Tag: voting

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Were we wrong about Trump?

A few thoughts expanded from my Twitter yesterday, on the number of leftwingers or liberals who I see saying things like “Oh, Donald Trump has calmed down since winning, he’s toned down the extremism, maybe he won’t be a total monster as President.”

The thing is, Trump’s behaviour may have calmed down. But the hatred and violence he deliberately fostered during the election hasn’t.

There were many, many factors involved in the US election result, and a lot of the narratives presume there was a massive surge in Republican support, to which I just keep referring to this graph:

But just because Trump didn’t get a huge stack of new voters doesn’t mean his aggressive, violent messages had no impact. Of course they affected the way people talk, and the way people are behaving now he’s won, and their sense that openly racist, xenophobic, sexist attitudes are acceptable now.

Those people are now doing the work for him, of terrorising people who might resist, of shutting down honest debate about democracy, and of marginalizing even further the people already on the margins. They are harassing, attacking, abusing, vandalising, threatening, and inevitably they will be killing other people because of Trump’s message.

It’s entirely convenient and cynically, strategically smart for Trump to chill out and start acting like a grown-up for the cameras now. Because the violence will carry on regardless – they got the message – and our “oh it’s not so bad, he’s stopped screaming racist abuse” reaction means it will go unchallenged.

If we say “oh but violence is terrible, I deplore violence” yet do not actively resist the root cause of that violence we might as well say nothing at all.

Trump’s newfound “mature” demeanour gives people – especially privileged liberals with access and resources – an excuse to step back and stop being angry. Stop elevating the voices of others who don’t have our privilege. Stop caring about violence and abuse targeted at people who don’t look like us.

After an election in which so many marginalized people already felt like (and have plenty of data to support the notion) middle-class liberal white people sold them out, we simply cannot double down on ignoring their needs.

We cannot take comfort in the fact that Donald Trump has taken off the red baseball cap of the disruptive threat to the status quo and put on the trappings of a normal, safe white male politician. Because then all we’re doing is saying fascism is okay as long as it’s not too shouty.

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QOTD: Herald Insights on NZ voting patterns

Credit where credit’s due, some great work is coming out of the NZ Herald’s Insights data site, like this interactive exploration of how different groups in NZ vote. But there’s a lot more to it than you might think on the surface:

  • Best predictors for National voters are places with high proportion of people from European ethnicity.
  • In a Labour versus Greens contest, places with higher proportion of educated voters are more likely to vote for Greens.

A comparison between different parties allows readers to see the shift in voting patterns for different population characteristics.

However, it is not possible to infer voting patterns for individuals using this analysis.

…

Even considering the social patterns, such as higher proportion of European ethnicity, it is useful to consider whether it is the ethnicity or living in a less diverse neighbourhood that has the impact on voting patterns.

[Edited slightly in solidarity with lost subeditors]

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “Pasifika people all vote Labour” or “small business owners all vote National” or “this person is a middle-aged white male tradie, he’ll be really conservative”. We have to go a lot deeper, and consider each individual’s place in their community, to understand why they vote the way they do.

Go check out the whole thing!

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Why would progressives vote for Trump?

[A note in hindsight: this post was published in April 2016, a good amount of time before it became crystal clear that Trump is a goddamned Nazi-enabling rule-of-law-trashing fascist. And yet some people who claim to be of the left still think his election was a good idea. This is when the world went topsy-turvy.]

This is a tangent off yesterday’s post, specifically about the common justification for calling on Sanders to withdraw: that to continue campaigning against Clinton will damage her chances against the Trump.

(An interesting framing issue there: why do we take it for granted that Clinton and Sanders must run negative campaigns against each other? The simple answer is “that’s politics”, but if the Sanders campaign has shown anything through its grassroots fundraising and popularizing of “radical” “socialist” policies, it’s that the rules can be changed.)

There are concerns that Sanders supporters, feeling stymied or bitter or just generally sexist, would not only not support a Clinton ticket but actually vote for Trump. That this would mean “robbing” the United States of four more years of Democratic presidency.

As I said yesterday, the point of democracy is we don’t disenfranchise people whose opinions we don’t like. But there’s another problem. The reasons people vote one way or another are complex. And although it sounds utterly inconceivable to people who have already weighed the pros and cons and decided for Hillary, there are plenty of reasons progressives might think a Trump presidency is the “better” option – or at least the lesser of two evils.

A Trump victory could mean the end of the Republican party. Maybe you want to get fancy and accelerationist about it, or maybe you just like seeing people get a taste of their own medicine, and the Republican machine are freaking out as the inevitable outcome of their years of gerrymandering and panic-mongering are coming back to bite them in the ass. Maybe you think four years of Trump, assuming he even lasts that long, would be worth it to see the GOP establishment thoroughly ripped away from their Tea Party base. It could pave the way to twelve or sixteen or twenty-four years of Democratic leadership which has the space to make truly progressive policy.

It’s pie-in-the-sky but there are far sillier reasons to vote for someone. Besides, even if you think that’s too much of a long game, Trump is a walking disaster zone. Maybe you think he’s so erratic, unpredictable and completely unprepared/unable to negotiate the checks and balances of the US government system that he’ll never achieve anything. He could be impeached within a year. We could use that year to set up the machine for the glorious Warren Democratic ticket.

Trump’s misogyny is contemptible, but not significant. The real battle over reproductive rights, especially abortion access, isn’t being fought at a federal level. Who cares who’s in the White House when it’s your governor and state senate who are mandating waiting periods and shutting down clinics? Ditto North Carolina’s transphobic bathroom laws.

Trump’s racism is contemptible, but impractical. He’s not going to build a wall and Mexico isn’t going to pay for it. His plan to “shut down” all Muslims living in America are either big talk with no real commitment to action behind it, or laughably offensive – so offensive to basic decency that any attempt to implement it would lead to impeachment or revolution.

I don’t particularly agree with any of these arguments. I’m simply saying it’s not impossible for someone to be a progressive and reject the idea that supporting Clinton is the only feasible option.

You don’t have to agree. But in this, as in many other political situations, if you insist on throwing your hands up lamenting “NOBODY with any SENSE would vote for this, there’s no point asking why, the reasons can only be STUPID!” you learn nothing. And they’ll do it anyway, and probably feel even more righteous doing it because you’ve been a condescending prat to them. And if that makes the difference between winning and losing, you’ll keep losing.

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The flag and democracy

The results of the first flag referendum has really thrown up some bizarre perspectives on democracy in New Zealand.

Like the person I jostled with on a mutual friend’s Facebook page who said he “feared” people voting to keep the current flag because they didn’t like the blue Lockwood design. Apparently this would be ignoring the wishes of the majority who had voted for it.

Or this – somewhat joking, I guess? – editorial on Stuff which argues that it’s just time for a change therefore you must support change because the only reason you could possibly vote to keep our current flag is because you’re childish (or an old RSA fogey, or Winston Peters, which I suppose are kind of the same thing.)

Now, I’m not particularly thrilled by our current flag. I absolutely agree that it’s time to move past the symbols of our colonial masters, as part of a serious process of acknowledging that that colonial past is still very much with us.

But it’s a bit bloody cheeky for this government, who actively reintroduced archaic rubbish like knighthoods (and gave one to Peter Talley) to wax lyrical about our need to rebrand as a modern global nation by scrapping the union jack. It’s a bit cheeky for anyone who isn’t actively advocating republicanism to say “getting rid of the Union Jack is the most important thing” when the Queen will still be on our currency, the Governor-General will still rubber-stamp all our laws in her name, and probably most importantly, we’ll still be pointlessly sending our soldiers into overseas conflicts because the UK told us it was a family event and it wouldn’t be the same if we weren’t dying there too.

I think the blue Lockwood flag is ugly. I think it looks horribly corporate, horribly 90s, and just boringly obvious. It’s not a surprise it won this referendum because it’s comfortably bland. Even if Helen Clark had overseen this process, I would not vote for this flag.

Because we only get one shot at this. If we change flags now, we probably won’t have another chance in my lifetime. If we keep the current flag, for now, there’s an opportunity for a different government to run a proper discussion about our identity as a nation – not one orchestrated by a Prime Minister desperate for ~a legacy~ in cahoots with a panel stacked with stuffy old white men, ~business gurus~ and reality TV producers.

New Zealand could easily become a republic in the next 10, 20 years. I can wait.

And here’s the ultimate irony. There’s a strong meme going around that Red Peak fans are being bitter and nasty and childish about their #1 pick not being the winner. But the only nastiness I’m seeing is from people who like the blue Lockwood (or like the idea of John Key getting that legacy), sneering that we must accept the ~wishes of the majority~ … by not exercising our votes in the second referendum – not in a way they don’t want.

Democracy, chaps. It works both ways.