Damn. I just read the latest Andrew Sullivan column. (I cannot find it at the moment.) Somehow that lead me to the meme above. Damn. I think this is a winning idea.
Sullivan laid out very clearly how a lot of Americans feel ill-used and ignored. Trump tapped into that. If any of the other Republicans had pulled the stick out of their butt they could have won with his message of long-simmering humiliation.
Sullivan did not take the next step however by pointing out that President Trump pandered to and betrayed their base just the same as Nixon, Reagan, Bush and all the others.
Still, that is a darn fine slogan. I think it will work.
The counter to that, which of course can not be demonstrated until after THEY get Trump, is: Look- They got Trump, seemed satisfied, and never did come for you after all.
Again, that wouldn’t counter the con as it was being run by Trump, which is a useful feature in your idea, but would be effective after. Con men know more about this stuff than I do.
Unfortunately, it probably WILL work. But that says more about the mental capabilities of most of the people (lizard brains) in his “base” than it does anything else.
I also thought that slogan was well-executed, if thoroughly despicable. In terms of propaganda, it’s pretty good. As far as who will be motivated by it, I dunno. Both parties have their solid base and are fighting over the “don’t bother to vote” contingent. This might move some of them.
Who will that kind of message reach? Disaffected people in the middle of the country who see Washington as the enemy, but who don’t particularly care about the minutae of politics.
The Democrats are going to have the same problem as the Liberals in Canada. The zeitgeist on the left at this time is all about climate change and big city politics. But those policies are destructive in places like Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and other places that have boom economies based on fossil fuels.
In the last election in Canada, the Liberals were completely wiped out in Saskatchewan and Alberta, as well as rural and small town regions in Ontario, Quebec and BC. Canada’s concentration of population in the regions they took allowed them to survive with a minority government. The Democrats in the U.S. don’t have that luxury.
In the last debate, Joe Biden didn’t hesitate to say that he would destroy hundreds of thousands of oil and gas jobs for climate change. He then said there would be new ‘green’ jobs to replace them, but that’s a fantasy. Alberta’s NDP promised the same, and all we got were the job losses.
Elizabeth Warren says she’ll shut down fracking and offshore drilling on her first day in office. I guess she doesn’t need any votes between the coasts and a few big cities, because talk like that will ensure she doesn’t get any.
That’s who Trump’s meme is going to affect.
Democrats better look hard at what happened to the Liberals in Canada and Labour in the UK, and start moderating their extreme positions.
Yep that is more or less it. Cities have grown ever-larger, they are now so massive that the structural advantages given to rural areas can no longer constrain them. Power is moving from rural areas to city ones and that frightens a lot of rural people. They are angry and scared.
That might be enough to swing this election for President Trump. In the long run demographics is destiny.
In time the cities will pay back the rural counties in their same coin. No way around it. It will not be pretty.
Still, Democrats ought not to push too soon. Give it time before they go whole-hog with some of their policies that upset rural folk.
That seems a rather grim and untrue view of the situation. You think there’s no farmers or fishermen worried about climate change? And you paint it as if “the cities” are some cabal awaiting their moment to strike the heart of their sworn rural enemies. Sheesh.
I don’t think farmers and fishermen are worried as much about climate change than they are of the policies of a hostile government.
Getting back to Alberta, I’ll point out fhat what’s already been done to our economy is likely worse than what climate change would do over decades. In fact, being a northern landlocked province it’s entirely possible that we would benefit from moderate warming. But federal climate policy has gutted our ability to get oil to market, killing tens of thousands of jobs and putting the province in recession. Calgary has a 30% downtown vacancy rate as many oil and gas companies left. Alberta went in 5 years from having the lowest unemployment in Canada to the highest.
And for what? Canada is a blip in the global warming numbers. The coal plants we shut down and the oil we stopped shipping doesn’t even match a few months of *increase in fossil fuel energy in China. And yet, even that is ripping apart Canada. There is now a serious western separation movement building in western Canada over this.
And yet, what the Democrats are promising would be far more extreme. Consider Warren’s promise to end fracking. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fracking has already created 1.7 million jobs in the U.S., and will create 3.5 million more by 2030.
Elizabeth Warren’s plan pretty much sounds like ‘they are coming for you’. Add up all those fracking jobs, plus the families and friends of the people in them, and Warren would be directly and very negatively affecting maybe 10 million people or more, plus all the fax revenue, etc. And that’s just one small part of her grand collection of plans for other people’s lives, all of which will destroy jobs and the economy in general.
No one buys the ‘green jobs’ bullshit. And oil patch workers making big salaries would not be happy losing their high paying jobs in favor of installing weather stripping for $15/hr. And if there are new ‘green jobs’, there’s mo guarantee that they would be in regions hardest hit by her policies, or that the people trained in the oil and gas sector would be qualified for them.
Except farmers are literally holding large-scale conventions on how to deal with climate change and its effects.
But hey, cheer for how things will get better for you with increased global temperatures. Just be ready for all those Mexicans - might want to start on a wall or something.
That’s a fascinating article, and a hopeful one.But note the enormous difference in the politics and the tone of discussion:
The convention described in that article was all about intelligent discussion of practical issues that farmers can do now–better ways to till the soil, planting more ground-cover crops off season.
There was ZERO talk about the things that Democrats and big-city elites love to declare: the green New Deal, laying off millions of workers, and proudly decimating rural communities.
The Dems need to pay attention; To win back the flyover voters, they need to change their tone dramatically. With the rhetoric they are using now, they are just providing fertile ground for Trump’s fear-mongering.