Coop Scoop Don't Mourn, Organize -- The Total Wrap Up

Trump won because he feels their rage

Meme: Mark Schubb

November 6, 2024

By Marc Cooper

Settle in. This is long but serious.

We are facing rough and dark times.  But I will start with some simple words from Winston Churchill: “In defeat, defiance.”

In this piece I intend to probe the whys and wherefores of the Trump victory.  And then some ideas on how to move forward.

First, I want to clear out what I consider the day after clutter that is gathering on the web. I will be direct and clear.

The loss is not due to the candidate. It would have made no difference who the Democrat was.  I have zero interest in parsing the campaign, what Harris did or didn’t do.  It would have made little difference.  The only specific I want to mention is Joe Biden.

No, he would have lost by probably a bigger margin. He was the most unpopular president since Truman.  He should have put his ego aside, and after his first really good year, and especially after his program was blocked by the R’s allied with Sinema and Manchin, he should have stuck to his promise to do one term only and set a primary right after the mid-terms and let someone else take over. 

Do not be in denial.  Biden is seriously impaired, and his one debate performance was a nightmare. A very bad one.  He then diddled for weeks until Pelosi bumped him off.  But that left Harris even less time.

Second piece of clutter. Those who are now claiming that the Democratic position on Gaza would have made a difference. Sorry. Only 4% of all voters said foreign policy was a top priority. The portion of the Democratic electorate that was most upset over the war were the liberal currents in the party and they did not abstain or vote for Trump.  And a tougher stand on Israel would not have won over any Republicans. Parenthetically, I will say that those who found it immoral to vote for the Democrats and urged a third-party vote, did not spoil any Democratic victory but they are about to find out in blood and bones what it will mean to have Trump in alliance with Netanyahu and how completely pointless their position was. And how damn dangerous you would have been if this had been a closer election.

The other piece of clutter I want to clear are the manifold rehearsals of all the crimes, defects and general character of Trump. We know that already. We have been repeating it for yrs.  It means nothing at this point. Control yourselves.

This defeat owes to much deeper dysfunction in our political system and our society than this one election.

If Bill Clinton won by saying “I feel your pain,” I will quote JVL from The Bulwark who said Trump told the American people “I feel your rage.”

Liberals and the left correctly said that the pandemic laid bare the cracks and inequalities in the system. That’s what motivated the Summer of 2020 with militant BLM marches etc. and the election of Joe Biden. But they missed the bigger cracks. Twice as many Americans died in the pandemic than in World War II. And just like a war, the sort of plague that is COVID, disrupted and disoriented and scared and enraged the population.  Trust in major institutions was already threadbare and they began to snap with the chaos of the pandemic and then were further exacerbated by the first Trump administration.

The pandemic wrought real economic chaos with millions losing their jobs and small businesses.  Yes, there was a lot of cash sent out to everybody as a support, but it was just enough to get by.

It was also enough cash, combined with broken supply lines to set off a global inflationary cycle.  For sure, the spike in inflation has been curbed in the U.S. but prices remain very high and people are more likely to look at gas station price boards than read the WSJ on how much the IMF approves of our current economy.  The macro indicators are indeed robust.  But the fact remains that half the population doesn’t have $400 on hand to meet an emergency.

Half of America was POOR before the pandemic and remain so afterward, only with higher prices.  And the pandemic, quite sadly, only re-enforced the swagger of individualism in America where people felt they were on their own fighting for their own survival and care for others and social solidarity hit bottom.

This is a global phenomenon that has resulted in a sweeping anti-incumbent wave throughout Europe, and it matters not if the incumbents are left, right or center --- they are all vulnerable or have already been tossed.

People are pissed. A whole lot of them are everywhere.

That’s why everything we thought was outrageous about Trump was so attractive to the 66 million who voted for him.  They were feeling rage and wanted him to punch out what they believe is an uncaring establishment and a Democratic Party, no matter the candidate, who they feel had been sneering at them or at a minimum not paying them any attention.

It's true that the electorate was paying little or no attention to real policy differences between the two parties. On paper the Democrats made some reasonable proposals while MAGA did everything possible to stoke and heighten the rage. And that worked,

I would argue that what we saw last night was the peak of Nixon’s overtly racist Southern Strategy, that both Reagan and Bush quietly fed, and that Trump burnished, revived and made socially acceptable. This morphed into the Culture War and Democrats helped to heighten it.

The so-called tribalism in American politics was deep into formation by the time Trump came along and he was more than ready to accept it and widen every wedge issue.

Now comes the part a lot of you might object to but I suggest you ponder it for a few minutes before throwing rocks at me.

The Democrats and the “shadow party” (the NGOs and satellite interest groups) also consolidated into very much a tribe. And in doing so they widened the gap between them and, excuse me, the white working class that should be one of the pillars of the Democrats but instead is now rocket fuel for MAGA. Indeed, the establishment left has become so much of a tribe that it now even has its own dialect and is ready to police and punish anybody who does not adopt their new lexicon.  The younger staff to Democratic pols and the left-leaning NGO’s are far to the left of their own Democratic electorate and cannot properly read the field.

The Democratic tribe became as inured to domestic reality as RFK Jr. is from science. The Democratic abandonment of the working class goes back decades, and we can debate it’s starting point.  But it has been at least 30 years and the chickees have now come home to roost.

Emphasis on race and gender are important issues that needed and need attention. But it became the calling card for the entire party and the shadow party.  They are the centered issues at a time when Americans of all races are trying to pay their bills. It has become an obsession, and a highly counter-productive one.

I would hope, though I am ready to be disappointed, that walloped Democrats can now accept the fact that there is nothing magical about black and brown voters, especially the males. And women as well.  Many of those voted to repeal abortion bans and then voted red down the ticket because they are tribal and feel the Democrats are not worthy of their support.

Latino workers don’t get up in the morning and immediately say, Oh boy, I’m a BIPOC, or a POC or a LATINX or whatever. They think about how they are going to get through the day and make the rent just like every other worker in America does,

Black and brown workers have the same issues as white workers.  And they would be better off if they worked together, and if they were looked upon by Democrats and the Left as what they are…normal people who have much more in common than not.

I grew up in the 60’s when it was common knowledge that victories are won when you build multi-racial and multi-ethnic coalitions.

Who was it that came up with the genius idea that liberals should participate and lead in chopping up the working class, and the population in general into specific categories that only divide rather than unite their constituents? 

Identarian politics and the abandonment of multi-racial coalition building is probably the single greatest disease that afflicts the party. And if it continues, as I suspect it will, the party is doomed. Republicans have distorted DEI but everybody I know who has been subjected to DEI training, hated it.

Democrats have benighted and pandered to every single cohort in their tribe and celebrated them as crucial or special. Blacks, Latinos, AAPI’s (aren’t they also already POC’s or  BIPOC’s but what the hell, let’s chop up the tribal members as finely as we can), trans, LGBTQ+ and so on. 

But, oops, they forgot the white electorate (which is still 70%) and not only abandoned white working-class men, but rather villainized them as promoters of male toxicity. Just how do you think that lands on the ears of a white male retail worker making $35,00 a year when a down payment on a small, cheap house is more like $100k? Or when a DEI bureaucrat dings them for the use of an “inappropriate” word innocently used? White working class men and women have been so scorned they were not even given an acronym label by the Liberal Tribe.  Couldn’t they at least be labeled as the WWC?  And women?  Hasn’t that word been discarded by our tribe and replaced by “birthers?” 

Better than that, how about NO identitarian labels as they are divisive, counter-productive and impede solidarity and class consciousness.  It’s a strategy that encourages workers of any color to vote for a new regime run by oligarchs!

Good work, Democrats!

I’m not arguing in any way or manner that these “special” interest groups should be cast off by liberals.  I am suggesting that these issues be approached in a manner that takes into consideration how opposing tribes will respond or, God help us, they be invited to ally.  At a minimum they should not be centered by liberal politics.

And the most efficient way to do that is to meet the voters where they are at and try to bring them along.  You don’t scorn them, preach to them or make fun of them because they are not like you.  You only alienate them.  You fill them with more rage. These “normies” as some call them are not going to buy into trans surgery for teenagers if you just say it is right and they are wrong. These require complicated contact and the building of bridges for more open-ness. I am not saying that this “normie” culture is full of wonderful ideas. On the contrary.  But it does contain some values that liberals are quick to dismiss and that breaks off all communication. 

No everybody who owns a gun is a “gun nut.”  I own 7 of them and I shoot. But I mostly collect them for historical value. I am a stone-cold atheist, and I detest the leadership of all religions.  But I understand why individuals turn to religion out of family tradition or succor.  In any case it’s a lot easier to find a church in any neighborhood than it is to find a liberal or progressive neighborhood center that actually brings people together.

The normies have got them. Starting with churches.  But they have something even better, they actually have community, they have MAGA workers inviting them to backyard BBQ’s, little league and so on.

What do liberals provide in an equal way?  Where are the resident organizers in your neighborhood.  What is the local Democratic Party office?  Usually a storefront in a strip mall.  Have Democrats completely abandoned year-round local community work in exchange for emails browbeating you for donations in the last month of every election? Where is the local canvassing and political outreach between elections?

Let me sum up the last number of paragraphs into one simple sentence before moving on to the other causes of defeat: Either the Democratic Party makes a a radical turn towards building multi-racial class-based politics starting at the local level and abandons its Identarian obsession or it will be in the political desert forever. Talk about “woke,” it’s the woke who really need to wake up and realize you are only contributing to more tribalization. I don’t have hard data but anecdotally, it seems many of the very young men who voted MAGA did so because they were sick of wokeness being pushed on them (this while much of the left claims the term was invented by the Right and woke doesn’t exist). Bullshit.

Next cause of defeat: the quisling politics of the old Republican Party with Mitch McConnell at its head.  Since Nixon the Republicans have promoted racism and misogyny and Trump has made it central to the campaign.

We can in great part lay this at the feet of the now disassembled GOP and  Mitch McConnel. Mitch has played the same role as Franz von Papen did on the rise of Hitler.  Along with other members of Germany’s Conservative Party, and feeling the restlessness of the mases and the growth of the Nazis thanks to the depression, von Papen thought it smart to form a new government bringing the Nazis into a coalition government in a minority role, thinking the “adults” could contain Hitler. That lasted less than a year when the Nazis took control of the entire regime and the Conservatives disappeared,

In the U.S. the fascists are not a separate party, and we do not have coalition governments.  They were always on the fringe until 2016 until Trump beat all the traditional Republicans. And Mitch welcomed MAGA in as did the other spineless opportunists in the GOP and…well….they are now history.  In January we will have a MAGA White House and Congress. The leaders of both houses will be MAGA and McConnell is already toast. A lot of spooky similarities between these two historical moments. At least von Papen was indicted for war crimes at Nuremberg. When McConnell croaks, Kentucky will build monuments to him.  And remember, McConnell could have easily impeached Trump in Feb 2021 and disqualified him in office but chickened out. And I am not sure that would have worked either. The MAGA tribe was ready to lynch anybody who got in the way of their plans and who knows what kind of violent reaction it would have provoked.

Let’s very quickly turn to the media which will fall like dominoes to Trump. I don’t think I need to belabor this point.  American journalism roundly failed in covering Trump.  He was treated as sort of an amusing spectacle after NBC consciously created a totally false image of him for an unbearable 14 years!  Then as a candidate he was a rating bonanza applauded by the then CEO of CBS for bringing in the viewers.  And then once in power and during the last 4 years, the MSM refused to call him the fascist he is and pretended the election was just one more normal one and not a referendum on democracy. They will be obedient for sure, but Trump is going to come after them anyway because that is what his enraged base wants.

The population has lost trust in the media.  Newspapers are written in college level English and yet never reach any conclusion because every story reeks of he said/she said (“the blazing straddle”) leaving the reader in confusion. Broadcast news is obviously much quicker but more superficial. And on the web, we now have oligarchs running the major platforms. Facebook has long been suppressing spread of political content and any post that has outbound links.  And an unhinged Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a white supremacist propaganda arm of MAGA.  There are still some decent sites on the web but they are a mish mash and mixed with true loon stuff.  The media needs to re-invent itself but the timing is bad because they are about to be banged around by Trump.

Mostly, we have to accept we are going through a political re-alignment and today’s electorate is in intellectual decline, to say the least. They absorb much less true information.

Globalism has been a bust for most common people, though most Tesla’s are built in China (we’ll see about tariffs on that little enterprise). It has robbed people of their local identity and escalated loneliness and confusion about one’s role in life.  Worse, not only has globalism not brought us closer together, it has ratcheted up racism, nativism and xenophobia though the media clings to the euphemism of “the immigration issue.”

Those interested or engaged in social change need to pause and take a long look in the mirror as the decades-old strategies and terminologies are now out of phase with the times.  They have failed.  Our understandings are obsolete.

Yes, there is a class and economic division, but now there is also a severe education gap. A housing gap.  There is a gap between young and old. And there is tribalism on both sides that further obscures the picture.  A lot of our long-held assumptions are just plain wrong.

Just for example, there is no real evidence that Democrats pick up more votes when or if they move left but that is always the knee-jerk reply to any Democratic loss. Racial minorities are not automatic Democratic voters.  Blacks, black women, are the most loyal Democratic voters, but generally Blacks are conservative culturally.  They go to church more than others. 

If we continue as we have been doing, then forget about it. 

What then to do about the incoming administration? I have no recipes but rather some still inchoate thoughts. We don’t know how far Trump will get in his dictatorial desires.  Probably a lot more than we like, and a lot less than he thinks.

The MAGA House will have a tiny majority, and they have proven themselves a cat of bags, unreliable to even fund the government. We’ll see.

The institutions have been eroding but they are still there. Some of the federal judiciary and the state courts are not MAGA. 

Unless Trump goes full bore and brings the congress with him and puts the military in the streets, and suspends the constitution we are still going to have midterm elections. And if we do, that will be an important indicator of whether MAGA has been 100 percent consolidated or will Trump’s popularity erode over his first two years. It will also be a measure if the Democratic Party is dead or alive.

He's not going to be able to fulfill his promise of a better economy because he has no plan other than to put Mad Musk in charge of the “hard times and sacrifice ”Mr. Tesla has promised.

Trump might hate Obamacare but 50m Americans are on it and even some MAGA congress-members in vulnerable districts might balk on some of the most extreme measures to stay in office.

We still have half the country in opposition to Trump and right now we need to organize them. Community by community and stop relying on online organizations to do your work for you.

The first steps are to come out of denial about our own tribe’s mistakes and then refocus our work on real coalition building. And these must be non-partisan nonviolent community based organizations that network nationally and try to grow rather than exclude.  Those who think it was terrible that Liz Cheney endorsed Harris are not going to be comfortable with this because they are at heart sectarians who are part of our tribe. Too bad, you’re wrong.

It's not going to be an easy task to re-orient ourselves and we have to be nimble because we do not know yet who Trump is going to bring in and how much he is really going to do.  But whatever he does, we cannot sit still and just mourn. We have to start building this mutli-racial coalition next week after you have cried enough and are sober.

I have lived under military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, and they are no fun. I am not expecting draconian military rule here, I hope. If that comes to pass, we will need to shift strategy and tactics.  The starting point is solidarity and organizing and outreach and disassembling the tribal structure we have created for our ourselves.  That work needs to begin immediately, and we need to see some green shoots by Inauguration Day (please no pink hatted marches – they accomplish nothing).

And you have to be willing to make sacrifices.  I cannot count the number of Chilean friends and colleagues who were jailed, tortured and some disappeared. Those that survived went back out immediately to resume the fight, once again risking their lives and eventually forced Pinochet out of power.  So while I sympathize with your crying and sobbing and moaning over Trump’s election, it is not that impressive.  Millions of people facing much more harsh and dangerous conditions still found the courage to stand back up and fight.

Our first material task is organizing defense of those who are targeted for deportation. We need to take that threat along with all the others very seriously.

When and if we build our coalition, we need to develop a pro-active offer politically and not just be a “resistance.” 

One small anecdote to close with.  For years we used the term “socio-economic class.” Somewhere along the line “socio” got dropped.  We must retrieve it as economic inequality is tied to social mobility and culture and politics are all downstream from the above.

Don’t mourn, organize! And please do not clutter the debate with nitpicking about the campaign. Our dysfunction is much deeper and even lethal if we do not admit it and work to better our work.  Solidarity. Solidarity. + +

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