump's call that his defender's cannot see it. It is one of the worst things about politics, that almost nobody can be objective when it is their tribe that is in the spotlight.
He spent the entire call discussing improprieties in the voting process and then asked them to do their job. The fact that you suggest that call was worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 shows you are so far beyond the point of reason that you can't see reality.
If you haven't been paying attention that case is entirely dead.
By the way is Trump building new concentration camps or just using the ones from his last Presidency?
To Yascha, this is why Team Blue lost: Your side is insane.
The majority of Americans do not want abortion on demand up to time of birth.
The majority of Americans do not want men playing in women's sports.
The majority of Americans do not want social media controlled by the government.
The majority of Americans do not want to be censored.
The majority of Americans do not want open borders.
The majority of Americans do not want runaway inflation from an administration that doesn't know anything about economics.
The majority of Americans don't want a sitting President to try to jail his opponent.
The majority of both men and women do not believe that every man is toxic, and every white person is a racist.
The majority of Americans know explicitly clearly now that the mainstream media is just an appendage of the Democrat National Committee.
The majority of Americans knew that Biden was not well and that we were consistently lied to.
The majority of Americans know that Kamala was/is/and always will be incompetent punctuated by her awesome work at the border, and that she didn't win here nomination through democracy but was appointed and installed by the group that overthrew Biden. They also know that Kamala had the lowest approval rating of any VP until the media declared that she was the best VP of all time.
The majority of Americans now know that most of what came from Fauci was made up from whole cloth, that Russia Gate came from Hillary Clinton's campaign, and that the majority media can't help but print lies all of the time.
If you are so far in a bubble that you disagree or can't see what is right in front of you, there isn't any hope for you to understand, not only the Trump victory, but a basic political realignment that is likely to continue for the next several elections.
This misses the point. The Democrats were trying to do what the Republicans ought to have done but signally failed to do after January 6th when Trump had finally proven beyond any shadow of a doubt how unfit he was to be President ever again.
Bullshit Trump wasn't going to win the primary. The indictments may have gotten some more favor for him, but the GOP has been in lockstep with him since 2016; the criminal issues didn't change that.
What's sickens me is when anyone suggests or implies that no one should have attempted to hold Trump responsible for the crimes he committed. Trump committed crimes, and he needs to be punished for them. The problem is (1) that more than half of this country doesn't want to punish him and (2) those in charge of holding him accountable dragged their feet.
New golden rule: Rich white men rule, no matter what. Let them rape, murder, steal, lie...whatever. They win. I think Biden is a good man, but he won in 2020...and I bet his whiteness and maleness got him over the finish line.
Actually, thank you for so perfectly illustrating why the majority of this country is determined to neutralize this kind of poisonous thinking.
Your utter lack of awareness to the real issues and reliance on race as the culprit for everything is very telling and right on brand.
This comment no doubt served to justify voting for Trump, for any readers here who were unsure if they did the right thing.
It’s sentiments like this exactly. This is why the Dems lost. Absolutely no one adheres to this ‘golden rule’ yet you continue to claim it has validity. And you blame whiteness for everything, failing to acknowledge the real issues.
In the UK the recent ‘Cass Review’ commissioned by the NHS (national health service) into children with gender problems has totally changed the discussion on all aspects of the trans issue. And basically it says drugs are wrong, probably don’t work, and that talk therapy is the way to go. Google Cass Review.
San Francisco native and lifelong Democrat, this is spot on. The 360 degree messaging from progressives and the media at best was amateurish, and at worse, insulting and demeaning. I am not gay above anything else that I am. My friends are not trans, black, or other simplified categories, yet even companies based in SF were requiring me to pledge I was not a racist and campaign messaging similarly claimed I was if not supporting Janaja. And who are the fascists? Quit making this about Trump, few really like him, but it was the who Democrats lost this election plain and simple by losing its base.
It's about Trump because he gave voice to the frustration in a way that noone else managed to do - and because his obvious flaws made supporting him the most effective middle finger to show in response.
In 2016 Trump wasn't my preferred candidate because of his personality and a skepticism that he would actually get anything done.
In 2024 I voted for him, not only because he ended up being a great President, but more importantly I believed, and still believe, that he is going to take an axe to the nearly wholly corrupt government. Washington D.C. voted close to 93% for Harris, and that is our seat of power. That is horrifying. The faster he moves departments out of DC the better for our country. This has created an unaccountable bureaucracy that believes there are no consequences to their actions because there is no one in their peer group to tell them otherwise.
"his obvious flaws made supporting him the most effective middle finger to show in response."
I've never thought of it this way. You're saying that Trump didn't win *despite* his flaws, but at least in part *because* of his flaws? Fascinating (and plausible) notion.
You've... really never thought of it this way? This has been Trump's whole appeal since 2015. Have you never actually talked to anyone who ever voted for him?
To me this explains a lot of the "base", a good number of the people who voted for him twice before, when he won and when he lost, and voted for him again now. What it doesn't explain is the most recent landslide win as opposed to the previous results, for that I think we have to add voters who resemble what OP describes. I don't believe you can ever win an election with just your base, you need the others, the converts, the defectors and the reluctant supporters etc.
I feel I have understood Trump's appeal since 2015, and I have — more times than I can count — explained to Leftists why Trump has so much appeal. But Duane, I'm not sure if you and I have an actual shared understanding of the point I was making in that comment there. I mean, we might, but I want to be sure. So could you, without using *my* words, could you please explain what you think I am saying in that comment?
This and a few other things.
1. Trump was/is never as bad as would the Democrat and MSM negative branding campaign against him have the electorate believe. Everything has been hyperbolic and extreme. His comments were consistently taken out of context and made into a perpetual attack commercial against him. And since he is authentic and speaks openly and often, there was always a trove of material to exploit. So those afflicted with the Bluebonic plague got injected with even more TDS... repeating these intellectually dishonest chants, slogans and rhetoric ad nauseum. These under-educated (or non over-educated) voters might be slow, but they are not so dense that they would not put all the fact patterns together to eventually conclude that the anti-Trump cascade from the Democrat-biased MSM was really a bunch of crap.
2. Democrat politics and ideas are still not popular. I am sure many of you have noted the inconvenience of the 2024 election vote counts showing how the 2020 election was a 20 million vote abnormality especially given that 80% of those additional votes when to Hiddin' Biden. Regardless if you believe there was cheating, or if the Democrats leveraged the fortuitous benefits of the global pandemic to push mass mail in balloting that they then harvested within our loose legal boundaries of state's election authority... the fact is that without those abnormalities it was likely that Trump would have been reelected and the GOP held the majority in both houses of the legislature. The problem with the blues is that they lied so much that the public loved them... that the demographics had changed to cancel older and whiter conservatives and moderates... that they believed it themselves. But it was never really true. The Democrat Overton Window had shifted left, while the public values and views had remained pretty fixed except for real civil rights progress related to racial and gender equality and gay rights. If you think deeply about this, the self-lying by blues that Democrats were favored based on their squeak by win in the 2020 election, created this wave of wailing depression like their basket of cats were eaten by a pack of toxic masculinity wolves.
3. It is the economy stupid. But it isn't just the Biden inflation pissing off the American middle class. Brexit happened and then Trump in 2016. Prior to this were was the global financial collapse of 2008, then they bailed themselves out and Democrats in charge proceeded to lead a six year jobless and economic uncertain recovery. The 2024 election was a large dose of anti globalist Regime establishment uprising. Lefties keep up the scolding that MAGA is stupid watching Fox News and mistakenly believing that the economy is in bad shape. The idiocy of this position is lost on the blues as they enjoy their higher incomes and wealth in the security of their coastal and big city liberal enclaves... because their denial of the real situation on the ground for the majority of American families only increases the electorate's ire over the situation. The problem here is that the Democrats and the government are joined at the hip and they have taken to manipulating the economic data to feed a propaganda campaign to attempt to manipulate the electorate. For example, the U-3 BLS unemployment rate is plastered on the MSM, but the real impactful rate is U-6. The U-6 rate was 7.9% in August of 2024. Then there are about 1200 labor surplus areas where unemployment is double-digits... and many high double-digits.
With respect to the economy, blues are living in a bubble of their own making unable to see out to honestly observe or recognize the reality for the majority of American families. This is the worst of the worst behavior of the gilded class... to posture that life is really good for everyone because - look at me! - life is good for the gilded class.
So much here that is wrong. Too much to bother with. I’ll just do two as a tiny sample. In 2008, a Republican was President, did you know that? Also, there is no such thing as “Democrat politics.” Do you mean “Democratic politics?”
LOL. So you say so much that is wrong, but fail to write what it is. And then you show your hypersensitivity to language that your party attempted to corrupt for politics and as you point out above is the reason that the Democrat Party got spanked.
2008 a Uniparty president was in office. He was really no different than the next one that took over.
Okay, Francine. Names don’t matter!
I guess Mikey Fucks.
Now you understand! Calling it the Democrat Party is just as childish! Basic respect is calling people and organizations by their correct name. How the United Stated is governed is not a Kindergarten game. It’s serious stuff. Please act like an adult.
finally, evidence of Patient0 of BDS
At the moment, Dennis the Menace is the cultural icon for American boys, at least in the minds of leading cultural critics. He is not going to take the frog out of his pocket or apologize for breaking Mr. Wilson’s window with his baseball no matter how many pink-collar role models you show him. His role model is Joe Rogan and his mentor is Jordan Peterson.
It shouldn’t be like that, but for the moment essentialism is shaping the backlash against the attempt to break the grip that the adage “boys will be boys” has on our society.
A better approach would be to get parents to emulate the ways certain Asian-American parents are able to prevent their boys from succumbing to the allure of the Dennis the Menace life. Accepting deferred gratification plays a large role, but that only works if it goes hand in hand with realistic prospects of handsome future rewards.
He only 54% of men and 46% of women. I’m not sure your theory holds water.
"At the moment, Dennis the Menace is the cultural icon for American boys, at least in the minds of leading cultural critics." Those critics? They didn't vote for Harris.
These are all very good points. However, (mostly white) male despair as a result of poor life outcomes was still the strongest motivator.
This is so off base.
I agree with much of what you said. It's great to see dialogue like this. We can disagree with some things but agree to talk about it. We all got tired of being "lectured" too. Thanks and have a great day.
Dear Michael with lots of degrees. America does not care what you pretend to think.
How come you aren't allowed to downvote this whining drivel? For God's sake, grow a pair. And don't worry about DC some of those agencies are going to be spread across this country and break up that elitist attitude and work for the PEOPLE.
Ha, the propaganda will never let anyone see it that away, that would imply abandoning a culture that shrinks the population of those most exposed to it (english speakers).
But they have to shrink that population to make way for an AI based society. The culture meets their needs for a future American society based on machine labor. So there can never be push back on the mind virus, the mind virus must be permanent so that a world in which all tasks requiring thought are conducted by machines can be established alongside a world where all tasks requiring menial but non repetitive tasks can still be conducted by durable and cheap slave ("undocumented") labor.
Human families must be choked off, the number of children in every line reduced until the only child is sex changed out of fertility. Social poison like drug use, petty crime, and general violence must be increased so that lifespans fall as soon as someone loses their job to a machine (lest they become a ward of the state for too long)
Long before the Democrats realize everyone hates their culture (whose purpose is just instituting human suffering and death) establishment Republicans will come to embrace it.
Unless Trump succeeds. So I am praying he does.
you sure don't have a degree in common sense. You ARE the problem
Very well said! I give you a lot of credit for having all of these realizations as a center-left Democrat. The Democrat party needs to look in the mirror with introspection and come to these same conclusions or they will lose more elections in the future.
I agree with your take of what the left focuses on. I would also add that they don't seem to mind American cities turning a blind eye to the huge homelessness, drug addiction, and crime problems. Average people will vote for anything that keeps the local store from having to keep all of their deodorant under lock and key.
Excellent comment. In my old home country of Poland the people rejected EU aligned politicians for a party we all regarded as generally backwards, but the central issue was immigration and the "Law and Justice" party, while leaving a dirty aftertaste in one's mouth on most other issues, was aligned with the public on that issue so they kept winning. This wasn't just the "farmers" and "religious fanatics" voting for them, enough of the "educated" rejected progressive policies to make it happen. Now many years later other parties have relented and shifted their positions to align with the general public so law and justice finally list their grip on power. I'm interested to see if the Democrats do so as well or if they just keep blaming their loss on bigotry and misogyny and just wait for the Trump admin to turn off enough voters to swing enough of the electorate their way.
Well said indeed.
I am also center-left with a lot of degrees, and I agree with you completely on all these points. HOWEVER, I see no evidence that the kind of cultural stuff that upsets you and me and others like us was of any significance in determining the vote of swing voters, who by and large are very different from us. From all I can tell, it was inflation and immigration that were top of mind, not the special maladies of "educated" spaces which many of the swing voters, especially the increasingly Trumpified working class, don't know much about and care about even less.
Well, yes on inflation—although in fact the economy is in great shape and inflation is a memory, not an active process. I think it’s like the crime narrative, which is also based on a surge that was temporary. My take is that these served as permission structures for voters to respond to their real feelings, which are what I said.
Gender nonsense was on voters’ minds outside overeducated spaces. The proof? Trump ran ads saying “Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you.”
And I’d argue that voters’ reaction to immigration wasn’t really about the border. In fact, it’s all a fake controversy. No cats are being eaten. No jobs are being taken away. Immigrants, even illegal ones, are more law-abiding than citizens are. Immigration is a net positive in that it brings in more taxes than it consumes in services, and has many more economic benefits besides.
The Democratic theory of the case was that identity solidarity would trump Trump’s nativism. But it turned out the opposite way. There was no BIPOC bloc. A lot of Blacks and Latinos were offended by the identitarian assumption that their votes were in the bag. So were a lot of non-BIPOC voters who didn’t like being labeled racist. Not to mention all the Asian-Americans who asked, what about us?
And certainly young men weren’t voting on inflation or immigration. They were voting to reject a society that considers them crap.
Maybe no cats were being eaten, but towns ARE being swamped by illegal immigrants. It's the same point Vance made with Martha Raddatz on ABC--she said that violent immigrant gangs had only taken over "a handful" of apartment buildings in Colorado and seemed completely unaware that she had admitted that, yes, violent immigrant gangs are taking over apartment buildings. To her, it wasn't a problem that this was happening, but that Trump and Vance were talking about it.
Black communities could see as plain as day that these new immigrant groups would replace them as the Dems' major voting bloc if this trend continues. You really think they're happy about that?
Inflation is not a memory! Every time I go to the store I can’t get over the sticker shock. That attitude right there is why the Democrats lost the election. “You plebes aren’t experiencing inflation. It’s just a memory.”
>>crime narraative
the murder rate may be declining vs. the peak post Floyd, but we still have half the aisles our pharmacies under lock and key, still have tons of public urination/homelessness/encampments in our cities etc. and still, until this very election, were at the mercy of insane DAs in much of blue America (still are in too many places). Specifically i don't think crime explains Trump's victory stricto sensu (as it is mostly aa blue state problem) but it can be factor in Trump's surge in NY and CA (in the former, esp. in NYC possibly also due to likely shift in Jewish vote due to campus antisemitism). This in turn may be a factor in Trump winning the popular vote.
>> The proof? Trump ran ads saying “Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you.”
How is that proof? It merely shows that Trump campaigners are plugged into culture war stuff (as elite Republicans of course very much are!). There is no evidence however that this ad changed anything. Considering that Harris outspent Trump by x2 or x3 times (!) it seems that the best prior should be that ads didn't matter much.
The ad got a lot of media hype because the media, too, is plugged into culture wars. It still doesn't prove people cared too much either about the issue or the ad.
Finally, as for your take on immigration. It is woefully out of touch, on multiple levels. Don't have time to get into now. You seem both ignorant of the many practical problems this current, unprecedented wave of illegal immigration has caused or may cause (overwhleming city infrastructures etc.; potential security risks) AND to have not thought through the problems with this thing as a matter of principle (in short - it doesn't square with any theory of democrcay or the rule of law). You also are almost *certainly* American born, thus blissfully ignorant of the hardships legal immigrants come through and cannot begin to fathom the rage the double standard with illegal immigration is causing among legal immgiraants who made huge sacrifces to respect America's laws (and it is only the legals who vote - at least for now...)
Inflation is not a memory! Every time I go to the store I can’t get over the sticker shock. That attitude right there is why the Democrats lost the election. “You plebes aren’t experiencing inflation. It’s just a memory.”
I will tell you why I voted for Trump. My wife and I are masters/PhD educated Brooklynites who work in academia. Several weeks ago my wife was teaching a class and a student very proudly mentioned they would never willingly collect anything produced by a white man. It’s not that this was said, it’s that this is a common and acceptable position for democrats even though you’ll say it isn’t. I’m tired of the hypocrisy. What the democrat worldview says reality is like is neither true nor morally supportable. I read many NYT comments the other day that said things like “Trump and Musk are the true elitists.” No, guys. No they’re not. It’s not about money. It’s about who gets to tell you what to say and who gets to break “the rules” and who doesn’t. It’s about what you can talk about and what you can’t. It’s about laws for some presented as if they’re for all. It’s about what you’re allowed to see. It is a fundamental, hypocritical rot that is just so clearly there.
Excellent commentary. Fellow brooklynite with multiple graduate degrees, but I’ve left academia for the private sector. Managing a blue collar work force has brought home how out of touch the academic elites who claim to advocate for democracy and the working class truly are. Their supposed advocacy is elitist paternalism, with little interest or regard for the actual opinions and feelings of hourly employees - many of whom are young white men without college degrees. It was enough to swing me to a vote I would have never imagined possible just four short years ago.
Toby, the best education I got was leaving education in 1987, working in manufacturing and construction in management for 13 years then returning to education in 2000.
When you go out and work with people working 2 jobs just to be able to stay in their crummy apartment, it changes your world.
I've worked blue-collar and in the military and many americans are astoundingly ignorant.
But the question is, when you or I label someone "ignorant", what do we mean by that? I want to believe that I only apply it to people who are uniformed about indisputable facts. But I know I see more and more people (mostly, but not exclusively on the Left) who apply that label to people who merely harbor views contrary to their own. It's almost as if some of our most well-educated people never learned the difference between fact and opinion.
trump loves the poorly educate4d, who fortunately get the same value for their vote as elitist multi-degree snobs
Ignorant? Ask yourself why. Not everyone wants to be deep.
You out yourself as one of them very quickly!
Ignorant is in the eyes of the beholder
Same - have lived in Brooklyn 25 years, masters degree, work in academia. Lefty credentials go as far back as Nader's MSG rally in 2000, helping start a reform Dem club in Brooklyn, volunteering for Obama, on and on. I voted for Trump too. My liberalism is such that I will never accept anti-male, anti-white hatred no matter how much they think it is fine and normal.
I'm in the same boat. As a liberal, starting in 2015, I seen too many liberals abandon liberalism in favor of some weird statism combined with being in a hate group. I left and became and independent - and will NOT vote for the current iteration of the Democratic party.
I’m a wealthy Democrat and Trump’s 4 years were fine…I got vaccinated but lower educated Trump voters didn’t and died. My Trump supporting family friends had a perfectly healthy 17 year old son die from fentanyl in 2020…and they still voted for Trump. As long as the stock market goes up at the end of the day I don’t really care about working class wages now that the working class voted for Trump because gasoline was expensive for a few months in 2022…f them. Btw, those expensive gas prices were great for America because America produces more oil and gas than any nation in history…I guess my “education” allows me to figure stuff like that out. 😉
Liked just for the handle.
does ypur education allow you to figure out that America and the USG are two different things and that what is good for USG and what is good for America do not frequently align?
Record oil and gas production is great for America…suck it!!
Think beyond the production numbers.
There is nothing America can other than produce more…or consume less. If we drive more miles with EVs we will consume less oil.
as likely the only person on this page that has done business with, sued, and won against Trump, I can assure you he does not believe he needs to play by the rules. He aspires to be the only elitist with influence. the particular interaction between your wife and a student is troubling on many levels. I am also a center-right Republican in Silicon Valley and find all of the white European discrediting ridiculous and just say so. perhaps too many of you stuck in academia are there because you have not had to fight in the streets, and don't know how to deal with crazy people. I can assure you that without guardrails, the next four years won't be great for you
Ah but you see, you think this about Trump.
Also, I don’t appreciate your assumptions of who I am. I work in academia now but I worked in East Brooklyn for many years before, and not a glamorous work either. I worked in a factory in Detroit making transmission springs before I moved to NYC and eventually got to where I am. I have many, many stories more than those. I know more than enough about struggling and fighting, maybe even more than you. So don’t take me for less than I am. Stop assuming you know so much about me.
Stop assuming you know about any of us.
it seems I have committed the ultimate sin of cultural appropriation and now will be cancelled.
Ahh, you have broad life’s experiences. That’s the best education you can get!
I’m very critical of educators, many of them went from being a student to their own classroom with no meaningful experiences to back them up. They teach their subject matter with no clue why it’s important to kids future after school.
Yes, making springs for transmissions is a meaningful life’s experience because it is much more than that. Many people don’t get that.
When the elites who oppose Trump confidently assert they *also* don’t have to play by the rules, it neutralizes their assertion that he is a unique threat.
the bigger concern is around the elites that support Trump and share this view
For goodness sakes, how about the elites that surround the democrats? Harris kept dragging out celebrities to support her. What do they have in common with someone cleaning rooms in the morning and waiting tables at night? Do they think working people are that stupid?
don't get your point. the discussion was about elites playing or not playing by the rules. are you asserting that George Clooney has a plan to do something nefarious?
Stay frightened, Karl. Your oligarchs are counting on it.
meh.
Bravo. Hopefully no one in Brooklyn knows your true identity.
Brooklyn is not nearly as blue as it’s presented to be. I think this vote got a lot of people’s attention as well.
Very glad to hear that
When are you going to get rid of AOC?
My Magic 8-Ball says I have to ask again later. Sorry.
Across the country we are moving right. Look at The democratic strongholds that flipped like Miami/Dade and Starr County. The solid blue states that had diminished democratic support like New Jersey and (Illinois I believe).
Not sure exactly what said student's comment meant, but may I ask how your wife responded? I am also in academia, also tired of wokeness, but recently am starting to be a bit more hoenst with myself in realizing how liberals like me (the silent majority? the substantial minority?) contributed to all this by keeping quiet for too long. So I decided to simply no longer stay silent. I do not actively seek any fights, but I called out colleagues a few times now when things happened right in front of me. It's always awkward, but so far the sky hasn't fallen, and it made me feel a little bit better about myself and the future of my profession. At the end of the day, Trump won't save academia. It is up to us to no longer stay silent and thereby complicit. We all need to be a little bit braver and each do our humble bit to make college sane again.
Actually it now and always has been about what our country was designed to be, and what nearly 250 years worth of Americans have lived, worked, fought and when necessary died to protect and maintain. Trump is the antithesis of that. Trump is the first President ever elected who has proven to utterly disdain the democratic process, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
Democratic norms such as jailing your opponents, silencing, sacking and de-banking your critics, forcing untested vaccines on healthly men women and children, opting back-room candidate selection over a democratic primary process?
I have to tell you that if this reply is the best you can do in attempting to emulate the sheer level of misinformation with which your Orange Hero has so conned you, you’ve got a ways to go to achieve competence.
How do you propose to bring together a divided nation or at least achieve a respectful dialogue when you refer to Trump as an "Orange Hero" who has "conned" his supporters? Your contempt and disdain for views and opinions you make no attempt at understanding or debating are matched only by your clear hostility to the main reason, I believe, so many people otherwise turned off by his brash personality nonetheless voted for him: Free speech. We have HAD IT with the statist mindset which brands unfashionable views "misinformation" or "conspiracy theory". Whatever happened to Left's dedication to challenging power centers, diversity of thought and tolerance of dissenting views? Do you not see the authoritarian theme which all your deplatforming, cancelling and attacks on political opponents which is so repugnant to everthing a free society stands for? "Misinformation" is a term invented to launder censorship and statism so it sounds like something other than what it is: the inability to defend your belief that certain views are unnacceptable and you will use coercive state power to silence your opponents. For all his faults, Trump engages. He debates, he defends. If you can't handle a free exchange of ideas, that gives you no right to silence those of us articulate and respectful enough to risk a dialogue with opposing opinions.
Crushing return, that’s an ace!
The reason for what I have said is simple. First, despite what you may have come to believe, Trump’s whole ethos is exactly what you have accused me of being, and more.
Trump has made the Republican Party into a personal cult, whose legislative representatives and other leaders are ruled by fear of people like you who have bought into his endless politics of ignorance, fear, prejudice, hatred, and vengeance and think it is somehow American.
The irony is that he doesn’t care a wit about you. He doesn’t care a wit about America or the office of the presidency except as he can use it to feed his bottomless need for power, adoration, and obedience. He values loyalty over integrity, which means he has neither.
America was founded as the most crucial and riskiest experiment in human government ever attempted. The Founders themselves harbored serious doubts that it could be made to work. Their only hope was that ‘We the People’ could, through time together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the humility, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. They knew that would mean that in the midst of whatever differences we might find among ourselves, we would continue to elect enough legislators and leaders who understood the necessity of operating along those lines, honoring those characteristics, and when needed, rising above the parochial fray to see our national needs.
Ask your self how well we’ve managed to do that. Ask yourself how many of those characteristics Donald Trump has ever shown in either his public private life.
And finally, take some time to read and to understand what Abraham Lincoln said in those two minutes at Gettysburg. If there is any single bit of understanding of who we were designed to be and the task we had in front us in order to achieve it both then and now, I don’t know of it.
Listen to Lincoln and listen Trump side by side. The differences are appallingly clear.
James. Lincoln isn’t running for office now, is he. Most of what you said is a waste of bandwidth anyway.
My mama always said ' when you resort to name calling you've lost the argument.'
I have called no names. I have simply described a man you should long ago have recognized for what he is, and what he has done.
My mama also said ' tell the truth '
You have to stop riding that horse, it’s dead.
You want to blame the Big Orange Cheeto POTUS. The majority of voters don’t care.
How about you turn around and honestly look at the many faults of the Democratic Party. They are many.
BTW, you are on that horse with me. You just don’t know it yet.
Not hardly. I stopped beating dead horses many years ago. It gets you nothing. You keep trying to pull that rotting nag up.
Stop focusing on TRUMP, BAD! Who doesn’t already know that. He was a jerk back in the early 80’s when he bought the New Jersey Generals and never lost his pace. When he survived President Pussy Grabber (sorry ladies) I realized he was bullet proof. Focus instead on why he won or, more importantly, why the democrats put up two bad candidates. Read what moderate democratic reps in Congress are saying. Bernie was in your face blunt. And honest.
When I was 30 I became very cynical about the American political process. I was an HR manager then, one of my many responsibilities was working with a PAC we were involved with. The short story, voter representation is bought with money. I tell my friends that run in local elections, politics is not for honest people. That’s the truth.
Then the majority of voters simply don’t care about the nation we were designed to be. Lincoln, as always, put it best. “As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time, or die by suicide". Trump is choosing suicide and would happily take the rest of us with him. Sleep well.
The majority of voters biggest concern is if they can survive until the next payday. I know this as fact, both from growing up and my professional life.
Is he though? He seems very American to me. Almost 19th Century.
Only if you consider the pre-Civil War slave owners to be very American. Trump would have fit right in with those guys.
Or perhaps you mean the Robber Barons? Yes, he would have fit right in there as well.
A cross between a Robber baron and P T Barnum really.
There is so much more to 19th century American history than that. I live in NYC so “Gotham” by Burrows comes readily to mind as a suggestion but there are many more.
Of course there is. I lived and taught American history for over 40 years in NYC. It is cliche to note that there were many kinds of Americans around all during the 19th century. I was merely suggesting that Trump was of a certain kind, two examples of which I gave. Many Americans have had problems with the democratic process or the Constitution or the rule of law - but none of them with the level of disdain for all three was ever elected President.
I hear you, but the criticism you gave, particularly the references, were of a type that has become less about accurate criticism and more about signifying in and out groups. Yassine Mekhout had a good piece on this recently. Calling him a robber baron is like calling him a fascist, which is like saying he represents a new, as-yet-unseen form of corruption. None of these actually say anything. Why not call him a Nazi? What about the corruption of deciding who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t based on what party they belong to? If you want to get somewhere you should use your 40 years and not just tell me you have 40 years. What am I supposed to make of that? “Oh, ok… guess I was wrong! Dum dee dum…”
Ahh, a history teacher for 40 years.
Never got dirt in your nails working with the commoners. Just another academic that went from the classroom as a student to the classroom as a teacher. You are the academics I despise the most.
I love history BTW. Would have taught it but I knew most kids hated it.
I am a retired teacher btw, as is my wife, 4 of our five sisters, my mum, three aunts, my grandmother, uncountable cousins, best friends and many more.
Until you actually go out and get your hands really dirty working with the lower working middle class you will remain out of touch.
And you don’t even know it..
He has the shallowest American roots of any president in history.
Even though I agree with much of what you say, I have trouble believing your are an academic (although you say you "work in academics," which could mean a lot of things.) Why? Because your analysis just doesn't fit the bill. First, you need to narrow your generalizations down a little. If you want to complain about wokeness, reference "progressives," as opposed to Dems. Traditional liberal Democrats are, on the whole, not onboard with the whole woke agenda. They are more like traditional Republicans who can't stand Trump and the MAGA types but have been cowed into silence -- and, yes, just as with so many of the traditional Republicans who secretly despise Trump and Co., the silence of traditional Democrats in the face of wokeness has been a form of cowardice. Another point: re your contention that elitism is not about money. Dude, try a little harder. One of the things that differentiates the two parties, generally speaking, is what they mean when they complain about "elites": Democrats are usually talking about the moneyed, while Republicans are talking about people with cultural power (academics, MSM, Hollywood, etc.). Both types are, in fact, elites. If you honestly don't think Elon Musk is an elite, I don't know what to tell you. You say the "true elitists" are those who get "to tell you what to say and who gets to break the rules" and, somehow, incredibly, fail to see that nobody fits that description better than the head of "X." Oh my.
There are two typles of elites: rich people who hate everyday Americans, true believers of the progressive woke religion (Democrats as exemplified by the utter contempt for America from mainstream leftist media) and rich people who do not despise America and working class Americans (Trump Republicans, and former Democrats who left the party of increasingly, insufferable insanity).
Now, now Claire. Try to get it right. Rich Democrats don't hate working people, in fact, they constantly vote for tax raises on themselves to fund programs that benefit the poor and working class, and even (and wrongly) undermine meritocratic standards in order to give them a leg up in academia and industry. What Dems don't like, generally speaking, are people who worship ("He was sent by God!") a crude, narcissistic authoritarian, insist that military-grade weapons be allowed to flood the country, and bray "Drill, Baby, Drill!" while climate change is literally reconfiguring the planet. See the difference?
David, you couldn't be more correct, working class IS terribly ungrateful, whether they should be or not is in the eye of the beholder.
Wealth cushions the effects of bad policy. Perhaps you might consider that the working class has been hit harder than you and your friends have.
PS
My mama always said ' when you resort to name calling you've lost the argument.'
PSS
Out of curiousity, an honest to goodness couple of questions for you... they are specific, not general questions.
Do you really think human beings can stop or manage the rate of climate change? Is there a direct cause and effect equation where a delta 'x' amount of C02 equals a 'y' direct effect on global temperature, natural disasters and climate events ?
Let’s clarify that a bit. Do you really think that 360+ million Americans can counter the garbage sent into the atmosphere by China, India and the rest of the 3rd world. The answer is no. I taught a class called Energy and the Environment, was educated by Rolls Royce on the advantages of green energy and am ready to take on anyone on this! CO2 poisoning of the atmosphere is something I know a lot about.
Clare, priceless for you to call me out for name-calling. Your assaults on Dems are as insulting as they come -- they also sound suspiciously like ill-considered talking points. As to your questions: (1) It's not a matter of if humans can currently stop or manage climate change, it's a matter of if we can make it more or less worse. There's an old adage: when you are in a hole, stop digging. The response from the right to our current hole is "Dig, Baby Dig!" Do you think that has something to do with fact that much of the Republican Party is in thrall to Big Energy? Nah. I don't see a second question so let me respond to your contention that I am some wealthy elite. LOL. Most of my friends are social workers or teachers. (I actually teach in a huge county jail right now--you know, trying to help druggies and criminals turn their lives around. Such a glamorous, elitist, money-mongering choice.) Many of us graduated from college with honors, but opted for jobs that had high social utility over high compensation. What do you and your hubby do? Don't bother answering.
Fault! Your serve was so far off base it landed in a
The parking lot. Three counties over.
Thanks for playing, try again.
I think it's only accurate to say that Dems hate Trump and Trump voters - calling us nazis, fascists and garbage. I am not calling Democrats any names, just reflecting back what Democrats say about Republicans non stop. The vitrol is well documented. The 'insufferable insanity' is telling us that men can turn into women, that we should castrate confused kids and that if we all work hard enough, we can stop the climate from changing. I understand that many Democrats really do think all of the above. I believe they are sincere. I disagree. I think that we should of course pursue clean energy in every way possible and feasible because it makes sense on it's own merits, not because we have the power to control the climate, global temperatues and natural disasters!!!!
!
My goodness sakes, you are so far off base!
You are part of the problem. People like you get the Big Orange Cheeto POTUS elected because you just, don’t, get it.
I know, you’ll send several long paragraphs back at me telling me I’m wrong. It will just prove that you don’t get it.
Look at the national results down to the county. This election wasn’t about Trump, it was more about rejection of the far left platform.
Collect, as in "take pride in the act of being a hobbyist collector" ? Like of decorative plates or something?
No. As in curatorial collections. Museums and etc.
Well that's not good. might even be a breach of fiduciary duty... it would be a fun lawsuit.
I mean, the real answer to the student is “yes you will. It’s a breach of federal, state, and city anti-discrimination laws not to.” It’s more that this is not the first time something like this has happened and I’m tired of racism like this being protected.
I mean, sure. But i think the more important and pedagogical response would be to simply ask them "why"? If I were their teacher I'd have challenged them to justify such position. Free speech is the best healer. Let's see if they can actually defend such despicable idea.
‘Pedagogical response’. I despise the vocabulary of education too.
FernConcern, first of all, thank you for sharing this candidly and transparently. I read it with interest, and I must admit sympathy for your position, although the ballot box won't help solve it, especially in an unstable era and especially with an opposing figurehead and counterculture which is incapable of modelling better behaviour. Out of curiosity, I would also ask if there are additional reasons for your vote, and if you and your wife made an intentional decision to switch your vote after that incident (or a number of incidents that fit that type)?
Be that as it may, I agree with a different poster who wrote on Matt Yglesias's blog that Trump's genius for making society worse tracks on your specific concern as well, namely suffocating progressive wokeness. By most measures, it got MUCH worse during Trump's first term, from 2016-2020. And the ascendent American right gave it much oxygen, and carried it far. Many would also agree that wokeness and the viral hashtag movements it birthed have slowly started ebbing in Biden's term.
The very basic observation has stood the test of time, and will stand the test of time: everything Trump touches dies or turns to fecal matter. Wokeness, American traditionalism, American Christianity, inflation, the Western security alliance, western civilization itself. Let us verify this over the years to come and return to this issue in 2028, provided that a free and fair election is still on offer by the authoritarian elite the electorate has ushered into power.
Your last paragraph trashed your entire statement and anything else you might say.
Thanks for playing.
I’m similar in background. In the 1990s, a professor handed out an essay portion which stated a goal: change the language and we will change people’s thoughts. I almost passed out from shock, and I’ve never forgotten it. I turned away from that world then turned back again, and my abiding interest has been in how successful that effort has been.
The rights claimed by the nominal left, and the mechanisms for claiming them, hinge on the Enlightenment values that the most lauded academics and their poorly educated grad students savagely reject. The answer to many of our problems, from social to economic to political, lies in revisiting those values and understanding the reasons for their historical imperfect application, and addressing those.
Trump himself understands and promotes those values. Not all of his base do, it’s true. The religious right are only as interested in creating a theocracy as the pseudo-left progressives are interested in creating an authoritarian system based on their ideology, and perhaps less so. (Some of the religious right are willing to accept separate smaller systems, although that’s not satisfying to me, as only a commune doesn’t rule over nonbelievers, and communes are divisive. Still others, though not enough, are willing to hold to the separation of church and state).
The solution to the problem of the religious right cannot be found in a “left” authoritarianism.
I keep putting “left” in quotes because as Marx pointed out, identity politics serves the bourgeoisie. This can be seen in how DEI serves individuals seeking power in existing neoliberal society, while doing nothing to effect class-based politics. Indeed, class interests are derided and actively fought against, with the excuse that poor whites are the problem. This is just another version of the historical use of race to divide the working class and make consensus impossible. Yet as a Bernie foot volunteer in the Rust Belt, I saw firsthand that poor whites are interested in a class politics, and simply want rigorous fairness in its design. Not the “fairness” of punishing them for prior generations’ hostility (itself promoted in the 19th and 20th centuries by anti-class rhetoric expressly designed to fracture labor movements), but fairness now, for the people who are alive and suffering now.
Trump acknowledged this in 2016. The populist right and the populist left have common interests, and the rhetoric from the neoliberal DNC clearly responded to this potential by pushing narratives that asserted that common interests are impossible because of race. That of course is revolting and simply cannot be voted for, in my opinion.
I don’t know how many people made that a central point in their analysis, but I know that some did. They can be found in groups that have “walked away” from the Democratic Party.
What did the student mean by saying he wouldn’t “collect” anything made by a white man?
He? Was it a he?
How much of an explanation do you need?
I had a secretary that told me I “owed her” because of slavery. I was astounded. Only the rednecks I grew up with said that. The disappointment I had was DEEP! She validated what they had been saying all along. ARRRRGH!
After I went through my family history with her and she finally accepted my family didn’t arrive here until 1863 and none of us moved below the Mason Dixon line until the 1960’s did she tell me I was ‘ off the hook’.
I called my contact at Jet-Prep, the agency we worked with to get women and minorities placed and they yanked her out quick.
What? I was just asking what the student was refusing to collect. I don’t know if the student was a he or a she, but I often use masculine pronouns in the old way—to be inclusive, as in “mankind” or “chairman.” The student’s gender is irrelevant. I was simply asking about what was being collected.
But in makingAmerica great again, it was about taking America back in which there was censorship galore, in which almost all gays were invisible, in which oral sex was illegal, in which divorce was illegal, and masturbation represented a form of insanity, in which women could not vote, and on and on and on.
Swing and a miss, thanks for playing.
FernConcern, first of all, thank you for sharing this candidly and transparently. I read it with interest, and I must admit sympathy for your position, although the ballot box won't help solve it, especially in an unstable era, and especially if the opposing figurehead is incapable of modelling better behaviour. Out of curiosity, I would also ask if there are additional reasons for your vote, and if you and your wife made an intentional decision to switch your vote after that incident (or a number of incidents that fit that type)?
Be that as it may, I agree with a different poster who wrote on Matt Yglesias's blog that Trump's genius for making society worse tracks on your specific concern as well, namely suffocating progressive wokeness. By most measures, it got MUCH worse during Trump's first term, from 2016-2020. And the ascendent American right gave it much oxygen, and carried it far. Many would also agree that wokeness and the viral hashtag movements it birthed has slowly started ebbing in Biden's term.
The very basic observation has stood the test of time, and will stand the test of time: everything Trump touches dies or turns to fecal matter. Wokeness, American traditionalism, American Christianity, inflation, the Western security alliance, western civilization itself. Let us verify this over the years to come and return to this issue in 2028, provided that a free and fair election is still on offer by the authoritarian elite the electorate has ushered into power.
Trump's genius was to achieve historic rates in real income growth for working class Americans while protecting our borders and using American strength to keep peace. ie. negotiating the Abraham Accords. His administration was an era of peace and prosperity. The Democrats genius is destroying our cities, flooding our borders, stoking ruinious inflation, dividing americans into identity tribes of race and however many genders and sexualities (take note academia most normies aren't as race and sex obessed as you are) silencing, jailing and debanking critics, and - to top off the insanity -- forcing women and girls to compete against and share their restrooms and bathrooms with men and boys. Wake up!
To head off the transphobic ridiculousness.
I have absolutely no fear of transmen, women, boys or girls. I have nothing but respect for their choice to live as they wish.
Academics take note! Transwomen are not women (female xx). It is absurd to have two categories and not be able to define or differentiate between them. It defies logic to insist that transwomen and women are two separate categories and yet the exact same thing.
Society can quite easily acommodate transpeople in single unisex restrooms, changing rooms etc. Transpeople can and should be welcome in all sports. There has never been an issue of trans people competing in sports categories for their birth sex. I do not believe transwomen should to compete in women's sports.
Biological men competing in women’s sports? No.
I abstained from voting for president in a swing state after voting Democratic for more than 40 years. Although I fit into the "elite" category (M.A. degree, taught at a university, live in a liberal bubble), I could not vote for either of them. Since you are asking why, these are my reasons in no particular order.
The dominant media lying about Biden's fitness, the clear bias in its reporting on Israel, and its obvious bias for the left turned me off completely. I have no idea anymore what is objectively "true" and what is complete spin.
I personally witnessed the meltdown of an organization that has gone full-on "woke" and abandoned its mission in order to cater to the most radical people in that organization.
I have mixed-race children. The emphasis on how all whites are racist makes my mixed-race son "want to vomit" and infuriates me.
Both my children (a boy and a girl) were college athletes at D1 schools. Don't lie to me and tell me there is no difference between biological men and women.
The slogan "Defund the police" may have been discarded, but the rampant crime that liberal cities ignore is counter-productive for the very people white progressives supposedly want to help.
The absolute inability to tolerate anyone who dares disagree with progressive dogma in elite institutions (academia, publishing, media, and theater) is illiberal and infuriating. Instead of having adult conversations, cosseted progressives who run these organizations believe disagreement is "harm" and literal violence.
I could keep going, but I think you get the drift. I didn't leave the Democratic Party; it left me.
I hear you loud and clear Adrienne! I have had a similar change of attitude. I had been an avid NPR listener from my college years up until about 1/2 way through the Biden years. I found all their coverage so slanted and propagandistic I just had to shut them off. They became an arm of the DNC!
It's funny, because the slanted coverage is clearly meant to increase/retain support for their side, but it did the opposite in my case, as well. I lost whatever sense of loyalty I once felt to that side and now consider myself an independent moderate. Given the options, I chose not to vote for any candidate for president in the last two elections, despite voting in the downballot races.
In late 2016/early 2017, I happened to listen to NPR frequently on my drive (never having done so before that), and they really made it seem like only an absolute monster could be a Trump voter. I found it very difficult to believe that half the country was as morally depraved as all that, so I decided to figure out what the deal was. I tried to find sources where Trump voters explained, in their own words, why they voted for him. Lo and behold, none were the monsters they'd been made out to be. I found the lies, half-truths, and misrepresentations that had been fed to me infuriating and insulting.
I have still never voted for Trump, and never would, because I have too many actual qualms about him. But that said, I deeply resent the way a certain caste of elites seem to think they're entitled to manipulate and condescend to the rest of us. Despite being a college-educated white woman -- supposedly their most reliable demographic -- I can still see through the bullshit and am, as they say, "not here for it."
I deeply feel the fury coming from your comment and vehemently agree. I voted L for the first time despite having your same profile (and formerly being woke) because I couldn't stand the hypocrisy anymore. It was simply too much for me to tolerate the paradox of tolerance.
Adrienne, you have been red pilled. I know it is scary at first, but you realize how much happier you are once you actually open your eyes to the propaganda you have been fed. Please read articles from both sides on Real Clear Politics for a month and you will quickly realize how much the majority media lies. You can follow Taibbi, Sascha, Greenwald, and even to a small extent Maher, in realizing the Democrat leadership only cares about their own power.
great comment. Amazing Dems and media still blame us ignorant voters instead of all the issues you describe. The press hid Biden from us and I hope they all go bankrupt. They reaped what they sewed
Adrienne, thanks for your cogent comment. I’m a lifelong Republican conservative who lost all trust in Trump after Jan 6. I was devastated by his betrayal of the process of lawful transfer of power!
I abstained from voting for president because, as much as I would like to FINALLY have a woman president, liberal Democrats have behaved exactly as you portrayed them. And I could not vote for Trump.
So now we’ll all see what happens. But the good news is that the vast majority of people in the great country will get up each day, love their families and work hard.
This is also me
BANG! I was 30 when ‘I got it!’
This I isn’t about embracing the GOP either. Choose the devil that will hurt you the least!
The comments so far have done a good job of exploring the main reasons Trump won - a woke decade, a lousy candidate, inflation, elitism, and concern about the border.
But I want to add something I don’t see addressed below: the people who make up the Left have, as a group (one I used to belong to) become deeply unpleasant. I personally know several people who have stopped speaking to family members - including their parents! - based on differences in political opinions. Most recently was a distant cousin who refused to pick up her mother from cataract surgery because her mom voted for Trump last week.
You don’t see this behavior on the Right, at all. And the political differences that caused these rifts were insane - I wonder now if my elementary school friend regrets breaking it off with his parents over Black Lives Matter.
This behavior has a lot of different flavors of screaming which are probably unnecessary to parse out, but it all adds up to “a tendency that I don’t want to lend power to”. It’s ugly and frightening.
Great point, Lasagna (love it!) - perfect moment to share my 'decency' story from election day, as a JOE (Judge of Elections):
We had two R poll watchers there, including a retired woman who had never done this before. I explained to her what she was allowed to do (and what not - she wanted to be a poll worker), and she was grateful and engaged. She made coffee for all of us, she brought donuts - all around a wonderful person. The male R poll watcher left in the afternoon, but not before he found me to shake my hand and thank me/us for our service. On the other hand, the D poll watcher came about an hour before closing. No smile, expensive gray suit - a lawyer, no doubt. As I said to my wife later, "he wasn't the type to make coffee - it is made for him".
A trivial story, I know - but sometimes the truth is revealed through trivial stories...
I ran a polling site as well. We had 6 or 7 official observers (ie people who signed in as such). Also 2 lawyers from the DOJ (for a visit to ask some questions), plus 2 visits from the city DA’s office (not the election commission). All were perfectly well-behaved and pleasant. I gave them the doughnuts I’d brought that my colleagues didn’t eat.
Anecdotes are not data.
Very true, Robert - anecdotes are not data.
But in our time, the more relevant insight should be: Data are not anecdotes.
Not sure about you, but I am a scientist. Medicine. One key error too many of us make is that we over-rely on data and forget the power of anecdotes. Any sociologist who does deep story research can tell you that...
In my world, left-side-politics friends are longer friends precisely because of politics. There are absolutely zero times this happens with right-side-politics friends.
The other thing Trump did is manipulate the hell out of the media- he got publicity for everything he said or did. I’m beginning to think he figured out when the media took his words out of context and purposely lied about what he said he would make outrageous comments about bloodbath or dictatorship knowing they would spin it against him. Then if people reviewed what he actually said they would realize the media was lying and lose confidence in it. It saved him a lot of campaign expenses 😉
I think this behaviour exists on the anti-woke side. I have a family member who is nearly impossible to talk to because everything is a trans lesbian conspiracy to murder him and his family. He keeps walking out on family events over small things. But overall I agree with what you're saying.
When I was a raging Leftie from 2016 -2022, my deeply conservative mother and longtime friends from college & my semester abroad in Israel (I grew up fundamentalist Christian) were all gracious to me. Their unconditional love meant a lot. It made the behavior I was seeing on my side seem so much worse. When Oct 7 happened and all my Leftie friends started posting anti-Israel vitriol while saying absolutely zero to me about it, I felt painfully betrayed. I turned to my mom, my friends who were right there with me in my pain. Leftism, to me, is a cult where you signal your goodness via your belief system rather than actually being a good person. It is soulless. I voted for Trump.
I beg to differ. Trump personally fired and if not possible tried to fire everyone who told him he lost. In addition he castigated those who dared to criticize him as "weak and pathetic" and "totally degenerate". People like Cassidy Hutchinson who dared to testify against him for trying to overthrow a free & fair election lost their jobs and got death threats.
The problem is that if people truly believe their friends or family members voted for a literal Hitler or Mussolini, they feel justified to shun those who voted that way.
But the step before that, PSW, is the critical one. And the one Lasagna highlights here: Do you negate everything you know about a person, even a loved one, based on a vote? Or does your love or affection, or mere knowledge of a person, inform the way you think about their -in your mind- misguided vote for the next Hitler or Mussolini?
This is the basis for the disastrous conclusion (false but also strategically disastrous) that "the whole country is full of racists and bigots, and they just revealed themselves".
This is a big part of what Yascha and others have called the need to take a long and hard look in the mirror. We liberals, not those voting for what we think is a next Fascist.
In the minds of people who believe that your race, gender, religion or sexuality defines who you are, it’s very easy to make the leap that you politics also define who you are. Thus, the judgment that if you vote for Hitler you are Hitler.
We can talk about opinions with friends and family. But during the third Reich, many men divorced their Jewish wives to save their careers. A few German women did the same, but most had no careers to speak of, and whether they did or not, most stood by their Jewish husbands. Before deportation began, many people including Jews did not believe it would get that bad. They thought it was ok to put "communists", "vagrants", even "elite Jewish bankers" in the camps, but surely not their beloved family doctor, their piano teacher, their wife...
This is no longer about opinions.
the dems have been fart cupping "_________" is fascist or Hitler for a long time. problem is they eventually believe it but have to go deeper and deeper down the mental rabbit hole to keep it true in their minds. committing to false ideas or opinions as gospel can put your mind in bleak and confused place.
Well, plenty of people on the right believe (insanely) that Biden et al represent the return of a pedophiliac fascist uber state. But I haven’t heard of any of them cutting things off with their families over it
Not that my experience can be extrapolated very widely, but I can attest that both my wife and I have family members who have all but cut off ties with us because we generally lean left (and voted for Harris). We’ve been told we support pedophilia, sex slavery, and infanticide (among other horrific things) all because we see the world a little differently. We both grew up in a pretty high-demand religious community (Mormon) and the fact that we see things a little differently, now, has been enough for certain family members to speak all sorts of ill of us and to cut us out of their lives.
“The left” isn’t alone in its ability to ostracize and demonize.
i agree. well said!! I wrote a long comment about this and I would love to hear your comment on it.
I didn’t vote for him in 2016. I was disgusted by his rhetoric. I did like his attacks on the corrupt establishment, but found him to likely be a dangerous authoritarian. I didn’t vote for him in 2020; I was a Yang guy in the primary and voted libertarian both in 2016 and 2020. January 6th seemed like confirmation of exactly why I didn’t vote for him.
The Biden administration then far exceeded what I had thought possible in terms of how corrupt and just evil the federal government would be. A full blown censorship apparatus spun up, while the media lied to us they it was happening. Then they forced an experimental medical product on people. I took it without bothering to ask if it was safe, because I didn’t think I had any way of knowing and the social pressure was immense. Then they said “no inflation” when this was obviously not true.
At every step of the way, the “speak truth to power” media did nothing but beat the drum for these abuses of power.
The thing that fully broke it open for me was a friend telling me, in the same way you’d tell someone about your drug habit, was that he and his wife used traditional gender roles and it made them both happier. I asked my therapist about this and he said that the couples he found to be happiest did the same. They both cautioned me that “traditional gender roles” doesn’t meant you disrespect or put your wife down, but that you understand you’re skilled at and inclined to different things, and you should instead support and build her up while not trying too hard to do precisely what she wants.
In other words, being told something which was obviously true for most of human history, but has become verboten to us in the last few decades made me realize that as much as i distrusted the elites, I didn’t distrust them enough.
Then Vivek Ramaswamy demonstrated what a politician could be. With every question he was asked, he’d say, “here’s the principle, here’s the historical basis for it, here’s how it applies.” He made it clear that the executive branch agencies are a fundamental violation of the separation of powers laid out in the constitution. He said he supported Trump and actually gave reasons for it.
And my intelligent friends who lean left couldn’t take him seriously. They didnt have counter arguments or reasons he was wrong; they didn’t engage with anything be said. It was simply, no way someone that smart believes this stuff.
So the last 4 years have made it clear the elites live in their own bubble, refuse to consider anything that doesn’t fit their narratives, and use that bubble to cause incredible damage. Trump stood up to that, against immense personal cost, and I can’t help but respect this. The people who criticize Trump and musk are, I think, rightfully seeing their flaws. But what they miss is, no human being can accomplish anything at scale without also being deeply flawed because to be human is to be flawed. Missing this, they seem to prefer someone “talk corporate to them”, and reject an actual human being who thinks independently.
I agree fully. I would add that Obama went all in on identity politics in my opinion to solidify voting blocs by appealing to matters of race etc. Identity politics are the antithesis of e pluibus unum. We learned this past week that we still have millions of Americans who still believe in and want to live in our beautiful melting pot and not a society that encourages multi culturalism
The Obama coalition is dead - for these very reasons
More than that--the Obama coalition is now the Trump coalition.
Gosh, that's gotta make Obama seethe. He was supposed to be the Prophet who led the world to the Promised Land. This wasn't supposed to be how it ended.
It was always clear -to many writers, and for many years- that the "working class" (initially thought of as the WWC) would be the critical group that either party needed to reach a stable and durable majority. Romney/Ryan Rs failed to do this, and so did Hilary Clinton/Pelosi Ds. I would have bet money that Ds would be smart enough to get there - but they got caught in a Brahmin woke doom loop, and now the rainbow-colored working class is Trump's...
President Obama went all in? NO, America was built on identity politics by enslaving one race and claiming another race was superior. After the Civil War one group of people continued to disenfranchise people based on their race. By doing so a voting bloc was solidified by race. One race could vote the other race couldn’t vote. One race was treated like citizens and the other race wasn’t. Women weren’t treated equally either. People are tired of one group of people treating others like crap. Black people are tired of it. Women are tired of it. The LGBTQ community is tired of it. Disabled people are tired of it. I could go on. People started speaking up and demanding equality. THAT’S what you don’t like. So you try to belittle ALL of the those groups of people by calling it “identity politics” in order to silence them.
Well, too bad. When you stop oppressing people, people will stop complaining about being oppressed. Get it?
You write: ‘The Biden administration then far exceeded what I had thought possible in terms of how corrupt and just evil the federal government would be. A full blown censorship apparatus spun up, while the media lied to us they it was happening. Then they forced an experimental medical product on people. I took it without bothering to ask if it was safe, because I didn’t think I had any way of knowing and the social pressure was immense. Then they said “no inflation” when this was obviously not true.’
Not a single word of that is accurate. What corruption? What evil? Trump made millions out of the presidency. So did his daughter and son-in-law. Biden? Show me anything corrupt he did.
Full-blown censorship? Where? Tucker is in jail for his speech? You are? You mean responsible people trying to tell people the truth about not taking horse medicine for COVID, and to stop believing lies about 2020 being stolen? Doesn’t somebody have to point out the dangerous lies? Look all the lies you obviously believe based on a single paragraph!
No one said “no inflation.” People rightly said it’s worse overseas, but it’s bad so let’s fight it, and now it’s finally down. Do you know what the word means? It doesn’t mean prices. It means how fast they are rising. Try Googling the term.
The COVID vaccine is a huge triumph. It has saved tens of millions of lives. Ask somebody who actually knows something.
This. This is why Trump won. You aren’t listening.
he can't and won't. pride and arrogance do not permit this. such as these, you just need to defeat.
At fools “doing their own research?” Yes, you’re probably right. Those kind of fools voted for Trump. He would have won in a bigger landslide if so many of them hadn’t already died from “doing their own research.”
You just can’t help yourself. I DON’T want Trump to be president. But comments like this are why he IS president. Please stop. Please listen to the real concerns. I’m begging you to actually listen to your fellow Americans. If not, I fear our next president will make our current buffoon-in-chief look like George Washington.
Thank you! You are another person that gets it!
Okay. I’ll bite. What are these real concerns, would you say. I was responding to false, inaccurate, nonsensical ones. But please tell me the ones you have in mind.
I know you've commented a lot on this column. I won't pretend to have read them all. But if you honestly want to know what the real concerns are, you only need to read about 3 comments, chosen at random. You will find that every one expresses a disgust with the gaslighting going on. We are told trans women ARE women and therefore should be able to compete in women's sports. We were told the border is not "open." We were told inflation was "temporary." We were told anyone who does not support Harris is sexist and probably racist. We were told the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce inflation. We were told ONLY the unvaccinated get and spread COVID. We were told Biden was mentally competent. We were told women are being treated as second-class citizens because some states have chosen to protect the unborn. I know you are already composing a devastating take-down on each of these points, but that is exactly my point. The correct response is, “You are right. Much of that is indefensible and we should have been honest.” I can already hear the sputtering, “You think Trump is honest?!?” No. No I do not. He is a master-class BSer. But his lies are ridiculous and self-serving. He does not tell you that what you know to be true is not true. Trump won because those who feel gaslit and condescended to HAD NO OTHER OPTIONS. The Democrats refused to say even once, “We hear you and you are right.” (I actually think the comment you made that sits at the top of this thread that Yascha liked it is insightful. For a minute, you got it. But then you went back to "all Trump voters are idiots.") If Kamala had said, "Of course trans women are not actual women, I support common sense regulations on abortion, the border is out of control and that's my fault, inflation is real and we screwed up with the Inflation Reduction Act, we had no business keeping kids out of school as long as we did during COVID, your child will not be "affirmed" in his new choice of gender behind your back, men are not toxic and we owe a debt of gratitude to them for their myriad sacrifices, we were wrong to police "disinformation" and that was deeply unAmerican, our party let fear and panic guide us for too long rather than trusting the American people to be rational humans. We have been patronizing for far too long and we are sorry," she would be President-elect Harris today.
Whooshing hard.
Let me speak in terms you understand. Lol.
You are so far off base, you dont even know it.
Look at the election results across the country down to the county and local elections.
The “horse medicine” to which you are referring was give a Nobel prize because of how many people it’s treated. Again, this total refusal to engage with reality, in favor of fictions peddled by the priestly class.
Ivermectin works in humans to treat parasites that cause River Blindness. That has nothing to do with COVID. Taking it first COVID doesn’t help and is dangerous. The “priests” you refer to are actually called doctors.
Insulin is an excellent treatment for people who have diabetes. If you take it first pneumonia, it won’t help and might even kill you.
See?
Of course it couldn't be deduced from its efficacy against River Blindness that Ivermectin would be of therapeutic benefit against Covid infection. Nor could it be deduced from the same premise that it wouldn't be. Ivermectin was one of several drugs approved for treating other diseases that were experimentally administered to Covid patients within dose levels that had proved harmless to humans in previous trials of their efficacy for other purposes. See, e.g., https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/fulltext. Such repurposed treatment with Ivermectin may have been ineffectual, but what evidence is there that it was dangerous? See https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801827
BTW, Paxlovid, the antiviral approved for treatment of Covid 19, was originally developed for treatment of another disease, namely SARS.
COVID *is* SARS (SARS-COV2 to be precise)
Not so.
The SARS virus, i.e., SARS-COV, is similar to the Covid 19 virus (aka SARS-COV2), but they are genetically distinct in ways that matter. SARS-COV2 is much more readily transmissible to humans but less lethal to them than SAR-COV, which had a human case fatality rate of 9.6% but hasn't caused any known human infection since 2003. See https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-does-SARS-CoV-2-Compare-to-SARS-CoV.aspx
As I replied to someone else: Let’s leave aside the direct impact of administering unnecessary medicine. All medications have potential side effects and some number of bad reactions. You do a cost- benefit analysis when prescribing. If there’s no benefit why risk any down side?
The bigger issue, as with all snake oils, is that people will foolishly think they can depend on the false promise and neglect real prophylaxis and real treatment. Why take a vaccine if there’s a medicine the internet tells you can just cure you? That’s the big reason it’s dangerous. Misinformed people don’t do what they should do instead.
You clearly don't understand how medication works. It isn't that very smart scientists design a perfect ideal medicine for any given situation that has only ONE use and no other. Medicines are chemicals that can have myriad effects. It is very common for medicines to be used for many different things. My husband and I take the same medication - I take it for a heart problem and he takes it for high blood pressure. The medication works on different parts of the body in different ways, and affects different disease processes as a result.
It is the same with ivermectin - it can (and according to many doctors and researchers, does) have more than one effect. Even insulin is being researched for multiple purposes.
Regardless of how much you believe you value intellect, you are succumbing to magical thinking regarding medications and their uses.
I’m sure I can’t convince you. But, for example, read this. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115869
Silly analogy.
Just a few points here: Biden corruption? 10% for the "Big Man", Hunter's $$ from China and Ukraine (when all he had to offer was access to Daddy in the White House!) Full blown censorship? Matt Taibbi's visit from the IRS, Tulsi Gabbard's harassment by the TSA, Zuckerberg's META suppressing anything anti-vax or deemed Covid disinformation.
I could go on and on. Honestly- do you have your head in the sand???
The kind of censorship that lead people like yourself to believe, even to this day, that ivermectin is "horse medicine". Did selegiline suddenly become an ineffective dopaminergic as soon as the first person gave it to their dog? Yes it does little to nothing against covid but early studies that were poorly done or fraudulent showed promise. Early and even later mask studies showed promise, like the huge one in Bangladesh I think it was, but when you look at the full dataset it shows that surgical masks did nothing either. I bet you never heard that retraction though, did ya. No censorship to see here folks, move along now!
Ivermectin works in humans to treat parasites that cause River Blindness. That has nothing to do with COVID. Taking it for COVID doesn’t help and is dangerous.
Insulin is an excellent treatment for people who have diabetes. If you take it for pneumonia, it won’t help and might even kill you.
See?
Nope, it works in humans to prevent and treat a whole host of parasites. I literally wrote that it doesn't work for covid. You wrote it again so you could feel right? No comment on any counterpoint, just charge ahead obliviously. "Dangerous", he says 😅 Nope, wrong there too. Pretreatment legitimately decreased mortality in huge swaths of the world, possibly due to the incidence of parasites lowering immune response, possibly other factors. You don't know any of this, because your curated feed was censored.
Dude, I read medical journals, not “curated feeds.” You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go to MIT and Penn for a dozen years like I did, then come back and talk to me. And don’t try heart surgery on yourself either. Please.
Argument from authority is a fallacy, didn't they teach you that at MIT either? So you didn't know that many well done studies in Africa and elsewhere showed ivermectin use statistically significantly decreased covid mortality, and even after I've made you aware of this you continue to deny reality and hide behind your degrees? Gee, maybe those "medical journals" you read have some funding conflicts that lead to what some might call censorship? Nah 🙈🙉🙊
Surgical masks are not perfect but they help.
Who ever said they were perfect? Even the homemade masks are better than nothing.
BTW, I was the health and safety manager in our plant. We did everything up to full body SCBA gear. A little protection is better than nothing at all.
New disease comes out. Scientists make recommendations based on what they can figure out at first. They continue finding stuff out. The new information leads them to make different recommendations. Isn’t that obviously the way it would work? What’s your problem?
You may want to expand your media diet. No one said Trump wasn’t a monster. They said the Dems were a bigger one.
Your understanding of COVID seems to be stuck somewhere in mid-2021.
I’m not exactly sure what you are saying but I do think you and Ramasthwany severely overestimate the “separation of power” issue with respect to regulatory agencies. I sometimes think many Americans simply don’t understand that America is a superpower that is immensely complicated to run properly. America needs nimble regulatory agencies that can operate without having to check in with Congress constantly in order to take initiative in doing their jobs. If Congress tries to rein in the operation of regulatory agencies too much, those thousands of businesses that depend upon agencies in order to know how to do their work, will be slowed down in getting their work done. And this will make America LESS effective and efficient than it was before., all in the cause of some purist notion that agencies have usurped the role of Congress. We need robust regulatory agencies in order for America to operate as efficiently as it has—and that is VERY efficiently, next to other countries of its size.
> immensely complicated to run properly
This is exactly the story the priestly class would tell if they reality that the government was full of corruption and self serving rot. They’d say, “our jobs are so complex, we are doing the best we can.”
What kind of actual evidence can you give me that this is true?
My evidence that it’s false: We spent 20 years, trillions of dollars, and hundreds thousands of lives fighting in the Middle East to accomplish … what exactly? We spent $320 million on a floating pier in Gaza that blew away because of a storm. A shooter was allowed within 150 yards of the opposition candidate, despite numerous advanced warnings. There’s a map of streets covered in poop in major U.S. cities.
Why should I believe that they are actually extremely competent?
Otto Von Bismarck supposedly said that "if you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either being made," and the quip resonates with me in light of my 41 years of experience as a civil service employee in a Federal regulatory agency. To which I'd add that even if you like sausage and trust that government regulations are well-intended you shouldn't assume that having more of either is better.
If you suppose that the rules currently set forth in twenty thousand-some pages in the Federal Register have a net stimulative effect on economic production there's a bridge over the East River I'd be happy to sell to ya for a terrific bargain price!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2024/11/10/biden-white-house-releases-newest-regulatory-cost-benefit-report/
The irony of you considering a bunch of billionaires not the elite. Voting for a felon and adjudicated rapist is beyond the pale. I wonder what your media diet is? Unconscionable choice. Trump is out for himself, he could care less about anyone else. This is a disaster for the United States and the world.
Who had more billionaires on their side?
Trump, clearly. The money is a big problem, but what about the policies, the fascist rhetoric, the threat of rounding up millions of people into camps? What about the women bleeding out in parking lots and dying because they can't get treatment for pregnancy complications because doctors don't want to end up in jail? What about the catastrophe of global temperatures going up 2 degrees and Trump who promised the oil industry unfettered access to public lands? Getting rid of childhood vaccines? Fluoride in water? Two of the greatest public health policies of the last hundred years will cause countless deaths. This is a no brainer.
You could answer the billionaire question (correctly) with a simple internet search.
Harris raised considerably more money than Trump. Where do you think this money came from, plumbers?
This is the dumbest conversation I’ve ever been in in my life. He won, hope he wins the house and implements everything. Bye.
This is a very typical response from a modern leftist. When you have no answers to the hard questions, declare everyone who has a different opinion is stupid and then run away before you can get called out any more.
Many of us have been trying to communicate honestly and openly with people from the left since 2016. This is the response we have gotten. You're in a bubble solely because you choose to remain there.
I can definitely see how this would be one of the dumbest conversations of your life. Next time you should Google the facts first so what you're saying is actually true, then that wouldn't be the case. Bye!
Most recent billionaire support count I have found is in the low 50s for Trump and 83 for Harris. Harris’ campaign spent 1.7 billion and Trump’s 1.1 billion.
But of course Harris raised and spent this money in a very short time and Trump spent it over the span of a year if not longer.
Kamala also ended up $20 million in debt.
You are unbiased as Alvin Bragg and Rachel Maddow. Please forward the verdict of rape including the date committed
I know! And was E.Jean Carroll a reliable accuser? And were her actions following the $$$ she was rewarded those of someone who had been wronged or traumatized in anyway?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/
And the day on which the sexual assault occurred was ???
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump
The exact was when? Not seen in your post. First paragraph says late 95 or early 96. Most "crimes " are associated with a SPECIFIC DAY as in "where were you the night of Novembe 10th? Looking forward to the specifics here
Idk if the rape happened or not, but I do know Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything and the MSM lost credibility many years ago. Be careful and way of your sources.
And you’re as unbiased has Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. It was the judge of the case that called it rape. And he was convicted. You and your ilk no longer believe in the rule of law if you ever did. Donald Trump is definitely your man. Good luck America.
What is the name of the prosecutor , you know the person who seeks CONVICTIONS IN CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS? He was found liable in a civil trial and for serial assault not rape. Me and "my ilk" do believe in the rule of law which last I checked includes unbiased judges and juries . I will reask my original question: on what DAY did the sexual assault occur? The day not " in the spring of 1996." To repeat 1996. The law looks to specifics and evidence . You likely view all ny juries and judges as unbiased. So did the citizens of Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. And that's your Constitutional right. BTW I looked up many ofvthe facts I posited above from CNN NEWSWEEK and other sources so if you respond please do the same and with respect to my exact statements. Me and my ilk would be most indebted to you.
Trump is the first American president ever elected who is not just ‘flawed - as. human beings they all have been in one way or another - but utterly disdainful of the democratic process, the Constitution, and the rule of law. His election spits in the face of every American who has lived, worked, fought, and when necessary died to protect and to maintain this Republic.
Millions of years of evolutionary adaption (biological and social) have created "traditional" roles as beneficial for the continued survival of the species. Don't @ me about matriarchal societies - there were none - images of goddesses and women idols speak to a time when mankind celebrated women as life givers before understanding the role of sex in reproduction, and aren't evidence of matriarchy.
Modern feminism is directly responsible for collapsing birth rates and the eventual destruction of societies that promote it.
Evolutionary fact. The thing is, the consequences take a while to hit. They are already biting, though.
Please consider that January 6th was an expression of the values enshrined in our founding documents: a political system that fails to serve its citizens can be confronted, and January 6th was simply a protest confronting a situation which the protesters firmly believed to be a coup by the Democratic Party.
Having become involved in poll watching and then formal election integrity efforts in 2016, I find merit in their concerns. But even if I hadn’t gained knowledge to support that analysis, I would still view that protest as in line with American founding principles. Examine the rhetoric used by the media and politicians who framed it as illegitimate, and I think a person knowledgeable about those founding principles and their implications will agree that that rhetoric undermined the key principle that government is only legitimate when it has the consent of the governed, and that government is required therefore to be wholly transparent, and to respond to inquiries as to its actions with open books and with complete honesty. The government did not respond that way in the days between the election and January 6, and the stakes were the highest. Therefore, citizen escalation of confrontation of the malfeasance is legitimate. I say malfeasance, because that is what government’s refusal to respond to inquiries as to the legitimacy of a vote is.
It may help to understand election law. In many cases, attempts to seek redress for suspect election handling were dismissed for reasons such as “lack of standing”. This does not mean that the vote or its count weren’t suspect. It means that regardless, the law does not permit most citizens to bring the situation to the election authority or to the court to be examined. The law is structured to allow fraudulent actions to go unchallenged, in other words.
When laws are discovered to be written that way, citizens who object are forced to fall back all the way to the Declaration of Independence, which asserts as a justification for the separation of the Colonies from their King that citizens have the right to determine the form of government that suits them. A law that does not allow citizens to inspect and challenge a problematic vote might not be a problem for some citizens, but that doesn’t mean that other citizens lose their “god given right”, or in other words, their innate right to challenge a government that claims it has no responsibility to act as though such a law did exist.
Understanding the election laws that caused claims of election (not “voter”) fraud to be dismissed in 2020 would be a big project and a deep and wide dive, I know. I think it’s necessary, though, for anyone who has claimed that they understand January 6 and deem it an illegitimate citizen action.
Add to that the various ways in which the assembled citizens were led to enter the building, by officials on site and by some individuals who then were not prosecuted by the commission, and I think a reasonable person will begin to question the official narrative. And again, that’s a narrative which as a relative rarity in American history, claims that the American government cannot be inspected by its citizens and cannot be called to account by “assembled citizens demanding redress”.
This is important: those citizens were peaceable against humans, and against the building ( although in any case, permission to enter our legislative buildings has been part of our national identity as a feature of that “by the people, for the people, of the people” credo), until and even after those unprosecuted persons riled and led the crowd to gain energy. With a riled crowd then part of the documented events, the narrative was able to focus on that, and conjoin that to statements describing what’s permitted of citizens as vastly different from how Americans have understood their rights to self-determination heretofore. Examine those statements and I think a reasonable person will see, they assert that the government is immutable and cannot be legitimately challenged in any meaningful way, even if its laws or its processes completely fail to serve the citizens. Keep in mind that the Declaration of Independence did not assert that citizens only have the right to challenge the government in ways permitted by the government. But that is what the new, post-January 6 narrative asserted. That narrative attempted to fundamentally alter the power and duty relationship between the citizens and the government.
That narrative came from the Democratic Party, from unelected bureaucrats, from specific members of the media, and from a set of Republicans thereafter known as RINOs (Republican in name only). This narrative’s rejection of the founding American principles is a key reason that many Americans voted against that party this time around. It’s not that people want to revolt. It’s that they require a government that is in check and fully accountable to the citizens. The government in power at that time fully rejected that notion. The grand narrative that followed January 6 attempted to make a mockery of the very concept of election integrity. Among many watchers of what’s been called “prestige television”, “election integrity” has become a dirty word. This is unacceptable.
Election integrity used to be something that American media and politicians claimed was essential to good governance. Its lack in other nations was used as an excuse for our military presence, and for domineering approaches to international relations. Isn’t it strange, therefore, that it suddenly became a concept to sneer about, when people began pointing out specific American locations where elections had been conducted without any integrity visible? I think a reasonable person should fold that into their contemplation of January 6 and of the events and discourse which followed.
As for the Georgia tape: I listened to the whole thing. Trump wasn’t asking the Secretary of State to go find him a specific number of votes to put him over the top. He was responding to demurrals about the scope and difficulty of a recount. The Georgia SoS was claiming that there was no reason to do a recount and that it would be too large a burden. Trump was pointing out that if that many votes were found, and he was certain they would be, they would prove the necessity. That is fundamentally the premise of any recount. In fact I have observed sample recounts and that is the mathematical relationship which, if unexpected tallies are found in the recount, indicates a problem with the initial count. (This doesn’t mean that election laws require all jurisdictions to do anything about an unexpected outcome of a recount, but again this takes us back to the principle that when a government is found to not meet the needs of the people, and laws that enforce honest elections and inspection of elections are certainly some of the needs of a citizenry, that government can be challenged by the citizens, whose consent is a requirement for any government’s continued existence).
The media and various politicians made a lot of hay out of a decontextualized and misrepresented snippet of what Trump said in that phone call. That misrepresentation was another demonstration of their contempt for the justifying principles of our government, and their intention to retain power while not submitting to evaluation by the citizens or even by their political opponent, who in election law always has the most standing, even though that also is never granted adequately to ensure election integrity.
I hope you will take what I’ve said seriously, and look at the January 6 event and its causes and aftermath with an aim to understanding what hasn’t been acknowledged or discussed by those who use it as an excuse to make enemies of the citizens, including Donald Trump, who found themselves in opposition to the managers of that election, and the politicians who used and defended that election’s, and our election law patchwork’s, lack of accountability and integrity. Thank you for your time in reading this.
WOW, just WOW, great post!
To quote Orwell: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
To quote Trotsky: "The Soviet bureaucracy is like all ruling classes in that it is ready to shut its eyes to the crudest mistakes of its leaders in the sphere of general politics, provided in return they show an unconditional fidelity in the defense of its privileges."
To quote Cicero: "To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law."
To quote Sowell: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
To quote Larry McDonald: "We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box".
On every topic, economic and social, the Democrat Party blatantly gaslit the public. They demanded that people publicly affirm statements that they, and we, knew to be blatantly false. They then persecuted (and prosecuted) dissent with shunning, censorship, firing, and lawfare, literally culminating in imprisoning political opponents using entirely unprecedented novel legal theories, while simultaneously exempting themselves and their favored groups from enforcement.
On the issue of "democracy", slightly more people trusted Trump and Republicans. A clear majority of people have said for years that the country is "on the wrong track". Democrats not only didn't listen or course correct, they insulted and attacked the people saying it. When the soap box fails, the people necessarily must deliver their rebuke via the ballot box.
I will just point out that Larry was borrowing that one from Fredrick Douglass.
I can't edit it now, but I appreciate the added context.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/our-flailing-elites?r=1neg52
Trump won because conservatives (and non-progressives) have spent years talking to poor and working class people-about gender ideology, inflation, bail reform, etc.
The Left has mostly refused to engage with anyone who doesn’t already agree with them. There are some nimble and heterodox Democrats willing to mix it up, certainly, but Leftists as a whole simply do not enter the spaces I’m in (Substack, history podcasts, warehouse work, contracting) and they try to characterize anyone who disagrees as a bigot. When possible they use stigma or administrative penalty to shut down speech, which we’ve seen again and again.
I love watching debates! There are standing offers to debate a number of controversial political topics which have gone unanswered for YEARS. 3 debates on youth gender transition policy were made… but the ‘pro-‘ side backed out after activists (on the Left) put pressure on them.
The right is now the wing of ordinary working folks willing to respect and speak with anyone. The left is the side of educated folks who believe their graduate education in public health or graphic design entitles them to make policy and they largely avoid interactions and debates with regular people.
Look at all the folks saying this election was a referendum on racism or fascism. Do you think any of them have spoken to even ONE Trump voter? Of course not. They already know they’re right and you’re wrong. Why won’t you see it?! When you combine that tendency with the fact that these people are the richest, loneliest, most mentally ill cohort in human history you’re left with a movement on a slow glide path downwards. The descent is beginning to steepen now…
What would be, in your opinion/experience, the best way for a politician to enter, say, a warehouse space? So as to really hear/see/listen/understand without making it “about them”? I mean if such an environment isn’t a natural extension of their preexisting world (a genuine q)?
I don’t think a POLITICIAN could… but a normal person could! That’s my point. I work with hundreds of men (mostly black) every day and NONE of them buy Leftist ideas. Some probably do in private but everyone agrees: prices are too high; college is too expensive; the border situation is crazy. In 2020 most of them were saying that defunding the police was fucking dumb. This was while educated white people were posting black squares on IG, from their expensive apartments to which police would respond with alacrity if they received a call. THESE IDEAS ARE NOT POPULAR and I suspect that if Leftists entered these spaces and tried to engage with normal folks (many of whom are canny and some brilliant) they would be amazed at how silly they came off. Such interactions would probably result in the Leftists changing… not the masses. Climate change, gender ideology, DEI… we debate these issues and display a range of opinions. But nobody is progressive. The only progressives I know are (for the most part) young ladies with graduate degrees.
I hear you!! Totally. How could a normal person who doesn’t work there actually find themselves in a position to hear all of that directly, from those guys? It’s sorely needed, to be sure. I’m just trying to imagine how it would actually happen, like how do people visit warehouse spaces without obnoxiously interrupting the work day, etc?
Yeah you can’t just go visit a warehouse or a job site or a factory to talk to people 😂. But these folks spend time other places where conversation is easier. Barber shops and bars, definitely. Trucking is the #1 job for men without a college degree. A person could go to a truck stop and hang out all day and just talk to people (mostly-but not all-men). Church is popular among some and anyone can go to a church, as long as you don’t mind a lot of people coming up and asking your name 😂 . My church is as diverse as can be-it’s literally almost a demographic reflection of the U.S. in terms of ages/races. Most people are Trump supporters (just because Biden was considered to be hostile towards Christianity, which I don’t agree with but it’s the general opinion) but some people support Harris (mostly older women). Again, though, nobody wants to dismantle the patriarchy. Everyone loves the US and what it stands for. Nobody wants to hamper small businesses to address climate change or opposes deporting migrants who have committed crimes.
The people are out there (millions of them!), and they’re willing to talk to ANYONE. If you went into these spaces and said you were a Harris voter and you wanted to hear their side they would be completely friendly and honest and happily speak to you for hours. What if I return to the gender studies department at U of AZ or the NYT building or a homeless nonprofit and said I was a Trump voter? What kind of reaction do you think I would receive? Hours of friendly conversation from hard-working and humble people? Or hostility from a group that thinks that I’m ignorant and reactionary? I can make a guess.
You know what really strikes me? All of the journalists and commenters worried about anti-democratic or racist or sexist sentiment among Trump supporters… I bet none of them has ever really spoken to people like these. They’re forming a world based upon Twitter and colleagues and Trump speeches and ignoring 75% of the country. It’s sad, in my opinion. I wish I could tell them: venture out here. It’s pretty nice 🇺🇸
Such a great answer, James. I really appreciate this and I agree in so many ways. I have had a similar experience in heavily R spaces (even recently), experiencing the people as mostly friendly, warm, open, and willing to talk. I have also experienced some assumptions on their part, ie people thinking that they're talking to someone who shares their underlying beliefs about Jesus, for example (though I am Jewish), but that's probably because I didn't announce myself as a Jewish Democrat. I wanted to actually hear what they had to say, what they think about and care about, and not shut down conversation or make it awkward. Which is on me - who's to say that it would have become awkward (and not really the Jewish part; more the Democrat part, to be clear)? I also agree that while there would certainly be exceptions, your point is valid about the reverse: I think there would probably be more fear (in the form of open scorn/judgment/superiority) coming towards you from those places were you to announce yourself as a trump voter. I wonder where you're located?
I haven't spent much time in the South, but I do know the reputation and got a taste of it on a recent trip to Nashville (which I know is more representative of urban environments in general, in terms of political leanings, but still). I loved it. I kept texting my husband that we were moving to Nashville. :) But my point is, there is definitely a vibe difference (I don't think anyone could argue with me!) between, say, Boston (which, don't get me wrong, I love very much) and Nashville. Not necessarily having anything to do with political persuasion, but just in terms of warmth vs a general cultural guardedness. And that guardedness is perhaps only reinforced by the media/academic/gatekeeping cultural institutions that so heavily populate those regions. If I had to come up with a word to describe the culture in the most absurdly generalized way possible, it might be "unrelaxed."
And when people are not relaxed within themselves, it is easier to shut down/shut out others, to let fear take over. I have observed this within myself. This is not to say that I don't agree with much (!!) of what Democrats fear in Trump (as in the man/leader and the things he plans to do); but I think it's really important to distinguish between Donald Trump and people who voted for Donald Trump, and to — just as you suggest — step outside of those disembodied circles of commentary and opinion and actually be with real, unique, individual people. I am grateful for the dialogue.
I'm living in South Florida right now. I moved down here to go to rehab ~6 years ago (I was in Law school in Delaware). I've lived all over though: Alaska, NYC, Arizona, North Carolina, Afghanistan. SoFlo feels like home in a way that few places have, but I'm considering moving to the mid-Atlantic next year to be closer to my parents.
Anyway, I think there are 2 separate issues here: temperament, and intellectual open-mindedness. They definitely intersect and overlap though. Southerners and Midwesterners DO have a kind of natural warmth but the bigger issue (in my opinion) is a rarely-stated assumption: folks with professional jobs and college degrees are SMARTER (better) than others. They never say this outright but I'm seeing a lot of that subtext in the post-election dialogue. Latinos were tricked. "Uneducated" women (the actual commentators verbiage) went for Trump. The "rabble" (verbatim from another exchange) broke for fascism. "People want a strong man" or a "daddy". This is incredibly condescending and I don't actually think these factors are decisive.
I would actually agree that college graduates probably do have higher IQ's than non-, on average. However, working class people have unique skills and experiences that I believe make them BETTER judges of policy outcomes, overall. I would rather consult a restaurant owner or a trucker or a contractor to understand what the economic reality is in America and what kinds of common sense solutions might be found, rather than a college professor or a lobbyist or a graphic designer.
Look at the Left's record on policy: defund the police, Covid lookdowns, decommissioning nuclear power plants... There's a lot of science supporting the fact that fairly smart people (midwits) tend to be particularly easily captured by ideology. They're JUST smart enough to convince themselves that their emotional biases and affiliations are correct. I think there's something to that.
The longer they cling to their psychological class prejudices the more power they will lose.
We could all learn to challenge our own assumptions and listen to others more (you sound very kind and open-minded and I've enjoyed this exchange!). That's a discipline, and it's hard for everyone. However, you will be more receptive to the realities of the world AND more persuasive to others if you approach them as equals. It's ironic that for an ideology rooted in radical egalitarianism, snobbiness should be such an obstacle!
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/scout-mindset
I’ve said before that policymakers and journalists and politicians should HAVE to spend extended periods of time among the following groups: teachers, workers, ex-cons, and the lumpenproletariat (people in rehabs and county jails and DOL offices). THAT’s your country. Without that exposure (JD Vance already has a deep familiarity) you’re just governing for investors and professors and lawyers and corporations. Their lives are already fairly safe and comfortable. They shouldn’t have monopoly control over policy-making as well.
Totally agree.
Keep in mind that Trump was a former real estate developer, so he knew how to interact with, say, construction workers. He himself may not have been such a worker, but he dealt with those people for decades and knew how to speak their language.
He was also a salesman, so he knew how to interpret what audiences thought about a product.
In general, it's a good idea for politicians/policy wonks to actually have real jobs. A LOT of Ds simply go straight from academia into the media or some kind of government/administrative job, with no real work experience outside of that.
It's been pointed out lately that journalism, for example, USED TO BE a blue-collar job. Local guys would work their city streets. Today, journalism is an elitist position (and boy, oh boy, can you feel it with every word they say!). There's been a fundamental disconnect away from the "regular people" and towards the safe spaces of the ivory towers.
Trump never interacted with construction workers. He hired their companies, who got the contract because of low wages and undocumented immigrant workers. Then he stiffed the companies.
dont be a politician. be a representative. then you know where you came from and who your people are. ypu dont need to enter that space, because it is your space. the idea that some detached politician should represent these people in the first place is wrong.
I think that's really true on a local level, but if you get higher up and start representing more people (like, say, the Senate), then that becomes more difficult. If you hold a statewide office, it's still really important to stay connected to all elements of your community, but there isn't really a way to achieve that authentically across such a wide geographic region. This is by no means a defense or excuse (and I am not a Senator!), just an articulation of how I am trying to understand the problem of these disconnects.
Four female friends (three former self-described progressives, one former never-Trumper) in blue states told me they were going to vote for Trump. All college-educated professionals with good jobs. Their motivations were antisemitism, corporate ESG excesses, and gender & race ideology in schools. Only one seemed to have gone down what I would consider to be a rabbit role.
They all told me their plans because they knew I wouldn't judge them (I've had my own issues with woke ideology), unlike their other friends, colleagues and even family.
In my view, diminishing people's real "lived experience" concerns while explaining they are missing out on The Real Problems, is a great way to alienate electorate. By now, the majority of Americans - across classes, sexes and races - feel this is what has happened to them.
This sounds accurate for many people I know. If you are already in a blue state, abortion issues are (mostly) neutralized in terms of what your vote can do. Therefore, opposition to woeful education policies, antisemitism, and gender-ideology no longer have to be subsumed to that broader goal.
Yes. Three of the four are mothers, who despite all being pro-choice said they were more worried about their kids (antisemitism, race & gender ideology in schools) than abortion (or Trump's character, which they highlighted as a concern). Based on the strength of their conviction, I would guess that they would have voted the same in swing states. I do take your point on the luxury of a protest vote in a swing state.
Tow big reasons. First, the left moderates walked away from dems. I’m a liberal parent in California and my daughter got sucked into the gender insanity hard. After three years of hitting up against it (the eating clinic insisted on testosterone to treat her ARFID from autism, being told by the dentist to get right with the pronouns, school scolding me, neighbors wanting to take her for a walk to get her away from us), I decided to move our family abroad to get her away from the ideology. It’s EVERYWHERE and SO many kids around us were swept up, even my sister’s daughter (see below). It really is true. Many parents like me have found each other and we are angry.
Second, I’m from the Deep South and most of my family are conservative. The dems have left them high and dry. My sister is more concerned about how to afford filling up her gas tank to get to work than what pronouns she uses or than being scolded for being a ‘cis heteronormative white woman’. The dems have completely lost touch with the reality of most Americans, who are truly struggling, have little savings and are just trying to get through the day without too much stress or hardship. They don’t want to be called racist (most are not!), homophobic, or nazis.
It’s been very revealing the past week watching the sheer amount of hatred coming from dem voters towards everyone, one even slyly posted a picture of a cute puppy and then went on a rant about white men in the description. They refuse to self reflect to their detriment. I had already lost a lot of liberal friends over the trans issue (they walked away, not me), and sadly, I suspect more might walk. My conservative family is eager to talk and I’m eager to listen to them, and they me. Until dems are able to listen to other viewpoints, not much will improve I’m afraid.
Thank you for sharing your story here. Hope that you are finding life in the EU less judgmental and more supportive of parental authority. Our daughter is also stuck in the cult and at a school where all the adults affirm her boy identity. And the parents send scolding looks my way when I “misgender” my own child. It’s crazy-making. My biggest fear is some well-meaning teacher trying to “rescue” her from us.
If I were in your position, I would do everything within my power to remove my child from that school environment.
Aww, I’m sorry to hear it’s a struggle there. It just is unrelenting, right? Everywhere you turn. I will say things are much, much, much better here. The doctors all insist on using her legal name and sex, no one is buying into the narrative, no one encourages, hardly a trans flag seen anywhere, well except certain cities nearby. And we’re seeing a very slow walking away from it all. Tonight she said she really loves it here. Hang in there, I feel like the tide is turning, they say seven years ….. we’re on year three ……
Extremism is why the Dems lost.
I think there were several problems, and it’s obvious.
1. Kamala is a master at the internal politics of the Democratic Party, but she is not a national leader who can appeal to swing state voters. She comes off as fake. She can’t answer questions directly. She paid lip service to moderation without explaining how she stopped being 2019 Kamala. People can see that. They aren’t dumb.
2. A couple of structural political issues, namely, the economy and the border. People hate inflation. People hate rampant illegal immigration at the southern border. The world feels more unstable now to many. Whether or not it’s true/fair, people blame Biden for these mistakes. She “owns” some of this structural stuff from the Biden admin, much of it she can’t control. And she did an insufficient job distancing herself from the current administration and atoning for what they could control (immigration).
3. The woke stuff is extremely unpopular. Kamala did an insufficient job of disowning these people.
4. The Democratic party is run by a bunch of out-of-touch elitists who come off as having contempt for many ordinary Americans in the middle of the country. Democrats have not been empathetic to the concerns of normal people, especially working class men, for some time. Dems need to fight Trump with actual empathy, not revolution or screaming racism. Empathy is not calling rural white people privileged because they are white while dismissing every concern they have as racist and stupid. It’s listening to and taking these concerns seriously.
5. Trump has been underestimated for far too long. His strategy whittled away at the democratic base, hurting the “turnout is everything” game in key areas. When he gets out of his own way, he can be very effective.
6. There is an anti-incumbent movement globally. These electoral headwinds work against her.
7. The liberal media establishment does two things simultaneously: it eats itself alive with criticism and negativity about everything, and is hysterical about Trump, giving him free ads 24/7.
8. Democrats are not good at building a big tent party right now. If you’re anti-abortion, anti-woke, or against them on some cultural issues, it’s difficult to sincerely be in the party. Too many litmus tests.
9. Elites have lost trust with the public, but Democrats communicate with the public as if this loss of trust hasn’t happened. The “smart” people in the room lost their credibility with Iraq, 2008, COVID, and on culture. You need to govern competently to regain this trust, and it’s too easy to argue that Democrats didn’t do so.
10. There is a genuine appeal to much of Trump’s agenda. If people believe that the political system doesn’t work for them, it’s fundamentally corrupt and filled with those unaccountable to the public interest, or worse, controlled by those who hold them in contempt, then of course they will want to break it and throw out the elites who run things. It’s not disruption for the sake of disruption. That’s what Trump offers.
Excellent response.
This is hands down the best post.
I’m a college educated middle aged white woman. I’m fortunate that our HHI is high enough that inflation didn’t hurt us. Below are some of the reasons why I voted for Trump.
Democrats as a whole seem to be a miserable group of people. Whether on the national level (tv and magazine/newspaper “journalists”) or local (friends and relatives), many spew hate at every opportunity, at Trump, Republicans, and their supporters. They are condescending, intolerant, and hyperbolic. I did not see this from conservatives.
Illegal immigration - denying it’s an issue, spending millions of dollars to support them, treating them better than US citizens who need help. Ignoring the crimes they committed.
Transgender stuff - the puberty blockers and surgeries on minors is a bridge too far. Everyone should live how they wish…. once they are an adult. And none of it belongs in our schools. It’s clear that social contagion is playing a role based on the number of kids that identify as transgender.
Education - Teachers should not be activists. Teachers should not share or push their political views. Teachers should not keep information from parents. Fill those 7-8 hours a day teaching the basics. No kid moves forward without mastering the material. No one should be graduating high school that doesn’t know how to read! Teach critical thinking. Allow school choice.
Free speech - the Twitter files were a huge reason I voted for Trump. Our first amendment is vital.
Lawfare - get Trump at any cost was the Dem’s strategy. It was clear that some of the suits against him were lawfare. To me, the years spent investigating him and twisting the law into a pretzel just showed there was no there there. Re: Jan 6: because there is little reason to trust our government (or those who report our news) and many reasons not to trust them, I remain skeptical about what actually happened that day and why. I’m not sure we will ever get an entire truthful accounting.
Honestly, I would have forgiven the attempts to charge Trump for Jan 6th, or even the classified documents, if only the Attorney General had done it seriously.
If Garland had come flat-out and said, within 30 days of his confirmation, "I think I have a case against Trump, I expect the appeals to take years, I promise to follow all relevant regulations very carefully, but I have a duty to complete the legal issues as soon as possible, so I'm filing charges right now, and let's see where the law takes us...."
I could have understood that. That would have been a fair fight, and it's arguably the attorney general's job, and he might even have had a case.
Instead.... he avoided the issue for two years for reasons he never explained in any plausible way, and then once the Jan 6th committee essentially hounded him into filing charges, he appointed a special prosecutor who arguably wasn't qualified to receive that appointment constitutionally or under the regulations of the DOJ, refused to fix it when called on it, bungled the Hunter Biden prosecutions too, and overall, seemed to be working really hard to accomplish two goals:
1. Make Trump look bad during the 2024 election.
2. Don't let the DOJ actually accomplish anything actually important or interesting or in a timely way.
That sort of mix of laziness and clear political motivation behind the prosecutions was absolutely ruinous. The democrats would have had far more credibility if they'd actually draw a line between 'fair prosecution tactics' and 'humiliating attempts to ignore the laws and standards for fair procedures'
The Georgia cases might have been defensible if they'd had a better prosecutor. The jan 6th and classified documents deserved a fair trial, with all the I's dotted and T's crossed and multi-year appeals heard. The New York prosecutions were fundamentally unjust. And if Dems wanted to be the 'rule of law' party, they should have SAID those things, not just eagerly cheered for any and all cases, no matter how flawed.
Were you worried, as you voted for Trump, that he could end democracy as we know it?
I agree with much of what you list here - but I could never have voted for him, based on what my German grandparents told me of the years leading up to 1932. I am nauseated by Trump, yet angry at the Democrats for being controlled by over-educated, Brahmin, navel-gazing warriors...
Not at all, in fact the opposite. All the reasons the left gave for why Trump was a danger to democracy were actually things they had done or are doing. Trump is a bloviator, and personally I dont like that, but most people who voted for him know that it’s just talk. And we have four years of his leadership to look back on. He has some very good people along with him this time around. I think it will bring some needed balance. Trump got the better party switchers for sure.
All of what you said mirrors my own considerations. I was also deeply skeptical that the Dems would keep us out of war. I am not willing to let my son die for those joyless scolds who clearly hate this country and its people.
I so hope you are right!
I do not agree with you. In my opinion, populism can develop a terrifying life of its own - that is indeed the lesson of Germany in the early 1930s. I believe our electorate has chosen an unbelievably dangerous experiment - but I agree with you that the alternative was not appealing.
As my favorite NYT writer Bret Stephens put it, before the election: "A Trump win
makes me nauseous. A Harris win makes me scared."
some people that voted for Trump saw the totalitarian tendencies coming from the dems. they already ended democracy as we knew it.
I beg to differ on Trump supporters being nice, some probably are, but, where I live they definitely are not..I don[t ever insult anyone, not my style, but, I have been insulted and threatened and repeatedly called evil for being a lib..( not a dem, independent)...plus all their nasty signs on their yards in on their trucks...they are not all nice people, and I am not using any isms either...they are just rude and uncvil and some of them are pretty scary
Certainly not all, but a big enough group that I have noticed...hate libs and they only desire is to hurt us, something I would never advocate, yet I get accused of
I generally as to the issues on the left ( though I am a center left anyway) that turned away a lot of people, but, I don't think those are the only reasons all of the people who voted for him have...many do just want to hurt those they disagree with...something I would never advocate but
I think this is a very important aspect, Angie. I agree with you, and I believe many here do: A substantial part of MAGA is exactly what you describe. They are not interested in dialogue, and they want to dominate and/or destroy.
But Yascha's question was; Why did Trump win? And Trump could not win with only those MAGA voters, whatever their percentage of voters is. He needed the decent Rs and former Ds - and that is where much of what has been written here comes into play.
Trump won because of wokeness,the average person doesn't understand tariffs,geopolitics or economic issues,but they understand men punch harder than women.And when elites like you downplay wokeness they think you don't have their best interests in mind
This election was a referendum on who and what is valued in American society. If you truly can't understand DT's appeal, might I gently suggest that you might belong to the favored half, the half whose views are socially acceptable, the half whose work conveys some element of prestige. Surely this was partly about work and respect, and how "marginalization," for most Americans, refers not to any identity but the one you adopt in reference to your work, and to the fact that most of the work that's done by most Americans is not respected.
I can only describe my motivation for my vote.
1. The view of the left/progressives that denigrates those who have a different point of view. Calling people Nazi's. Fascists, Deplorables, Garbage, Liars, Felons, Racists, Misogynists, Toxic (men), Illiterate, Backward, Xenophobes, etc. Very similar to totalitarians of all stripes and there isn't much ground you have to cover to get to start removing the liberties of those you see as less. To paraphrase Lao Tsu, when people don't respond to the moral man, he rolls up his sleves and uses force.
2. Double standards. Exacerbated by the medias failure to call them out and gaslighting those who do.
3. Trust. What has the left done to earn trust? The abortive attempt to set up the Ministry of Truth? Joe's fine and can still function without notes and a teleprompter? We picked Kamala because the earned it? Masks work? We're not going to ban your gas stover? Trumps Charlottesville comments. I can't believe a word they say. Many will point out Trump as a liar, but what about your lies?
4. Distorted view of reality. The 1619 project, DEI, energy policy, immigration policy, fiscal policy. I'm not sure what world they live in but isn't one I know.
Also, I am sorry but as long as republicans talk about “hellhole” and “war zone” democrat cities, they are going to get some heat back. There is a seed of truth to both disorder in cities and country people being uneducated and bigoted.
Urban area don’t have bigoted and uneducated people? Let’s add to the list FEMA instructing relief workers to avoid residences with Trump sign. I guess that person must be from Ohio.
Would you prefer to talk to a COVID-infected person with a mask on or without one?
Is that like have you stopped beating your spouse?
#1 Global conflict. If you are not strong your enemies do not fear you and your friends can not depend on you.
#2 Economy - I can see the state of the economy with my own eyes.
#3 ILLEGAL imigrants getting better benefits than citizens is just backwards.
#4 Wokeness and identity politics - forcing positions that violate my basic values does not sit well.
#5 MSM - cheerleading for Harris and pulling a 180 where she went from the most unpopular vice president to a savvy politician.
#6 Harris did not articulate policy positions clearly. I did not want 4 more years of the same let alone her shifting to the left after the election.
Total moral failure on the Israel/Palestine issue.
A situation where doubling of GDP in a generation has not trickled down to the bottom half of the population.
And the trans kids issue. We all laughed at Trump for saying you might drop your boy off at school and when you come to collect him he's turned into a girl. But this plays on a completely rational anxiety that when you come to collect him he's come to believe that he is a girl. Public policy in the UK is now much more critical of the entire trans-concept, having been influenced by major reviews (Cass Review at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/ and summarised in Wikipedia, British Medical Journal major review, open access, at https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382 which concluded that "The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment") Unfortunately, none of this seems to be noticed in the US, where the Democratic Party is still uttering LGBTQI+ shibboleths.
How will Trump be better for Israel/Palestine? Do you believe he just magically solve all the conflicts.
Trump is a realist. If he hews to a realist foreign policy, he will acknowledge that the conflicts of the middle east have been going on for thousands of years and cannot be solved. They can only be mitigated. Eradication of Iranian proxies in the Arab world will achieve that mitigation. As for the Palestinians, Israel themselves have let it be clear that when they have a trustworthy, competent partner to negotiate peace, there will be peace. It's on the Palestinians to get their house in order.
I do not know how long you have been following the situation. It has been Israeli policy, going back to the old days of the Mapai supremacy, to encourage control of Gaza by the most intransigent representatives of the Palestinians, in order to enfeeble the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, and Hamas was, directly before October 7, responsible under Israeli supervision for the distribution of Gulf States aid in Gaza. From your remarks, you seem to be taking the Netanyahu government's statements at face value. I think that is a failure of logic.
That’s not inconsistent with what I said. But there’s also some spin on it. You’re seeing the situation through western eyes. Don’t. Gaza has been a hotbed since David slew Goliath. Israel wants peace. It wants the Palestinians to be adults. But to the Palestinians, the kind of partner Israel wants is anathema to them culturally. It asks them to be less Arab and more Western. To ignore honor and pride and history. Can’t have it both ways. Israel rules the roost. Eventually, if Palestinians want peace and autonomy, they will have to make the decision to become something they are not presently willing to become. And there’s nothing any western nation can do to expedite that process. It has to happen organically. Best we can do is assist in the deconstruction of Hamas and Hezbollah.
>>it has been Israeli policy, going back to the old days of the Mapai supremacy, to encourage control of Gaza by the most intransigent representatives of the Palestinians, in order to enfeeble the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank
A very curious sentence considering that "Mapai supremacy" ended in 1977 at the latest, whereas the Palestinian Authority didn't exist before the mid 90s...
Indeed, nor did Hamas. Islamic Jihad was played off against the PLO. Good catch. And at that time the PLO was irredentist and terrorist. But still, in retrospect, not a smart move
I’ve been following it for 30 years and this is a very, let’s say *specific* description of Israeli policy that in no way offers anything of value when discussing the current situation. Leveraging various semi and fully terrorist groups against each other to neutralize a hostile territory is normal politics.
Trump has no desire to let this conflict drag on endlessly, and takes quite a bit of pride in his "no new wars" talking point. He will want to end both the Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine wars very quickly. Whether people like how he does that is a different story.
Of course I believe nothing of the sort. He will, if he can, make things even worse. But the question was, why did Trump win, and part of the answer is people refusing to vote for an administration colluding in genocide. I have heard this said by people who would otherwise have been out there actively campaigning for Harris.
You are correct, Paul. This is a common sentiment among progressive voters,
It is completely false - but that doesn't mean it isn't an opinion held by many voters
This segment of voters is so much smaller and much more inconsequential than you want to realize. The irony is that people on the “other side” also when for Trump, so how did that strategy work out? Protest abstentions are a part of democracy, but on this issue they were pointless. Kamala was the only person that wanted that vote and she lost.