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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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This is the failure of the Kamala Harris campaign to achieve a close loss, particularly the loss of the popular vote.

I said on here at some near the time when the swap occurred, that it was likely that Kamala would lose the election, perhaps even more likely that she would lose than that Biden would lose, but that the Democrats had to make the swap to try to win the popular vote and maybe hold onto the House, and preserve some argument that they weren't completely spent as an electoral force.

The popular vote win in 2016 provided a talismanic argument for the Dems that they still represented, in some way, the will of the people, and that with better luck or reshuffling of the deck or minor procedural changes they could win again. It was of course legally meaningless, but it was important to the spirit of the team. The Coalition of the Ascendant was still Ascendant, this was white men's Dead Cat Bounce. This time, there is no such rhetorical fig leaf to hide behind. The campaign was a disaster for the Dems. New Jersey was closer to flipping Red than Texas or Florida were to flipping Blue. Kamala lost women and minorities relative to 2020. Culture war issues were largely hidden under the rug by the Harris campaign, who feared to say anything out loud at all. It was a pure defeat.

Where 2016 Hillary's defeat was like a close defeat in which the losing team had more possession of the ball, but the winning team got lucky on a few plays; 2024 was a wall to wall domination, where the winning team was clearly better.

Rhetoric matters.

weren't completely spent as an electoral force

I don't know if it's wise to get carried away here, they lost a single election, and a lot can happen between this one and the next one. I don't know how things are in the US, but at least in Europe the economic vibes are getting kinda weird, and a 2008-style crash could easily see them rebound. I guess this part of my confusion, it's hard for me to see this election as more than a temporary win.

The economic vibes have been weird in Europe for 15 years now.

Europe is over unless the business weecking EC gets the Milei treatment and Council of Europe and the atrocious ECHR that prevents deportations of illegals gets utterly destroyed.

I suppose we never really recovered from 2008, but most of the 2010's felt normal-ish to me.

In my particular European country, 2008 threw the entire political system into permanent disarray. Societal trust never recovered, and the infrastructure-debt incurred by the austerity of the 2010s was never paid back.

I have honestly never gotten the feeling that we properly recovered from 2008, despite many economic indicators showing otherwise. The Southern European countries by and large don't even have those.

infrastructure-debt

What is this?

Investment into infrastructure that's needed, but has yet to happen. In other words, it's what is "owed" to your country's infrastructure to keep everything functional at the desired level.

Speaking for England, we didn’t crash in 2008 exactly, nothing visibly changed. It’s just that from that point, things started slowly deteriorating. The cohort before me were being begged to use up academic funding, mine was scrambling for cash. University fees went up. Salaries went down. Just, very slowly, absolutely everything started getting worse and hasn’t stopped.

Personally I think that the period between Thatcher and 2008 was an illusion. We had nothing real to sell, so we sold our seed corn and our prestige. 2008 was just the day that stopped working.

What was the seed corn that you sold? I’m having a hard time figuring out what you’re thinking of.

Was thinking of things like our utilities, factories (all the car brands), our transport systems, our real estate (all those flats in the centre of our capital being sold to Chinese investors as glorified safety deposit boxes), our engineering (ARM) etc.

All those things are what a country needs to thrive IMO. Most of it was stuff that had broken down after decades of socialism. Despairing of being able to fix those things, or find money to invest in them, we sold them instead. And because we had loads of cash, we told ourselves we were rich and congratulated ourselves on how well we understood the post-industrial globalised world. See Terry Pratchett’s Making Money for an example of the genre. But we weren’t rich any more than an aging dowager who pawns her jewellery, and we understood nothing.

Despairing of being able to fix those things, or find money to invest in them, we sold them instead.

Was there a realistic shot at fixing or investing in those areas, or was selling them the only realistic option in your opinion?

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Oh certainly, I'm old enough to remember seeing Forty More Years on the shelves at Borders.

But, to take that as a clear analogy, the Republican party that came back and proved Forty More Years and the Obama Coaltion of the Ascendant false, was very different from the Dubya-McCain era party that was defeated. Not as different as some would have you believe, many of the same guys are still involved, and many of the same aims are still pursued. But the changes are obvious and manifold.

The hypothetical Democrats who come back and win the 2026 midterms and then run the table in 2028 against JD Vance would probably look very different from the Harris campaign. Quite likely in ways we don't quite know about yet! McCain was perceived as a bit left of Dubya on social issues, civil and bipartisan, focused on getting money and corporations out of politics, but hawkish and interventionist on national security; the McCain strategy was certainly not the one that lead Republicans to victory in 2016 or 2024.

The hypothetical Democrats who come back and win the 2026 midterms and then run the table in 2028 against JD Vance

I mean there are two radically different timelines that result in a Dem win in those years. The Dems winning because they retolled and redid there messaging looks way different from the dems just winning because the worst-case scenario about the amount of damage Trump could do to the economy came true and they just win by default.

Kamala lost women and minorities relative to 2020

Can't overestimate the body blow of losing Latinos to a guy they've been trying to protect Latinos from since he came off the elevator escalator. Total narrative collapse.

Only thing worse would be losing black people. That'd be existential.

Can't overestimate the body blow of losing Latinos to a guy they've been trying to protect Latinos from since he came off the elevator.

We warned them to stop calling us Latinx.

I really wish latinx was around when I was in college. Id have had so much fun introducing my latino friends as latinx at parties full of white kids. My friends would have to grin and be polite as I wax effusively about their journey to the hallowed shores of america where their latinx identity would be given the respect in this safe space of understanding. It'd be seeing a human pressure cooker in action.

"Latinx: a word used only by gringxs."

Where do you stand on 'Latines' or 'Latinaos'?

I've noticed the use of 'hispanohablantes' in the wild. While this sounds like a politically correct euphemism, it's at least a reasonable term to use in writing that doesn't, say, break the rules of Spanish grammar and pronunciation.

Hispanohablantes is real and commonly used in the spoken language, it just means Spanish-speakers.

I have never heard an actual Spanish speaker use the term Latinx though, or Latine/Latinao. The furthest Spanish language political correctness goes is 'Latinos y Latinas' or 'chicos y chicas'. Even then, the PC versions are more commonly used by European Spanish speakers, Latin Americans are more likely to use the more concise, masculine/neutral versions.

Willing to believe that(and the translation is literally correct), but to a second language speaker of Texas Spanish it sounds like a politically correct euphemism for which the usual term is 'Latinos'.

It definitely has an academic ring to it, a bit like saying 'anglophones' in English.

Well yeah, that would explain how learning Spanish by talking to cooks and construction workers makes it sound like a weird but perfectly intelligible euphemism, sort of similar to 'sight-impaired' for 'blind'.

As a US-born spanish speaker "Latines" is obviously the correct term, but is also rarely used outside formal/academic settings. Colloquially everyone just uses "Latino" or "Hispanic"

In the meantime nothing screams "I am an illiterate gringo with a room tempreature IQ" like "Latinx".

In my opinion, latines is as woke as Latinx or Latinaos. Granted, It's the only spoken term that is seeing a push in latino-american, but it's correctly mocked when encountered. The plural is Latinos or Latinas if the group consists entirely of females. Wokies must accept that there are gendered languages.

"Latinaos" I have never seen in my life.

"Latines", (and "e" as gender neutral in general) is indeed the form south american leftists actually use. It seemed ascendant for a while, but luckily there has been a pretty big pendulum swing, so I'd say we have at least another decade until it takes over normal life.

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