Get with the fucking program. It was Pelosi’s fault.
I don’t feel much hope either. I used to have hope due to demographics, but demographics can change. Whites w/o a college education keep moving further and further and further to the right, negating whatever benefits come from demographic tends that favor the left (growth in millennials, single women & non-whites while older whites are dying off). College educated whites are about split between the parties and have been for a while, but high school educated whites keep moving further and further to the right.
The problem is whites only make up 60% of Americans now, and about 70% of voters. So somehow the GOP keeps cobbling together winning coalitions from 70% of voters. No idea how they do it. I think around 85% of Trump’s voters were white (vs 50% for Hillary).
Something like 18-19% of voters are white liberals. So 1/3-1/4 of all white people who vote are liberals. Sadly if you do the math (71% of voters in 2016 were white, assume 18% of all voters are white liberals), that means 25% of all white voters are white liberals. Hillary only won 37% of white voters. Meaning barely 1 in 10 white voters isn’t a liberal but still voted for Hillary. By comparison, the base of the GOP (core conservatives) only make up 24% of all white voters.
Basically as far as white people, liberals (who make up less than 1/3 of white voters) are pretty much the only ones who vote democratic anymore. And no matter how bad the GOP fuck up, racial tensions are more important and will keep them alive.
The GOP at this point is only alive due to tribalism and in-group/out-group dynamics. White. male. christian. hetero. native born people are the in group, anyone who doesn’t fit into that is the out group.
If you could take racism, misogyny, religious tensions and nativism out of the picture, the GOP would become a tiny regional party.
Higher voter turnout trends away from the right. When a D president is in office, he will tend to lose ground in the midterms because the non-RWs become complacent. So far, when a R president is in office, the first midterm has not generally shown the same kind of losses.
I don’t understand these people. Billionaires wanting more.
It is a power struggle I suppose, I’ve never wanted power, so I don’t understand. I do quite well living within the boundaries of human decency.
They certainly don’t want power to help their fellow man. I doubt we will ever understand what it is that is wrong with them. I suppose that **they believe **that their wealth and power over others defines them as ‘better’. What a sad definition they have of a good person.
What is crazy, is that trumps supporters believe that these people with ‘power’, these people that only want to stomp on them, desire to give their overlords MORE power.
Yes, it’s power. It’s control. They use their enormous financial power because they want to control others. Everyone has an ideal, a worldview. They’re no different. I imagine it would make more sense if we were living in their world, but we’re not.
I absolutely do not understand this at all. I tried to shed some light on the matter in this thread back in October, Are you motivated by power and wealth? It’s safe to say that people who sit around posting on message boards mostly aren’t.
I understand, in the way that I understand quantum mechanics (and keep learning stuff from better-informed people here.)
treatise
The billionaires are almost always spectrum narcissistic sociopaths. I say “spectrum” because I believe that most mental/emotional conditions are non-binary, and may even have spectrum transit potential.
The narcissism is easy enough to understand. I am here and you are down there: I must be smarter than you. And when that perspective gets validation, it eventually turns into I am smarter than you, so you should do things they way I say. The narcissism feeds on your accession/approval and seems to grow and demand more.
The sociopaths lack empathy and tend to be cunning and good at convincing people. Those are abilities that facilitate advancement in society. And they are qualities that people tend to overlook in an environment where aggressiveness tends to be rewarded and the weak get stepped on.
Hence, our socioeconomic system is just right for bouying these kind of people to the top. And once they get there, they want to stay there, which means keeping as many people as possible from rising, because the less top-level competition the better. Those people down there are a resource to exploit. And many of the people on top feel a sort of camaraderie with those in their class, because they are of similar character.
In other words, our system is configured to elevate persons who have questionable traits. The leaders tend to be narrow-focused and short-sighted because of their narcissistic sociopathy, but the traits that are most problematic are the very ones that drive them to succeed.
Our society is unwell because its structure makes that its inevitable natural state. As long as we support and follow people with troublesome mental/emotional issues, our and goals society will be shaped by the wrong-headed. Getting out of this trap is extraordinarily difficult, because it would require some major cultural realignment. As we have failed to come close to doing that, social collapse is for dessert.
Президент Трамп
The Pork Star
Ah yes - виноват. :smack:
Hmmm… Ya know, I’m starting to think, that when the rubber meets the road, these people are simply very, very afraid. They wouldn’t know how to operate and could not live if they didn’t have a few million in cash at a moments notice.
I’m a very, very lucky man. I’m ‘richer’ than about 90% of the people on the planet. I have no concern where my next meal is coming from. I’ve worked my ass off since I was 10 years old. trump etal, were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and have NO idea what it means to actually WORK for a living. Oh, they’ve gotten their hands dirty all right, but not in a good way.
Pelosi beat Trump?
Bastard!
Трамп — не «президент», а «прецардеит»
I agree with the analysis but still have some faint hope that your conclusion is still “most likely” and not yet “inevitably”.
Wait… she made a statement at some point that *wasn’t lying to the American public? I find that hard to believe… I mean, it’s gotta be in her official job description, somewhere, in the fine print.
I agree with a lot of this.
Not all billionaires are necessarily bad people - I don’t think Warren Buffet’s a bad guy at all. I think Mark Cuban might be arrogant, but he seems decent. A lot of the billionaires are just competitive people, which is fine up to a point. Humans are partly competitive animals, but we’re also social animals. We evolved to be cooperative, not just competitive. To use a pet phrase of mine, we’re hardwired with an innate “fairness meter,” and we’re constantly scanning our environment to detect things that don’t seem fair.
We talk of checks and balances a lot in our civics classes and in the media. The Constitution has checks and balances, but they’re probably not sufficient. After the New Deal, we had a lot of checks on the power of the rich because a good generation or two of Americans had gotten fed up with their propaganda - they began to question why they were standing in bread lines while their oppressors had vacation homes in South Florida. I suspect our society will eventually ask and ponder those same questions…when we, too, are standing in bread lines.
You’re wealthy but probably not wealthy enough to gain accustomed to controlling other people the way that they are. They have enormous power and influence, and I would imagine that they’ve grown accustomed to getting their way with people. This is how they function.
I think you’re correct: there’s an underlying fear of losing that power and that ability to control others. These are people who have enormous power, and they don’t get to where they are by being democratically-minded. They compete with others, and their mentality is to compete ferociously until the other guy isn’t fighting back. They live in a world of competition. Cooperation isn’t their thing. I think they live in constant fear of others defeating them, whether it’s a rival in the business world or an economic and political force that competes with them for economic and political power.
Public institutions compete with people who are privately powerful - public and private power have competed and lived an uncomfortable coexistence with each other for decades, even centuries. Public institutions represent democratic power. They represent a challenge to their authority. The Department of Labor. The Environmental Protection Agency. The Internal Revenue Service. The state departments of environmental quality. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Department of Justice. The Security and Exchange Commission. OSHA. These are all institutions that represent the public’s interests, and these are institutions that put limits on their power. The better-adjusted billionaires of the world like Warren Buffett accept that as the price they pay for living and doing business in a prosperous society, but the Mercers and Kochs of the world resent that power and try at every turn to undermine it.
These corporate interests have created a kind of economic and political Leviathan that has so badly corrupted and corroded our political system over the last half century that they can do something that would have seemed unthinkable not even a decade ago. They’re attacking not only the individual institutions but the entire premise of a rule of law and a political order that represents the common interests. Attacking the EPA is one thing, but they’re not just attacking it or rolling back a few regulations; they’re waging on all-out war on all institutional power that puts boundaries on their own powers. They’re gutting the EPA to the point where it barely ceases to function at all. They’re dangerously under-funding the Centers for Disease Control. They’re refusing to prosecute Equifax for its lapses in protecting our most sensitive data. And in case you missed it, they’re attacking the Mueller investigation and the FBI. They’re attacking not just with funding a political campaign; they’re actively waging a propaganda war on these institutions as well. They’re even going so far as cooperate financially and otherwise with Vladimir Putin, an avowed adversary of the United States government – emphasis on government. These corporate interests themselves do not necessarily see themselves as Putin’s enemies. In fact, if Putin can disrupt the government, then that’s completely fine with them.
What’s at stake now is the survival of America the nation-state as we know it. I don’t know if people realize just how close we are to the precipice.
If they don’t, it isn’t for your lack of trying.
Sean Hannity can tell you!
Heh. I can’t find the article again, but apparently during televising of Trump’s speech yesterday, there was a split screen. On one side was him giving himself credit for the performance of the stock market and on the other side was the stock plunge story, showing endlessly spinning numbers rocketing downwards. A lot like Fry’s speech in the stock exchange.