2016 U.S. Presidential election

This poll says 5 percent of Sanders supporters now support Gary Johnson and 12 percent support Stein.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilassur/2016/10/10/are-bernie-sanders-supporters-backing-hillary-clinton/#7e36d587ba03

Juan Conatz

It might just be that some media outlets smelled blood with Johnson, who seems ill prepared for national level grilling and has trouble shrugging off ignorance with bravado and rhetoric like Trump.

Honestly, I really think it's as simple as what you've said. I think his gaffes have fed into the notion he's just unprepared to be president, and when gaffes reinforce preconceived notions, fair or not, it becomes almost impossible for a candidate to break free from them (see for instance the Dean Scream). To his advantage, he at least seems to have the capacity for it at some point as opposed to say Jill Stein who appears to be categorically incapable of ever being prepared to do the job.

Just seen that Glenn Beck has now endorsed Clinton! Things look very bad for Trump… http://www.breitbartREMOVE.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/10/glenn-beck-electing-hillary-clinton-moral-ethical-choice/

Technically he's not endorsing her. He's just saying that Republicans should feel free not to vote for Trump without worrying about Clinton winning. He'll be voting for a very small right-wing party called the Constitution Party.

ah right thanks for the clarification

so, this piece

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/13/liberal-media-bias-working-class-americans

is actually pretty good and, interestingly, has been at the top of the Guardian's most shared articles for a number of days now.

There have been a few articles about college education
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-12/education-level-sharply-divides-clinton-trump-race

And a urban / rural divide.

Good god-- I won't recap the past week and a half with all of the sexual assault allegations against Trump and associated perpetuation of rape culture. But tonight was the final debate, and the huge take-away from the night is Trump's unprecedented, continued refusal to state he will accept the results of the election if he loses. His on-going message has been that the election is rigged with rampant voter fraud. His claim that there is a vast conspiracy of elites, mainstream media, and politicians working to rig the election resonates to varying degrees. That there actually is something resembling a conspiracy between those groups (capitalism) gives the charge some weight, particularly amongst his core supporters.

The voter fraud claim is a long-term GOP talking point, though study after study has found very few, if any, actual instances of voter fraud. Nonethless, most states have now passed voter-ID laws which pretty much eliminates even the possibility of voter fraud (though most experts believe the ID laws supress low-income voters).

That said, Trump's refusal to state he will accept the election results is something completely new. Given the anger in his support-base, and given he appeals to some very dangerous, violent right wing racists--maybe it makes me a wimp--but it totally scares the crap out of me.

clinton did the right thing tactically by immediately calling for the FBI to disgorge everything: "see, i'm all above board and not afraid of whatever's in there." i wonder how comey will proceed: sit on anything he finds until after the election? but the mere announcement has knocked everything into a cocked hat, as i think the limeys say.

and a trumpista was caught red-handed trying to vote twice in IA. so there's your voter fraud.

i still think she'll win, but not by too much in the popular vote. NYS polls suggest she has my state sewn up.

clinton did the right thing tactically by immediately calling for the FBI to disgorge everything: "see, i'm all above board and not afraid of whatever's in there.

for sure, and now it looks like podesta and others including HRC are gonna push the insinuations that comey was politically motivated. the whole thing is very bizarre all around, but clinton for once, seems to be handling it properly from a PR perspective as petey said.

though tbf, it's really hard to believe that the clintons haven't asked abedin what is in these emails given she's flying on the damn campaign plane. if you believe the anti-Clinton investigations from the 90s, the clintons have never shied away from perceptions of suborning perjury before now, so it's hard to believe that here, in the most critical moment, someone in the campaign hasn't asked someone else within the campaign for a head's up as to what to expect. so, the cynic in me says they are playing up the comey political angle to motivate dems to GOTV.

all said it seems really unlikely this would be enough to swing the election. many analysts think worries about the emails/investigations are baked into Clinton's poll numbers. i am certain down ballot republicans are very, very grateful. nothing does for GOP party unity more than allegations of clinton wrongdoing and the subsequent investigations.

petey

the mere announcement has knocked everything into a cocked hat, as i think the limeys say.

er not that I've ever heard!

Steven.

petey

the mere announcement has knocked everything into a cocked hat, as i think the limeys say.

er not that I've ever heard!

oops

Cocked hats were also worn in America in the 19th century and 'knocked into a cocked hat', despite the hat's link with Olde Englande's town criers, beadles and taverns, is actually an American phrase.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/knocked-into-a-cocked-hat.html

so if you're english, and less than 200 years old, i guess you wouldn't have ...

jesuithitsquad

clinton for once seems to be handling it properly from a PR perspective

they're the pros but there have been many moments when i wondered why her campaign didn't hit lower or respond faster or talk tougher. when obama made his "lipstick on a pig" comment he was showing that he could play as dirty as any rightwinger, and that neutered the limbaughs of the world.

petey

... knocked everything into a cocked hat, as i think the limeys say.

Cocked hats were also worn in America in the 19th century and 'knocked into a cocked hat', despite the hat's link with Olde Englande's town criers, beadles and taverns, is actually an American phrase.

petey

...
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/knocked-into-a-cocked-hat.html

so if you're english, and less than 200 years old, i guess you wouldn't have ...

How odd. I think it's a common expression in the UK but I've just asked my partner and she doesn't know it. So I shall try to contain my surprise that Steven. doesn't either.

(PS though born in England I am not more than 200 years old).

I'm only 68 and I know and use the expression.

Latest poll average at Real Clear Politics has Gary Johnson down to 5 percent and Stein at 2.1 percent. If that is the vote Stein receives it will be roughly equivalent to the vote received by Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party in 1932. Left wing candidates generally do not receive even that much vote. Nader received 2.7 percent in 2000, which was the highest for a leftwing candidate since Wallace of the Progressive Party in 1948.

Clinton is still maintaining a solid lead in the polls in enough states to giver her more than 270 electoral college votes.

syndicalistcat

Latest poll average at Real Clear Politics has Gary Johnson down to 5 percent and Stein at 2.1 percent. If that is the vote Stein receives it will be roughly equivalent to the vote received by Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party in 1932. Left wing candidates generally do not receive even that much vote. Nader received 2.7 percent in 2000, which was the highest for a leftwing candidate since Wallace of the Progressive Party in 1948.

On that, don't third-party candidates normally poll considerably higher than they end up getting? As when it comes down to it people often decide to go for the "lesser evil" option rather than "waste" their vote

Gary Johnson's poll numbers have been collapsing rapidly, now down to 4.8 average at Real Clear Politics. This is largely the source of the surge in Trump's poll numbers just recently. Trump has reduced Clinton's lead to only around 3 points in the polls even though Clinton's numbers haven't fallen. Stein's numbers haven't fallen as rapidly as Johnson so it's hard to say where her solid support level will be.

It's also unclear whether Democrats will retake control of the Senate. Elections for Senator in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Indiana and Nevada are basically tied in the polls.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-went-wrong-for-gary-johnson/?ex_cid=newsletter-top-stories

A fairly succint rundown of Johnson's dramatic collapse in the polls. Although, an even more succinct explanation could simply say: "What's Aleppo?" + Evan McMullen. The latter candidate actually has a very real shot at winning Utah as I think someone mentioned above. He led the most recent statewide poll there, so it will be interesting to watch the Utah returns on election night. Particularly if the polls continue to tighten, and in the unlikely event that HRC's Electoral College firewall breaks, McMullen winning Utah's electoral votes has the potential to turn the process into total chaos.

Re: IN SEN--Evan Bayh is definitely in the political fight of his life. When he first announced his surprise candidacy, the polls literally took a 50 point swing overnight. For a popular former two -term governor and former two- term senator (with a term as Secretary of State to boot), you'd expect a 6th statewide election to go pretty smoothly. But Bayh's "retirement"-turned- hiatus has dogged him in this run. Bayh cashed-in when he became a "non-lobbyist" lobbyist for some bad customers, including the insurance, health care, and the nuke industries. His opponent plus related GOP Super PACs have done a really good job hammering him for it in their media buys. That said, I'd be surprised if the combination of the family name plus their political machine doesn't win out in the end, but barring a last-minute swing, it's all going to come down to which side GOTV the best.

some of the latest polls now have Johnson's support down to only 3 or 4 percent but these polls show Stein's support holding steady at 2 percent. as there seems to be a shift of Johnson's supporters to Trump, Clinton's lead over Trump overall has been evaporating, down to 1.9 percent at Real Clear Politics.

One of the more obvious aspects of this absurd electoral cycle is the way personalities, behaviors and trivialities end up obscuring or disappearing major issues....global warming & need to get off fossil fuels, poverty, the housing crisis, etc.

Margin of error on these polls is usually +/-3% right? So it's within margins of error now?

Margin of error on these polls is usually +/-3% right? So it's within margins of error now?

For the popular vote, yes. But presidential elections in US are not decided by actual voters but by the Electoral College. the key states right now are New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Clinton's support in those states is down to about 4 to 5 percent. If she takes those states & the states she has a more secure lead in, that will give her more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed for election.

Oh, and I forgot to mention Colorado. her lead there is only 2.9 points...within the margin of error. she also needs that state or Florida where her lead is even weaker. So if we consider the fact that Colorado is effectively tied, the whole thing is actually tied at this moment, according to the polls.

Have you got elections for the Senate at the same time? How is that looking, does it look like the Democrats will take that as well, or like the Republicans may win, even if Clinton wins the presidential election?

One third of the senate is elected every 2 years. So, yes, there are Senators up for grabs. It doesn't look so good at the moment for the Democrats to retake the US Senate. Again, extremely tight races in Nevada, Indiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. It does look as if the Democrats will re-take seats from Illinois & Wisconsin. But it's not clear they can hold onto the seat of Harry Reid, who is retiring, in Nevada. Catherine Cortez Masto has gone up and down in the polls & is currently maybe a couple points behind. But all the polls in all these five states are within the margin of error. Lately it does look as if McGinty will defeat incumbent Republican Toomey in Pennsylvania but it's very close.

if Democrats were to win in all seven senate races, they would have a 51 to 49 majority.

So just quickly, 538's model is roughly showing a 70-30 probability of a Clinton win. This is pretty much where Obama-Romney was in 2012. I think this 538 conversation between Harry Enten and Nate Silver sums it up pretty well.

harry: Can we get into this a little here, Nathaniel? I know we’ve discussed this a bit before. Clinton is holding onto fairly strong leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and I’m not seeing a “path” for Trump despite some of the national polls looking really close. Yet our model has Clinton with a MUCH higher chance of winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College than vice versa. What the heck is going on?
.

natesilver: Well, if she wins the national popular vote by 4 percentage points (her current margin), she wins the Electoral College almost for sure. The problem is that her path is fragile. Subtract 2-3 points from her margin, and a lot of states get awfully close. If she underperforms the polls because Trump gets a big white working-class turnout and Clinton gets a weak black turnout, then Michigan becomes competitive, for instance.

We also don’t have a lot of good polls lately in Michigan, Colorado or Wisconsin. If there are a bunch of ’em showing an 8-point lead for Clinton or whatever, obviously she’ll gain in our forecast.

harry: So what you’re saying is that there is uncertainty, but the race isn’t THAT close.

natesilver: I’m saying the polls only have to be 2-3 points off to make the Electoral College hairy for Clinton.

Also, there are a couple minor inaccuracies in posts above. The Dems need to pick up 4 or 5 of the competetive races to gain control of the Senate. The uncertainty there is contingent on who wins the Presidency if it is a 50-50 split. The Vice President holds the tie breaking vote. So, if Trump wins it's 5; if HRC wins it's 4.

Additionally, the electoral college fight isn't quite as close as mentioned in the posts above (as of yet anyway). Until there is polling showing otherwise, Clinton still has an electoral firewall in the industrial midwest. Again, like the 538 guys said, the race isn't THAT close yet, but there is a much higher level of uncertainty than this time last week.

This from NBC News best explains what i mean:

Their confidence is rooted in the fact that while Clinton has multiple paths to 270 and a wide margin of error, Trump needs almost everything to go perfectly for him Tuesday in order to run the table of almost all of the key tossup states.

"If Hillary wins Florida, she'll be next president of the United States," Bill Clinton said while campaigning Tuesday in the state, which is essentially tied. The same is likely true for Ohio and North Carolina. And Clinton could still make it to the White House by losing both and instead winning Pennsylvania and one other state, like New Hampshire, two places where she has lead in every single poll since July.

The NYT Upshot is more bullish on Clinton's chances at 88% and Princeton University's modeling shows her with a 97% chance.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/washington-elector-hillary-clinton-rejection-229647

Does this discussion thread still have a purpose? Seems now to be little more than a libcom game of 'place your bets now!' Perhaps USA posters can explain why they persist with it in this fashion?

I'm interested what happens to the fashy white nationalist movement around Trump either way. They'll possibly be more dangerous if Clinton wins, though tbh what a Trump presidency would involve seems unpredictable. Kinda glad our fash mostly can't get their hands on anything more powerful than air rifles.

This election has been more absurd than US presidential elections usually are. Trump is an unusual candidate for sure. That said, it still fulfills the usual purpose as distracting people from the major basic issues & struggles. But I think everything useful has been said. At this point the election is just exhausting & distracting & I'll be glad when it's done. As far as the fash level of arms is concerned, it's probably advisable for people in this country to be armed, given the actual situation.

Spikymike, honestly not looking to point score but when you wrote this awhile back

spikymike

To that extent some of the detail 'teh' recounts is of use to those of us (including the many non poster viewers of this site) less familiar with USA mainstream politics.

i took it to mean you found the thread helpful. Or was it just that poster's (sometimes less than helpful) contributions? Other non-US posters have asked questions above.

Personally, for me the thread is something of a release valve--a place i can talk about the election with people who share my politics. I don't have to get into long- winded conversations about why electoral politics are a dead end etc. just to be able to discuss the current events which as you can imagine is wall-to-wall coverage, and has been for a long time.

In another thread, I addressed why following the election is actually more than train spotting for me , and it seems an appropriate response here too:

Respectfully, I disagree with your point about bourgeois political nerdery inherently leading to an acceptance of bourgeois politics. I geek out on the stuff, and it's partially because it allows me to be able to, with varying degrees of accuracy, predict what's to come. Of course, many of the ways in which the macro impacts my day to day life doesn't vary much, regardless of what happens in the political sphere, but occassionally it does, and in those cases, it's nice to know what to expect.

Additionally, and more importantly, I've found that being able to speak knowledgeably about mainstream politics with friends and coworkers gives me more credibility when I talk about anti-Politics. Understanding arcane rules and processes allows me to effectively demonstrate how things like re-districting to eliminate gerrymandering, term-limits, campaign finance reform, an increase in proportional representation, or whatever other reform is the latest craze will do absolutely nothing to change the structural role of bourgeois 'democracy," and allows me to demonstrate how we have absolutely no control over the most important aspects of our day-to-day lives.

And while we are all blind to our own weaknesses, I don't believe it's put me on a path to selling out my communist principles. In fact, watching the consistent ineptitude of "progressives" to ever implement even a modicum of positive change, I'd say it actually reinforces the dead-end nature of electoral politics. I'm not disputing you've seen a correlation, but correlation doesn't automatically mean causation, obviously.

To be honest I'm a little worried about the election, with all the shit Trump is spouting about fraud etc I'm concerned about armed attacks on polling day. It seems like they are endlessly feeding really dangerous currents in order to try to pretend that this election is some kind of real choice.

I'm concerned about armed attacks on polling day.

So on this, I'm interested in others' thoughts. I've had some debates with comrades off-line about an appropriate communist anti-racist approach to this issue.

For those that may be unaware, Trump has encouraged supporters to go to 'certain areas' to prevent voter fraud. I'm fairly confident these guys would never go into majority POC neighborhoods, knowing full well they wouldn't walk away if they tried pulling this crap. I think the potential for this is actually in white majority areas that have smaller enclaves of migrant workers or other small minority areas/neighborhoods.

So, the debate is--would defending against these types of attacks actually be an inherent defense of electoral politics? My take is essentially that white supremacists need to be opposed, regardless of the details (so long as we're organizing on class lines), but I'm open to arguments that I could be wrong.

i dunno jesuithitsquad. i think the bigger question is the feasibility; unless people have been organizing and training to do this, there are enough people involved, and have the infrastructure to respond to state repression after the fact, it all seems immaterial. i wouldn't go somewhere to do this if people have only been talking about this recently...

this is all separate from the question of how this relates to electoral politics. if people are willing to take risks to defend voting why not devote that energy to a more constructive end?

I think it's an important point. There's a problem with organised groups of racists being able to walk around in neighbourhoods intimidating people and stopping them from doing what they want to do, even if they were stopping people from going to watch the baseball it would be wrong. And I do think trying to intimidate black people who are trying to vote is very serious, even if I also have a critique of electoralism. I can't articulate it very well but they are trying to make sure people don't excercise political power, and they are telling everyone that's what they are going to do. They are telling white people to back them if they want black people to be disempowered, and telling black people they have no right to try to have any political say and that they will actively stop them.

Joseph Kay

I'm interested what happens to the fashy white nationalist movement around Trump either way.

Same. I'm also kinda surprised there isn't more discussions on libcom about alt-right that's been on the rise since Trump won the nomination.

Agreed with Fingers. Even as someone who does not vote, the idea of preventing African Americans from voting is abhorrent, especially in light of the relatively recently repealed Jim Crow laws, as well as other mechanisms which effectively serve to disenfranchise black people. Preventing black people from going to the polls, whether by means of intimidation or by spreading misinformation would be highly symbolic act. However, in advanced polling, African American turn out has been reduced, not so much - in my opinion - that Trump supporters are intimidating people but because HRC has taken the black vote for granted and quite frankly is not offering much. I've heard grumblings online pre-emptively blaming the black vote for any hypothetical loss to Trump, as opposed the the fault of the Democrats for fielding such a god-awful candidate that few people feel actually enthused about voting for.

Tbh, I don't have TV so I've managed to avoid a lot of awful cable news coverage (thank god.)

As for violence perpetrated by Trump supporters/right-wingers is already happening. There's been a spate of black church burnings this year, including one this week.

*Sorry, I would have put in links usually but I'm really tired & about to crawl off to bed.:(

the far right up to now has been pursuing an electoralist strategy, so their strategy for discouraging votes of blacks or Latinos or the poor has been via the Repub voter ID laws that have been passed in various states. Since the '60s & the passage of the Voting Rights Act I don't recall incidents of physical intimidation around polling centers. If we see that in this election, it will be an escalation of right wing threat. If this occurs it would be more likely in areas of certain states where there are high concentrations of alt-right supporters or people with those leanings & nearby areas where people of color or poorer people (maybe racially mixed areas) live. The country tends to be geographically polarized, so these might be more likely to be states where Trump support in general is stronger (maybe in states with the newer voter suppression laws). But at this point it is hard to say if this threat will materialize.

The physical intimidation I'm talking about here is around voting stations. I realize that there is more overt organizing by alt-right groups going on & incidents of fires and that kind of thing.

Actually sabot--the alt-right point was something I was just getting ready to make--like fingers mentioned above, part of the problem here is that the far right is becoming more and more comfortable openly organizing.

As an example, while in the past, even up to last year, average local fash intimidation attempts involved, more or less, a half dozen to a dozen hard-core skinheads with one or two normalish looking fellow-travelers. These days you'd have a hard time picking at least half of them out of a crowd, and I think to a large degree it's the result of the shifting Overton Window from Trump's open racism and the subsequent quick rise of the alt-right.

Guys like Milo Fuckwitivitch are finding success in normalizing open bigotry, but it's the on-the-ground guys that are the real threat.

This guy from my region is constantly traveling the country (and the world, actually), finding a lot of success organizing otherwise ordinary-seeming people. He's often referred to as the new leader of a new generation of fash. (I'm linking, rather than naming here, to avoid drawing the inevitable fash traffic.)

The people he's organizing are those who have probably always harbored racist ideas, but they were never guys to get their hands dirty until now.

gram negative--totally valid and helpful points. these conversations have been going on for awhile, and i do think the infrastructure exists (in varying degrees) to quickly mobilize, but probably not the ability to respond against the inevitable state repression (though tbf, in the end does anyone? but point taken.) it's a complicated issue, and i appreciate the food for thought.

another problematic issue is having organic connections in communities so as to avoid the situation where a bunch of weirdo radicals with a touch of a savior complex show up out of the blue, trying to take charge. It's important to be there in solidarity and to help where possible, but really in the end, looking to fight side-by-side with vulnerable communities instead of fighting for them .

but the big problem as i see it is that while those community connections do exist in metropolitan areas, as fingers has pointed out before, most of us strike out when it comes to organizing in rural areas. consequently, my concern is in these more rural areas where migrant workers in particular might be vulnerable to right-wing attacks. further complicating the issue is it's not only radical groups, that struggle in these areas, but often even mainstream ngo's are sometimes non-existent there, potentially leaving already vulnerable people completely exposed.

thanks everyone for the thoughtful contributions so far.

ETA: cross posted with fluer and syndicalistcat. This

If this occurs it would be more likely in areas of certain states where there are high concentrations of alt-right supporters or people with those leanings & nearby areas where people of color or poorer people (maybe racially mixed areas) live.

is what i was trying to say, but better.

i'm happy to see that some posters from across the ditch are cottoning on to the atmosphere over here. on other uk/irish sites i read, people seem to think it's edgy to boost trump, which is as sick as it gets.

i agree with others above that the intimidation isn't just about the polling booths, it's a kind of swagger that the racists/antisemites/gender reactionaries have developed in the wake of trump's candidacy. read the comment boxes of US newspapers, in my lifetime i've never seen bile spewed so openly. the damage of trump is that this sort of thing is being or has already been mainstreamed. a clinton presidency wouldn't squelch that obv but a trump presidency would open the faucet right up.

‘Prior to this campaign season, these ideas were relegated to sort of the political fringe of the American political landscape,’ Ryan Lenz, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said.

Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2016/11/04/the-pro-trump-training-camp-where-militants-are-ready-to-fight-and-kill-6235069/#ixzz4P4WB637D

Some disconnected, unrelated thoughts on Trumpism and the election:

1)One of the reasons that the far right in the US has been relatively easy to keep in check is how utterly disorganized they have been. Everytime a new wannabe Fuhrer pops up, the inevitable Internecine fighting sets them back years. Regional and National gatherings are notorious for assassination attempts.

The Trump phenomenon has given them a common cause to rally around. As others have said, win or lose it will be interesting to see how this plays out. From what I gather there is a new regroupment underway, though an earlier iteration fell apart.

2) As was mentioned earlier, the Clinton campaign has been pushing the narrative that the FBI announcement was politically motivated. I was highly sceptical at first, and while I still wouldn't dismiss the notion that they are getting help from sympathetic reporters, the more reporting that comes out on this, it's starting to look like there could be a there, there.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/03/fbi-leaks-hillary-clinton-james-comey-donald-trump

'The FBI is Trumpland': anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaking, sources say
Highly unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton intensified after James Comey’s decision not to recommend an indictment over her use of a private email server

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/03/meet-donald-trump-s-top-fbi-fanboy.html?via=desktop&source=twitter

Fox (News) is the pipeline for the fifth column inside the bureau, a battalion that says it’s doing God’s work, chasing justice against those who are obstructing it, while, in fact, it’s doing GOP work, even on the eve of a presidential election.

The kicker for me believing there's some truth to it is Giuliani teasing this info a few days before Comey's letter. If you see the footage, there's little doubt the letter is what he's talking about, and he just couldn't help gloating in advance. The Daily Beast article does a nice job showing his close relationships with FBI Agents. Today, Giuliani is going around saying that there's a revolution going on inside of the FBI. After realizing he or the agents feeding him the info probably committed a crime, he's backing off claiming he didn't know about Comey's letter.

It's no surprise to find that the FBI would tend toward law and order conservatism, but I can't help but find a Bureau full of Trumpists kind of terrifying.

3) If Trump loses, it will be interesting to see if the Republican Party holds together its shrinking coalition. Following the 2012 Romney defeat, Centrist Republicans released 'The Moratorium' which found that if the GOP wanted to be a national party it needed to broaden its tent to include minorities. Obviously, with Trump as nominee they have gone in the opposite direction. The recriminations following a Trump loss will be interesting to watch, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a split. Another problem for Republicans is that there aren't just two wings of the Party. It splits up in several ways, and for example, Christian Conservatives have been pretty vocal in their displeasure with their coalition with pro-business Republicans, and many in this wing are stridently anti-Trump.

4) If HRC wins, given the backdrop of the WikiLeaks emails, will she be able to hold together the Democrats? Bernie-oriented Dems have already fired shots across the bow in relation to potential cabinet nominations, and there is a ton of anger at the Clinton's for what Bernie supporters see as her campaign rigging the primaries.

5) Given all of this, if Establishment Party politics are shaken, and there is a large and militant extra-parliamentary proto-fascist movement, and a generation of Bernie supporters who self-describe as anti-capitalists, will there be a little more space for our ideas and if so, how can we position ourselves to help capture the moment?

6) Surely, surely the collective ruling class won't allow Trump to throw the country into a succession crisis, right? I mean, I have a really hard time believing there's a cost-benefit analysis showing more gains than losses for even a small segment of the national bourgeoisie if the US was thrown into that kind of a crisis. In a way, I guess that's Trump's argument in a nutshell--that he can't be controlled, but there has to be someone out there with enough leverage to get him to come in line before things get too out of line, if he loses ( In b4 yeah, his name is Putin.).

Speaking of which...
7) The NY Times ran a story by David Sanger today about potential election day hacks of voting machines/voter rolls/etc.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/us/politics/five-possible-hacks-to-worry-about-before-election-day.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fdavid-e.-sanger&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection&_r=0&referer=http://www.nytimes.com/by/david-e-sanger

John Heilman today said after he interviewed Sanger he's freaking out a little about the potential for election day chaos. When combined with suspicions on both sides (Trump supporters believing the election is rigged; Clinton supporters believing Russia is trying to get Trump elected.) the mood is ripe for any kind of election day anomalies to create a crisis. Combined with the point before, I'll say it again, I'm a little terrified by what this place will look like come Wednesday morning.

That's blog material, Jesuit.

i.e. totally tldr! (kidding--thanks!)

jesuithitsquad

1)One of the reasons that the far right in the US has been relatively easy to keep in check is how utterly disorganized they have been. Everytime a new wannabe Fuhrer pops up, the inevitable Internecine fighting sets them back years. Regional and National gatherings are notorious for assassination attempts.

The Trump phenomenon has given them a common cause to rally around. As others have said, win or lose it will be interesting to see how this plays out. From what I gather there is a new regroupment underway, though an earlier iteration fell apart.

Focus should be on the far-right in power, the Democrats and the Republicans, not the fringe satellites on the populist right. Those latter people were always around. John Birchers had tens of thousands of members in the early 60's. Ross Perot won tens of millions of votes in the 90's. Media hyped the "militias" during the Clinton years. The second Bush administration had the Minutemen spectacle.

The reason the far-right has been more prominent this election cycle is because 1) Democrat Party foundation has collapsed around a single family and is its ideological base since Reagan is under attack by a changing crisis-ridden global economic reality. So its usual "Republicans are KKK" is amplified at a much greater pitch. They even dug up David Duke for the campaign. He's hasn't been heard in the national press since the 1990's. 2) Journalists are now forced by their employers as well as by lack of job security/necessity of self-marketing to be on social media- especially Twitter- all day long. Since these platformed are made/run by liberal ("libertarian") fanatics things like anonymous racial chauvinism is not only tolerated but encouraged by the platform because those same journalists (who's bosses are mostly anti-Trump) then write about it and publicize the attackers for free. But even then, anti-Trump groups like the ADL could only count a few thousand such accounts. Far-right websites might be more popular but its mostly spectacle and does not reflect a re-organization. US political system is explicitly designed to keep these people in the fringe. That the political status quo's "Bush-Clinton until forever" was upended by Trump shows the systems versatility in the face of stagnation and its strength not its weakness.

2) As was mentioned earlier, the Clinton campaign has been pushing the narrative that the FBI announcement was politically motivated. I was highly sceptical at first, and while I still wouldn't dismiss the notion that they are getting help from sympathetic reporters, the more reporting that comes out on this, it's starting to look like there could be a there, there.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/03/fbi-leaks-hillary-clinton-james-comey-donald-trump

'The FBI is Trumpland': anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaking, sources say
Highly unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton intensified after James Comey’s decision not to recommend an indictment over her use of a private email server

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/03/meet-donald-trump-s-top-fbi-fanboy.html?via=desktop&source=twitter

Fox (News) is the pipeline for the fifth column inside the bureau, a battalion that says it’s doing God’s work, chasing justice against those who are obstructing it, while, in fact, it’s doing GOP work, even on the eve of a presidential election.

The kicker for me believing there's some truth to it is Giuliani teasing this info a few days before Comey's letter. If you see the footage, there's little doubt the letter is what he's talking about, and he just couldn't help gloating in advance. The Daily Beast article does a nice job showing his close relationships with FBI Agents. Today, Giuliani is going around saying that there's a revolution going on inside of the FBI. After realizing he or the agents feeding him the info probably committed a crime, he's backing off claiming he didn't know about Comey's letter.

It's no surprise to find that the FBI would tend toward law and order conservatism, but I can't help but find a Bureau full of Trumpists kind of terrifying.

Maybe I spend too much time reading the news but Guardian and Daily Beast reporting this makes me _less_ likely to to believe this. These outlets are receptacles for whatever is dropped down the feeding mill and have no editorial standards free from centers of power whatsoever. It sounds like damage control from the Clinton campaign- by making the story about the FBI. That said its reasonable the FBI is pissed at the DOJ for sidelining their investigation into Clinton and is now doing revenge after having pressured Comey after the new laptop info was discovered.

3) If Trump loses, it will be interesting to see if the Republican Party holds together its shrinking coalition. Following the 2012 Romney defeat, Centrist Republicans released 'The Moratorium' which found that if the GOP wanted to be a national party it needed to broaden its tent to include minorities.

With all the Bush people supporting Clinton its clear they wanted to change by just becoming the Democrats (in style/posturing, I mean; in basic policy they already are). But there already is a Democrat party. As with Blair/Cameron in the UK there can only be one party. In this case Republicans wouldn't be able to imitate Dems nationally. Talk about Bush II attracting Hispanics was just him selling the housing bubble, people ended up screwed by that. Hispanic immigrant majorities are not going to vote for the GOP if they copy the Democrats.

Obviously, with Trump as nominee they have gone in the opposite direction. The recriminations following a Trump loss will be interesting to watch, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a split. Another problem for Republicans is that there aren't just two wings of the Party. It splits up in several ways, and for example, Christian Conservatives have been pretty vocal in their displeasure with their coalition with pro-business Republicans, and many in this wing are stridently anti-Trump.

Republicans _might_ become unviable nationally but on the state and congressional they are the strongest right now then they have been in almost a century. I mean Dems held the House of Representatives almost uninterrupted for 60 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_U.S._states#Historical_party_strength

Democrats are definitely the weaker party. Not only that but Dem higher-ups are perfectly fine with that status-quo- fits with their business model.

4) If HRC wins, given the backdrop of the WikiLeaks emails, will she be able to hold together the Democrats? Bernie-oriented Dems have already fired shots across the bow in relation to potential cabinet nominations, and there is a ton of anger at the Clinton's for what Bernie supporters see as her campaign rigging the primaries.

Sanders is campaigning for her, 8 out of 10 of his supporters will probably vote for her. He'll probably do the Michael Moore act for a couple of years until he retires from politics. Judging by the history of the Dems left-wing and their satellites a President Clinton can conveniently ignore them by just saying Republicans control congress (like Obama in 2008-2010 said 'we dont have 60 senate seats').

Don't know why people on this site are sympathetic to Sanders and co. In my opinion hes the worst out of all the candidates this year. He's a demagogue that voters left and right supported or respected while all the others candidates were seen, correctly, as buffoons and incompetents. And that makes him dangerous for lefts.

5) Given all of this, if Establishment Party politics are shaken, and there is a large and militant extra-parliamentary proto-fascist movement, and a generation of Bernie supporters who self-describe as anti-capitalists, will there be a little more space for our ideas and if so, how can we position ourselves to help capture the moment?

Only if labor-management relations breakdown and destabilize will left have an opening. The other stuff is politics as usual.

6) Surely, surely the collective ruling class won't allow Trump to throw the country into a succession crisis, right? I mean, I have a really hard time believing there's a cost-benefit analysis showing more gains than losses for even a small segment of the national bourgeoisie if the US was thrown into that kind of a crisis. In a way, I guess that's Trump's argument in a nutshell--that he can't be controlled, but there has to be someone out there with enough leverage to get him to come in line before things get too out of line, if he loses ( In b4 yeah, his name is Putin.).

It happened in 2000. A couple of times in the 19th century. As long as the US military has a global presence I dont think the regime has anything to worry about a crisis of rule.

teh

Focus should be on the far-right in power, the Democrats and the Republicans, not the fringe satellites on the populist right. Those latter people were always around. John Birchers had tens of thousands of members in the early 60's. Ross Perot won tens of millions of votes in the 90's. Media hyped the "militias" during the Clinton years. The second Bush administration had the Minutemen spectacle.

So, yeah--these guys have always been around, no doubt. Many of the groups have roots either directly or ideologically in the John Birch Society, but beyond that, it stretches credulity to suggest Birchers are analogous with say,The National Socialist Movement.

And no doubt, the biggest racist threat is from the state and both parties are equally as guilty--you'll get no argument from me on that at all. But the difference is-- barring a major social upheaval, there's not a whole lot any of us can do to stop the violence of the United States Government. Conversely, a few well-organized, dedicated working class militants can help stop some of the intimidation and violence of these self-described fascist groups.

The reason the far-right has been more prominent this election cycle is because 1) Democrat Party foundation has collapsed around a single family and is its ideological base since Reagan is under attack by a changing crisis-ridden global economic reality. So its usual "Republicans are KKK" is amplified at a much greater pitch. They even dug up David Duke for the campaign. He's hasn't been heard in the national press since the 1990's. 2) Journalists are now forced by their employers as well as by lack of job security/necessity of self-marketing to be on social media- especially Twitter- all day long. Since these platformed are made/run by liberal ("libertarian") fanatics things like anonymous racial chauvinism is not only tolerated but encouraged by the platform because those same journalists (who's bosses are mostly anti-Trump) then write about it and publicize the attackers for free. But even then, anti-Trump groups like the ADL could only count a few thousand such accounts. Far-right websites might be more popular but its mostly spectacle and does not reflect a re-organization. US political system is explicitly designed to keep these people in the fringe. That the political status quo's "Bush-Clinton until forever" was upended by Trump shows the systems versatility in the face of stagnation and its strength not its weakness.

Right, but here's the thing--for all of the anti-Trump hysteria in the media today, their coverage of Trump in the interest of higher ratings/larger profits is one of the primary drivers of the Trump phenomenon in the first place. I don't remember the exact number, but estimates put Trump's free media haul in the billions, with a B.

If you don't think the 'few thousand such [social media] accounts' can do much damage, I suggest you take a look at any one of countless examples of women, people of color, and lgbtqia who have been dogpiled on twitter, and ask those people if it made them feel safer to know the adl only found a few thousand accounts.

We've already covered why the Democratic narrative of Republican=KKK narrative is not the only basis of what's going on with Donald Trump. Trump's actions, words, ideology and supporters demonstrate on a daily basis that 'Trump as a racist' is not just a Democratic narrative. It is a Democratic narrative, but it is not without a basis in truth. You have a POV; I disagree with your POV. Rehashing that argument again isn't a productive use of yours or my time.

Maybe I spend too much time reading the news but Guardian and Daily Beast reporting this makes me _less_ likely to to believe this. These outlets are receptacles for whatever is dropped down the feeding mill and have no editorial standards free from centers of power whatsoever. It sounds like damage control from the Clinton campaign- by making the story about the FBI. That said its reasonable the FBI is pissed at the DOJ for sidelining their investigation into Clinton and is now doing revenge after having pressured Comey after the new laptop info was discovered.

I get what you're saying, but those are just two of many independently reported stories over the past few days. As I said, I remain skeptical but the reporting is beginning to stack up, and the Giuliani quote that about a revolution going on in the FBI does give it more credibility.

Republicans _might_ become unviable nationally but on the state and congressional they are the strongest right now then they have been in almost a century. I mean Dems held the House of Representatives almost uninterrupted for 60 years.

No doubt, though tbf Republicans should make sure redistricting efforts are unsuccessful because if not, success-- even the House-- will become increasingly difficult for them.
.

Sanders is campaigning for her, 8 out of 10 of his supporters will probably vote for her. He'll probably do the Michael Moore act for a couple of years until he retires from politics. Judging by the history of the Dems left-wing and their satellites a President Clinton can conveniently ignore them by just saying Republicans control congress (like Obama in 2008-2010 said 'we dont have 60 senate seats').

Don't know why people on this site are sympathetic to Sanders and co. In my opinion hes the worst out of all the candidates this year. He's a demagogue that voters left and right supported or respected while all the others candidates were seen, correctly, as buffoons and incompetents. And that makes him dangerous for lefts.

teh, I imagine you could be an effective contributor here, and I'd like to see that happen, but quite often when you pop on here, you present a similar type of strawman. Can you point to multiple examples of 'people on this site being sympathetic to Sanders'--as in, regular libcom contributors? In my post, I said nothing about Sen. Sanders himself, but about his base. A report last month stated that a majority of millennials don't believe in capitalism; a large portion of these are Bernie supporters. That they don't understand that Bernie's politics would do nothing to undermine capitalism, and instead, would likely strengthen it, there is no doubt. But that's where our efforts should come into play, I would think.

It happened in 2000. A couple of times in the 19th century. As long as the US military has a global presence I dont think the regime has anything to worry about a crisis of rule.

Eh, I don't think 2000 is really a good comparison. There was a ton of uncertainty, for sure, but at no point were there legitimate threats and fear of wide-spread violence, unless you thought the "Brooks Bros Riot" qualifies. In fact, the opposite was true: during the entire crisis, everyone kept patting themselves on the back for respecting the rule of law and peaceful transfer of power. Hell, Al Gore has achieved sainthood in some quarters for the way he stood down. The 19th century examples are far more relevant. The best known example in which one party refused to accept the legitimacy of the results of the Presidential election lead, directly, to the Civil War.

teh

Democrats are definitely the weaker party. Not only that but Dem higher-ups are perfectly fine with that status-quo- fits with their business model.

Could you explain what you mean here please?

Current polls show Clinton only just barely ahead. Her current chances depend on taking Florida where she leads by only 1 point in the polls, according to the Real Clear Politics poll averages. She's fallen behind Trumpster in the polls in New Hampshire, Nevada and North Carolina where she was formerly ahead. (Some other poll aggregator sites are a bit more favorable to Clinton.)

The Democratic Party have only themselves to blame for their steadfast commitment to rank plutocratic politics of the Clinton variety....a corrupt, deceitful figure who has gotten rich through entrepreneurial politics, serving the ruling class in both domestic and imperialist foreign politics. Trump is the less polished blowhard, just as deceitful, but he's not wrong when he attacks NAFTA and the other socalled "trade pacts" (actually investor protection rackets) and Democrats having abandoned millions of "forgotten" people.

The election has also brought out the way that "identity" politics or "privilege" talk can be used as manipulative cover for ruling class politics, as in the various attacks on supporters of Sanders' social democratic program as "privileged" or against people who refuse to fall in line to vote for Clinton (either because they don't vote or will vote for Stein). Meanwhile, Stein's backing in the polls stands at 2.1 percent...approximately the share of vote received by the Socialist Party in the election of 1932 in the midst of economic collapse.

Whichever of these dreadful candidates wins, there will be a major challenge in terms of ramping up the level of various kinds of social movement activities, that is, systemic opposition in the various fault lines currently in play. Paul Street's piece today is a decent summary of the situation:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trump_hillary_clinton_the_left_the_election_and_its_aftermath

i caught Info Wars - yes i know i should have more sense than to watch it - and now the conspiracy being peddled is that it was a real assassination attempt on Trump being covered up.

I wonder how many new votes he has acquired from those who believed it. Or are these the votes he is already guaranteed?

Yeah those people are already 100% pro trump. Keep in mind, this was the crew pushing the story that Justice Scalia was assassinated, smothered with a pillow.

A related note--there is a much higher level of undecideds this cycle, 13% vs. 2% in 2012. The theory on this is that they are not undecided between Trump- Clinton, but undecided as to whether not to vote at all. This is why some of the modeling is still so volitile.

In an interview published yesterday the famous philosopher, and Left Forum keynote speaker, Slavoj Zizek seriously (and not merely ironically, as he has done before) declared that if he was voting in the American elections he would vote for Trump. The victory of Trump, despite Trump being absolutely "disgusting", according to Zizek would trigger a "big awakening". It would cause a fundamental shock to the American political system and force realignments, the emergence of new political phenomenon.

http://www.leftvoice.org/From-Farce-to-Tragedy-Zizek-Endorses-Trump

How predictable by Zizek.

"After Trump, us!" - Slavoj Zizek, 2016

1934 called, they want their slogan back.

About 70 percent of the vote in Nevada is in Clark County where Las Vegas is located. This is a highly unionized city (by U.S. standards). HERE (hotel union) has 57,000 members. The unions in Vegas have been running a highly effective operation to get members to early voting. The Democrats have now run up such a huge lead in early voting, it's virtually impossible for Trump to win. It means that most likely Harry Reid's chosen successor, Catherine Cortez Masto, will win his Senate seat. With the loss of Nevada, it's hard to see how Trump can win. HERE is a majority Latino union and there is high Latino voter turnout so far. More bad news for Drumpf.

Just to piggy back on that-- initial reports from early voting across the country are being described as a tidal wave of Latino voters. The proportion of Latino voters so far is much higher than polling sampling rates. Can't remember who, but one analyst said it could be that the election was over the day Trump made his campaign announcement.

That said there is also a theory of the Shy Trump voter--people who don't want too admit to pollsters that they will vote for Trump for fear of being seen as racist.

Also, I'm sure everyone knows by now, but James Comey said yesterday, in essence, "Never mind."

Analysts keep talking about all the various American Institutions that have lost credibility this election cycle, the FBI being the latest--and none too soon.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/08/standing-rock-north-dakota-access-protesters-election-vote

“I don’t think anyone here votes,” said Julie Richards, an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. “We’re all like, fuck the government, fuck voting, and fuck the people running.”

Well, at this point one thing seems sure, that getting a non-traditional candidate (Trump - blatantly racist misogynistic windbag), and a traditional non-traditional candidate (Hillary Clinton - pseudo-feminist neoliberal warmonger), on the ballot seems like a good way to get people interested in participation in an election. Just an observation.

Also, full solidarity with the Standing Rock protesters.

Juan Conatz

About to head to bed, but it looks like Trump has it. One of the biggest upsets in American political history I'm sure. Virtually all the polls were wrong.

Or are the polls just the tail waging the dog and didn't want Trump?

Hence the Dow plunged 600 points today at the prospect of President Trump.

I was just surfing around on the 'net and saw a New York Times story critiquing -- albeit mildly -- the questioning methods of polls. It simply said many on the fence didn't want to own up to supporting Trump, lest they be labeled "racists" and "misogynists." A little exaggerated, perhaps, but touching on an element of truth.

Shit, can't find the same article again . . .

Donald Trump didn't just beat Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party tonight. He also broke the Republican Establishment and all of the accumulated knowledge of political science. What ends up rising from the ashes is beyond my understanding at the moment.

I wrote this for non commies so a lot of it will seem like preaching to the choir here, but it's been a long day so I'm just gonna C&P and leave it at that for now.

As depressing as it actually is to think there are enough racists for tonight to be even a possibility, it's important to have some context:

1) On-going institutional racism at every level of government is both bipartisan and exponentially more dangerous to the daily lives of people of color
than Trump or his supporters ever could be.

2) Knowing that the electorate is roughly 50% white, it's tempting to think that there are a lot more racists out there than anyone thought. Keep in mind that the electorate is not the entire population. Many people do not, did not, and never will vote. And before blaming non-voters' apathy, ask-did HRC try to do anything to appeal to them?

Most non-voters are much more concerned about keeping their lights on and feeding their kids than voting for a president. Because no president ever has and no president likely ever will do *anything* to help ameliorate their circumstances.

3) The role of social media algorithms cannot be overstated. Trumpists-- *just like you* --rarely see information that challenges their worldview

4) This is just part of the larger rise of a worldwide far-right movement of Authoritarian Nationalists.
While the rise of the far right is totally terrifying, the cancer is now out in the open as opposed to it being hidden, difficult to find, and hard to cut out.

5) The answer to fighting back has nothing to do with 2018 or 2020. The fightback begins 1st thing tomorrow morning when you go to work or school.
Make sure to give coworkers who are people of color the opportunity to talk about how they feel.

Listen to what they say.

Find out if you can do anything to help them feel safer.

Then start organizing to make things better.

If we have power as agents of change it's in our workplaces & neighborhoods, working to rebuild the old concept of an injury to one is injury to all.

Juan Conatz

I don't know what you mean by that. Are you saying that the polls were fixed or tilted by media outlets?

Polls are weighted based on which groups are predicted to show up and at what rates. Ideology determines how this is decided. The social has not yet reconciled itself to the needs of the (post-2008) economic.

So the thing which worries me is less Trump (who's gonna get largely hemmed in by "sensible" elements of his own party, the national bureaucracy and the markets in any case), and more what his win represents for the triumphant hard right, which seems analogous to Brexit in empowering the fantasies of the downtrodden racist and is leavened by an existing febrile atmosphere in communities which are quite heavily armed.

What the actual fuck, America?

Statement by Kandi Mossett (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara – North Dakota), Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN):

Look at it this way. We know exaclty what we're dealing with & it only reinforces what this country is made up of & what it was founded on. It doesn't change, it's just clearly revealed & there is no false hope. Now, more than ever, we have to come together.

Anti-Trump protests in California.

The Jackson Rising project (jacksonrising.org) had a really interesting streaming 7 hour debate last night, a lot of good radical speakers chiming in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izMRx6zIxs8

Or peep from here if you've not got 7 hours, on the global situation of capital/labour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8122&v=izMRx6zIxs8

We're screwed. This is like a nightmare.

NGNM85

We're screwed. This is like a nightmare.

Same shit, different pile. Although this one stinks worse.

Sorry if the following is sloppy. Despite Trump's victory being shocking, it's not that exceptional. I'm listening to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now on the radio right now and they're saying although Trump won the electoral college it looks like Clinton is going to win the popular vote.

But this shit has been coming for a long time. Some forget that the Democrats were the party of slavery and only around the time of Prohibition did the Democrats successfully sway working class immigrants into its camp. When I was a kid I heard stories of black families who voted the Republican slate, uncritically, because they saw it as the party of Lincoln and Emancipation.

Between the 1968 and 1972 elections the white working class vote began the slide from Democrat to Republican, much of it being a referendum on civil rights, affirmative action, and school busing for desegration. If there was a pivotal turning point, it was McGovern's loss in the 1972 presidential election. It must be remembered that McGovern wrote his Ph.D. dissertation, called "The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–1914," about the Ludlow Massacre and the class war in the mines. George Wallace in his divisive, racist presidential campaign and the rise of Ronald Reagan as governor of California (having been elected in 1966 on the campaign promise to "clean up the mess at Berkeley") were key elements in the process of this erasure of labor -- and class issues -- from either party. Making true the quote by Gore Vidal: in the U.S. there is one party with two right wings (my addendum: one is pro-business the other is anti-labor).

Just read Jefferson Cowie's brilliant Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class to see this process spelled out in lucid detail. Here's what he said about Nixon's strategy for the white working class:

[quote=Cowie's Stayin' Alive]Meantime, Richard Nixon, taking his cue from Wallace, was designing his own heretical strategy to woo white working-class voters away from the party of Roosevelt. His plans to build a post-New Deal coalition--the "New Majority" he liked to call it--around the Republican Party in 1972 was based an making explicit pitch for white, male, working-class votes by appealing to their cultural values over their material needs (pp. 6-7)[/quote]

Reagan's "Moral Majority" further developed this cultural war, supported by suburban tax-payer revolts against inner city social programs (real or imagined) that began with California's Prop. 13 and spread nationwide. Jim Sensenbrenner, House Rep from Milwaukee took up the mantle with his anti-immigrant H.R. 4437, in tandem with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's attack on organized -- mostly public sector -- workers. And with Trump that continues onward.

But there is hope (and these ramblings are not fully developed). Latina/o workers rose up against H.R. 4437 on May Day 2006 with millions refusing work for the day in a nationwide general strike. Congress backed down on the anti-immigrant law. During austerity against education in California in 2010, many of the same Latina/o communities rose up in the same places, sometimes even the same families who marched in 2006. The Spanish-speaking working class is the main target in Trump's sights and they have a track record of resisting, even in class terms, and as the population of California is now over 50% Latina/o and is the bedrock of the working class throughout the U.S., hopefully they'll rise up again and we can unite with them in defending immigrant communities who most likely will come under direct attack -- once again.

Trump has already expressed his hostility towards Black Lives Matter, so hopefully it can rebound and unite with other oppressed groups who'll come under Trump's ramped up police state attack and continue fighting back.

Just some thoughts.

dp

imo good points in rob ray's post

Rob Ray

So the thing which worries me is less Trump (who's gonna get largely hemmed in by "sensible" elements of his own party, the national bureaucracy and the markets in any case)

exactly right, and this was completely ignored during the campaign. he contradicted himself on almost every policy issue, so who can know what he'll try, and my guess is that he won't try half the things he said he would: no wall, which would cost billions, and no deportations, which would have to be locally administered and would fail because either the local jurisdictions (like mine in nyc) or the local capitalists who exploit the cheap labor won't co-operate very easily. it's good if these things don't happen, but it's bad that he could win an election saying that they will. he's also never had to face a bureaucracy like the US federal gov't and i'm looking forward to twitter meltdowns when he doesn't get his way.

the fantasies of the downtrodden racist

many of trump's supporters are racists, but i don't believe that's their motivation. imo a more prominent one (i've said this before) is gender reaction. the likes of a melania trump is more agreeable to trump supporters, both male and female, than the likes of a hillary clinton or a michelle obama. the trump marriage and his sexual juvenility too. mostly i think trump voters voted for the reasons they said: relatively speaking he's outside the power structure that answers only to itself and has immiserated them. that it's capitalism to blame is an almost impossible sell in the US.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opinion/sunday/we-need-somebody-spectacular-views-from-trump-country.html

Hazard is in Perry County, where unemployment is above 10 percent. On a bench opposite the county courthouse, on the Starbucks-free Main Street, I found Steve Smith and Paul Bush. Smith used to work underground at the Starfire mine. He earned as much as $1,500 a week, but was laid off a while ago. His unemployment has dried up and he has four children to feed. His family scrapes by on his wife’s income as a nurse. He’d been in court over a traffic offense; now an idle afternoon stretched away.

“Trump’s going to get us killed, probably!” he told me. “But I’ll vote for him anyway over Hillary. If you vote for Hillary you vote for Obama, and he’s made it impossible to ship coal. This place is about dried up. A job at Wendy’s is the only thing left. We may have to move.”

communities which are quite heavily armed.

could go two ways: either they now feel empowered to engage in daily and open abuse, knowing that trump will do nothing about their guns, or, since they got what they wanted out of the election, the wind is out of their sails and they kind of shut up a bit.

Juan Conatz

Virtually all the polls were wrong.

True.

NPR radio just had a story about how the only poll to call a victory for Trump, going back a couple weeks, was USC-Los Angeles Times. They used more statistically sound questions to truly test probability, rather than the dated -- and leading -- methods used by traditional pollsters.

Great post Hieronymous.

Knowing that the electorate is roughly 50% white, it's tempting to think that there are a lot more racists out there than anyone thought

So, I've been out of American for the better part of a decade and I just happened to come back for basically all of this election cycle. And this is one thing that struck me: there is a lot of fucking racism in American. I think a lot of it comes from the Black Lives Matter movement bringing otherwise underlying racism to the surface, but the anti-Obama backlash does seem to have fully blossomed in Trump - who's also made overt racism far more acceptable in a mainstream setting.

All that said, I'm viewing this very much the way I viewed Obama's election: no matter who's in the presidency, the looming threat of war, worsening living conditions, climate change, racism are always there and we need to be organizing against them. The same applies to Trump.

I do fear that Trump's election will empower far-right street violence, but I think his defeat would have done the same. The need for defensive organization that's always been there will continue to be there.

I was wiondering, to what extent is this demographic? As large chunks of America are stable or declining in terms of population and the cities will tend to attract younger, democratic voters, does this simply mean that the possibility of winning in the western, southern and midwestern states drains away and only serves to increase majorities in the blue states?
Clinton did just scrape the popular vote but lost fairly heavily in the electoral college (which is hardly unusual in a first past the post system .)

Today's events have demonstrated the hollow commitment of many self-identifying 'revolutionaries' – I see so-called communists/anarchists on Facebook, being upset about Trump's victory; they are admitting, by implication, that deep down, they would have preferred a Clinton victory.

Shame!

Today's events have demonstrated the hollow commitment of many self-identifying 'revolutionaries' – I see so-called communists/anarchists on Facebook, being upset about Trump's victory; they are admitting, by implication, that deep down, they would have preferred a Clinton victory.

It's hard to shake off ideology, that's for sure. Don't understand why you would get downvotes for making that statement...

More anti-Trump demos:

including 1,500 at Berkeley High School (which is half the students) walking out this morning before classes at 9:00 a.m.

Too many people are overestimating the importance of the role of 'President'. The American state is an enormous machine, with multiple, conflicting strata (e.g. urban vs. rural; state vs. federal; middle America vs. coastal America). This is a society with a vast array of corporate interests (which includes Trump's own interests). Now that he's obtained political power, he doesn't have much of an incentive to significantly disrupt the status quo. Sure, immigration controls might be tightened, or there might be a cultural conservative backlash, but this isn't unprecendented in the long history of American politics.

I can understand that people are bombarded with sensationalised information by the media, but both sides (both his allies and his enemies) have an interest in portraying Trump as more significant than he actually is in the grand scheme of things.

And finally, is Trump more of a reactionary than, say, Truman?
Will a Trump presidency be more conservative than that of Reagan?
Personally, I don't think so.

There is no reason to over dramatize the situation. Voting patterns did not radically change. But of course, the democratic party lost the (former) industrial rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio (and almost Michigan). And that is only natural. Working class communities and people in those places are ruined and living through hell for decades now. Think about the Flint! There are counties in PA which for almost decades consistently voted democrat and turned republican in this election, clearly as a protest.

If the results of this elections mean something it definitely means that identity politics is buried in the lands that it took its stupidest form. The democratic strategy based on holding onto an electoral majority constituted by minorities + white collar women + LGBTi against an amorphous southern + white blue collar boogeyman has just collapsed. Cross class alliances does not attract enough votes because obviously they don't change the lives of oppressed minority workers or working class women. Change any laws you want, but if you are single parent mother struggling in the Appalachian countryside than there is nothing common between you and an Ivy League women studies professor.

The post-WWII political/ideological scheme in the West based on a moderate conservative right and a slimy social democratic / liberal left sharing power also collapsed. This duality was not working on the edges (in Greece, Turkey, etc) and now it failed in the center as well.

If the fascists and rightists are getting bolder and bolder, it is time for the communists to do the same and even more so. This timid left and its rotten "capitalist realism" has got to die.

Many of the people who voted for Trump voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012. Clinton got 6 million fewer votes than Obama. This is one of a number of reasons to not suppose that racism explains the outcome. Many of Trump's supporters are racist to one or degree or another but I agree that wasn't the main thing that was driving a lot of people to vote for Trump who in the past had voted for Democrats.

Even though Trump also got 1 million fewer votes than Romney -- lost Repubs to the other side or non-voting -- he still won because of the collapse in support for the Democratic Party candidate.

Clinton won almost 200,000 more votes than Trump but Trump won a majority of the Electoral College. This is maybe the third or fourth time this has happened, most recently in 2000. This is easier to happen for Repubs because their base is in a lot of small rural states & the Electoral College gives them disproportionately more weight.

Greens had no effect on outcome. Stein got 1.2 million votes, about 1 percent.

The Democratic Party elite have pushed policies that ignore working class interests for decades now and many professional-managerial class liberal pundits look with disdain on the working class, especially white working class. So the party establishment decided way in advance it was Clinton's turn & they would just move everybody up in their careers in the machine...no matter what the angry mood of the old & new middle classes & working class may be. For the latter this was a way to give the finger to the elites in charge.

This election is definitely proof of the completely out of touch character of the Democratic Party political machine.

Trump is likely to move to a major focus on deportations...as he has promised. But Obama had already been engaged in major deportation effort, so this is more a matter of how much than of a basic change. He has promised to appoint a reactionary Supreme court justice of the sort of Scalia & that's something he'll do, but that is just back to where it was.

People have been sort of exaggerating the event as if Hitler had won election. White nationalists & fascists will be encouraged by this, but it's not clear exactly what will change in terms of how the state operates. Under Obama there were already plenty of police state aspects.

It's very likely that TTP and TTIP are now dead. Maybe the only positive result. Trump may try to renegotiate NAFTA with Mexico but who knows what if anything that will change.

x"

Craftwork

Today's events have demonstrated the hollow commitment of many self-identifying 'revolutionaries' – I see so-called communists/anarchists on Facebook, being upset about Trump's victory; they are admitting, by implication, that deep down, they would have preferred a Clinton victory.

Shame!

It's funny you should say that, I was thinking how the election of Trump made a lot of anarchists rediscover their critique of electoralism. I mean, the same people who were on social media supporting Sanders a few months back are, today, on social media highlighting the bankruptcy and uselessness of electoral politics.

Anyway, as others have said, it's the deeper implications of a Trump victory that are frightening. Paul Mason, FWIW, has highlighted the misogyny that goes a long way to explaining Trump's victory. Just speaking to my immediate family members, I think he's right to do so.

Chilli

Anyway, as others have said, it's the deeper implications of a Trump victory that are frightening. Paul Mason, FWIW, has highlighted the misogyny that goes a long way to explaining Trump's victory. Just speaking to my immediate family members, I think he's right to do so.

Do you think the US is more mysogynist than UK, where we're on our 2nd female PM? If so, in what way and why? Or have these PMs been sufficiently right wing to over-ride the mysogyny of those who'd vote for them? (May wasn't elected but at present would prob win the next election.)

x

I wish I could "up" S Artesian's last couple comments 10 times (yes, I realize how bizarre it is that I just wrote that sentence.) Seriously, spot on.

some people like to grandstand. this is what i said:

but I agree that wasn't the main thing that was driving a lot of people to vote for Trump who in the past had voted for Democrats.

but for the moral grandstanders apparently for every single Trump voter racism was the main thing. I don't think so. my neighbor, who is black, and a butcher, was one of the 13 percent of black men who voted for Trump. the neoliberal Democratic Party establishment, represented by Clinton, has pursued ruinous policies for the working class & much of the middle class.

So, it came to my attention today that there are otherwise well-informed people who are unaware of just how vile so-called alt-right online comments are. I would imagine most here have seen the stuff but again, these were people who I assumed were in the know. Anyway, if not here's a collection of their celebratory comments.
https://mic.com/articles/159070/alt-right-donald-trump-victory-celebration-racist-pepe-memes-anti-semitism-white-surpremacy-4chan-8chan-reddit

x

If you put a pile of shit as the democratic and a can full of pebbles as the republican candidates people could still have felt obliged to vote against one or the other. And neither the noisy can nor the smelly pile of shit would change the structural racism that is ingrained in this country. It is better to analyze how this election expresses the dynamics of the bourgeois state's rule and its posture against the working class instead of morally judging workers for voting.

Red Marriott

Chilli

Anyway, as others have said, it's the deeper implications of a Trump victory that are frightening. Paul Mason, FWIW, has highlighted the misogyny that goes a long way to explaining Trump's victory. Just speaking to my immediate family members, I think he's right to do so.

Do you think the US is more mysogynist than UK, where we're on our 2nd female PM? If so, in what way and why? Or have these PMs been sufficiently right wing to over-ride the misogyny of those who'd vote for them? (May wasn't elected but at present would prob win the next election.)

I don't know if it's particularly more misogynistic - and I'm not sure the existence of female political leaders is much of an indicator of general misogyny, anyway. More just that the criticisms of Clinton could have just as easily been leveled against Trump, but with Clinton there was often the caveats that she wears "pant suits", is a "secret lesbian", is "manipulative" or, of course, is a "nasty woman".

Add to that that a huge section of the US population was willing to vote for a man who had a dozen claims of sexual assault against him and was recorded bragging about sexually assaulting women, and the role of misogyny in this election just seems pretty undeniable.

Basically, I think if Clinton had been a man and had the exact same policies and the exact same scandals, she would have probably won the election. That's personal experience talking, but when I talked to my right wing family members about Clinton, it was always wrapped up in pretty deeply sexist language.

mikail firtinaci

If you put a pile of shit as the democratic and a can full of pebbles as the republican candidates people could still have felt obliged to vote against one or the other. And neither the noisy can nor the smelly pile of shit would change the structural racism that is ingrained in this country. It is better to analyze how this election expresses the dynamics of the bourgeois state's rule and its posture against the working class instead of morally judging workers for voting.

I don't think anybody is judging workers for voting, but the ascendancy of Trump - for all the contradictions of him running as an anti-elitist outsider - does say something about race and gender in America.

Even if a majority of his supporters voted for him based on some severely misguided economic calculations. that doesn't detract from the how Trump symbolizes anti-immigrant sentiment in the US or the white backlash against Black Lives Matters. So even if people voted for him to give a bloody nose to (neo-)liberal establishment politics, they had to decide his economic populism trumped the explicit racism that was also part-and-parcel of his campaign.

I haven't seen the data from the general election yet, but Trump suppoters median income was $72,000 in primaries. So again, as others have said, not working class.

Also, this was a low turn-out election. 2012 Romney had more votes than 2016 Trump.

On another note, many lefty-liberal people I know seemed much more open to talking about a libcom critique of capitalism and electoral politics today.

dp

Just remember that Irish "white niggers" were the first to be brought by force to the US as laborers, and even though they weren't slaves, they definitely weren't seen worthy enough to be the equals of property owning citizens.

Sorry to nit-pick but not quite accurate. You are talking about indentured servants and they came from all parts of the British Isles.

As for Irish, the first in numbers were the Scotch-Irish transplanted to Ulster from Scotland by James the 6th and were even lower down the land-owning hierarchy than the local native Irish, (the Anglo-Irish being at the top) so they headed to America in the 18thC. They say that the term "hillbilly" came from that fact that they were still singing about William of Orange. Not so sure if that is true or urban legend.

The next Irish came almost a hundred years later with the result of the19thC Irish Potato Famine emigrations and became the Irish mafia/Irish police/Tammany Hall Irish that eventually led to the Kennedy Dynasty.

I won't respond to Artesian now or in the past because he's a fucking asshole. what can I say?

Yeh. vote this down. but I'd ask Artesian, What was your fucking point other than as a holier-than-thou put down?

jesuithitsquad

I haven't seen the data from the general election yet, but Trump suppoters median income was $72,000 in primaries. So again, as others have said, not working class.

What is the median income of the average white voter does anyone know?

With racial income disparity, and poorer people being less likely to vote (or be able to vote), my suspicion is this figude isn't quite as high as it immediately looks - the breakdowns I've seen of the vote overall seem to suggest Trumps support was fairly evenly distributed across all (white) income brackets, and the trend towards Clinton increased support from lower incomes coming almost entirely from her higher support from lower income demographics (Largely POC, women).

x

Juan Conatz

Yeah, I know people are mentioning the LA Times poll now but they were also wrong. They had Trump winning the popular vote by 5-6 percentage pretty consistently, however it looks like Clinton will end up winning by 0.2%.

Have you been looking at the accuracy question. From looking at the results and some polls it seems like the polls were mostly right in percentage terms within the margin of error (normally 3%) but Trump won swing states by majorities within that error* So it was't that the polls were wrong but that pundits called states when they shouldn't of if they took the margin of error into account.

* ie a poll that said Hilary 51 Trump 49 with a +/- 3% error would still be right if the state came out as Hillary 49 Trump 51. But that flips the result in any winner takes all state which I think is all of them but 2.

syndicalistcat

Many of the people who voted for Trump voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012.

Is there any hard evidence for this (i.e. exit poll questions). Given that a very large number didn't vote the missing Obama voters could just as well be people who started at home and the additional Trump voters could have been energised racists who normally wouldn't bother. I've seen both explanations and wonder if there is any actual date which might indicate which is more likely to be true?

jesuithitsquad

I haven't seen the data from the general election yet, but Trump suppoters median income was $72,000 in primaries. So again, as others have said, not working class.

Exit polls indicated that those earning less than 100k did not vote for Trump, those earning over 100k did. I'm not sure how much skilled workers can earn in the US but that figure argues against the idea that it was working class support behind Trump.

Will you two pack it in please?

Thanks ajjohnstone

Red Marriott #392
‘Do you think the US is more mysogynist than UK, where we're on our 2nd female PM? If so, in what way and why? Or have these PMs been sufficiently right wing to over-ride the mysogyny of those who'd vote for them? (May wasn't elected but at present would prob win the next election.)’

I cannot answer your question as to who is the most misogynist, the USA or UK.
It has been suggested the reason why the Tory Party loved Mrs.T. was because she reminded them of their childhood nannie or governess. The UK upper class are trained to enjoy firm discipline. I would suggest May exudes the same air of ‘authority’. It should be noted that MrsT. was considered the most unpopular prime minister with the general public until the Falklands war. She then adopted the royal ‘we’ when addressing Jimmie Young et al.

Trump scares the crap out of me.

AndrewF

Is there any hard evidence for this (i.e. exit poll questions). Given that a very large number didn't vote the missing Obama voters could just as well be people who started at home and the additional Trump voters could have been energised racists who normally wouldn't bother. I've seen both explanations and wonder if there is any actual date which might indicate which is more likely to be true?

This is the important question that I haven't seen active answer yet.

A lot of the analysis is assuming voters switched from Obama, but I've seen no evidence for this, and am skeptical because it's usually people trying to prove "see it's not about race!"

Personally, I'd be fairly shocked if a candidate as esoteric as Trump wasn't picking up a fair chunk of previous non-voters - anecdotally you a lot of the people in pre-election 'explaining the Trump phenomenon' pieces were full of "I never usually vote, but..."

Would be good to see some hard data on this; but "Obama voters switched to Trump" makes a lot less instinctive sense than "Worst Democratic candidate since McGovern puts a lot of Obama voters who stay at home and most openly racist campaign in decades enthuses lots of racists who don't normally vote."

AndrewF

jesuithitsquad

I haven't seen the data from the general election yet, but Trump suppoters median income was $72,000 in primaries. So again, as others have said, not working class.

Exit polls indicated that those earning less than 100k did not vote for Trump, those earning over 100k did. I'm not sure how much skilled workers can earn in the US but that figure argues against the idea that it was working class support behind Trump.

Either way, there was a huge swing amongst those earning less than $50k to Trump - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_r=0

Would need to see the raw data and cross tabulate it, but given the massive income disparity against PoC, it look fairly likely that amongst white voters, Trump's support was at least as strong amongst the poorest as any other income bracket.

I was wondering what people thought the imperialist implications are with a Trump victory. I see trump as representing a wing of the American bourgeoisie that basically wants out of the Middle east to a large extent (keeping their main points of influence such as Isreal and Saudi etc). This is clearly linked with a different approach to Russia and China. He seems to want a closer relationship with Russia and a more confrontational one with China.

My prediction is that while he will probably not send troops anywhere his administration would possibly ramp up support for groups in Africa and South America against Chinese interests as well as taking a tougher stand on trade deals with China. What do people think?

[quote=Fall Back
Either way, there was a huge swing amongst those earning less than $50k to Trump - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_r=0
[/quote]

I think you meant more than 50K there? But yes the difference between the less than 50K and more than 50k subgroups of the less than 100k could well be down to wage differentials between black and white workers. I hadn't considered that.

Sorry, was unclear - I meant the swing between 2012 and 2016 - Clinton % dropped wildly.

2012 (Obama)

Under $30k - 63%
$30-50k - 57%

2016 (Clinton)

Under $30k - 53%
$30-50k - 51%

Trump didn't quite rise exact same amount the Democrat vote dropped (stronger 3rd party candidates than 2012 I guess?), but still pretty wide swing in 4 years!

(Also, not sure if it's accounted for in weighting, but students would slightly skew this - they'd most likely be in the bottom income brackets, massively more likely to have voted Clinton, but obviously there are huge difference a student doing 15 hours a week at $12 an hour until they graduate and someone in a dead end full time job paying less than $30k PA that the raw numbers obscure)

In response to Jaycee, while Trump has been inconsistent on a number of issues the one (or two) things that he has been consistent about since at least 2010, has been his questioning of the existence of Nato and his support, both personal and political, for President Putin. This must be of great concern to the European powers, the Baltic states, US allies in East Asia and the various nationalist and "rebel" organisations in Syria and Iraq that have been kept alive by direct US support. A Clinton presidency, with all her entourage, looked to be pushing for a direct confrontation with Russia over Syria. A Trump presidency, with all his entourage, makes that much less likely and I agree with Jaycee's point here, particularly in relation to disengagement from the Middle East and further support for Israel as well as other "strong" regimes - such as Egypt and Turkey.

He has also consistently talked about wiping out the US debt to China, the latter effectively "owning" about two-thirds of the US economy and, as Jaycee says, this could well be expressed in anti-Chinese proxy wars - such elements of which are already going on. It's a "new world disorder" and a further indication of capitalism's descent into irrationality overall. It remains to be seen how the individual elements work out but the above are the points that Trump and his team have been consistent on for some years now.

Trump got almost the same number of votes as the previous republican candidates, but Clinton got significantly less than Obama. so the explanation that makes the most sense is that the same people that usally voted republican voted republican, but less democrat voters turned out.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-how-she-lost-he-won-us-election-2016-turnout-low-a7408941.html

radicalgraffiti

Trump got almost the same number of votes as the previous republican candidates, but Clinton got significantly less than Obama. so the explanation that makes the most sense is that the same people that usally voted republican voted republican, but less democrat voters turned out.

Yep but the pattern in the rust belt states is a little different as he picked up votes and some on the left attribute that as 'open to the left' workers switching sides because of his opposition to trade deals. If true it would be an important story for those states and for the local left response but it appears to be a story created from the voting pattern and as above other stories are also possible and perhaps more likely. I'm curious is anyone has come across any hard evidence that would favour one interpretation over another.

BTW I'm asking all these questions as I'm working on a number crunching piece similar to the post Brexit one I wrote.

radicalgraffiti

Trump got almost the same number of votes as the previous republican candidates, but Clinton got significantly less than Obama. so the explanation that makes the most sense is that the same people that usally voted republican voted republican, but less democrat voters turned out.

Yep but the pattern in the rust belt states is a little different as he picked up votes and some on the left attribute that as 'open to the left' workers switching sides because of his opposition to trade deals. If true it would be an important story for those states and for the local left response but it appears to be a story created from the voting pattern and as above other stories are also possible and perhaps more likely. I'm curious is anyone has come across any hard evidence that would favour one interpretation over another.

BTW I'm asking all these questions as I'm working on a number crunching piece similar to the post Brexit one I wrote.

Trumps plan for 1st 100 days:

http://www.npr.org/2016/11/09/501451368/here-is-what-donald-trump-wants-to-do-in-his-first-100-days

According to Reuters, huge increase in number of first time voters - http://reut.rs/2eBEn4k

If you can get the full poll (I can't find it, altho they said they were releasing it on Tuesday) and it had a proper breakdown should give some answers (mainly if it's people voting for Trump who hadn't before or voting Clinton bc they shat it about Trump), especially if you can compare to 2012.

re: "working class"

I'm not telling anyone on here anything that they don't know, but when the media talks about working class voters in America, it's very, very much a cultural definition of class - income doesn't really play into it, never mind a structural understanding of class. So when they interview these disenfranchised white voters, that could very much mean small business owners, the (truly) self-employed, or those that have retired from such positions.

That said, from experience, I think we're kidding ourselves if we don't think Trump drew support from truly working class people - especially in predominantly white rural and suburban areas.

Also, Jesus, I just had a look at that NPR link about Trump's first 100 days. I know, really, it's not like under Clinton there wouldn't have been many of these same policies (and, other, differently bad policies), but that's a fucking onslaught. There's not remotely enough organization to resist all that at once.

AndrewF

BTW I'm asking all these questions as I'm working on a number crunching piece similar to the post Brexit one I wrote.

This comparison with Brexit might be useful for that. tl;dr: no clear relationship with economics, lots of indication it's about authoritarian vs other-regarding values (though I don't think it's very convincing on where those values come from... basically arguing a handful of high/rapid immigration areas experience culture shock, then white people elsewhere vicariously hate on immigrants too).

Edit: of course there being no relationship between Trump vote and income doesn't mean that millions of lower income people didn't vote for Trump, it just means they didn't do so in any different proportions to higher income people.

The Democrats who spent the election painting Trump as pretty much Hitler are rapidly reversing course now that the election's over and done with. We've got Clinton urging people to give Trump a chance to lead, Obama saying that he's rooting for Trump to succeed in leading the country, and Elizabeth Warren hoping that her and Trump can put aside their difference and work together. This sort of shameless opportunism and disingenuousness isn't surprising to see, but the speed at which it's taken hold is a bit startling. It'll be interesting to see if this election outcome strengthens Sanders types, given what a complete joke the argument of Clinton's electability has turned out to be.

First, this will be short since I'm on a short break at work. So sorry for the sloppiness. And this happened around 10:15 a.m.

But I have to repeat The Who: "The kids are alright!"

I work, teaching EFL/ESL in San Francisco's Financial District, along Montgomery Street a.k.a. "Wall Street West" where banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America were founded, and thousand and thousands of kids just marched down the street. It looked like all the city's high schools cleared out because the procession of quickly and spiritedly marching students took several city blocks.

Office workers flooded out of high-rises and cheered the youth on. Food workers came out of restaurants with massive pans and metal ladles to beat a rhythm as they celebrated the kids too. Same with the ubiquitous construction workers. Granted 85% of the city voted the traditional Democratic Party line for political hack Hillary, but just the same it was inspiring. Like a massive street party.

Gotta go back to work, but one of my left-liberal co-workers just said "we should all do a general strike so we can go out and join the kids." Now that's the spirit!

Fall Back

According to Reuters, huge increase in number of first time voters - http://reut.rs/2eBEn4k

If you can get the full poll (I can't find it, altho they said they were releasing it on Tuesday) and it had a proper breakdown should give some answers (mainly if it's people voting for Trump who hadn't before or voting Clinton bc they shat it about Trump), especially if you can compare to 2012.

The early voting numbers were being reported as a huge turn-out amongst latino 1st time voters, with Florida reporting 100,000 new voter registration. So as you say, it could be either/or. The interesting thing is Trump's ability to GOTV without much of a field operation at all. Even if his vote was down vs Republicans in 2012, it really puts into question the importance of ground-level, professional political operatives.

Also, your point re: income disparity with low income african americans is something i hadn't considered and an interesting point.

As Chilli pointed out above, small business owners who run say, plumbing or construction companies have consistently been referred to as blue-collar/working class throughout the 2016 cycle.

A broader question--putting aside questions about whether the worldwide, right wing nationalist wave is fascist, protofascist or authoritarian nationalism--it seems the function it serves for capital is more or less the same. The traditional ultra-left analysis has historically been that these movements appear as a way of both disciplining the national bourgeoisie and as a reaction to a strong worker's movement. It's easy to see the first part in play as a reaction to the global crisis, but there really isn't much of a rise in working class militancy, at least in the West. Unless we (and more importantly, they) see things like the increase in POC militancy as an existential threat to the current order, how do we explain the dramatic rise of the far right? Like, honestly I don't know...

jesuithitsquad

Unless we (and more importantly, they) see things like the increase in POC militancy as an existential threat to the current order, how do we explain the dramatic rise of the far right? Like, honestly I don't know...

I'm not sure if you are being rhetorical here, it it vary obvious that they do see things that way, they go on endlessly about SJW's and complain about how everyone is too sensitive and clearly consider tolerance of LGBTQ, POC etc to be the cause of all the problems with the world today

Joseph Kay

AndrewF

BTW I'm asking all these questions as I'm working on a number crunching piece similar to the post Brexit one I wrote.

This comparison with Brexit might be useful for that.

I'm not convinced by Kaufman's argument that the vote had little to do with personal economic circumstances, at least not how he counterposes that to his authoritarian personality theory. The LSE data are from August, which seems like a long time ago, also he tends to compare extreme Trump supporters with extreme Trump opponents. According to the exit polls from two days ago, 78% of those who say their family is worse off today voted for Trump (24% of those who say they are better off) ; 79% of those who think the economy is in a poor state voted Trump ; 63% of those who believe life will be worse for the next generation voted for Trump. So if the exit polls are accurate, then there is fairly strong evidence that personal financial situation played a role.

Of course that does't change the fact that most Trump voters (and EU Leave voters) are relatively wealthy, and the theory of a white working revolt as a result of losing out from globalisation is crap. I think the relationship between economic crisis and Trump's victory (and Brexit) might be as follows. Economic crisis and austerity have created a climate where available resources suddenly seem very limited compared to before 2008 - there isn't enough for everyone. In that context the message blaming migrants and minorities (and "Brussels" in the EU referendum) strikes a chord with racist whites who believe that they are entitled to more. While most people vote the same as previously, the hard right are suddenly able to mobilise a segment of relatively poor racist whites who did not bother to vote previously, and that tips the balance in favour of the hard right. This politics also resonates particularly strongly with people who subscribed to right-wing authoritarianism, which is what the LSE's Kaufman sees.

radicalgraffiti

jesuithitsquad

Unless we (and more importantly, they) see things like the increase in POC militancy as an existential threat to the current order, how do we explain the dramatic rise of the far right? Like, honestly I don't know...

I'm not sure if you are being rhetorical here, it it vary obvious that they do see things that way, they go on endlessly about SJW's and complain about how everyone is too sensitive and clearly consider tolerance of LGBTQ, POC etc to be the cause of all the problems with the world today

So I probably could've phrased that much better. Obviously, the 'alt-right' etc see things this way, but by "they' I was asking if the bourgeoisie see these movements as existential threats as they stand today.

I'm not demeaning movements like the street level of BLM or the Latino 2006 general strike, etc, but doesn't it seem like Trumpism is a bit of a sledge-hammer/champagne glass for these movements?

baboon

A Trump presidency, with all his entourage, makes that much less likely and I agree with Jaycee's point here, particularly in relation to disengagement from the Middle East and further support for Israel as well as other "strong" regimes - such as Egypt and Turkey. .

Trump had previously displayed a sympathetic attitude to Erdogan's post-coup crackdown, and Erdogan has already reached out to Trump to congratulate him on his victory as well as to discuss the possibility of greater cooperation between the two countries in the "war on terror", etc.

Kinda wonder what all this might imply for the PKK, the PYD, and their Democratic-confederalist project in Rojava?

Sike

Kinda wonder what all this might imply for the PKK, the PYD, and their Democratic-confederalist project in Rojava?

Trump says he would arm "the Kurds" to fight Daesh. He could mean the KRG peshmerga. He could also mean the YPG.

He has also pledged to hit the Islamic State, not Assad.

Who the fuck knows if he means any of it.

I'm kinda surprised that nobody here has mentioned the millions of people throughout the country in the streets protesting the Trump victory. My only criticism of this is the fact that such protests would likely not be taking place if Clinton had won the election despite the fact that she is a devote neoliberal who supports austerity and has never seen a U.S. military intervention against a weak foreign nation that she hasn't been absolutely giddy about, nor the fact that her political party under the Obama administration has overseen immigration policies that have done nothing but add to the militarization of the U.S./Mexican border and have also seen record numbers deported, policies that in their implication are every bit as xenophobic and racist as those proposed by Donald Trump. But then again, maybe most of this anger is not so much in support of Clinton as it is against the blatant vileness of Donald Trump, as well as disgust with the American political establishment and possibly even capitalism itself. With things starting out like this I think it is safe to say that we are in for a very interesting next four years.

Yeah, exactly, with that guy who the fuck knows.

Also, I always hate it when the uniformed, typically those on the right, racially essentialize the Kurds by referring to them in terms of a single homogeneous ethnic group ("The Kurds") regardless of the political affiliation of the specific Kurd's that they are referring to.

Sike

I'm kinda surprised that nobody here has mentioned the millions of people throughout the country in the streets protesting the Trump victory.

You're surprised because you're not paying attention.

You obviously didn't read these:

#372

#386

#427

jesuithitsquad

radicalgraffiti

jesuithitsquad

Unless we (and more importantly, they) see things like the increase in POC militancy as an existential threat to the current order, how do we explain the dramatic rise of the far right? Like, honestly I don't know...

I'm not sure if you are being rhetorical here, it it vary obvious that they do see things that way, they go on endlessly about SJW's and complain about how everyone is too sensitive and clearly consider tolerance of LGBTQ, POC etc to be the cause of all the problems with the world today

So I probably could've phrased that much better. Obviously, the 'alt-right' etc see things this way, but by "they' I was asking if the bourgeoisie see these movements as existential threats as they stand today.

I'm not demeaning movements like the street level of BLM or the Latino 2006 general strike, etc, but doesn't it seem like Trumpism is a bit of a sledge-hammer/champagne glass for these movements?

i don't think the bourgeoisie are that unified or organised, i think "fascist" movements are opportunistic, they take on certain roles with in capitalism yes, but they do it because they get the opportunity, not because they bourgeoisie decides to use them.

in the early 20th century they would no have been able to take power because of the opposition from the left and because the state and society was not structured in a way that would allow them to. when the state defeats a revolutionary movement it destroys the ability of the left to oppose fascism and makes the state more vulnerable to a fascist take over, by removing plurality of political views, removing freedom to descent etc

trump is not like fascists of the 30s who had paramilitary organisations interdependent of the the state etc but he does have some of the same advantages, the left has been successfully repressed, there is a strong fear among the right that cultural change is destroying society etc

radicalgraffiti

i don't think the bourgeoisie are that unified or organised, i think "fascist" movements are opportunistic, they take on certain roles with in capitalism yes, but they do it because they get the opportunity, not because they bourgeoisie decides to use them.

in the early 20th century they would no have been able to take power because of the opposition from the left and because the state and society was not structured in a way that would allow them to. when the state defeats a revolutionary movement it destroys the ability of the left to oppose fascism and makes the state more vulnerable to a fascist take over, by removing plurality of political views, removing freedom to descent etc

trump is not like fascists of the 30s who had paramilitary organisations interdependent of the the state etc but he does have some of the same advantages, the left has been successfully repressed, there is a strong fear among the right that cultural change is destroying society etc

Thanks for this--very helpful, and yeah, I think I fall into the trap of anthropomorphising the ruling class and imaging them as being organized and working toward a common goal. Thanks for the reality check.

A lot of stories going around on social media and some news networks about racist harassment and violence since the Trump victory.

Does anybody feel like the ongoing narrative about the "white working-class" voting in Trump is just a convenient way of blaming the "stupid workers"?

Does anybody feel like the ongoing narrative about the "white working-class" voting in Trump is just a convenient way of blaming the "stupid workers"?

It's not just you, it seems to be a common trope.

Hieronymous

You're surprised because you're not paying attention.

You obviously didn't read these:

#372

#386

#427

Thanks for pointing that out, I've been trying to keep up with this thread but somehow I totally missed those. It's probably has something to do with the fact that I have a cold and haven't gotten nearly enough sleep recently.

Get some rest, comrade.

x

I say goddamn, SA is on fire

S. Artesian

jura

Does anybody feel like the ongoing narrative about the "white working-class" voting in Trump is just a convenient way of blaming the "stupid workers"?

There's more than one "narrative" about the "white working class" voting class. There's the "stupid worker" narrative, and then there's the "angry, confused, neglected, frustrated, crushed, abandoned by the Dems/unions/leftists" worker narrative-- you can find a thread of discussion re that on Goldner's Insurgent Notes, where Goldner remarks that Trump was the first major candidate to speak "lucidly" and "directly" to white workers about the sources of their economic distress.

I didn't buy it. I don't buy it. I don't buy the lucid and direct part. Don't doubt he addressed their fears, like Nazis address fears, but the entire discussion is pointed towards identifying an "enemy" that is definitely not capitalism, but some "bad guys"-- Jews, blacks, "elites," migrants, whatever-- anything to avoid targeting the ownership of production as capital. It's the real estate developer con-- Trump University! You too can be a real estate developer, once we get rid of the ______, ____________, ________________. (fill in the blanks).

If Trump's speech was direct, and lucid, and "disarmingly" so, in identifying the economic cause and sources of distress plaguing "white" workers, why then didn't that disarmingly lucid analysis make any headway with black workers, or latin workers? Black and latino workers hourly wages are still only 70+% of those of white workers, and have not closed the gap since 1980, even while the average real wage for white workers has declined. Poverty as a % of the population is greater for blacks than whites. % of children living in poverty is higher for blacks and latino workers. unemployment is higher among black youth and latino youth-- so when some point out that 69% of those voting for Trump had only a high school education or less, why were so few of that 69% black and latino?

In fact Trump's approach was classically corporatist-- that there's a unity of purpose between capital and labor, and if only we get rid of -- see above-- then the "volk/laborers" will be able to enjoy the fruits of their small property. It's the classic, deliberated confusion of the workers as a class, with the workers as the "people"-- the "blood" the "great (white) Americans."

Either white workers could see through Clinton's bullshit, but not see through Trump's-- which means they are not stupid, but looking for something else and they found it in Trump; or they understood that Trump's economic promise was inseparable from the racism, xenophobia, and promises to restore white men to their mythological position as "the real Americans" and they were OK with that, as somebody else would have to pay the price. The doesn't sound like working class politics to me; that sounds like anti-working class politics, the socialism of fools....and the petty-bourgeoisie, who cycle in and out of the white working class in particular, given the higher wage, greater access to property, that section of the workers has.

Part of the issue of course is that racism has been so fundamental to the composition of the working class, going all the way back to the 19th century; to the abandonment of Radical Reconstruction, to the AFL's endorsement of the Asian exclusion act, and beyond.

I think everybody knew and knows that Trump isn't going to "bring back the jobs;" and I don't think they care. This is the fruit of 40 years of devastation. They don't want the solution. They want a victim.

word

It pains me to agree with you Jesuit, but agree I must.

x

It might be a decent idea to split this thread between pre-post election with a really short intro so that a) it can go on the front page. there's some really good stuff here from the past few days, and it might even draw a little traffic. and b) anyone looking for a libcom analysis of Trump's election doesn't have to first dig through 350 some odd posts from before election day.

I'll totally volunteer to help if it's a pain in the ass.

Fall Back

According to Reuters, huge increase in number of first time voters - http://reut.rs/2eBEn4k

If you can get the full poll (I can't find it, altho they said they were releasing it on Tuesday) and it had a proper breakdown should give some answers (mainly if it's people voting for Trump who hadn't before or voting Clinton bc they shat it about Trump), especially if you can compare to 2012.

The CNN exit poll has 10% first time voters and 56% Clinton 47% Trump. That poll can give a state by state breakdown on most questions so be interesting to see if that varies in the rust belt & Virginia
http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/national/president

AndrewF

Fall Back

According to Reuters, huge increase in number of first time voters - http://reut.rs/2eBEn4k

If you can get the full poll (I can't find it, altho they said they were releasing it on Tuesday) and it had a proper breakdown should give some answers (mainly if it's people voting for Trump who hadn't before or voting Clinton bc they shat it about Trump), especially if you can compare to 2012.

The CNN exit poll has 10% first time voters and 56% Clinton 47% Trump. That poll can give a state by state breakdown on most questions so be interesting to see if that varies in the rust belt & Virginia
http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/national/president

Is the same data available for previous years? I'd assume usually first time voters massively lean Democrat on the basis of young people being more likely to vote "left", and first time voters (probably?) majority being people where it's the first election they've been able to vote.

Artesian, thanks for that insightful reply.

This isn't from a libertarian perspective but just puts across who america just voted in as president, and it's disturbing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svoeu6RPbX4
[youtube]svoeu6RPbX4[/youtube]

I just hope he won't carry out precisely what he has said that he will do leading upto this election victory (Trump that is ofcourse)

Theres also this explanation of why Hilary Clinton was the wrong Democratic nominee...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe2_uKyfi7E
[youtube]Qe2_uKyfi7E[/youtube]

In terms of a concrete number interpreting the CNN exit poll suggests 130,000 more voters from union families voted for Trump than you would have expected from the national average. Total vote in Ohio was over 5 million.

You're welcome

Can't see if it has been asked before, but where can I find the results for third party candidates calling themselves socialist? In particular Mimi Soltysik standing for the SPUSA.

jondwhite

Can't see if it has been asked before, but where can I find the results for third party candidates calling themselves socialist? In particular Mimi Soltysik standing for the SPUSA.

http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president

this give state by state, not national totals so far as i can see

The link in Petey's post also has county-level results. Harlan County: 85% for Trump.

I make that 2471 votes **nationwide** for Soltysik.

x

You're making one great post after another Artesian. Thanks for the analysis.

But you being uncertain must be a first ;)

I haven’t read the IN thread Artesian mentions. But it gets kind of irritating to hear the leftist line - after Brexit & now Trump - that it's to do with worsening of working class conditions more than racism that led to these results; it defines the relationship between the two wrongly and often seeks to downplay any possible growth of w/c racism. It’s as if the old romanticised view of the w/c as an inherently radical homogenous bloc must be defended in the face of contradictory reality; when in reality the working class is neither homogenous in that way nor solely determined by external forces and what is done to it, but also by its own creative agency in dealing with those circumstances. It’s like they see the w/c as a child that can’t be responsible for its own actions (or lack of action in reducing its actions to voting options).

All of which continues to view the social role of the w/c much as the Right does – as a constituency to be manipulated one way or other by external forces. But if one believes in any kind of self-determination of proletarian struggle one has to see the fault in the internal defeat and capitulation of the w/c - and its resolution in recognising that and the w/c dealing with it and the divisions it’s based on. Meanwhile the ideologues just carry on moaning that the w/c has been fed the wrong ideology.

The growth of racism is real and not a mere passing electoral aberration; imo it can partly be traced to a decline of w/c identity – including in its official institutional and recuperative form of the old labour movement and its industrial base – leading to desperate searches for new primary clothes and masks such as race & nationality. The claims by some that this decline of w/c identity opens up a path to a messianic ‘immediate full communism now’ ignores the other possibilities that appear at present more likely – eg, a drift towards a new fascism, as this article discusses; https://libcom.org/library/communisation-theory-question-fascism-cherry-angioma.

x

jondwhite

I make that 2471 votes **nationwide** for Soltysik.

lack of ballot access activity will be part of it. the SP is headquartered here in NY yet has not been on the NY ballot in my memory. the rightwing successfully painting the likes of obama as a "communist" will be another part of it. the message of the SP - more identity politics than class politics - is a third part of it.

x

Has anyone put together a leaflet yet? Thinking of doing one but if there's already something out there, no need to duplicate work.

petey

jondwhite

I make that 2471 votes **nationwide** for Soltysik.

lack of ballot access activity will be part of it. the SP is headquartered here in NY yet has not been on the NY ballot in my memory. the rightwing successfully painting the likes of obama as a "communist" will be another part of it. the message of the SP - more identity politics than class politics - is a third part of it.

Isn't that how Obama and Hillary won the most votes? Why won't it work for SPUSA?

x

Anarchist perspective on Trump's victory

"No One is Coming to Save Us"
http://m1aa.org/?p=1268

S. Artesian

Goldner and others think "intersectionality" is an expression of, or accompanied by contempt for white workers; that issue of race, color, and gender are essentially "diversions" from class struggle-- which IMO is the "left wing" version of the right wing Rush Limbaugh theses. I think that, in particular, is crap and has to be denounced, rejected as simply playing into the rhetoric of reactionaries.

I somehow skipped over this paragraph. Is Goldner really arguing this? I haven't had time to take a look but if so, that's very disappointing.

infektfm-solid effort

Do comrades have any explanation as to why a lot (relatively speaking) of Latino folks voted for Trump? (29% as opposed to 8% with blacks.) Especially given Trump's stance on immigration.

jura

Do comrades have any explanation as to why a lot (relatively speaking) of Latino folks voted for Trump? (29% as opposed to 8% with blacks.) Especially given Trump's stance on immigration.

A couple of partial reasons at least. Firstly a lot of Latinos in Florida especially are right wing Cubans who fled Castro's revolution who always vote Republican. Secondly the 2nd most recently arrived group of migrants often dislikes the latest because they see them as competition at the bottom of the labour market.

Thanks bastarx, that makes sense. I've seen the anti-Castroist aspect discussed elsewhere. As to the second point, don't many black voters compete for the same kinds of jobs? The turnout was such that blacks and Latinos represented roughly equal parts of the electorate (12% vs. 11%), but the difference in Trump support was pretty big. Could religion play a role in this?

x

Red Marriott

All of which continues to view the social role of the w/c much as the Right does – as a constituency to be manipulated one way or other by external forces.

I've seen people calculating what percentage of the working class are LGBT and what percentage are racist and deciding 'we' should posture as racist homophobes now... a particularly crude example of this kind of 'constituency' thinking.

Red Marriott

The growth of racism is real and not a mere passing electoral aberration; imo it can partly be traced to a decline of w/c identity – including in its official institutional and recuperative form of the old labour movement and its industrial base – leading to desperate searches for new primary clothes and masks such as race & nationality. The claims by some that this decline of w/c identity opens up a path to a messianic ‘immediate full communism now’ ignores the other possibilities that appear at present more likely – eg, a drift towards a new fascism

This is really important. Work-based identities may have been ultimately pro-capitalism, but they were also a basis for solidarity within it. There's a 2013 book Angry White Men by a liberal sociologist who hung out with Men's Rights Activists, white supremacists and the like. He basically finds a common factor in a sort of identity crisis in American masculinity among mostly non-college educated white men (not necessarily working class in Marxist terms, but many are), who kind of feel like they should be breadwinners, but can't afford to and/or can't understand why their wife divorced them, etc.

He doesn't put it in exactly these terms, but he's basically talking about the same breakdown of the 'Fordist' work-centred identity as communisation types, and how that loss of identity has lead to a disorienting, reactionary radicalisation of some men, for whom the available work, and relative freedom of women in relationships, don't conform to an idealised breadwinner role in a nuclear family. It seems like this nexus of family-gender-labour is at least partly implicated in Trumpism, and like you say Red, workers aren't just being duped by ideologues, some do really desire Trumpism and that's what needs to be explained (obviously loads of rich (white) men and women voted Trump too, so this isn't anywhere near a complete explanation, but it seems like part of the one - perhaps in Harlan County, at a guess).

In terms of more communist theory on this, I've found Angela Mitropoulos' work really useful on this:

Mitropoulos

It is what I would call a recursion to oikonomia, in that the lines of affection, intimacy and movement it seeks to redraw are around those of a familial-racial-national entity and its apparently unique properties. So we might also take an additional step and redescribe domestic violence as a method of control that includes both gendered violence as well as the kind of racist violence that escalated around Brexit, including the horrific murder of Jo Cox. It is not clear to me why we do not draw the connections between these two kinds of violence, which after all turn on ideas of domestic property (its rightful ownership, lines of inheritance and transmission), including for instance the kind of violence that Trump incites at his rallies in the US while conducting the entire campaign as one for a family-name brand.

Once again, I would say it is impossible to separate gendered and racial violence—in the case of Jo Cox’s murder, I think that women are more often cast as ‘race traitors’ because men being entitled to regard women (they read as white like them) as their property has been an important compensatory element in the history and politics of class and race. I think it is difficult to separate concepts of feminine availability (and anxiety about paternity or ownership, women’s promiscuity) from anxieties about proper, racial reproduction.

I am also still reeling a little at the realisation that Jo Cox’s murder did not lead to the widespread and outright rejection of Brexit but, instead, incited a rush to embrace some version of it in arguments for stricter migration controls, as if the mere presence of migrants rather than a racism is the problem. Which is perhaps an index of how deep, still, the emotional conflation between family, race and nation is, and why it returns as the normative idea of what a crisis is and how to solve it.

Her book's online as a pdf here too. I find this useful cos it's part of an analysis of class relations (specifically, the reproduction of labour power, and the bases of property and contracts), it helps understand dynamics where many workers act more in terms of race-nation (for example).

Also a some-time libcom poster went on an anti-Trump march and got mocked as a "redneck", so Trump isn't inventing the whole 'urban liberal elites hate small-town/rural Americans' thing, he's just tapping into that quasi-class hatred (it's more classism that class struggle I guess).

x

There does certainly seem to be a backlash against liberal ideology in this somewhere. It can be seen in a few ways; both in terms of a backlash from 'privileged' people (straight white men) against perceived gains from 'minorities' (everyone else) and I certainly think sexism played a part against Hillary to some extent but it is I think more important for revolutionaries to understand the other side at work. For starters the bourgeois notion of equality needs to be more thoroughly critiqued a lot of the time. The bourgeois concept of equality at best is the equality in the market place.

I'm sure most here know that but I think that just as Fascism always is a perverted insight into capitalism so the reaction against the 'pc brigade' by the 'Alt-Right' types is on some level a perverted insight into the ideological nature of 'equality' in its current conceptions.

An example of what I mean can be seen above where it was mentioned that there is an aspect of a certain section of men who feel as if there is no role for them that there's no masculine 'ideals' today. This is on one level people reacting to losing privilege but on a much much deeper level it is an expression of alienation and the fact that modern capitalist lives are not fulfilling in general. There is no authentic role for men or women today (either as men or women or on a more general human level).

I think my overall point is that the right-wing shift we are seeing as well as being explained by all the normal explanations of Fascism is also an ideological back lash against the Liberal ideology which has become more and more dominant in recent decades. The left has become more and more ideological in that period as it has focused on identity and words above all else.

Craftwork

.

"No support to Syriza, but certainly defense of labor, leftists, immigrants from Golden Dawn attacks" — and what about defense of workers, revolutionaries and immigrants from the much greater attacks of the SYRIZA government? Golden Dawn, and groups like it, are not significant in the grand scheme of things. These groups are the rot that festers in the wounds of society, when the working-class is under attack from the democratic bourgeoisie/capital.

Leftists (e.g. Trotskyists) pretty much offer the same analysis as you. They like to distinguish between different factions of the bourgeoisie, between, say, the 'nicer' bourgeois-democrats and the 'dangerous' fascists, or draw distinctions between the 'moderates' and nastier 'right-wing'... all this serves to reinforce ineffective opportunism, and make the prospect of cross-class alliances more palatable.

Honestly Craftwork--I don't see how your analysis applies to what SA, myself, and others have been saying. Noting that Trump represents a new line of attack and being sad that this line attack uses explicit racism in a way that heretofore was unacceptable, and to find it has so much support is not even remotely contingent on an inherent support of the DNC or it's constituent components. I'm really having a hard time understanding who you're arguing against because all I've seen so far here is an explicit rejection of lesser-evilism. I've always respected your contributions, but I'm really struggling to interpret what you're saying here as anything other than fighting a Straw Man of your own creation.

Of course the Dems facilitated Trump's rise. Of course they are all now lining up to provide 'loyal opposition.' None of that is surprising at all. It is also no surprise to anyone that a lot of Leftists line up to support Dems as a lesser evil. Of course they do. That's their role as the left wing of capital. But who on this thread is doing this?

this serves to reinforce ineffective opportunism, and make the prospect of cross-class alliances more palatable.

There is nothing in the arguments presented here that make Dem support inherent to understanding that Trump is not the same as others before him. That the institutionalized racism of both parties and the state is the number one threat to vulnerable populations, there is no doubt. Putting an out and out racist in charge of that apparatus, knowing how weak the worker's movement is--if that prospect isn't depressing, I don't know what would be.

I mean Dauve said something along the lines of--of course one would prefer to live in a social democratic sweden rather than NAZI Germany. The US is neither right now of course. 'Civil bourgeois society' as it has been is always going to be a more pleasant place to live than the alternative of a white supremicist led regime. Or as another example, fighting against being imprisoned doesn't mean a person believes they are actually free in capitalist society. Not to mention, we have more space for organizing in the current formulation--understanding of course that this could change at any moment, were we to become a legitimate threat.

I've said it before in this thread but it bears repeating--our analysis for the past 30+ years that both 'sides' are the same, needs to be adjusted to reflect the new reality, the facts on the ground, as it were. Of course both Trump and Sanders ultimately serve Capital. No questions, no arguments. But Trump represents a different line of attack--while his policies serve the same master as say, HRC or Sanders, Trumpism does it in a different, more direct way. A failure to recognize this change, and instead, sticking to the same binary, invariant analysis runs the risk of alienating those who most need our support right now, and allows us to be easily dismissed as 'cranks' who cannot see the difference in Capital's strategic change of attack.

x

Yo, so this thread has been great.. cheers to everyone for their contributions..

Wanted some quick thoughts on the J20 general strike that I've seen floated around social media: do people know where that call has come from? How do people see it shaping up?

#GeneralStrike has been called for #J20 inauguration day. Build the resistance against #Trump and his America #NotMyPresident pic.twitter.com/NysBctycTA— Occupy Oakland (@OccupyOakland) November 12, 2016

x

I 've seen a call-out on CrimethInc. #DisruptJ20 , supported by a number of anarchist and antifascist groups. No Peaceful Transition Itś mainly about street action and so on, but it mentions a general strike call.

*no longer interested*

Wooboy!! We got a live one!

So first, the inaccuracies; these are just the ones I know to be untrue,just by memory. Who knows how many other misleading or inaccurate things are in this post:

Trump won less popular votes than Mitt Romney secured in the 2008 election against Obama.

John McCain was the Republican nominee in 2008. Mitt Romney ran against Obama in 2012.

There is also the unreported issue of the announcement just prior to the election that insurance premiums would rise an average of 25 percent across the United States. Pennsylvania was said to be on track for an increase of over 32 percent!

Not only was this not unreported, many political analysts believe a combination of the rising premiums and the Comey letter cost Clinton the election. While I would argue it's more complicated than that, one would have to have read literally no news coverage of the last few weeks of the election in order to believe this issue went unreported.

With the except Bernie Sanders, Trump was the first candidate to go to the industrial heartlands where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost and say “we will rebuild the factories” since the collapses and liquidations of 1970's and 80's.

Again, just a simple perusal of american political literature would do you some good. Literally EVERY presidental nominee in the modern era has promised to do this. Off the top of my head, I think it was even cited in this very thread.

The potential difference between the popular vote and the votes of the winner in this election is unprecedented, yet this is not considered newsworthy by any major publication or media outlet let alone the Democratic Party and its candidates.

Again, most major news outlets mention this on a daily basis. If you narrow the scope to just cable news, the frequency increases to nearly every single hour.

During the primaries, as the coal industry plummeted, mines scaled down or closed, and courts allowed mine operators to cancel retired miner's pensions, Clinton said “we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right” before making some vague promises about “clean energy”

Have you ever seen the video from this speech?http://money.cnn.com/video/news/economy/2016/03/14/hillary-clinton-coal-miners.cnnmoney/Your characterization of it is complely inaccurate. Like, I'm about as far removed being a Clinton supporter as you re likely to find, and there are more than enough legitimate reasons to criticise her that you really wouldn't have to even smear her with half-truths. It really kind of reminds of something, someone recently said . . .

When you find yourself repeating the arguments of the bourgeois opinion making media mouthpieces and academics

Ah yes, that's the one.

And specifically on the coal issue, since you put clean energy in quotes I think it's worth noting here that it is market fundamentals pushing electricity away from coal usage and not policies or regulation.

Previous candidates, when they addressed these people at all, promised welfare or unemployment benefits, or “job retraining.” They rarely talked about “the working class” at all and they never talked about bringing back factory jobs

now we're marching into silly land. Other than the promise of retraining, no candidate running for office have or would say this, unless their goal was to lose by 1984-election margins.[/quote]

There are, or should be, some of the people communists look to the most, as opposed the the soft left-light which had all but disappeared the working class before this election in favor of focus groups of ideology driven students pushing for “safe spaces” on college campuses so they could live in their isolated suburban islands without danger of being potentially offended.

Before I read this paragraph I assumed you and I just had some significant differences, but were likely to be one the same side, more or less. But thing is, now I have read it, and now I know you're nowhere in the same vicinity as being on the same team. Therefore, you can fuck right off. Again, that one nugget of wisdom you gave us:

When you find yourself repeating the arguments of the bourgeois opinion making media mouthpieces and academics

If you think it had no effect, or that it had less effect than hate spewed by marginal racist grouplets like the KKK or individuals like David Duke which haven't been able to make any real inroads for four decades,

Do you even do news? You can just google the phrase, Day 4 in Trump's america. If that doesn't work, and you still you dont think these racist grouplets are making inroads, please go to the next antifa event close to you. Not only will you see with your own eyes the inroads these groups are making, you might just be able to so some actual good just by being there. (That is, unless you make habit of showing up to political groups, just like you did here, just to point score based on some prolier than thou crude workerism?)

When you find yourself repeating the arguments of the bourgeois opinion making media mouthpieces and academics scorning the “racist and backward” members of “the white working class” you may want to reconsider your position, or at least stop pretending to be on our side.

"Well hello there Mr. Pot. Allow me to introduce you to my old friend, Mr. Kettle."

Free tip, If your goal is constructive conversation or even trying to convert folks, you might not want to make your first post about telling everyone else they are counter revolutionary if they don't agree with you. Even then, if you want to play the full gambit, you're gonna want to fact-check your irrelevant screed. One final note, it is sometimes helpful to go ahead and read the thread you're commenting on before arguing against a position no one is actually taking. Otherwise you could open yourself up to looking foolish, and that would be embarrassing.

Some specifics I think we ought to remember to look for in the coming regime.

Things to consider in the coming weeks:

* Melania Trump intends to take on "Internet bullying" as her pet project, the way Michelle Obama approached nutrition or Laura Bush assumed literacy as her pet cause.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/10/magid-helping-melania-trump-combat-cyber-bullying/

Who do you think will be the bullies?

The critics of the regime.

And how many liberals bought into the school bullying "crisis" of the past several years?

* Most government statistics - FBI hate crime statistics particularly, courtesy of King James of Comey, but also unemployment and insurance rates - are going to be heavily manipulated, and this probably before the White Terror takes full hold. The liberal conceit that all socioeconomic problems can be resolved by appeal to the experts is going to be utterly discredited, to the extent it isn't already, by the use of Shadowstats in the incoming regime. Be heavily skeptical of sudden, rapid improvements in reported economic conditions.

Fortunately, most workers distrust these statistics intuitively.

* YouTube, the outlet de rigueur in the Bush Administration for Opposition activities, will be heavily censored, particularly once footage documenting the brutality of the fascist reaction begins emerging in earnest. I suggest keeping a cache of these videos downloaded to an external hard drive or flash drive. In the coming years truth will itself become a battlefield.

Don't wait. Save it now so that, in the future, they'll have to ask "who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?".

* I reiterate that the capitalist media relies on capitalist market mechanisms: Trump, the biggest draw ever to hold the office of the Presidency, will be in a position to dictate the terms of his coverage without any overt coercion. He will be relentless in freezing out the "biased, liberal media" whenever they contradict him, which is going to be increasingly less common.

I cannot repeat this enough: the news is going to be captured without a single gun being drawn. Make sure others understand this, and understand why. It isn't the result of a conspiracy; it's the natural function of the market at work.

jura

Thanks bastarx, that makes sense. I've seen the anti-Castroist aspect discussed elsewhere. As to the second point, don't many black voters compete for the same kinds of jobs? The turnout was such that blacks and Latinos represented roughly equal parts of the electorate (12% vs. 11%), but the difference in Trump support was pretty big. Could religion play a role in this?

I think so, I read something yesterday saying IIRC that 20-25% of Latinos are evangelical protestants and they vote like their white co-religionists - Republican.

Just had a look at that J20 call-out poster:
"We will not sit by and watch our freedoms, civil liberties and future opportunities be stripped away by a government that is not for the people or by the people."

Is that not what the electorate has been doing consistently for decades?
Is that not what all U.S governments seek to do?
Does this mean that this call out would have also been made if Clinton had have won?

I'm sure that this has been discussed already on this thread, but I still fail to see how the rampaging, neo-liberal hawk that is HRC could be seen as better (or worse) than Trump.

jesuithitsquad

That the institutionalized racism of both parties and the state is the number one threat to vulnerable populations, there is no doubt. Putting an out and out racist in charge of that apparatus, knowing how weak the worker's movement is--if that prospect isn't depressing, I don't know what would be.
[....]
I've said it before in this thread but it bears repeating--our analysis for the past 30+ years that both 'sides' are the same, needs to be adjusted to reflect the new reality, the facts on the ground, as it were. Of course both Trump and Sanders ultimately serve Capital. No questions, no arguments. But Trump represents a different line of attack--while his policies serve the same master as say, HRC or Sanders, Trumpism does it in a different, more direct way. A failure to recognize this change, and instead, sticking to the same binary, invariant analysis runs the risk of alienating those who most need our support right now, and allows us to be easily dismissed as 'cranks' who cannot see the difference in Capital's strategic change of attack.

By US Presidential standards, Trump's racism is unexceptional, and Trump isn't such a conservative.
Systemic injustices prevail, whoever's in-charge. Trump's policies will not and cannot differ that fundamentally from Obama's. [see image below]
The idea that Trump, a cosmopolitan, New York businessman, is die-hard racist, rather than a mere opportunist/egoist, is absurd. Republicans don't have many 'values'. They're extremely servile to business interests.
As for the likes of the KKK/national socialists, they're marginal at best.
Also, much of the activism/protests appear to be confined to liberal areas/Democrat strongholds, in other words, not really making inroads in "enemy territory" so to speak.

I think Trump is a worst prospect than Clinton would have been for several reasons. He wants to be ‘unpredictable’. The idea that his political cronies will keep him under control, is as comforting as being given a crocodile as a present, and told he can be kept in the bath.

Clinton wanted to confront Russia over Syria. That appears to me small potatoes when Trump wants to: give all of Jerusalem to Israel (it was reported that the Senate is in agreement); scrap the Iran treaty to the delight of the Saudis and Israel; open a trade war with China (those economic rapists). I could go on. The only hopeful prospect is that he will so disappoint his supporters, that a reason to impeach him can be manufactured in the not too distant future.

Confronting Russia in Syria is small potatoes? But for a trade war with China that could turn into a cold war, all the other things you mention are small potatoes. Israel already has de facto control of Jerusalem and have had so for ages; the US and Iran have been at heads for decades and it is only recently relations improved and before that fuck all happened.

If anything, Trump is more of a disaster domestically than internationally. In some way, Trump could actually lead to tensions between Russia and the West to lessen; that is, unless he actually will leave NATO which may embolden Russia in Europe (and that is defe a large potato).

Noam Chomsky Predicted The Rise of Trump 6 Years Ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UwG0yizFw0
[youtube]1UwG0yizFw0[/youtube]

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craftwork

by US Presidential standards, Trump's racism is unexceptional

yeah it's stuff like this that i was talking about. It's just fundamentally, factually inaccurate. Even though it's in and of itself exceptional, forget all of his rhetoric. Assume it's all opportunist as you say.

The man is factually, literally an actual racist. I mean, at the most basic, definitional level. He was sued and settled a discrimination case with the Justice Department. In the 2nd debate(?), his response to a question about this was along the lines of 'yeah, but everyone else discriminated in the 70s.'

Both the case and his answer to this question would have been disqualifying for any other candidate of the past generation. If you can show me candidates in the modern era who are also documented racists, like on a legal level, I'll gladly withdraw the point, but they don't exist.

The argument that Trump is unexceptional is just baffling to me. Sure people are bending the stick too far sometimes. Maybe even I'm doing it from time to time, idk. But to respond by bending the stick so far the other direction as to risk breaking the damn thing, I just don't get it.

EDIT--crossposted with SA.

If he explicitly selects USSC justices based on their willingness to "pre-announce" their desire to overturn Roe v. Wade, is that a significant policy change from Obama? I think so.

Not just Obama, but every Presidential nominee since 1974, IIRC. The lack of a litmus test on Roe v Wade is a bipartisan tradition. Almost certainly lip-service, but a tradition all the same...

Khawaga #492

Perhaps your crystal ball is better than mine. With Clinton, Russia knew what it was up against. With Trump no one knows what he is capable of. As you say, Jerusalem has been part of the occupied territories for years, however to sanction its political takeover and establishing it as Israel’s new capital is, I believe, a greater humiliation to the Palestinians and the Arab world than you give credit. Small potatoes?

Your comment regarding Iran is at best ill-informed. Fuck all happened? The West attempted to destroy it before, by supplying arms to Iraq during the years when they were at war. Or have you forgotten the effects of years of western sanctions? Israel has long wanted an armed intervention. Will they now get the green light? Does the Iranian regime do nothing in the face of these threats?

China has been the only lever the USA has had when trying to contain North Korea. There again Trump has indicated nuclear proliferation is not really a problem. So that’s all right then.

On foreign policy, Max Fisher does a decent job laying out the concerns by region.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/world/americas/donald-trump-foreign-policy.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthe-interpreter&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection&referer=http://www.nytimes.com/column/the-interpreter

Iran and Israel are small proxy wars; Americans and Russians shooting at each other is not. Proxy wars keep the superpowers in a predictable stalemate. The point is, despite all the efforts to try to topple the Iranian regime, Iran's response could never ignite a new world war.

And so what about humiliating the Palestinians? We've seen decades worth of it; most Palestinians, unless they are geriatrics, cannot visit the al-Aqsa mosque. Shit still has not gone down in any way that could lead to world war.

I know my Middle Eastern history very well, thank you very much. What I am saying is based on that knowledge. If anything, you're lacking perspective. Sure, what has happened in the Middle East is a tragedy, but the chances of that spilling over has never been that great. The point is that Americans shooting at Russians in Syria has a much higher chance of developing into something even much worse than what we have so far seen.

But, I agree. This is crystal ball stuff, so who the fuck knows what will happen or what would have happened with a Clinton victory.

Edited the autocorrect errors

New post on Lifelong Wobbly: To Escape Trump's America, We Need to Bring the Militant Labor Tactics of 1946 Back to the Future

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Kind of in the same vein, how thanks to Bush and Obama's strengthening of executive powers and surveillance ability, these powers are now in the hands of Trump.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/11/commander-in-chief-donald-trump-will-have-terrifying-powers-thanks-obama/

I think Khawaga is right about Israel and Palestine. Realistically who is going to attack Israel if Jerusalem is recognised as its capital? An Israeli strike on Iran would be risky, depending on how it was organised, but Israel isn't going to drop nukes on Iran any time soon. Russia, from a strategic point of view, is quite happy to see Iran weakened and humiliated. It brings it back into the sphere of influence.

In terms of Trump encouraging racism, I can only mention anecdotal evidence, but I4ve seen a fair few facebook posts from friends and friends of friends who have been insulted in the street or who have had people telling them that they should speak English with their kids.

Edit : also Artesian is right about voter suppression. Regardless of your viewpoint on voting systematic efforts to deprive people, specifically minorities, of their voting rights are a danger.

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@ #476
Mitropoulos

the lines of affection, intimacy and movement it seeks to redraw are around those of a familial-racial-national entity and its apparently unique properties.

Seems odd that she doesn't seem to include the rise of fundamentalist religion, with its 'Holy Fathers', as fulfilling a similar familial-type function.

running tab here

http://ithasbegun2016.tumblr.com

Red Marriott

@ #476
Mitropoulos

the lines of affection, intimacy and movement it seeks to redraw are around those of a familial-racial-national entity and its apparently unique properties.

Seems odd that she doesn't seem to include the rise of fundamentalist religion, with its 'Holy Fathers', as fulfilling a similar familial-type function.

Agreed, in fact I thought about It's absence when I noticed the familial-racial-national formulation was eerily reminiscent of Faith-Folk-Family, which is the slogan for a newish US fash group.

*no longer interested*

*no longer interested*

I posted it here in part to oppose the analysis of S.Artesian which all to many libcommers seem to lap up with love

Yeah - and with all due respect to S.A whose contributions on this thread have really been insightful - bsuok you clearly haven't been following libcom for any length of time to make a statement like this.

bsouk- like, have you still not watched the video even after being called out for repeating a false right-wing attack line? I even did your homework for you and gave you a link. Or you do know what she said and are still continuing the misinformation?

So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

So, the point she was obviously trying to make is actually the opposite of why you were attacking her. Again, I can give you countless reasons to attack Clinton, but you've simply repeated a Rush Limbaugh smear, and did it in the same breath of accusing me of falling for Clinton talking points.

You asked if I know about these issues, here's an anecdote. Where I live, we brush our fucking teeth with coal as the saying goes. Of the 100 super polluters in the US something like 25% of them inhabit a 30 mile radius in my state. And yet, the coal related industry accounts for no more than 2,500 jobs statewide.

Meanwhile, a statewide Energy Efficiency program that grassroots organizations worked really hard to get implemented created over 19,000 good paying jobs. Additionally, in its first year, the program saved enough electricity to power a city of 250,000 people for year. The energy association was terrified the invester-owned utilities wouldn't make enough profits, and so they were able to sneak a provision for "lost revenues" into the legislation so the utilities profits remained steady on the deal. Despite this, the program was still wildly successful , saved ratepayers money, and was deeply popular.

In 2013 a new Koch Brothers-backed govenor was elected. 7 of the governor's top 10 contributors were Investor-owned electricity providers and related organizations, and despite the lost revenues provision, they detested the energy efficiency programs.

In his first legislative session, he backed legislation to overturn the program and replaced it with legislation allowing the utilities to write their own energy efficiency programs. To date, none of the 5 investor owned electric utlilites has submitted an energy efficiency program sufficient for the Utility Regulatory Commission's approval.

The point to going in to depth on the issue is threefold. 1) There are good paying clean energy jobs; there are even more clean energy jobs than coal industry jobs. 2) To illustrate to you that yes, in fact, I understand a little something about this issue and 3) As a general point of interest that the Koch Brothers-backed governor is now the Vice President Elect of the United States, who will likely play an outsized role in energy issues at the federal level.

The bottom line is that juxtaposing clean energy against employment is a false narrative pushed by the coal industry, as is the notion that coal is struggling because of regulations and subsidies to wind and solar. Coal is struggling because it is expensive, has a massive social cost, and unsubsidized wind and solar continue to produce electricity at a lower KwH each successive year. And that's before even dipping our toes into the flooded waters of the on-coming disaster that is Climate Change.

Tonight on 60 minutes, there was Donald Trump, Jr dismissing racist attacks as fabrications. And then now, here you are downplaying the incidents in nearly identical phrases. There have been a couple alleged fabrications; the majority are documented facts. But if you call ripping a hijab off a woman non violent, well then fuck off.

While the KKK and David Duke are relative small-potatoes, the violent far right as a whole are not so much. As I've demonstrated before, Trump gives these guys a rallying point. One of the reasons they are so small is because of the incredibly high levels of internal strife. Rallying around Trump has brought many of them to a point of regroupment. The thing with these movements is to deal with them precisely while they are still small...

Gotta say it was a bold rhetorical choice deciding your best play on my comment that it seems you're playing for the wrong team was going with 'no u.'

Your next right-wing inspired comment was mocking the notion of safe-spaces by claiming they are designed to help rich kids avoid being offended. I'm not even going to get into this with you, but surely even you can see the irony of accusing everyone on the thread of repeating canned media talking points and accusing me of parroting HRC talking points all whilst spouting, verbatim, lines that would be right at home in a Trump speech.
.
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(Someone should probably give Goldner a heads up that he might he want to vet these comments before giving bsouk space in IN, just sayin'.)

Some left wing people here (UK) have also been saying that the reports of racist attacks after Brexit were exaggerated. I think the level of under reporting is actually really high. I saw two racist attacks in the street after Brexit and I didn't report either of them (I did intervene though) and four of my friends were racially harassed the weekend directly after Brexit.

In one of my classes, all women, one student said she'd been racially harassed and then fully half the class said they'd also been racially harassed. They didn't mean specifically after Brexit, just that since moving to the UK they'd been harassed, but this area is so diverse that there's a research project on 'superdiversity' that's based here. I went to a talk about it and interviewees had said that they feel safer here because they don't stand out and feel they are less likely to be racially harassed. So if it's that high here, I think it's a very serious problem and under reported.

I would also like to say that yes I think we should take very seriously the situation of working class people living in deindustrialised areas where there are declining numbers of jobs. However we shouldn't go from there to dismissing or putting down the working class people who live in the big cities or the more job-plentiful bits of the country. Workers in those areas may have work but are struggling with high rent and low wages. There's no reason to make it Pennsylvania vs LA or make it Yorkshire vs London, which I'm seeing creeping in to the discussion in a fair few places. I've got mates in LA and they are scared they are going to be gentrified out of the area they've lived all their lives. The number of people being evicted and made homeless in London is frightening.

And can I say that I do think the issue of ignoring the deindustrialised areas is real but a lot of anarchists live in those areas and are active there.

We need to remind liberals on the borderline that the Democratic Party will do absolutely nothing for them.

Take a look at this.

Does she sound ike someone the incoming regime is going to prosecute to you?

Liberals are victims of the long con.

The two themes that seem to have dominated much of the post-election discussion on this thread and generated some exaggerated accusations of right or left/liberal leaning bias amongst posters is the extent to which Trumps campaign and victory (the peculiarities of the federal electoral system aside) resulted from his anti-immigrant/racist/sexist language and imagery and/or his 'promises' to regenerate the industrial 'heartlands' of the USA. So far it seems to me that a combination of both seems to be somewhere near the truth but that the later was what made the difference this time round, given workers experience under all the most recent past Republican and Democrat regimes. Even if that was the case Trumps extremist language by past standards would inevitably be a factor in encouraging anti-immigrant and racist attacks (as appeared to be the case post the UK Brexit).

PS: Just as an aside I'd say that how the 'Clean energy versus coal' debate is perceived in terms of it's impact on peoples daily lives within capitalism tends to differ according to the sectional interests of both workers and capitalists and doesn't necessarily have any practical working class wide reformist solutions.

Red Marriott

@ #476
Mitropoulos

the lines of affection, intimacy and movement it seeks to redraw are around those of a familial-racial-national entity and its apparently unique properties.

Seems odd that she doesn't seem to include the rise of fundamentalist religion, with its 'Holy Fathers', as fulfilling a similar familial-type function.

She mentions it in passing in the book, though the analysis is more focussed at the level of marriage contracts as a social form, which religious fundamentalisms are often an attempt to reassert I guess.

Initial reaction on our website....

http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201611/14175/president-trump-symbol-dying-social-system

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bsuok

Voter suppression could help explain a drop in black votes, but it couldn't explain that Trump won a higher percentage of black votes cast than the last candidate who ran on the Republican ticket.

people have got to start learning basic statistics before they start trying to interpreter the result of elections and polls.
If there are two options and the number for one goes down wile the other stays the same, then the proportion for the first decreases and the proportion for the second goes up despite having no more supporters

As the article I linked to argues, I don't think there's any contradiction between the misdirected rejection of the 'neo-liberal' policies of the last few decades and the racist rhetoric. Many workers who would insist that they are not racist are still vulnerable to the nationalist scare-monging, since the latter goes hand in hand with the populist attacks on the globalising elites, who are denounced for exposing 'native' labour both to competition from migrant workers and the shifting of production to Asia and elsewhere.

"Again, more detailed statistical studies are needed, but it does appear that a core strength of the Trump campaign was the support it won from non-college educated whites, and especially from workers in the ‘Rust Belt’, the new industrial deserts who voted for Trump as a protest against the established political order, personified in the so-called ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. Many of these same workers or regions had voted for Obama in the previous elections, and some supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Their vote was above all a vote against – against the growing inequality of wealth, against a system which they felt has deprived them and their children of any future. But this opposition was framed in the complete absence of a real working class movement, and has thus fed the populist world-view which blames the elite for selling out the country to foreign investors, to giving special privileges to migrants, refugees and ethnic minorities at the expense of the ‘native’ working class – and to women workers at the expense of male workers. The racist and misogynist elements of Trumpism thus go hand in hand with the rhetorical attacks on the ‘elite’".

The relationship between racism and anti-capitalism/globalisation is well articulated by, for example, Postone in Anti-semitism and National Socialism (e.g. the relationship, for example, between hostility to financiers/bankers and hostility to Jews).

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Craftwork

The relationship between racism and anti-capitalism/globalisation is well articulated by, for example, Postone in Anti-semitism and National Socialism (e.g. the relationship, for example, between hostility to financiers/bankers and hostility to Jews).

Thanks for the link, Craftwork. A really interesting read.

Juan Conatz

Should be pointed out that Trump appointed the former CEO of Breitbert, a site that really blurs the lines between angry white male, Republicans, the alt-right and actual fascists. He promptly reached out to UKIP and Front National in France.

This has drawn praise from the American Nazi Party, who now think Trump might be the real deal:

The chairman of the American Nazi Party was surprised Trump put Steve Bannon in the White House. https://t.co/8V2a127Mfw pic.twitter.com/o9pqz6waPk— Anthony De Rosa (@Anthony) November 14, 2016

Obama continues his remarkable kowtow to a man who, when Clinton's electoral success was at stake, he regularly skewered and characterized as dangerous and unfit for the presidency. Maybe he's recognized the benefits of the Putin approach of flattering Trump and in response getting Trump to orient his policies in your favor, but who knows. Somewhat intriguingly, Obama's given some indication that he plans to return to his liberal activist roots once he's out of office. Nothing very exciting for communists, of course, but a bit unusual for a US president.

*no longer interested*

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bsuok

If his actions didn't speak loudly enough, Obama already spilled the beans, maybe even more than he should have, on Trump's election: "This is an intramural scrimmage."

For those who don't know, an intramural scrimmage is a practice match played by people from the same school.

There is no "good bourgeoisie" and "anti-fascism" is a trap just like "lesser of two evils" is. There is the bourgeoisie, and their various tactics and forms of rule, and there is the working class. And it is between those two camps that the real battles take place.

Who x do you think you're giving a vocabulary lesson to? Given all your spelling and grammatical mistakes, in addition intentional falsehoods, you're hardly in a position to preach to anyone.

You registered on libcom just hours ago and you're already acting like x . Why don't you take your condescending hustle elsewhere? Don't you have a flock of parishioners somewhere else to tend to?

admin: flaming removed. Please be civil

*no longer interested*

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Statements from US Anarchist groups on the election of Trump (in order of time they came out):

No one is coming to save us
http://m1aa.org/?p=1268

Red November, Black November An Anarchist Response to the Election
http://www.blackrosefed.org/election-statement-2016/

WSA's Post-Election Statement
http://ideasandaction.info/2016/11/post-election-statement/

*no longer interested*

bsuok

Hieronymous

bsuok

If his actions didn't speak loudly enough, Obama already spilled the beans, maybe even more than he should have, on Trump's election: "This is an intramural scrimmage."

For those who don't know, an intramural scrimmage is a practice match played by people from the same school.

There is no "good bourgeoisie" and "anti-fascism" is a trap just like "lesser of two evils" is. There is the bourgeoisie, and their various tactics and forms of rule, and there is the working class. And it is between those two camps that the real battles take place.

Who the fuck do you think you're giving a vocabulary lesson to? Given all your spelling and grammatical mistakes, in addition intentional falsehoods, you're hardly in a position to preach to anyone.

You registered on libcom just hours ago and you're already acting like a pedantic dick. Why don't you take your condescending hustle elsewhere? Don't you have a flock of parishioners somewhere else to tend to?

I don't even really know what you're talking about. No where did I preach. I have nothing to sell and no group to recruit anyone too. I was simply clarifying a term that some may not be familiar with. There may be people who don't speak English as a first language here or otherwise have trouble with it and "intramural scrimmage" isn't exactly every day speech.

I've been a communist probably since my first picket line more than 20 years ago. I haven't registered on Libcom until now, and this sort of post would be a good example of why I haven't. The others trashing people from my neck of the woods as backwards racists would be another. Sorry about any grammar or spelling mistakes I made. I never made it past high school. I had to go to work.

So now you're telling us that we're judging your "neck of the woods as backwards racists." You're a fucking liar because we have no idea of who you are or where you're from.

So, giving you the benefit of the doubt, what woods did you grow up in? What work do you do (besides for Goldner)?

Frankly, your whole intervention shtick on libcom smacks of bad faith and condescension. I --wrongfully -- assumed you picked up vocabulary about rugby at prep school or while studying -- granted poorly given your writing ability -- sociology at some Ivy League school (since that actually is everyday speech on a college campus).

admin: again please tone down the abuse

*no longer interested*

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bsuok

Unlike your cheerful welcome and non-condescending way of trashing my (lack of) ability to put words together, right?

In your first post, you led with your chin. You talked trash, were prolier than thou, told us how wrong we were, and specifically because we were having a substantial discussion with Artesian. So instead you're right; based on what? An Insurgent Notes text you'd been solicited to write? Hopefully, you'll at least use spellcheck on that one -- and have someone do a simple fact check edit.

bsuok

Thanks for criticizing my writing ability some more without addressing anything I actually said though. It's endearing (almost wrote "endeering" 'cause of my poor learnin'). I'll try to study harder professor.

This has nothing to do with formal -- or institutional -- education. The process of learning has more to do with opening your mind. I've learned more from fellow workers and comrades, like those here on libcom, than I have in any academic setting.

bsuok, my unsolicited advice to you would be to type less and think more.

bsuok

radicalgraffiti

bsuok

Voter suppression could help explain a drop in black votes, but it couldn't explain that Trump won a higher percentage of black votes cast than the last candidate who ran on the Republican ticket.

people have got to start learning basic statistics before they start trying to interpreter the result of elections and polls.
If there are two options and the number for one goes down wile the other stays the same, then the proportion for the first decreases and the proportion for the second goes up despite having no more supporters

But voters weren't suppressed on the basis of which candidate they would vote for, since that would require mind reading among other precise information, which is not what happened.

Trends can be identified among certain areas and groups, and those groups can be targeted for suppression, but it's not like people are getting turned around at the polls for carrying Democratic Party cards.

oh? so if some identifies the areas that traditionally vote for there political opponents and make sure its harder for people in those areas to vote it don't make no difference to the election? i guess soon you'll be telling me there is no such thing as gerrymandering either

bsuok

It is also significant that a lot of black people simply didn't go to the polls. Maybe they know something than others who think Clinton was some kind of barrier against an impending Reich don't.

It's not that Trump surged among black voters or anything like that. But there was no surge of black support for Clinton, who helped throw countless black people behind bars and end "welfare as we know it," and that is the point, and that is a major reason why Trump increased his portion of the black vote.

yes its significant, because it shows why trump won, not because he convinced people he could solve there problems, but because he did nothing to put off the normal republican voter while Hillary had nothing to offer, her best point was she wasnt trump, and that it turned out wasn't enough for a lot of people to vote for her. where obarma had hope and medical care hilary had memes and isn't trump, not a terribly inspiring package.
i'm not sure why you want to present this as " Trump increased his portion of the black vote." which although not technical incorrect, makes it sound like he gained black voters, which isn't the case, maybe you don't intend it this way, but i think its important to make a clear distinction between:
people being uninspired by the political options presented to them and
people being inspired by a a far right political program.

Because the first appears to be what's actually happened, and the second is the narrative the media is mostly going to go with. The second justifies trump and everything he is going to do and the first undermines the whole political system.
I'm not sure which angle you are pushing here? your clearly right about several points but your conclusions seem to be giving more credit to trump than is actually the case

I'd like to butt in for a moment and ask if everyone could try to make their case with fewer pointless insults. I think both "sides" have good points, but I'm getting exasperated with the bickering.

Just my two cents.

As our posting guidelines state, 'play the ball not the person'. There some very interesting and enlightening conversation happening here, but If there are any further personal attacks or insults, warnings will be issued to users and the offending posts deleted.

Ed

Yo, so this thread has been great.. cheers to everyone for their contributions..

Wanted some quick thoughts on the J20 general strike that I've seen floated around social media: do people know where that call has come from? How do people see it shaping up?

#GeneralStrike has been called for #J20 inauguration day. Build the resistance against #Trump and his America #NotMyPresident pic.twitter.com/NysBctycTA— Occupy Oakland (@OccupyOakland) November 12, 2016

S. Artesian

I have "heard" about big demonstrations planned, but not exactly as a general strike.

Hieronymus is usually on top of this stuff.

This sounds so much like the post-Occupy call for a general strike on May Day 2012. In Oakland, that came on the heels of the J28 "Move-In Day" debacle, where activists -- including some self-identified as part of the communisation tendency -- tried to covertly organize the occupation of the second or third largest building in the city, the Kaiser Auditorium. It was an utter failure and the best that could be said about the action was that it made spectacular riot porn during some of the brazen -- and ultimately defeated -- street fighting. On May Day 2016, the cops also managed to kettle crowds to prevent anything from kicking off, as well as having snatch squads wade into crowds to arrest militants.

In the reaction to the Trump victory, some of the same types of street skirmishes have occurred again in Oakland and Berkeley, amounting mostly to less spectacular dumpster fires and barricades made up of knee-high piles of garbage on the street. Hardly a reenactment of the Paris Commune.

Sadly, with no movement within the working class, I expect May Day 2017 to be a replay of the 3 events above. But it doesn't have to be so. Below, I will trace an alternative direction this might possibly play out.

On the first and second day post-election last over 10 San Francisco middle and high schools almost entirely cleared out -- many of the same schools that had cleared out on May Day 2006 as well as on March 4, 2010. Coincidentally, the political establishment from the local chief of police and mayor, through the governor, to Obama, Hillary Clinton and president-elect Trump -- with the latter initially calling the protestors "unfair" -- started praising the demonstrators as "passionate" and upholders of the democratic right to protest, ad nauseam. All of them, to a person, has been seeking stability above all else.

But what if the Latina/o kids, many of whom were part of the 2010 attempts at a coordinated statewide walkout -- our romantic general strike -- against austerity in education and the public sector took up the mantle of this again. Which might draw in black kids because at the marches I've been to in San Francisco "black lives matter" is a constant refrain. And since Latina/os are the biggest demographic group in California schools statewide, this would solidly center the protests on working class Latina/o families. Since many of the parents of these kids took part in the nationwide general strike against H.R. 4437 -- the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Act -- they might draw on this class action once again and with the added benefit of the kids being aware that Black Lives Matter clearly involves brown youth too, who are in the sights of homicidal cops as much as black young men, especially throughout parts of the U.S. where there are many Latina/o workers.

I went on an evening demonstration the evening of Wednesday, November 9, the day after the election. I almost left as it was organized by the ANSWER Coalition and began with their litany of quasi-Stalinist-liberal demands and banally boring speeches. But the rally became a permitted march and ended up passing through the predominately gay Castro District. There it took on a life of it's own and many young gay and lesbian couples came out of bars to join the march. Soon there was a sizeable contingent of transgender youth as well. What was inspiring was that as each new faction joined the march, the slogans reflected their desires and fears with a Trump presidency. I ideologically find fault with "intersectionality" as abstract ideology, but in practice this march was what it could -- and should -- be, which is an inclusive attitude to all the divergent parts of the working class and a sensitivity to their needs, concerns and -- especially in the age of Trump -- fears.

Lastly, many young militant women at the marches have brought up their concern for reproductive rights and defense of Roe vs. Wade. I know this might sound like liberal sentimentality, as you had to be there to feel the visceral power of it, but women started chanting "my body, my choice," then men in reciprocity started replying "your body, your choice." I got a lump in my throat thinking about how un-lame the whole march had become all of a sudden and how ANSWER was no longer in control and how open and limitless the possibilities seemed.

As I posted above, I caught a brief glimpse as several thousand school kids marched past my workplace on the morning of Thursday, November 10 and what I'll never forget was Latino kitchen workers coming out of restaurants to cheer the youth on. I even saw some office workers in tears and was almost moved to tears myself seeing men and women in business suits coming off the curb into the streets to march with the students. And traffic came to a standstill and it seemed like every driver was honking their horn rhythmically, in support. If somehow we could start a movement that could draw working class people out of their workplaces like that again, we'll have genuine class struggle and it would spread solidarity throughout the class -- and that could even lead to mass strikes.

Now it's a week later and all the actions in the streets seem like the tired old empty rituals they always are. But in my gut I feel like a spark was lit and it might smolder for a while, but it might also reignite and should Trump sic his ICE goons on immigrants, a reaction like May Day 2006, the gran boicot, might happen again. If only the Crimethinc -- and other -- organizers can get out of the riot porn ghetto and start talking to their co-workers about struggles from the point of production -- and distribution, consumption and reproduction -- but also against the repression of immigrants, people of color, Muslims, women, queers, transgender people, and homeless folks, etc., etc., and in solidarity with all laid off industrial workers, coal miners and refinery workers, and all the unemployed and underemployed, as well as with employed workers struggling against declining living conditions, etc., while putting their critique -- and call to action -- in class terms, a general strike might truly be possible again.

Just some random thoughts. I'd love to hear the ideas of others (even the naysayers on this thread).

x

*no longer interested*

*no longer interested*

bsuok

You make me wonder where *you* are from. Maybe some liberal arts college. Maybe I'm wrong.

Play the ball, not the player. As in, be honest this is passive-aggressive, you have no interest in me or anyone on libcom -- since your guru has a program that you lap up with love.

When Trump started winning primaries, several of my co-workers were constantly on the company computers, scheming ways to migrate out of the U.S. Goldner wasn't the only one predicting a Trump victory.

bsuok, your typos pale in comparison to your factual errors. jesuihitsquad did a fine job refuting them, but in order to play the ball here are the more egregious ones I found:

bsuok

#8 There is also the unreported issue of the announcement just prior to the election that insurance premiums would rise an average of 25 percent across the United States. Pennsylvania was said to be on track for an increase of over 32 percent! This is the legacy Clinton, already hated and despised as a soulless and corrupt apparatchik beholden to Wall Street and the security state apparatus, proclaimed her eagerness to continue.

This news story was running 24/7 for days before the election. My insurer sent me a letter saying as much in case I wasn't paying attention to the media. How in the world can you say this? Did you mean "constantly reported" and this was a typo?

bsuok

9. “Whites” between the ages of 24 and 59 have the highest death rates caused by suicide, drugs and alcohol of any “racial group” in America. Some groups of such as middle aged, low income white people, have seen death rate surges of up to 25 percent in a handful of years. This has never been seen in a developed country (let alone the richest country in the world) and is comparable to the results of the collapse of the USSR and “Eastern Bloc.”

Sure, and this is awful. But why is the working class addicted to opiates and methamphetamine? Where do they come from and how do they get distributed? That was a big attraction for building the wall, to keep the "Mexican criminals" from bringing the drugs. Which is a racist scapegoat for a much more serious, complex problem.

bsuok

#11. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, Trump was the first candidate to go to the industrial heartlands where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost and say “we will rebuild the factories” since the collapses and liquidations of 1970's and 80's. This should not be underestimated in places where whole cities have been destroyed after plant closures, with the people left in them to rot away and die.

Since I have been able to read, politicians have pandered to laid off industrial workers and gone into rust belts and said "jobs," "jobs," and more "jobs." While they were not fools enough to say they would build factories, they were telling the same lie. Some even evoked the same anti-Chinese xenophobia and said those jobs will be brought back. Again bsuok, for the 20 years you've been a commie haven't you read the news? Just do a simple google search and you'll find tons of stories about political candidates visiting shuttered factories and promising laid off workers everything under the sun -- and especially jobs.

bsuok

This is the same sort of UAW leadership that pushed anti-Japanese rhetoric to the max in the 1980's and whipped workers up into a violent frenzy that led directly to violent attacks (and even murder) of totally innocent Asian people in Michigan, but wouldn't dare lift a finger to reach out to Japanese autoworkers for joint activity or challenge the Big Three bosses as they dismantled factories across America.

The man had a name: Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982. Since Walter Reuther built the UAW into a "one-party-state" decades before, it's naive to hope that is will ever endorse class struggle or internationalism. It, along with the AFL-CIO, have always been linchpins of anti-communism and U.S. imperialism. What else is new?

And "dismantled factories across America" is factually untrue. Most of the factories were moved south of the Mason-Dixon Line to right-to-work states in the South. Or across the border to be part of a NAFTA auto production cluster with Mexico (and Canada to a lesser extent). Lost of assembly happens in the U.S., but 70% of the component are manufactured abroad. Remember the floods in Thailand in the fall of 2011? Auto electronic component factories there closed, which shut down assembly lines in North American. The auto production system is so globally interconnected that talking about the "Big Three bosses" is inaccurate.

bsuok

(#11)These are, or should be, some of the people communists look to the most, as opposed the the soft left-light which had all but disappeared the working class before this election in favor of focus groups of ideology driven students pushing for “safe spaces” on college campuses so they could live in their isolated suburban islands without danger of being potentially offended.

If we believe in the relevance of class struggle we should have bonds of solidarity across the world, from the homeless tent cities of Fresno, California, to the shopfloors of Shenzhen factories and workshops, to the mines of Bolivia, to the unemployed autoworker in Flint, to the cotton farmer in Senegal, to the Filipina nurse in Saudi Arabia, to the barista at Starbucks in Manhattan -- and everywhere in between. Class war happens in all aspects of social life under capital, to neglect one of these means to ignore them all.

Where does this contempt for students come from? Ressentiment? Read Marc Bousquet's How the University Works and his chapter "Students are Already Workers," (which I learned of thanks to John Garvey of Insurgent Notes), with these stats:

Marc Bousquet

In the United States, only 20 percent of undergraduates do not work at all. About 50 percent of all undergraduates work an average of twenty-five hours per week. The remaining 30 percent work full-time, more than full-time, or at multiple jobs approximating the equivalent of full-time, averaging thirty-nine hours a week. This means that about 10 or 12 million undergraduates are in the workforce at any given moment. Indeed, if you’re a U.S. citizen under age twenty-five, you are more likely to be working if you are a student than if you are not. Over 3 million persons aged twenty to twenty-four are unemployed. Being a student isn’t just a way of getting a future job—it’s a way of getting a job right now.

Which begs the question: are they workers who study? or students who work?

Or does it make a difference? They're part of the working class, so bsuok you're contempt for them is anti-working class.

And are you reactionary enough to mock students fighting for safer spaces? That's disgusting! The whole fucking world should be a safer space and we should all unite to stop anyone from being threatened, beaten or killed because of their gender identity or preference, or their religion, or the color of their skin. This is a no-brainer. Only a perverse ideologue would turn the suffering of the oppressed into something to mock. bsuok, please open your mind and get rid of his "hard" workerist commie shtick. It's pretty nauseating.

Cross-posted with others-- Great posts by Hieronymous and Juan above re:J20. H-- Multiple times in the past couple days I've retold your 'the kids are alright' account you posted last week.

In the interest of keeping the conversation constructive, I'm going to forego responding to bsouk directly, and instead make a few general points:

a) Given the current state of and prospects for electricity-generation technology, the heads-on approaching calamity of climate change, the health detriments to miners--up to and including death, in addition to the flat-out poisoning of working class neighborhoods by emissions containing arsenic, mercury, and a multitude of heavy metals, just like we say about police and prisons, there will be no communist coal mines.

b) Though I've said nothing to indicate otherwise, just to avoid any confusion, I do not consider natural gas to be clean energy. (Incidentally, neither does anyone with any credibility on the matter.)

c) I've seen no evidence in this thread of anyone blaming a 'stupid, racist working class.' Instead, most here have accepted that there is likely a combination of economic concerns and racism involved in Trump's support. If Trump's racism wasn't actually the primary attraction for some, then at a minimum, these supporters were not repelled by it enough to reject him.

d) I've always had time for Goldner's analysis. Though I don't always agree with everything he writes, I think he often has thought-provoking things to say.

e) Singling out any one person for not projecting a Trump win is unproductive, at best. Very few got it right, and many of those who did simply got lucky. In fact, in many ways those who predicted a Clinton win were right, given that she will have garnered millions more votes than Trump; the votes were just in the wrong locations for Clinton. Even then, if the election had been held on October 28th, Clinton would have won in a massive landslide (by modern standards). Her margins on the 28th were large enough to accommodate the polling misses in a handful of states. Ridiculing anyone for not foreseeing the Comey letter, the larger than expected ACA-related premium increases, and most importantly, Trump's new-found ability to stay on message and prosecute the case against Clinton--instead of always turning the focus to him-- is patently ridiculous.

f) Unrelated, in many conversations with liberals, there is a lot of anger at the DNC, and it's not just directed at the Clinton campaign. The anger seems to increase with each 'intermural scrimmage' type comments and actions.

http://kjzz.org/content/394973/tohono-oodham-nation-tribal-leaders-say-wall-mexico-will-not-be-built-their-land

Please, children, cut out the ego-rivalry or take it to private messages – you all have interesting things to say but it’s tedious to wade thru the grandstanding dick-waving to get to it.

jesuit

I've seen no evidence in this thread of anyone blaming a 'stupid, racist working class.' Instead, most here have accepted that there is likely a combination of economic concerns and racism involved in Trump's support. If Trump's racism wasn't actually the primary attraction for some, then at a minimum, these supporters were not repelled by it enough to reject him.

This is a key point that hasn’t been dealt with sufficiently, imo. If it’s not at least a sign of increasing accommodation to racism, what is it?

On the way the question has sometimes been posed – ‘did workers vote for Trump for his economic promises or for his racism’? That seems a very limited way to look at it, often more based on a moral defense of an idealised proletarian than seeking broader understanding. Eg, it would be interesting to know; how many workers voted Trump in ethnically mixed areas knowing that Trump’s racism/immigration policies would impact on their workmates & neighbours? How many were in mainly white areas?

What does it mean for w/c solidarity that workers – including a minority of blacks & latinos – were willing to vote for a programme of racist policies, threatened rapid mass deportations (albeit only a great acceleration of Obama’s deportation policy – 3 million in recent years) etc?

What does it mean when voters believe or pretend there isn’t a connection between promised economic benefits and racist social policies as part of the restructuring that will supposedly deliver them?

What does it mean for class solidarity if the non-racist Trump voter sees the racist baggage and impact as a necessary or acceptable cost of economic improvement?

How much of the evidence of voters saying it was an economic vote, not a racist one can be attributed to ‘shyness’ in admitting racism – part of a more general ‘shyness’ now often cited as reason for skewing the polls and leading to recent surprising results in UK & US?

x

bsuok's main crime seems to be that he can match some of our regulars in snideness. he seems to be driving them to apoplexy. better though that we had none of it.

as you weren't ...

I don't think he's committed any crime at all.

'
This seems to be as good a time as any to say that I intimately know close to a dozen people who voted for Trump. It's taken me the better part of the last week to come to terms with it, and I've been trying to figure out what it all means. All of these are family members. Each one of these people would vehemently argue that they are not racists. None of them would commit a hate crime. All but one would never use the "n-word" or use hate language in the direction of a person of color, but they are not above telling racist jokes in intimate circles. All of them would be personally nice to people of color in one-on-one interactions.

Of the Trump voters I know, I think they can safely be broken down into three categories:

-- The 'there are black people and then there are . . . ' group. Fortunately, I know only a couple people like this and actively avoid interactions when possible. Despite their protestations to the contrary, they are pretty clearly flat-out racists, and Trump's racism was a feature and not a bug for them.

--The traditional Republican, Christian Conservative voter. These people were vocally anti-Trump during the primaries, many of whom loudly declared they could never vote for Trump. They were all strong Ted Cruz supporters, and deep into the election cycle were 'Never Trump'-ers. At some point following October 29th, something flipped the breaker box in their brain. Whether it was the emails, the health insurance increases, Hillary's general unlikability, or Trump's ability to comport himself in a more 'Presidential' manner I don't know, and I would guess they would also have trouble identifying what pushed them into Trump's camp. There is less overt racism in this group than the first, but these are people who cross the street if a black man is walking behind them, and generally are not ashamed to admit this.

--The Sanders primary/Trump general voter. These people are older, often retired or nearing retirement and are clearly not "Bernie Bros." They've had front-row seats to the devastation of neoliberal policies, have watched as their unions have become a ghost of their former selves, and have seen their small, quaint working class towns whither away on the vine.

Sanders appealed to their former lives as strong union households, and had he been the nominee, they would have voted for him without a second thought for Trump. They could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary, and saw her candidacy as a continuation of all the ruinous policies of the past 30 years. These people would never, in a million years, consider themselves racist. They try to use inoffensive language, and in their limited interactions with people of color, they are kind and warm.

However, as much as it pains me to admit it--because this group includes my parents--they have never been able to overcome the vestiges of prejudice. They are a product of a white supremicist society and are unable or unwilling to fully break with deeply ingrained notions about race. That is to say, that despite their knowledge that racism existed (because largely, in their minds, it is a thing from the past--We voted for a Black man for President!!), deep down they believe that many of the problems facing POC in America are issues of personal responsibility. They believe in upward mobility for African Americans and while they do understand some of the barriers to breaking out of the cycle of poverty, they have a deep seated belief that if one is dedicated and works hard enough, he or she can and will make a better life for themselves.

Obviously, there is a significant spread between these three groups, but the common bond that connects them all as voters is that Trump's racism was not enough to dissuade them from voting for him.

great post

petey

bsuok's main crime seems to be that he can match some of our regulars in snideness. he seems to be driving them to apoplexy. better though that we had none of it.

as you weren't ...

or maybe people disagree with him providing cover for racism

jesuithitsquad, thanks for the excellent post. We need more concrete accounts of what people were thinking, rather than abstract conjecture.

I think some of these comments especially Jesuits last one could be useful being added to the library or a blog post. A lot of people are really confused about the results and some of the responses by Jesuit, Hirerony and S.A could be quite useful in making sense of this.

I don't think I'm going to advance the conversation too much with this post, but here are the two Trump supporters I know.

Jose is the cleaning guy at the bar I work at at night. He comes after hours, I usually wait and have a beer with him before I head home. Since he is a black Dominican with heavily accented English, I was a little surprised to find out that he was planning on voting for Trump. I think that was kind of naïve of me because he does own a small cleaning company that is doubtless in competition with dozens of others like it. Class politics trump identity politics for Jose (no pun intended).

Andrew is an African-American police sergeant and a hard line Reagan conservative. He once told me how much he loved a particular restaurant in our neighborhood, and how happy he was that it was closing soon (according to some inside information he had). The fact that condos for rich transplants were going to be put on top of this old neighborhood spot was , to him, the invisible hand at work and it delighted him to no end. He is a sexist dirtbag and I've had to threaten to kick him out twice for trying to rub the trump victory in other patrons' face. Total scum.

Juxtaposed against Andrew is Rico, another person of color, I think he's from central America or something. He's a liberal education worker. He's had several discussions with Andrew and dismisses his advocacy of trump as trying to stand out or seem special as an African-American. I tried to point out his job with the police but he merely repeated his original hypothesis. His liberalism blinds him to the realities of class. He does not take seriously my opinions because I am merely a bartender.

Oh, the owner of the bar probably voted for trump, but he is a millionaire so...

the one trump voter i know for sure (i've got my suspicions about a few others) is of the 'obama has destroyed the constitution and raised taxes all over the place' variety. he is also very tribally ethnic, proudly owning that sense of cultural victimhood that rightwingers are fond of, and is a small-business owner, a demographic that went largely for trump afaik. i'd say he's motivated in equal measure by the prospect of business tax breaks and a return to the "old days" with a dollop of stigginit to the liberals..

The one person I absolutely know who voted fro The Dumpster is my mother-in-law. Person of color woman born in a "third world" country who is very conservative

I know about 20+ Trump supporters and my experience is fairly similar to that of jesuithitsquad.

Juan Conatz

Yeah, H., the J20 thing reminds me a lot of 'Occupy May Day', which I put a lot of time and effort into and overall now think it was a waste of time. But at the time, there was really no knowing what was going to happen. It just doesn't seem to me that any general strike in the United States has ever happened by people calling for it in advance and divorced from material demands. It's not going to be a general strike in the way that this is generally understood, it will be probably scattered rallies and marches, some large, some small, some A-B, some disruptive.

I'm curious if you've had a chance to read the article I wrote (in which I made a pretty similar argument, I think), and what you think.

*no longer interested*

OliverTwister

Juan Conatz

Yeah, H., the J20 thing reminds me a lot of 'Occupy May Day', which I put a lot of time and effort into and overall now think it was a waste of time. But at the time, there was really no knowing what was going to happen. It just doesn't seem to me that any general strike in the United States has ever happened by people calling for it in advance and divorced from material demands. It's not going to be a general strike in the way that this is generally understood, it will be probably scattered rallies and marches, some large, some small, some A-B, some disruptive.

I'm curious if you've had a chance to read the article I wrote (in which I made a pretty similar argument, I think), and what you think.

I read it and found it inspiring, especially this:

[quote=Life-Long Wobbly]The biggest challenge towards any industrial action will be the union bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO is “ready to work with Trump”, and would be incapable of calling for or organizing a general strike even if they wanted to. We need to build the kind of movements which can challenge the hegemony of the business unions and call for strikes over their heads. Maybe a starting point would be agitating hospitality and restaurant workers in DC to shut down all hotels and restaurants leading up to the inauguration, or agitating media workers to refuse to broadcast anything by Trump. The main point is that there won’t be one general strike that saves us and then we all go back to normal – our focus has to be recreating a culture of militant, production-stopping strikes which seek to spread through secondary strikes and mass pickets, and which take aim at all injustice in society, not just workplace issues.[/quote]

I wholeheartedly agree. This would make the action an actual strike, rather than the activistism of the J20 call-out posted earlier in this thread -- although the latter purports to being militant, and clearly the desired result would be a riot.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words. There's just a whole lot of solid analysis and thought-provoking counterpoints in this thread, generally. And it's really nice to see this level of engagement here again.

The media has made much of the urban-rural divide in election results, and it's not entirely without merit.

Red Marriott in post #553asked about how the vote broke down in multi-ethnic areas. I can only speak in general terms about this, but for the most part minority populations congregate in urban areas. There are some exceptions: in the deep south there are still quite a few very small towns with african-american majorities; also, in the southwest there are latina/o majority rural areas. By and large though, urban centers have the most diverse populations in the US.

I haven't looked at the county-by-county breakdown since election night, but last I looked the results largely followed the demographic breakdown in most modern elections--urban areas=dem, rural areas= gop. The county breakdowns are a bit more useful than the blue state/red state maps because it becomes easy to homogenize large swaths of the country. That is to say, even in the reddest of red states, the urban areas in those states likely have majority democrats. Conversely, in a dark blue state, most of the rural counties vote republican. Of course even within those trends, it's easy to overlook that significant numbers of people vote against the trends in the strongholds of both parties.

How much of the evidence of voters saying it was an economic vote, not a racist one can be attributed to ‘shyness’ in admitting racism – part of a more general ‘shyness’ now often cited as reason for skewing the polls and leading to recent surprising results in UK & US?

The "shy Trump voter" seems to have been a larger phenomenon in the general election than during the primaries, and in many ways, that makes sense. So, I think we can pretty conclusively discount the economic vs racism exit polls where respondents overwhelmingly said they didn't vote based on race. Particularly with urban voters, it's almost unimaginable that a voter would tell a stranger, who  might very well be a person of color, 'yep, I'm a born and bred racist and proud of it.'
----
One thing that pops out to me after reflecting a bit on the content of bsouk's posts is that even communists aren't immune from the urban-rural divide conflicts. Presumably, all of us are guilty of a bias to one degree or another. Without in any way saying I'm above the fray, I did grow up in rural area and moved to a city as an adult, and much of my family still lives in small towns.

At no point in the year did I meet anyone who supported Clinton in the immediate area (a four county area with a few hundred thousand people where "blue collar" work is still the mainstay). In fact, over a period of 8 months the only Clinton sign or sticker I ever saw was on the side of a student housing building at a university about 20 miles away.

As you might imagine, for many of us who live in urban areas the opposite is true. It was extremely rare to see visable signs of Trump support. Interestingly, there are a scattered few here and there now, post election, which weren't in place before Trump's win. When I see those I chuckle a bit.

I can think of four instances of gun violence in the immediate area in the last 12 months just off of the top of my head.

I'm sure this is probably proportionally high for the population of your town, and I have no doubts about the tragic impact this had on those intimately involved. That said--no joke, no exaggeration--I've literally heard (at close range, like less than a block) four instances of gun violence in the past 2 days. Consequently, there is a very large divide along the urban-rural lines in regards to gun control. I have mixed feelings on the matter myself, and it's a personal matter for me--a 15 year old relative was the first homicide shooting victim in my city in 2015; by year's end we hit a seven year high of 144 homicides. The sickening thing is that this number doesn't even include killings that are considered 'justifiable,' such as self-defense shootings or police shootings. I mean, with such stats it's pretty easy to understand why people in cities are more likely to support gun-control measures, don't you think?

We have a lot of crime and a lot of broke drug addicts looking for money.

While the opioid addiction epidemic is nationwide, it has disproportionately impacted rural areas. This is primarily an issue of infrastructure. A county in the southern part of my state has made national news several times due first to the addiction epidemic and then due to the subsequent HIV crisis resulting from the lack of a needle exchange program. For those looking to recover, the nearest treatment facility was something like 90 miles away.

I'm not sure what the answer is, exactly, to dealing with the divide beyond a generalized increase in class militancy. We've talked a lot recently on libcom (including in this thread) about some of the difficulties in organizing in rural areas. But one thing that wouldn't make it worse is for communists from both areas to make sure we're not engaging in an us vs them dialogue.

Do people think the $72,000 figure for yearly household income of an average Trump supporter is accurate?

At first I thought the $72k were individual income (which would be pretty high, right), but then I noticed it's household income. (I then rememered it's more common in the US to talk or ask about annual income, and household income at that, but that's really weird to a European – I know exactly how much I earn per month, and I can estimate what that adds up to in a year, but I'd have to pull up a calculator or a spreadsheet to find out how much our household of two earns per year, so if someone asked me about that in an exit poll I'd probably be stumped). Anyway, is this figure within reach for a skilled worker's family in the US? Or would you rather think about a small business owner?

The exit polls also included information on income. I couldn't find a more detailed description of the data, but presumably these figures were also household, not individual income?

The $72k figure was in the primaries, which skew towards higher incomes. It was the least of all serious Republican candidates.

Average US household income is approx $52K, $57K for white households.

538 has a breakdown of these figures here w (liberal-ish) analysis - http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/

http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/11/14/colin-kaepernick-addresses-why-he-did-not-vote-you-cant-vote-your-way-out-oppression/

“You know, I think it would be hypocritical of me to vote,” Kaepernick told the San Francisco Chronicle Nov. 13. “I said from the beginning I was against oppression, I was against the system of oppression. I’m not going to show support for that system. And to me, the oppressor isn’t going to allow you to vote your way out of your oppression.”

http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/the-arizona-tribe-that-knows-how-to-stop-a-trump-wall-20161115

jura

Do people think the $72,000 figure for yearly household income of an average Trump supporter is accurate?

yes, or higher. that's my gut talking.

(I then rememered it's more common in the US to talk or ask about annual income, and household income at that

"a family of four" is a category you frequently hear for the purpose of calculating benefits, e.g., though there are federal definition-of-poverty guidelines for all different numbers in the household:
https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines

The exit polls also included information on income. I couldn't find a more detailed description of the data, but presumably these figures were also household, not individual income?

that's likely, but not certain

Entdinglichung

http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/11/14/colin-kaepernick-addresses-why-he-did-not-vote-you-cant-vote-your-way-out-oppression/

“You know, I think it would be hypocritical of me to vote,” Kaepernick told the San Francisco Chronicle Nov. 13. “I said from the beginning I was against oppression, I was against the system of oppression. I’m not going to show support for that system. And to me, the oppressor isn’t going to allow you to vote your way out of your oppression.”

More from Kaepernick's refusal to vote: The historical context you should know about Colin Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick has invoked Malcolm X many times over the last few months — from shirts bearing quotes attributed to the civil rights leader to a black baseball cap featuring a large white X. Malcolm X’s philosophies were complicated. You can hear that in one of the speeches he’s best known for, made in 1964. It’s called “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Malcolm X thought the Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater was racist. He called him “a wolf” — an obvious threat. But Malcolm X was also frustrated with the policies of the Democratic party under President Lyndon Johnson. He called Johnson “a fox” — a sneaky enemy. Whether by the fox or the wolf, Malcolm X said, black people would get eaten.

To a crowd gathered in Detroit in April, 1964, he said, “You can see that the Negro vote is the key factor. And despite the fact that you are in a position to be the determining factor, what do you get out of it? The Democrats have been in Washington D.C. only because of the Negro vote. They’ve been down there four years, and they're -- all other legislations they wanted to bring up they brought it up and gotten it out of the way, and now they bring up you. And now, they bring up you. You put them first, and they put you last 'cause you’re a chump.”

*no longer interested*

I'm not sure what it's worth (if you'll forgive the pun), but $72,000 outside of urban areas sounds like a shit-ton of money to me. Having lived both in New York and now in a rural-ish area in the South over the past year, I'm pretty shocked at difference both in the wages as well as the cost of living.

Just to say though, very few people still have jobs like that. I have a friend who works in a steel mill and makes $120k/year, but he works crazy hours, like upwards of 70 hours a week. Outside of heavy industry, the number fall back quoted is more in line with what most non-union industry jobs pay.

--crossposted with chilli, exactly

This is the kind of stuff that issues directly out of the "safe space" anti-speech initiatives on college campuses and then filters through society. In my experience this is the kind of thing a lot of working people resent.

Ya know, Bsuok, I thought you finally gave me a post I could up. But then you come here with this nonsense.

How you've managed to relate any of this to safer spaces - this weird, right-wing bugaboo - is beyond me. How are these things remotely related?

It just seems odd, you seem to be down-playing the role of race and racism in this election yet then you claim that working class resentment is fueled by the language of campus activism? You think that's somehow remotely on a par with the very real underlying racism that's been exposed by the Trump campaign and the anti-Black Lives Matter backlash?

FWIW - and let's try not to make this a derail - the issue with "safer spaces" is one of branding. I find a lot of the language of campus activism a bit irksome myself - I get that - but a safer spaces policy is just a set of rules.

I'm willing to bet you wouldn't let someone in your house who's using oppressive or bigoted language or acting in an oppressive or bigoted way, right? A safer spaces policy is just a codification of that in shared or collective spaces.

NYT has a county by county geographical breakdown here:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/16/us/politics/the-two-americas-of-2016.html

note to comrades abroad, alot of those labels are "funny" not real designations

x

Have there been an upswing in racist/hate attacks? I think so and so do the SPLC.

More Than 400 Incidents of Hateful Harassment and Intimidation Since the Election.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/15/update-more-400-incidents-hateful-harassment-and-intimidation-election

*no longer interested*

What kind of mine do you work in and how much do you make? And how much overtime can you get?

*no longer interested*

*no longer interested*

Since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, I've noticed a significant uptick in racial conflict where I live. And this despite San Francisco's booming economy, with only 3.2% unemployment (which is obviously skewed, not factoring underemployment and those who neither work nor seek out jobs). I commute 25 minutes every morning and evening on a city bus, going from my working class residential district to downtown and back; I've been doing this for the last 12 years, so I've noticed changes over that time. My 'hood is an eclectic ethnic mix of Chinese, Russian and Irish, both immigrants and native born, with a smattering of Koreans and other Asians and a few working class whites who've managed to remain. But my bus passes through projects in the center of the city and this is where most of the racial altercations occur, almost exclusively between Chinese immigrants and blacks. At times there have been brawls that resulted in the cops being called, but usually it's just harsh words based on native vs. newcomer hostility -- but always racially coded. And since 2008 the tensions have increasingly felt like a powder keg, ready to blow any minute.

Here's a story from last week, where an immigrant woman was told "Trump might deport you." As a great philosopher once said: figures lie and liars figure. Whether this shit is on the rise -- which I think it is -- or not, when it happens one time like this it is one-times-too-many.

One of the worst incidents I ever saw in my life was about 5 years ago at a fast food restaurant in a tourist district when a completely drunk white bro punched a young black guy in the back of the head, in a completely cowardly act with absolutely no provocation. The other bros spouted vile racist slogans and left en masse. It was disgusting and I attribute it to racist scapegoating when the crisis' affects we're still devastating. When I'd seen racist violence before there was usually some pretext; the only one in this case was unadulterated racism as the victim was blindisded..

There's been lots of displacement due to gentrification caused by both a speculative bubble -- attracting investment capital from around the world -- and the rapidly rising tech sector. So this tension has been happening citywide, but most often pitting people at the bottom of the working class against each other with the divisions usually based on ethnicity -- instead of the proper class enemy, landlords (the city is 2/3 renters) and bosses. So despite there obviously being more interracial mixing, there is still overt racism that's palpable every day. With an ever increasing disparity in wealth, overt hostility towards the non-white working class is also growing -- as well as blame the victim ideology, especially with homeless people who are predominately people of color. The New Jim Crow is white supremacy in a different guise as its more and more becoming wealth-based segregation, which is all the more punishing with the complete lack of any kind of social safety net (mostly thanks to Bill Clinton' workfare reforms). I hate unnuanced activist cliches, but schools have become pipelines to prison -- or addiction, despair, and shortened lives.

So I have to strongly disagree with (unsubstantiated) references to statistics indicating declining numbers racist attacks. I'm sick of hearing so-called communists mimicking the post-racial argument. In my lifetime I've witnessed racism intensifying with my own eyes. When the rise of the "warrior cops" gets factored in, the homicidal war against black and brown youth has been increasing to horrifying proportions (just read Radley Balko's book of the same name). On one end of the spectrum is a renewed open season on black and brown youth, like cops are gunning down fugitive slaves, on the other is ubiquitous stop-and-frisk laws. Anyone denying this rising racism has their head buried in the sand. Trump's electoral victory, rather being a mandate for change, was a vote justifying a tradition of racial oppression that began with the birth of the nation and will just give ammunition to the class war against all of us.

bsuok

Hieronymous

What kind of mine do you work in and how much do you make? And how much overtime can you get?

I'm a professional asshole. I get paid to make grammatical errors on message boards. Ask one of your proletarian graduate students, they'll tell you how it works.

I work multiple jobs, but the currents ones involve teaching immigrants and test-prep to foreign youth (you'd know that if you actually bothered to read this thread). And for shit pay in an office that's like the 7/11 of education. Don't get to see many graduate students where I live and work, unless they commute on the same bus (but I really can't tell).

bsuok, you pump yourself up with all this macho workerist street cred, but you seem to know the inner-working of universities and the subjective ideology of grad student activists better than anyone else here on libcom. I know I should play the ball not the player, but I call bullshit: you don't even live in the U.S., do you? And you don't work in a mine or mill. What are you? A grad student? Trustafarian?

Alright, that's it.

Look, you've brought this up in like every other post, as if it's somehow related to the election. Several others like hieronymous and chilli sauce have attempted to engage you on the issue. They both offered you sensible, constructive points which you've completely ignored in favor of repeating catch phrases.

And hey, you don't have to agree with them. But when comrades explain something that is important to fellow workers and why it's important to them, what you don't get to do is ignore them, and completely fail to engage, simply to revert to your prejudices, and then act as if you've come down from the mountain with the Stakhanovite commandments. Well I mean, you can do that, sure. But to do that and still call yourself a communist? Nah, not so much. Your schtick isn't edgy; it's a collection of right wing (but for WORKERS) headlines masquerading as theory.

Your implication is that things like safer spaces are responsible, in part, for the rise of Trumpism. There are a lot of problems with this POV, but all of them pale in relation to a quite simple practical problem for you: you've told us how isolated your town is from universities, and how there is pretty much no contact between your idealised workers and the university world.

So do please enlighten us pal--how is it that safer spaces on a campus 20 some odd miles from your town, with no interaction with your friends impact anything, in any way in their lives or the way they see the world? I mean, outside of what right-wing radio tells you about these things?

But in the end, we finally get to the bottom of your prolier than thou attitude--all this talk as if you're a blue collar working clarse hero, and all along it's that you don't work.

Which is cool, whatever. I'm all for people being lazy if they can. But you don't get to demean students or academic workers or anyone else who doesn't fit your image of the idealised worker who work their fucking assess off at a shit job and get themselves into a lifetime of debt for a sliver of hope at a better life, while you sit on your ass clunking away on a keyboard telling us all about the hard life of real proles.

-crossposted with H-

What i have noticed since the end of the election is how the Green Party and Jill Stein has completely and utterly disappeared from the post-mortems after a very disappointing electoral performance that i don't think even reached 1% of the popular vote, despite being on more ballots than ever and some notable endorsees.

It was a million votes she got but Gary Johnson who revealed just ignorant he actually is got 4 million votes (and i wonder how many of them were stoned out of their skulls)

For those of us who have some sort of politics that involves electoral activity, just how can we break out of the lesser evil voting strategy especially when the greater evil is voted in as the lesser evil.

Other dismal results:
PSL - 0.04%, 50, 672
SWP - 0.01%, 11,667
Workers World - 4003
SPUSA - 2579
SEP - 369

*no longer interested*

bsuok, do you have a blog or any method of reaching you away from the (often times toxic) discussion found on these forums? thank you

average household size in the USA is 2.54 persons. 72k/2.5 = ~28.5k per person. now look at the states that went heavy for Trump, some as low as 30k/2.5 = 12k per person. hardly even enough for food, transportation or rent.

*no longer interested*

"One should be very careful indeed about using such loaded terms as ‘frustration,’ ‘anger,’ and especially ‘resentment’ to explain populism. One should at least face up to the political consequences of such psychologizing diagnoses — namely, that they end up confirming those people’s view of ‘liberal elites’ as being not just deeply condescending but also constitutively unable to live up to their own democratic ideals by failing to take ordinary people at their word.”- Jan-Werner Müller, author of "What is populism" with some words of wisdom.

Hieronymous

So despite there obviously being more interracial mixing, there is still overt racism that's palpable every day.

This has come up a few times now, and I keep forgetting to address it.

I agree with H, I don't think statistics on interracial marriage can be cited to prove anything other than the fact that there are more interracial marriages. I bring this up for illustrative purposes only, but I also have a mixed family.

In my post about family members who voted for Trump, the out and out racists I described have nephews, neices and cousins who are mixed. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in the US mixed white-black children are generally considered to be black. (See for instance Barack Obama.)

So, while it's impossible for me to understand how a guy can drop the "n" bomb in front of his family members who are mixed, I've seen it happen more than once. There is a level of cognitive dissonance there that's hard to come to terms with.

I sometimes wonder if, rather than mitigating prejudices, people who are predisposed towards racist ideas aren't somehow 'activated' in a way that increases their racism upon seeing family members in mixed relationships? Idk, I could be way off base, but it's the only way I can grasp how a person can hate a group of people which includes his or her loved ones.

Hieronymous

bsuok, you pump yourself up with all this macho workerist street cred

You're right. The part where I said I am nothing and nobody special pumped me up the most. You should see me right now, I'm like a balloon filled with nothing but raw proletarian sweat and the salt of the earth. I can barely fit into my overalls.

but you seem to know the inner-working of universities and the subjective ideology of grad student activists better than anyone else here on libcom... What are you? A grad student?

I have never spent a minute in a college class. I was on college campuses I think four times in my life. Once I was about seven and waiting for my mom to finish job training at the community college (after work and there was no on around to baby sit me, I had to wait in an empty room). The next time I visited the dorm room of a girl I was dating. I think I was about 18. The next time I was visiting a different girl I was dating. Also in a dorm room. I think I was about 20. The next and last time I stopped by something being promoted as an "occupation" at a university in NYC during Occupy Wall Street. I think I lasted around about 3 minutes. That's it.

I did run into a lot of college students and professions when dealing with the left though. A lot of them acted like you do here. Those experiences and reading stuff written by academics is where my ideas on the university come from.

Where I'm from it's not so common to go to college. Of an extended family of 4 generations and 100 or so people I've only ever known four people who went to college. One got a 2 year degree, one dropped out and became a housewife, one (son of a millwright) got a 4 year degree and went to work for Ford, one (other son of a millwright) got a 4 year degree and became an architect. I've had more relatives in jail than college. How's that for street cred? I'm even more blown up now.

And for whatever reason even most of the friends I made when I lived elsewhere weren't college graduates either. Maybe I'm attracted to the uneducated. Or maybe not. I've dated some college students and graduates. There you have it.

Trustafarian?

LOL! My disabled dad cleared a whopping $12000 last year. The only thing he ever left me was his bad attitude. That would be nice though.

And you don't work in a mine or mill.

None of the union mines were hiring when I came out of high school. I had a relative with seniority on a UMW call up list for about 14 years when I graduated so I knew I wasn't getting in. I did apply at the scab hole where other relatives worked, but they didn't call me. So I went into the craft unions instead. I worked at a coal burning power plant and later a steel mill against the advice of relatives working in both places. I fucking hated every minute of it. That kind of work doesn't last long for craft workers. You have to go where you're called, when you're called, if you're called. There's a lot of lay offs and time on unemployment. And you have a good chance of getting fucked up, like my coworker who got his skin burned off, or my grandpa who got lung cancer, or my uncle who got liver cancer, or my other uncle who got bladder cancer. I moved on as soon as I could but I also hated every minute of every other job I ever had, including roofing, a call center, three retail stores, two fast food restaurants, a mail sorting center and a pizza delivery gig.

If you want my full life history you can file a freedom of information act on me like I said earlier.

Now that we've got the personal stuff out of the way, feel free to address anything I've actually written here. Thanks.

It's not what you've written, it's what you've left out. Now fess up, prole übermensch, you don't actually live in the U.S., do you?

"

One should be very careful indeed about using such loaded terms as ‘frustration,’ ‘anger,’ and especially ‘resentment’ to explain populism. One should at least face up to the political consequences of such psychologizing diagnoses — namely, that they end up confirming those people’s view of ‘liberal elites’ as being not just deeply condescending but also constitutively unable to live up to their own democratic ideals by failing to take ordinary people at their word.”- Jan-Werner Müller, author of "What is populism" with some words of wisdom.

So, your solution instead, is to what? To out populist the populists?

Quote:
So do please enlighten us pal--how is it that safer spaces on a campus 20 some odd miles from your town, with no interaction with your friends impact anything, in any way in their lives or the way they see the world? I mean, outside of what right-wing radio tells you about these things?
Try actually reading my posts for once. You'll find what you seek. To quote myself:

"as these very same people go on to write and edit newspapers, produce television programming and film, lead NGOs and political parties, become experts/talking heads"

right. that's definitely what you're worried about.

anyway, would you mind giving us examples of how a concept of say, trigger warnings, impact the information your friends hear (or don't hear, for that matter?) and then please expand on exactly how these concepts impacted the election--because that's the implication, right?

also, in your original post on the issue you said safe spaces are designed to keep rich suburban students away from hearing about things that offend them. can you please cite instances of this occurring?

finally, i think a blog is a fantastic idea for you bsouk. a blog is designed as a one way conduit of information. these, on the other hand, are discussion forums, where people come to debate ideas and uh, discuss things. the beauty of a blog, is you never have to address the actual things people say.

the irony of a person so worried about safe spaces complaining about personal attacks, with what appears to be a sock puppet jumping on to complain about a toxic atmosphere. just wow.

So I have to strongly disagree with (unsubstantiated) references to statistics indicating declining numbers racist attacks.

Who posted such a thing anywhere here? Or are you referring to some other place where you saw it? And if racist attacks really were in decline, would it be okay to say that? Or would that be wrong?

Are things always black and white (for lack of a better phrase)? Can we mention the racist attacks that broke out after Obama's election, just as reports say is happening this time around?

Can we mention we don't really have good statistics right now one way or the other? Is Vox normalizing racism when they publish this: http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13628200/trump-hate-crimes-racism ?

I'm sick of hearing so-called communists mimicking the post-racial argument

The only people I've ever heard make those arguments were Obama supporting liberals in around 2008 and right wingers in the years between then and around when Zimmerman murdered that poor kid. So-called communists are more likely to emphasize race than ignore it in my experience. They definitely talk about it more than any "regular" workers I know, black, white or otherwise.

Look, perspective is in definitely in order. You people do realize that the US is a country where not to long ago people were regularly beaten to death and hung from trees by mobs on account of their skin color right? Where interracial marriage was illegal in many places until 50 years ago? Where people where denied the ability to take a job or buy a piece of land or move into a house on account of skin color not by the individual prejudice of the seller but by actual official laws on the books?

Is it "normalizing racial attacks" to talk about this?

It definitely isn't all roses right now. Not in the least bit. And working people should definitely organize and arm themselves, especially when they are at risk of physical attack from rightists and racists, but I honestly don't see the benefit of looking at things as they really are.

No one was even charged for the public murders of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Today people are fired from jobs for making comments that can be construed as racist. Cops spent how long killing people unimpeded in the US? Now there are mass public reactions, attempts to organize against it, people mobilizing. Black people used to get physically attacked just for asking for access to unionized jobs. Beaten, pelted with eggs. It's still not roses in the unions. Not in the least, but 20 percent of black workers are in unions, and if you go to hiring halls in "mixed" areas you see black people there next to the immigrants and others.

Let's not discount the struggles people have been fighting for years and years and pretend that everything is just like it always was. And let's not pretend that things can be totally fixed under the system either. It will require a revolutionary social transformation. That's a fact. Finally, let's be realistic, let's prepare for possible attacks and promote self defense, but let's not paint a bleak picture of a coming Third Reich without evidence. Let's not discount the advances that have been made and the possibilities and precedent for real, united, working class struggle that overcomes socially constructed divisions like race.

Now that we've got the personal stuff out of the way, feel free to address anything I've actually written here. Thanks.

sure thing. as soon as you reply to the substantive points made by h and chilli re:safer spaces

or really any of dozens of points others have made for that matter. . .

I work multiple jobs, but the currents ones involve teaching immigrants and test-prep to foreign youth (you'd know that if you actually bothered to read this thread). And for shit pay in an office that's like the 7/11 of education. Don't get to see many graduate students where I live and work, unless they commute on the same bus (but I really can't tell).

I honestly don't care what you do. I never asked. I don't want know to know now even though you've told me. I was referring to your shit post about "working class grad students" from a few pages back. I don't know you, I don't want to know you, and the only posts I've directed toward you were replies to your unsolicited personal attacks on me.

I came here to exchange ideas not have a proletarian penis size contest.

Hieronymous

It's not what you've written, it's what you've left out. Now fess up, prole übermensch, you don't actually live in the U.S., do you?

LOL you're too pathetic to be a FED so I'll go ahead and guess you're just a creep. Born and raised in the US, as I told you, where I told you.

I left for a couple of years. Then moved back to enjoy the wonderful election cycle. This fall I came to another country to stay with a friend for a while. My friend works in a factory and my decrepit old $5000 house is still there in coal country, USA and I'll return to it before we celebrate Jesus's birthday.

Is that okay with you? Should I look out front for your unmarked white van when I get back? Does this impact any of my posts or arguments in any way? If I was a graduate student or if I was still in the mill would that give me arguments more or less credence?

Who gave you information about me? S.Artesian? Did he tell you how made a living negotiating against working people? Or was it a certain petty bourgeois academic with an obsession on race? Maybe you got so upset about my posts critical of university types that you had to look up my IP address?

Do you feel bad that someone said something negative about academia and middle class leftists in "the workers movement"? Do you need a "safe place" to stay? My house is empty but I can guarantee that my neighbors wouldn't like you at all.

*no longer interested*