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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31296 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I find it entirely normal that journalists try to come up with all sorts of explanations for an election outcome that was relatively surprising. So the arguments in these articles don't strike me as anything extraordinary. But they aren't the equivalent of the revisionist narrative, to the extent that it even exists, that "Trump was going to win anyway".

All deride Hillary's supposedly obvious and massive flaws as a candidate, while ignoring that she was inches from winning. Massively flawed candidates don't end up there.

Yes, inches from winning against someone universally derided as a laughingstock! That's hardly an argument against her being deeply flawed.

But Trump isn't universally derided. He is, in fact, immensely popular.

As far as I can tell, Trump and his presidential bid was universally derided as a laughingstock by the great majority of polite society and the mainstream media. In retrospect, we know that he was popular, that much is true.

"Demeaned by polite society" isn't the same as "universally derided". Yes, Blue Tribe -- both its left wing members and right wing members -- revile Trump. But they are not everyone.

I guess we disagree here. If political skill is a concept that exists, Trump has it. He KOed Republican primary challengers like he was prime Tyson, one after another. He built a base of enthusiasm like nothing we've seen before or since.

That says more about the rest of the challengers than his political skills, I think.

Assuming elections are basically real (and this conversation is kinda dumb if we assume they aren't) then it's sorta bass ackwards to say that nobody who wins elections nationally or in big states is good at politics. They went through a selection process where hundreds of smart talented guys would have wanted their spot, and they won, they clearly had something the other guys didn't.

He built a base of enthusiasm like nothing we've seen before or since.

Obama. Just like Trump, Obama's cult of personality hollowed out the infrastructure of the party he hijacked, upending more "establishment"-connected figures left, right, and center. Also like Trump, Obama's coalition was not associated with any particular policy innovations, but generally was based on vibes ("he's young! Slim! Black! At home in celebrity culture!") that eventually settled into having most relevance in culture war issues that the candidate himself historically flip-flopped on (Trump on abortion, Obama on gay marriage). The parallel isn't exact, but it's a lot stronger than it seems like it should be on the face of the matter.

Maybe it's a perspective thing, but I don't recall Obama ever having Trumpian levels of support. The biggest thing with Trump was the grassroots nature of his support, which maybe Obama never had the chance to form because the media loved him so much. Trump supporters made their own billboards for him. Obama never had that kind of spontaneous outpouring of faith, outside of the Black community.

My experience is that Obama's support among the people was equivalent to Trump's, but that Obama also had the media fawning over him, which amplified the personal charisma to legendary proportions. I say this as someone who voted for Obama when I first turned eighteen, so I was in the enthusiastic youth cohort.

Huh, maybe I just missed it in context. I found Obama's supporters to be more issue bound than Trump's have been, but I was young so who knows really.

Obama got more people praying than the Second Coming would, man. I was right there in the thick of it -- he was a rockstar, not a politician.

This is so obvious I feel dumb for not noticing it. And Obama left the DNC amazingly unsupported by the end of his presidency, too. You kind of expect Trump to not give a shit about the GOP, but surely Obama cares about the institution of his party, right?

(I think Obama kept his email fundraising list out of the DNC's hands, but I am having trouble googling this to confirm.)

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