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You’re not wrong but I also think DeSantis lost because anyone running against Trump was suspected of being a spoiler candidate. Trump’s unique asset is that he is obviously and viscerally loathed by the Cathedral / rich donors and got to the top through TV fame so he is felt to be uniquely independent. The more respectable people pushed DeSantis as being ‘Trump but respectable’, the less popular he became.
Trump's unique asset is that he is deeply and irrationally loved by a significant body of low-IQ conservatives who will rabidly attack anyone who challenges him. As such, he can threaten to spoil any Republican strategy that doesn't elevate him. The point the strategy outlined above is to try and break his hold on these people because insofar as they are responsive to anything, it's to vulgar social dominance. You're never going to win them over by arguing that you're better qualified or more competent, because they don't care. Nor can you win them over by appealing to principles, because they don't have any. You have to simultaneously tear Trump down as a weakling and present yourself as a better vessel for their inchoate rage.
Insofar as Desantis had a plan, it was hope that Trump was too old or too imprisoned to run.
There are genuinely smart people who genuinely love Trump above Desantis and Nikki Hailey. They point to his regulation cuts, relative isolationism, and that he says exactly what he’s going to do.
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The Trump base might not be the most articulate but there are absolutely smart people in their orbit who understand their grievances and why they're so angry. You can win them over to someone who isn't Trump - but you need to understand why they went for him in the first place, and if you're going to claim that was because of vulgar social dominance you're going to fail each and every time. If you're interested in a good article that explains what attracted those voters to him, I recommend https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
I didn't say every Trump supporter is stupid. I said that he has a dedicated core of supporters who are very loyal but not very bright or discerning, which I will stand by because I think it goes an enormous way towards explaining the durability of his support in particular despite losing as an incumbent and because it conforms to the general pattern with populist politicians more generally.
I've read it before. I'm not impressed. Many of its factual claims are tendentious or more reflective of self-image than reality (e.g. the persistent efforts to paint Trumpism as the voice of the working class). Much of it boils down to saying "liberals don't like conservatives and say mean things about them." Conservatives don't like liberals either and say mean things about them, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from that, other than that maybe conservatives care more about what liberals think of them than vice versa.
Once we cut past that, it is essentially a more sympathetic framing of my claim that Trump functions as an empty vessel for the nebulous fury of his supporters. The difference is that Greer thinks they are basically justified on grounds of economic neglect while I think the economic anxiety narrative is bullshit and they are attracted to Trump because he promises to vicariously remediate their sense of humiliation.
I actually agree with this, but I think that this is true of any large political movement. There are plenty of people in the democrat base who are utterly thoughtless and pick their vote/political allegiance based purely on tribal instinct as well - this isn't something unique to Trump. though his personal charisma likely means he has a larger number of these people than other politicians.
I disagree with this reading of the article - you don't seem to have grasped the point actually being made, which is that Trump has been using this tendency on the part of the left to ingratiate himself with his base. He knew that he'd be able to get the talking heads to talk shit about him in ways that would make people who dislike those talking heads support him as a result, and so he went out of his way to get the media to attack him. This is stated explicitly in the article so I'm not sure if repeating it here will do any good, but that's what you're meant to take away from that particular section.
You think the economic anxiety narrative is bullshit? Do you have any kind of argument against the claims he makes?
Where's the bullshit here? Are you living in another America that doesn't have a massive fentanyl crisis and didn't outsource huge swathes of productive industry to China? I (and Greer, based on the quote) can understand not wanting to talk about it or admit that it happened, but there's a substantial amount of fire beneath the smoke of economic anxiety. Is there an element of vicarious remediation of humiliation? Absolutely! But to pretend that's the only motivating factor strikes me as absurd.
What is very distinctive about Trumpism is that the loyalty is to Trump, specifically. Non-personalist political movements can and do regularly replace leadership figures when they become a liability, while their duller supporters are usually the least motivated and exert minimal influence over leadership selection.
I was never disputing it it. It was central to my claim: "they are attracted to Trump because he promises to vicariously remediate their sense of humiliation." My point there is that the "grievance" is hollow. There's no material injury. Trump supporters have an inferiority complex and feel humiliated when college-educated liberals look down on them. (They, of course, have never been shy in their own hatred for CELs, but nobody seems to regard this as a reciprocal grievance. Nobody is visiting yoga studios to do pop-anthropology of Hillary voters or hand-wringing about how they might start a civil war if we prosecute her.) To the extent that these people have been abused (referring primarily to rural conservatives, rather than affluent exurbanites), it has generally been by their own leaders who they continue to support. The reason the town's factory closed down wasn't because of snooty Democrat journalists from NYC. Though in fairness to the Republicans, even a maximally protectionist industrial policy isn't going to fix competition on the international market.
The socio-economic composition of Trump's voters and the economic (and political for that matter) history of the United States. Like,
is prime bullshit - a politically expedient claim made with no regard for the truth. I won't go so far as to call it a lie, because while I think Greer probably knew it wasn't true he wasn't so much willfully misrepresenting facts as making an... emotionally satisfying statement. Nevertheless, the fact that he says this with a straight face makes it hard to take him seriously. It is both an overly rosy portrait of life in 1966 America and a comically pessimistic one of life in 2016 America. Single income couples with children are still common in the US and are overwhelmingly not homeless, as I'm sure he knows. They're not as proportionally common as they used to be, but that's mostly due shifting social norms around women working, not because modern America is such a wasteland that there's no other option. And let's say nothing about the legal status quo in 1966.
You don't have to think the US is a utopia with no economic issues to doubt the claim that Americans are worse off now than they were in 1966. At least on grounds of material abundance like Greer appears to be making. If you want to make a normative argument about the desirability of segregation and women's labor force participation, I'm going to have to pass on that discussion.
For Trump's die hards? It's the sine qua non. They have other concerns, but they are either standard Republican things (tax cuts, abortion, nativism) that most Republican candidates would deliver on (and thus don't really explain Trump's particular appeal) or at odds with the reality of policy under the Trump administration (e.g. the Republican Party continues to be anti-labor).
I feel that a part of this is the sheer non-presence and lack of authenticity behind most modern politicians. Contrast him to any other conservative politician in the last two decades and it isn't exactly hard to understand why he does so much better in this regard. The fact that he is actually the best vehicle for that inchoate rage and sense of resentment that has taken over so much of America adds to that as well - there's no way that his base would accept another empty suit who gives off the impression that he will immediately betray them once he gets into power.
Where's the US manufacturing sector? Do you live in some kind of alternative universe where there's no fentanyl/opioid epidemic? I think that there's actually a serious case to be made that a lot of the people in Trump's base are noticeably poorer than they were before, and the exact policies that Trump has made clear his opposition to were responsible. You're the first person I've encountered who claimed that the economic problems his base have been talking about just don't exist.
I feel like this is extremely uncharitable - this is the mirror image of the argument that Trump haters are simply immature people who hate their fathers, and that sense of childhood grievance is what actually informs their opposition to him. Deep down people who don't like Trump know that he's right and correct, but because they can't get over their daddy issues they just can't accept an authority figure who can tell them no.
Is there some yokel in a trailerpark somewhere who looked up from the crackpipe to vote for Trump due to some university educated SJW looking down on him? Sure, that dude probably exists somewhere, but you're doing yourself a disservice when you base your view of the world on people like that.
Their own leaders who they continue to support? No, the policies that have destroyed these communities were passed with bipartisan agreement. I think that the Republican leaders prior to Trump were corrupt ghouls who pursued policies responsible for untold suffering in order to enrich themselves and profit from the public purse, but it isn't like the left had anything better to offer. Many people in the Trump base actually voted for Obama because they believed in the message of change - and then they saw what they actually got (policies identical to another 8 years of Bush).
I honestly don't know how much this can be fixed - the big mistake was in growing China into the industrial and manufacturing powerhouse it is now, and it isn't like Trump could just hit the "undo" button on policies which lead to China having 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US. The promise of Trump is that he at the very least would be trying to improve things as opposed to just taking a nice cut from the people making the problem worse.
I don't think that he's lying, but I'm perfectly willing to just go and ask him the next time he opens up for questions. He actually spent quite a while living in the areas he's talking about, and he's old enough that he actually has childhood memories of the 60s. He was actually there! While I'm open to the claim that you have a better understanding of the situation than he does, I'd want some actual evidence rather than just waving your hand in the direction of the evidence (especially seeing as how your opinion is conflicting with someone who was there at the time).
Not at all - if you're familiar with the rest of Greer's work, the actual reason (I think) he gives for this would be the combination of vast fossil fuel reserves, WW2 destroying the US' competition and the proceeds of empire all feeding back in to the prosperity enjoyed by America during those years. He's not advocating for some kind of GLORIVOS RETVRN, and he even explicitly makes the point elsewhere that he's not suggesting going back to the social values of those years.
Trump famously didn't give a shit about abortion and gave answers which embarrassed his base on the topic. Other republicans also don't give a shit about immigration (they make a lot of noise about it to get elected, but they don't actually do anything to solve the problem because too many of them financially profit from the illegal immigration situation). The strongest point you make there is talking about things that were "at odds with the reality of policy under the Trump administration", but the general belief in his base was that he was hamstrung by a Republican establishment that hated him as well as a deep state that was actively fighting against him at every turn. There's a decent amount of truth to those claims as well, enough that these people can maintain their faith in him.
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I think this is a stretch. How many have been fired for not hewing to CEL social mores? How many have been threatened with firing to force them to do so? How many have been banned from social media for their political views?
The reason for the asymmetry of "resentment" vs. "contempt" is that the primary ways these classes interact are power relationships, and the power almost always goes the same way; the sneering bureaucrat autowins on most levels of escalation except for the two highest ones - electoral politics and violence.
Extremely few. Especially once you factor out instances of nonconformity that boil down to things like "don't sexually harass your coworkers so badly that even HR can't ignore it".
Does it, though?
Alternative theory: the asymmetry of "resentment" vs "contempt" is because the mean things liberals say about conservatives cut significantly deeper than vice versa. When conservatives call liberals godless degens, liberals' response is generally something to the effect of "hell yeah we are 😎". This is because they fundamentally don't care about the accusations. There's also a degree of reactance, especially for LGBT individuals, but there's no sense of shame or humiliation. Its like accusing a Christian of being a bad Muslim. On the other hand, almost everyone in the US thinks bigotry is bad and education is good. So when liberals call conservatives ignorant bigots, that actually lands. Notably, conservatives tend to get way more riled up about being accused of racism than homophobia (and don't care at all about being called things like gun nuts).
The actual power asymmetry is that educated liberals can make uneducated conservatives feel bad about themselves, whereas uneducated conservatives can merely scare educated liberals.
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This is leaning way too heavily into "boo outgroup." Let's not start the "low information voters" and "NPC" discourse here. You're free to argue that a specific group behaves a certain way or that a specific position or belief is uninformed, but just labeling all your opponent's supporters "low IQ" ain't it.
I don't think Skibboleth did?
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