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"People become sick of this, and vote Trump just to fuck with everyone." This is extremely superficial, arrogant, even offensive to people who voted for Trump.

by soneca 10y ago

"People become sick of this, and vote Trump just to fuck with everyone." This is extremely superficial, arrogant, even offensive to people who voted for Trump. And that is the reason why Trump won IMO. Opposition couldnt understand (not even recognize) the legitimate and valid thoughtful reasons people had to vote for Trump.

dongslol 10y ago
I'm talking here about the alt-right, e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos' crowd, who self-profess that this was partly why they voted for Trump. People for whom this election was largely cultural, and saw Trump as a "fuck you" to the safe-space, microaggression, language-policing left. I know they have real concerns, like economic pain, threats to their way of life, and concerns about mass immigration—concerns which, by the way, I argued in the grandparent that the left counters with labels. "Your concerns aren't real; you're just xenophobic." But I think the cultural stuff was a big part of it. I realize they don't represent all Trump supporters, and never said they did.
- spangry 10y ago
  I hope (what I have come to term) 'the authoritarian left' realise that this is basically what the military might call 'blow-back'. If you're going to stage a cultural revolution you should at least get that there will be some form of counter-revolution at some point. And if your revolution is concerned with things that don't concern the the rest of the populace (and in fact sounds like complete gibberish to them), best of luck with that fight...
josefresco 10y ago
Anecdotally, the people I know personally who voted for Trump did so because they "didn't like Hillary" which I translate as "just to fuck with everyone". They knew who they were "supposed" to vote for, and rejected that. They didn't once repeat any of Trumps proposed policies or justify their choice based on public positions. They were given a choice between two flavors of politicians, and picked the one they liked (or the the one they didn't, not like)
- belorn 10y ago
  Recall seeing statics (polls) that showed about the same amount of Hillary and Trump voters decided on policy issues. The most popular reason to vote in both camps was to make sure than the other candidate did not win. Its was very symmetric.
- germinalphrase 10y ago
  As a Midwesterner, I've found many unexpected Trump voters who had similar motivations. A lot of: "well, Hillary isn't going to change anything and things need to change". Not a lot of deep consideration as to what this 'change' will mean (beyond potential reinvestment in infrastructure and "jobs"). I actually think this may be quite a problem for President Trump down the line. These are friendly, community minded people who - generally speaking - overlooked (rather than covertly support, as everyone seems to project) Trump's more outlandish/discriminatory rhetoric. If he comes up short on the community reinvestment and gets mired in a bunch of unseemly scandals, the support of these people will drop off.
  - josefresco 10y ago
    I'm actually worried it won't be a problem. For those Americans who don't obsess over policy, all Trump needs to do is make them happy in the week of, or month of the re-election and he'll have a decent chance. Combine this with the voters in each side who "robo vote" for their party (mostly to prevent the other party from winning) and it will again be a close race. Lastly, many of the policy changes can't be easily measured (or take much longer for the effects to be felt) which allows the party in power to convince voters to stick with them to allow time for the new policies to take effect.
    - germinalphrase 10y ago
      Maybe - but I'm skeptical that he will largely be able to follow through with his promises. Many of the big issues we face aren't problems created by/solved by political leaders. For instance, we're not going to quickly turn around job loses in the US because we're fundamentally seeing a shift in the importance/balance of labor to capital. Low-skill manufacturing jobs are never coming back - and there isn't a ready pool of alternative ideas that previous presidents were just refusing to implement (or some nonsense). If a president could solve that problem it would already be done. That said, what people think is true is - of course - whatever they can be convinced is true. Immigration really isn't/hasn't been a problem, so if the president can build an unnecessary wall and convince people that immigration isn't a problem anymore because of it then maybe we're boned.
tqwcs 10y ago
I know plenty of people who actually did vote for Trump because they hated Hillary. Only reason given.
- derrickdirge 10y ago
  I knew a handful of people who simply didn't "like" Clinton, but also felt a need to "throw a wrench into the system." Some of whom I had pegged as relatively progressive.
mikeash 10y ago
I'm sure it's a small minority, but I encountered people who said they thought Trump was a bad choice but were voting for him just to upset liberals.
pluma 10y ago
I'm still struggling to understand where this obsession with explaining how Trump got people to vote for him comes from. The real killing blow was the low turnout for the Democrat candidate. Trump only had to beat Clinton and practically nobody (outside the most progressive parts of the US) voted for Clinton. Trump may have swayed some undecided voters in his favours as a protest vote but all he had to do was rally the Republican voters and make Clinton look so bad the Democrat voters wouldn't want to get her elected. The question isn't why Trump won, the question is why Clinton lost. In terms of absolute numbers, Clinton couldn't even match the numbers with which Obama was re-elected. She won the popular vote but the popular vote is not where you win the presidency and she knew that. The voters who should have been Democrat voters didn't have faith in their candidate and I think they didn't even have faith in their party. Trump's election is not simply a weird victory of a Republican outsider, it's a massive defeat of the Democrat establishment.
- nailer 10y ago
  I know a Trump voter who voted for him because of his Orlando speech where he was apparently the only candidate to state what actually happened: Islamists were killing gay people. Everyone else apparently didn't talk about either or both of those things.
  - derrickdirge 10y ago
    Because that's not what 'actually happened'. A single young man with a sordid past and complicated relationship with the gay community claimed allegiance to Islamists immediately prior to massacring dozens of people at a gay-centric dance club.
    - jazzyk 10y ago
      According to Wikipedia, no credible evidence for the "self-hating, closeted gay" narrative has been found by the FBI. The killer was upset about the US presence in Iraq/Syria and had been preparing the attack for some time, possibly helped by his wife (arrested and charged with helping him). Both were Muslims. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Orlando_nightclub_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Orlando_nightclub_shootin... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/politics/noor-salman-arrested-orlando-shooting-omar-mateen.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/politics/noor-salman-a...
krapp 10y ago
>This is extremely superficial, arrogant, even offensive to people who voted for Trump. It's also what Trump supporters on this very site and elsewhere have stated to be their rationale. Trump was meant to be a "brick through the window of the establishment" thrown by angry, conservative, lower-middle class white voters driven to desperation by globalism and liberal cultural oppression, who wanted the existing system destroyed so that something more representative of their values could replace it. Various articles have been written about the phenomenon, so clearly it was a factor.

by soneca 10y ago

dongslol 10y ago

I'm talking here about the alt-right, e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos' crowd, who self-profess that this was partly why they voted for Trump. People for whom this election was largely cultural, and saw Trump as a "fuck you" to the safe-space, microaggression, language-policing left. I know they have real concerns, like economic pain, threats to their way of life, and concerns about mass immigration—concerns which, by the way, I argued in the grandparent that the left counters with labels. "Your concerns aren't real; you're just xenophobic." But I think the cultural stuff was a big part of it. I realize they don't represent all Trump supporters, and never said they did.

spangry 10y ago
I hope (what I have come to term) 'the authoritarian left' realise that this is basically what the military might call 'blow-back'. If you're going to stage a cultural revolution you should at least get that there will be some form of counter-revolution at some point. And if your revolution is concerned with things that don't concern the the rest of the populace (and in fact sounds like complete gibberish to them), best of luck with that fight...

josefresco 10y ago

Anecdotally, the people I know personally who voted for Trump did so because they "didn't like Hillary" which I translate as "just to fuck with everyone". They knew who they were "supposed" to vote for, and rejected that. They didn't once repeat any of Trumps proposed policies or justify their choice based on public positions. They were given a choice between two flavors of politicians, and picked the one they liked (or the the one they didn't, not like)

belorn 10y ago
Recall seeing statics (polls) that showed about the same amount of Hillary and Trump voters decided on policy issues. The most popular reason to vote in both camps was to make sure than the other candidate did not win. Its was very symmetric.
germinalphrase 10y ago
As a Midwesterner, I've found many unexpected Trump voters who had similar motivations. A lot of: "well, Hillary isn't going to change anything and things need to change". Not a lot of deep consideration as to what this 'change' will mean (beyond potential reinvestment in infrastructure and "jobs"). I actually think this may be quite a problem for President Trump down the line. These are friendly, community minded people who - generally speaking - overlooked (rather than covertly support, as everyone seems to project) Trump's more outlandish/discriminatory rhetoric. If he comes up short on the community reinvestment and gets mired in a bunch of unseemly scandals, the support of these people will drop off.
- josefresco 10y ago
  I'm actually worried it won't be a problem. For those Americans who don't obsess over policy, all Trump needs to do is make them happy in the week of, or month of the re-election and he'll have a decent chance. Combine this with the voters in each side who "robo vote" for their party (mostly to prevent the other party from winning) and it will again be a close race. Lastly, many of the policy changes can't be easily measured (or take much longer for the effects to be felt) which allows the party in power to convince voters to stick with them to allow time for the new policies to take effect.
  - germinalphrase 10y ago
    Maybe - but I'm skeptical that he will largely be able to follow through with his promises. Many of the big issues we face aren't problems created by/solved by political leaders. For instance, we're not going to quickly turn around job loses in the US because we're fundamentally seeing a shift in the importance/balance of labor to capital. Low-skill manufacturing jobs are never coming back - and there isn't a ready pool of alternative ideas that previous presidents were just refusing to implement (or some nonsense). If a president could solve that problem it would already be done. That said, what people think is true is - of course - whatever they can be convinced is true. Immigration really isn't/hasn't been a problem, so if the president can build an unnecessary wall and convince people that immigration isn't a problem anymore because of it then maybe we're boned.

tqwcs 10y ago

I know plenty of people who actually did vote for Trump because they hated Hillary. Only reason given.

derrickdirge 10y ago
I knew a handful of people who simply didn't "like" Clinton, but also felt a need to "throw a wrench into the system." Some of whom I had pegged as relatively progressive.

mikeash 10y ago

I'm sure it's a small minority, but I encountered people who said they thought Trump was a bad choice but were voting for him just to upset liberals.

pluma 10y ago

I'm still struggling to understand where this obsession with explaining how Trump got people to vote for him comes from. The real killing blow was the low turnout for the Democrat candidate. Trump only had to beat Clinton and practically nobody (outside the most progressive parts of the US) voted for Clinton. Trump may have swayed some undecided voters in his favours as a protest vote but all he had to do was rally the Republican voters and make Clinton look so bad the Democrat voters wouldn't want to get her elected. The question isn't why Trump won, the question is why Clinton lost. In terms of absolute numbers, Clinton couldn't even match the numbers with which Obama was re-elected. She won the popular vote but the popular vote is not where you win the presidency and she knew that. The voters who should have been Democrat voters didn't have faith in their candidate and I think they didn't even have faith in their party. Trump's election is not simply a weird victory of a Republican outsider, it's a massive defeat of the Democrat establishment.

nailer 10y ago
I know a Trump voter who voted for him because of his Orlando speech where he was apparently the only candidate to state what actually happened: Islamists were killing gay people. Everyone else apparently didn't talk about either or both of those things.
- derrickdirge 10y ago
  Because that's not what 'actually happened'. A single young man with a sordid past and complicated relationship with the gay community claimed allegiance to Islamists immediately prior to massacring dozens of people at a gay-centric dance club.
  - jazzyk 10y ago
    According to Wikipedia, no credible evidence for the "self-hating, closeted gay" narrative has been found by the FBI. The killer was upset about the US presence in Iraq/Syria and had been preparing the attack for some time, possibly helped by his wife (arrested and charged with helping him). Both were Muslims. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Orlando_nightclub_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Orlando_nightclub_shootin... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/politics/noor-salman-arrested-orlando-shooting-omar-mateen.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/politics/noor-salman-a...

krapp 10y ago

>This is extremely superficial, arrogant, even offensive to people who voted for Trump. It's also what Trump supporters on this very site and elsewhere have stated to be their rationale. Trump was meant to be a "brick through the window of the establishment" thrown by angry, conservative, lower-middle class white voters driven to desperation by globalism and liberal cultural oppression, who wanted the existing system destroyed so that something more representative of their values could replace it. Various articles have been written about the phenomenon, so clearly it was a factor.