The founder and publisher of this site, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, has a diary up: “Be happy for coal-miners losing their health insurance. They’re getting exactly what they voted for.”
Now, Kos is not a coal-miner, as far as I know, so why is he so worried about the coal-miners? It might be because he has coal-miners in the family or such, in which case this is an issue I’d judge to be directly in his self-interest.
If coal-miners having health insurance was in Kos's self-interest before the election, why did that change based on the outcome of the election?
If coal-miners having health insurance was not in Kos’s direct self-interest, but only in some general larger interest, then (a) why does that change with the result of the election? and (b) cannot Kos recognize the possibility that coal-miners too, were voting not for direct self-interest but what they saw as some general larger interest?
Basically, Kos is saying that if health insurance was not the issue that determined the coal-miners’ votes, then scr*w them. But perhaps the coal-miners felt forced into a horrible choice, lose their health insurance or scr*w the country and they took losing their health insurance to be the lesser of the two evils.
Of course, as Democrats, we disagree that the coal-miners’ perception that a vote for Clinton would “scr*w the country”; and that the vote for Trump is indeed very bad for the country. But we should recognize the possibility that the coal-miners see the choice they made as ultra-patriotic, at great personal cost; that Kos and his band of urban Democrats are not the only ones who might vote for something beyond immediate self-interest.