When Trump at last sees the end looming and is in the fetal position under his Resolute desk, what act of desperation might enter his fevered mind? Declare a state of emergency and send a carrier to Quemoy or Matsu? Deploy armed forces to our guano territories?
Is there a Reichstag to be burned?
Apparently that oldie “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” Article.
Even though he endorsed him.
I talk to them everyday.
Any who are willing to listen have already left the Republican party, or at least are never trumpers. You are right that they want to be listened to, as they rant about falsehoods and misrepresentations. They do no listening to anything that doesn’t reinforce their worldview.
They are rooted in the idea that the world is changing, and they don’t want it to. They want to have the same lives as their parents, and they want their children to have the same lives as they do. The fact that there are even options for their children to do something other than follow in their footsteps offends them.
You actually have suggestions, or are you just going to repeat the mantra that they need to be listened to? You don’t get it, no matter how much you listen to them, they don’t ever become rational. In fact, humoring them seems to have the effect of validating their misinformation. They will not listen. They have turned that function of their brain off. They have no interest whatsoever of hearing anything at all that does not confirm their worldview.
Exactly, and when the media comes to them, and asks them what their complaint is, they say that no one is listening to them. The media asks them what their complaint is, and they say that no one is listening to them. This may seem repetitive, but only because it is, but when the media reaches out to them, comes to their towns, and asks them what their complaint is, they say that no one is listening to them.
And this is true of politicians as well. When the politician comes out to rural areas, and asks them what their complaints are, they are told that no one comes out to the rural areas and listens to them.
Of course not, everyone is so focused on listening to the complaints of the red voters, to try to mollify their feelings of persecution, that no one else matters, at all.
It’s like saying that domestic abuse can be stopped if only the abusee was a better listener.
Have you tried listening to them? 
They truly are coming from a different reality. Anything that does not reinforce their persecution and hate is discarded, no matter how blatantly counterfactual or even self contradictory it is.
I have had discussions where a person has said two completely contradictory statements, where if one of them is true, the other one simply cannot be. When I pointed that out to them, they didn’t process this and come to an understanding, they just got angry.
They cannot be reasoned with, they did not get to their views through reason. They got there through hatred. They got their through a need to see themselves as persecuted, to justify their hatred.
I do my best not to. There are some who I can pretend are good people as long as politics doesn’t come up. But once it does, they show their true colors, and I can never see them the same way again.
Maybe we should try listening to them?
No disagreement that, for whatever reason, they embrace a false narrative. I am not a psychologist or a sociologist, and I’m only an arm-chair historian/anthroplogist at best. I suspect that, as you suggest, we’re dealing with people who are confronted with a world that is changing around them, and they fear displacement. It’s rational to fear a changing world, though. I know of no culture, no people on earth who don’t have at least some anxieties about massive influx of immigrants and dizzying technological and social change. Again, this is not to defend their beliefs in conspiracy theories, their racism, or their love of Trump.
What I would remind people, though, is that there was a time when rednecks voted Democrat even while they were pushing for social justice that they personally did not identify with. My uncle’s father-in-law from Toledo was a classic example: a union guy who railed against trickle-down economics and was a diehard democrat when it came to economics but one of the most racist and intolerant sons of bitches I ever did met. Democrats were winning that guy’s vote as recently as 8 years ago, but they’re losing it now.
K9…
I listen to my son and his wife. They tell me all about other people. Other people get free food and health care and housing. Other people live well and don’t have jobs. Other peoples kids get scholarships so their kids can’t. All those other people are free loading liberals. And my son’s health care insurance was cancelled because of ACA. Trump hates liberals. Trump will stop the liberals. Trump will stop abortions. Trump will restore marriage. Trump will restore the courts. Trump believes in God.
Trump believes in the Constitution. Covid is a conspiracy. Biden is a pedophile.
Interestingly they do not vote because the government is a fraud.
You may be correct, but could you clarify what I might learn by “listening to them”?
Interesting. Thank you.
Their actions to date can be interpreted two ways:
Unfortunately, there is a rule of thumb in Journalism:
For any headline / title ending in a question mark, the correct answer is “No.”
The ABA is not exactly a journalistic organization. And is aligning themselves on the side of conventionality and rule of law as one would expect. But are they right? That is the $64Trillion question.
No, it’s not. Not really.
And they aren’t going to stop it, it will progress with or without them.
They really are one and the same.
Right, because the Republicans destroyed unions, so he’s no longer a union guy.
He fears the boogieman in the closet, and only gets mad at you when you open the closet to show there’s nothing there. And since you won’t protect him from that boogieman, he will instead call for someone who will. Someone who will tell him that that boogieman is real, and is out to get him, and that only they can protect him.
I’m not sure this was meant to be directed at me, but when I said "listen to them. " I included the rolleyes emoticon to indicate how futile that has been.
I suspect we are in agreement on this.
No disagreement, but one of the points that Bernie Sanders made during his campaign - and rather effectively, I thought - was that a lot of Democrats started getting a little soft and gave ground in areas where they were once strong.
I’ve made it clear that I’m not a Bernie Bro, but I think he did have a point in that economics is what Democrats need to really focus on and find their value. Republicans killed unions, and Barack Obama made Republicans pay for it. Trump made Hillary Clinton for being an establishment, elitist, out of touch Democrat who appeared to favor Wall Street over Main Street.
This is why I think Democrats have to be careful about the takeaways from this election. I’m seeing a lot of discussion in the media about how this election can be used as evidence to dismiss the democratic socialists, and I’m not so sure about that. I absolutely agree that they need to stop using that damn label - there’s nothing attractive about the word ‘socialist’, but progressive values are, I think, what Democrats need to aggressively run on. There’s tremendous wealth inequality out there, and if Democrats can’t make the case that this is a problem and that this is not a good thing for the midwestern family farmer or the guy in Ohio or Michigan who’s about to lose his job at the local plant, then I don’t know what else they can do.
Yes, there’s a lot of misinformation out there - there always has been at least some misinformation. That’s what conservatives are good at and specialize in. But there are ways to counter that message. I acknowledge it’s not easy though.
The Democrats nominated a black man for president, and he spent 8 years in the role. This is part of the reason that your uncle’s father in law from Toledo left the party and will not win that guy’s vote again. Racism and hatred are powerful forces, and the Republicans (and Trump) tapped into these forces.
In their complaints they are showing that they resent these people but at the same time would happily be among them if given the chance. Why do they envy welfare bums?
To relate this back to the topic at hand, Trump is basically the ultimate welfare bum. His miraculous recovery from COVID was because he had access to a level of health care your family will never, ever have. Everything he has ever had in life was given to him by others and he has squandered most of it. I can understand people having conservative principles but Trump is not a good conservative and definitely should not be held up as an example to aspire to if you hate selfish, entitled welfare bums. He’s not a good anything and he’s not going to fix anything. This would continue to be true even if Trump was President for life.
I agree with you that there are a lot of people (esp. white people) out there who could still be persuaded by a crypto-white supremacist message or by a liberal/broad left message. The thing I don’t know is what specific method you would use to counter that message. I think a lot of people have a feeling of how they want the Democrats or the left to find a way to bridge the divide but I rarely see a concrete strategy
Personally I think the Democrats need to make an economic case. I don’t think softening the message on social issues will help with most of those marginal people. You don’t see the mainstream dems now saying that all Trump supporters are racist or anything, and they can’t control what random people say on twitter. What the fight ends up turning into is an argument over terms like “white privilege”. I don’t think it’s a correct strategy to back off of those terms because the hostility to those is generally arbitrary and if you change the term you use then the right just demonizes the next one.
Yes, they listened to them.
How? When did this happen? Destruction of unions has been nothing but a boon, entirely positive for Republicans. Those people who were union guys and voted Democrat? Not union guys anymore, so now they vote Republican.
He said these things. These things were not true. They were believed by those who were motivated to believe untrue things.
Yeah, check out the thread on the demonization of the far left, and see how they are being dismissed. Right here on this board, they consider Biden’s squeeker to be evidence that it is the Republicans that need to be listened to, not the progressives.
Very few do, but are called socialist anyway. You want to take an issue with how people are labeled, take it up with the right wing media that calls even a center right politician like Biden a socialist.
This is only true if you buy into the demonization of the right. They can make anything a slur. When I was growing up the word “liberal” was a dirty word. Progressive is a dirty word. You are letting them control your language, and then wondering how they are winning.
You’ve given up before you even get to the playing field.
They do. That’s exactly what they do. But any suggestions about doing anything about it are socialism, and as soon as that comes out as an accusation as to the policies being discussed, we need to spend all of our time trying to coddle anyone who was frightened by that word.
Why not reclaim socialism as a good word? There is nothing wrong with it, other than what those who want to perpetuate and increase that wealth inequality have said about it.
If someone is worried about losing the job at their local plant, then the options are for us to nationalize the plant, and protect his job that way, or to create a social safety net, to protect anyone who loses their job. Politicians are not going to stop automation. They can try, but they cannot stop globalization, protectionism runs exactly counter to the principles of the free market that they claim to support.
They are also good, apparently, at getting us to accept their demonizations as legitimate.
Okay… I’m listening. What ways are those?
I suspect it would require the same level of lying and misinformation that the Republicans use. They get that guy to vote for him by lying and telling him that they will protect his job. We could lie too, but then there isn’t anyone who is connect to reality, and I consider that to be a problem.
Do you have any ideas that both incorporate the harsh realities of… well reality and that also counter a message that is based only on what they want to hear?
The problem is is that economics is complex. A policy cannot be reduced to a soundbite, much less a bumper sticker.
When Democrats have made the economic case, people tune out, and the only parts that are ever heard are the parts taken out of context that acknowledge reality.
Clinton made the economic case that coal was not going to be viable in the future, and that we needed to provide a social safety net and training to help the people who would be displaced from their jobs. All that they heard was that they would be displaced from their jobs.
They still lost their jobs, as the reality was that coal was not a viable future, but instead of having other options and opportunities, they are just SOL, and they blame Clinton for their misfortune, rather than the ones who actually caused it.
They will continue to vote for Republicans, like a cargo cult trying to bring the planes back.
This is the crux of it. Most people simply do not want to put in the work to understand a complex issue.
Understanding how Wall Street and banks and the rich are squeezing them for money is a lot harder to understand than, “Welfare queen is a layabout living on welfare that you pay for.” It doesn’t hurt that the welfare queen is almost certainly a minority (never mind that more white people are on welfare).
So first of all that I should clarify I’m including healthcare in the economic case.
I do think that they need more of an elevator pitch and less of an emphasis on the messy details. I think the negative messaging is very good when they go there (such as Ossoff’s attack in the debate about preexisting conditions). I think they need more positive messages about what they will do (“We will make sure everyone has the ability to buy into medicare and no one has to go bankrupt because they got sick and lost their job” as an example). They also need to take every opportunity to talk about income inequality, minimum wage etc.
I wish more realistic economic messages like the reality that coal is going away unfortunately doesn’t work that well. I think for people you can’t reach with your top line policies, and the right is reaching with dogwhistles, you’re just not going to reach them. I don’t think the strategy needs to be to hit every disaffected white worker. If someone is susceptible to Trump’s appeal and also works in something like coal and doesn’t want to hear about getting trained to install solar panels, they just aren’t someone worth focusing. The goal doesn’t need to be to get every single vote.
“But I hate those options! I’ll vote for anyone who tells me they can magically preserve my job, or at least tell me who to blame if they can’t.” – the ex-union member who now votes GOP
I think it probably translates into fewer words than that. To wit …
“So … Socialism. Got it.”
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
It’s even worse than that. I work with a bunch of blue-collar construction workers who are currently in a union and who vocally express their politics. The white guys are all Trumpers and voted GOP. The upper management (who have been trying to kill the unions for years) also support and donate to the GOP.
The blue-collar whites and Latinos all vote GOP for social issues. They don’t seem to realize that they are voting against their own economic interests. (This has been recognized for a while, not just with union members.)
Upper management supports the GOP because of economic issues.
The only ones voting for the Democrats are non-Latino minorities and most of the college-educated middle management (including engineers like me). Nobody knows my politics, though, because I don’t generally discuss politics in the workplace. I certainly don’t plaster my cubicle with Trump paraphernalia like the Trumpers do.
