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

fwiw there is a compilation of Norm MacDonald trashing the Clintons on Weekend Update on youtube. half the jokes are about how much she lies, and this was in 1996.

I'm not sure this proves what you think this proves, unless you meant to highlight that she was fighting a 20-year wall of bullshit.

Where are you going to get the 85 additional electoral votes you still need for the national popular vote thing to mean anything at all, and how are you going to get any states with red state legislatures to pass it?

it proves she was a risky candidate. its not like Trump just came up with this strategy and EMAILS are what did them in. she has 20 years of bad press and instead of countering it they relied on the media hyping up Trump's worst qualities.

I don't know, man alive. Still waiting on k3vin and Adam to turn in their proposals on how to bring the Real American voters back into the fold, then none of the electoral college reform ideas or counter-gerrymandering stuff is even necessary

Have you guys figured out why Trump won yet

we didn't listen to Iago Galdston

i don't have any "ideas", and neither does anyone itt. i'm pretty pessimistic about the future and i just find the straw-grasping ("trump will be impeached, just watch", "the electoral college will be gone in 10 years", etc) laughable. finding humor in our shared doom is merely an ego defense

all the same people who were supremely confident in everything that went wrong a month and a half ago are now also optimistic about the future because of these far-fetched escape hatches, one weird tricks, etc. we're fucked.

you and larry appleton should go on a date

You're kind of being a dick in this thread el tomboto

America will be radically transformed & possibly decimated under Pres. Trump but the electoral college and gerrymandering will endure for centuries

i don't have any "ideas", and neither does anyone itt. i'm pretty pessimistic about the future and i just find the straw-grasping ("trump will be impeached, just watch", "the electoral college will be gone in 10 years", etc) laughable.

otm

u mean the electoral college or the senate?

Both or either. "Abolishing the EC" would have to be tied pretty heavily into Senate reform.

Neither of which will happen until global thermonuclear war breaks into a dozen rump states ruled by warlords.

i don't have any "ideas", and neither does anyone itt. i'm pretty pessimistic about the future and i just find the straw-grasping ("trump will be impeached, just watch", "the electoral college will be gone in 10 years", etc) laughable. finding humor in our shared doom is merely an ego defense

― k3vin k., Sunday, December 18, 2016 4:21 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup

yeah I need to gtfo this thread

all the same people who were supremely confident in everything that went wrong a month and a half ago are now also optimistic about the future because of these far-fetched escape hatches, one weird tricks, etc.

straws would be one thing as we are early in the coping process; what i could do without, and certainly not just itt, is the accompanying contemptuous sneering at any suggestion that america's antifascist party failed to win the support of america's now very perilously enfranchised antifascist majority for any reasons that were at all within their control

or that could have been brought within their control by any technique besides racism

+ my own far-fetched straw is that people who think like that can be dislodged from their power soon and the party can be reorganized from the bottom. that's all

failed to win the support of

stick "sufficient" in here before someone explains the electoral college to me; would that someone had explained it to the dems.

I think it's good to have passionate disagreements about this stuff, not sure it can be separated from the process of "uniting" to defeat our common enemy

i def think what people call "relitigating the past" is important to the future!

(not that you can't do it too much or in circles)

I think we can keep having these arguments even as we are "building the party from the ground up" so to speak. It's more important that we rebuild than that it gets rebuilt on a single model.

Like I'm not worried about people thinking "Let's just tweak the Clinton coalition" vs "Let's use the Sanders model." I'm worried about people thinking we can just keep doing top-down messaging with no local parties, and I'm worried about people who say "we need to purge all of the x from the party."

Hey just a super-quick suggestion if you're worried about getting back some marginal votes, stop referring to large swaths of the country as "the rust belt." It's bullshit condescension, and since the scale of manufacturing whose departure heralded the nickname is not coming back any time ever, defining a large-ish region of the country by what it lacks is maybe not helpful?

is anyone in the rust belt actually offended by "rust belt"? Serious question.

yes

pretty sure the dems already got the votes of everyone in america offended by stuff like that

Impeachment is good because Trump should be impeached, by even the most charitable reading of the law. They shouldn't do it to be successful, they should do it to be on the right side of history.. What is there to lose?

Reporting from St. Louis, seriously fkn stop using basically any term that lumps half the country together, our probs are wildly different from Wisconsin whose probs are very different from Ohio's. Deindustrialization is a thing but so are a hundred little issues that basically make it stupid as fuck to talk about these places as the same and that thinking is exactly the top down nonsense that has weakened the local parties. No one is offended by you using them, per se, but they make you think about these places in an incredibly dumb way.

Have you guys figured out why Trump won yet

― Οὖτις, Sunday, December 18, 2016 4:19 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they believed their own hype so they didn't work as hard. people are making fun of Trump for doing thank you rallies in states Clinton didn't even go to.

the only reason we're even talking about the midwest right now is because trump swung a lot of midwest voters and thus the election by talking about manufacturing jobs / using these same lazy stereotypes, so it seems like a particularly weird time to be suggesting that we don't do that.

iatee, the electoral college is going to be gone in a decade. forget about the midwest

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or sincere. Why in the world would it be gone?

guys, Florida is going to be gone in a decade.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or sincere. Why in the world would it be gone?

stainer's assault will bring it under control

steiner, sigh

If we can step back from the "trees" to the "forest" of the whole direction of the party debate, I think it's important to look at not just how do democrats win, but what is the purpose of the democratic party, and what is its vision. I think the GOP has a pretty clear vision: be the party of captial and the wealthy. Of course that alone doesn't give you much of an electoral base, which is where social and religious conservatism come in -- appeal to the non-economic motivations of people with personalities that tend to prefer order, structure, authority. And this, of course, suits the GOP vision very well -- they generally believe in a hierarchical and ordered society ruled by the wealthy.

I don't find the contemporary democratic vision as coherent, and I think that's reflected in this debate. It doesn't feel so much like a party of labor as counterbalancing force against capital, as a party of certain niches of the wealthy, buttressed by vulnerable groups who vote in part out of fear of the other option being worse. It's the party of the creative professional and the tech entrepreneur (sometimes), and of tolerance, but I feel like it has drifted away from a coherent vision of society and the role of government. The party is schizophrenic on public schools, and on unions (once a stronghold of its own power!). It pushes all kinds of confusing public-private solutions and nibble-around-the-edges programs. Parts of the party feel like GOP lite, or GOP policy in NPR language.

It's not that I specifically want the Democratic party to go after "white working class men" it's that I want it to return to coherently and clearly representing the working class of all races, because I want it to be the party of labor and of the 99%, because that's what's right and because that's the logical role for it to play -- a counterweight to the party of capital, not a smartened-up, urban version of the same thing with more diversity.

if you have ears and any kind of bullshit detector, you were always able to tell that Hillary Clinton p much didn't believe a fucking word she ever said in public.

I want it to return to coherently and clearly representing the working class of all races, because I want it to be the party of labor and of the 99%

i think the political party you're looking for exists, but as a faction within the democratic party, which seems to me more like a coalition rather than a distinct party with internally coherent views. it's the sanders/warren wing, right? the GOP has nailed down the desires of socially conservative religious rich assholes, but that leaves a huge political space. in our two-party system, the democrats try to address all the people and issues that the GOP doesn't care about, but sacrifice a consistent message.

Yeah, that's true. But I feel like that's a relatively new phenomenon and still underrepresented in the party. And there's still so much underhandedly ANTI-labor stuff in the party, like widespread support for charter schools.

Also there are still clearly factions of the party that don't just disagree with that wing but want to squelch it.

I want someone to run for Congress in one of these midwestern Trump districts with "kill all rich people" as their campaign slogan as a kind of test balloon.If anti elitism is what the people crave the Left shouldn't have a problem leveraging that. They invented it.

A crudely anti-elitist party that correctly identifies who the elites actually are might be able to make inroads in these places. Rush Limbaugh's talking points shouldn't be hard to overturn with a loud enough megaphone. I think the Democrats are too polite and they never really engage in the muck of this right wing propaganda --- they should try to force their way into these markets and shout, loudly and clearly, that the right wing's radical antigovernment agenda only benefits elites. Coastal elites even if you'd like. Breaking public unions hurts all workers. Etc

It shouldn't just be the party either. Efforts need to be made to break the spell of the right wing media machine. The danger of accepting hyperpartisanship is it means we are resigned to having half the population breathing in that filth.

I want someone to run for Congress in one of these midwestern Trump districts with "kill all rich people" as their campaign slogan as a kind of test balloon.If anti elitism is what the people crave the Left shouldn't have a problem leveraging that. They invented it.

― Treeship, Sunday, December 18, 2016 10:36 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have had half a mind to register to run for the state rep seat in my v conservative district (in tx) which went unopposed to do just this. but then i remembered that my govt name is on ilx from years back and i get too embarrassed by my 18 year old self.

I've often thought of making a thread 'does your ilx posting history ensure that you can never run for public office'

I'd say an ILX publishing history is exactly what you need to win.

I used to worry about this but everyone has twitter accounts and participated in other social media nonsense now.

oh -- good mourning!