Understanding the United States of America (USA) - III

[Rishi Verma]

I see a very interesting trend among posters here who opposed Trump here, not just opposed but said many evil things about him, and predicted heavy defeat by some 83:17 margins.

Many of you continue to malign him.

He won the debates, primaries, and ec votes fair and square. Now Pls leave him alone without further insinuations, he is not as dumb and crazy as you guys are painting him. None of you know him personally and you will be proven wrong again.

He had assembled a great business team at one time and was going great guns. The whole team died in a helicopter crash somewhere and it was a big blow to him.

But he survived that and many other setbacks and now is elected president.

[Gus]

There's no shortage of idiocy and hypocrisy on both sides in US. Pretending that this is one sided is another form of hypocrisy.

yes but only one side constantly puts on a "holier than thou" mask, ain't it?

And what do you think is going on with the "o look at these liberals not accepting majority verdict" going on now?

[Lalmohan]

An isolationist america has no particular interest in the uk, eapecially one that is isolated in europe

The farage joker aside, i expect that theresa may is feeling a little nervous. I believe shri modi's call was taken before shrimati may's call

[Lalmohan]

In the levant dhaga i raised the need for us to study non-linear warfare

Just look at the heated passions on this thread alone - and what we see in our democracies

Division and arguement as a means for destabilising your opponent is a key pillar on non-linear warfare

This is not secret, its been an openly stated policy for some time

Lets focus our energies in learning

[Austin]

Keiser Report: Winners & Losers (US Election Day special E991)

[Singha]

Trump has decided reporters will not get to ride in his personal plane. this is a leaf from Namo book who only allows PTI and DD I think and rest can pay their way and go on own as they want.

predictably, howls of media being muzzled and "free" press being stomped.

[NRao]

He had assembled a great business team at one time and was going great guns. The whole team died in a helicopter crash somewhere and it was a big blow to him. ]

Loss in crash is very true.

BUT Trump blamed his NJ casinos failure on them too.

I agree with you that one needs to wait.

But he is fair game till then. Part of being internet analysts.

[Singha]

chalo ek bekaar ko to koi naya kaam mil gaya

barkha dutt ‏@BDUTT Oct 26
Happy to share official announcement from @washingtonpost about me joining them as a Contributor for Global Opinions

[Austin]

Barack Obama is a 'loathsome creature' who 'can't stand Britain', says Nigel Farage

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 09236.html

[Singha]

a writer named Monisha Rajesh for Guardian tweeted for DTs assassination and then deleted her account..but someone saved a screenshot

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/11/347278/

https://80trains.com/

[Viv S]

6:19 PM - 10 Nov 2016



3:14 AM - 11 Nov 2016

[Yagnasri]

One of the best i read for a long time.

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/s ... liberalism

Posted in full before it vanishes.



The smug style in American liberalism
by Emmett Rensin on April 21, 2016
There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.

The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt
The consequence was a shift in liberalism's intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.

It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.

The origins of this shift are overdetermined. Richard Nixon bears a large part of the blame, but so does Bill Clinton. The Southern Strategy, yes, but the destruction of labor unions, too. I have my own sympathies, but I do not propose to adjudicate that question here.

Suffice it to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition?

Why did they abandon us?

What's the matter with Kansas?

The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all.

Learn more


How politics makes us stupid

The trouble is that stupid hicks don't know what's good for them. They're getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest.

As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty breakup knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.

The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:

Study finds Daily Show viewers more informed than viewers of Fox News.


They're beating CNN watchers too.

NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.

You're better off watching nothing than watching Fox. He likes that even more.

The good news doesn't stop.

Liberals aren't just better informed. They're smarter.

They've got better grammar. They know more words.

Smart kids grow up to be liberals, while conservatives reason like drunks.

Liberals are better able to process new information; they're less biased like that. They've got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They've got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.

The smug style created a feedback loop. If the trouble with conservatives was ignorance, then the liberal impulse was to correct it. When such corrections failed, disdain followed after it.

Of course, there is a smug style in every political movement: elitism among every ideology believing itself in possession of the solutions to society's ills. But few movements have let the smug tendency so corrupt them, or make so tenuous its case against its enemies.

"Conservatives are always at a bit of a disadvantage in the theater of mass democracy," the conservative editorialist Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review last October, "because people en masse aren't very bright or sophisticated, and they're vulnerable to cheap, hysterical emotional appeals."

The smug style thinks Williamson is wrong, of course, but not in principle. It's only that he's confused about who the hordes of stupid, hysterical people are voting for. The smug style reads Williamson and says, "No! You!"

Elites, real elites, might recognize one another by their superior knowledge. The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing.

Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you're actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn't know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.

The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing. It is the smug style's first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. A politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from "imposing their morals" like the bad guys do.

Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style's culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn't get them. A culture that has come to replace politics itself.

The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important, but go no further: What is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch links and mockery at those who don't. The Good Facts are enough: Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns.

The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism "is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition," that "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse ... do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing
Richard Hofstadter, the historian whose most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this essay exists in some obvious reference to, advanced a similar line in writing not so well-remembered today. His then-influential history writing drips with disdain for rubes who regard themselves as victimized by economics and history, who have failed to maintain correct political attitudes.

But 60 years ago, American liberalism relied too much on the support of working people to let these ideas take too much hold. Even its elitists, its Schlesingers and Bells, were tempered by the power of the labor movement, by the role Marxism still played in even liberal politics — forces too powerful to allow non-elite concerns to entirely escape the liberal mental horizon. Walter Reuther, and Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph were still in the room, and they mattered.


Sixty years ago, the ugliest tendencies were still private, too. The smug style belonged to real elites, knowing in their cocktail parties, far from the ears of rubes. But today we have television, and the internet, and a liberalism worked out in universities and think tanks. Today, the better part of liberalism is Trillings — or those who'd like to be, at any rate — and everyone can hear them.

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court found that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment. After decades of protests, legislation, setbacks, and litigation, the 13 states still holding out against the inevitable were ordered to relent. Kim Davis, a clerk tasked with issuing marriage licenses to couples in her Kentucky county, refused.

At the distance of six months, it is surprising that she was, beyond a few short-lived and empty efforts, the only civil bureaucrat to do so. One imagines a hundred or a thousand Kim Davises in the country, small administrators with small power, outraged by the collapse of a moral fight that they were winning just a few years prior.

In the days between the June decision and the July 1 announcement that the American Civil Liberties Union would represent four couples who had been denied marriage licenses by the Rowan County Clerk's office, many braced for resistance. Surely compliance would come hard in some places. Surely, some of the losers would refuse to give up. There was something giddy about it — at long last, the good guys would be the ones bearing down with the full force of the law.

It did not take long for the law to correct Davis. On August 12, a judge ordered a stay, preventing Davis from refusing any further under the protection of the law. The Sixth Circuit, and then the Supreme Court, refused to hear her appeal.

Despite further protest and Davis's ultimate jailing for contempt of court, normal service was restored in short order. The 23,000 people of Rowan Country suffered, all told, slightly less than seven weeks without a functioning civil licensure apparatus.

Davis remained a fixation. Dour, rural, thrice divorced but born again — Twitter could not have invented a better parody of the uncool. She was ridiculed for her politics but also for her looks — that she had been married so many times was inexplicable! That she thought she had the slightest grasp of the Constitution, doubly so.

When Davis was jailed for five days following her refusal to comply with the court order, many who pride themselves on having a vastly more compassionate moral foundation than Davis cheered the imprisonment of a political foe.

The ridicule of Davis became so pronounced that even smug circles, always on the precipice of self-reproach, began eventually to rein in the excess. Mocking her appearance, openly celebrating the incarceration of an ideological opponent — these were not good looks.


Kim Davis at a rally in September 2015 (Ty Wright/Getty Images)

But a more fundamental element of smug disdain for Kim Davis went unchallenged: the contention, at bottom, that Davis was not merely wrong in her convictions, but that her convictions were, in themselves, an error and a fraud.

That is: Kim Davis was not only on the wrong side of the law. She was not even a subscriber to a religious ideology that had found itself at moral odds with American culture. Rather, she was a subscriber to nothing, a hateful bigot who did not even understand her own religion.

Christianity, as many hastened to point out, is about love. Christ commands us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. If the Bible took any position on the issue at all, it was that divorce, beloved by Davis, was a sin, and that she was a hypocrite masquerading among the faithful.

How many of these critiques were issued by atheists?

This, more than anything I can recall in recent American life, is an example of the smug style. Many liberals do not believe that evangelical Christianity ought to guide public life; many believe, moreover, that the moral conceits of that Christianity are wrong, even harmful to society. But to the smug liberal, it isn't that Kim Davis is wrong. How can she be? She's only mistaken. She just doesn't know the Good Facts, even about her own religion. She's angry and confused, another hick who's not with it.

It was an odd thing to assert in the case of Christianity, a religion that until recently was taken to be another shibboleth of the uncool, not a loving faith misunderstood by bigots. But this is knowing: knowing that the new line on Jesus is that the homophobes just don't get their own faith.

Kim Davis was behind the times. Her beliefs did not represent a legitimate challenge to liberal consensus because they did not represent a challenge at all: They were incoherent, at odds with the Good Facts. Google makes every man a theologian.

This, I think, is fundamental to understanding the smug style. If good politics and good beliefs are just Good Facts and good tweets — that is, if there is no ideology beyond sensible conclusions drawn from a rational assessment of the world — then there are no moral fights, only lying liars and the stupid rubes who believe them.

When Davis was first released from county jail, Mike Huckabee went to meet her. But the smug style sees no true ideology there, no moral threat to contend with. Only a huckster and a hick: one to be ridiculed, and the other to be refuted. What more, the smug man posts, could there be to say about it? They're idiots! Look, look: This Onion article nails it.

Popular story:

Adlai Stevenson, Democratic candidate for president, is on parade. A band is playing. Onlookers cheer. He waves to the crowd.

A woman shouts: "Gov. Stevenson, you have the vote of every thinking person in this country!"

Stevenson replies: "Thank you, ma'am, but we need a majority."


The smug style says to itself, Yeah. I really am one of the few thinking people in this country, aren't I?

In November of last year, during the week when it became temporarily fashionable for American governors to declare that Syrian refugees would not be welcome in their state, Hamilton Nolan wrote an essay for Gawker called "Dumb Hicks Are America's Greatest Threat."

If there has ever been a tirade so dedicated to the smug style, to the proposition that it is neither malice, nor capital, nor ideological difference, but rather the backward stupidity of poor people that has ruined the state of American policy, then it is hidden beyond our view, in some uncool place, far from the front page of Gawker.

Learn more


Why have weddings and houses gotten so ridiculously expensive? Blame inequality.

"Many of America's political leaders are warning of the dangers posed by Syrian refugees. They are underestimating, though, the much greater danger: dumbass hicks, in charge of things," Nolan wrote. "...You, our elected officials, are embarrassing us. All of us, except your fellow dumb hicks, who voted for you in large numbers. You — our racist, xenophobic, knuckle-dragging ignorant leaders — are making us look bad in front of the guests (the whole world). You are the bad cousin in the family who always ruins Thanksgiving. Go in the back room and drink a can of beer alone please."

Among the dumb hicks Nolan identifies are "many Southern mayors" and "many lesser known state representatives." He cites the Ku Klux Klan — "exclusively dumbass hicks," he writes. "100%," he emphasizes — despite the fact that the New York Times, in an investigation of white supremacist members of Stormfront.org, found that "the top reported interest of Stormfront members is reading." That they are "news and political junkies." Despite the fact that if "you come compare Stormfront users to people who go to the Yahoo News site, it turns out that the Stormfront crowd is twice as likely to visit nytimes.com."

"They have long threads praising Breaking Bad and discussing the comparative merits of online dating sites, like Plenty of Fish and OKCupid," the Times reports.

In another piece, published later the same month, Nolan wrote that "Inequality of wealth — or, if you like, the distribution of wealth in our society in a way that results in poverty — is not just one issue among many. It is the root from which blooms nearly all major social problems."

He's right about that. But who does he imagine is responsible for this inequality? The poor? The dumb? The hicks?

Hamilton Nolan isn't stupid. He has even, lately, argued that even the worst of the rubes must be allies in class struggle. Yet the trouble is still swallowing what "******" those people are.

Nolan is perhaps the funniest and most articulate of those pointing fingers at the "dumbass hicks," but he isn't alone. It is evidently intolerable to a huge swath of liberalism to confess the obvious: that those responsible have homes in Brooklyn, too. That they buy the same smartphones. That they too are on Twitter. That the oligarchs are making fun of stupid poor people too. That they're better at it, and always will be.

No: The trouble must be out there, somewhere. In the country. Where the idiots are; where the hicks are too stupid to know where problems blossom.

"To the dumb hick leaders of America, I say: (nothing). You wouldn't listen anyhow," Nolan writes. "My words would go in one ear and right out the other. Like talking to an old block of wood."

It's a shame. They might be receptive to his concerns about poverty.

If there is a single person who exemplifies the dumbass hick in the smug imagination, it is former President George W. Bush. He's got the accent. He can't talk right. He seems stupefied by simple concepts, and his politics are all gee-whiz Texas ignorance. He is the ur-hick. He is the enemy.

He got all the way to White House, and he's still being taken for a ride by the scheming rightwing oligarchs around him — just like those poor rubes in Kansas. If only George knew Dick Cheney wasn't acting in his own best interests!

It is worth considering that Bush is the son of a president, a patrician born in Connecticut and educated at Andover and Harvard and Yale.

It is worth considering that he does not come from a family known for producing poor minds.


It is worth considering that beginning with his 1994 gubernatorial debate against Ann Richards, and at every juncture thereafter, opponents have been defeated after days of media outlets openly speculating whether George was up to the mental challenge of a one-on-one debate.

"Throughout his short political career," ABC's Katy Textor wrote on the eve of the 2000 debates against Al Gore, "Bush has benefited from low expectations of his debating abilities. The fact that he skipped no less than three GOP primary debates, and the fact that he was reluctant to agree to the Commission on Presidential Debates proposal, has done little to contradict the impression of a candidate uncomfortable with this unavoidable fact of campaign life."

"Done little to contradict."


George W. Bush and Al Gore during a presidential debate in 2000. (Tannen Maury/AFP/Getty Images)

On November 6, 2000, during his final pre-election stump speech, Bush explained his history of political triumph thusly: "They misunderesimated me."

What an idiot. American liberals made fun of him for that one for years.

It is worth considering that he didn't misspeak.


He did, however, deliberately cultivate the confusion. He understood the smug style. He wagered that many liberals, eager to see their opponents as intellectually deficient, would buy into the act and thereby miss the more pernicious fact of his moral deficits.

He wagered correctly. Smug liberals said George was too stupid to get elected, too stupid to get reelected, too stupid to pass laws or appoint judges or weather a political fight. Liberals misunderestimated George W. Bush all eight years of his presidency.

George W. Bush is not a dumbass hick. In eight years, all the sick Daily Show burns in the world did not appreciably undermine his agenda.

The smug mind defends itself against these charges. Oh, we're just having fun, it says. We don't mean it. This is just for a laugh, it's just a joke, stop being so humorless.

It is exasperating, after all, to have to live in a country where so many people are so aggressively wrong about so much, they say. You go on about ideology and shibboleths and knowing, but we are right on the issues, aren't we? We are right on social policy and right on foreign policy and right on evolution, and same-sex marriage, and climate change too. Surely that's what matters.

We don't really mean they're all stupid — but hey, lay off. We're not smug! This is just how we vent our frustration. Otherwise it would be too depressing having to share a country with these people!

We have long passed the point where blithe ridicule of the American right can be credibly cast as private stress relief and not, for instance, the animating public strategy of an entire wing of the liberal culture apparatus. The Daily Show, as it happens, is not the private entertainment of elites blowing off some steam. It is broadcast on national television.

Twitter isn't private. Not that anybody with the sickest burn to accompany the smartest chart would want it to be. Otherwise, how would everyone know how in-the-know you are?

The rubes have seen your videos. You posted it on their wall.

Still don't get why liberal opinion is correct? This video settles the debate for good.

I have been wondering for a long time how it is that so many entries to the op-ed pages take it as their justifying premise that they are arguing for a truth that has never been advanced before.

We have long passed the point where blithe ridicule of the American right can be credibly cast as private stress relief
"It's an accepted, nearly unchallenged assumption that Muslim communities across the U.S. have a problem — that their youth tend toward violent ideology, or are susceptible to "radicalization" by groups like the Islamic State," began an editorial that appeared last December in the New York Times. But "after all," it goes on, "the majority of mass shootings in America are perpetrated by white men but no one questions what might have radicalized them in their communities."

But this contention — that Muslims possess superlative violent tendencies — has been challenged countless times, hasn't it? It was challenged here, and here and here as far back as 9/11. The president of the United State challenged it on national television the night before this editorial was published. The Times itself did too. The myopic provincialism of anybody who believes that Muslims are a uniquely violent people is the basis of a five-year-old Onion headline, not some new moral challenge.

The smug style leaves its adherents no other option: If an idea has failed to take hold, if the Good Facts are not widely accepted, then the problem must be that these facts have not yet reached the disbelievers.


In December 2015, Public Policy Polling found that 30 percent of Republicans were in favor of bombing Agrabah, the Arab-sounding fictional city from Disney's Aladdin. Hilarious.

PPP has run joke questions before, of course: polling the popularity of Deez Nuts, or asking after God's job approval. But these questions, at least, let their audience in on the gag. Now liberalism is deliberately setting up the last segment of the population actually willing to endure a phone survey in service of what it knew would make for some hilarious copy when the rubes inevitably fell for it. This is not a survey in service of a joke — it is a survey in service of a human punchline.

As if only Republicans covered up gaps in their knowledge by responding to what they assume is a good-faith question by guessing from their general principles.

It may be easy to mistake with the private venting of frustrated elites, but the rubes can read the New York Times, too. It is not where liberals whisper to each other about the secret things that go unchallenged. Poll respondents are not the secret fodder for a joke.

Learn more


"Late-breaking sexism": why younger women aren’t excited about electing a woman president

This is the consequence of "private" venting, and it is the consequence of knowing too: If good politics comes solely from good data and good sense, it cannot be that large sections of the American public are merely wrong about so many vital things. It cannot be that they have heard our arguments but rejected them — that might mean we must examine our own methods of persuasion.

No: it is only that the wrong beliefs are unchallenged — that their believers are trapped in "information bubbles" and confirmation bias. That no one knows the truth, except the New York Times (or Vox). If only we could tell them, question them, show them this graph. If they don't get it then, well, then they're hopeless.

The smug style plays out in private too, of course. If you haven't started one yourself, you've surely seen the Facebook threads: Ten or 20 of Brooklyn's finest gather to say how exasperated they are, these days, by the stupidity of the American public.

"I just don't know what to do about these people," one posts. "I think we have to accept that a lot of people are just misinformed!" replies another. "Like, I think they actually don't want to know anything that would undermine their worldview."

They tend to do it in the comment section, under an article about how conservatives are difficult to persuade because they isolate themselves in mutually reinforcing information bubbles.

What have been the consequences of the smug style?

It has become a tradition for the smug, in editorials and essay and confident Facebook boasting, to assume that the presidential debates will feature their candidate, in command of the facts, wiping the floor with the empty huckster ignorance of their Republican opponent.

It was popularly assumed, for a time, that George W. Bush was too stupid to be elected president.

The smug believed the same of Ronald Reagan.


John Yoo, the architect of the Bush administration's torture policies, escaped The Daily Show unscathed. Liberals wondered what to do when Jon Stewart fails. What would success look like? Were police waiting in the wings, a one-way ticket to the Hague if Stewart nailed him?

It would be unfair to say that the smug style has never learned from these mistakes. But the lesson has been, We underestimated how many people could be fooled.

That is: We underestimated just how dumb these dumb hicks really are.

We just didn't get our message to them. They just stayed in their information bubble. We can't let the lying liars keep lying to these people — but how do we reach these idiots who only trust Fox?


Rarely: Maybe they're savvier than we thought. Maybe they're angry for a reason.

As it happens, reasons aren't too difficult to come by.

During a San Francisco fundraiser in the 2008 primary campaign, Barack Obama offered an observation that was hailed not without some glee as the first unforced error from then-Senator Cool.

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania," Obama said, "and, like, a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

It's the latter part that we remember eight years later — the clinging to guns and religion and hate — but it is the first part that was important: the part about lost jobs and neglect by two presidential administrations.

Obama's observation was not novel.

The notion that material loss and abandonment have driven America's white working class into a fit of resentment is boilerplate for even the Democratic Party's tepid left these days. But in the president's formulation and in the formulation of smug stylists who have embraced some material account of uncool attitudes, the downturn, the jobs lost and the opportunities narrowed, are a force of nature — something that has "been happening" in the passive voice.

If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are they voting against their own self-interest?
This, I suspect, will one day become the Republican Party's rationale for addressing climate change: Look, we don't know how the dead hooker wound up in the hotel room. But she's here now, that's undeniable, so we've gotta get rid of the body.

Today, it is the excuse of American smug mind: Where did all of these poor people come from?

If pressed for an answer, I suppose they would say Republicans, elected by rubes voting against their own self-interest. Reagan, Gingrich, Bush — all those Bad Fact–knowing halfwits who were too dumb to get elected to anything.

Well, sure. In the past 30 years of American life, the Republican Party has dedicated itself to replacing every labor law with a photo of Ronald Reagan's face.

But this does not excuse liberals beating full retreat to the colleges and the cities, abandoning the dispossessed to their fate. It does not excuse surrendering a century of labor politics in the name of electability. It does not excuse gazing out decades later to find that those left behind are not up on the latest thought and deciding, We didn't abandon them. The idiots didn't want to be saved.

It was not Ronald Reagan who declared the era of big government. It was not the GOP that decided the coastally based, culturally liberal industries of technology, Hollywood, and high finance were the future of the American economy.


If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are they voting against their own self-interest? But no party these past decades has effectively represented the interests of these dispossessed. Only one has made a point of openly disdaining them too.

Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the smug in turn.


The rubes noticed that liberal Democrats, distressed by the notion that Indiana would allow bakeries to practice open discrimination against LGBTQ couples, threatened boycotts against the state, mobilizing the considerable economic power that comes with an alliance of New York and Hollywood and Silicon Valley to punish retrograde Gov. Mike Pence, but had no such passion when the same governor of the same state joined 21 others in refusing the Medicaid expansion. No doubt good liberals objected to that move too. But I've yet to see a boycott threat about it.

Early in the marriage equality fight, activists advanced the theory that when people discovered a friend or relative was gay, they became far more likely to support gay rights. They were correct. These days it is difficult for anybody in a position of liberal power — whether in business, or government, or media — to avoid having openly gay colleagues, colleagues whom they like and whom they'd like to help.

But few opinion makers fraternize with the impoverished. Few editors and legislators and Silicon Valley heroes have dinner with the lovely couple on food stamps down the road, much less those scraping by in Indiana.

If any single event provided the direct impetus for this essay, it was a running argument I had with an older, liberal writer over the seriousness of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Since June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, this writer has taken it upon himself each day to tell his Facebook followers that Donald Trump is a bad kind of dude.

That saying as much was the key to stopping him and his odious followers too.

"Ridicule is the most powerful weapon we have against any of our enemies," he told me in the end, "but especially against the ones who, not incorrectly, take it so personally and lash out in ways that shine klieg lights on those very flaws we detest.

"If you're laughing at someone, you're certainly not respecting him."

"Anyway," he went on, "I'm done talking to you. We see the world differently. I'm fine with that. We don't need to be friends."

Ridicule is the most effective political tactic.


Ridicule is especially effective when it's personal and about expressing open disdain for stupid, bad people.


Political legitimacy is granted by the respect of elite liberals.


You can't be legitimate if you're the butt of our jokes.


If you don't agree, we can't work together politically.


We can't even be friends, because politics is social.


Because politics is performative — if we don't mock together, we aren't on the same side.


If there is a bingo card for the smug style somewhere, then cross off every square. You've won.

I would be less troubled if I did not believe that the smug style has captured an enormous section of American liberalism. If I believed that its politics, as practiced by its supporters, extended beyond this line of thought. If this were an exception.

But even as many have come around to the notion that Trump is the prohibitive favorite for his party's nomination, the smug interpretation has been predictable: We only underestimated how hateful, how stupid, the Republican base can be.


A Donald Trump rally in Pittsburgh. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Trump capturing the nomination will not dispel the smug style; if anything, it will redouble it. Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the ****** happened?

On March 20, Salon's David Masciotra wrote that if Trump "actually had the strength to articulate uncomfortable and inconvenient truths, he would turn his favorite word — 'loser' — €”not on full-time professionals in the press, but on his supporters."

Masciotra goes on:

Journalists found that in the counties where Trump is most dominant, there are large numbers of white high school dropouts, and unemployed people no longer looking for work. An alliance with the incoherent personality cult of Donald Trump's candidacy correlates strongly with failure to obtain a high school diploma, and withdrawal from the labor force. The counties also have a consistent history of voting for segregationists, and have an above average percentage of its residents living in mobile homes.

The kicker: "Many conservatives, and even some kindhearted liberals, might object to the conclusions one can draw from the data as stereotyping, but the empirical evidence leaves little choice. Donald Trump's supporters confirm the stereotype against them."

Here's the conclusion I draw: If Donald Trump has a chance in November, it is because the knowing will dictate our strategy. Unable to countenance the real causes of their collapse, they will comfort with own impotence by shouting, "Idiots!" again and again, angrier and angrier, the handmaidens of their own destruction.

The smug style resists empathy for the unknowing. It denies the possibility of a politics whereby those who do not share knowing culture, who do not like the right things or know the Good Facts or recognize the intellectual bankruptcy of their own ideas can be worked with, in spite of these differences, toward a common goal.

It is this attitude that has driven the dispossessed into the arms of a candidate who shares their fury. It is this attitude that may deliver him the White House, a "serious" threat, a threat to be mocked and called out and hated, but not to be taken seriously.

The wages of smug is Trump.

Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. That for every overpowered study finding superior liberal open-mindedness and intellect and knowledge, there is one to suggest that Republicans have the better of these qualities.

Most damning, perhaps, to the fancy liberal self-conception: Republicans score higher in susceptibility to persuasion. They are willing to change their minds more often.

The Republican coalition tends toward the center: educated enough, smart enough, informed enough.

The Democratic coalition in the 21st century is bifurcated: It has the postgraduates, but it has the disenfranchised urban poor as well, a group better defined by race and immigration status than by class. There are more Americans without high school diplomas than in possession of doctoral degrees. The math proceeds from there.

The smug style takes this as a defense. Elite liberalism, and the Democratic Party by extension, cannot hate poor people, they say. We aren't smug! Just look at our coalition. These aren't rubes. Just look at our embrace of their issues.

But observe how quickly professed concern for the oppressed becomes another shibboleth for the smug, another kind of knowing. Mere awareness of these issues becomes the most important thing, the capacity to articulate them a new subset of Correct Facts.

Everyone in the know has read "The Case for Reparations," but it was the reading and performed admiration that counted, praised in the same breath as, "It is a better history than an actual case for actually paying, of course..."

Pretend for a moment that all of it is true. That the smug style apprehended the world as it really is, that knowing — or knowing, no inflection — did make our political divide. That the problem is the rubes. That the dumbass hicks are to blame. They can't help it: Their brains don't work. They isolate themselves from all the Good Facts, and they're being taken for a ride by con men.

Pretend the ridicule worked too: that the videos and the Twitter burns and destroying the opposition made all the bad guys go away.

What kind of world would it leave us? An endless cycle of jokes? Of sick burns and smart tweets and knowing? Relative to whom? The smug style demands an object of disdain; it would find a new one quickly.

It is central to the liberal self-conception that what separates them from reactionaries is a desire to help people, a desire to create a fairer and more just world. Liberals still want, or believe they still want, to make a more perfect union.

Whether you believe they are deluded or not, whether you believe this project is worthwhile in any form or not, what I am trying to tell you is that the smug style has fundamentally undermined even the aspiration, that it has made American liberalism into the worst version of itself.

It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people from the duty to respect them. It becomes all at once too easy to decide you know best, to never hear, much less ignore, protest to the contrary.

At present, many of those most in need of the sort of help liberals believe they can provide despise liberalism, and are despised in turn. Is it surprising that with each decade, the "help" on offer drifts even further from the help these people need?

It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people from the duty to respect them
Even if the two could be separated, would it be worth it? What kind of political movement is predicated on openly disdaining the very people it is advocating for?

The smug style, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. Further: It is a failure to believe that empathy has any value at all. It is the notion that anybody worthy of liberal time and attention and respect must capitulate, immediately, to the Good Facts.

If they don't (and they won't) you're free to write them off and mock them. When they suffer, it's their just desserts.

Make no mistake: I am not suggesting that liberals adopt a fuzzy, gentler version of their politics. I am not suggesting they compromise their issues for the sake of playing nice. What I am suggesting is that the battles waged by liberalism have drifted far away from their old egalitarian intentions.

I am suggesting that open disdain for the people they say they want to help has led them to stop helping those people, too.

I am suggesting that in the case of a Kim Davis, liberalism resist the impulse to go beyond the necessary legal fight and explicitly delight in punishing an old foe.

I am suggesting that they instead wonder what it might be like to have little left but one's values; to wake up one day to find your whole moral order destroyed; to look around and see the representatives of a new order call you a stupid, hypocritical hick without bothering, even, to wonder how your corner of your poor state found itself so alienated from them in the first place. To work with people who do not share their values or their tastes, who do not live where they live or like what they like or know their Good Facts or their jokes.

This is not a call for civility. Manners are not enough. The smug style did not arise by accident, and it cannot be abolished with a little self-reproach. So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further. They will choose the smug style.

Maybe the cycle is too deeply set already. Perhaps the divide, the disdain, the whole crack-up are inevitable. But if liberal good intentions are to make a play for a better future, they cannot merely recognize the ways they've come to hate their former allies. They must begin to mend the ways they lost them in the first place.

Emmett Rensin is deputy First Person editor at Vox.

[Singha]

[Singha]

is that huge blue shift state on the left colorado?

DT engineered a massive red shift around the great lakes , dakota plains and mississippi and ohio river valleys and down the appalachian states.

rest of the states did not shift much either way except the union territory, that center of the universe, SFO !!

[TSJones]

is that huge blue shift state on the left colorado?

DT engineered a massive red shift around the great lakes , dakota plains and mississippi and ohio river valleys and down the appalachian states.

rest of the states did not shift much either way except the union territory, that center of the universe, SFO !!

he didn't engineer it. it was laying there on the ground ready to be harvested.

those folks were economically slaughtered by globalism among other things.

he was the only one to bother even mentioning it, so he got it,

[bharotshontan]

Please put all your posts in this thread in one post as its has something to chew on for people outside the forum.

Will do. Following are my posts in this thread:

In America there is a generic social caste system:
1) WASP hetero male
2) Black/Afram hetero male
3) Latino male
4) White women
5) Latino women
6) Black women
7) White LGBT
8. Non-white LGBT

Within that it had lately become fashionable (in media and social media) to gloss over differing interests of castes 2-8 and present it as one unified voice vs the interest of caste 1. Truth is that at base level this doesn't work. In strongly Democrat California for example, castes 1-6 ganged up against LGBTs wrt gay marriage during Proposition 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californi ... n_8_(2008)

This election, a key statistic to keep in mind is that Trump got less aggregate votes than Romney or McCain. So what this proves is that it isn't exactly that the vote of caste 1 showed up to the booths more than usual, it is that the voters of castes 2-8 that were all equally excited about Obama (caste 2) being elected were not equally excited about Hillary (caste 4). Yes Hillary won the popular vote, but she didn't get anywhere close to what Obama ever got. Obama never got the votes of caste 1. In fact the same white-working-class group that has supposedly catapulted Trump this election also only gave <30% of their vote to Obama. It is more that castes-2 and 3 and by some extension castes 5 and 6 abandoned Hillary.

US SJW media had a tremendous loss of face during the Prop 8 as it was shown that it was highly religious Christian black community which had shot down gay rights in California. They are going to face a similar but greater loss of face this election. This SJW brand is fooling themselves into thinking that the various castes are somehow united in their common hatred towards caste 1. At the crass level, the open xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia one can experience from castes 2 and 3 is currently at much higher levels than what one can expect from caste 1 (this might change in coming days). Basically this projected alliance of diverging interest groups is bound to fail.

I didn't put Asian males and females in this caste hierarchy as we are too minuscule to fall anywhere in there in terms of political power. We're the equivalent of Parsees, i.e. economically important but not politically.

Yup. This was always a battle of attrition to see who less support in terms of the vote compared to Obama and Romney. Trump won that battle even though as you rightly point out he secured less total votes than McCain or Romney. As was expected given the unpopularity of both the candidates, the third party vote was also significantly higher compared to 2012.

Yes I noticed this firsthand at the local barbershops. Blacks and Latinos don't really care for white feminism which they see as a elite white establishment thing. Nothing of the sort of how middle-class blacks were pooling together hard-earned salary money to rent school buses to bring blacks in ghettos and projects out to voting stations in 2008 and 2012 happened this year. I think it is a mistake to interpret this election as "America got more racist". No, so-called "racist" was always there. America just showed that it is "misogynist" and the white-women-feminist caste are expected to be allies to black-male caste, but not vice-versa. Over the next few days, there will be tons of finger pointing articles coming out regarding this. First white-feminists will accuse blacks of misogyny with lot of sweet lacing as to how they are not coming at this from a racial pov but a gender-pov. Then blacks will defend themselves playing race card. Then black-feminists will accuse the generic-feminist movement of being racial and also blacks of being misogynist. Nowadays there are all kinds of hilarious identities popping up like "black Muslim-convert lesbian": http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2013 ... slim-south
Basically this SJW movement is coming towards a collapse now that people are recognizing that each interest group knows what it wants and nobody is nobody's "ally".

Also the spread..What would the Indian-American or even Asian American population share be if we took out all of us living in solid blue, or solid red areas? Places like CA, NY, NJ, TX, WA etc.

Exactly, and the only place where we mattered in this regard was Fairfax County in Virginia where Trump sent his daughter the other day to celebrate Diwali. Fairfax has some 20,000 Indian-American families. Either way Virginia overall and Fairfax county went to Clinton, but there was at least a photo-op attempt made where we could have mattered. Otherwise you're correct, most of the battleground states have the more "core" US demographic groups and Asians are a non-entity there numerically.

And then I entered a conversation with regards to differentiation between interests of India and interests of Indian-Americans and whether the latter is even a worthy investment as a diasporic demographic in the interests of the larger mass of Indian people. Just some personal info I feel would be relevant, I moved to the US in class 9 with parents, so I am personally significantly more assimilated in my day-to-day life. In addition to the above, we also moved to a part of the country that is completely top-to-bottom non-WASP. It is completely Hispanic and Afro-Caribbean demographically and WASPs could be counted in the single digits out of thousands. Therefore I am extremely familiar with the upcoming demographics of US, which I feel most other Desis are not because they follow the technology corridor gravy train and contain themselves within white suburbia of Northeast/California etc. The minor segment of our population that is interacting with blacks and Latinos on a day to day level is the gas-station and motel owners in downtowns, but even this is a different experience as they are used to seeing white upper-middle-class and white/black/Latin poor class, while I am familiar with black/Latin upper-middle-class and black/Latin poor class. Because my US life does not involve a simple binary of Desi-white but I exist in Desi-white plus also Desi-black, Desi-Latin, etc where the Desi is the central element and others are peripheral, I think I offer a different perspective compared to people only familiar in the white-centric Desi-white continuum.

I think Asians must start voting their "class" in places like Kalifornikashun, if the Evangelical wackos are sidelined in the Elephants and it turns into a economic and social conservative party minus the religious nutcase fringe and the attendant shrill idiocy like letting religious beliefs intrude and supplant science and logic.

What is the goal in this besides empowerment of Indian-Americans? Bigger question I might ask...is it a zero-sum game wrt India's rise in economic power, living standards, HDI, etc vs America's position at the top? If it is indeed a zero-sum game, then it is better to have Indian-Americans not bat too hard for the larger whole of where they live but rather remain politically on the peripheries (thus emotionally not invested into whether US does well or not).

They and more importantly their Children are fully paid up American citizens. They better be politically and emotionally engaged with the US and be well invested in it's success and prosperity. And they must make sure that they punch their weight and more.

I understand the obvious. I was wondering if India's return to wealth is a zero-sum game with regard to US future. Lot of Europeans were also floating around in various Indian kingdoms from 1500-1700 serving in individual capacities as mercenaries and traders. Most of the earlier ones near the beginning were assimilating emotionally, but as European political and economic power rose up and Indian wealth went down, those that were borderline in assimilation began extricating themselves and seeing themselves as colonists. I'm not asking about a moral argument of "better do xyz", I am asking is it a zero sum game or not. Past history suggests so more or less.

great example that. the 1st waves europeans in india did indeed go native and some took up local wives and concubines.

Yes I was comparing Rudyard Kipling (India born) vs Antony Firingee. It is clear how the wealth disparity within the different centuries of their existence made a difference as to their attitudes.

At this point in time, I don't know if it is possible for Indian-Americans to become a viable power-center in US society or not. There is a tremendous cultural dissonance between the American-born or raised-in-US<10y.o. vs those that come later in life either as professionals or grad students and then stay on as professionals. I am intimately familiar with plenty of Hispanic families and amount of language retention among Hispanics is 100% even in 3rd/4th generation compared to Indians. For most Indians, I'm seeing zero language retention. Depending on a whole host of social factors, the kids will either have an inferiority complex about their ethnic origin due to the dissonance from their parents and also how different they feel when they visit India and interact with cousins etc. Those not doing arranged marriages are under no natural pressure that other demographics largely do maintain to date within one's race (look at Mindy Project). It seems like there is either the option of marrying someone with caste/gotra/rashi/sun-moon-alignment lined up (which restricts you to 0.5% within Indian community) vs marry white, which is also a default-other as if assimilating couldn't mean marrying blacks or Latins or Chinese-Americans.

This is from US Census 2001, I understand a lot has changed since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Americans

The 2001 U.S. Census Bureau’s publication of the 56,497,000 married couples, shows that overall the percentage of Indian males married to White females (7.1%) was higher than Indian females marrying with White males (3.7%); whilst for those who were US born the reverse was true with more Indian females marrying with White males (39.1%) than Indian males married to White females (27.3%).[79]

You do not create a sustainable demographic if your out-marriage rate is something obnoxious like that for both boys and girls. Once again, the more Indian-Americans invest into the US, the more they are heading towards their bloodlines assimilating into white-American ocean and not building a stable Indian demographic. At least according to 2001 census, there is more Antony Firingee than Rudyard Kipling. Now is that a good thing or bad thing, I don't know. At an individual level it doesn't matter whether my 4-generations-down line is blue-eyed-blond with curly hair and Chinese-shaped eyes and worshipping Christ and doesn't understand a word of any Indian languages...question is if that is the path for an Indian-American anyway, then does it matter towards India's upliftment? How Indian-Americans vote, does that have any relevance towards the mass of 1.25 Indian people?

On topic of election rigging, there's a show on Netflix called Scandal that I got suckered into watching, but its pretty interesting and gives a good idea of the deep state and how it functions. Not sure if I'd say highly recommend watching, but its better timepass than most bhaiwood movies

[Singha]

Students at Royal Oak Middle School in Michigan started chanting “build the wall!” during a lunch period following Trump’s election. Shawn Lewis-Lakin, superintendent of Royal Oak Schools, confirmed the episode, saying in a statement that a “small group of students” briefly chanted the phrase Wednesday.

“Yesterday, November 9, 2016, there was an incident during one of the lunches at Royal Oak Middle School that was captured on video and posted to social media,” the statement read. “In the incident a small group of students engaged in a brief ‘build the wall’ chant. School personnel in the cafeteria responded when this occurred.”

[vijayk]

Voted for Gore and Obama twice

Democrats/Liberals are putting Liberalism to shame.

[ramana]

Philip and Lalmohan while reading the Nick Farage suggestion about England having an opportunity post Brexit and Trump election in US, I recalled George Bernard Shaw's old play "The Apple Cart".

Do dig it up and think about it.

GBS writes the play that a future King of England decide to merge back with the American colonies and creates a new economic and political power.

---
Theresa May is looking towards India for same reason.

[Karthik S]

Ramana garu, I am unable to connect the dot, KoE merging back with American colony and May looking towards India?

[Atmavik]

bharotshontan Ji,

Thanks for the post. i was going to skip it but glad i did not.

on the language front at least in the Tech Suburbia things are looking much better nowadays.In my group of cousins all kids speak Hindi except the eldest and she has made a good effort to learn it. one of them speaks Telugu too though his parents are from Bihar.

[Raja Bose]

I am just curious, should #Calexit become a reality, where will they get their water from? Colorado Water Treaty?

Hey if Pakis can eat grass, we can drink piss! Heck, most chi chi craft beers in SF taste like piss anyways.

[Lalmohan]

Ramana
Lots of brexiteers think india particularly and china will welcome them with open arms... little and surely the other assorted ex colonies will fall in line and salute queenie
That ship sailed past aden a few decades ago

[ShyamSP]

I am just curious, should #Calexit become a reality, where will they get their water from? Colorado Water Treaty?

Hey if Pakis can eat grass, we can drink piss! Heck, most chi chi craft beers in SF taste like piss anyways.

No provisions exists to exit. Cali police are enough to take care so it doesnt even need army.

Fancy Hashtagers and FB posters' revolutions are limited to those websites to make them feel good.

[Raja Bose]

Hey if Pakis can eat grass, we can drink piss! Heck, most chi chi craft beers in SF taste like piss anyways.

No provisions exists to exit. Cali police are enough to take care so it doesnt even need army.

Fancy Hashtagers and FB posters' revolutions are limited to those websites to make them feel good.

psst...don't tell PRC Bay Area liberals that there is a world outside coffee shops, twitter and FB. Next you will be claiming that Santa doesn't exist!

[Lalmohan]

Bay area wallahs need only take a short drive to the orher side of the sierra nevadas to see the red lands... its staggering how the worldview changes in a few miles

[Y. Kanan]

#calexit or #NE_exit is a myth. the vast bulk of the industrial power, military bases, fresh water lakes , food, army , AF and glaciers are in red america. the only defensible place in blue america is san diego and bremerton oregon due to the large naval bases. north karolina peoples militia will surely overrun virginiah and take over norfolks uber giant base and all its ships. and kings bay georgia ssbn base is truly in red land.

there are probably fictional books on a future civil war between confederate and bluecoats

I have to smile at the very notion of America's soft pampered dhimmi liberals fighting for anything. As for the idea of red states breaking off one day, we'll... not quite as far fetched. Anyway nothing of the sort will ever happen. Well-fed drones hooked on TV and Xbox don't make for good revolutionaries.

[bharotshontan]

bharotshontan Ji,

Thanks for the post. i was going to skip it but glad i did not.

on the language front at least in the Tech Suburbia things are looking much better nowadays.In my group of cousins all kids speak Hindi except the eldest and she has made a good effort to learn it. one of them speaks Telugu too though his parents are from Bihar.

Yes I think the language front has been underestimated completely in terms of developing one's identities or global group loyalties in this increasingly globalizing world. The various diasporic groups even in small-town USA will have enough mass to bring together a weekend school of 2-hour class for the kids at someone's house for the parent's language with homework. It isn't like said group of immigrants are not getting together, they are. Generally they get together, send kids into a room and order them pizza, while they themselves eat the regular Indian "spicy" food. I mean, the alienation is happening at the home environment. Ramifications of this are multifold. These people have no incentive to even visit India with their earned money as adults. They have 1-generation of commonality with fellow kids that were sent to the room to eat pizzas, that's about it. They have no incentive to see each other as a community.

I am noticing in the Bengali case, an ironic situation has arisen in the US wherein the Bangladeshis are way more competent and tuned in to keeping Bengali language going compared to the Indian Bengali diaspora (primarily typical Kolkata upper-caste leftie Bong). Bangladeshis are developing the apps for Bengali keyboards on cell phones and computers. Here after moving to DC for first time in my life I have heard of a Bengali language school in the US for the kids with official curriculum and syllabus and homework. There are two avenues, one is offered by the Bangladeshi embassy, which on top of Bangla is also having a Pali class offered as well as well as Arabic
http://dcbanglaschool.org
And there is one by the local Kali temple which is also run by Bangladeshi Hindus primarily and not Indian Bengalis:
http://kalitemplewashington.org/language-school/

Ironic because it is like if tomorrow Pakjabis became the beacon of Punjabi language and culture. Anyway, didn't mean to get into intricate Bengali social dynamics that much as this thread is about the US. Just a note to see how the various cultural packages that Desis come with into the US and how that plays out into the following generations.

[Singha]

Fsscinating sir..please do post on bengali social dynamics in some other thread like indian interests thread

[chetak]

Received by email

America’s new president

The Trump era

His victory threatens old certainties about America and its role in the world. What will take their place?

Nov 12th 2016 | From the print edition
Timekeeper

THE fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9th 1989, was when history was said to have ended. The fight between communism and capitalism was over. After a titanic ideological struggle encompassing the decades after the second world war, open markets and Western liberal democracy reigned supreme. In the early morning of November 9th 2016, when Donald Trump crossed the threshold of 270 electoral-college votes to become America’s president-elect, that illusion was shattered. History is back—with a vengeance.

The fact of Mr Trump’s victory and the way it came about are hammer blows both to the norms that underpin politics in the United States and also to America’s role as the world’s pre-eminent power. At home, an apparently amateurish and chaotic campaign has humiliated an industry of consultants, pundits and pollsters. If, as he has threatened, President Trump goes on to test the institutions that regulate political life, nobody can be sure how they will bear up. Abroad, he has taken aim at the belief, embraced by every post-war president, that America gains from the often thankless task of being the global hegemon. If Mr Trump now disengages from the world, who knows what will storm through the breach?

The sense that old certainties are crumbling has rocked America’s allies. The fear that globalisation has fallen flat has whipsawed markets. Although post-Brexit Britons know what that feels like, the referendum in Britain will be eclipsed by consequences of this election. Mr Trump’s victory has demolished a consensus. The question now is what takes its place.

Trump towers
Start with the observation that America has voted not for a change of party so much as a change of regime. Mr Trump was carried to office on a tide of popular rage (see article). This is powered partly by the fact that ordinary Americans have not shared in their country’s prosperity. In real terms median male earnings are still lower than they were in the 1970s. In the past 50 years, barring the expansion of the 1990s, middle-ranking households have taken longer to claw back lost income with each recession. Social mobility is too low to hold out the promise of something better. The resulting loss of self-respect is not neutralised by a few quarters of rising wages.

Anger has sown hatred in America. Feeling themselves victims of an unfair economic system, ordinary Americans blame the elites in Washington for being too spineless and too stupid to stand up to foreigners and big business; or, worse, they believe that the elites themselves are part of the conspiracy. They repudiate the media—including this newspaper—for being patronising, partisan and as out of touch and elitist as the politicians. Many working-class white voters feel threatened by economic and demographic decline. Some of them think racial minorities are bought off by the Democratic machine. Rural Americans detest the socially liberal values that urban compatriots foist upon them by supposedly manipulating the machinery in Washington (see article). Republicans have behaved as if working with Democrats is treachery.

Mr Trump harnessed this popular anger brilliantly. Those who could not bring themselves to vote for him may wonder how half of their compatriots were willing to overlook his treatment of women, his pandering to xenophobes and his rank disregard for the facts. There is no reason to conclude that all Trump voters approve of his behaviour. For some of them, his flaws are insignificant next to the One Big Truth: that America needs fixing. For others the willingness to break taboos was proof that he is an outsider. As commentators have put it, his voters took Mr Trump seriously but not literally, even as his critics took him literally but not seriously. The hapless Hillary Clinton might have won the popular vote, but she stood for everything angry voters despise.

The hope is that this election will prove cathartic. Perhaps, in office, Mr Trump will be pragmatic and magnanimous—as he was in his acceptance speech. Perhaps he will be King Donald, a figurehead and tweeter-in-chief who presides over an executive vice-president and a cabinet of competent, reasonable people. When he decides against building a wall against Mexico after all or concludes that a trade war with China is not a wise idea, his voters may not mind too much—because they only expected him to make them feel proud and to put conservative justices in the Supreme Court. Indeed, you can just about imagine a future in which extra infrastructure spending, combined with deregulation, tax cuts, a stronger dollar and the repatriation of corporate profits, boosts the American economy for long enough to pacify the anger. This more emollient Trump might even model himself on Ronald Reagan, a conservative hero who was mocked and underestimated, too.

Nothing would make us happier than to see Mr Trump succeed in this way. But whereas Reagan was an optimist, Mr Trump rails against the loss of an imagined past. We are deeply sceptical that he will make a good president—because of his policies, his temperament and the demands of political office.

Gravity wins in the end
Take his policies first. After the sugar rush, populist policies eventually collapse under their own contradictions. Mr Trump has pledged to scrap the hated Obamacare. But that threatens to deprive over 20m hard-up Americans of health insurance. His tax cuts would chiefly benefit the rich and they would be financed by deficits that would increase debt-to-GDP by 25 percentage points by 2026. Even if he does not actually deport illegal immigrants, he will foment the divisive politics of race. Mr Trump has demanded trade concessions from China, Mexico and Canada on threat of tariffs and the scrapping of the North American Free Trade Agreement. His protectionism would further impoverish poor Americans, who gain more as consumers from cheap imports than they would as producers from suppressed competition. If he caused a trade war, the fragile global economy could tip into a recession. With interest rates near zero, policymakers would struggle to respond.

Abroad Mr Trump says he hates the deal freezing Iran’s nuclear programme. If it fails, he would have to choose between attacking Iran’s nuclear sites and seeing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East (see article). He wants to reverse the Paris agreement on climate change; apart from harming the planet, that would undermine America as a negotiating partner. Above all, he would erode America’s alliances—its greatest strength. Mr Trump has demanded that other countries pay more towards their security or he will walk away. His bargaining would weaken NATO, leaving front-line eastern European states vulnerable to Russia. It would encourage Chinese expansion in the South China Sea. Japan and South Korea may be tempted to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.

The second reason to be wary is temperament. During the campaign Mr Trump was narcissistic, thin-skinned and ill-disciplined. Yet the job of the most powerful man in the world constantly entails daily humiliations at home and abroad. When congressmen mock him, insult him and twist his words, his effectiveness will depend on his willingness to turn the other cheek and work for a deal. When a judge hears a case for fraud against Trump University in the coming weeks, or rules against his administration’s policies when he is in office, he must stand back (self-restraint that proved beyond him when he was a candidate). When journalists ridiculed him in the campaign he threatened to open up libel laws. In office he must ignore them or try to talk them round. When sovereign governments snub him he must calculate his response according to America’s interests, not his own wounded pride. If Mr Trump fails to master his resentments, his presidency will soon become bogged down in a morass of petty conflicts.

The third reason to be wary is the demands of office. No problem comes to the president unless it is fiendishly complicated. Yet Mr Trump has shown no evidence that he has the mastery of detail or sustained concentration that the Oval Office demands. He could delegate (as Reagan famously did), but his campaign team depended to an unusual degree on his family and on political misfits. He has thrived on the idea that his experience in business will make him a master negotiator in politics. Yet if a deal falls apart there is always another skyscraper to buy or another golf course to build; by contrast, a failure to agree with Vladimir Putin about Russia’s actions leaves nobody to turn to. Nowhere will judgment and experience be more exposed than over the control of America’s nuclear arsenal—which, in a crisis, falls to him and him alone.
The pendulum swings out

The genius of America’s constitution is to limit the harm one president can do. We hope Mr Trump proves our doubts groundless or that, if he fails, a better president will be along in four years. The danger with popular anger, though, is that disillusion with Mr Trump will only add to the discontent that put him there in the first place. If so, his failure would pave the way for someone even more bent on breaking the system.

The election of Mr Trump is a rebuff to all liberals, including this newspaper. The open markets and classically liberal democracy that we defend, and which had seemed to be affirmed in 1989, have been rejected by the electorate first in Britain and now in America. France, Italy and other European countries may well follow. It is clear that popular support for the Western order depended more on rapid growth and the galvanising effect of the Soviet threat than on intellectual conviction. Recently Western democracies have done too little to spread the benefits of prosperity. Politicians and pundits took the acquiescence of the disillusioned for granted. As Mr Trump prepares to enter the White House, the long, hard job of winning the argument for liberal internationalism begins anew.

[ramana]

Ramana garu, I am unable to connect the dot, KoE merging back with American colony and May looking towards India?

Not "and" OR
So two paths are being pursued and both lead to former colonies.

[ShyamSP]

No provisions exists to exit. Cali police are enough to take care so it doesnt even need army.

Fancy Hashtagers and FB posters' revolutions are limited to those websites to make them feel good.

psst...don't tell PRC Bay Area liberals that there is a world outside coffee shops, twitter and FB. Next you will be claiming that Santa doesn't exist!

I'd say most Desis became liberals with zero real knowledge of politics and world but got bytes knowledge from likes and tweets. Fun part was when I said I was voting for Trump they were snickering that 1 vote doesn't change for Hillary. When I said Trump would win, they were all in good laugh.
Hope this election gave enough jolt to shut them from clicking likes, tweets

[ramana]

In California, Silicon Andhra runs a Telugu language program for young kids called "Mana Badi" or Our School.

Its quite successful.

[ramana]

I don't know if people recall but in 2008 BRF also predicted Obama will be the Democrat nominee and the winner.
Now they predicted Trump in 2016.

[UlanBatori]

There's no shortage of idiocy and hypocrisy on both sides in US. Pretending that this is one sided is another form of hypocrisy.

Oh, Gusji, you don't HAVE to be so generous and distribute your hard-won laurels...

[Rudradev]

Exactly, and the only place where we mattered in this regard was Fairfax County in Virginia where Trump sent his daughter the other day to celebrate Diwali. Fairfax has some 20,000 Indian-American families. Either way Virginia overall and Fairfax county went to Clinton, but there was at least a photo-op attempt made where we could have mattered. Otherwise you're correct, most of the battleground states have the more "core" US demographic groups and Asians are a non-entity there numerically

Not really... the Philadelphia/collar counties/Camden/Wilmington MSA has over 90,000 Indians in a highly significant swing area. About 30,000 less than VA/DC/MD to date, and also slightly less as a % of total population, but certainly enough to matter in this and future elections. DT's Edison, NJ event with the RHC targeted desis in this area quite specifically.

[Raja Bose]

Bay area wallahs need only take a short drive to the orher side of the sierra nevadas to see the red lands... its staggering how the worldview changes in a few miles

Where saar? All deserted over there. You have to drive farther than that to see the red lands.

[Vayutuvan]

6:19 PM - 10 Nov 2016



3:14 AM - 11 Nov 2016

That is true. Only paid protesters resort to violence. Small groups are simply passionate. There is no inconsistency between those two tweets. Dems want everything spoon fed to them - even their thinking.

[Rudradev]

What I get from this election is an overwhelming sense of relief that majoritarian nationalism is not dead anywhere in the world... far from being undone by globalism, it is globalism that endures at the majority's pleasure and can step no further than the majority's mandate will allow.

#1 Lesson for India... we are stil a lot more Hindu than America is white. We must of course pay attention to sustaining the demographic equation in India by all necessary means in the long term... but what DT's victory shows is that with a 79% Hindu population, Hindus have only ourselves to blame if a mahathugbandhan of Cong/AAP/Left and casteist parties manages to usurp the Indian narrative, or to subjugate our political voice again in any election.

[sanjaykumar]

What a tiresome windbag of an article.


"Many of America's political leaders are warning of the dangers posed by Syrian refugees. They are underestimating, though, the much greater danger: dumbass hicks, in charge of things," Nolan wrote. "...You, our elected officials, are embarrassing us. All of us, except your fellow dumb hicks, who voted for you in large numbers. You — our racist, xenophobic, knuckle-dragging ignorant leaders — are making us look bad in front of the guests (the whole world). You are the bad cousin in the family who always ruins Thanksgiving. Go in the back room and drink a can of beer alone please."


There is a crack in everything...that's how the light gets in.

Rest in Peace Leonard.