2016 U.S. Presidential election

It's probably worth quickly mentioning that there is a group of computer scientists/mathematicians urging Clinton campaign to challenge the results in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan due to alleged anomalies between votes taken on machines vs. paper ballots.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clin...

Most are regarding it as wishful thinking/a conspiracy theory, and Nate Silver and others have done a quick analysis saying that the differences likely can be explained by demographics. That said, there are some serious people involved, but in fairness, there were also serious people talking about 'anomalies' in the Ohio tallies in 2004.

The line cutting metaphor is interesting and it has been widely used and reported on in a very uncritical way. What did the line look like historically in America? Who was at the top of the line, who was in the middle and who was down back or not even allowed join? Who for that matter used to live on the land that the que heads to - literally in the sense of the land rushes as the west was 'opened up'.

It's really not a metaphor that can be used without centering how white supremacy was used historically and once that is done the complaints about line cutters are complaints about the white man no longer getting what was promised, a place at the front of the line.

This piece quotes Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in their own land on the 'line cutting' metaphor, and makes a similar criticism:

When I used the "cut-in-line" metaphor, I did borrow from Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. But I also used ideas from J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Maria Kefalas' Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood, just watching the film Winter's Bone, and many other sources. But I mostly drew on personal experience.

My critique of the excerpt in the post above is that sociologist Bhambra is pointing out the sociological limitations of sociologist Hochschild's field work. The latter intentionally went to one of the most segregated parts of Louisiana for her research. She was not writing a labor history of the entire working class of that region. But she's a sociologist and never went beyond the limitations of that discipline.

Not being a sociologist, I'm loath to cast about the word "privilege" so loosely. I'd prefer white supremacy to define the attitude of working class whites in the examples above. I'd also add that Bhambra does make the germane point that deindustrialization not only affects white workers. Many unions enforced Jim Crow rules in hiring and in many cases the color line was only broken by civil rights struggles. But by then, deindustrializaation had already began -- I'd say the process began in the late 1950s. So blacks, being the last hired became the first fired.

Resistance to this engendered new forms of struggle. When the Black Panther Party formed in Oakland in 1966, deindustrialization in that part of the East Bay was already a fait accompli. Whatever limitations they had, one of the Panther's goals was a classless society. In Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newtonw, Bobby Seale writes:

When Chevrolet closed its East Oakland plant to suburbanize production 40 miles away in then-rural Fremont in 1962, blacks followed and fought for jobs in the factory (that plant later became the GM-Toyota joint venture NUMMI in 1984; it closed in 2010 and then became Tesla). The Panthers created a black caucus within the UAW in Fremont in the late 1960s, one of the most inspiring -- and most historically underrepresented -- events of the era. The Panther Caucus fomented shopfloor struggles, sometimes in solidarity with whites and workers of other ethnicities.

I bring up this example because neither Bhambra nor Hochschild look for evidence of class struggle or other examples of collective resistance, being limited within the narrow scope of sociology. Hochschild's sociological field research was neither trying to "legitimate" working class racism nor was she attempting a class analysis of working class whites. Bhambra's critique clearly misses the mark because of her own sociological blinders.
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I have my own personal example of the cutting-in-line metaphor.

I once had a white co-worker who was born and raised in California's Central Valley, in a town that due to the crisis starting in 2008 was soon in the top 3 cities in the U.S. for not only the number of foreclosures but also for its unemployment rate (I'll call her SM). Just prior its agricultural hinterlands were booming with housing developments. It's also just over 50% Latina/o, about 40% white, and 10% Asian -- mostly Hmong.

SM and I used to try to organize meetings with other workers to fight against conditions at our workplace. As a teenager, she had worked at a national grocery chain and had benefited from relatively good UFCW wages during the 1990s. But she moved away to study at university and ended up working in our city upon graduation. SM drew on the high wages and generous benefits as a unionized grocery clerk as a motivation to attempt to organize with our fellow workers and we often talked about this during breaks in the staff lunchroom. She even found that management's enforced lunchtime meetings were flagrantly in violation of labor law and, with the help of a sympathetic labor lawyer, showed the law to our boss. In the end, all of us got retroactive penalty payments for our lost lunch time, in my case it was several hundred dollars.

Our work is seasonal and although management claims there's no seniority, to maintain morale it is maintained as a de facto policy. So when we hit the low period, there's a lot of stress about who's hours will be cut. Our immediate supervisor is pretty fair about distributing cuts evenly, and only laying people off when absolutely necessary. But it creates a lot of tension -- and when we should stick together, it causes serious fractions among us.

A Latina worker was the last hired, and about a year ago the cuts were about to come down (I'll call her AB). She wasn't exactly "out," but if anyone asked she identified as lesbian. She is also a heavyset woman. Her and I hit if off because she grew up in the Los Angeles exurb where my mixed race cousins currently live. She also worked really hard and took any extra hours she could get because she was barely getting by.

On day SM confided in me, saying that AB was trying to "get ahead." She literally said that. I was flabbergasted and she sensed that I wasn't getting it. So she explained, "that fucking bitch is using three things: being Hispanic, being gay, and being fat to get more work." My jaw dropped. Here was my closest fellow workplace agitator dissing on my new friend at work. SM identifies as a "rocker" and says she's a "flower child born into the wrong generation." She's also capable of saying really fucked up racist, homophobic and shape-ist shit. I began to argue back, thinking I'll be gentle at first and maybe she's just having a bad day -- and this was just her venting. But she remained steadfast in defending her position, even implying that I was kowtowing to political correctness for defending AB. SM's views are a perfect embodiment of the cutting-in-line argument.

In the end, AB just got a few hours shaved off but kept her job. My relationship with SM soured and got even worse. Soon after, she complained to our boss -- who is a white woman -- about me cutting some corners around our work duties. It is common practice and something that even that SM often did. There was no proof, so I just got a slight admonishment to follow all the rules. But SM and I never talked again. She left a few months later for another job, which was a relief. At the end, I tried to broach the silence and diplomatically bring up her fucked up attitudes, but she stonewalled me and after she left I found out that she'd gossiped about me being some kind of moralistic PC doormat.

Where did SM get these fucked up ideas? And how could she have such awareness of workplace concerns -- even having once been willing to fight the boss -- while maintaining deeply bigoted ideas? I attribute some of it to where she's originally from: a bottomed out, post-industrial region rife with methamphetamine abuse and sizeable tent cities of the newly homeless. Her hometown is a small city that recently became majority Latina/o, the unemployment rate remains around 15%, and racial tensions are in full bloom; I fully believe that despite no longer living there, her present closeness to family members there is the crucible where her ideas developed.

The important question is how to draw out people like SM's innate ability to see some things in class terms, while showing her how divisive her prejudices about others -- especially her fellow workers -- can be. This is the challenge for all of us: how do we deal with working class whites who buy into the racist cutting-in-line myth?

(Fwiw Hieronymous I wasn't aiming Bhambra's critique at you - I think your posts are an example of 'good faith class analysis that begins from the racialized histories...'.)

Thanks for clarifying, but I assumed as much. I began by responding to AndrewF's post, then threw Bhambra's piece into the mix while writing it. Thanks for posting it, because it's more fodder to explore this from all different angles.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that my all-time favorite in the genre mentioned in my previous post is Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. It is he account of moving back to his deindustrialized hometown of Winchester, Virginia and detailing how class relations have changed. I also learned the history of the Scots-Irish in the U.S.

https://www.ft.com/content/61e34e7a-b0d6-11e6-9c37-5787335499a0

Does anyone think that Donald Trump's policy of getting 'allies' to foot the bill for their defence, i.e Japan, Nato etc is not a typical expression of a declining Empire? It seems like the classic result of the situation of overstretch which all empires eventually reach.

while that may seem like the case, does it seem realistic anymore that that is what will happen?

I spent the morning of Black Friday hiking in the redwoods an hour north of my home. I stopped for lunch on the way back in Petaluma, a town of 60,000 with a fascinating history. It once called itself "America's Egg Basket" and from the 1920s through the 1950s most of these chicken farmers were Jews who self-identified as "socialists." Today it's 80% white, but has such a WASPY, Americana feel that in 1973 was the location for filming American Graffiti.

Around noon anti-Trump protestors started streaming down the sidewalk of the main street. I counted about a hundred and thought that it was impressive for such a small town. But the procession didn't stop for almost 20 minutes, where there were five times as many as I initially tallied; so it was a demonstration of over 500 people that included lots of families with kids. I also noticed many were wearing buttons with Stars of David with a peace sign at the center. It was nice that many are probably descendants of leftist chicken farmers.

The best slogans were in solidarity with immigrants, other tolerable ones were simply anti-Trump, but a few were doing call-and-response chants of "What does democracy look like?: this is what democracy looks like," which were trite and too liberal for my taste. Yet I was impressed that 2 1/2 weeks after the election people are still out in the streets -- as meek as they might be.

So I asked how long this has been going on in the area and found out that a week after the election, on Monday November 14, thousands of kids in that part of Sonoma County had walked out of their high schools in protest. In the nearby county seat of Santa Rosa, students walked out of all 5 high schools, joined by kids from 7 other high schools in the surrounding towns of Petaluma, Windsor, Sebastopol, Healdsburg and Rohnert Park. Now these are affluent blue suburbs and exurbs in the perhaps the bluest region in the country, but the youth did their action on November 14th in coordination with their peers in Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and Denver.

As I said before, the kids are alright. And I am impressed that the liberals are still out in the streets too. Parents would be radicalized if they walked out of work themselves, an escalation that would put them on par with their kids. We can only wish.

Thanks Hieronymus for investing your time in these, well basically essays, although I wish there was a different outlet for sharing them. I also wish there were a lot more of them.

However, I have some confusions regarding this comment:

This is actually quite the interesting example. Democracy is looking pretty bad, right now. So what's wrong with this chant?

PS - I cannot respond to direct messages for some reason. Forgive any lack of my communication due to this problem.

sorry, that is due to our anti-spam controls. You can now use PMs

The state of Rojava congratulates the American people for electing a new president of the USA:

http://en.hawarnews.com/msd-congratulates-americans/

Quote:
"In the name of Democratic Syria Council, we congratulate the American people who elected a new president and we deeply respect the free and democratic choice of the American people, we also hope that the new administration stands by the oppressed people in the world, undertakes its role in bringing about global peace and security, advances in fighting terror, impose crackdown on the dictator regimes and we are looking forward to more collaboration on all levels in fighting terror in Syria and reach a settlement of the Syrian crisis and we hope success and prosperity for the American people and the new administration”.

This has been an interesting thread, but I haven't seen much discussion of the changes happening among the "liberals", aka, those who traditionally vote democrat. One trend I find rather disturbing, is a transition taking place among democrat leaning voters is that they seem to be becoming more interested in distinguishing themselves as somehow "well educated", then they seem to be interested in actually having a political direction. The most extreme case of this, is that of the New York times. This newspaper usually takes on an extreme right wing libertarian economic stance, however, they campaigned harder than anyone for Clinton. The thing is, that my grandparents, who have always been proud democrats, read the New York times and they haven't noticed the shift. All they see are complete sentences and correctly spelled words, and that's all that really matters to them. The total political incoherence hasn't occurred to them.

As an example of "The New York Times is a libertarian cum rag", I'll give the following article about the French presidential election:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/business/international/francois-fillon...

1) "Can France actually be reformed?" Here, they use reform, which has a strong positive connotation, to refer to austerity measures and the goals of an extreme right wing candidate.

2) "deeper labor overhauls while the economy is weak" The term "overhauls" also has a positive connotation. They seem to present the need for these "overhauls" as a certainty which is beyond discussion.

3) Here's the real killer: "the infamous 35-hour workweek". WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH A 35 HOUR WORKWEEK??? Even my far right libertarian friends think that people should be working less as technology improves.

4) "Unemployment is stuck around 10 percent, more than twice the rate in Germany" this is a bit more subtle, but the New York times should know that comparing unemployment numbers is meaningless. But this isn't necessarily an intentional bit of spin. It is possible they just wanted a statistic and didn't care that they chose a meaningless one.

5) NY-Times condemns Le-Pen to be too far to the left on economic issues stating "Economists say those plans are unsustainable."

I think that there is a lot of truth to the claim that the "liberal media" is a bunch of elitist buffoons who have lost their pants. Why did NYT even support Clinton, given that, economically, the paper is farther right than Rand Paul?

I think that things have gotten to the point where we can talk about two groups of Democrat voters. The first group is the left-wing reformist group, who thinks that capitalism would be OK if only there were lots of laws and social programs to keep the capitalists in line. These folks are feeling really confused now. They watch Clinton scold Sanders in a debate for "being unrealistic" when he says that it would save money to cut out the private insurance industry entirely. They voted Clinton, but don't trust her at all. They now realize that the elitist faction of the Democrat party is not only not on their side, but actively seemingly to be an enemy.

The second group is a lot like the first, they want the same things as the first, but they are so disgusted by the Trumpists that they still love the corporatist, elitist, part of the Democratic party even though any sane person can see that the actual politicians and people surrounding them are basically libertarian in their economic views. What is interesting, is that the second group seems to HATE the first group. Just go on-line and read some of the comments, they seem to be downright fascist, attacking anyone who wasn't %100 "with her" as being a Trump supporter. They seem to have the mindset, that anyone who voted for the Greens was worse than a Trumpetier.

However, for me, both groups are equally dissatisfying. I find the idea of having a really powerful "socialist" federal government to be in many ways the opposite of what the autonomist tendencies in me dictate.

Trump scored his first post-election major victory by announcing that Carrier will retain 1,00 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico. This is less than half of those facing lay-off, and likely will set the stage for enterprising CEO's to threaten to leave the country in return for collecting a ransom from the government. Much like the Kentucky Ford plant jobs that Trump 'saved,' the devil is in the details. But this will likely be unimportant to the big-picture message that Strongman Trump is fighting to save jobs.

Incidentally, last night Politico reported that while Govenor, the Pence administration ignored Carrier and other businesses' request to veto Indiana SB340. At the time, Carrier said the bill would kill off jobs. SB340 was the legislation I've previously mentioned twice in this thread in which the Pence administration killed off the state's successful energy efficiency program, along with the 19,000 industry-related statewide jobs lost due to the program's demise. The reporting is a day-late a dollar short, but it is fun to see Pence finally getting his comeuppance for his inability to see beyond his front row of campaign contributors.

Timthelion-- I think your point about the education gap is interesting. It definitely has shades of the urban-rural divide discussion we've had, and is overtly backed in Chuck Schumer's reported quip that he was fine losing out on one blue collar voter in exchange for every two well-educated moderates the dems would pick up as a result.

Your point about the 2 wings of the Dems seems pretty much correct to me. It's kind of amazing to watch the democratic party be so oblivious to the fact that the Sanders' wing of the party represents the potential to win the presidency for a generation all while being the last, best hope for a 'kinder-gentler capitalism.' Instead, they have re-elected Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader despite the fact that they have lost over 60 seats in the House from 2010-2016, a truly historic meltdown of Congressional support. (Yes, a major factor in this equation is the state-by-state gerrymandered redistricting process, but 60+ seats in 6 years and you still get to keep your job? Sign me up for that gig!)

Meanwhile Keith Ellison is being backed by Bernie Sanders to lead the DNC, but the DLC is lining up opposition. The 'anti-racist' democratic leadership are terrified of the visuals of a Black Muslim man being the face of the party in the Trump era. I heard one Democratic pundit talk about how Ellison is 'always angry,' which is pretty much transparent dog-whistling for 'color blind' white supremicist liberals.
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That said, this part below is a little confusing.

I think this question

Is answered by your statement below.

HRC is a major player in the most successful neo-liberal group in the history of that economic school. Specifically, the austerity reforms begun by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair had been unimaginable just a few years earlier. Under George HW Bush, Ronald Regan, John Major, and Margaret Thatcher, the deep level of austerity cuts would have been politically suicidal. But by putting 'friends of labor' faces forward, the neo-liberal program was exponentially accelerated, and welfare reform, balanced budgets, and free trade became the only game in town.

In fact, I don't think it's very controversial to say that the Democratic/Labor Party version of neoliberalism is the most brutally effective class weapon in the history of the Labor vs. Capital battle. Now we are faced with the prospect of a divided, weak, and nearly defeated worldwide workers' movement attempting a last stand against a global far right xenophobic authoritarian nationalist movement. If we're incapable of turning back the tide, we will be looking down the barrel of the "New Gig Economy," and an impending ecological disaster. This in turn will almost certainly create so-called Climate Migrants and--when placed in conjunction with the tide of xenophobia-- the very real prospect of genocide on a previously unimaginable scale.

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I agree that those bits of my post were a bit confusing. So let me take this slowly. First, the last quote is not referring to the NYTimes, but to people like my grandparents (who support single payer healthcare). How is it, that my grandfather can support single payer and not realize how far right the NYT is economically? That is what makes no sense to me. But for him (he is an Ivy League grad), I guess there is some kind of class coloring which makes him blind to the contradiction. He sees the NYT as being on "our side" just because they represent education and intelligence :/. But this is all really just a way of restating what I said before, that people like him are somehow more allied to their educational class than they are to political coherence.

As to the first two posts, I do see a contradiction within the pages of the NYT itself. Clinton supported a rise in the minimum wage in the US. The NYT was all for her, and you can find articles in which they laud her support for raising the minimum wage. But then, in other places, they write with a far right economic stance. And so it seems to me that the Time's itself is schizophrenic. But as you write, this seeming schizophrenia can also be cynically explained by saying that the Times is well aware of the fact that Clinton is a neo-liberal and that they support her BECAUSE of that, and that they are willing to lie to their readers about their intentions in supporting her. EDIT: Well, why didn't the NYT support Johnson? His public opionion is far more in line with their public economic views, isn't it?

Timthelion, I think it's important to remember that large news organizations like the New York Times are not monoliths. Every hour of every day hundreds of journalists and their editors are struggling over exactly what goes to print, modulated by policies set by upper management. There are many shades of traditional liberalism, neo-liberalism, conservatism and even social democratic tendencies involved in this struggle. Different stories at different times will reflect the ascendency of different viewpoints.

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God help me, but I'm gonna piggy back on what Artesian says here...

Given that The NYTime's most prominent economist is Paul Krugman who has supported single payer for a long time - albeit in that liberal "let's do what we can with what's politically feasible" sort of way - I don't think it's shocking that your grandfather sees the NYTime's as the Democratic-leaning paper that it is.

You're right that it's right-wing in the sense it's not anti-capitalist, but I'm not sure that does much to move the conversation forward. Rather I think understanding it in terms of the Chomskian manufacturing consent model - fake choice by having vigorous debate between two artificially oppositional option - is more illuminating.

That said, I really think highlighting the media when discussing the rise of Trump obscures as much as much explains. For one thing, the anti-media narrative of many Trump voters is about a misplaced rejection of elitism - albeit an elitism that is somehow absence of class and wealth. The fact that dialog can even exist reflects just how much we've fallen in terms of class power and consciousness. In other words, it's a symptom not a cause and not where we should be focusing our critique or analysis.

Apparently Biden said he is running for 2020

Partly informed by the conversations, good and bad, here

Trump & the myth of the progressive but misled 'white working class' voters

Great analysis, Andrew, thanks for taking the time to do it, as with the Brexit vote.

I would pretty much agree with all of it.

Although I do have a question in that you first talk about voters who earn under $100,000. But then you compare that with households earning less than $100,000 to get a percentage. But I'm not really sure what exactly these figures are referring to, because households and individual voters' earnings are not necessarily the same thing, and indeed probably wouldn't be as most households have two earners

That's sloppiness on my part, I think both are referring to household rather than individual income

okay fair enough. It is talking about household income then $100k is not a big income at all

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I would highly encourage anyone who still thinks we need to change things up in order to appeal to Trump people to read this.

Andrew F-- I'm sure it took forever to compile all of those #'s, so thank you for doing it.

Also, I don't know if this was a reference to this thread

but I got a kick out of it.

Deleted-- needs further development

No not specifically although I can see how it can be read like that. That story cropped up all over the place because on the surface it did seem to be the strongest example of the Obama-> Trump for economic reasons story. I think I started working on that piece after reading a long piece in the Guardian. TBH I read a huge volume of material including all of this thread so with any theme there wouldn't be a single influence. I did a speaking tour of the US in 2007/8 and a lot of what I was looking at was initially showing up on my large collection of 'North American anarchists in 2007/8' FB friends both in terms of linked articles but also the stories they told.

On the 100k thing, I'd very much prefer if the exit poll had a lower ceiling that that (maybe 75k) as I'd reckon while the 75-100k band does have some skilled workers (both blue collar and tech) it probably also has a lot of small business owners. I tried to find how much small business owners earned but although `I did find some figures they weren't reliable enough to include - those indicated that 75-100k was a common average range for the first 5 years of ownership but after that it would be much higher. I'd guess that's an effect of a very high failure rate in those years meaning the average is low because some of those businesses are doomed escape dreams.

However in the context of the article the overestimate of the size of the working class that probably follows isn't that important as a consistent over estimate for the comparison purposes and in real terms it means Trumps working class support is if anything smaller than estimated.

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In that pay range, I'd imagine most were managers, no?