A View From The Beach’s Fritz has a long running series on Reasons Why Trump Won, such as this one. Here’s another
https://twitter.com/WilliamTeach/status/1012341845081370626
Will Wilkerson at the NY Times tries to sorta be rational, but, you can feel the derision, condescension, and hatred shining through
The great, gradual migration of the human population from the countryside to the city has transformed the world, but we’ve barely begun to reckon with its political implications. Over generations, urbanization has sorted us on the traits — ethnicity, education level, personal temperament — that draw us toward cities or keep us away.
The logic of our electoral institutions has always sorted the bulk of American voters into one of two major parties. What’s new is that the sorting dynamic of urbanization now accounts for partisan sorting, too. Democrats have become the party of the multicultural city, Republicans the party of the monocultural country — the party of urbanization-resistant white people.
The only thing missing is calling them racists, Fascists, Nazis, and KKK members.
Such a clean partisan break along density lines has thrown our democracy into a crisis of legitimacy and dysfunction. Our federal system of democratic representation has drifted dangerously out of sync with the geographic distribution, demographic makeup and outsize economic role of America’s urbanized population.
Our politics is cracking up over the density divide. Big cities and their distinctive interests are suffering a density penalty and need more visibility in our scheme of representation.
This is the old whine about less populated states having *gasp* the same representation in the Senate as populous states (can we repeal the 17th now?). I mean, how dare those yokel hick redneck have representation, amiright?
America’s Constitution was devised in the 1780s to balance power between free and slave regions in a thoroughly agricultural economy. In an urbanized polity in which a handful of dense, multicultural metro areas contain most of the people and produce most of the wealth and tax receipts, our federal scheme of representation, which effectively gives extra votes to dirt in low-population states, defies both moral and prudential common sense.
America’s outdated system of representation allowed Donald Trump and the party of the monocultural country to seize total control of the state with a minority of votes and about 36 percent of the economy. That’s not just a glitch. That’s a disaster.
That type of sneering is why Trump won.
Under Mr. Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has singled out urban Democratic strongholds for terrorizing deportation raids under the pretext that so-called sanctuary policies imperil public safety by attracting and shielding dangerous criminal immigrants.
That’s where most of the illegals go, because the Democrats protect the illegals over US citizens.
A Democratic takeover of at least the House in the midterm elections would blunt Mr. Trump’s ability to inflict this sort of cruelty — unless our system’s density penalty allows Republicans to hold it with a minority of votes. It happened in 2012, and election wonks say it has a nearly one-in-three chance of happening again.
In other words, Dems are pissed off by those votes to dirt people being given the Right to vote and have them count as much as the cool city folks.
Families are being torn apart, thousands are packed into squalid prisons, and millions of city-dwelling Americans have been made to suffer under a regime of “institutionalized cruelty†because country people are anxious and city votes count less. Fixing this is far more important than whose team wins when we fix it, because the basic framework of democratic self-defense is far more important than any ephemeral policy. As Judith Shklar sagely said, “without enough equality of power to protect and assert one’s rights, freedom is but a hope.â€
See? They want the hayseeds’ votes to barely count. And this is why Trump won. And will continue to win.
