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More Remarks

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Clarissa

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I didn’t mention the people who were truly economically devastated by globalization in my posts. Those people absolutely do exist, I’ve seen them, I’ve seen their little towns that look like a war zone. These are people who either don’t vote, or if they do, they go Democrat. 

The line about Trump voters being devastated by globalization makes zero sense to me. I’m not seeing any evidence of that. The plight of such people is real and it’s tragic. But Trumpism is about cultural alienation, not economic.

Also, the “if only we’ d gone with Bernie” folks: Hillary lost because half of the country sees her as way too progressive for their liking. Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. She didn’t lose because she wasn’t progressive enough. Take a peek at who holds most governorships, the Senate and the House for clues. By the way, who’s the governor of Vermont?

19 responses to “More Remarks”

  1. David P. Bellamy Avatar
    David P. Bellamy

    Hillary Clinton lost because she lacked the charisma to excite voters. It was not because she was too progressive. Sanders and Trump had this charisma, Sanders moreso than Trump.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      As I said, I’m not very interested in repeating the same line about the candidate lacking charisma to excite voters that we repeated after Gore and after Kerry. It’s getting way too repetitive.

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    \ Hillary lost because half of the country sees her as way too progressive for their liking. Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true.

    It is not hard to believe for me at all.

    The main article about Hilary on Israeli website is titled “Won in all large cities – and lost the election.”

    In Britain, Londoners voted against Brexit too, in contrast to the less central parts of the country.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s the delusional idea that Bernie would have won the country when he couldn’t even win his own party. It’s like people are living in an alternative reality.

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        Bernie – a socialist Jew – winning American elections.
        🙂 🙂 🙂

        And, in the privacy of voting booth, the Jew part would work against him, no matter what people would admit publicly.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          In a country where a KKK candidate just won, I’d say you are absolutely right.

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  3. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    It begins.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-climate-skeptic-to-lead-epa-transition/

    Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition

    Choosing Myron Ebell means Trump plans to drastically reshape climate policies

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Nobody even tried to make climate and issue during this election. I’m not blaming anybody: the public is stupid on the issue but it totally sucks.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Read the article. It’s worse than I thought. And it won’t get better until more people are educated on climate.

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  4. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    Charisma isn’t the only or most important factor, but it’s in the mix and parties pay no attention to it at their peril.

    I think that Clinton would have wiped the floor with Cruz or Jeb or Rubio (the choices in rough order of the Republican establishment). She would have had a slightly harder time with Carson but I don’t think he was ever seriously in the running.

    Her biggest problem was being the right candidate at the wrong time. I’ll never stop thinking she should have been the democratic nominee with Obama as running partner in 2008. That felt right and they would have won (because it was hard not to win against McCain) and Obama would be a better candidate now and would probably win against Trump.

    Hindsight is everything. I was very much a supporter in 2008 but this year? I would have voted for her if I hadn’t abstained on principle (since I don’t live in the US). But not that enthusiastically as I would have in 2008.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      As we say, if husband #4 hits you in the face, the problem is not the husband but the face. Crude but true. If one candidate after another loses because of “charisma”, one has got to ask if something else isn’t at play.

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  5. el Avatar
    el

    Rhetoric or reality? Arabs struggle to decode Trump’s Mideast rhetoric
    …
    In particular there are worries that Trump’s hostile rhetoric towards Muslim migrants will play into the hands of ISIS and al Qaeda, which are eager to recruit disaffected young Arabs to wage war on the regional governments they despise as stooges of Washington.

    Gulf Arab leaders […] want help to push back against Iran, their main rival. But they fear Trump’s public praise for Vladimir Putin will encourage Russia to expand its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran and an enemy of most Gulf Arab states.
    …
    Trump’s win has not only delighted Western right-wingers but also jihadists who told supporters the election had revealed the true position of the United States towards Muslims.

    “The masks have slipped,” one supporter said on Islamic State websites. “(Trump’s) moronic declarations alone serve us even if his decisions will be under the supervision of the Senate…,” wrote another.

    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4876975,00.html

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  6. Fred Avatar
    Fred

    The thing is, the cultural and economic alienation cannot be separated. The two are interrelated.

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  7. For upon this quiet life Avatar
    For upon this quiet life

    I agree with basically everything you’ve said in your election analysis. Even I – a democratic liberal – am tired of the liberal police who think I’m not towing the party line enough. They alienate well-meaning people and are so smug they never even questioned the polls saying with 85% certainty that HRC would win. I was worried about it because the British media thought that Brexit could never happen too. I was in London when Brexit happened and I had a feeling then that it was an omen about our own election. I’m bummed I was right.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I honestly didn’t have even a shadow of a doubt we would win. Not even a sliver of a shadow. And I live in the Midwest, I should know better.

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  8. David Gendron Avatar
    David Gendron

    Trump won mainly because upper-middle White voters who had massively voted for Obama in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2008 and 2012 voted massively for Trump this time.

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    1. David Gendron Avatar
      David Gendron

      Moreover, she did better than Kerry and Gore with a sweep in these 3 highly Hispanic-concentrated States: Nevada, Colorado and New-Mexico.

      Also, Kerry have won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2004.

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  9. Jones Avatar
    Jones

    “Hillary lost because half of the country sees her as way too progressive for their liking.”

    Believe that at your peril, and I do mean this quite literally as well as figuratively, as I will explain …

    The economic numbers are bad enough: presently roughly 40 counties in the United States account for over half of the overall economic growth. Most of the metro areas are putting in less-than-immodest growth or are barely holding level, which then brings us to the vast expanse known as “flyover country”, which it appears you are now going to visit.

    “The customs! The odd manners of dress! The cowboy hats!”

    You truly make an awful stereotypical tourist, you do know that, right? 🙂

    Anyway, these people in “flyover country”, which includes the outer counties of major metro areas, are tired of not having what they consider to be “a voice” in things. They feel excluded and that few in the cities are listening to what they have to say.

    They just managed to pull off one of the largest Fuck You votes in American history.

    Trump doesn’t really represent much of anything — we don’t know much about policy specifics, only about “The Wall” that Mexico is supposed to pay for and other such rhetorical shiny objects. Yet just enough people voted for him to allow him to be elected to the highest political office in the United States.

    America should do better than this, but it won’t and I’m not convinced in its present state that it ever could. America didn’t elect Adlai Stevenson and it wouldn’t have elected Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.

    Now that the disenchanted have a voice through Donald Trump, the sledge hammers and wrecking balls shall emerge from the shadows, and that’s clearly the intention with an obvious declaration of appointing someone who disagrees with the prevailing opinion on climate change.

    Imagine millions upon millions of much smaller sledge hammers and wrecking balls, and I believe you’ll start to get my point.

    I could have stayed in England where I wouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense. Brexit is going to be enough regulatory, institutional, and governmental chaos to last many of us for quite long enough, especially with what I eventually see as the emergence of “The United Kingdom of England and Wales”.

    I’m here because there are more than just a few things to save when the sledge hammers and wrecking balls start to tear apart American institutions that matter.

    There may be some ugly deals that need to be made with Trump in order to preserve some of those things, and once again I point out that I’m not political, but that I will find a way to buy off Trump with some sort of move of goodwill at the least.

    My part of it can be summed up in brief: the meek shall inherit the Earth, and before some of the rubble starts to accumulate, I’ll find a way to get enough of the artefacts of America’s knowledge to places in the world where there has never been armed conflict.

    My library project exists because I don’t trust political operatives of any kind, and I’m in America because I’ve been buying books, lots of books, currently being dealt with in multiple storage units across America.

    That doesn’t mean I’ll lift even one single solitary finger to help those institutions.

    The problem is that once they’ve been infiltrated of political operatives of any kind, they eventually cease to provide the protective and guardian-like services that you would normally expect in a well-functioning society.

    Having experienced America again after having been away for a very long time, after having been off the plane for about a week, my summary more or less was this: emergent third-world situations with first-world prices.

    So in essence I see a country with not-quite-UK-pricey levels of cost, but still expensive, where major parts of the economy and society simply do not work to any reasonable specification.

    Healthcare is only the most obviously broken part that’s broken — I currently pay nearly 1000 USD/month for a reasonable policy and I expect that to go up significantly in 2017, especially if I choose to move out of the city into another state and into the countryside, and that is for broken healthcare that is often not even up to the level of a near-failing NHS trust.

    It’s not a big surprise that some people want to start chanting “BLOW IT UP” or “TEAR IT DOWN” like the angry residents of Pruitt-Igoe, one of America’s infamous Corbusier-influenced tower block council estates.

    But they’re not going to stop with government, and I think that should be fairly obvious.

    I don’t expect the American public university system will be much more than a stripped bare pedagogical vessel, at least at undergraduate and graduate levels, once the reformers are done with it. The “education bubble” exists because of American government policy regarding student loans, and the American government has tried to have its cake as well as eat it with such things as making these loans non-dischargeable during bankruptcy.

    Enough people have been hectored about their sentiments in “flyover country” that they’re not going to give one flying toss about what the people in these institutions care. They’re going to trim budgets and to get things “back to plan”, and if they have to smash a few dozen eggs to make a three-egg omelette, they will do precisely that.

    I’ve tried to provide a few warnings — I’ve left little bits about this, such as the bit from Razib Khan. There are plenty of people who do not think kindly of the university as it stands in America, especially when it comes to the ridiculous excesses undertaken in the name of “fairness” and “equality”, and those people will now feel empowered to do something.

    Insofar as some of the blunt objects go who just don’t get it: the three words I had in mind were “you’ll never understand”.

    My patience with political operatives has now fairly much dropped to zero, and I am now focusing on the things I need to get done in order to accomplish my goals. I’d hoped for a few experts to provide some assistance, but I have realised that I need to take great care in vetting these experts, especially when personal reputations in public life may be at stake.

    Some people didn’t make it along on the trip.

    It’s not that I don’t understand politics — I’ve had more than my fill.

    Once upon a time, during one of my earlier times of living in America, I chose to live in Austin, Texas, where I learned to shoot rifles well. My Saturday morning range partners were various Representatives and Senators of both the state and federal variety, as well as a few future hopefuls for the Governor’s office. In Texas, you don’t aspire to public office without a rather public display of dove hunting, deer hunting, or something along those lines.

    Back then, I fit into the scene with an NRA Stetson, bespoke-tailored Oxfords and jeans, and some comfortable yet stylish dress shoes with steel reinforced shells of a type favoured by managers of Japanese auto factories.

    Now here’s the thing …

    I’m really a bit player in all of this — what I have to offer doesn’t come close to the kinds of resources that the larger “social engineering” players such as George Soros could put into motion.

    But if I could see this coming even as a suggestion of a possibility, it wouldn’t be a surprise at all if there already are other projects similar to mine in motion, and that I’m simply not connected with those people enough to see that happening.

    After all, I’m not really politically connected anymore, neither in London nor in Austin.

    That’s not really a problem for me.

    It eventually came down to knowing who you can trust.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is a very good essay, thank you. For the first time ever, I actually understand everything you wrote. And I agree with most. My ms I never objection is that I’m from the St Louis area. Sure, I’m not used to cowboy boots but I have almost 10 years of living in the Bible Belt (first in Indiana and now in STL.) I used to despise Midwestern “religious fanatics” to which my blog bears full witness. After living here for almost a decade, I get the people you are talking about. I don’t agree with them but I get them. And yes, the social safety net is in tatters and it’s only going to get worse. Healthcare, public ed, everything you say. I’ve been to West Virginia, and as you say, it’s a 3rd world situation, absolutely. I was stunned.

      I also agree with you about American university destroying itself. It’s all true.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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