From an interview with Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon:
This was made worse by the arrival of Donald Trump. Trump was what liberals imagine a working-class person would be like if they came into money. They would obviously get a golden toilet and buy a model wife. Trump rejected all of their liberal mores. He was a perfect aesthetic encapsulation of white, liberal-elite angst about what the working classes are imagined to want.
I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of Trump voters. All of them, apart from one, said to me that Trump should stop tweeting and making racist comments, and should stop being so undignified. They wanted him to focus on governing. The idea that working-class people were in it for all that gross commentary was just wrong – they were not. But the media, of course, could not get enough of it. So liberals totally missed what Trump was about and what made him successful, which was the hunger for economic populism among the working classes.
From the latest post by White Hot Harlots:
Stressing difference is no way to build a coalition. It is, by definition, the opposite of what you need to do to build a coalition. There is no means of understanding race as deterministic and inalterable that does not result in privileging certain groups over others. That’s the obvious, undeniable fallacy of so-called “intersectionality.” All this can possibly accomplish–and what it’s accomplishing right now, right before our eyes in an objective and measurable manner–is the splintering of the Democratic base, supposed allies pitted against one another as they strive to reach the top of the pyramid of conceptual victimhood. If anyone else gets help, they’re evil. Everything should go to me. Decency is zero sum. I cannot be happy unless everyone else is miserable. Your success is my failure. The problem is not structural. The problem is that the other exists.
Ungar-Sargon and the pseudonymous WHH approach the same truth from slightly different angles. Namely, that American liberalism has gradually become its own antithesis. The political team that you expect to side with the poor and working classes has become disgusted by them and now sees them as the enemy. But there's no way to come out and say, "We need to put the poors back in their place," without sounding like a Bourbon. The race angle, ugly as it is, is also the most plausible cover story. Spend enough time vilifying white trash and their white trash ways and you can convince your cohorts that these chuds deserve whatever they get. You can also distract from the fact that you're also screwing over lower class people of color, who--to take one example--don't actually want their neighborhoods de-policed.
Is this a recipe for electoral success? I'm not sure anyone cares. The upper echelons of the Democratic Party appear to have given up on governing and put everything into fundraising. The refusal to pivot from COVID makes much more sense from this vantage point. Almost two years in, telling your subjects that of course triple-vaxxed five-year-olds should continue to mask as they attend Zoom kindergarten will leave most of them cold. But a few will believe it, and you can tap them pretty hard for funds.
2 comments:
While I'd have to agree with those who wished Donald Trump would tone down his rhetoric somewhat it's true he had to endure the worst support of any president I've ever heard of or read about. He tried to recruit reliable supporters of the policy positions he espoused but the fact is he didn't know enough people in DC to be able to staff his administration properly. Instead, he got traitors and incompetents.
It's been a very long time since either political party really had representatives who honestly believed in either conservatism or liberalism. It costs so much money to run any kind of political campaign that what most of the members of Congress spend their time doing is looking for donors while making promises to the voters they don't intend to keep.
The last thing the country needs is more of the hard-core partisans who've been entering lately, same with careerists and opportunists who bend their beliefs to the prevailing political winds. Wouldn't it make a nice change to have some moderates who really care about getting things done, spend more time asking questions and researching, and are focused on the people's interests rather than their own and the party's.
Meanwhile, the middle class has been decimated financially these past two years and more. I think the natives may be getting restless.
His rhetoric seems in a lot of cases to be someone in over their head vamping to cover. Not knowing what he should say he falls back on the familiar. Some people find this charming. Some find it the opposite of that. In some ways it doesn't matter. Trump is an amateur and it shows in the results. What I've come to see over the past couple of years is that the professionals can be just as stupid and just as evil, and more likely to get away with it.
The promises they make in public to the public they immediately break. The promises made sub rosa to sinister mega-donors are actually kept. If and when the average citizen figures out their place in the pecking order it's likely to send them into despair, which is also useful for those at the top.
Hardcore partisans and political careerists alike tend to hang out in the same kind of spaces--largely virtual ones these days. It leads to an echo chamber effect where the test of a policy is whether it appeals to the like-minded few. Ideologues with a blatantly antigovernment agenda often subvert their official duties, yes, but it turns out big government supporters are not necessarily any better
Anyway, I hope the natives do get restless. People shouldn't be forced to accept an inferior position.
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