and a way to save it. I’ve gotten no small number of “happy now asshole?” notes for my continued desire to say something more rich than “racist misogynist xenophobic asshole” to describe the 59,000,000+ citizens who voted for Trump last night. But I also got an amazing note from a woman with whom I went to HS in Latrobe, PA. It was in FB messenger so forgive run-ons and the lack of paragraphs.
“Kip, I think that it must be hard living in NYC to understand the trump voter. Must be like living in a liberal bubble. The racism with Trump is a recurring theme in your posts. I agree it is disturbing that he has such hateful followers and thanks to him they feel emboldened to crawl out from under their slimy rocks. I cast my vote for hilary. Last time I voted for a democrat was gore in 2000. In the past few weeks, republicans who I thought were not voting for trump decided that in the end just could not vote for hilary. Most had a specific issue or two that made them look past his disgusting faults – taxes, SCOTUS, national security, late term abortion. None of them want a ban on Muslims. All feel immigration is an essential part of who we are and want a path to citizenship. None of these people are racist. Outside of your posts, I have heard no one talk of racism. I agree it was an issue for me, though. I was in many an argument with a white supremacist on twitter (my husband is a Jew, my daughter dating a black boy). All these Republicans believe he is awful but that hilary is worse. Because they did not like either candidate they voted on issues. Now, I don’t think trump has a stance on any issue – or he has about 5 on every issue. Nor do I trust that he will do anything he says he will. My print is that outside of NYC and other big liberal cities, the racism was never much of an issue . I work with several black men who were voting for trump. When I asked why, they stated economy. To finally get to my point, don’t worry about your white brothers, the same racists that have been there are still there (just louder), 99% of his voters aren’t racist – they had other issues on their mind. And not being racist themselves, I don’t think they believe it is a huge problem with others (right or wrong). My husband shocked me when he voted for trump. He said we can’t afford another 4 years of Obama. The last 8 years we’ve been taxes to death. Due to economy, he’s had 3 pay cuts, no bonuses in past 8 years. He is finally back to his 2008 salary now. We are paying $84,000 a year for 2 kids in college. 6 more years of this to go (sophomore in collegw and my youngest is a senior in HS). Oldest graduates from clemson this year and we start paying for medical school as well. Taxes were his only issue when he voted. He is no racist. I adore your passion, your love of your fellow human beings and wonderful heart. But your liberal friends have to realize that not everyone has the luxury to vote based on issues like that. Remember Michael Moore? This was the big F-you. Let’s just pray we don’t pay for this in such a way that we can’t recover in the next presidency
Tell.your friends that this is hiw common america thinks of NYC liberals. Elitist. Holier than though. Smarter and know better than others. Listen to no one else. If your friends want to know how the rest of America views them
In at The End of The World 
I guess I don’t really care why people voted for Trump. I don’t think any of that matters anymore. Nor am I that interested in reconciliation. First of all, the Trump team won so maybe they should do the reaching out to the losers.
We live in a vastly different country today than we did yesterday. I mean categorically different. The American republic that started in 1776 and the governing norms and structures that made us the leader of the free world since 1945 all ended yesterday. There will still be a country called the United States. It will still have a powerful army and fertile farm land and innovative companies. But we are no longer that republic governed by mutual consent and the rule of law. 1776-2016. A nice run. We were alive to see it end.
I don’t doubt the motives of many people who voted for Trump. Some of them were racists or worse, but many, many of them, like our classmate above, voted out of what they saw as their reasonable self- interest to improve their lives.
I don’t really care why they voted for Trump because at the end of the day, whether you just hate colored people or are having trouble paying the bills or are pissed off at a very real cultural and economic divide between people with graduate degrees from prestigious universities and everyone else, you still had massive evidence that Trump is dangerously ill suited for the presidency. And also didn’t offer any policies at all let alone any policies that would help out our classmate. In fact, his tax plan—to the degree that he remembers it or even cares about it—gives massive tax cuts to the very wealthy. Not the middle income people who put him in office.
But he’s in office now. Or soon will be. And I’m less concerned about the racism and misogyny. Concerned and deplore it of course, but the lasting damage will come from his assault on the rule of law and the American republic. Don’t think for a moment that he and Steve Bannon won’t use the powers of the federal government to punish their enemies. Use the IRS to perform punitive tax audits. Challenge and undermine the free press. Will the New York Times survive the next four years? Probably, but maybe not.
At some point in the next four years it’s highly likely that a federal court will make a ruling that the Trump Administration disagrees with, and the Administration will just ignore the court. And get away with it, thus ending the authority of the federal courts to interpret the law.
States with Republican governors and legislatures will be free to pass laws that restrict voter participation. If those laws are challenged in court, and the court rules for the plaintiffs, a governor might well just ignore the court. And it’s highly unlikely that the Trump Justice Department will do anything about it. This is just one way that democracy is eroded and a one-party state created.
What happens if there is a national security crisis in February, and the new president is in the situation room and all eyes turn to him to make the call? And he’s still trying to locate the China Sea on a map. Or pronounce China correctly. Or doesn’t even understand the types of naval ships we have within a day’s sailing distance of the potential area of conflict?
And, it’s those people making $84k a year whose sons and daughters are most likely to be sent into harm’s way. So, I don’t doubt their motivations, but I can’t accept any of them as a rationale for voting for Trump. And while I’m all for peace, love, and understanding, it’s all too late for that now.
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That’s a completely fair point. If we’re well and truly fucked, we should take a page from Paul Kingsnorth in Britain – he’s given up on the planet, and is enjoying what days we have left. That’s fair. If there’s any point at all in looking at 2018, 2020 or beyond then we have to see if we build a majority that’s greater than 200,000 people. Another reason to look is that 59MM simply aren’t all raving racists and they might be engageable. Another thing to look at is the lower than hoped for black and Latino turnout, and the 31% of Latinos who voted for Trump in Florida. Another reason to look is because mid-term elections are when oppositions make gains, put on the brakes and set up bigger moves. None of that is doable if believe that 59 million citizens are irrevocably our enemies.
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Oh, and FTR, because everyone seems to miss this, they’re paying $84k a year for their kids’ educations, not making it. Not sure it’s important.
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Yes, I misread the post in regards the $84k. My mistake.
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“We live in a vastly different country today than we did yesterday.”
This I just can’t see. And I’ll just confess here that I found myself literally crying, screaming curses, and kicking furniture like the most obnoxious eight-year-old on earth during Clinton’s concession speech–thankfully I was alone–had to make the actual effort to get a grip. Quite an experience.
But doesn’t this election just expose, horribly, the country we’ve been living in for some time? The long failure of both the leadership and the citizenry to understand and make good use of politics and democracy? These questions aren’t just rhetorical–I don’t think i know, that is –but this is where my thinking goes. Rule of law didn’t seem overwhelmingly in evidence during Bush 2. Nor, on the basic competence thing, was it believable that GWB personally had a close, nuanced read of the various kinds of ships, the locations of nations, etc. Nixon was a criminal, driven from office, true, and in that sense the system worked, but he was elected–or thought he was–in part because he committed treason, secretly getting the the South Vietnamese to boycott the peace talks until after the election: that’s non-controversially now known to be fact. Johnson got into the House on outright election fraud, in which Supreme Court justices actively colluded. I could go on–anyone could–but my point isn’t that it’s always sucked so this is just more of the same.
This is worse. This is the worst. This jackass has never done or thought anything. We know what he is, and it’s sickening what happened on election day. Yet there just have to be a multitude of ways in which *we*–meaning the whole people, from elites and leaders to ordinary people of every kind, in a multitude of varying and conflicting ways–have done this, not two days ago but over time. The left says no: it’s always exclusively the elites who fuck us up, especially in this case the DLC. That partly true. The liberals say “rural” white people are racist misogynist jingoists; intellectuals say that reality-TV has polluted the minds of the less-educated public en masse. Those are both manifestly *partly* true. The populist right says coastal elites and academic pointyheads want to tell people how to think and behave. That’s totally true. Clinton should have campaigned in Wisconsin, and she’s generally unlikable, not a great candidate, so it’s her fault. Sure, but why have so many Dem voters come to feel that if they don’t experience messianic visitations, or get a lot of high touch, they don’t need to vote? Against a Trump!? She offered extremes of sheer competence rarely seen, and partly because of Bernie and Warren and her own pragmatism, her platform and policy offered what might start to look like the last, best hope for moving the dial to the actual left over time. Shrug: she didn’t show up in my town and get *me* excited, meh.
A lot of black voters who voted for Obama didn’t turn out for Clinton. That seems to me very poorly considered on their part. Sure wish they’d shown up.
I spend so much time calling coastal elites idiots that I would be patronizing in the extreme not to call Trump voters *and* non-voting Dems in swing and red states idiots too–even those Trump voters who aren’t racists and misogynists. But it’s not actual idiocy. They, like the liberal elitists, are just not thinking things through. And why not? How hard is it? What have we come to think this process is about? A religious revival for whatever secular religion you happen to subscribe to?
I guess that is a rhetorical question, and the answer is Yes. And now we have the culmination of that dumbass all-American process.
Anyway, I think the government is now in very bad hands, the worst we’ve ever seen, posing real and present dangers, and that we lost a huge opportunity. Still can’t quite believe it. But I still recognize, in this election, the land of my birth. I just sometimes really don’t like it.
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Mr. Jones, I agree with everything in your post. When I said that, “we live in a vastly different country today than we did yesterday” I didn’t mean to suggest that something new had been introduced into the culture or politics. Certainly, the Republican Party has been pursuing a lot of these objectives ever since Reagan declared that “government is the problem.”
My point about the country being vastly different is that this time we have passed the point of no return. It will all be smashed beyond repair. We’ve crossed a Rubicon or a tipping point. Or, perhaps we’ve crossed a Rubicon that is a tipping point that leads to a slippery slope paved with good intentions.
It’s finally broken for good. I try to address some of this in a post earlier today.
You mention Nixon and Johnson and certainly they were not temperamentally suited for the presidency. You couldn’t design in a lab someone less emotionally equipped to deal with Vietnam than Johnson.
He had his first run for the senate stolen from him by fabricated vote counts from precincts on the Mexican border. No voter ID fraud, the local political bosses just made stuff up. He won his next race for senate thanks to those same fraudulent vote counts, and then used that to help JFK win.
Chris Mathews once asked Pat Buchanan why Nixon never complained about Texas being stolen. Buchanan chuckled and said, “Because, Chris, we were stealing Kentucky.” But those things were all cleaned up eventually.
What Trump will do will make Nixon and company look like children. And there won’t be any select committee on Watergate this time. No Howard Baker prosecuting a president of his own party. I don’t think any of us can even wrap our heads around someone like Sam Ervin, who spent much of his senate career defending Jim Crow and segregation, but then chaired the senate select committee on Watergate. There will be no Barry Goldwater or other senate Republican conservatives who finally told Nixon that the game was up.
I know that you know all this. Somehow, for all the terrible things that have happened in our history, there was always a layer of civility, respect for conventions, and the law that won out. A way forward. Not so much anymore, I’m afraid. 1776-2016.
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And re LBJ, yes, Senate, not House!
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“But doesn’t this election just expose, horribly, the country we’ve been living in for some time?”
I hesitate to jump in as I am probably closest to the left you describe and the most angry and likely to blame liberals for their own failures. Consider that self-recognition. But the country/political climate we’ve been living in for some time could also be covered in a labor t-shirt that I had in the 90s: “business has two political parties, isn’t it time we had one?” For a long time, for me since 1992, I’ve thought Democrats had moved away from the economic justice of the New Deal. When I complained loudly and bitterly about Clinton’s dog whistle politics, I was told Supreme Court. When I complained about Clinton’s abandonment of labor by 1996, I was told Supreme Court. Over and over, economic justice gets sidelined, and we say Supreme Court. That dynamic has been around for years – the same country we’ve been living in – with little change. I even have a hard time defending my beloved Obama who reminded us that over the last 30 years “each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.”
Before anyone is tempted to explain yeah but this is worse, I know that already. Don’t mistake my persistence in action or my still unchanged narrative as thinking a good thing happened. Don’t mistake it as blame either. We’re in this hole, we’re not getting enough votes, we’re not getting the people who should obviously be with us. As a former marketer, I’m of the opinion that when someone isn’t buying what you’re selling, you fix your product and you fix your marketing. Blaming the customer isn’t useful, it strikes me as empirically inaccurate, and if we’re right about how fucked we are, it’s a luxury we can’t afford.
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PS Re black voters, while many will regret the choice of not turning out, it’s worth mentioning how hard HRC supporters tried to stomp out any mention of super-predator, crime bill, or welfare. On this blog, when I mentioned incarceration and welfare state, there was a glib comment about what is this, the 70s? When we stamped out the ability to talk about and process these tragedies/travesties we negated the daily experience of millions of black voters for whom it’s a very real and devastating issue. Bill Clinton could never decide how he felt about it and he sharply scolded BLM protestors as being hypocrites saying “You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.” Isn’t that something? A man who signed a crime bill that was clearly racist, and is increasingly called the New Jim Crow because he wanted to be tough on crime, telling young black voters that they’re hypocrites because they rejected the language of super-predator? Hillary, when she was invited onto “Another Round” a podcast by two very open-minded, friendly black women, was asked “Do you think your or the Democratic Party owe the black community an apology?” Hillary rambled about states’ implementation of the crime law. In fairness to many activists, people went eerily quiet on criticizing Hillary when she was the nominee. But now that it’s over, Democrats need to finally own the devastating effects of their bills and policies on the voters they want to turn out in droves for them.
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“Do you think your or the Democratic Party owe the black community an apology?” Hillary rambled about states’ implementation of the crime law.
I remember that and thinking “Shit. Possibly a huge missed opportunity right there.”
I hear this and am not saying “hey, just move on.” I guess my question is whether there’s evidence — and I’m not saying I’ve looked for it, it may be staring me right in the face, just by the numbers — that the 90’s horrorshow — and when one looks back, that’s really what it was — *is* what kept so many black Dems from showing up in ’16. During the primaries — different people, it’s true, with a different relationship to the process — didn’t in droves support the powerfully insurgent alternative to HRC. But this gets into a whole big question, which it may take years to get a grip on. The broad idea and history of the American left, including the golden-age labor-government bargain, has race issues too. It’s not *just* fallacious upscale coastal elitism to see a streak of open racism running through the classic white union-labor community that has been so badly turned on by the party. It’s a streak, not a monolithic thing, but you don’t have to send Times reporters to darkest West Virginia to find it, you can take the ferry to Staten Island or, *in some cases* drop into your local firehouse (ours went for Trump almost 100%, and *some*–not all!–of those guys just are old-school, misogynists and racists). This all has to get aired out somehow, someday on the left-liberal side of the line. It’s not any more insane for some black voters choose HRC over Sanders than it is for some to stay home to election day. And “black voters” aren’t monolithic either of course. Obviously many are fed up for all kinds of good reasons with the Democratic Party. I also think I see, in my majority-black neighborhood, some impatience among middle-aged people with the activist reaction to the “super predator” thing — indeed, I believe the Clintons’ taking a “tough on young black males” stance *played*, in the 90’s with some older voters in this neck of the woods. I know from casual chats that a bunch of my neighbors vocally love(d) stop-and-frisk and feel discriminated against, maybe justifiably, when police *don’t* roust the hanging out and loud music and so forth. I’m off point now, but in wishing more African American voters had turned out for Clinton, i’m not saying they should ignore the 90’s or even like or respect her. My larger point, if I have one, has to do with how Americans, of all kinds, view–or misread–their right to vote and its real purposes …
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I don’t think there’s slam dunk statistical evidence that this is the case. But now that the election is over, people of color seem to feel much freer saying that this was a problem for them. And the idea of ‘taking black votes for granted’ has been around a while, went quiet during the last months of the campaign and has resurfaced.
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CVFD: “No Howard Baker prosecuting a president of his own party. ” Yeah. That is the nightmare. And yeah, it’s been a slippery slope, and that slope has landed us here. We see it the same way, but man, there has to be a way to push back. There will be, somehow, because that’s what people do. How, though, is impossible for me to see right now, and may be unrecognizable by me if/when it appears Laska: No hesitation about jumping in. This stuff *has* to get aired out if there’s to be any effort at movement forward. I’m seeing heinous tone out there right now, on both sides, all sides, ad hominem invective, etc., because I’m not siloed enough–really considering starting to follow only music sites and feeds for a while, something. But I came back to this blog after election day because it’s a … safe space!!?? Yowza. Anyway, generally agree as well. Blaming the customer is insane — but in this area, I’m kind of trying to get out of the marketing model. Not sure it really fits. The customer here is a citizenry that’s supposed, by definition, to be actively engaged in the making. And largely isn’t. In the end, I’m not literally blaming the non-voters and the Trump voters (and I blame the non-voters more than most of the Trump voters), even though because I too am angry I indulge that tone. I’m blaming a whole, long process of delusion and gamesmanship that our politics has adopted–including Dem abandonment of labor in the 90’s–and miseducation, as Lauryn Hill once put it. There’s a longer discussion to be had on this, of course. I think at some point the “they’re all racists and misiogynists” people and the “it’s all about class” people (too broad, these strokes, of course) are going to have to come to grips with one another. Somehow. And that if they can’t–and maybe they really can’t–*that* is when we’ll really know we’re fucked for good. Not like singing kumbaya together, maybe just having a fight in which nobody has to die at the end. So I guess because I’m less of an activist and more of a . . . critic? storyteller? something? I feel free to criticize all sides in this. I mean, I’m not really trying to sell anything to the American public. And I wouldn’t know how to love this country–or anything else?–if I didn’t let myself also hate it sometimes. All of the people, but only some of the time. But that I take as a personality thing, not some righteous truth.
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I think this is a danger that’s hard to see. A lot of folks (God that sounds like Fox) are taking comfort in “checks and balances” but are missing the fact that checks and balances only work when: 1) there is diversity of opinion and representation; and 2) there is true respect for the importance of the system and real adherence to the rule of law. That’s a threat which, to Mister Jones’s earlier point, highlights a much longer arc. I put it back to Reagan I, when we started gutting public education and pushing the margins of acceptable behavior in the public space.
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