The Dems should have skipped perseverating about Trump as a threat and painted him as a cheat. That’s my post-election post-mortem.
This mistake goes back at least as far as the first impeachment when screwing around with foreign leaders was given more attention than emoluments.
Who cares if he blackmails some president of Ukraine? What does that have to do with me?
Besides, what about Hunter?
The billionaire hype? The gaudy gold? The musky Musk? That’s my American Dream of too much.
And yet you say he would stick me with the tab if we have a beer together. That sounds bad.
And his big-time wheeler-dealer bankruptcies bankrupted small-time folk like me? Folk who get their dander up if getting fooled makes us last on the pecking order, not second to last?
A threat to democracy? I don’t give a shit about democracy when it looks like this and prices are what they are.
But man, what a wuss. Like you say, he did not even go to fight with those other tourists on January 6th.
And he cheats at golf? He cheats? At golf?
“He cheats at golf,” or some variation thereof might have been the last thing every Dem talking head said these last eight years. Most contractors in NYC know what Trump is all about and every Joe The Plumber from Queens should have been on a constant scroll telling their counterparts in the plain states what’s what:
You're an American, not a cheat. This guy cheats.
Effective politically? I don’t know. But every time the Dems said this guy was a threat to democracy they only reinforced the message that he was a change agent, and change is the one thing everyone wants.
Naturally, when your strategy does not work and your lose the contest you have to look both at the strategy itself and the values that led you to that strategy in the first place. That the Dems went ‘High-Brow Threat’ rather than ‘Man-In-The-Street Cheat,’ and did so from the start should be part of the mirror they look into. What they would see there—no surprise—is that it is easier to talk about a threat to hyperventalate about a terrible human being rather than to adress a divided economic order which benefits their thought leaders. Ever notice that no more folks from the middle-class appear on CNN than on FOX? Ever been bothered by that? Neither is CNN.
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I am breaking off here because I fear this is a tiresome topic and looks like an easy answer in a world of difficult ones, a distraction in a world of distractions. Indeed, I wote the above quickly and let it sit for a few days because I thought it needed more and did not know what that would be.
And just now I finished teaching one of my classes. For context, a month ago all of these kids knew Liam Payne died. Only three of them knew what the electoral college was. Today I got them to look up at me for five minutes as we talked about shopping and I manaaged to get into a philosphical debate about categories around the question: Are shoes clothing? But I could not keep their interest sustained beyond that and they went back to their phones.
I have a couple more things to say post mortem-wise about the election and will do that tomorrow, I think. But cancer of the bone is not cured with topical ointments.
On that note, here’s a quote from Carl Sagan from 1995. This came to me by way of Bary. So thanks to him for that.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”