"Is it that the Dems don't understand white, working-class America?" No, that's not it

My version: “You buttered your bread, now you have to lie in it.”

This is a bit off. As some women and brown people voted for Trump. If you’d have been paying attention you’d realize that what Trump really said was that he was going to murder ALL NON-WHITE MALES!!!

GO TRUMP!!!

Voter turnout was not much lower than in 2012.

I was wondering why he didn’t support Bernie more then I realized that from where he is standing on the political spectrum, they both look like dots on the horizon.

Quite the opposite.

IIRC, McCain lost the 2000 Republican primary because some Bush operatives in South Carolina spread the rumor that the daughter that McCain adopted from one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages was actually McCain’s love child with a black woman.

IIRC, when Republican operatives were spreading the rumor that Obama was a Muslim, McCain publicly corrected members of an audience that brought up the issue.

He has some bigoted views on women and gays in the military (and gays in general).

I didn’t agree with McCain on gays in the military but I would have vote for him over Gore (and I voted for him over Bush in the primary, this was back in the day when I considered Republicans to be a viable alternative to Democrats, you know, before we invaded Iraq and the GOP lost its mind). So, I can see how someone can disagree with Trump on applying a religious test to refugees but still support him over Hillary.

I can see how people do many things, but supporting Trump without being personally bigoted means that one doesn’t place much value on opposing bigotry, or else being ignorant of what bigotry can actually consist of, both of which I think warrant strong criticism.

You can oppose bigotry and still vote for the bigot because your alternative is Hillary.

If so, I think your (not you personally) values are seriously out of whack and you deserve a lot of criticism. Nothing Hillary did or proposed comes close to as bad as the damage that bigotry does to America.

But, but, but, emails… benghazi… whitewater…

See there’s three things, compared to the singular of Trump’s enabling and encouraging of bigotry and intolerance, easy choice.

Or… more likely, they do place value on opposing bigotry, but not as much as some other things, like say keeping jobs in the US, or dealing with illegal immigration, or any of those other things that the Republicans/Trump espouse.

As a hypothetical, there are almost certainly people out there who are more concerned than anything else with stock-market performance due to its effects on their retirement income.

They may be the most unbigoted people in the world, but when it comes to safeguarding their livelihood, they’re going to vote for that every single time, even if it unfortunately means voting for things that may not be good for people of color, gays, etc…

Corruption is just as bad. Now I’m not saying Trump is less corrupt, but you can’t discount people being fed up with a corrupt establishment and wanting a message sent to the corrupt establishment.

This doesn’t dispute what I said. I think such folks have values way out of whack and deserve criticism.

Bigotry has done far, far more damage (slavery, near genocide, Jim Crow, etc) to America and Americans than corruption. Bigotry is far, far worse.

I know white supremacy is your boogeyman but wars of conquest and slavery have existed far longer than the USA has and are still an ongoing problem. The USA and the U.K. also worked very hard to lessen slavery worldwide. So, in my mind, while bigotry is bad at least western nations work against. Corruption on the other hand undermines the rule of law and the legitimacy of the state and I find that worse.

Yeah, the message was, “Here’s a big helping of corruption to put on top. Comes with a side of bigotry.”

Not a message I have a great deal of respect for.

That’s fine. I’m just saying a corrupt establishment has real costs. One of them is demagoguery being palatable.

If you have people, you are going to have corruption. That’s pretty much an unavoidable situation.

The trick is to limit the corruption to as little as possible, and have what does go on be the kind of productive corruption that everyone expects. (The politician gets a kickback, but the road does get built.)

Now, can you show me why people thought that Obama and or Clinton were more corrupt than Donald Trump, without relying on fake news?

I don’t think that the amount of corruption in the party of the government was the reason for the election, but the perception of the amount of corruption, as pushed by fake news sites, may have been.

How exactly you combat perceptions that are based on lies is a topic for another ongoing thread.

There has been progress, but electing someone who ran on bigotry is a big setback. Bigotry also can undermine the rule of law and the legitimacy of the state, in addition to the many other terrible things it does.

I don’t think there’s a comparison. In US history, bigotry is responsible for the subjugation, brutal oppression, and deaths of millions. Corruption doesn’t come close. Even if we’ve made a lot of progress in opposing bigotry, preventing backslides absolutely must be a higher priority even than things like opposing corruption. There’s still enough hatred in society, and still enough apathy about the fate of minorities, that terrible things could happen if we’re not careful.

You miss my point. It’s not relative corruption. It’s that a corrupt establishment person is a target for a charismatic demagogue. Even a highly flawed demagogue. People need to stop thinking of people as rational.

I don’t think this was the major reason that Clinton lost but it had an impact. And with what she had to lose vs what she had to gain it strikes me as she’s a tiny bit paranoid to have taken that risk.

Perhaps you are right. I just see a higher threat to functioning democracy from a loss of faith in democracy than I do with opposing illegal immigration or opposing dangerous ideologies masked with the term religion. If I’m wrong and I start seeing interment camps and reeducation camps and Twitter and Facebook are controlled by a modern day Goebbels then sign me up for the resistance.