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This is the biggest irony of the article. Everyone in the establishment media is trying to figure out how Trump won without their endorsement without addressing
by ewzimm 10y ago
This is the biggest irony of the article. Everyone in the establishment media is trying to figure out how Trump won without their endorsement without addressing the actual issues voters cared about. It even says in this article that people suspect that the media is biased and consolidated, implies that it's actually objective and fact checking, while also acknowledging that every editorial board supported Clinton and implied that the only reason someone would vote for Trump is racism and sexism. It questions whether Facebook is too powerful while acknowledging that the actual source of information on Facebook is people's peers. What it's really questioning is whether people are too empowered to talk to each other rather than listening to authoritative sources.
Michael Moore is the liberal source that I've seen most quoted by Trump supporters. He says the reason people voted for Trump is that they are sick of a neoliberal agenda which focuses on intervention in foreign wars and Free Trade agreements which seem to be little more than corporate protectionism. They're sick of policies which have been proven to increase wealth inequality rather than enrich lower and middle class workers. They're sick of economic uncertainty in a time of unprecedented productivity. Newspapers gloss over this and focus on racial conflict, which is a real problem that needs to be addressed, but it's not the whole story, and editorial boards which generally agree with neoliberalism are unwilling to question it with any depth.
- hiou 10y agoThe reason many people, including myself, look to xenophobia as one of the driving forces in the election is because I'm fairly certain Donald Trump would struggle to place somewhere like Belgium on the map and likely can't list the countries that border Syria. He is so grossly unqualified for the position that it is difficult for me to understand what other reason someone would chose to vote for him. Clinton was a poor choice for sure but Trump doesn't even pass the phone screen of the basic necessary knowledge for the position. Edit: I should clarify that the point of my comment is not to reopen the debate about Trump as opposed to give some context as to why many people look to those specific issues as a driver of his election.
- mc32 10y agoHuh, so obviously highschool students and college students who can't place countries on a map can't do so because they are xenophobes. That's a very interesting conclusion to make.
- hiou 10y agoI would hope you wouldn't elect a high school student to be President of the United States. I would also hope that knowledge of basic geography of important regions in the world would be a prerequisite for a position that largely deals with foreign affairs. If we completely ignore basic competency, then I must conclude his rhetoric, which largely revolved around scapegoating immigrants and the people of foreign nations, played a large part in the decision. Edit: Again, this is intended to give context as to why some, including myself, look to those issues as a driving force in the election.
- bigtex 10y agoYou mean how the left wants to ignore islamic terrorism and instead attacks Christians who don't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding?
- hiou 10y agoHonest question, do you get most of that stuff from Facebook, email chains, talk radio or maybe another source I'm unaware of?
- bigtex 10y agoDon't watch or read Fox News, don't believe anything in email chains and don't do Facebook really. I get this information by collecting large amounts of information from various sources. I see the ridiculous things that the Sally Kohn's of this world do to try to equivocate what happened with the Orlando massacre to the general Christian opposition to gay marriage. When leftists try to compare people having and voicing an opinion to the actual murder of fellow citizens, we have a problem.
- soundwave106 10y agoA big real estate New York businessmen / reality TV star (certainly of the New York "establishment" for decades) entered the Republican primaries. Donald Trump was a nobody. Then, he started talking about walls around Mexico and banning all Muslims. This made him very popular in many places. This ended up carrying him all the way to the presidency. That is a reason why there's so much talk about this. It's a mistake to think that this is election was just economics. A lot of Trump's support came from very well off people after all. Having said that I do agree with you a fair bit. For a start, "racist" is a bad term. That implies outright hatred, which in my viewpoint is very minority; "cultural anxiety" is a better phrase to me, future insecurity compounded by tribal instinct. EG: It's not "I hate Mexican people", it's "Mexican people took my jobs". Those two sentences are not equivalent. This too is not the only reason people supported Trump either (anything from nostalgia to agreement with policies to Hillary hatred played a role). On the flip side Bernie Sanders showed that non-culturally-anxious economics played well with many Trump voters too. But that initial data point still is troubling to me. And it's less on the people that voted for him and more on the candidate himself. Trump was able to exploit this, and in the process made current culture a lot more toxic.