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Wednesday, November 09, 2016

A Lesson Learned

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor loser. Go smoke some pot and maybe you'll feel better.

jimf said...

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/11/09/damn-you-god-damn-you-all-to-hell/

Oy!

Dale Carrico said...

Brave, Anonymous, do enjoy your victory -- in politics victories and defeats follow upon one another without end, there is no happy ending, there are only happy warriors doing the work -- I wish you joy in the cruelties you endorse and the defeats soon enough to come: As for me, I will continue to resist racist, sexist, heterosexist, cissexist bigotry and inequity and exploitation and violence and climate denial whoever is in the White House. I don't smoke pot, I prefer tasty euphorizing baked goods.

jimf said...

> A Lesson Learned. . .

I blame it all on The Gays. :-0

Lorraine said...

What we are suffering is not a candidate who is not entertaining enough, but one who doesn't present a clearly and assertively stated policy agenda.

Dale Carrico said...

Clinton, who lost, published exhaustive policies she exhaustively discussed on the trail while the media talked about hacked e-mails and her use of a private server -- Trump, who won, has a few slogans passing for policies without plans attached and no history to guide our sense of what unspeakable death-dealing evil will be proposed in his name while the media covered his raucous rallies nonstop for their profitable entertainment value. This unprecedented catastrophe is not monocausal, my twitter essay here addresses just one issue, but I stand by its claim and have learned its lesson whether my party has or not.

Dale Carrico said...

I blame it all on The Gays. :-0

With rancid antigay bigot Pence running things Cheney-style while Trump golfs I fear many will find they want to blame and punish the gays for the distress of a depression economy, multiplying acts of terror, criminalized abortion, vanished healthcare, images of martial law on the tee vee, and accelerating resource descent and greenhouse storms disrupting precarious populations. This is not going to be okay. Trump is going to make W seem like a walk in the park. America hasn't recovered from Reagan and W -- Trump may end this experiment and replace it with an ugly hopeless dying thing we just try to survive while clinging to our loved ones in the dark.

Anonymous said...

Trump's candidacy became a kind of counter-movement representing those whites who were offended (and probably scared) by the Black Lives matter movement. This was a sneak attack in the Culture War which never really ended.

Dale Carrico said...

It looks an awful lot like that to me too -- though there are two dangers in saying so: First, the evil of bigotry and righteousness of repudiating it are so clear that this point can distract us from necessary recognitions how the choice of a candidate with a history yielding very high negatives (however unfair) who is also an unnatural and uncomfortable politician (by her own admission) invited disastrously low turnout; and Second, the Obama coalition of the ascendant is still the reality in America and we really did win the Culture Wars (creating dis-organizing complacency among the winners and organizing resentment and fear among the losers) and the Trump victory cannot license ongoing mischaracterizations of the problems and possibilities inhering in that reality.

Anonymous said...

Oh my god, you are clueless beyond my wildest suspicions.
Short version of your explanation: "there is something wrong with Americans".

That's exactly why you lost. People have excellent reasons for doing what they're doing, and you have failed to detect even one of them.

At least be butthurt in silent dignity. Don't make your profession and your people ashamed.

jollyspaniard said...

At the beginning of this year I thought the old truism of Canada, the USA and Britain following the same trends no longer held true. The situations in each country seemed quite different. But populists won stunning upsets in all three countries. In Canada's case the populism was from the left and was anti-racist. Sadly Chris Hedges is looking prescient here with his warnings that the right would put a populist in power if the Left didn't beat them to it.

Anonymous said...

My point is more to politely disagree partially with the conclusion you're drawing in your tweet stream above. I don't think the lesson to be learned is that charisma and entertainment value are what wins elections, anymore than say, confident competence, or affable trustworthiness, or good looks, or what-have-you. But if you want to win an election by tapping into primal fears and coalescing a movement of actual voters based on those fears, a charismatic and entertaining leader is exactly what you need. Fortunately, we don't often see such movements or need such leaders.

I do agree though that charisma and entertainment value certainly have some value in a candidate. Not enough to decide the question of who that candidate should be though, for me at least.

Anonymous said...

When Obama won people didn't burn things. With Trump winning now were in our second day of rioting and burning. Does that say something about who we are? Being a Dem it saddens me that our brothers and sisters have to resort to such tactics.

jimf said...

> Trump is going to make W seem like a walk in the park.

Are we allowed to call him President Pussygrabber?
(It's got such alliteration and cadence.)

I see in the New York Times today that the "normalization"
has started -- starting with quoting Hillary's concession
remark "Let's give him the benefit of an open mind." and other
similar sentiments.

We have to "come together".

----------
HENRY COLLINGRIDGE: And now, let our watchword be this.
Let's find the right way for all of our people to come together.

(CHEERING)

PATRICK WOOLTON: Bloody nonsense. All come together?
Sounds like a motto of a knocking-shop in Marrakech.

FRANCIS URQUHART: Dear old Patrick. Knocking-shop in Marrakech!
Very wide of the mark. Our esteemed new leader wouldn't
know a knocking-shop if he saw one. His morality is strictly
backstreet Sunday school hypocritical cant picked up in
Peterborough or Rugeley or some such God-awful place.
Not that one holds that against him. But we started something
when we let fellows like that climb up the greasy pole.
----------

FU, indeed.

jimf said...

Charlie Stross' thoughts:

"I think I'm going to give up on writing near-future SF,
unless it's to go for the most ghastly crapsack shitlord-ruled
dystopia I can imagine."

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/11/the-day-after.html

Dale Carrico said...

Suspect more than one Anonymous posting here -- to the one who called me clueless, enjoy it while you can.

Dale Carrico said...

I mentioned stiff Gore, Kerry, Clinton, bit could mention Mondale, Dukakis... all Democrats, all losers. Our winners? JFK, Bill Clinton, Obama, charismatic, communicators, in addition to their other qualities (I didn't like Bill Clinton but preferred winning to losing). Truman, LBJ, Carter are special cases given death of a four-term president, assassination, and then Watergate. Democrats pick the awkward wonk over and over because we care about policy and the insiders know the candidate well enough to know the person -- a very different figure from the persona/celebrity/narrative vehicle who has to do the job. Nice, decent, sensible, professional, policy conversant matter enormously... but for the job. For getting the job, learn the lesson: a communicator, charismatic, resonant with a prevailing/ascendant winning coalition. Pay attention to negatives, pay attention to audience response, don't go into denial about what the under-informed emotional American people whose votes we need are signalling. I'm not saying they are right, I'm saying that it doesn't matter -- they have the votes we need. I don't like this lesson. I'm not saying this is the whole story. But this matters more than Democrats find congenial culturally and temperamentally and it has tripped us up too many time at too great a cost. Reagan, Gingrich, W, and now Trump have unleashed untold destruction. Finding decent competent professions who also know how to put on a show can't be that fucking difficult considering the stakes.

jollyspaniard said...

Dale I beg to differ on your winning the culture wars argument. The old bigotries are back, they never left or were decisively defeated. They were routed and are regrouping in a new package. The conspiracy theory movement/paradigm. These people aren't going to be persudaded by a candidate who tells them to read her policy documents on her website.

They've also pulled off a neat trick, convincing people that voting for right wing authoritarians is a subversive, rebellious act. That's an illusion that will become harder to maintain. A lot of them don't really believe it, they're just angry.

Dale Carrico said...

About the anger you mention: Anger is an emotion the propositional correlate to which is something like: "an injustice has been done [usually, but not always, to me]." There are lots of people with more righteous anger at this moment that I care about infinitely more, but setting that aside I guess maybe Trump voters might turn that very anger back on Trump and Trumpism (a billionaire businessman and a populist message already providing a pretext for the usual privatization and looting and wealth-concentration politics) if they come to feel he treated them like chumps, but only so long as the vehicle of that message doesn't come from what they take to be liberals or establishment types gloating or calling them names. Then again, the fragility of these brainless bigots seems so infinite I honestly don't know how to avoid such accusation without actually indulging in their bigotry and ignorance itself at this point which I won't do because they are evil and wrong and anyway they are an ever more marginal minority even if still sufficiently large that certain kinds of foolishness on the left can still provide openings for them to prevail in.

Realizing the multicultural left won the culture wars should connect in my view to grasping the significance that HRC won the popular vote, that raising the minimum wage and providing family leave and voting women of color into high office for the first time also happened in this election, that Trump won no more votes really than Romney did and that depressed turnout (given her negatives from the outset, fair or not, in the context of campaign vicissitudes like the late-breaking Comey debacle) lost her this election but were far from destiny. I will not concede Trump or Trumpism a mandate because the election did not confer one and for the same reasons I won't pretend the multicultural left lost the culture wars when I see no sign we did and I think it foolish to relinquish the power that victory might invest the Democratic party with if only we sought to understand it on its actual terms.

Esebian said...

Death squads are now roaming the US. We've stumbled into a dystopian SF pulp novel.

Please, don't read that as a glib dismissal of all the suffering and death happening right now and over the next four years, but we have to look forwards. Even in the miniscule event Cheetoh Jesus doesn't outright ruin society and economy, there's no way he can make good on his campaign promises. He can't reopen the steel mills of Pennsylvania or the textile factories in light of cheap Asian competition. As we've seen in the Obama years, the American voter is impatient. Disillusionment among his former supporters will set in, and that's the chance to kick this human cancer to the curb.

Stay strong, Dale.

Dale Carrico said...

Thank you! That's today's first crying jag over and done, then.