Meet the new cuck. Same as the old cuck.
October 31, 2016 § 67 Comments
In the post below donnie suggests:
Trump supporters may be liberals who are still half-asleep, but at least that means they’re also half-awake.
I don’t see “make America 90’s again, other than the opposition to abortion and homosex” as half awake. I see it as the typical consolidation of a new ‘conservatism’ which attempts to protect liberalism from its current worst excesses (white genocide, safe spaces vs free speech, etc).
The central focus of Trumpism is on stopping white genocide, but under the guise of immigration/nationalism. The reason for this is twofold.
First, liberalism is the political philosophy of white people and cannot survive – at least not yet – under a system which is not ruled by a majority of white people capable of overruling dindu, la raza, and mohammedan tribalisms.
Second, Trumpism is promoted under the guise of ‘nationalism/immigration’ because that allows charges of racism to be plausibly denied while still opposing white genocide. Nationalist liberalism is still liberalism, so liberalism itself can remain unchallenged and unquestioned.
So Trumpism represents a walk-back of liberalism’s most recent and most self destructive excesses without any repudiation of liberalism whatsoever, and with the ‘successful’ innovations (e.g. normalization of sodomy) retained. That is how the process works: successful liberal innovations are retained, while unsuccessful ones are walked back and re-tooled.
Meet the new cuck. Same as the old cuck.
Zippy Catholic 
The Alt-Right’s pro-white nationalism does not oppose Liberalism under any fundamental basis. It’s nostalgic for previous iterations of Liberalism (the 40’s, the 90’s, ect) and attempts to limit the franchise of Liberalism to white men. So it is “archaic” in the sense that it does not grant universal membership into Liberalism that the SJW’s and Leftists do.
Just as how MGTOW/MRA/PUA wants Liberalism for Men but not for Women
Just like how Nazism wants Liberalism for Aryans but not for the Untermensch
The Current Year MAGA Alt-Conservatism wants Liberalism for White Men but not for “icky brown third worlders.”
There’s always a scapegoat who is in the path towards enlightenment and human progress under the aegis of Liberalism, although the truth is that their pseudo-religion of Liberalism itself is the problem, not sexist white males, brown peoples, the patriarchy, ect…..
allows charges of racism to be plausibly denied
I’m not going to say that the denial is plausible because the denial just isn’t there. Trump’s followers and the alt-right is unapologetically racist.
Aethelfrith:
I don’t take the “of course we are racist” agree and amplify of chan culture to be typical of Trump supporters. In fact I’m quite certain that the average Joe with a Trump/Pence sign on his lawn would see my own views as “racist”.
Well, at least some things are walked back rather than sprinted forward.
Zippy,
Maybe you’re right. But it seems that the ones working the hardest to spread Trump’s message are promoting stuff like this.
I agree that many, if not most, Trump supporters see themselves as “protecting America’s values” (i.e. liberal values) from what they perceive as hostile outside groups.
But I think this is still bad news for liberalism.
The reason is that the fragility of liberal values thesis is flat wrong. “White genocide” poses absolutely no threat to the liberal status quo. Quite the opposite in fact! That’s why virtually every world leader of every modern liberal nation is completely on board with mass immigration, refugee resettlement, and diversity brainwashing. These folks are working hard to paint the whole world grey and they know that this is exactly how you do it.
Then along comes the Frog Casino King, a libertine, would-be globalist billionaire who decides, you know what, I really like my driveways painted yellow (golden, actually) and if the folks in charge have their way my grand-kids will never know a driveway that’s not beige or grey. Sad!
If it weren’t for the Frog Casino King, right-liberals would be continuing their three-decade long zombie walk toward the liberal singularity, lead most likely by Senor Guac Merchant.
I consider the fact that they are awake enough not to do this, and also awake enough to question the motives of those who currently hold the reigns of power in our liberal society, to be a small, but real improvement on the state of things.
donnie:
I suppose it is debatable how much life is left, objectively, in the globalist-liberal dream before the white liberals driving it are overrun and destroyed by the consequences of their own triumph. But there is no doubt that the engine driving nationalist liberalism is the pervasive desire to save liberalism from Those Globalist Tyrants.
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
Aethelfrith,
What problem was I supposed to see with that post?
Again, the problem is we are not given an idea of a acceptable non-liberal state of affairs.
Alt-right is explicitly against equality. But apparently it is not sufficient to get rid of the liberalism taint. Why? Just because it does not hold certain natural law propositons sodomy wise?
Alt-right is not particularly keen on freedom as well. Free trade is unpopular.
But did any state ever hold all natural law propositions? Pre-modern states had slavery, usury and other evils. Were they are liberals?
The biggest problem with Vox’s post is that it assumes that the coming *war* will be based on race when in reality it will be based on ideology and religious persecution.
One of the things that frustrates me about fellow black Americans who identify as Christians but vote democrat (and largely find LGBT viscerally as well as morally repulsive) is their utter refusal to understand that when the rubber meets the road they will not be able to straddle the ideological fence and rationalize away their support for the pro-abortion, pro-sexual perversion party (yes Zippy I get that the GOP isn’t much better but allow me some berth here).
So…while I agree that there is a real and imminent attack against traditional, religious, heterosexual white men -an increasingly vanishing segment of the population- it is on the basis of ideas, not a war against whiteness.
But I’m just a kook who believes the Bible when it says the coming persecution and war will be against the saints (the true remnant), regardless of race.
Elspeth:
Agreed in general terms: the way I might say it is that liberalism is a war against authority. It is ‘accidental’ from liberalism’s standpoint that white people, men, etc have long had disproportionate authority. Liberalism (from its perspective) is not aiming to destroy white people, men, etc — it is aiming to destroy all traditional authority, all rule of men over other men, which it believes to be illegitimate.
The idea that abominations cannot be condemned unless some happy story and circumstances acceptable to vishmehr24 are specified is obviously fallacious. See e.g. the Hiroshima bombing.
Elspeth,
You may be right, but even if you are I’m not seeing the racism in that post Aethelfrith seems to.
Malcolm:
I said Trump’s most vocal supporters are racist. The link shows David French ( a known Trump critic from NR) lamenting that his haters are photoshopping his adopted black daughter’s face onto a gas chamber victim with Trump photoshopped on, operating the controls. VOx responds by encouraging his sycophants to double down on sending awful messages to their enemies.
If you read that whole post and said, “Nothing wrong here,” well, I don’t know what to tell you.
Aethelfrith,
Perhaps part of it is that my sympathy for French is equally limited. Mean pictures are just that: mean pictures. I wish they’d leave his daughter out of it, but ultimately – and I know it’s the unpopular thing to say – they’re really not that big a deal.
Aethelfrith:
The behavior is certainly abominable, and it is true that much of the energy on the alt right derives from the typical liberal approach of being deliberately offensive toward establishment pieties. Whether that constitutes Literally Racist behavior is a distinct question, I suppose. To me it all looks more than a little stale: the anti-establishment wing of liberalism is acting all shocking and offensive again, and the establishment wing is acting all offended. I have a hard time sympathizing with either French or his juvenile tormenters. Meet the new cuck; same as the old cuck.
Zippy,
Pretty much.
I suppose another aspect for me is that when the families of Professional Public Figures get inevitably dragged through the mud to a degree proportionate to their success as PPF’s, I have plenty of sympathy for the family but much less
for the PPF. The whining PPF is like a Facebook user complaining about loss of privacy right after handing over all of his personal information to the Zuck You Exploitation Machine.
People need to own their own shit, including the perfectly predictable effects of their own choices on family members. French’s daughter deserves none of this, just as the innocent victims of his jealous god neoconservatism didn’t deserve to die.
But French himself is another story.
Aethelfrith,
Also, some guys making juvenile pictures of a Z list writer from NR are hardly among “Trump’s most vocal supporters”.
The supporters promoted the most by Hilary Clinton, sure.
@Aethelfrith
The Trump supporters in this corner of the Web are not the most vocal; not by a long shot. Bloggers do not compare to Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Jeffress, etc.
[…] typical of anti-establishment liberalism – deliberately offensive minority part of the new conservative synthesis, which we might call Trumpism. Rather than seeing the 1950’s as America’s cultural […]
Zippy,
A lot of commonplace discourse could not be understood in terms of the positivist philosophy. It seems same goes with your philosophy.
Is the commonplace statement –“India got freedom in 1947”-meaningful by you or is it tainted by the word “freedom”?
Zippy,
I’m in Manhattan this week, and I can tell you it is certainly very difficult to see the Frog King’s triumph on Tuesday as a victory for liberalism. That’s not to say you’re wrong, only that the circumstances on the ground here make it very difficult to believe.
The loud protests over the last couple of nights have shown what a horrible defeat the liberals here see this as. Even the average Joes and Janes working their 9 to 5s are beside themselves. Everyone I’ve met so far is completely despondent.
I’m actually shocked, really, because like you I had considered him to be just a different flavor of liberal. I know a lot of these people personally and consider them to be more or less reasonable, decent folks. I did not expect their reactions to the Abortion Witch’s defeat to be so severe. For crying out loud, Trump’s been a staple of this city for over three decades! He’s just an uncouth rehash of 1992-style liberalism, not an existential threat to the country! Why the hell is everyone acting like Al-Qaeda just took the White House?
A lot of the people I’m talking to here just can’t fathom that a geographically diverse coalition of over 60 million voters came together to cast their ballots for the Frog Casino King. They wonder how anyone could do so in good conscience. One colleague of mine, lamenting his experience of having to explain the election results to his two young daughters, said to me the morning after the election, “Don’t people ask themselves before they vote, what does voting for this man say about me?”
I wanted to ask him why he didn’t ask himself the same question when he cast his vote for the Abortion Witch. Doesn’t voting for her say something about you? Should you not feel shame for willing the rise to power of a career criminal who has made it a focal point of her career to expand the industrial mass slaughter of the inconvenient?
They don’t see it that way at all. They feel like liberty, equality, and fraternity lost on Tuesday. And it lost bigly.
God I hope they’re right.
Aren’t there pretty similar reactions in a lot of major sports cities after the home team loses? A big reason that bread and circuses works is precisely because folks get so invested in the circuses, and a presidential elections is the biggest circus of them all.
donnie:
I understand: because one faction of liberals always sees other factions of liberalism as tyranny ascendant. Current events are instructive for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
The odds of Donald Trump unequivocally repudiating liberalism though are about as good as the odds that we successfully colonize Jupiter by 2025.
I hate to rain on the parade, even though that so often seems to be my reluctant role. But they are wrong, and unequivocally so. What lost is their particular conception of those things, as defined by the configuration of unprincipled exceptions which in their minds define authentic liberty.
What happened is that one unprincipled conception of liberty literally Trumped a different, incompatible conception. But that is all.
Hrodgar:
Indeed. Sometimes including the riots and undocumented shopping, when the upset is particularly strong and unexpected.
Heck, people have been killed in the stampede while going to a rock concert or a Black Friday store opening.
Because many people don’t see the other side as “true liberalism” they see the unprincipled exceptions the other side offers as principled and it frightens them.
Let us pray each day for the conversion of Trump, America, and repentance for all.
I would love to see Hillary enter a convent.
TomD:
Precisely.
Recall that an unprincipled exception is the assertion of some particular discriminating authority under liberalism. It is unprincipled because the exercise of particular discriminating authority is rationalized away as compatible with liberty qua core principle of political action.
Group A has successfully rationalized their own preferred exercise of particular discriminating authority to themselves. The ugly side of their coin is hidden, and they see only the beautiful shiny side: let freedom ring!
But when members of Group A see Group B, they see the ugly exercise of particular discriminating authority clearly. Therefore Group B are not (from the point of view of Group A) liberals at all: any lip service they give to political freedom is disingenuous: I mean look, the authoritative discrimination in their rhetoric is right there for everyone to see!
And so it goes. Nobody thinks to question the validity of the first principle: of the notion that liberty as principle of political action, liberty-as-authority, is even a coherent idea in the first place.
The only way for me to understand the reaction of the losers, especially pertaining to their further fomenting a class war between the sexes, is to keep in mind that they are being consumed by envy, and to take with humility all the warnings that go along with giving in to such things.
Witness.
buckyinky:
While there is no shortage of envy, I think it is a mistake to see envy as primary. That way lies the psychologizing of liberalism: liberals just want power and success, and only say they believe certain things because they lead to power and success.
The problem with that isn’t that there is no truth to it. The problem with it is that it underestimates the power of liberalism and interferes with any attempt to resist the siren song. There is much more to it than that.
We won’t truly grasp liberalism until we fully accept that liberals – of whatever stripe, group A, B, or C – believe themselves to be in the moral right. They cry and throw tantrums like babies in part because of their own personal weaknesses, to be sure; but even moreso because they see (not without a great deal of irony, from my perspective) the Trump victory as a defeat of liberalism, which just is the good as it pertains to politics.
Hrodgar,
There is a palpable difference here. I remember Boston when the New England Patriots were about to cap off their perfect season with a Super Bowl victory over the New York Giants, only to be upset by Giant’s receiver David Tyree making a leaping one-handed catch pinning the football with his hand to the crown of his helmet.
The city of Boston was in shock for days when that happened. But it wasn’t like this, not even close. Liberals here are more than sad, everyone is walking around with a storm cloud of anxiety and depression over their heads. These people are scared. It’s not just that their team lost, it’s that the enemy has won.
Like I said above, it’s almost as if Al-Qaeda took the White House.
Zippy,
You are right of course, but then again a lot of low probability events have happened lately…
You have said yourself that Trump’s brand of liberalism will take us back to 1993. Give the man two terms and perhaps this country will reach 2001.
Why the hell is everyone acting like Al-Qaeda just took the White House?
Because in this postmodern world, people are just that committed to their particular flavor of untruth.
Donnie:
I’ll take your word for it, though I think a lot of that can be explained by a difference in degree. To be fair, they are probably right about their enemy having won, but, well . . .
Maxim 29
donnie:
Judgement of low probability depends on your priors, I guess.
I thought well before the primaries that Trump had a reasonable chance to win, and have been expecting a white racial backlash against the constant charge of bigotry for decades.
Heck one of my brothers and I have been warning for many, many years now that liberals should be careful not to awaken the sleeping white redneck. Middle American white people are in general very tolerant, are pragmatic and not terribly principled, good neighbors to have no matter what your race, and yet can be extremely dangerous when you finally manage to provoke them.
Zippy,
Thanks for giving me much to chew on.
I hadn’t seen Dalrock’s latest post yet when I posted my last comment, but he illustrates how when the motivation is envy, there is no such thing as satiation. And best to recognize this from the outset before wasting precious time and resources on finding common ground.
But what you said perhaps covers this ground and more by comprehending a yet wider circle of hell.
buckyinky:
I’m not downplaying envy as a psychological factor — it is certainly there. But I am warning against psychologizing away a conflict which is much deeper than psychology. What I am downplaying is not particular psychological factors, but the habit of psychologizing/relativizing in general.
Cultural marxism / postmodernism attempts to reduce political conflict to mere psychology and concomitant quest for power/status. This ends up in relativism. While psychology is certainly always in play, it is often just the thing that makes liberalism itself invisible. The obvious psychological flaws of the enemy’s slaves become the cloak which conceals the true enemy.
And you can’t kill or defend yourself from what you can’t perceive, except by accident.
He’s just an uncouth rehash of 1992-style liberalism, not an existential threat to the country!
Nobody knows if that is a true statement and I don’t have any great reasons to believe it. We survived a demagogic president with a volatile temper before, namely Andrew Jackson. However Jackson also had lots of previous experience in military and public service and a reasonably competent grasp of policy. Anyway, I intend to give Trump the exact same respect Republicans gave Obama and hope that he fails and will do everything I can to mock the Hair Furor.
[…] may well hold back the the influx of less liberal races of people into middle America for a while, thus preserving liberalism from its own worst self-destructive […]
I think it’s a mistake to treat the reactions to Trump’s victory as typical. If the tables were turned, this would not be happening.
Many right-liberals I knew were 100% percent convinced that Romney would win the election in 2012. They also believed that it was imperative that he do so, that four more years of Obama and we wouldn’t have a country anymore. If Romney lost, they said, there would be no going back. And I know quite a few of them really believed it.
Well, Romney lost. And were there right-liberals rioting in their town squares? Were there right-liberals breaking down in tears, struggling to explain the results of the election to their children? Were there right-liberals wearing safety pins in an attempt to inspire hope and solidarity in the face of national crisis?
No there wasn’t. Right-liberals were upset, but no more so than if their team had lost the Super Bowl.
I sympathize with a lot of the people I’ve spoken to here in Manhattan. What does it say about our country that 60 million plus voters elected Trump? Nothing good. But what does it say about our country that 60 million plus voters almost elected Clinton? I would argue something equally terrible, if not worse.
I think I could stomach this kind of hysteria if it were just par for the course. If it could be reasonably expected that if Clinton had won, Trump supporters would have held demonstrations, and wept with their children, and wore safety pins to comfort and support each other during a time of fear and crisis. But that would never have happened. It’s utterly ridiculous to even think of.
This country is hurting because liberals believe we’ve just elected a demon from Hell to the highest office in the land.
Perhaps we have.
But we’ve been electing people with demonic beliefs to high office since this country was founded.
Why is this time any different?
I don’t know. But the fact that people are treating it so differently makes me really want to believe it might actually be different.
Right liberals don’t riot when they lose, or go on drunken binges when they win, because losing frequently and cleaning up the mess when they temporarily win is their role. How can you be smug when you are busy cleaning up the vomit and excrement from the party in order to insure that the parties continue? And how can you get too worked up over a party raging out of control when you are paying for the party yourself?
Step2,
My point about 1992-style liberalism is in reference to Zippy’s post prior to this one, “Trump as the Third Black President.”
As a point of fact, when you look at Trump’s actual policy views, he is a tornado of everything that was popular politically in 1992. He’s what you’d get if you put Buchanan, Perot, and Bill Clinton in a blender and molded them into a single presidential candidate.
And this is what disturbs me the most. I don’t want to roll back the last 24 years of liberal “progress.” I want to roll back the last two hundred and fifty years of liberal progress. But if we can’t even go back to the “good ol’ days” of the ’90s without inciting a national incident, I don’t know where the heck we go from here.
donnie:
I’d modify that to say that his stated policy positions are what you’d get. (Great description by the way).
To the extent Step2’s point is that we really don’t have any idea what Trump will actually do, he has a point. Trump is always negotiating, and tends to win negotiations by doing and saying things that surprise people. That is something I can relate to, actually – any number of my own personal career anecdotes involve doing something totally unexpected.
The only thing I am confident in is that Trump will not do anything that harms Trump, Inc – his and his dynasty’s financial interests and social status. So that can be an index of sorts for where there will likely be ‘executive air cover’ going forward.
I don’t know that he even wants a second term, though if he does then that is another factor. Everyone probably assumes so, but I can picture any number of narratives in which he does not. He is a seventy year old billionaire with nothing really to lose, and it isn’t really clear what he is in this for.
But that would never have happened. It’s utterly ridiculous to even think of.
Does anyone remember a few weeks ago when Pence had to calm a supporter at a rally who said it was time for armed rebellion if Clinton won? Or Joe Walsh stating the same sentiment on his Twitter feed? Or Trump himself claiming the whole system was rigged and threatening to dishonor the results if he lost? I mean, how strong is the memory hole that it is “ridiculous to even think of” that there would have been massive protests against a Clinton victory, especially if he had won the popular vote but not the electoral vote, perhaps even led by Trump.
OK, but left-liberals don’t usually riot when they lose either. At least, I don’t remember that happening when that crazy, imperialist, Nazi named George W. Bush won two terms.
Liberals are treating Trump’s victory different from the usual right-liberal victory. I’m hopeful that it is not for no reason.
Well there was this:
https://www.salon.com/2001/01/21/protests_8/
Also, to be fair, Step2 has a point about violent rhetoric on the pro Trump side.
donnie:
To the extent it is true I think it is because of two things:
1) They were told she was going to win and expected her to win. It wasn’t even supposed to be a close race.
2) She was supposed to be the first woman president, which is a symbolic totem like the first black president. If Obama had lost to McCain you could easily have seen similar violence because of the perceived symbolic importance.
Step2,
There would have been violent Trump supporters acting on their own volition, for sure. But the difference between right-liberals not getting what they want and left-liberals getting what they want is the difference between isolated acts of violence, and mob violence.
As for Trump leading a violent insurrection, himself? Come on. Does anyone really believe that if Trump had lost the election he would have raised an army of red-hatted septuagenarians to cross the Potomac?
OK, really good point. Liberals react violently when their “arc of progress” narrative is threatened. Even in cases when it was not actually threatened.
Guess we’re still screwed then.
1) They were told she was going to win and expected her to win. It wasn’t even supposed to be a close race.
If you were looking only at the end of the race it was supposed to be close but she was expected to win. The RCP poll was the most pessimistic I looked at and it predicted her electoral total at 272. Fivethirtyeight gave her about a 70% chance of winning, but the FBI curve-ball plus the late deciding independents and Republicans should have made the pollsters much, much more cautious about what they predicted. This doesn’t even include the hidden flaws in the polling but is only based on what they knew.
The fact that she got nearly 6 million less votes overall than Obama in 2012 points largely to her multitude of problems as a candidate.
As for Trump leading a violent insurrection, himself? Come on.
So Trump encouraged violence against protestors at his rallies, rallies where he bragged constantly about turning out thousands and thousands of people, but he’s somehow unable to encourage his devoted followers to take to the streets? As far as I’m concerned the entire point of his rigged election rhetoric was to lay the groundwork for mass protest if he lost.
Step2,
You seem to think that the polls were somehow an accurate measure of public opinion at any point during the race. Believe me, they weren’t. The race was always close, we could have held the election in June or January and it would have been a coin flip each time. Public opinion doesn’t move 15 points every two weeks. It doesn’t even move five points in that amount of time.
Here in Manhattan, almost all of my colleagues I’ve talked to realize this. They realized they were lied to. They know that the media and the press were every bit of afraid of Trump as they were and that the news organizations hired pollsters that pushed fraudulent polls. The phony polls were supposed to demoralize Trump’s supporters and motivate undecideds to bandwagon. It didn’t happen. In all likelihood, it probably backfired.
Trump’s “rigged election” rhetoric was hilarious in how ridiculous it made the press look. The media took it to its extreme, just as you have, which was the height of foolishness. Trump’s rigged election talk was the beginning of what would have been his concession speech. It was him admitting that his prospects looked bleak, and doing something outrageous in an attempt to save face with his supporters.
If he would have lost, he would have simply conceded and then expected the media to give him credit for conceding peacefully.
Trump is a media-savvy billionaire blowhard. He is not Hitler. And he was never going to lead an army of red-hatted vulgarians in a charge across the Potomac. Not in a million years.
I think the ‘rigged’ language played well with people who felt that the system and the elites had rigged things against them. (Not to imply that elections aren’t ‘rigged’ in many senses, both legal and illegal).
I expect that every slogan by Trump was A/B tested. Where Step2 (presumably) sees nefarious fomentation of ideological violence, I see professionally executed marketing at work.
In some ways Step2’s ideologue picture (assuming I am characterizing his view accurately) of Trump is more flattering of Trump than my own view. It assumes that Trump’s rhetoric and strategy are tightly connected to his actual personal goals and motivations as a 70 year old billionaire.
I think that Trump wanted to win the presidency. I think he did his homework and figured out a way to get it done, which involved appealing to particular constituencies — much like any marketer segmenting a marketplace in order to develop a product strategy. He then executed that product strategy and achieved his objective.
I have several possible stories about why Trump may have wanted the presidency, some more flattering of his character and some much less so.
But here is the thing: Analyzing the marketing strategy that he used to achieve the presidency doesn’t really tell us as much about his own reasons and plans as you might expect. Someone might well hate cars and still want to be CEO of Ford Motor Corp, and achieve that objective, for a whole variety of reasons.
And because he is a 70 year old billionaire, the range of reasons that may apply to Trump is much wider than what could apply to (say) a financially broke ideological power couple from Arkansas whose wealth could only come from selling political influence.
As usual, people see only the sort of possibilities that they can imagine and project from their own bubbles. In my experience those projections are often deficient in imagination: in terms of grasping the real range of credible possibility.
donnie:
Yeah, this. The whole point was to achieve the objective. Now that he has achieved it, we won’t really know what he wants to do until he does it.
Public opinion doesn’t move 15 points every two weeks. It doesn’t even move five points in that amount of time.
Uh, I never said it did. A two or three point swing can have a huge difference upon who wins a majority vote though, and that is what the polls were trying to discern.
They know that the media and the press were every bit of afraid of Trump as they were and that the news organizations hired pollsters that pushed fraudulent polls.
It sounds like your friends are easily manipulated.
Trump’s rigged election talk was the beginning of what would have been his concession speech.
Let me see if I understand your theory correctly. Trump knew the polls were phony and that he was actually winning; therefore he deliberately began what would have been his concession speech so that he could impress the same biased media that produced those polls.
More evidence that, at least in terms of political marketing, Trump is basically Bill Clinton redux:
Step2,
Check with Nicholas Nassim Taleb before you cite Nate Silver as a credible source on election forecasting.
Most people are.
No. Trump knew the polls were bogus and that the actual data showed a close election. Close does not equal winning. Trump needed to be prepared to save face with his supporters if he lost. The press was never going to actually give him credit for graciously conceding but he’d be sure to remind them that they should, and then go off on Twitter about how dishonest and rigged the media is against him, and how he would have won in a landslide if they were honest and fair.
It’s all an act, and he’s a showman. Plain and simple.
Even if you think I’m way off on my read of things above, the fact remains that there is no way, not in a million years, that the man who couldn’t be bothered to open field offices in battleground states was going to organize an armed insurrection against a “rigged system.”
It’s wrong to treat Trump’s absurd bluffing like a credible threat.
Correction to the above, the gentleman’s name is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
You can read a preliminary draft of all the reasons why Nate Silver is a clueless dolt when it comes to election forecasting here
Zippy, somewhat related to your politico link, a friend on facebook gave what I think is a pretty shrewd analysis. (You know the writer, but I don’t know if he wants his name used, so I’ll keep him anonymous). He called it his “Complete amateur armchair quarterbacking in the wee hours,” and it went like this:
“At the core of tonight’s Trump voters is a group of blue collar workers who (considered statistically) don’t often get excited about voting. Existing voting models didn’t take much notice of them. When they got off their third shift jobs on voting day, the pollsters expected, most of them would go home, open a beer, and gripe about life rather than standing in line for an hour or two just to cast a ballot.
But this time, it was different. This time there was someone on the ticket as brash and bombastic as they had always wished a candidate would be. He was over the top and often vulgar, yes, but they forgave him those flaws because he was the only candidate in ages who said openly the things that many of them thought and said to one another. In this year’s presidential contest, they saw a chance to give a bloody nose to the cultural elites who openly despise them — to the people who would write them off with a sneer as ‘the basket of deplorables.’
And so, to almost everyone’s surprise, they showed up at the polls. That cold beer could wait. This was the night of reckoning. This was payback time.
Tomorrow morning, when Hillary looks in a mirror, the thought may cross her mind that they hate her every bit as much as she despises them. And when she was speaking contemptuously about them at that rally in New York City on September 9, they were listening.”
Bill:
One of Hillary’s biggest gaffes was the ‘deplorables’ remark. She meant it for the Internet alt-right, but bubba took it personally as being about himself because the leftist coalition of freaks has been screaming at him that he is a racist bigot for decades now.
Trump’s marketing was brilliant and will be studied for decades, right down to the red baseball caps.
Trump knew the polls were bogus and that the actual data showed a close election
You didn’t read the part where I already admitted it was a close election but that doesn’t mean the polls were bogus. Trump’s own internal campaign polls gave him a 30% chance of winning, does that mean Trump was crazily paying for bogus polls against himself?
Even if you think I’m way off on my read of things above, the fact remains that there is no way, not in a million years, that the man who couldn’t be bothered to open field offices in battleground states was going to organize an armed insurrection against a “rigged system.”
You seem to be conflating the two ideas of mass protest and armed insurrection. I don’t think the protests now are an armed insurrection and I am not suggesting Trump would lead an armed insurrection, I am suggesting he would encourage a mass protest. You also seem to think that Trump pretending the system was rigged (and why use scare quotes around rigged system when you are explicitly claiming it was rigged?) was in many ways better than saying the truth that the polls were close and he had a significant chance at winning.
Nate Silver is not a dolt, at the link I provided he explained carefully and intelligently why his forecast was wrong. If you think an imperfect ability to predict the future makes him a dolt I would love to see your time machine. Apparently if your weather forecaster tells you there is a 70% of clear skies and you end up getting rain that is sufficient reason to never pay attention to another weather forecast again.
Zippy:
To the extent Step2’s point is that we really don’t have any idea what Trump will actually do, he has a point. Trump is always negotiating, and tends to win negotiations by doing and saying things that surprise people. That is something I can relate to, actually – any number of my own personal career anecdotes involve doing something totally unexpected.
One of Trump’s greatest assets now that he has both gotten away with it and habituated people to it is his weaponised ambiguity.
donnie:
Why the hell is everyone acting like Al-Qaeda just took the White House?
Because for months they’ve convinced themselves that Trump is a blend of Nazi, Fascist, Ku Klux Klan, Al-Qaeda etc etc.
William Luse:
But this time, it was different. This time there was someone on the ticket as brash and bombastic as they had always wished a candidate would be. He was over the top and often vulgar, yes, but they forgave him those flaws because he was the only candidate in ages who said openly the things that many of them thought and said to one another.
Trump is the bad-boy that leaderless men have been yearning for: someone who says and does what they are unwilling or unable to.
[…] going to hurt you all that badly. He’ll still conserve liberalism, he’s just going to eliminate some of the worst excesses. If you repent now, and stop your persecution of white males, in 8 years, you could elect a […]
God damn you really are fucking useless Zippy.
LOL you really are fucking useless Zippy. The only cuck here is you.
usel/useless:
Then why do “your” kids have my eyes?
[…] the new cuck. Same as the left wing enemy of the old cuck, but with extra bonus sodomy for all […]