This is my strategy, this is my speech:
"Friends, countrymen - we are a nation of 350 million, 60 million of which are dutiful fucking assholes. So fuck 'em. They want to close borders and institute an SS-style secret police to arrest and deport people of the ‘wrong’ skin color. They want to repeal protections for the weak and oppressed. They want to remove public health care entirely. Their mantra is ‘Fuck everybody, I have money’. Fuck them.
This is our policy for a better future:
Automatic annual federal grants of 4,000 towards post-secondary education.
While I think most virulent racists voted Trump, I don’t think most Trump voters are virulently racist, unless you classify virulent racism as simply not being particularly concerned about making accommodations to the concerns of visible minorities.
However, regardless of how they voted, I will say that I strongly suspect many people who hold aggressively racist attitudes now feel much freer to express their sentiments.
As for why people voted Trump (and right-wing elsewhere), I think it’s simple. We’ve had an unprecedented amount of social and technological change, and many, if not most, don’t like change. They can accept it, but maybe at a quarter the pace it’s happening.
For me, social change means diminished social harm, so it’s easily worth the trade off. We’ve got a long ways to go. But I think for much of the population, the cost of diminished social harm (especially to people that are culturally different) now outweighed the personal discomfort of having to endure social change.
Now, I honestly thought the awfulness of Trump would hold back the inevitable for another 4 years, so I was wrong there, but I did believe it was a matter of time. Now we simply have to see how much progress we lose.
Of course, the question then becomes: what if the racist, sexist, fascists actually are the majority?
Are you to be admired for maintaining your purity in a fashion that enables them to inflict their evil policies upon the populace forever? Some might call putting your own personal desire to be in the right over doing the some good for the greatest number and an evil in and of itself.
Of course, I’m playing the devil’s advocate here. But the appropriate course of action when:
You believe in a democracy and
The moral side is in a minority
are a great deal fuzzier if your goal is to do good rather than simply satisfying one’s conscience.
Not that I’m seriously trying to change your course of action. However, I would suggest accepting that there will be many different strategies and approaches to dealing with this crisis, and none of us should be 100% certain that our strategy is the one that will best limit the harm.
Admittedly, no, so I went back and watched it. I’m not sure what the point of it is, other than arguing about this or expressing anger about it doesn’t make it any better. While that’s probably true, I don’t yet see ANYTHING that will make this better. Our country is run by white supremacist, science-denying, sexist goons. We’re pretty much fucked. Short of another civil war, I don’t see any way to fix this, at least not in any meaningful, long-term way. We’re still cleaning up after George W. Bush more than a decade later, and Trump will be much worse, even in the best case scenario. Positive change in the United States won’t happen within my lifetime, no matter who wins the next election, assuming there IS a next election.
The per-capita government investment and intervention required to facilitate country living far exceeds that of city-dwellers, mainly due to the vast advantages of economies of scale and eliminated redundancies present in urban centers. Not to mention that many rural communities would not even exist today without a network of regulations bringing them vital infrastructure they could never afford on their own. The tax bases of the cities and suburbs heavily subsidize people living in the sticks, not the other way around.
You… vote for a xenophobic white nationalist who’s promised to take away your healthcare, raise your taxes, make abortion illegal, and remove your legal protections if you’re gay? Seems a bit of a leap of logic.
I shan’t be following any of this, and I have no interest in reconciliation. Mainly because those who voted for Trump fall into the “dish it out but can’t take it” classification. They deserve the mental distress that my comments create.
How about: “Would you have considered voting for Bernie Sanders if the two only viable political parties in your country had not forced the choice between a corrupt, war-mongering and globally destabilizing lapdog of the establishment or a primitive, misogynist, racist psychopath on you?”
And this is where I side with those saying that no productive dialog can happen when all we have is pointless, factless, silly namecalling, before and after.
My point is that, while it´s kinda hard to comprehend how someone made the choice to vote Trump, it´s not hard at all to comprehend how someone made the choice not to vote Clinton. The list makes it seem like Clinton was some sort of passable alternative when the whole election was a choice between two very shitty candidates.
Most exactly this. Any attempt to normalize Trump or any of his ideas is a terribly dangerous mistake. I think back to Obama apologizing for calling out racism in the Cambridge (MA) police and asking both the professor and the cop to the White House “for a beer” and wonder what the [redacted] it is about Dem politicians that make them incapable of standing behind their positions.
If you engage with Trump supporters, you run the very real risk of providing them with, in their minds, validation of their position.
Trump did not apparently win by converting substantial numbers of Dem voters. He drew the normal GOP base, minus a few aristocrats, plus a few extra Klansmen. The Dems lost because the part of their base that were brought to the polls by belief in Obama’s hope have now returned to despair.
Much of the “we need to empathise with Trump voters” argument seems to be based in the idea that the only way to regain power is to convert Trumpkins into Dem voters, and that just ain’t true.
The GOP base is baked into their positions. You aren’t going to convert significant numbers of them to Dems; at best, you can convince them to stay home on election day.
Any attempt to attract Trumpkins is likely to devolve into offering policies that are Trump-lite. Firstly, this is an ethical failing; even a Lite version of Trumpism is still awash in racial animus. Secondly, it won’t work: Trump will always win in a bidding war of racist bastardry.
The GOP base are not the only source of power. Non-voters outnumber GOP voters two to one, and their average political leanings on the issues are closer to Bernie than Trump. Most Americans support affordable and universally available education and healthcare. Most Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy to reasonable levels. Most Americans aren’t aggressive bigots; most Americans aren’t fascists. Give them a positive reason to vote (not just fear of the other, not just liberal social policy pasted on top of plutocracy) and they can overpower voter suppression and the gerrymander.
your comments about clinton show clearly how well right-wing propaganda works. clinton may have been the establishment candidate with enough ties to the democratic foreign policy clique to make her more likely to resort to military force than obama but on most other issues she is to the left of obama and not very far to the right of sanders. obviously the long-term and concerted efforts of right-wing “news” organizations have managed to effect even left-liberal voters.
