Tag: Kübler-Ross model

American liberals continue to play out the five stages of grief in response to Donald Trump’s win. Now they appear to be in bargaining mode, trying to figure out just how little they might need to evolve – not merely to keep Trump in his box, but also to keep him from winning again. Some Californians have proposed “Calexit”; in a liberal daydream, blue states could become social justice utopias were they to sever their ties to their God-fearing and gun-toting fellow citizens in the red ones. If too many Americans in “flyover country” will not support liberalism, this half-measure says, the problem must be a failure to sell them our candidates, if not our values. In a similar vein, the politics professor Gerard Alexander recently opined in the New York Times that liberals continue to come off as judgmental scolds, and as a result have been “more effective at causing resentment than in getting people to come their way”. But policy matters much more than politeness. The trouble with American liberalism is not the rhetoric, the selling or the advertising; it is not even the product to sell, as if politics were marketing. The last two presidents of the United States have each been elected as antiwar candidates, even though each went on to govern militaristically. More even than “white male workers” (often cited as the principal reason for Trump’s win), it was the fact that urban African Americans failed to show up to the polls that did liberals in. Clinton, by contrast, could run on her party’s recent policies alone, and urban African Americans were clearly not impressed.