This is my last political piece for a while ‘cause I can’t take anymore.
Some months back– during the heat of the primaries, I think– one of Slate’s soapbox columnists produced an liberal outrage-of-the-day piece on an issue so ephemeral it escapes me now but which drew unmitigated scorn from even the left-wing members of the comment section. One poor soul went so far as to post, “My God, please stop. This is what gets you Trump. Do you want Trump?”
We got way too little of “Trump has no idea what the fuck he’s doing and the bullshit he’s selling you is not going to fucking work” during this campaign. That was the single most compelling issue, as far as I’m concerned… having someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing in the Oval Office.
And now we’re all in for it.
Maybe that wouldn’t have even worked. Maybe 47% of the electorate simply don’t care if the system keeps working or not. Maybe they’re just fine with bringing it all crashing down on our heads. Because for them, it wasn’t working.
Now what?
You sell them on a plan that will actually work.
Low minimum wage + direct-to-employee wage subsidies - creates massive jobs, cuts out a lot of anxiety for the lower classes, breaks the welfare trap. Fix the trade balance. Rebalance immigration and quit talking like it’s a plan to demographically replace them.
Unfortunately that won’t happen because both the party leadership and the party base are too ideological and clueless. That’s why they failed to buy off the Rust Belt in the first place, even though doing so should have been hypothetically ideologically compatible if you aren’t Globalist.
And, of course, if they were competent, they would have fixed the welfare trap already. But they aren’t competent. F’in politics m8.
Or to put it another way, those Rust Belt voters don’t believe the party that professes to hate them has their best interests at heart, so something expensive will have to be sacrificed to signal that they’re willing to go to bat for them for real. Obama was given a pass on hope and change. It won’t work a second time. It’s going to be tough.