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 about?" he once asked, without irony).
But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the 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 granted to Barack Obama.
Shunned during election season by many in his own party, 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 People's Court reboot, might be attorney general.
God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we can 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 more "eclectic"
cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislature that will
attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk to Beijing.
Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I 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 blindness.
Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to
treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes be
unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told.
Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this 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 jetliner.
And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering so 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 into a media-speak during the sit-down.
Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of The 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 language, true.
But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.
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 bad.
We couldn't understand what they were saying to us. We refused to 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
headed over the wall.
Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply never 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 especially media figures.
Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American 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 about were profits.
The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted 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 system.
Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades, 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! And so on.
Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each of 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 like NAFTA.
Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, I 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 star-struck courtiers."
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.
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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-america-go
t-it-so-wrong-w449783http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/president
-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 about?" he once asked, without irony).
But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the 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 granted to Barack Obama.
Shunned during election season by many in his own party, 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 People's Court reboot, might be attorney general.
God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we can 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 more "eclectic"
cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislature that will
attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk to Beijing.
Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I 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 blindness.
Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to
treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes be
unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told.
Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this 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 jetliner.
And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering so 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 into a media-speak during the sit-down.
Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of The 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 language, true.
But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.
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 bad.
We couldn't understand what they were saying to us. We refused to 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
headed over the wall.
Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply never 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 especially media figures.
Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American 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 about were profits.
The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted 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 system.
Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades, 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! And so on.
Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each of 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 like NAFTA.
Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, I 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 star-struck courtiers."
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
