Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Trump's Win Wasn't An Accident: Bannon Had An Insight





"The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run."
Steve Bannon




Michael Moore tried to tell us.  Trump and Bannon were focused on working stiffs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all along. They knew that "Blue Wall" was not impregnable, and in fact it was the Achilles heel of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who had long ago lost the paycheck to paycheck crowd.


Look at the real election maps which the brilliant folks at the New York Times put together:
This is where the Clinton voters were:
This is where the Trump voters were:
This is entirely consistent with what we saw canvassing in New Hampshire, and what David Brooks reported from Idaho and what Anon reported from North Carolina: If you looked at territory, Trump signs and Trump voters held an enormous lead. All of Clinton's strength was concentrated, geographically in the cities.


But the electoral college is all about the geography, about territory and states. Thus Clinton is swamped by geography, even as she wins the popular vote.


America was designed by people from Jefferson to Hamilton who valued property and land more than individual human beings. In fact, only 3/5 of Black people counted, where the Constitution was concerned.


This was no fluke. This was a well conceived, well planned strategy.
And nobody, of all the talking heads on CNN, or MSNBC or PBS News Hour or even Fox could see the essential truth that Stephen Bannon and Trump saw: There are simply more white voters than there are Brown or Black voters. 


As a member of the White, East Coast elite, I was guilty of listening to "experts" who told me what I wanted to hear, who reinforced each other constantly but had no new information and who were intellectually lazy.


My brother had a cartoon in his office which showed a dozen little stick figures chanting "No! No! No!" In the second frame a big sun like figure rises over the horizon and says, "Yes!" the third frame shows all the little stick figures chanting, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" 


I've been wasting my time listening to those little guys.
Unless I miss my bet, Mr. Trump is a tabula rasa. Government, government policy has never really interested him. He's interested in making money and government only interests him to the extent government could  help him make more or would prevent him from making more money.
On some level, he knows he's a lightweight and he needs help. Nixon was like this. So Nixon turned to Kissinger to be his wise man, his shaman.
Trump is now turning to Bannon to play this role for him. He'll get cogent, pithy, convincing direction from this guy, and it behooves us to read everything we can about what Bannon thinks.  Patton read Rommel's books before he ever met Rommel on the field of battle. We ought to learn from that.









2 comments:

  1. Mad Dog,
    Oh yes, I agree it's important to know more about Trump's premier strategist..Like Othello, who had Iago, Trump has Bannon whispering in his ear. It would be nice to have a better idea what he's whispering..
    Maud

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  2. Mago,

    As Joan Didion famously opened her novel, "Play It As it Lays," --"What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask."

    But we ought to at least know what he's whispering. We may not know the why, but we can guess at the what.

    Mad Dog

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