It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population. Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.
Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we need when we face planet scale threats like global warming.
Get out of your bubble.
Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.
The divide is bridged one person at a time.
PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK with the mods.
EDIT:
His concession speech seems to indicate that he's beginning to appreciate what he's been entrusted with.
We're seeing this pattern where the coasts of many countries are cosmopolitan and well-integrated into the world economy, but the interiors are very conservative and nationalistic. Scotland & London vs. Wales & the rest of Britain. The U.S. West Coast & Northeast vs. the Farm Belt, Rust Belt, and Mountain states. Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia. The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR. Even in a Red State like Texas, Houston (on the coast) has gone democratic.
What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd. The economy would cease to function. On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.
What sort of organizing principle would the world have then? I haven't seen anything historically like that - the closest would be the Roman Empire that rimmed the Mediterranean. For most of recorded history, the primary means of production has been land and so fights have been over land, but over the last 150 years or so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information. What kind of social organizing principle does that imply?
> On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
If you think the immigration debate is about Google employees, I think you don't understand the immigration debate.
> If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world."
The interior (culturally and geographically) is massively over-represented in the security forces and military. So good luck with that.
> What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world."
I think if it actually came to that, it would eventually mean war. The interior economy falls apart, coastal regions secede, the poor countries would inevitably be driven to war against the coastal regions out of desperation. Extreme nationalism would just make this more likely. No one should think this is a good idea.
Also, saying coasts are "well-integrated into the world economy", implying the rest of the country is not, is just a horribly myopic view of the world. They are only "well-integrated" because the government chose and planned that explicitly - globalization and free trade as an economic policy, removal of protectionism (e.g. NAFTA, etc) and heavy subsidies of the industries involved (especially tech, via military spending).
It didn't have to be that way - it isn't because tech, finance, whatever is more meritocratic or anything. With more sensible protectionism you could have international trade while still preserving your country's manufacturing base, allowing the rest of the country's economy to also be "well-integrated". But labor is expensive in developed countries, corporations want more profit, and our government doesn't particularly prioritize the working class.
London isn't on the coast. What you're looking at here is not coasts vs non-coasts even if American maps might make it look that way. It's cities vs everywhere else. It just so happens that in America most of the biggest/best known cities are on the coasts.
You're misunderstanding the proposal about immigrants. The proposal is to send all immigrants that are here illegally back to where they came from.
Yes, I agree it would hurt the California economy if that happened. But are you saying that on your team of 10 people at Google, all of them were here illegally? I can't comprehend the fact that Google would hire immigrants without proper visas or background checks. If they're legal immigrants or they have the required visas, they would be just fine.
edit: the proposal is also just that...a proposal. It's not guaranteed this will happen.
> On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
No one wants to send legal immigrants on your team back their countries of origin. Blue collar, unskilled laborers want to stop the influx of unskilled laborers and illegal immigrants who 1) take their jobs and depress their wages and 2) take up resources from social programs.
> some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd
Oh come on. Nobody is calling for sending all immigrants back. Trump's wife is an immigrant... The questions are:
* Big one: What to do about illegal immigration.
* Smaller one: What to do about the widespread abuse of the h1b program. For example, FY 2015, Infosys [outsourcing Indian company] leads the h1b pack with 23k visas, whereas Google has 3k visas.
I'm not sure it's "coastal vs interior" as much as "urban vs rural".
I think we're past the time period where water transport was hugely superior to land transport (and air didn't yet exist). It's not that much harder or more expensive to get a plane ticket or UPS package to the Midwest compared to California.
I think the election results by county support this. Even in red states, urban centers are blue, and in blue states, rural areas are red.
I'm not sure there's a sufficient segregating force to change this. Aside from election time and resulting legal frameworks that apply to both areas, the ease of transportation and also of moving information mean that there's little friction in being next door to or embedded within the other groups.
It's an interesting question. But doesn't the fact that coastal regions are pro-trade and interior lands are against it tell us that people are pro-trade when they engage in it and against it when they don't?
So a response may be to get more people engage in trade and globalization instead of only seeing the bad sides, the closed factories, etc.
How does one do that I don't know. Maybe Google should move its campus to Iowa.
> For most of recorded history, the primary means of production has been land and so fights have been over land, but over the last 150 years or so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information.
I don't expect wars over land to be done anytime soon. We might be doing most of our work on computers rather than on land, but the resources for these computers gotta come from somewhere. This is why esp. China has been going around and buying huge troves of land in Africa: not only to feed their growing population, but also to call dibs on the minerals in the ground.
That doesn't mean that information wars are not happening as well. (Though not nearly as prominent since these need way less personnel and happen less openly.)
> On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen.
How is this an argument? I'm not from the US and I'm not very well read on the issue, but isn't it illegal immigrants they want to deport?
Who said that people from those countries couldn't be well educated and be fully functional Americans?
Also, I live in Malmö Sweden (coastal city) and the right-wing party here is strong, and we have lots of problem with immigrants, both legal and illegal.
Not good example. They were not voluntarily part of USSR (see Molotov-Ribentrop pact), Stalin sent a lot of them to Siberia. They have huge Russian minority too (remember Putin's policy for "protecting" russians in foreign countries). It it not easy for them to survive, they have to be as independent on russia as possible, so they have no other choice than integrate into international organizations.
It's basically urban vs rural, the cities are just on the coasts for historical reasons related to trade and shipping I think. Global trade means that the economy has centred more and more around highly-skilled jobs that require the network effects of being in a major city. Rural residents can't afford to move there and probably wouldn't be able to get jobs anyway.
Also, being dependent on imports to feed the population would have major national security implications.
> What sort of organizing principle would the world have then? I haven't seen anything historically like that
The Hanseatic League was a federation of free-trading market towns along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coastlines. [1]
A number of people have suggested that cities (and federations of cities) may become more of a focus as a political unit in the medium term over the nation state.
> Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd.
FYI, I'm not aware of anyone proposing to send all immigrants back, only undocumented (also known as "illegal") immigrants. Like it or not, the current laws are such that people in that category are not here legally, so if we truly are a nation of laws, those laws should be upheld, no?
If you don't agree with the law, vote to change it rather than act as if the law just doesn't exist.
To single out a certain group of people and act as if laws don't apply to them in a country that is otherwise built on laws is to deprive them (and all of us) of one of the most fundamental American virtues. Whether we agree with the laws or not, if we don't uphold them, we cease to be a free country (it's the laws that keep us free, after all). It's absurd to believe otherwise.
Or, you know, we can keep going down the rabbit hole of selectively enforcing laws, and we can ignore your vote too because some people don't agree with it; the voting laws are just words on paper.
"What sort of organizing principle would the world have then?"
I don't know if this is what is likely to happen, but I've been pondering this: The Westphalian order for the world, which we currently live under, involves drawing borders for countries, and then basically insisting that the governments within those borders must have some sort of unity, regardless of what those borders are, do, or come from.
Do you have a group of people that are geographically localized but have borders going right through the middle of them, like the Kurds? Then they are not a country, not countrymen, and regardless of their affiliations they are subject to their country's policies for dealing with each other. The split of East and West Germany was an extreme case of this, where a national border was drawn, and you had families cut in half.
Do you have bunches of people that basically loathe each other with the fire of a thousand suns, but there's a border drawn around them on the world map? Then they live together, until the most pathological cases like Yugoslavia finally just blow apart.
And where did these borders come from? Did some bureaucrats in Europe in the 1700s or 1800s draw some conveniently straight lines in Africa? You're a country now in the 21st century, regardless of how anyone local feels about that. Pretty much anywhere in the world you see a straight line border you see something very artificial that took no account of conditions on the ground.
In the 1990s, the cyber utopians thought that technology would lead to more decentralization. With improved technology, you don't need industrial-era practices to deal with cities and counties and states and countries. You can have very sophisticated government and government services now at much smaller polities; even the small local cities take online payments now, for instance, and have online billing.
Perhaps the future looks like the Westphalian system cracking up, and polities being more willing to secede, easily join together in arrangements of convenience as needed, and easily break apart again as their interests diverge. There are certainly a lot of practical issues involved in that transition, but as diversity increases all around the world, there's increasingly a lot of practical issues involved in forcibly jamming people together because of borders drawn 200+ years ago. It wouldn't solve war; that's not on the table. But it might just prevent World War III.
Even before the Roman Empire, there were trade focused sea faring groups with significant influence, as seen on a map of Greek & Phoenician colonies[1]. The Carthaginians even sailed around West Africa and reached as far as Gulf of Guinea to search for precious metals[2].
I would expect the largest, most successful cities to be located on the coast, or in extremely fertile regions like the Nile Delta or Mesopotamia. Couldn't find any pretty visualisations that would show that though, so I might be wrong.
They will leave the US before they start a war or try to force a california sucession. Ireland could become the next Silicon Valley it may change from Silicon Valley to Technology Island. It would be cheaper for them to pay for their diverse workforce to move to a different country rather than go to war for sucession.
I think the situation in Wales is that the South and East are more cosmopolitan, lots of immigrants going back many years. The West and North less so.
Similarly in Scotland I think the major urban areas dominate, where populations are more diverse. But rural populations away from communications and conurbations seem far less accepting of [large groups of] migrants.
Similarly in the UK poorer populations that might feel threatened by incomers seeking low-skilled jobs (eg due to poor language skills) seem less welcoming of migrants.
Personally I think the whole "culture" aspect is a red herring and what people really care about is their own wealth. I mean the UK's history is epitomised by outside influences either due to invasion of Britain or British invasion and Empire.
Personally I think to survive and meet the needs of everyone the West will need give up some of its luxuries, get rid of our need to own everything we use, move away from the disposable lifestyle.
In short my analysis is it's liberal just greed that drives this whole thing - 'I deserve wealth but other people don't'.
>Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd. The economy would cease to function. On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
>What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.
It's a decent idea for large parts of America to be devolved into separate nation-states. Texas, California, and Massachusetts are looking not to be governable as a unified country.
What if, people vote with their feet?
Would it be possible that sites like https://teleport.org or others, make moving as simple as booking a holiday trip? People will find their likeminded peers in the cloud and meet up physically at a place that fits best their needs? Not just to meet up for conferences but for longterm stays? Countries, cities, governments would have to compete for talent? Would this change the dynamic how governments act overall? Being in competition for people, for talent on a complete new level?
What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Then those regions might form their own government, see for example the Hanseatic League [1]. These cities answered directly to the Emperor, instead of some local nobility or government.
Kind of reminds me of the medieval Hanseatic League - city-states and merchant guilds around the Baltic Sea trading goods and culture (and providing for the defence of all that shipping) while the interior regions were more isolated.
>"We're seeing this pattern where the coasts of many countries are cosmopolitan and well-integrated into the world economy, but the interiors are very conservative and nationalistic. Scotland & London vs. Wales & the rest of Britain"
London is the interior, it is not on the coast. Wales and and Scotland are both coastal.
>"Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia."
I assume you mean the former Yugoslavia? Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro are also on the coast. So what does that leave for non-coastal fomer Yugoslavia? Macedonia?
>"The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR"
There hasn't been a USSR since 1991. Do you mean the former USSR?
> so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information. What kind of social organizing principle does that imply?
Agggressive, negotiators with awareness of cognitive biases like base-rate fallacy, asymmetry of information advantage, etc.... will form or create the organizing principles most likely.. I think of it and it becomes a pain thinking about the asymmentry of information. Hopefully, if it happens, we'll build a better deterrant against withholding information.
In Heinlien's Friday the US has split up into competing and fractious rival states, like a late 19th century Europe. The heroine is from a persecuted minority (namely genetically engineered people).
> What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Until you can fix your toilet, repair your house, teach your kids, pave your roads, and have your meals cooked for you remotely, I don't think this is a valid concern. The upper "coastal" class depends on local, blue collar labor that can't be outsourced (with current technology).
Rich folk can move to the suburbs but everyone will need to coexist within contiguous geographic states for the foreseeable future.
Honestly, I'd quite like to have a world with a few large 'nation-states' in charge of 'the global scene'. I am not an economic liberal by any means, but I am a proponent of forming ties between nations and having democracy applied to smaller communities.
Global city-states need to become independent with open immigration, separate from the Nations which should enforce strong immigration controls to maintain the native population & culture.
Those cultural ties practically already are stronger. Living on the west coast of Canada I really feel that - to the south we have Washington, Oregon, California.
No one is proposing sending all the immigrants back to where they came from, and if they did the economy would not cease to function. Maybe part of the problem is that companies like Google hire teams of 90% immigrants while Americans can't find good jobs.
As a brown Indian dude, it seems to me that the western world is caught in some self-hating loop.
It simultaneously trivializes my culture while hating its own culture.
I watched Justin Trudeau dance the bhangra and people claim "oh what beautiful Indian culture". I've seen people eat butter chicken to partake in "Indian culture" experiences.
That's just wrong. Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
At the same time, I see white people negate their culture altogether. It might have been built on colonialism and imperialism, but what, say, Renaissance artists pulled off is significant, very significant.
Everyone needs to back off and think about this for a bit
> That's just wrong. Indian culture - and culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
I think there's a key concept missing from every discussion about culture, and that concept is that "X immigrant culture" is a completely different culture from "X culture." Indians in India have one culture, while Indians in e.g. Britain have a related, but divergent culture.
Two places this matters:
• Frequently, the people of "X immigrant culture" care a lot about 'preserving their heritage', because it's a constant struggle for them—while the people of "X culture" couldn't give a damn, because they're constantly steeped in their own culture and it's not going away. "Cultural appropriation" is an invention almost entirely of immigrant cultures.
• People "exploring a culture" frequently have the implicit goal of exploring the domestic-immigrant offshoot of a culture, not the native one. Because of the lack of connection and cultural touchstone organizations that immigrants face, things like dances and dishes are seen as far more relevant in immigrant cultures, similar to their role in itinerant cultures.
This is the most concise explanation for what many on the left fail to grasp, and one of the many reasons why I and many are Trump supporters.
We are on one hand supposed to respect and honor other cultures, but are not allowed to cultivate, maintain and respect our own (American) culture.
Which is absurd for many reasons... one being it denies a very real reason for many wanting to come to our country, or fails to identify the characteristics that made western culture generally preferable to many others.
I've thought lately that the cosmopolitan outlook, which I do hold and generally enjoy, is also a rootless one. In accepting the ever-present change, respecting the multitude of outlooks, it often denies connecting with traditions in favor of a single "modern, rational, progressive" view that buries its internal contradictions beneath fleeting surface treasures.
At the same time, it supports the imperial concept of misappropriating original traditions as a convenient fancy, a reference to the exotic, or a belittling of the other, which you give a great example of - with the pretext that this is somehow contributing to progress. Appropriation can be "done right" and produce great new works, but it can't be done easily. It's so much easier to simply loot the past without thinking.
One of the books I like that considers similar thoughts at various points is Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Philosophy. [0]
> That's just wrong. Indian culture - and culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
Maybe now you start to see the "damned if you do damned if you don't" nature of political correctness, and why it has been rejected in this election cycle with great success.
You do realize that what the great renaissance intellectuals created, the right wing in the united stated looks down upon and scoffs at, right? They hate anything to do with art or culture unless it's their version of Christianity.
This is the same attitude of Boko Haram.
The left wing doesn't dismiss the great cultural achievements the west has created, but we try to create space for them within a nation known for accepting immigrants, rather than forcefully imposing our culture on them, which seems to have failed so brilliantly in places like France.
The politicians trivialize this shit, because they pander to the voters. The left embraces other cultures because we're sick of getting Christianity shoved down our throats.
White guilt is a large reason why white people are afraid to assert themselves and their racial identity. You're basically labeled a bigot if you don't support the cause of nihilistic globalism and moral leveling.
Of course culture is more than food or dance, but what's wrong with trying those as a way to have a glimpse into the Indian culture? I don't think anyone claimed to be expert on Indian culture after having a butter chicken. What would you propose instead?
It's not about culture, people are still fine with their culture, it's about economics. Globalisation and corruption has caused a lot more instability for the working class. If you look at polls about what the number one issue was you'll see it's the economy, that's the main thing people are concerned about.
> Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
I think most people understand that. What do you think would be an improvement? Surely not that they fail even to appreciate the dance or the dish. It's not likely that they'll embark on a years-long quest to understand the deeper history, religion etc. of a dozen different cultures. What, really, would you have them do? Without a suggestion, you're just bashing.
You know, this is kind of inspiring. I know where my blood comes from (Sicily and WASP), and I know where I grew up and got my ideas (Berkeley), but, it's not like I've really tried to turn into some kind of culture; I've participating in a thing that's been made into a culture (festivals), but that's not the same, is it?
I feel that the US will now, finally, focus on the US. It's time for that. Instead of their usual imperialistic attitude that involves enticing Europe to boycott Russia, taking out stability providing leaders in the middle east without much (after)thought (or the wrong kind of thought), providing weapons the the Free Syrian Army mercenaries that now fight for the better paying ISIS side (this is not stupidity, it's rubbelization with economic motives imo). Etc. Let the US focus on the US for the next 4 years, the US has enough problems to solve within their borders. Clinton would just intensify the Syria situation, alienate Russia even further, make secret deals with Wall Street and keep things just as they are. And things are not fine as they are.
Yeah yeah, I think Snowden is a hero and I hate Trump for calling him a traitor. Also his abortions views are medieval. But hey, a more balanced anti-imperialist would simply never win in the corrupt, house-of-cards like US.
Whenever I hear those arguments, I have to bring up a point:
There is a very good reason why big, powerful empires always have a big military, meddle and stick their noses into everyone's affairs.
Economic power doesn't come from thin air. It has a lot to do with political power, influence and domination.
Those are two sides of the same coin, they support and nurture each other.
You reach limits of growth when you just trade and build up your own economy.
Almost all foreign policy is dedicated to furthering self-serving goals. Often medium and long term, so not apparently visible. Often related to things the public know very little about. Just as often, completely misguided.
It's important to realize that no voter imagines how US military actions do or don't coordinate or synchronize with US big corp action. That kind of stuff never shows up in the political discourse. Politicians aren't riling up Americans with talk of how military boosts economy. Nobody makes that connection on TV.
From my understanding, some industries depend tightly on the military, and not bolstering your own national industries would be a mistake as all the big global players cheat with nationalistic help.
People aren't going to get more or less imperialism. From George Bush Sr, to Bill Clinton, to George Bush Jr, to Barack Obama, when has the US military + international big corp coordination ever stopped, much less shown variability between presidents? When a president is elected, is there a sweep through the US armed forces command structure? No. Is there a sweep through industry? No. Is there a sweep through the CIA? No. National bureaucracies make plans longer than 4 years, and their programs don't stop executing in-between elections.
What I'm really worried about is what happens in a winner-takes all branches of government scenario, especially when conceivably the majority of the population supports different policies. It makes sense for the ruling party to do a makeover of power, as the GOP has tended toward redistricting as a strategy, and I think that's exactly what's going to happen.
Donald Trump cannot be an independent leader because no ruler manages bureaucracy alone. You must always listen to the bureaucracy machine because it has too many aspects that you don't understand but is someone else's little kingdom. And that's why Donald Trump is nominating all Washington insiders. It's not like Donald Trump decided, "Why not try for business elites through my network, instead of classical Washington?" Nope, didn't happen.
It would be nice if that were true. Maybe Bernie could've pushed the focus back on improving the US instead of picking international fights, but Trump's rhetoric is far more Hawkish than Obama or Clinton.
You can clearly tell the extent Trump's isolationist attitude by having John Bolton on as an advisor. Also, the Iran deal? He promised to shred it. The Iranians might finally obtain nukes.
I hear so many educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.
I hear so many more educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.
You can't sacrifice large swaths of the population for the so called "greater" good. Globalisation, as it stands now, is neo-colonialism. It offshores blue collar jobs and concentrates white collar jobs in rich countries. It disenfranchises blue collar workers in the west, and causes brain drain in the developing world. All it's done is benefit the elite. Read progressive economists like Piketty, and combine it with visits to places like Detroit. The current model hasn't been working. I don't think Trump has all the solutions, but he diagnosed the problem better than the smug elites. Same goes for Brexit. This isn't xenophobia, working class jobs are disappearing from the west. It's a real economic phenomena. Maybe one day the world will be united, but its too soon.
You could argue that globalization has pulled millions of chinese peasants out of poverty, and helped creating a middle class in China, which is already increasing the pressure on the regime to transition to a democracy.
In any case, as some pointed out here, outsourcing to China is only the first step in the destruction of these jobs. Robotics is likely going to replace many of these jobs in the next 20y, which might bring back some industry into the West, ie more jobs but more sophisticated jobs.
Globalism shuffled jobs around the world, and trade policies can change that to a modest extent -- one's trade policy can't change the fact that your citizens are too expensive versus Thailand or China. Tariffs against Mexico cannot make a Shenzhen. GM is not metaphorically coming back to Detroit.
US manufacturing employment is going down, and even if / when high tech manufacturing brings production back to the US, it will be robotic production. And with every company in the world racing for machine learning, I don't see how the future looks good for a specific generation of people in history too old to newly take up a globally competitive trade. Also, it's been mentioned around here that driving is one of the most frequent jobs in most states in the US, and that Uber recently made a deliver of beer by automated truck. Uber and every relevant company in the world is trying to destroy a category of worker from everywhere in the world.
I agree, but want to point out that it is not just blue collar jobs being off-shored. Many white-collar jobs (software development included) are being off-shored, too.
I sometimes worry that liberal democracy may turn out to be a temporary fad. The rise of uninformed populism and strongmen is everywhere. Right-wing extremism, often with little love for the free press or due process, has been on the rise all over Europe. The Brexit campaign was dominated by lies and took a seriously xenophobic turn, and now the US has elected a president who is openly racist and lies more often than he tells the truth. In in increasing number of countries, strongmen seem to have more staying power than informed democracy.
It may be attractive to spin this as merely being anti-globalist, but in every instance, racism is a big part of it. After the Brexit vote, people of colour got shouted at by people who claimed they voted for foreigners to leave.
Maybe the problem is that we have allowed right-wing extremism to take hold of the anti-globalist agenda. That used to be a left-wing thing, though anti-globalism never really became mainstream with the left as its champions, but now that the extreme right is championing the cause, suddenly it wins. Does anti-globalism do better when combined with racism? Do they need each other to get a majority?
Or is the problem with democracy itself? Is it possible that the world is too complex for the average citizen to make an informed decision about it? Or do we need a regular lesson in the consequences of our choices? After WW2, everybody (in western Europe at least) was united in their desire for freedom and opposition to racism and totalitarianism, but we've seem to have forgotten that lesson. Or maybe the lesson has been poisoned by becoming too rigid and part of establishment dogma?
Democracy started off as an oligarchy of the nobles, then extended to free white men/citizens, then to women and then to every citizen. While it was idealistic, I suspect the people who designed the system did not expect large participation; usually the only participants would be city folk/wealthy landowners etc. who probably more or less held similar worldviews. Now, technology/media has made it very easy for many more people to participate in a democracy, and we have to deal with the uncomfortable situation that this gives a lot of power to people who may not be well educated; in fact, who might be rather shallow/easily influenced...
Anyways, I don't think democracy itself is the problem; it is the Establishment that has mostly lost touch with some of the things that Americans respect. A common criticism of Hillary was that she wasn't a straight shooter like Trump. Let's think about that: Hillary was a career politician, a First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, all diplomatic positions that require her to be, well, diplomatic. Obama did well because he could actually pull off both: be a straight-shooter in public, yet diplomatic when talking to other politicians. Hillary unfortunately did not have that skill, of public oration. That is probably what hurt her most.
Now I agree its rather unfair to discount Hillary for that reason. But the reality is: that is how US politics seem to work. And politicians need to understand that fact.
Polybius [1] would share with this point of view. He believed that governments iterated through a cycle of basic forms: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy and their degenerate forms.
"Or is the problem with democracy itself? Is it possible that the world is too complex for the average citizen to make an informed decision about it? "
I believe, that democracy lost it when started to serve minorities instead of majority. Of course people are getting angry, when majority of them elect government which then won't care about their problems, but about immigrants, sexual minorities, big business, elites etc. Democracy, by definition, is the government of majority, and when it stops serving majority, it loses its purpose. I don't have a solution to this problem, but hopefully somebody will find it sooner rather than later, because I'm afraid some very dark times might otherwise be ahead.
The problem is that people like you dismiss legitimate concerns as racism. If there's one thing you should take from this election, it's that we're tired of that.
>Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
I use to think this too, before this election. But it became clear to me that the "other side" is not interested in being assuaged. They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.
They are interested in control. Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happen again.
The politics of fear won, and I see no oppertunities to bring a divide where one side is hellbent on dynamiting every brick as it's laid.
I am very Anti-Trump, but I have to ask, could the same thoughts not be said by a right-winger to a leftist? It seems like neither side is listening.
From what I understand, this isn't what democracy used to be. We've created a divide where somebody says "I'm a democrat/republican" and they look at the party for what that means.
It isn't only the system that is broken, but it is how we view it and how we view each other.
This is why I agreed with Sama and not removing Thiel from YC. We have to listen to the other side and empathize so we can understand. Without that we all lose.
I think the "uncertain and complex world" trope is a part of the problem here.
I have become very cynical over time about the way intellectuals, academics, trade negotiators, politicians and the media use/abuse complexity to get their own way. Many times when I examine an issue I see a whole lot of people saying how complex the world is, how impossibly nuanced it is and .... the kicker .... therefore you shouldn't attempt to figure it out or have an opinion. You should just do whatever the "experts" recommend even if it's apparently unintuitive or even quite clearly against your own interests. Anyone who doesn't obey this line is written off as ignorant, too stupid to have a vote, etc.
Yet are these issues really so complicated? Often they are not. The complexity, when you take the time to tackle it, ends up being largely artificial.
> But it became clear to me that the "other side" is not interested in being assuaged. They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.
Yep. We're all racists and xenophobes and our views have no rational basis. Please feel free to make sweeping judgments about what anyone who voted against Hillary Clinton must be thinking.
Please keep up this rhetoric so we can win in 2020, too!
> They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.
Doesn't this describe the other side? "Deplorables," "ignorant ruralites," "uninformed -ist -phobes"? Is that attitude interested in empathy or calmly discussing things?
> Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happen
Isn't this exactly how Obama got elected? "Hope and change", and Obama's been practically worshipped as a savior ever since.
> The politics of fear won
I think fear had a lot to do with this result, but those fears are grounded in reality. One candidate acknowledged the problems that have arisen in the last decade, while the other did not. Time will tell how well he actually handles them.
Globalization isn't the problem. Computerization is.
Other countries are not taking "our" jobs. We simply don't need those jobs anymore. Taxes on foreign labor will only do one thing: subsidize robots.
We're going to spend billions of dollars on a big wall, and I guarantee you we're not going to have a lot more jobs after that. (The wall itself is a pretty big project though.)
Most likely, few of the promises / threats of the campaign will materialize.
It just might turn out that Trump will be a very moderate republican president. He just might have played a role for the last few years. A role that got him voters.
Then again, he might not care at all about doing the actual job and let Pence run most of it.
I still can't believe how Americans could actually elect someone like that. I understand a protest vote, but with that candidate...
I guess the majority of voters just didn't care that he has no actual opinions, is an entitled, rich, insecure, macho, old generation 'man', and just projected their wishes for change, ignoring all of him they didn't want to think about.
Republicans hold both houses and the presidency now, though.
I guess Obama's legacy has been wiped out today.
For me, the problem is more when people think: a) the different-skinned guy down the street is causing this problem; b) voting for right wing guy can stop globalisation. Brexit showed that the people most likely to vote on immigration/kick out foreigners basis were also those with the fewest immigrants in their region.
More left-leaning people seem a bit confused about inequality/poverty vs globalisation - inequality globally is on the way down, which is why it's on the way up locally (you're losing to the guy half-way around the world, some of your neighbours are not losing to their equivalents... yet).
I support globalization, and agree computerization will be more disruptive (in the future). But that you, and democrats, and the establishment republicans ignore the jobs lost to globalization over the last 30 years is exactly what leads to a reactionary election and a Trump presidency.
No wall is needed... Just make it so that employers cannot legally employ those not authorized to work in the country --and fine with an amount which will deter people/companies.
At least that's what I would do if I needed to control unauthorized workers for any place which wanted to do so.
That will happen in the long run but that's not what happened the last 30 years. Secretarial jobs are certainly a casualty of computerisation. But the job losses that got Trump elected are industrial job losses, from factories that have been essentially outsourced to China. China is barely begining to computerise its production, Chinese factories are mostly competitive because of their ample and cheap manual labor.
Disagree that computerisation is this problem. It's a problem, but it's not what's driven this. Why would the vote fall so strongly down racial lines if the primary problem was the elimination of lower-end jobs?
(Along with one of your respondents, I also don't think the wall or many other promises will eventuate.)
Lol what are you on about. Plenty of countries have a very multicultural society, and they do great.
Look at Melbourne, Australia, we have huge immigrant populations, and all the different cultures have made this an awesome place to live - E.g. I highly doubt you'd find a more diverse selection of restaurants per capita anywhere else.
This election wasn't about race. Don't project your bigotry onto all Trump supporters.
And the 'world elite' is not actually the group of people that aren't racist, it's the middle class that isn't racist. The 'elite' and the 'worker class' are actually pretty similar in how bigoted they are.
In my opinion Australia is one of the most monocultural countries in the world, and I have visited over 100 countries.
It is a monoculture because they basically exterminated natives like they were bunnies in order for some guys to take all the territory to themselves.
There is only one culture in Australia precisely because all the minorities are not significant. It is one thing to have a Muslim or two, completely different having tens of millions.
Who is the owner of the land in Australia? White families. I have a friend in Australia who has so much territory he needs a plane to move around it. It is normal there.
What makes Australia a great place to life is having a continent almost as big as the USA,with comparable natural resources, but with less than 13 times less population.
In a similar country like China there lives 65 times more population. In fact most of China is mountains so the actual density is even higher in populated places.
That's interesting. The anti-immigration right in the UK hold your immigration system up as the way forward.
We have a multicultural society in the UK that many are rejecting, with racial tensions at a high.
The difference is that many immigrants are working class. They are scapegoated to great success with the white working class. I disagree with that - I think the real problem is meagre infrastructure investment to support new arrivals but perhaps the Aussie style system works on the other end of the spectrum: focus only on valuable people where value is how much money they would earn.
Is that true about Melbourne? I mean, I believe that there are large immigrant populations, and that you have a lot of diverse restaurants. But I struggle to believe that they "do great" and that there is a lot of unity. I know New Zealand is a deeply racist country, and I had always heard that Australia was even worse.
Trump's campaign might be anti-establishment, the people he will be bringing in will not be.
Jeff Sessions
Giuliani
Christy
just to name three of his "inner circle"
I cross my fingers that we will get through the next 4 years without any significant events. However, I think this is really a black eye in America. I think right now at least, we're going to be the butt of jokes for the rest of the world. Lets hope he proves us wrong, or at least the system works to contain him.
I noticed the same thing about how how establishment his "team" is. I predict that what we've elected as a nation is, in fact, a fairly run of the mill establishment Republican. But I guess we'll find out!
The fact that the electoral college exists probably distorts the popular vote. People in non-swing states may not vote in the same proportions if the president were decided by popular vote. Of course, this trend could go either way.
And much like brexit, this fiasco reveals how much of a fool the journalistic establishment has made of itself. At least we can stop debating one thing at this point, whether or not the media is somehow disconnected with reality.
It says more about the media -- in a short-sighted quest for ratings and quarterly reports -- stops doing journalism and starts being a vector for political click-bait.
Even just the Halo-effect of ridiculous claims being requoted verbatim is huge, even when followed with rebuttals.
Immigration and gay marriage and women’s rights etc. are scapegoats. The real problems are international competition (unskilled workers in developed countries have to compete with unskilled workers in Thailand and Bangladesh and Indonesia), automation (the US has higher industrial production than ever before, but it takes much less labor), changing tax laws and easier travel/communication/money movement (letting rich people live far away from production and markets, and siphon their wealth into tax havens), break-down of civic institutions (labor unions, churches, public services, local newspapers, etc.).
After Brexit and Trump, the next milestone on this curious series is the French presidential elections in May 2017. The far right candidate Le Pen is leading the polls, but winning at the second round of the election is not going to be easy. Although, no doubt that Brexit, the Trump election, potential new terrorist attacks in France as well as the developping migrant crisis are going to give her a boost.
But like Trump she is unlikely to control the parliament. The republican party will likely temper Trump through the senate. And without a majority at the French parliament, a French president is more like a queen of England, just with the nuclear red button in her hand.
• The Geert Wilders trial in Netherlands. GW is the most popular politician in NL right now. He is on trial for what is essentially pure political speech, he asked a crowd if they wanted more/fewer Moroccans (i.e. visa policy), they said fewer, he said "OK we'll sort that out" or words to that effect. He is boycotting his own trial. If he is found guilty and punished, it's hard to believe this will go down well or hurt his support. Should be resolved by end of the month.
• Austria rerunning its presidential election. Last time the "far right" candidate Norbert Hofer lost to his Green/left wing opponent. But there was voter fraud and the vote was so close that the amount of fraud was larger than the margin of the win, so the courts required a rerun. If Hofer wins ... well, the President of the EU Commission has said Austria would be frozen out of the EU as a punishment for voting the wrong way. Should be resolved in December.
• General election in the Netherlands next year.
• Election in France, as you note.
• Towards the end of the year election in Germany. Very volatile politics there. Turkey is threatening to unleash a torrent of migration on Europe unless it gives Turkey what it wants, which the EU doesn't want to do. Germany's Trump equivalent (Frauke Petry) started losing support when the migrant crisis began slackening after the Turkey deal. If it collapses then AfD may see a resurgence in time for the election.
> The far right candidate Le Pen is leading the polls
But, she's not?
Alain Juppé is, an old-school right-wing politician. Le Pen is second and the third is a party that is not quite far-left but still far enough to the left for the communist party to ally with it.
> winning at the second round of the election is not going to be easy
I don't think this has any chance of happening. But of course, who knows...
>The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail.
No, the attempts at building an interconnected globalized world are becoming less popular. Or maybe the people who opposed that sort of thing all along are finding a voice.
It's a different thing; Interestingly, you get different answers when you vote votes than when you vote with dollars; and in this case? the dollars have teamed up with the center (or what in america is called the center-left) - and lost to the votes. (I guess I don't really see why you think the center left (or center) has sold out to the far right. This is America, and we like our market-based solutions, but the center is capable of regulating that. I give you the ACA as exhibit A.)
>There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
uh, so really, 'left' vs 'right' doesn't work so well when describing "third way" nationalist movements; that's kind of why it is the "third way" - I mean, not that brexit and trump are actually fascist movements, but they are similar in that they have strong nationalist and nativist aspects to them, and are less clear where they stand on the economic side of things. All 'third way' movements, historically, have had some socialist and some capitalist elements; their argument is that the left/right economic divide isn't the primary issue; taking care of "your people" and protecting those people from the others is the big issue.
The real divide here is between what I call "the coalition of everything is fine" - people like me, for whom the economy looks like it's booming, minorities and women who see that their rights get closer to parity every year, vs... uh, what I want to call the rural poor, but this election showed that it's more than just the rural poor. I mean, I can see what is up with the rural poor... but what about everyone else?
And there's not a lot of understanding in general; it's not just me. I mean, I can understand voting for the other guy 'cause you don't have a job... but unemployment, by just about all measures, has been going down for about all of the time that Obama has been in office.
Where is this majority of people who think that things are so bad?
> I mean, I can understand voting for the other guy 'cause you don't have a job... but unemployment, by just about all measures, has been going down for about all of the time that Obama has been in office.
The unemployment rate only includes people actively seeking work. One often-toted statistic is that men have been dropping out of the labor market completely (i.e. not looking for work at all) at higher-than-normal rates. These are quite possibly also people who were Trump voters.
What was also fascinating in this campaign is the divide between the media and the people; even if Trump had lost with 49% of the vote it would have been striking. Zero newspapers endorsed him, which means half of the US population is not represented in the media.
People like community. It's hard to have a community when people don't share similar backgrounds, when people don't share same values. People will feel less connected and less responsible for one another. People will also feel more distrust to one another. Social cohesion will break down. This is the reason why integration should be an essential part of immigration. Immigrants should adopt the leading culture, at least when moving outside of the confinements of their homes.
I think you are making a great assessment and that is what fears me. I don't think your words are pretty useful on HackerNews folks in general.
My thoughts as a Swede is that I don't actually give a fuck if your president is a turd. His view on immigrations doesn't scare me, his view on NATO doesn't really scare me.
Trump say he is going to invest in fossile fuels THAT scares me A LOT.
The future already looks super dark and leaders like Obama shed a tiny light on that things would turn out for the better. But now when two of the worlds largest countries doesn't really care (USA and Russia) I mean wtf. It doesn't matter what the rest of the world does if these two giants will fuck it up anyway.
And the biggest CO₂ emitter is China, not the US or Russia. Aactually, pulling industry back to the US could reduce global CO₂ output if efficiency was made more of a priority than in China due to higher labor and energy costs.
One should be careful about extrapolating a trend from two disparate data points.
Trump and Brexit have one major thing in common: they relied on surprisingly high turnout from white working class men for ostensibly right wing causes after a lot of anti-Establishment and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
They have a lot not in common, like pro-Brexit voters very strongly disapproving of Trump, Brexit being a popular political cause for over twenty years backed by a vast majority of the mainstream press which actually picked up momentum because Establishment and liberal free trade figures came out in favour of it, the demographics for Brexit voters being heavily skewed towards older people[1] in a way that Trump votes almost certainly weren't, and Trump evidently picking up a lot of "the incumbent party haven't done anything for us; let's vote for change" votes that aren't really related to the appeal of his wall or birther remarks to ex-Obama voters living in Mexican-free areas of Michigan. Trump's "Make American Great" again spiel might well resonate more with an unemployed ex-factory worker than a broadsheet article extolling the virtues of comparative advantage, but it certainly isn't the sort of practical protectionist plan he needs to deliver a permanently change the status quo position on globalisation, and his new supporters aren't going to stick around if he doesn't deliver something.
It's also clear that other relatively recent major Anglosphere elections haven't been a major success for the radical right.
[1]that campaign certainly wasn't won on subreddits
> A similar divide can be found among the different age groups with younger voters favouring the Democrats and those aged over 65 years leaning towards Mr Trump.
> However, Mrs Clinton's appeal among those aged under 30 years, where she has a 20-point lead over Mr Trump (54/34%), is not as great as Barack Obama's 23-point lead.
I saw a graph much more detailed but I can't find it anymore. It showed that Clinton won the votes of the under 40 and Trump the ones of the over 40 by more or less the same margin. The story on Sky seems to confirm that.
> The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
This is am important point. Current system does not foster competition. As a migrant myself, I think the whole system is rigged to the benefit of chosen few mega corporation.
Taking UK as an example, Skilled immigration category was abolished few years back due to which I cannot apply for a visa and compete in free market for a salary. However, I am allowed to come to UK on a lower salary for nine years easily under company transfer scheme practically bounded to my employer with no option.
If allowed to compete as an individual, I would either compete for higher wages or go home. Current system just puts myself as well local at disadvantage to benefit chosen few.
The whole objective of free market and globalization is lost to greed and manipulation.
> Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture
I don't understand that part. Isn't US a sum of N cultures that decided to have a common culture? So why the newcomers can't do what the predecessors did?
There's not really a good response I can think of here which fits with the guidelines of this site aside from basically we have a lot of ignorant short-sighted voters in this country.
I think the same mistake was made in both Brexit and this election. The people at the top looked around them, and they assumed the people they saw were a representative sample of the population. Because usually, they're more or less right.
There's a whole demographic out there that doesn't really care about politics. It doesn't matter who POTUS is because nothing will really change in my city. They don't bother voting because none of the policies particularly interest them. Suddenly you've got this guy who isn't a politician, and he's promising to do things that decades of politicians haven't been doing.
Trump got the people who are disaffected by traditional politics to come out and vote, and that's enough to make a big difference, just like it was with Brexit.
> It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
It's a seductive idea but I think you're reading too much into this. It's hard to tell what people are really voting for when there are two options each of which encompasses a bunch of largely disparate policies. I wouldn't be surprised if a large amount of the Trump vote was just a vote against "political correctness" or one against Hillary as a person. Humans sure love patterns.
In this case the popular result is very likely the opposite of what you assert. That is, Clinton will probably win the popular vote and lose the presidency.
So popular sentiment is actually in support of an open, connected world. The political structures in the US systematically oppress this majority, due to its concentration in cities and the legacy of a voting system that respects territory over people.
If people care so much about immigration, why do anti-immigrant groups need to lie so much? If I had to accuse deficit hawks of being rapists that were conspiring with the Jews to bring down the US then I'd maybe conclude that people didn't care that much about the deficit.
The people who voted on the single issue of losing jobs overseas are in for a rude awakening when they realize that almost all of these jobs will be automated even if they do come back to the US.
I equated the discontent in the US with the discontent in the UK that led to the Brexit vote when it happened - my wife didn't believe they could have the same root cause but now I'm pretty convinced your predictions are likely to happen.
As an aside, Clinton would have given (will give?) a concession speech but Trump gave a victory speech.
> The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail.
Because the interconnected globalized world had a lot of "buts" to it.
You can be interconnected and globalized...
...but we're going to still lock down copyright
...but we're going to export bad patent laws
...but we're going to externalize pollution even more than we were before
...but we're going to ignore competition and allow massive multinationals to form
...but we're going to maximize labor arbitrage while minimizing consumer choice
...but we're going to try and create a global jurisdiction that favors the guy with the most money
...but we're going to try and weaken the protections surrounding the most powerful tool for interconnection ever created.
This is why people are turning their backs on globalization - it hasn't worked for everyone, and it's hurt many people.
I'm fairly certain copyright and patent laws played no role in out-of-work steel workers in western Pennsylvania and Ohio turning out in droves for Trump.
> Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture.
I believe their care about that because they have nothing else to look forward to.
(Lower-)Middle class in the West has been funding prosperity around the world (can't find the chart at the moment). Basically every social class everywhere in the world is better off than 30 years ago, except middle class in the Western world.
There is this generation that have less than their parents and know that their children will have even less. They cling to what they have, this nebulous identity/culture. And a bunch of populist politician is just happy to give them that.
What they really need is prosperity. Very few care about their neighbors beliefs when life is good. People living in cities like London demonstrate that: they are way more liberal because being liberal does not (seem to) cost them a lot.
I think it is more populism than far right.For example, in my country greece, under similar discontent, people voted the (supposed) "radical-left" party of Syriza.
> understand their concerns and try to assuage them
You can't do both at the same time.
For starters, the "theory of competitive advantage" is incredibly weak. But it's pretty clear that trade represents a small constant factor in the GDP level, which is used up once all markets have sufficient liquidity. It can explain only a small fraction of economic growth since the Industrial Revolution. And it is not necessarily a Pareto improvement with respect to nations -- which is why protectionism has been a fact of global trade for 4,000 years.
Oh the elites are headed towards a globalised world however that does not mean they need to include every country or people.
However what is happening in Europe if not the US is that people are pushing back against their governments and the elites because they are tired of being run over by the ideals of a group which suffers none of the negatives of the choices they force on others.
The elite, the political class and those connected to it do talk down to the masses, trying to embarrass or even intimidate them into accepting the needs of the elite. This means lower labor costs, more dependents on government, and long term more locked in votes. This ends up forcing the already pressed lower and middle classes further into an economic malaise they cannot escape. Worse any negatives, from loss of jobs and opportunities or worse, crime and violence, is confined to their areas as the elite tend to live in a very protected environment.
With regards to the US, at least we have been consistent in flipping the White House every eight years or so. It is pretty remarkable. However Democrats have been actually fighting a losing battle for a long time and not modifying their message but instead becoming more heated. By that I mean they are losing control over vast parts of the country with regards to the House and Senate but more importantly they lost a lot of governorship and local governments all of which feed upward
I thought about your text a few hours. Because some of it sounds really right, but somehow it also feels strange.
You say, if I understand you correctly, that the rural voter is the majority, and that we should finally start to listen to his needs, ideas, fears and dreams.
And I agree that we should listen to the majority and figure out how to make most people happy. But exactly this "rural voter" is not the one who educates himself (independent of the education he receives through his government a lot of learning happens after school). He has very simple needs and doesn't care about the details of how these interact with the needs of people who "tick differently". Sometimes when I talk to "rural folks" (have some in the family) they don't even seem to understand what they themselves want and need. They just know when they don't have it and then they are unhappy.
Therefore there is not much to learn from this "rural voter", or from talking to him. But his needs are obvious and simple as well. And we all know them already. Give him a job that exhausts him, give him a wife, 1-2 children, a tv, if possible a single family home. Keep the taxes low enough for him to provide for his family, fly or drive somewhere cheap in summer and make alcohol cheap enough for him to have some parties and a few beer on the weekend. Then he's happy and won't trouble any politician.
Thus, I would say the question is not about understanding them better but about rich and social enough to provide them what they need. And the funny thing is that the politicians on the right usually prefer the well off population and make politics for them, while the left tries to provide for the commoner, the "rural voter". That's the funny thing in my eyes, the "rural" voter hates the people who fight for him and loves the people who try to exploit him.
Your comment is incredibly condescending, which is a significant contributing factor as to why this "rural voter" got out and voted.
Perhaps rather than taking this tact (which we've seen a million times):
> Rural voters aren't smart. They vote based on feelings and ignore the stuff that actually matters (which I can identify better than they can). They're simple folks that just need simple stuff, but they're frequently tricked into voting against their interests by the other party.
You could consider something like this:
> Rural voters have different values than mine. My perception of their intelligence is irrelevant because I know there are intelligent people who share their views. Maybe if their viewpoints were taken seriously instead of dismissed outright as sexist and xenophobic, we could win their votes (or at least not cause such high turnout for the opponent) next time around.
Realize that Republicans can identify demographics that frequently vote for Democrats the same way. Take that first paragraph above and sub in "black people," "hispanics," and "women." See how incredibly offensive it is now? That's how "rural voters" feel when you post things like this.
> we should finally start to listen to his needs, ideas, fears and dreams.
> his needs are obvious and simple as well. Give him a job that exhausts him, give him a wife, 1-2 children, a tv, if possible a single family home. Then he's happy and won't trouble any politician.
Yeah, right, sounds like you got it.
Please somebody tell me this is sarcasm ridiculing the leftists.
Funny you say globalization has failed when we've had a corporate global economy for decades that has sent worker wages down in more-developed countries and corporate profits skyrocketing in more-developed countries. Believe me, these global corporations love the Republicans more than the Democrats; their profits come first, the people come last.
It's not a return to the 1920s. Globalisation proceeded too quickly, and many people got left out.
It is a revolt against a system which simply doesn't work for the majority of European descended whites.
Paul Buchheit once linked to an article from the American Conservative, which shows at least he had an open mind to hearing about these anti-establishment views.
Paul Graham and Sam A have instead just continued the political correctness anti-Trump agenda which in the long-turn actually plays into his hands, as there is a growing dislike of PC, especially from multi-millionaires who don't understand what its like to be out of work with no education behind you.
I think all this talk will come back to bite Silicon Valley and YC on the ass, as Trump will look to take revenge on the Tech Crowd. I expect the Tech Bubble to burst over the nxt year.
> Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
That to me is the key point. As someone who falls squarely into Mr. Trump's camp I've found the condesending way people talk about his supporters infuriating.
Economists study data, make observations and come to conclusions. They can't just tell people what they want to hear. Trump told coal country he'd being back mining jobs in the face of a freefall in demand. That's just lying. Don't blame economists.
> It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
Good practice would suggest that you need slightly more than two datapoints to establish a trend.
There's a fairly well understood relationship between both slow GDP growth (& income disparity) and the rise of extreme political views (e.g. http://voxeu.org/article/global-crisis-and-political-extremi...). When times are good, people don't misattribute their misfortune to issues like globalisation and immigration. When times are bad, they do.
I think you are right. Here in Germany the Afd is also on the rise, who has a strong stand against refugees and the EU.
What is the common denominator? Obviously it is about globalism and culture, but maybe it has more to it?
I think none is really looking at the big picture. What are our values and how do democracies work? Do we in the west have the better system or where we just lucky? Currently the west is in a crisis. Everyone notices, that we loose on economic terms while China is winning. And groups from outside the west get more and more influence (most prominently Islam).
So how can we turn this around? One answer might be Trump, but there will probably be better solutions if we think about these issues.
You make an assumption that globalisation is a man-made thing. That we could say "no" and it would stop. But this is not so. Globalisation stems from very primal human and commercial needs that have been enabled by the internet.
Enough of this No True Scotsman bullshit that I see constantly here and basically anywhere with something approaching an international audience. In the context of the United States, which is where this election occurred and where the majority of people are reading this site from, the Democratic Party is a leftist party. Yes, if you want to lump in European democratic socialism, they fall elsewhere on the spectrum. When is the last time a US Democrat and the European Democratic Socialist were facing each other on the ballot? It's a meaningless comparison.
> It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
No, you'd be extremely naive to believe this is an isolated event:
* Greece, SYRIZA and minor parties on the surge since 2014
* UK, votes for brexit in 2016, I'm not sure if UKIP is gaining votes or not though.
* France, FN (LePen) is leading the polls at least for the first round.
* Italy, M5S is awfully close to lead the polls in Italy
* In Germany AfD is on the raise
* FPO is leading the pools in Austria
Keep in mind that the mainstream media, often downplays the possibility of an alternative surging - I believe on purpose: In Greece the polls were nearly 15% off in the referendum. It's staggering! Now, Brexit and the US pollsters got-it all wrong. In Greece many people lie to pollsters on purpose.
I don't see any sort of isolation, I see a very clear and predictable pattern.
> There is no genuine leftist alternative.
Wait a minute there. I have this strong sense that if the democrats had gone with the other candidate, they'd be celebrating today. Hillary, was the only candidate that was susceptible to a loss (emails, wall street money, legacy, the surname, etc.). Hillary == Establishment in every possible way. Sanders on the other hand was possibly the most scandal-free candidate of the last 20 years at least. I wouldn't say that the leftist is the problem.
However, at least in Europe, the ones who'd screwed up everyone were the Socialist parties by pushing a Brussels-based liberal agenda for a decade or so, so in a sense, at least in the EU the left or mild left at least, is rather dead in the water.
UPDATE: I think part of T. Frank's article in the Guardian describe my feelings in a detailed manner:
Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.
And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.
If you watch stuff from YouTube you should check out Peter Coffin's break down of this. This is a failure of neoliberalism and it's something that needs to be addressed ASAP for sure.
>Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
Many of the people that care so much about immigration and preserving their culture are the grandchildren of immigrants. It's very much an attitude of "I got mine, you can go F yourself".
>Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.
In the context of the economic literature that exists in mainstream academia, which is in overwhelming support of globalism as a policy which supports economic growth of all people, it appears your comment strongly suggests anti-globalism is equated with bigotry.
I'm neither defending nor supporting globalism: is it reasonable to conclude that someone who is not in support of globalism is a bigot or racist? This seems to have more to do with political correctness and I think all people deserve the right to have a thoughtful discussion and represent their views without being effectively silenced, and when something is labelled as bigotry or racism it is effectively outlawed in western culture. Shouldn't we be more careful here?
> Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
Weird - most people on the left don't consider economists to be priests of their world. That's a right-wing frame of mind.
If you are interested in finding the truth here, the first thing to do is stop assuming that all the people who voted conservative are unemployed farmers. There are a lot of the educated elite in that bloc.
Or the simpler view: this is result of lack of critical thinking or any thinking skills at all.
And a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot just in spite.
The Media (and you it seems) almost immediately went into "where did we do wrong and what can we do better" mode. While that's a completely important thing to do, and appropriate for many problem situations, it isn't appropriate here. Here's why:
1. Clinton won the popular vote.
2. Economists think Trump is a bad idea, so on that level, the popular vote was not wrong.
Don't blame yourselves. The electoral college and Trump's campaign taking advantage of it (and the F.B.I.) are the reason that things are going to go bad.
If the electoral college had been close there was always the possibility of a renegade Republican elector or two flipping things (especially if Trump's forthcoming trials gave them further excuse to do so). Though they certainly wouldn't have done that in the expectation of reducing riots.
The electoral college isn't close though. Given that they've won the popular vote in all but one of the Presidential elections since 1992 and lost three, it'll be interesting to see if electoral reform comes onto the agenda when the Democrats are back in power again. But in the mean time, the absolute best case scenario for the left is a revelation which leads to Trump's impeachment and four years of President Pence.
I called both Brexit and Trump but I can't quite agree with your synopsis. You might be surprised to hear that from a quasi-neoreactionary. I see migration and globalization as important elements of a more disturbing pattern not many people seem to have picked up on.
I don't know that Trump understands this himself, but Thiel sure does.
Having been a fan of Thiel's ideas for some time, I concocted a hypothesis called the 'Wolfian World' that gives a high level look at older currents moving in the world. It is here if anybody's interested in something different from chronocentric newspapers and talking heads with their short sight and overconfidence.
America had several massive immigration flows before NATO existed. And several racist backlashes. For example, a backlash against the slightly-less-white people from Italy in the early 1900s. There's nothing new about the current backlash.
This is utter madness. If we're lucky, this wheels fall off this whole enterprise and these people are discredited before they do too much harm.
It's deeply frustrating to hear so much crap analysis of what's been going on. If we're really honest with ourselves about what's happening, we're seeing a massive vote for protectionism of a particular demographics that have long enjoyed it.
People talk a lot about the forgotten white working class voter. And while that's a real thing, that's only half the story. The Trump voters are on the whole wealthier than the Clinton voters. That means there are a whole bunch of people with real money who've decided they can stomach the open bigotry of Trump's campaign because they think ultimately his policies are what they want. That's why the incumbents of the GOP largely never fled his side, no matter how obscene his personal conduct.
To be really blunt, Trump's entire track record says "if you're white and wealthy, I've obviously got your back", and his words have said, "if you're white and struggling, it's brown people who stand in your way". In that way, he's managed to get an extremely energetic white vote.
This election will be forever remembered for just how lurid it has been. From the very beginning of the Republican primary, it's been Trump who continually lowered the bar. God help us all if we do in fact end up with literally the least qualified Commander in Chief of American history. Going to sleep now, deeply discouraged.
Trump won because the Democrats railroaded their best candidate in favor of someone who is profoundly unlikeable and untrustworthy. Regardless of if she is truly a criminal, or not, the Democratic party choose a candidate who is under investigation by the FBI instead of a candidate that had real honest to god connection with the working people of the country. The voters have literally said that even Trump is better than what the Democrats have tried to ram down their throats this election. This election was lost, not won.
They should have woken up quickly when they noticed Bernie's level of support. He wasn't supposed to be that popular. Especially with younger people. On paper it looked like "oh she's a woman, young people would like that". When it didn't happen, it was time to listen, not throw everyone from that camp under the bus.
I don't even know how DNC will recover from that. It is viewed as a failure, a cesspool of corruption and anyone with morals would stay away from it.
> This election was lost, not won.
So true. They had it in their pocket. Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump. But of course corruption gets in the way...
Democrats lost this. She was deep in Benghazi / Emails / Foundations .. which is all public. Trump might have same picture, but its not public not even his Tax record ! Bravo to american public !
Its a slap to the democratic establishment for not understanding the dynamics. Bernie or for that matter Elizabeth would have been right candidates.
I also think Hillary used a lot of other celebs for campaign - Beyonce, Perry, Michelle / Obama, Muslim family ... rather than talking about her strong points / achievements (none ?), and I saw the women card thrown a lot. On the other side it was just Trump and his bullshit.
Also Canadian (damn, we sound so smug now), I've been saying the same thing. But seems Americans think Socialism is a bad word. They've forgotten the opportunity they had with Bernie.
On the flipside, seems the "potentially" closest candidate to Bernie in this election is Trump. He actually has talked about controlling Wall Street, bringing back manufacturing jobs, less military, and if you look at money raised during this election, I'd say he has won the Presidency without bringing tons of big dollars in to politics (I could be wrong on some of these).
Of course, their methods are completely different and they differ hugely on other issues.
I'm not suggesting that Trump is a good replacement for Bernie, but you can see how Bernie supporters would see him as a better alternative than Clinton.
As a Conservative in America (and, as of this year, a former Republican), I watched what was my party railroad one or two good candidates in favor of someone who is a cartoon villain. So I know the feeling.
I am pretty sure the voters tell that to the losing side each election. while its easy to lay claim that Sanders could have won it is anything but easy to prove. true he had support but not among groups known to show up to actually vote. he also did not have support of many Clinton voters and there is no guarantee he would get them.
The US is pretty consistent in flipping the White House. That in itself is amazing and a good thing. The sad part is all the hate that comes out on this site which is sadly typical of people not thinking but reacting
I may not completely understand the US primary system, but wasn't Clinton chosen by the US democrat voters? (She won the popular vote, not just because of the super-delegates).
I don't really understand why she won instead of Sanders, maybe he was too much on the left for many democrats?
Sincerely, I am confused by this analysis. All the media outlets have talked ad-infinitum about how Trump supporters are predominantly uneducated whites, typically from rural areas, and how college educated whites support Clinton.
Hillary without question had Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the DC circuit behind her, which are large epicenters of wealthy white, elite people.
There is without doubt a terrifying aspect of white nationalism behind Trump, but unless you have statistics I am not aware of, the white elites, maybe outside of Texas, were not behind Trump.
EDIT - to add what I believe is a hopeful note, Trump's election isn't a great reading of the pulse of the nation; Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect. The DNC selected the less competitive candidate as the result of a dishonest primary.
I think there are many hidden Trump voters. They might never disclose at work or among friends their choice, but I suspected many did. I was watching both the Hillary and Trump Reddit channels, and on Trumps' channel there was a constant stream of educated people (doctors, programmers, lawyers), a large number of non-whites, LGBT, ex-Bernie people there and so on.
On Hillary's side there was a constant -- "Ah look at those stupid sexists, hating us for wanting a a woman President" type of complacency.
So the result was surprising, but not too surprising at the same time.
> Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect
Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump, no doubt.
My highly unscientific analysis of the numbers is that Trump won in many rural and less populous districts, whereas Hillary won the more densely populated districts. This by itself probably isn't much of a surprise, and the less populous districts have significantly fewer votes – but there are more of them. Combine a strong Trump performance in these small districts with an underperforming Hillary in the others, along with a number of flipped districts, and it becomes clear how Trump won. (Note: how, not why.)
Check the results for Wisconsin for instance, and you'll find a lot flipped districts. In Michigan, the Detroit stronghold saw a drop of 8,6 points compared to the 2012 vote. To be fair, it looks like Wayne County (where Detroit is) according to that map isn't fully counted so this may very well change, but it's at 98.9% reporting so that'd have to be a pretty significant chunk of votes to widen that margin.
Again, this is armchair analysis so I may very well be writing bullcrap, but it looks to me that the Trump campaign where confident in keeping the red states and focused pretty hard on flipping some of the states the Democrats really didn't think they could possibly win, along with a strong push to win Florida. Those 29 electoral votes from the sunshine state really opened things up for Trump.
If there's a huge racial divide as you're making out, with white people outnumbering all others, why was Obama elected twice?
Trump literally lives in a gold skyscraper with his name in large lettering on it so he's not exactly someone people should be able to relate to or vice versa but people like him because he doesn't talk down to them and doesn't schmooze his way around the celebrity and political circuit trying to cultivate an image of presidential perfection.
He speaks off the cuff, he knows how to draw a crowd, he tweets his mind and he's worked his ass off to get around to as many locations as possible and people also respect that. They're sick of pre-prepared speeches, evasive answers, lies and pure corruption.
Trump is a big wrecking ball that the people have chosen to smash up the current political system. The majority of politicians today are career politicians, detached from reality and detached from normality.
> He speaks off the cuff, he knows how to draw a crowd, he tweets his mind and he's worked his ass off to get around to as many locations as possible and people also respect that. They're sick of pre-prepared speeches, evasive answers, lies and pure corruption.
> "if you're white and wealthy, I've obviously got your back"
What disappointments me more than anything is how all the minority American citizens will feel knowing that the majority of the people they know preferred a man who has for many months publicly and explicitly insulted their own race and ethnicity. How do you reconcile that? I have no idea.
"I think alot of people feel like that, uh, America told them exactly - African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, you name it...Asians...I think alot of people tonight are feeling like, you know, [the] United States told me exactly what they think of me." - James Carville, after Trump's win.
This is what Hillary supporters would like to portray about any Trump voter, and it's frankly the reason they got such a surprise. They failed to even attempt to understand why people voted for Trump. Just wrote everyone off as racists and bigots.
> Does this mean the majority of Americans are secretly inherently racist?
It is my opinion that all humans are inherently racist and that the only way to overcome it is to first acknowledge it. The majority of humans (and therefore Americans) aren't self aware enough to admit to themselves that they are racist and so the racism within lives on.
This is just something I've been pondering on and isn't a fully formed argument, but it seems to me that a large number of conflicts around the globe can be boiled down to "racist rednecks" trying to kill people that aren't like them.
> To be really blunt, Trump's entire track record says "if you're white and wealthy, I've obviously got your back", and his words have said, "if you're white and struggling, it's brown people who stand in your way". In that way, he's managed to get an extremely energetic white vote.
yeah and exactly because of this kind of insane, bogus "analysis" you lost.
When or if you find back the connection to reality, you will realize how Trump actually won. By talking about real issues that nobody else even dares to touch.
When or if you find back the connection to reality, you will realize how Trump actually won.
Trump won by appealing to people who historically felt they were and deserved to be the in-control majority but now feel they are the not-in-control minority, and he won by claiming he would make them feel like an in-control majority again.
It is that simple. It is also simply the case that the people who historically felt they were and deserved to be the in-control majority were white men.
Populism in American politics is nothing new. Nor is populism oriented on racial lines. There is no secret "untouchable" issue lurking behind it. You pick a large group, capable of forming a powerful voting bloc, a group that believes it has reason to feel resentful, to feel cheated out of power that's rightfully theirs, to feel that "elites" are conspiring against them to ruin the country, and you tell them they deserve power and you're going to give it back to them.
Exactly 120 years ago, William Jennings Bryan ran on a similar platform of "restoring" political and economic power to people who felt they once had it, lost it, and deserved to have it once again. In the process he delivered one of the objectively greatest political addresses in American history (the "Cross of Gold" speech). The only difference is Bryan lost the electoral college by about the same margin Trump won it by.
Since when were American politics about issues rather than image?
People who voted for Trump clearly liked his bombastic asshole style, and want to stick it to the "liberal elite". There happened to be more of them this time around than there were people afraid enough of a Trump presidency to vote for a relatively subdued and conventional candidate.
That's, of course, given that there wasn't enough voting fraud to make a difference, which with electronic voting machines in the mix isn't really a given.
>I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n*, and they stomped the floor.
-George Wallace
He took a very simple road. He appealed to the fear of the Other.
Those are the real issues that were discussed. People talk as if it's normal that blacks and latinos mostly vote as a block, well now white working class does as well.
Been following the coverage since the primaries and though I don't know who I would have voted for, seeing the self righteous intelligentia being so blatantly wrong on the election outcome gives me an embarrassing satisfaction.
None of the established media did even try to keep a disguise of neutrality. Not in the US, not the BBC or here in Germany.
You can be against Trump all you want, but where has "journalistic standards" been gone? If your whole organization is made up of individuals who see themselves as morally-superior while being a Clinton-biased - how realistic is it that this organization is able to get a realistic glimpse at the outside world?
I will always remember the media in this campaign. CNN's quote of "Also interesting is remember, it’s illegal to possess, ah, the stolen documents — it’s different for the media" really typifies the type of standards the media has lowered itself to.
How could nobody see that ignorance and stupidity on that level was not helping them... It is like they took a gun, paid a lot of money for it, and then used it to shot themselves in the foot.
spot on!
In the end I (a German) was watching Fox News! Can you believe it? I know they have their own bias but this one time they were doing a somewhat better job.
The media is entirely biased towards moral liberalism and I thought it was an "open secret" that only the most self-deluded didn't know about. Of course they're going to be biased towards Clinton, she's the morally liberal candidate. That's their job. If they don't go along with it, surely they get fired. They provide an avenue for confirmation bias, which is interesting because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, considering most people are liberal because of the strong influence of the (biased) media on them.
The media wanted a razor-tight race because it was great for their ratings, so they gave Trump billions in free advertising on the 24-hour news cycle. And they got their wish: 48% to 48% of the popular vote.
I'll give the foreign media a pass since Trump was doing a lot of finger pointing at foreign countries and their citizens. The domestic media on the other hand...
> "The loser out-spent the winner by huge amounts. Does money really buy elections? Maybe, but not this one."
I would have said attention buys elections, and Trump was the kind of candidate that had the media tripping over themselves to give him free coverage. That definitely seems to explain the primary season, but the general election campaign turned things around a bit by consisting almost solely of negative attention that hurt the candidates when they were in the spotlight. I guess neither candidate could spend enough to buy anywhere near as much attention as the various scandals attracted, and perhaps this campaign season was meaningfully different in overall tone.
> had the media tripping over themselves to give him free coverage.
Media treated people as idiots, in some cases CNN went to levels of stupidity and lies that would have put Fox to shame. They thought they were helping their candidate, but they were actually hurting the cause.
The fact that many Democrats have voted for Trump doesn't mean Trump is great necessarily, it means they really hated Hillary and what she represented (and no, not because she is a woman, if anything this will always be remembered as step-back for woman as a US president, people will remember Hillary and cringe next time).
And from the looks of it, it was Clinton's campaign pushing liberal media to focus on the crazy outliers of the Republican candidates. Backfire it did.
I always wondered if the president really has the power people perceive him to have, or if he's still influenced and bound by many people in the background.
One can observe this with Obama. He made promises (like closing Guantanamo etc.), which he ultimately couldn't force through. But why? Possibly, because he isn't nearly as free in his decision making.
Now, Trump claimed to do a lot of things and I'm wondering if he really can pull that off or if many of his extraordinary claims and goals won't be doable, because of other people with power.
This is what I don't like about modern politics: So many things are claimed to be done, but ultimately, it's all bullshit and you only know what you've voted for long after the election – which could be something entirely different than you'd voted for in the first place.
I'd argue that checks and balances are very much a good thing. Less gets done overall but at least one side/person/party/opinion can't get pushed through without resistance if too many people oppose it.
Then again, Trump didn't just win the election, Republicans also won majority in the House and Senate. So it's going to be a lot easier for Trump to push policies through than it was for Obama.
I'd argue you're missing the most important point in this election.
Both leading candidates were despised by a large number of people. Many people were heard talking about having to vote for the lesser of two evils. Therefore it makes sense to frame the election in this way. What we have today is not a pro-Trump victory, but an anti-Clinton victory.
I don't think the Democratic establishment realised what a gamble it took by favouring Clinton over Sanders, if they had just let open primaries decide who their candidate would be I'm fairly confident a Democratic candidate would now be heading for the White House.
The last point is super interesting. More and more the democrats are coming to represent the upper class and republicans the lower.
This election was hugely divided across class lines. Technically it's by college education status. But I believe that is highly correlated with social class.
The sad part of this is that if this election was about economics and not about racism and bigotry, then a lot of people voted rather nonsensically. The Democrats aren't exactly a social/left party (at least by global standards), but they're the party that brought better healthcare while the Republicans are the party of Ayn Randism.
So if lower class people voted Republican for economic reasons, they're only hurting themselves. Of course they'll blame immigrants or whoever, so that it can all end up in a vicious cycle of stupidity.
From an outsider's perspective: superdelegates. Stein hit the nail on the head regarding the Democrat campaign[1]. Moderates swung to non-participation, their vote for Bernie actually meant nothing.
A lot of Bernie supporters were college kids who spared whatever money they could and donated only to find, it was rigged, their money was stolen and given to Hillary instead.
I think people have no idea how much this was a vote against Hillary. Look at Trump, even with all his rhetoric and crazy statements he made, they still picked him! That says a lot about Hillary and the DNC and the campaign they ran.
Regarding your first observation, I think that people who are very religious and anti-abortion expect their agenda to now be championed by the new administration. I have my doubts whether that will actually come to be.
Will the real direction on those issues come from Trump or the mass of influence in political power under him? I think the latter. I think his grand plans will be largely neutered by a more level-headed GOP (relatively speaking), but they will also have more strength to push socially conservative issues.
More years spent getting caught up on intraspecies drama (bathroom use!) rather than working on big ideas.
The religious right are ultimately tools. I wonder if they will ever realize it and form their own party. It's laughable that they think Trump is means to achieve their goals.
On 538 they also talked a lot about political theory during the elections. The "economic model" of the election says that the candidates do not matter, that what matters is the economic state of the country and variables such as the presence of an incumbent.
Most people at 538 seemed to think that this theory would be invalidated after the pretty probablye Clinton win, but was a reason for them to consider the uncertainty high.
I think tomorrow they are going to discuss if this theory is not vindicated after all.
> Yet again, Americans didn't even consider the third party.
The presidential third party vote more than doubled this election compared to 4 years ago.
> They aren't even allowed to debate.
Ron Paul begs to differ.
---
The challenge, of course, is the the system is susceptible to the spoiler effect. Trump won Florida's 29 electoral votes by just 1%. Gary Johnson alone had double that number in the state.
In 2000, the entire election was decided by 537 votes for George Bush in Florida. And the majority of Ralph Nader's 97k votes in the state would have gone to Al Gore in a two-party race. The Green Party lost the Democrats 4+ years of the presidency.
Trump and is running mate Pence want to appeal Roe vs Wade, I wouldn't exactly call that "wishy-washy" on abortion.
Given the rest of his political standing it's pretty clear that putting women's rights back a few decades is definitely on his agenda.
Now that religious social issues like gay marriage and abortion have been essentially settled, we have been in the beginning of a trend where left-wing politics begins to align with religion. We are already seeing with people using religious arguments for things like social programs and environmentalism. FFS the Pope said people should vote for Hillary.
Obama rode to power on change ticket and immediately abandoned it, wholesale.
OK that didn't work so who else you got? Bernie, outsider with nothing, no money, no establishment friends, too old, been a democtat for 5 minutes and nearly got the democratic nomination and the dem establishment hate him and broke the rules fighting him. Donald has fame and got the republican nomination. Republican establishment hate him.
American voters want change.
Change at any cost right now. And they'll keep trying for it.
There has been no meaningful political reform. Regulatory capture and gerrymander are the norm. People hate it. They genuinely hate the status quo, the political establishment. Really hate it.
Whoever is judged the most likely to do something, anything, in the way of reform has a huge advantage. You can be inexperienced and African American, you can be a blow-hard who inherited a billion dollars. Doesn't matter if people actually believe you are more for change and reform than the opposition.
It's not the only important thing but having credibility as an agent for change is extremely valuable. Hilary had precisely no credibility on that count and was proud of it .
> Obama rode to power on change ticket and immediately abandoned it, wholesale.
He had two years where he had legislative power, and spent that time shoring up the US economy after the financial crisis and passing healthcare reform. Had he passed political reform instead he would have been accused of putting elite concerns before the practical things affecting ordinary people.
One of the problems in the US seems to be that the President has all the rhetoric of a ruler, but in fact only has power with Congress.
People invest an enormous amount of hope and effort into the federal system, but in fact it's mostly ineffective, if the two parties are at one another's throats no one is capable of action a majority of the time. The system is set up to rely on the states for action, but people move around so much the states aren't seen as worth the effort (because you might be taking a job on the other side of the country in a year or two). It's a system which doesn't really match up with how people live their lives.
> He had two years where he had legislative power, and spent that time shoring up the US economy after the financial crisis and passing healthcare reform.
Respectfully, he shored up the banks that had precipitated the crisis rather than the people most affected by the crisis. Some will call that virtuous and necessary, or 'deeply unfair' and necessary (Timothy Geithner), but the people who benefited are not the people who voted last night.
As for healthcare reform, he chose health insurance rather than health care. From the point of view of most of the people who voted last night, that means another bill to pay, not better healthcare.
He invested his power, to the degree he had it, more in keeping things the same than in the change people voted him in for.
Obama only had 7 weeks of legislative power. That's how long his party had enough votes to overcome the filibuster in the Senate. Criticizing him for not getting enough done is nonsensical.
Jeez, everybody is all bent out of shape on this. The Republican establishment hate Trump nearly as much as they hate Clinton so with Republicans controlling The House and The Senate how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
The really interesting part of all this was reading Scott Adams blog who proposed the idea that Trump is a master persuader (probably this is just a fancy name for populist). He has been blogging about persuasion techniques and about cognitive biases and how humans are irrational creatures 90% of the time and are open to persuasion techniques.
This seems to offend everybodies sensibilities but for me it's been fascinating and a real eye-opener. The reaction (bias?) in the media has been particularly interesting and has forever changed my world view.
If you have the time it's probably worth reading the posts for the past year or so, http://blog.dilbert.com/ It won't be so interesting now that we know the result but the ideas and methods of persuasion he talks about will shape the future for a long time to come.
The cognitive dissonance being shown by the media is particularly funny. It's amazing that they really don't understand that a large percentage of the population voted for Trump because he probably represents for them a reasonable hope for change. I'm waiting for somebody to suggest that nobody actually voted for him and instead he rigged the election all by himself.
> Jeez, everybody is all bent out of shape on this. The Republican establishment hate Trump nearly as much as they hate Clinton so with Republicans controlling The House and The Senate how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
The Republican establishment, in terms of actual currently serving politicians rather than former ones or writers, have largely rolled over for Trump. With this "mandate", they'll continue to do so for fear of getting voted out.
And even if that weren't the case Trump would still be plenty dangerous. Sure, we can imagine they'd stop him if he tried to get some terrible policy passed -- but the biggest danger from Trump isn't some terrible deliberate policy. It's the constant screwups we can expect from someone who's not competent to run the executive branch.
Media bias? If anything, the media has been weirdly accommodating to Trump. Trump literally hides his tax returns and they just kind of go "Oh well, guess that's that," but they kept reporting on Clinton's emails ad nauseum no matter how many times it was established that there was nothing there. When Comey broke protocol and commented on her emails again a week ago, the story was not, "Look how the GOP is trying to rig this election with a false scandal," the front page stories were once again credulous acceptance that there was something fishy about Clinton. And when Comey once again failed to find anything, that was a much smaller story.
IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump is one of the most interesting contributors to this result.
I agree. There's a big lesson in focus here. One side hammered the emails incessantly while the other had too many issues to get the media to lock down on one.
I tend to think that this was the meeting of three things:
- media driven by drama
- individual operating how they always have, unlike the norm
- a populace with many negative feelings, reacting to both
Part of it is also that Hillary's emails was pretty much handed to the media, with very little work required from their part. Digging into Trumps taxes or other scandals would require actual work.
As for Comey, he had a lose/lose scenario. If he didn't go forward with the new emails, and it had turned out that there was actually something worth investigating, he's would have kept important information from the US public, just before an election.
While Trump perhaps isn't exactly the ideal candidate for the US presidency, I have the same take on him as I did on the Brexit: The world is simply to boring a place for this to become a major issue. In the long run everything will be fine.
>they just kind of go "Oh well, guess that's that,"
Because this is what the media does for damn near every political scandal that politicians don't immediately capitulate to. Weathering the storm of news, attention and publicity to a "scandal" when a story hits is how it becomes a non-story next week.
>they kept reporting on Clinton's emails ad nauseum no matter how many times it was established that there was nothing there
Because there were incremental changes and updates, the media gets to milk the story for every new morsel. Also, a sleazy, immoral and poorly implemented system for attempting to avoid (even without breaking) open records laws is not "nothing."
IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump
The media's actions are better explained as both lazy and desperate for reader/viewer attention. It explains everything they do from coverage of Trump and Hillary all the way to coverage of the Scout Bake Sale.
I feel they were biased in another, more insidious way (and they went along with it). Trump has carefully crafter a persona for himself over the years (perhaps even accidentally, by virtue of his personality), where he can pretty much say anything (and especially things no other candidate would ever be able to say without saying goodbye to any chance at election), and the media (and people) will just go "oh, well, sure he said some racist, sexist things, but that's just Trump... you know how he is". Kind of like that racist uncle at the dinner table... you gotta put up with it, but at least he's family, so you understand him better, and perhaps realize he has other redeeming qualities.
So, this has allowed Trump to appeal to bases of people no other candidate could even hope to reach, with the current "acceptable" rhetoric.
I can't believe that someone can come to the conclusion you just did. The media was overwhelmingly anti-Trump, that shouldn't even be in dispute. He may have "won" a few talking points that the media was forced to report on as you indicated, but to say the media was accommodating to Trump is just fantasy.
> how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
His rhetoric is already escalating the "war on Muslims". Electing him further confirms that Americans are the enemy of Islam. This is exactly what terrorists were trying to accomplish, and I think we can expect many more people to become radicalized. We can expect an increase in terrorist attacks. Walls won't save you. Tighter immigration control won't save you. The damage was done today, and in the months leading up to the election. I am legitimately scared to visit countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. I was already scared about Turkey, and the situation there will only get worse. I'm worried for my relatives and friends who live there.
Donald Trump doesn't trust the science behind climate change. He doesn't believe that it's real. He would like to dismantle the EPA and increase our dependence on coal and oil. Even if I ignore his deep character flaws, business failures, and sexual assault accusations, this single issue is a dealbreaker for me. Luckily we have many other people working on clean energy, like everything that Elon Musk is doing. But how can this be coming from the President of the United States?
When it comes to radicalization, I would be much more worried over the long-term use of drone bombers. Some people have already incorporated drones into local lore (if you don't behave, a drone will get you), and from myth and lore it is a short step to define the operators as evil and create rhetoric that is used by radicalization. We saw a similar effect in art when England was under constant bombing during ww2. Several years of bombing can cause a rather radical effect on peoples mind, and I suspect studies on stress can confirm that. The wrong president being elected on the opposite side of the planet seems minor in comparison.
The climate aspect is indeed bad, even if many of the trade deals that trump oppose and Hillary was active in bringing forth was labeled as negative for the climate. Hillary was likely the lesser evil all in all, but hopefully in 4 years we can see an actually advocate for the environment and clean energy.
I'm very worried about preemptive announcements of how his presidency will fail. That's the sort of thing that makes people resent "elites" in the first place! I think that the best thing is for the liberals to marshal their political support while saying they'll consider bills trump proposes. Keep all the leverage they can while not signaling that they'll be out to sabotage trump. Saboteur government, like with the republicans under Obama, didn't work, and I hope the Democrats doesn't try it.
Americans refuse to live in fear (at least, the block of Americans I understand and am part of). We don't really count on walls to save us. We count on the ability to destroy those who want to murder us.
That will probably freak a lot of people out here. I'm not a warmonger. But we are a strong nation, and those who want to kill our innocent civilians need to know, America will not cower.
Terrorism is on the rise because there are large groups of people who have devoted their lives to barbaric murder of innocents -- some on the front lines with bombs strapped on, others through financial and cultural support.
These groups of people have a culture in favor of anti-US terrorism. Note: I have not named the groups. You can't say "Islam", because many Muslims don't feel that way. You can't say "Arabs" because it is likewise inaccurate.
It's hard to name the group with a precise enough term. But they exist, and their culture makes them our blood enemies. They want to murder us, and therefore I want to murder them.
What really needs to die is the barbaric culture. But how do you kill a culture? (I can only think of one example off the top of my head ... atom bombs on Japan seemed to quickly, drastically change their culture. Hopefully there's a less drastic way).
Tolerance and peace are some of the greatest human ideals. But when someone desires with their whole heart to murder you and all that you love, tolerance is the wrong response. That enemy needs to be recognized, understood, and defeated.
For one Trump will give them at least one, more likely two even more Supreme Court Justices, so some of the most right-wing conservatives we've seen in the past half century will decide the law of the land for the next twenty to thirty years.
The Republicans will have control of all three branches of government for the next few years and there is a whole lot that they can do with that. As a foreigner, what worries me most is that American progress on climate change policy will be set back by another 15 to 20 years as Obama's progress will be erased and there is no progress to hope for until another Democrat is elected in four or eight years. Russia can also be expected to threaten Europe with more confidence; hopefully our defense spending will increase to pick up the slack.
The Democrats certainly brought this upon themselves. People say the primaries against Sanders were rigged, but really the problem wasn't that the DNC pushed Clinton. The problem was Clinton herself. Clinton soundly rejected Sanders' populist ideals when almost half of the party and a great number of independents supported them. All it took at that point were a few leaks and a letter from Comey to rip the blue collar worker's vote from her.
Can we stop with the 'Clinton rejected sanders policies' line? She pretty much accepted most of them. Bernie supporters are idiots for not getting behind her. You reap what you sow.
I'd completely forgotten about Scott Adams. Now we're never going to hear the end of it.
But I seriously question the idea that Trump can't do much damage because of the Republican controlled House and Senate. The Republicans have been quite eager to do damage to the US without Trump.
> how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do
Probably a lot less than people think domestically -- I suspect he's going to find his hands tied nearly as much as Obama. (And the outbursts of frustration we're likely to see from him as result will probably be epic.) Foreign relations are going to be interesting for a while though, and the stock market is probably going to crash, if it hasn't already.
> I suspect he's going to find his hands tied nearly as much as Obama.
Yeah no, he can just give free reign to Pence (as he explicitly said he'd do) and establishment GOP and they'll let him have his pet hates. Obama was "the enemy" and opposed at every turn, Trump just has to give the GOP their Supreme Court nominee and they'll be more than happy to indulge him.
Personally, I hope the silver lining may be that through these almost inevitable outbursts, the public will get a bit of a "peek behind the curtain" of how politics in the US (and the world at large) actually work. That's a tall order though, since Trump is more likely to just simplify everything to "me wants to do good, he try stop me, he bad!"
It is amazing that all the news organizations which are supposedly representing opposing views all lined up against him. You'd think if he was really a monster we'd know by now. Donald Trump is 70 years old, after all.
Well, I don't know if a "real monster", but if pandering to (and propagating conspiracy theories from) the alt-right doesn't tickle you as a bit bothersome, you might be part of the problem.
It's a long established fact that an appeal to emotion as opposed to rational argument or character, is a far stronger form of persuasion. I think a lot of people overlooked this in this election.
Sure, people will justify their support either through reasoning or judgement of character - "He's a racist bigot", "She's part of the establishment", his/her policy is better etc. but what it comes down to is the emotional appeal of the arguments.
I think Donald Trump was more successful at rallying people around his promise to "make America great again" whilst Hillary failed to rally people around the idea of "Stronger together". I think her campaign became preoccupied with attacking the character of Donald Trump, seeing this as his weakness, as opposed to founding it on a strong appeal to emotion. I would argue the Sanders campaign was much stronger in this regard.
Maybe the domestic damage will be limited, given the checks and balances the three branches provide. As much flak as congress gets, it's interesting to see that no one part of the government is all powerful.
But foreign policy and diplomacy falls squarely in the executive branch. It's impossible to separate the US election from the rest of the world, when the US is so incredibly influential. Diplomacy is tricky, time consuming, and can fall flat on the stupidest little things. Even a really good secretary of state backed by a strong state department can only do so much with an elephant in the china shop.
Like Brexit, it remains to be seen what will actually happen, but if the campaign is any indication of future performance I won't hold my breath.
I've been thinking about this too. He might have no no history in government, but the years of selling himself and his name have made him damn near the perfect politician.
Yeah, that was interesting. You did, I did. I tossed in here one of his better pieces over 3 months ago. Flagged off, of course. "La-la-la, not listening ..."
You have no clue. This is really serious shit, the genies he let out of the bottle during the election will not go back in just as victory has come into their grasp.
> Jeez, everybody is all bent out of shape on this. The Republican establishment hate Trump nearly as much as they hate Clinton so with Republicans controlling The House and The Senate how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
The President deals with foreign policy, and Trump is in Putin's pocket. Time for Ukraine and the Baltic states to become part of Russia.
Brexit and the Trump election share the same root causes:
* Inequality within developed countries, leading to dissatisfaction among working-class voters.
* Globalization benefits accrue largely to capital owners, leaving a lot of workers behind. Many blame immigration since it is the most visible cause. The blame is partly backed by human's xenophobic instincts.
Ironically, Trump's tax plan will mostly benefit the rich.
Instead, we need a much better system to mitigate hardships from job losses to globalization and technological change. The 2017 Congress will be very unlikely to enact such policies.
I wonder how this tension will play out in the future...Thoughts?
You've hit the nail on the head: inequality is at the heart of this. Unfortunately, people are quick to forget the democratic foundation of society. It is not big businesses that have the final say, neither is it the middle classes or any other segment of population. It is the people, collectively, that have influence. And when you forget that over a long period of time, it comes back to bite you hard. Lesson for the future: take inequality seriously.
Since the GOP now holds both Congress and the Presidency, with a possibility of the Supreme Court majority, they may enact some protectionist policies to appease the voters. However, they could in fact make the economic situations worse and some people would start to blame other things.
Could the backlash spill to the technology and related sectors as well? (e.g. a neo-luddite movement might get started)
Note: I did not grow up in the US, so I would like to hear your opinions on this, especially from Americans.
> with a possibility of the Supreme Court majority
... possibility? They already have it. He gets to pick Scalia's replacement and that's 5-4. If Ginsburg or Breyer can't make it 4-8 more years (and Ginsburg is 84), then it'll be a guarantee for the next 30+ years, minimum.
Poor whites in America seem to identify with rich whites more than others from different races who are working (or unemployed) right next to them.
To them, Trump is like the star NFL quarterback that everyone wishes to be, and wears that star's jersey on their back. Even if the fan is overweight and can barely waddle across the parking lot.
Except that in reality Trump does not have the skills necessary to do the job. (He is a great candidate, but will likely be a terrible president). Someone observed that Trump is a poor person's idea of a rich person. He is unfortunately likely a disenfranchised person's idea of an effective president.
That's ironic, because that quote means the exact opposite of what people think:
“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
Yeah, it's one of those high-horse things elites tell themselves while they try to understand why they can't just instill their perfectly obviously correct opinions already.
Indeed. Globalization is not the enemy. Overall wealth and productivity have gone up, up, up in the last 40 years. The problem is that a disproportionate share of the returns from that growth have gone into the pockets of the rich. There's about a zillion reasons why that happened, but there are also many ways to tackle the problem and improve the situation.
US is above its head in debt right now, on par with states like Spain or Greece.
Lowering the tax means it will be less money, meaning less social initiatives that benefit the poorer such as Medicare. Making taxes more progressive would work.
This event and Brexit are proof that you cannot shame people into voting how you want. Calling them bigots over and over just galvanizes them if anything.
It's more of a case that us upper-middle class liberal elites think we are shaming this segment of the population when we are calling them bigots and racists and stupid and uninformed and homophobic and hicks and white trash, because those are horrible things that we don't want to be called.
But a large part of the population don't share that sentiment, they're not shamed, they don't care that you're screaming "RACIST!" at the top of your lungs.
And when you address their actual concerns that globalization and automation are killing their jobs, killing their communities, and killing their people with a shrug, with an "I'm so sorry, move to the cities, get an education!", they'll get angry. And political. And here we are.
I don't think you really have your finger on the pulse of most voters.
I can tell you as someone in silicon valley who sort of vaguely supports trump, that I have been essentially not permitted to talk about it. What's the benefit to it? Why would I speak up and engage in a conversation? Any talk of Trump here isn't actually a real debate. It's everyone around you saying "Trump supporters are racists and bigots. They are disgusting."
Nobody _actually_ wants to hear any arguments from the other side. So I sit with my mouth closed. It's better than losing my friends and having my coworkers ostracize me for my political views. Which maybe they would have the chance to change if they were willing to listen, but aren't.
I know so many people like myself. I was surprised with the result of the election, but not surprised at the fact that there was a surprise like this. Places like SV don't know how many Trump supporters there are or even _why_ they really support him, because they've essentially put their hands over their eyes and their ears and spun in circles shouting "Trump is racist! You are racist!"
Would you like to know how a normal person gets to vote for Trump?
I'm a male French, in France, and I intend to vote FN (extreme right). I have higer education, 10 years of experience in programming, including 5 in 3 different countries. I have social values, like companies should take care of the humans behind the employee, and we should give our maximum to include everyone who wants to be included. I turned my back on leftist movements because no matter how generous I was (e.g. thousands donated to charities, >1200hrs of volunteering, engaged in social causes, etc), leftists always find a way to depict me as a spoiled child with rich parents, and they dismiss any good work I've made as a result of luck.
Oh and my 8-year old cousin was raped by an Arab teenager – I still don't know whether that's due to probability or whether he identifies to the Arabs-against-whites cause. It did change a lot for me.
So now that I'm freed from liberal shamers, I've decided to vote depending on only one criteria. In my whole professional experience, promotions were given to women, to the point that it was unfair to me; In my whole life women have been bitter to me. I'm pretty satisfied that there are currently hundreds of laws in favour of women which offset any inequality they can claim; The only party which proposes to keep those existing laws and not adding new ones is FN, the extreme-right French party.
All in all, what you need to gain back someone like me is love. Give me luck with finding a girlfriend, give me a fair treatment at work, recognize my social engagement and the positive parts of my values, stop assuming all my rationale is just raw racism or raw machism, stop assuming I've just been lucky with work, and you'll get me back among the centrist voters.
But as long as it's not possible to expose my problems without hearing generalizations and shaming, I'll keep voting FN.
If you don't call them out it doesn't stop them being bigots either. And with Brexit we saw just how much bigots were emboldened by the vote, thinking that it was a validation of their worldview. Hate crime in Briton went up by 60% after Brexit.
It's not that bigotry is a non-issue in these elections, it definitely is, the KKK endorsed a presidential candidate after all. The issue is that there are deeper underlying problems that are being exploited by race baiting politicians to win elections. The problem in pre-Nazi Germany, for example, was a deeply dysfunctional economy and trying to seek a scape-goat for the loss of WWI and the shame and humiliation that caused. Today the problem is largely economic inequality and a lack of economic opportunity and mobility for most people in the bottom half of the wealth distribution. Wages have stagnated while housing, college, and healthcare costs have skyrocketed. The recent recession left a huge crater in the economic histories and career developments of most folks under 30 in the form of unemployment and under-employment. Outside of the cities there hasn't been an economic recovery in the last decade. On top of that you have the opiate epidemic. It's gotten so severe that life expectancies for middle aged folks in middle America took a significant hit (due substantially to increases in suicide and deaths from alcoholism and drug overdose). All of that has nothing to do with gay marriage, Syrian refugees, or increased awareness of police brutality.
But a lot of the people who have been disadvantaged over the last few decades have been able to be convinced by demagogues that the cause of their problems is the elite establishment (especially liberals) and to capitalize on latent feelings of racism, anti-gay sentiment, etc. Make no mistake those bigots are not the entirety of the vote, but they are enough of it to swing the election. More so, as in Britain, there is a huge section of the electorate who may not be intrinsically bigoted per se but is perfectly content to sit around and run in a pack with true bigots and to support candidates and policies that will rollback progress in racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality. Sufficiently advanced indifference to issues of racial equality is indistinguishable from bigotry.
You're right that you can't fix this by calling everyone who voted for these things bigots, almost certainly not. But ignoring that aspect doesn't lead to a good outcome either. It's necessary to fix the underlying economic problems while at the same time maintaining a hard line on driving forward to improve equality, enfranchisement, etc.
Really shocks me that this wasn't obvious to people post-Brexit. I was a remain voter who was shocked by that result but this win has been obvious to me for a long time after that.
Calling leave voters racists achieved nothing and only strengthened their views. It was obvious when Trump voters appropriated the term Deplorables that personal attacks were going to fail. All you did was cause the polls to not reflect the final vote because people would say Hilary when asked but put an X next to Trump in private.
No it's not. They are merely two data points. Look at Germany. I guarantee you Merkel is going to be reelected next year.
Okay, the AFD is going to gain some power but it is outright impossible for them to win the election. But this isn't just about the AFD. What the experts and the media forced down the throats of the people is that there is no alternative to what's currently going on. SPD, Grüne, Linke, FDP don't even need to bother finding a Chancellor candidate.
To be fair, Merkel's policies are fairly centrist compared to the usual CDU/CSU rhetoric and ever since the WASG split the SPD has been more center than left, too.
Merkel is also relatively popular with many non-CDU/CSU voters because her policies all in all have been very moderate. She's generally perceived as very static despite having had to deal with the economic crisis, the refugee situation and now Brexit.
The rise of the AfD is largely a result of conservatives (who probably would have voted CDU/CSU otherwise) being upset with Merkel's handling of the refugee situation. The far left still hates her because she's a conservative, the far right hates her because she's too liberal. She's in the sweet spot where her policies are just balanced enough nobody can propose any sane alternatives that don't sound like almost exactly what she's been doing and any criticism either sounds petty or hyperbolic.
The problem for the SPD is that they alienated their leftist demographic under Schröder (leading to the rise in popularity of the Linke) and later with the coalition government aside the CDU/CSU. Aside from traditional party loyalists they're now directly competing with the CDU/CSU for conservative voters.
The only thing that concerns me is that the CSU is taking a lesson from the revival of the AfD (which was pretty much doomed to fail when the Euro crisis waned but was rekindled by the refugee situation) and is now spouting even more populist xenophobic rhetoric than usual. Considering how much disproportionate influence the CSU traditionally holds in the Union, this might spell trouble for the CDU internally.
As an anecdote: I would never have voted for the CDU (I've previously voted for Linke and the Pirate Party) but unless one of the other parties surprises me with a great candidate, I would probably vote to re-elect Merkel.
And let's not forget that the GamerGate fiasco shared a lot of things in common with Brexit and Trump's presidency in how the media covered it too. The media tried to attack people over and over while painting those it disagreed with as bigots, and it worked about as poorly then as it did with this election and Trump supporters.
But no, same general pattern occurred with both Brexit and Trump, with similar results.
This is exactly the moral of the story. If you want to blame somebody for Trump, blame yourselves. Democracy, especially in the US is ruled by consensus. If 30% of the people are extremely opposed to something, like gay marriage, you cannot shove it down their throats. You cannot disregard their feelings and opinions. You just have to swallow it and move on. Because if you don't, somebody will take advantage of your foolishness.
What is being "shove[d] down their throats" because my sister fell in love with a woman and wants to make a family with that person?
Stopping her from doing that is throat-shoving. Her freedom to make her life with a particular someone doesn't harm anybody. _You_ cannot disregard _her_ feelings.
Grew up in the US. I'm a minority. I think this is the only time in my life I've ever felt like I didn't belong in America.
Tonight a large portion of the country confirmed that the US is for whites. That it's not a melting pot. This demographic has been angry for a generation because they've felt like their culture, their socio-economic status and way of life is slipping away and this election (after 8 years of a black president), the line in the sand would be drawn. The numbers don't show any division in voting based on class, but an entire chunk of whites (women, men, making under or over 100k+ a year, college education or not), all voting for Donald Trump.
I don't know what the future looks like now for America.
I'm a white Trump voter in flyover country. You belong in America as do all Americans. This was a push back against an out of touch corrupt elite in Washington and mass immigration. Not all immigration, but the massive increases of the past several decades. Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture. I fully expect that Trump will reach out and moderate. If not, there's always another election that's just two years away.
and if he does what he's said and re-implements stop and frisk and every non-white citizen has to frequently deal with the indignity of being searched all the time?
Your sentiment while delightful isn't in line with the sort of policies Trump has been promoting during his campaign.
> Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture.
I respect that that's how you think about it, and maybe that's even how Trump thinks about it; but I don't think you can credibly make such a blanket statement about Trump voters in general. There are still people in America who believe American culture is white American culture.
The arguments of the more moderate Brexit voters sounded similar to yours, but after the referendum they found out that an uncomfortably large number of their allies really are deeply bigoted. That in itself doesn't make their point invalid, but they can't claim that their opinion defines the whole movement.
I think that if you actually articulate in great detail what it is that you think comprises American culture, as something which is distinct from white culture and is threatened by immigration, you'll find that you are actually talking about white culture.
But, aren't you also from an immigrant family? Isn't 99% of the country from immigrant families? I genuinely don't understand how a country that is built on and by immigration hates immigrants so much.
I think this attitude drove more people to trump. The real reasons most people voted for him were things like party loyalty, they dislike Hillary, perceived him as anti establishment etc etc.
People like you took the narrative from the big news networks of the mass numbers of bigots and racists and just ran with it. Problem was that story smelled like bull, which pushed more people to his camp.
The extreme/regressive left was too busy frothing about white tyranny to pay attention to the true tyrant, Trump, "he'll never get voted in." At the same time, the majority of that vote was being called names. Hillary made the mistake of constructing her lies in order to gain favor with the loudest crowd.
I'm very far left and completely agree with you. The American left is an abysmal disgrace in terms of what I consider social progress. Instead of attempting to spread progressive thinking, the American left spreads hatred and name calling.
Next time try making friends and not enemies. More of this[1] and less of this[2].
As much as the media tried to make this about racism vs liberalism, I don't think it was really about that.
Yes, it's a snub that the pro-Trump wing doesn't give a shit about women and minorities and LGBT. That much is clear. No matter what, to vote Trump you have to see certain people as "acceptable losses".
And yes, Trump is backed by a lot of vitriolic racists.
But the key thing, I think, that won Trump the presidency was anti-globalism, and the fact that he's a gigantic asshole.
Americans wanted an asshole. Pro-Trump voters see him like Apple saw Steve Jobs - the guy who cut through the BS and saw simple problems with simple solutions, and demanded that those problems be fixed.
Faced with the problem of America's increasingly anemic industrial jobs, the political wing and the press collectively said "we're okay with this". Trump said insane things like making Apple build stuff in the USA and pulling out of trade agreements.
Faced with terrorism in Europe, the press and the left collectively said "well there's not much we can do about that, we have to take care of the refugees". Trump said "screw the refugees, I'm closing the border and kicking out the muslims".
Trump offers simple, brutal solutions to complex problems. His solutions are generally pretty stupid, but they sound like solutions, which is better than the complex rationalizations we hear from everyone else.
This also explains why his opinion on the middle-east oscillates between "let's just pull out and let them kill each other" and "let's just carpet-bomb the crap out of ISIS". Simple, brutal solutions.
My dad's family in India are very anti-gay, anti-muslim and they are elated at the result. When my aunt came for my wedding, she asked "Why is an African the president?" There's a amount of people inside and outside of the US that think it's only for whites, not knowing America's history or its current diversity.
I think you need to let things sink in a bit. There often seems to be an element of panic with the losing side of these presidential elections, but life goes on.
Ignoring the characters involved in this campaign, at a basic level, this sort of party switch is pretty normal, as there is often a party change once the President completes his second term. Its a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. Reagan to Bush was an exception, but we know what happened with his re-election attempt. So, in 4 or 8 years, I wouldn't be surprised if things moved back to the left.
> Grew up in the US. I'm a minority. I think this is the only time in my life I've ever felt like I didn't belong in America.
It's not that simple.
There was a large section of the Indian-American community that voted Trump; presumably this was also true of "non-minority" minorities like assorted Asians and Jews.
Did he outperform the 70-30 Clinton support that polls were showing for Indian, 75-20 from Jewish, and 70-20 non-Indian Asian peoples that support that polls had him at? He won because of non-collection educated Caucasians, with whom he outperformed models by 15% points.
Readit News
The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population. Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.
Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we need when we face planet scale threats like global warming. Get out of your bubble.
Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.
The divide is bridged one person at a time.
PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK with the mods.
EDIT: His concession speech seems to indicate that he's beginning to appreciate what he's been entrusted with.
We're seeing this pattern where the coasts of many countries are cosmopolitan and well-integrated into the world economy, but the interiors are very conservative and nationalistic. Scotland & London vs. Wales & the rest of Britain. The U.S. West Coast & Northeast vs. the Farm Belt, Rust Belt, and Mountain states. Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia. The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR. Even in a Red State like Texas, Houston (on the coast) has gone democratic.
What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd. The economy would cease to function. On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.
What sort of organizing principle would the world have then? I haven't seen anything historically like that - the closest would be the Roman Empire that rimmed the Mediterranean. For most of recorded history, the primary means of production has been land and so fights have been over land, but over the last 150 years or so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information. What kind of social organizing principle does that imply?
If you think the immigration debate is about Google employees, I think you don't understand the immigration debate.
> If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world."
The interior (culturally and geographically) is massively over-represented in the security forces and military. So good luck with that.
I think if it actually came to that, it would eventually mean war. The interior economy falls apart, coastal regions secede, the poor countries would inevitably be driven to war against the coastal regions out of desperation. Extreme nationalism would just make this more likely. No one should think this is a good idea.
Also, saying coasts are "well-integrated into the world economy", implying the rest of the country is not, is just a horribly myopic view of the world. They are only "well-integrated" because the government chose and planned that explicitly - globalization and free trade as an economic policy, removal of protectionism (e.g. NAFTA, etc) and heavy subsidies of the industries involved (especially tech, via military spending).
It didn't have to be that way - it isn't because tech, finance, whatever is more meritocratic or anything. With more sensible protectionism you could have international trade while still preserving your country's manufacturing base, allowing the rest of the country's economy to also be "well-integrated". But labor is expensive in developed countries, corporations want more profit, and our government doesn't particularly prioritize the working class.
Yes, I agree it would hurt the California economy if that happened. But are you saying that on your team of 10 people at Google, all of them were here illegally? I can't comprehend the fact that Google would hire immigrants without proper visas or background checks. If they're legal immigrants or they have the required visas, they would be just fine.
edit: the proposal is also just that...a proposal. It's not guaranteed this will happen.
No one wants to send legal immigrants on your team back their countries of origin. Blue collar, unskilled laborers want to stop the influx of unskilled laborers and illegal immigrants who 1) take their jobs and depress their wages and 2) take up resources from social programs.
Oh come on. Nobody is calling for sending all immigrants back. Trump's wife is an immigrant... The questions are:
* Big one: What to do about illegal immigration.
* Smaller one: What to do about the widespread abuse of the h1b program. For example, FY 2015, Infosys [outsourcing Indian company] leads the h1b pack with 23k visas, whereas Google has 3k visas.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
I think we're past the time period where water transport was hugely superior to land transport (and air didn't yet exist). It's not that much harder or more expensive to get a plane ticket or UPS package to the Midwest compared to California.
I think the election results by county support this. Even in red states, urban centers are blue, and in blue states, rural areas are red.
I'm not sure there's a sufficient segregating force to change this. Aside from election time and resulting legal frameworks that apply to both areas, the ease of transportation and also of moving information mean that there's little friction in being next door to or embedded within the other groups.
So a response may be to get more people engage in trade and globalization instead of only seeing the bad sides, the closed factories, etc.
How does one do that I don't know. Maybe Google should move its campus to Iowa.
I don't expect wars over land to be done anytime soon. We might be doing most of our work on computers rather than on land, but the resources for these computers gotta come from somewhere. This is why esp. China has been going around and buying huge troves of land in Africa: not only to feed their growing population, but also to call dibs on the minerals in the ground.
That doesn't mean that information wars are not happening as well. (Though not nearly as prominent since these need way less personnel and happen less openly.)
How is this an argument? I'm not from the US and I'm not very well read on the issue, but isn't it illegal immigrants they want to deport?
Who said that people from those countries couldn't be well educated and be fully functional Americans?
Also, I live in Malmö Sweden (coastal city) and the right-wing party here is strong, and we have lots of problem with immigrants, both legal and illegal.
Not good example. They were not voluntarily part of USSR (see Molotov-Ribentrop pact), Stalin sent a lot of them to Siberia. They have huge Russian minority too (remember Putin's policy for "protecting" russians in foreign countries). It it not easy for them to survive, they have to be as independent on russia as possible, so they have no other choice than integrate into international organizations.
Also, being dependent on imports to feed the population would have major national security implications.
The Hanseatic League was a federation of free-trading market towns along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coastlines. [1]
A number of people have suggested that cities (and federations of cities) may become more of a focus as a political unit in the medium term over the nation state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
Basically City-States
FYI, I'm not aware of anyone proposing to send all immigrants back, only undocumented (also known as "illegal") immigrants. Like it or not, the current laws are such that people in that category are not here legally, so if we truly are a nation of laws, those laws should be upheld, no?
If you don't agree with the law, vote to change it rather than act as if the law just doesn't exist.
To single out a certain group of people and act as if laws don't apply to them in a country that is otherwise built on laws is to deprive them (and all of us) of one of the most fundamental American virtues. Whether we agree with the laws or not, if we don't uphold them, we cease to be a free country (it's the laws that keep us free, after all). It's absurd to believe otherwise.
Or, you know, we can keep going down the rabbit hole of selectively enforcing laws, and we can ignore your vote too because some people don't agree with it; the voting laws are just words on paper.
I don't know if this is what is likely to happen, but I've been pondering this: The Westphalian order for the world, which we currently live under, involves drawing borders for countries, and then basically insisting that the governments within those borders must have some sort of unity, regardless of what those borders are, do, or come from.
Do you have a group of people that are geographically localized but have borders going right through the middle of them, like the Kurds? Then they are not a country, not countrymen, and regardless of their affiliations they are subject to their country's policies for dealing with each other. The split of East and West Germany was an extreme case of this, where a national border was drawn, and you had families cut in half.
Do you have bunches of people that basically loathe each other with the fire of a thousand suns, but there's a border drawn around them on the world map? Then they live together, until the most pathological cases like Yugoslavia finally just blow apart.
And where did these borders come from? Did some bureaucrats in Europe in the 1700s or 1800s draw some conveniently straight lines in Africa? You're a country now in the 21st century, regardless of how anyone local feels about that. Pretty much anywhere in the world you see a straight line border you see something very artificial that took no account of conditions on the ground.
In the 1990s, the cyber utopians thought that technology would lead to more decentralization. With improved technology, you don't need industrial-era practices to deal with cities and counties and states and countries. You can have very sophisticated government and government services now at much smaller polities; even the small local cities take online payments now, for instance, and have online billing.
Perhaps the future looks like the Westphalian system cracking up, and polities being more willing to secede, easily join together in arrangements of convenience as needed, and easily break apart again as their interests diverge. There are certainly a lot of practical issues involved in that transition, but as diversity increases all around the world, there's increasingly a lot of practical issues involved in forcibly jamming people together because of borders drawn 200+ years ago. It wouldn't solve war; that's not on the table. But it might just prevent World War III.
I would expect the largest, most successful cities to be located on the coast, or in extremely fertile regions like the Nile Delta or Mesopotamia. Couldn't find any pretty visualisations that would show that though, so I might be wrong.
1 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Griechis...
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator#Modern_ana...
Do you think the US would let California leave? Can CA defend her own borders (especially against the rest of the US)?
Similarly in Scotland I think the major urban areas dominate, where populations are more diverse. But rural populations away from communications and conurbations seem far less accepting of [large groups of] migrants.
Similarly in the UK poorer populations that might feel threatened by incomers seeking low-skilled jobs (eg due to poor language skills) seem less welcoming of migrants.
Personally I think the whole "culture" aspect is a red herring and what people really care about is their own wealth. I mean the UK's history is epitomised by outside influences either due to invasion of Britain or British invasion and Empire.
Personally I think to survive and meet the needs of everyone the West will need give up some of its luxuries, get rid of our need to own everything we use, move away from the disposable lifestyle.
In short my analysis is it's liberal just greed that drives this whole thing - 'I deserve wealth but other people don't'.
Does that idea fit in other geographies or not?
>What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.
It's a decent idea for large parts of America to be devolved into separate nation-states. Texas, California, and Massachusetts are looking not to be governable as a unified country.
Then those regions might form their own government, see for example the Hanseatic League [1]. These cities answered directly to the Emperor, instead of some local nobility or government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_league
There was an interesting article on this some time ago that broached some of these ideas:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329850-600-end-of-n...
Are we really all part of New Hansa?
London is the interior, it is not on the coast. Wales and and Scotland are both coastal.
>"Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia."
I assume you mean the former Yugoslavia? Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro are also on the coast. So what does that leave for non-coastal fomer Yugoslavia? Macedonia?
>"The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR"
There hasn't been a USSR since 1991. Do you mean the former USSR?
Agggressive, negotiators with awareness of cognitive biases like base-rate fallacy, asymmetry of information advantage, etc.... will form or create the organizing principles most likely.. I think of it and it becomes a pain thinking about the asymmentry of information. Hopefully, if it happens, we'll build a better deterrant against withholding information.
Until you can fix your toilet, repair your house, teach your kids, pave your roads, and have your meals cooked for you remotely, I don't think this is a valid concern. The upper "coastal" class depends on local, blue collar labor that can't be outsourced (with current technology).
Rich folk can move to the suburbs but everyone will need to coexist within contiguous geographic states for the foreseeable future.
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You're so far from the average Trump voter that they would never see your point.
How is Wales less coastal than Scotland?
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It simultaneously trivializes my culture while hating its own culture.
I watched Justin Trudeau dance the bhangra and people claim "oh what beautiful Indian culture". I've seen people eat butter chicken to partake in "Indian culture" experiences.
That's just wrong. Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
At the same time, I see white people negate their culture altogether. It might have been built on colonialism and imperialism, but what, say, Renaissance artists pulled off is significant, very significant.
Everyone needs to back off and think about this for a bit
I think there's a key concept missing from every discussion about culture, and that concept is that "X immigrant culture" is a completely different culture from "X culture." Indians in India have one culture, while Indians in e.g. Britain have a related, but divergent culture.
Two places this matters:
• Frequently, the people of "X immigrant culture" care a lot about 'preserving their heritage', because it's a constant struggle for them—while the people of "X culture" couldn't give a damn, because they're constantly steeped in their own culture and it's not going away. "Cultural appropriation" is an invention almost entirely of immigrant cultures.
• People "exploring a culture" frequently have the implicit goal of exploring the domestic-immigrant offshoot of a culture, not the native one. Because of the lack of connection and cultural touchstone organizations that immigrants face, things like dances and dishes are seen as far more relevant in immigrant cultures, similar to their role in itinerant cultures.
We are on one hand supposed to respect and honor other cultures, but are not allowed to cultivate, maintain and respect our own (American) culture.
Which is absurd for many reasons... one being it denies a very real reason for many wanting to come to our country, or fails to identify the characteristics that made western culture generally preferable to many others.
I appreciate your perspective on this issue.
At the same time, it supports the imperial concept of misappropriating original traditions as a convenient fancy, a reference to the exotic, or a belittling of the other, which you give a great example of - with the pretext that this is somehow contributing to progress. Appropriation can be "done right" and produce great new works, but it can't be done easily. It's so much easier to simply loot the past without thinking.
One of the books I like that considers similar thoughts at various points is Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Philosophy. [0]
[0] http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo186...
Maybe now you start to see the "damned if you do damned if you don't" nature of political correctness, and why it has been rejected in this election cycle with great success.
This is the same attitude of Boko Haram.
The left wing doesn't dismiss the great cultural achievements the west has created, but we try to create space for them within a nation known for accepting immigrants, rather than forcefully imposing our culture on them, which seems to have failed so brilliantly in places like France.
The politicians trivialize this shit, because they pander to the voters. The left embraces other cultures because we're sick of getting Christianity shoved down our throats.
I think most people understand that. What do you think would be an improvement? Surely not that they fail even to appreciate the dance or the dish. It's not likely that they'll embark on a years-long quest to understand the deeper history, religion etc. of a dozen different cultures. What, really, would you have them do? Without a suggestion, you're just bashing.
Hmm. Are there cultural world's fairs anymore?
Yeah yeah, I think Snowden is a hero and I hate Trump for calling him a traitor. Also his abortions views are medieval. But hey, a more balanced anti-imperialist would simply never win in the corrupt, house-of-cards like US.
There is a very good reason why big, powerful empires always have a big military, meddle and stick their noses into everyone's affairs.
Economic power doesn't come from thin air. It has a lot to do with political power, influence and domination.
Those are two sides of the same coin, they support and nurture each other.
You reach limits of growth when you just trade and build up your own economy.
Almost all foreign policy is dedicated to furthering self-serving goals. Often medium and long term, so not apparently visible. Often related to things the public know very little about. Just as often, completely misguided.
But there's always a reason.
From my understanding, some industries depend tightly on the military, and not bolstering your own national industries would be a mistake as all the big global players cheat with nationalistic help.
People aren't going to get more or less imperialism. From George Bush Sr, to Bill Clinton, to George Bush Jr, to Barack Obama, when has the US military + international big corp coordination ever stopped, much less shown variability between presidents? When a president is elected, is there a sweep through the US armed forces command structure? No. Is there a sweep through industry? No. Is there a sweep through the CIA? No. National bureaucracies make plans longer than 4 years, and their programs don't stop executing in-between elections.
What I'm really worried about is what happens in a winner-takes all branches of government scenario, especially when conceivably the majority of the population supports different policies. It makes sense for the ruling party to do a makeover of power, as the GOP has tended toward redistricting as a strategy, and I think that's exactly what's going to happen.
Donald Trump cannot be an independent leader because no ruler manages bureaucracy alone. You must always listen to the bureaucracy machine because it has too many aspects that you don't understand but is someone else's little kingdom. And that's why Donald Trump is nominating all Washington insiders. It's not like Donald Trump decided, "Why not try for business elites through my network, instead of classical Washington?" Nope, didn't happen.
The U.S. didn't start playing this role of World Power until it got dragged into two World Wars that were born out of nationalism and isolationism.
If the U.S. retreats from its role in the world, Russia, China, and Iran will be more than happy to fill the vacuum of power.
Not sure he's going to achieve that much.
Not sure he's going to achieve that much.
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In any case, as some pointed out here, outsourcing to China is only the first step in the destruction of these jobs. Robotics is likely going to replace many of these jobs in the next 20y, which might bring back some industry into the West, ie more jobs but more sophisticated jobs.
US manufacturing employment is going down, and even if / when high tech manufacturing brings production back to the US, it will be robotic production. And with every company in the world racing for machine learning, I don't see how the future looks good for a specific generation of people in history too old to newly take up a globally competitive trade. Also, it's been mentioned around here that driving is one of the most frequent jobs in most states in the US, and that Uber recently made a deliver of beer by automated truck. Uber and every relevant company in the world is trying to destroy a category of worker from everywhere in the world.
It's benefitted everyone except the working class in developed countries. That's a lot of people. The great majority, actually.
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It may be attractive to spin this as merely being anti-globalist, but in every instance, racism is a big part of it. After the Brexit vote, people of colour got shouted at by people who claimed they voted for foreigners to leave.
Maybe the problem is that we have allowed right-wing extremism to take hold of the anti-globalist agenda. That used to be a left-wing thing, though anti-globalism never really became mainstream with the left as its champions, but now that the extreme right is championing the cause, suddenly it wins. Does anti-globalism do better when combined with racism? Do they need each other to get a majority?
Or is the problem with democracy itself? Is it possible that the world is too complex for the average citizen to make an informed decision about it? Or do we need a regular lesson in the consequences of our choices? After WW2, everybody (in western Europe at least) was united in their desire for freedom and opposition to racism and totalitarianism, but we've seem to have forgotten that lesson. Or maybe the lesson has been poisoned by becoming too rigid and part of establishment dogma?
Anyways, I don't think democracy itself is the problem; it is the Establishment that has mostly lost touch with some of the things that Americans respect. A common criticism of Hillary was that she wasn't a straight shooter like Trump. Let's think about that: Hillary was a career politician, a First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, all diplomatic positions that require her to be, well, diplomatic. Obama did well because he could actually pull off both: be a straight-shooter in public, yet diplomatic when talking to other politicians. Hillary unfortunately did not have that skill, of public oration. That is probably what hurt her most.
Now I agree its rather unfair to discount Hillary for that reason. But the reality is: that is how US politics seem to work. And politicians need to understand that fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos
I believe, that democracy lost it when started to serve minorities instead of majority. Of course people are getting angry, when majority of them elect government which then won't care about their problems, but about immigrants, sexual minorities, big business, elites etc. Democracy, by definition, is the government of majority, and when it stops serving majority, it loses its purpose. I don't have a solution to this problem, but hopefully somebody will find it sooner rather than later, because I'm afraid some very dark times might otherwise be ahead.
"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election. (Aristotle)"
Truth be told, your whole post seems to contain more questions than answers ;)
I use to think this too, before this election. But it became clear to me that the "other side" is not interested in being assuaged. They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.
They are interested in control. Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happen again.
The politics of fear won, and I see no oppertunities to bring a divide where one side is hellbent on dynamiting every brick as it's laid.
From what I understand, this isn't what democracy used to be. We've created a divide where somebody says "I'm a democrat/republican" and they look at the party for what that means.
It isn't only the system that is broken, but it is how we view it and how we view each other.
This is why I agreed with Sama and not removing Thiel from YC. We have to listen to the other side and empathize so we can understand. Without that we all lose.
Today, we all lost.
I have become very cynical over time about the way intellectuals, academics, trade negotiators, politicians and the media use/abuse complexity to get their own way. Many times when I examine an issue I see a whole lot of people saying how complex the world is, how impossibly nuanced it is and .... the kicker .... therefore you shouldn't attempt to figure it out or have an opinion. You should just do whatever the "experts" recommend even if it's apparently unintuitive or even quite clearly against your own interests. Anyone who doesn't obey this line is written off as ignorant, too stupid to have a vote, etc.
Yet are these issues really so complicated? Often they are not. The complexity, when you take the time to tackle it, ends up being largely artificial.
Yep. We're all racists and xenophobes and our views have no rational basis. Please feel free to make sweeping judgments about what anyone who voted against Hillary Clinton must be thinking.
Please keep up this rhetoric so we can win in 2020, too!
Doesn't this describe the other side? "Deplorables," "ignorant ruralites," "uninformed -ist -phobes"? Is that attitude interested in empathy or calmly discussing things?
> Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happen
Isn't this exactly how Obama got elected? "Hope and change", and Obama's been practically worshipped as a savior ever since.
> The politics of fear won
I think fear had a lot to do with this result, but those fears are grounded in reality. One candidate acknowledged the problems that have arisen in the last decade, while the other did not. Time will tell how well he actually handles them.
Other countries are not taking "our" jobs. We simply don't need those jobs anymore. Taxes on foreign labor will only do one thing: subsidize robots.
We're going to spend billions of dollars on a big wall, and I guarantee you we're not going to have a lot more jobs after that. (The wall itself is a pretty big project though.)
Most likely, few of the promises / threats of the campaign will materialize.
It just might turn out that Trump will be a very moderate republican president. He just might have played a role for the last few years. A role that got him voters.
Then again, he might not care at all about doing the actual job and let Pence run most of it.
I still can't believe how Americans could actually elect someone like that. I understand a protest vote, but with that candidate...
I guess the majority of voters just didn't care that he has no actual opinions, is an entitled, rich, insecure, macho, old generation 'man', and just projected their wishes for change, ignoring all of him they didn't want to think about.
Republicans hold both houses and the presidency now, though. I guess Obama's legacy has been wiped out today.
Oh well, the world will go on.
For me, the problem is more when people think: a) the different-skinned guy down the street is causing this problem; b) voting for right wing guy can stop globalisation. Brexit showed that the people most likely to vote on immigration/kick out foreigners basis were also those with the fewest immigrants in their region.
More left-leaning people seem a bit confused about inequality/poverty vs globalisation - inequality globally is on the way down, which is why it's on the way up locally (you're losing to the guy half-way around the world, some of your neighbours are not losing to their equivalents... yet).
At least that's what I would do if I needed to control unauthorized workers for any place which wanted to do so.
(Along with one of your respondents, I also don't think the wall or many other promises will eventuate.)
It's not A isn't / B is. Both globalization and automation of work are creating discontent.
Look at Melbourne, Australia, we have huge immigrant populations, and all the different cultures have made this an awesome place to live - E.g. I highly doubt you'd find a more diverse selection of restaurants per capita anywhere else.
This election wasn't about race. Don't project your bigotry onto all Trump supporters.
And the 'world elite' is not actually the group of people that aren't racist, it's the middle class that isn't racist. The 'elite' and the 'worker class' are actually pretty similar in how bigoted they are.
It is a monoculture because they basically exterminated natives like they were bunnies in order for some guys to take all the territory to themselves.
There is only one culture in Australia precisely because all the minorities are not significant. It is one thing to have a Muslim or two, completely different having tens of millions.
Who is the owner of the land in Australia? White families. I have a friend in Australia who has so much territory he needs a plane to move around it. It is normal there.
What makes Australia a great place to life is having a continent almost as big as the USA,with comparable natural resources, but with less than 13 times less population.
In a similar country like China there lives 65 times more population. In fact most of China is mountains so the actual density is even higher in populated places.
We have a multicultural society in the UK that many are rejecting, with racial tensions at a high.
The difference is that many immigrants are working class. They are scapegoated to great success with the white working class. I disagree with that - I think the real problem is meagre infrastructure investment to support new arrivals but perhaps the Aussie style system works on the other end of the spectrum: focus only on valuable people where value is how much money they would earn.
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Jeff Sessions Giuliani Christy
just to name three of his "inner circle"
I cross my fingers that we will get through the next 4 years without any significant events. However, I think this is really a black eye in America. I think right now at least, we're going to be the butt of jokes for the rest of the world. Lets hope he proves us wrong, or at least the system works to contain him.
A majority of something, but probably not the population: http://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president?action=c...
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And much like brexit, this fiasco reveals how much of a fool the journalistic establishment has made of itself. At least we can stop debating one thing at this point, whether or not the media is somehow disconnected with reality.
Even just the Halo-effect of ridiculous claims being requoted verbatim is huge, even when followed with rebuttals.
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But like Trump she is unlikely to control the parliament. The republican party will likely temper Trump through the senate. And without a majority at the French parliament, a French president is more like a queen of England, just with the nuclear red button in her hand.
I wrote about this here:
https://medium.com/@octskyward/ok-what-now-e3f64d38f7#.po6ym...
Briefly, the next steps are:
• The Geert Wilders trial in Netherlands. GW is the most popular politician in NL right now. He is on trial for what is essentially pure political speech, he asked a crowd if they wanted more/fewer Moroccans (i.e. visa policy), they said fewer, he said "OK we'll sort that out" or words to that effect. He is boycotting his own trial. If he is found guilty and punished, it's hard to believe this will go down well or hurt his support. Should be resolved by end of the month.
• Austria rerunning its presidential election. Last time the "far right" candidate Norbert Hofer lost to his Green/left wing opponent. But there was voter fraud and the vote was so close that the amount of fraud was larger than the margin of the win, so the courts required a rerun. If Hofer wins ... well, the President of the EU Commission has said Austria would be frozen out of the EU as a punishment for voting the wrong way. Should be resolved in December.
• General election in the Netherlands next year.
• Election in France, as you note.
• Towards the end of the year election in Germany. Very volatile politics there. Turkey is threatening to unleash a torrent of migration on Europe unless it gives Turkey what it wants, which the EU doesn't want to do. Germany's Trump equivalent (Frauke Petry) started losing support when the migrant crisis began slackening after the Turkey deal. If it collapses then AfD may see a resurgence in time for the election.
So 2017 is gonna be an interesting time.
But, she's not?
Alain Juppé is, an old-school right-wing politician. Le Pen is second and the third is a party that is not quite far-left but still far enough to the left for the communist party to ally with it.
> winning at the second round of the election is not going to be easy
I don't think this has any chance of happening. But of course, who knows...
No, the attempts at building an interconnected globalized world are becoming less popular. Or maybe the people who opposed that sort of thing all along are finding a voice.
It's a different thing; Interestingly, you get different answers when you vote votes than when you vote with dollars; and in this case? the dollars have teamed up with the center (or what in america is called the center-left) - and lost to the votes. (I guess I don't really see why you think the center left (or center) has sold out to the far right. This is America, and we like our market-based solutions, but the center is capable of regulating that. I give you the ACA as exhibit A.)
>There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
uh, so really, 'left' vs 'right' doesn't work so well when describing "third way" nationalist movements; that's kind of why it is the "third way" - I mean, not that brexit and trump are actually fascist movements, but they are similar in that they have strong nationalist and nativist aspects to them, and are less clear where they stand on the economic side of things. All 'third way' movements, historically, have had some socialist and some capitalist elements; their argument is that the left/right economic divide isn't the primary issue; taking care of "your people" and protecting those people from the others is the big issue.
The real divide here is between what I call "the coalition of everything is fine" - people like me, for whom the economy looks like it's booming, minorities and women who see that their rights get closer to parity every year, vs... uh, what I want to call the rural poor, but this election showed that it's more than just the rural poor. I mean, I can see what is up with the rural poor... but what about everyone else?
And there's not a lot of understanding in general; it's not just me. I mean, I can understand voting for the other guy 'cause you don't have a job... but unemployment, by just about all measures, has been going down for about all of the time that Obama has been in office.
Where is this majority of people who think that things are so bad?
The unemployment rate only includes people actively seeking work. One often-toted statistic is that men have been dropping out of the labor market completely (i.e. not looking for work at all) at higher-than-normal rates. These are quite possibly also people who were Trump voters.
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1. Potential for a 20% reduction in corporate income tax, a huge boon for small business owners.
2. Repeal Obamacare and it's obscene costs to small business.
People hate globalization and strangers.
What was also fascinating in this campaign is the divide between the media and the people; even if Trump had lost with 49% of the vote it would have been striking. Zero newspapers endorsed him, which means half of the US population is not represented in the media.
The melting pot has lumps and clots.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
The only certain conclusion I'd draw at this time is that traditional ways of manufacturing consent through broadcast media have stopped working.
Don't fret, the system will adapt.
My thoughts as a Swede is that I don't actually give a fuck if your president is a turd. His view on immigrations doesn't scare me, his view on NATO doesn't really scare me. Trump say he is going to invest in fossile fuels THAT scares me A LOT.
The future already looks super dark and leaders like Obama shed a tiny light on that things would turn out for the better. But now when two of the worlds largest countries doesn't really care (USA and Russia) I mean wtf. It doesn't matter what the rest of the world does if these two giants will fuck it up anyway.
Time to be a climate prepper.
And the biggest CO₂ emitter is China, not the US or Russia. Aactually, pulling industry back to the US could reduce global CO₂ output if efficiency was made more of a priority than in China due to higher labor and energy costs.
Trump and Brexit have one major thing in common: they relied on surprisingly high turnout from white working class men for ostensibly right wing causes after a lot of anti-Establishment and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
They have a lot not in common, like pro-Brexit voters very strongly disapproving of Trump, Brexit being a popular political cause for over twenty years backed by a vast majority of the mainstream press which actually picked up momentum because Establishment and liberal free trade figures came out in favour of it, the demographics for Brexit voters being heavily skewed towards older people[1] in a way that Trump votes almost certainly weren't, and Trump evidently picking up a lot of "the incumbent party haven't done anything for us; let's vote for change" votes that aren't really related to the appeal of his wall or birther remarks to ex-Obama voters living in Mexican-free areas of Michigan. Trump's "Make American Great" again spiel might well resonate more with an unemployed ex-factory worker than a broadsheet article extolling the virtues of comparative advantage, but it certainly isn't the sort of practical protectionist plan he needs to deliver a permanently change the status quo position on globalisation, and his new supporters aren't going to stick around if he doesn't deliver something.
It's also clear that other relatively recent major Anglosphere elections haven't been a major success for the radical right.
[1]that campaign certainly wasn't won on subreddits
From http://news.sky.com/story/us-election-demographics-show-bitt...
> A similar divide can be found among the different age groups with younger voters favouring the Democrats and those aged over 65 years leaning towards Mr Trump.
> However, Mrs Clinton's appeal among those aged under 30 years, where she has a 20-point lead over Mr Trump (54/34%), is not as great as Barack Obama's 23-point lead.
I saw a graph much more detailed but I can't find it anymore. It showed that Clinton won the votes of the under 40 and Trump the ones of the over 40 by more or less the same margin. The story on Sky seems to confirm that.
This is am important point. Current system does not foster competition. As a migrant myself, I think the whole system is rigged to the benefit of chosen few mega corporation.
Taking UK as an example, Skilled immigration category was abolished few years back due to which I cannot apply for a visa and compete in free market for a salary. However, I am allowed to come to UK on a lower salary for nine years easily under company transfer scheme practically bounded to my employer with no option.
If allowed to compete as an individual, I would either compete for higher wages or go home. Current system just puts myself as well local at disadvantage to benefit chosen few.
The whole objective of free market and globalization is lost to greed and manipulation.
But I think a lot of it is just due to her being a woman. And an older one at that.
Many people are not all that progressive in the US, as the campaign has clearly shown.
(I know she was a candidate with plenty of flaws, but a lot of dirt that got thrown at her would never have been directed at a man in that manner).
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...
I don't understand that part. Isn't US a sum of N cultures that decided to have a common culture? So why the newcomers can't do what the predecessors did?
Interracial marriage was illegal in the US south less than 50 years ago.
The arguments against Mexicans and Muslim refugees today are nearly identical, just with the names changed.
1940s Sinatra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpO6mpYvyqQ
There's a whole demographic out there that doesn't really care about politics. It doesn't matter who POTUS is because nothing will really change in my city. They don't bother voting because none of the policies particularly interest them. Suddenly you've got this guy who isn't a politician, and he's promising to do things that decades of politicians haven't been doing.
Trump got the people who are disaffected by traditional politics to come out and vote, and that's enough to make a big difference, just like it was with Brexit.
Calling your opponents deplorable also did not help.
i for one welcome our new orange overlord
also twitter and youtube seem to be more important than all the old media - Trump had a big presence on twitter that is.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/08/election-...
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It's a seductive idea but I think you're reading too much into this. It's hard to tell what people are really voting for when there are two options each of which encompasses a bunch of largely disparate policies. I wouldn't be surprised if a large amount of the Trump vote was just a vote against "political correctness" or one against Hillary as a person. Humans sure love patterns.
BTW the estimated popular vote is between 0.7 and 1.3% in Hillary's favor at this point , according to NYT http://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president . Not really a big difference.
So popular sentiment is actually in support of an open, connected world. The political structures in the US systematically oppress this majority, due to its concentration in cities and the legacy of a voting system that respects territory over people.
This is also on the heels of Al Gore and John Kerry.
The track record of the Clinton-Blair center-right elite "neoliberal" machinery has pretty much been a failure now for 20+ years.
Obama wasn't part of that machinery (even though he immediately tacked center-right after getting elected).
Doesn't Trump belong to that elite you are talking about?
As an aside, Clinton would have given (will give?) a concession speech but Trump gave a victory speech.
Because the interconnected globalized world had a lot of "buts" to it.
You can be interconnected and globalized... ...but we're going to still lock down copyright ...but we're going to export bad patent laws ...but we're going to externalize pollution even more than we were before ...but we're going to ignore competition and allow massive multinationals to form ...but we're going to maximize labor arbitrage while minimizing consumer choice ...but we're going to try and create a global jurisdiction that favors the guy with the most money ...but we're going to try and weaken the protections surrounding the most powerful tool for interconnection ever created.
This is why people are turning their backs on globalization - it hasn't worked for everyone, and it's hurt many people.
I believe their care about that because they have nothing else to look forward to.
(Lower-)Middle class in the West has been funding prosperity around the world (can't find the chart at the moment). Basically every social class everywhere in the world is better off than 30 years ago, except middle class in the Western world.
There is this generation that have less than their parents and know that their children will have even less. They cling to what they have, this nebulous identity/culture. And a bunch of populist politician is just happy to give them that.
What they really need is prosperity. Very few care about their neighbors beliefs when life is good. People living in cities like London demonstrate that: they are way more liberal because being liberal does not (seem to) cost them a lot.
This probably isn't a sufficient step to get exposed to really different opinions...
The anti-globalization trend is very real though.
You can't do both at the same time.
For starters, the "theory of competitive advantage" is incredibly weak. But it's pretty clear that trade represents a small constant factor in the GDP level, which is used up once all markets have sufficient liquidity. It can explain only a small fraction of economic growth since the Industrial Revolution. And it is not necessarily a Pareto improvement with respect to nations -- which is why protectionism has been a fact of global trade for 4,000 years.
However what is happening in Europe if not the US is that people are pushing back against their governments and the elites because they are tired of being run over by the ideals of a group which suffers none of the negatives of the choices they force on others.
The elite, the political class and those connected to it do talk down to the masses, trying to embarrass or even intimidate them into accepting the needs of the elite. This means lower labor costs, more dependents on government, and long term more locked in votes. This ends up forcing the already pressed lower and middle classes further into an economic malaise they cannot escape. Worse any negatives, from loss of jobs and opportunities or worse, crime and violence, is confined to their areas as the elite tend to live in a very protected environment.
With regards to the US, at least we have been consistent in flipping the White House every eight years or so. It is pretty remarkable. However Democrats have been actually fighting a losing battle for a long time and not modifying their message but instead becoming more heated. By that I mean they are losing control over vast parts of the country with regards to the House and Senate but more importantly they lost a lot of governorship and local governments all of which feed upward
What we've had for the last three generations is a race to the bottom.
You say, if I understand you correctly, that the rural voter is the majority, and that we should finally start to listen to his needs, ideas, fears and dreams.
And I agree that we should listen to the majority and figure out how to make most people happy. But exactly this "rural voter" is not the one who educates himself (independent of the education he receives through his government a lot of learning happens after school). He has very simple needs and doesn't care about the details of how these interact with the needs of people who "tick differently". Sometimes when I talk to "rural folks" (have some in the family) they don't even seem to understand what they themselves want and need. They just know when they don't have it and then they are unhappy.
Therefore there is not much to learn from this "rural voter", or from talking to him. But his needs are obvious and simple as well. And we all know them already. Give him a job that exhausts him, give him a wife, 1-2 children, a tv, if possible a single family home. Keep the taxes low enough for him to provide for his family, fly or drive somewhere cheap in summer and make alcohol cheap enough for him to have some parties and a few beer on the weekend. Then he's happy and won't trouble any politician.
Thus, I would say the question is not about understanding them better but about rich and social enough to provide them what they need. And the funny thing is that the politicians on the right usually prefer the well off population and make politics for them, while the left tries to provide for the commoner, the "rural voter". That's the funny thing in my eyes, the "rural" voter hates the people who fight for him and loves the people who try to exploit him.
Perhaps rather than taking this tact (which we've seen a million times):
> Rural voters aren't smart. They vote based on feelings and ignore the stuff that actually matters (which I can identify better than they can). They're simple folks that just need simple stuff, but they're frequently tricked into voting against their interests by the other party.
You could consider something like this:
> Rural voters have different values than mine. My perception of their intelligence is irrelevant because I know there are intelligent people who share their views. Maybe if their viewpoints were taken seriously instead of dismissed outright as sexist and xenophobic, we could win their votes (or at least not cause such high turnout for the opponent) next time around.
Realize that Republicans can identify demographics that frequently vote for Democrats the same way. Take that first paragraph above and sub in "black people," "hispanics," and "women." See how incredibly offensive it is now? That's how "rural voters" feel when you post things like this.
Sure it can be dangerous to believe you know what's best for others and force decisions upon them, but clearly what we have now isn't working either.
More than ever we desperately need more resources put into education. But that isn't going to happen.
I don't see an easy way out of this mess. It's something we've been building toward for a long time and it's incredibly saddening.
> his needs are obvious and simple as well. Give him a job that exhausts him, give him a wife, 1-2 children, a tv, if possible a single family home. Then he's happy and won't trouble any politician.
Yeah, right, sounds like you got it.
Please somebody tell me this is sarcasm ridiculing the leftists.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909204
Hanging out with people you don't agree with is one thing. Hanging out with people that want you to stop existing is an entirely different matter.
If people are willing to (vote to) cross that line, time for talk and bridging divides is not just over, it's suicidally naive to think otherwise.
I could go Godwin here, but you get the point.
It is a revolt against a system which simply doesn't work for the majority of European descended whites.
Paul Buchheit once linked to an article from the American Conservative, which shows at least he had an open mind to hearing about these anti-establishment views.
Paul Graham and Sam A have instead just continued the political correctness anti-Trump agenda which in the long-turn actually plays into his hands, as there is a growing dislike of PC, especially from multi-millionaires who don't understand what its like to be out of work with no education behind you.
I think all this talk will come back to bite Silicon Valley and YC on the ass, as Trump will look to take revenge on the Tech Crowd. I expect the Tech Bubble to burst over the nxt year.
http://www.vox.com/2016/9/19/12933072/far-right-white-riot-t...
That to me is the key point. As someone who falls squarely into Mr. Trump's camp I've found the condesending way people talk about his supporters infuriating.
Good practice would suggest that you need slightly more than two datapoints to establish a trend.
There's a fairly well understood relationship between both slow GDP growth (& income disparity) and the rise of extreme political views (e.g. http://voxeu.org/article/global-crisis-and-political-extremi...). When times are good, people don't misattribute their misfortune to issues like globalisation and immigration. When times are bad, they do.
What is the common denominator? Obviously it is about globalism and culture, but maybe it has more to it?
I think none is really looking at the big picture. What are our values and how do democracies work? Do we in the west have the better system or where we just lucky? Currently the west is in a crisis. Everyone notices, that we loose on economic terms while China is winning. And groups from outside the west get more and more influence (most prominently Islam).
So how can we turn this around? One answer might be Trump, but there will probably be better solutions if we think about these issues.
Enough of this No True Scotsman bullshit that I see constantly here and basically anywhere with something approaching an international audience. In the context of the United States, which is where this election occurred and where the majority of people are reading this site from, the Democratic Party is a leftist party. Yes, if you want to lump in European democratic socialism, they fall elsewhere on the spectrum. When is the last time a US Democrat and the European Democratic Socialist were facing each other on the ballot? It's a meaningless comparison.
Thus the reason I voted against Trump. (I'm second generation US citizen -- Mexican grandparents)
http://thebulletin.org/timeline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
We definitely live in interesting times.
This is what Russia wants.
I agree with this. Even if the causes are unclear, it would probably set up a path affecting quite a lot western societies (and maybe others too).
Interesting times.
No, you'd be extremely naive to believe this is an isolated event:
* Greece, SYRIZA and minor parties on the surge since 2014
* UK, votes for brexit in 2016, I'm not sure if UKIP is gaining votes or not though.
* France, FN (LePen) is leading the polls at least for the first round.
* Italy, M5S is awfully close to lead the polls in Italy
* In Germany AfD is on the raise
* FPO is leading the pools in Austria
Keep in mind that the mainstream media, often downplays the possibility of an alternative surging - I believe on purpose: In Greece the polls were nearly 15% off in the referendum. It's staggering! Now, Brexit and the US pollsters got-it all wrong. In Greece many people lie to pollsters on purpose.
I don't see any sort of isolation, I see a very clear and predictable pattern.
> There is no genuine leftist alternative.
Wait a minute there. I have this strong sense that if the democrats had gone with the other candidate, they'd be celebrating today. Hillary, was the only candidate that was susceptible to a loss (emails, wall street money, legacy, the surname, etc.). Hillary == Establishment in every possible way. Sanders on the other hand was possibly the most scandal-free candidate of the last 20 years at least. I wouldn't say that the leftist is the problem.
However, at least in Europe, the ones who'd screwed up everyone were the Socialist parties by pushing a Brussels-based liberal agenda for a decade or so, so in a sense, at least in the EU the left or mild left at least, is rather dead in the water.
UPDATE: I think part of T. Frank's article in the Guardian describe my feelings in a detailed manner:
Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.
And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.
Article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald...
I tried hanging out on /r/TheDonald, but anything that doesn't tow the party line gets your banned for "concern trolling."
Would it be a stretch to say the "bubbling" that happens on the internet plays a role in causing these divides?
Many of the people that care so much about immigration and preserving their culture are the grandchildren of immigrants. It's very much an attitude of "I got mine, you can go F yourself".
Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.
Quoted for emphasis.
This divide will not be bridged.
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In the context of the economic literature that exists in mainstream academia, which is in overwhelming support of globalism as a policy which supports economic growth of all people, it appears your comment strongly suggests anti-globalism is equated with bigotry.
I'm neither defending nor supporting globalism: is it reasonable to conclude that someone who is not in support of globalism is a bigot or racist? This seems to have more to do with political correctness and I think all people deserve the right to have a thoughtful discussion and represent their views without being effectively silenced, and when something is labelled as bigotry or racism it is effectively outlawed in western culture. Shouldn't we be more careful here?
Weird - most people on the left don't consider economists to be priests of their world. That's a right-wing frame of mind.
If you are interested in finding the truth here, the first thing to do is stop assuming that all the people who voted conservative are unemployed farmers. There are a lot of the educated elite in that bloc.
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1. Clinton won the popular vote.
2. Economists think Trump is a bad idea, so on that level, the popular vote was not wrong.
3. The electoral college is outdated, was originally created because southern states wanted to keep slavery: http://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Unless the electoral college decides to vote with the American popular vote in this election, very bad things could happen:
* California could try to hold a referendum for succession from the U.S., if they're not too stoned to do so: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-protest-trump-20...
* Riots.
Don't blame yourselves. The electoral college and Trump's campaign taking advantage of it (and the F.B.I.) are the reason that things are going to go bad.
I can't get over how differently results seem to be reported in the US.
As of right now, reports I read suggest she's barely 100,000 votes ahead on that measure with "44 electoral votes still available".
i.e. there's a huge number of votes uncounted and that "fact" could easily turn out to be a poor prediction/
Why are news reports/speculation/predictions taken as fact without waiting for results to be announced?
The electoral college isn't close though. Given that they've won the popular vote in all but one of the Presidential elections since 1992 and lost three, it'll be interesting to see if electoral reform comes onto the agenda when the Democrats are back in power again. But in the mean time, the absolute best case scenario for the left is a revelation which leads to Trump's impeachment and four years of President Pence.
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I don't know that Trump understands this himself, but Thiel sure does.
Having been a fan of Thiel's ideas for some time, I concocted a hypothesis called the 'Wolfian World' that gives a high level look at older currents moving in the world. It is here if anybody's interested in something different from chronocentric newspapers and talking heads with their short sight and overconfidence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413
Lol, true that.
One thing I'd like to point out is that NATO and UN existed for decades before the massive immigration flow started.
It's deeply frustrating to hear so much crap analysis of what's been going on. If we're really honest with ourselves about what's happening, we're seeing a massive vote for protectionism of a particular demographics that have long enjoyed it.
People talk a lot about the forgotten white working class voter. And while that's a real thing, that's only half the story. The Trump voters are on the whole wealthier than the Clinton voters. That means there are a whole bunch of people with real money who've decided they can stomach the open bigotry of Trump's campaign because they think ultimately his policies are what they want. That's why the incumbents of the GOP largely never fled his side, no matter how obscene his personal conduct.
To be really blunt, Trump's entire track record says "if you're white and wealthy, I've obviously got your back", and his words have said, "if you're white and struggling, it's brown people who stand in your way". In that way, he's managed to get an extremely energetic white vote.
This election will be forever remembered for just how lurid it has been. From the very beginning of the Republican primary, it's been Trump who continually lowered the bar. God help us all if we do in fact end up with literally the least qualified Commander in Chief of American history. Going to sleep now, deeply discouraged.
Trump won because the Democrats railroaded their best candidate in favor of someone who is profoundly unlikeable and untrustworthy. Regardless of if she is truly a criminal, or not, the Democratic party choose a candidate who is under investigation by the FBI instead of a candidate that had real honest to god connection with the working people of the country. The voters have literally said that even Trump is better than what the Democrats have tried to ram down their throats this election. This election was lost, not won.
I don't even know how DNC will recover from that. It is viewed as a failure, a cesspool of corruption and anyone with morals would stay away from it.
> This election was lost, not won.
So true. They had it in their pocket. Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump. But of course corruption gets in the way...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cwy_92NWEAAwyqe.jpg:large
Well, guess that worked out great for them. The DNC is the biggest screw up of this whole election I think.
Democrats lost this. She was deep in Benghazi / Emails / Foundations .. which is all public. Trump might have same picture, but its not public not even his Tax record ! Bravo to american public !
Its a slap to the democratic establishment for not understanding the dynamics. Bernie or for that matter Elizabeth would have been right candidates.
I also think Hillary used a lot of other celebs for campaign - Beyonce, Perry, Michelle / Obama, Muslim family ... rather than talking about her strong points / achievements (none ?), and I saw the women card thrown a lot. On the other side it was just Trump and his bullshit.
On the flipside, seems the "potentially" closest candidate to Bernie in this election is Trump. He actually has talked about controlling Wall Street, bringing back manufacturing jobs, less military, and if you look at money raised during this election, I'd say he has won the Presidency without bringing tons of big dollars in to politics (I could be wrong on some of these).
Of course, their methods are completely different and they differ hugely on other issues.
I'm not suggesting that Trump is a good replacement for Bernie, but you can see how Bernie supporters would see him as a better alternative than Clinton.
The US is pretty consistent in flipping the White House. That in itself is amazing and a good thing. The sad part is all the hate that comes out on this site which is sadly typical of people not thinking but reacting
I don't really understand why she won instead of Sanders, maybe he was too much on the left for many democrats?
Hillary without question had Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the DC circuit behind her, which are large epicenters of wealthy white, elite people.
There is without doubt a terrifying aspect of white nationalism behind Trump, but unless you have statistics I am not aware of, the white elites, maybe outside of Texas, were not behind Trump.
EDIT - to add what I believe is a hopeful note, Trump's election isn't a great reading of the pulse of the nation; Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect. The DNC selected the less competitive candidate as the result of a dishonest primary.
On Hillary's side there was a constant -- "Ah look at those stupid sexists, hating us for wanting a a woman President" type of complacency.
So the result was surprising, but not too surprising at the same time.
> Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect
Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump, no doubt.
The WaPo map is pretty good:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/2016-election-results/us-pres...
Check the results for Wisconsin for instance, and you'll find a lot flipped districts. In Michigan, the Detroit stronghold saw a drop of 8,6 points compared to the 2012 vote. To be fair, it looks like Wayne County (where Detroit is) according to that map isn't fully counted so this may very well change, but it's at 98.9% reporting so that'd have to be a pretty significant chunk of votes to widen that margin.
Again, this is armchair analysis so I may very well be writing bullcrap, but it looks to me that the Trump campaign where confident in keeping the red states and focused pretty hard on flipping some of the states the Democrats really didn't think they could possibly win, along with a strong push to win Florida. Those 29 electoral votes from the sunshine state really opened things up for Trump.
Trump literally lives in a gold skyscraper with his name in large lettering on it so he's not exactly someone people should be able to relate to or vice versa but people like him because he doesn't talk down to them and doesn't schmooze his way around the celebrity and political circuit trying to cultivate an image of presidential perfection.
He speaks off the cuff, he knows how to draw a crowd, he tweets his mind and he's worked his ass off to get around to as many locations as possible and people also respect that. They're sick of pre-prepared speeches, evasive answers, lies and pure corruption.
Trump is a big wrecking ball that the people have chosen to smash up the current political system. The majority of politicians today are career politicians, detached from reality and detached from normality.
Number of Press Conferences - Trump 17+ Hillary 0
What disappointments me more than anything is how all the minority American citizens will feel knowing that the majority of the people they know preferred a man who has for many months publicly and explicitly insulted their own race and ethnicity. How do you reconcile that? I have no idea.
Race is certainly a part of this election, like it is all elections in the USA, but not all.
Does this mean the majority of Americans are secretly inherently racist?
Note: I am not from the US and this a genuine question and no offense meant.
It is my opinion that all humans are inherently racist and that the only way to overcome it is to first acknowledge it. The majority of humans (and therefore Americans) aren't self aware enough to admit to themselves that they are racist and so the racism within lives on.
This is just something I've been pondering on and isn't a fully formed argument, but it seems to me that a large number of conflicts around the globe can be boiled down to "racist rednecks" trying to kill people that aren't like them.
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yeah and exactly because of this kind of insane, bogus "analysis" you lost. When or if you find back the connection to reality, you will realize how Trump actually won. By talking about real issues that nobody else even dares to touch.
Trump won by appealing to people who historically felt they were and deserved to be the in-control majority but now feel they are the not-in-control minority, and he won by claiming he would make them feel like an in-control majority again.
It is that simple. It is also simply the case that the people who historically felt they were and deserved to be the in-control majority were white men.
Populism in American politics is nothing new. Nor is populism oriented on racial lines. There is no secret "untouchable" issue lurking behind it. You pick a large group, capable of forming a powerful voting bloc, a group that believes it has reason to feel resentful, to feel cheated out of power that's rightfully theirs, to feel that "elites" are conspiring against them to ruin the country, and you tell them they deserve power and you're going to give it back to them.
Exactly 120 years ago, William Jennings Bryan ran on a similar platform of "restoring" political and economic power to people who felt they once had it, lost it, and deserved to have it once again. In the process he delivered one of the objectively greatest political addresses in American history (the "Cross of Gold" speech). The only difference is Bryan lost the electoral college by about the same margin Trump won it by.
People who voted for Trump clearly liked his bombastic asshole style, and want to stick it to the "liberal elite". There happened to be more of them this time around than there were people afraid enough of a Trump presidency to vote for a relatively subdued and conventional candidate.
That's, of course, given that there wasn't enough voting fraud to make a difference, which with electronic voting machines in the mix isn't really a given.
>I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n*, and they stomped the floor.
-George Wallace
He took a very simple road. He appealed to the fear of the Other.
What was anyone else scared at all to touch?
Curious - What were these real issues?
Like Obama's birth certificate? Or Benghazi?
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Income Clinton Trump
Under 30K 48% 32%
30K-50K 44% 38%
50-75K 37% 44%
75K+ 41% 49%
[1] http://www.investors.com/politics/ibd-tipp-presidential-elec...
* A Republican just won without being very religious and being wishy-washy on abortion.
* The loser out-spent the winner by huge amounts. Does money really buy elections? Maybe, but not this one.
* The rich abandoned Republicans, but many poor and working-class abandoned Democrats. [1]
1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/e...
Been following the coverage since the primaries and though I don't know who I would have voted for, seeing the self righteous intelligentia being so blatantly wrong on the election outcome gives me an embarrassing satisfaction.
None of the established media did even try to keep a disguise of neutrality. Not in the US, not the BBC or here in Germany.
You can be against Trump all you want, but where has "journalistic standards" been gone? If your whole organization is made up of individuals who see themselves as morally-superior while being a Clinton-biased - how realistic is it that this organization is able to get a realistic glimpse at the outside world?
How could nobody see that ignorance and stupidity on that level was not helping them... It is like they took a gun, paid a lot of money for it, and then used it to shot themselves in the foot.
I would have said attention buys elections, and Trump was the kind of candidate that had the media tripping over themselves to give him free coverage. That definitely seems to explain the primary season, but the general election campaign turned things around a bit by consisting almost solely of negative attention that hurt the candidates when they were in the spotlight. I guess neither candidate could spend enough to buy anywhere near as much attention as the various scandals attracted, and perhaps this campaign season was meaningfully different in overall tone.
Media treated people as idiots, in some cases CNN went to levels of stupidity and lies that would have put Fox to shame. They thought they were helping their candidate, but they were actually hurting the cause.
The fact that many Democrats have voted for Trump doesn't mean Trump is great necessarily, it means they really hated Hillary and what she represented (and no, not because she is a woman, if anything this will always be remembered as step-back for woman as a US president, people will remember Hillary and cringe next time).
See http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-has-gotten-nearly-3-b...
I always wondered if the president really has the power people perceive him to have, or if he's still influenced and bound by many people in the background.
One can observe this with Obama. He made promises (like closing Guantanamo etc.), which he ultimately couldn't force through. But why? Possibly, because he isn't nearly as free in his decision making.
Now, Trump claimed to do a lot of things and I'm wondering if he really can pull that off or if many of his extraordinary claims and goals won't be doable, because of other people with power.
This is what I don't like about modern politics: So many things are claimed to be done, but ultimately, it's all bullshit and you only know what you've voted for long after the election – which could be something entirely different than you'd voted for in the first place.
Then again, Trump didn't just win the election, Republicans also won majority in the House and Senate. So it's going to be a lot easier for Trump to push policies through than it was for Obama.
Both leading candidates were despised by a large number of people. Many people were heard talking about having to vote for the lesser of two evils. Therefore it makes sense to frame the election in this way. What we have today is not a pro-Trump victory, but an anti-Clinton victory.
I don't think the Democratic establishment realised what a gamble it took by favouring Clinton over Sanders, if they had just let open primaries decide who their candidate would be I'm fairly confident a Democratic candidate would now be heading for the White House.
But then, 24 hours ago, both parties would've expected one result and have since received the other so that's easier to say with hindsight.
One of them was hated by 50 percent and loved by 50 percent. The other was hated by 50 percent percent and accepted by 50 percent as the lesser evil.
This election was hugely divided across class lines. Technically it's by college education status. But I believe that is highly correlated with social class.
So if lower class people voted Republican for economic reasons, they're only hurting themselves. Of course they'll blame immigrants or whoever, so that it can all end up in a vicious cycle of stupidity.
And thanks to the exponential increase in college tuition over the past couple decades, the class/education status has almost completely converged.
[1]: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/jill-stein-expect-trou...
I think people have no idea how much this was a vote against Hillary. Look at Trump, even with all his rhetoric and crazy statements he made, they still picked him! That says a lot about Hillary and the DNC and the campaign they ran.
More years spent getting caught up on intraspecies drama (bathroom use!) rather than working on big ideas.
Most people at 538 seemed to think that this theory would be invalidated after the pretty probablye Clinton win, but was a reason for them to consider the uncertainty high.
I think tomorrow they are going to discuss if this theory is not vindicated after all.
This is what 1 in 3 looks like.
The presidential third party vote more than doubled this election compared to 4 years ago.
> They aren't even allowed to debate.
Ron Paul begs to differ.
---
The challenge, of course, is the the system is susceptible to the spoiler effect. Trump won Florida's 29 electoral votes by just 1%. Gary Johnson alone had double that number in the state.
In 2000, the entire election was decided by 537 votes for George Bush in Florida. And the majority of Ralph Nader's 97k votes in the state would have gone to Al Gore in a two-party race. The Green Party lost the Democrats 4+ years of the presidency.
He didn't. And he wouldn't do that either.
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OK that didn't work so who else you got? Bernie, outsider with nothing, no money, no establishment friends, too old, been a democtat for 5 minutes and nearly got the democratic nomination and the dem establishment hate him and broke the rules fighting him. Donald has fame and got the republican nomination. Republican establishment hate him.
American voters want change. Change at any cost right now. And they'll keep trying for it.
There has been no meaningful political reform. Regulatory capture and gerrymander are the norm. People hate it. They genuinely hate the status quo, the political establishment. Really hate it.
Whoever is judged the most likely to do something, anything, in the way of reform has a huge advantage. You can be inexperienced and African American, you can be a blow-hard who inherited a billion dollars. Doesn't matter if people actually believe you are more for change and reform than the opposition.
It's not the only important thing but having credibility as an agent for change is extremely valuable. Hilary had precisely no credibility on that count and was proud of it .
He had two years where he had legislative power, and spent that time shoring up the US economy after the financial crisis and passing healthcare reform. Had he passed political reform instead he would have been accused of putting elite concerns before the practical things affecting ordinary people.
One of the problems in the US seems to be that the President has all the rhetoric of a ruler, but in fact only has power with Congress.
People invest an enormous amount of hope and effort into the federal system, but in fact it's mostly ineffective, if the two parties are at one another's throats no one is capable of action a majority of the time. The system is set up to rely on the states for action, but people move around so much the states aren't seen as worth the effort (because you might be taking a job on the other side of the country in a year or two). It's a system which doesn't really match up with how people live their lives.
Respectfully, he shored up the banks that had precipitated the crisis rather than the people most affected by the crisis. Some will call that virtuous and necessary, or 'deeply unfair' and necessary (Timothy Geithner), but the people who benefited are not the people who voted last night.
As for healthcare reform, he chose health insurance rather than health care. From the point of view of most of the people who voted last night, that means another bill to pay, not better healthcare.
He invested his power, to the degree he had it, more in keeping things the same than in the change people voted him in for.
And yet they keep voting in the same Congress which can affect the most change.
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The really interesting part of all this was reading Scott Adams blog who proposed the idea that Trump is a master persuader (probably this is just a fancy name for populist). He has been blogging about persuasion techniques and about cognitive biases and how humans are irrational creatures 90% of the time and are open to persuasion techniques.
This seems to offend everybodies sensibilities but for me it's been fascinating and a real eye-opener. The reaction (bias?) in the media has been particularly interesting and has forever changed my world view.
If you have the time it's probably worth reading the posts for the past year or so, http://blog.dilbert.com/ It won't be so interesting now that we know the result but the ideas and methods of persuasion he talks about will shape the future for a long time to come.
The cognitive dissonance being shown by the media is particularly funny. It's amazing that they really don't understand that a large percentage of the population voted for Trump because he probably represents for them a reasonable hope for change. I'm waiting for somebody to suggest that nobody actually voted for him and instead he rigged the election all by himself.
The Republican establishment, in terms of actual currently serving politicians rather than former ones or writers, have largely rolled over for Trump. With this "mandate", they'll continue to do so for fear of getting voted out.
And even if that weren't the case Trump would still be plenty dangerous. Sure, we can imagine they'd stop him if he tried to get some terrible policy passed -- but the biggest danger from Trump isn't some terrible deliberate policy. It's the constant screwups we can expect from someone who's not competent to run the executive branch.
IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump is one of the most interesting contributors to this result.
I tend to think that this was the meeting of three things:
As for Comey, he had a lose/lose scenario. If he didn't go forward with the new emails, and it had turned out that there was actually something worth investigating, he's would have kept important information from the US public, just before an election.
While Trump perhaps isn't exactly the ideal candidate for the US presidency, I have the same take on him as I did on the Brexit: The world is simply to boring a place for this to become a major issue. In the long run everything will be fine.
Because this is what the media does for damn near every political scandal that politicians don't immediately capitulate to. Weathering the storm of news, attention and publicity to a "scandal" when a story hits is how it becomes a non-story next week.
>they kept reporting on Clinton's emails ad nauseum no matter how many times it was established that there was nothing there
Because there were incremental changes and updates, the media gets to milk the story for every new morsel. Also, a sleazy, immoral and poorly implemented system for attempting to avoid (even without breaking) open records laws is not "nothing."
IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump
The media's actions are better explained as both lazy and desperate for reader/viewer attention. It explains everything they do from coverage of Trump and Hillary all the way to coverage of the Scout Bake Sale.
So, this has allowed Trump to appeal to bases of people no other candidate could even hope to reach, with the current "acceptable" rhetoric.
His rhetoric is already escalating the "war on Muslims". Electing him further confirms that Americans are the enemy of Islam. This is exactly what terrorists were trying to accomplish, and I think we can expect many more people to become radicalized. We can expect an increase in terrorist attacks. Walls won't save you. Tighter immigration control won't save you. The damage was done today, and in the months leading up to the election. I am legitimately scared to visit countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. I was already scared about Turkey, and the situation there will only get worse. I'm worried for my relatives and friends who live there.
Donald Trump doesn't trust the science behind climate change. He doesn't believe that it's real. He would like to dismantle the EPA and increase our dependence on coal and oil. Even if I ignore his deep character flaws, business failures, and sexual assault accusations, this single issue is a dealbreaker for me. Luckily we have many other people working on clean energy, like everything that Elon Musk is doing. But how can this be coming from the President of the United States?
People say that Donald Trump is a smart man. Smart people don't say things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU2p6YakNJg
The climate aspect is indeed bad, even if many of the trade deals that trump oppose and Hillary was active in bringing forth was labeled as negative for the climate. Hillary was likely the lesser evil all in all, but hopefully in 4 years we can see an actually advocate for the environment and clean energy.
Americans refuse to live in fear (at least, the block of Americans I understand and am part of). We don't really count on walls to save us. We count on the ability to destroy those who want to murder us.
That will probably freak a lot of people out here. I'm not a warmonger. But we are a strong nation, and those who want to kill our innocent civilians need to know, America will not cower.
Terrorism is on the rise because there are large groups of people who have devoted their lives to barbaric murder of innocents -- some on the front lines with bombs strapped on, others through financial and cultural support.
These groups of people have a culture in favor of anti-US terrorism. Note: I have not named the groups. You can't say "Islam", because many Muslims don't feel that way. You can't say "Arabs" because it is likewise inaccurate.
It's hard to name the group with a precise enough term. But they exist, and their culture makes them our blood enemies. They want to murder us, and therefore I want to murder them.
What really needs to die is the barbaric culture. But how do you kill a culture? (I can only think of one example off the top of my head ... atom bombs on Japan seemed to quickly, drastically change their culture. Hopefully there's a less drastic way).
Tolerance and peace are some of the greatest human ideals. But when someone desires with their whole heart to murder you and all that you love, tolerance is the wrong response. That enemy needs to be recognized, understood, and defeated.
The Republicans will have control of all three branches of government for the next few years and there is a whole lot that they can do with that. As a foreigner, what worries me most is that American progress on climate change policy will be set back by another 15 to 20 years as Obama's progress will be erased and there is no progress to hope for until another Democrat is elected in four or eight years. Russia can also be expected to threaten Europe with more confidence; hopefully our defense spending will increase to pick up the slack.
The Democrats certainly brought this upon themselves. People say the primaries against Sanders were rigged, but really the problem wasn't that the DNC pushed Clinton. The problem was Clinton herself. Clinton soundly rejected Sanders' populist ideals when almost half of the party and a great number of independents supported them. All it took at that point were a few leaks and a letter from Comey to rip the blue collar worker's vote from her.
Any real threats to Europe will lead to nuclear conflict. It's not 1910 - you don't need to be afraid of rifles and spending money on tanks.
You can say - but the Ukraine! - well, it's not European country, and it has no valuable partners that deeply invested and pledged to protect it.
But I seriously question the idea that Trump can't do much damage because of the Republican controlled House and Senate. The Republicans have been quite eager to do damage to the US without Trump.
Probably a lot less than people think domestically -- I suspect he's going to find his hands tied nearly as much as Obama. (And the outbursts of frustration we're likely to see from him as result will probably be epic.) Foreign relations are going to be interesting for a while though, and the stock market is probably going to crash, if it hasn't already.
Yeah no, he can just give free reign to Pence (as he explicitly said he'd do) and establishment GOP and they'll let him have his pet hates. Obama was "the enemy" and opposed at every turn, Trump just has to give the GOP their Supreme Court nominee and they'll be more than happy to indulge him.
There's a lot of damage to be done there.
Also, he has shown that he can make the Republicans shut up and follow. Quite easily.
The "problem" that made them fall in line won't go away. The voters will stick with him for a while.
I have a newfound respect for him because he literally called every step of this election.
Sure, people will justify their support either through reasoning or judgement of character - "He's a racist bigot", "She's part of the establishment", his/her policy is better etc. but what it comes down to is the emotional appeal of the arguments.
I think Donald Trump was more successful at rallying people around his promise to "make America great again" whilst Hillary failed to rally people around the idea of "Stronger together". I think her campaign became preoccupied with attacking the character of Donald Trump, seeing this as his weakness, as opposed to founding it on a strong appeal to emotion. I would argue the Sanders campaign was much stronger in this regard.
But foreign policy and diplomacy falls squarely in the executive branch. It's impossible to separate the US election from the rest of the world, when the US is so incredibly influential. Diplomacy is tricky, time consuming, and can fall flat on the stupidest little things. Even a really good secretary of state backed by a strong state department can only do so much with an elephant in the china shop.
Like Brexit, it remains to be seen what will actually happen, but if the campaign is any indication of future performance I won't hold my breath.
Yeah, that was interesting. You did, I did. I tossed in here one of his better pieces over 3 months ago. Flagged off, of course. "La-la-la, not listening ..."
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The President deals with foreign policy, and Trump is in Putin's pocket. Time for Ukraine and the Baltic states to become part of Russia.
* Inequality within developed countries, leading to dissatisfaction among working-class voters.
* Globalization benefits accrue largely to capital owners, leaving a lot of workers behind. Many blame immigration since it is the most visible cause. The blame is partly backed by human's xenophobic instincts.
Ironically, Trump's tax plan will mostly benefit the rich. Instead, we need a much better system to mitigate hardships from job losses to globalization and technological change. The 2017 Congress will be very unlikely to enact such policies.
I wonder how this tension will play out in the future...Thoughts?
Could the backlash spill to the technology and related sectors as well? (e.g. a neo-luddite movement might get started)
Note: I did not grow up in the US, so I would like to hear your opinions on this, especially from Americans.
... possibility? They already have it. He gets to pick Scalia's replacement and that's 5-4. If Ginsburg or Breyer can't make it 4-8 more years (and Ginsburg is 84), then it'll be a guarantee for the next 30+ years, minimum.
To them, Trump is like the star NFL quarterback that everyone wishes to be, and wears that star's jersey on their back. Even if the fan is overweight and can barely waddle across the parking lot.
Except that in reality Trump does not have the skills necessary to do the job. (He is a great candidate, but will likely be a terrible president). Someone observed that Trump is a poor person's idea of a rich person. He is unfortunately likely a disenfranchised person's idea of an effective president.
“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
What?
Lowering the tax means it will be less money, meaning less social initiatives that benefit the poorer such as Medicare. Making taxes more progressive would work.
But a large part of the population don't share that sentiment, they're not shamed, they don't care that you're screaming "RACIST!" at the top of your lungs.
And when you address their actual concerns that globalization and automation are killing their jobs, killing their communities, and killing their people with a shrug, with an "I'm so sorry, move to the cities, get an education!", they'll get angry. And political. And here we are.
I can tell you as someone in silicon valley who sort of vaguely supports trump, that I have been essentially not permitted to talk about it. What's the benefit to it? Why would I speak up and engage in a conversation? Any talk of Trump here isn't actually a real debate. It's everyone around you saying "Trump supporters are racists and bigots. They are disgusting."
Nobody _actually_ wants to hear any arguments from the other side. So I sit with my mouth closed. It's better than losing my friends and having my coworkers ostracize me for my political views. Which maybe they would have the chance to change if they were willing to listen, but aren't.
I know so many people like myself. I was surprised with the result of the election, but not surprised at the fact that there was a surprise like this. Places like SV don't know how many Trump supporters there are or even _why_ they really support him, because they've essentially put their hands over their eyes and their ears and spun in circles shouting "Trump is racist! You are racist!"
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I'm a male French, in France, and I intend to vote FN (extreme right). I have higer education, 10 years of experience in programming, including 5 in 3 different countries. I have social values, like companies should take care of the humans behind the employee, and we should give our maximum to include everyone who wants to be included. I turned my back on leftist movements because no matter how generous I was (e.g. thousands donated to charities, >1200hrs of volunteering, engaged in social causes, etc), leftists always find a way to depict me as a spoiled child with rich parents, and they dismiss any good work I've made as a result of luck.
Oh and my 8-year old cousin was raped by an Arab teenager – I still don't know whether that's due to probability or whether he identifies to the Arabs-against-whites cause. It did change a lot for me.
So now that I'm freed from liberal shamers, I've decided to vote depending on only one criteria. In my whole professional experience, promotions were given to women, to the point that it was unfair to me; In my whole life women have been bitter to me. I'm pretty satisfied that there are currently hundreds of laws in favour of women which offset any inequality they can claim; The only party which proposes to keep those existing laws and not adding new ones is FN, the extreme-right French party.
All in all, what you need to gain back someone like me is love. Give me luck with finding a girlfriend, give me a fair treatment at work, recognize my social engagement and the positive parts of my values, stop assuming all my rationale is just raw racism or raw machism, stop assuming I've just been lucky with work, and you'll get me back among the centrist voters.
But as long as it's not possible to expose my problems without hearing generalizations and shaming, I'll keep voting FN.
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It's not that bigotry is a non-issue in these elections, it definitely is, the KKK endorsed a presidential candidate after all. The issue is that there are deeper underlying problems that are being exploited by race baiting politicians to win elections. The problem in pre-Nazi Germany, for example, was a deeply dysfunctional economy and trying to seek a scape-goat for the loss of WWI and the shame and humiliation that caused. Today the problem is largely economic inequality and a lack of economic opportunity and mobility for most people in the bottom half of the wealth distribution. Wages have stagnated while housing, college, and healthcare costs have skyrocketed. The recent recession left a huge crater in the economic histories and career developments of most folks under 30 in the form of unemployment and under-employment. Outside of the cities there hasn't been an economic recovery in the last decade. On top of that you have the opiate epidemic. It's gotten so severe that life expectancies for middle aged folks in middle America took a significant hit (due substantially to increases in suicide and deaths from alcoholism and drug overdose). All of that has nothing to do with gay marriage, Syrian refugees, or increased awareness of police brutality.
But a lot of the people who have been disadvantaged over the last few decades have been able to be convinced by demagogues that the cause of their problems is the elite establishment (especially liberals) and to capitalize on latent feelings of racism, anti-gay sentiment, etc. Make no mistake those bigots are not the entirety of the vote, but they are enough of it to swing the election. More so, as in Britain, there is a huge section of the electorate who may not be intrinsically bigoted per se but is perfectly content to sit around and run in a pack with true bigots and to support candidates and policies that will rollback progress in racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality. Sufficiently advanced indifference to issues of racial equality is indistinguishable from bigotry.
You're right that you can't fix this by calling everyone who voted for these things bigots, almost certainly not. But ignoring that aspect doesn't lead to a good outcome either. It's necessary to fix the underlying economic problems while at the same time maintaining a hard line on driving forward to improve equality, enfranchisement, etc.
Calling leave voters racists achieved nothing and only strengthened their views. It was obvious when Trump voters appropriated the term Deplorables that personal attacks were going to fail. All you did was cause the polls to not reflect the final vote because people would say Hilary when asked but put an X next to Trump in private.
Merkel is also relatively popular with many non-CDU/CSU voters because her policies all in all have been very moderate. She's generally perceived as very static despite having had to deal with the economic crisis, the refugee situation and now Brexit.
The rise of the AfD is largely a result of conservatives (who probably would have voted CDU/CSU otherwise) being upset with Merkel's handling of the refugee situation. The far left still hates her because she's a conservative, the far right hates her because she's too liberal. She's in the sweet spot where her policies are just balanced enough nobody can propose any sane alternatives that don't sound like almost exactly what she's been doing and any criticism either sounds petty or hyperbolic.
The problem for the SPD is that they alienated their leftist demographic under Schröder (leading to the rise in popularity of the Linke) and later with the coalition government aside the CDU/CSU. Aside from traditional party loyalists they're now directly competing with the CDU/CSU for conservative voters.
The only thing that concerns me is that the CSU is taking a lesson from the revival of the AfD (which was pretty much doomed to fail when the Euro crisis waned but was rekindled by the refugee situation) and is now spouting even more populist xenophobic rhetoric than usual. Considering how much disproportionate influence the CSU traditionally holds in the Union, this might spell trouble for the CDU internally.
As an anecdote: I would never have voted for the CDU (I've previously voted for Linke and the Pirate Party) but unless one of the other parties surprises me with a great candidate, I would probably vote to re-elect Merkel.
And let's not forget that the GamerGate fiasco shared a lot of things in common with Brexit and Trump's presidency in how the media covered it too. The media tried to attack people over and over while painting those it disagreed with as bigots, and it worked about as poorly then as it did with this election and Trump supporters.
But no, same general pattern occurred with both Brexit and Trump, with similar results.
https://ballotpedia.org/Alabama_Interracial_Marriage,_Amendm...
Should that be outlawed too?
Stopping her from doing that is throat-shoving. Her freedom to make her life with a particular someone doesn't harm anybody. _You_ cannot disregard _her_ feelings.
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Tonight a large portion of the country confirmed that the US is for whites. That it's not a melting pot. This demographic has been angry for a generation because they've felt like their culture, their socio-economic status and way of life is slipping away and this election (after 8 years of a black president), the line in the sand would be drawn. The numbers don't show any division in voting based on class, but an entire chunk of whites (women, men, making under or over 100k+ a year, college education or not), all voting for Donald Trump.
I don't know what the future looks like now for America.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/03/5-facts-abou...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/why-is-t...
I respect that that's how you think about it, and maybe that's even how Trump thinks about it; but I don't think you can credibly make such a blanket statement about Trump voters in general. There are still people in America who believe American culture is white American culture.
The arguments of the more moderate Brexit voters sounded similar to yours, but after the referendum they found out that an uncomfortably large number of their allies really are deeply bigoted. That in itself doesn't make their point invalid, but they can't claim that their opinion defines the whole movement.
Are you recommending we have less overall legal immigration?
People like you took the narrative from the big news networks of the mass numbers of bigots and racists and just ran with it. Problem was that story smelled like bull, which pushed more people to his camp.
I'm very far left and completely agree with you. The American left is an abysmal disgrace in terms of what I consider social progress. Instead of attempting to spread progressive thinking, the American left spreads hatred and name calling.
Next time try making friends and not enemies. More of this[1] and less of this[2].
[1]: http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2016/july/how-one-black-blues... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/liberal-but-not-tole...
Well, we elected a black man as a president for two terms in a row, so the country may not be as racist as people perceive.
And see how the republican base and party reacted.
> so the country may not be as racist as people perceive.
Or the country didn't feel it could express its racism until Trump gave it a bullhorn and an endorsement.
Yes, it's a snub that the pro-Trump wing doesn't give a shit about women and minorities and LGBT. That much is clear. No matter what, to vote Trump you have to see certain people as "acceptable losses".
And yes, Trump is backed by a lot of vitriolic racists.
But the key thing, I think, that won Trump the presidency was anti-globalism, and the fact that he's a gigantic asshole.
Americans wanted an asshole. Pro-Trump voters see him like Apple saw Steve Jobs - the guy who cut through the BS and saw simple problems with simple solutions, and demanded that those problems be fixed.
Faced with the problem of America's increasingly anemic industrial jobs, the political wing and the press collectively said "we're okay with this". Trump said insane things like making Apple build stuff in the USA and pulling out of trade agreements.
Faced with terrorism in Europe, the press and the left collectively said "well there's not much we can do about that, we have to take care of the refugees". Trump said "screw the refugees, I'm closing the border and kicking out the muslims".
Trump offers simple, brutal solutions to complex problems. His solutions are generally pretty stupid, but they sound like solutions, which is better than the complex rationalizations we hear from everyone else.
This also explains why his opinion on the middle-east oscillates between "let's just pull out and let them kill each other" and "let's just carpet-bomb the crap out of ISIS". Simple, brutal solutions.
Ignoring the characters involved in this campaign, at a basic level, this sort of party switch is pretty normal, as there is often a party change once the President completes his second term. Its a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. Reagan to Bush was an exception, but we know what happened with his re-election attempt. So, in 4 or 8 years, I wouldn't be surprised if things moved back to the left.
That's a bit strange, I thought the right preferred assimilationism (melting pot) and the left preferred multiculturalism (salad bowl).
It's not that simple.
There was a large section of the Indian-American community that voted Trump; presumably this was also true of "non-minority" minorities like assorted Asians and Jews.
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