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Comment by NotSammyHagar | Hacker News Reader

That was the thing that broke my family. The older generation became way more openly racist after that. I didn't want to accept that it was happening, but I finally gave up denying it. And then Trump came along and all rationality went out the window. Distinguished people with engineering degrees, PE some of them just lost their minds. Wealthy boomers with no care in the world just couldn't handle that (I know not all are that way, but half my family became that).

Looking back there were some racist tendencies in that generation but it wasn't openly talked about with me or more likely I just missed it.

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I'm sorry to hear it...

I guess it shouldn't be as surprising as it was. You basically just need to be a non-zero amount of racist/sexist/whatever to think that [category x] shouldn't hold the presidency, given that it's the highest office in the world. Any tiny amount of x-ism will do. Turns out a whole lot of apparently normal people are at least a tiiiny bit racist, and it absolutely broke an entire political party.

I think its as simple as the fact that "we" won the Cold War, and that was the only thing putting any leftward pressure at all on US politics. The psycho right wing didn't materialize in 2008 out of nothing (think about LaRouchism, the "moral majority", Pat Buchanan, and on and on). Yes, Republicans are racist, but so are Democrats and Obama did actually win twice so somebody must have voted for him.

Rather, Obama's election was the just the last time that the New Deal coalition was strong enough to hold together, having deteriorated over the course of the 90s and 2000s because it had no clear purpose. Capital no longer feels any need to throw scraps (like limited NLRB-disciplined union organizing, Social Security, Medicare, consumer surplus) to workers to prevent 1918 happening here, which had been the Democratic Party's entire purpose since FDR. It had seemed increasingly ludicrous that revolution would come to America over the course of midcentury, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought the farce to light.

In other words, we're still eating the leftovers of anticommunism, the 20th Century's original sin (to mix a metaphor).

Out of curiosity, where were you living during the 2008 election?

Lansing, Michigan

Yeah, that checks out. It's exactly the type of over-intellectualized rationale someone in a Democratic stronghold would come up with.

The left wing didn't aimlessly move left away from labor. Biden was dramatically more pro-labor ("New Dealy") than Obama. The right wing lost their fucking minds because we elected a black man. Trump himself is a one-man microcosm of this: loosely Dem-aligned until... Obama.

Spend some time with the GOP base. They're actually broadly racist, ranging from slightly (and ashamedly) to loudly and unabashedly. The left obviously also has various problems with race, so don't take this as some implicit categorical exoneration.

Biden was more "new dealy" and won. Harris had nothing of the sort to sell and lost. I'm not saying Obama's skin color isn't a factor in our politics since 2008 but it's not the Rosetta Stone.

There were a lot of unusual things about Harris that combined to make it harder to be elected. The vibe of the economy is worse, the reality that the economy is worse than it was 10 years ago for low-income people. The very short time she had to run, how she was kind of part of the Biden administration and tried to push new ideas.

And she's a woman and she's black, again. Then there was the issue that one side of the Democratic party wanted to support Israel more strongly or something, and the other side wanted to protect gazaans and the Palestinians. I think many people wanted to do both at the same time, but there is a fair number of people that picked one side or another. Some of those people voted against her. Some people in my family thought the biggest problem facing America was dei.

> In other words, we're still eating the leftovers of anticommunism, the 20th Century's original sin (to mix a metaphor).

I can think of a couple of things that rank higher on the 20th Century's original sin list.

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