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    ReburnsABurningReturnsTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:43am

    Clinton must steer away from “identity politics” and “address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class.”

    Three things:

    1. I don’t know if she has to, because Mitt Romney couldn’t win after getting the highest percentage of white male votes a candidate has ever picked up, but if she can thread that needle, she might be able to make this election much of more of an outright mandate that Republicans will be genuinely scared of when looking to midterms than we have seen since 1984, seeing as Clinton’s big victory over Dole was greatly magnified by Ross Perot.

    2. FiveThirtyEight had a piece laying out the estimated median household income of Trump vs. Hillary Clinton supporters, and it makes a good case that Trump supporters are not, on average, poor dumb whites. They are middle class, bordering on upper middle class households who may not be all that highly educated but who do have decent jobs. Hillary Clinton’s supporters, even her white ones, and especially Bernie Sanders’ white supporters, are poorer than Trump’s. The point of all of that comparison is that lower-working class whites are already somewhat aligned with Clinton and the Democrats.

    3. One potential avenue for Trump to make some inroads with some of the people who like Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric is on protectionist trade policies. I’d really love it (and am aware it will never happen) if a politician like Clinton or Obama who favors loose trade policies would say something akin to:

    “Yes, free trade absolutely takes some good paying jobs and replaces them, for the moment, with lower paying jobs. But over the long run, it keeps our economy competitive, and I propose to remedy that loss of income by strengthening social safety nets and making education and retraining more affordable and accessible to blue collar America”.

    The right answer to global economic forces in 2016 isn’t to attempt to pretend that they don’t exist by engaging in protectionist trade policies. It is to contend with them and mitigate the negative outcomes by taxing the positive outcomes.

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      DubayaTeeEffReburnsABurningReturns
      5/04/16 10:53am

      “Yes, free trade absolutely takes some good paying jobs and replaces them, for the moment, with lower paying jobs. But over the long run, it keeps our economy competitive, and I propose to remedy that loss of income by strengthening social safety nets and making education and retraining more affordable and accessible to blue collar America”.

      They say that every election cycle. It’s bullshit, and it’s obvious bullshit.

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      XrdsAlumReburnsABurningReturns
      5/04/16 10:55am

      The interesting thing about your point 2 is that it indicates an enormous (and justified) anxiety among those white middle class people with mediocre educations that the offshoring and automation and unbalanced trade treaties that they spent the 1990s and early 2000s cheerleading (because, hey, those blue collar workers never deserved a middle class existence) are now coming for their supposedly secure jobs, too.

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    RappingNinjaTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:42am

    The headline is clearly silly.

    But the actual Andrew Sullivan article has a lot of salient points.

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      Bolivia Newton JohnRappingNinja
      5/04/16 10:48am

      Counterpoint: No, it does not. The main thrust of the article is that the rich, like a nurturing godmother, must cradle the petulant proles back into their ignorant slumber. It’s nothing more than a 7,500 word thesis in support of Marie Antoinette’s famous adage, “Let them eat cake.”

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      GullyFoyleIsMyNameBolivia Newton John
      5/04/16 10:53am

      Counter-counterpoint: Yes, it does.

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    flamingolingoTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:43am

    The more people like Sullivan freak out about how unprecedented and earth-shaking this election will be, the more inclined I am to view it as nothing of the sort. Trump has been an unexpected success in the Republican primaries, but the rest of the election has been shaping up in largely predictable ways.

    This kinda reminds me of Francis Fukuyama’s confident assertion that we were at “the end of history” in the ‘90s with the assured triump of western-style liberal democracy reigning supreme. Pundits love counting their chickens before they’re hatched.

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      DubayaTeeEffflamingolingo
      5/04/16 10:51am

      Their job is to assert things. Nothing more, nothing less. Their language is more precise, but the coherence of the thoughts they express rarely surpasses the standard of the always bitching always shit-flinging internet.

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      Kony Tornheiserflamingolingo
      5/04/16 11:18am

      “Trump has been an unexpected success in the Republican primaries, but the rest of the election has been shaping up in largely predictable ways.”

      You may very well be right that people are freaking out when Trump obviously has no chance in the end, but that’s not close to being clear at this point, and the fact the ‘rest of the election’ isn’t as crazy doesn’t really tell us much of anything.

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    Netflix and ShillTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:59am

    Trumpism is the work of the left—“the newly energized left,” the “Black Lives Matter left,” “the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown.”

    I did find it odd that he was blaming the “_____ left”, but we have to remember that many serious Republicans are still working their way through all the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).

    Overall, I think this piece did a great job explaining the big picture problem we face:

    ...late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.

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      Kony TornheiserNetflix and Shill
      5/04/16 11:21am

      He wasn’t ‘blaming’ the left. He’s not saying Trump supporters’ feelings are correct. He’s simply trying to explain them. I think he’s more right than he is wrong.

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      IkerCatsillasKony Tornheiser
      5/04/16 11:31am

      He is blaming the Left, in a sense. He’s suggesting that the causal factors of Trumpism lie in leftist movements of the last thirty years, while entirely failing to look at the other side of the equation.

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    Hollow_LogTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:36am

    God damn it! I have been blaming Ed Sullivan this whole fucking time.

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      The Noble RenardHollow_Log
      5/04/16 10:38am

      I knew the Beatles weren’t to be trusted. We need to build a wall to keep the “Invasion” out.

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      Johnny ChundersThe Noble Renard
      5/04/16 10:40am

      Some of them, I assume, are good people.

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    MarmaladeTeardropsTom Scocca
    5/04/16 12:24pm

    The elite class has presided over an assault on the dignity of the common folk. It has “disdain” for the white working class, Sullivan writes—a working class whose members “now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome.”

    It’s not surprising that uber misogynist Sullivan erases the existence of 51% of the nation (and the world). It’s disappointing — and perhaps not surprising — that Scocca doesn’t even notice.

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      Montauk MonsterMarmaladeTeardrops
      5/04/16 2:43pm

      When I think of the white working class, I think of the single moms I know from my hometown. Waitresses, cashiers at Wal-Mart and Dollar General, receptionists...

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      MarmaladeTeardropsMontauk Monster
      5/04/16 4:02pm

      These are the overlooked, forgotten, slip-through-the-cracks women. They aren’t raging against the elites. Rather, they’re dying at “accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s.”

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/20…

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    KyuzoTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:47am

    Trump is a consequence of an ignorant electorate. The seeds of this were planted 40 years ago, when we started systematically dismantling public education.

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      motherscratcherKyuzo
      5/04/16 11:06am

      You’ll find this to be a terribly flawed hypothesis. If you look at the stats, Democrats owned the poorly educated, high school educated and super-educated voting blocks in 2012.

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      MikeATXmotherscratcher
      5/04/16 11:16am

      Wow. That’s one of the worst false equivalencies I’ve ever read. It was not Democrats at either the federal or state level that have continually reduced funding for public education. It’s been the GOP at every level. Try harder.

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    Bolivia Newton JohnTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:39am

    So this is how democracy dies: to thunderous applause.

    (May the 4th be with you, people)

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      RappingNinjaBolivia Newton John
      5/04/16 10:42am

      *bow of respect* Love the ref. Someone shoud totally make a meme of a Trump rally juxtaposed with that Padme/Antilles reaction shot.

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      IanBolivia Newton John
      5/04/16 1:12pm

      Too bad that that theme was lost in the dumpster fire that was Jar Jar Binks Wars.

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    IAMBlastedBiggsLostBurnerTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:48am

    It's an overthought, overdone essay that could've just as easily said something along the lines of 'people who have never had to worry about a fucking thing besides sharing the space at the table with those who've been isolated for far too long are pissed about having to do just that, and finally have been given permission to express their rage.'. There's nothing more complicated about it than that.

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      Kony TornheiserIAMBlastedBiggsLostBurner
      5/04/16 11:20am

      I don’t really disagree with you, but if it’s simply ‘overdone,’ why are so many people trying to claim that Sullivan is crazy or hypocritical? I don’t agree with all his conclusions, but he strikes me as more right than he is wrong.

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      IAMBlastedBiggsLostBurnerKony Tornheiser
      5/04/16 11:43am

      Well, that's an excellent point, and I guess the best answer I can give is that he's paid to write because he's deemed as having skills worthy of being compensated for. Thus, he's going to want to put forth detailed arguments and prose designed to illustrate his points. Hey, he's the writer. I'm just some random jackass putting out a thought or two, so nobody pays any attention at all to me.

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    XrdsAlumTom Scocca
    5/04/16 10:43am

    Republican intellectuals (if you’ll allow the term) may not be happy about Drumpf, but you can’t fault them for not grabbing at the opportunity to push their case against democracy forward on behalf of their corporate masters (who, have no doubt, continue to support unbalanced treaties like the TPP and TTIP and who regularly question democracy’s compatibility with free market capitalism behind closed doors).

    The level of mendacity and historical denialism from “respectable, educated and reasonable conservatives” like Sullivan, Will, Douthat, and Bo-Bo never fails to disappoint.

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      Kony TornheiserXrdsAlum
      5/04/16 11:20am

      Say what you will about Sullivan, but he’s not a Republican.

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      SirHudFudKony Tornheiser
      5/04/16 11:23am

      Sorry: a Thatcherite.

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