45th President of the United States of America

josh wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

The big disappointment will come afterwards.

He is not the source of racism and the fact that he got to where he is proves just how significant that is at the level of power in the US.

His wacky beliefs are widely held.

His influence is greater than he is -- the judges he leaves behind, the damage to government policy, the division he created.

The US is sick and crazy. Trump is not that sickness -- he just exposed it.

The Republican party is all kinds of crazy -- some kinds of Trump crazy and some other kindes that are no better.

The US prefers not to show what it is all about but with Trump you get to see it.

 

That's not entirely fair.  54% of voters did not vote for him.  Plus, those who didn't vote tended to be anti-Trump. 

The level of support he got and the inability to do something about it with the last year of history shows that country is sick.

Your logic is like telling a patient dying of cancer that 95% of their body is healthy.

I'm sure that, on average, there were more anti-Trump non-voters than Trump non-voters. And I'm not even saying that because many voters were both anti-Trump and anti-Clinton. What I mean is that if 100% of eligible voters voted and could only vote for either Trump or Clinton, Clinton would have done even better in the popular vote on a relative basis.

The demographics are clear. Compared with the last two elections, the POC vote was much less. And, although Trump got a slightly smaller percentage of the white vote than Romney, he still got a solid majority of the white vote and white people were a higher percentage of total voters compared with '08 and '12, particularly in the rust belt.

Trump did well with minorities for a Republican, but there's no question that if more minorities voted the majority of those extra votes would have gone to Clinton.

Also, the "Trump can't win" narrative coming from the media definitely caused some complacency among Clinton voters. The people who supported Trump knew every vote counted and had a point to prove, those who supported Clinton thought it was in the bag and I'm sure a fair number of them stayed home.

So no, Trump couldn't reasonably claim that the majority who didn't vote supported him.

Cody87 wrote:

So no, Trump couldn't reasonably claim that the majority who didn't vote supported him.

Don't let that straw man catch fire.

Nobody said that.

I said that this is an indication that the US is sick. The illness does not have to be 100% to say it is far higher than the fringe that can be ignored. The rest would have to do something about it. If they can't -- sick again.

That a person with these views could become leader and stay there for a year with this means the country is deeply sick. Playing numbers about what supported him is meaningless. More than a third still do and that cannot be ignored.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

I said that this is an indication that the US is sick. The illness does not have to be 100% to say it is far higher than the fringe that can be ignored. The rest would have to do something about it. If they can't -- sick again.

That a person with these views could become leader and stay there for a year with this means the country is deeply sick. Playing numbers about what supported him is meaningless. More than a third still do and that cannot be ignored.

You forget that not everyone who voted for/still supports Trump believes he has the views you believe he has. Whether or not you're correct about his views aren't the point. The point is, if you believe Trump is horrible things X Y and Z, and therefore you believe that 64 million Americans support horrible things X Y and Z, then you still don't understand that most people who voted for Trump do not believe Trump is horrible things X Y and Z. Yes, I'm sure there are a few people - relatively speaking - who actually do believe Trump is X Y and Z and voted for him because they actually are horrible people who support X Y and Z. But I would wager that is less than 5% of the people who voted for Trump.

It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of black and hispanic voters who voted for Trump don't believe he's a white supremacist. It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of women who voted for Trump don't believe he's a sexist. It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of those in the LGBT+ community who voted for Trump don't believe he's a homophobe.

They don't read the news you read. They don't follow the same personalities you follow. They see something different than what you see, and so they voted for a different candidate with different views than the candidate that you see. It doesn't mean they're right, but it does mean they're not just a large group of sick people who are knowingly embracing a fascist dictator, which seems to be what you're suggesting.

Cody87 wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

I said that this is an indication that the US is sick. The illness does not have to be 100% to say it is far higher than the fringe that can be ignored. The rest would have to do something about it. If they can't -- sick again.

That a person with these views could become leader and stay there for a year with this means the country is deeply sick. Playing numbers about what supported him is meaningless. More than a third still do and that cannot be ignored.

You forget that not everyone who voted for/still supports Trump believes he has the views you believe he has. Whether or not you're correct about his views aren't the point. The point is, if you believe Trump is horrible things X Y and Z, and therefore you believe that 64 million Americans support horrible things X Y and Z, then you still don't understand that most people who voted for Trump do not believe Trump is horrible things X Y and Z. Yes, I'm sure there are a few people - relatively speaking - who actually do believe Trump is X Y and Z and voted for him because they actually are horrible people who support X Y and Z. But I would wager that is less than 5% of the people who voted for Trump.

It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of black and hispanic voters who voted for Trump don't believe he's a white supremacist. It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of women who voted for Trump don't believe he's a sexist. It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of those in the LGBT+ community who voted for Trump don't believe he's a homophobe.

They don't read the news you read. They don't follow the same personalities you follow. They see something different than what you see, and so they voted for a different candidate with different views than the candidate that you see. It doesn't mean they're right, but it does mean they're not just a large group of sick people who are knowingly embracing a fascist dictator, which seems to be what you're suggesting.

I am saying the country is sick. This is not abut a majority being one way or another. It is naive to think that 1/3 of US people are completely unaware what this man they support represents. They are okay with it.

Trump is a symptom of the disease not the whole disease.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

I am saying the country is sick. This is not abut a majority being one way or another. It is naive to think that 1/3 of US people are completely unaware what this man they support represents. They are okay with it.

Trump is a symptom of the disease not the whole disease.

Oh I never said Trump supporters don't know what he represents. Trump supporters know exactly what he represents. What I said was, what he represents to them is not what he represents to you.

And, frankly, I don't know why you seem to think those voters should respect your interpretation of matters when you literally do not even understand that they have a different one.

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It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of black and hispanic voters who voted for Trump don't believe he's a white supremacist. It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of women who voted for Trump don't believe he's a sexist. It should be obvious, for example, that the vast majority of those in the LGBT+ community who voted for Trump don't believe he's a homophobe.

It should be obvious that that vast majority of people who eat a huge portion of poutine for lunch every day don't believe that a huge portion of poutine is unhealthy.

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They don't read the news you read.

Why not?  It's in the same language.

Do they just reject it outright because it doesn't tell them how healthy a huge portion of poutine is??

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Just the white ones? What about the other Americans who make over $250k? Are they excluded from his tax cuts?

No worries!  That disproportionately small population is included too!

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Oh I never said Trump supporters don't know what he represents. Trump supporters know exactly what he represents.

But evidently, non-supporters have no idea.  Huh.

Magoo, now I'm going to maintain my level of political neutrality and not  disclose my political affiliation.  However in real life I do support one political party.

If my candidate that I would normally vote for hypothetically becomes exposed for past criminal behaviour  like a major sexual assault in his past one week before the election, I may decide that I don't want to vote for him. But since I can't vote for the other parties because I don't support what they do and how they govern, then I may not vote.

You were saying that if I don't vote then I'm supporting all the other parties. And I'm not. I'm just in a position where I cannot consciously vote for the party that I normally would.

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You were saying that if I don't vote then I'm supporting all the other parties. And I'm not. I'm just in a position where I cannot consciously vote for the party that I normally would.

Then no matter how good your reasons for abstaining might be, you're still giving equal weight to all candidates. 

Strangely, even including the one you suddenly feel you could not vote for. 

But please tell me that "like a major sexual assault in his past one week before the election" isn't intended as some kind of totally inappropriate allegory for "like some e-mail server nonsense revolving around Anthony Weiner that magically popped up one week before the election". 

As an interesting aside, today is the day that "Carlos Danger" reports to prison.  He might not have fucked who he hoped to fuck, but he certainly fucked the Democrats.

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No, I was not referring to Anthony Weiner at all.

Fair enough.  I wasn't (really) referring to him either. 

I thought that since we had started talking about the U.S. Presidential election, you were referencing voters who suddenly could not vote for Clinton, because one week before the election, terrible and horrible things were uncovered about her e-mails.  If this has zero to do with her then, great!

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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They don't read the news you read.

Why not?  It's in the same language.

This. This is the million dollar question. Figuring out the correct answer to this question is figuring out how to stop Trump.

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Just the white ones? What about the other Americans who make over $250k? Are they excluded from his tax cuts?

No worries!  That disproportionately small population is included too!

I know it wasn't you who said it, but then why were just the white ones singled out? Seems kind of discriminatory to me. Something about fighting monsters...

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Oh I never said Trump supporters don't know what he represents. Trump supporters know exactly what he represents.

But evidently, non-supporters have no idea.  Huh.

I didn't say that either. He represents some things to some people and different things to other people. They don't need to be mutually exclusive things, either. I'm not saying Trump doesn't represent xenophobia for example - he clearly does. But as one example, he also represents a pushback against corporate international trade deals like the TPP. So a Trump supporter can say that Trump represents nationalism, and Sean can say Trump represents nationalism, and even then when they use the same language they aren't seeing eye-to-eye because nationalism means something different to Bob the miner from Wisconsin than it does to Sean in Ottawa. It doesn't mean either are necessarily wrong (although they could be in some instances). It just means they are seeing different things.

The entire point I've tried to make is that Trump represents mostly good things to Trump supporters, and mostly bad things to his detractors. This should be obvious, but Sean's arguments imply that he believes that Trump represents the same mostly bad things to his detractors as Trump represents to Sean and those things appeal to his supporters because they are bad as well. That's not the case.

And my criticism is that Sean's inability to see such speaks to a significant lack of empathy. You can say they are wrong, or misguided, or hypnotized or whatever, but when you say "I think Trump's literally Hitler and all of his supporters know it" that's much different than saying "I think Trump's literally Hitler and he's fooled those who support him into thinking he's Jesus." The latter presents an opportunity for redemption, the former will only create more division.

This can be taken a lot farther than the nationalism case. To both groups, Trump's election is the result of increasing racism in American society. They do not agree on who the racists are. To both groups, Trump's election is a result of sexism in American society. They do not agree on who is systemically discriminated against. To both groups, Trump's election is the result of increasing religious intolerance in society. They do not agree on who the intolerant ones are. Both groups see fascism rising in America. They definitely do not agree on who the fascists are. And so forth.

I'm not saying Trump's supporters are right. I'm not saying that at all. And I'm not saying that Trump's detractors don't know what he represents either. I'm just saying that the two groups are working from different premises and so they have reached different conclusions. Sean seems to think they are working from the same premises. Go ahead and think that if you want, but I hope it's at least obvious that such an outlook leads down a dark parth not unlike the path you hope to guard against. 

Cody87 wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

I did say that enough Trump supporters support views that are extreme that I defined the country as ill. I stand by that. It is not even that unusual an opinion.

It is not hard to see evidence for this in many respects.

Quite so. Hillary Clinton herself called Trump's supporters an irredeemable basket of deplorables. Amazing that that brilliant political ploy didn't convince them to vote for her.

Seriously. What exactly is the thought process? Either you and her are right, and you can't do anything except round them up and shoot them because they're irredeemable, or you're wrong and you've just alienated them further by validating their views that you don't understand them. There is no possible scenario where this is productive.

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Your opinion is not more valuable or valid  just becuase you are being rude and insulting.

A very polite man once gave me some advice, that I'll now pass on to you. "Don't let that straw man catch fire."

Let's start by saying that you clearly do not know what a straw man argument is. Google is your friend.

And of course you are running both sides of the conversation in your head -- intruducing to my part the things you want to criticize. Nowhere did I say anyone was "irredeemable." Nowhere did I position myself as agreeing with Clinton or saying the same thing -- that was you.

I said that there is sufficient evidence to say that the US is sick. There is a critical mass there believing in outright lies and choosing to have no critical thought or even desire for evidence. The hate there is out of control and there is little road to reconciliation.

I have said enough here that you really do not have to make up out of your head my side of the conversation. Please stop doing that.

From a psychology point of view, plenty of people would vote for Trump again, only because it would be easier than having  to reconcile the fact that they voted for him in 2016 but not in 2020.  If he royally pisses them off then they may choose differently (because they can tell themselves that they only voted for him the first time because he hadn't pissed them off) but as long as he grants a few wishes, kicks out a few Muslims, lays a few bricks for that wall, and keeps wearing the red hat, he'll either win again, or not lose too badly.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-why-donna-brazile-book-...

"But the idea that Brazile's book amounted to a smoking gun that the primary was "rigged" against Sanders is "problematic" in its own right, for two reasons:

1) That the DNC had things stacked against Sanders from the start wasn't secret. After all, the DNC wouldn't even let Sanders use their headquarters as a venue to announce his candidacy, way back in April of 2015. As the book Shattered explains it, DNC officials felt it was inappropriate to "give Sanders the imprimatur of the party." He made his announcement on a strip of grass outside the Capitol. He was never treated by the DNC as a real candidate, not from the first minute of his campaign.

2) But it didn't matter! Clinton would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway. As her proponents have repeatedly pointed out, the race wasn't that close. Even as a Sanders supporter, I concede this."   ...

As the campaign continued, and we saw both Trump's rise and results like Brexit, the "too much democracy" argument began to emerge even more, along with the embrace of techniques that would have horrified true liberals a generation ago.

In the last year, we've seen the blue-state establishment celebrate the use of the infamous FISA statute against American citizens, and the use of warrantless electronic surveillance against the same.

We've seen the ACLU denounced for defending free speech and we've seen sites like Buzzfeed celebrated for publishing unverified and/or slanderous material, usually because the targets are politically unpopular.

Liberals used not to believe in doing these things not only because they understood that they would likely be the first victims in a society stripped of civil protections (a school district forcing the removal of Black Lives Matter stickers is a classic example of a more probable future in a world without civil liberties).

No, they eschewed these tactics because they genuinely believed that debate, discussion, inclusion and democracy brought out the best in us.

The point of the Brazile story isn't that the people who "rigged" the primary were afraid of losing an election. It's that they weren't afraid of betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn't believe in them anymore."

It's a pretty good article. Here's the link:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/08/donald-trump-johnstow...

The thing that I find most interesting is something Sean pointed out about the hate and racism - that's the through-line from pre-election to shortly after to one year in. These people are deeply racist and they respond to the dog-whistles and blatant racism on Fox and in Trump's tweets.

It's as if being white is all they have left and they're not letting go of it even in the face of being able to vote in someone equipped to do something about their troubles.

Also an interesting article about low enrollment in training for alternatives to coal jobs:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retraining-insight/...

What many experts call false hopes for a coal resurgence have mired economic development efforts here in a catch-22: Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The stalled diversification push leaves some of the nation’s poorest areas with no clear path to prosperity.

Federal retraining programs have fared better, with some approaching full participation, in the parts of Appalachia where mining has been crushed in a way that leaves little hope for a comeback, according to county officials and recruiters. They include West Virginia and Kentucky, where coal resources have been depleted.

But in southern Pennsylvania, where the industry still has ample reserves and is showing flickers of life, federal jobs retraining programs see sign-up rates below 20 percent, the officials and recruiters said. In southern Virginia’s coal country, participation rates run about 50 percent, they said.

It's heartbreaking, but what more can you do? They're clinging to a narrative that is unmoored from the realities they're living in.

Timebandit -- Sounds to me like you agree with Dan Savage.   Retraining program didn't work so nothing to do but let them rot?   They did not have a chance to vote for a candidate who would do something about their situation.   The other candidate helped create their situation and had no interest in fixing it.  

I agree it's sad, and my suggestion for fixing it would be for a party, any party in the USA to take up legitimate concerns around poverty and jobs for manual labours or poorly educated people of all races.

Sean -- not going to parse the poll or argue your analysis about it.   Usually find your comments on polling methodolgy interesting and insightful.   But I profoundly disagree that the election was all about the racism of white middle/lower class Americans, and I think continuing to see it solely or mainly through that lens will lead nowhere near a solution to the deep problems the American government is shoving on it's citizens and the world.

After reading what Sean and Timebandit had to say I want to provide a different perspective.

Is this fault of society or the individual.  Here is an example, the messaging around individual blame for choosing a poor choice of education followed.  We blame the individual making a poor career choice, you should have studied STEM courses instead of humanities.  Individual failure.  But what about the structural barriers like the fact the idea that "full employment" means 4 to 5 unemployment which means some workers will not work.  Society failure.  

Individual failure-Blame the individual so there is no need to do anything the individual is at fault.

Society failure-Means that society has commit resources break down structural barriers.  This much harder to accept because we need reform of the system and those run the system want status quo. If you accept society failure will you go the next step and accept collective responsibility for that failure or will you blame the individual?

So to me a racist individual is not a failure of the of the individual rather a failure of the society.  Society has let down the individual through poor socialization.  The word socialization includes education, economic factors, etc.  Its leads to the acceptance of demagogy and many social ills.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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We blame the individual making a poor career choice, you should have studied STEM courses instead of humanities.

Well, there are at least two good reasons for choosing an education:

1. you want to get a good, lucrative job.

2. you're fascinated by something and want to learn as much as you can about it.

It's only an issue if someone chooses Elizabethan Poetry for their Masters, and is then shocked when nobody's hiring Elizabethan Poetry grads.

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So to me a racist individual is not a failure of the of the individual rather a failure of the society.  Society has let down the individual through poor socialization.  The word socialization includes education, economic factors, etc.

But does it include "family"?  And how shall society control that?

I don't think most schools are making kids read "Little Black Sambo" any more (we read it in Grade 1 in 1973 -- no joke).

But how is "society" supposed to overcome what kids are taught at home?

The first part sounds to me a strawman argument. But I will play your game.  Whats a more reasonable argument.  

a)We have structural unemployment because too many people went to school to be Elizabethan Poetry grads.

b)We have structural unemployment because capitalism needs a reserve army of unemployed to make things function correctly.

Part 2.

If the liberal ontario government in 2015 had the courage to discuss changes to the sex education curriculum than surely we can include something on racism.  Consider that many parents spend 8 hours in the workforce while the school have the kids for 6-7 hours.  There is an opportunity here.  But to large degree home socialization is no longer what it was, the family unit is off loading some socialization work to the schools.  Schools have the power to really influence what kids think.