I respond to Donald Trump’s victory in a blog post.
It might be helpful to pull together my writings on this election. I have attempted to be comprehensive so you can see for yourself how right and how wrong I was. The titles often speak for themselves. Sometimes I have added notes in parentheses:
- First, in my blog, Not Housebroken:
- June 24, 2014: Clinton owes rape victims a deeply-felt apology
- November 5, 2014: Updated: The Democratic Party just isn’t that into you
- January 27, 2015: Dear Hillary: What your husband can’t tell you (In fact, both major party nominees were deeply unpopular.)
- April 17, 2015: Just sayin’ (This was a brief comment on Clinton’s logo.)
- July 25, 2015: A journalistic disgrace
- August 8, 2015: Sanity about Donald Trump (My doubts that Trump could win didn’t last very much longer.)
- August 11, 2015: Bringing down Donald Trump (No one followed this advice.)
- August 16, 2015: The buzzards are circling over the Clinton campaign
- September 13, 2015: Democrats: As always, making it easier for Republicans
- September 15, 2015: Bernie Sanders is doomed (Actually, outrage about the potential cost of Sanders’ proposals on health care isn’t what did him in.)
- September 16, 2015: The misleading $18 trillion—and precisely how it is important (About the cost of Sanders’ proposals.)
- September 20, 2015: No, we cannot all just get along: The dangerous delusions of the status quo
- September 21, 2015: Hillary Clinton as the ultimate outsider
- September 30, 2015: Watching the train wreck
- October 11, 2015: Feminists for patriarchy
- October 20, 2015: Donald Trump may well win in November 2016
- November 22, 2015: The populist party in the U.S. is not Democratic
- November 24, 2015: As the world fumbles toward another world war, the U.S. fumbles toward a Trump presidency
- November 30, 2015: An essential first step
- December 15, 2015: Yes, it really might be President Donald Trump
- December 19, 2015: Two thumbs on two scales
- December 29, 2015: The alternative to a ‘right wing nutcase’: Buying off poor whites
- January 8, 2016: No kumbaya for Clinton (Updated)
- January 15, 2016: On the feminist argument for Clinton
- January 21, 2016: The very possible and increasingly probable President Trump
- January 22, 2016: Conservatives swimming against the tide (In retrospect, I’m wondering if history will even remember the largely neoconservative effort to stop Trump.)
- January 25, 2016: Just in time for the 2016 election (In retrospect, an economic downturn has yet to materialize, but the economy hasn’t really taken off either. However much one may be inclined to attribute Trump’s victory to economic conditions, it’s clear that the economy was insufficiently helpful to the incumbent Democrats.)
- January 28, 2016: Cheering political incorrectness and irresponsible speech
- January 31, 2016: Education for pacifying the population with illusory promises of prosperity
- February 4, 2016: The real reason why Bernie Sanders’ ‘utopianism’ is a problem
- February 18, 2016: The illegitimacy of the opposing party (This is largely about Barack Obama’s failed effort to replace the deceased Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. It became a campaign issue.)
- February 19, 2016: Trump’s alleged Christianity and the schism between ‘nice’ and ‘mean’ Christians
- February 23, 2016: Why I do not vote (Generally applicable to all elections in the present paradigm.)
- February 27, 2016: A pox on both your parties
- March 3, 2016: Donald Trump would (and probably will) be the president the establishment deserves
- March 6, 2016 (in its most recent re-publication): Updated (again and again and again): Damnation by faint praise: Sanders claims to be more electable than Clinton (My most comprehensive effort to detail Hillary Clinton’s failings as a candidate, it degenerated with successive edits into something of a ‘data dump.’)
- March 12, 2016: Absolutely, there is a bug (This mentions Clinton’s email server controversy.)
- March 20, 2016: The art of the intolerable
- March 30, 2016: The New York Times gets it badly wrong on so-called ‘free’ trade
- March 31, 2016: Donald Trump and the polls
- April 4, 2016: Hillary Clinton, the entitled and the corrupt
- April 11, 2016: On the Clintons and ‘listening’
- June 8, 2016: The two-party system crashes and burns
- June 15, 2016: My friends are harmful for my health
- June 26, 2016: The ‘Brexit’ vote may signify the end of the illusion of ‘progress’ (This outcome foreshadowed yesterday’s result in the U.S. election both in 1) a voter rejection of elite policies that have failed to benefit ordinary people, and 2) completely wrong survey results that forecast an outcome different from what actually transpired.)
- July 2, 2016: When experts are not experts (This is more about the ‘Brexit’ vote in the United Kingdom.)
- October 10, 2016: Yes, Hillary Clinton must answer for Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults
- November 2, 2016: A false dichotomy view of politics
- November 9, 2016: Why Donald Trump won
- While I attempted for a long time to stop short of actually forecasting a Trump victory in public, preferring instead to warn of the possibility, in fact, I forecast it in response to a question at my dissertation defense on November 19, 2015. My committee members unanimously harrumphed and dismissed the possibility, which is actually part of the problem: We on the left have been entirely too dismissive even of legitimate working class white complaints.
- What I was more convinced of, for quite a long time, was that Clinton was incapable of defeating any of the loonies competing for the Republican nomination. As it happened, the successful loonie was Trump, who proved to be an even worse candidate than I imagined, first, about a month after he won the nomination, and second, early in October. This led me to doubt he could prevail and I never retreated from that doubt. Even as I think I understand his victory now, I have to admit that even I’m surprised that such a horrible candidate could win.
- One place I clearly was right was in warning about the accuracy of polls. This warning came as a product of misleading results in a number of preceding elections. With this election, once again, the polls were wrong and it’s only now occurring to folks that some rethinking might be in order.[] It remains to be seen, however, how accurate my diagnosis, largely drawn from a methods class taught by Valerie Sue at California State University, East Bay, in 2003 (yes, thirteen years ago!), proves to be.
It’s somewhat striking to see others saying something like what I said in my blog post. On one hand, it’s gratifying. But on the other hand, if you have to be told you “weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair,”[] or if you’re only now listening to David Dayen when he writes the following because you’ve just gotten a hard slap across the face, that says something about your empathy and your compassion. It says you’re a fucking hypocrite:
You can believe that half the country is racist if you want, and there’s no question that there’s an undercurrent of anger in Trump’s stunning rise. But that anger isn’t directed at any individual ethnic group. It’s more inchoate than that. It’s rage at institutions that people believe have failed them forever. It’s rage at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary folks. It’s rage at a cultural milieu that perceives too many non-coastal Americans as buffoons. It’s rage at the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession, in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger, and the two-tiered system of justice paraded on full display. It’s rage at an elite class that people feel is lined up against them.[]
And if you’re only now pondering Michelle Dean’s point that “[t]he parallels between the two cases [of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton] . . . not only mirror each other in their particulars, they also reflect certain attitudes about women and sex long held by many men in power,”[] then you need to stop calling yourself a feminist because your priorities were someplace besides personal autonomy for women.
And if you are a member of one of those groups, be it LGBTQ, Mexicans, Blacks, women, Muslims, the disabled, or any other group these progressives claim to care about, you’d better hold onto your wallet with both hands. Because what these assholes really care about are certain labels, not about human beings. I don’t know precisely what scam they’re running, but they’re running one.
What we’re seeing here is that a bunch of so-called ‘progressives’ really aren’t. They’re frauds. They’re in it because they think it’s the cool thing to do or because all their friends are ‘progressives’ or some other reason. But they aren’t concerned about human beings. And that makes them as hideous as any conservative.
As for the Democratic Party and the media—well, let me just let Thomas Frank take over:
To try to put over such a nominee [Clinton] while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.
Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:
How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?[]
He concludes,
The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough![]
Associated Press, “AP Calls The Election For Donald Trump,” Talking Points Memo, November 9, 2016, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ap-calls-for-trump
David Dayen, “The ‘Deplorables Got the Last Laugh,” New Republic, November 9, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/138615/deplorables-got-last-laugh
Michelle Dean, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” New Republic, November 9, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/138038/dont-stop-believin-election-reckoning-sexual-assault
Jonathan Easley, “Pollsters suffer huge embarrassment,” Hill, November 9, 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/305133-pollsters-suffer-huge-embarrassment
Lauren Fox, “Reports: Clinton Conceded To Trump Over The Phone,” Talking Points Memo, November 9, 2016, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/clinton-conceded-to-trump-over-the-phone
Thomas Frank, “Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there,” Guardian, November 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals
Annie Karni, “Shock, anger consume women at Clinton headquarters,” Politico, November 9, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/women-clinton-headquarters-2016-presidential-election-231049
German Lopez, “The diverse coalition that backed Clinton knows it isn’t looking good — and they’re scared,” Vox, November 9, 2016, http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/9/13572128/clinton-trump-scared-2016-election
Brad Reed, “Michael Moore’s tough words for liberals: ‘You weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans,’” Raw Story, November 9, 2016, http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/michael-moores-tough-words-for-liberals-you-werent-paying-attention-to-your-fellow-americans/
Darren Samuelsohn, “Democrats: We ran into an unstoppable wave,” Politico, November 9, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/clinton-supporters-fallout-2016-election-231056
Tierney Sneed, “Trump wins in stunner,” Talking Points Memo, November 9, 2016, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/trump-wins-the-presidency
Kenneth P. Vogel and Alex Isenstadt, “How did everyone get it so wrong?” Politico, November 9, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/how-did-everyone-get-2016-wrong-presidential-election-231036
Aaron Zitner, “Pollsters Whiffed on Voters’ Appetite for an Outsider,” Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/pollsters-whiffed-on-voters-appetite-for-an-outsider-1478679202
Aaron Zitner and Paul Overberg, “Rural Vote Fuels Trump; Clinton Loses Urban Grip,” Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-vote-helps-donald-trump-as-hillary-clinton-holds-cities-1478664251