BLUE RUIN: Can you run a large modern nation this way?

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2025

Bogus claims can spread faster than flames: Here at this incomparable site, we've been trying to address a set of extremely important questions. 

As a general matter, those questions are variants on one basic point of incomprehension—on a bit of puzzlement widely voiced here in Blue America:

How in the world did we ever lose to a guy like Donald J. Trump?

We Blues!  Quite routinely, we say that we can't imagine a reason why a decent person would ever have voted for someone like Donald J. Trump. In the face of such incomprehension, we tend to fall back on a preferred explanation for our (rather narrow) loss:

Trump's voters must all be racists!

This pleasing assertion is on wide display in Blue America's comment threads. Sometimes, our highest-profile tribal leaders even say such things as this:

BLUE AMERICAN POLITICAL LEADER (9/9/16): You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call "the basket of deplorables." 

(Laughter/applause) 

Right? 

(Laughter/applause) 

They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

As you can see by clicking here, that's the way these remarks were transcribed by the leading authority on this now-famous assessment.

In fairness, everyone speaks unwisely at some point in time. Unfortunately, that unwise statement went viral. 

Over on the Fox News Channel, the statement lingers as part of the national discourse. It may even explain why some people voted for Trump this part year, a full eight years after the fact.

Briefly, let's be fair. In that instance, the speaker said that only half of Trump's supporters were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it." 

(Were all those people "irredeemable?" It depends on how you parse the last part of that passage.)

At any rate, that was only half of the fellow's supporters! According to the speaker in question, the other half of his supporters were a different kettle of fish:

BLUE AMERICAN LEADER (continuing directly): But the "other" basket—the other basket—and I know, because I look at this crowd, I see friends from all over America here...but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. 

It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but—he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

Interesting! According to this high-profile leader, fully half of Trump's supporters were in fact redeemable. They actually weren't "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it," the way the other half were!

According to this political leader, we should empathize with those people. So it was in 2016—and  presumably, it was from this second basket of people that we Blues lost votes this last time around. 

Some voters for Biden now voted for Trump. Some voters for Biden stayed home this past year. Presumably, those switchers are drawn from the basket of redeemable people, not from the people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.

According to that political leader, we should try to understand why they did what they did. We lost votes from people who aren't irredeemable. So how did we lose their votes?

For today, we're jus trying to clarify the question we've been attempting to chase. The basic fact remains true, as always:

No one else will ever be as smart or as decent as we Blue Americans are.

We Blues! We're fated to live with the effects of our vast superiority. This past year, we somehow managed to lose some votes from people who are at least redeemable. So how in the world did that ever happen? How did we lose their votes?

In the comments threads of our own Blue nation, some of us continue to "labor under a mistake." We continue to think, and to say, that everyone who isn't just like us is racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. 

According to experts, this is the oldest conceptual framework in all of human affairs. This picture of the world is bred in the bone. It's the way we humans are wired.

Still and all, the question remains. How did we manage to lose those votes? What led the switchers to switch?

Was it something we said or did? Why did some voters leave us?

For today, we just wanted to clarify the reason for the season—the basic rationale behind our current search.

Many of us can't imagine why a decent person would have voted for Candidate Trump—or, perhaps, why a decent person might have decided to vote against a gang of people like us.

In our own view, there quite a few such reasons. Other Blues can see them at all!

In our search, we're trying to address that one small lapse. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we Blues are sometimes stuck with this one small bit of angry incomprehension.

Question:

When we admitted geniuses give voice to this massive incomprehension, is it possible that we drive even more voters away?

This afternoon: Can a large modern nation really function this way? Bogus statements can travel faster than the flames from a very large fire!

Tomorrow: We recall what Alberta said