(I think I know the answer)

This old, white, blue-collar, male Texan was desperate to vote for Elizabeth Warren for president. Does that still make me part of the problem?

It really is close to as simple as that. I’ve been listening to the autopsy reports coming in a flood from the creative-class enclaves of Williamsburg and Park Slope and they still have no idea why or how this happened. Moore knew...and Thomas Frank knew...and if the liberal commentariat had bothered to visit Racine…

Ahhh...I shoulda hit refresh first. That’s a great clip you linked.

There was a Black Mirror episode about that very thing, IIRC. It was brilliant.

That was very good.

This has long been the M.O. of the American people. Voters in the Deep South have been voting against their economic self-interests for decades now. The difference now is that the collapse of manufacturing and the freefall of the middle class into the working poor in the Rust Belt has deprived poor whites there a…

This has been my suspicion all along. He’s just too ignorant about how governance works to not fuck it up. In the meantime, we need to start grooming the most progressive young politicians in the Democratic Party to give the working poor an alternative to carnival barkers and Huey Long wannabes.

I’m on it. And read Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal! He predicted this very result last spring.

And fuck you, too, for doing a shitty job of encouraging Obama voters to vote for Clinton. And fuck Obama for not getting black folks to turn out in North Carolina and Philadelphia. See, you can do this for days and never get to the real cause: That neither party lifted a finger in over a generation to create real…

Keep telling yourself that in the long reaches of the night.

By the time I finished reading that thing on Sunday, I knew beyond any reasonable doubt that the professional urban classes that represent the vast majority of online media creators were in for a god-awful wakeup call on Tuesday night. The contempt, and over weaning smugness of that screed reaffirmed for me that the…

Thanks for the tip. In the weeks ahead, as I try to get a grip on what happened and exactly why, I’ll revisit The Gist.

This election demonstrates, among other things, that if you give the working poor who are struggling to keep their heads above water even a shred of hope, they’ll follow you anywhere...even into the abyss.

It’s a frustrating peculiarity of our system that it’s really only a few thousand votes in a handful of states that decide our presidential elections. A few thousand in North Carolina...Wisconsin...Iowa...and it’s a different world.

This. This means that North Dakota votes are worth thousands of California votes. It’s a funny old world.

Now would be a good time for the urban, professional classes to try to understand why this happened, instead of wishing that the folks who voted for Trump would burn in hell. Half of this country isn’t racist, but half of this country is watching their futures vanish under the weight of an economy that has left them…

This. I wrote a long, hysterical screed trying to make these points. Your comment pretty much sums it up.

Likewise.

I’m surprised, too. I googled the subject and Apple seems to be a bewildering distance behind both Amazon and Google. It’s...weird. It’s hard to imagine that Jobs wouldn’t have had something on the shelves long before now.