Wednesday, November 04, 2020

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE LUXURY OF A POSITIVE THOUGHT: WHY DEMS LOST

 
I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. 
 
Don't tell me "Biden still has a chance." Like HELL he does. 
 
Biden will lose. The Senate is lost. Dems lost House seats.
 
Everywhere I went throughout the past year, people hated me because I told the gloomy truth. I was kicked off of the liberal forums. I was told that my depressing assessment might depress the vote. My real sin was not telling people want they wanted to hear.
 
Fuck you, optimists. Optimism is the most toxic substance on the planet, yet everyone keeps telling me to gulp it down and serve it up to others. I hate optimists even more than I hate Trump. 

Here's why we lost: Political correctness. Cancel culture. Feminism. "Progressive" rioters and their enablers. Way too much attention paid to Black people (who, for the most part, don't live in purple states) and not enough attention paid to Hispanics (who largely do). 
 
Americans voted for Trump even though Trump is an idiot and everyone knows it. They did so because people are furious with the anti-White, anti-male, anti-straight madness infesting our colleges, our media, and all liberal institutions.

"Feel guilty, Whitey" is a message that LOSES elections. The "1618 Project" LOSES elections. Talking about a "1776 Project" WINS elections.

You don't like that situation? Tough shit. Even if you construct an argument in favor of the "1618 Project" that I personally would consider logical and persuasive -- and it wouldn't be hard to do so -- so what? Trump's staying in the White House and the fascist movement is growing. You might be able to win a debate with a guy like me, but you can't win an election.
 
Get a clue, assholes: Most White people don't want to wallow in self-hatred
 
They're struggling. And every so often, they would like to be able to say "I'm struggling" without immediately being told that Blacks have it worse. 
 
When White people lose jobs or can't make mortgage payments or suffer some other humiliating setback, they do not want to hear one goddamned word about White privilege. They scoff at those who insist that a White guy working the graveyard shift at 7-11 is somehow more "privileged" than Oprah Winfrey. And they don't want to be called "racist" when they scoff.
 
They do not want to be told: "The color of your skin means you were born evil."
 
They do not want to be told: "Your country was born evil, your flag stands for evil, and the historical figures you were taught to admire were actually evil." When average folks struggle to make ends meet, they take pride in national identity -- in patriotism. They hug the flag. They need to feel part of something larger and nobler than themselves.
 
When liberals make excuses for mobs who tear down statues and destroy shops, it is natural for their opposite numbers to excuse hideous mob violence on the right. Christ, what did you think was going to happen?

Black Lives Matter and Antifa attracted many idealists with good intentions, but when they took to the streets, they provided the river in which the agent provocateur could swim. Fools. If those young dimwits had ever read a book or two, they might have been able to predict what would happen.

Good intentions count for a lot, but effectiveness matters more. BLM and Antifa were ineffective at everything they tried to do. All they accomplished was the re-election of Donald Fucking Trump.
 
When you visit the right-wing sites, you'll see a constant focus on the horrors of political correctness and the stupidities of feminism. Prepare for a shock: Many of these articles are well-written, fact-based and sensible. Most other articles on right-wing sites are conspiracy-crazed horseshit, but not those articles. It infuriates me to see my enemies publish valid critiques of the anti-White, anti-male, anti-straight fanatics who have gained a stranglehold on our college campuses. 
 
These issues matter, yet Dems keep minimizing them. And Dems keep losing. 
 
As David Axelrod said: "People will vote for someone they don't like, but they won't vote for someone who doesn't like them."  The Democratic Party has become the home of smug, nescient, "progressive" postmodernist assholes who cannot disguise their contempt for the very people whose votes we need.
 
The Democratic Party needs to remake itself or it will soon die. Here's how:

1. Democratic leaders must denounce feminism while re-affirming a commitment to gender equality. Feminism is not popular -- not even with women. Watch videos featuring Christina Hoff Summers and Camilia Paglia. I don't agree with everything they say, but they nevertheless have much to teach.

2. Take the "BLACK OWNED" sign off of Democratic Party headquarters. Democrats must stop listening to the voices on MSNBC who keep saying "Forget about working class White people! They're gone forever! Concentrate on Black people!" 
 
Blacks are only twelve percent of the population, and only a small fraction of that twelve percent live in the battleground states. Remember three simple words: Black ain't purple. Constantly telling Black voters in New York or California (or Tennessee or Arkansas) whatever they want to hear cannot impact the electoral college.
 
3. Stop concentrating on tiny constituencies. Gender dysphorics constitute only 0.6 percent of the population, yet the fucking progs talk about them as though they were 60 percent. Progs want everyone within the 99.4 percent majority to list their pronouns, just to make an annoying, unpleasable faction within the 0.6 percent feel good about themselves. (There are many within the 0.6 percent who find this demand to be ridiculous.)
 
And then progs wonder why they lose!
 
The other day, I saw a headline on Democratic Underground: LGBTQ Latinos are for Biden! Who gives a damn? That's a minority group within a minority group. I'd rather see the Dems stop taking all Latinos for granted. Trump grabbed a huge chunk of the Latino vote. Obscene.
 
Instead of thinking small, let's think big. Let's reach out to the working class -- to the millions of big tough guys who wear steel-toe loggers while working construction. They used to vote Democratic, back in the days when Democrats won elections.
 
4. Cancel all proponents of cancel culture. They have succeeded only in making lots of people want to cancel liberalism. They make fascists seem cool and hip.
 
5. Yell "FUCK YOU" at the Language Police. People are sick and tired of self-important scolds who keep hyper-scrutinizing our every utterance for some ever-so-subtle sign of racism. 
 
Example: Customarily, I will refer to an American Indian as a member of his or her tribe. But when I don't know the tribe, or when I have to refer to Indians generally, I use the word "Indian" -- not "Native American." Why? Because I am a Native American, as is anyone else born here. (Many Indians prefer the word "Indian" for that reason.) 
 
You wanna call me racist now? I bet some of you do. FUCK YOU.
 
You wanna call me a bigot because I occasionally use the word "homosexual" as a synonym for "gay"? Or because I usually avoid the unwieldy and un-euphonious coinage "LGBTQ"? FUCK YOU.
 
6. Yell "FUCK YOU" at the Culture Police, especially those who want to censor or eradicate old movies that contain moments which make modern progs cringe. Yes, those movies often make me cringe too: When I first saw Casablanca in a revival house back in the early '70s, the audience hissed when Ingrid Bergman called Dooley Wilson "boy." They were right to hiss that moment, but they were also right to applaud the movie's finale. People were more sensible then.
 
The recent attempts to cancel Gone With the Wind only made that movie attractive to young people who otherwise hate to watch old movies. If you know anything about human psychology, you'll understand that censorship always backfires. Sure, GWTW has many very cringe-inducing moments, but -- despite what the Culture Police keep telling us -- that movie is not about race. It's about sex. That's why it was so popular for so long. 
 
(I'm surprised that the Culture Police have not tried to ban Selznick's follow-up, Duel In the Sun. That film is also about sex. Unfortunately, it is genuinely racist -- way moreso than GWTW -- but it's so campy and overheated that it was "adopted" by an earlier generation of gay film buffs. I saw it at a Filmex screening back in '76 with a largely-gay audience, and lemme tell you: They should have gone on tour with the thing. Have today's gay people joined the Culture Police? I hope not!)
 
The Searchers is not a racist movie. It's a movie about a racist. There's a difference. 
 
Yes, I know some really cringey stories about John Ford. The guy was nevertheless an artist -- a friend to the worker and the immigrant, a man who served his country bravely in World War II. Sometimes artists do magnificent things and sometimes they do rotten things. Here's a hearty FUCK YOU to all progs who want to censor art not made by saints.
 
7. Leading Dems must take a stand against this postmodernist madness on our college campuses. I never thought I'd live long enough to see the right commandeer the "free speech" movement.
 
Go to YouTube and do a search on this name:
 
HELEN PLUCKROSE
 
Watch every damned video that comes up. Don't try to argue; she's obviously smarter than you (or me). Squelch your arrogance, drink it all in, and allow yourself to be taught a thing or two. And then formulate a new political strategy based on those lessons.
 
She's not the enemy. She's not making excuses for the pals of Pepe. She is a true liberal. She's on our side. She is trying to help you.

Will liberals heed this advice? I dunno. These days, Bill Maher is the only liberal on teevee who consistently makes sense to me. Naturally, many progressives love to beat him up. Progs would rather bask in purity than attain power.
 
Well, progs, you did it. You LOST. Your side lost what should have been a landslide election. Even if Biden squeaks out a win -- and I don't think he will -- Dems sure as hell didn't get their predicted -- necessary -- landslide. 
 
Look in the mirror, progs. It's your fault. This is on you. You elected Trump, and you probably re-elected Trump. 
 
Robin DiAngelo elected Trump. Everyone who enabled that bitch elected Trump. Everyone who wants to give me a predictable feminist harangue because I used the word "bitch" just now elected Trump. 
 
Everyone who made excuses for looters and rioters elected Trump. 
 
When Ari Melber, just a week before the election, gave airtime to a Black writer hawking a new book titled Why White People Should All Go to Re-Education Camps, Ari cast a vote for Trump. (Okay, that wasn't the actual title of the book, but it might as well have been.) When Jamelle Bouie absurdly claimed that Black people freed themselves during the Civil War -- because Bouie cannot tolerate the thought that members of the hated White race might have died for a noble cause -- Bouie cast a vote for Trump. The liberals who refused to denounce Bouie's obvious anti-White bigotry all cast votes for Trump. 
 
Democracy is a popularity contest. Insulting the majority is not the way to make your side popular. 

When I think of how stupidly the Dems have acted, I'm amazed they won anything
 
Biden ran a great campaign for the most part, but couldn't he have offered a fierce denunciation of communism, just to please (say) the Cubans in Florida? Trump's love affair with Kim Jong-un should have made Trump toxic in Florida. JFK would have seized such an obvious opportunity. Why didn't Biden?

That's my final lesson for today: Democratic candidates should never miss a plausible opportunity to run to the right of a Republican. JFK did that to Nixon, when he harped on that (non-existent) missile gap. Bill Clinton's "Sistah Souljah moment" served a similar purpose. Like it or not, that's how you win. 

(Note: John McWhorter favors capitalizing both "White" and "Black." I'm following his lead, but the transition isn't easy.)

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

So in 2016 it wasn't Hillary's fault, after four years of looking at dump still over sixty millions people voted for him. He would have won over anyone.

Gus said...

Also, I'm seeing lefties getting upset that the Dems "rigged" the primaries so that Biden would win, and that if the candidate was Bernie right now we'd be seeing a landslide victory for the Dems. I thought the right was delusional, but the left has been outdoing them lately (and I'm a lefty).

I agree with most of what you wrote above Joseph. A friend and I have been discussing similar topics for the past couple years, and we have both been concerned about how the types of things you talk about could cause the left to shoot itself in the foot. Seems like that is what happened. You'd think 2016 would have taught the Dem party a lesson, but I guess not.

Ivory Bill Woodpecker said...

Uh, the votes have not all been counted yet.

************************

I'm as cis-het, white, and male as you are, but these things you obsess over do not bother me.

I wonder what the difference(s) is/are?

fred said...

Joseph, you were right. Biden might squeeze in but if Trump goes to SCOTUS he will win. Then the Nightmare begins. Full Police State and the end for US Democracy. Gutted environment and Social Security. The open economy and herd immunity. 4,000 dead a day. Good God, but people, Left and Right, are so stupid. Turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

Just recently I came across Spiked, a UK site reflecting all the Right wing grievances you have outlined. Headed up, of course, by a Libertarian Marxist. The merger of the Left and Right.

The Internet amplifies the lie that all voices have an equal claim on truth and that democracy is only working when I get mine. It's a world full of children carrying guns. And now we are here.

OTE admin said...

You are wrong. Biden won the election. He is now the president-elect of the United States. He will likely run the table on at least six of the seven remaining states, but it may be a couple of weeks before the final result is known for North Carolina and possibly Pennsylvania.

The REASON it is taking so long is because of the mail-in ballots. There were millions upon millions of them, with many of them concentrated in heavily urban, heavily blue areas.

He has won Michigan. He has won Wisconsin. He is likely to win Georgia tonight. He will win Nevada because of the Clark County blue firewall. He is expected to win Arizona because there are hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots in heavily Democratic Maricopa County. There is NO possible way for Trump to prevail, and what he is doing is basically a half-assed showboating exhibition for his brain-dead followers. I think he is already looking at doing other things to bankrupt and trying to stay out of jail.

It's over. Relax. We have a LOT of work to do, but there is no point having a nervous breakdown over something that isn't true.

Anonymous said...

Joe, I wish you would use another word for the man-hating type of feminist you describe.

I am an old-school,RBG feminist -- love men (in general) and want things to be fair for men as well as for women. I want to expand choices for women and for men. Thus women working full time -- wonderful. Women staying home to raise their family -- wonderful. Men staying home to raise their family - wonderful. I have known several men who made better parents than their wives. I know some feminists believe women were smarter or better than men,but it seems about even to me. There are good people of all genders and bad people of all genders.

I know that misogyny exists and so does man-hating. I disapprove of both. There is still a shocking amount of physical abuse and murder of supposedly-loved ones in this country. Statistically, more men do this. However, I have known men who were physically abused by their female partners (men who would never retaliate, by the way) and gays of both sexes abused by their partners.

Democrats do give Republicans weapons to use against them. Republicans have used bathroom issues to scare voters since the ERA. What is wrong with a separate bathroom for non-traditional gender roles or unisex bathrooms that are one at a time? violent protests have no place with Democrats -- I believe Biden made that point clear, as he will in his Presidency.

Yes, I am still hoping for a Biden win and believe it will happen: MI, WI, AZ, NV. I agree candidate farther to the left would have fared much worse.

Anonymous said...

Joe - This was your best post in a while. Truth! What do you think is actually going to happen in WI, MI, and PA? What will trump do over the next few weeks? Are mail in ballot irregularities really happening or could some of those actually been planted by Trump agents to foment chaos?

Anonymous said...

As a country people has to look seriously at those who voted for Trump. After four years of utter incompetence,evil intentions,corruption and death still huge section of this country made the effort to have more of that. This not politics,this is disease. I hope someone address that from a different angle than the usual punditry style.

Anonymous said...

Excellent fatalist screed, Joseph! One of your best.

However, your blind-spottish aversion to conspiracy theories still causes you to not see that all that "hate-straight-whitey," election-losing spewing of the progs was devised, nutured and promoted to serve a very specific purpose: to deflect the dems from their historic focus on ECONOMIC INEQUALITY caused by the system being RIGGED (yes, rigged) to favor the plutocrats who OWN (via campaign contributions) egregiously large portions of BOTH parties.

And any acknowledgment of the indisputable fact that so many of these string-pulling plutos are war (in the mideast) mongering dual-loyalists so frightens your admirable, knee-jerk liberal sensibilities that you instantly stop your ears, cover your eyes, and bite your tongue -- but only after screaming "Fascist!!!" at the acknowledger.

Anyway, if nice-guy Biden does gain the White House, we can expect that he'll obediently cater to Wall Street, just as did all his modern-era predecessors (with the fatal exception of JFK) without going off-script (particularly in regard to avoiding bloody, full-scale bombing-and-invasion, military misadventures) as often as did the loose-canon, narcissistic nincompoop he'll be replacing.

And with ol' turtle-face still commanding the Senate, Sleepy Joe's best liberal-minded, non-threatening to the PTB intentions will likely come a cropper too.

But Biden-era gridlock still seems more inviting than a one-way path to the Trumpocalypse that was the alternative.

Sincerely, your longtime reader and admirer

Anonymous said...

Add this to the pile and I agree it's time to point the finger at the Democrat party. You don't get this close to collapsing a longstanding democracy without an ineffective opposition party. Scammers are gonna scam, the Republican's are just being who they are.

Even when they've been in power what did the Democrats help deliver, bad, expensive healthcare, mass incarceration and a student debt crisis based on revving usury laws. It's a political machine run by really old people. The star is Obama who after four years owns two multi-million dollar properties, one in Washington and one in Martha's Vineyard, because who wouldn't. Life is good at the top.

The Democrats are the Washington General's to the Republican's Globetrotters. The objective is to move as much of America's wealth to the billionaires and it's going great. Fight hard, put on a good show but don't be too effective.

This is also a signpost on where civilization is at this time in history. Great wealth brings great opportunity, hopefully good will prevail.

Joseph Cannon said...

Anon 2:47: You did not understand me AT ALL.

My problem is not the "Democrat" party. My post was meant to slap around progressives -- the faction favored by the writer of that Guardian piece to which you link.

Joseph Cannon said...

Let me add this, anon. Why do you think that my temporary redecoration of this blog includes a picture of the gate of Auschwitz and the words "Optimism Kills"?

The Nazis attained power because the progs of the 1920s did everything they could to destroy the center and frighten the average German. The socialists and communists were blindly, stupidly over-confident. They optimistically thought they could hoist the red banner and that the German people would march with them.

In those final elections, they did not attack the Nazis. They attacked the centrists -- the Social Democrats.

The progressives stupidly overestimated their appeal.

As do you.

The progressives helped Hitler attain power by making the alternative seem too extremes.

As then, so today.

Anonymous said...

From Anonymous : 7:53 PM
One more point: without a lot of African American votes in places like Detroit, Flint, Atlanta, Philly, etc. VP Biden would have lost. They are key to the success of the party.

By contrast, many Americans of Hispanic descent are quite conservative and are either not interested in politics or not interested in the Democratic party. Of course, we should understand what they want and need and try to recruit them. It is not always the natural fit some Democrats assume it to be.

Joseph Cannon said...

Anon, you are right -- to an extent. But I'll stand by my major points:

1. The number of purple Blacks is smaller than the number of purple Hispanics.

2. Hispanics are often pretty conservative culturally, but so are many African Americans. The Marxists who started BLM do not represent the rank and file. Black voters went for Joe, not Bernie (thank God).

3. Democrats had overwhelming power within American politics when they were a true working class party, as opposed to a patchwork coalition of people of color.

The more I ponder the situation, the more convinced I am that Identity politics are ruinous. We must return to Class politics.

Yesterday, I was sneeringly denounced as an "anti-Communist" by some nescient prog nitwit. Yet Marx would have agreed with every word of the preceding paragraph. We live in a strange new world, where the people now called "Marxists" believe in a bizarre mutation of Marxism which has no relationship to anything dear old Uncle Karl actually wrote.

Here's why I prefer class politics to Identity politics:

Biden cannot attain anything like what FDR achieved, because Biden doesn't have the Senate. He doesn't have the Senate because he doesn't have working class support.

Meanwhile, the GOP is successfully branding itself a working class party. The GOP stands for tax breaks to millionaires. They stand for the elimination of the minimum wage, Social Security and anything that even slightly resembles socialized health care. Yet THEY are now considered the working class party, and the Dems are stigmatized as the party of uncaring elites.

How did this absurd situation come to be?

There is only one reason: The Dems have allowed themselves to be branded as the party of anti-White, anti-male, anti-straight "progressives." If you look at the right-wing sites, this issue comes up over and over and over again. The average American simply cannot abide Identity politics.

I'm sorry, but the ONLY way for Dems to regain the commanding position they once had is to give up on this mad desire to belittle Whites and males. An Obama or a Biden may be able to eke out a win, but only after a Republican president fucks up royally -- and the victory will always be constricted and temporary. Identity politics is the politics of futility. TRUE change won't happen until we capture the hearts and minds of a generation of American workers -- and that won't happen as long as postmodernist academics keep coming up rationalizations for alienating and insulting Whites and males.