THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

That night, I was dragged to my gf's parents house for a Hillary celebration pizza party. It was an absolutely unbearable 6 hours. I've wanted to write a post about it for a long time just to get it off my chest but it would have to go into a private forum.

I would read it.

I could live another 200 years and I would still never understand how these right-wing candidates get any support from minorities and immigrants. I know that this had very little to do with Trump winning the election and that it was less about him over-performing McCain and Romney and more about Hillary under-performing in comparison to Obama but it is still baffling.

I found out a few weeks ago that my twenty-year-old relative supported Trump in the election. My knee-jerk reaction was 'what a piece of shit, his grandmother is an immigrant, that makes no sense.' Then I found out that his grandmother also voted for Trump...

Similar topics:
http://www.publishedauthors.org/t9893-would-you-vote-for-this-woman-in-2016-and-why

I was also listening to a report about Arab and Muslim minorities living in poorer suburbs around Paris who were supporting Le Pen & the National Front. Their rationale was usually something about needed stability and economic growth, but she has explicitly stated that the children of white French people should be favored for university entry and have easier access to other state programs and services...

Again, these voters represent a fraction of the minority/immigrant electorate in France and the vast majority of French Muslims will undoubtedly support the opposing candidate (whoever the ends up being) in the run-off, but its still dumbfounding to me.

chrondog wrote:

raj gibson wrote:

C-poots wrote:Having been in the UK during the Brexit vote, I'm getting more and more fearful of a surprise win from Trump and seeing the sort of confidence evident in Raj's post only makes me more fearful.

Well, I was speaking to Undo's pessimism even in the event that Trump loses (maybe unclear since I didn't quote his whole post). I am also still relatively confident he'll lose the general, and while I think the Brexit vote is a good reminder that people shouldn't take things lightly or underestimate the margin of error in polling, I think the American case is significantly and crucially different, not in small part because we have a much larger non-white population.

African-American and Hispanic people don't have their heads in the ground. They know what the stakes R, and I think they will keep Trump out of the White House. But yeah, nothing 4 granted. Going to vote myself this afternoon.

revisiting the greatest hits today in hopes that it would inspire me to do some more political writing. nope. bleak as fuck.

chrondog wrote:it was really sad to read a lot of what i wrote and go back to that headspace where i was SO SO confident that Hillary would win. and i was. i was nervous yet confident on election day. i checked with my country registrar online again to make sure my ballot had been received. it felt like the dawn of new day in many ways. this was our chance to reject so many things that are fundamentally gross and wrong with society, embodied by Donald Trump.

there is such a strong demarcation between the way i thought then and the way i think now. i feel like electing Hillary and having the country commit to another 4-8 years of competent, forward-thinking leadership, at least on some basic level, and locked in the social gains we've made as a country. now i feel like hate and ugliness and been unleashed and infected my brain. i know it's stupid because people haven't changed, they've just been exposed, but i feel the Trump malaise to this day.

I could spend a lot of time unpacking my posts earlier in this thread but one thing that stands out is that I had a lot of (ultimately misplaced) confidence in things to sort of take care of themselves. I definitely had to spend some time re-evaluating things after the election and changing the way I think.

For the people feeling the Trump malaise, I really can't recommend enough getting out and doing something. It doesn't even have to relate directly to Trump; it's probably actually better the more local it is. I'm now certified to register people to vote and am looking at a lot of other volunteering/action opportunities. There are tons of opportunities out there right now.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/the-destruction-of-hillary-clinton-sexism-sanders-and-the-millennial-feminists

undo wrote:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/the-destruction-of-hillary-clinton-sexism-sanders-and-the-millennial-feminists

The mental gymnastics that someone must have to go through to write an entire book around a bankrupt premise like that hurts my head.

What issue would you take with this particular excerpt?

Is there a falsehood afoot in this account or are we living in a time when it's both too late and too soon to do a proper Hillz-reevaluation?

She acknowledges this generational divide and seems to accept that both Hillary's appearance and career confirms the suspicions that many younger voters have about her. But then most of the excerpt is just her just lecturing younger voters about how they are misguided and ignorant of the historical struggle made by 1960s women activists. Every transgression of the Sanders campaign is accentuated, whereas things like Hillary receiving hundreds of thousands dollars for secret speeches with Goldman Sachs is swept under the rug. Why?

Also, liberals want to have it both ways. On the one hand, Sanders and Hillary are both politically progressive and neither is anti-establishment (both were Senators with long political careers). I think there is a lot of truth to that statement and that the perception around the Sanders campaign wasn't grounded in reality. Although, Sanders push for debt-free college and Medicare-for-all, not to mention him self-identifying as a socialist (which does matter) differentiates him from both Clinton and Obama. So the first argument is that they are basically the same and the only reason younger voters flocked to Bernie is that he was an out-spoken man. Basically, that just isn't true. I wasn't holding my nose when I voted for Hillary because she was shrill. I was holding my nose because right after the DNC she was courting "centrist" establishment conservatives, because remember this was the pragmatic thing to do, rather than trying to rally her base of young supporters by building a bridge to younger progressives. The blame is always placed on the doorstep of the Sanders campaign because he didn't do enough to convince people that Hillary was a good candidate. That isn't his job, but as soon as she became the Democratic candidate it was hers.

The other thing that liberals are going to do then, when the similarities argument is eroded, is to just default back to calling Sanders a pie in the sky socialist. That has been the default answer for decades and it is over now. Most candidates who ran to the left of the Party platform were somehow deemed unsuitable for the office or too radical for the country. Turns out that was always made up because we just elected a reality television celebrity psychopath. And yet, despite this, we are still getting the same tired and boring arguments form a morally bankrupt and politically defeated center. It's dumb and should stop.