Ordinarily, I think a nominee is not harmed by having been attacked in primaries by members of the extreme wing of their party. Because I think it helps them pivot to the general election when they need to appear more moderate, and having been defined that way in the primaries is helpful in that respect.
What was different about this election was that the general election was not really an ideological one. There was very little focus on legitimate issues and focused inordinately on relatively trivial matters like emails, quasi-scandals, and various obnoxious statements by Trump. As a result, the fact that Clinton was portrayed as more moderate than she actually is didn’t help her with the newly attuned moderates. But it did hurt her enthusiasm-wise with the progressive element of her constituency.
The “arc of history” view is a bromide that liberals pass around to make themselves feel better. Sometimes the Mongols come in and burn your cities to the ground, throw the works of your greatest library in the river, fill up all your canals, and you never recover.
That’s bullshit. Overall–as is pretty persuasively argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature–we’re getting better as a species. It has nothing to do with your stupid assertion that it’s something liberals say to make themselves feel better, and you should feel ashamed for saying something so dumb.
But in this case, the arc has twisted back on itself.
Well, she sure has practice with concession speeches.
I think it was Wolf Blitzer today (not sure) who said something like, “Hillary concedes to the man who crushed her presidential hopes”, and my first thought was, Obama? Bill? Wiener?
I don’t agree. We are just as shitty as our ancestors were. We just have better technology, so we can kill more hundreds of thousands at a time. The Mongols had swords and arrows. We have nuclear devices.
People are allowed to vote for whoever they want to. It is up to the candidates and parties to convince them to vote for them. That they don’t vote the way you want them to is not their fault. It is yours.
I can’t show it’s a liberal shibboleth. Anecdotally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen conservatives fall back on that sort of humanistic idealism. I associate it strongly with liberals and their conception of progressive history, especially after they take a hit on the chin, like when abortion centers are closed en masse, or black people are shot by police with no repercussions, or when Trump of all people wins. It’s a good coping method. I just think it’s more akin to a religious belief.
I don’t believe Pinker is well regarded academically, outside of his field. Similar to Jared Diamond and Sam Harris. His book is fairly contentious. He’s a liberal, as far as I know.
My main point is there’s no particular reason to think things will improve. It will take a lot of fighting to get out of this hole. And sometimes you lose. Like the Cathars, Native Americans, or most anyone who upset the Mongols. The arc didn’t bend for them. There’s no reason it has to bend for American liberalism.
Listen asshole, don’t fucking blame us when your party’s standard bearer sucked up to Trump in 2012, giving the birther-in-chief legitimacy. How many Republicans denounced him?
Your party is the party of misogynists, xenophobes and racists.
I suppose you are going to now pit the low income blacks who weren’t able to vote because of restrictions your party put on them.
My Texan born, racist brother-in-law told me that he quit the Republican party because it changed. Thank god for that. You took the Black-hating, white trash and gave them a good home.
Don’t blame Hillary. It’s your party which doesn’t care about facts and is ready to trash America.
If Hillary was a man, she would never have been first lady and her political acareer would never have gotten off the ground. She would be a partner at a law firm somewhere on wall street paying the former first lady hundreds of thousands of dollars for a 30 minute speech to make her feel better about her role in destroying the economy in 2008.
By Theodore Parker around 1850ish, paraphrased in its short form (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”) by MLK at a speech to the SCLC .
Notice the original refers to a faith in something long term that you cannot really understand how it will come about. But faith or no, sometimes individual persons or nations will not only never make it to the top of the mountain, but will get clobbered good and hard in the attempt. Does not mean the arc gets interrupted.
But you’re missing my question then. If they didn’t like that stuff about him, yet it at least puts him on par with Hillary (or worse), then why did they dislike her more and completely discount his behavior? It’s like opposing the Hatfields, yet signing up to join the McCoys.
I don’t pit Hillary; I pit Barack Hussein Obama who moved the party so far to the left Hillary couldn’t be the naturally centrist Hillary that she was a FLOTUS and Senator. Had she, Bernie would’ve beaten her in today’s party.
Barry Hussein Obama moving the party so far left with his stupid “transformational Presidency” is what helped destroy Clinton so badly in the red states and get Trump to the win in the purple states. HE is the one to be pitted. And Obama moved left in his second term too, knowing a successor was to be in order. Hillary was a much better WH shot in 2008; she woulda won then by more than Obama did; WV was polling for her vs. McCain back in 2008. She was polling well in Kentucky vs him in 2008; he was piss poor.
Obama created this mess by being a divisive President and wading into divisive issues in his second term, and now we have POTUS elect Donald Trump.
If Hillary had said any of these things it wouldn’t have helped her at all. She would have only lost harder. If a parallel universe version of Hillary with more charisma had said any of those things, she would have definitely won the election.
Have you ever worked in a call centre? I’ve worked in a few and one of the first things they teach you is that 93% of human communication is totally non-verbal. I forget the exact percentages, but about 60% of communication comes entirely from body language, and the rest is all down to tone of voice, cadence, and inflection. That’s where charisma comes from. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Hillary’s non-verbal communication skills are some of the worst I’ve ever seen. She looks awkward in front of a crowd, she yells into the microphone, her posture is stilted, her sense of humour is awful (remember “Pokemon Go-to-the-polls”? Ugh, Jesus Christ…), and she’s basically the walking antithesis of everything a good campaigner needs to be.
Now, please bear in mind I’m saying good campaigner, not good President. I think Hillary would have made a good President, and I’m 100% convinced that Trump will be one of, if not the worst Presidents America has ever had. But as a campaigner, he beat Hillary hands down. He beat her on body language, tone of voice, humour, spontaneity, stage presence and, most importantly, he actually looked like he was enjoying himself. Hillary only beat him on policy, which most people don’t really care about. And we know they don’t care about it because none of Trump’s flagship policies are remotely workable. Ultimately, it all came down to charisma, as it always does and as it always will.
Except that Clinton isn’t the one who got mugged. We are. Clinton was supposed to be the cop who kept us safe from the mugger, except instead of doing that, she tripped over her shoelaces, dropped her gun, and got beat up by the mugger before he proceeded to run off with our wallet.
Sure, the mugger deserves the lion’s share of the blame, here, but if the cop can’t stop one mugger, then maybe they should have gotten a different job.
Im certainly not arguing against the charisma angle, but I must ask… did you see any of the debates? In every one that I watch, Hillary looked as close to carefree (for the most part) as she is capable of. She looked confident, at ease and happy. By contrast, he came across as a sulking, ill-tempered, two year old on the verge of either a tantrum or a heart attack. He hulked and skulked and snorted and rolled his eyes. He sneered and whined and acted, for all purposes, that he felt like the only way he could dominate the situation was if he physically bullied the people involved.
Now, I don’t know if the folks that voted for him want that sort of behavior or if others view that as charismatic, but from where I was sitting and watching, he was about the furtherest thing from it. So, could you elaborate more? Because I’m honestly not seeing it.
