Juggalos and Trump voters

[Johan Larson]

Nathan Rabin draws some interesting connections between Juggalos and Trump voters:

There are a number of commonalities between Donald Trump, the world's most hated man, and Insane Clown Posse, who have damn near trademarked "The World's Most Hated Group." Trump and Insane Clown Posse each have an unusual connection to an unusually loyal, even pathologically obsessive, fanbase. They also share a number of carny hustles / psychological appeals that the left could learn from while trying to figure out how to appeal to the angry voters who made the nightmare of President Trump happen. With that in mind, here are six things I learned about Trump's appeal from many years in the field alongside Juggalos.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-juggalo-culture-teaches-us-about-trump/

 

[johnny1...@gmail.com]

The left author of that piece actually comes closer to understanding what happened than many.  Where he goes off the line is attributing the effect to Trump as such.  Yes, Trump brilliantly tapped into it, but the anger and resentment was already extant.  Trump didn't convince his followers that the news media is corrupt and effectively a branch of the Democratic Party.  He didn't 'reframe' it into that. 

The majority of his voters already believed that before Trump ever came down the escalator.

That energy was there to be tapped into in 2012, even 2008.  But neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney was equipped to do it, nor psychologically wired to even perceive why it would be needful.  Nor were there advisers and consultants.  Ditto Jeb Bush.

If you want a sample of where the 'expert' opinion in the GOP was, consider this:

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/mike-murphy-on-donald-trump-214948   Mike Murphy (head of Jeb's campaign) Oct 2015

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-donald-trump-campaign-meltdown-20160623-story.html same guy, June 2016 (months after The Inevitable Jeb had dropped out of the race, after spending a gazillion dollars for 3 delegates at the GOP convention)

Here's a bit from June 2016 from Hank Paulson:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-it-comes-to-trump-a-republican-treasury-secretary-says-choose-country-over-party/2016/06/24/c7bdba34-3942-11e6-8f7c-d4c723a2becb_story.html?utm_term=.127bef3fa0ff

Likewise, the press asks in amazement why nobody cares about Trump's dodges and evasions and falsehoods.  The problem is that even for those of his voters who acknowledge that yes, there were some, it doesn't help, because even with that they still think Trump is not as deceptive or dishonest as both major political party elites or the news media and left academia (or the corporate right, for that matter).

So even when the criticisms were recognized as valid, they got no traction.

To make it worse, in the not-yet-four-weeks since Trump was sworn in, most of the stuff he's done or tried to do is pretty much in line with the general thrust of his campaign.  One might hate what he is doing and trying to do, but nobody can say he didn't run on it, which puts him a notch ahead of several of his immediate predecessors in terms of persuasive power.

Trump did not overturn the American political world.  It rotted away from within over 25 years, he just came along and gave the tree a good kick.

[johnny1...@gmail.com]

Addendum to my above post:  in fairness to the experts, I myself called Trump a 'clown' in a discussion over an SJG forums back in 2015, though I recognized that he was tapping into something real.  I was wrong, and I knew it just a few days later, the first time I heard Trump address a crowd.  When he's 'on', he the best political speaker America has seen since Reagan, and I totally underestimated his personal intelligence when he started.  Mea culpa.

[Johan Larson]

It's a strange experience to be serenely confident about something, but then find that you were wrong all along. A week before the election, I would have taken a 10-1 bet that Trump would lose. The idea that someone with no public-sector experience at all would be elected to the highest office in the land just seems bizarre to me.

[johnny1...@gmail.com]

Throughout most of the last several decades, Trump would have been unelectable, for just that reason.  Traditionally, the electorate in the USA doesn't see the Presidency as an entry-level position, almost always whoever gets it has been either a governor, or a Senator or something, or often several things.  But the anger and frustration has been building up to dangerous levels over the last 25 years.

That cycle I mentioned above has been cycling for a long time. 

Back in their glory days, the Democratic Party had near-total dominance because of the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, they dominated American politics from 1933 to 1972.  Back in those days, the Dems were the 'party of the working man' and the GOP was the 'party of the rich', by which people  meant 'the party of big business' whether they knew that or not.  (Both parties were dominated by wealthy men, but the divide was real.)  Also, in those days, the Dems were both the nationalist party and the socially conservative party, it was the GOP that was socially liberal and leaned internationalist (again, following the natural impulses of big business).  Democrat Speakers of the House, in those days, would have called the Dem majorities after 2006 pallid and thin.

In the social upheavals of the late 60s, the emergent social liberal upper class disrupted FDR's majority, bringing back in the hard-core types that FDR had ejected with Wallace decades before.  This led to the nomination of McGovern in 1972, which was a disaster for the Dems.

Richard Nixon won on a law-and-order platform, vs. George McGovern, who lost in an epic national landslide.  But Watergate crippled Nixon's Presidency and let the radical Dems take control of Congress in 1974.  They angered enough Dem voters to let Jimmy Carter come forward to win the Dem nomination in 1976, which started the downward spiral to where we are now.  Carter ran as a morally traditionalist southern Dem, which played well in the after math of McGovern and Nixon.  But once in, he governed as a McGovernite Dem, socially very liberal, anti-military, anti-Western, almost diametrically opposite what his supporters thought they had been voting for.  To make it worse, he governed both oppositely and ineptly.

Reagan tapped into that and won two electoral landslides, the first with some help from the Anderson campaign that pulled from Carter in 1980, the second in 1984 with a genuine popular landslide as well.  He did this with crossover Dem vote, the so-called working class 'Reagan Dems'.  But they still preferred Dem economic policy, they just wanted the McGovern/Carter social policies and intellectual ideas off the table.  The Dems refused to learn from experience for a while, in 1984 they nominated Walter Mondale, in 1988 Michael Dukakis.  The latter was almost perfectly suited to alienate the conservative Dems they needed to win back.  But even against Dukakis, GHWB lost a bunch of States Reagan easily held, a lot of Reagan Dems didn't trust him, nor did a lot of social conservative Republicans and others as well.

Clinton beat Bush I in 1992 by running the center, sort of like Carter in 1976.  He refocused on economics, which is where Dems traditionally do best against the GOP, and Bush Sr. played into his hands with the unique House Bush brand of clueness disconnectedness.  But even by 1992, there was so much electoral discontent that Perot was able to swing 20% of the popular vote.

Clinton's first 2 years were dominated by Hillary, though, she came very close to actually being President in 1993 and 1994, for reasons involving Clinton's sexual scandals and various internal deals.  The Cabinet was packed with "friends of Hillary", Ruth Bader Ginsburg came from that camp, and Hillary infamously was assigned the role of health care mastermind.  Clinton had run as a middle of the road conservative Dem, but once again, the first 2 years were dominated by McGovern style policy and social liberalism and anti-military thinking and internationalism, it was a lot like the Carter years.

Once again, the public rebelled, the GOP shocked everyone in 1994 by recapturing the Senate and House, the latter for the first time in over four decades.  The trouble was that they immediately ignored what they had been elected to do (counter the liberalism of the Clinton Admin) in favor of trying to implement their preferred big business agenda.  The GOP-dominated Congress focused on precisely the least popular elements of their coalition agenda, which collapsed their popularity.

Meanwhile Hillary had been sidelined by the 1994 election and Clinton went centrist, in time to beat Bob Dole in 1996, who let his wife run his campaign and more-or-less ran on 'fiscal conservative social liberal' again.  The GOP always loses national elections when they run 'fiscal conservative social liberal'.  But then came the Monica scandal and Clinton's momentum collapsed again.

This pattern has repeated over and over since 1972, and has intensified since 1994.  The Dems win nationally, when they do, almost invariably on economics, but then govern social liberal and globalist.  The GOP wins nationally, when the do, on social conservatism, American nationalism, tight borders, law and order, etc., but then when they win they govern on the business agenda (social liberal, free trade, open borders, globalism, etc.

In 2006, the GOP lost both houses of Congress because their own voters were disgusted with Bush's repeated attempts at immigration amnesty.  The Dems immediately tried to help Bush do another try an immigration amnesty, which infuriated their voters further.  The true roots of the TEA Party movement were in the networks that came together to oppose Bush, McCain, and Kennedy on immigration reform.  The Dems were infuriating their own working-class white and black voters with amnesty proposals too, and a growing bipartisan opposition to the free trade regime was emerging as well.

But the GOP wasn't done with dumb yet.  After 2006, the GOP apparat came together and more or less announced that there were 3 possible candidates for the White House in 2008, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.  Right.  Three different versions of 'business-wing conservative/social liberal', the toxic combination.  Rudy was openly, proudly social liberal, John McCain was on the outs with the SoCon wing and was also Mr. Amnesty 2006 and Mr. Amnesty 2007, and Mitt Romney was Mitt Romney.  Not a one of the 3 had a chance in November, even though the party geniuses thought it was an unbeatable slate.

Over and over, the voters switched one party out for the other, only to get the policies they most hated reinforced.  Obamacare was so unpopular that it cost the Dems the House of Representatives in 2010, and would have cost them the Senate if the GOP had played a it a bit smarter.  But the GOP, once back in, tried to switch from opposition to Obamacare, which the Chamber of Commerce likes, to 'entitlement reform', meaning cuts to or privatization of Social Security and Medicare, which the Chamber likes and their voters hate.

In 2010, the new Congress had not even been sworn in yet before Paul Ryan was talking about 'Medicare vouchers'.  Short of deep-frying a live kitten on national TV, he couldn't have said or done anything much stupider, politically.  That was just precisely what the GOP voters had not been voting for.  Then in 2012, Mitt Romney seemed to think he was the protagonist of an Ayn Rand fantasy novel, banging on about Makers and Takers and entrepreneurs and 'unleashing Wall Street'.  If there was one thing working class whites, black voters, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and atheists, young and old, women and men, all pretty much agreed on it was that Wall Street was already far enough off the leash, thank you.

In 2014, the GOP were ready!  They had the Gang of Eight Amnesty Bill!!!  It was the best Amnesty and Open Borders Bill the voters could elect.  The voters, OTOH, responded with, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."  The bill passed the Senate and set to pass the House so Obama could sign it, when Eric Cantor, the GOP majority leader in the House, lost his primary to a political newcomer because his own voters were so angry about his immigration stance.  It was the first time a majority leader had lost a primary vote in over a century, and it was Republicans who crushed the Republican incumbent.

Sorry to run on at such length, but if you were shocked that a novice outsider was entrusted with the Presidency, the nuclear codes, the whole enchilada, in spite of his known flaws, that's why.  He addressed the issues the voters were upset about, and the voters had decades of experience that told them they would never get the results they wanted from the establishment.  They knew that either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton would give them essentially identical policies, and they were sick of those policies.  They had long since lost faith in the press, in the academy, in the courts, in the legal profession, in the political class, etc.

  George Bush Sr. won the White House in 1988 on the strength that he would be Reagan's 3rd term.  But he governed 'country club Republican'.

[Warren Ellis]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/

This might prove a good article to read.

[Warren Ellis]

Honestly I think it has less to do with social stuff and more to do with manufacturing jobs going away.

Opening trade relations with China, in addition to NAFTA, hurt US manufacturing immensely and ruined many peoples' livelihood:

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/business/the_next_20/2016/09/when_china_joined_the_wto_it_kick_started_the_chinese_economy_and_roused.html?client=ms-android-hms-tmobile-us

Constant crowing by both sides about how the economy is doing well (yet none of that wealth and no new jobs are going in to many places) is belied by what people see around them.

[johnny1...@gmail.com]

You can't really separate the social stuff from the economic impact.  This problem predates the admission of China to the WTO, as the author of the Atlantic piece correctly observes, class disputes have been part and parcel of America since before it was America.  They're part of human nature, and part of the reason we're in this mess now is the stubborn American pretense that we aren't a class-ridden society.  When we do admit that we have a class structure, we tend to lie to ourselves and say we have just 3, rich, middle class, and poor, and most people try to identify with the middle one.

In fact, even speaking simply in terms of economic status, there are probably at least 5 levels in general American society, maybe six or seven.  You have the uber-rich, the merely rich, the upper middle class (which is subdivided into a professional class (doctors and lawyers etc.) and the high end of the working class, often the remaining unionized private sector), then there's the working class proper, then the surviving poor, then the really truly poor.  Of course there are vertical divides as well, and social standing can not be separated from economics without turning the analysis into nonsense.

It's also important to note that class status depends not simply on income, but on the stability and reliability of that income, and also on what the society at large things of the source.  A unionized coal miner and an ordinarily successful doctor might have comparable personal income, but the latter usually has higher social status.

You also can't separate out social pressures that sometimes produce economically weird results.  For ex, in America, Madison Avenue has managed to manipulate pop culture to create the perception that the 'expected' lifestyle for each given economic class is about one level higher than they can often afford.  This leads to an epidemic level of consumer debt, as people try to live as they think they 'should' for their position, and high levels of stress when they can't pull it off.

This is not just true of the working class, either.  Just as there are working class people making $25,000 a year who try to live as if they had an income of #50,000, there are doctors, lawyers, and successful businessmen who clear $100,000 or more a year and try to live as if they make $200,000 or more, and for the exact same reasons.

That said, the opening of China made an emerging bad situation vastly worse, no question about it.  But it was part and parcel of the bad, self-destructive policy that's dominated American (and Western) politics since the 1970s.  Both parties are dominated by the same social/economic class, at the top, and for decades they've been acting in their class interest.  It's not a conspiracy, there's no master plan or control center, just people with shared interests doing what comes naturally, and with less and less contact with others.  We passed NAFTA and opened the WTO to China and did the other bad decision over the last 30 years in large part because of social factors that divide the interests of the rulers from the ruled.

The Economist did a very interesting article a week or so ago that analyzes the voting history in the State of Alabama, and they showed that there is a class divide that has animated Alabama politics since before the Civil War, roughly the same counties lining up on each side all through that time.  They were using Alabama as an example, the same sorts of patterns show up elsewhere, though the details obviously vary.

But that 'contact with others' that I mentioned is vitally important.  The Economist, for ex, did do that story, and has done some other stories that show some insight into current events, of late.  Other media centers are finally starting to cover the problem, too, in America and elsewhere.  It's being talked about in government and some sacred cows that were sacred until very recently are suddenly open for discussion.

But, this new openness only happened because they elite class had the repeated systemic shocks of Brexit, President Trump, the rise of the so-called 'far right' in Europe, etc.  The problems have been around for decades, they've worsened sharply over the last 15 years, the public has been practically screaming at their governments that what they were doing was not good enough, and the only reaction was dismissal until this last year or so. 

The UK is on tract to do something considered unthinkable as recently as nine months ago.  Think about that, less than the time it takes to make a baby has seen the unthinkable well on its way to being fact.

America elected Donald freakin' Trump as President of the United States.  That would have been even more unthinkable than Brexit just 2 years ago.  The phrase 'President Trump' would have been the punchline of a joke anytime over the last 30 years, and now it's reality.  There's a little humorous ditty circulating in some quarters about Trump, to the tune of Bad Bad Leroy Brown, and one of its lines is, "...he's livin' large and now he's in charge of the U.S. nuclear codes..."

Imagine if a precognitive ESPer had predicted, in 1986, that in 30 years the American electorate would be sufficiently angry with their rulers that they'd entrust Donald Trump with atomic bombs rather than endure more of the same.  Imagine the reaction to that prediction...which came true.  The electorate was that angry in 2016.

Of course, Trump has already delivered more for his voters in a month than they were able to get from 4 years of Bush Sr. and 8 years of Bush Jr., on several issues.

Way back in the 1960s, the old American TV show Laugh-In used to have a comedy sketch called 'news from 20 years in the future', and one of their regular punch-lines was the idea that 20 years in the future, then-Governor Ronald Reagan would be President.  Which of course ended up happening, but it was seen as unimaginable in the 1960s.

But the reasons why reality caught up with and passed the punchline had some similarities in both cases.  But President Trump is the bigger shock to the system.

Note that even now, the reaction of the elite classes, straddling both parties, is to scream "NO!" and try to undo it or make it go away or neutralize it rather than actually deal with the public uprising.  The Establishment is desperately looking for some way to neutralize Trump, whether it's the Democrats' lunatic rantings about the 25th Amendment, or John McCain's and Lindsey Graham's grandstanding and attempts to undercut his support.

In Britain, the business elites (a lot of them, anyway), and a big chunk of the metropolitan elites are still trying to find some way, any way, to block Brexit, or neuter it.

But even if these efforts were to succeed, it wouldn't solve their problem, it would just leave the public even more infuriated than they already are.

[Warren Ellis]

I like this article from Salon that points out something: a lot of "liberals" in the US are really progressive fashion police. Classism oozes from their pores:
http://www.salon.com/2017/02/25/outgrowing-the-cosmetic-left-a-liberal-plea-for-fake-liberalism-to-grow-the-hell-up/

[Johan Larson]

Eeep. Have you tried looking at that Salon page without an ad blocker? It's just unusable.

[Warren Ellis]

I'm able to read it without an adblocker on my phone.

[Johnny1A]

On Tuesday, September 19, 2017 at 6:01:24 PM UTC-5, Warren Ellis wrote:

I like this article from Salon that points out something: a lot of "liberals" in the US are really progressive fashion police. Classism oozes from their pores:
http://www.salon.com/2017/02/25/outgrowing-the-cosmetic-left-a-liberal-plea-for-fake-liberalism-to-grow-the-hell-up/

Oh yeah.

I've seen several articles written by liberals since the election, articles that show that at least a few liberals do recognize at least some of what went wrong for the Democrats and their movement in 2016.  Usually, as this one does, they note that not everything in American politics and society is about race relations or (especially!) gender politics, and they note that the strongest part of the lefty agenda is precisely their critique of the tilt of the economy too much toward the .01%.

This is true.  Most American voters are not full-bore socialists and certainly not Communists, but they also are very much not Ayn Rand Objectivists or libertarians.  Especially of late, there is common ground on which a lefty economic agenda could get some traction with the very voters who elected Trump, and that there is overlap between the interests of white working class voters and working class blacks, too.

The black vote is far less motivated by Confederate statues than they are by personal economics, and they aren't any more eager to see more imported labor competition than is white working class.

But I've also noted that the usual reaction from other lefties, so far, is a furious, half-coherent scream of hate and anger and an order to shut up and stop criticizing their social agenda, often accompanied by allegations of racism, white supremacism, or whatever 'ism' motivates the angry commenter.

I suspect what we're seeing is a potential large-scale political realignment trying to happen, with working class Americans of al races lining up with traditionalists, national soveriegntists, social conservatives, immigration border warriors, etc. vs. the upper class white liberals and the high-end business elites.  It's still pretty inchoate, though.

[Warren Ellis]

"But I've also noted that the usual reaction from other lefties, so far, is a furious, half-coherent scream of hate and anger and an order to shut up and stop criticizing their social agenda, often accompanied by allegations of racism, white supremacism, or whatever 'ism' motivates the angry commenter."

Probably because those lefties don't want to admit they're often part of that .01%. Nor do they want to admit they completely failed to bring on in working-class whites due to massive amounts of mockery from them in regards to stuff like culture or socioeconomics.

Kind of like how they love to feel sorry for other working-class groups (while not actually living near any of them.)

That article had a real good point about the massive amounts of mockery more rural areas get in the US. Calling someone a hick, in my opinion, should be like how we call a black a "nigger." Considered horrible.

And yet the same people who would never dare say nigger, because it's a genuinely nasty, racist term, often have no problem calling people hicks and rednecks and all that. They're a bunch of fucking racists and ethnicists in my opinion.