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Month: November 2016

The main man

The main man

by digby

For those of you who may not be following the details of the Steve Bannon story out of sheer despair, here’s a selection of quotes, via Mashable,  that will fill you in on the man who has been chosen to the chief White House strategist under President Trump:

On why liberals hate conservative women:

” [T]hese women cut to the heart of the progressive narrative. That’s why there are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement. That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England.” — 2011 radio interview with Political Vindication Radio


On sending his girls to an elite academy in Los Angeles

  He “didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews … He said he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiney brats.'” — The Guardian, from his wife in court documents filed in 2007. Bannon has denied saying it.


On what keeps him going

“Fear is a good thing. Fear is going to lead you to take action.” —Richmond-Times Dispatch

Stephen Bannon, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign chairman, attends Trump's Hispanic advisory roundtable meeting in New York, Saturday, Aug. 20, 2016.

Stephen Bannon, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, attends Trump’s Hispanic advisory roundtable meeting in New York, Saturday, Aug. 20, 2016.

On furthering Tea Party goals

“I’m a Leninist … Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” — The Daily Beast


On Breitbart News

“We’re the platform for the alt-right.” —Mother Jones

“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy.” — The Washington Post

“We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.” — The Washington Post

“We hire people who are freaks” and “They don’t have social lives.”— The Washington Post

On the Occupy Movement

“After making the Occupy movie, when you finish watching the film, you want to take a hot shower … You want to go home and shower because you’ve just spent an hour and fifteen minutes with the greasiest, dirtiest people you will ever see.” — The Atlantic 


On his favorite group of Republicans, the GOP

“What we need to do is bitch-slap the Republican Party.” — The Atlantic

“Leadership are all c*nts” and “We should just go buck wild.” — The Daily Beast, from an email exchange.


On charges of anti-Semitism from former Breitbarteditor-at-large Ben Shapiro

“Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic.” — Mother Jones. Shapiro quitBreitbart News after Trump’s then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, allegedly assaulted Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. He accused Bannon of turning Breitbart “into Trump’s personal Pravda.”

For even more ridiculousness, be sure to read some Breitbart headlines, such as “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew” and the charmer above. For the very brave, jump into the comment threads.

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Trump’s big money wackos

Trump’s big money wackos

by digby

I wrote about the Mercers for Salon this morning:

Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of Donald Trump’s victory is watching the media immediately mainstream his white nationalist lieutenant, former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon whom he appointed as White House strategist. It’s not a symbolic position; in previous administrations it was held by the likes of Karl Rove. According to KellyAnne Conway, Bannon is a “brillian tactician” and  the “general” who ran the winning campaign so he will have immense power. This is an amazing turn of events. A man who was fringe player on the far, far right a year ago is the new president’s Razputin.

Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s notorious former secretary of state and member of the Trump transition team described the division of labor between RNC chair Reince Preibus, the new chief of staff, and Bannon this way:

“Bannon is going to be keeper of the image of Trump as a fighter against the status quo, and Reince is going to utilize his personal connections with the speaker and others, to make the trains run on time.

Yes, he actually used the phrase “make the trains run on time.” The only good part of that is that he was referring to Preibus the colorless bureaucrat not Bannon the white nationalist. (Actually, after consulting Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil, I remembered there isn’t much difference between the two under the right circumstances.)

There has been a lot written about Bannon in the last few days but the gold standard piece about him is this one from last summer by Bloomberg’s Joshua Green presciently headlined, This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America.  It’s a scary look at a very scary man. And now that scary man has a tremendous amount of power.

There are dozens of facets to the Bannon story worth looking at in depth, but one project was particularly important to the election of Donald Trump. Breitbart media surely played its part, but it was his blandly named “Government Accountability Institute” (GAI) that really did the job which Green describes as a non-profit organization designed to create indictments against major politicians to partner with mainstream media like the New York Times and the Washington Post to achieve wide dissemination. Its main contribution to the 2016 campaign was a bestseller by GAI’s president, a right wing propagandist named Peter Schweizer, called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich” which I wrote about for Salon here. The mainstream press cooperated eagerly and the book created the framework for the “Crooked Hillary” theme that dominated the campaign.

It’s interesting that after years of following big shot right wing donors like the Koch brothers that a new day has dawned in Republican politics when it comes to the big money. The influence of these deep pockets  billionaires are surely still being felt in politics around the country, but Trump is not one of their creatures.
Still there is one pair of super donors in the Trump inner circle and they just happens to be in Steven Bannon’s inner circle as well: hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.

And while the likes of the Kochs and  Sheldon Adelson are far right menaces, the Kochs being libertaian ideologues and Adelson being singularly focused on the the issues of Israel and his own gambling empire, the Mercers are something else entirely. They are fringe kooks with a vast fortune and a willingness to back other fringe kooks like Steve Bannon. Rebekah Mercer was a director of his GAI propaganda outfit and the family has heavily funded Breitbart.

Both Mercers have spent tens of millions on various right wing candidates and institutions in recent years including establishment organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. In the primary they backed Ted Cruz with the Keep the Promise SuperPAC  and later the “Defeat Crooked Hillary” Super PAC both of which first employed KellyAnne Conway and David Bossie who later joined the Trump campaign with Steve Bannon, reportedly at Rebekah Mercer’s urging. 

According to this fascinating profile by Bloomberg’s Zachary Mider, Robert Mercer is an extremely eccentric character, a machine gun collecting computer genius who made his billions relatively late in life when he was hired by the Renaissance hedge fund to “crunch market data and spot patterns a human trader would overlook.”  He was extremely successful there and became CEO in 2009 with another “quant” who had come to the fund with him from IBM.

He may be a genius, but when it comes to politics he more closely resembles tin-foil hat conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones. Indeed, it’s hard to find a fringe scientific theory he hasn’t thrown money at, from climate change denial to conferences that feature speakers presenting “evidence” that HIV does not cause AIDS and that the disease is an elaborate government coverup of the health risks of “the homosexual lifestyle.”

He’s also put a lot of money into groups promoting far right economic theories including the weird idea that “fractional reserve banking”, which is simply what banks have always done — lend their depositors money to others — is a massive fraud and a ponzi scheme.  He is also a huge proponent of a return to the gold standard, of course.

These are just the tip of weirdness iceberg. Looking at the long list of crazy stuff that Robert Mercer is involved with, it seems that he believes everything he reads or hears from right wing kooks. And con men and grifters see him coming a mile away. Indeed, he and his daughter seem to be financing pretty much every far right fringe organization and wacky theorist in America, from white nationalists to climate deniers. So naturally, they are major backers of our new fringe President-elect, Donald Trump.

How much influence they will have remains to be seen. But Rebekah Mercer was named last week to Trump’s transition team and one of their closest associates has just been named the White House chief strategist so their wacky ideas will certainly get a hearing in the oval office.

Heard it from a friend who… by @BloggersRUs

Heard it from a friend who…
by Tom Sullivan

Mike Lux put up a lengthy breakdown of just what did last week for Democrats. Digby chewed on some of it yesterday, but recent events have me thinking about another section:

We are in for four years of a president who likely will be worse than Nixon in terms of domestic surveillance and dirty tricks against opponents. Trump and his AG will not care one whit about the rule of law, so we are likely in for wiretapping, electronic surveillance, targeting political opponents with rumors and innuendo, and maybe worse.

As for targeting political opponents with rumors and innuendo, we don’t need a Trump administration to do this. We do it to ourselves by spreading fake news:

Mark Zuckerberg says the notion that fake news influenced the U.S. presidential election is “a pretty crazy idea.”

The Facebook CEO is finding himself in a unique position in this election cycle. Many news organizations have come under fire for their coverage of the campaign. Now Facebook is getting it too, as a modern media company that does not vet fake news from its News Feed and that, critics argue, allows users to stay in information bubbles that reinforce existing prejudices.

Ya think? If it reinforced what they already believed, friends on the left cheerfully “Shared” this stuff as eagerly as your right-wing uncle “passed it on” to his email list a decade ago. One of my Facebook friends just declared he would unfriend anyone trafficking in this garbage. Mark Zuckerberg says he’s working on weeding it out, claiming 99 percent of his news feed is authentic, but:

Earlier on Monday Facebook denied claims that a tool to whittle out fake news had been created before the election, only to be shelved due to concerns it would make Facebook look like it was censoring conservative views.

Weeding out propaganda is bad for business. Zuckerberg wrote:

“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. An even greater volume of stories express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

A site called TechCrunch observes:

Zuckerberg’s comment draws a false equivalency between “mainstream sources” of news (including TechCrunch) and political groups masquerading as news brands.

The Denver Guardian was one site that posed as a news publisher to bombarded readers with content full of misinformation meant to sway their opinions about candidates and issues on the ballot. And another group, based in Macedonia, had been posting fake news to Facebook’s News Feed simply to make money.

Fake news circulated virtually everywhere online, and on Facebook, at a time when voters needed facts to inform their decisions, unfortunately.

There is a possibility that Facebook may not even want to become “arbiters of truth,” because doing so could reduce engagement.

As a former Facebook designer named Bobby Goodlatte wrote on November 8th on his own Facebook wall, “Sadly, News Feed optimizes for engagement. As we’ve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging.

I bring this up because of a highly engaging story I saw on Facebook last night (although not from a “news” site). It was another nasty, post-election story of a black woman being harassed by two Trumpist white guys in a local grocery store. We’re hearing lots of these. It was posted by a friend who said she got it from a friend. A commenter said she’d heard the sams story from an Uber passenger who “knew this woman.” Did she really? It certainly reinforces an anti-Trump narrative, but is the story true or not? It matters. Given what’s been documented so far, it may well be. But it has the hallmarks of an urban legend. It recalls a post I wrote criticizing e-propaganda back in May:

In the misty past before the dawn of the internet (1980?), I was visiting the home of a friend who told me with some alarm that I should never buy any more products from the Procter & Gamble company of Cincinnati, Ohio. Its president, she said, was on the Phil Donahue Show and said the company gave money to the Church of Satan. As proof she told me, you could look on their packaging and see a small crescent moon and stars symbol, a “satanic symbol.”

“When did you see this?” I asked.

Oh, well, she had not seen it. A friend had told her about it. Except, of course, her friend had not seen it either, because it never happened. But because the news came from a friend and confirmed her darkest fears about how the world worked, she never questioned it.

This is going to be a real problem in a Trumpland whipped up by “Denver Guardians” and Macedonians. Especially with “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement” whispering in Donald Trump’s ear and the left primed to believe the worst without questioning sources. If you care about the truth, be careful what you pass around unless you know from whence it came.

There Was Only One Candidate by tristero

There Was Only One Candidate 

by tristero

It wasn’t what was written about Trump that anyone cared about, it was the quantity. He was worthy of attention. 
It wasn’t what was written about Clinton. It was the fact that she barely was worthy of attention, and people barely worthy of attention will never, ever get elected president of the United States.

Digby quoted from this interesting essay by Mike Lux:

A study I saw in the middle of the Republican primary tracked how the more coverage Trump got, the higher he rose in the polls, even if not all of the coverage was positive. 

And exactly how much coverage did he get? Well, for a while I was informally tracking it. 
On a typical day, Trump was provided roughly 3 times the coverage of anyone. And nobody seemed to notice or care. Finally, I stopped, hoping to God that I’d see the gross skewing of coverage that I noticed covered as a news story in its own right by any of the major media I was reading. It never was.
But, it was worse than the mere quantity of the Trump coverage. The little coverage that Clinton got, comparatively, was approximately two-fold, nearly all of it awful, and a lot of it her campaign’s own fault. Most that I saw was either:
1. Ethical scandals that clearly made her look as corrupt as Trump.
2. Policy articles by her and others in her campaign that were so incredibly boring, so inside-baseball, and so badly written that no one in their right mind would ever bother to read them. 
Here’s the first post I wrote on the subject (there are pictures, too) called There is Only One Candidate , written on September 16 :

According to the media I look at, it looks like all but one person has dropped out. Sure, there are a bunch of losers floating around, including someone who seems to be kind of sick, but only one candidate gets truly prominent news coverage, meaning headlines and pictures. 

This happens more days than not. And in many more places than I have time to take screenshots of. And we wonder why the polls are are so alarming? No one else seems to be running. 

And remember: It doesn’t matter what gets said. All publicity is good publicity.

And this is the third post

Go out and pick up a hard copy of the NY Times.  The online edition is different, you need the full effect of actual hard print here. I’ll wait. 

Got it? Great! Now look on the front page. There’s a headline with the word “Trump” in it above the fold. Now, go through section A (the main news section of the paper). The word “Trump” is on a smaller headline in the news summary on page 2. 

Keep going. Page 10, “Obama” gets a headline. Page 16, again there’s a “Trump” in the headline. 

Page 18, again, two headlines above the fold with the word”Trump.” 

Page 25, an above the fold headline with the word “Trump.” 

Now, the editorial pages. 

“Trump” is in the headline of the lead editorial on page 26. “Donald Trump” is in the headline of Tom Friedman’s editorial on page 27. Both above the fold, by the way. And that’s the front section of the paper of record. 

Not a single headline mention of any rival candidate. 

This regularly goes on day after day after day everywhere, in every media outlet in this country. All Trump, all the trumping time. There is no one else running for president.* 

Whoops! Wait-a-minute, wait-a-minute… Flip back. On the op-ed page (nearly missed it!) there’s an editorial entitled “My Plan For Helping America’s Poor” with a byline by – wow, I can’t believe it, they’re letting her publish something?- Hillary Clinton!!! Let’s look!!!! 

Oh, dear… Oh, no. Oh. 

It’s unreadable, completely unreadable. Clinton takes 7 long and statistic-bloated paragraphs to tell us that (who knew?) she thinks it’s bad that some American children are growing up in poverty. 

And then her plan! A… a what? A 10-20-30 plan? What the hell is that? And who is Jim Clyburn? Is he running for president, too? Clinton finally gets her name (albeit in tiny type) mentioned above the fold and this is what we get, the best cure for insomnia ever, guaranteed? 

We are doomed.
——
*Because who, including Times readers, has time to read more than one or two articles beyond the headlines, except for politics junkies?

After a few more, I gave up. No one understood.

It is impossible, literally impossible, to overestimate how badly the media behaved during this election.
It is also impossible, literally impossible, to overestimate how badly the Clinton campaign navigated the media landscape during this election.

A new hope: Newton’s 3rd law in action

A new hope: Newton’s 3rd law in action

By Dennis Hartley

This is why I love living in a city like Seattle:

[from an email I received from Seattle’s Labor Standards office]

Our Commitment to
Equity, Inclusion and Openness

As Mayor Ed Murray stated last week, Seattle remains a city guided by the values of equity, inclusion and openness. “Seattle is a city that supports women and the LGBTQ community, that welcomes our Muslim brothers and sisters, that embraces immigrants and refugees, and that believes that Black Lives Matter.”

As the Director of the Seattle Office of Labor Standards, and an openly transgender individual, I assure you that we in the Office of Labor Standards are deeply committed to upholding these values, and ensuring that we continue to be a supportive resource and partner to Seattle’s most vulnerable communities. We will re-double our efforts to advance labor standards through thoughtful community and business engagement, strategic enforcement and innovative policy development with a commitment to race and social justice.

To our immigrant community partners, Mayor Ed Murray has promised that the City of Seattle will remain a welcoming city, committed to serving all the residents of Seattle regardless of their immigration status. Under a local law passed in 2003, Seattle city employees are NOT allowed to ask about people’s immigration status when providing city services, unless required by law or a court order. We in the Office of Labor Standards are proud to enforce labor standards for all of Seattle’s workers, regardless of immigration status. We also have strong anti-retaliation provisions across all our labor standards ordinances.

If you have any questions about our work or services, feel free to contact us. We look forward to our continued work ahead.

In solidarity,

Dylan Orr
Director, Seattle Office of Labor Standards

We’re circling the wagons, folks. We have to stay strong.

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Got democracy?

Got democracy?

by digby

Not much.

As we all sit around in our hair shirts trying to figure out how to accomplish a total Democratic Party makeover before our next election, this is rather sobering:

Last week’s election produced the widest gap between the Electoral College and the popular vote in a generation — a result of Hillary Clinton racking up huge margins in populous coastal states such as California and New York while narrowly losing several Midwestern battlegrounds to Donald Trump. Were this pattern to continue, Democrats could be at a significant Electoral College disadvantage.

Clinton, who’s currently leading in the popular vote by 0.6 percentage points and whose advantage should increase — probably to between 1.5 and 2.0 points — as additional ballots are counted, became the fourth candidate to lose the Electoral College while winning the popular vote. She joins Al Gore (2000), Grover Cleveland (1888) and Samuel Tilden (1876).1 But Tilden’s loss to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 was, in part, because Colorado — which had newly joined the union and said it didn’t have time to run an election — appointed its electors to Hayes via its state legislature. Thus, Clinton is likely to win the popular vote by the widest margin of any Electoral College loser in an election in which all states voted, surpassing Cleveland’s 0.8-percentage-point margin in 1888.

This is the second time in 16 years that the Democrat has lost the White House while winning the popular vote. This time the margin is truly astonishing.

Those of us in California and New York and the like, people in cities with large populations of people of color — well, our votes just don’t count as much do they?

It’s always something.

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Normalizing the monster

Normalizing the monster

by digby

Think Progress:

The New York Times has produced a “short list” of people under consideration for top White House posts. There are 57 entries. 6 are women.

Yet the Associated Press says Trump is about to make history because he is considering a woman for one leadership post: chair of the Republican National Committee.

Here’s how the Associated Press frames the news, with emphasis added.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump is considering a woman and an openly gay man to fill major positions in his new leadership team, history-making moves that would inject diversity into a Trump administration already facing questions about its ties to white nationalists.

The chair of the Republican National Committee is not part of the Trump administration. Nor is the appointment of a woman to lead a major political party “history-making.” 

The Democratic Party’s first female chair, Jean Westwood, was appointed in 1972. 

The AP’s coverage is part of the normalization of Donald Trump. The candidate routinely belittled and demeaned women as a candidate — and none have been named to top posts in his transition or administration. During the campaign itself, more than 10 women accused Trump of sexual assault.

The remaking of Trump as a history-making champion of gender diversity less than a week after his election illustrates just how far, and how fast, the bar has been lowered.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon is an unabashed white nationalist, anti-Semitic proto-fascist. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times described him as an “outsider” and a “firebrand.” Those words don’t really capture the truth, do they?

Trump said the American people were demanding only the best

Trump said the American people were demanding only the best

by digby
So Trump’s considering John Bolton for Secretary of State. That sounds right. I wonder if he can find a place for Bolton’s good bud, Pamela Geller?

Remember this?

The manifesto of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik, who attacked targets in Norway in July killing nearly 100 people, contained numerous citations to Islamophobic bloggers and other so-called experts on Islamic terrorism here in the United States. The references included “counterjihad” bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, who received a combined 174 citations from Breivik (Geller and Spencer also feature prominently in CAP’s latest report on the Islamophobia network in the U.S., “Fear, Inc.”). 

ThinkProgress’ Eli Clifton subsequently noted that former Bush administration official and prominent war hawk John Bolton — who is currently considering a run for president — has a “Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer problem.” Indeed, Bolton has deep connections to Geller. He even wrote the foreward to Geller and Spencer’s 2010 book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. The book contains language eerily similar to Breivik’s manifesto.

Bolton kept quiet about his links to Geller and Spencer after Breivik’s attack. But now, it appears he’s fully embracing them. Geller announced today that Bolton will be speaking at her “9/11 Freedom Rally: Stand Against Ground Zero Mosque”

They go way back. if you search on Geller’s site Atlas Shrugged, you can find a whole bunch of interviews with him. They’re tight.

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Understanding the apocalypse

Understanding the apocalypse


by digby

Progressive organizer Mike Lux has written a comprehensive and interesting analysis of the campaign that’s worth reading and thinking about in its entirely. There are a lot of moving parts that have to be dealt with so i’m not going to address the whole thing right now. But his very first observation is absolutely brilliant and it’s something I haven’t seen anyone else point out:

Trump successfully used the media forms he knew to dominate the media narrative. FDR mastered radio; JFK won in ‘60 because of TV; the Obama team won in part because they dominated in email and Facebook. And a huge part of Trump’s victory was because he understood reality TV and Twitter. He knew that being outrageous and entertaining, sounding spontaneous and unscripted, would make him the media favorite and allow him to overwhelm everyone else in terms of free media and coverage. A study I saw in the middle of the Republican primary tracked how the more coverage Trump got, the higher he rose in the polls, even if not all of the coverage was positive. In fact, it didn’t bother Trump if he got bad press, because he was still dominating the debate and the media narrative, making the race all about him. The other dynamic was that all his outrageous statements made him seem much more genuine than other politicians, which voters loved and made them trust him more, even though they knew he wasn’t always truthful on the facts. 

One of the things that had me worried throughout the campaign, and I think my worries were confirmed both by the polling I saw during the campaign, and the final results, is that we Democrats made this campaign too much about Trump. In doing this, we played into his strategy of defining the narrative of the race. Too many of the HFA ads were focused on how dangerous and outrageous and crude Trump was, when in fact those very characteristics were fundamental to his appeal as a change agent. 

I suspect most Democrats thought that by exposing Trump for the cretinous monster he is that a vast majority of our fellow Americans would reject him. We assumed a basic decency would prevail. We were wrong about that and I doubt anyone will ever make that mistake again. We now know what our country is — or have been reminded of it. 
His observation about Trump’s use of the new media is very apt. He is a man of moment who recognized the zeitgeist better than anyone. What confused us was that he’s such a throwback to the 1970s, a man whose worldview is grounded in a period that only people who are my age or older would recognize. What I failed to see was that to his fans, his worldview is fresh. His use of the media of the moment to portray that was really quite brilliant.  And to the older folks my age, he’s just like them, reminding them of the good old days when they were young and had that same haircut.
I think we underestimated him all along. I certainly knew he could win, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around him actually doing it. And I should have. I live in that media world too. He overwhelmed everything by being outrageous and provocative and unscripted. And he got his American alpha male dominance message (that’s pretty much all it was) out not only with what he was saying but by how and where he said it. 
And don’t underestimate how much that excitement translated into a loathing of politics by people with more sensitive natures. By the end it was almost unbearable to deal with the negativity. Trump understood his audience. Clinton failed to understand that some measure of hers was traumatized and tuning out. Exposing his negativity perversely blew back on her. 
And that brings me to another of Lux’s points:

After we won in 2008, our party fell in love with technology and data- big data and what Obama and Clinton strategist Jim Messina calls “little data” and microtargeting. And data is very important to running modern campaigns. But we fell in love with it so much that it sometimes feels like we forgot that we have to create a political movement that excites and motivates and energizes people, a movement that involves actual humans who volunteer to make calls and knock on doors; who give their small contributions online; who get on their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to post videos and memes; who are excited about convincing their friends and neighbors and coworkers to get out and vote for Democrats. Obama didn’t get 70 million votes in 2008 mainly because of data, he got those votes because people felt they were part of a movement. While they weren’t as excited in 2012, there was still enough residual love for him and that movement to put him over the top after a tough 4 years. We didn’t have that feeling this year, and we need a candidate and party that will get us back to that old time movement religion.

I’ll just say this: the inspiration in this campaign was about electing the first woman president. And in the face of shocking misogyny and abusive behavior in person and online from all sides, women retreated to private spheres, as they always do when under assault. They were intimidated. Perhaps that was weak and cowardly but it was the reality. There was no way to create that surging sense of excitement in public without solidarity from the rest of the progressive coalition and it just wasn’t there. 
The lesson is that women’s equality will never be that old time religion. Democrats will have to find something else. The first woman president will be a hard right Republican. That’s the only woman who won’t be met with overwhelming misogyny from the other side and will be defended by their own male allies. They are “the deciders.” 
Anyway, lots to think about in that piece by Lux. Some I agree with some I’m still thinking over. But it’s the most comprehensive piece I’ve read by a progressive thinker to date that’s looking at this from an organic perspective. Well worth the time. 

This is what they love about him

This is what they love about him

by digby

There’s plenty of hate driving the Trump phenomenon. But there’s also plenty of inspiration of a very particular American kind.

It’s about winning:

They feel like they’ve been losing and he promised to “win” for them. Whether you feel you’ve been personally screwed by “immigration” or black people and women getting all the perks or just that you and America itself isn’t getting the respect and deference it deserves, this man said he was going to change it. It felt good.

 The specifics didn’t matter in the campaign and they don’t matter now. This is what his voters (and probably a lot of other people who will come around) believe:

“Many American voters, especially Republicans, are dissatisfied with their own status and the status of the country, but by far the most dissatisfied are Donald Trump’s supporters, who strongly feel that they themselves and the country are under attack,” said Quinnipiac University Poll Director Douglas Schwartz, PhD.  

“Trump supporters are true stand-outs. They want a leader who is very different from the leader sought by other voters, explaining the mystery many see behind Trump’s support,” Dr. Schwartz added.  

There is a wide partisan division among American voters on the statement, “The government has gone too far in assisting minority groups.” Agreement is 45 percent among all voters, 72 percent among all Republicans and 18 percent among Democrats. Agreement is highest among Trump backers, 80 percent. 

Agreement with the statement, “What we need is a leader who is willing to say or do anything to solve America’s problems” is 53 percent among all voters, 68 percent among all Republicans and 39 percent among Democrats. Trump backers agreement is highest with 84 percent. 

There is widespread agreement, 76 percent, with the statement, “Public officials don’t care much what people like me think.” Agreement is 84 percent among all Republicans and 68 percent among Democrats. Ninety percent of Trump supporters agree, the highest of any candidate. 

There is a lower level of agreement, 64 percent, with the statement, “The old way of doing things no longer works and we need radical change.” Agreement is 71 percent among all Republicans and 58 percent among Democrats. Agreement is highest among Trump supporters with 83 percent. 

Among all American voters, 56 percent agree with the statement, “Leaders don’t worry about what other people say; they follow their own path.” Agreement is 65 percent among all Republicans, 46 percent among Democrats and 74 percent of Trump voters agree, the highest of any candidate. 

They wanted a man who said he would “win” no matter what it took.

He did it.

They will love him for it no matter what he does on policy.

I think there’s a very good chance he’s going to be popular.

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