4 quotes saying the same thing — who wrote them?

Here are 4 longish quotes (with no ellipses) from 4 different writers on politics.  They all say pretty much the same thing.  What is remarkable is the political spectrum of the writers.  Answers at the end

Quote #1: “Donald Trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. He never hid that. Voters knew it.  They just concluded that the options were worse — and not just Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but the Bush family and their donors and the entire Republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016: the people in charge.

Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created.  Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street.  He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died.  You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.

There was also the possibility that Trump might listen. At times he seemed interested in what voters thought.  The people in charge demonstrably weren’t.  Virtually none of their core beliefs had majority support from the population they governed.  It was a strange arrangement for a democracy.  In the end, it was unsustainable.”

Quote #2: “The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who, it turns out, really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everone who didn’t accept their assessment.  And then they lost.  Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about ear-splitting self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that a chronic complacency has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone — except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.  The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the ‘last thing standing’ between us and the end of the world.  It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electibility.  The time is up for these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system.  Enough is enough.”

Quote #3: “In 2018, Hillary Clinton told Britain’s Channel Four News: “The real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania —that is really the nub of the question.”

No, the real question is why so much of the US and European establishment accepted and promulgated Clinton’s alibi for her failure to follow her husband into the office of president of the United States.  A Clinton or Bush was president, vice president, or secretary of state in every year between 1981 and 2013, years in which working class incomes stagnated, offshoring devastated US and European manufacturing, the world suffered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the US lunged into multiple disastrous wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Trump became president by running against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election.  The desire of many American voters to disrupt the quarter-century cycle of nearly identical versions of technocratic neoliberalism under alternating Bushes and Clintons is quite sufficient to explain the presidential election of 2016.”

Quote #4: “Iowa was the real “beginning of the end” to a story that began in the Eighties.

Following the wipeout 49-state, 512 electoral-vote loss of Walter Mondale in 1984, demoralized Democratic Party leaders felt marooned, between the awesome fundraising power of Ronald Reagan Republicans and the irritant liberalism of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.

To get out, they sold out. A vanguard of wonks like Al From and Sen. Sam Nunn at the Democratic Leadership Council devised a marketing plan: two middle fingers, one in each direction.

They would steal financial support for Republicans by out-whoring them on economic policy. The left would be kneecapped via “triangulation,” i.e., the public reveling in the lack of choices for poor, minority, and liberal voters.

Young pols like Bill Clinton learned they could screw constituents and still collect from them. What would they do, vote Republican? Better, the parental scolding of disobedient minorities like Sister Souljah combined with the occasional act of mindless sadism (like the execution of mentally ill Ricky Ray Rector) impressed white “swing” voters, making “triangulation” a huge win-win — more traction in red states, less whining from lefty malcontents.

Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners — everyone but donors.

They didn’t just fail to defend groups, but built monuments to their betrayal. They broke labor’s back with NAFTA, embraced mass incarceration with the 1994 Crime Bill, and ushered in the Clear Channel era with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Welfare Reform in 1996 was a sellout of the Great Society (but hey, at least Clinton kept the White House that year!). The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act gave us Too Big to Fail. Shock Therapy was the Peace Corps in reverse. They sold out on Iraq, expanded Dick Cheney’s secret regime of surveillance and assassination, gave Wall Street a walk after 2008, then lost an unlosable election, which they blamed on a conspiracy of leftist intellectuals and Russians.

Still, if you were black, female, gay, an immigrant, a union member, college-educated, had been to Europe, owned a Paul Klee print, or knew Miller’s Crossing was a good movie, you owed Democrats your vote. Why? Because they “got things done.”

Now they’re not getting much done, except a lost reputation. That feat at least, they earned. To paraphrase Joker: What do you get when you cross a political party that’s sold out for decades with an electorate that’s been abandoned and treated like trash?

Answer: What you fucking deserve!”

Quote #1: Tucker Carlson “Ship of Fools” p. 3 — a classic conservative

Quote #2: Thomas Frank: “Rendesvous with Oblivion” p. 185.  A classic liberal

Quote #3 Michael Lind:  “The New Class War” p. 98.  Although he’s been writing for 25 years, I was unfamiliar with his work

Quote #4 Michael Taibbi: — a reporter who writes incredibly well for Rolling Stone, probably very liberal. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iowa-caucus-democrats-disaster-trump-sanders-949655/amp/

I find it remarkable that 4 writers, from nearly as wide a political spectrum as it is possible to get, are basically saying the same thing.