Runcible

it's not about pay, it's about anti-intellectualism.

Ivory tower is a reference to academia, not luxury per se

"GG bro"

"soon"

I had a friend from the south and would tell me I was part of the "coastal elite" because I had socialist values. He was working in tech making ~8x what I did working in manufacturing and he thought people should have to pass a competency test on issues to be able to vote for them.

but when the world needed him most, he vanished

I thought the one thing Bernie's crowds should have made pretty clear is that there is a large contingent of people who care what's happening and want something enough to support it but this just got memory holed into "young people don't vote" and "the left needs to vote for Dems". Why would these people vote? Why wouldn't you acknowledge that you could gain some portion of the ~1/3rd of people eligible to vote who don't? Certainly seems more likely than flipping that portion of the opposing team.

well obviously now that there are no political consequences they'll start withholding aid to Israel, amirite?

And abortion wasn't salient

Of course it wasn't. The Democratic party has done precisely fuck all for the last two years on this. Anything positive that happened was the result of ballot initiatives but there was zero party led attempts to protect or reinstate abortion.

Republicans have lots of stuff to offer: Fascism and they are willing to admit shit is fucked (because of immigrants, not the rich)

I think you can go simpler than this, or rather I don't think fascism necessarily has broad appeal. It's the same take I have from when they kept trying to rail against "populism" At the end of the day when everything is fucked up but the system is "working as intended" people have a lot of motivation to want change. It may not be likely they'll get what they want but staying the course is pretty clearly a disaster.

"everyone who disagrees with me is a bad person and/or an idiot" is maybe not the hard realization they need

first time a republican has won the popular vote in ....20 years? And that was only a response to the war on terror.