All true, Miriam, and more!
My vote for Jill Stein was never an endorsement of the Green Party.
It was never done with the belief that Jill Stein could change the
nation's course, if some miracle placed her in the presidency. My
vote was simply the act of giving the finger to the Two Headed Monster
that is today's Political Party for the Rich.
At the state and local level I did vote for a number of fairly decent
Democrats, and even one(1) Republican. Patty Murray, while a mixed
bag, is still far better as a Senator than any who have run against
her. I also voted to return our governor, for the same reasons as my
vote for Murray. And we now have a blind man as lieutenant governor,
Cyrus Habib, a very bright and Left Leaning Democrat.
We need to cultivate more people of human compassion, and elect them
regardless of their Party labels.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/14/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Oh please! The cult that got us into this mess is the Clinton cult and its
supporters and the folks who refused to see that Obama was following in
their footsteps. The Greens didn't have any power and they didn't splinter
anyone. The Clintons, along with Robert Reuben, Larry Summers, timothy
Geithner, their NeoCon friends and Neo Liberal friends like Samantha
Powers, Victoria Newland and her husband, who is a Neo Con and whose name
escapes me, our esteemed former attorney general who felt that we couldn't
prosecute any bankers because it would disrupt the financial system, those
are the people who have torn our people to shreds and opened the space for
a
monster to become President. All of those media pundits who peddled the
lies
that they were fed by the Bush and Obama administration, who never told the
people the truth about why we have eternal war, who is benefiting from it,
the media who never held the administration to account over its two faced
policy on global warming, who never questioned Obama on why he suddenly
changed his mind about NAFTA and supported all the new lousey trade
policies, and Obama who was so quick to compromise with the Republicans
while he still had a Democratic majority in Congress and who was ready to
cut social security benefits, (I heard him tell romney that in their
debate), all of that and you're still fixated on the Greens!
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Frank Ventura
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 2:48 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How America Got It So Wrong
I think the green party is dysfunctional as well and the byproduct is that
they have splintered, discouraged and fragmented the working class against
itself and its own best interests. One thing I have noticed by left wing
pundits is that they avoid speaking about the greens and rarely mention the
name of Stein. That is a classic sign of cult brainwashings. The unwitting
followers of these cult leaders always shy away from speaking the name of
their oppressor.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 2:13 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How America Got It So Wrong
I actually never even thought of her. She got something like 2% of the
vote, now that you mention her. And Chris Hedges, who was supporting her
because there seemed to be no alternative, says that the Green Party is
currently dysfunctional. I don't care what the name of the vehicle for
change is. I felt that the Sanders campaign was useful in educating masses
of people about the dangers of corporate capitalism.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Frank Ventura
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 12:41 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How America Got It So Wrong
Nice way to tip toe around the name of Jill stein
But you knew that
Sincerely
Frank Ventura
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 14, 2016, at 9:01 AM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
support?
Who are the far left cult leaders? Do you mean the native Americans at
Standing Rock or Black Lives Matter? Do you mean Occupy Wall Street or
Code Pink? Do you mean the Socialist Workers' Party? Do you mean
Jewish Voice For Peace or the ACLU or the Center For Constitutional
Rights? Is Carl a far left cultist leader? Am I? Do you mean the
people working for Palestinian rights? Do you mean Chris Hedges or
Bernie Sanders or Keith Ellison or Elizabeth Warren? And who is it
whom you respect? Who are the leaders in the Democratic party whom you
about?" he once asked, without irony).
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Frank
Ventura
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 5:00 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How America Got It So Wrong
This article uses the phrade "we must all pay the price". How wrong
that is, neither the far right or far left cult leaders will pay the
price. It is merely us in the middle that will pay the price.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam
Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2016 12:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] How America Got It So Wrong
But the title of this article should be, "I'm sorry that I got it So
Wong"
because that's what Taibbi is saying.
Miriam
Taibbi writes: "Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball
of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes
almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be
anything but a figurehead."
Donald Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of
conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost
nothing to traditional Republicans. (photo: Molly Riley/AP)
How America Got It So Wrong
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 November 16
Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump
presidency
- now, we all must pay the price
uesday, November 8th, early afternoon. Outside the Trump Tower in
Manhattan, a Aman in the telltale red Make America Great Again hat
taps me on the shoulder.
"You press?" he says, looking at a set of lanyards around my neck.
I nod.
"Fuck yourself," he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He
then turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down
Fifth Avenue, a hand gently tousling his son's hair.
This was before Donald Trump's historic victory. The message afterward
no doubt would have been the same. There's no way to overstate the
horror of what just went down. Sure, we've had some unstable
characters enter the White House. JFK had health problems that led him
to take amphetamine shots during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan's
attention span was so short, the CIA had to make mini-movies to brief
him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush not only didn't read the news,
he wasn't interested in it ("What's in the newspapers worth worrying
But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of thegranted to Barack Obama.
familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable,
relatively sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters
the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a
one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional
Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead. He
takes office at a time when the chief executive is vastly more
powerful than ever before, with nearly unlimited authority to
investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate foreigners and even U.S.
citizens - powers that didn't seem to trouble people much when they
were
Shunned during election season by many in his own party,People's Court reboot, might be attorney general.
President-elect Trump's closest advisers are a collection of crackpots
and dilettantes who will make Bush's cabinet look like the Nobel
committee. The head of his EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is a
noted climate-change denier. Pyramid enthusiast and stabbing expert
Ben Carson is already being mentioned as a possible Health and Human
Services chief. Rudy Giuliani, probably too unhinged by now for even a
God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we canmore "eclectic"
only hope they turn out to be lawyers, or at least people who played
lawyers onscreen. And sitting behind this fun-house nightmare of
executive-branch worthies (which Politico speculates will be one of
the
cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislatureBeijing.
that will attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk
to
Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, Iblindness.
felt sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the
Republican Party as a force in modern American life. Now the
Republicans are more dominant than ever, and it is the Democratic
Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future.
And they deserve it. The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald
Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the
all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most
of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump
rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It
denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and
bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling
them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin's Russia.
But the party's willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance
across the American intellectual elite. Trump's election was a true
rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of "the
establishment." The target group included political leaders, bankers,
industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the
media. And we all closed our eyes to what we didn't want to see.
The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump's
victory
- the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from
rust-belt states, like Michael Moore - spoke to an astonishing
cultural
Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grewdid what it was told.
accustomed to treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose
behavior could sometimes be unpredictable but, in the end, almost
always
Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of thisjetliner.
elusive creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like
ourselves. We talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former
campaign strategists, party spokes-hacks, even other journalists. Day
after day, our political talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit
interviewing another geek in a suit about the behaviors of pipe
fitters and store clerks and cops in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West
Virginia. We'd stand over glitzy video maps and discuss demographic
data points like we were trying to determine the location of a downed
And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering sointo a media-speak during the sit-down.
hard about, were all around us, listening to themselves being talked
about like some wild, illiterate beast.
When 60 Minutes did its election-eve story about the mood of the
electorate, they had to call up a familiar Beltway figure, pollster
Frank Luntz, to put together a focus group. Luntz's purpose was to
take the white-hot rage and disgust hurled at him by voters on both
sides of the aisle during the "focus group" portion, and translate it
all
Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of Thelanguage, true.
People's temperature. "That's not blowing off steam," he said. "That
is a deep-seated resentment."
Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which
we could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation.
That's as opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us
all so hard for our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very
chins of ours would get driven straight through the backs of our skulls.
There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of
the "low-information" voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates
who spoke above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by
academics and analysts that Trump's public addresses rated among the
most simplistic political rhetoric ever recorded.
But that story cut in both directions, in a way few of us
silver-tongued media types ever thought about. The People didn't speak
our
But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.bad.
Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge's Idiocracy, ostensibly a
comedy but destined now to be remembered as a horror movie, was often
cited this past year as prophecy. The film described a future dystopia
of idiot Americans physically unable to understand the tepid
grammatical speech of a half-smart time traveler from the past. Many
reporters, myself included, found themselves thinking about this film
when we heard voters saying they were literally incapable of
understanding the words coming out of Hillary Clinton's mouth.
"When [Trump] talks, I actually understand what he's saying," a young
Pennsylvanian named Trent Gower told me at a Trump event a month ago.
"But, like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a
bunch of bullshit."
So these Trump voters had a comprehension problem. But we were just as
We couldn't understand what they were saying to us. We refused toheaded over the wall.
accept every signal about whom they hated, and how much. Why? Because
Trump's voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America
for decades, if not forever.
Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class. America is like
a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don't know they're
aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered
millionaires. And America's cultural elite, trained for so long to
think in terms of artificial distinctions like Republicans and
Democrats instead of more natural divisions like haves and have-nots,
refused until it was too late to grasp the meaning of the rage-storm
Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply neverespecially media figures.
believed its electorate wouldn't drop and roll over on command when
the time came, we media types never believed all that anger out there
was real, or at least gathered in enough force to matter.
Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because
we saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by
last-gasp, racist frustrations of America's shrinking silent majority.
Sure, Trump had enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers
under his wing to ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no
way he could topple America's reigning multicultural consensus. How
could he? After all, the country had already twice voted in an
African-American Democrat to the White House.
Yes, Trump's win was a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and
xenophobia that has always run through American society. But his
coalition also took aim at the neoliberal gentry's pathetic reliance
on proxies to communicate with flyover America. They fed on the
widespread visceral disdain red-staters felt toward the very people
Hillary Clinton's campaign enlisted all year to speak on its behalf:
Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians, Beltway activists, academics,
and
Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic Americanabout were profits.
myths, the post-racial society and the classless society.
Candidate Trump told a story about a conspiracy of cultural and
financial elites bent on finishing off a vanishing white middle-class
nirvana, first by shipping jobs overseas and then by waving hordes of
crime-prone, bomb-tossing immigrants over the border.
These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were
tools of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on
immigration and trade in order to win votes, when all they really
cared
The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsistedsystem.
politically on the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching
multiculturalism while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump
insisted, were out of touch with the real American voter. Neither
party saw the awesome potential of this story to upend our political
Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades,And so on.
refusing to the last to understand how dangerous this behavior was.
They never imagined their voters would one day demand that they act on
all this race-baiting talk. They believed their own pablum about
racism being a thing of the past and reverse discrimination being the
true threat to the American polity.
Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership, even as it was increasingly
indebted to banks and corporations, never imagined that it could be
the target of a class uprising. How could we be seen as aristocrats?
We get union endorsements! We're the party of FDR! We're pro-civil
rights!
Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each oflike NAFTA.
these major-party blind spots. He called the Republicans' bluff on
race almost from the start with his crazy Mexican wall idea, which
instantly positioned the rest of the party field as nationalist
pretenders. As for the Democrats, he lucked into a race against a
politician he would portray as a 30-year symbol of a Beltway-insider
consensus, one he said had left Middle America behind through trade
deals
Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, Istar-struck courtiers."
guessed at the probable nominee's general-election strategy: "Trump
will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the
dissolute-conspiracy story he's been selling, representing a workers'
party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast
cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington
into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike
into
Back then, I thought Trump had a real chance at the presidency. Butvalid.
later I made the same mistake most every other reporter did. I
listened to polls and media outlets, instead of people. I thought
Trump's maladroit and ridiculous general-election campaign, in which
he went back on virtually every major primary-season promise while
being revealed through seemingly hourly scandals as one of the world's
most corrupt and personally repulsive individuals, would do him in. He
would lose and lose huge, ending up a footnote to history, having
served no purpose beyond the destruction of the Republican Party.
Conventional wisdom said so, and wasn't conventional wisdom always right?
Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made,
the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own
influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in
love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and
distrust us as much as they apparently do.
It's too late for any of us to fix this colossal misread and lapse in
professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this
failure of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like
the politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now
America will do its own talking for a while. The world may never
forgive us for not seeing this coming.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
about?" he once asked, without irony).
Donald Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of
conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost
nothing to traditional Republicans. (photo: Molly Riley/AP)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/president-trump-how-amer
ica-go
t-it-so-wrong-w449783http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/pre
sident
-trump-how-america-got-it-so-wrong-w449783
How America Got It So Wrong
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 November 16
Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump
presidency
- now, we all must pay the price
uesday, November 8th, early afternoon. Outside the Trump Tower in
Manhattan, a man in the telltale red Make America Great Again hat taps
me on the shoulder.
"You press?" he says, looking at a set of lanyards around my neck.
I nod.
"Fuck yourself," he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He
then turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down
Fifth Avenue, a hand gently tousling his son's hair.
This was before Donald Trump's historic victory. The message afterward
no doubt would have been the same. There's no way to overstate the
horror of what just went down. Sure, we've had some unstable
characters enter the White House. JFK had health problems that led him
to take amphetamine shots during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan's
attention span was so short, the CIA had to make mini-movies to brief
him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush not only didn't read the news,
he wasn't interested in it ("What's in the newspapers worth worrying
But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of thegranted to Barack Obama.
familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable,
relatively sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters
the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a
one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional
Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead. He
takes office at a time when the chief executive is vastly more
powerful than ever before, with nearly unlimited authority to
investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate foreigners and even U.S.
citizens - powers that didn't seem to trouble people much when they
were
Shunned during election season by many in his own party,People's Court reboot, might be attorney general.
President-elect Trump's closest advisers are a collection of crackpots
and dilettantes who will make Bush's cabinet look like the Nobel
committee. The head of his EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is a
noted climate-change denier. Pyramid enthusiast and stabbing expert
Ben Carson is already being mentioned as a possible Health and Human
Services chief. Rudy Giuliani, probably too unhinged by now for even a
God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we canmore "eclectic"
only hope they turn out to be lawyers, or at least people who played
lawyers onscreen. And sitting behind this fun-house nightmare of
executive-branch worthies (which Politico speculates will be one of
the
cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislatureBeijing.
that will attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk
to
Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, Iblindness.
felt sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the
Republican Party as a force in modern American life. Now the
Republicans are more dominant than ever, and it is the Democratic
Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future.
And they deserve it. The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald
Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the
all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most
of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump
rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It
denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and
bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling
them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin's Russia.
But the party's willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance
across the American intellectual elite. Trump's election was a true
rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of "the
establishment." The target group included political leaders, bankers,
industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the
media. And we all closed our eyes to what we didn't want to see.
The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump's
victory
- the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from
rust-belt states, like Michael Moore - spoke to an astonishing
cultural
Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grewdid what it was told.
accustomed to treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose
behavior could sometimes be unpredictable but, in the end, almost
always
Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of thisjetliner.
elusive creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like
ourselves. We talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former
campaign strategists, party spokes-hacks, even other journalists. Day
after day, our political talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit
interviewing another geek in a suit about the behaviors of pipe
fitters and store clerks and cops in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West
Virginia. We'd stand over glitzy video maps and discuss demographic
data points like we were trying to determine the location of a downed
And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering sointo a media-speak during the sit-down.
hard about, were all around us, listening to themselves being talked
about like some wild, illiterate beast.
When 60 Minutes did its election-eve story about the mood of the
electorate, they had to call up a familiar Beltway figure, pollster
Frank Luntz, to put together a focus group. Luntz's purpose was to
take the white-hot rage and disgust hurled at him by voters on both
sides of the aisle during the "focus group" portion, and translate it
all
Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of Thelanguage, true.
People's temperature. "That's not blowing off steam," he said. "That
is a deep-seated resentment."
Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which
we could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation.
That's as opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us
all so hard for our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very
chins of ours would get driven straight through the backs of our skulls.
There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of
the "low-information" voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates
who spoke above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by
academics and analysts that Trump's public addresses rated among the
most simplistic political rhetoric ever recorded.
But that story cut in both directions, in a way few of us
silver-tongued media types ever thought about. The People didn't speak
our
But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.bad.
Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge's Idiocracy, ostensibly a
comedy but destined now to be remembered as a horror movie, was often
cited this past year as prophecy. The film described a future dystopia
of idiot Americans physically unable to understand the tepid
grammatical speech of a half-smart time traveler from the past. Many
reporters, myself included, found themselves thinking about this film
when we heard voters saying they were literally incapable of
understanding the words coming out of Hillary Clinton's mouth.
"When [Trump] talks, I actually understand what he's saying," a young
Pennsylvanian named Trent Gower told me at a Trump event a month ago.
"But, like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a
bunch of bullshit."
So these Trump voters had a comprehension problem. But we were just as
We couldn't understand what they were saying to us. We refused toheaded over the wall.
accept every signal about whom they hated, and how much. Why? Because
Trump's voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America
for decades, if not forever.
Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class. America is like
a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don't know they're
aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered
millionaires. And America's cultural elite, trained for so long to
think in terms of artificial distinctions like Republicans and
Democrats instead of more natural divisions like haves and have-nots,
refused until it was too late to grasp the meaning of the rage-storm
Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply neverespecially media figures.
believed its electorate wouldn't drop and roll over on command when
the time came, we media types never believed all that anger out there
was real, or at least gathered in enough force to matter.
Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because
we saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by
last-gasp, racist frustrations of America's shrinking silent majority.
Sure, Trump had enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers
under his wing to ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no
way he could topple America's reigning multicultural consensus. How
could he? After all, the country had already twice voted in an
African-American Democrat to the White House.
Yes, Trump's win was a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and
xenophobia that has always run through American society. But his
coalition also took aim at the neoliberal gentry's pathetic reliance
on proxies to communicate with flyover America. They fed on the
widespread visceral disdain red-staters felt toward the very people
Hillary Clinton's campaign enlisted all year to speak on its behalf:
Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians, Beltway activists, academics,
and
Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic Americanabout were profits.
myths, the post-racial society and the classless society.
Candidate Trump told a story about a conspiracy of cultural and
financial elites bent on finishing off a vanishing white middle-class
nirvana, first by shipping jobs overseas and then by waving hordes of
crime-prone, bomb-tossing immigrants over the border.
These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were
tools of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on
immigration and trade in order to win votes, when all they really
cared
The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsistedsystem.
politically on the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching
multiculturalism while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump
insisted, were out of touch with the real American voter. Neither
party saw the awesome potential of this story to upend our political
Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades,And so on.
refusing to the last to understand how dangerous this behavior was.
They never imagined their voters would one day demand that they act on
all this race-baiting talk. They believed their own pablum about
racism being a thing of the past and reverse discrimination being the
true threat to the American polity.
Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership, even as it was increasingly
indebted to banks and corporations, never imagined that it could be
the target of a class uprising. How could we be seen as aristocrats?
We get union endorsements! We're the party of FDR! We're pro-civil
rights!
Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each oflike NAFTA.
these major-party blind spots. He called the Republicans' bluff on
race almost from the start with his crazy Mexican wall idea, which
instantly positioned the rest of the party field as nationalist
pretenders. As for the Democrats, he lucked into a race against a
politician he would portray as a 30-year symbol of a Beltway-insider
consensus, one he said had left Middle America behind through trade
deals
Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, Istar-struck courtiers."
guessed at the probable nominee's general-election strategy: "Trump
will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the
dissolute-conspiracy story he's been selling, representing a workers'
party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast
cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington
into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike
into
Back then, I thought Trump had a real chance at the presidency. But
later I made the same mistake most every other reporter did. I
listened to polls and media outlets, instead of people. I thought
Trump's maladroit and ridiculous general-election campaign, in which
he went back on virtually every major primary-season promise while
being revealed through seemingly hourly scandals as one of the world's
most corrupt and personally repulsive individuals, would do him in. He
would lose and lose huge, ending up a footnote to history, having
served no purpose beyond the destruction of the Republican Party.
Conventional wisdom said so, and wasn't conventional wisdom always right?
Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made,
the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own
influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in
love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and
distrust us as much as they apparently do.
It's too late for any of us to fix this colossal misread and lapse in
professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this
failure of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like
the politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now
America will do its own talking for a while. The world may never
forgive us for not seeing this coming.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
