I liked her. I thought she was smart, savvy, hardworking, highly qualified.
If you just talk to people you know, you hear the things you want to hear. More than half of those who voted, voted for her. Millions of people who didn’t just ‘hold their nose and vote for the lesser of 2 evils’ but who felt strongly, passionately, that she was the most qualified candidate to do the job.
But that’s OK. We have a narcissist who is proud to sexually assault women. Almost as good, right? Because who really cares about women?
I consider them pretty credible, yeah. They screwed up Trump’s primary odds, but they were pretty upfront about the high degree of uncertainty going into last night.
“So on the morning of Nov. 9, the Kremlin’s royal court must have surely een as shocked as everyone else. It’s possible that enabling a Trump victory was never the point — better to cause mischief, such as with the DNC hack, and make a future Clinton administration’s job more difficult.”
…
“Plenty of Russian foreign-policy insiders,” Galeotti wrote, “also appreciate that Trump’s volatility … could mean he’d make for an unpredictable and potentially problematic interlocutor for Moscow, too.””
Many people in my family are “on the other side.” They’re not ‘inhuman monsters’; they’re willfully ignorant and easily manipulated pawns, who won’t care until they personally feel the repercussions… and again, by that time it will be too late.
“Blame” never solves any problems; it just creates a diversion while shit gets even worse.
The way it usually “just happens” to work out that voting for either democrats or republicans is an “establishment” vote. That does not make the parties or candidates equivalent, but they still draw from the same spectrum of established problems and solutions.
Fuck it. You get that space, to feel bleak, to mourn, to be angry, to go through the fifty stages of depression, whatever. If some of these fools can pop in here just to say another dickheaded thing (“Really it’s all Alicia Machado’s fault…”), then you get to be you, however that might be.
Thank you for posting this article. It pretty well encpasulates what I (along with many others) am feeling right now.
This is so much worse for me than when Gore lost in 2000. Gore’s loss a shocking gut punch to me and look what it brought us. In W’s first term alone we had massive erosion of civil liberties, multiple failed foreign wars, huge hits to the sciences, and blows to rights of women and same-sex couples. When his second term rolled around all I could muster was a, “great, four more years of this shit.”
This loss though just hits me so much harder, though. Maybe because I’m older and wiser than I was then and saw just how dark things could get in the early 2000s. While Obama wasn’t the Jesus everybody was hoping for, a lot of good has happened under his presidency and I can see this all being rolled back (and further regressed) all in the name of MAGA.
I feel such a sense of hopelessness for the future right now and I’m one of the “privileged” ones. I can’t even begin to comprehend what must be going through the minds of those who aren’t cis white males right now. As usual I appreciate your candor here to provide some much needed perspective.
One point of optimism: I look at all of the pessimism and doomsaying, and see reflected back the same pessimism and doomsaying that McCain and Romney voters were crying out to the skies when Barack Obama was elected and re-elected.
The worst hopes of the far-right didn’t come true when Obama, and a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House, were elected in '08.
Let’s hope our fears are similarly proved wrong by history.
I would love to have weighted voting where candidates would get points based on how you ranked them. Third parties would actually get support then and it would change our entire party landscape, giving us many more choices. As it stands, we’re stuck with a very rigid and divisive landscape.
For anyone trying to analyze why people would have voted for Trump, definitely one place to start from is that they didn’t believe Hillary Clinton would do any of the things she promised. The number of Americans who said she wasn’t trustworthy meant that even many of of her own voters didn’t trust her. It would be baffling if more than a tiny fraction of those who voted for Trump thought she would actually try to raise minimum wage, for example.
Also keep in mind that everything else you view as facts might have been regarded as questionable. Where do you get facts? Experts? The media? Empirical research you conducted yourself and then had peer reviewed to make sure you didn’t fuck it up?
We’ve been fed this ridiculous culture of experts that tries to give media pundit economists that same status as research physicists, the result is that people rightly don’t trust anything they hear. The more I hear about how opiates were sold as “not that addictive” to America the more I think this position of complete non-trust makes sense. You need resources to try to sort out trustworthy sources of information from untrustworthy ones, resources you are unlikely to have without a college education.*
Don’t go from there to, “But why trust Trump?” because maybe they didn’t even trust him. In a condition of total non-trust, though, how would you make a choice?
Here is the biggest thing I think Trump offered a lot of people as a reason to vote for him: “I love the poorly educated!”
And when we laughed at him for saying it, we offered them their biggest reason not to vote for Clinton.
* This is not a dis against people without much education. Education is a useful thing to have, but not having it doesn’t make you worse than other people any more than having a car makes someone better than me. That’s a resource they have that I don’t. Democrats lost this election largely because of people without college educations. Why the fuck are so many people so undereducated in the “greatest country in the world”?
Before you get too attached to the idea of restricting bad speech, remember that in the US, for the next four years, Donald Trump and the judges he nominates would be the people who decide what is good or bad speech.
Answering bad speech with more speech is the least bad, least intrusive option. The alternative is to give power to someone, someone who may be Donald Trump, to decide what is or isn’t okay to say.
Nah, this is total horseshit. My point is that Donald Trump will be restricting free speech over the next four years and that your stupid constitution won’t do anything about it because the politicized court he appoints will side with him. The judges won’t decide what is good and bad speech, they will decide whether what he is doing counts as a restriction on speech, legally. And even if they didn’t side with him he could do it anyway because demagogues don’t follow the law. If you assume an evil government will get in place, then none of your laws matter at all. Laws aren’t magic, they don’t stop people from doing bad things.
You have two choices: Restrict the speech of people who use speech as a weapon to harm others, or wait for them to amass support through tribalism and intimidation and let them restrict all the speech they want.
The argument you are making is that we can’t tell the difference between non-racists who restrict hate speech and racists who restrict anti-hate speech. You are advocating the right to stab people because you need to protect your right to cut vegetables.
Everything good about freedom of speech would be covered off by “governments shouldn’t pass laws unless there is a good reason to,” and “people expect governments to act in good faith and never vote for those who have shown they don’t.” But in America you have absurd faith in free speech to accomplish some good that it demonstrably never has, and as a result you replace those principles with, “governments will do the absolute worst that they can get away with,” and “people hopelessly vote for people who they don’t trust because they don’t trust the other guys even more.”
In fact, Silver was locked in a long Twitter thread yesterday stating exactly that all other sources were dangerously downplaying Trump’s chances. He had to defend why his model was giving Trump still competitive when nobody else did. He’s turned out much less wrong than most of the field, again.
I already pointed out that this is stupid because Trump has a significantly lower median income in his followers than any other GOP candidate. Nate Silver’s article literally proves the point that Trump took the working class from the Democrats.
