Hey, how about interviewing the people at Ma’s Pie Shop?
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron agreed that both of their papers have to do a better job of covering President Donald Trump’s supporters.
Not this crap again. They do cover Trump’s supporters. We hear endlessly about forgotten people in forgotten small towns and their forgotten hatred of immigrants; we hear far more about forgotten small town Murika than we do about big city Murika, where a vastly larger percentage of people live.
Baquet and Baron joined NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday to talk about how the Trump administration has waged war on fact-based reporting, and what news outlets should do to push back against disinformation. When asked about why people support Trump despite his numerous falsehoods, Baquet said “I’m not convinced people want to be lied to,” but journalists have a job to report the truth even when its counter to the lies that “bad politicians” offer their supporters.
“I don’t want to be dismissive of people that support our president. They’re owed our respect they certainly have mine,” Baron said as he jumped in. “They feel the so-called elites in Washington have not paid attention to them, that they don’t understand their lives…They feel that the president is actually listening to them and addressing their concerns and so they tend to believe him.”
Blah blah blah blah. They have no right to “feel” that the president is actually listening to them and addressing their concerns, because he isn’t, and it’s obvious that he isn’t, and there’s zero reason to think he is or ever would be. We don’t need to “respect” people who think that because Trump is a racist and a pussy-grabbing pig and a hater of immigrants and a mean shithead who publicly insults everyone who stands up to him, therefore he cares about them and will make their lives better. Trump is a greedy profiteering law-breaking exploitative real estate hustler, and he has no interest whatsoever in farmers and workers. None. We do not have to respect people who are mindless or mean or both enough to think Trump is a friend to working stiffs.
I am so tired of this bullshit.
Apparently there’s a number of lukewarm Trump supporters who will take anything said about the worst of the troglodytes personally. They have power to shift the election. This “I don’t want to be dismissive of people who supported our demonic overlord” blahblahblah reminds me of Billy Mummy’s family in that Twilight Zone episode, constantly grinning and nodding and approving whatever the child said in order to save their lives.
If preventing Trump from getting a second term takes pandering and groveling, standing on principle may be weakness.
But how does one even figure out in what way to grovel to people who think Trump is on the side of forgotten working people? It’s such a random, bizarre, inexplicable thing to believe that I can’t think of any reasoned way to figure out what would do the trick.
After a lifetime in which political activism has figured more prominently than I would have wished it to (we live, after all, in interesting times) I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that we who live in representative democracies get the governments we collectively deserve.
This is no argument for political passivity. Just the opposite.
Sad, but true.
Being an adolescent bully seems to appeal to a lot of people, evidently enough to win elections. It’s a sports fan mentality in this country now, and there is no viable opposition. Appealing to people’s higher mentality is no longer an effective strategy. Remember that average intelligence is 100, the 125+ folks have no chance in the current climate. Mudslinging and cult of personality is the only thing that will win, and I think I will not vote in the next election, I mean, what’s the point.
twiliter #4 wrote:
The point of voting in the next election is that it will save your life.
Because if you do not vote — and vote for the candidate most likely to beat Donald Trump, too — I am going to come over and eat you.
Remember when elections were about ideologies? Those days are gone, now it’s about twitter wars, flaming your opponents, boasting about whatever self congratulatory crap you can think of, bullying your opposition to the point of slander, and pissing in the wind with ineffective policies that help no one (maybe your cronies). Welcome to the new decade. Hard to believe so much xenophobic rhetoric exists in this modern day. But they falsely tell us otherwise, all of them. Pelosi and her ilk are stupid, give us hope, don’t tell us you’re going to fix things by attacking someone who is the playground bully and you’re the whining finger pointer. Give us real options, not ineffective retaliatory posturing.
Sastra, I appreciate your response, I just wish for someone who I feel good about voting for.
I actually wish they would cover the Trump voters, but cover them accurately. These are not forgotten voters. These are white males and conservative white females who are angry that someone else gets to have the same rights they have. The idea that they are being ignored is because someone else gets to have a vote, too, and sometimes someone else actually prevails in the election (can anyone say Obama?)
These are the people I know. I work with them, I live near them, I shop in the stores with them, I read the same local newspapers and frequent the same restaurants. I open my ears and hear. They are not forgotten, they are not unheard…damn, you can’t help hearing them. They speak at the top of their voices, angry voices, mad that someone has “taken away” America – by which they mean, angry that they look around the restaurant and see Mexican faces (black faces, too, in some towns, but we are notoriously low on black people in my city – so low, I see one in my classes only about every 7 years!). They are angry that gay people are not forced into conversion or prevented from holding hands in public. They are angry that women have taken all the “good” jobs (which, of course, they haven’t, but if these people see one woman in a “good” job, they can’t notice the 400 men she is working among).
These people are angry that city people are allowed to have a voice, because they know, deep down, that there are more “city” people (by which they mean anyone who doesn’t vote Republican, plus anyone who actually lives in a city).
This group, this so called “forgotten-middle”, has been in charge of our political system for my entire life (and actually, for the life of the country). They have a disproportionate voice in the presidential elections, a disproportionate voice in the Senate, and a disproportionate share of tax dollars flowing their way. And that isn’t enough. They must have it ALL. They feel they have been robbed because other people may drive a nicer car, and they assume those other people are black women who are on welfare and having another kid every year to make the welfare checks higher. And there is NO AMOUNT of facts or logic that can make them realize that the welfare rules changed in the 1990s, so no one can be on welfare for more than 5 years out of their entire life – and they must be constantly looking for work, cannot turn down work, and cannot even get an exemption on that for going to school – they will lose their welfare, which is not enough to raise that next kid on, anyway.
It is this “forgotten middle” that is the reason the Democratic Party hews so sharply right, that Clinton pushed through the welfare reform, and that Obama’s policies regarding energy, the environment, and the various wars were, at best, tepid. Everyone, pundits and politicians alike, panders to them.
By all means, let’s talk about the “forgotten” voters. Let’s tell the damned truth for once in our lives – these people do not like you. They do not want you to have any rights. They do not want you to have control of your body or your mind. They want women pregnant and cooking, black people raking lawns and saying “yessir” and “nosir”, gay people forced to marry someone of the opposite sex, and atheists to be forced into churches and converted against their will. They want the educated classes to be sent to Europe, preferably shot their out of a cannon.
I am sick to death of hearing about the plight of the “forgotten middle”. They are running the country, they have always run the country, and they scream loudly because they hate the idea that the rest of us might have rights, too. Yes, they believe they are mistreated, ignored, and subjected to tyranny. They believe they are the only real Americans. It is not the job of anyone, pundits or politicians, to ignore the vast majority of the country in favor of my neighbors. It is the job of the pundits and the politicians to TELL THE TRUTH and fix things so we don’t have to creep around pretending that the people who have a louder voice than anyone else are actually being silenced.
Sorry for the rant. I guess you can tell I’m fed up, huh?
iknklast:
Very well said.
But in this day and age, dissenters do not have to migrate halfway round the world to find a more agreeable society to live in, as the Puritans did. (And they only managed to set up yet another groupthink hellhole, as portrayed so well by Arthur Miller in The Crucible..)
In a large city or town, we can all find soulmates of whatever kind.
I had the personal good fortune to be attacked once by a half-crazy drunk. I dealt with him by playing ‘I agree’ (out of ‘Games People Play’ by Eric Berne.) But the very next night I went out and joined my very first Japanese martial art class, and was still at it 27 years and enough Dan grades later, when for medical reasons I had to stop.
All I had in common with my fellow trainees was the martial art. But that was sufficient for good, meaningful and worthwhile conversations. Similarly, I have good friends whose only common interest is music. But that is enough.
Trump voters are in a numerical minority in the US, and they know it. And Trump knows it. And he has about as much insight into himself as is displayed by the average cockroach. Less, probably. And a lot of his supporters are just as disadvantaged. That has to count for something.
Hope this helps.
Not all reasons for being angry at / disillusioned with the established system are created equal. On the one hand a person might be angry at the system for being too unequal and unjust, too corrupt, too hopelessly rigged in favor of billionaires and giant corporations and against everyone else, perhaps also too bigoted and chauvinistic, too racist and sexist and homophobic, too biased in favor of straight white men at the expense of every other group. Some of us are even angry at the system for being too unsustainable, too hellbent on liquidating every natural resource on the planet and turning it into short-term profits for those who already have too much etc. etc.
On the other hand there are people who are angry at the system for not being unequal and unjust enough. not corrupt enough, not sufficiently rigged in favor of billionaires and giant corporations and against everyone else, not bigoted and chauvinistic enough, not racist and sexist and homophobic enough, not sufficiently biased in favor of straight white men at the expense of every other group, perhaps not even unsustainable enough, not sufficiently hellbent on liquidating every natural resource on the planet and turning it into profits for those who already have too much etc. etc.
In the case of Trump voters we can safely rule out anything but the latter kind of anger and disillusionment. There are no sympathy points for wanting “change” if the change is for the worse, and there are no points for being angry at the prevailing system if what you want to put in its place is more of everything that’s wrong with the status quo, only multiplied by a thousand.
Ah, but some of us do not live in that sort of setting. To be fair, I have carved out a niche for myself with copacetic people, but I have to drive 100 miles to get there. I am sitting here today looking at the remainders of yesterday’s snow, hoping it isn’t ice, knowing it is, and realizing my odds of getting to my scheduled meeting with my theatre friends is an extremely low probability (though if I can get to the Interstate, it’s probably good because the snow didn’t do much to the east of us, last I heard).
And if one works longer than average work hours, and one’s co-workers are Trump voters, it may be small consolation that the weekend can be spent with nicer people.
twiliter @7:
Honestly, that’s not a realistic wish, unless your bar for “feel good about” is fairly low. (And maybe it is for you, in which case the rest of this post will seem like I’m jumping on you. I’m really just using your post to take aim at a commonly-expressed sentiment that I think is a problem in general, even if it isn’t a problem in your specific case.)
Even if all of politics came down to a simplified one-dimensional ideological spectrum, you would have to be one of the relatively few lucky ones who happens to occupy a point on that spectrum that is at or close to a viable candidate.
Add in another dimension, such as personal qualities of the candidate, and it gets even harder. Allow for one or more other political dimensions (e.g. social and fiscal), and… your odds of finding a viable candidate close to you in political space are pretty slim.
Voting isn’t like picking a restaurant for your small group of friends, where it really ought to be the case that you can find a place that all of you feel good about; it’s like trying to select a single dish that your entire town will eat. There just isn’t likely to be any way to satisfy all those disparate diets and allergies, let alone mere preferences. The best you can hope for is something that will keep you nourished; tasty and exciting is not a realistic expectation.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on Hey, how about interviewing the people at Ma’s Pie […]