2020 Presidential Election

[Frelga]

It's not like there's anything new about funneling economic discontent into racial and religious enmity. It had worked for others in the last century. Not for very long but enough to get a lot of people killed.

[yovargas]

I don't see the progression you are suggesting. I would say most Republicans were appalled by Trump up to the time he was elected, and probably most are still appalled by him every time he opens his mouth.

I certainly see no evidence that this is the case. My own sister said during the campaign that she would vote for him but she really disliked a lot of what he did. Fast forward a couple years and she says to me "I think in 50 years, historians will view Trump as one of the all-time great presidents." I suspect this reflects the view of the majority of the right at this point, as Republicans have a near-unanimous approval of his job performance.

[Impenitent]

...Fast forward a couple years and she says to me "I think in 50 years, historians will view Trump as one of the all-time great presidents."

I've seen this stated by others, and it's beyond my capacity to understand.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Joe Biden's latest "gaffe" - claiming that he was Vice President during the 2018 Parkland shooting - is extremely troublesome. Yes he has been a gaffe-machine all of his political life but this one seems to have a different quality to it, and the fact of the matter is, he would be the oldest president ever if we won (and Sanders is even older).

Apropos the discussion going on, I find it quite telling that Biden and Sanders both comfortably lead Trump in early head-to-head polls whereas the candidate who in my opinion is most likely to make a positive difference in the lives of most people, Elizabeth Warren, is at best a point or two ahead of him.

Sexism is probably still ahead of racism as the number one factor in American politics.

[Cerin]

I don't see the progression you are suggesting. I would say most Republicans were appalled by Trump up to the time he was elected, and probably most are still appalled by him every time he opens his mouth.

I certainly see no evidence that this is the case. My own sister said during the campaign that she would vote for him but she really disliked a lot of what he did. Fast forward a couple years and she says to me "I think in 50 years, historians will view Trump as one of the all-time great presidents." I suspect this reflects the view of the majority of the right at this point, as Republicans have a near-unanimous approval of his job performance.

Sorry that wasn't clear. I was talking there about Republican lawmakers, among whom there was almost universal disapproval of Trump while he was winning the nomination, IIRC. I realize Trump's approval rating is very high among Republican voters.

[Cerin]

As for thinking that people are upset only because Trump beats them at 'their own game' I beg to differ. Trumps behavior would NEVER have been accepted by Republicans had the same things been done by a Democrat. They would have lit their hair on fire and had a public lynching.

Rose, Democrats do have their hair on fire, they are investigating Trump on numerous fronts and the media has been engaging in a public lynching since the day Trump announced his candidacy. As you point out, Republicans would be doing the very same thing if Trump were a Democrat. Is your complaint that Republican lawmakers aren't joining in the attempt to overthrow Trump? I'm afraid I find that rather naive. Many of them publicly expressed their distaste for Trump as he was campaigning, some still make public complaint over his behavior, I suspect that many continue to be privately disgusted by him, but they aren't going to join in actively trying to overthrow a President representing their own party and advancing their own agenda.

[Cerin]

Joe Biden's latest "gaffe" - claiming that he was Vice President during the 2018 Parkland shooting - is extremely troublesome. Yes he has been a gaffe-machine all of his political life but this one seems to have a different quality to it, and the fact of the matter is, he would be the oldest president ever if we won (and Sanders is even older).

I'm coming to feel that they are both older than I want a President to be. The Mueller day at the House may have helped me come to this conclusion.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I still don't think that Andrew Yang has any chance of winning the nomination (though he has qualified for the third debate), but this may well be the realest moment of the campaign.

Andrew Yang breaks down in tears at gun safety town hall: 'I have a six- and three-year-old boy, and I was imagining...'

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[narya]

I highly recommend the podcast "The Argument". Every week they have a thoughtful argument about an important topic from a variety of points of view. This time, they interviewed Missouri senator Josh Hawley.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/opin ... awley.html

Here's a clip about "cosmopolitan elites":

Josh Hawley: "The folks who are in leadership of our big corporations, who are in leadership of our universities, who are in leadership of the media and the chattering class, and yes, government, too, they don't really share a common ethnic background, a common religious background... they do share a common background in education - usually they are educated at elite schools - and they also tend to share an outlook on the world that was shaped by those institutions and it is an outlook that is in many ways denationalized. So, they don't think a whole lot about patriotism, they don't put a lot of emphasis - in fact many of them are hostile to the idea of patriotism as being too nationalistic - as being somehow retrograde. They tend to think about global citizenship. They think of themselves as citizens of the world. They tend to emphasize change over tradition, the values of career ambition over place. All of that is fine, it's just that that gives you the politics of elite ambition rather than the politics of the American Middle, and here is why - most Americans don't share those values and that outlook. Most Americans want to live in the town they grew up in, they want to work in the family business if there is one, they want to raise a family. That's very praise worthy. In fact, you can make the argument, and I do, that it's those virtues that built this country, and my argument is that our leadership class has become dangerously divorced from that outlook, from those values, from those ambitions, so much so, that they really don't understand it anymore."

Ross Douthat: "This argument got labeled antisemitic, for the term "rootless cosmopolitan" to describe Jews and Judaism. I want your quick response to that."

Josh Howley: "That's totally absurd. There is nothing that liberal elites love more, besides the fact that of being elite and looking down on others, than using the charges of bigotry to shut down debate, especially when they are implicated in such serious social and economic failures as they are. And the truth is that the leadership of this country has given us this system that we are struggling with now. It has given us wages that have been flat for decades, it has given us families that are in crisis, it has given us an opioid crisis, it has given us a death and despair crisis, these are real things. And I think what you'll find is that segment of the ruling class - they don't want to face up to these things and they do not want to admit that they have anything to do with them."

~~~~
I'm not sure that I agree with him, but at least now I understand better how and why some conservatives see the other side this way.

[Frelga]

Yeah, that is not a statement I am prepared to accept at face value.

Rootless cosmopolitan was a charge leveled against Soviet Jews in Stalin's push to purge them from, well, everywhere.

[yovargas]

I mean, the cultural divide between rural/urban and educated/non-educated is well known and established regardless of attitudes towards Jews, so I find that aspect of the discussion irrelevant. I would expect that kind of cultural divide to be found pretty much everywhere in the world, even ones with no Jewish population at all.

[Cerin]

Whether or not one agrees with this description of the elite, I think it is an accurate assessment of how the elite is viewed from middle America. Thanks, narya, that was interesting. I have considered myself a 'liberal' all of my life, but I increasingly feel out of touch with the left and the Democratic and media (i.e., elite) response to issues. I suppose this could be a generational thing. If pressed today, I could no longer identify myself with any particular political segment on the spectrum.

[Frelga]

I mean, the cultural divide between rural/urban and educated/non-educated is well known and established regardless of attitudes towards Jews, so I find that aspect of the discussion irrelevant. I would expect that kind of cultural divide to be found pretty much everywhere in the world, even ones with no Jewish population at all.

And yet.

[River]

I mean, the cultural divide between rural/urban and educated/non-educated is well known and established regardless of attitudes towards Jews, so I find that aspect of the discussion irrelevant. I would expect that kind of cultural divide to be found pretty much everywhere in the world, even ones with no Jewish population at all.

While this is true, there's a part of the world I keep a weather eye on. The rural/urban divide in Serbia is exacerbated by information access. You can't get broadband in "inner" Serbia (I put that in scare quotes because the whole country is landlocked and the capital city itself is a couple hours driving from the nearest international border, but that's what my husband calls anything that's south of the Danube and north of the southern borders). You can't get all the TV channels Belgraders get either. And since the tradition of a free press is pretty much non-existent and the Vucic's party has co-opted all the theoretically independent outlets, it's state-sponsored news all the time. Which means whatever Vucic says goes, whether or not it's actually true. I won't get too deep into what that means for Serbia because it's depressing and off-topic. But it comes back to Frelga's point in that weird anti-Semitic stuff crops up occasionally. And the part that makes it really weird is the Jewish population in Serbia barely existed before WWII and got almost completely obliterated during. There are some Jews left - there's a synagogue near the Belgrade Zoo and there's another very old one up in Novi Sad that's a city landmark - but the population numbers in the thousands. Most of the people spouting this nonsense have only seen a Star of David on pictures of the Israeli flag. It's insane, but it's there.

Which is my very long-winded way of agreeing with Frelga. It might be more current to extend "rootless cosmopolitan" from "Jews" to "everyone not like us" (however you define "us") but, as far western civilization and its history are concerned, the original "rootless" people, the OG "other", those educated types who got around and lived in major population centers, were the Jews after the Romans booted them out of Jerusalem.

[Túrin Turambar]

While the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ argument has been directed against Jews, I agree with Senator Hawley that it’s wrong to automatically linking it to antisemitism.

I often pass through Southern Cross Railway Station when I take the train into central Melbourne. It’s where the regional trains from Victoria’s rural towns arrive and leave. And every now and again I’ll see a man in his fifties or sixties, wearing a battered bush hat, flannelette shirt and blundstone boots standing outside the station on Spencer Street looking completely bewildered while the crowds on the footpath surge around him.

He invariably sticks out amidst the Chinese students, Indian IT workers on skilled immigration visas, and white-collar professionals who might have been born in Victoria but could just have equally come from interstate (like me) or overseas. He probably lives in the same town as his parents and grandparents did. It’s unlikely he has any education above high school, and probably didn’t finish high school. If he lives in a very small town far from Melbourne, then he might only occasionally visit a large regional centre like Ballarat or Bendigo, let alone a major city. Unless he lives in an area with a visible Aboriginal community, most likely all his neighbours look like him. And I get the impression the capital city of his own state strikes him as being a foreign country.

About this time last year I gave a talk to the historical society in a small town about three hours’ drive from Melbourne. It was for a ceremony at the town cemetery for the veterans of the First World War buried there. And for the people I spoke to, their connection with the local district meant a lot to them. Their grandparents were buried in this cemetery, and their great-grandparents, for some of them, going back to the original white settlement of the area in the 1850s. Similarly, they took pride that their forebears fought for this country, they were “our Aussie diggers” who were willing to go to war in the hope that their descendants would continue to live in the same district. Australia Day, Anzac Day and Remembrance Day matter in small towns - they make little difference in the middle of Melbourne. This the world the bewildered man on Spencer Street would have probably come from.

[narya]

There's more in the podcast I linked to, and I highly recommend listening to it.

Taking a very broad look at history, at one point the Europeans in power said that Jews could not own land, so they became part of the burgeoning economy of the cities. Add to the coastal cities the newly arrived, landless immigrants and slaves, and you set yourself up for an us against them scenario. This is now played out as the landed gentry of Middle America vs the denizens of the coastal cities that are not rooted in land, uniform culture, or uniform religion. They don't "get" each other. The Middle Americans see the less fortunate as having no place in their society - they are landless, family-less, and different. They are often seen as leeches rather than members of the body.

Unemployment has gone down steadily in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 8 years straight. Yet many are working at least two jobs and can't afford a place to rent. These are not leeches.

[Frelga]

Just to emphasize the amount of BS in the quoted statement - Republican politicians have no problem with educated elites when it comes to, e.g., Donald Trump (The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League university) or George W. Bush (Yale and Harvard).

Meanwhile, the struggling working people they support are... who, exactly? Are they service industry workers? Not based on the amount of crap Ocasio-Cortez gets for her stint as a batista. The migrant agricultural workers? The blue collar unionized workers? No and no.

Howey's statement is full of code words, where "Middle America" stands for white and elites stands for Jews and uppity brown folks like Obama and Ocasio-Cortez.

See also Ken Cuccinelli's new frontiers in racism: Real Americans are "people coming from Europe

[Dave_LF]

It's pretty hilarious that in the same paragraph where he accuses "elites" of being out of touch, he also says most Americans want to grow up and work in the family business. There's, what, like 3 of those left?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction.

Elizabeth Warren is going to be the Democratic party nominee for president, and go on to defeat Mr. Trump in the general election. I believe that Trump's relentless mocking of Warren as 'Pocahantas' Will backfire and that Warren will be able to attract enough of the white, working class mid-western voters that were turned off (or taken for granted) by Hillary Clinton to take back those states.

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[River]

I hope you're right, Voronwë.