Duh?
Asked if he would leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden, Trump said: “Certainly I will. Certainly I will. And you know that.” But Trump said it would be hard for him to concede because “we know there was massive fraud,” while continuing to offer no concrete evidence of widespread voting irregularities.
Joseph Cotto and I discuss the fragmentation of the United States.
Increasingly, the USA is going to be fragmented into an ever-growing number of neo-tribes that lack a common cultural framework with many of these regarding many of the others as inherently illegitimate. An electoral win by “the other side” will likewise be considered illegitimate by definition.
Amy Chua on neotribalism
There is usually a direct correlation between unemployment rates and incumbent victory/defeat in presidential elections.
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti discuss how unemployment drove voters in the Presidential Election.
The only hope for the Republicans to continue to be a competitive national party will be to increase their ability to attract minority voters. It doesn’t look for them even if Trump managed to improve his performance among minorities in 2020 over 2016. My guess is that the future of “conservatism” in the US will look a lot like Dave Rubinism or #WalkAway, i.e. a rainbow coalition of anti-leftists who are grudgingly supported by the “far-right” (nativists, WNs, libertarians, 2nd amendmentists, religious traditionalists, pro-lifers) because “at least they’re not communists” or “at least they won’t take your guns away.”
By Avik Roy, Forbes
At his post-election press conference, President Trump said of his presidential campaign, “I won the largest share of non-white voters of any Republican in 60 years.” While Trump did improve on his performance with minorities in 2020 vs. 2016, according to exit polls, the previous Republican president—George W. Bush—did significantly better in 2004.
Prior to 1936, a majority of Black voters supported Republicans, due to the Republican Party’s historic role in ending slavery. However, the Great Depression and the New Deal led the majority of African-Americans to switch allegiances to the Democrats starting in 1936. Nonetheless, from 1936 to 1960, Republicans garnered a meaningful share of the Black vote, averaging 30% over that period.
The split between the managerial class and the “post-bourgeois proletariat” identified by Sam Francis 25 years ago.
By Aaron Zitner, Wall Street Journal
The job and wage growth that President Trump hoped would propel him to a second term was particularly strong in metropolitan America. Yet the Americans who live where the economy is thriving most—in the nation’s cities and their surrounding communities—voted to reject the president.
Mr. Trump won Texas but lost the county that includes Fort Worth—a first for his party since 1964. He carried Florida, but voters in and around the state’s largest city, Jacksonville, voted Democratic for the first time since 1976. Phoenix’s county voted Democratic for the first time since 1948.
In all, Mr. Trump lost 91 of the nation’s 100 largest counties by population in the 2020 election, four more than in 2016.
That shift is one of several that show the nation’s economic divisions continuing to mirror its political divisions, with both growing wider. Metropolitan America, with its higher education levels and concentration of white-collar jobs, is increasingly voting Democratic, while Republicans strengthen their hold on slower-growing and less-urban parts of the country.
Gee, who would’ve thought?
Well, well, well…
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti discuss MSNBC’s blacklisting of former presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
To ask the question is to answer it. He was the plutocrats’ handpicked frontman to purge the Orange Man. Hedges is way too much of a conventional liberal ideologue for my tastes, and this interview contains a fair amount of obvious hyperbole, but he’s interesting is that he is far more willing to criticize the “liberal class” than most of his compatriots.
By Chauncey Devega, Salon
Joe Biden is now president-elect of the United States, whether Donald Trump will admit it or not. Biden won the 2020 election by at least 5 million votes, and received the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history. Joe Biden also won the highest percentage of the popular vote as a challenger since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election.
When Biden (presumably) takes office in January 2021, he will face formidable obstacles and lofty expectations. Even now, he faces the resistance of the Trump regime and its supporters, who have refused to accept the fact that Donald Trump has clearly been defeated both in the popular vote and the Electoral College.
So Republicans and Democrats share a similar future. Fair enough. The encouraging thing that has happened on the mainstream right-wing lately has been the signs of a split between FOX and the Trumpists and talk of a Trump TV network. Being a persistent thorn in the side to the neocons and their mouthpieces is a way Trump really could perform a “public service.”
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
Meanwhile, Trump’s party will have a straightforward task: As they did with President Barack Obama, the Republicans will try to obstruct whatever Biden might want to do, sabotage the economic recovery if they can and generally do whatever is in their power to make him fail. But as they do so, they are likely to be riven by another echo of the Obama years: an internal conflict pitting the party’s angriest elements against an elite they will declare to be insufficiently devoted to the cause.
FOX is throwing Trump under the bus now that he’s no longer useful. A split between FOX and the Trumpists would be great.
A four-way ruling class splintering between Trumpists, neocons, neoliberals,and progressives is exactly what we need, hopefully with more splintering coming after that.
Plenty of Trumpists have contacted me since yesterday saying Giuliani’s press conference proved the Democrats stole the election. Whatever, folks. The Russiagate of the Right.
Now it’s the Repugnicans turn to spend four years whining about a moderate Republican is really a dictator is on the horizon. The same way the Democraps did for the past four years.
By Bill Lind, Traditional Right
As of this writing, the outcome of the Presidential election is uncertain although it appears Biden will “win”, thanks to questionable vote totals from urban areas. The Senate looks as if it will remain Republican, and the Democrats have held onto the House although with a reduced majority. The most important result of the election is, however, clear: the legitimacy of the state has taken another hit.
Dave Rubin’s program has interesting interviews at times, but he’s just become a neocon puppet at this point. He’s being used by the neocons to create the “next conservatism.” Kim’s critique of the Left is spot on although, fortunately, we don’t need the Left. We just need the lumpenproletariat. Bakunin was right.
The most “left-wing” an AOC administration would be might be something comparable to the mild social-democratic populism of Cristina de Kirchner. More likely, it would be similar to what a Ted Kennedy regime might have been if Mr. Chappaquiddick had ever gotten himself elected president. The best thing about an AOC presidency would be watching the FOX News ‘tards having a meltdown about “socialism.”
By Sophia Meixner, ABC Australia
Next week US voters will choose between the two oldest presidential candidates in history —Joe Biden at 77 or Donald Trump at 74.
In 2016, Trump made history as the oldest person to assume office at 70 years old.
If Joe Biden is elected, he’ll break that record at age 78.
While American electors don’t have much choice this year, it’s already being speculated that the 2024 election could usher in a younger generation of political candidates.
We already saw the beginnings of this younger energy this year, when Democrats Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard ran in the Democratic primary aged in their late 30s.
If Joe Biden is elected in 2020 but opts not to run for a second term, 31-year-old Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (often called AOC) is touted as another 2024 candidate.
The gist of this article is that Trumpism actually has nothing to do with fascism but could possibly, kinda sorta, be a stepping stone to fascism, maybe. Sometimes I think these “anti-fascist” people actually want fascism to happen so they can have something to feel heroic and/or self-righteous about.
By Christopher Vias, The Jacobin
1: Trump’s Authoritarian Personality Is Electable.
Jacobin contributing editor, Matt Karp, discusses what shifts in the Democratic coalition mean for the future of the party.
A split between the neocons and Trumpists at FAUX News. Hopefully, some serious bloodletting takes place.
Usually about half of eligible voters actually participate. This time it was two-thirds.
By Annie Goldsmith, Town and Country
record number of Americans turned out to vote in this year’s presidential race between President Donald Trump and now President-Elect Joe Biden. Biden just won the presidency with over 74.4 million votes, and many are still being counted. The former Vice President garnered more votes than any presidential candidate in American history.
For both parties, voter turnout was record-breaking. According to Bloomberg, at least 161 million Americans voted in the 2020 election, the largest number of voters in a U.S. presidential election in history.
While more people have voted than at any other time in American history, percentage-wise, this number does not quite break records. Given that around 239.2 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2020, the projected number of voters brings us to a 66.8% turnout rate. This makes 2020 the year with the highest voter turnout since 1900, when Republican William McKinley won reelection with 73.7% turnout.
When Trump was elected, there were liberals and leftists call for a reversal of the election by the Electoral College as well.
By Tom Porter, Business Insider
So Chad Himmler defies the orders of the Orange Fuhrer? This has got to be the most limp-dicked “coup attempt” in history.
By Steven Nelson, New York Post
Department of Homeland Security acting Secretary Chad Wolf is defying President Trump’s order to terminate election cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, multiple sources tell The Post.
The White House on Wednesday evening instructed Wolf to fire Krebs after Krebs openly dismissed claims of voter fraud in the Nov. 3 election.
“He gave us a bunch of reasons why he didn’t want to do it and he said no,” a senior White House official told The Post about Wolf’s refusal.
“If anything, Chad is carrying Krebs’ water,” the source added.
Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, has since 2017 led DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and recently launched a “Rumor Control” website to debunk claims of voter fraud. A CISA panel declared Thursday that the “November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” rejecting Trump’s claims of widespread fraud.
A different administration official said “the president wants to fire him” and “Chad Wolf is refusing.”
oth officials told The Post that there was no ambiguity about whether the termination order came from the president, who says fraud resulted in narrow unofficial losses to President-elect Joe Biden in crucial swing states.
“Honestly, it was the president saying, ‘What the heck is this guy doing? He’s giving me grief before the election and now he’s saying there’s nothing wrong in the world?’” the White House official said.
Krebs irked Trump allies even before he refuted claims that election fraud tilted results toward Biden. Foes claim he’s close to former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor, who recently outed himself as “Anonymous.”
A third person familiar with the matter noted concern that Krebs employs an appointee of President Barack Obama, Matt Masterson, as his senior adviser for election security.
“Chad was asked by the president to fire Anonymous’ best friend and he’s refusing,” the administration official said. “He is not managing his agency, but that should not surprise anyone because he is a [former DHS Secretary Kirstjen] Nielsen lackey.”
The most immediately obvious problem with this article is that it merely makes the left-opposition into an appendage of the Democratic Party (to the degree they are not already) held captive by rightwingophobia. Although a valid point the article makes is that the neocons will indeed attempt to harness Trumpism and bend it more directly toward neocon purposes. They could go the redneck route and try to use Tom Cotton as their frontman, or go the diverse route and try to use Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley as their front, or try some other method. But the Repugs will likely try to add a faux economic populism to their wider laundry list of scams.
Tech Learning Collective, Center for a Stateless Society
Trump lost. Last weekend we celebrated the electoral defeat of a US president undeniably behaving as an openly fascist dictator. Yet we must remember that elections are for choosing the targets of our political pressure, not for choosing our saviors. Only we the people, not the president-elect, can meaningfully bring that pressure to bear.
The hate movement that carried Trump to the presidency is bruised but not broken. Writing at Vox, Ezra Klein notes “[t]he conditions that made Trump and this Republican Party possible are set to worsen,” pointing out that not only have Democrats failed to flip the Senate as the polls predicted, but that Republican politicians still control redistricting efforts in statehouses across the country. They will surely use that control to further entrench anti-majoritarian rule for another decade. Then there’s the new 6-3 conservative and partisan majority on the Supreme Court, to say nothing of the well over two hundred conservative judges that have been added to the judiciary with lifetime appointments.
Turkish-born technologist and sociologist Zeynep Tufecki warns in The Atlantic that “[this] situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. […] Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president.”
