Article about Mumsnet on Unherd. "Has Mumsnet fallen for Farage? Labour is losing Middle England"

I often say the best way of understanding Trump is to watch Caddyshack and pay close attention to Rodney Dangerfield's character.

Trump may belong to the elite class in the financial sense, but in terms of NYC society he's always been that brash guy from Queens who Manhattan high society looked down their noses at, the same way London high society would look on a white van man from Essex.

Which is kind of relevant in the UK context because Reform is the party of white van men.

I swear, we have a lot of socialists these days who would watch Caddyshack and assume that the snobs who wanted to exclude Rodney Dangerfield from the golf club were the heroes.

I like how @persephonia thinks I need to be scolded for suggesting that elites are out of touch.

I suppose the next line will be that left wing people are nicer, in which case I have some interesting stories to tell you.

It wasn't blocked for me but I use a VPN. Copyright maybe. Hmm. It wasn't anything awful just a slightly un pc clip from a Carry On Film.

Even university students eat McDonald's. It's one thing to talk about politicians being out of touch. But it's a very clever piece of propaganda to suggest de facto anyone who disagreed with Trump is "cultural elite" while Trump, a billionaire with a gold toilet who avoids taxes is one of the people. I do agree he is good at connecting with people and connecting with people's grievances. It's a particular kind of intelligence.

Some Carry On films were excellent (carry on up the Khyber). Some were dire. They were extremely sexist (and sometimes a bit racist) BUT if you watch them they did make fun of everyone. E.g Barbara Windsors breasts are a source of jokes. Older women are battle axes. But the men are portrayed as sex pests and idiots as well. Posh characters are laughed at, so are the working class characters. That's very different to the way MAGA humour operates and I think it's that that puts me of. A comedian told a crown PR was garbage and they cheered. Biden (who should not have been allowed near the presidential race yet alone allowed to go for a second term) said "how outrageous they/he is the garbage" probably referring to Hinchcliff and the crowd, and Trump spun that into outrage about how the elites think me and by extension the American people are garbage. It means Trump can be as horrible as he wants and if you object it's because you are out of touch, but if anyone criticises Trump he tries to get them cancelled. It's Bully mentality. Or I just don't understand American humour

McDonalds is one of those class signifiers. For all its faults, it's one of America's great democratic institutions. And that photo of Trump waving from the drive-through window in his apron was like something out of Norman Rockwell. America has a graduate cultural elite that's educated itself out of understanding its own culture.

There was another great example in Trump's first term, I think in the NYT magazine, where they interviewed some posh Manhattan socialites who used to have Ivanka in their social circle, but had cut her off since her dad went into politics. I think the article was meant to portray the posh debutantes as #Resistance heroines, but it really just made them look like snooty bitches and Ivanka look cool and relatable.

I suppose the UK equivalent in humour terms would be something like Carry On. I always describe Carry On as vernacular British culture, because you can't make it upmarket or intellectual, but it pulled in enormous audiences for decades. Brits who are too sophisticated to understand its appeal are too sophisticated to understand about 80% of the country's population.

And Democrat commentators were very sneery about Trump at MacDonalds.

I'm not sure what your point is here.

I don't think there is any particular requirement that anyone finds Trump's type of humour funny. Humour is very individual though it also has strong culture, class, racial, and other factors that influence how we receive it. In the end, what we find funny we find funny, what we don't, we don't.

What I was suggesting however is that the progressive middle classes, in the case of Trump and his voting base, tends to interpret the humour that is not native to their own group as evidence of stupidity, and it isn't. It's evidence of a different background. (They on their part also likely find the humour of the university educated progressive classes lacking. Which does not make it all dumb. Just differernt.)

It's fundamentally a lack of class connection. And it is at best a blind spot, and often a way to allow themselves the comfortable illusion that the opposition is all dumb dumbs. Which means they never even try to really understand the strategy or reasoning for the actions. It's why you can't find any half decent commentary on Trump's economic strategies in the progressive media, you have to go to some place like Unherd, even though there you can find socialist economists who will talk about it. But the mainstream progressive left is wilfully blind.

You think democrats or their "equivalent social group" don't eat McDonald's or work at McDonald's? Do you mean politicians or supporters? It's unclear.

On humour. I spent time in a house where the adult male loved "banter" in the forms of hilarious jokes usually directed at other people. You couldn't complain because it's a joke. But if any banter was directed at him (even immediately after he had made a joke) it was met with either rage or extreme hurt. I think everyone has known people like that. I agree that the US Democrats really struggle to connect. But that sort of banter/humour only works if you are willing to take it as well. Otherwise it's bullying. And lots of people do find that funny I suppose.

Spectator podcast: Sonia Sodha and Tim Shipman discuss:

Well, you definitely have to have 'the smarts'.

The corollary to that is only smart people get to be POTUS.

I can't bear the 'Trump is dumb, haw haw haw' rhetoric. Whatever he is, you don't get to be President of the USA by being dumb.

Yes.

I think there are a lot of Democrats, or their equivalent social group in the UK or where I am in Canada, who have this kind of a priori view that Trump is dumb and can only do dumb things and hire dumb people, and his campaign was dumb. And they have blinded themselves to the fact that he ran a really good, tight campaign.

Partly this is because they focus on stuff they don't easily culturally connect to, the MacDonald's thing, or the kind of humour he uses in his speeches. They don't "get" it, they just see it as a sign of being thick.

But you are right, the media has really dropped the ball in the UK as well and don't show people anything that might make them question that assumption. Or maybe not dropped the ball as it now appears that quite a lot of that may have been deliberate.

The serving at McDonalds thing too, doing a job that many Americans do, young Americans.
And clearly loving it. Despite the artifice of the media stunt, his joy was sincere.

I remember watching this and seeing a side of Trump I had never seen before and realising that he has the common touch.
I also began to realise that the BBC was not making any effort to show that side of him at all.

My mid-30s, US family member, Democrat through and through, said at the time that everyone considered the Clintons to be corrupt and lining their nest and her vote for Hillary was joyless.

Puerto Rico being "garbage" at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally.

The Latinos/as that everyone was getting offended on behalf of think PR is garbage too. That's why they moved to the US. Think of the song like to be in America's second verse.

The only offence that might be taken is of the "hey, that's ours, only we get to say how shit it is" type.

The serving at McDonalds thing too, doing a job that many Americans do, young Americans.

And clearly loving it. Despite the artifice of the media stunt, his joy was sincere.

I think this is a very dangerous situation, and we can count ourselves lucky that we've got the populism we've got, and not something genuinely extremist. This might not hold if Labour allow their authoritarian instincts to prevail.

Agree. Great comments by both @SionnachRuadh and @lechiffre55 - what you're describing is what I'm seeing too. And many people I speak to.

Someone who didn't read the article

I should reread that book Shattered, that gave the definitive account of what a shitshow the Hillary campaign was. It's a strange book because it was written by journos who were embedded with the campaign and obviously really wanted her to win, and kept being amazed by how awful the campaign was.

Trump is the villain of the story, but he's almost entirely offstage.

They give us a picture of Hillary being so arrogant she was almost floating above the campaign, with her overpromoted aides squabbling among themselves about who had access to her and who was going to get the big jobs after her inevitable win.

I don't like Bill Clinton for obvious reasons, but the man is a genuine political genius, and there are odd, almost sad moments where Bill wanders into a meeting and says he's worried about the polls, and maybe it would be an idea to reach out to Middle American voters, and everyone just ignores him.

It's a great example of how an arrogant and out of touch elite can sabotage itself.

I don't know if this story is true, but it seems plausible.

We know that Hillary didn't go to Wisconsin. What I heard was that Democrat organisers in Wisconsin were worried about low black turnout in Milwaukee, and begged the campaign to send them Barack Obama or Michelle Obama or Jesse Jackson or anyone who could fire up the base.

The Wisconsin Democrats didn't get the Obamas or Jesse Jackson. They got Chelsea Clinton.

At that time, I think, party bigwigs were still interested in grooming Chelsea as a future candidate. Or they pretended to be, to suck up to Hillary.