Democracy Watch
3am Waffle House Deciding the Fate of America??
And so the world … um, No
Democracy, democracy, democracy … sheesh.
Charlamagne tha God rippled the digisphere on a slow news day in June with a shot at the blue team for its communications strategy. He thinks they need more authenticity … like Moscow Marjorie.
No, really. MTG is CtG’s idea of authentic.
Vulgar, I’ll give you. Authentic?? What does that even mean?
“Authentically what?” is the better question. Small minded. Gullible. Violent. Crude. Supernaturalist. Authoritarian. Un-American in her MAGA love of all things KGB and CSA … sure, 24 carat, authentically all of the above.
Is it any wonder Spanko tha Felon is most at home in a WWE crowd, the sport quickest to mind when one thinks about authenticity.
Which brings us to Joseph de Maistre’s depressing quote, often misattributed:
In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve.
Call me stubborn and sentimental, the opinions of our closest neighbors to the contrary, I don’t think the American people are so degraded that we deserve a KGB patsy convicted felon bankrupt nepo baby scripted reality-TV game-show serial cheater con-man rapist as POTUS.
James Carville concurs with CtG on the comms aspect, but shifts the focus to the issues that matter to the common person, rather than their vernacular, as any good EC counting strategist should. All while demonstrating his own s- and f-bomb dropping authenticity.
Whether swearing is a sign of intelligence, honesty and creativity, or just bad manners, I will leave to the brain and social scientists. Eating at Waffle House at 3am, though, I fucking doubt correlates in any distinctive way with those traits. Absolutely it cuts a stripe across the blue/red heels of the horseshoe, which is to say the non-elite strata of all races.
Let me be clear: I don’t want either of these two ~octagenerians with their proverbial finger on the nuclear button. But I also want a Tranquil Union of peace and prosperity for all the people of the planet.
Want’s got nothin’ to do with it, sadly.
Based largely on the Pew Research corpus of survey data, the US polled populace gets it right most of the time, in my opinion. On the gnarliest issues like migration, abortion, race, gender & sexuality, fiscal policies, federalism, foreign policy … I find it surprising how often that wisdom of the crowd is, in fact, wise. Even on as contentious and divisive as the culture war transgender topic.
Lest this start to sound like an endorsement of the CtG/Carville dumb-it-down comms strategy, however, Pew aggregates the entire horseshoe, not only the Waffle House bottom tier. There are plenty of voters who want to admire our leaders, to think of them as among the best of US, not just performers/entertainers who have no filter and give voice to the devils of our viler natures. We want more superego, less id.
The winning EC strategy is about building a coalition of different factions, many of whom with zero-sum tensions on single issues (e.g. feminists and suburban moms vs LGBTQ+ activists on male-to-female trans athletes on girls’ high school sports teams). That requires the same sort of nuance, subtlety and sophistication that the Biden/Harris brain trust used in 2020 to snake its tiny silver thread through the (then) six swing states.
Plain talk is good, but Biden trying to out-Trump Trump on the crude scale is a losing tactic.
I interact with a lot of blue collar types, as well as my own cohort of white collars … playing old guy pub league soccer in NorCal is a good way to meet a demographic cross-section. For the most part it’s encouraging. The closed minded zealots, of either color, are the exception. In the seven years I’ve been with my current club, I can only remember one moment that turned testy, in the event, between Italian and German immigrants, in the heat of the 2020 election.
This go-round, I’ve been struck several times by how even seemingly stereotypical MAGANs can be reasoned with, no matter how strongly they may drink the anti-Biden Kool-aid. When they have good arguments on the issues — say taxes, inflation, crime & grime here in the Golden State — they’ll engage in solid debate, but they aren’t fully hypnotized into the personality cult of Trump. They can understand the connection between the pandemic mishandling, subsequent bipartisan stimulus spending open spigot and the inflation bubble, for example.
That doesn’t mean they shrug off $5 gasoline … let alone $7 at its recent worst.
Trump’s jury conviction even has one or two saying that they’re no longer going to vote for him. Whether they’ll switch to Biden, sit it out, or opt for one of the 3rd party protest votes is TBD. Since we’re talking California here, it doesn’t matter in any case. But if this is in any way representative of their cohort’s attitudes in WI, MI, PA, NC or GA … could be the ballgame.
Carville continues to be right that wallet is the bottom line. Nobody gives a shit about Gaza, or October 7.
