In 2015, I had two friends working on the Kentucky governor’s race. Their candidate was popular Attorney General Jack Conway. I called both on the day of the election to wish them luck. Both told me the same thing: they were expecting a nice victory that evening.
Conway’s opponent was a self-funding businessman named Matt Bevin who had never served in public office. His biggest claim to fame was losing a primary in 2014 to Mitch McConnell by 25 points. According to Politico, Bevin “was mocked by fellow Republicans as an ‘East Coast Con Man.’” Still, Bevin won the nomination by defeating two establishment candidates.
Conway, for his part, was a known quantity who had unsuccessfully run for Congress and US Senate. He was following the lead of popular Democratic Governor Steve Beshear who had embraced Obamacare and expanded Medicaid. His program drastically reduced the number of uninsured Kentucky residents and had broad support. Regardless, Bevin ran against the program, promising to repeal it.
Like my friends on the race, most of the national political establishment believed Conway would win. When the votes came in, though, Bevin beat the Attorney General by nine points. Most of the polls had missed it, including Conway’s internals.
A few months later, I announced I was running for Congress in a rural district in North Carolina. One of my friends on the Conway team called. He warned that there’s an undercurrent of resentment among rural voters that polling is missing. They don’t really care about policy or politics because they don’t expect political leaders to deliver anything, anyway. In their minds, they’ve been so left behind and left out, that they just want to give a big F-you to the political establishment.
He was right and the Kentucky race portended Trump’s victory. Democrats need to understand these voters. They didn’t vote against their self-interest. They didn’t even really vote for Trump or Bevin. They voted to burn down the system because they see that as in their best interest.
The reason for their pessimism and resentment is multifaceted. It’s not just economic insecurity or racism, though both play a significant role. It’s a belief that parts of the social safety net encourage dependency and that they pay for it with their paychecks. It’s the sense that they are losing their culture. It’s the knowledge that the next generation will likely have to leave home to maintain their quality of life. And it’s the understanding that the benefits of the modern economy are going to other parts of the country. And they believe politicians from both parties have encouraged these trends while ignoring their effects on their way of life.
These people will give Donald Trump a lot of leeway as long as they think he’s fighting for them. They’ll forgive him increases in health care premiums since they believe they were going up anyway. They won’t know, or care, that his treasury secretary worked on Wall Street or the net worth of his cabinet members.
What they will know is that Donald Trump kept 1,000 jobs from going to Mexico when every other politician would have stood by and done nothing. Like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump feels their pain. They’ll excuse a lot of bad behavior as long as they keep believing that. And that’s what Democrats need to understand.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
In this thread there exists a paradox of causality as to why Trump was elected President. The reasons are many, depending on the perspective of the writer. Chief among them is ignorance; a seeming lack of information on the part of the voter. There are also those that contend that a lack of education was the root cause to the election of Trump. Then there is the ignored camp; the Democrat party ignored and disenfranchised those that eventually voted for Trump. There are also those that believe the factors of race, immigration, and perhaps to a lesser extent religion played a role in the election of Trump. Some believe that the Democrat party has moved away from the position of being the party of the working man (masculine noun; not meant as a slight) and became the party of the liberal/progressive elite.
Where am I going with this? Well, to gesture to the obvious, we all have our own opinions based on the facts and our understanding of them as to what went wrong. Does that make one more right or wrong than the next? Not really. In a sense, perhaps we’re all right to an extent or we’re all not wrong. We see there is a problem. We acknowledge that something is broken and in need of fixing. We look for causality as a means of explaining what took place on November 08th. Perhaps to an extent we’re trying to develop a whipping boy to castigate for each political loss that is to come in the next four years. This is after all, someone’s fault and there needs to be accountability. Even if we are successful in finding what was wrong, those responsible parties, or solving the cause/effect riddle, it won’t change what happened.
I know that if can solve that problem, we can work toward preventing it from happening again. Good luck. Knowing what’s wrong is one thing; doing something about it is the other. We can identify each and every driving factor that spurred people into the Trump camp. But if we do nothing to counter those things, of what benefit will it have been to identify them?
We’ve been given another bite at the apple of sorts. A chance to change message, direction, and focus. We’ve got elections coming up in 2017 and another the year after. It’s time take back our state and nation. It’s time to undo what Republicans have done. It’s time Democrats acted like and became the party of the people again.
That’s because our ‘boy’ President-elect has never been told ‘no’ and it mean what it means to the rest of us.
As for his appointments, I’m sure they’re all about grabbing as much as they can for themselves before the Emperor exposes his madness completely. Particularly his latest piece of enlightenment, the Duchess of Alaska.
As I’ve watched the machinations of the past weeks, I get the unnerving feeling that Caligula has been elected President and Nero is his second in command. It seems we have nano-seconds of sanity and rationality poignantly interspersed with mad ramblings and verbal tirades, railing attacks, and unfounded accusations.
We have two choices as I see it. Lay down and take it or we can fight back. I’m not predisposed to accept what’s being shoveled. I hope that’s true of millions more.
The question of civic ignorance mentioned by Justice Souter is the umbrella for all the factors you mentioned. Hatred of minorities, fear of immigration, hatred of religions other than Evangelical Christianity, hatred of the press, belief in the inferiority of women, and belief that the gay gene can be programmed into oblivion, disbelief in science and a broad hatred of liberals arise out of profound ignorance of the world outside the misinformation bubble.
That civic ignorance is so prominent a feature in American politics is puzzling. As the premier economic and military superpower, the nation can boast of great universities, many educated people and many smart people who did not go to college. How does a profound ignorance of our world become so comprehensive that if affects everything in our world? Information is at our fingertips everywhere, all the time. Computers, televisions, telephones and information technology are within inches of us at every minute of every day.
Libraries are in every city. We can order anything from Amazon or other booksellers. We can listen to books and tapes in the car, on the bus, riding the subway or on an airplane. How did we get to be so stupid with so many opportunities to learn at our disposal?
This isn’t about finishing college. The richest American Bill Gates didn’t finish college. Some of our best presidents didn’t finish college. This is about being informed at a very basic level.
Civil ignorance has provided an opportunity for cynical manipulators of the public conversation. The worst offender was once Fox News, and while Fox News has not gotten any better, there are many outlets that spew far worse disinformation like Alex Jones, WND and Breitbart, where stories are generated out of whole cloth. Fake news is a growth industry. We have all laughed at the headlines in the supermarket check-out lines. “Michael Jackson Is an Alien,” “I lost 100 pounds on the Chocolate, Ice Cream and French Fries Diet,” or “Brad and Angelina Live in a Space Ship with Elvis.” Preposterous stories in tabloids may be popular but no one, surely, nobody really believes that nonsense.
Some people believe that stuff. They form their world view around the lies and fables they read. They are not well-enough informed to filter the wheat from the chaff, the lies from the facts. In his 2008 book, “Just How Stupid Are We?” Rick Shenkman eliminated any remaining doubt about the growing inadequacy of the American electorate to participate responsibly in democracy. He found:
50% of Americans can name characters from “The Simpsons,” but less than a quarter can name more than one of the guaranteed rights in the First Amendment.
Only 40% of voters can name all three branches of the federal government;
Only 20% of voters know that there are 100 federal senators;
Only 1 in 7 can find Iraq on a map.
But as citizens of a democracy, we ought to be concerned. As John Stuart Mill said in the 19th century, the democratic premise rests on the presence of an educated citizenry. Ideas and policies can neither be examined nor tested in the marketplace in the absence of an informed and critical public.
An electorate ignorant of the three branches of government cannot know that a promise by Trump to fix everything all by himself is a big lie. Voters need to know that the laws come from the legislature. Without that basic piece of civic understanding, they can be told to hate Obama for acting like a dictator (when the legislature refuses to do anything,) and they can believe that the incoming president will exercise dictatorial powers in a way they will like.
The Trump victory was a bomb thrown at the nation by weaponized ignorance. It will explode like a giant exploding cigar before anyone is ready for it. Afterward, Trump will Tweet a lie to cover it up.
A valid and well reasoned argument. To which I will simply say, “you can teach and inform them about civics, government, and politics. You can’t understand it for them.” How much of that ignorance is blissful and how much is intentional I haven’t a clue. But I, like you, know that it does exist at a rate that defies comprehension.
To borrow something here that I believe Thomas said yesterday quoting John Hood to make this point, paraphrasing; “It doesn’t matter whether or not there is actual voter fraud taking place. The point is that it has been said often enough and long enough that it’s believed to be happening.” News sources like Fox don’t tell bold faced lies; they tell distortions of the truth. Everything coming from Breitbart, Alex Jones and others grounded in some minuscule truth spun into an elaborate distortion. The news is tabloid entertainment for the singular purpose of profit. It’s supply and demand. This crowd is demanding a particular slant on what they consider news and it’s being told by outlets that are willing to provide that service.
Stupid is as stupid does and it’s making the world a very dangerous and unstable place.
“It’s a belief that parts of the social safety net encourage dependency and that they pay for it with their paychecks.”
These folks receive a lot of the social safety net benefits. They aren’t objecting to their disability, their Obamacare, their medicare, medicaid, food stamps.
They resent people of color getting these benefits. This is where racism is key.
Justice David Souter was a great Supreme Court selection by George H. W. Bush. He was a rare Republican. He was the embodiment of integrity and intellectual honesty who almost resigned over the Bush v. Gore decision. It made him sick. He was interviewed after his retirement from the Supreme Court, and he said some things that every American should know:
“…It is a product of civic ignorance.
“What I worry about is a remark that Benjamin Franklin made and Susan Leahy quoted Jefferson at the beginning about how “an ignorant people can never remain a free people.”
“Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance…
“Franklin was asked by someone I think on the streets of Philadelphia shortly after the 1787 convention adjourned in what kind of government the constitution would give us if it was adopted. Franklin’s famous answer was “a republic, if you can keep it.” (edited)
“You can’t keep it in ignorance. I don’t worry about our losing republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about it because I think there is going to be a coup by the military as has happened in some other places.
“What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough, as they might do, for example, with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown, some one person will come forward and say, “Give me total power and I will solve this problem.”
The source of the financial meltdown was complicated but it was absolutely the fault of Republican faith in a cartoon kind of free market that does not exist. That meltdown took trillions of dollars away from the U. S. economy. The banks and investment banks had gambled with federally-insured money and paid themselves outrageous pay and bonuses. The meltdown put millions of people out of work, and it caused millions of home foreclosures. The primary cause was a level of irresponsibility and unfathomable greed by those who were charged with the responsibility of protecting our savings. That event occurred in the last days of the Bush presidency.
For the next 8 years, the Republicans in Congress refused to work with the President of the United States and fought against any measure which would have improved job growth. For 8 years, Americans waited for Congress to get the country back to work, and they waited in vain. Yes, there were improvements over George W. Bush’s dismal failed economy and employment improved, but a robust recovery was denied the nation by the Republicans. They did not want to give the Democratic President the credit for a robust economy, even if it meant that millions of workers would suffer, which they did.
Their plan worked. It worked because of vast ignorance of the source of the problems in this country. A pathological liar, an ignoramus with a twitter account, a sexual predator who craps through a golden toilet seat, a narcissistic madman has stepped forward to fix these problems. His intelligence is limited to 142 characters per shot. An informed populace would have booed him off the stage at his first appearance. They would have laughed him out of town. But he handed out red caps and objects of hatred to an audience that neither reads or understands how we got to here.
Being angry is not the same as being informed. Being informed requires some effort. Being angry requires nothing. As Dean Wormer told Dorfman in
“Animal House”: “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
The red caps somehow believed that drunk and stupid is enough, and their hate and ignorance is equal to thoughtful problem-solving. They have elected a demagogue and a fraud. He rails against the media to keep the truth from the marketplace of ideas. Nothing he says is true. He is caught lying every time he opens his mouth, but profound ignorance has become a thing in American politics.
The ending is not written, but we are witnessing the dark foreshadowing of bad days ahead for America.
“They don’t really care about policy or politics because they don’t expect political leaders to deliver anything, anyway. In their minds, they’ve been so left behind and left out, that they just want to give a big F-you to the political establishment”
Bingo! Finally got it right.
Alert to NC Democrats for 2017… read this over and over.
I don’t think you’re wrong at all Thomas. I believe you’ve scratched the surface and shed a bit of light on this ulcerous aberration.
At some point in the future, hopefully not too distant into, Democrats generally and the Democratic party specifically will come to the realization that rationalization of politics is for the academician; polling is for the pundit and focus group; and belief in a future that includes hope is for the electorate. Of those three, only one encompasses a group large enough to court for votes.
Guess which one was also ignored by the Democratic party.
Leon Panetta believes that Obama’s actions created ISIS, as well.
Just sayin’
disgusted, agree about much you said. When I read the article and your response I once again, from my progressive and educated perspective, thought, ‘You can’t fix stupid’. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of what we are dealing with. Here in Caldwell County I commiserated with my progressive Dem buddies on thoughtful topics, with lots of data behind it, and watched as the repubs did nothing of the sort. It was all appeal to the masses based on hate, anger and racism. There are no civics classes taught that help these folks understand the various branches of government and how they work together (or don’t as we saw the obstructionism of the Obama years unfold). Until we can ‘Make America Smart Again’ I fear we are in for more of the same from con men and right wingers looking to blow up the system and take my 401(k) with it.
What is the answer? Does it really come down to just finding a charismatic candidate? Someone you want to have a beer with?
As long as people are against “the system,” conservatives, who promise to shrink government, will win. Even the most liberal college students I know have no faith in government to solve their problems. They believe government IS the problem. I don’t know how liberals counter that.
It doesn’t matter that Trump fed into the problem when he (probably) offered big tax incentives to Carrier to get them to keep some jobs in the U.S. No president-elect has appealed directly to a corporate employer like he did and “won.” This solidifies his support and boosts his image as someone who get things done, even if he’s a little crazy.