@ggersh @ggersh

This is a huge, wonderful article (which may have been posted here before? Or one making the same point, at any rate) making many important points and I hope that everyone who hasn't yet can manage to read the whole thing at source. But in case, here's a sample of some of them, where the best is yet to come further in the article.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-notion-that-white-workers-elected-...

Jul 08, 2017
TD originals
The Notion That White Workers Elected Trump Is a Myth That Suits the Ruling Class

Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…

...Trump’s Real Base

This storyline has been repeated over and over and taken for granted in the mainstream media and even in much of the progressive left—including by me (see this Truthdig essay, in which I unfortunately referred to “Trump’s conservative, white working-class base”). And it is false. The narrative is flatly contradicted by the data. As Lehigh University political scientist Anthony DiMaggio noted three weeks ago:

Support for Trump … is largely concentrated among more affluent Americans. Trump voters were significantly more likely to be older, white, Republican conservatives—a group that has been quite privileged historically speaking. Trump voters were not more likely to be unemployed, compared to non-Trump voters. Income-wise, the single largest group of Trump supporters was comprised of individuals hailing from households earning incomes of more than $100,000 a year—which made up 35 percent of all his voters. Those earning between $75,000 to $100,000 a year accounted for 19 percent of Trump voters, meaning that 54 percent of the president’s supporters came from households earning over $75,000 a year. Another 20 percent of Trump supporters earned between $50,000 to $75,000 a year, putting them over the national median household income, which has long hovered around $50,000. In sum, approximately three-quarters of Trump voters were from households earning more than the national median income, while just one-quarter earned less than the median.

Lost in the hoopla over Trump’s alleged “working-class base” is an all-too-easy-to-forget fact that a higher percentage of Trump’s voters (35 percent) than Hillary Clinton’s (34 percent) were from the one-fourth of Americans who live in households that “earn” over $100,000 a year.

Academic studies of exit polling data show that Trump’s backers were concerned primarily with the “social issues” he championed. Sexism and racism (white identity) were the leading correlates with Trump voting, not economic dissatisfaction or disadvantage. It was Trump’s chauvinistic positions and statements on race, gender and immigration — not his “blue-collar populism” — that scored him the most points with his mostly middle-class backers.

Yes, the white working class, defined as Caucasians with less than a college degree (more on that below), demonstrated yet again their preference for Republicans over Democrats in the presidential election. Indeed, Trump bested Clinton among white voters without college degrees by 66 percent to 28 percent, the biggest Republican margin with those voters since 1980.

But the lack of a college diploma is a highly imperfect measure of working-class status. Bill Gates never got a bachelor’s degree. Neither did his proletarian comrade Mark Zuckerberg. Occupation and income are far better indicators. Exit polls include the second category but not the first. And nearly 60 percent of white people without college degrees who voted for Trump were in the top half of the income distribution. One in 5 white Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

Another difficulty with the white Trumped-proletarian narrative is that most whites without an allegedly class-defining college degree don’t vote. Thanks in part to this silent election boycott, Trump got votes from approximately just a fifth of the 136 million white American adults who lack the higher ed diploma.

The image of poor and working-class whites flocking to Trump is a media myth. Like fascist and other right-nationalist political movements of the past, Trump has drawn his main support from the more reactionary segments of the middle class and petite bourgeoisie. ...

...Slate writers Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr got it right three weeks after the election. “Donald Trump didn’t flip working-class white voters,” they wrote. “Hillary Clinton lost them. … Relative to the 2012 election, Democratic support in the key Rust Belt states [Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] collapsed as a huge number of Democrats stayed home or (to a lesser extent) voted for a third party.” The decline of working-class Democratic voters between 2012 and 2016 was much bigger than the rise of working-class Republican voters in the “Rust Belt Five.” Among those earning less than $50,000 a year there, the decline in Democratic voting was 3.5 times greater than the rise in Republican voting. Among white voters in general, the decline in Democratic voting was 2.1 times greater than the growth in Republican voting.

The most relevant factor behind Trump’s success in winning over the majority of “white working-class” voters was the decision by so many in the working class not to vote at all, given the neoliberal nothingness of the onetime purported “party of the people.” This is the truth behind Bernie Sanders’ recent statement to the People’s Summit in Chicago: “Trump didn’t win the election. The Democratic Party lost the election.” ...

...The corporate and professional class elitists atop the onetime “party of the people” have been betraying the proletariat and eschewing populist and working-class rhetoric for decades. The Hillary Clinton campaign was specifically crafted around a highly identity-politicized neoliberal politics of “hate and castrate”—a politics that wrote off the working class as irredeemably racist, nativist and sexist. The strategy failed, dovetailing with Obama’s failure to address working- and lower-class needs to demobilize enough normally Democratic voters for even the noxious and unpopular Trump to prevail—with some help, to be sure, from racist voter suppression (a key factor that has been sadly forgotten in the discourse of liberals obsessed with unsupported charges of relevant Russian election interference), the openly absurd Electoral College, James Comey and some ill-timed increases in health insurance premiums under Obama’s not-so-Affordable Health Care Act.

Establishment Democrats find it useful to continue smearing the white working class as a bunch of despicably racist and sexist rubes and reactionaries. This absolves them, they think, from their ongoing refusal to properly address the needs of the nation’s economically embattled working-class majority. It’s a remarkable failure in a nation where the top 10th of the upper 1 percent possesses as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, where half the population is poor or near poor and lacks any assets while an ever more opulent minority lives in obscene hyperopulence and globalist indifference to ordinary Americans.

“Hey, don’t blame us,” elite Dems suggest, “blame those stupid and vicious right-wing white proles out there. Hillary shouldn’t have called them ‘deplorables,’ but they’re pretty, well, deplorable.”

There’s an obvious parallel here with the “blame Russia” narrative. The irony is that if the Democrats had run Sanders or a Sanders-like campaign, they would have mobilized enough white and nonwhite working- and lower-class votes to prevail. ...

This also makes one think about the huge numbers of Americans now routinely either denied their voting rights even when in conformance to rules often making the process more restricted and limiting registration periods or who did simply not have their votes count due to various stratagems, as well as those refusing to vote for routinely bad/corrupt candidates - or too over-worked, discouraged and/or exhausted to make it to the polls.

And since low turn-outs are good for Republicans - including Hillary Clinton by any other label - no official worries.

http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101

Voter Turnout

Robust voter turnout is fundamental to a healthy democracy. As low turnout is usually attributed to political disengagement and the belief that voting for one candidate/party or another will do little to alter public policy, "established" democracies tend have higher turnout than other countries. However, voter turnout in the U.S. is much lower than most established democracies. In this section we present research on voter turnout in the United States and the steps we might take to increase voter turnout. FairVote's most recent report examines voter turnout in the 2016 presidential primaries. ...

Maybe if Americans had something to vote for? And could be certain that their votes would be counted? And correctly counted? And adequate polling facilities were available? And there was no other voter suppression?

Maybe if they actually had an established democracy, their turn-out would match that of those?

Didn't Yankee Doodle have a pony?

So why can't Americans even have independently monitored elections on tamper-proof and verifiable systems and verified results with full counts, (including any provisional ballots,) and investigations of anomalies, with immediate recounts where doubt exists?

The political corruption within the Two-Corporate-Party Trade-Off scam is so thick that one wonders if anything else still remains...

Edit to add: gee, I wonder why Homeland Security took over all electoral infrastructure to prevent 'Russian hacking' without ordering, in the name of National Security, changing from hackable voting systems where still used and where checking for verification of results may be verboten due to the use of privately owned and voting machines being used by the privately owned political parties supplying the generally privately corporate/millionaire/billionaire-rented-out candidates which the American public is permitted to vote for?

That and why no enforcing of cheat-proof procedures in every case carefully overseen, with everything to be transparent to the American public?

The country and government in each case belong as a commons to the people who inhabit it, not to whoever happens to be transiently holding public office.

Elected/appointed public officials are not 'rulers' but public servants and when clearly incapable of doing their jobs and instead abusing the powers the people delegate to their office to be used for the public good must be subject to law no-one can be 'above', whatever may be claimed.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the establishment of corrupt and destructive tyrants was never presented as 'the American dream'.

When ruthless corporate interests are permitted to gain power over the people, disaster is certain.

(This starts slow for the first few minutes; becomes very interesting.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWLis-TVB2w

Who Was Really Behind the 9/11 Attacks?
corbettreport

This includes facts surrounding the cold-blooded murder of thousands NY citizens and 9/11 rescue and other workers by the lie which the EPA was forced to tell under the Bush Admin that the heavily poisoned air was safe to breathe - because Wall St had to continue with 'business as usual' even at the direct cost of massive suffering and death of even more American citizens.

Typical of polluting industry under complicit governments; more so under governments formed of polluting industry reps, as was the Bush Admin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKoEHt8HbQ8

The real Suspects of 9/11 (Corbett report video series reupload)

The gloves came off after 9/11, with corporations at last directly filling government.

Now, with Trump, the billionaires are moving in.

Now, they're after the rest of the countries on that 'kill' list, including Russia, Pakistan, China, Iran, with India and others further down, using faked 'Words of Mass Destruction' as the excuse for attacking Russia and right out loud in public lying in the face of expert-argued fact that Iran is supposedly not nuclear-compliant, just like a group of crazed police officers shrieking "Do not resist as they beat an unresisting and handcuffed victim lying on his/her stomach on the ground, right in front of a filming crowd nonetheless unable to stop them. This is not a good direction...

cuz he has two bases, one being a minority of
the minority, the other being the .05%.

after all the base has taken the pledge

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwV3xOM9dUQ]

@native

The American public is in effect, being held hostage by two political Parties,

caricature of the USA. It's an exaggeration and amplification of the nation's most primitive and parochial instincts. It is also disturbingly accurate and perceptive. American liberals would prefer to think of "their" nation as an essentially kind, well-meaning, and compassionate collective. In fact it has never been that. Rather it has been and still is, an amalgam of idealism, generosity, hypocrisy, avarice, religion, and violence. An uneasy and quarrelsome mix right from the start, and one that tends to be "united" only in times of actual war.

The divisions are deeply rooted and longstanding. Attempts by Obama and the Clintons to paper them over with pseudo-liberal rhetoric and ineffectual "reforms" have apparently failed, and produced a backlash of surprising force. The corporate-financed neoliberals controlling the Democratic Party are unwilling to mount an effective counter-offensive, preferring instead to "stay the course", in hopes that enough people will finally "come to their senses" to rescue them. Whether or not they are worth rescuing is an open question.

Which of course begs the next question: What's the alternative? The American public is in effect, being held hostage by two political Parties, neither of which inspires a great of confidence in anyone. There's trouble brewing everywhere, and the future looks dark and uncertain. This is fertile ground for a demagogue like Trump.