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At the time the democratic supermajority was pronounced it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to somewhat nod your head and think the case they were making had a logic foundation to it. I remember sort of nodding my head slightly but still not abandoning the general pendulum effect politics has. I was never in doubt that their hubris was going to cause them to eventually eat shit after sniffing each other’s ass so much.
Two things the democrats missed. One was a fairly well known fact people didn’t attach significant weight to that they should have, namely that minority immigrants are some of the most staunch supports of pulling up the ladder after themselves once they’ve made it, and many of them are often highly racist against other demographic minorities or subcultures in their original country. These are not people who are going to be sympathetic to your liberal idealistic wishlist. On that point the ball is in the Republican’s court with their responsibility not to fumble the advantage they have.
The second point was the less well known but later empirically adduced Cultural Backlash thesis by Norris and Inglehart. The nativist reaction to systemic cultural, demographic and social changes greatly empowered a political hiccup like Trump to gather as much appeal as he did. A lot of people initially were in denial that this was ever a factor because they see America as a post-racial, post-identity country when it isn’t. We faire a lot better and are more progressive than Europe is historically, but just because these issues are taboo in society doesn’t make them go away in the minds of most people. You see it embodied in debates between people like Mearsheimer and Pinker. I think Mearsheimer is completely right and Pinker always struck me as the quintessential Shitlib Intellectual.
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