Decent conservatives

Even without any of the specific information that’s available, I should have thought it was obvious on general principles that if you want to mobilise opposition to Trump, your strategy should give higher priority to appealing to people who did not vote for him and lower priority to appealing to people who did vote for him.

There would be a problem for those priorities if a majority of citizens had voted for Trump. But that’s not the case. The most important piece of specific information available is that a majority of citizens did not vote for Trump. Therefore, a majority is at least in principle available through a strategy of concentrating on people who did not vote for Trump.

“Oh, those terrible liberals, and after we were so nice to Mr. Obama for eight years.” It’s late, I’m cranky and have little tolerance for people who feel aggrieved at being called out for their support of Trump. It’s just an illustration that everyone wants to thought a good person no matter how vile their politics.

“Even her much-criticised remark about deplorables was a clumsy attempt to split the presumed mass of decents from the racist, misogynist alt-right.”

Uh? If a conservative politicians were to denounce communists among the left, would you say it was a “clumsy attempt to split the decent progressives from the extremists”, or would you call it red-baiting in order to energize his own base?

The argument best applies to people who registered or otherwise identify as independents and voted for Trump. So the polling data on self-described Republicans seems irrelevant.

Supposedly decent conservatives these days are either lining up outside Trump Tower or Mar-A-Lago to kiss the plump one’s ring (Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Theresa May), or playing a more or less profitable game of footsie with the right wing of the Democratic Party (George Will, David Brooks, David Frum). Decent is scarcely how I’d describe either their conservatism or their behavior in general. Contemptible is the adjective we’re looking for, at least in public. In private, far more accurate, if less polite, adjectives spring to mind when contemplating their anemic re-staging of what is in fact an ancient immorality play. Let the Devil have them as soon as he can get the temperature down there properly adjusted.

If you’re only decent to family and friends, are you decent? There were a lot of Germans, once, who were perfectly happy to look the other way. This is not different.

The Democratic leadership are fools.

For what its worth I know people who would, for sure, answer in an opinion poll that they believe Trump is trustworthy, caring, well-informed and a good manager, but believe no such thing (being non-crazy). They are, for now, loyal. Their loyalty is, I think, unstable, and if things get bad enough, it will break. In particular, publicly visible mishandling of actual military/terrorist conflict will destabilize their support. I don’t know how deep this goes.

Trump’s record unpopularity is not unrelated to the close-to-incompatible-with-winning-the-Presidency extent to which he lost the popular vote. He starts at a massive disadvantage relative to most other Presidents.

What is interesting to me about the elected Republicans (Ryan et al) is that they believe that nobody will hold them responsible for their venality. I think this is a correct calculation — when he screws up and loses support they’ll disassociate themselves from him and become the alternative to him, and his supporters will peel off to them because the core Republican vote really is principle-less. (Unlike Democrats who were willing to throw the 2000 election out of fierce loyalty to a sitting President who demonstrably had loyalty to nobody but himself).

The vast majority of people who voted for the Republican candidate in 2016 are — drum roll, please — Republicans. We now know that they would vote for Bozo the Clown if he had an (R) after his name because that is what they did. They would have voted in roughly equal numbers for Cruz or Rubio or JEB! And if Cruz or Rubio or JEB! had won, we wouldn’t be talking about how to reach them because there would be nothing to explain. The only way we could reach them would be to become Republicans.
Most of these people aren’t themselves racists, misogynists, grifters, or fascists — by realistic as opposed to aspirational standards — but they enabled obvious racists, misogynists, grifters, and fascists and deserve scorn for it. No tactical downside either, because we can’t reach them anyway.

Lee A Arnold @10: as I understand it, when an iceberg of whatever size melts, sea level is not affected at all. Am I wrong?

PS please do not regard this as any sort of support for the unique President Trump.

I see absolutely no evidence for this assertion: “Most of these [Republican] people aren’t themselves racists, misogynists, grifters, or fascists — by realistic as opposed to aspirational standards….” I”m not even sure what that means. People who “enabled obvious racists, misogynists, grifters, and fascists” are, to the exact degree they support such, racists, misogynists, grifters, and fascists — otherwise the terms have no meaning. Is one only racist if one actually knots the noose or lights the cross?

We need first of all to face the depressing fact that a huge number of our fellow citizens (and people in general) are in their heart of hearts “racists, misogynists, grifters, and fascists.” Most people are banal, and this is the most fashionable form of banal evil. When we give them the benefit of the doubt they instantly weaponize it.

@11 could have gone further. My history being imperfect, I don’t recall the name for the faction of German Jews who basically said “let’s be nice and accomodating, and maybe they’ll be nice (less awful) to us”. I think that’s the one with which to hit “let’s be understanding” Democrats.

Of course, that assumes said accomodationist Dems actually have principles, other than fear of missing out gravy train opportunities (see also T. Cruz).

Arnade, et al. have some interesting points about front/back row, but ultimately, in order to effect change, one needs more than “understanding”.

@Kalkaino,

What amazes me about people who come to this conclusion is that they don’t seem to realize both the futility an immorality of their own position as a result of this fact.

If half the country is basically evil, isn’t it high time for progressives to abandon their communitarian national politics? If most Americans have fundamental disagreements with you, shouldn’t that lead to become more libertarian, to favor devolution of responsibility away the federal government both for their own good, and because they don’t have the right to drag people kicking g and screaming into the new Great Society without their consent?

Their are two logical conclusions a progressive may reach from Trump’s victory: 1) realize half of Tge country really does not share your vision for the country and let red states be red states and blue states be blue states and accept local politics as the appropriate theater for policy determination; San Francisco can be socialist if it wants, just let Houston stay capitalist. Or 2) work even harder to convert people to your own vision. Inasmuch as progressives choose the second, many of us have little reason to sympathize with their ‘resistance.’ If you’re a Shia who just lost the latest election to the Sunnis, doubling down on the need to Shia-ize the country isn’t going to appeal to people who would rather just have religious freedom (or my other analogy: why should a Republican care about helping the Bourbons overthrow the Hapsburgs?

What party do you feel welcome in? for most voters, including most Democratic voters, that’s a controlling factor in making the choice of what party to choose at the ballot box. Trump made a slice of middle/conservative white male (and their female family members) voters feel included simply by acting the part. Also by claiming to be able to replace lost jobs, also by validating their questions about illegal immigration (as in, why do they get to break the law when I don’t get to?). I know many such voters who are not alt-Right, not particularly racist (voted for Obama), or heartless about refugees or legal immigrants. They did not always vote for Trump unless they were pro-life purists, but many stayed home. I think they can be won back (Trump is helping in that task by acting so cruel and weird) but it will require better emphasis on and framing of these issues.

Layman @8:

The question left unanswered was: If Joe Manchin or Heidi Heitkamp are reliable votes for any Trump nominee or initiative, what would it matter if they were replaced by Republicans? If Republicans are selling the rightist agenda, do we need Democrats to sell it, too?

I totally agree about the idiocy of the Democrats generally accommodating themselves to Trump. But Manchin and Heitcamp are (at least at the moment) outliers. And the actual question regarding them is: If Joe Manchin or Heidi Heitkamp are occasional (or even frequent) votes for Trump nominees or initiatives, what would it matter if they were replaced by Republicans?

The answer to the first question is: because there’d be more reliable votes for the Republican agenda. I’m all in favor of primarying accommodationist Democrats who can be replaced with resisting Democrats. But replacing accommodationist Democrats with Republicans is cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Octavian @ 20:

it’s not a matter of turning down a dial but acknowledging (if one believes it) the distinction between what one disagrees with and what one finds intolerable. E.g., disagreeing with school choice (Betsy DeVos confirmation) or market deregulation or the Hyde amendment (typical conservative positions) vs. finding the travel ban not merely something with which to disagree but something intolerable.

Where I disagree with this is that the line between mere disagreement and that which I find intolerable is not the same as the line between typical conservative positions and positions unusual to Trump. I agree that market deregulation and the Hyde Amendment, e.g., are awful, but tolerable, in part because they’re, in principle at least, reversible. However, destroying public education (i.e. “school choice”) or the environment — both also typical conservative positions — are not tolerable.

Again, imagine you were counseling an Arab country in how to deal with terrorists in their midst.

Do you say “well pretty much any one who adheres to Islam to irrational to ever be dealt with, too racist, and naturally too violent”?

Or do you say “some Islamic adherents get super-radicalized, and you need to work to keep them to a minimum, probably through a combination of co-opting a bunch of them, making lives better for a bunch of them, and helping them feel more rooted so that they don’t think tearing everything down is a good gamble”?

Now that isn’t EASY. But it is pretty much the only approach known to work.

Why shouldn’t it work here? Is there something super-special about the US that makes that excellent advice bad?

@Octavian:

San Francisco can be socialist if it wants, just let Houston stay capitalist. Or 2) work even harder to convert people to your own vision.

The exit-polling from the election tells us that *both* SF and Houston (Harris County) went blue. ISTR there were (something like only) two major cities that did NOT go blue. So some sort of “partition” would have to be between the cities and the “heartland” (as the rubes call it).

Re: Shia-vs-Sunni, you’re onto something there, scary as it sounds. The racism animating Trumpism (and the Rs since the 70s) is deeply rooted — right back to slavery. What to do? Well, for starters, there’s a lotta decent folk in the heartland, too. [One of the major cities that voted for Dampnut, so I have read, is Fort Worth, TX] I was heartened to see how much resistance there was even in Fort Worth. And in small towns all over. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe not.

@Octavian [20]:

it’s not a matter of turning down a dial but acknowledging (if one believes it) the distinction between what one disagrees with and what one finds intolerable. E.g., disagreeing with school choice (Betsy DeVos confirmation) or market deregulation or the Hyde amendment (typical conservative positions) vs. finding the travel ban not merely something with which to disagree but something intolerable.

I’ll take one of your examples (b/c long comments are bad): You may find that the Hyde amendment is sufficiently different from the travel ban, that you wish to not equate them. But for many progressives, they’re just as bad.

Here’s the thing: many progressives look at libertarianism, and see neo-feudalism. Many see an infantile embrace of a naive understanding of economics. And many see the way that libertarians refuse to properly account for spillover (“oh, can’t get rid of the corporate barrier”) and see “socialism for me, libertarianism for thee”.

It’s fair for a conservative/libertarian to argue that there are good policies/positions on their side, that are unfairly demonized. It is, after all, the hill they chose to die on (metaphorically). It is equally fair for progressives to argue that each and every one of those policies, when examined in detail, is immoral and evil.

Let’s return to the Hyde amendment. As the feminists say, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”. That a conservative could deny women the right control their bodies is to many feminists the proof of their evil nature. And to say that it’s identity politics is balderdash. Frankly put, it’s about the money. Let Dampnut subsidize every baby that would have been aborted with a $10m trust fund, and I’m sure there’d be a lot fewer abortions. Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out (in excruciating detail) just how much of the policies of Jim Crow and segregation (e.g. redlining, contract houses) were a form of -economic- repression.

To sum up: cons/libs can believe that progressives are squishy and soft and all cuddly teddy bears. We’re not. We have carefully reasoned and detailed arguments supporting our positions. And as far as we can tell, all cons/libs have is “FYIGM”.

@Octavian [20]: I should have added, re: the Hyde amendment, that even a cursory examination of maternal mortality rates in Texas should be sufficient to convince one that access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive services, is a matter of fundamental human rights.

It is a -right- to not die in pregnancy/childbirth. And that is at this point in question, for poor women in Texas.

If half the country is basically evil, isn’t it high time for progressives to abandon their communitarian national politics?

The US experimented with that for a couple centuries. Besides some minor social issues that bothered the conscience, like slavery and Jim Crow, the politics and policy ran into some other very serious problems due to geographic separatism and that kind of tolerance, eg the South was a strong national force for militarism, anti-unionism, fiscal conservatism etc and tended to cost more than they gave.

But since progressive solutions like the elimination of the electoral college and Senate are simply not going to happen, and would likely generate a civil war in the process anyway, Democrats and progressives do need to seriously think about what devolution (already here) and de facto separation would look like, whether it would be manageable and tolerable. Really too many aspects to handle in a blog comment, from the depressing abandonment of the liberal political project to the material questions of resource areas vs finance/intellectual areas. Kansas provides grain, Montana and Texas energy, and neither really would die without HBO and critical theorists.

Metropole/periphery post-colonial problems are not unique to the US and probably are a useful analytical resource.

Just a couple more, and I will try to keep them short:

As we look forward to 110+ degree summers: the wind farms, solar arrays, and nuclear plants are not going to be built in central Manhattan; it is very likely much cheaper energy-wise to cool a small house surrounded by trees than a 17th floor apartment; and the urban liberals decided they didn’t want guns. Besides construction materials of wood versus steel and concrete. Now the rurals will need combines and transformers, but the coastals decided to ship heavy manufactures overseas, or at least out of the cities.

Conservatism, hard variety may be based on a deep pessimism, trying to sustain what is existentially necessary under catastrophic conditions. Stuff like democracy, diversity, tolerance, equality are luxuries of a rich high-energy, high-productivity society.

Sebastian H: ‘Or do you say “some Islamic adherents get super-radicalized, and you need to work to keep them to a minimum, probably through a combination of co-opting a bunch of them, making lives better for a bunch of them, and helping them feel more rooted so that they don’t think tearing everything down is a good gamble”?’

Every time you try out this argument on a specific issue, where you claim that it is a small minority of Republicans who hold extreme views on that issue, someone shows you that you are wrong, and that most Republicans actually hold extreme views on that issue. We just had that exact exchange last week, and here you are again.

“Every time you try out this argument on a specific issue, where you claim that it is a small minority of Republicans who hold extreme views on that issue, someone shows you that you are wrong, and that most Republicans actually hold extreme views on that issue. ”

So you’re from the “we must kill all the Muslims because they just can’t be dealt with group”. Ok. Everyone else agree or is it just Layman?

EB

Do you think it’s good strategy to give priority to trying to win over people who voted for Trump ahead of trying to win over people who did not vote?

“decent conservatives…I’ve met a reasonable number of US Republicans, and Australian conservatives, and plenty of them are decent enough in their personal lives. But there is no reason to believe that this decency will carry through, in any significant way, into their political choices.”

Let’s make sure we know what we’re talking about here. Obama’s share of the white vote was 43% in 2008, Clinton’s was 37% in 2016. In terms of American national electoral politics that’s actually a pretty hefty difference. So what are we talking about here? Strictly ideological people who self-identify as conservatives? Republicans? Or the several million who are conservative-ish to moderate who voted for Obama a mere eight years ago?

Those people aside, it’s worth noting that the U.S. is at the ass end of voter participation in the “developed” world, meaning that there are tens of millions of people who aren’t particularly liberal or progressive or socialist but could probably be persuaded to vote that way if given a compelling, positive reason to do so. But since both our major parties are hellbent on not appealing to these people, there we are.

OTOH, I think the mainstream media are just about cured of reflexive centrism

The mainstream media no longer matter, or matter in some way that needs to be recalculated, like Democratic enthusiasm. But there is no longer a national consensus. Trump voters, Republicans, and conservatives are no longer listening. At all.

Isaac Simpson

“The heavily pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald has become one of the most powerful forces on the Internet, with almost 400,000 highly-active subscribers and tens of millions of readers each day.

The result is a dangerous disconnection between what we’re being told is going on and the beliefs of a substantial portion of the citizenry. Not a substantial portion like a couple million. A substantial portion like 100 million. This week’s Rasmussen Poll, for example, found that 45% of voting Americans believe America is on the “right track.” This is down two points from the record high, which was recorded two weeks ago, and is higher than any week during the Obama presidency. ”

The NY Times could definitively prove Trump was a Russian spy, and half the country wouldn’t believe it, if they ever even heard it.

Sebastian H
What leads you to the conclusion that the approach you describe is ‘pretty much the only approach known to work’? Can you give some examples of its working?

@BenK [26]: while I agree with John Quiggin’s response, this bit here deserves more pushback:

‘Decent’ – consider people who believe they are making the world a better place, striving to meet their own ethical and moral standards.

*Absolutely* not. Your definition basically says we must take sincere people at face value. It says there is no objective morality in our society, much less in the world. [Recall that for both slavery and segregation there were supposed religious arguments well-founded in the Bible.] And when we combine that with the fact that the Rs want to impose -their- morality on -us-, you’re really saying “capitulate in order to preserve domestic peace”. Bollocks. Also, I think you should read _On Bullshit_, wherein Harry Frankfurt demonstrates that

In the end, sincerity is bullshit.

Sebastian H

The whole recent series of threads on crookedtimber seems to involve a bunch of people not willing to differentiate between levels of support, and just putting everyone in the “we can’t deal with them at all” area that is normally reserved for hardcore terrorists.

You can’t expect a country to run if you put 20-30% or more of people in that category unless you are willing to take away their right to vote, or kill them.

What makes you think that? How is the approach of the present Trump Administration different from ‘putting 20% of the population in the “we can’t deal with them at all” category’? Is that approach preventing them from running the country?

– there was this theory before the election that an erection of a F…face would made ultimately obvious for everybody how important it is NOT to be a F…face – and NOT to believe in the stuff a F…face believes in – and so called conservatives – and I believe this theory is also working very well in practice – as the pushback against the F…face and conservatism and nearly everything they stand for – is so powerful – and so GREAT and so moving – as nearly as moving as Meryl Streep NOT liking Trump – and we now all experience every day how great it feels NOT to belong – and having nothing to do with ‘conservatives’ are people like the F…face!

I note only that nobody can define “decent” in terms that both conservatives and liberals will accept as the correct definition in political terms. There are also two general forms of “decent”: Public behavior and internal beliefs. They are not necessarily the same kinds of decency.

I find that unless and until “decent” is defined by mutually agreed definitions by both conservatives and liberals the subject of “conversions” rests on different ideas of what “decent” conservatives means at all

Quiggins post is thus simply a proposition to convert one’s values that you don’t like to values you do like.

In my own value system I can only say that those who were decent conservatives didn’t vote for Trump. That only means that they would vote for some other conservative republican or libertarian. One can say that any conservative in the white house is better than having Trump there (Cruz? Rubio? who were next in line after Trump)… but for a liberal there’s not a lot of real difference in terms of getting policies and laws passed that liberal want.

Trump isn’t the issue or problem. It’s the conservative value system that appealed to voters.. that it’s far more reactionary that one might have previously thought is only because, imo, most liberals don’t understand conservative’s basic value system. If you spend a moment though you can begin to get a pretty good idea by looking at Alabama’s Republican voters, or Oklahoma’s or Mississippi’s Conservative voters South Carolina’s as well. That’s as close to what the conservative value system is now and has always been (back to the constitutional convention and before).

The other option is to believe that those conservative voters in those states were voting “against” Hillary, as opposed to against Democrats. That’s fantasy.

“How is the approach of the present Trump Administration different from ‘putting 20% of the population in the “we can’t deal with them at all” category’? Is that approach preventing them from running the country?”

Yes, it is preventing them from running the country.

On a more important level there is a lot of culture capital to spend in the institutions of the United States. The Trump Administration burning through it makes me appreciate what was there a lot more than before. Trump is in the process of breaking the United States. The fact that he hasn’t yet completely done so shouldn’t be taken as evidence that his practices are “running the country”.

Layman, “Sebastian should stop manufacturing crap analogies”. This would be a lot more convincing if you actually attacked the analogy instead of attacking me. What is it about the analogy that is so bad? It seems to me that if we can look at actual terrorists and say “you know what, the best thing to do would be to try to de-radicalize their support communities” the same is doubly true of anything extremely harmful but less so than actual terrorists.

It is easier to say that to far away countries, because we don’t feel the hate directly. But that doesn’t make it incorrect.

But if you don’t believe that about Republicans, you seriously need to question the advice regarding Islamists. Islamists groups are highly racist, religiously intolerant, misogynistic and promote violence. To the extent that Republicans are those things, they are less so than Islamists. So why such different advice?

I would suggest that it feels different largely because you are personally involved. So either we need to put aside the cloudiness of personal involvement and take our own good advice on the subject, or admit that personal involvement suggests that our advice was terrible. If there is an easy path to avoid one of those choices, I’d love to see it.

Sebastian, it wasn’t a small number of Trump supporters who were deplorables; Clinton said it was about half, and the data seems to bear her out.

Chet, in the short term, Clinton lost to sexism, racism, bad press, and bad luck. But in the longer term many of those voters remember being turned out of their homes and being unemployed for years. Just about everyone knows someone who has been there. Too early for statistics, but it’s hard to see how that could not have made a difference. In the even longer term, how could the vast expansion of income inequality and economic uncertainty of the past 30 years not have made difference?

I don’t think sexism, racism, and economic inequity are separable. Marx and Engels didn’t think so, and neither did Martin Luther King. Forgetting this, it seems to me, was a huge mistake on the part of the Democratic centrists like William Clinton.

@Sebastian H [65]:

It seems to me that if we can look at actual terrorists and say “you know what, the best thing to do would be to try to de-radicalize their support communities” the same is doubly true of anything extremely harmful but less so than actual terrorists. […]
But if you don’t believe that about Republicans, you seriously need to question the advice regarding Islamists. Islamists groups are highly racist, religiously intolerant, misogynistic and promote violence. To the extent that Republicans are those things, they are less so than Islamists. So why such different advice?

There are two things wrong with this, and I will illustrate with the example of the misogynist beliefs of Trumpists (and their christofascist brethren) (I could do this with racism, or homophobia, but one example suffices):

(1) Nobody is contemplating changing our societies to conform with what takfiris want. Instead, our governments and NGOs are trying to teach them that their beliefs are incorrect, so that they can be reintegrated into Western society. WHEREAS in the case of these Trumpists, what is contemplated is to actually compromise with them? Because for sure, we’ve been trying to teach them that women’s rights are human rights for …. what? 50 years? Longer? When did Betty Friedan write _The Feminine Mystique_? And we know that whenever we compromise with them, bad things happen: whenever it’s been attempted to give ground on abortion, in hopes of preserving contraceptive access, it’s turned out that nooooo, contraceptive access was the next target in their sights. We’d all love to teach them to be better human beings. That seems difficult to achieve.

[In this next point, I want to state up-front, that I DO NOT mean to discuss Muslims, and if anybody mistakes me, I’ll point at the FLDS, and (from my own heritage) some of the more misogynist Hindus. There are nutjobs of all religious faiths.] (2) In the case of takfiris, salafists, etc, their -number- is very small. ISTR the low-end number is around 30k, and the high-end estimate is around 100k. By comparison, there are >1B Muslims. And certainly the number of Muslims with these radical beliefs in Western countries is minuscule. WHEREAS manifestly massive number of misogynists and christofascists who voted for Trump -specifically- because he would gut abortion protections (recall that preachers were -specifically- calling on their flocks to vote for Trump, for this reason). If there were even 10% or 20% of the US population consisting of takfiris/salafists [not Muslims — takfiris], there’d be alarm bells ringing everywhere …. in every town. Nobody would be talking about “reasoning with them”. It’d be out-and-out civil war. And yet, with massive, massive numbers of Americans who are manifestly religious misogynists, we’re supposed to … what? Try to convert them one-by-one?

So no, your analogy is inaccurate and doesn’t apply.

Both for US Republicans and for adherents to radical Sunni Islam, I think that Sebastian H’s advice to “help them feel more rooted so that they don’t think tearing everything down is a good gamble” is actually very good. That emphatically doesn’t mean giving either of these groups anything politically or ceding an inch of the ideological ground (I think that part of the resistance to the suggestion stems from a conflation of the two), but that could mean trying to address the structural causes of their sense that the social structures they inhabit is under attack which can be addressed in a positive way.

As Sebastian H said, that isn’t easy, but it does sound like a good idea. Funnily, I personally completely understand how some youths in Tunisia or France can end up listening to a radical Imam on YouTube; I am actually less clear on how American right-wing college students could have lost so much intellectual taste and basic self-respect to listen to Milo (at least until his minimization of pedophilia became widely known).

Sebastian H: “This would be a lot more convincing if you actually attacked the analogy instead of attacking me.”

This is quite funny given that I was responding to yours @43 & @44.

In any event, you didn’t respond to this: “…right after he stops making false claims about Republicans…”

That’s funny, too.

Taking this analogy more seriously than it deserves, if a large minority of the population were Islamist (rather then Christianist) theocrats, my response would be the same: to try to outnumber them rather than attempting a compromise with them.

It is presumably uncontroversial that that sounds like a recipe for civil war?

Functioning multi-cultural societies will, on acquiring a new cultural minority, begin a process of negotiation looking for areas where the implicit budget allocated for such things is best spent, and where the universally-applicable rules need interpretation in the context of that particular culture. They may even straight waive the rules in particular cases (classically Sikhs and motorcycles helmets) where none outside the culture gets harmed, and ensuring compliance would be more difficult than it was worth.

And then, in the ideal at least, they will look for issues that the new-t0-them culture has which require new laws against things previously not worth legislating about (e.g. FGM).

Non-functioning ones will take universal principles and turn them into an excuse for oppression, a story about how We are the good guys and the Other is bad.

The guru of political organisation Marshall Ganz has pointed out that Republican politics now relies on dense networks of community organisations that do other things than politics and are accordingly more rooted in society, like evangelical churches and gun clubs. The parallel institutions for Democrats – Catholic churches, unions, big – city patronage machines – have faded or become unreliable.

It will be very hard for Democrats to rebuild such institutions. At all events, the insight shows the folly of the centrist strategy of throwing the rainbow coalition under the bus in the hopes of appealing to the WWC. The rainbow coalition do have community roots: feminists, blacks, Latinos, gays, greens. Abandoning these groups does not rebuild unions.

I got a small amount (one specific mention) of pushback on my anecdotal depiction of decent Republicans, so I’ll add a few details.

I used the qualifier “at least in their social circles” because they live in a mostly white-occupied suburb and I don’t have a lot of evidence outside of those confines except this: the doctor has done volunteer work in Africa and Latin America, and the retired music teacher (whose students still ask after him when they see me because I resemble him) volunteers as a teacher of USA citizenship to prepare immigrants for the citizenship exam.

I should also note that I do not know that they voted for Trump. However they have a very low opinion of HRC and one of them told me that he wrote in his son’s name. Abortion is one of their highest-priority issues.

The Earth has a limited carrying-capacity for humans; I personally wouldn’t care if I had been aborted (tongue in cheek but I think there is a serious philosophical point there); only a very, very small percentage of potential humans (egg and sperm combinations) will get born with or without abortion; nature (god?) aborts humans (miscarriages); animals with large litters often can’t feed them all and have to sacrifice some of them (apparently part of the plan, if there is one); and the Bible doesn’t treat loss of a fetus very seriously in Leviticus. It seems to me the religious issue could be debated in a reasonable way – and that if a compromise could be agreed on, we would have better elections.

It’s worth noting that the republicans (and many conservatives from other countries) have been campaigning for years for the right to publicly call people niggers and faggots and to say that those people are emotionally, morally or spiritually damaged, with impunity and without consequence – even the consequence of being called racist for saying those things. They were willing to entertain a pro paedophilia guy in the service of that campaign. How can we dredge any decency out of a movement with those stated goals and those proven actions?

Ben K says this dubious thing:

“‘Decent’ – consider people who believe they are making the world a better place, striving to meet their own ethical and moral standards. One may not agree with those standards or think that they will make the world a better place, but those people are ‘decent.’”

First, I don’t think that this describes very many people. Most, in my experience, muddle along in a moral sleepwalk hardly ever applying ethical considerations to their own actions — while of course not hesitating to apply them to the actions of others. Second: under this definition of the word, those who sincerely seek to better the world by exterminating the Evil Others (as has definitely happened) are “decent.”

Ben K also says this preposterous thing.

“They are not people to despise. It isn’t about agreeing with the concrete ethical and moral standards, its about accepting that they pursue those standards honestly, without evil intent.”

Ben needs to get out more. In my experience the America right-winger uses “concrete moral and ethical standards” not honestly but precisely as the card-sharp uses the rules — as a weapon against those who take them seriously. (For instance: those Christian Fundamentalist sure do love them some Pussy Grabber — what happened to their vaunted standards?)

Finally, people who think that evil commences with “evil intent” really need to get a grip. By and large evil doesn’t look and sound like Hannibal Lecter; it’s just everyday negligence, both the venial and the vast carelessness. We need always remember, however, there are monsters who will aggregate it. Enter Bannon and Trump….

Maybe we don’t need to convert any republicans? Maybe we already have plenty of Dems and undecideds to attract? Maybe we just need a Dem national party that isn’t deeply in hock to incompetent and highly paid consultants?
https://medium.com/theyoungturks/are-multi-million-dollar-consulting-contracts-worth-the-future-of-the-democratic-party-247f3ecba480#.htyzumva1

as I understand it, when an iceberg of whatever size melts, sea level is not affected at all. Am I wrong?

Yes. melted fresh water (in the iceberg) takes up more volume than the saltwater that was displaced by a floating berg.

It is likely that the easiest way to win back the Senate and House of Representatives
in 2018 would be to appeal to people who are not currently voting for some reason.

That is indeed what common sense suggests, but, it is exceptionally hard to get people who don’t vote to vote. This is why virtually no political candidate uses this strategy. It is smarter to mobilize regular voters who might agree with you than it is to try to turn nonvoters into voters. i wish this were not so but, well, it is.

one of the astonishing things about Trump voters is that for most of my acquaintance, it came down to the single issue of abortion, plus some degree of unthinking R loyalty (Daddy was a Republican). Accidents of history made abortion a unique issue in the USA, for which many Trump voters were willing to stomach all the other vileness. A few are radical Christianists, Pence supporters, but the crazy you will always have with you. Between these two I cannot think of any persuasion that could work.

Luckily it’s not necessary to persuade them. They are a small minority of voters. Voter suppression efforts have been very successful, including voter id laws, shutting down polling stations (over 500 in the South), targeted Facebook and other social campaigns, and plain old physical intimidation. Add to that the inability of people working 2 or 3 jobs to get to the polls, or find public transportation to get to the polls, or stay long enough to vote at the single polling station left open; and a lot of the missing voters are explained.

Some percentage of R votes can be attributed to voting machines provided by Republican firms to Republican states, that have no audit trails and allow for undetectable hacking. The large discrepancies between exit polls and election results in the critical counties are suggestive.

REDMAP was also very successful, redrawing the electoral map to ensure R victories. See
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html
This can be fixed, by creating non-partisan redistricting commissions, and using Professor Duchin’s insights into metric geometry to ensure fairness.

Benjamin Letzler’s letter to the LRB expresses this very well.
“Half of the American voting population doesn’t vote at all – namely, the poorer half. Some countries hold elections on weekends or ad hoc holidays; US elections are on a Tuesday, following a 19th-century farm schedule. Americans with no job security working multiple jobs with no breaks often have no time to vote. If Americans have been convicted of felonies, they are in many states disenfranchised for the rest of their lives.

Most of those who are entitled to vote in the US and who have the leisure to do so will take part in a primitive winner-takes-all system of electoral districts that the Republican Party has systematically manipulated. They will vote on electronic voting machines with minimal electronic security, purchased by Republican state governments from Republican-donor equipment suppliers, machines that routinely return Republican candidates to office even when polls show a wide lead for the other party – this may inform the Democrats’ ‘loss of nine hundred seats in state legislatures’.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n05/letters

Fix the elections and the deplorables will have to go back to seething quietly by themselves. As Galbraith wrote, “Better that the fool be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence, which goes well with stupidity.”

Might it, then, not be useful to try to develop a strategy for expanding support,
rather than rhetorical efforts to make existing support terrified and docile?

Any specifics of any such strategy would be heartily welcomed. I would hope for more than not hurting the delicate feelings of unreachable voters, which, from all I can see, is something that people who won’t vote for Democrats anyway say when confronted with the awfulness of the person they did vote for.

The result of all this was that Trump attracted virtually the same support among Republicans as did Mitt Romney. It was the failure of any significant number decents to switch to Clinton, rather than large-scale desertions from Democrats, that was crucial factor in Trump’s victory.

What this elides is that just as Trump’s most notable quality as a candidate was being heavily disliked, his opponent’s most notable quality as a candidate was being heavily disliked also.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-distaste-for-both-trump-and-clinton-is-record-breaking/

So while some of the “decents” may have voted against Trump, or not voted at all, others may voted against Clinton, or not voted at all. It would be interesting to have data.

The rainbow coalition do have community roots: feminists, blacks, Latinos, gays, greens. Abandoning these groups does not rebuild unions.
From the perspective of somebody who has tried to get people to join unions, and had a small number of successes, the kind of groups you mention don’t seem like rivals for political attention; unions and your ‘rainbow coalition’ groups are allies, certainly in aspiration and in potential, and I hope also in practice. I don’t want those groups abandoned. I am confident that’s the attitude of the two unions I have been a long-term member of, and of many other unions in my country (I wish I could be equally confident that it’s the attitude of all of them); maybe that’s true in the US as well, and if it’s not it should be.

@94
In fact, at the end, the HRC ads were directed at moderate wealthy repubs — Kasich-type voters. Lots of ads replaying the “grabbed her” audio. And a shift toward supposed swing states like Azizona. She thought she had moderate Repub women wrapped up. Meanwhile Trump was all jobs jobs jobs mixed in with The Wall and Lock Her Up in his final Midwest swing. The election was lost when the Clintons strong-armed Biden and others out of the primary. How frickin’ incompetent were the Dems to lose to Trump? Extraordinarily. They couldn’t generate Black turnout. They lost the working class. They were too stupid to realize that they never could get the Kasich vote. They underestimated the obvious – just how disliked the Clintons (and Bushes) are — and that any dem would have crushed in NY and CA. The Dem establishment is incredibly insular. It’s the same insiders forever. It took real skill to lose to Trump. And now frickin’ Chelsea appears to be joining the family business after Sidwell/Stanford/Hedgefunds. Please, make it stop.

Doug K

Accidents of history made abortion a unique issue in the USA

It wasn’t just accidents of history, it was a calculated political strategy.

Re: MFB@72. That would appear, to an outside observer, to only be two themes: signalling and post-op analysis. The first is helpful for people trying to cope with this situation emotionally; the second useful in developing strategy going forward. I generally suck at the first in almost all venues and gravitate to the second instantly. As for the, shall we say, Russo-antipathy, it appears largely true but a dangerous distraction in theme two. It may be comforting (theme one) to assert that James Comey/V. Putin/Misogyny was responsible for this defeat, but they are unlikely to have played a significant role. Many of the black (mostly men) and white women that went to the polls for Obama but stayed home or voted for Trump respectively did so because Obama was inspiring and Clinton was not.

The simple reality is that, unless you were already in love with her, Hillary Clinton was a singularly unappetizing candidate, for reasons of both policy and persona. Realpolitik dictates that you take the lesser evil, but that is not how the human mind is wired. D of Y (@16) and OC (@48) mentioned cognition and the operator’s manual for the human psyche; I suggest we all step back and browse some anthropology and social psych texts in preparation for 2018. We are, by thousands of generations, tribal creatures, regardless of our avowed political positions. If you say your tribe is humanity you really saying that it includes people far away at the expense of people near by. To a conservative that is a fundamentally immoral proposition.

For whatever reasons you wish to assign, republican voters will reliably vote republican for the forseable future while democratic voters will do likewise. We all know HRC won the ‘popular vote’ just as we all know it is both irrelevant and not going to change. This election was lost because Trump, not the GOP in general, breached the ‘blue wall’ states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Given the way we elect at the federal level, that point is uniquely important. Voters in the rust belt states, primarily suburban and rural whites, switched sides (as many union people I know), some after supporting Sanders in the primary. It is that segment the democratic party can make headway with for the near-term prospect of regaining the presidency. That will require, for upper/upper-middle class democratic elites, embracing the unfamiliar ideas and uncomfortably combative rhetoric of industrial labor progressivism. In the long term it brings displaced industrial labor back into the democratic fold.

The point made by James Wimberly (@43) and J-D (@97) does not stand up to scrutiny.
Being latino or gay does not a community group make. The essential thing is that the groups which hold republican voters together do something else between elections. Churches (for example) have power because they keep their members engaged and provide something tangible every single day. PatinIowa (@98) alluded to this and it seems a good place to start rebuilding the democratic party bench. Go down to the DNC office for help with job discrimination, landlord problems, etc… The social justice wing of the catholic church can play souls to the polls well if it abandons shame as an operating principle. I’m sure all of you can add to the list. Bobby Kennedy had it right: the black-blue coalition should be the cornerstone of the democratic party; rainbows are ephremal by nature.

mojrim
How do you get from ‘primarily suburban and rural whites’ to ‘industrial labor progressivism’?

For what it’s worth, I really do think the problem with the Clinton campaign was primarily the candidate, with her characteristically poor choice of advisers and strategies as a secondary factor. My friends/acquaintances are mostly on the liberal side of the scale and even now, after the Trump “victory”, there’s a substantial percentage of them who felt and feel no enthusiasm for or trust in HRC, even though they overwhelmingly voted for her. This isn’t something driven primarily by Trump propaganda – it goes back decades for some of them – and it comes out of a strong sense that HRC was not especially competent, that she was prepared to play footsie with some very questionable groups and individuals, and that she had been willing to say some extremely ill-advised things in the course of the 2008 primary that put her commitment to liberal ideas in serious question. I think people studying the Clinton debacle should look at the end of the 2008 primary to get a sense of why a substantial number of Obama voters simply didn’t think HRC was worth showing up for. To me, the memory of that parade of follies, lies and injudicious utterances mattered rather more than the mythical Evil Bernie Sanders.
I suspect that a competent Democratic candidate in 2022 without Clinton’s baggage will beat Trump handily. I just hope the Democratic party has managed to get its act together by them and gives that candidate a Democratic House and Senate to work with. The wreckage of post-Trump America is going to take a lot of fixing.

John @107–I would gladly surrender your points but for the money–the multi millions that have infused the politics of my once-beloved progressive state of Wisconsin to make it an abjectly northern Wississippi in less than 10 years. How can we underestimate the power of 2500 billionaires–0nly the top 8 of whom possess half of the world’s wealth–to truly dictate the near-term direction of not just US but global politics? What space for egalitarian optimism remains given this world-wide plutocracy allied with its power to tap fear of terrorism?

Stephen,

When a floating ice mass cuts loose and floats out to sea there is no effect on worldwide sea levels.

When amounts of Antarctic ice melt, the near shore surface water becomes less saline, and hence freezes more easily than the more saline it has floated over. Hence in the short run satellites sometimes show a seasonal surface ice of greater area than before.

Inland ice and calving icebergs add to the volume of the seas at a rate of one cubic metre per previously above-sea-level ton, identically before and after they melt. This raises sea levels around the world.

-dlj.

‘ They are now the smaller half, and are likely soon to become too small to win, even with all the advantages of a gerrymander and voter suppression.’

This point might not be quite as strong as you think it is. After all voters have more than just two choices: they can vote Democrat, or Republican, or they can vote for a third party or independent or they can choose not to vote . It is noticeable that the American electorate overwhelmingly chooses this last option.

Also don’t discount the sheer scale of Republican gerrymandering/voter suppression.

Meanwhile, in the Dreherverse:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/imaginative-david-gelernter/

“The Left hears nothing we say” – all those lefties need to shut up and listen to the conservatives.

Interesting to learn that Roger Scruton is “exiled from the academy” rather than merely retired from it; he did actually have academic posts and deliver lectures during the strife-torn Thatcher years, when he was a hate figure. I saw him speaking in Cambridge in the mid 90s, sneering at Derrida and Foucault and all that, and the audience (mostly staff of the Philosophy department) lapped it all up, even though most of them were politically against him (but in agreement about postmodernism). But that doesn’t fit the victimology narrative so well.

Sebastian H: “So Democrats need to pick up a few votes in a few of the more rural states.”

No, not really. Fewer than 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would do it. None of those are rural states. Your way, I’m guessing they need millions of votes.

“there has never been a large country where the wasn’t a huge percentage of racists often with huge amounts of religion mixed in”

Actually, this is not true. In most large countries there wasn’t a “huge percentage of [overt] racists” after WWII.

– and everybody:

‘Don’t you just see he is an asshole’?
-(courtesy Jon Stewart)

“This is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. It’s not too farfetched that GOP might add Latino votes in a few years, even with the immigration crackdown.”

Just picking up on this one point – I agree that it’s a little short-sighted to necessarily see the whole of the Latino vote as naturally favouring Democrats, a lot of them come from fairly racially stratified societies and have a certain definition of themselves as ‘white’ as opposed to others in their society who are not. Plus there is the natural conservative tendency also.

@vasilis (120)

Your point on the Latino votes is an important one. Part of the issue is that many Latinos consider themselves (and basically are) white.

RichardM, NickT:

(Presumably you meant “in 2020” rather than “in 2022”, as the next US Presidential election would occur in 2020, not 2022.)

“Since 1945, the usual, and generally successful approach , has been to treat racists as beyond the pale, refuse any coalition deals with them and so on.”

In this post fact, “what the President believes world” we need the blunt force tool of more and more massive demonstrations. We will not be able to persuade ourselves out of this mess.

Pester a congressman, join a march, protest.

Here is one I’m planning on, Protest Paul Ryan, Chicago at the Chicago Club in the South Loop on March 23.

Compromising on economic equality, social justice or environment is likely to cost as many votes to apathy and divisive intraparty fights as it wins by appealing to GOP moderates. And note that different moderates can defect from GOP for completely opposite reasons. Former coal miners or factory workers rejecting Trump because he fails to bring back their job are very different from wealthy but educated suburbanites who find his rhetoric offensive–Democratic moves designed to appeal to one group would likely repel the other.

Even just trying to hold back on the “mean” rhetoric concern trolls are complaining about could easily backfire–a lot of the appeal of Trump (and Sanders) was their media image as straight talkers, their willingness to criticize the political establishment in harsh terms.

The only issue I’d compromise on if not toss out altogether is gun control, because it’s a political loser for the Dems, has no chance of happening, and some parts of Democratic coalition may be changing their minds on it post-Trump (look who’s buying guns).

Other then that, the issue isn’t who voted for Trump it’s who didn’t vote.

He was leader of the Senate Democrats for 12 years. He was a founder of the Sophia, West Virginia, chapter of the KKK in the early 1940s.

He was abject in his public apologies for having been a member of the KKK, long after his career was over. Whether he was in any (interesting) sense racist when he led the Senate Democrats is not clear to me (it might be to others). Denis Healey wasn’t a Communist, in any (interesting) sense, when he was UK Chancellor of the Exchequer.

@129

Indeed. I hate my sinuses. I shall hang my head in shame, flog myself lightly and then have a damn fine cup of coffee and go again.

On the subject of what the Dems do next:
1)Don’t waste time pandering to racists.
2) Don’t waste time analyzing the thought processes of people who claim that they were “forced” to take sides. They had and have as much free will as anyone else. They chose .. poorly. End of.
3) Remember that several million Obama voters weren’t convinced by what the party was offering. Think about winning them back and turning out the people who don’t usually bother to get off the couch. Do that and you can make your majority a winning majority.
4) Offer a genuine Democratic program and spell out what that means for the future. Don’t mumble. Say it like you mean it. Make it clear that you are offering a healthier, cleaner, better future. The GOP are offering something nasty, brutish and short on facts – as is the conservative norm these days.
5) Remember, 10.5 million “minority” voters will come onto the rolls by 2020. 1.5 million pale pink “majority” voters. Which of them offers you better prospects for increasing vote share, hmmm? A head-scratcher this is not.
6) Don’t insult your voters by playing the bi-partisan game again. You end up losing credibility and enabling the racists, obstructionists and racist obstructionists who make up the GOP contingent in the House, the Senate and now, the Orange Creamsicle House.
7) Don’t pretend that all was well under Obama. Democrats made plenty of mistakes – and that’s part of the story of how they got slaughtered at the local level. Throw in a failure to organize and an over-reliance on people just seeing sense and you’ve got the disaster that we now face.

Do any of you bother to check out the conservative end of the blogosphere?

The policies advocated here the help elect Democrats are to advocate identity politics and push the progressive platform.

Interestingly enough those are the exact policies Republicans are hoping that Democrats advocate as they are sure it cause even more Republicans to be elected in 2018.

One group or the other has to be wrong.

pointing out what a shameful thing it is to be a Republican looks like the best strategy to peel off the small number who are open to shame, at the price of annoying the rest even more.

That also has the upside of appealing to the non-voters who are outraged at what’s happening, as well as the “they’re both bad” voters should any of them be amenable to persuasion. I’m hoping there are a chunk of Bernie-supporting types who’d vote Democrat if only it wasn’t a hold your nose exercise. The question is where *exactly* those voters are.

Another way to look at it is that the Dems can also win by wholesale recapture of the house and senate, even if that means a Republican president. The US is used to that sort of deadlock and it’s less damaging the the current three tier capture.

@139

“those are the exact policies Republicans are hoping that Democrats advocate as they are sure it cause even more Republicans to be elected in 2018”

And they are so convinced that those policies are a losing proposition that their response is to double/triple/quadruple down on vote suppression as a response. The GOP are running on rancid fumes at this point – and are about to produce even more backlash when Trump and his still not fully stocked cabinet of horrors finally manage to get their saggy old Russian-owned asses together and actually do some of that there bigly legislatifying. Some apathetic non-voters are going to get the mother, father and kin group of all wake up calls. Throw in the non-trivial percentage of Trump voters who thought that Donnie Putinobitch wasn’t really going to do any of the crazy stuff and the GOP have nothing to sell and the nation is going to discover that there’s nothing but fool’s gold in them there TRUMP-brand hills.
But sure, tell us more about your burning conviction that now is the time for the Democrats to leap aboard the conservative ship of fools.

I believe that “Facts don’t matter” in these discussions. In my travels in being stuck for 10 hours at a time in truck stops and in communities all over America actual facts did not matter. Self-interest mostly did not matter. Charisma did. For me Trump had no charisma. BUT for many Trump had that magic and Clinton did not. As a practical person I supported the Democratic candidate. Obama had charisma. Clinton did not have charisma. Sanders did not,for me, have charisma. All people are a mix of somewhat good and somewhat evil. You need that person who captivates and appeals to their better natures. Facts will not get you over that line to victory. Policies need to be there. However the extra margin of 2-4% of the electorate will only be reached by emotional appeal. Bill Clinton had charisma like his policies or not. With over 300 million people in the US there has to be someone emotionally appealing with liberal policies. During a stop in Arkansas one time after doing that dance whether you can speak to the other person about politics a woman behind the bar told me a story that no one she had ever spoken to had voted for Bill Clinton. “And you know” she said “he won the governorship twice”?

But is it politically wise to work to find common ground with [some] of the people who voted for Trump [probably by focusing on serious mitigation of globalism problems but your mileage may vary] so that they become ‘repentant racists’?

The general tenor of the threads around here since Brexit (especially the comments) would appear to me to be ‘no’.

So how is this supposed to work? They can hate me and my family until their personal economic problems and those created by globalization in general are solved? I will turn a blind eye to this hatred that is targeted very directly at me, my family and social circle on so many levels in the vague hope that a more just society will change people’s minds eventually? And I will ignore the fact that it is completely irrational and not goal oriented to blame me, my family and social circle for their misfortune, but that they don’t seem to have the guts and/or brains to identify the people who are responsible for their situation and instead elect them to the highest offices?

‘So, we appear to be in furious agreement. It’s fine to work with repentant racists who renounce their assocation with racist groups, such as the Republican Party. And in this context, I’m not really fussed if this repentance is politically calculated, rather than sincere, as long as it is reflected in political choices. The problem is how to deal with unreprentant racists, such as those who support Trump.’

Oh. So the real issue is that they oppose your favored set of public policies. You would be ok with them, if they made the right political choices, but if they make they make the wrong political choices they need to be called unrepentant racists.

You do not want to gut the EPA because you are a racist. If the country were entirely white, Republicans would still favor massive deficit financed tax cuts for the rich, and still favor almost all the same policies from guns to economics, that they favor today. Pretending that the Republican party is a racist institution like the KKK is wrong and silly.

You might be right that a blanket accusation of racism is the best approach. That ->

‘In this context, pointing out what a shameful thing it is to be a Republican looks like the best strategy to peel off the small number who are open to shame, at the price of annoying the rest even more.’

but I think it is more likely to drive people away, and to make them double down, and at the same time to render accusations of racism completely meaningless. The term racist will lose all of it’s power. If everyone you disagree with is a racist, everyone is a racist, and then no one is a racist.

anymouse: “So the real issue is that they oppose your favored set of public policies.”

Since we cannot read minds, and because people are not reliably truthful about the contents of their heads, we’re left with determining what motivates people by looking at what they actually do. Republicans by and large consistently promote racist policies, often using racist messages(*), so whether they’re secretly not racist doesnt really matter. On the other hand, if inner racists consistently promote non-racist public policies, well, we’ll be fooled by their actions, and it won’t matter what they really think.

(*) Spending cuts that consistently cause greater harm to minorities sold by claims of ‘welfare queens’ and ‘young bucks buying T-bones with food stamps’; law and order regimes that feature racially motivated sentencing schemes that incarcerate disproportionate numbers of minorities sold by Willie Horton ads and worse; legislative districts engineered to minimize the impact of minority voters, and voting rules and procedures designed to suppress minority votes sold by specious claims of voter fraud by unAmericans for which no evidence ever materializes; laws and institutions which permit cops and white private citizens to shoot black men under almost any circumstances without any substantial legal penalty, and which at the same time identify any black man presumed to have a gun as a danger to society and fair game for shooting by anyone, anywhere, sold by inciting white fire of crime by minorities; legal and institutional antipathy for minority immigrants sold by the claim that they are all rapist or murderers, sold by lies about the rate of violent crime by immigrants. Shall I go on?

But the point of the OP is that the vast majority of Trump voters …. are longstanding Republicans who mostly voted for Romney in 2012, which suggests they aren’t particularly hostile to globalisation. The assumption of the Clinton campaign was that lots of Romney voters (the “decent conservatives” of the OP) would be repelled by Trump’s racism and misogyny, enough to vote against him.

Those advocating persistence with this approach, like Haidt, want to claim that, even though Repubs reluctantly voted for Trump, they really don’t like him. Again, the evidence in the OP refutes this.

The evidence in the OP is that voters currently willing to identify as “R/Lean R” are happy with the job Trump has done so far. Well sure, but it doesn’t tell us if the composition of “R/Lean R” changed from Romney to Trump. And there is still all the evidence that Trump was a very weak candidate. The increase in the Libertarian Party vote totals from comment 108 is one such piece of evidence. Another is that in Utah, having a local non-Trump conservative on the ballot drove the R vote from 73% (Romney) to 46% (Trump). Overall, Hillary won 6 states – Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico – with less than 50% of the vote. Overall the non-major party vote went from 2.74% to 6.03%. That may not seem like much, but against the backdrop of a series of close elections?

I will link again to this 538 article:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-distaste-for-both-trump-and-clinton-is-record-breaking/

Okay, you say, but maybe it’s just Democrats who hate him. Well, that article links to this:

http://www.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/188177/trump-image-among-democrats-independents-negative-gop-candidate.aspx

Surely, when your opponent has such high unfavorables among people who identify as independents, and is not even particularly well-liked even among people who identify as Republicans, it makes some sense to appeal to those voters on that ground.

JQ’s thesis seems to be “that appeal didn’t work.” I don’t think this has been proved, in fact I think it’s untrue. The problem is that in a two-party system there are two candidates, not one, we are in a Trump-style zero-sum game. The problem the Democrats had, as I see it, was trying to tell people they didn’t want to vote for Trump, when they also didn’t want to vote for Clinton. It’s easy to look at the final results, 66-61 (m) Obama over Romney and 66-63 Clinton over Trump, and say Trump did better or about as well as Romney, or a typical Republican, but if Clinton was a significantly weaker and less appealing candidate than Obama, or a typical Democrat,that simply isn’t necessarily true.

“So the real issue is that they oppose your favored set of public policies.”

Especially the ones intended to combat racism and decrease inequality, yes. That is the issue.

@150
A fun exercise is looking at the 1976 electoral map. It’s like America did Opposite Day from our perspective now.

So what is meant by “rural states” here?

An interesting question.

There is an official reported index of urbanisation calculated on the basis of US census figures.

It turns out that, for the most part, States with an index of urbanisation higher than the national figure voted for Clinton, while States with a lower index of urbanisation (a category which turns out to include Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all slightly less urbanised, on the official index, than the USA as a whole) voted for Trump.

Still, it’s only ‘for the most part’. There are ten exceptions. Is there anything to be learned from inspecting these exceptions?

There are four States with urbanisation indexes higher than the national one which voted for Trump: two are large States on the fringes of the old South, Texas and Florida, and the other two are Arizona and Utah.

There are six States with urbanisation indexes lower than the national one which voted for Clinton: three of them make up northern New England, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and the other three are Virginia, New Mexico, and Minnesota.

The one that interests me particularly is Minnesota, which stands out in another way as the State with consistently the highest turnout. Does its record in recent times as a reliably strongly Democratic State have any value as evidence that getting more people to vote is a good strategy for the Democrats?

And that prompts in my mind another question: why is making it so that people do not vote, voter suppression, such an important strategy in the US (I mean, for one side)? Are there other countries where it’s politically significant?

“So, should we expect the Libertarian vote to peak at 3% of the total, or should we expect it to rise higher?”

My guess is that 3% is peak glibertarian, provided that the Democrats nominate a candidate who is even reasonably credible to the yearning masses. Whether the Democrats are able to do so remains very much in question. Watching Steve Beshear’s bumbling response to Trump’s “neo-presidential with minimized fascist stylings” cosplay did not inspire confidence.

Also, if there are in fact decent conservative voters, there ought to be some decent conservative politicians they have elected. Who are these decent conservative politicians? Anyone care to name one? Not McCain – he put Palin on his ticket and let her and his team run an explicitly racist and nationalist campaign, because he thought he could win that way. He paved the way for Trump. Who else?

Wallace won 23.5% of the vote in the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries.

J-D@156: The voters I’m aiming for are the traditional cornerstone of the dems, industrial unionists, that have been getting peeled away by the repubs as they became displaced or are their sons living with the knowledge that they will never get as far. These people, the occupants of eastern PA and the like, gave the three previously reliable blue states to Trump. If we have given up on them, both as voters and as members of the tribe, then we have given up the purpose of the dem party.

Conversely, Trump was able to win them by at least paying lip service to their interests, which do not include free college, worker retraining, or increased minimum wage. The neoliberal wonks that gave us Clinton’s disastrous campaign imagine those policies as realistic adaptations to the inevitable, but that is neither true nor convincing. The hollowing out of our industrial base is the result of specific decisions made over time and, while not 100% reversible, can be countered. Addressing that directly and forcefully, talking openly about national industrial policy, and actually following through unlike the yam, can go a long way to bringing those people back.

Solyndra provides an excellent example of repub strength and dem weakness in this matter. It was, if I recall correctly, part of a $35b DOE loan program currently in the black. Contrary to the common narrative, Solyndra went under because the PRC responded with a $350b subsidy program for that industry, allowing chinese manufacturers to dump cells on the US market. Rather than stand by passively and allow the US company to be buried we should have rejected or tariffed the imports, propped up our own industry, and shouted about it from the rooftops. Instead dems did the same thing they did in the Acorn kerfluffle and got both an albatross and a lost industry in the bargain. Opportunities do come along to reinvigorate the industrial base and get the credit for it, but we have to publicly disavow the neoliberal trade schema that delivered us to this economic and electoral nightmare.

In electoral politics there is both the tangible and the symbolic. Prosecuting the bankers would was a missed opportunity. We can still campaign on breaking up banks, clearing the debts of homeowners that got crushed in the meltdown, protecting domestic industries from cheap imports, and cancelling labor import programs like H1B. If we put forward someone charismatic and combative we can still get these people back in the fold. The alternative is (still) waiting for the demographics fairy, a shaky proposition at best.

mojrim

The voters I’m aiming for are the traditional cornerstone of the dems, industrial unionists

That’s clear enough as far as it goes but:
A. No adequate justification has been produced for the conclusion that industrial unionists are switching (nett, and at a significant rate) from the Democrats to the Republicans. What’s the percentage of industrial unionists who voted Republican in 2016, and how does it compare with the figures for earlier years?
B. If what you mean is ‘industrial unionists’, why did you refer earlier to ‘rural and suburban whites’? These two expressions are not synonymous, and not even close to it. Industrial unionists are more likely to be urban than rural, and I don’t know of any reason to expect them to be more white than non-white.

Conversely, Trump was able to win them by at least paying lip service to their interests, which do not include free college, worker retraining, or increased minimum wage.

They don’t? Why not? I know that unions in my country are in favour of such things; why would unions in your country be different?

The hollowing out of our industrial base is the result of specific decisions made over time and, while not 100% reversible, can be countered. Addressing that directly and forcefully, talking openly about national industrial policy, and actually following through unlike the yam, can go a long way to bringing those people back.

You seem to contradict yourself. If you’re right that Trump won the voters you’re talking about without delivering the agenda you’re talking about, there’s no reason why others can’t do the same.

“I know that unions in my country are in favour of such things; why would unions in your country be different?”

Could be the hierarchy of needs. Unions in the USA are fighting for basic survival.

“If you’re right that Trump won the voters you’re talking about without delivering the agenda you’re talking about, there’s no reason why others can’t do the same.”

The coal-miners are learning that Trump doesn’t keep his promises when they are hard to keep or they conflict with his own goals. The fact that Democrats also sometimes compromise their stated principles is why I am not a registered Democrat although I vote mostly for Democrats. It may be one reason for the large number of Independents here. Anyway, it is a poor long-term tactic. George H.W. Bush may have lost the election for a second term due to a broken promise (“Read my lips: no new taxes!”), although I think he was correct to break it (wrong to make it in the first place).

Michael Moore made a similar argument to mojrim’s, talking about how Trump stood in front of a Ford plant in Michigan and threatened to put a large tariff on cars made by Ford in Mexico if Ford closed a plant in the USA to move it to Mexico (as Ford had announced plans to do). The plant workers probably preferred that policy to free college, and they already made more than the minimum wage (as long as they had their current jobs).

JimV

“I know that unions in my country are in favour of such things; why would unions in your country be different?”

Could be the hierarchy of needs. Unions in the USA are fighting for basic survival.

That’s not an answer to my question. There’s no conflict between, on the one hand, unions being in a fight for basic survival and, on the other hand, unions being in favour of things like free college, worker retraining, and increased minimum wage. What mojrim wrote was not those things are not currently high priorities for industrial unions but rather that those things are noe included in their interests, which is a much stronger claim, and so far an unsupported one.

Solyndra lost out because of an unanticipated fall in silicon prices, which made their unorthodox solar panels unable to compete. That’s the whole story. The old GOP lies about the Solyndra subsidy/corruption/Obama and the lizard people deserve nothing but contempt.

anon/portly

Thanks J-D. Since your comment is directed at me, not JQ, I take it that you think Wallace’s reconciliation with blacks in the late 1970’s supports JQ’s “almost complete by 1968” formulation from comment 136.

No. I thought the quotes were interesting in themselves and relevant to this discussion generally. I don’t think dating of the transformation under discussion to exact years is important to this discussion.

I don’t think dating of the transformation under discussion to exact years is important to this discussion.

Well the dating is really the entirety of my point!

Look again at JQ’s comment 158. He is defending the “pretty much complete” idea, even though, for an obvious example, many of the senators who led the fight against civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 would remain in office for many years afterward (e.g. Stennis, Eastland, Byrd, Sparkman, Long). No “pushing out” as comment 136 might suggest, they were generally kept in, unless JQ is not talking about the actual politicians, or only about “choices” and not the actual process. Was there a sea change in their thinking between 1965 and 1968? AFAIK most southern Democrat politicians, as with Wallace, eventually, if they hung around long enough, expressed a change of views and/or regret towards their earlier actions; how genuine this was or how much it affected their voting patterns or how they were viewed by other Southerners (black or white), I am not an expert. I suspect it is somewhat complicated and would have guessed the process was just starting, not finishing, in 1968.

As shown above, from 1968 to 1996 the 5 Wallace states were “almost equally solid” Republican only in the sense that, in presidential elections, these states would vote for a Republican over a Northern Democrat, but would more or less be split in a race between a Republican and a Southern Democrat.

Oddly enough from 1968 to 1996 the only time the Republicans needed to win in the South and won there was 1968, although if you give Dukakis the entire Confederacy he almost wins. The year the South as a whole really mattered, it went for Carter. (In 1992 and 1996 it split, so that Clinton could have lost the Southern states he won and still won). Of course in 2000, 2004 and 2016 things were very different. (And the Southern vote could have potentially have been the difference for Republicans in earlier years, it just happened not to).

If the presidential election voting doesn’t convince anyone, if anyone is still reading or cares, these 5 states kept on electing Democrats to the Senate for many years after 1968. Until 1978 the 5 Wallace states had 10 Democratic senators and 0 Republican senators. As late as 1988 it was still 9 to 1 (through most of the 1980’s it was 7 to 3). Arkansas didn’t elect a Republican to the Senate until 1997. Louisiana, 2005. I was surprised to discover this, myself, I thought the Republicans did better there before 2000 than they did.

If you reversed (from D to R and R to D) every Senate and Presidential vote in those states from 1970 to 1996, the Republican party would have benefited enormously. That’s some perverse way of dominating, isn’t it?

Hmmm, you say, Governors? Mississippi elected its first R Governor (since Reconstruction) in 1991. Alabama, 1986. Arkansas (2 year terms), 1966, Nelson’s brother Winthrop, but from 1970 to 1996 only R for two years. Louisiana, 1980 (then back and forth). Georgia, 2002.

(Under the new commenting guidelines, am I allowed to make a “those ________ can really hold a grudge” joke at this point?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(pejorative)

Final note: the point of my comment is not which public officials and which voters were how racist when. My point is simply that the 5 Wallace states after 1968 were not “almost equally solid Republican,” contra comment 158.