When Clinton and Obama were elected, Democrats weren’t wed to postmodernism. They are looking for different ways to communicate their message, but it’s the message itself that men reject.
This seems to me to be a culmination of all the Democratic weaknesses rolled into one—an excessive concern for what elites (Beltway think tanks, influential academics, big donors) think, pols who have served so long and many of whom came from elite backgrounds themselves, too much deference to scolds and single-issue activists and a lack of communications/media networks that’d help them get their message to the people they want to reach. And now publicly acknowledging that they don’t know how to talk to men! Hilarious except for the fact that this broken idiot party is the only thing standing between us and fascists.
This situation cries out for every damn one of these pols, party activists and pundits to be replaced.
The way we’ll win again is plain old partisan registration. The GOP shifted their ground game to rural areas in purple and blue states. They secured wins in all seats on the school boards in two Districts of our county in recent elections. Field team 6 is making huge gains in registering Dem leaning voters through text banking and post cards. Check them out.
Wall Street investors have cooked up a new term for betting against President Donald Trump ― and some have used it to score big gains at a time when the markets are behaving erratically due to the president’s on-again, off-again tariffs.
It’s called “TACO,” which is code for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” and it refers to the president’s tendency to announce massive tariffs, causing the markets to plunge, only to back off days later, causing them to rise again.
That trump always chickens out shows just how cowardly and/or corrupt so many Americans are, especially those with the money and the power to stop that piece of shit from destroying the country.
The US is long past 'focus groups' 'messaging' and 'winning coalitions' to elect leaders now. It has been entirely taken over by a modern Nazi party. Every day they are pushing the boundaries and getting away with more and more as there is apparently nobody left to stop them. They will nullify midterm elections and attempt to remain in power by all means. The courts are stacked with enablers, non-elected officials are given carte blanche to destroy Federal institutions and rule of law is breaking down.
Tutt tutting the 'limousine liberals' and bemoaning the past campaigns of Clinton and Obama amounts to telling Paul von Hindenburg he should change his strategy in 1932 and include more working Germans for a effective message.
Speaking as an American, I wish that Canada and Mexico would invade the USA and split us up. We would all be better off. I enjoyed the Bicentennial in 1976, but dread the 250th Nazi "celebrations" next year.
I hope that King Chuck reads the American Nazis for filth when he comes to Canada.
"I first voted in 1992. The two most successful Democratic presidents of my adult life — Clinton and Obama — had a coalition that included working class voters from both rural Ohio and urban New York. It’s not impossible, nor do you need to offer up vulnerable people as ritual sacrifice. "
Well guess what, modern Democrats get lots of clout for shitting on either of those figures, *especially* Bill Clinton. So modern Democrats can't have it both ways. They can't go, "well James Carville is a VERY BAD MAN" and "Everything nowadays is Bill Clinton's fault" because part of the Democratic way is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and salting the earth. For clout. So in essence Democrats have to start over. And a lot of the firebrand figures Dems like what tell them the pretty words with actual populism seem to keep getting stomped out when they go for anything higher than a House seat (thinking of Beto O'Rourke for example)
And sure I'm fine with entertaining "well it's not racism and all that explaining the victories" except that...well, I look at the blood libel visited upon innocent Haitian-Americans in Springfield, Ohio. I look at openly, *flagrantly* racist and otherwise bigoted rhetoric from President Klan Robe's campaigns. In fact this was a feature of the first maladministration ticket, but people wanted to talk about Hillary Clinton's speeches and superdelegates (all that juiced by Russia).
But here's my thing about the "well the voters can't be racist because they once voted for Clinton and Obama."
Ashli Babbitt reportedly voted for Barack Obama.
The pricktator himself was a Democrat long ago (now in this I am certain this is for social reasons because he wanted to fit in among the cool people in showbiz who tend to be Democrats).
People change. People can lose the plot. And a lot of people are also dismissing the effects of a fully powered up rightwing media human centipede that has the power to propagandize. It is one of the tools that makes the already dangerous effects of sadopopulism even more dangerous and intractable.
I've always thought that the racists who claimed to have voted for Obama lied about voting for Obama. "But I voted for Obama, so I can't be a racist!" is today's "But I have a Black friend, so I can't be a racist!"
Plus, there’s a lot of people—and not just white people!—who will vote for bigots if those bigots offer them what they perceive as a better deal. A bigoted candidate has simply never been a dealbreaker for most voters.
It is also possible for there to be racist Democrats, *especially* in blue-collar Rust Belt areas as well as the expected unreconstructed zones. "Ancestral Dems" as I think Reese used to say on Xitter way back in the day. My own city had a particularly infamously famous longtime Democratic mayor who utterly loathed Black people. Towards the end of his life he actually did a joke run for President as a Republican/Conservative.
And this is part of that Blue Dog coalition too. Manchin was probably the last vestige of that (I am convinced he is a racist from the particularly disrespectful way he interacted with MVP Harris).
Bottom line, you are going to have to have bigots in the coalition. There is no "perfect people" coalition. That coalition shrinks daily anyway, as someone who made the cut yesterday will inevitably do or say something that gets them rejected. We can be right and lose or more tolerant and win.
My issue then is, how far do we accept the bigotry? Who gets to be sacrificed and should those groups go along with it?
Since Newsom is working to clog that lane we're going to see. I will say that personally I am not for it. In my estimation we leave nobody behind when it comes to civil rights. Because when it's OK to smash one minority it becomes acceptable to smash the rest of them. But I recognize I could just be old-fashioned for this moment. After all we are in Gilded Age 2.0. and that was a time when Americans were happy that Black folk didn't have agency.
I think it’s not about accepting bigotry but not alienating people — ironically enough by not being bigots! When Democrats are seen as the party that thinks more than 80 percent of the population is morally flawed in some way, that is not good for the brand.
Yeah but that's like random commenters. I've not even seen a Democratic campaign even on a national stage that has even implicitly said, "White people are bad and wrong." I feel like the closest was that MAGA-like guy glowering over his supposed wife in the voting booth (which we know happens). Online Dems loved the shit out of that commercial. I actually think that came out of a PAC.
But in reality Democratic campaigns have been THE most inclusive. You didn't have Democrats adopting eliminationist rhetoric and they had the common theme of an America for All.
And on top of that there were people that claimed online that Harris/Walz didn't do enough to highlight trans people. It's like the most Kobayashi Maru thing ever, campaigning as a Democrat.
Was the diversity shown in the DNC a bad thing then? All the tapestry of America shown (and the RNC even attempted to do this but only as window-dressing given their actual makeup in office).
Here's my issue with how Democrats are seen. I think there's a BIG divide between what Democrats are actually saying and what we're told the perception is, and the key to that is the rightwing media human centipede. That's where language goes to die. This is kinda where I am of the opinion that campaigning in itself is irrelevant as well as a lot of the retail campaigning if people are going to be tuned into a media human centipede that includes podcasts and bots that tell people "What I Wish to Be True."
And I always harp on this, but there are consequences when Democrats make promises they can't keep. Democrats are even held accountable for the promises of their own defeated primary opponents! Murc's Law is the secret sauce there.
By contrast there is no (immediate) penalty for sadopopulism, at least for the people who use it to win campaigns. Its inevitable arc is towards atrocity and for that reason that *is* a flaw in the electorate. If you are animated by the desire that people who are legally here (even though you want to believe they're not) should be removed, that is a flaw, actually. I don't think it's 80% of the electorate at least, but it's enough because of the way unreconstructed territory works.
That's fair. But my impression too is that one reason we have this outcome is that there wasn't someone as openly offering out and out bigotry on a national scale as this pricktator has. It was always Lee Atwater-style innuendo (like "states' rights," etc.) A whole new world opens up when you take those guardrails off.
When I read the part about Dems consulting with their high priced consultants and focus groups to learn how to fix the problem, I thought, "we're doomed!"
Though I will say this: nature abhors a vacuum. Do we have any examples of nationally winning campaigns out of unreconstructed areas *aside* from Bill Clinton and I suppose Jimmy Carter, and that was a different world politically!
Oh yeah and now that I think about it, back then there was the Blue Dog caucus. Remember those days and the struggles of getting the ACA through? Whew even that ordeal feels like an impossibility now!
I think part of Trump’s allure is how boldly corrupt he is. In their view, ALL politicians are corrupt. At least he’s honest about it
Yesterday, I saw the video of Trump at Arlington and heard the enthusiasm for some of his stupidest comments. And when I brought this up, people on forums not to different than this one said those were paid people, or some other nonsense. We dismiss that at our own peril.
For all the stories of regret, there are still a LOT of people who’d vote for him again if they could. He makes the delineation between the good guys and the bad guys easy to follow.
I agree with you, they really do think no one would want to be a politician unless it were to enrich themselves. So someone expressing a desire to serve the public is suspect as a liar, and someone flagrantly corrupt is not, and nobody likes a liar.
In my lifetime I’ve preferred people who don’t understand their own motives but who talk the talk and make the choices I prefer even if they seem to be doing so for popularity reasons, but there are a lot of people who prefer that racists and sexists and bigots put it all out there, and I guess their reasons are just as valid as mine. I’d still prefer to elect the dude who thinks he’s being a feminist but can’t see his own sexism to the dude who insists women get back into their place. The outcome can be similar, of course, but I’ll take performative feminism over sexist any day. But I definitely see a difference in how this plays out with non-white voters and racist candidates and I assume there is a reason I don’t see.
I wonder how much of this willingness to support truly nasty people comes from the “we are all sinners” rhetoric and redemption narratives of the religious right.
When Clinton and Obama were elected, Democrats weren’t wed to postmodernism. They are looking for different ways to communicate their message, but it’s the message itself that men reject.
"I can’t stomach blacks like you." - I forgot one am relieved to know he's not going to eat you.
Typo... "for" not "forget"
🤦🏻♂️
The Party That Cannot Tell You What A Woman is, Mad Men Will Not Vote For Them. https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/the-party-that-cannot-tell-you-what
This seems to me to be a culmination of all the Democratic weaknesses rolled into one—an excessive concern for what elites (Beltway think tanks, influential academics, big donors) think, pols who have served so long and many of whom came from elite backgrounds themselves, too much deference to scolds and single-issue activists and a lack of communications/media networks that’d help them get their message to the people they want to reach. And now publicly acknowledging that they don’t know how to talk to men! Hilarious except for the fact that this broken idiot party is the only thing standing between us and fascists.
This situation cries out for every damn one of these pols, party activists and pundits to be replaced.
If you need focus groups to tell you how to talk to normal people maybe it’s time to replace your elitist pols with actual normal people.
The way we’ll win again is plain old partisan registration. The GOP shifted their ground game to rural areas in purple and blue states. They secured wins in all seats on the school boards in two Districts of our county in recent elections. Field team 6 is making huge gains in registering Dem leaning voters through text banking and post cards. Check them out.
https://www.fieldteam6.org/
RE: The Taco hed image:
Wall Street investors have cooked up a new term for betting against President Donald Trump ― and some have used it to score big gains at a time when the markets are behaving erratically due to the president’s on-again, off-again tariffs.
It’s called “TACO,” which is code for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” and it refers to the president’s tendency to announce massive tariffs, causing the markets to plunge, only to back off days later, causing them to rise again.
That trump always chickens out shows just how cowardly and/or corrupt so many Americans are, especially those with the money and the power to stop that piece of shit from destroying the country.
I'm a Canuck so take this for what it's worth...
The US is long past 'focus groups' 'messaging' and 'winning coalitions' to elect leaders now. It has been entirely taken over by a modern Nazi party. Every day they are pushing the boundaries and getting away with more and more as there is apparently nobody left to stop them. They will nullify midterm elections and attempt to remain in power by all means. The courts are stacked with enablers, non-elected officials are given carte blanche to destroy Federal institutions and rule of law is breaking down.
Tutt tutting the 'limousine liberals' and bemoaning the past campaigns of Clinton and Obama amounts to telling Paul von Hindenburg he should change his strategy in 1932 and include more working Germans for a effective message.
Speaking as an American, I wish that Canada and Mexico would invade the USA and split us up. We would all be better off. I enjoyed the Bicentennial in 1976, but dread the 250th Nazi "celebrations" next year.
I hope that King Chuck reads the American Nazis for filth when he comes to Canada.
Telling all the elite to have their children do handy work
and not go to college is not exactly a formula for success .
The working class are the Proletariat or the Communist Class !
Not exactly all nice people.
"I first voted in 1992. The two most successful Democratic presidents of my adult life — Clinton and Obama — had a coalition that included working class voters from both rural Ohio and urban New York. It’s not impossible, nor do you need to offer up vulnerable people as ritual sacrifice. "
Well guess what, modern Democrats get lots of clout for shitting on either of those figures, *especially* Bill Clinton. So modern Democrats can't have it both ways. They can't go, "well James Carville is a VERY BAD MAN" and "Everything nowadays is Bill Clinton's fault" because part of the Democratic way is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and salting the earth. For clout. So in essence Democrats have to start over. And a lot of the firebrand figures Dems like what tell them the pretty words with actual populism seem to keep getting stomped out when they go for anything higher than a House seat (thinking of Beto O'Rourke for example)
And sure I'm fine with entertaining "well it's not racism and all that explaining the victories" except that...well, I look at the blood libel visited upon innocent Haitian-Americans in Springfield, Ohio. I look at openly, *flagrantly* racist and otherwise bigoted rhetoric from President Klan Robe's campaigns. In fact this was a feature of the first maladministration ticket, but people wanted to talk about Hillary Clinton's speeches and superdelegates (all that juiced by Russia).
But here's my thing about the "well the voters can't be racist because they once voted for Clinton and Obama."
Ashli Babbitt reportedly voted for Barack Obama.
The pricktator himself was a Democrat long ago (now in this I am certain this is for social reasons because he wanted to fit in among the cool people in showbiz who tend to be Democrats).
People change. People can lose the plot. And a lot of people are also dismissing the effects of a fully powered up rightwing media human centipede that has the power to propagandize. It is one of the tools that makes the already dangerous effects of sadopopulism even more dangerous and intractable.
I've always thought that the racists who claimed to have voted for Obama lied about voting for Obama. "But I voted for Obama, so I can't be a racist!" is today's "But I have a Black friend, so I can't be a racist!"
I don't think they were *overtly* racist so much as people who aren't going to appreciate terms like "white privilege" or "intersectionality."
Plus, there’s a lot of people—and not just white people!—who will vote for bigots if those bigots offer them what they perceive as a better deal. A bigoted candidate has simply never been a dealbreaker for most voters.
It is EXACTLY that.
It is also possible for there to be racist Democrats, *especially* in blue-collar Rust Belt areas as well as the expected unreconstructed zones. "Ancestral Dems" as I think Reese used to say on Xitter way back in the day. My own city had a particularly infamously famous longtime Democratic mayor who utterly loathed Black people. Towards the end of his life he actually did a joke run for President as a Republican/Conservative.
And this is part of that Blue Dog coalition too. Manchin was probably the last vestige of that (I am convinced he is a racist from the particularly disrespectful way he interacted with MVP Harris).
Bottom line, you are going to have to have bigots in the coalition. There is no "perfect people" coalition. That coalition shrinks daily anyway, as someone who made the cut yesterday will inevitably do or say something that gets them rejected. We can be right and lose or more tolerant and win.
My issue then is, how far do we accept the bigotry? Who gets to be sacrificed and should those groups go along with it?
Since Newsom is working to clog that lane we're going to see. I will say that personally I am not for it. In my estimation we leave nobody behind when it comes to civil rights. Because when it's OK to smash one minority it becomes acceptable to smash the rest of them. But I recognize I could just be old-fashioned for this moment. After all we are in Gilded Age 2.0. and that was a time when Americans were happy that Black folk didn't have agency.
I think it’s not about accepting bigotry but not alienating people — ironically enough by not being bigots! When Democrats are seen as the party that thinks more than 80 percent of the population is morally flawed in some way, that is not good for the brand.
Yeah but that's like random commenters. I've not even seen a Democratic campaign even on a national stage that has even implicitly said, "White people are bad and wrong." I feel like the closest was that MAGA-like guy glowering over his supposed wife in the voting booth (which we know happens). Online Dems loved the shit out of that commercial. I actually think that came out of a PAC.
But in reality Democratic campaigns have been THE most inclusive. You didn't have Democrats adopting eliminationist rhetoric and they had the common theme of an America for All.
And on top of that there were people that claimed online that Harris/Walz didn't do enough to highlight trans people. It's like the most Kobayashi Maru thing ever, campaigning as a Democrat.
Was the diversity shown in the DNC a bad thing then? All the tapestry of America shown (and the RNC even attempted to do this but only as window-dressing given their actual makeup in office).
Here's my issue with how Democrats are seen. I think there's a BIG divide between what Democrats are actually saying and what we're told the perception is, and the key to that is the rightwing media human centipede. That's where language goes to die. This is kinda where I am of the opinion that campaigning in itself is irrelevant as well as a lot of the retail campaigning if people are going to be tuned into a media human centipede that includes podcasts and bots that tell people "What I Wish to Be True."
And I always harp on this, but there are consequences when Democrats make promises they can't keep. Democrats are even held accountable for the promises of their own defeated primary opponents! Murc's Law is the secret sauce there.
By contrast there is no (immediate) penalty for sadopopulism, at least for the people who use it to win campaigns. Its inevitable arc is towards atrocity and for that reason that *is* a flaw in the electorate. If you are animated by the desire that people who are legally here (even though you want to believe they're not) should be removed, that is a flaw, actually. I don't think it's 80% of the electorate at least, but it's enough because of the way unreconstructed territory works.
I think the point is that bigots were once part of a winning coalition. I actually don’t think people have changed that much.
That's fair. But my impression too is that one reason we have this outcome is that there wasn't someone as openly offering out and out bigotry on a national scale as this pricktator has. It was always Lee Atwater-style innuendo (like "states' rights," etc.) A whole new world opens up when you take those guardrails off.
When I read the part about Dems consulting with their high priced consultants and focus groups to learn how to fix the problem, I thought, "we're doomed!"
Though I will say this: nature abhors a vacuum. Do we have any examples of nationally winning campaigns out of unreconstructed areas *aside* from Bill Clinton and I suppose Jimmy Carter, and that was a different world politically!
Oh yeah and now that I think about it, back then there was the Blue Dog caucus. Remember those days and the struggles of getting the ACA through? Whew even that ordeal feels like an impossibility now!
I think part of Trump’s allure is how boldly corrupt he is. In their view, ALL politicians are corrupt. At least he’s honest about it
Yesterday, I saw the video of Trump at Arlington and heard the enthusiasm for some of his stupidest comments. And when I brought this up, people on forums not to different than this one said those were paid people, or some other nonsense. We dismiss that at our own peril.
For all the stories of regret, there are still a LOT of people who’d vote for him again if they could. He makes the delineation between the good guys and the bad guys easy to follow.
I agree with you, they really do think no one would want to be a politician unless it were to enrich themselves. So someone expressing a desire to serve the public is suspect as a liar, and someone flagrantly corrupt is not, and nobody likes a liar.
In my lifetime I’ve preferred people who don’t understand their own motives but who talk the talk and make the choices I prefer even if they seem to be doing so for popularity reasons, but there are a lot of people who prefer that racists and sexists and bigots put it all out there, and I guess their reasons are just as valid as mine. I’d still prefer to elect the dude who thinks he’s being a feminist but can’t see his own sexism to the dude who insists women get back into their place. The outcome can be similar, of course, but I’ll take performative feminism over sexist any day. But I definitely see a difference in how this plays out with non-white voters and racist candidates and I assume there is a reason I don’t see.
I wonder how much of this willingness to support truly nasty people comes from the “we are all sinners” rhetoric and redemption narratives of the religious right.