It seems to have become depressingly routine to describe the loss of Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump in the US Presidential election of 2016 as something inevitable, although it was anything but when the votes had not yet been cast. Trump's surprise win elicted a broad range of responses on the left, most of them sadly predictable.
If only if they'd chosen Bernie Sanders. If only we'd have spent more time connecting with the white working class. What if Joe Biden had run?
The truth of the matter is that while Trump carried a white majority, by far the biggest majority he carried was among the upper class, not the working class. And he lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.
Jacobin, a class-struggle stalwart with Marxist roots, panned a widely shared New Yorker cartoon that compared Donald Trump's election to a random passenger on a plane shouting he should be the pilot. The article claims it's emblematic of snooty liberal elitism that fails to factor in so many contextual issues that lead to this happening in the first place.
While the piece does a fair job at disassembling the cosiness of smug, vaguely left-of-centre liberalism, I think it's myopic in not metioning the tide of sheer hatred that carried much of Trump's campaign. Also, for its scoffing at liberal elites, I wonder how many blue-collar people actually read Jacobin.
The plane metaphor is too simplistic to put Trump in perspective, but so is Jacobin's expansion of it. His election is not a repudiation of liberal ideas - rather, he slunk through an incredibly narrow window of opportunity to almost fail into victory.
Democracy is in danger in all of the West, and establishment candidates are not the answer to the rising wave of racism and bigotry. Racism and bigotry that have been enabled by weak media institutions that favour ratings over actual reporting, and have been systematically gaslighted for years by reactionaries into giving them a platform for their fact-free bullshit.
One of the left's glaring errors, for just as many years, has been trying to reason their way into regressive people's hearts, or simply co-opting a softer version of their right-wing ideologies. Now, as Jeb Lund said, we can only hope that Trump and his ilk will fall apart so spectacularly that it shocks the system into provoking people who will work for actual change.
If only if they'd chosen Bernie Sanders. If only we'd have spent more time connecting with the white working class. What if Joe Biden had run?
The truth of the matter is that while Trump carried a white majority, by far the biggest majority he carried was among the upper class, not the working class. And he lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.
Jacobin, a class-struggle stalwart with Marxist roots, panned a widely shared New Yorker cartoon that compared Donald Trump's election to a random passenger on a plane shouting he should be the pilot. The article claims it's emblematic of snooty liberal elitism that fails to factor in so many contextual issues that lead to this happening in the first place.
While the piece does a fair job at disassembling the cosiness of smug, vaguely left-of-centre liberalism, I think it's myopic in not metioning the tide of sheer hatred that carried much of Trump's campaign. Also, for its scoffing at liberal elites, I wonder how many blue-collar people actually read Jacobin.
The plane metaphor is too simplistic to put Trump in perspective, but so is Jacobin's expansion of it. His election is not a repudiation of liberal ideas - rather, he slunk through an incredibly narrow window of opportunity to almost fail into victory.
Democracy is in danger in all of the West, and establishment candidates are not the answer to the rising wave of racism and bigotry. Racism and bigotry that have been enabled by weak media institutions that favour ratings over actual reporting, and have been systematically gaslighted for years by reactionaries into giving them a platform for their fact-free bullshit.
One of the left's glaring errors, for just as many years, has been trying to reason their way into regressive people's hearts, or simply co-opting a softer version of their right-wing ideologies. Now, as Jeb Lund said, we can only hope that Trump and his ilk will fall apart so spectacularly that it shocks the system into provoking people who will work for actual change.
