Until about half an hour ago, I’d only met one! For sure, that is - I probably know dozens of people who’ll vote for Trump who aren’t admitting it, and you probably do too.
But one of my cow-orkers just switched from Bernie Sanders to Trump, believe it or not. I personally have difficulty believing it, especially since the guy’s wife is Colombian. Seriously; they speak Spanish almost exclusively in their home.
Currently I’m planning on voting for Jill Stein. Like Bernie only better.
I believe it. Tell people who like Sanders that he can’t win and that they should suck it up and vote for Clinton, that’ll happen. If being pissed off with the system is a bigger factor than leaning left, there you go.
Like Bernie only with 0% chance.
(admittedly, I voted Green in the UK last year)
That’s what staff and advisers are supposed to be for. It is possible that successful lawyer-politicians have the same tendency as engineers to think that their expertise is directly applicable to all other fields and are thus loath to seek consultation or accept input. And obviously the factual truth of a matter sometimes takes a backseat to political goals, but that’s hardly specific to lawyers.
Most of the people in my professional life seem to agree on the following: they plan to vote for one of the other Republican candidates – Rubio seems to be the majority favorite – but if Trump becomes the official nominee then of course they’ll vote for him in the general election because he has an R next to his name.
And I’m starting to hear the nonsense fears from the 1980’s again.
Change is very, very scary to toddlers. They’ll go back to baby toys and behaviors whenever frightened. I think that’s what we’re seeing here.
I don’t think it’s a completely useless phrase. If I do bad in the world, I should expect to reap bad karma in return. I just think it’s inapt here.
In the case of Drumpf, he’s got decades of wronging other people. Decent people should be able to call him on that without reaping bad karma in return. Anything less, in my opinion, is intimidation.
I personally think that’s a broad generalization if you include the bbs in that lump. I, personally, have attempted to educate people as to how much of a con artist and enemy of working people that Drumpf really is. I know that you know that, as I know you’ve been a witness to Drumpf’s horribleness.
I’d say that depends.
Trump has definitely built a coalition. One part is certainly disaffected and maltreated workers, who have my empathy and whom I try to enlighten to the true legacy of Trump. He’s fucking bad to working people, and will betray them.
One part of his constituency is an absolutely horrid remnant of confederate racists, whom I condemn to the dustbin of history. I don’t think they are reachable.
Along for the ride are, of course, the profiteers and the craven opportunists. I don’t think they are likely to be swayed, so I’m happy to expose them.
Well, I think President Trump is actually pretty likely at this point, but the state I live in is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the official Dem candidate will landslide here regardless of who that is. Well, in the upper two counties, that is - the relatively sparsely populated southernmost county, which is mostly agricultural, will go for whoever most resembles Huckabee in their minds (which might well be Trump) but they’ll still be outvoted by the upstate Democrats.
So for me, the point is to help smaller, better, less corrupt parties achieve and maintain 5% of the vote, because they need that to stay on the ballot here. It’s one of very few ways I can make my vote actually do something during a general election.
After using that simile, I thought a bit harder about it. Because Jesus would say-- and I don’t think he was wrong about violence-- that if someone attacks you, the best thing you can do is to not retaliate, not seek revenge, and not even feel anger. And that’s not just a practical strategy to reduce violence, it’s a moral power move; it’s saying that if you commit violence, I won’t sink to your level, I’ll leave you down there by yourself, because eventually you’ll have to look in a mirror.
So, yes, I suppose I should try to not attack Trumpolines, and not harbor anger toward them. The act of pointing out their racism and sadism allows them to believe that it’s the external attack that’s upsetting them, rather than their own conscience. I accept that I have more work to do in this regard.
But there’s also a ticking clock element here. Say Trump gets a million voters who, in the fullness of time, will renounce the motives that led them to do it. Well, those million people could put him in the White House, so it’s enormously preferable that they are prompted to examine their motives now, even if that prompting gets a lot of people bent out of shape.
Republicans were only able to win the presidency the last two times they did by finding various ways to rig them. Given all the establishment republican disdain for Trumpadump, I wonder if they’d be willing to do it this time.
That’s a really good point.
You probably do on that, and I generally agree with what you and @Funruly have said about it. But I thought maybe…well, with these responses about the sense of empathy or condemnation, is it at all apparent that I wasn’t quite talking about that yet? Because really I was still stuck on the first word, understanding.
I think actually understanding Trump’s rise is probably the first step for anything else, and I get the impression people are instead building narratives to localize blame – to this fringe movement, or these politicians, or maybe now we can scapegoat SJWs – to not face the point of how popular politician is popular. It’s not really comfortable but I bet we do ourselves no favors leaving it out of account.
This is probably just echoing my earlier post, though, so in case I’m really not explaining myself well I will leave it there.
That’s a really good point. People do tend to ignore the idea that popular politicians might be popular because they have popular ideas or positions. Everyone is so used to thinking about how people pander to this demographic or that, how their marketing is tricking people into voting for them. What about people voting for them just because they want to vote for them?
This is how I felt in the last Canadian election when our incumbent government was going after Muslims hard to try to win and for a while it looked like it was working. They were rising in the poles. People were saying things like, “This isn’t what Canada stands for,” and I was saying bad, “Bad news, this is exactly what Canada stands for.” In the end they didn’t win, but I think that was because their appeals to xenophobia weren’t enough to overcome people’s general distrust of them after 10 years of shitty governance and corruption, it wasn’t because the xenophobia wasn’t selling.
merely that we agree to let the popular position win, even when we know it to be evil.
After being harried every day by unpopular, undemocratic, and counter-to-reality policies and laws of education, employment, insurance, voting, medical care, etc., the people must listen to libertarian twats lecture us about how the opinions of a minority of a minority prove that democracy is a crock and should be abandoned.
Thanks! I could be watching your debate on Fox instead.
FYI… I can’t get your link to come up, for some reason.
Yes, but to be fair, if there is any one actor who works for his role, it sure as hell is the awesome as fuck Peter Dinklage…
Appears it was supposed to be to this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0052FF7YM
So… question… if we are supposed to treat his supporters with empathy, when do they start doing that with the rest of us Americans? Why can’t they treat the rest of us with empathy? How long do we take their BS, vitriol, and hatred? When are we finally in a position that we can demand empathy from them? When they’ve rounded up everyone in our country who they deem as unAmerican, and gassed them, or at the very least brutalized them and made them second class citizens?
GOP has for a long time been destroying trust in press…
This is a ridiculous claim and gets at the heart of why the mainstream punditry class does not get Trump’s appeal at all. The PRESS destroyed trust in the press by being a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America and shameless shills for corrupt power. The internet has provided real free speech for the first time and Trump, at least, is calling bullshit on a lot of things that are actually bullshit.
The quasi-liberal pundit class has always had contempt for the poor and working class Americans in the “flyover” states so they happily assume everyone supporting Trump is a racist. Matt Taibbi (of course) nails it in his excellent RS article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224
Who on Earth are these people, and what media corporation has given them a TV camera? Seriously, I’d like to know. The only one I’m aware of is Rachel Maddow. The internet is an entirely different game. It’s best to keep in mind that the people who are most afraid of their own shadows get their punditry from TV.
The saddest thing about the right-wing message about how we shouldn’t trust the media is that the message is delivered by people working in media, and broadcast on the very media people are being told not to trust. Conservatives would die in droves if they had to internalize all the BS they project.
It can be both. The GOP (and the ring wing in general) has been crowing about liberal bias in the media for decades. At the same time media sources have increasingly (if I believe the stories of the golden age of Watergate reporting) allowing their financiers to dictate their content. The result is that we have a press that constantly shills corporatism being accused of somehow being biased in favour of leftwing politics.
This would work better if Congress hadn’t dramatically cut its professional staff of experts and advisors in the 90’same a LA Gingrich
