Non-American here. I was more in camp Clinton mostly because of the electability argument. Man, did that blow up in my face.
Having said that, my country, Austria, just elected a green/independent president over a far-right lunatic with a surprisingly big margin. Not all hope is lost yet.
The overriding feeling I’ve got is the opposite. Lots of people here voted Dem despite their misgivings about Clinton. But it depends on which state people live in anyway. Lots of Californians here.
ETA: lots of people here who were perfectly happy with Clinton in her own right, too.
Yes. I was relieved to be greeted by that news this morning from the BBC. 
I feel a lot of it has to do with proximity, fortunately.
Funny actually. Everyone expected Austria to be the first to fall for fascism again (you know, with the small mustachioed guy and all that). But then there was Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Czech Republic, and the Orange One. Hey, so we’re not that bad anymore, I guess.
I think the Founding Fathers would be horrified to see all the political power in the country concentrated in the hands of two Established political parties. (Granted they immediately formed two political parties and set the form to this day.) I think there needs for be more serious choices on the ballot to guard against years when both parties misfire.
There was the worship of wealth by the millions of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
There was Comey’s ratfucking.
There was Russia actively interfering in the election by hacking the Dems. and spilling everything into the public eye, gaming social media to get fake news stories to trend, as well as their propaganda sites, fake comments, and fake social media accounts.
There was WikipediaWikileaks peddling the data from the Russian hacks and adding extra BS editorializing to make fairly normal bureaucratic party politics look sinister.
There was the additional bitterness/alienation among Sanders backing Dems due to the Russians shining a light on the Dem. party’s internal machinations.
There was Clinton’s terrible campaigning skills, total lack of charisma, lingering minor scandals that were hyped as massive corruption, and long history of unhinged propaganda that brought motivated opposition.
There was Clinton’s well funded ground game by people who in theory should have been good at getting out the vote, but didn’t.
There was the press giving equal coverage to Clinton’s emails as Trump calling Mexicans rapists, and the press being played like a fiddle by Trump’s sensationalism.
There was the SCOTUS overturning key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to actively disenfranchise Dems., along with the GOP’s normal stable of anti-democratic voter suppression mechanisms.
There’s the Greens campaigning for the environment with a hyper-focused attack on the Dems., though Stein was such an unhinged crackpot, they were a minor factor among many more serious.
The polls being so unreliable that a Clinton win seemed highly likely might have contributed to decrease voter motivation as well. Hard to tell.
This loss had a huge mix of variables. It’s too easy to pick your favorite hobby horse and see it as the one real issue, when it really was a perfect storm of serious problems converging.
The Democratic Party establishment seems completely determined not to learn anything from this. They’re grasping at any straw they can find to blame anyone except themselves.
This is super easy to solve, just reverse the GOP strategy from 2010. Use whatever issue you need to, get in control of the 2020 census and the redistricting.
There are clear steps. The real problem is getting enough control to write assumed voter protections into state or federal constitution(s).
When they thought he was a populist for real. They then sank into invisibility in the right wing consciousness.
You mean Wikileaks, surely?
D’oh!
I would have gave you a like, but the Borg don’t deserve to be insulted like that.
We may all have to escape to Austria.
Like the Trapp family, but in the opposite direction.
Didn’t read through to the “unhinged” or “hobbyhorse” bits. Not even going to check the profile.
Did a quick scan and sounds like your average not particularly progressive person trying to “stick it” to liberals.
It wasn’t a country right up to WW1, though. It was an empire or a portion of it. To imagine that they were somehow entirely blameless in the disaster that was that war ignores an awful lot of agency on their part.
On that you’ll find no argument from me!
Historians agree on few things, of course. The nationalist interpretation of history (the notion that “nations” are natural, long-standing configurations, not modern inventions) has long been used as a means of ignoring culpability for things like wars, where more than enough blame can often be shared. Histories, especially those that filter into the public consciousness, tend to reflect the view of nationhood as the natural state of man, and those views are often projected back into the past.
I’d suspect that the Austrians played a role in suppressing the Serbian/Yugoslav nationalist movement within it’s borders, which contributed to anti-A-H feelings along the southern portions of the Empire. And Serbia had only recently won its independence from the Ottoman empire, and were seeking to “free” portions of the A-H empire that they viewed as “naturally” Serbian. But the empire wasn’t as willing to view it as part of the Serbian national “right” and actively suppressed nationalist movements in the empire…
Maybe “blame” isn’t the correct word here, but it seems to me that the Austrians were just as active in shaping events as the Hungarians or Serb nationalists (and the Russians, who had a long history of intervening on behalf of Serbians, because of a shared slavic identity). I guess I just don’t buy that the Austrians had no role in the disaster, as they were just as active as everyone else in attempting to shape central Europe to their liking.
