US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6179

On November 11 2016 02:35 Mohdoo wrote:
Big problem with these rural white communities is that their expectations are unreasonable. The days of raising a family off a single factory wage, and then also buying a house, is straight up madness at this point. It's not even easy for a chemical engineer. WW2 gave people wildly unrealistic expectations.

Does anyone believe there is a path for a factory worker raising a family and buying a house? I really, really don't.

On November 11 2016 02:35 Mohdoo wrote:
Big problem with these rural white communities is that their expectations are unreasonable. The days of raising a family off a single factory wage, and then also buying a house, is straight up madness at this point. It's not even easy for a chemical engineer. WW2 gave people wildly unrealistic expectations.

Does anyone believe there is a path for a factory worker raising a family and buying a house? I really, really don't.

The stuff Trump talks about immigrants is one thing, how MSNBC treats midwesterners is quite another. If you like some densely packed coasts and cities ruling over a sea of red--because votes--I salute your unironic endorsement of colonialism because that's a hard thing to do. Everybody knows where your overlords and moral betters live.

On November 11 2016 01:57 Djzapz wrote:

Well it is a country of 330 mil people across 3+ timezones after all. Nonetheless there's something at least symbolically problematic about electing the POTUS with fewer votes than the opponent. It was a problem in 2000 and it's a problem now, at least in terms of the legitimacy of the president.

On November 11 2016 01:51 TheYango wrote:
The discussion right now about the electoral college is a red herring here. Even if Clinton won the popular vote, it's still true that almost 50% of the country voted for Trump. Whether you disenfranchise slightly more or slightly less than 50%, the problem is still the same.

The electoral map posted by Danglars illustrates the real problem here: we are a country that is living in two different worlds. The way rural America experiences the world is too different from urban America does. Even the urban Trump voter probably voted for Trump for vastly different reasons than his rural counterpart. In the last day since the election, I've been trying to reconcile myself with how so much of the country not only has a different worldview from my own, but one that seems utterly incompatible with my own.

It is easy to dismiss their view as uneducated or illogical, but that doesn't make the problem go away. It's easy to be partisan and blame the other side, when in fact a lot of what's wrong isn't the fault of either party, and is just an inevitable consequence of advancing technology and a shift in economy toward 21st century tech. We need to make a better effort to understand each other as a country, and what we should be doing to help such a massive swath of people who have been left behind by the 21st century.

Clinton’s campaign assumed that the Obama coalition, which relied heavily on urban minority and suburban women voters, was permanent. Democrats saw little need to court blue-collar whites in places like western Pennsylvania, as Clinton did in 2008, or even acknowledge what’s happened there over the past 40 years. In a moment of utter tone-deafness back in March, Clinton even said at a town hall in West Virginia, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Voters remembered that. Across eastern Ohio and rural Pennsylvania, political signs in town after town declared some version of, “Elect Trump, stop the war on coal.” Perhaps without fully realizing it, the Clinton campaign conveyed a blunt message to working-class whites across the region: we don’t care about you.

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.


And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.

Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

• Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
  
• Her scandals weren’t real.
  
• The economy was doing well / America was already great.
  
• Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
  
• And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.

How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

On November 11 2016 02:41 xDaunt wrote:

Sure there is if you live in the middle of nowhere. People who live in the coasts and the elite cities have no concept of the difference of the cost of living when you're in small town, rural America. I go to one such town in Arkansas at least once per year. Last year, there was a house for sale across the street from where I was. Instead of having a realtor's for sale sign, there was a plain white sign staked into the ground that said "For sale -- $19,500 cash only." And this was a big house. Granted, this is an extreme example, but the cost of real estate in these types of rural areas can be as little as 10% or less of what you'd be paying in the more prominent urban areas.

On November 10 2016 23:56 travis wrote:
Oh, I guess I missed the meat of the discussion:

Well anyways my 2 cents on it (as someone who rarely agrees with the vote of rural states), is that the EC is more fair than not having the EC.

The U.S. is supposed to be a union of states. States are supposed to be represented. Popular vote would make sense as the decider if there was only one giant state, and everyone was governed under the same laws and rules. But states have a certain level of sovereignty of their own.

Going only by the popular vote is like telling the people of north dakota(for an example), "even though your state is 1/50th of the union, your vote only matters 1/500th." City regions would always dominate.

Electoral college actually kind of compromises the issue by not giving north dakota 1/50th, but also not giving it 1/500th either.

On November 11 2016 02:20 Buckyman wrote:
Okay, GIVEN that rural and small town voters have real problems that aren't being addressed, how do we address those problems?

On November 11 2016 02:35 Mohdoo wrote:
Big problem with these rural white communities is that their expectations are unreasonable. The days of raising a family off a single factory wage, and then also buying a house, is straight up madness at this point. It's not even easy for a chemical engineer. WW2 gave people wildly unrealistic expectations.

Does anyone believe there is a path for a factory worker raising a family and buying a house? I really, really don't.

On November 11 2016 02:27 Logo wrote:


You can't just pretend everything is absolute. Rural areas deserving solid representation and the will of the people/cities being undercut are not mutually exclusive ideals.

Let me ask you this, what part of the federal government represents the will of the people based on popular vote? The house doesn't, the senate doesn't, and the presidency doesn't.

Shouldn't it be an issue that no part of the federal government is representing the country wide popular vote?

On November 11 2016 02:48 IgnE wrote:


haven't you been reading oneofthem's cryptic posts about infrastructure coupled with targeted programs for small business development?

trump might not be so bad if he focuses on public spending projects. he does like building things. leaving a renewed infrastructure as a monument to his presidency makes sense to me.

what does not make sense to me is President Trump. i cant believe he shares the same office that washington and lincoln had.

On November 11 2016 02:58 Nyxisto wrote:


I still haven't really understood what he is going to pay his infrastructure projects with, given the enormous tax cuts he aims to implement.

On November 11 2016 02:47 Danglars wrote:

I'm very comfortable with this country being several United States. Save the will of the people based on popular vote for very homogeneous societies with smaller populations. In fact, let's call them the governors of states. That's about as much as I'll allow to be a healthy translation of the "will of the people."

The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.