An interesting take from a survivor of Chavismo in Venezuela. Bottom line: you can’t beat a fauz populist wannabe strongman with scandal outrage, because scandal only drives his supporters deeper into the bunker.
A clip: 
And this, about recognizing that in the minds of an authoritarian strongman’s supporters, you are not a truth teller: you are the enemy.
And one more, on the discordance of these realities with what you know to be true:
The writer argues that only empathy for Trumpists ultimately can defeat Trumpism, which is a fairly common hot take these days among many progressives (though pointedly disputed by lots of progressive POC).
The counter-narrative, which I think was borne out in Alabama, is that outrage against Trumpism and its adjuncts (like Mooreism) is precisely what is required to defeat it, and that compassion (via policy) should follow victory, but not be a substitute for it.
In Alabama, black voters, Millennials and secular white women were disgusted with Moore and his tribe, not empathetic toward them. Their sheer outrage won out. And arguably, the policies fhey will push Doug Jones to stick to will be more compassionate to all, Mooreists included.
That’s not an argument against this writer’s analysis of our tribal condition, just a suggestion that there are other takes on what it means the majority can do about it.
One other good point I see a lot of you making in the thread is that Venezuela, while it definitely has racial and ethnic politics, doesn’t have them to nearly the same extent as the U.S., so the grievances of Chavistas are more purely economic. Here it’s deeply entangled w race.
Obama’s Philadelphia speech in 2008 was about empathizing not just with the economic grievances of white working class Americans but with their racial grievances as well (go back and read the parts about his grandmother). That’s part of why he did better w/ them than most Dems.
But whereas a black candidate with a name like Barack Hussein Obama needed to perfectly thread that needle, the question is whether with Trumpism a fact, not a theory, Democrats can or need to use that gambit now.
That’s essentially the debate inside the Democratic Party right now.
