But that requires work. :eek:
Still, it’s a lot less painful than reevaluating beliefs and policies and instituting change where needed.
Because, goddamit, we’re right, and all negative voter feedback is due to stupidity, racism, religious fundamentalism and fake news. :mad:
I agree with this; the worst thing that ever happened to the political process in the country was the rise of the Internet and the rise of conservative talk radio.
Those things allowed both sides to sort of fold inward and convince themselves that the other side is actively evil and/or willfully stupid and ignorant, working toward the ruination of the Republic out of that evil, stupidity or ignorance, and to discount them out of hand as a result.
The echo-chamber effect amplifies the differences, and reduces the similarities in essence.
You’re right. It’s actually willful stupidity. Far more difficult to overcome because it’s so fact resistant.
It cannot be done.
Trying to do so for decades and failing utterly is one of the problems the Democrats have; they keep wasting effort trying to persuade people who cannot be reasoned with or appealed to. It just drives people away who see it as a betrayal when the Democrats keep trying to suck up to bigots.
That’s fine to say because it sounds so reasonable, gentle and kind on it’s face. After all, don’t we all love our children and just want to live in peace and harmony with our neighbours? But then you begin to examine each side’s positions based on merit and evidence. And suddenly it becomes harder and harder to justify Trump style stupidity.
This is more or less what I’ve been saying since before the election. This is exactly what I observed spending time on forums that had a lot of right-leaning people.
These people don’t think.
They don’t care about the evidence. They don’t care about science (let alone economics or social sciences or predictive models). They don’t care about anything that questions their intellectual orthodoxy. This shouldn’t be a surprise; we’re talking about people who came out to vote for Trump even after he spent three debates consistently showing how utterly unqualified and clueless he was; but somehow people here don’t believe me.
It’s the false equivalency rule. “Both sides are just as bad”; therefore, the Republicans and their supporters cannot be as bad as they actually are. Admitting how bad the Republicans are is taboo.
I can tell you right now what you’re not going to find:
Good reasons.
They don’t exist. The reasons you’ll find are almost universally based on insane, motivated reasoning, right-wing lies, and a complete resistance to actual rational argumentation. These people DO NOT FUCKING THINK.
Well shit, after all avenues of rational thought have been cut out, I figure shame and derision can’t hurt. It’s not like we were going to change their mind anyways.
From the Twitter-Elect: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” -posted yesterday.
If his own incredibly illogical lies aren’t enough to convince followers to leave him, how could any words, any approach, any thing at all that Democrats could possibly do reach them? Who in the right wing media is calling him on this?
I read this piece. Like many of the similar pieces flying around, there are elements of truth, there are elements of choir-preaching, and some eye-watering hyperbole and condescension. I agree with a great deal of the analysis, but it skirts the basic truth that rural white voters who have very little are frustrated with the government taking from them, in the form of taxes or regulation, and expending time and attention on concerns that (by definition) do not include them.
I happen to think it’s good for the government to right social wrongs and fix a top-heavy economy where necessary. I don’t think we’ve gone about it the best way, and I can certainly see how people would be pissed at the apparent reality that everyone else in the country is cutting in line for a handout.
But when we look at suffering black people in urban areas making self-undermining choices, we don’t launch thinkpieces about how stupid and pariochial their concerns are. We don’t tell them they need to get out of the ghetto because obviously there’s no economic salvation there. We try to build vibrant communities and vitalize the schools and maybe plant a community garden here and there. I believe all of this is totally merited because of systemic injustice, and I’m financially comfortable enough to advocate for higher taxes. But that’s a very bitter pill to swallow for white people who have never enjoyed the apparent lavish lifestyle of white privilege in nowhere, Kansas.
Anyhow. I sympathize with the angry liberal perspective but I don’t think it’s very productive. There’s no better way to make a political adversary than to tell someone else how stupid and privileged they are.
I believe you. I frequented a right-wing board for a time- one that was mentioned here, in fact - and its denizens simply do not accept reality. Global warming is a fraud because James Inhofe says so. Temperatures are dropping because that’s what they read on Watt’s Up With That or whatever. Show them a dozen papers authored by 30 scientists that state otherwise and well, that just means the Great Liberal Conspiracy is 30 “scientists” larger. That’s when I learned that whereas liberals base their politics on their worldview (I do, anyway), right-wingers base their worldview on their politics. They support Republicans, Republicans say global warming is a fraud and waterboarding isn’t torture, so that’s what they believe. If scientific results or international laws concerning human rights contradict those beliefs then the scientists are frauds and the human rights advocates are terrorist sympathizers.
I’m sure not every single right-winger in a nation of 330 million people believes this, but I doubt I found the only ones who do. Such people strike me as simply mad. Or maybe they just have too much of their identities wrapped up in being Republicans to question received truth.
WTF?! The government spends a great deal on their concerns. Guess they never heard of farm subsidies. :rolleyes:
Meanwhile, part of the problem is all the stuff they hear from Fox News and talk radio that just ain’t so. Welfare reform really happened 20 years ago, but talk radio’s still spreading stories of how the black folks in the ghettos are lazing around, living high off the hog on their dime.
‘Apparent reality’ is the operative term.
Are we even in the same fucking reality? For the past fifty fucking years, everything that’s gone wrong for urban blacks has been blamed on shit like the dysfunctional black family and gangsta culture, usually with a swipe at blaming that on welfare. Meanwhile, the problems with both opiod addiction and the breakdown of the rural family has been the subject of a hefty quantity of sympathetic articles, all blaming it on the fact that the jobs have moved away. But the articles about What’s Wrong With Urban Blacks never urged them to move somewhere where the jobs were, because they rarely mentioned the lack of jobs as a cause of urban black family breakdown to begin with. (Plus nobody wanted blacks tracking dirt across their nice clean suburbs.)
While there will be a time for “what should the Dems DO about it,” the first step is to figure out what’s going on to begin with. And in that discussion, yes, rural whites have agency, and it’s reasonable to call them out on their fuckedupitude.
Yes, the Dems need to figure out how to get back on the right track. But it wasn’t the Dems who put Trump in the White House. The politicians who supported him, the media that normalized him, the people who voted for him, bear the primary responsibility. They’re not robots or children. They have agency. They did this.
Take a gander at this chart and tell me farm subsidies are on the upswing. Aside from a few blips they’ve been declining for years.
The 1990’s called, they want their… well… Bill Clinton were the ones who ended “welfare as we know it” with a hefty dose of “superpredator” undertones. As far as I’m aware, no self-respecting liberal buys into that bullshit anymore. They’ve just directed that condescension against the poor confused white people now.
White people need to stop asking for government handouts and instead take some personal responsibility and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Am I doing this right?
No. They should accept the “government handouts” they keep being given* without* complaining they aren’t getting any and blaming black & brown people and liberals for it. And they should try to develop some other emotion besides malice.
It also makes Dems look like the stupid ones. As stupid as turnips that just fell off that ole truck.
Getting working class people to realize when they are being played by greedy politicians is a problem older than this country. Shit, it’s a problem older than civilization. So why is it now that we suddenly should be able to fight this issue with well-reasoned appeals and gentle tones? I cringe to think some us really think ours is the first generation to have this radically novel idea.
Expecting rational discourse to change someone’s political bias is like expecting rational discourse to change someone’s religion. It doesn’t work unless someone is already “enlightened” enough to question and doubt the prevailing beliefs they’ve been raised with, and that has to come from the inside. The question before us is how many Trump supporters are actually like that? Do we have any reason to think it’s particularly many? I don’t think so.
If you’re an outsider who wants a bunch of hardcore Christians to stop believing there was a slain demigod named Jesus who resurrected himself to save humanity from Hell, you can talk all you want but it will not change their minds. All you end up doing is entertaining them (because after all, you are a nutter who thinks he’s smarter than the Almighty) and frustrating yourself. The vast majority of atheists figure this out very early in life. Thinking you can “win” simply by being logical enough is an exercise in futility because the religious have built-in defenses against the atheist’s arguments. If they didn’t have these defenses, it’s unlikely they’d be religious. Circular, I know, but true. If there is something Dems need to understand about working class whites, it’s that the same thing is at work politically. It’s why the problem has been so intractable for so long.
For religion, one thing that makes non-belief inherently difficult is the fear of being on the wrong side of God and being sent to hell for it. For the working class dude who puts his faith in the GOP just like his parents, his grandparents, and everybody else in his family does (except that one black sheep cousin who moved to the city 10 years ago), fear of being That Guy is what keeps you locked in. That Guy is the guy you’ve been told all your life is not only wrong, but misguided, naive, effeminate, unamerican, communist/socialist/hippie dippy, …you get the idea. Changing political stripes means becoming all of these things you fear, so why do that? It’s easier just to stay put.
Liberals are really no different, if we’re to be honest. For example, it would be an uphill battle to get me to ever vote for a Republican, and it’s not only because of the party’s politics. It’s because of what the party has come to mean in my mind after all of these years. Backwards, mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, racist (if you’re white), self-hating (if you’re not white)…you get the idea. Being aware that I’m biased doesn’t suddenly make me less biased, but it does help me see why appealing to people biased in the opposite way is so difficult.
What causes people to wake up and change direction is when the jerks they elect go on to do bad things and it becomes harder and harder to excuse it. Once there is a critical mass of discontent within their community bubbles, there’s an opportunity for some of the less biased and dogmatic ones to break free from the pack (usually the young folk) and start trying on new beliefs. This explains how Obama picked up so many votes from non-Dems in 2008 after 8 years of Bush the Embarrassment. I believe it had less to do with his campaign skills and more to do with how amenable people were for something different. The pendulum swung in the other direction this year, and so here we are.
All of this is to say, the Dems can’t afford to keep crying over working class whites who are biased against them. Winning elections requires energizing people who are the most likely to support you, and that happens to encompasses many more demographic groups than just the ones living in the rust belt. Why can’t we talk about that motley crew for once? There are more in that group than the one that keeps being the subject of all of these essays.
They have fear down pat.
Okay, so the narrative is that “the Dems failed to understand…” What would “understanding Dems” have looked like, exactly? What would they have to do to demonstrate that they “understood” the white working class?
It would have to be something other than policy, because their policies do favor the working class, and it didn’t work.
Maybe Democrats could stop talking about race entirely? Surely that would win them ALL the elections, right? Or maybe they could become Republicans, and start pushing the idea that it’s white people who are the real victims here. Would that do it?
Obviously, I don’t accept this “Dems don’t understand” narrative. What I think happened was that Democrats were fighting on the side of reality, and reality lost.
That’s the important part. Reality lost. I may not like it, and you may not like it, but this is where we are. There are no more facts. We could say that lies won, but when there’s no such thing as truth, then nothing is a lie either.
People now vote with their tribe. And a small number of them sometimes consider switching tribes when the other candidates put on a better show - when they offer them a story they like better, no matter how absolutely divorced it is from any objective measure of what we used to call “truth.”
It’s almost liberating to accept that, because it means we don’t have to pretend we’re discussing ideas anymore. What the hell is the use of debate? All this talk about “listening” and “understanding each other” is cute, but the time for that is over.
But then what does the future look like? We used to battle with words, facts and ideas, but now that they’re completely obsolete, what do we do? How does a minority of the population advocate for their own interests? The Constitution used to protect the minority, but that was way back when we had principles, standards and norms. Nowadays the Constitution is pretty much just an inconvenience for the majority, the last thing standing in the way of their doing whatever the hell they want. That’ll still be true when the pendulum swings back in the other direction, by the way. It’s not like anybody’s guaranteed any safety from cycle to cycle.
How does this end? I keep asking this question, and I keep hearing “Calm down, everything’s fine,” which is not an answer! Not willing to make a prediction? Then the answer is “I don’t know.” If you are willing to make a prediction, then the possible answers are as follows, as far as I can tell:
A. Permanent stalemate
B. Massive, unprecedented reconciliation between two factions who currently can’t suffer each other to exist
C. Violent civil war
Am I missing any possibilities here? What else is there?
It won’t swing, and there is no cycle. I’ve been told for decades that sooner or later the “pendulum” would swing back to the left some day; but it’s not going to happen.
A permanent right wing totalitarian state.
It’s simple. We didn’t get the guys we wanted. They all dropped out. Trump was the only one left. He was my 4th choice.
But the bottom line is that Trump on his worst day will still be a better President than Clinton on her best day. There it is.