The Sunday Post for November 13, 2016

A Time for Refusal

Well, I was going to go election-free today. I thought: "wouldn't it be nice to read around the thing, to not have to face it every moment. Why can't we have a Sunday morning without the election?"

I still think that's a fine goal, but to be honest, the best things published this week are about the election. Everybody is thinking about the election. Everybody is writing about the election.

So, let us go there, too, not with panic, but with a desire to learn and understand.

And who better to start with then one of our most prescient and thoughtful writers, Teju Cole, who published this in the New York Times Magazine.

It is a Sunday afternoon in a provincial town in France. Two men meet at a cafe. One of them, Berenger, is half-drunk. He is being berated by his companion, Jean. All of the sudden, they hear a great noise. When they and other townspeople crane their necks to figure out what’s going on, they see a large animal thundering down one of the streets, stamping and snorting all the way. A rhinoceros! Not long after, there’s another. They are startled. It’s outrageous. Something must be done. What they begin to do is argue heatedly about whether the second rhino was the first one going past a second time or a different one, and then about whether the rhinos are African or Asiatic.
Revenge of the Forgotten Class

Alec MacGillis, in ProPublica, about those voters all politicians have overlooked, who broke for Trump in a big way. By the way, ProPublica is an important institution, a non-profit news gathering organization. Consider tossing them a few dollars, if you can.

Hand-wringing among Democrats about the party’s declining support among white working-class voters goes back a long time, to Lyndon Johnson’s declaration that signing the Civil Rights Act would sacrifice the allegiance of white Southerners. Then came the rest of the historical litany: the crime wave, riots and anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s, the consolidation of suburban white flight, Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reagan Democrats, NAFTA, gun control, the War on Coal, and on and on. By this year, many liberals had gotten so fed up with hearing about these woebegone voters and all their political needs that they were openly declaring them a lost cause, motivated more by racial issues than economic anxiety, and declaring that the expanding Democratic coalition of racial and ethnic minorities and college-educated white voters obviated the need to cater to the white working class.

But this assessment suffered from a fatal overgeneralization. The “white working class” was a hugely broad category — as pollsters defined it, any white voter without a four-year college degree, roughly one-third of the electorate. Within that category were crucial distinctions, especially regional ones. Democrats in national elections had lost most white working-class voters in the Deep South — indeed, virtually all white voters there — a long time ago. They had in the past decade and a half seen much of Greater Appalachia, stretching from the Alleghenies to Arkansas, follow suit, to the point where West Virginia, one of just five states that Jimmy Carter won in 1980, went for Mitt Romney by 26 percentage points in 2012. It was hard to see how the Democrats were going to win back coal country like Logan County, W.V., which Bill Clinton won with 72 percent in 1996 but where Obama got only 29 percent in 2012.

The smug style in American liberalism

An older piece, by Emmett Rensin, in Vox about liberalism's attitude towards the world. It sure seems like a lot of people who voted for Trump complain about how poorly liberals think of them.

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.
How It Happened

Elizabeth Drew looks at how we could have all been so certain Hillary would win, and how we were all so shocked that she didn't.

In late September, I ran into Newt Gingrich and, out of curiosity, I asked him how he thought the election would turn out. “There’ll be a surge for Trump at the end,” he said. “There’s only so far that Hillary can go; too many people don’t like her.” I dismissed this as spin, forgetting that for all his erratic nature Gingrich is a bit of a visionary. Until it happened in 1994, no one outside his small circle believed that he could turn the House of Representatives—in Democratic hands for forty years—into a Republican bastion; hardly anyone took seriously the idea that Gingrich, the rowdy back-bencher, could become speaker. How deeply he believed what he told me about Trump’s chances, I didn’t and still don’t know, but I think my reaction suggests how a great many people thought about this election, up until Tuesday evening: no way it could happen. So it wouldn’t.

And finally, I am totally with Maris on this:

But, after last night, I'm with her on this too: