Here’s a possible solution for you and other “like minded free thinkers”
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I think there’s a huge difference between “you voted differently than me! Whine!” and “You literally chose a white supremacist whose stated goal is to take away my personal freedoms.” That’s not “intolerance”.
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To discredit your point, I could write the same thing about pseudo-liberal propaganda writing Clinton up fueled by fear of Trump. Keep telling yourself that Clinton was a good candidate and you may have the same shitshow in four years.
Edit: By the way, this is not an American problem. Over here, so called “Socialist” and “Leftist” parties are getting overrun by the far right everywhere because they have been in bed with the establishment and financial elites for decades, and have lost their defining characteristics in a futile attempt to curry favour with their electorate that have gone over to the right-wing reactionaries.
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If the purpose of empathising with other people is to regain power for the Democrats, then it doesn’t make sense (at least in the short term). If the goal is to improve communication and the person doesn’t otherwise give the impression of being driven by bigotry, building bridges is a reasonable aim. This is a clip that I imagine has been shared quite a bit on the right:
All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
Bill Clinton was not Trump, but this appeal to strengthening borders and deporting criminal and non-criminal illegal aliens appealed to the same fears, and got a standing ovation. In 2008 he used the same claims that due to the tough economic times, they needed to make America great again, bring back jobs, lower fuel costs etc., and vote for Hilary.
My point is not to say that they’re basically the same, but people who have the same concerns may well be drawn to similarly worded appeals. Our information input is ideologically curated, so while we hear the worst of candidates like Trump and reasons to vote Clinton, others hear different messages and may be attracted in spite of strong disagreement, not because of it. This election wasn’t lost by white men being attracted to Trump (the difference was negligible). Despite all the claims that Trump was terrible for women, he didn’t lose many of their votes. Despite all the talk about Trump’s racism, he actually gained support among Black, Hispanic and Asian people and Clinton lost it bigly. Even the voice of the future, the 18-25 year olds, were decidedly less keen on Hilary than Obama.
White Evangelicals did vote overwhelmingly for Trump, and this is made to look like they are racist. That may be, but it needs to be explained why they liked Obama so much more than Clinton.
As far as I can tell, a lot of this is empire building (Pence as VP, conservative supreme court judges, rolling back abortion rights etc.). In any case, this seems to be the underlying reasoning behind the Trump voters I know. It’s not outright bigotry in the sense that it’s not because they hate minorities or women, but I would say it is continued fallout from the Moral Majority and an attempt to bring back conservative values that privilege Evangelical positions. They are losing power and lashing out. If this is true and made a significant difference, then this is less true:
The demographics may look the same, but it seems that white GOP support has shifted toward fundamentalists, and they’re losing support elsewhere (or at least Trump is). Not only that, but Evangelical support looks a lot less significant when only a third strongly backed him before Pence came along:
According to a Pew Research Foundation study (conducted before Trump announced his choice of Pence), white evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump, with 78 percent saying that they would vote for him. Now in fairness, only about a third “strongly” back him, while 42 percent say it will be difficult to choose between Trump and Clinton because “neither one would make a good president.” In fact, antipathy toward Clinton is the dominant emotional driver among many of these prospective Trump voters, with 45 percent of them characterizing their vote for Trump mainly as a vote against Clinton.
I don’t agree with a lot of the motivations of GOP voters, but I don’t think they’re as monolithic, entrenched or only based on bigotry as we are led to believe. Asking these questions can decrease polarisation and increase the chance that things could change. Much as in the prison system, isolating and vilifying those who hate makes things worse – we have to engage and empathise with those we see as irredeemable assholes if we want to see improvement.
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The tax bases of the cities and suburbs heavily subsidize people living in the sticks, not the other way around.
Let’s not confuse subsidy with hand out. People in the city need people in rural areas producing food. It’s a symbiotic relationship fostered by the current economic paradigm.
Any cultural divides are not merely whimsy, they are necessary to maintain status quo. When either so called city slickers or country bumpkins start to feel that one side is taking more than its fair share, then you are also going to start thinking that any perceived differences in culture or priorities are due to moral failings. Trump capitalized on this. Let’s stop doing this.
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As a Clinton supporter, I disagree that she was equally “shitty” as a literal white supremacist endorsed by the KKK whose goal it is to take away my personal rights, so I’ll disagree with you there; again, I’ll state that by her resume alone, she was the most-qualified candidate for president in the past several decades, likely my lifetime. But I understand that people have many various personal grudges with her and that she was deeply disliked by more voters than anyone expected.
I do think that her campaign was one of the most underwhelming and lousy pieces of marketing I’ve seen in many a year. Her ads not only did a crappy job of inspiring people, but actually hurt her by focusing on her opponent; she was in point-and-gasp mode for the whole campaign. Whoever ran her campaign was somehow never able to figure out what voice she should have, what key messages to convey, and worst of all, gave the impression that she was the inevitable winner, which turned people off even more.
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Robby Mook.
Personally, I don’t think that Clinton and Trump are even remotely equivalent; Trump is clearly the much worse option.
But there’s a big difference between “not the worst option” and “good”. To me, Clinton was not a good candidate; at best, she was tolerable.
OTOH, she’s no worse than 90% of the established US political class. I’d be happy to see the majority of both US major parties imprisoned for extreme and blatant corruption [1].
[1] But that ain’t never gonna happen, because they’ve rewritten the law so as to make themselves impossible to prosecute.
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The Republicans hold the vast majority of State governments, the Senate and the House. And that’s with a Democratic party that already tilts ridiculously to the “racist, sexist, fascist” in order not to alienate too many voters, as that’s it’s adaptive strategy to true, active egalitarianism being a natural minority.
Sure, a fair number of people are for equality, as long as it only means that the laws don’t actually enforce discrimination. As soon as they’re asked to make meaningful sacrifices or make significant cultural changes, to no one’s surprise, support shrinks.
(And if you think racism and sexism and homophobia is weaker in new immigrant communities, you are mistaking lack of power and general social acquiescence for absence. There’s no pool of non-racist/sexist/homophobic people to draw upon anywhere. (Edited for clarity))
I’d say that perhaps 10% of the Americans and 15% of Canadians share the political leanings of the gestalt here.
I live in my bubble, but at least I know it’s a bubble.
Only about 3% of the US population is directly engaged in food production, for which they presumably earn fair compensation. The rest of the people living in the country are every bit as reliant on government handouts as the worst fictional welfare queen in the city. But the welfare queen is not asking me to maintain a million dollar bridge used by a handful of people. I’m personally fine with that up to a point, but when they somehow convince themselves that the arrangement is reversed and that they don’t need no stinking government, I am left scratching my head.
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From Googling I see that’s not quite a settled conclusion, especially if you don’t include agricultural subsidies. But it doesn’t change the point that people in the country rely less on government services and public works in their day to day lives, even if it’s true that those services cost more per capita.
For example people in the country rely less on public transit, street cleaning, health code enforcement, parking rules, and that sort of thing. They have yards instead of parks, private cars instead of public transit, malls instead of public squares.
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That doesn’t sound like the country to me. To me, country is a mile from the nearest (unpaved) road, and even the fire department is privatized.
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You’re right but most people include small towns and incorporations into “rural” or “country” so those 5-digit population areas still get listed as country by a lot of people.
Spoken like a true city dweller! Just kidding, but of course I’m using “country” more loosely than that. In fact I’m including suburbia.
Here’s a pretty amazing map that the New York Times made showing areas that Trump won. It could, of course, also be a map of population densities, or urban versus non urban:
Here’s the opposite map, showing where Clinton won. Another way of putting it, of course, is that its a map of American cities and high population densities:
Here’s the source article by the way.
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Yeah, contains no big city other than Phoenix and only 46% of the population.
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Suburbia gets way more respect than the country. Plus, a lot of people are so deep in their bubble that they have never even been to the country, can’t describe it, and have no frame of reference.
I love the maps, by the way.
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Plus, it implies that the working class is somehow unable to stand up for themselves and demand the political representation that best serves them. It’s insulting, really, to suggest that working class people are unable to do anything to protect their interests other than choose A or B once every 2-4 years, and if A isn’t absolutely perfect well then by-gum they’re going to pick B to show everyone how pissed off they are.
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Because I know exactly where they are, I can plainly see Kansas City (both sides), Austin, and San Antonio.
Edited for clarity: …as voting for Clinton. At least the KC suburbs.
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Clinton’s policies this campaign were Term 2 Obama, with a salt of Sanders in. Saying that Hillary is a very shitty candidate somehow implies that Hillary is worse than, oh, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie(!), etc etc. No. Hillary may be out of touch. Hillary may be overly reliant on establishment politics. But at least Hillary had policies that would progress the country - she ran on “let’s continue the work we started in 2008” and LOST to a guy who wants to revert to pre-civil rights 1950s.
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