This weird breakdowns on Twitter or ESS of voters not pledging fealty to Biden or Clinton, or breaking down at the possibility of people making legitimate demands, concessions, and pleas for relief and help met with disgust.
It's clear that both liberals and conservatives are quite reactionary but why do the former even attempt to pretend to be good people if they're just defending their privilege and identity?
They’re West Wing liberals. They believe that the system is functional and leads to just outcomes. Trump is proof that the system is nonsense. If he loses, they can presumably blame Russia for 2016 and then assume all is right with the world. If he wins, they can still blame Russia (or China, or Bernie Bros, or Jill Stein again for sake of nostalgia), but the damage will have been done, because it puts them in a position where one of two untenable possibilities is true:
- The US will have lost control of two presidential elections in a row, electing an illegitimate president both times, which would show that the system is trash and clearly can’t be relied on to deliver legitimate outcomes.
OR
- Trump is a legitimate president, elected by a fair and democratic process, and none of his incendiary rhetoric, bad behavior, violating norms and social taboos, or outright criminal activity matters.
Either way, a second Trump victory is an indictment of the system that they have convinced themselves is valid and worth defending. The policy doesn’t matter anymore. For them, to a certain extent, this is an existential threat to some part of their identity. Either American democracy is a sham, or meritocracy is a sham, and they need both to be legitimate in order to sleep at night. That’s why they don’t care about anything other than getting Trump out of the way. It has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with maintaining the worldview that they have invested themselves into.
none of his incendiary rhetoric, bad behavior, violating norms and social taboos, or outright criminal activity matters.
They're rules nerds and they're being forced to confront the fact that the rules don't really matter.
Two more related parts of being a rules nerd are 1) their material position makes them able to be involved in politics only on the periphery; the outcomes don't matter that much evening they truly do want change, and they're either white or white-collaborators; and the rules and system are set up for their benefit. And 2) the rules don't matter, but were given to the wonks to act as their idea of being involved in politics; if the come to the realization that the rules are bs and just for show, then they will have to admit to themselves that what they have done to be involved in politics is a sham. At least some of them have been tricked and don't want to admit it.
West Wing liberals
aka fascists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticization_of_politics
Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. (...) Mankind, which in Homer’s time was a spectacle for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself. (...) Communism responds by politicizing art.
Fucking this. The worst thing to happen to American political discourse was the West Wing - it seems to have broken the brains of libs in your country and around the world.
it seems to have broken the brains of libs
Ironically you're doing liberal idealism by thinking a tv show has more impact on people being fascist than their imperialist and colonialist material class interests.
Yeah, fair point. I can see how that comes through. My belief is that media can give us the language and ideals to further normalise behaviour. I don't disagree that the class interests of the libs have a gigantic impact on the way they function, but I believe the media they consume (in particular, the West Wing) gives them an excuse and a language to speak to one another about it without looking too fashy.
It's probably best described as a delusion to justify exploitation, much like the notion of White Man's Burden was during the 18th and 19th century colonial empires
That's a perfect analogy - Sorkin is basically Kipling for a modern era.
Media may not directly shape culture, but it can definitely crystallize and give form to the shapes that are already there, half realized. For example: South Park didn't make people transphobic out of nowhere, but it definitely gave a form to it and helped turn a shapeless, chauvinist-biased ignorance into open, fully formed hatred and contempt. Similarly, the West Wing didn't create Liberals from whole cloth, but it did crystallize their preexisting biases into one easily exploitable shape.
The liberal reality relies on America and capitalism being a flawed project with pure intentions. Trump represents the pure, mask off, truth about the system that they are such willing participants and believers in. Their brains simply can’t handle the shattering of their worldview and the revelation that America/capitalism has always been brutish and evil, so they just compartmentalise it as “Trump is brutish and evil“.
As a former lib I can confirm that this is exactly what happened, except I never quite compartmentalized it and the myth-America in my brain slowly collapsed
The liberal reality relies on America and capitalism being a flawed project with pure intentions.
the virgin Hegelian idealism vs the chad Marxian materialism
Is this the same line of logic that informs the liberal visceral contempt and hatred of Sanders?
Is it just in the reverse where Sanders advocates the sharing of American wealth with the non-deserving that liberal Protestant Work Ethic has contempt for, or jsut the exposition of how the liberal values are just about inspiring speeches and not material equity? (Probably answered my question there though.)
That aside, the responses here are all very good and well articulated convincing arguments for explaining the cognitive dissonance of Trump thwarting liberal values,.
The shock of Hillary losing is what broke them, especially coming on the heels of Brexit. I talk about this a lot but Clinton ran sort of the ultimate liberal fantasy camp of a campaign. She's popular among lanyard types and no one else, so the comparison to Tracey Flick that she gets often is not uncalled for. But her campaign built out an algorithm called Ada that told her where to campaign next based on the polls. If you ever wanted something more technocratic, you won't get it. So let me reiterate.
Hillary's entire 2016 campaign was run on a fucking algorithm that was given preferential treatment over anything else. If it wasn't scientifically proven or metricized, it was discarded.
There's a story of a woman looking to help out in Michigan (a state Hillary lost by a margin of 10,704 votes) who came into a campaign office asking for a yard sign, and the campaign dorks told her that a study said that they don't impact a candidate's electability, so they told her they don't have any. She left and never came back. This kind of wonky bullshit cost them by a dick's hair.
Bill Clinton tried to advise on the campaign too and got overruled. As a consequence, Hillary never stepped foot in Wisconsin. She lost that state by 22,748 votes.
Their false idol of metrics betrayed them, and suddenly nothing is certain.
I will point out that liberals aren't the only ones who this broke. I see lots of leftists this time around not trusting polls and talking bout how Biden's gonna lose. I think it's good to not base all of your assumptions on metrics, but an exception simply proves the rule. 2016 isn't 2020, and Biden is polling really well compared to Hillary's numbers, and by all accounts he's got a much better ground game than she did. You have to use polls as a tool in a belt of methods to determine outcomes, and this time around looks very different. Unless things go south very quickly (and I doubt they will, people seem to be sick of Trump) then I don't see Biden losing. His margins are high enough to even overcome suppression attempts.
It's just how they resolve the cognitive dissonance between their belief in the institutions and how easily those institutions have worked for a Trump admin. Either one corrects their fundamental assumptions that led to the error, or builds some sort of more elaborate explanation to preserve those assumptions. So they do the latter and think of Trump as some aberration and corrupting influence. All the bad things started with Trump, or maybe they were there but Trump made them way worse (read: we were able to ignore them previously). That's the root of Trump derangement syndrome.
when libs see trump they see their true selves. Trump is the naked expression of American Empire, libs want their empire disguised with a smile and nice language. Maybe I'm giving libs too much credit and assume that they actually are aware that maybe the US are the bad guys.
Absolutely too much credit, most still cling to the "the US are bestest good guys!" crap desperately. It's not like they can't realize it, they just refuse to do so.
