2016 Election Postmortem

Some Quick Election Postmortem Notes:

• This is not about morality, this is about winning. And we didn’t win.
• The liberal elite in America bought into the red herring that liberal politics can be built solely around identity politics and ignored the crushing problems that economic inequality, stagnant wages, and underemployment have wrought on the white middle and lower classes.
• The corporate liberal is finished (or should be).
• Neither party’s candidate nor the media explained the importance of the Panama Papers and the implications these revelations should have had during this election cycle. To me this is very revealing.
• Oppressed groups will most likely become more oppressed over the next four years. Banding together with allies and looking at the greater good is more important now than ever.
• Identity politics is important and should be part of the national dialogue, but a laser focus using academic language and purity tests will lose more votes than it wins in the current electorate.
• Yelling at white males about how awful, racist, and sexist they are is, apparently, not a very effective political strategy.
• Outrage culture, which has been erected as a tent pole in the liberal camp, pushed too hard and too fast and this is the blowback. Time to develop a new strategy.
• Posting outrage and hatred for swaths of people will most likely entrench an opponent’s opinions.
• Posting on social media is public. Temporary anger could very easily be used by an opponent to paint a side as more radical than it actually is, driving the narrative that political correctness is “out of control.”
• Knowing how to positively engage with people who disagree with you and reach some point of human understanding is very important. Understanding people who disagree with you is very important.
• The GOP now controls the House, Senate, most likely the Presidency, and soon the Supreme Court.
• Welcome to the suck, Obama liberals. Let’s talk strategy, not feelings or outrage.
• Finally, conspiracy theories and the ring-wing media machine are real forces to be reckoned with, and the liberal/corporate media must come up with a remedy. This is likely to get much worse before it gets better.