I did not see him as a threat, no. I was confident he would not be president. In fact, I think there are comments of mine 'round here where I basically said “Doesn’t matter what he says, not one bit, because whatever else Hillary will win. No doubt about it. She could eat a live baby on CNN tomorrow and still be president because the alternative is patently ridiculous.” And I was dead wrong, evidently, but if only it was my folly alone. The common wisdom at the time was that the GOP imploding to the stage of making Trump their candidate, a candidate the party itself loathed and which our best models told us would never, ever, ever be president, gave Hillary the greatest gift she could have asked for.
So, no. I didn’t see the threat. If he won sure. But that was such a remote possibility that it was scarce worth thinking about. The enormously skewed statistical models show that, as foolish in retrospect as my opinion was, it wasn’t picked out of thin air.
If you saw that he was likely to win before the elections themselves, well, your foresight astounds me.
I wasn’t the only one. We discussed it at length here in many “Bernie” threads. I mean, let’s temper this back to reality. Nobody, self included, “knew” he would win. We intensely suspected or strongly speculated that he would.
My suspicions were aroused when I saw the scantly attended Hillary rallies, compare to all the Bernie noise, and verified that this was in fact the truth. People were not attending her rallies like they were for the other guy.
And then when Bernie lost Brooklyn and something like 100,000 votes were missing. When that happened, I knew the Dems were fucked and Trump would have it in November.
I really don’t think that’s some kind of mental gift. It was just recognizing writing on the wall and lots of people knew it, and talked about it, not just me. I’m not going back to all those threads, and half of those people are gone from here now anyways. But that’s how I remember it.
We’ve got plenty of the former, and whoever survives the outcome of the anti-vax movement could easily go through lack of healthcare, homelessness (exposure), hunger, or lack of potable water. Those wheels have been in motion for a while.
I didn’t make a conclusive call immediately prior to the election, but that was mostly because I’d foolishly listened to some Democratic party “experts” who insisted that Clinton had the electoral college so well engineered that she’d win even if she lost the popular vote.
Large scale agriculture may collapse, but if we reach that end stage… Well, a small plot can be managed by a person or family group, hand pollinated if necessary, and feed that same small group. And if it is at that stage, we won’t have large groups left to feed.
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
James Madison, Statement (1787-06-26) as quoted in Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 by Robert Yates.
