Saturday, September 24, 2016

Morons, Meet the Morons

Fucking Cardinals fans. The very worst.
Also, they are losers.
One of the difficulties is what you might call the Trump bloc. I'm using this to refer to a silent majority that isn't a majority and is not particularly silent*: whites, generally older, generally less educated, although of course with exemptions for all of those generalizations.

[This group] is a very, very awkward size. It seems to be somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the electorate, which is big enough that it feels like a majority but small enough that it isn't actually a majority.

That's a very uncomfortable place to be, politically, because smaller groups I think come to appreciate, not immediately but eventually, that they have to compromise and form coalitions. Larger groups can just win.

But this group doesn't seem small enough to compromise or big enough to win. That makes people very angry. I think some of that anger is reflected not just in Trump's campaign but in the sort of rhetoric you see around the rallies. And everyone has seen footage of people who are just hopping mad in a way that I suspect is alien not just to the journalists who cover them but also to movement conservatives who have claimed to speak for them in the past.
"Movement conservatives"? Yes, a few hundred deluded buffoons:
I think the great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives.

There is an infrastructure of journalists, intellectuals who are vested in a conventional combination of limited government, a relatively hawkish foreign policy, and a sort of religiously inflected public morality. There are a few hundred such people, and they all know each other. But it turned out that there aren't that many voters who actually care about these things — or at least cared about them in quite that combination.
Nope, just full-on jerks who are "hopping mad" about anyone not just like they are.
*Our emphasis. SHUT UP, MINORITY OF LOUD-MOUTHED POORLY-EDUCATED & ANCIENT HONKY BASTARDS. GO SOMEWHERE & DIE ALREADY!

1 comment:

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

But this group doesn't seem small enough to compromise or big enough to win.

They could easily compromise if they weren't dead-ender assholes.

Also, that whole 'small government' thing has always been bullshit, nobody wants their pet projects cut.