“1, 2, 3, 4, Trump Can’t Rule Us Anymore: With impeachment looming, it’s time to take to the streets again.” (NYT, October 21, 2019):
All over the world right now, outraged citizens are taking to the streets. Mass protests in Hong Kong have been going on for months, at one point drawing about a quarter of the territory’s population.
So as Donald Trump’s sneering lawlessness and stupefying corruption continue to escalate, it’s confounding, at least to me, that Americans aren’t taking to the streets en masse.
“Want Trump to Go? Take to the Streets: Another moment for public protest has arrived.” (NYT, a day earlier), by David Leonhardt, “a former Washington bureau chief for the Times”:
Fortunately, some progressives understood that politics isn’t only an inside game. The outside game — of public protest and grass-roots lobbying — matters, too. … On the day after Trump’s inauguration, some four million Americans took to the streets for Women’s Marches …
Do you remember the images showing throngs of people taking to the streets for the Women’s March? The size of the crowds, especially compared with Trump’s inauguration, reinforced the fact that most Americans rejected Trumpism.
The comments to these articles are packed with complaints that 48 percent of Americans elected the object of the proposed protests and sometimes express contempt for these 48 percent, e.g., as believing Christians, racists, etc.
Since the people who voted for Trump still support him, isn’t the proposed protest best understood as by coastal elites against the non-elites whose right to vote they forgot to take away? (and the protest is against the non-elites being able to vote in what they perceive to be their own interests)
Why use Trump as a scapegoat? If people who live in New York City feel oppressed by those who live and vote in Georgia, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc., shouldn’t they be able to name their true oppressors and protest against them? Maybe demand that voting be restricted to those with a liberal arts degree! Why should people without college-level training in the humanities be choosing a government?
Related:
- “As Homelessness Surges in California, So Does a Backlash” (NYT): the righteous will have to step over a lot of their neighbors sleeping on the sidewalk to get to the “anti-Trump” protest
The “central planners” in California are one step ahead of this. They just passed a law making it illegal to vote for Donald Trump. This seems much easier than requiring everyone to get a silly degree!
This is another bizarre distraction. The Republicans are the party more responsive to the interests of Wall Street and other large corporations, in other words, wealthy people. Yet somehow they’ve been pushing this nonsense for decades that they represent working class middle American Christians. It’s often implied that such people are the real Americans. It’s just nonsense.
Vince: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election shows that voters near “Wall Street” voted for Hillary, not Trump. The same is true for voters in states that are homes to the most headquarters of the “large corporations” that you cite. Hillary won Illinois, California, New Jersey (see https://thebossmagazine.com/states-fortune-500-headquarters/ for a ranking of states by Fortune 500 HQ).
You might be right that Trump is acting in the interests of “Wall Street and other large corporations”, but that’s a separate topic. The people who voted for Trump are simply individuals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/29/places-that-backed-trump-skewed-poor-voters-who-backed-trump-skewed-wealthier/ says “The average median household income of counties won by Trump was about $47,200. The average median income in counties Clinton won was about $51,600.”
(Though with government controlling about half of the U.S. economy, it isn’t surprising that roughly half of the voters at the $250k+/year preferred the candidate promising more government spending.)
I don’t think it is reasonable to say that the groups that heavily favored Hillary were “working class”. Hillary did well among voters with household incomes of less than $50,000/year, according to that Washington Post article. Those are families on welfare, not “working class” in the sense that “working” is what leads to them being able to afford a house, health care, food, smartphone, etc.
(for reference: a family of 4 is eligible for public housing in Los Angeles if it earns less than $83,500/year. A single person can get on housing welfare up to $58,450/year. See http://home.hacla.org/applyforph )
Hillary did well among voters with household incomes of less than $50,000/year, according to that Washington Post article. Those are families on welfare, not “working class” in the sense that “working” is what leads to them being able to afford a house, health care, food, smartphone, etc.
That’s an odd statement that I’ve never heard before, that the work people do is somehow irrelevant if it doesn’t result in a certain level of income and therefore is not equivalent to working at all. Also, people with household incomes under $50,000 are probably nearly half the population.
Vince: The work that they do is not “somehow irrelevant” to them and their employer. That most of their spending power is derived from welfare, however, means that their rational vote is for whichever party promises to make collecting welfare more lucrative.
The average median household income of counties won by Trump was about $47,200. The average median income in counties Clinton won was about $51,600.”
That’s a pretty small difference. The cost of living in Clinton counties is probably significantly higher as well. More importantly, those statistics don’t actually tell us about the incomes of the actual voters.
Of course, that’s not very important either. Trump has relaxed environmental regulations, made union organizing more difficult, left hundreds of inspector positions unfilled at OSHA, cancelled proposed financial regulations and so and so forth. All of these things are done to increase corporate profits. There’s not a huge difference between the two parties, but the Republicans are clearly more friendly to the wealthy at the expense of the rest of the population.
@Vince,
“Trump has relaxed environmental regulations, made union organizing more difficult, left hundreds of inspector positions unfilled at OSHA, cancelled proposed financial regulations and so and so forth.”
But States, rightfully I would argue, are taking matters into their own hands and enacting their own polices and regulation. Philip just posted [1] about one such example not too long ago.
So why should anyone be angry at Trump’s actions? What’s good for State X doesn’t mean it is good at State Y.
[1] https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/10/19/we-are-in-a-climate-emergency-but-californians-can-wait-3-4-years/
He must have been impeached 150 times by now, based on the news. The democrat’s only hope between weekly impeachments, was originally a nuclear annihilation of Trump himself, but a 1st strike against the flyover states no-one lives in anymore that voted for him might be required.
Voting is a privilege not a right and if “non-elites” (a/k/a “deplorables”) can’t be trusted to exercise their franchise responsibly their votes shouldn’t be counted. Or at least their votes should be given less weight than normal people who attend first rate universities like Harvard and MIT and USC and live in NYC and Boston and SF, etc. The deplorables who don’t vote right could also be punished in other ways like permitting millions of low skilled workers to cross the border, live in “sanctuary cities” and drive down the cost of unskilled labor — so people like us can enjoy low cost avocado toast and kombucha drinks. We could hand the public education system over to the municipal labor unions so getting a good education would be well nigh impossible unless you could pony up $40K annually for private school & what deplorable has that kind of dough? We could make opioids easily and cheaply available so the deplorables spend their lives in a stupor and don’t even think of voting. I am sure that others could think of additional ways we could keep the deplorables from screwing up this great country of ours and ensuring that it does not descend into fascism.
I think you’ll find Republicans are overwhelming the party that attempts to suppress voters.
“Why should people without college-level training in the humanities be choosing a government?”
Is this a viewpoint that you honestly believe, or you’re projecting some fanciful notion on others? It’s certainly not a position I’ve heard anyone advocating.
The Left is self destructing, thank you President Trump.