We frequently talk about how intolerant rhetoric can cost the Republicans support among the targets of their contempt. They’re going to lose support among young women, we say, and gays and lesbians, and Latinos and Asians and blacks and…
That’s all true, but this is a general phenomenon that actually goes on in an atomized and individualized way– one voter at a time.
Here’s one of those voters:
At midday on the eve of the [Iowa] caucuses, into the Hockenberry house walked two men who had driven to Dubuque from Milwaukee in a white Mercedes SUV. One of them was Ismail Fersat, who was from Turkey, and Muslim, and a successful entrepreneur who ran his own granite-countertop business. Once, back in Turkey, he was the national boxing champ. He came to America from Istanbul 16 years ago in hopes of becoming a professional boxer.
What did America mean to him? “For me, the key is democracy,” said Fersat, still two years away from citizenship. “I feel that if the people can tell honestly and confidently what they think without any fear, no matter what religion they belong to, what culture they belong to — that, to me, is democracy.” He had more than anything admired this about America — until he started to worry about it during this campaign.
For years in Wisconsin, he had thought that he should support the Republicans, because they would be best for business. Then along came Trump. “When Trump came out, I felt offended by the comment he made. The Muslim is blah, blah. That hurt me in a big way. I see democracy as something else. When Trump came out, boom, no more. I’m done with the Republicans. I said, ‘I’m on the wrong side!’”
Here’s an entrepreneurial immigrant, a job creator and small businessman. The chances are pretty good that he has some traditional ideas about gender roles and family and human sexuality. He was a Republican, he says, because he believed they would be better for his business. That stands to reason since their economic rhetoric is aimed like a laser at people like him. How many times did Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan talk about small business owners and entrepreneurship? It was like a mantra, or Chinese water torture, or an annoying involuntary tic.
Yet, once Donald Trump came out and said that “Islam hates us” and Muslims shouldn’t be allowed into the country and they should be forced to register with the government and that he might shut down mosques because virtually 100% of them are anti-American?
Once Donald Trump said all that, Ismail Fersat got the hint and said, “I’m on the wrong side!”
And Ismail Fersat didn’t become some anti-American saboteur or terrorist. He and his buddy jumped in their white Mercedes SUV and drove down to Iowa to campaign for Hillary Clinton. They decided to knock doors for her campaign because they believe in democracy and they believe in the right to say (and be) what you want without fear.
Everyone has their own story, but there are millions of people in this country who are making, or have already made, or will soon be making the same voyage as Mr. Fersat and his friend.
That’s how a once great party rips itself apart– one voter at a time.
The Republicans in general, and Trump by far most of all, certainly know how to alienate minority groups. That’s why their behind the 8-ball every presidential cycle. But even more so, it’s that such tactics work so well with their base that’s killing them. Team Obama was scared of Huntsman. The guy couldn’t buy a ticket to sweep floors at the convention. For a narcissist (perhaps sociopath) like Trump, the stooges make a target too large and tempting to resist. The party’s bread and butter for the last 30+ years has been racism by implication. You can only dance with the devil so long before he come ’round and demands payment for services rendered.
Yeah, they suck so much that they control the House and Senate and most Governors office and state legislatures.
Marie, I’ve come to admire your contribution to this discussion area over the months (as I think I’ve said before). As with Greenwald, and others, I like commentators who refuse to let emotional whims or ideological loyalty get in the way of their observations and judgment. (Meaning, you can see what’s bad and you’re not going to stop seeing it even if it’s inconvenient or depressing, unlike many others.)
That said, don’t you think we’re seeing something remarkable this cycle? Yes, they control the legislature, but hasn’t it been (since the days of Goldwater or Nixon — I know you have a good historical perspective) an essentially fraudulent game they’ve played with their constituents? And aren’t they, finally, paying the piper right now?
I’m going to go off on a tangent because I think your question isn’t broad enough.
This cycle is certainly less usual. Difficult for me to say that it’s remarkable because I can’t help seeing how it links to the last one and the one before that, etc. The thing is that once on a certain path, it takes more juice to keep those pushing the beast to stay on the path and plow forward.
The GOP game has been a fraud (in modern times) since Coolidge. The piper came to collect in the first round within a few years. The DEMs lucked out with that because they too had been pushing a fraud with Wilson. The country lucked out with FDR because he had been born to privilege and knew his class was nothing but frauds and he cared enough about ordinary people that he could tell “his people” to go to hell. Of course that wouldn’t have been enough if it didn’t have an uncanny ability to hire the right people for the right jobs (although he never felt that he got the VP right).
The GOP had to repackage their fraudulent product because it would never sell itself once modern (radio and movies) communications came into existence. They didn’t get it wrapped up in a shiny package with a pretty bow until Reagan. But the national news media and DEM party at local, state, and congressional level was still just good enough and a majority of the people retained just enough knowledge of what halfway decent government looked like that the Reagan wrapping paper frayed quickly.
The piper was poised to collect, but just as he began to walk through through the door the DEM party closed and locked it. Because the DEM party decided to sell a version of the GOP product. So, both parties were jockeying to wrap it up in shiny paper for whichever demographics they could con most easily. Always with social/cultural wrapping that doesn’t cost the elites a dime.
Back in 2004, it seemed to me that both parties were on the brink of fracturing, but couldn’t see which would go first and the timing was fuzzy; so, while the outline was there, when was an open question. After GWB was re-elected and he proudly announced that he would touch the third rail, I knew that the GOP would go first and they did. Unfortunately, with a lot of bailing wire and chewing gum, the DEM party got a new sheet of wrapping paper. Guess what I’m saying is that both parties have been bankrupt since 2004. The people get it on some sort of gut level but can’t see beneath the shiny wrapping what it is that they’ve been buying that doesn’t seem to work as well as advertised. So, we end up with bifurcated governments with the two parties tossing the hot potato back and forth hoping not to catch it when it’s too hot to handle.
After the 2012 presidential election the GOP elites began to publicly try to ditch abortion/gay rights, etc. because it’s past it’s sell by date. Total resistance from their consumers because what would it mean if one had invested one’s entire political thought for decades and are now told that it is garbage and always was a lie? So, the GOP couldn’t replace the wrapper and the wrapper would preclude winning the next presidential election. IMHO they conceded the 2016 election shortly after the last midterms. Throw Jeb? out there as a hail Mary (a Bush is always preferable to a Clinton, but a Clinton is good enough) and if the GOP rubes wanted to choose a different loser instead, sobeit.
Trump is problematical because he’s selling pieces of the old wrapper that the party elites know is garbage. They could live with that as he loses in a landslide. What they can’t live with is that he’s also lifting up corners of the wrapper and exposing aspects of the fraudulent product and convincing his audiences that they’ve been duped by the rich big boys.
Trump may have the aspirations of an FDR, but psychologically he’s nouveau riche and he will always be in the acquisition and accumulation stage of wealth and power. Public service as a duty and calling doesn’t come quickly and easily for those born into wealth — takes a few generations. And that high-mindedness is absent in those that go into politics to gain personal wealth and power.
We have a real shortage of high minded politicians. Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are two obvious exceptions. Sherrod Brown seems to have lost it which is sad.
We definitely have a real shortage of high minded politicians, and the Clinton duo doesn’t help the Democratic Party or the country in that respect.
We all know the Democratic Party has a deep fault line between the FDR inspired branch (whether or not any of them know all that much about FDR) and the corporatist branch, which is covered by the fig leaf of social issues just as the Republican Party has done for decades.
The question is whether the anger will be put to good use, as high minded politicians like Warren, Brown, Sanders and Udall and some others have tried, or give voice to thuggery and racism (Trump) or religious extremism (Cruz).
Extremely astute. Thanks for answering in detail.
I always think of FDR as the quintessential American pragmatist, bored with theory and willing to entertain any idea on the pure basis of whether it will “work” or not, and better than most of the others because, more than any other president after Lincoln, he was willing to look objectively at ideas of the radical left. He was perfectly at home with other wealthy people, from Bernard Baruch to Joseph P. Kennedy. He was also willing to look at right wing ideas, campaigned through 1932 on the promise of balancing the budget, which would have been catastrophic (and revived the obnoxious idea in his second term, almost sinking the New Deal), but the better ideas won out. (Partly because of that brilliant hiring.)
Warren (with her affection for small-town bankers and their style of conservatism) and Brown are in that tradition, as are Obama and the Clintons, not high-minded but broad-minded. Sanders may be a better human being than any of them, for all I know, but he lacks the intellectual flexibility to be a productive president.
This is miles off Boo’s topic of what’s happening to the Republican party, but there’s a connection.
The Republican party is a collection of stupid but “high-minded” people each with his own obsession from which he cannot be bent; those who think the United States is a “Christian nation”, those who think only English should be spoken here, social Darwinists who think poor people are degenerates who should simply die away, people who think the 16th Amendment should be repealed, and so forth. That’s an unstable setup, and it was bound to crack; some people would think the fault line would be between the abortion crusaders and the libertarians, but I never thought so; I was certain the libertarians would be happy to sacrifice women because their principles are really about paying taxes, not some abstract ideal of freedom. I thought it would be over immigration, probably said so here at some point last year, because the wealthy who love immigration and the white poor who fear it really can’t find a compromise, and so it has turned out.
The Democratic party is a coalition of broad-minded people. That’s why Sanders has never been able to bring himself to join it, because to do so would mean associating his name with people who disagree with him in ways he regards as evil. High-minded people on the left in the US just don’t have a party, and probably never will.
On an issue like immigration, we can find a line (e.g., liberal immigration rules combined with enforced regulation on wages, so that employers can’t use immigrants to bring the wage down) that brings people of open but pro-worker views together from either side of the wealth barrier.
The pragmatic flexibility of the Democrats makes us in the long run more stable. Yes, the party can lose elections, and the period since 1994 has been pretty awful in the federal and state legislatures, but the party survives and improves on the whole. The progress in the way we think since 2007 has been incredible. (And the way its heads like Obama and Clinton think has improved under that pressure, and all honor to Bernie for his contribution on that score.) It gets better.
The Democratic Party broadens by moving to the right.
Bernie Sanders = Jeremy Corbyn. Hillary Clinton = David Cameron. Donald Trump = Nigel Farage. If you remove Corbyn from that equation, you do in fact end up with a more stable Tory Party, which can pride itself on its broad-minded, pragmatic flexibility.
Indeed, the Democrats are the gatekeeper of the left for the elites.
So, are people like yourself who share this idea organizing a new, left-wing party? I’m trying to understand the point of the complaining about the Democrats’ lack of ideological purity.
There is an overabundance of ideological purity in the 21st century Democratic party, imo. I’d like to sully it quite a bit.
Warren (with her affection for small-town bankers and their style of conservatism) and Brown are in that tradition, as are Obama and the Clintons, What a pathetic dismissal of Warren. As for the Clintons being like FDR, you either don’t understand and appreciate who FDR was or you don’t have a clue as to what the Clintons have stood for and done.
FDR
How in the hell does someone that was instrumental in destroying the New Deal federal financial regulations and gives private talks to banksters for a fee of at least $235,000 exist in your mind as “like FDR?”
Irony just got killed.
I’d say that “the stupid” is rampant.
Good heavens it’s not a “dismissal” of Warren at all. I think she’s the best. I’m claiming she’s my kind of politician and not (as I suppose, and apologies if I’ve got it wrong) your kind. I’ll still admire her immensely if she endorses Clinton in the next few months, just as my admiration for Sherrod Brown and Bill de Blasio hasn’t changed, while you seem to have relegated Brown to the traitor’s box.
And I’m so glad she’ll continue regardless of who wins the nomination to be in a position to push that “positive reinforcement” for the benefit of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of struggling people, in the way she has done so effectively in the past. In the meantime I’ll keep doing “positive reinforcement” in my own small way.
Oh, that small bore thinker like Warren and the intellectually rigid and unproductive Sanders are doing more inconsequential fluff – Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are going after activist hedge funds
Not big and important stuff as Senator Clinton did during her tenure as a Senator. Like all those post office and highways that she got renamed.
A good first step in reducing predatory capitalism’s worst face. They have a ton of work ahead on that–infinite varieties allowed by the courts.
All the churning now to paper over the STARK differences between FDR Democratic government that worked for the commons and is best represented now by B & E, and 21st century neoliberal Democratic government with its sale of the commons and Social Darwinism. Its “free-trading” and monopolistic advantaging.
We really need both Roosevelts to give government back to the people who make it.
This may seem unrelated to my response but it’s not:
Perfessor Senator Warren responds:
Recall from last week that DWS is also on the warpath to “neuter” the good Senator Warren. (And the HRC fans are blind to the connections and implications.)
Warren has not a trace of the sexism and greed that infects Clinton, the little girl in a big house. She’d be nearly unassailable as candidate. Sanders too.
While I was very impressed by the breadth and depth of knowledge that Warren displayed years ago in an interview with Terry Gross, it was her compassion for ordinary people that seemed extraordinary to me. Her caring is authentic and not merely the posture of a do-good type liberal DEM.
She’s a successor to the great Frances Perkins and not about to take no from TPTB. Stripped of her “baby,” the CFPB, she didn’t retreat and couldn’t be bought off. She’s a people’s Senator in that the people chose her. The DEM party elites were fine with her going back to Harvard to continue her work from there and fine with Scott Brown as a MA Senator.
Some of us value compassion and admire others who manifest it. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot more people who admire the opposite of compassion.
Disagree. Except for sociopaths and extreme narcissists all people value compassion. Deep and authentic compassion is a rare quality which is why it’s praised when seen. Articulating and channeling the limited amount of innate compassion that we do have is a task that’s easily subverted or subject to being supplanted with sentiment and restricted to individual instances where compassion is a normal response. Thus, Americans can shrug off bombing innocent people abroad but cry when they see a dog being abused. The right gets people to cry about imaginary fetuses in imaginary wombs while they applaud LEO killings of innocent AA children. Those who exploit the natural compassion of others for their own gain are my definition of evil.
Let me put it this way: Experience suggests that, in a political contest where one side emphasizes attitudes like hopefulness, compassion, and solidarity, while the other side emphasizes attitudes like fearfulness, hatred, and division, it’s the latter that usually wins. Not saying I wish this were true.
Not sure that I agree with that either. Oh sure, every once in a while a Democrat runs on hope, but mostly it’s fear (the GOP evil one can’t be allowed to win, can’t let the GOP choose another SCOTUS (not that they’ve stopped a bad choice in decades with Bork). Reagan and GWB most definitely ran on hope (the hope to get government off our backs and hope “to restore dignity and honor to the WH). Compassion? For who?
Solidarity — yeah, like the Clinton/DNC/partisan DEM faction ordering Sanders’ supporters to get in line and get with her?
The problem is that when people live in bubbles they always apply positive adjectives to themselves and negative ones to those outside their tribe and are almost completely incapable of recognizing the positive adjectives the opponents live and the negative ones that they live.
If one isn’t well informed and astute, one can easily mistake Trump’s well honed persona for authentic, honest, and telling it like it is. HRC hasn’t been able to develop such a persona and most people go with that to form their impression of her as untrustworthy. However, if they were well informed they would know that she lies, a lot.
Fortunately, Clinton is not a party to the GOP attacks on CFPB, whatever Wasserman Schultz may be up to. As Elizabeth Warren said in December,
Senator Warren appreciates the power of positive reinforcement and fully understands that the DEM party is the only that she has to ally with if she’s to have any hope of seeing any part of what she stands for furthered. However, she’s not a fool either.
DNC Chair Joins GOP Attack On Elizabeth Warren’s Agency. She is fully informed of how the Clinton machine works and DWS’s role in it.
Any DEM that doesn’t understand that payday lenders are the modern version of the “company store” — the piece in the chain of financial services that preys on the least among us — is a Republican.
How you can see/hear this from DWS and not connect the dots to HRC is mind-boggling. DWS was one of HRC’s ’08 campaign honchos and hand picked for DNC chair to protect HRC ’16. Ignoring that (along with decades of the Clintons currying favor with Wall St.) in favor of some nice words that Senator Warren said about HRC and other Democrats goes a long way to explaining why DEMs keep electing economic DINOs. Why not just vote for Republicans because they’ll get the job done quicker.
I took this as a shot across her bow from HRC and Co. To assure she stayed on the sidelines.
Well, Hillary is campaigning quite explicitly on preserving and enforcing the powers of the CPFB and the rest of Dodd-Frank, so there is no effective way to factually support this claim.
And how will you rhetorically support these shady claims when Senator Warren vigorously and effectively campaigns for Clinton if she wins the Dem nomination? That will happen if Hillary gets to the general election, and this “Elizabeth GOOD Hillary BAD” stuff will seem odd at that point.
Polarizing the electorate is a rough thing to do, but it can be a way for a campaign to win elections when it has the majority. Bernie doesn’t have the majority yet, so slinging offensive, simplistic and poorly supported claims won’t gain the nomination for Sanders, and could well backfire.
More:
Salon — NYT: Obama compares Bernie Sanders to George W. Bush, calls on Democrats to unite behind Hillary Clinton at closed door fundraiser .
Obama likening Bernie to GWB would be similar to likening Senator Warren to former Senator Phil Gramm. Or MLK, Jr. to Obama.
I’d wait til the sausage is made to hand out the plaudits. We have seen this indignant act for the cameras before that actually presages a cave.
God, but HRC wants to co-opt Warren.
Only rhetorically for the election. Not authentically for policy positions once in office.
I started a reply to this comment. It grew. Now a stand-alone post.
Them Foobirds, They Comin’ Home To Roost!!!
Please comment there.
AG
Amazing what gerrymandering can do, isn’t it?
You rightly point out the migration this cycle, but in a change election you can expect any number of cohorts to be on the move. Let’s hope there’s not a meaningful leakage of voters the other way.
Look in the mirror, Booman. Look in the mirror.
as someone who shares most of your demographics (although I’ve gathered that I’m a little younger than you, but we are in the same state) I still don’t understand what you are seeing
I don’t feel under attack
Can you explain it?
People wonder how Asians, who should, in theory, be staunch Republicans, voted overwhelmingly for President Obama – at even higher numbers than Latinos.
Asians have more immigrants in their family than even Latinos.
The anti-immigrant rants from the GOP hurt them with far more than Latinos.
Asian-americans largely settled in the western united states, which is generally more liberal (particularly culturally). So in many ways, immigrants are just adopting the culture they find themselves in.
In Southern California Asians also suffered from red lining and other attempts to keep them out of certain neighborhoods. Not to mention interment camps. The South Bay of Los Angeles is filled with old ‘sun down towns’. I grew up in three of them. Two of them….no Asians allowed for many years.
That history has a tendency to fine tune a persons bigotry radar.
.
Points taken and agreed with. I was involved in the anti-NAFTA fight. I was talking with congressional aids in the lead up to the vote. I will never forget any of that. What this also means is that I was skeptical, at best, of Bill Clinton nearly from the beginning.
I also watched the smear campaign against the Clintons, the echo-chamber disinformation, etc. I never fell for it, and funny thing, I noticed the Republicans never criticized the Clintons for anything they actually deserved criticism for, only bullshit. I was sympathetic for the president when they tried to impeach him, and disgusted with people like that double-dealing, sanctimonious prick Lieberman.
Two different things.
In retrospect, including the many years since Bill left office, and the 2008 campaign, and Hillary’s stint as SoS, I think we have had more than enough of the Clintons by now, thank you.
I realized around 2003 that the DLC was a good part of what was wrong with the party, my hopes rose when I saw Howard Dean realized it too. I was delighted when Obama beat the Clinton machine in 2008. (They seem to have patched things up since then.)
We need a real Democrat as president, and maybe it’s safer to be a real Democrat if you’re not actually in the party.
I put this comment in the wrong place, it was actually supposed to be a reply to Mino. see below.
Sadly,the same story can probably be told on the opposite side of the coin. How many people have made the journey from a lifelong Democrat to a Republican, simply because of an analogous experience of feeling abandoned and betrayed by a party they thought they knew and could trust? It might be possible more people have made that journey than the one made by Mr. Fersat and his friend.
Only those that convince themselves that the grass is greener on the other side.
Those that see no grass on either side, join the 42.9% in a good election turnout year. Usually they have far more company.
I know people who’ve flipped both ways. A Democrat neighbor flipped–he claims to be unaffiliated but invariably votes Republican–seemingly because he hates gun control but more because he’s caught up in that myth about how government should run like a business. (Plus, this neighbor is a contrarian, and what better way to be one here in heavily Democratic Portland, Oregon than by flipping to the GOP?) A Republican co-worker with a strong libertarian streak, who greatly admired Reagan, now despises the GOP owing to the party’s captivity by evangelicals and their reactionary social agenda. The point is, any individual’s motivations for changing party affiliation are idiosyncratic–which is Booman’s point, right?
Quit treating voters as ciphers, as automatons who necessarily behave according to some stereotype.
Yes, and beyond voters the perception of American democracy has been Trump skewed world wide.
The Democratic Party ignores, stomps on or belittles the disaffected within the party at their own peril. From what I can tell a large number of the unaffiliated voters in my county generally vote Democratic, but they cannot be counted on to support a candidate just because of the D beside their name.
Still a very sore spot for Americans who believed no one should be above the law. Till we were slapped in the face with it and told to like it.
“A former head of a major Irish bank has been extradited from the U.S. and brought before Dublin District Court to face several charges stemming from the bank’s role in the 2008 financial crisis.
[…]
As of October, Iceland’s criminal bankers had been sentenced to a combined 74 years in prison — with others awaiting trial. Then, the sale of one of its national banks meant a payout, albeit small, for every Icelandic citizen.”
So, good on my progenitors…http://www.activistpost.com/2016/03/ireland-to-prosecute-top-banker-who-destroyed-their-economy-gues
s-where-he-was-hiding.html
Pffft!
Enough of Saint Sanders, on to Saint Warren!
.
I was chatting recently with a “Millenial” family member, whom I’ll call X, about the Democratic primaries. She’s an avid Sanders supporter. Fine, I like Sanders, too–always have. Problem was, X has swallowed the following narrative: Everything was fine and dandy with the Democratic Party until the Evil Clintons took over in 1992, supported NAFTA, undermined the traditional working-class base of the party, and shipped all those good paying jobs overseas. X kept telling me how this was the first electoral campaign she had ever paid attention to, and how she could never vote for Hillary Clinton if she wins the nomination.
I spent about an hour with X talking about how de-industrialization and outsourcing were going on long before the Evil Clintons got anywhere near the White House. X didn’t know anything about how the coalitions of voters supporting the Ds and Rs had been changing before the Evil Clintons arrived on the scene, or how those changes have continued since the Evil Clintons moved out of the White House.
X is a good person, well meaning, but struggling economically, and views Sanders’ agenda as some sort of salvation. I asked what Sanders has been doing to help Democrats at the local and state level regain power. Turns out that X was unaware that the GOP controls most state legislatures and governorships. That the GOP had been slowly, slowly taking control from the bottom up for several decades, and had used that power to gerrymander Congressional districts, for example. That Evil Hillary Clinton, warts and all, had been raising money on behalf of candidates for “lower” offices.
I don’t know whether X is typical or not, but I sure found her lack of perspective troubling.
Nice job of gatekeeping the left. LOL
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/the-year-of-the-angry-economists?highlight=WyJuYWZ0YSIsI
m5hZnRhJ3MiXQ==
Also…http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Blogs/The-Avenue/2016/03/15-angry-voters/MM-and-SK-on-Voter-Anger–
Manufacturing-Employment-Decline1.jpg?la=en
Points taken and agreed with. I was involved in the anti-NAFTA fight. I was talking with congressional aids in the lead up to the vote. I will never forget any of that. What this also means is that I was skeptical, at best, of Bill Clinton nearly from the beginning.
I also watched the smear campaign against the Clintons, the echo-chamber disinformation, etc. I never fell for it, and funny thing, I noticed the Republicans never criticized the Clintons for anything they actually deserved criticism for, only bullshit. I was sympathetic for the president when they tried to impeach him, and disgusted with people like that double-dealing, sanctimonious prick Lieberman.
Two different things.
In retrospect, including the many years since Bill left office, and the 2008 campaign, and Hillary’s stint as SoS, I think we have had more than enough of the Clintons by now, thank you.
I realized around 2003 that the DLC was a good part of what was wrong with the party, my hopes rose when I saw Howard Dean realized it too. I was delighted when Obama beat the Clinton machine in 2008. (They seem to have patched things up since then.)
We need a real Democrat as president, and maybe it’s safer to be a real Democrat if you’re not actually in the party.