Complex problems require sequenced actions that follow a coherent process amenable to corrections based on feedback. That’s a difficult approach to sell with a dry recitation of facts. Fortunately any process can be described simply and linked to shared beliefs and desires.
What the right wing has mastered is appeals to fears and hatreds in order to sell ideas which restrict or punish minority segments of the population. This has been successful with a large enough plurality of the electorate to allow the right wing to impose their policies fairly broadly at the state level even when those ideas quite clearly work to the detriment of the same plurality who voted for them.
The same techniques used to sell fear & loathing can also be used to appeal to decency and hope and practicality. This is what put our 44th POTUS into office.
There are advantages the right wing has in this area, starting with the relatively easier task of distilling simplistic solutions into pithy rhetoric (and ending, IMO, with the lockstep fidelity to dogma that’s a condition common to those who lean toward authoritarian social structures). But there’s also a larger native market for practicality than there is for spite.
Arguably, if HRC had spent more time on the campaign appealing to the practicalities of her (and the Democratic Party’s) own proposals, instead of to fear of the Donald, that might have made enough of a difference in the key swing states. This is hindsight, and I don’t blame HRC for pointing out the clear and present danger embodied in her opponent (which should have been enough), but we should probably take the right lessons from her loss.
It’s not just an American thing. In Europe, the nobles and kings would draft the commoners and serfs to fight their many wars, and then grab all the land and wealth for themselves.
They already had it, kings and nobles owned, everybody else rented. Most of the war stuff was about getting more. A squabble between in-laws and cousins, Granpa’s dead, who gets Westphalia?
The latter is going to happen no matter what, now. Protecting the innocent is no longer a possibility; all we can hope is that some of the guilty suffer and die along with them.
Now that they are going to control the government they no longer need to worry about popularity. They can simply *make themselves *the winners of any election by fiat.
The invention of the concept of race to differentiate between the white indentured servants and the black slaves was a bit of added evil genius though. The poor whites had someone to look down on and abuse, and so were less likely to be thinking about the injustice of their own situation.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
You’re the one engaged in absurd nitpicking. Trump is on the way to office, and there is power in that. And of course the transition period, before his picks for cabinet are finalized let alone sworn in, is an optimal time to assassinate a president-elect, were one so inclined.
donnie is making “lists” of the intellectuals. So you’re OK with it because there is absolutely no chance you’re going to be on any of them. Don’t you think that’s all we need to know about you?
Here you go. The Republican president-elect has been revealed to have a dossier on him that alleges he may have been turned by the Russians, that they have blackmail on him including watersports, that he may be in debt to the Russian mafia, and the allegations are serious enough that the Israelis are not sharing intelligence with you any more.
If this was a Democratic president-elect, what do you think the Republicans would say?
Simple, intuitive memes that together make up a coherent narrative. Catchy ones. Bonus points if they are not wrong or cannot easily be shown to be wrong, but not a requirement. And keep hammering on with them until they become accepted as assumed facts.
Your democracy is over a quarter of a thousand years old. During that history this is the easiest setup any party has had by a wide margin. Open goal. If you can’t do anything with this, you should go home.
That dossier is horseshit, and that’s kinda the point. He was supposed to be advised of it, he should have been advised of it, its something he should know. What he’s trying to do is to suggest that all the stuff about him and the Russians is horseshit, because its all a conspiracy! For his base, that will work.
“Its not his ignorance that scares me, its what he knows for certain that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain (attrib.)
Read in passing somewhere(?) that the dossier originated as an effort by “Never Trump!” Republicans to put a kibosh on his nomination. Anyone have more on that?
Looking from outside the US, the Dems have to get their act in order.
You had a black democratic president elected 8 years ago. National culture doesn’t change that much in 8 years. Thus stop whining and get organized and working.
Unfortunately, while Obama is an exceptionally good and smart person, he did not understand (and disliked) power for most of his presidency. He is mild and affectionate but lacks the bulldog instinct. He allowed both internal and international enemies to tread on him incessantly. His reactions to Putin, Assad and Netaniahu were pitiful, and he could not muster enough anger to fight deranged Republicans effectively.
The Dems must acquiesce now that they are operating in emergency mode. The focus must be to regain power both at the local and at the national level. This means abandoning (for some time) issues that are very close to the hearts of some Liberals, like the ones on this board, if they are not conducive to the re-powering of the democratic brand. These may be left to the care of blue state polities.
While many, maybe most of the white Trump voters are well pictured by a specific “The Simpsons” character, one must find enough empathy resources to understand that their choices result from a lot of suffering, hopelessness and disconnection, and not real enmity. They are now not jealous, but envious (jealous as in “I want to have what he has”, envious as in “I want him not to have what I do not have”). They cannot imagine themselves in the shoes of the successful urban Americans.
Most every educated, wealthy and successful American (maybe except the 0.1%) are Liberal. You are this age’s nobles. The pitchforks point to you, this is only natural.
The DNC and the Democrat Cabal must be replaced with completely different types of people. This is true at the state level even more. Sanders can teach them how.
Hillary was a terrible candidate. She might have been a good president, I don’t know, but she is old, rich, contemptuous, and in cahoots with the most hated bastions of power. She was hated as an individual, too, from time immemorable. Who were the idiots pushing her candidacy, at such a crucial point in time ?
She got an awful lot of votes for the nomination, considering that everybody hates her. Don’t care for her much myself, but my beef with her is the whole Clintonista Republican Lite shit. Wish Joe would have done it, but looks like family tragedy took the starch out of him. Bridge too far.
Like Uncle Bernie Bedhair like crazy. I wish America wanted him, but my political views have always been unpopular, and remain so. So, the Democratic voters picked the safest, most centrist. Can’t say as I blame them.
The Pubbies spent a year getting crazier and crazier, with a series of sure things to stop Trump. Jeb(!) was gonna corner all the big money, and that would be that, but he did, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t possible to go downhill from there, but they did it. Compared to Trump, Bernie is the County Commissioner for Transportation and Roadways, compared to Trump, Bernie is normal.
It wasn’t a good choice, it was simply the best available.
Did I imply anywhere that Trump was better than her ?
Hillary was contemptuous of more people she absolutely needed for winning than Trump.
Also Trump is an uneducated vulgarian using his short fingers for grabbing pussies, while Yale educated Hillary has manicured fingers used for pulling strings in the right quarters. Guess whom the 100,000 missing votes preferred.
I think that if a more normal Pub (Rubio, Kassich) would have been nominated, Hillary would have lost in a landslide, not by 100,000 votes and a surplus of 3 Mill. popular. Just look at the Dems power brokers, Pelosi et al. to see how disconnected these people are.
Might be that Bernie would have won even against better Republicans. He and his supporters had the fire in them.
So this is the time to find Democrats able to resist the forthcoming calamity and run in the next election.
Did I imply anywhere that Trump was better than her ?