Van Jones gets it

There is a good interview with CNN commentator Van Jones at Salon. Unlike most of the Leftist Media, Jones understands that all Trump supporters aren't the "deplorables" as Hillary Clinton liked to define them:

I went to Ohio and I went to Pennsylvania and I talked to Trump voters before and after the election, including Trump voters who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. For those people, they didn’t have either set of reactions that I think a lot of liberals expected. For those people, the racially inflammatory, culturally and ethnically inflammatory language was not a turn-on, but it wasn’t enough of a turnoff either, and that’s a different problem. These are not people for whom these comments were delightful, but they also were not disqualifying. They found them distasteful but not disqualifying. 

You literally have counties that went from blue to red in the Rust Belt. That is where the race was won and lost — in a handful of counties in the Rust Belt. When you go to those counties, the people who voted sometimes twice for Obama but then voted for Trump — they will tell you, “We didn’t like some of those inflammatory comments. We wouldn’t want our kids making those kinds of comments. We don’t think those kinds of comments are helpful. But we also did not feel that Hillary Clinton cared about us in any way or was going to do anything for us. She wasn’t talking to us. She was talking to everybody else but us and we thought that at least Donald Trump was trying, so we were willing to give him a chance.” 

Now, that’s disappointing. That’s not the same as saying they’re all part of the alt-right. 

Jones does run off the rails a little when he says:

I think that the people who held their nose and voted for Trump felt that both candidates were flawed. I do think that sexism was operating at least as powerfully as racism if you read between the lines for some of these voters, especially the ones that voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. The thing that they have in common is [they] voted for the two guys against a woman.

Jones was doing so well too. The people who weren't being racist were also not being sexist. Hillary Clinton was never Mother Teresa, or even Margaret Thatcher. Except for a silly minority, voting against Hillary wasn't about her genitalia. Jones had it right the first time before spouting this elitist stupidity.

Fortunately, Jones gets back on track:

My premise is there’s something wrong with us that we need to figure out because, first of all, we’re never going to convince 25 percent of the country that we’re right because they’re hard-core conservatives. If you gave them fake news, real news or no news at all they’re going to be right-wingers, so let’s not worry about that.

Likewise, if they’re sitting around trying to figure out how to convince us to be Republicans, they’re wasting their time. It’s the 50 percent of the people in the middle. Again, the people who went from Obama to Trump — here’s where I think we’re failing. We’re so focused on the people who are at the extreme, who are not going to move anyway.

A businessperson who voted for Trump but who would be outraged if Trump started dragging Dreamers off college campuses and throwing them into vans and driving them off in the middle of the night. Veterans who voted for Trump but [who] would be outraged if they started registering American Muslims who have done nothing wrong and would say, “Listen, I didn’t go over there to fight for this kind of stuff.” It’s the people who are in the middle who voted for Trump, or maybe held their nose to vote for Trump, who we are now just shoving over into Trump’s camp.

We’re building Trump’s coalition for him by basically treating them all as if they’re all “deplorables” and irredeemables or stupid people who we need to fix, and that’s the problem. That’s the elitism. We are operating — listen, both parties suck right now because the liberals think we’re the party of the working people and the poor people and the downtrodden, but we have allowed a strain of very nasty elitism to take root in our party such that we don’t even see it anymore.

Then the Republicans suck because they see themselves as the party of color-blind meritocracy, but they’ve allowed a section of horrible bigots, including outright neo-Nazis, to take up residence in their party and they either deny it or downplay it.

This was the point I was making 2 days ago in "Localizing our disagreements": We need to quit trying to force our own political views down other people's throats, and take our disagreements down to the local level, where they are less likely to find objection. let the Californians have their welfare utopia, just so Georgians can have their conservative utopia. Everyone wins, and we can all hold hands and sing "Kumbaya". A Trump versus Clinton election is what we get when we assume our way is the only way.

Van Jones gets the last word here:

If you’re a right-winger and believe in markets and I’m a left-winger and believe in democratic government, we’re not going to agree. I’m not going to change my mind and you’re not going to change your mind, but we could come up with a public-private partnership through debate that’s better than your idea or my idea. That’s a constructive use of disagreement: I never changed my mind and you never changed yours.