Nor do I. But propaganda is a powerful thing – as we are currently witnessing.
This split seemed inevitable when the Tea Party was welcomed into the Republican fold in 2010 but not assimilated, while no huge changes were made to the Republican plank. You saw it in 2012 when most of the Republican candidates who were more in the Tea Party mold or who could have bridged the gap had their turn on top before flaming out and the focus turning very reluctantly to Mitt Romney, the establishment’s favorite.
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Yep, I’m frankly tired of hearing about how mainstream democrats abandoned the working class – they didn’t.
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Outside of Iowa, over the past 40 or so years, Democrats have been more and more focused on urban populations and urban issues and less so on rural populations and rural issues. Particularly given the big increase in urban (and then suburban) population during that time. So, I would bet that any working class populations that do feel abandoned by the Democratic party as a whole are more likely living in someplace more rural and less urban, like Chilton County, Alabama as opposed to Arlington County, Virginia.
As someone in rural Alabama, race, niggers getting welfare, abortion, the war on Christianity, and gays getting married are the issues most frequently brought up. Only other things that ever get mentioned very often are manufacturing jobs going overseas/NAFTA and health insurance prices going up.
Did you think it would come off as sarcastic, or were you using it in earnest?
In either case, it was very misguided, at best.
I’ve started to see followers of his on twitter painting their opponents as globalists and attacking globalism. It’s an interesting, and late to affect this cycle, take on reaching across the left-right divide to populist notions that were in the Sanders campaign. Whether someone could thread the needle on the other issues to unite the populist chunks from both sides is a tricky question. Still both parties had a candidate who professed strong populist sentiment get 40-ish percent of the vote.
I don’t think that Tzigone was using that word; I think he was mentioning it. As in, when the rural Alabamans around him discuss politics, that’s the word they use.
Maybe Trump fears losing bigly to Hillary and wants to at least say that he was able to take someone from the GOP down with him – a twisted consolation prize.
If you are familiar with Tsigone as a poster, and know them not to be someone who would countenance such a remark, then I’m relieved to accept what you’re saying.
It would have been clearer if the offensive word had been set off with quotation marks, or otherwise had been marked with some indication that the writer distanced him/herself from the remark (e.g. “n*******”, “the n-word”, “in their words”, etc.).
Thank you for the clarification.
“More and more focused on urban …” means “doing anything at all for black people.” There’s no rationality at all in it.
Ultimately, the policies that will benefit urban people will benefit everyone. So there’s no real urban-rural divide on a rational policy basis.
Oops; you are quite right. I mixed up the two terms. Sorry.
(Thank you for correcting me gently and politely.)
You mean “Contract on America”, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and the Bush administration Congress that rubber stamped his massive tax cuts and the Iraq War? We don’t need a “return to normalcy”, we need to take advantage of Trump’s destabilization of the Republican Party-a God-given opening if there ever was one-to blow up the existing political equilibrium and replace it with something much more to our advantage.
Huey Long. George Norris. Burton K. Wheeler. Robert LaFollette. In fact it’d be more useful to list the toxic forms of populism.
It’s quite historically inaccurate to call the “Redeemer” movements of the 1870s as “populist” considering they were led by the Bourbon Democrat planter elites seeking to restore the status quo of oligarchic white supremacy of the antebellum period. In fact, while this is not very well remembered, many Southern states imposed voting restrictions on poor whites as well as blacks precisely in order to prevent a resurgence of crossracial populist movement that posed the last serious challenge to the Jim Crow order in the 1880s and 1890s. Even among the segregationist candidates during the civil rights revolution, Kevin Philips documents that the more explicitly segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond did best among the urban white middle-class in cities like Memphis and lost in the rural hinterlands. While it was a different story with Wallace, he ran on a broader right-wing populist platform that included among other things opposition to the Vietnam War.
While its important to distinguish between the Populists and Progressives, we should also not draw a false dichotomy when there is none. Populist movements supported reforms such as the income tax, direct election of Senators, regulation of big business, and the like much as the Progressives did and the political offspring of these Populists made sure these reforms got implemented in rural states (such as the Upper Midwest or the Great Plains) in coalition with their urban Progressive allies. While Populists had some wacky economic ideas and perhaps overly agrarian in their tendencies, it is good we did not permanently accept all of the ideas of the Progressives which included alcohol prohibition, eugenics, and the restriction of immigration to reinforce “Nordic” WASP supremacy.
Why can’t it be a two-way street? It’s true elements of the WWC abandoned the Democrats due to racial resentment but its also true Democrats ended up emphasizing bread and butter issues less in favour of Culture War issues like guns and abortion.
You forgot the word “white.” Trump tapped into the anger of the white working poor. His candidacy has somehow not really appealed to the large minority of working class voters who are not white.
I used because that’s what the people around me say when in an all white group that they think thinks like them (not at work, but around second cousins and neighbors and so on).
Sorry, I thought I was clear, but that often happens - you think other people know what you mean and don’t clarify. I could have asterisked out not to offend, but as I wasn’t speaking in “my voice” it didn’t really occur to me. Plus when I think about it, I don’t really like doing that, as it dilutes the impact of what’s actually being said.
Qin, perhaps I’m misreading you, but did you just cite Huey Long as an example of nontoxic populism?
Quote marks on the phrase would have worked, IMO. I am not onboard with turning it into an absolutely “unprintable/unspeakable” thing when it is clear we are reflecting how other people use it.
You’re absolutely right – I need to mentally turn back the clock farther, to get to a time when the minority and majority worked together, a little.
You also helped pinpoint the single individual most responsible for the current sorry state of polarization and gridlock: Newt Gingrich. That evil asshole has a lot to answer for.
Many on this board complained that HRC was separating “toxic” Republicans from the “others”, especially during the convention and the weeks after.
Yes, considering on balance Long was a constructive politician whose policies immensely benefited the people of Louisiana unless we are willing to conclude that (for example) FDR was a “toxic” politician due to his toleration for Southern segregationism, interment of Japanese-Americans, and allowing the USSR to occupy Eastern Europe.
North Carolina’s Populist Party is a fascinating historical organization. Most state politics at the time were dominated by avowed white supremacists, including major factions within the Populist Party. However, it was also within the Populist Party that the strongest efforts toward ending white supremacy occurred, as poor whites and poor blacks allied against moneyed interests.
To give full credit where it’s due, the NC Republican party at the time was also relatively anti-racist, and it was the Populist alliance with the Republicans that led to their successes. If only the modern fusion between Republicans and Populists were as benign…