'Total upheaval': Columnist wonders why Americans are united in 'deep chords of distrust'https://t.co/fuEotbJFpD
— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 20, 2024
In a sense, it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united,” the authors of the report wrote in their introduction.
The findings from the study, conducted before the election by researchers at Louisiana State University, the University of Maryland and the University of Chicago, led Schmemann to believe that Donald Trump’s victory was not the surprise many found it to be.Trump achieved his highest vote count. And yet his margin of victory was 1.7% of votes cast.
“Deep chords of distrust” is a little overwrought. Lots of seeking after an overarching grand unified theory, when the ground level granular analysis hasn’t really yet begun.
How much of this outcome is just “same as it ever was,” but God forbid we even consider that. There’s more than a little “we were better than this but the Yahoos snuck into camp while our guard was down” explaining away going on. Which isn’t divisive because, you know, they’re the ones being divisive. Sort of a “those white people are messing it up for us white people” argument.
Same as it ever was, IOW. It’s not that we have to examine our culpability, whoever “we” is. It’s more that we have to examine our assumptions. Change the facts, change the outcome. Now, what do we think the facts are?
Addendum: regarding the comment below: 💯
The quest to pin down the win of Trump to any one thing or even a couple or three or four things might be a legacy of the "enlightenment's" origin in the culture of science, in its most unrealistic ideological form. The relationship of physics to the ideologically monistic quest of physicists, as manifested in today's quest for a theory of everything is a very real thing. The belief that sociology and psychology are sciences and, in large part what the motivation to consider something so clearly an attenuated manifestation of that, opinion polling, is a direct consequence of the idea that due to the monistic nature of reality, reality is vulnerable to the methods of physics and chemistry, so deeply embedded that I'd bet most of those who practice those have, at best, a vague notion that that is the foundation of their claim that what they are doing is science.
ReplyDeleteI think the strength of misogyny and racism in the culture as manifested every single day in the passive acceptance of violence and the casual acceptance of stereotypical and negative views of both Women and People of Color probably account for the first reason that both she and Hillary Clinton lost by the narrowest of margins. Though neither of those reasons is a simple phenomenon. Racists are often misogynists, racists include those who have interiorized the generally racist culture (Clarence Thomas?) and women have often interoirized misogyny (the examples of that include every Woman Trumpist you could name).
Ignorance is another pervasive and obvious reason as can be seen in the numerous Trump voters who believed his line about how tariffs were going to be paid by foreign companies and corporations. - something that I think Trump still believes, himself. And that's only one instance of how the basic ignorance of a very large percentage of voters can win a presidential election for someone who the media endlessly echos in their lies as comprises the public career of Donald Trump from even before he rode down the chintzy golden escalator. To attribute some folk wisdom as so many of these journalistic and pseudo-sociological explanations do is absurd. Even the attributed wisdom that Trump won because of the price of eggs is, at bottom, an example of the ignorance of a large number of Americans because along with that artificial boost to the price of eggs came the undeniable benefits to Americans in their earnings. Another big part of that is the attempt early in the Biden-Harris administration to boost the minimum wage, BLOCKED BY REPUBLICANS, AS I RECALL WITH AN ORDER FROM TRUMP TO DO THAT. Kirsten Sinema is a one-person reason that more Americans didn't directly experience what would have been one of the greatest boosts in personal wealth among the working poor and many in the lower middle class.
Which brings us to the third most obvious reason that Trump won, he had the support of the mass media that makes up what most Americans seen to believe is what they know about the world and what they believe they experience.
And there are certainly many other reasons that led the thin margin of voters AND THE NON-VOTERS who reimposed Trump on us, one of those things is what gave him his first regime, the Electoral College.