Covid Support Thread
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Newsflash: there’s plenty of fucked up white WOMEN Republicans out there. Plenty. Witness the rise of daily “Karen“ stories everywhere. More — white women haven’t exactly been fucking great as far as electing women or minorities. Hell, Hillary failed to even win with white women.
But Hillary lost because she ran a miserable campaign, has precious little charisma, came with a ton of baggage and picked a lame-ass running mate few even remember. Honestly? I am blanking on his name. He was just such a non-entity. (Oh, and fuckface Comey sure didn’t help!)
The DNC boned us by shamelessly rigging things for the “sure thing” HRC. Too bad she was a “sure miss.“
Now, they’ve inexplicably saddled us with Biden who is about as boring a candidate as humanly possible. In the middle of a full-blown fucking burn everything to the ground revolution, the powers that be somehow REALLY think sputtering and doddering Biden is going to miraculously save us between naps?!? As if.
Hillary lost because a group of republican men, enraged by a Black man in power, conspired with a foreign power to make sure their guy would win. And the electoral college which, white men.
No shit white women voted for Trump, we’ve been through this on the other Trump thread. More women than men voted for Hillary though. White women were about equally split, and a majority of white men were for Trump. You guys are really keeping your heads in the sand with this blame Hillary, blame women narrative while the Republican men in power are STILL cheating, could still win because they cheat, and their blindly loyal cult of white men is suiting up in tactical gear with assault rifles and their police (again, men) are killing people in the streets. Wake up.
Hindsight gives us all 20/20 vision doesn’t it?
We now see that Hillary ran a bad campaign. At the time, those of us in our little pockets of left-ness didn’t imagine that Trump’s Russian campaign team was going to be successful. And yes, Ron, for some people the most important thing was business and finance. That was their single issue. However, what became clear from the election results was that for people who voted because of financial insecurity – they were fine voting for a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, had a long history of racism and made loud and appalling racist statements – because they would be able to make more money.People who voted for Trump, and I said this back in 2016, were either flagrant racists or silently accepted racism.
Yup, I said it too. And sexism.
“Financial insecurity” here is code for white men who are afraid of losing their longstanding power and privilege in the US to people of color, and who want to be able to keep women in the kitchen.
It really isn’t 20/20 hindsight on Hillary. A lot of us saw it before she got the nomination in 2016. That’s why I voted Bernie in the primary, even though it galled me that he refused to even identify as a member of the Democratic Party and he was a little too far left for my preference). This wasn’t Hillary’s first dance. I closely watched the debates and primary campaign, largely Hillary vs Obama in 2008. She came into that one as the prohibitive favorite and, except for the traditional women’s issues, which Obama also supported, basically ran as a Republican: she cast herself as the biggest neocon fighter of international wars in the room and was very corporatist and not very progressive, apart from those women’s issues. She had two competing highly paid campaign managers, with nobody really in charge, and showed a lack of charisma and tone deafness to where most of the Democratic Party stood on issues of war and peace and international relations. If she had been willing to apologize for her Iraq War vote she would have beaten Obama. Actually, even with that, she would have won had her advisors planned for a full campaign, but she and they expected a spectacular early knockout and left the Rocky Mountain/upper prairie state as uncontested Obama wins.
The haggling between Obama and Hillary to secure Hillary’s ‘endorsement’ and ‘support’ in the general election was unprecedented in my memory. She got Secretary of State and, presumably, control of the DNC and a pledge of support for her candidacy when Obama left office. It is highly unusual for a president, especially a two-term president, not to take control of the party apparatus, but that remained in the hands of the Clinton supporters. Those of us who did house to house campaigning in the whiter portions of our small city could not help but notice a large number of women who, even in late October, were highly antagonistic to Obama, because he had the temerity to run against Hillary, when they thought it was her turn in 2008 and that it was very wrong to have the first black president before we had the first woman president. It had an unappealing racist tinge, but they also knew their history and this has been an issue in some feminist circles going all the way back to the start of Reconstruction, when there was bitter disappointment and sense of betrayal that black men got the vote while white women did not (a very valid complaint, but hardly the fault of the black men, but yes, sexism did trump racism for Lincoln and his supporters).
Come 2016 and the DNC, and Obama, did clear the field for Hillary. She would not have had any real primary opposition had Bernie not run (he wasn’t a Democrat, so nothing DNC could do to stop him, but the DNC files release did show a heavy DNC thumb on the scale in favor of Hillary). Our strongest candidate in 2016 would have been Elizabeth Warren. Unfortunately, she was encouraged not to run.
It was not at all surprising that Hillary was as bad a candidate in 2016 as she had been in 2008. She repeated the same mistakes.
“Financial insecurity” here is code for white men who are afraid of losing their longstanding power and privilege in the US to people of color, and who want to be able to keep women in the kitchen.”
Kate —
I think that you are confounding two different groups of white men. The ones who switched D to R to vote Trump did do so, in part, out of a sense of losing cherished privilege over women and people of color, just for being white men, but they also were the group of men with ZERO power. The Democratic Party’s white men with power (whether politicians, union leaders, business leaders, big trial lawyers, leaders of academe seem not to have voted Trump). Those poorer white D men in failing industries/communities seemed to me to be very heavy on former union, non-college workers, who had lost their high-paid union jobs. They also seemed to have largely voted twice for Obama, so they were able to vote against race, possibly lingering union ties — in our Congressional district, the head of the Steelworkers Union (all fired, retired at that time) had just run for Congress twice.Why tf are you still analyzing Hillary to death? Move on. Look at what’s in front of you. A cesspool of criminals looking to rig an election in any and every way they can.
And yeah, no, Ron with the “many men have zero power!” bullshit. That’s a false argument to relieve people of the responsibility of being racist or sexist. But I have no power! No, ya do, even if you’re the poorest, laziest, stupidest white guy. You can feel absolutely safe and confident doing a thousand different things that Black people can’t do. You can even kill them and get away with it. Stop with the “these poor guys lost their jobs” line of shit. Every single person who voted for Trump was signing off on sexism and misogyny.
Hillary keeps being brought up and I respond. Beyond that, I admit to sharing a common progressive resentment to the lingering hold that the Clintonistas have had on the apparatus of the Democratic Party. They are the more conservative, corporatist, get-involved-in-international-wars wing of the party which specializes in fund raising and protecting entrenched corporatism and excessive globalization. Also, too conservative for my taste.
I don’t think we should dismiss the economic concerns of the Obama to Trump Democrats and Independents. To do so, in my view, misses a group which we might need to win going forward and which the Democratic Party has traditionally served. Yes, there is racism and sexism in this group, which is culturally conservative. There also is a lot of economic pain. There is the same level of frustration and just wanting to blow up the whole system and hope the pieces fall into something more appealing them that we see in the rioters. They are a product of the collapse of American manufacturing, mining, logging, and small farming. They don’t have post-H.S. educations, many not even H.S. educations.
They feel put upon and that they are looked upon as inferior. Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ label was seized upon as an identity badge. They embody so many contradictions, that I don’t see them as hopelessly Trumpists or even natural Republicans. The golden past the look back to was forged by labor unions, yet they are anti-union. Their farms failed, because they couldn’t compete with factory farms, yet they accept the Republican approach to unregulated, finance-driven capitalism. The income they once enjoyed now flows to the top 1%, yet they have been convinced by Republicans that is the poor minorities and immigrants that steal their incomes and take the jobs, which they don’t actively want. They have been duped by Republicans.
They saw Trump as their bully who would fight for and save them. He hasn’t. They blamed both party establishments. So, post-Trump, they are up for grabs. If the culture war predominates their thinking, they will be Rs. If Democratic economics appeals to them, they will be Ds. If we win this election, we can turn many of them back to the Democratic Party, which will weaken the R’s cultural sway. Many are not truly racist, or are able to look past inherent racism, or they wouldn’t have voted for Obama.
Really, if 2016 was a Bernie vs Trump election, this group of voters would have split. More anger an nihilims than racism or sexism as the drivers.
I don’t focus on Trump’s 35% of electorate base. Unremittingly racist and sexist, and totally believe that is how God wants them to be. Don’t believe Democratic men are real men, we don’t match their model of masculinity. They aren’t convincable — about anything. It is religion to them. 2020 will be won on turnout and the, perhaps only 5% of electorate, voters who actually can be persuaded. Can’t persuade them if you don’t try to understand where they are coming from and convince them that you are going to help solve their REAL problems.
