Fuckin A.
And all the people definitively positing comments as if they know why shit went so awry (outside of racism and misogyny) are NOT helping.
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Yoink!
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That was in no way meant to be a criticism of you or your posting, or of AOC for doing the survey, either- more a wondering of how any of us are going to be able to fix the problem when the problem just seems to be people who simply can’t be bothered to care or think. I know we’re all hurting right now, and I apologize for triggering that pain with my words.
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Rephrasing one’s wording and considering how your comments may be received before hitting ‘submit’ might be wise, in that case.
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The same way she trains her dog. If it doesn’t obey her unquestioningly, take out the back and put a bullet in its head.
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When the votes are all counted, Trump will likely end up with the narrowest margin of victory since 2000.
Important to keep that in mind when you hear Trump and his bootlickers in the GOP and the media talk about him having a mandate. He doesn’t and Democrats need to remember it and act like it.
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I spoke with many of the people I had first met when I was secretary of labor in the 1990s. Several brought their friends and grown children to my informal meetings, which became a kind of free-floating focus group spread across states that had once been economic powerhouses but were now economic basket cases.
With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked my “focus groups” which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were the likely Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively.
Yet almost no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, oftentimes both, as candidates they’d support for president.
The rest...
When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”
In the 1990s, many of these people (or their parents) had expressed frustration that they weren’t doing better. By 2015, that frustration had morphed into raw anger.
The people I met were furious with their employers, the federal government, and Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, upset that they had no job security, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and outraged that houses were unaffordable, schools second-rate, and everything far more expensive.
Several people I talked with had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis of 2008 or the Great Recession that followed it. Now most were back in jobs, but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.
I heard the term “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.”
These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party; some had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement. Yet most of them didn’t consider themselves political.
They were white, Black, and Latino, from union households and non-union. The only characteristic they had in common was their position on the income ladder: middle class or below. All were struggling.
Many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met condemned big corporations getting sweetheart deals from the government because of lobbying and campaign contributions.
A group of farmers in Missouri were livid about the emergence of “factory farms” — owned and run by big corporations — that abused land and cattle, damaged the environment, and ultimately harmed consumers. They claimed that giant food processors were using their monopoly power to squeeze the farmers dry, and the government was doing squat about it because of Big Agriculture’s money and influence.
In Cincinnati, I met with Republican small-business owners who were still hurting from the bursting of the housing bubble and the bailout of Wall Street. “Why didn’t underwater homeowners get any help?” one of them asked rhetorically. She answered her own question: “Because Wall Street has all the power.” Others nodded in agreement.
Whenever I suggested in a public appearance that big Wall Street banks be busted up — “any bank that’s too big to fail is too big, period” — I got loud applause.
In Kansas City, I met with Tea Partiers who were angry that hedge-fund and private-equity managers had wangled their own special “carried interest” tax deal. “No reason for it,” said one. “They’re not investing a dime of their own money. But they’ve paid off the politicians.”
In Raleigh, I heard from local bankers who thought Bill Clinton should never have repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that separated investment banking from commercial banking. “Clinton was in the pockets of Wall Street just like George W. Bush was,” said one.
Most of the people I met in America’s heartland wanted big money out of politics and thought the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was shameful.
Most were also opposed to trade agreements, including NAFTA, that they believed had made it easier for corporations to outsource American jobs and destroy their communities.
Regardless of political party, most thought the economic system was biased in favor of the rich.
The more conversations I had, the more I understood the connection between people’s view of “crony capitalism” and their dislike of government. They didn’t oppose government per se. In fact, most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and infrastructure.
Rather, they saw government as the vehicle for big corporations and Wall Street to exert their power in ways that hurt them.
They called themselves Republicans, but many of the inhabitants of America’s heartland were economic populists. Heartland Republicans and progressive Democrats remained wide apart on cultural issues, such as immigration or abortion or LGBTQ+ rights. But wherever I went, the economic populist upsurge was real.
In 2016, Sanders — a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary — came within a whisker of beating Hillary in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses.
Had the Democratic National Committee not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging campaign financing in favor of Hillary Clinton, I believe Sanders would have been the party’s nominee in 2016.
Trump, a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America.
Something very big was happening: a rebellion against the establishment.
Hillary and Jeb Bush had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers, all the name recognition you could want — but neither of them could convince voters they weren’t part of the system, and therefore part of the problem.
When I did my interviews, the overall economy was doing well in terms of the standard measures of employment and growth. But those indicators didn’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans felt and continue to feel, nor did they show the seeming unfairness most people experienced.
The indicators didn’t reveal the linkages many Americans saw, and still see, between wealth and power, crony capitalism and stagnant real wages, soaring CEO pay and their own loss of status, the emergence of a billionaire class and the undermining of democracy, and globalization and the loss of their communities.
The standard measures didn’t show the frustration of American workers without college degrees, who for decades have had to work harder with very little to show for it, and whose lifespans have shrunk.
Fast forward to today. Much of the political establishment denies what has just occurred. They prefer to attribute Trump’s reelection to political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, and the weaponization of the internet with racism, misogyny, or nativism.
Wrong. Trump has been able to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class away from the real causes of working-class distress — away from the big corporations, wealthy individuals, and denizens of Wall Street whose money has rigged the game against average working people.
It was not the first time in history that a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of their distress, and it won’t be the last.
In 2016 and then again in 2024, Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in communities that have never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings and loss of good jobs.
Big money in politics has been the root of the problem. Campaign donations from wealthy individuals and big corporations have turned the economy over to large corporations, CEOs, and billionaires.
Large corporations, CEOs, and billionaires have embraced global trade without giving blue-collar workers any means of coping with it.
They have turned Wall Street into a gambling casino without insuring the rest of America against the risk that those bets would turn bad.
They have allowed giant corporations to monopolize without giving workers the countervailing power to unionize.
This was the premise of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”) — although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted. And, of course, his promises were empty ones.
In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Hillary Clinton with blue-collar voters. He did this by attacking trade agreements, Wall Street greed, income inequality, and big money in politics. Sanders sought to remedy the disease of the Democratic Party — its abandonment of economic populism and of the American dream.
Now that Trump has been reelected and his Republican lapdogs are in control of the Senate and likely to be in control of the House, it’s critically important for Democrats, progressives, and everyone concerned about social justice to see where the anger in America’s heartland has come from, to channel it toward its real causes, and to commit to taking power back from the big corporations, CEOs, and billionaires.
What. do you think?
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Probably so, yeah. But I think we can’t overestimate the utter cluelessness of so many American voters either.
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It can be and likely is, BOTH.
The worst of all worlds.
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Yeah, that Venn diagram might not be a circle, but damn close.
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I was thinking that Biden should sign a ton of executive orders- fuck with Trump before he gets sworn in.
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I had that thought too, but wouldn’t Tromp just reverse them?
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Yeah, that’s always been one of the problems with executive orders… the next guy can reverse them, often times.
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Can we from now on agree that reaching out “across the aisle” is and was a huge mistake? I mean, it would have been nice to realize this before the election, but could the powers that be please realize this now? I swear, I felt like a crazy person when I I saw all those democrats leaning right to try and take voters from the other side. Cheney (Liz or Dick, didn’t matter) was a fucking boat anchor… no one wanted what they were selling. Mark Cuban? Who cares what he has to say? Promising a cabinet position to the republicans? What exactly did that gain the big D machine in terms of votes? You can see it right there… it got them less than nothing!
Sorry, I just have to vent, because I hate being made to feel like a crazy person when the crazy people are the ones running the ostensibly left-wing party.
This goes double for Canada, btw. Gonna have to build from the ground up here and fast…
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(hell) in my dismal imaginings Biden should use his supreme court official act immunity to uphold his oath to protect and defend the Constitution by any means available to the office - but that’s not going to happen
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Yeah, that’s always been one of the problems with executive orders… the next guy can reverse them, often times.
Probably even pardons. If say, Biden pardoned Peltier (unlikely, I know), Tromp might just throw him right back in prison. Which is no reason not to issue patrons. And probably not certain executive orders either. I do wish Biden would issue say, $10,000 checks to all remaining students loan holders.
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