→ Las cartas están echadas. 🎴 El azar nos trajo un par de reinas 👑, ¡que comience el juego!
🎙 Los sábados y domingos, de 08:00 a 11:00, Marcela Turubich y Susana Maisonnave hacen de tus mañanas algo especial✨
This is a repost of my original thread about Trump's election, which has since disappeared. This time I am reposting it is a single message.
I feel anxious and saddened by Trump’s election. Years of turmoil and uncertainty await us. I have also come to believe that this is not Trump’s win. It is the Democrats who have lost this election.
This is not because Biden stayed on as a candidate despite his age. It is not because Kamala Harris is not qualified (I believe she’s amply qualified). It is because of Democrats’ campaign. Dems have been losing the American workers and did nothing to regain them in this election.
Dems have ceased to be the workers’ party long ago, owing to their support for digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant flows, and “woke” ideas.
The transformation is really striking, as I have argued before: now it is the highly educated, not manual workers that vote for Democrats, and if the center-left does not become more pro-worker, it and democracy will suffer: https://t.co/KG37pwiPvS
For a while it looked like Dems could still win elections with support from Silicon Valley, minorities, some portions of organized labor and the professional class in large cities. But this was never a healthy coalition, and even organized labor wasn’t going to remain faithful for long.
This coalition made Dems increasingly alienated from workers and the middle class in much of the country, especially in smaller cities and the South.
The message was loud and clear in 2016, and all of the soul-searching that followed was healthy. It was part of the reason why Biden adopted a pro-worker industrial strategy.
Biden’s economy delivered for the working class in terms of jobs and strengthening the industrial base of the country. Wages at the bottom rose rapidly. Policy started moving towards the views of the American workers on immigration, protectionism, support for unions and public investment.
And yet, I fear that Dem activists and the establishment never fully internalized the woes of the workers and never made enough of an effort to bring them back to the fold. They sounded distant and detached.
My test is the following: if stranded in an unknown city, would a Dem elite (typically a professional or bureaucrat from a coastal city, with postgraduate education) prefer to spend the next four hours talking to an American worker with a high school degree from the Midwest?
Or would he or she prefer to spend it with a professional with postgraduate education from Mexico, China or Indonesia? Or name your country? I asked this question to colleagues and friends, they all think is the latter --- as do I. Most Dem elites are now alienated from American workers.
It seemed at first that Harris-Walz may try to change that, emphasizing bolstering up the middle class and patriotism, in an effort to appeal to the working class deserting the party. A true effort in that direction would have been commendable, and if credible, perhaps win the election.
But at the end, the campaign focused on abortion and other issues appealing to the base. The main effort to broaden the base came from using Liz Cheney to appeal to suburban women --- on abortion.
Of course, abortion is a critical issue. But focusing on it was never going to win the working class, and certainly not the working-class men.
On the economy, Dems can talk about opportunity and jobs (which they need to do). But they never distanced themselves from the Silicon Valley and the global business elite (but ironically, Silicon Valley started leaving them!)
I fear that, now, Trump and Vance’s Republican Party will be the main home for workers, especially manufacturing workers and those in smaller cities.
I am saddened and fearful for the United States, and I am deeply saddened about the Democratic Party --- unless this time it gets the message can truly change.
This is not just essential for the Democratic Party but for US democracy, which needs to refocus more on egalitarianism and voice for everybody, as I have argued recently: https://t.co/QL5snisj2i and https://t.co/Ua153Wj8bt
What is tragic is that Biden’s agenda had started paying off for workers already (and also proving that it was possible to adopt policies that would help workers and disproving the claim that globalization and inequality were acts of nature that could not be influenced).
What is even more tragic is that the Trump-Vance policies are likely going to be for the plutocrats and not for the American workers.
I will write separately on my views of what to expect from Trump’s policies in the next thread and follow that up with another one on what this presidency might mean for the world.
Debemos ponernos a dieta mental de libros de autoayuda y de discursos simplistas sobre la #felicidad para poder pensar en alternativas que pongan el foco del bienestar en lo común y el cuidado mutuo.
Charlando con @srjosekarlos en @CC_LaMalagueta.
https://t.co/yOdACMqLyj
No dejen de leer esta entrevista. Va más allá de las razones de la victoria de Trump: una reflexión sobre los errores de la izquierda liberal...
Michael Ignatieff: “Trump ha cosechado los efectos de 50 años de negligencia progresista ante la desigualdad” https://t.co/QL8bGZTi3O
Hoy @delia2d me ha quitado las palabras de la boca. Solo tengo una cosa que añadir: la niebla no es un accidente, es parte del plan. Lo describió Hanna Arendt: "el pueblo que ya no puede distinguir entre la verdad y la mentira no puede distinguir entre el bien y el mal".
@varelavito@vara_robles Sobre esto y fuera del ámbito laboral, quizás os interese ver esta serie:
https://t.co/1KE12073N1
Crónica de @laventana :
https://t.co/4jAEmmh3Pl
@jonsarean Sí. En el fondo, se trata de un problema de orgullo y cinismo, de pereza indolente que se envuelve con la bandera de un presunto 'propósito mayor' o de estar sirviendo a un presunto 'bien común' para justificar toda clase de abusos. Por eso es tan importante la reacción colectiva
@varelavito@vara_robles Creo que quien debería ir a "ayuda" debería ser la persona u organización generadora del problema y no quien lo sufre. Pero es una simple opinión a contracorriente
@vara_robles No soy muy optimista, en general creo que no nos tratamos bien. La mala gestión del poder es un tema que es transversal a las actividades humanas, con o sin transacción económica