Maybe. Or maybe it taught us that if one party has a sack of clowns, dweebs and dorks running into each other, and the other runs a historically horse**** candidate you get a weird result.

We'll see - I'm old enough to remember when McGovern won the dem nomination and everyone was CERTAIN the new youth vote was going to change the world. Not so much.

MM MD

trump won thanks to all the free airtime msnbc, cnn,abc,nbc,cbs,new york times washington post,wall street journal etc etc etc gave him. he ran the perfect campaign funded by a bunch of liberal nin com poops. i know some may disagree but reflect upon this and learn

Trump is a unique candidate in that he was able to get an absurd amount of free airtime. If you look at stats, he had by far the most time on air. Yes, he was able to get that time for free. It seems unlikely many other candidates will be able to do so, meaning they will still need money.

Basically, it's wrong to say money doesn't matter.

California Democrats block single-payer healthcare in California

http://www.latimes.com/politics/esse...htmlstory.html

These dirty ****ing rats need to be primaried and thrown to the side. This is NOT acceptable. This is NOT a way to win.

The "olds dying off and current liberal youth will guarantee the Republican Party gets destroyed in the future" line of thought has been around awhile, true. And it hasn't fully come to fruition.

However, I have to believe that the current state of Republican politics is so turn-offish on civil rights and the like to young people that there won't be a turn-35-and-convert-to-Republican-for-monetary-reasons anymore. I'm right in this age range and no one in my peer group has any intention on trying to put Republicans in office to get a tax cut.

Well educated people with decency basically all live in like 15 cities. Republicans will continue to crush rural communities and states, therefore retaining power over state houses, governorships and gerrymandering, for decades.

Hey, *******. I would like to think I'm in the first catagory and I don't live in one of your magical 15 cities. So **** off.

This kind of **** is how we got to where we are in politics - total tribalism and thinking the worst of everyone else.

MM MD

Anybody who doesn't support Universal Health Care, please kindly go and register for the Fascist (Republican) party TODAY and never ever call yourselves "liberals" or "Democrats" ever again. Please and thank you.

No offense to you personally, but I'm completely ****ing done honoring the supposed decency of middle and rural America. If you vote Democrat, great, thanks. Seriously. But I have had enough of "hey you stop saying we are all ignorant and intolerant" from rich white people in Texas or Mississippi or Wyoming or wherever the ****. Amazing how all the white people you talk to from those places "don't agree with him on everything" or whatever the **** they say to get people to not make fun of them, while reliably pulling the lever for absolutely atrocious human beings.

At this point, if you have any ambivalence about which team you're on, that's on you. Look at what these mother****ers do.

"However, I have to believe that the current state of Republican politics is so turn-offish on civil rights and the like to young people that there won't be a turn-35-and-convert-to-Republican-for-monetary-reasons anymore."

Well, I suspect it's more of a turn 50, but I think (and hope) you're probably right. We'll see.

MM MD

Dear God. The Democrats have learned absolutely NOTHING. Look at this ****.

it takes all kinds (click through to the images)

https://twitter.com/delmoi/status/879788103044608000

http://www.dhbusinessledger.com/news...a-raise-july-1

Cook County recently raised the minimum wage, but allowed towns to opt out and keep the existing minimum wage. The majority of towns did so despite 80% or so being Democratic strongholds. There is a map and article in the link.

Towns that opted out:

• North Cook, which transitions from heavily D near I-94 to Republican in NW Cook. Middle and Upper middle class. Far SW Cook is in this category. Very white areas.
• White working class in the W and near SW suburbs, heavily Democratic. A few Black towns in this group.

Towns keeping the higher MW:

• Chicago proper
• A handful of Black and Hispanic towns in the South and Near West suburbs, Democratic and low income
• Wealthy swing districts on the North Shore and far NW Cook. Top 2% in income.
• Evanston and Oak Park, which are basically Berkeley.

This is a pretty harsh way to express it, but I agree. Rural America has its own brand of smug and people are at least equally capable of the same hypocrisy that you'll find anywhere else, only some seem so in love with their folksy, honorable self-image they can't even recognize it.

I hear a lot of sanctimonious talk about values from that corner, but do the results ever seem to match? For example, marriage should be limited to a man and a woman because it's sacred - so I guess I can expect to find divorce rates pretty well under control then, right?

And while we're on family values, I also assume that such great folks are placing a high priority in ensuring that their children receive quality educations. Naturally they've also got issues like teen pregnancy sorted out. And alcoholism. And drug addiction. And fostering a respect for the environment that they'll live in. Surely they're managing what few deadbeat dads they have.

Rural/middle America is open and friendly, and always hospitable to folks that are different (mostly). Gun policy also reflects careful consideration and common sense, which is important because it's possible that these recreational and self-defense tools could be potentially hazardous. Maybe even to a family member!

...

Snarkiness aside, there a real problem with rural/middle America right now that can't be chalked up to lifestyle or culture or a failure of Democrats to "reach out". In times past you could make that argument, back when our differences were things like state vs. Federal reach, fiscal policy, abortion, guns. Now they're just voting in imbeciles and shuttering themselves off from reality, and I see very little honest self-reflection about it or attempts to bring any kind of order to their own house.

So yeah, I'm not giving a pass either. If they want to hand a blank check over to these animals that are openly trying to screw them over, there's not much that can be done. Just hope they don't expect sympathy ten years from now when they're no better off, still living week to week and not being able to afford medication.

well, most of us at 35 are all still broke these days.

Yeah, but clearly the Republicans aren't depending on that angle much anymore, because they can't. Spreading misinformation (and seeding distrust of the press who would call them out on it) seems to make for far easier fishing.

I think the fundamental, very fundamental problem is capital. Namely the lack of it, or at the very least the way in which while some in these places might still have it, on the whole it these areas are degrading.

But the degradation is holistic. I'm surprised we can't recognize that lifestyle and culture are associated, resulting problems from economic ones. And that middle American whites are suffering pretty greatly here, maybe more here than they are economically. The disorder is pretty apparent, and real, and witnessed in growing drug addiction, decreasing life expectancy, the rise of divorce and single parent households. It's frankly no surprise upon reflection that these people are falling into right-wing authoritarian movements to set things in order. But I think we ignore and deny the cultural and lifestyle problems to our detriment. I do not think they are the proximate cause of problems in middle and rural and exurban and even suburban white America, but they have comorbidity with economic problems and are probably being felt far more acutely.

I think liberals have unfortunately not quite addressed this, understandably washing our hands of the problem in one respect (riverman's point of view is understandable, a lot of these people deserve no sympathy and are quite contemptible). And perhaps not wanting to finger-wag at people in ways that always felt conservative. The only people writing about the condition are frankly more self-aware right-wing racist asshats like Kevin Williamson and Charles Murray who have made careers out of lambasting black people for the same problems building across white America and are 'honest' enough to admit the same problems they tut-tutted at black people about (single parent households, failing schools, families on government assistance, drug addiction) are bleeding out into white America the ways that used to be ghettoized and segregated and limited to black America.

I obviously take a different tact, namely that modern capitalism if nothing else has proven strangely egalitarian like that, exporting problems to a wider array of life's losers than it used to instead of very specifically targeted at racial minorities. The middle of the 20th century and far more progressive politics shielded the middle class and working class whites from the worst of the collective effects of laissez faire capitalism that were always allowed to pervade on blacks. Once the forces were unleashed, like many things in America, the victims became far more diverse. But some of the very critical things that a more unfettered capitalism unleashes is a destruction of institutions, of cultures, of ways of life that don't serve or undermine the market. Mediocre white America with all of its cultural whimsy became a deprecated feature and abandonware as the market moved onto more promising new products and features. There's enough money and accumulated wealth and government assistance afforded to these places that they're not yet living in true economic privation but -- and this is the grand point, in respond to your post -- the ephemeral cultural and lifestyle stuff is eroding first, and people are feeling it deeply. Cultural and social anthropologists can start to witness the degradation of the Roman way of life starting in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD as trade and production started to falter...but long before the political system formally fell and the trade and economy totally collapsed by noting decreases in the quality and quantity of letter writing and literature and oration, for instance. You can see superstitions start to replace facts in public writings. You can see family life eroding in the ways orphanages took on more children decade over decade in the 3rd century. It's actually a common story in societal collapse. It's like Maslow's hierarchy: lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts, confidence, culture, art, welcoming of outsiders fall first. Family and social institutions fall next. Economy and security collapse last.

History ain't fate and it isn't inevitable, and I don't think the effects are irreversible. But you'll miss the story waiting for total economic collapse to arrive before you see the initial signs of destruction arrive. There's real problems in rural, middle America that are perhaps not *caused* primarily by but signaled and exacerbated by cultural and 'lifestyle' failures.

But I don't see the right-wing authoritarian movements atrophying unless we address it, no matter how much we feel like America's angry white brigades don't deserve the help.

That isn't any different than when I was that age. For most people it takes a lifetime to grow wealth.

Problem is we've delayed the start of people building wealth by dramatically increasing the amount of debt they have to shoulder to get out of college. You REALLY notice how much leverage you get on your investments with time - my pension has made pretty much all of the gains in the last 7 years or so (with the help of a friendly market) - for the first 8 years or so it grew VERY slowly. If you can't start putting away $$ because you're crushed with debt early, you lose the benefit of time.

MM MD

Your posting generally seems reasonable but GTFO with this offended bull****, snowflake.

Here's the issue.

The whole "everyone in rural America is a racist scumbag" take is way too close for my tastes to "all islamic men are terrorists" or "those mexicans just want to steal our jobs" or "those black welfare queens are just pumping out babies on the taxpayers dime" sort of thinking that the idiot Fox news types chant about. Simple, concise and wrong.

It's way too easy to lump a huge group of people into a catagory and demonize them. It's sloppy thinking. This forum skews to the left, understandably given the demographics, and I probably skew a bit to the right of most of the posters - but overall, I enjoy the discussion and learn something from time to time. There are only a couple of posters I ignore - and it's generally because they've staked out a totally black and white position on a topic that has shades of grey. There's no reasoning with them - kind of like trying to talk to hardcore NRA types about assault rifles in schools. So I don't bother...

MM MD

By his late 20's my father was supporting a family of four in a home he owned as a blue collar factory worker with just a high school degree. He retired early with a full pension and a comfortable nest egg.

Congrats to your dad for choosing to be born a white male!

It wasn't easy, but he worked hard for it!

Seems like the stats on "had a steady career and secure retirement" contrast for people born in the 40s and 50s vs people born in the 70s and 80s are going to be pretty sick.