Since November 8 we have been treated to an endless stream of pundits trying to explain why Dems lost the White House (and failed to take back the House or Senate) even though Republicons chose the worst qualified and most despicable nominee of all time.

Most of these explanations eventually get around to some version of this phrase: “Democrats failed to understand white, working-class, fly-over America.”

We are told we need to listen to their concerns and try harder to reach them and figure out a way to tailor our message to them.

Recently someone named Forsetti’s Justice has written an article that explains why that argument is ridiculous.

It’s long, so I think I can take four excerpts instead of three and still be within fair use guidelines:

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The real problem isn’t east coast elites who don’t understand or care about rural America. The real problem is rural America doesn’t understand the causes of their own situations and fears and they have shown no interest in finding out. They don’t want to know why they feel the way they do or why they are struggling because they don’t want to admit it is in large part because of choices they’ve made and horrible things they’ve allowed themselves to believe.

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It doesn’t matter how “understanding” you are, how well you listen, what language you use…if you are viewed as an outsider, your views are automatically discounted. I’ve had hundreds of discussions with rural white Americans and whenever I present them any information that contradicts their entrenched beliefs, no matter how sound, how unquestionable, how obvious, they WILL NOT even entertain the possibility it might be true. Their refusal is a result of the nature of their fundamentalist belief system and the fact I’m the enemy because I’m an educated liberal. At some point during the discussion, “That’s your education talking,” will be said, derogatorily, as a general dismissal of everything I said. They truly believe this is a legitimate response because to them education is not to be trusted. Education is the enemy of fundamentalism because fundamentalism, by its very nature, is not built on facts. … Learning is only valued up to the certain point. Once it reaches the level where what you learn contradicts doctrine and fundamentalist arguments, it becomes dangerous.

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Rural, Christian, white Americans have let in anti-intellectual, anti-science, bigoted, racists into their system as experts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, any of the blonde Stepford Wives on Fox, every evangelical preacher on television because they tell them what they want to hear and because they sell themselves as being “one of them.” The truth is none of these people give a rat’s ass about rural, Christian, white Americans except how can they exploit them for attention and money. None of them have anything in common with the people who have let them into their belief systems with the exception they are white and they “speak the same language” of white superiority...

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“Rural, white America needs to be better understood,” is a dodge, meant to avoid the real problems because talking about the real problems is viewed as “too upsetting,” “too mean,” “too arrogant,” “too elite,” “too snobbish.” Pointing out Aunt Bee’s views of Mexicans, blacks, gays…is bigoted isn’t the thing one does in polite society. Too bad more people don’t think the same about the views Aunt Bee has. It’s the classic, “You’re a racist for calling me a racist,” ploy… [snip] I’ll gladly sit down with Aunt Bee and have a nice, polite conversation about her beliefs about “the gays,” “the blacks,” “illegals,”…and do so without calling her a bigot or a racist. But, this doesn’t mean she isn’t a bigot and a racist and if I’m asked to describe her beliefs these are the only words that honestly fit. No one with cancer wants to be told they have cancer, but just because no one uses the word, “cancer,” it doesn’t mean they don’t have it. Just because the media, pundits on all sides, some Democratic leaders don’t want to call the actions of many rural, Christian, white Americans, “racist/bigoted” doesn’t make them not so.

A perfect example: right now there are millions of people who believe Drumpf won the popular vote because of an article they saw at Breitbart.com. But the Breitbart article (I go there so you don’t have to) is a carefully crafted piece of misdirection that slides right under the radar of people who don’t read past headlines and have no ability for analytical thought. The Breitbart article entitled “Donald Trump win 7.5 Million Vote Landslide In Heartland” (I won’t link to them) is exactly what it says it is: the 7.5 million votes is DJT’s margin of victory only in the counties Breitbart.com has defined as “the heartland” , and not surprisingly, those “heartland counties” are deep red counties. But lo-info voters are jumping to exactly the conclusion they were directed to take, and happily telling each other that DJT “won the popular vote”, and by a landslide, tuning out all other more legitimate news sources talking about a 2 million popular vote win for Hillary. The fact that people can be so easily duped feels like an almost insurmountable obstacle.

So is it hopeless? What can we do?

As I have said over and over, and will keep repeating in the vain hope that someday someone in party leadership will hear and act: if people don’t trust the candidate, identify with the candidate, or see the candidate as a reliable authority figure, they won’t even listen to the candidate. Period. They tune out and don’t even HEAR the message, so it doesn’t matter what s/he says. Only after trust is established and people feel emotionally engaged will they even consider whether the actual words of the stump speech or campaign commercial make sense or are based on facts. But when they trust a candidate and feel emotionally engaged by the candidate, VOTERS DON’T CARE whether the campaign is based on facts, because the first two are more important to them!

So if I ran the DNC, I would focus on putting forward only the kind of D candidates in red areas who will be seen by those voters as “one of us” and not “one of them”. Only candidates who match the identity markers, speak the language and signal common values have any chance of being trusted, listened to and believed. If the bench is thin and we don’t have any of those people ready to run, we must focus on recruiting non-traditional candidates who right now might have no political experience but who have the people skills and communication skills to at least present the D message with authenticity.

That’s how we will win elections. Not by abandoning core principles of inclusive justice in the name of “understanding” the fears of WWC rural voters. First they need to understand themselves. In the meantime, we have to use what we know about these constituencies and what they respond to exactly as they are right now. And we could stop expecting Ivy League educated lawyers from the northeast with college-level vocabulary and good qualifications on paper to be successful in these parts of the country.

Please go and read it all. This article deserves to be read and shared widely. I plan to link to it every time anyone here at DK or anywhere else starts blathering about how we will never win another election until we capitulate to white fragility and stop calling shortsighted low-information voters what they are.

If the article was blogged here before, I missed it, and maybe others did too, so I am posting this diary to bring it to the attention of others who may have missed it.

Last but not least, I also read every single comment to the Alternet article and there were just over 1,000 when I wrote this diary. Reading the comments to an essay like this can be an eye-opening education all its own. If the article does not persuade you, some of the comments make the point even better.