I greeted Donald Trump's announcement that he was running for president with some skepticism. He has alluded to this in the past and hasn't followed through. But when he dominated the polls despite saying things that would sink most presidential campaigns, I knew he was a shoe in to win.
I was shocked that media pundits, politicians and pearl clutchers didn't catch on and take him seriously. They casually dismissed him as a racist demagague that would sputter out by the end of September. They broke the number one rule in any competition: Never underestimate your opponent.
Donald Trump wasn't your ordinary underdog. He owned this campaign. His opponents threw everything they had at him and he still ended up smelling like roses. He defeated 16 other Republicans in a spirited primary race at only a fraction of the cost that others had spent. Main stream media attacks only made his polls go up. And Barack Obama, the man with the 50% approval rating, came off sounding completely clueless when responding to Trumps rise in popularity while the rest of the Democratic party (including Hillary) only did marginally better.
Let me remind everybody of a few things. This was the man who was able to get Barack Obama to show us his birth certificate. He uses bankruptcy law to get better terms from his creditors. He's an expert at handling the media and is great at handling people. Trump has had some well publicized feuds with other celebrities on social media, but generally, he does well with people. The man has demonstrated in the past that he has influence to get people on his side and to get what he wants. His book, The Art of the Deal was published in 1987. Didn't anybody read it and know what this man was capable of? Nobody took him seriously and now he's the most powerful man in the world!
How?
Name Recognition
I'm going to start with a cliché just to get it out of the way. Name recognition still counts for a lot. Especially when the current campaign has as many candidates as this one did. Unless somebody was living in a cave somewhere, the whole world knew about Donald Trump. Certainly, everybody in the United States did even if some of them hate him.People that run campaigns also know this fact, which is why a lot of effort in campaigning is getting the candidate's name out there. People that have high name recognition with the public such as Clinton or Bush have an advantage. People already know these names and will feel that they already know them as individuals, even if they don't really know them at all. But if a candidate can use social media and the main stream media as effectively as Trump does, then he's already won the name recognition game before it even begins. For people that don't regularly follow current events or the news, but still vote, this can make the difference. They'll tend to vote for names that they recognize.
Doesn't Follow the Script
Ostensibly, the media has been ordained with the task of vetting candidates during elections. Prior to the internet age this served a valuable function, but not anymore. Now, people can vet their own candidates and see where they stand on the issues themselves. Media vetting has degenerated into a gaffe scavenger hunt and trying to set traps and "gotcha moments" for candidates to stumble into. And they need to sell copy (or clickthroughs in the internet age) so they have incentives to dig up and hype scandals. Realistically, everything you need to know about a candidate can be gained through their Twitter feed and is already condensed into a 140 character sound bite. What do we need the media for?We've all seen how today's main stream media operates. For example, when an athlete, politician or celebrity makes a public apology in regards to some scandal or impropriety, a tweet or a facebook post isn't going to be good enough. One must call a press conference, invite the media and make a statement where he kind-of-apologizes, but not really. Does anybody believe that he's being sincere? No. Even supporters and fans that are more likely to forgive him realize that this is something they just have to do. It's part of the script.
Likewise, the media can interview and ask questions of celebrities and politicians, but they can't probe too deeply. That would be a one-way ticket out of a job. If word gets around that you're the journalist or a reporter that doesn't play ball, then nobody will talk to you and you can forget getting the press credentials to be on the inside track in Washington, Hollywood or anywhere else. Even before the Wikileaks scandal had broken about the Clintons receiving interview questions prior to interviews had broken, it seemed obvious that interviews and press conferences seemed rehearsed. Questions are often submitted beforehand and approved before the interview or press conference even takes place. By the time you see it live, everybody has been through rehearsal and knows their lines. So everybody involved, media and subjects, have to dance the same dance and abide by the same unspoken rules. Your guess is as good as mine in regards to which of them really sets the agenda or the narrative that the rest of us must adapt to. It seems to be a chicken or egg debate at this point.
A lot of the exasperation coming from the main stream media is that Trump isn't playing along, and the public love him for it. He doesn't have a political career that can be ruined by a few scathing editorials or hardball interviews. When the media confronts Trump about what he may have said--"may have said" being the key phrase since half the time it's a misquote--they expect him to back down, back-peddle or apologize for the remarks. When Trump doesn't apologize and sticks to his guns, then the media resorts to vitriol and become exasperated when his polls continued to climb.
"He's making a mockery of the political process!"
Pfft! You're kidding me, right? After years of yellow journalism that would make a literary hack look respectable in comparison, you are going to start complaining about people mocking the process? Hillarious!
Remember Dan Rather from CBS? He became undone over some false documents about Bush junior's military service by a bunch of pajama-wearing bloggers sipping their morning coffee. It's impossible to overstate the significance of con jobs like this. The main stream media, and the careers and celebrity of those who participated in it, relied on being in complete control of the medium that they operated in. The internet shattered this paradigm and exposed about 95% of the journalism profession as talentless hacks and con men (or con women?). It's funny really. Dan Rather had the opportunity to dodge scandal by claiming that he just reads the news briefs that people hand to him, but no. He doubles down on the documents being authentic and chooses to go down with the ship. Rathergate hasn't been the only news media scandal in recent times. There are many others-- in print and on air-- that should demolish any public perception of the media as being an impartial source of information.
So it's no surprise that the public opinion of the mainstream media is at an historic low according to Newsbusters. This Gallup poll also shows public trust in the media being just as low . The terms politically biased and inaccurate frequently make an appearance when the American public describes the media. The media is as polemic as Daily Kos and Ann Coulter. Except that neither Daily Kos or Ann Coulter claim that they're balanced or impartial like the main stream media does, which makes them a lot more ethical in my book.
I suppose that a lot of aspiring journalists are looking for that Nixon and Frost moment to define their career, or to have the same gravitas that Walter Cronkite had, or perhaps get that clever soundbite that people will be talking about for the next decade. It's not going to happen. The market is too saturated now. Every journalist is a glorified blogger copying stories off the wire and putting their own ideological spin on them. Nowadays, a kid that isn't even old enough to vote can beat you to a scoop because he lives nearby and has an internet connection.
Hillary and the Democrats
What were the Democrats thinking??? They couldn't encourage a few more members of the party to run for president to give the voters a choice? Biden? Warren? Kerry? Bueler? Anybody?There were only two serious candidates. One was a woman that already suffered an embarrassing loss for the nomination to Barack Obama back in 2008, and was dangerously close to being indicted for federal crimes (that's Hillary Clinton for the slow people). At the other podium was a die-hard socialist that still thinks it's 1928, and nobody outside of New England has ever heard of him (Bernie Sanders). That's it????? Nobody else in the Democratic party wanted to be president? How could this be? Molly Ball from The Atlantic brings up a good point. In her essay, Liberals Are Losing the Culture Wars, she writes:
Republican divisions are actually signs of an ideologically flexible big-tent party, while Democrats are in lockstep around an agenda whose popularity they too often fail to question.Even before the scandal involving the DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz manipulating the primary race had broke, the whole thing seemed a little fishy to anybody paying attention. Were we expected to believe that nobody else in the Democratic party was interested in occupying the most powerful office in the western world? They thought Hillary was their best hope for victory? Nobody in the party leadership tried to convince Hillary that she had too much baggage to be considered a serious candidate? I'm beginning to wonder if some of the rumors about bad things happening to people that oppose the Clintons are actually true. If so, then Molly describing Democrats as being "in lockstep around an agenda" barely begins to describe their problems.
I can't believe that nobody else from the Democratic party was interested in running for president. It seemed that Hillary Clinton was to be the presumptive nominee from the very beginning. The news media had little to work with when covering the campaign. They had to include Uncle Joe Biden in the polls that they conducted at one point just to make the contest interesting. When the Democrats finally had their first debate (after the Republicans already had two), they had to include a few other individuals just to fill up the stage. And what a pathetic display it was--a gaggle of idiots arguing about who can give away the most money.
By contrast, there were 17 Republican candidates that officially tossed their hat in the ring. They came from very diverse backgrounds and represented a broad range of perspectives: business men, senators, governors, doctors, etc. When primary debate season rolled around, there were too many to fit on one stage. The debates needed to be split into two sections and they needed to do at least 10 of them to narrow down the field for primary season. The bickering and arguing on such a large scale had many pundits comment that this was a symptom of troubles within the party. Matt Yglesias disagreed. In his article for Vox, Democrats Are In Denial, Yglesias writes:
Much of the current Republican infighting — embarrassing and counterproductive though it may be at times — reflects the healthy impulse to recognize that the party lacks the full measure of power that it desires, and needs to argue about optimal strategies for obtaining it.It's around the time that Yglesias wrote this article that Republicans regained their majority in the House of Representatives and gained a majority in the Senate while continuing to give Democrats the boot in local contests all across the country. Republican infighting seems to be a nice problem to have.
Candidates do well in elections when they align their platform with public sentiment. Instead of realigning with public sentiments, the Democrats are pushing more of the same and the American public has grown weary of it.
The American public has grown tired of socialism and thought twice before electing Bernie Sanders because, as a political and economic system, socialism is coming to an end. It has created a parasitic underclass that demands more and more government benefits without producing anything of value. This isn't sustainable no matter how high you raise people's taxes to cover this expense. More and more people will find other ways to screw up their lives, expecting a bailout and it will never end. Have you ever heard of moral hazard? It's the idea that people will tend to act more irresponsibly knowing that the government or insurance companies will swoop in and bail them out if their actions get them into trouble. Moral hazard was a primary concern when discussing bailout programs for banks and the automotive industry under TARP. Remember how many people loudly opposed it on the grounds that the banks won't act responsibly in the future? It's the same disgruntled feelings, but coming from the other side of the political spectrum
More importantly, socialism tends to bankrupt governments and reduce standards of living. If you don't believe me, then look at the governments around the world going bankrupt. Look at Greece. Look at Spain. Look at Venezuela.... It's not like we can't see this coming. Look at the USSR during the late 1980's. That was our warning. Read Atlas Shrugged, it's coming true. Socialism eventually leads to economic collapse with a rapid decline of living standards and everybody knows this. The only reason we are keeping it going is the idea that the system won't implode while we're still here. It would suck for our grandchildren, though. Good luck kids!
Hillary, on the other hand, has been strongly pushing the feminist angle in her campaign and it flopped. Feminism is also on it's way out--at least in the form it has debased itself to in modern times. Recent surveys reveal that less than one in five American women identify themselves as a feminist (albeit about 80% believe in equality). Looking at the propaganda put out by feminist organizations, it's easy to see why. The movement has degenerated into a group of foul-mouthed, whining man-haters. Women were all girrrrl power and you go girl until their sons and nephews started falling behind in school, losing their jobs and losing their shirt in divorce settlements. And now a lot of men are checking out of society or even worse. The chickens have come home to roost.
I'm not really surprised by all this. I wrote more about how the Democratic party is screwing up.
Anti-Establishment Sentiment
The fact that the Democrats hate Donald Trump isn't a big surprise. The interesting thing is that the Republicans hate him too--at least the party leadership does. So does the mainstream media. Conservative media hates Trump as well (with the exception of Breitbart)--even Fox News hates Trump! You can barely get these groups to agree on what day of the week it is, but they all despise Trump. This was a good enough reason for many people to give Trump a second look.Public opinion of Congress have been at historic lows for a long time. A solid majority of Americans believe that we are on the wrong track as a country (this is despite President Obama having a decent approval rating--around 50%). These poor approval numbers, in conjunction with public distrust in the media (discussed above), should have had the establishment very worried.
We saw anti-establishment sentiment during the primary season. For a time, the top three Republican candidates were all candidates that weren't established, career politicians. This should have made somebody like Hillary Clinton extremely nervous because she is as establishment as it gets. Hillary and her husband have either run for public office or occupied public office throughout their political careers and have grown wealthy as a result -- First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, etc. Hillary likes to think she is being anti-establishment because that is what Democrats have been, traditionally. Except, Democrats aren't the anti-establishment party anymore. They are now the establishment with just as many ties to big business, special interests and Wall Street, as any Republican. The Republican party, after compromise and compromise while the country is being pulled further and further left, is simply considered Democrat-light.
The anti-establishment sentiment that led to Trump's election wasn't just a fluke. It's been building to this point for a while now. Stripped of the novelty of electing our first black president, Barack Obama won in 2008 because, in part, he was considered an outsider. Yes, he was a Senator for Illinois, but not for very long, and certainly not nearly as long as John McCain or Hillary Clinton were Senators. Obama was considered fairly pristine as a candidate. The worst anybody could pin on him was the firebrand rantings of Reverend Wright. McCain sensing this shift in the political winds had tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate. As governor of Alaska, Sarah was also as far away from establishment politics in Washington as it gets, politically and geographically. Later, Tea Party candidates were also being elected and gaining representation in Congress on waves of populist sentiment--the same populist waves that elected Donald Trump.
So this anti-Establishment wave that ended up electing Donald Trump has been in the making for at least a decade. How else can you explain the phenomenal success of Fox News (number one in prime-time cable news for over 13 years)? The network has been challenging existing media and political narratives and viewers responded positively. And before you accuse me of hallucinating, other journalists are remarking on the similarities between Obama's 2008 campaign and Trump's 2016 campaign. Nate Cohn, writing for the New York Times, published an interesting editorial. Cohn doesn't use the language of populism or anti-establishment in his editorial, but observes that Trump is winning over a lot of the white, blue color demographic that voted for Obama in 2008 for the same reason--both Obama and Trump portray themselves as agents of change in Washington.
My question is, why couldn't our parties adapt to the change in voter sentiment? Forget what your polls and focus groups say, look at ratings! Ratings are actually what signals people's preferences when they think nobody is watching them. Round up the same people and put them in a focus group or start polling them and they start giving the progressive, politically correct answers when they know they're going to be on record. It's why Democrats call for recounts and bring up accusations of vote rigging when they lose elections; their polls say they're in the lead but the people end up voting differently once they're alone in the voting booth.
But, nothing is being rigged. The Bradley Effect explains this outcome very well, and due to the left's hysteria over Trump, I'd say that the Bradley Effect exceeded the margin of error of most polls by a significant amount. I suspect that most pollsters and pundits are familiar with the Bradley Effect but they don't talk about it for a simple reason: It would equate to public admission that the liberal left has a very large, firm monopoly on the media and political discourse in this country with tentacles extending into our schools, our churches and even our homes. Certain political views become so sancrosanct that the only place one can honestly oppose them is in a 4-square-foot voting booth with the curtain drawn. But this may be changing. Obama tried to slam people that didn't vote Hillary as sexist. Hillary slammed Trump supporters as "deplorable". While everybody else tried to blame Trump and his supporters as being racist. These labels were often used as trump cards to virtue signal, silence opponents or generally get one's way. But in this election, we are finally seeing some evidence that these labels are losing their effectiveness. They've been overplayed.
I'll bottom-line it for you. There's a political and economic realignment that is occuring as we speak, and it's been occuring well before Trump started his campaign. We'll all find out where it ends up in about 10-15 years, so don't worry. As long as you can adapt you'll be fine. But if that scares you, then you've been too busy branding yourself and sticking yourself into nice little boxes. Look at Jeb Bush. Look at Marco Rubio. Look at Hillary Clinton. Look at Barack Obama. They seem absolutely dumbfounded over what has occured this election. They all branded themselves thinking it's what people wanted. Unfortunately, the brand went the same way that grunge did in the 1990's. But if you want to be a hipster, there's still time!
"But I'm an Independent!"
No, you're not. You have some vague notion that it's a combination of money, special interests, lobbyists, flying saucers and the Illuminati that's screwing things up. In other words, you didn't independently come to this conclusion. Somebody told it to you and you're repeating it. How independent do you think this makes you?
"They should just compromise."
You don't want compromise. You don't even know what compromise looks like in the first place. Civil Unions was a suitable compromise in the gay marriage debate, wasn't it? It allowed someone to "marry" someone of the same sex in the eyes of the government, entitling them to benefits extended to married couples. But this wasn't good enough. Segregation, you called it. You wanted the "marriage" label, and not only that, you also wanted to force other people to recognize it as marriage even though they understand the term to mean something else entirely. So you got 5 people in robes to agree with you and the rest is history.
We tend to idealize the concept of compromise as a noble quality, but sometimes this means selling out your principles--one would hope for a greater good but that's often debatable. We laud the original authors of the Constitution for their spirit of compromise--the same spirit that counted a negro slave as 3/5 of a person. None of this is a judgement on you but you have to be careful what you ask for.
Compromise is an obsolete concept in today's political climate anyway. The Overton Window is a more accurate description in regards to what is occurring in the modern political sphere. The anti-establishment factions are finding that the Overton window has shifted so far to the left that there's almost nothing in American society that shows any respect or reverence for their values-- and if you bring up the fact that the anti-establishment still has their gun rights, I'm gonna shoot you in the eye!
Read more about the Overton Window and gay marriage here.
"I just want them to do the right thing for the American people."
Who's going to tell them what "the right thing" is? You?
I can throw a stick at random and hit somebody who thinks the "right thing" is the exact opposite of what you think the right thing is. That's when the yelling starts and CNN/MSNBC/FOX is there waiting to broadcast it in HD, 24 hours a day because--you know--ratings!
How does it feel to know that you're being manipulated for ratings? Rhetorical.
Angry White Men
I'm sure that most Trump opponents have more than a few choice words to say about him to anybody that will listen. Heck, they've been ranting about him since halfway through 2015!Now imagine that you weren't allowed to do this. Not that you would end up in jail or a victim of lynching or anything like that. But imagine that you would be shouted down by everybody within earshot for promoting such hateful rhetoric. Imagine if it jeopardized your career if you knew that such rhetoric got back to your employer and they had to dismiss you because what you say can reflect badly on the company. Imagine that such a tense atmosphere was created that you had to look over your shoulder to make sure nobody was listening before you whispered something about Trump to a close friend of yours or else people might overhear you and get the wrong idea about your character.
Can you imagine it? Can you actually put yourself in that position and imagine how you would feel?
That's how a lot of people felt when Barack Obama was elected!
Unless you were part of the circle jerk that framed Obama's election as "history in the making" and "bringing Change" or a repudiation of the previous administration, then you were made to feel like a pariah. You were cast as somebody who didn't care about the poor or race relations in the country. You were accused of supporting the banks and deep pocket interests that were out to screw you (Read What's the Matter With Kansas for details). They would call you a racist, a mysoginist and a hater.
Opponents had to wait until Obama did something stupid, like send a poorly translated reset button to Russia, to criticize him for anything, and even then, they had to be careful about how they said it.
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| Couldn't they at least transliterate to cyrillic? |
Feels good to live in a country with free speech, doesn't it? Well, that's for half of the population anyway.
During Trump's campaign, many people, both in public and in the main stream media lamented about "where all this hate is coming from".
First of all, it was always there. It's just been shamed, shouted down and banished from public discussion based on the idea that such sentiments are regressive and not welcome in our postmodern era. When I try to explain this, it seems to come as a shock to any supporter of the Democratic party or the liberal left. They simply aren't acclimated to different points of view. It's primarily because they have been used to getting their way since the Great Depression. Year after year and decade after decade, they learned that if they whine about something long enough they'll get it via legislation, or if public opinion wasn't on their side, Supreme Court rulings. Surely, they've encountered some opposing viewpoints, but they've never encountered an elected official or a candidate that is openly antagonistic to their values in the way that the Clintons or Barrack Obama have been to conservative values. Donald Trump is the first candidate that has antagonized liberal values since Barry Goldwater, only this time, Trump didn't lose. Trump's candidacy came as such a shock to liberals that they had no way to effectively address it. Remember the culture shift that ended up blindsiding conservatives in the 1960's? Your turn now.
Second, it isn't hate--it's anger.
This might come as a shock, but black people aren't the only people in this country that are angry. The white people are angry also. More specifically, white men are angry. Just ask whitey living in the trailer park about white privilege; he'll tell you everything you need to know about it if you can stomach it. They're sick of getting blamed for everything. They're sick of falling behind in school and losing their jobs while nobody cares because they're white and supposedly have things easier. They're sick of getting fleeced in divorce court or have tax dollars being wasted on
"It's not the same," you say? "It's different," you say?
Really?! You think everybody has it easy except you? Everybody else is just lazy or greedy, but you're the one that's getting screwed?
Reality check: Let me issue a challenge right now. Tell me what rights does a white man have that women and minorities do not! Write this in the comments. I suspect that you can't come up with one. It hasn't been legal to discriminate against black people since 1964 and women have been entitled to equal pay since 1963. Yet, candidates campaign on how much more rights we need to give these people. More laws, more executive orders, more money. And white men are just suppose to shut up about it.
I suppose that there could be a legitimate concern that there are forces still marginalizing some groups of the population. But what causes me to reject this thesis is that there's people shouting the secrets of success from the rooftops: Stay in school, stay off drugs, don't get pregnant, etc, etc.
But no, we're all suppose to clutch our pearls and try to address the root causes that would compel a group such as #BlackLivesMatter to trash neighborhoods and gun down cops, but jere and condemn Pepe the Frog as being a racist icon of white supremecy? Does anybody see the hypocrisy in this? Well, white people do!
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| I'm just a meme jerking your chain. |
"We don't have any good role models", you say? Really? No role models at all?
Why wasn't Ben Carson, Collin Powell or Condolezza Rice inspiration for you? Because they're conservatives? You can't check out a book from the library about George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr or Harriet Tubman? Why are gangsters, athletes, promiscuous harlots and rappers good enough role models for you but not people who actually accomplished things, and did so in a much more hostile political environment than the one you are living in right now?
Something tells me that "no role models" means "no people that got successful while being lazy or sociopathic"
Richard Nixon once postulated that there was a silent majority, living in this country--a group of people that didn't express their political opinions publicly or showed up at the polls. I didn't really believe that this group existed. They certainly don't exist within my family or peer group. But increased voter participation this election cycle suggested that the silent majority finally showed up! And they elected Trump.
Yes, you should be worried. All that progressive, post-modernism nonsense that you subscribed to might just be a vocal minority opinion. Pull your head out of your echo chamber and look around.
Framing
I've discussed framing before when discussing the Myth of the Gender Pay Gap. It would be nice if we made all our decisions based on facts, but unfortunately, this isn't what influences the mind on a cognitive level. The facts need to be presented within a context that will resonate with a targeted person or group of people--now this is the important part--what is said doesn't need to be true, it just needs to resonate with people so that they feel that it's true based on their experiences. Once people buy into the frame, it becomes relatively easy to demonize people that seek to oppose the frame or reframe the issue, hence you control the narrative. So obviously, you want to be the person that sets the frame in discussions.I'm still debating whether or not Trump's framing of certain issues was a brilliant maneuver that showed a lot of foresight or a remarkable coincidence that current events ended up alligning perfectly with his platform.
When Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, the liberal left went ballistic calling the proposal racist or "not being who we are as a country". Little did they know that they were no longer framing the debate. Trump is now dominating the frame on this issue and every terrorist attack since then has reinforced the frame that caused a rise in his polling numbers: Paris...San Bernardino...Brussels...Orlando...Istanbul...Nice...
Until recently, liberals have often framed immigration by stating that we were all descended from immigrants who have come to this country for a better life, legally or otherwise, and we should show compassion and allow open borders and promote amnesty. This set the frame on public discourse on immigration. Nobody was able to deviate from it. It also effectively branded people that oppose this frame as hypocrits since we are all descended from immigrants, so the frame also gets reinforced. If this attempt of framing didn't work on you then they called you a racist. These frames may or may not have worked on all people, but it was clear that liberals dominated framing of the immigration issue. Conservatives just played along because it would result in cheap labor.
But liberals were bush league compared to Trump on framing. Donald Trump is a master at framing. Any mud the press tried to fling at him, he managed to spin it into a positive. He would have to be great at framing if he is to be one of the most successful businessmen in modern times. Trump reframed immigration as one of the biggest problems facing our nation. Immigrants were now viewed as lazy, criminal and sociopathic. Trump reinforces his frame by linking unchecked immigration to national security issues, low wages, crime, overburdened healthcare systems, rising budget deficits and a myriad of other problems our country faces.
And with a cherry on top, Trump declares that he's going to build a wall on our border with Mexico and make the Mexican government pay for it. Unrealistic? You bet! But that's not the point. The point is that he's shown that he will fight for this issue on our behalf and enough people believe him. Every time Trump was criticized on this point, his polls went up. The media and the Democrats eventually learned to stop talking about it. Game, set, match.
Trump's frame worked in a broader sense as well. If it wasn't for him, nobody would be talking seriously about immigration right now. The Democrats still aren't addressing the issue. The GOP would still be talking about defunding Obamacare and Planned Parenthood instead, which would have been suicidal. It may not feel like it right now, but Trump saved the Republican party in 2016. Everybody is too proud to recognize it yet.
Radical Islam
I must have fallen asleep for the past few years. The liberal left, enabled by the Democratic party, has waged a very successful and protracted battle against public displays of religion since Engel v. Vitale. According to many of the current sound bites on the issue, Religion has been soley responsible for all the misery in the world and throughout history. Many of them think that post modern, secular humanism is the way to go. Karma, Wicca, Budism and Taoism are okay, but they don't want any of those religions that have a deity telling us what to do. It ruins the fun.So now, after a few nuts shoot up some nightclubs, President Obama and the liberal left are claiming that Islam is a religion of peace??? Somebody tell me when this paradigm shift occurred because I must have blinked and missed it. This is cognitive disonance at its most extreme.
Islam should represent everything a liberal dispises: open practice of religion in public and in government settings, discrimination based on race and gender, extreme violence, lack of due process, homophobia etc, etc. This is one issue that liberals and conservatives should be able to see eye to eye on (if maybe for different reasons). So why are so many liberals acting as apologists for the faith? It's not like you liberals know jack squat about Islam. Half of you think it's racist to condemn it, even though it's actually a religion that tries to convert others to its faith and not a race at all.
To be sure, I don't know much about Islam either. And I understand why Obama and others don't want to use the term radical Islam. They fear that it may lead to stereotyping at the very least or advocate hate crime and genocidal behaviors at worst. However, recent polling indicates that an unacceptable proportion of Muslims believe that suicide bombings are an acceptable means of waging jihad and want to implement sharia law in the countries that they live in or immigrate to. This strongly indicates that extreme violence and oppression is a systemic problem within the Muslim faith. So while the suicide bombings and shootings are being carried out by a minority of nut cases, there will be plenty of Muslims that will give aid or abet their activities and even stonewall our attempts to capture or kill them. Yes, I said kill them. We are at war.
Donald Trump positioned himself very well on this issue and this position meshed very well with his overall position on immigration--except it becomes about security instead of jobs. So there was a lot more internal consistancy in his doctrine than Clinton, Obama and the other liberals have on their position. How does a liberal reconcile our concept of gender equality with supporting a culture that practices female circumcision in many Muslim countries, for example? And why does such a liberal think that some bakery refusing to serve gay customers is a greater threat to the country than importing a culture that wants to hang them?
Radical Islam is another example of how well framing works in public debate.
These terrorist attacks weren't rare, isolated occurances. There was at least one terrorist attack committed against the West every couple of months, and Clinton, Obama and the rest of the Democratic party did absolutely nothing during their campaign to explain how they would address the issue. These idiots actually thought gun control was going to solve the problem while pushing for the US to accept more Muslim immigration from war zones! The cherry in top was inviting a kid to the White House for bringing a fake bomb to his school.
I've grown to respect Bill Maher. He's about as liberal as they get, which means I don't agree with a lot of what he says. But he infuses a sense of rationality and pragmatism that is sorely lacking in the liberal agenda. He may be the only pundit that's keeping the left from spinning off into lala land with their insane positions on many issues. And even Bill Maher suggested (paraphrasing) that the "Democrats were going to lose this election unless they use the term radical Islam." Trump and the rest of the public are demanding that they use this term but Obama stubbornly refused. Hillary Clinton finally used a similar term after being goaded into it by Trump (He got a birth certificate out of Obama so that was a piece of cake!).
It's not like we don't know what we are dealing with. Nobody is keeping it a secret and ISIS et al are boasting about their murderous exploits. Obama and the left's refusal to brand radical Islam for what it is, no matter how well intentioned, is perceived as denying reality.
Authenticity
The interesting thing that I noted about Trump supporters was they would always have to preface their commentary with, "I don't agree with everything he says but..."Why? What is it about today's political climate that somebody feels a need to issue such a disclaimer? Well, the mind craves simplicity. If opponents brand a candidate as a racist, sexist zenophobe, then so what? But if those opponents wield a great deal of influence in society through the mainstream media and our political system, then you can be condemned by associating with a candidate that doesn't hold favor with our intellectual and liberal elite. The disclaimer seems to be made in the spirit of a plea, "come on, I'm really a good guy. I just like him, okay?"
There was another candidate that people didn't agree with but still liked and supported--Ronald Reagan.
George Lakoff in his essay 12 Traps That Keep Progressives From Winning, discusses the findings of Chief Strategist for Ronald Reagan in the 1980's. He discovered that people that didn't agree with Reagan on issues still ended up voting for him. Why? Because Reagan connected with voters on a personal level. He was trusted by voters to do the right thing because he seemed to be one of them--he was authentic. Therefore, they trusted him as a known quantity.
Bill Clinton also seemed to recognize that authenticity brings in votes. "I feel your pain!" Remember that meme?
Thomas Frank in What's the Matter With Kansas also brings up the sense of authenticity that some candidates have with voters that cause them to vote "against their best interests". He just doesn't explore this beyond the religious right that he seems obsessed with criticizing. So there are, most certainly, liberal scholars who are familiar with the concept of authenticity and how it motivates and influences how people vote.
So where are they? Where are the authentic candidates? Well there's a problem. Because of rise of identity politics, everybody is so hyper sensitive and easy to offend, that it's nearly impossible for a candidate to give a speech and thread the needle without offending somebody. So he engineers a speech with all sorts of platitudes and qualifiers that don't offend anybody, but then again, they don't inspire and connect with people either. It's empty political discourse and it was the same discourse Hillary Clinton deployed in all three presidential debates. She may have won a couple of the debates on technical merits and shored up her base, but she didn't win over the undecided voters.
Have you heard Donald Trump speak? I'm not talking about what you've read from some sorority journalist on Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post about Trump. Actually listen to him speak. He uses normal words and the active voice instead of the passive one. He's unapologetic. He doesn't invent new words. He doesn't back-peddle. His tone is conversational. He makes himself available to the media. He runs the campaign, the campaign doesn't run him. He actually sounds like a normal person. He's authentic! This might be hard to believe, but it's true.
If you interviewed Joe the Plumber and shut off the cameras and refrained from shaming or mocking his views and actually listened to him, he would be saying very much the same things that Trump is saying. Nobody would realize this because they are too busy judging him for refusing to buy into the liberal frame. Lakoff writes in his essay about frames and has this to say about conservatives:
Conservative populists see themselves as oppressed by elitist liberals who look down their noses at them, when they are just ordinary, moral, right-thinking folks. They see liberals as trying to impose an immoral "political correctness" on them, and they are angry about it.You might want to pull your head out of your echo chamber and actually talk to people. I've been around social media and the blogosphere on both sides of the aisle for a long time. There's a lot of flaming going on from both sides, but according to the more rational and thoughtful commentary, it seems clear to me that conservatives understand liberals a lot better than liberals understand conservatives, Lakoff notwithstanding. There are recent attempts by conservatives to rebrand themselves as compassionate conservatives in an attempt to win over liberals in campaigns. Liberals, on the other hand, seem to assume that a sense of historical determinism is on their side that will assure victory. They view conservative viewpoints as regressive and they see no reason in wasting time addressing them. Obama, himself, embodies this sentiment perfectly. How many times do you have to hear Obama accuse us of being on the "wrong side of history" to recognize that liberals believe, very much, in historical determinism. But as they say in The Terminator, "The future is not set!" Liberals believe that they have a public mandate to push through their agenda by any means necessary while silencing dissenters, even by inciting violence at Trump rallies. This will only end in disaster. Question the agenda instead of assuming it's what people want. Then you might experience some authenticity instead of the sterile political environment that you built up.
Now that Trump has won, future candidates are going to make one of two critical mistakes. One is to attribute his victory as a fluke and ignore the popular sentiment that was responsible for his victory while trying to return to business as usual like nothing happened. The other mistake will be to try and copy Trump thinking that's what people want, and look like a big phony in the process and get creamed at the polls.
You would need to understand that even if Trump lost, he was a game changer. Every election campaign, hence forth will be trying to figure out how to capture and ride this populist sentiment that has recently been a significant force in American politics. We tried to ignore it when Obama was elected. We dismissed it as fringe when tea party candidates were getting elected. Trump made it a reality that we can't ignore.
Trump is brash, an egomaniac and very direct with his comments. That's because he's Donald Trump, but that isn't why he won. He won because people thought he was authentic and he challenged the establishment. This is the lesson people need to take away from this. You don't need to be like Trump. You have to be authentic in your own way and give the people new reasons to hope.
