From the newsletter of my local Indivisible group:
Our first response to this loss must be humility. We fought, we lost, that is on us regardless of any explanatory framework that might eventually emerge.
Our other first response to this loss must be skepticism wrapped in patience. Nothing in politics is simple. Occam’s razor is a pernicious fallacy and a very poor guide to thinking about complex things. When your favorite football team loses a 34-33 game because the kicker missed the final field goal, that was not a problem with the kicker (exclusively). Single cause and simplistic explanations we hear people tout are more likely to be part of, rather than an explanation for, the problem. Did you know that there is a thing called “the voter files” assembled over weeks following an election and subsequently analyzed by groups like Pew Research? This is the corpus of data from which all experts draw verifiable conclusions about what actually happened during an election. This is a better resource than gut feeling or anecdotal data, and will produce a better analysis than that produced by the usual immediate lamentation and rending of cloth. Have patience.
Having said that, here are some preliminary thoughts on some of the things.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
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