I don't think I can say this in the Elections forum

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Bryan_Ekers

You raise a number of interesting and valid points and I’ll adjust my view, but I’m not sure that wanting to replace the system with anything is an improvement over wanting to replace the system with how things used to be.

Thank you for your kind words. Most people I talk to feel that things aren’t working now and they haven’t been for a very long time, 20 years at least. Not everyone was getting rich off the dotcom boom but when it went bust it sure seemed to smack all of us, so there’s not even any nostalgia for the good parts of the 1990s.

@Bryan_Ekers

There certainly was a “shake-things-up” time in recent history - the Tea Party rise in 2010 - but that didn’t seem to help matters for the Trump supporters you describe (did it?) and I admit finding it kind of depressing that a plurality of American voters will follow someone who promises to take them someplace different for the sake of being someplace different, rather that pursue rational methods to improve their lot in plausible ways. Sure, a lot of them were pissed at Obamacare, for example, but Obamacare was relatively recent. Where is the demand for something better than Obamacare? I get that Trump was clever in saying not just “I’ll repeal Obamacare” but “I’ll repeal and replace Obamacare”, dangling a promise of something better, but what aside from that promise did he actually offer and can deliver?

All of the rational methods that people have seen tried over the last 20-30 years have not worked for them. Any deal that gets made that might help Average Citizens is immediately co-opted by the wealthy and by business. The PPACA is a great example of that, IMO, and one of the reasons that people hate it: it isn’t the type of help that people wanted or needed.

No one was pissed that they couldn’t get health insurance, for fuck’s sake. People were pissed that health care cost a lot of money, more than it does in any other country, and they didn’t have enough money to get health care.

But here comes the PPACA, offering our tax dollars to health insurance companies and mandating that we give them money out of our pockets besides, and then we have to let them dole money out to our doctors. Who the fuck wanted that besides the people skimming money off it?

So the electorate decided to go with “fuck it”, since that isn’t (they think) going to be easily co-opted by anyone, at least not for profit (Malcolm McLaren was not a US citizen and is, fortunately, currently unable to capitalize on this particular opportunity).

Voting for the rational choice has gotten the World Trade Center blown up, seemingly ineffective healthcare reform, the Housing Bubble Collapse, stagnant or dropping middle class wages, a wider gap between the rich and the poor, more terrorism, etc. There’s not a lot of truly good policies that had major impacts on people’s lives in the last 30 years of government, and even the ones that did have good impacts had a lot of negatives as well.

@Bryan_Ekers

It saddens me that a lot of Americans are seemingly stupid, but I’m not less depressed by the idea that many of them are vaguely angry enough and directionless enough to do something stupid and random out of desperation instead of something specific that might work for them.

Talk to them. Listen to them. Empathize with them (I can’t emphasize that enough, really). Then, through your actions, show them that you want to help them and that you can, with the help they want, not with what you think they need. If you think they need something, ask them. You can even tell them why you think it would a good idea. But if they don’t want it, don’t do it; that just creates stress and tension.