Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

the folks who are irritated by protests are not wont to look any more charitably at multi-culti celebrations of diversity

You are underselling the establishment-focused Democrats who are convinced that protesting Trump now means there will be carte blanche given to the right to protest whomever the next left-leaning person to the win the Presidency is and are afraid that the sentiment will destroy our democracy.

My main response is "America is already dead based on the outcome of this election so I really don't give a shit what this hypothetical future protest you're concerned about is"

been seeing photos from friends protesting in Chicago and NYC the past few days. im 100% supportive of them. imo they should just do what they gotta do and ignore what the media/establishment thinks of them as a general rule.

My main response is "America is already dead based on the outcome of this election so I really don't give a shit what this hypothetical future protest you're concerned about is"

essentially this but in both directions. idgaf about ppl concern trolling the protesters and honestly i don't really think the protests matter much either. i think we're fucked either way so if it makes ppl feel better to protest then they might as well bc i have yet to find something that makes me feel better.

Donal j trump has had our ear for going on two years now, flooding the public sphere with hatred, incitAtion to violence, assaults on the most basic constitutional tenets, and downright treasonous statements. He has not only gotten away with it, bu has been rewarded for it. His supporters have gotten what they wanted. Eh, I think protest is more than called. What happened is unacceptable.

i keep asking myself if this is how ppl felt in germany in 1933 and i've gotta think that no, they were probably more hopeful bc they hadn't yet seen what the worst could look like yet.

Or call them anything but "protests" (or worse) regardless.

Trumpers rode in on a wave of propaganda, mudslinging, and full-blown lies. Expect that to continue and to escalate, and never underestimate the power of an outrageous story - no matter how manifestly untrue - to take root in minds primed to believe the worst about any Other.

A friend went from the "protests are hurting things, the democratic process has happened and like it or not we have a new president" to half a day later posting "wait, the electoral college could vote against Trump!" to this morning posting something about how he will no longer be posting anything about politics

Uh that was in response to this: folks who are irritated by protests are not wont to look any more charitably at multi-culti celebrations of diversity

http://nypost.com/2016/11/11/kkk-celebrating-trumps-election-with-victory-parade/

my nice person facade of talking reasonably to people about politics is fading and when I see shit like "protests won't help" coming from presumed democrats I want to yell whatever the equivalent of "CUCK!!!" would be

is it still cuck, can I use that unironically

X-post to doc cass - I said they would seem undemocratic. For lots of people, and the media, it just seems like protesting that things didn't go their way.

guys, this is how it goes, this is how it always goes.

there are a lot of us, and we're not monolithic, and the vast majority of us say over and over again, no violence, no violence, no violence, but everybody's mad, a lot of people are mad, and we don't have control over people's minds, we can't ensure that nobody who hates trump will ever do anything bad ever again. and when somebody does something like that, we'll say "they don't speak for us", and they'll say "we speak for them", and who do you think the media are going to believe?

we don't have control over the "optics", we don't have formal power structures backing us up, and a lot of people are going to ask us to do the impossible and then blame us when we can't.

i'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about these things, but i think the question is for whose benefit we need to be concerned. and we need to be careful and judicious and precise about what we do and how we do it not because of how it will look to others. we need to do it for our own sake. we need to be the best we can be. any form of non-compliance or resistance, whatever form it takes, will be judged, and it will probably not be judged fairly. we need to expect this and build this into our outlook.

This (protests) is a difficult topic to address adequately via message board posts (esp when you're typing it on cellphone with one thumb). There's a lot of strategic and tactical considerations. Seems corny to say this on ilx but most everyone here has a point. If we were at dinner or a meeting together I'd attempt some grand, nuanced synthesis, and then you'd all see what a pompous blowhard i can be.

We need a Trump FAP!

yes!

set the time and place

rushomancy I'm delegating blowhard duties to you (iow: otm)

We might need more than one ... It's a big country

road trip!

rushomancy I'm delegating blowhard duties to you (iow: otm)

― never have i been a blue calm sea (collardio gelatinous)

cool, i've been preparing all my life for this

Who fucking cares what fascists think about people exercising their constitutional right of assembly. ??? They are the enemy. We can't win them over unless they totally break with the paradigm that enabled them to elect a racist authoritarian. Fuck them.

not interested in trying to win "them" over, but definitely think democrats should try to win over the most reachable of "them." It's not a monolith.

That's what i always thought but I'm too disgusted now. These people had a year and a half and plenty of evidence to let them know exactly what they were voting for

Unproductive attitude imo. As noted above, a lot of people don't pay that much attention politically. And they really disliked the democratic candidate and maybe got some hysterical ideas about her into their heads, although I think some of the underlying mistrust stems from a legit place.

http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/im-a-coastal-elite-from-the-midwest-the-real-bubble-is-rural-america

In some ways this has all been a victory for the young 'class-only' left who want a socialism without content, without analysis. We've done the class-only thing before - we can't go back to the pre-70s unionism that focused on white men and became an organ of oppression for women and minorities. You can't focus on class and ignore the rest. There is no trickle-down emancipation.

― Eallach mhór an duine leisg (dowd), Friday, November 11, 2016 4:17 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh, you do know that unions are actually disproportionately black, right? and that the american labor movement has a very wide-ranging record that's not all one-sided going back much further? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Sleeping_Car_Porters

xp Mordy:

Germans in 1933 weren't more "hopeful bc they hadn't yet seen what the worst could look like", the majority just saw Nazis as a counter to another Left/Spartacist revolution like that of 1918-1919.

Some of them had never been to D.C. before visiting me. They had never made the short drive to see the Constitution in person. They had not seen the Apollo moon lander, nor George Washington’s Revolutionary War uniform. And they certainly have not seen the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. They’ve never seen the extent of American greatness or its messiness.

And they still haven't even tried to get tickets to Hamilton!

let's not forget, they were coming off of WWI, and that was pretty catastrophically awful too. So you have to imagine plenty of people knew things could get real bad, but perhaps they didn't realize just how bad.

xp

lol sterl

Yeah, I have to believe (even if that belief is ultimately revealed to be unfounded) that a lot of the un- and underinformed voting public voted not out of hate but ignorance, and that seeing daily acts of harassment and violence committed against others in the name of their candidate of choice was not something they ever wanted. Many people are completely lost but I have to believe that many people are still reachable, and that there are ultimately more of us who reject hate than who accept it.

My husband is a 'class-only leftist' who has spent the last couple of days seriously rethinking his position.

let's not forget, they were coming off of WWI, and that was pretty catastrophically awful too. So you have to imagine plenty of people knew things could get real bad, but perhaps they didn't realize just how bad.

xp

― Al Moon Faced Poon (Moodles), Friday, November 11, 2016 11:08 AM (five seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Things were actually abysmally bad for Germans post-WWI, far worse than for the majority of Trump supporters, no? I'm not even sure things got worse for them under Hitler, if you weren't Jewish or gay or catholic or disabled or a dissident, etc., possibly better until they were firebombed and then occupied. Just saying it's not a totally analogous situation.

My husband is a 'class-only leftist' who has spent the last couple of days seriously rethinking his position.

― rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko), Friday, November 11, 2016 11:09 AM (fifty-two seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We can't be "class only leftists" but the dominant strain of liberalism has essentially been social "leftism" without class, which isn't really leftism at all.

I hate the flyover/coastal narrative so much. Heartland cities are blue and the rural coasts not an hour from urban metropolises are deep red.

ok, personally, i have concluded that trump voters, and only trump voters, are an absolute dead loss. could some of them be "won over" to vote democratic in the next election (assuming the continued existence of free and fair elections)? oh, absolutely. i definitely know people who voted for obama and trump.

but i have to ask, what's more important to me, numbers or values, and my conclusion is that it's values. we've had a democratic party that tried to be everything to everyone and wound up being nothing to anybody. we can approach this as a statistical problem and gobble up every word nate silver has to grace us with, or we can learn to lead.

anybody who voted for trump, _particularly_ if they also voted for obama, _particularly_ if they identify themselves as "not racist", has demonstrated a critical inability to live up to the courage of their convictions. and as long as that situation exists, it is a waste of time for us to try to appeal to them knowing that they'll turn on us for the next asshole with a bullshit slogan.

now, if we want to teach them to have values, hell yes, that's worth doing. but the only way we can do that is to have values ourselves.

I thought one of the most significant things in recent history in 1933 was the crash of 1929. Which meant that money was rendered near worthless. So everybody felt a lack of stability.

demonstrated a critical inability to live up to the courage of their convictions

idk I don't think their convictions are that strong. mid-term elections still have a huge drop-off, people treat the presidency as some solve-everything position and assign blame or credit to the president, having little idea what they do day-to-day

We can't be "class only leftists" but the dominant strain of liberalism has essentially been social "leftism" without class, which isn't really leftism at all.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Friday, November 11, 2016 11:11 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally. I feel like this is/should be the left's "We blew it" moment.

Focusing on educating people on the importance of mid-term voting has to be one of our main drives right now, I think. Like starting right now.

I thought one of the most significant things in recent history in 1933 was the crash of 1929. Which meant that money was rendered near worthless. So everybody felt a lack of stability.

― Stevolende

the biggest weimar hyperinflation crisis was actually in 1923. the depression made things bad- among other things it caused the us to cut off aid to germany- and the effects of sustained economic and political instability, along with partisan street violence, had taken their toll, but 1933 wasn't a particularly low ebb for the country.

idk the continuing efforts to expand continuing education, expansion of community college programs and availability, and the subsidies to let people join those programs are trickling through rural areas (I met someone on a flight who worked for an org in DC doing this)

it's the ability to blame the government for the loss of your job while you're getting subsidized education to learn a new career... that's gonna get killed off when the federal grants for adult education dry up

guys u kno i love talking about early 20th century politics like it's literally one of my favorite things to do but i want to just note that i was being kinda tongue-in-cheek / sardonic in my comment above

xp Stevolende:
The hyperinflation occurred in 1921-1923, a decade prior, but yes, it forced many to beg, middle class women into prostitution, etc., and yes, it was a strong memory.

Indeed, the memory and consequences of the German hyperinflation carry on to the current day, in German support for austerity measures over extending credit to Portugal/Ireland/Greece/Spain in the recent economic crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

So having concluded my self-assessment of being a completely useless armchair liberal for my entire adult life, I've decided that my first steps away from that will be a) a monthly rotating donation of whatever I can reasonably afford split between ten or so different charitable organizations that directly support the groups Trump et all are seeking to marginalize and b) getting involved in local government on some level. I think it's just going to involve joining a committee of some sort at the moment given my complete inexperience in that regard, but the city manager lives in my building so I'd like to take advantage of that convenience and have a conversation with him about what he'd recommend. I have a lot of other ideas brewing but I need to take this one realistic step at a time.

Guys, I'm basically an asocial shut-in who's stepping way out of his comfort zone here because the time to do so is long past. Anybody can do this shit if I can.

good luck, OL

anybody who voted for trump, _particularly_ if they also voted for obama, _particularly_ if they identify themselves as "not racist", has demonstrated a critical inability to live up to the courage of their convictions. and as long as that situation exists, it is a waste of time for us to try to appeal to them knowing that they'll turn on us for the next asshole with a bullshit slogan.

As I commented above w/r/t some parents at my school, I see this in action all the time.

piggybacking on old lunch here, and i apologize if i'm out of line but i've been spitting straight fire on facebook since tuesday. nobody's a great judge of their own writing but i think it's good stuff, and the twenty or so people who read it seem to agree. i kind of want to get it out there better, in the hopes that maybe it might help some people come to grips with this shit, but i've got massive social anxiety and don't even know for sure if it's honestly a good idea or not. thoughts?