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Bill Black:

Liberals Didn’t Listen – The Immense Cost of Ignoring Tom Frank’s Warnings

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Yves Smith

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published at New Economic Perspectives

I am writing this article late on election night in my office at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, about a mile from the home in which Tom Frank grew up just over the state line in Kansas. Beginning with his famous book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, first published in 2004, Tom Frank has been warning the Democratic Party of the increasing cost it was paying by abandoning and even attacking the working class, particularly the white working class. Some political scientists tried to savage his work, pointing to Bill Clinton’s electoral success and arguing that the disaffected members of the working class were also less likely to vote. Frank returned to the theme just in time for this election with a new book – Listen, Liberal – that documents in damning, lively narrative the New Democrats’ war on the New Deal, their disdain for organized labor, and their antipathy for what they viewed as retrograde white working class attitudes.

Frank kept showing the enormous price the working class were paying as a result of the economic policies of the Republicans and the New Democrats, and the indifference to their plight by the leaders of the New Democrats. Senator Bernie Sanders consciously took up the cause of reducing surging inequality and became a hero to a broad coalition of voters, many of them fiercely opposed to the New Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street cash, policies, and arrogance. Sanders set records for small donor fundraising and generated enormous enthusiasm. Sanders knew he would face the opposition of the New Democrats, but he also found that progressive congressional Democrats would rarely support him publicly in the contest for the Party’s nomination and even union leaders sided overwhelmingly with Secretary Hillary Clinton, the New Democrats’ strongly preferred candidate.

Hillary did not simply fail to reach out to the working class voters that the New Democrats had turned their backs on for decades, she infamously attacked them as “deplorables.” This was exactly the group of potential voters that was enraged because it believed, correctly as Tom Frank keeps showing us, that the New Democrats looked down on them and adopted policies that rigged the system against the working class. Hillary’s insult confirmed their most powerful bases for their rage against her. Her insult was an early Christmas present to Trump. Her attempt to walk the insult back was doomed.

Hillary Clinton handled things so miserably that she allowed a plutocrat whose career is based on rigging the system against the working class to become the hero of the working class. That is world-class incompetence. Had she followed Tom Frank’s advice she would today be the President-elect. The real cost, however, of her failure will be enormous damage to our democracy, the safety of the world, and the damage that President Trump will do to the working class as he systematically betrays their interests.

The first test of whether the Wall Street-wing of the Democratic Party has learned any of the lessons Tom Frank tried to teach them is whether President Obama will continue with his threat to try to have the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) approved by the lame duck session of Congress. Obama, who was elected on the promise that he would stop TPP, should listen to Senators Sanders and Warren and honor his promise to the voters to stop TPP. He must begin the process of the Democrats winning back the support of the working class.

The leaders of the democratic-wing of the Democratic Party need to move forward assertively to retake control of their Party. The current head of the DNC has been exposed as part of the effort to prevent Senator Sanders from winning the nomination. She should resign tomorrow. The Clintons should cease acting as Party leaders.

A period of enormous corruption and elite fraud is coming soon as the Trump administration brings its signature characteristic – crony capitalism – to bear to control all three branches of government. Trump promises to deregulate Wall Street, appoint top supervisors chosen for their unwillingness to supervise, and appoint judges who will allow CEOs to loot with impunity. Trump promises to outdo even the savage anti-media and anti-whistleblower policies of the Obama administration. The House and Senate committee chairs will intensify their blatantly partisan use of investigations while refusing to conduct real oversight hearings revealing the elite fraud and corruption.

The progressive Senate Democrats will have to be innovative and stalwart in these circumstances to find ways to blow the whistle repeatedly on the mounting corruption. Their challenge will be to lead despite having no real institutional power. Democrats should start by doing what they should have done in 2004 – take Tom Frank’s warnings deadly seriously.
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This is published at nakedcapitalism.com :

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/bill-black-liberals-didnt-listen-the-imme...

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Obama reeling from gut punch of Trump win

America's decision to embrace Trump and reject Obama's third term shocked the White House.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

11/09/16 09:27 AM EST

There is no plan at the White House.

They also never thought this could or would happen.

•••
"On top of all the other factors, never has there been such raw and clear mutual personal hatred and dismissal between two presidents. Trump was elected president on the back of the years he spent delegitimizing Obama. Obama has spent years denigrating Trump in return, and focused on proactively delegitimizing a Trump presidency he never thought was a real possibility. Now these are the men who will have to join together to lead the most difficult, and arguably most important, transfer of power America has ever faced.

" “The most shocking part of tonight is the number of people who approve of Obama but didn't vote for Hillary Clinton,” tweeted former Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer after the results came in—but that in itself may be a skewed portrait: the same polls that showed soaring approval for Obama showed Clinton winning at least 100 more electoral votes than she did, and being the president-elect who’d meet with Obama at the White House on Thursday. "
••• •••

Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren’t real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.

How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

You can believe that half the country is racist if you want, and there’s no question that there’s an undercurrent of anger in Trump’s stunning rise. But that anger isn’t directed at any individual ethnic group. It’s more inchoate than that. It’s rage at institutions that people believe have failed them forever. It’s rage at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary folks. It’s rage at a cultural milieu that perceives too many non-coastal Americans as buffoons. It’s rage at the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession, in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger, and the two-tiered system of justice paraded on full display. It’s rage at an elite class that people feel is lined up against them.
....
Liberals weren’t completely caught unawares. We recognized the rage—how could we not? We saw it in our social-media feeds all year. We read (and wrote) endless articles featuring reporters edging out to Red America, armed with a notebook and a pretense of empathy, to see what Trumpism was all about, why the fever seemed to be running so high among these people.
And what did that produce? The daily filling of a basket of deplorables. I sometimes refer to it as “point-and-laugh” liberalism. Our relentless mockery of Trump and his followers helped fuel the backlash and make it spread.
....
Political parties go into a presidential election knowing the landscape. They know the challenges. Their goal is to win. And my feeling is, the lesson for Democrats is ultimately clear enough: You cannot write off half the country, much less spend an election cycle deriding it, and expect success.
....
We turned “economic anxiety” into a meme that implicitly belittled anyone who didn’t find their life wonderful. We lapped up every Owen Ellickson Twitter narrative and every Funny or Die video of Trump being as dumb as a bag of hammers. And yes, the Democratic standard-bearer commented that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
However correct that quote might have been, it contributed to this anger and stoked it. Americans outside the big cities may not identify with conservatives, but they identified with their neighbors, both physically and culturally. And they heard the popular culture laughing at them.

" Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

"The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!"

HUFFINGTON POST :

CONTRIBUTOR | Krystal Ball

The Democratic Party Deserved To Die

Demographics are not destiny. Candidates do matter. And it is still the economy, stupid.

11/09/2016 01:47 pm ET | Updated 17 hours ago

---------------------------

They said they were facing an economic apocalypse, we offered “retraining” and complained about their white privilege. Is it any wonder we lost? One after another, the dispatches came back from the provinces. The coal mines are gone, the steel mills are closed, the drugs are rampant, the towns are decimated and everywhere you look depression, despair, fear. In the face of Trump’s willingness to boldly proclaim without facts or evidence that he would bring the good times back, we offered a tepid gallows logic. Well, those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege. Can you blame them for calling bullshit? All Trump could offer was white nationalism as protection against competing with black and brown people. It wasn’t a very compelling case, but it was vastly superior to a candidate who enthusiastically backed NAFTA, seems most at ease in a room of Goldman Sachs bankers and was almost certain to do nothing for these towns other than maybe setting up a local chapter of Rednecks Who Code. We bet that Trump’s manifest awfulness would be enough to let us eke out a win. We were dead wrong. Here’s my version of the Democratic Party autopsy because, make no mistake, the old ways of the Democratic party must die.

Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings were obvious from the beginning to anyone who bothered to open their eyes.

It’s not like we couldn’t have seen this coming. Last year, in my new home state of Kentucky, Democrats were high on their chances of holding onto the governorship. Our candidate was thoughtful, reasoned, disciplined. Theirs was a brash ideological businessman. We were up in the public polls and both campaign’s internal polls by 5 points on election day. We ended up losing by 10. The party wrote this off as an isolated event. It wasn’t. Eight years ago, on a promise of sweeping change and optimism, we elected Barack Obama, took back the House, gained a supermajority in the Senate. We have been riding the high of this wave ever since as Republicans took back the House (2010), took back the Senate (2014) and absolutely decimated Democrats in governor’s mansions and state legislatures across the country. 24 states are fully controlled by Republicans at the House, Senate and gubernatorial levels. Amid the carnage last night, Kentucky’s state house, which was the last legislative body in a state won by Romney still holding for the Dems, was unceremoniously handed over to Republicans in a rout. But we didn’t seem to care much about these losses in the vast middle and South and Midwest of the country, so long as we kept our lock on the presidency. The arrogance of thinking that somehow we could ignore most of the country and still hold a claim on the nation’s highest office is breathtaking. Demographics are not destiny. Candidates do matter. And it is still the economy, stupid.

Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings were obvious from the beginning to anyone who bothered to open their eyes. I wasn’t the only one who saw before she ever entered the race that a card-carrying member of the global elite who helped usher in this era of record-breaking inequality was hardly the best fit for the moment. It’s hard not to feel let down by people like Vice President Biden and Senator Warren who clearly saw the problems with Hillary but didn’t step up for their nation when they were called. Bernie did his level best but couldn’t compete against a party terrified of the modest radicalism that made him so appealing. I do believe that a different candidate would have led to a different outcome. But Hillary’s coronation is also proof that the problems in the Democratic Party run much deeper than just one candidate. There’s a reason why nearly the entire party rose up to stomp out the promise of Bernie Sanders candidacy.

The slow drift in the Democratic Party was long in the making. It’s been many years since the Democratic Party decided to throw their lot in with the shiny world of corporate professionals, Wall Street financiers, and Silicon Valley gurus. We accepted the decline of unions as inevitable (it wasn’t), didn’t bother even trying to come up with an alternative source of worker power and embraced the new politics of money even as we talked out the other side of our mouths about oh how terrible all this flood of cash in politics is. If you just send in one more donation we’ll be able to get the money out! There was an incredibly revealing moment at the DNC. In an effort to rev up the crowd one of the speakers called out: “Who in this room works with their hands?” Silence. It was a lot more than one candidate who led us to this place.

(Politico.com)

Clinton aides blame loss on everything but themselves

‘They are saying they did nothing wrong, which is ridiculous,’ one Democrat says.

By Annie Karni

11/10/16 06:24 PM EST

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-aides-loss-blame-231215

Sexism. The media. James Comey.

On a call with surrogates Thursday afternoon, top advisers John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri pinned blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss on a host of uncontrollable headwinds that ultimately felled a well-run campaign that executed a sensible strategy, and a soldier of a candidate who appealed to the broadest coalition of voters in the country.

They shot down questions about whether they should have run a more populist campaign with a greater appeal to angry white voters, pointing to exit polls that showed Clinton beat Trump on the issue of the economy. They explained that internal polling from May showed that attacking Trump on the issue of temperament was a more effective message.

They offered no apology for the unexpected loss.

On the call, Clinton surrogates who have supported the campaign from the outside for the past 18 months offered their thanks to the Brooklyn-based operatives. The mood was light and supportive, with Podesta and Palmieri expressing gratitude for everyone’s hard work.

But some people on the call were seething.

“They are saying they did nothing wrong, which is ridiculous,” said one Clinton surrogate. “She was the wrong messenger and everyone misjudged how pissed working class people were.”

As the reality of a Trump presidency began to set in on Thursday, there was a growing sick sense among longtime Clinton allies and advisers that the aide who long ago advised the former secretary of state against mounting a second presidential bid, Cheryl Mills, may have been right. In interviews with close to a dozen top Clinton allies and former operatives, who did not want to publicly criticize the losing campaign or candidate, many expressed a deep frustration that the party had pinned its hopes on a divisive establishment candidate. And they wondered why no one fully embraced the reality that despite President Barack Obama’s soaring approval rating, 2016 was ultimately a change election.

The issues were crystal clear as early as January 2015, but the campaign thought it could overcome it.

“Make a virtue of her longevity,” Palmieri advised in an email that month to Podesta, released by WikiLeaks. “Embrace all the Clinton-ness — the forty years in politics, the decades on the national stage...Maybe folks had Clinton fatigue at one point, now they are just seen as part of the fabric of America. (Hillary won’t go away, she is indefatigable, she just keeps at it, and you can trust her to get the job done.)”

But in a change election, pitching longevity and experience as a positive simply didn’t add up to a resonant message.

Despite being the wrong candidate for the moment, many allies who have helped the campaign for months were still in disbelief that Clinton did not succeed in putting away a man they see as unqualified to serve as commander in chief.

“She got this gift of this complete idiot who says bizarre things and hates women and she still lost,” said one longtime Clinton ally and fundraiser. “They lost in a race they obviously should have won. They need to take some blame.”

Clinton’s advisers have explained to the stunned candidate that she lost the race of her life in large part due to Comey’s October Surprise — they said their plan of winning college-educated white voters and turning out record levels of Latinos was working until Republican-leaning supporters shifted back to Trump in the wake of Comey’s bombshell letter, 11 days before the election, and the necessary enthusiasm among Latinos and African-Americans could not hold. By the time he released his clearance letter on the Sunday before the election, it was too late to re-energize voters.

Most Clinton supporters agreed that was part of it. But it wasn’t just that.

So much of the campaign’s energy was spent explaining inherited issues, they said, like the paid speeches Clinton delivered to Wall Street banks, pay-to-play accusations about the Clinton Foundation, and fallout of Clinton’s decision to set up a private email server at the State Department. “They spent their time protecting her, explaining her, defending her, with all these issues, the speeches, the Foundation, the emails — that became the energy of the campaign,” sighed one longtime Clinton confidante.

The paid speeches and the glitzy fundraisers, they said, did not paint a picture of a woman connected to the real suffering in the country. But that, they said, was just who Clinton was after so many years in the spotlight. “Her outlook is, ‘I get whacked no matter what, so screw it,’” explained one longtime confidant. “I’ve been out here killing myself for years and years and if I want to give the same speech everyone else does, I will.”

There was little the Clinton operatives could do about the “scandals” they inherited when they signed up to work for the former secretary of state. But Clinton allies are also faulting the campaign for failing to develop a credible message for downscale white voters, arguing she could have won by a larger margin on the economy.

And some began pointing fingers at the young campaign manager, Robby Mook, who spearheaded a strategy supported by the senior campaign team that included only limited outreach to those voters — a theory of the case that Bill Clinton had railed against for months, wondering aloud at meetings why the campaign was not making more of an attempt to even ask that population for its votes. It’s not that there was none: Clinton’s post-convention bus tour took her through Youngstown, Ohio, as well as Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, where she tried to eat into Trump’s margins with his base. In Scranton and Harrisburg, the campaign aired a commercial that featured a David Letterman clip of Trump admitting to outsourcing manufacturing of the products and clothes that bore his logo. And at campaign stops in Ohio, Clinton talked about Trump’s reliance on Chinese steel.

But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the “Stronger Together” framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party.

Clinton’s closing message in the final weeks of her campaign was focused on Trump’s temperament, and the fact that he was unfit for office. But the campaign’s theory that simply making Trump unacceptable was enough to win turned out to be wrong because of the unique factor that both candidates were so widely disliked by the public. “They lost the reality of what their opponent was doing,” said one longtime Clinton adviser. “They went for a target and they got their target, which was too narrow.” The closing picture of the campaign was an image of Clinton sharing a stage with two presidents at a rally in Philadelphia. The message was about continuity, not change. ...

Opinion |
Op-Ed Contributor |

Trump Defeated Clinton, Not Women


Josh Haner / The New York Times

By NAOMI KLEIN
November 16, 2016

For a great many women around the world, Donald J. Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton feels like a painful setback not just for democracy, but for our gender.

Voters chose a loose cannon of a man with zero government experience over a calm, collected and supremely qualified woman. The root cause of this injustice, many have suggested, can only be sexism — proof that the glass ceiling protecting the highest reaches of power cannot yet be shattered.

The reaction is understandable. It’s also wrong and unnecessarily demoralizing.

Of course no female or nonwhite candidate with Mr. Trump’s lack of experience, angry outbursts, boasts of sexual assault or trail of broken marriages could have gotten elected. That Mr. Trump did, while spouting such ugliness about women and minorities, speaks to deep and persistent strains of misogyny and white supremacy in American society.

But we can recognize all this yet still reject the idea that all women who reach as high as Mrs. Clinton will meet the same fate. Yes, she had a gold-plated résumé that more than qualified her to be president. But that overlooks an important fact: Virtually everything about Mrs. Clinton’s biography made her uniquely unsuited to draw blood where Mr. Trump was most vulnerable.

This election needed a Democrat who could call out, again and again, the myriad hypocrisies and absurdities of Mr. Trump’s claim to be a hero for the downtrodden working class. In the debates, Mrs. Clinton landed points when she exposed Mr. Trump’s history of outsourcing and tax dodging. But by then Mr. Trump had already spent the summer mocking his opponent for her private parties with oligarchs, painting her own lifestyle as profoundly out of touch with ordinary Americans (which it is).

In short, she landed on many of the right messages, but she was the wrong messenger.

Similarly, there was much to be made of the scandals at Mr. Trump’s foundation and at Trump University. But the Clinton Foundation — and its various entangled relationships between private corporations, foreign governments and public officials — made Mrs. Clinton’s attacks far too easy to turn back at her.

We’ll never know what it would have looked like for a woman who is outside the Davos class to have run against Mr. Trump, because voters were not given that option.

And then there is Mr. Trump’s record with women: the open talk of sexual grabbing without consent, the career made rating women’s bodies as if they were slabs of meat, the infidelity and serial marriages. Once again, these were all weaknesses that Mrs. Clinton was poorly suited to fully exploit. Not because she is a woman but because, as Mr. Trump pointed out in the most public and humiliating of ways, Bill Clinton has repeatedly been accused of sexual assault — and Mrs. Clinton has an on-camera record of working with her husband to discredit his accusers.

Mrs. Clinton’s behavior during these personal crises may be understandable, and she is certainly not responsible for her husband’s actions. But the fact remains that no matter which major party won, a grabby man was about to move into the White House residence. Would the election results have been different if Mr. Trump had faced a female adversary who could credibly have pledged that, under her watch, we would be free of this kind of seedy drama?

Here is the biggest problem with elevating sexism to the defining explanation of Mrs. Clinton’s loss: It lets her machine and her failed policies off the hook. It erases the role played by the appetite for endless war and the comfort with market-friendly incremental change, no matter the urgency of the crisis (from climate change to police violence to raging inequality). It erases the disgust over Mrs. Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street and with the wreckage left behind by trade deals that benefited corporations at the expense of workers.

In this version, it’s all about sexism. And that is the surest way to ensure that the Democratic Party’s disastrous 2016 mistakes will be repeated — only next time, with a man at the top of the ticket.<sup>1

Letting this early draft of history go unchallenged also means accepting a powerful constraint on the full potential of American women of all backgrounds and ideologies. Right now, all women are being bombarded with the message that they will be perennially kept down by that highest of glass ceilings — never mind that this barrier could well prove significantly more fragile than it seems.

That Mrs. Clinton could be defeated by the likes of Mr. Trump remains disgraceful. But Mrs. Clinton was too flawed a candidate for this disgrace to go down in history as a defeat for her gender.

Come January, Donald Trump and the Republican Party will have a great deal of power. Let’s not hand them power they have not actually earned — the power to crush the possibility that the right woman may one day become president."
---------------

Naomi Klein is the author of “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate” and “The Shock Doctrine.”

The New York Times Company</sup>

Opinion |

The End of Identity Liberalism
Mark LILLA
18 November

••••

" But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

" When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.” •••

" The media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white male reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure. A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.

" Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not(sic) recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it." •••

See, e.g. :

https://www.google.it/url?q=http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jon-stewart-the-daily-sh...

CBS News November 17, 2016, 7:00 AM

Jon Stewart on why Donald Trump is a "repudiation of Republicans"
_________________________

••• Stewart said America wages a fight “against ourselves” because it is not “natural.”

“Natural is tribal. We’re fighting against thousands* of years of human behavior and history to create something that no one’s ever-- that’s what’s exceptional about America and that’s what’s, like, this ain’t easy,” Stewart said. “It’s an incredible thing.”

And, of course, Trump is thoroughly tribal. But Democrats have become that, too. The absurd excuse for the American 'Left' revels in tribal divisiveness. It constituted _the_ single most important theme of H.Clinton's campaign--which in myriad ways screamed out a phrase "liberals" denounced in George W. Bush's use of it : "You're either with us or you're against us." -- That view, rather than the slogan, "Stronger Together," is what really epitomized the Clinton campaign.

We see exactly the same dynamic here at LT, a place of tribal sentiment par excellence.

-------------

"President Obama won’t explicitly say Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely it’s what he believes.

"The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital H. During the 2008 campaign, he declared Sen. John McCain “on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a generous touch — allowing for the possibility McCain might get right with History at some future, undetermined date).

"Obama has returned to this phrase and argument obsessively throughout his time in office. It is deeply embedded in his, and the larger progressive, mind — and indirectly contributed to the left’s catastrophic defeat on Nov. 8.

"The notion that History takes sides ultimately traces back to the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and borrows heavily from the (genuine and very hard-won) moral capital of the abolitionists and the civil rights movement.

"Obama is given to quoting Martin Luther King for the proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is deemed to be on “the wrong side of history” by progressives is always loosely associated with the opprobrium directed toward the Southern Fire-Eaters and the defenders of Jim Crow.

"This means the left wields History as a weapon and makes it an occasion for constant self-congratulation. But there’s a downside.

"For the left, History isn’t a vast, unpredictable, untameable force, but just like someone who might be standing in line next to you at Whole Foods. History is a board member of Planned Parenthood. It reads the Huffington Post and Vox, and follows Lena Dunham on Twitter.

"It really cares whether transgender people are allowed to use the appropriate bathroom. History was probably hanging out at the Javits Center on election night and collapsed into a puddle of tears right around the time Wisconsin was called.

"The political dangers of this point of view should be obvious:

"It assumes that certain classes of people are retrograde. Why would Democrats bother to try to appeal to working-class white voters if they’re stamped with the disapproval of History?

"According to Politico’s reporting, when poor Bill Clinton piped up at strategy sessions and wondered why Hillary’s campaign wasn’t trying to appeal to these voters, he was treated as an embarrassing relic, out of touch with the inexorable tide of the future.

"It becomes a warrant for all manner of overreach. History evidently favored trying to get nuns to sign up for contraceptives they didn’t want — and morally opposed — and forcing small businesses to bake cakes for gay weddings. There was really no amount of coercion on behalf of social liberalism that History wouldn’t heartily embrace.

"And, if History is thought to have an ascendant electoral coalition (and a hell of a data operation), it creates an unjustified sense of electoral inevitably. This is what the theorists of the “emerging Democratic majority,” and most of the pundits on the left, bought into.

"Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics has long been a scourge of this thesis, rightly pointing out the allegedly unstoppable coalition was vulnerable to relatively small changes in voting behavior and turnout, and of course larger events.

"All that said, the evidence was pretty good for the proposition that welfare-state programs, once ensconced, could never be reversed and therefore must enjoy the approval of History. This assumption pervaded the ObamaCare debate. Upon passage of his health care law, Obama said, “Tonight, we answered the call of history.”

"Harry Reid lambasted Republicans for not “joining us on the right side of history” and compared them to — of course — defenders of slavery.

"In retrospect, History might not have been so enamored of sprawling laws based on poorly thought-through economic premises, and might have looked more kindly on other, less disruptive means of getting more people insured. Regardless, when Republicans pass a repeal bill in one form or another early next year, it will constitute their most significant rollback of the welfare state ever.

"Another progressive assumption is that the nation-state is bound inevitably to decline in importance, as supranational institutions like the European Union grow in power and cross-border migrations increase. In a trip to Germany in April, Obama deemed Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming a massive wave of migrants as “on the right side of history.”

".Never mind that its recklessness has caused a political backlash in Europe that’s still brewing. Obama believed the same of his own latitudinarian views on immigration, apparently never imagining how many people might consider it progress to tighten our borders rather than render them more porous.

. "Now, a president who so confidently associated himself and his cause with the tide of the future has presided over a political wipeout that’ll send much of his legacy into the dustbin. If nothing else, History has a keen sense of humor."

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“What’s wrong is we keep losing,” Ryan said in an interview from his hometown of Youngstown. “We’re not a national party now, we’re a coastal party.” -- Representative Tim Ryan, 43, of Ohio said Tuesday (22 November, 2016) on Bloomberg Television’s "With All Due Respect"

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It's actually quite a bit worse than that. The 'Democrats' are a coastal party of the insufferable rich, conceited, arrogant corporatist Fat Cats who cynically use identity-politics and 'Politically Correct' bullying as devices to dupe their non-welathy supporters.

“It’s not good enough for someone to say: ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” “No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.” -- Sen. Bernie Sanders in Boston on Sunday, 20 November, 2016

"I was very impressed by that answer,” -- Donald Trump, in a meeting with New York Times reporters and executives, Tuesday, 22 November,

" The president-elect admitted that when he asked {retired Marine Corps General James } Mattis about waterboarding, he was surprised that the retired general rejected the idea.

" Mattis replied that he had never found abuse to be useful when dealing with detainees, Trump recounted to the newspaper. Instead, he advocated building a rapport with prisoners, something many in the intelligence community have been arguing for years is a more effective method of soliciting information. “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I’ll do better,” Mattis told him. " (Foreignpolicy.com)

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Trump already demonstrates that he can reflect on issues and change his mind in the light of others' opinions and arguments. That's already much more than the vast majority of the participants in LT's 'Pro & Con' show themselves capable of doing.

"Identity politics and political correctness aren’t the same thing, but they are interrelated. One situates political claims in a person’s racial and sexual status. The other tries to force a surface consensus on racial and sexual equality through taboos and speech codes. Lilla sees both phenomena at work in Trump’s triumph. The liberal obsession with diversity, he writes, “has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored.” These Americans, he says, “are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by ‘political correctness.’ ”

"There is truth in this analysis, but also a very real danger that it will be used to dismiss demands for equality for women and people of color. We are entering a moment of reaction that will reshape not just our politics but also our culture. Liberal assumptions that had become part of the atmosphere—that female leadership is desirable, that dismantling racism is an urgent social imperative, that diversity in gender expression constitutes progress—will likely fall out of fashion. In the 1970s, feminism seemed unstoppable; after Ronald Reagan’s election, it was treated as an embarrassing anachronism. If you haven’t lived through a cultural backlash before, you will be stunned by how quickly and how profoundly the intellectual weather can change. And none of us has lived through a backlash as severe as the one we’re facing."

-- Michelle Goldberg, columnist for Slate and the author, most recently, of The Goddess Pose, writing in Slate Nov. 22 2016 1:45 PM, Democratic Politics Have to Be “Identity Politics”

( from The Hill : November 26, 2016 - 06:16 AM EST

Dem women stand behind Pelosi

by Cristina Marcos


Getty Images

' Female lawmakers are lining up to form the backbone of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) campaign to hold on to her leadership position atop the House Democratic Caucus.

'Sixty-five women will vote in Wednesday’s House Democratic leadership elections, and 50 of them have signed on to a letter declaring support for Pelosi's bid to lead her caucus for an eighth term.

'To be sure, Pelosi’s expected support comes from a diverse coalition she has held together since becoming the party’s leader in 2003.

'Yet women are likely to make up more than half of the minimum 100 votes she needs to win the leadership race against Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio).

'Among many female Democrats, there’s a sense of loyalty toward one of their own.

'And with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) starting his first term leading Senate Democrats in January, many say Pelosi's experience negotiating deals with Republicans will be critical in the new Donald Trump administration.

' “I think that more than ever, we need an experienced practician and legislator who’s a proven fighter,” Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.), the incoming co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, told The Hill.

'She acknowledged the argument made by Ryan and other Democrats that the party needs to find a better way to appeal to white, working-class voters in the Rust Belt who propelled Trump to victory on Election Day.

'But at the same time, Frankel said, “The fact of the matter is a big part of our base is women.” '

Jewel Samad/Getty Images
LESSON LEARNED?

It's Storytelling, Stupid: What Made Donald Trump Smarter Than Hillary Clinton

Mark McKinnon
11.24.16 7:00 AM ET

••• •••

So what went wrong?

The short answer is the least complicated. She was the insider candidate in an outsider election. In 2008, I told John McCain he could have run a perfect campaign and lost by four points instead of six. Sometimes the currents are so deep it doesn’t matter how hard or how well you paddle.

But this one was close.

As a media guy, I’ve always believed there should be at least a little bit of art along with science in politics and life. But over recent years research took over the church while the choir sang from the hymnal of A-B testing, so I just shut up.

But then Donald Trump happened. I was surprised that he won. But the signs were there all along the way. The very first episode of The Circus, our real-time documentary on the campaign on Showtime, was titled “The Outsiders,” and featured Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. We believed at the very beginning voters were expressing a strong preference for something different.

And the title of our second-to-last episode was “Nobody Fucking Knows” because despite the blizzard of polls and research to the contrary, our experience led us to believe maybe something else was happening. My co-host Mark Halperin was excoriated in the mainstream media in the last week of campaigns for simply suggesting there might be a path for Trump to win.

Even when I was in charge of advertising for the George W. Bush campaigns in 2000 and 2004, I thought a lot of money spent on TV ads was wasted. And argued the campaign should think about other ways to spend the money. Donald Trump got that. And took it to an extreme. He spent more money on hats than ads or field organization, which seemed crazy at the time. But in retrospect, they were obviously better investments.

All the research when averaged out over the campaign had Hillary Clinton ahead the whole campaign. President Obama’s smartest strategist predicted there was 100 percent chance Clinton would win. 100 percent! Which fogged everyone’s lenses, including mine.

It seems likely that when it came to polling, Trump supporters participated in a “spiral of silence.” They don’t trust the establishment. Or the media. Why would they trust or talk to pollsters? Or acknowledge their support publicly only to be called ignorant, uneducated, misogynist, or racist? I think it’s more than likely they either didn’t respond to pollsters or intentionally misled them.

And Clinton was very well known and running for a third term for Democrats, so was effectively the incumbent. It should have been a clear warning sign when she never really polled above about 43 percent, because under this scenario, undecided voters are almost always going to break to the challenger.

And while Hillary’s rallies were always well orchestrated, supporters at the events always seemed more earnest than excited.

At the very first Trump rally I attended a year ago, and at the last rally I attended the day before the election, I was blown away. They were combination rock concert and church revival. I’ve never seen anything like them in more than three decades of working in politics. People got off work in the middle of day and stood in lines for hours in the blazing heat and freezing cold. They were passionate, enthusiastic, and totally dedicated.

Trump voters were never going anywhere else. No matter what they heard from the media or other candidates, they were sticking with their guy. In fact, all the attacks just hardened their resolve. Trump was right. He could have shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, and he wouldn’t have lost any of his support.

Authenticity is like pornography; you know it when you see it. It’s not something polling can accurately measure, but it’s something voters crave and reward when they get it. Which is why advertising doesn’t work. Voters want to see candidates unscripted and unvarnished.

In early 2008, Clinton’s campaign was a battleship of inevitability without much message. Then she lost Iowa, and went from front runner to down double digits in New Hampshire. Then there was an incredibly authentic moment that cameras captured just a day or so before the election. She was asked a softball question by a supporter at a town-hall event, and for once she tossed the talking points.

She was clearly not feeling well, had lost some confidence, and likely feeling vulnerable. In other words, human. Like all the rest of us. And she teared up just a bit and talked about why she was running, and why the struggle was important. And she articulated a clear rationale for her candidacy. It was simple, quiet, moving, and real. And 24 hours later, she erased what was thought to be an insurmountable deficit and won New Hampshire.

Why didn’t that lesson stick?

During this campaign, I saw a moment like that just once. The day after she lost, in her concession speech. It was incredible. And achingly human and authentic. I had the opportunity to work with and get to know Hillary Clinton just a bit a few years ago during some non-profit work. And I’ll repeat what many others say. In person, she is warm, affectionate, engaging, and has a great sense of humor. One of the reasons we produced The Circus was to give candidates and their campaigns an opportunity to reveal a more contextualized, authentic view of who they are.

We conducted many interviews with Donald Trump, on his plane, at his office, and at his home. And got a lot of time with family members like Eric and Donald Trump Jr. We practically lived with Bernie and Jane Sanders, who became a rock star for our audience. Bernie is not warm and cuddly or conventionally television friendly. Just the opposite. He’s gruff and exudes “get off my lawn.” But our viewers loved him because he was real.

But over the course of a year, we got exactly zero interviews with Hillary (or Bill, or Chelsea). I’m not saying we were 60 Minutes, but we had more than a million viewers, which ain’t nuthin’. But more importantly, we offered an unfiltered opportunity to let Hillary be Hillary.

I get it that Hillary is not Bill. That he campaigns in poetry, and she campaigns in prose. That she prefers governing to campaigning. That she prefers public service to public spectacle. But running for president is not an SAT test. People want to take their measure of the person. For the life of me, I do not understand why Hillary Clinton insulated and isolated herself in a bubble. Of course she did a lot of directed communication to her base supporters. But where was the outreach beyond?

Megyn Kelly begged repeatedly for Hillary to come on her show. The Megyn Kelly with millions of viewers; who is no ideological patsy and took on Donald Trump more forcefully than any other journalist; who stood up against sexual harassment of women and helped push out Roger Ailes as the powerful head of Fox; who I suspect has a lot of viewers in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. A Megyn Kelly interview should have been a no brainer.

Finally, here is what I believe is most important. Trump told a story. We think about story usually in a cultural frame: movies, books, music. But it’s just as true for campaigns. Voters are attracted to candidates who lay out a storyline. Losing campaigns communicate unconnected streams of information, ideas, speeches. Winning campaigns create a narrative architecture that ties it all together into something meaningful and coherent, as I articulated last year in a short New York Times op-documentary.

How do you tell a story? Identify a threat and/or an opportunity. Establish victims of the threat or denied opportunity. Suggest villains that impose the threat or deny the opportunity. Propose solutions. Reveal the hero.

That’s what Trump did. The reality TV star understands the power of narrative. He identified a threat: outside forces trying to change the way we live. And an opportunity: make America great again. He established victims: blue-collar workers who have lost jobs or experienced a declining standard of living. He suggested villains: Mexican immigrants, China, establishment elites. He proposed solutions: build a wall, tear up unfair trade deals. And the hero was revealed, Donald Trump.

What was Hillary Clinton’s story?

Campaigning and governing demand different skill sets. Hillary Clinton was as qualified as anyone who has ever run for the office of president. She is competent and organized, and I think she would have made the trains run on time. I disagree with a lot of her politics, but I was genuinely interested to see how she would govern. I think she would have been surprisingly bipartisan and worked with people like Paul Ryan to get things done and solve big problems.

But we’ll never know because until and unless we change the rules, you still have to get elected first. And that requires mastering the art of storytelling.

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Placed in the context of the last eight years of elections, 2016 looks more like the rule than the exception. The rise of President Obama obscured the fact that the Democratic Party he represented was struggling in virtually every other way in which a party's health is judged. Clinton's loss should make that fact plain to Democrats: The country, judging by down-ballot election results nationwide, is center-right -- and holding. And the Democratic bench is woefully devoid of major rising stars, itself a function of the party's down-ballot struggles over the last eight years.

The "why" of this Democratic decline is far more complicated. Vilsack blames an unwillingness to talk to rural voters. "We need to speak more directly to our folks in rural America,” Vilsack told Jaffe. “And we have to spend time there.” Others cite racism, economic anxiety, a national party that has moved too far left.(*) And so on.

Whatever the why -- and there is no single "why" -- the reality remains: The 2016 election wasn't an anomaly. It was consistent with the broader political currents in down-ballot races across the country over the last three elections. That's a reality Democrats need to wake up to if they don't want a repeat performance in 2018.

Michigan Guy2

3:42 PM GMT+0100

It's not a "left" vs "right" issue in the Democratic Party - its a rich vs. working class thing. With Bill Clinton / DLC and even Obama with the same Larry Summers, Geithner, Holder crew, the Democratic Party establishment chose the rich over the rest of us. Not only are we at near historic lows in terms of elected offices as a consequence, we're also near 75 year lows in terms of registered members.

Enough of that already, and enough of this lapdog incomprehension that too many folks in the media suffer from, living in the Beltway Bubble. Our new DNC Chair will focus on regular working Americans and getting good candidates elected out here in flyover country. Every leadership Democrat should resign in light of the current state of the Party and the smug loss on Nov. 8th.

The Clinton crowd can take their money and their Wall Street pals and join the GOP establishment where they belong. The time for a new New Deal is now - let's take back Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020.

"There's a huge part of the country that doesn't think Donald Trump is a disaster, and she might want to be a little bit inclusive, instead of sounding like the people she is accusing of being exclusive. She's just got to stop, I'm sorry. It is getting exhausting. And this was not helpful during the campaign, it wasn't. There's an anger there that was shrill, and a step above what it needed to be. Unmeasured and almost unhinged.

"It is not going to work, at some point we have to look at what happened, and look at the people who we lost along the way. Those are the people who Elizabeth Warren has been fighting for for decades. Those are the people who have been left out because of a rigged system.
Those were her people, and now she's leaving them out of the conversation. It doesn't make sense to me."

-- MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe, November 29, 2016

RINSE, REPEAT

House Dems Lose Big, Change Nothing As Pelosi is Re-Elected

Deep in the minority and facing long odds of digging out any time soon, House Democrats decided to change absolutely nothing about their leadership team and hope for a better tomorrow.

by Matt Laslo

11.30.16 9:35 PM ET

“We talk more about free range chickens than we talk about working people on the Democratic side sometimes here,” vocal Ryan backer Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) told The Daily Beast. “We’ve got to figure out why are we here, who do we represent and what causes will unify us, rather than segmented issues that divide us.”

Still, as a few dozen reporters huddled outside the room cracking jokes at the party’s expense and as Republicans walked past smirking at the thought of Democrats reappointing a leader they just beat, 134 of her colleagues voted her back into power. Even as one third of her party voted against her, she wore a smile.

“I have a special spring in my step today because this opportunity is a special one to lead the House Democrats, bring everyone together as we move forward,” Pelosi said. . “We know how to win elections. We’ve done it in the past. We will do it again.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/30/house-dems-lose-big-change-noth...