The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty
In modern times, an autopsy is the go-to post-mortem procedure to get answers to why a life ended. Highly trained medical examiners, often a pathologist, meticulously find the clues a body still holds once life has left it. Legal procedural shows and the true crime push for more and more real-life content have made the autopsies a staple of our collective consciousness. The medical examiner dropping some plot-turning nugget of knowledge is a narrative staple now, portrayed as an expert expertly expertizing on the elements of the enigma at hand.
It wasn’t always that way. In not-so-merry olde England, criminals executed for crimes were publicly dissected for the dual purpose of the primitive medical science of the day and also as one last temporal indignity to the criminal who has already been dispatched to eternity. This was portrayed infamously by William Hogarth in his The Four Stages of Cruelty, a print series of morality finger wagging that was sort of a combo social commentary tract as graphic novel. In them, the fictional Tom Nero starts out mistreating a dog as a child, then a horse as a young man, then graduates his debauchery to murdering his pregnant lover, and finally in the Fourth Stage of Cruelty finds his hanged corpse on the theatre table being publicly dissected.
We know he was hanged because — master of subtly that Hogarth was — there is still a tight noose around the elongated neck of Tom Nero as he is simultaneously disemboweled, has an eye gouged out, and something not quite explainable is done to his feet.
That imagery comes to mind as the chattering classes prattle on about election post-mortems and campaign autopsies. Far from forensic pathologists meticulously looking for clues, mostly these dissections of the politically deceased are unlearned hacks just dismembering a body for the public spectacle of it. Hogarth’s still-shocking imagery was meant as a morality cudgel, drawing a line through cruel children becoming cruel adults and abusing animals leading to abusing mankind as a whole, ending in state-sanctioned violence and humiliation even after death. Which makes the Four Stages of Cruelty a fitting comp to the political chattering of today.
There are stages to reverse-engineering a completed election to get out of it the meaning one needs to press on to the next one. Anger and frustration lead to finding some blame somewhere external to the self. Then there is a need for a scapegoat. If that doesn’t suffice, then a group of scapegoats. Perhaps even an entire demographic of scapegoats. Left unchecked, the politically ate-up mind finds themselves at perpetual war with the majority of the electorate because those awful, wicked, evil people just don’t understand how awesomely awesome their carefully curated and separated opinion really is. And darn that media for not covering it that way.
Much of the post-mortem election handwringing, finger pointing, and caterwauling is less analysis and more flagellation of the electorate that didn’t vote the way it was supposed to. If only Trump hadn’t wiped the primary floor with Jeb!, the artist formerly known as TrustTed Cruz, or now-nominated Secretary of State “Lil’ Marco” Rubio none of this would have happened. If only Bernie Sanders would have been given a chance to be president. If only the Republican Party had resisted the Great and Powerful Political Oz not-so-hidden up the golden escalator of 725 5th Ave, New York, NY 10022. If only Joe Biden hadn’t become the living opposite of Conjunction Junction verbally on live, national TV. If only Hillary had gone to Wisconsin. If only Mike Pence had the courage.
Ifs, buts, buttercups, whatsits. Mostly this is just hacking at the corpse of elections past so folks can ooh, ah, and gasp at the entrails.
But there is cruelty involved. Seeping into the corners of the discourse will be accusations that certain demographics did not vote as “they are supposed to” based on preconceived notions of what some think is best for that demographic. What that demographic themselves thinks is irrelevant, of course, because reasons and just win, baby. Such thinking is far from the opposite of a proper autopsy or postmortem search for truth; it is staring into the body cavity and finding only the reflection of presupposed prejudices lurking somewhere between the liver and spleen. The ancients thought the soul resided in the liver, before the poets figured out that made for bad verse and even worse imagery and thus moved the eternal parts of humans into the vague area of “the heart.” But with this much bile being slung across modern technology revealing more about humans than ever before, maybe the ancients were onto something.
For that matter, the very word autopsy reveals the problem with post-election postmortem posturing. Before the English and French got ahold of it, the word came through Latin and Greek as a sense of personal observation. Autos optos as in “self-revealed,” autoptos, autopsies (but say that one in a French accent). Those trained pathologists, even when dissecting another body, have a filter of remembering they are looking for things that can prove useful not only in determining the cause of death, but in continuing the process of life in the still-living through gained knowledge. Far from the spectacle in the 18th century theaters of not-so-merry olde England making sure a criminal is brutalized even in death, a proper postmortem concerns itself with an honest assessment of life, using death as a guidepost on the mortal road all must travel.
Honest assessments start with self and then work outwards. Post-election reviews that start with the failings of always popular villains They, Them, and Those are not good analysis but public spectacle morality finger waving at those who did not vote correctly and caused the failure of promised electoral glory. And then such finger wagging folks wonder why corpse they hanged in effigy, drew across news media, and quartered all over social media does not rise from the dead to return to the polls next election and elect they themselves god-emperors of the universe.
It is a mystery, alright.
Yes. Excellent.
Here’s the #1 tell:
“Could we have done better if we did something different?”
“WHY IN THE HELL SHOULD WE HAVE DONE SOMETHING DIFFERENT?!?!?”
There are a lot of ways that the response can be worded… “Oh, who do you think we should have abandoned? Who do you think we should have denied were human? Whose human rights do you think we should have trampled?” is a light paraphrase of one I’ve seen in the wild.
It’s not really a question, is it? It’s pretty much an attack that attempts to get the person trying to figure out, specifically, *WHICH* mistakes were made/avoidable to shut the hell up and get back in line.
“Let’s talk about this.”
“Let’s *NOT*!”
We just had yet another election where the people who weren’t allowed to talk about stuff in public decided to vote in private.
Maybe it’s time to talk about stuff in public.Report
I think the most amazing thing about liberal election post-mortems is that you hear the same thing every time they lose, and have as far back as I can remember (OK, at least since 2000): The Democrats have a messaging problem. Everyone likes what the Democrats are selling, but the Democrats aren’t selling at well. Many articles and books have been written selling various messaging fixes. The writers of these articles and books have then served on Democratic campaigns. It’s a great racket, and allows the Democrats to never, ever make a change to what they’re selling no matter how often they lose.Report
First you have to admit you have a problem.
My suggestion would be something like what Jonathan Pie yells about in his 2016 Election Rant about the importance of persuasion over cancellation.
But I work at the persuasion store and so of course I would argue that.Report
I just don’t think wokeness and cancelling people is a salient part of mainstream Democratic discourse. Yeah, it’s big on Twitter, and maybe in some universities, but I don’t recall any wokeness or cancellation talk from Harris, or from Biden before her, or from Bernie ever. You might say the “basket of deplorables” remark is a cancel not persuade remark, but other than that, I don’t even remember much from Clinton, and I doubt there’s anyone here who thinks less of Clinton than I do.Report
HR training, man. HR training.
And if it was big on twitter, it also made its way to Facebook. (Let’s not even talk about Reddit.)
So I think it was enough on the radar.
There’s also a problem with… I don’t know what the right frame is. Okay, last month, actor Simu Liu was a judge on a panel of one of those Shark Tank shows where he was asked about some kind of boba tea drink product and he shot it down because of “cultural appropriation”.
THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HARRIS, BIDEN, OR CLINTON.
But there seems to be an undercurrent out there that hints that you can’t do anything to push back against this except vote for Trump.
If you want to tell me that that’s not fair, I’ll agree with you.Report
Why would it need pushing back against?Report
For mirror reasons to it needing pushing.
Aesthetic masquerading as moral.Report
If we’re going by Facebook, then I don’t think the problem is cancel rhetoric, because what I see from conservatives is closer to eliminationist rhetoric.
Twitter might be an issue, but what % of voters pay attention to Twitter?
HR is something else. I don’t know how that relates to the Democrats, though.Report
Democrats cancel, in furtherance of their crazed woke agenda. Republicans, on the other hand, know right from wrong, and act accordingly, the way all good honest Americans do.Report
Get more pinko friends. My god, my feed is nothing but “self-care in these troubled times” advice posts.
I donât know how that relates to the Democrats, though.
Do you disagree that it does reflect on them or are you asking about the mechanism of it doing so?Report
Do you disagree that it does reflect on them or are you asking about the mechanism of it doing so?
I don’t see why it should reflect on them.
Get more pinko friends. My god, my feed is nothing but âself-care in these troubled timesâ advice posts.
My Facebook consists of three groups of people: people I went to primary/secondary school with, people I went to undergrad/grad school with, and people I have known since grad school. The last group is pretty much entirely pinko, not a liberal, much less a conservative in the group. The middle group is liberals, leftists, and (American-style) libertarians. The first group, though, is almost all MAGA with a few moderate liberals here and there. And from the MAGAs, I get to see a bunch of the extended MAGA ecosystem (from replies, shares, memes, etc.).Report
I donât see why it should reflect on them.
Fair enough.
Do you see that it does?
If so, we can move straight to you telling me that that isn’t fair and me agreeing with you.Report
Jaybird, something like 50% of stuff that was ‘on the radar’ about Democrats was utterly made up, and 50% of the stuff that was ‘on the radar’ about how Republicans would solve problems was made up, also.
The actual failure of this election is, oddly, the entity that the media is not talking about: The media.
The media normalized literally everything. And, yes, I’m aware that a huge segment of the population has warned off into insane media sources, but there is a certain point where the media should just have refused, bluntly, to repeat anything Trump was saying.
The problem is that Republicans understood how to work the media, so keep feeding stories that were often utter nonsense, and Democrats just…didn’t. But the problem isn’t Democrats, it is the media.
At a certain point it just has to become ‘This man is utterly unacceptable as president’ as sorta the lead to literally any story about him.Report
Sure, we can admit we have a problem. If “we” are American Democrats, we probably have a lot of problems. But what you see as the Democrats’ problem is almost certainly not what I see as the Democrats’ problem and Chris and Saul and everyone else here will see other problems.
The Democrats were not progressive enough.
No, the Democrats were too progressive.
The Democrats didn’t bring enough to the table to relieve middle-class economic anxiety in an age of inflation.
No, the Democrats brought all kinds of things to the table to relieve middle-class economic anxiety in an age of inflation, but did a bad job explaining why those things would help. The problem is Democrats just aren’t good explainers, see.
Democrats thought that Americans would be able to rise above sexism, and their problem is they just haven’t taken the measure of the American people.
No, the problem is that Democrats didn’t have the kind of ground game they needed. Sure there were lots of volunteers but knocking on doors and leaving pamphlets doesn’t convince anyone.
No, the problem is that Democrats couldn’t penetrate to the small number of undecided voters who the election turned on. You can’t give a wonky argument to someone who goes through life on vibes!
No, the problem is those voters were hungry for policy solutions to their problems, and all they ever got from the Democrats was vibes!
And on and on it goes.
Admitting there is a problem is not the issue. Choosing the correct problem to admit is. And that’s compounded when everyone is diagnosing problems based on their own unexamined priors. I’m probably guilty of that myself, and so are you, good reader.Report
Admitting there is a problem is not the issue. Choosing the correct problem to admit is.
I agree with this.
So long as it’s not the deep breath one takes before pointing out “subjectivity exists, therefore nobody knows anything, therefore the status quo. Q.E.D.”Report
Part of the meta problem is that most if not all of the various reasons have for the Harris loss are at least partially true. What are the most important ones that can be changed? Where is the change energy to be spent?
Where is the crux of the problem?
It also comes back to us( politics knowers and followers) to figure out what people who are disconnected from and dont’ follow politics think. Which is incredibly hard to do and also hard to figure out how to fix.Report
that, and also “the problem with Democrats is that they’re just too darn nice, they don’t attack so viciously as Republicans do”.Report
something something bringing charts and graphs to bazooka fights something something.Report
The take that is currently wandering around is that the whole “BernieBro” thing is where everything started to go awry.
Bernie was more attractive to a handful of people in 2016 than Clinton was. How to turn this around? Just accuse anybody who liked Bernie more of sexism! #MeToo wasn’t *THAT* far away and so you could just imply that someone preferred Bernie over Hillary of being a broski who wanted a white dude.
At the same times, there was a BLM thing going on… remember when the Bernie rally was interrupted by protesters who demanded equal time on the mic?
People who disliked this were racist and sexist.
Prove that you’re not. Vote for Hillary.
It wasn’t about socialism vs. a more realistic liberalism. It was about Identity.
Remember MTVnews’s 2017 New Years Resolutions for White Guys?
Good times.
Anyway, James Carville is nobody’s idea of a guy who won’t attack viciously… and his argument was that they needed better targets than HALF OF FREAKING EVERYBODY.
Ah, well. Luckily Trump is surely so bad that he’ll only get one term again.Report
I agree. Democrats do have a messaging problem.
The message:
– If you are white, you are racist
– If you are a man, you are sexist
– If you are heterosexual, you are homophobic
– If you are rich, you did it on the backs of everyone else and need to be punished
Why should anyone vote for the party that thinks you are a piece of garbage that needs the government to make them a better person?Report
That sounds more like an inference than an implication. I’m all but the last one on your list and I’ve never felt attacked by Dems.Report
Tell that to Critical Race Theory.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05
Men of any race get slammed for their choices.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/06/us-news/fuming-joe-scarborough-blames-racism-misogyny-among-black-and-hispanic-voters-for-harris-loss/
The homophobic stuff
https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/07/26/homophobia-is-now-part-of-gop/
https://www.learningforjustice.org/professional-development/ten-ways-homophobia-affects-straight-people
https://www.rainbow-project.org/internalised-homophobia/
I won’t go into the class warfare. It is way too easy to find a “Fair share” comment.Report
I think the role of wokeness in Democrats’ electoral fortunes is vastly overestimated by extremely online people who for whatever reason feel like wokeness is anti-them personally, for whatever reason. It’s a form of insecurity, resulting in projection.
There is a related, broader narrative among conservatives, which I first saw during the first Obama term, which says that by talking about race at all, Democrats are dividing people by race. Meanwhile, conservatives were showing up to political rallies during the ’08 election with monkey dolls standing in for Obama, but they weren’t creating any racial divisions.Report
When Trump responded to Biden’s “garbage” comment (Biden was accused of calling supporters of Donald Trump âgarbageâ, though he clarified that he didnât mean Trump supporters but rather their attitude towards Latinos – the official transcript had Biden saying, âThe only garbage I see floating out there is his supporterâs â his â his â his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and itâs un-Americanâ), Trump responded by saying “250 million people aren’t garbage”, a number which is damn close to how many white people are in America.
That math sure looks like division to me.Report
The Financial Times has a nice little article: Trump broke the Democratsâ thermostat.
This graphic does a good job of showing the long tail.
Long tails matter!
Report
This is DEI in a nutshell and sometimes it’s explained at this level of detail.
Calling this “a messaging problem” implies this message can be made prettier. This is a very ugly message and it should be treated like an ugly message.Report
No, it’s making people explicitly state what they are merely trying to imply. It sure weird how you think the discussion the Democrats are having should not involve people actually being honest about what they want changed.
And this is everyone’s reminder that Democrats will never, ever, ever, stop being attacked on LGBTQ issues, which we know because Republicans literally just make things up about those issues. Republicans attacks are not based in the real world.
Because the major attack _I_ heard was ‘The VP candidate required tampons in boy’s bathrooms in school’, which, it should be pointed out, is a lie.
Jaybird, why don’t _you_ explain what bad positions drove away voters that changing positions on could be described as ‘abandoning someone’ that the Democrats took this time? Not ‘What bad things exist in some abstract sense’, but literally anything Harris or Walz said or did? It doesn’t have to be limited to LGBTQ, although the demographics most suggested to be thrown under the bus.Report
Can I mention the whole commercial where Harris was talking about gender reassignment for prisoners that relied quite heavily on footage of her?
I mean, we’re not talking “I respect the right of all snickerdoodles to live with respect and dignity” in response to a question like that.
But I suppose another might be the whole failure to craft a Sista Soulja about any position that got embarrassing between 2022 and 2024. You know how AOC removed her pronouns from her bio quietly last year? Maybe something condemning that whole thing. You know the “LatinX” thing that everybody quietly walked away from? Maybe *CONDEMNING* it as being stupid (maybe even “colonist”).
Because the game we’re playing is the whole “lose 1% here to gain 2% there” game, right?
If you refuse to play, you get Donald Trump.
Are you refusing to play?Report
Then there’s the commercial with her dancing and chanting “no more deportations” with the protesters.Report
I don’t recall seeing that one, but our local media market played the “pay for transgender reassignment surgery” one a lot.Report
So what is your theory, there, Jaybird? That prisoners should not get medical care?
This has been policy for healthcare while in Federal detention since 2016. Trump didn’t do a single thing to alter it. It was the policy his entire administration.
This is exactly an example of what I’m talking about. Harris did not actually do _anything_. Gender-affirming care was added to various healthcare provided in prison in 2016, and that was it. She just said she wasn’t changing it.
The right just _lied_ about what was going on.Report
Oh, and to be clear, the lie was literally just based in bigotry, hoping people would have horrified reaction to the idea of trans people existing. It wasn’t crouched in ‘This is government spending out of control’, or at least not just that.
It was ‘Harris is for they/them’, aka, explicitly anti-trans. It was part of the Trump campaign general attack that ‘Harris does not loathe trans people’, which is not, in fact, a policy complaint, but just outright fascism.
But again, none of this is actually ‘changing positions’ whatsoever. This is not some sort of new policy position where the Democrats have gone too far. Providing medical care to trans people is…like, a normal thing. A thing that has been around for decades. And when the government controls all medical care, like when someone is detained, the government provides that.
Trump did not attack actual policy positions that Democrats hold, he attacked the mere concept of ‘not being bigotted against trans people’.This is _exactly why_, when some Democrats say ‘We should have taken positions that we wouldn’t get attacked on’, others ask the very questions you think is unacceptable ‘Whose human rights do you think we should have trampled?’
Because you’re there saying ‘Maybe the Democrats should have demanded trans people aren’t allowed to have healthcare, that would make the Republicans like them.’
Fun fact: It wouldn’t. They’d just make up something else to attack. ‘Harris supports laws allowing trans people to drive cars to schools to kidnap your children!” because she didn’t oppose a law allowing them to change sex markers on their driver’s license.Report
Here is a trans-woman who has run for office as a Democrat talking about how the Democrats have badly mishandled the trans issue(s).
Why We Lost – Brianna Wu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6fR0bhZJi0Report
Citing Brianna Wu suggests that you’re not online enough to know about Wu’s right turn.Report
you might say she made a real wu-turnReport
The puns are back!Report
Yes, I’m not. However one assumes she’s still pro-trans and is personally affected by the trans issue.Report
You do indeed assume that. It’s not true, but you do assume it.Report
Sorry, that was a little ruder sounding than I intended, but the trans community caught on to Brianna Wu’s little grift years ago. She’s a blatant truscum willing to throw anyone else under the bus.
I’ve been watching her get dragged on Xitter for years. Here’s one so bad (She fricking promoted the Harry Benjamin standard of care, from the _1970s_, a thing trans people have been pushing against for decades) that she deleted her posts:
https://x.com/badinfinity2/status/1636511420605952003Report
Worse than that. They just quoted her and made it a commercial.Report
Yes, Jaybird, organized persecution of trans people has progressed far enough that they can merely associate her mentioning a normal thing the government provides (medical care to prisoners, a thing the government has a legal, constitutional, and _moral_ requirement to provide) but involving icky trans people, and that fact causes a negative impact.
I repeat what I said: This is _exactly why_, when some Democrats say âWe should have taken positions that we wouldnât get attacked onâ, others ask the very questions you think is unacceptable âWhose human rights do you think we should have trampled?â
The right, or at least Trumpism, has moved into actual, literal, fascism. And I will defend that statement at this point, I’m being not hyperbolic. One of the targets, one of the outgroups that fascism requires, have been decided to be trans people, and queer people in general, and a good chunk of people here will be forever damned that they keep ‘asking questions’ about trans issues, or demanding compromise.
There is no compromise, because you cannot compromise with fascists trying to eradicate people they don’t like. They will never accept anything sort of totality, and they will just _lie_ about whatever position their opposition holds.
—
And the people who say things like ‘Maybe trans people should stop asking for health care’ (Like healthcare isn’t a perfectly normal thing people need.) or ‘Maybe trans people should stay out of sports’ (Like sports are even vaguely the business of the government or important at all)…you’re the Germans in 1934 who are saying ‘Look, I don’t agree with the Na.zis, and I don’t agree with any violence, but there are a lot of Jews in the government, and a communist did burn down the Reichstag, and I’m just asking questions. Maybe a few restrictions on people are in order…not what the Na.zi want, but, like, _reasonable_ restrictions.”
And maybe some of you need to f*cking stop and think about what you’re doing. The results you are helping accomplish by being ‘reasonable’. Because you are talking about things under a system that you know damn well will not be ‘reasonable’.Report
AOC is fundraising on fighting against Fascism.
You can help by sending her $5.Report
Na.zi/death-camp accusations are the “go to” argument if you don’t have a case, and it’s not convincing. Nor does it win elections.
Your prison hc argument would be stronger without them.
David: âMaybe trans people should stay out of sportsâ âĤyouâre the Germans in 1934
It’s a bad idea to insist that females-by-identity should be setting sports records that born-females can’t hope to match. Attempting to make this argument shatters creditability.Report
And those records would be found where exactly? Because they are not infiltrating the popular press.Report
Because they are not infiltrating the popular press.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/30/male-powerlifter-enters-womens-event-breaks-record/
The trans athlete setting records wasn’t high end before they converted. We’ve seen multiple other examples of vast improvement.
Of course the “female during the contest” coach who is trolling is another problem.
We separate the genders in sports for good reason.
Serena Williams, the best female tennis player in history, wouldn’t be in the top 200 if she were a man (we tested this and it wasn’t pretty). So if any of the top 10 male tennis players transition they’re going to be invincible.Report
The election was basically “It’s inflation, stupid” and now it appears to be dawning on people that perhaps they should have taken Trump seriously and literally and they have buyer’s remorse.Report
I’d say it’s more likely that almost everyone who voted for Trump last week are willing to wait until he actually takes office before regretting it.
But I do admire your optimism!Report
Why wait!?Report
True. Always better to get in on the ground floor.Report
Future historians are going to find so many people saying they voted for Harris, that they aren’t quite sure how she lost.Report
Pennsylvanians are famous for this.
About 7 million people claim to have witnessed Wilt score 100 points in Hershey.Report
I’ve already talked to three people who have told me “I wish that Nathan Hochman didn’t get elected, even though I voted for him”.
Did LA really know what they were doing? Maybe they just wanted Gascon to tighten up a little and wanted to, you know, make a shot across his bow without outright replacing him.Report
We’ve spent so many years telling people that their vote sends a message; I guess we shouldn’t be surprised when they take us seriously.Report
(Dudes, I was just kidding about Nathan Hochman. Seriously. Nobody in Colorado Springs knows who he is except for a handful of people and that handful of people are all delighted that Gascon is out on his keister.)Report
Heh. Come to Chicago if you want opposing terrible choices on the ballot.Report
The American people fished around and found out.Report
I really don’t feel like this election needs a post-mortem. The latest vote totals I could find were Trump 50.2% and Harris 48.2%. The popular vote in the so-called swing states was with 2-3 percentage votes, with the biggest one being NC which probably wasn’t all that swingy to begin with. The electoral college was more of a bloodbath, but that’s a peculiarity of that mechanism.
The popular vote hardly indicates a national mandate.
I, of course, could be terribly wrong. To my dying day, I will never understand what on earth could lead someone to consider Donald Trump fit for the office of president.Report
I will never understand what on earth could lead someone to consider Donald Trump fit for the office of president.
One take I’ve seen, over and over and over again: “Trump didn’t deserve to win but, by God, Harris deserved to lose.”
Explore “even more unfit” and see if it has explanatory power.Report
âNo, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.âReport
Sure a lot of people thought she was unfit. Mostly on vibes, and gender and race. Because when her name wasn’t on her proposals her stuff way outpolled his stuff.
She and he were not and are not equivalent in terms of fitness.Report
Did you hear the theory that Pelosi wanted an open primary?Report
Even if I had – and you are the only person I have ever read mentioning it – it would be laughable. The sitting VP was and still is more fit to be president then the convicted felon who is about to retake office. He was unfit last time and there’s no evidence of improvement.Report
Here’s the New York Times:
Report
That’s a very different thing than what Philip appears to be contending (and what I contend): there may well have been a more-electable candidate than Harris, and in that case, the Democrats screwed the pooch.
But in NO WAY is Harris actually less-fit to serve than the traitorous convicted felon in obvious mental decline (and I’ll stop the list of his deficiencies there for the sake of space and time and not making everyone wish I’d go away again), whose prior Admin was largely a disaster (a couple stopped-clock moments aside), and this should be obvious to anyone with eyes and ears.
And in that case, the American public screwed the pooch.Report
And yet half the country voted for him and about… what? 4% of the country switched from Biden to Trump or not-voting to Trump.
And you can’t imagine why unless it involves the voters being bad.
That’s a severe limitation. You should overcome it. You’ll be better off for overcoming it.Report
At the risk of Godwinning myself, explanations of why a voting public would choose something vile are not excuses for that choice. And I won’t conflate the two, don’t worry.Report
If the only explanations that make sense to you are ones that make you feel morally superior, this will happen again and you’ll be given another chance to pick and choose which explanations are acceptable.
Well, assuming we ever have another election.Report
Again, to repeat: I understand that people felt economically-insecure. I fully understand that because I did and do too.
I also understand at least some of the other voter-shifting culture-war bits – I myself, as you may recall from my prior tenure here, often felt uncomfortable with the “Left” (broadly, to generalize into a bloc)’s seemingly frequent eagerness to either criminalize or compel Speech, for example; amongst other issues where I sometimes felt somewhat-to-very out of step with them.
I am not arguing that the Left did not fail here, politically, in their primary duty to counteract the worst of that which needed counteracting.
Your comments about me feeling morally-superior are themselves a form of moral superiority; if I can distance myself emotionally-enough to view the problem clear-eyed, only then will I achieve true Enlightenment.
I will continue to try to understand the political failures (=explanations) here, so that they can hopefully be corrected and avoided in future.
Nevertheless, the selection of a poor (to put it extremely mildly) choice is a selection of a poor choice and while it can be (at least somewhat, in our limited capacity as limited humans) explained, it can’t be excused (the sense in which we are rhetorically using “understand” here), and I remain steadfast in believing the two things are different.
Do you contend explanations and excuses are the same thing? That anything anyone ever does, individually or collectively, can be sufficiently-handled with a “well, but you have to understand…”? That EVERYTHING is an aesthetics-masquerading-as-morals question, and aesthetics are all we have?Report
You don’t get it. Jaybird, and only Jaybird, gets to be a moral scold here.Report
I love Jaybird like a brother and part of why that is that in some ways I know his mind and my mind work somewhat in the same way, on some things. If people here sometimes get frustrated with JB, they probably got frustrated with me sometimes, and for some of the same reasons. And JB gave me a platform to write about music and stuff here, for which I will be forever grateful. So I am not interested in sparking or joining a JB pile-on; but I do admit to a certain amount of frustration here, which is probably on display.
I do get that to some degree we are talking about different things – “understand” is carrying (at least) two meanings here, in these discussions.
I do try, as best I can, to always say what I mean clearly. That much I will always try to do.
So if we all want to sit around and Monday-morning-quarterback jaw about the explanations, so that they can hopefully be addressed by next time assuming there is one, I’ll try to confine my commentary to that – though, as I’ve said, I do not find Trump to be mentally-fit for the job even leaving aside his many moral failings; and I feel that should be a pretty morally-neutral statement in a nation that saw Biden’s debate performance and rightly said whew, Joe’s clearly on the slide at this point, as is the human way of aging – in other words, explanations to have voted for DJT can be flimsy too, to the point where they sure resemble excuses.Report
Bingo.
Yes, he does. because it gives him an intellectual out to avoid being held accountable for his beliefs – nevermind a shield that he uses to try and mask those beliefs as long as possible.Report
My morality is alien to whatever state we currently find ourselves in. Some variant of classical liberalism mixed with some vulgar utilitarianism and a measurable feeling of disgust for visible disorder.
As such, I can completely understand how someone would look at the Blue Cities and conclude that the Democrats deserve to lose. The bums deserve to be thrown out.
After the worst excesses during covid, the worst excesses during the Mostly Peaceful Summer, the worst excesses of “cancellation”, I can absolutely understand why someone would prefer to not vote in 2024 to voting for Team Good. I can understand why they would prefer to vote Trump to Team Good. And I can *CERTAINLY* understand why they’d prefer to vote Third Party to Team Good.
And, get this, I don’t think that they’re necessarily any worse than me for doing so.
They’re not necessarily nazis, or racists, or sexists, or phobic.
They’re just sick of it.
And I think that if the Democrats don’t figure out what people were sick of, we’ll get an even harsher backlash.
And I would like to avoid that.Report
Every time I see a video online where people say “I’m sick of it.” there is nothing articulated. It’s always what “they” are doing.
Truly, the party of unspecified grievance.Report
First of all, you’re correct.
Having said that, for a “sitting VP” she’s remarkably inept, uninformed(?), and bad at this. She was selected by Biden to unify his identity politics base. She wasn’t ready to be at the head of the ticket.
There are a number of VPs who haven’t been ready for prime time. Lincoln’s VP was selected to bring ideological balance to the ticket, which is another way of saying he disagreed with Lincoln on basically everything.
More recently we have Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. Cheney at least was selected for his experience in governing, but if he had to head the ticket his total lack of charisma would have worked against him.Report
It’s an office that suffers from an odd combination of prominence and lack of official duties or authority, other than breaking ties in the Senate.Report
“Having said that, for a âsitting VPâ sheâs remarkably inept, uninformed(?), and bad at this.”
I’ve seen statements like this posted by the right, usually without explanation as you’ve done here, as if it’s axiomatic.
Are you able to make a case with evidence that statements like this are valid?Report
…Are you able to make a case with evidence
She just lost to a demented 78 year old after we proved the electorate cares about age. Trump had a truck load of other baggage to the point where I couldn’t vote for him. So he was a very weak candidate and she still lost.
As VP she… “had less experience than any modern vice president since Spiro Agnew.” She was an AG for 6 years and a Senator for 4.
Harris engaging in word salad during a CNN interview: https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/word-salad-kamala-harris-roasted-over-garbled-answers-at-town-hall-event/news-story/d63e706d48e37831524c67378d921520
There was a reason why she didn’t do much interviewing.
Asked what she’d do on day one she said she’d “prioritize the middle class”. Asked what she’d change from Biden she had no answer (she was running on “change”). Asked what she’d do about inflation she said she’d “punish price-gougers”.
Her political position on Immigration is she’s running as tougher than Trump (from her wiki)… however we also have her on video chanting “end deportation” with Protesters and as border czar she never visited the border.
A lot of her basic views are unclear to the point of creating problems.
She’s pro-trans… but also filed to block gender-affirming medical care for inmates as AG.
She has been against free trade multiple times but wasn’t running for Prez on protectionism.
That link I put up went over some of her lack of coherence over her middle Eastern stances.Report
come January 20th we will find out how much better she was at this then most people think.Report
Again, weird flex. If people aren’t smart or well-informed enough to figure out which candidate supports which policies, how can they possibly be smart or well-informed enough to know which policies will produce results they will like? The latter is much, much harder than the former.
You take pride in the fact that people who are completely clueless support the same policies you do. And I have no desire to challenge you on that point.Report
Reading her wiki I can’t figure out her actual stance on all sorts of things.
If you’re going to run as an empty suit with undefined policies then we’re not going to be able to figure out what you support.Report
Explore âeven more unfitâ and see if it has explanatory power.
It doesn’t.Report
Anyway, more on Pete Hegseth:
“Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trumpâs pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Hegsethâs attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said that Hegseth was âvisibly intoxicatedâ at the time of the incident, and maintained that police who were contacted a few days after the encounter by the woman concluded âthe Complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter.â Police have not confirmed that assertion.
Hegseth agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter âwould result in his immediate termination from Fox,â where he works as a host, the statement said.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/16/pete-hegseth-sexual-assault-accuser-paid/Report
There are lots of things to argue about, but can we at least have done with the nonsense about Trump’s “landslide.” Yes, on his third try he finally won a majority of the total vote — a whopping majority of 50.1%. And yes, 312 electoral sounds like a lot. In fact, it’s 53 fewer than Obama’s 365 in 2008, and 20 fewer than Obama’s 332 in 2012. Some landslide. The last time a Republican won a majority of the total vote, W in 2004, members of this party boasted that the Democrats would never win another election. They didn’t — until the very next election in 2006, when they gained 6 seats in the Senate and 31 seats in the House, enough for a majority in both houses. But sure, this time the Dems are all but dead.Report
Thank you, Ken.
But believing this would mean I canât enjoy Jaybirds âthe pendulumâs gonna stop this timeâ schtick.
For guy whoâs poked a lot of fun at âthe most important election of our lifetimeâ heâs really into the âthe most important post-mortem of our lifetimeâReport
The pendulum’s gotta stop this time! Trump’s going to engage in overreach and then Ezra Klein and MattY will be back advising the dems!Report