7 ms·

The sneering response to Trump’s victory reveals exactly why he won

68 points by erikj 10y ago

waterphone 10y ago
Because ignorant fools don't like having their ignorance and bigotry pointed out to them? Bad reason. Unfortunately, we've discovered there are a lot more ignorant fools in America than most who live within the mostly liberal, urban bubble realized.
- diggernet 10y ago
  Excellent example of the author's point.
- vibrato 10y ago
  Total votes for the republican candidate were basically unchanged from the previous few elections. The big difference was that total votes for the democratic candidate dropped off significantly from Obama's spike. Hillarys problem was she didn't excite people enough to get them to the polls.
  - braveo 10y ago
    Hilary's problem is that people didn't like her and chose to stay home rather than vote trump (whom they didn't like either).
- sheraz 10y ago
  With a different tone you might be able to engage in meaningful conversation. But launching toxic salvos like this will land with a fuck you response. But I think you know that...
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Please don't be this vitriolic on HN, we cannot let this become Reddit.
  - waterphone 10y ago
    Pointing out that ignorant racists are ignorant and racist is vitriolic? It isn't my intent to be simply snarky and dismissive, but it seems like this is coming down to people with terrible ideas being dismissed by more educated people who understand why their ideas are terrible, and then feeling bad about it and revolting. Okay, fine, maybe that's the reason. But it's a stupid reason from stupid people. Feeling bad about being stupid doesn't make you less stupid or mean anyone should implement your stupid ideas. Yes, I'm speaking in simple terms and simplifying things in a way some people will undoubtedly be offended by if they were driven to vote in droves for someone like Trump because people made them feel bad, but that is what it essentially comes down to. Reality is a lot more complex than the "simple" solutions Trump and his supporters are endorsing, and they're going to cause a lot of destructive harm to the world as a result of their ignorance and bigoted ideas.
    - danso 10y ago
      Yeah, it's vitriolic. It's like coming in here and telling everyone that they are child-killers, because of the numerous drone killings that the Obama administration has sanctioned.
    - muhammad117 10y ago
      ^^Uhhhh this so much. I mean its only a matter of days before Trump and Pence personally take to the streets to start rounding up and executing everyone who's not a white male. These people have the audacity to think that the same media that so ardently pushed Hilary could have also been pushing a false Trump narrative. /s So salty, I love it. praise KEK
      - SpikeDad 10y ago
        Well when Republicans push through all the pent up agenda that Obama has blocked we'll see about how rhetorical your comments are. Educational spending, basic science research spending, reversal of environmental legislation and repudiation of global climate change, mandated prayer, massive Social Security change and others are just ready to be put into action.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  This has to be a troll. Nobody can be this un-selfaware.
  - MK999 10y ago
    Aren't bad faith arguments like this from the Left the status quo?
  - retrogradeorbit 10y ago
    Actually yes they can. This person is what Nassim Taleb calls the "Intellectual Yet Idiot". https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211... And there is a lot of them.
Grazester 10y ago
...Except that the US political system was never a democracy and never would be with the electoral college.
- module0000 10y ago
  Democratic republic(what the USA has) does not equal democracy(what the Swiss have).
pcunite 10y ago
I'm seeing very dangerous rhetoric from the media right now. Namely, that Trump's "surprise" win was because ... get ready for this ... "white" people. Unless I'm mistaken, there are more whites in this country than any other type. I was so honored to see our nation have a black president. I was so honored when he suffered no violence. I'm talking about being absolutely proud of my country here. I am not going to apologize for being "black" or "white" or any color and I don't expect others to either.
- danso 10y ago
  I think the complaint is less than the fact that there is a majority white populace, and more shock that this group voted in a way that is feared to disenfranchise minority groups. That said, I think a large lesson can be learned here for the next race and by the Democrats. I'm an Asian who grew up in the Midwest. I encountered some racism growing up, but overall have fond memories, and I have a lot of friends who aren't "open-minded" by some standards, but if I'm only more "open-minded", it's through circumstance of being in a minority group of <3% of where I lived. So I don't see those fellow Midwesterners as "racist" even if they might be considered that out on the coasts, and they don't see themselves as that either. While I might prioritize how a candidate seems to view minorities, a whole lot of people won't, and I can sure sympathize for folks who put the hope of American jobs over a candidate's perceived viewpoints. Looking at the electoral map and all the surprise wins for Trump, people seemed to prioritize their hope in a revitalized American economy over misgivings of Trump's behaviors. That doesn't mean everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot or racist. Unemployment is usually a more pressing concern for people.
  - SpikeDad 10y ago
    Except of course Trump has no ability to revitalize any thing. Considering that the US economy has been on a steady recovery during the Obama years Republicans will as usually just magically declare their election is the cause. Trump is a con man so any attempt to attribute his election to some sort of optimistic view of "revitalization" is sheer nonsense. The combination of the normal Republican elite voting, the ill informed Hillary fearful and the general "White folks that have the chance to reverse their self-viewed powerlessness" was the combination that defeated Clinton. As usually people voted against their own logical needs in a US society because showing their power was more important than electing someone with any experience in complex government operations.
avmich 10y ago
> The respectable set’s allergy to Trump is fundamentally an allergy to the idea of democracy itself. What those explainers why Trump win don't seem to understand is that the disgust isn't about changing status quo - it's about the person who offers to improve that. Unless you're going to blindly go after whoever just seems different enough, it seems to be reasonable to think what are the changes proposed - and what's the person proposing them. If some changes seem irrational after evaluating them and the person himself leaves the feeling of urge to check one's wallet, perhaps it's not too un-democratic to wonder if this person should be seriously trusted.
mc32 10y ago
I can only imagine the response from the left if Hillary had won and you had demonstrators chanting "notmypresident" [and other colorful things] and burning her effigy. People would be going nuts calling them misogynists, bigots, racists, etc. but because it's Trump and he's nominally republican, it's alright. This kind of response only acts to further antagonize and prove his supporters right --they don't like us and act against us when things don't go their way, why should I support them when things don't go my way. Trump, like him or not, be he good or not, won 30% of the Hispanic vote --despite all the negativity their community spoke against him -and he himself only lukewarmly campaigning in areas heavily Hispanic... He had more black votes than Romney and won more white women than Hillary --53% to 43%, according to Nate Silver, that's astounding, despite her actually using the "women's" card.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  We've had 8 years of Obama being called that on top of being a 'secret Muslim' and not a US citizen, which was a claim that was pressed by Trump himself for years (amongst other claims like climate change being a conspiracy). The left handled it well enough. I think the idea that the right are these gentlesirs and the left the hysterics is fairly faulty. If anything, its the other way around. I can't remember the last time a Democrat claimed the GOP President wasn't a citizen of the US and spent years building a movement based solely on that claim. I'm fairly certain it never happened. The right's treatment of Obama both socially (ridiculous personal claims long proven false) and politically (massive obstruction by the GOP congress) are not forgotten and pretending they didn't exist is silly. Criticisms against Trump are rooted in reality: his birtherism, his denial of climate change, his far-right social agenda, his comments about women and minorities, etc. Protesters bringing that up is fair game and frankly, how democracies should work.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I don't recall people demonstrating and burning garbage cans and burning his effigy and chanting #notmypresident. Do they mean it, do they have another president somewhere else? The response has been very vitriolic and visceral. It's not the way to seek common ground and find a way forward. This is the recipe to antagonize and seek distance and further fracturing.
taliesinb 10y ago
I personally find Thomas Frank's way of looking at it quite interesting and entertaining, and, so far, convincing. Short article for Guardian post Trump victory: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald... Longer article in Harpers about establishment response to Sanders, not directly relevant but uses the same class-based analysis: http://harpers.org/archive/2016/11/swat-team-2/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/11/swat-team-2/ Talk about his most recent book "Listen, Liberal": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibDX92b5cnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibDX92b5cnY
reitanqild 10y ago
And swoosh it seems someone wants to flag it off the front page.
- swissoak 10y ago
  Not exactly surprising, HN is heavily people in CA, which is a huge echo chamber.
carsongross 10y ago
The meta-problem here is that the united states is a country without a nation. There is no underlying unity, pre-rational commitments, history, moral axioms or ideals. No matter who won this election, nearly half the country, many very good folks, were going to be irate, depressed and/or scared. The devolution of sovereignty and peaceful secession is the only solution that offers hope for all of us to live as we wish. The California secession movement is perhaps a start in normalizing this idea on the left. I have sincere sympathy for all people who wish to live under a government that represents them. I hope we find a way through this.
- acconrad 10y ago
  > The devolution of sovereignty and peaceful secession is the only solution that offers hope for all of us to live as we wish. That seems right in theory - the past few decades pretty much the same states have voted for the exact same side. But there have been plenty elections where that wasn't the case. For example, pretty much everyone voted for Reagan, and Kennedy. There have been times when the country was very much for one candidate. So I wouldn't say we're completely divided all of the time, just in the past few decades.
ankimal 10y ago
Democracy won. Middle America made their choice based on a hope that Trump will bring back jobs to America, especially manufacturing to the Middle American Industrial heartland. What they failed to see was that the dream is, just that, a dream! One that can almost never (never say never?) come true. This is so much easier to explain than to convince people that globalization is a reality and that the only option in many of these cases is to retrain for a high skilled economy that the US always was, and must continue be in order to be an economic superpower. No matter which party won, this section of people would be anti-establishment and unhappy with the present because nobody can break this bad news to them. A software engineering analogy is to convince leadership that you have to refactor your stack in order for it to scale, during which new products would suffer. BUT, its easier to convince them to hire 10 more engineers who can build new product on an aging stack, which may not solve the problem, but is relatively easier to sell. In 5-10 years, who will explain to the millions of automobile drivers (taxis/trucks/uber/lyft/..) that their jobs are dying as well? Nobody. Wait for another anti-establishment election!
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Its certainly doable. The monthly Vietnamese wage in manufacturing is $145 a month. Middle America would have to learn to live on $145 a month to compete against them. Oh, did they think factory work with big six figure salaries was possible here? Gee, I wonder who could have possibly misled them about this?
  - ankimal 10y ago
    That will not even meet min. wage requirements.
    - soulashell 10y ago
      We'll just get rid of that regulation.
- kevlar1818 10y ago
  Thanks for this. I've been looking for something that sums up how I'm feeling, and this pretty much hits the nail on the head. I'm sick of both the "Liberal Smugness" and the "Uneducated Peasants" talk. Never blame the people; blame the system.
b1daly 10y ago
I'm already sick of this analysis: the rubes got tired of being looked down on by the swells, and golly, showed them good. Not to say that there isn't something to it, it's just that I've read multiple versions of the past two days. It's just not an interesting analysis. It masks the fact that there is a pathology of "know nothingism," that runs deep in the US. Antagonism against marginalized members of society. Nihilistic acting out has been normalized by the election of a callow narcissist who cares not a whit for anyone besides himself. These are the same type of people who grew up hazing fags, mocking black people, and glorifying mysoginist, rapey behavior behavior by "bros" of all stripe. A lot of focus has been put on the economic dislocation experienced by the working class in the middle of the country. This doesn't ring true to me. I've seen references to the economic demographics of Trump supporters, and overall they have have higher incomes, on average, than Clinton supporters. (Can't find the article right now, this is an article from May that takes a look) http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-... This reinforces that this is really a cultural divide. It gets around to that sophomoric question of whether being intolerant of "intolerant people" is intolerant. It's of a pieces with religious conservatives adopting the language of victimhood to, justify their right to discriminate against gays. When it comes to being annoyingly self righteous, no demographic has a monopoly on that. It doesn't mean that the core beliefs of foes in the culture wars are morally equivalent.
- swissoak 10y ago
  Oh cool, it's another person sneering at Trump supporters who just doesn't get it. Thanks for all your unfounded vitriol, Trump wouldn't have been possible without people like you.
  - b1daly 10y ago
    huh, your laying the blame for Trump on "people like" me? Generalize much?
boards2x 10y ago
No matter how you feel about being looked down at, educated people don't typically make disinformation or harmful decisions which may have such profound implications for them. Parts Of the USA qualify as a developing country in many ways, not just the low income. It is so profoundly stupid and misinformed it's difficult to imagine they have a majoritie to vote in someone even more stupid them Bush.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
As a progressive democrat I think the protesting is abhorrent behavior. If the right burnt Hillary effigies has she won, it would be all about sexism... I voted for Bernie in the primaries AND the general. I picked my President last fall when I saw the inspirational message that Bernie Sanders brought. Trump won, get over it. Don't blame the #bernieorbust crowd, if you want to blame someone - blame the DNC for giving us a lame racehorse. Hillary lost because SHE is a Clinton. She lost because of corruption and illegal activity prosecuted or not. She is a liar, a cheat, and nobody can discount that. She might as well be a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. The people do not want to give more power to the establishment, unfortunately the nationalists won out over the egalitarianists, hopefully though egalitarianism can find it's way back into America. The article mentions us 'sheep' being 'stupid' -- but we're not stupid enough to NOT see through the lies and falsity that is Clinton.. I honestly think Trump simply said what he knew Republicans wanted to hear to anger them and get elected. He might temper and actually be an okay President... or he might be stunted by congress every step of the way and be the 'break' we need from Dem control to regroup and put a more progressive front up in 2020. I know for one thing - change is in the air, that change can be in the style of Hitler, or the style of FDR, sadly we didn't pick the FDR candidate, but we'll have another chance in 2020.
- mcphage 10y ago
  > She lost because of corruption and illegal activity prosecuted or not. She is a liar, a cheat, and nobody can discount that. I can discount that: if the issue was her being a liar and a cheat, then we wouldn't have elected a liar and a cheat—but we did. So apparently it isn't the stumbling block you think it is.
- braveo 10y ago
  > I know for one thing - change is in the air, This is basically my take on it. I preferred Trump over Hilary even though I think both candidates were terrible, and the reason is because we know what we're getting with Hilary, we have no idea what we're getting with Trump. You hope for the best and prepare for the worst, but atleast it's a change. Obama ran on change and ended up not being the change people voted him in to be. Maybe Trump will be it, maybe not. We'll find out.
tway123 10y ago
https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656 https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656

68 points by erikj 10y ago

Because ignorant fools don't like having their ignorance and bigotry pointed out to them? Bad reason. Unfortunately, we've discovered there are a lot more ignorant fools in America than most who live within the mostly liberal, urban bubble realized.

diggernet 10y ago
Excellent example of the author's point.
vibrato 10y ago
Total votes for the republican candidate were basically unchanged from the previous few elections. The big difference was that total votes for the democratic candidate dropped off significantly from Obama's spike. Hillarys problem was she didn't excite people enough to get them to the polls.
- braveo 10y ago
  Hilary's problem is that people didn't like her and chose to stay home rather than vote trump (whom they didn't like either).
sheraz 10y ago
With a different tone you might be able to engage in meaningful conversation. But launching toxic salvos like this will land with a fuck you response. But I think you know that...
JBReefer 10y ago
Please don't be this vitriolic on HN, we cannot let this become Reddit.
- waterphone 10y ago
  Pointing out that ignorant racists are ignorant and racist is vitriolic? It isn't my intent to be simply snarky and dismissive, but it seems like this is coming down to people with terrible ideas being dismissed by more educated people who understand why their ideas are terrible, and then feeling bad about it and revolting. Okay, fine, maybe that's the reason. But it's a stupid reason from stupid people. Feeling bad about being stupid doesn't make you less stupid or mean anyone should implement your stupid ideas. Yes, I'm speaking in simple terms and simplifying things in a way some people will undoubtedly be offended by if they were driven to vote in droves for someone like Trump because people made them feel bad, but that is what it essentially comes down to. Reality is a lot more complex than the "simple" solutions Trump and his supporters are endorsing, and they're going to cause a lot of destructive harm to the world as a result of their ignorance and bigoted ideas.
  - danso 10y ago
    Yeah, it's vitriolic. It's like coming in here and telling everyone that they are child-killers, because of the numerous drone killings that the Obama administration has sanctioned.
  - muhammad117 10y ago
    ^^Uhhhh this so much. I mean its only a matter of days before Trump and Pence personally take to the streets to start rounding up and executing everyone who's not a white male. These people have the audacity to think that the same media that so ardently pushed Hilary could have also been pushing a false Trump narrative. /s So salty, I love it. praise KEK
    - SpikeDad 10y ago
      Well when Republicans push through all the pent up agenda that Obama has blocked we'll see about how rhetorical your comments are. Educational spending, basic science research spending, reversal of environmental legislation and repudiation of global climate change, mandated prayer, massive Social Security change and others are just ready to be put into action.
jimmywanger 10y ago
This has to be a troll. Nobody can be this un-selfaware.
- MK999 10y ago
  Aren't bad faith arguments like this from the Left the status quo?
- retrogradeorbit 10y ago
  Actually yes they can. This person is what Nassim Taleb calls the "Intellectual Yet Idiot". https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211... And there is a lot of them.

Grazester 10y ago

...Except that the US political system was never a democracy and never would be with the electoral college.

module0000 10y ago
Democratic republic(what the USA has) does not equal democracy(what the Swiss have).

pcunite 10y ago

I'm seeing very dangerous rhetoric from the media right now. Namely, that Trump's "surprise" win was because ... get ready for this ... "white" people. Unless I'm mistaken, there are more whites in this country than any other type. I was so honored to see our nation have a black president. I was so honored when he suffered no violence. I'm talking about being absolutely proud of my country here. I am not going to apologize for being "black" or "white" or any color and I don't expect others to either.

danso 10y ago
I think the complaint is less than the fact that there is a majority white populace, and more shock that this group voted in a way that is feared to disenfranchise minority groups. That said, I think a large lesson can be learned here for the next race and by the Democrats. I'm an Asian who grew up in the Midwest. I encountered some racism growing up, but overall have fond memories, and I have a lot of friends who aren't "open-minded" by some standards, but if I'm only more "open-minded", it's through circumstance of being in a minority group of <3% of where I lived. So I don't see those fellow Midwesterners as "racist" even if they might be considered that out on the coasts, and they don't see themselves as that either. While I might prioritize how a candidate seems to view minorities, a whole lot of people won't, and I can sure sympathize for folks who put the hope of American jobs over a candidate's perceived viewpoints. Looking at the electoral map and all the surprise wins for Trump, people seemed to prioritize their hope in a revitalized American economy over misgivings of Trump's behaviors. That doesn't mean everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot or racist. Unemployment is usually a more pressing concern for people.
- SpikeDad 10y ago
  Except of course Trump has no ability to revitalize any thing. Considering that the US economy has been on a steady recovery during the Obama years Republicans will as usually just magically declare their election is the cause. Trump is a con man so any attempt to attribute his election to some sort of optimistic view of "revitalization" is sheer nonsense. The combination of the normal Republican elite voting, the ill informed Hillary fearful and the general "White folks that have the chance to reverse their self-viewed powerlessness" was the combination that defeated Clinton. As usually people voted against their own logical needs in a US society because showing their power was more important than electing someone with any experience in complex government operations.

avmich 10y ago

> The respectable set’s allergy to Trump is fundamentally an allergy to the idea of democracy itself. What those explainers why Trump win don't seem to understand is that the disgust isn't about changing status quo - it's about the person who offers to improve that. Unless you're going to blindly go after whoever just seems different enough, it seems to be reasonable to think what are the changes proposed - and what's the person proposing them. If some changes seem irrational after evaluating them and the person himself leaves the feeling of urge to check one's wallet, perhaps it's not too un-democratic to wonder if this person should be seriously trusted.

mc32 10y ago

I can only imagine the response from the left if Hillary had won and you had demonstrators chanting "notmypresident" [and other colorful things] and burning her effigy. People would be going nuts calling them misogynists, bigots, racists, etc. but because it's Trump and he's nominally republican, it's alright. This kind of response only acts to further antagonize and prove his supporters right --they don't like us and act against us when things don't go their way, why should I support them when things don't go my way. Trump, like him or not, be he good or not, won 30% of the Hispanic vote --despite all the negativity their community spoke against him -and he himself only lukewarmly campaigning in areas heavily Hispanic... He had more black votes than Romney and won more white women than Hillary --53% to 43%, according to Nate Silver, that's astounding, despite her actually using the "women's" card.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
We've had 8 years of Obama being called that on top of being a 'secret Muslim' and not a US citizen, which was a claim that was pressed by Trump himself for years (amongst other claims like climate change being a conspiracy). The left handled it well enough. I think the idea that the right are these gentlesirs and the left the hysterics is fairly faulty. If anything, its the other way around. I can't remember the last time a Democrat claimed the GOP President wasn't a citizen of the US and spent years building a movement based solely on that claim. I'm fairly certain it never happened. The right's treatment of Obama both socially (ridiculous personal claims long proven false) and politically (massive obstruction by the GOP congress) are not forgotten and pretending they didn't exist is silly. Criticisms against Trump are rooted in reality: his birtherism, his denial of climate change, his far-right social agenda, his comments about women and minorities, etc. Protesters bringing that up is fair game and frankly, how democracies should work.
- mc32 10y ago
  I don't recall people demonstrating and burning garbage cans and burning his effigy and chanting #notmypresident. Do they mean it, do they have another president somewhere else? The response has been very vitriolic and visceral. It's not the way to seek common ground and find a way forward. This is the recipe to antagonize and seek distance and further fracturing.

taliesinb 10y ago

I personally find Thomas Frank's way of looking at it quite interesting and entertaining, and, so far, convincing. Short article for Guardian post Trump victory: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald... Longer article in Harpers about establishment response to Sanders, not directly relevant but uses the same class-based analysis: http://harpers.org/archive/2016/11/swat-team-2/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/11/swat-team-2/ Talk about his most recent book "Listen, Liberal": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibDX92b5cnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibDX92b5cnY

reitanqild 10y ago

And swoosh it seems someone wants to flag it off the front page.

swissoak 10y ago
Not exactly surprising, HN is heavily people in CA, which is a huge echo chamber.

carsongross 10y ago

The meta-problem here is that the united states is a country without a nation. There is no underlying unity, pre-rational commitments, history, moral axioms or ideals. No matter who won this election, nearly half the country, many very good folks, were going to be irate, depressed and/or scared. The devolution of sovereignty and peaceful secession is the only solution that offers hope for all of us to live as we wish. The California secession movement is perhaps a start in normalizing this idea on the left. I have sincere sympathy for all people who wish to live under a government that represents them. I hope we find a way through this.

acconrad 10y ago
> The devolution of sovereignty and peaceful secession is the only solution that offers hope for all of us to live as we wish. That seems right in theory - the past few decades pretty much the same states have voted for the exact same side. But there have been plenty elections where that wasn't the case. For example, pretty much everyone voted for Reagan, and Kennedy. There have been times when the country was very much for one candidate. So I wouldn't say we're completely divided all of the time, just in the past few decades.

ankimal 10y ago

Democracy won. Middle America made their choice based on a hope that Trump will bring back jobs to America, especially manufacturing to the Middle American Industrial heartland. What they failed to see was that the dream is, just that, a dream! One that can almost never (never say never?) come true. This is so much easier to explain than to convince people that globalization is a reality and that the only option in many of these cases is to retrain for a high skilled economy that the US always was, and must continue be in order to be an economic superpower. No matter which party won, this section of people would be anti-establishment and unhappy with the present because nobody can break this bad news to them. A software engineering analogy is to convince leadership that you have to refactor your stack in order for it to scale, during which new products would suffer. BUT, its easier to convince them to hire 10 more engineers who can build new product on an aging stack, which may not solve the problem, but is relatively easier to sell. In 5-10 years, who will explain to the millions of automobile drivers (taxis/trucks/uber/lyft/..) that their jobs are dying as well? Nobody. Wait for another anti-establishment election!

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Its certainly doable. The monthly Vietnamese wage in manufacturing is $145 a month. Middle America would have to learn to live on $145 a month to compete against them. Oh, did they think factory work with big six figure salaries was possible here? Gee, I wonder who could have possibly misled them about this?
- ankimal 10y ago
  That will not even meet min. wage requirements.
  - soulashell 10y ago
    We'll just get rid of that regulation.
kevlar1818 10y ago
Thanks for this. I've been looking for something that sums up how I'm feeling, and this pretty much hits the nail on the head. I'm sick of both the "Liberal Smugness" and the "Uneducated Peasants" talk. Never blame the people; blame the system.

b1daly 10y ago

I'm already sick of this analysis: the rubes got tired of being looked down on by the swells, and golly, showed them good. Not to say that there isn't something to it, it's just that I've read multiple versions of the past two days. It's just not an interesting analysis. It masks the fact that there is a pathology of "know nothingism," that runs deep in the US. Antagonism against marginalized members of society. Nihilistic acting out has been normalized by the election of a callow narcissist who cares not a whit for anyone besides himself. These are the same type of people who grew up hazing fags, mocking black people, and glorifying mysoginist, rapey behavior behavior by "bros" of all stripe. A lot of focus has been put on the economic dislocation experienced by the working class in the middle of the country. This doesn't ring true to me. I've seen references to the economic demographics of Trump supporters, and overall they have have higher incomes, on average, than Clinton supporters. (Can't find the article right now, this is an article from May that takes a look) http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-... This reinforces that this is really a cultural divide. It gets around to that sophomoric question of whether being intolerant of "intolerant people" is intolerant. It's of a pieces with religious conservatives adopting the language of victimhood to, justify their right to discriminate against gays. When it comes to being annoyingly self righteous, no demographic has a monopoly on that. It doesn't mean that the core beliefs of foes in the culture wars are morally equivalent.

swissoak 10y ago
Oh cool, it's another person sneering at Trump supporters who just doesn't get it. Thanks for all your unfounded vitriol, Trump wouldn't have been possible without people like you.
- b1daly 10y ago
  huh, your laying the blame for Trump on "people like" me? Generalize much?

boards2x 10y ago

No matter how you feel about being looked down at, educated people don't typically make disinformation or harmful decisions which may have such profound implications for them. Parts Of the USA qualify as a developing country in many ways, not just the low income. It is so profoundly stupid and misinformed it's difficult to imagine they have a majoritie to vote in someone even more stupid them Bush.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

As a progressive democrat I think the protesting is abhorrent behavior. If the right burnt Hillary effigies has she won, it would be all about sexism... I voted for Bernie in the primaries AND the general. I picked my President last fall when I saw the inspirational message that Bernie Sanders brought. Trump won, get over it. Don't blame the #bernieorbust crowd, if you want to blame someone - blame the DNC for giving us a lame racehorse. Hillary lost because SHE is a Clinton. She lost because of corruption and illegal activity prosecuted or not. She is a liar, a cheat, and nobody can discount that. She might as well be a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. The people do not want to give more power to the establishment, unfortunately the nationalists won out over the egalitarianists, hopefully though egalitarianism can find it's way back into America. The article mentions us 'sheep' being 'stupid' -- but we're not stupid enough to NOT see through the lies and falsity that is Clinton.. I honestly think Trump simply said what he knew Republicans wanted to hear to anger them and get elected. He might temper and actually be an okay President... or he might be stunted by congress every step of the way and be the 'break' we need from Dem control to regroup and put a more progressive front up in 2020. I know for one thing - change is in the air, that change can be in the style of Hitler, or the style of FDR, sadly we didn't pick the FDR candidate, but we'll have another chance in 2020.

mcphage 10y ago
> She lost because of corruption and illegal activity prosecuted or not. She is a liar, a cheat, and nobody can discount that. I can discount that: if the issue was her being a liar and a cheat, then we wouldn't have elected a liar and a cheat—but we did. So apparently it isn't the stumbling block you think it is.
braveo 10y ago
> I know for one thing - change is in the air, This is basically my take on it. I preferred Trump over Hilary even though I think both candidates were terrible, and the reason is because we know what we're getting with Hilary, we have no idea what we're getting with Trump. You hope for the best and prepare for the worst, but atleast it's a change. Obama ran on change and ended up not being the change people voted him in to be. Maybe Trump will be it, maybe not. We'll find out.

tway123 10y ago

https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656 https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656