So they’re not evil, they just don’t care who they hurt as long as they get what they need?
That makes me pity them more, sure, but it sure as hell doesn’t make me respect them any more.
Many Japanese would prolly differ with you on that count. Many Germans as well. Also Donald J. Rander, US Army, who passed away earlier this year.
Who said they don’t care? They might. But picture yourself on an island, shipwrecked with only one other survivor, a person you never met before you washed up on the island. There’s only 1 hat, and no other shade on the island. Are you gonna wear the hat?
Someone almost always gets hurt. That’s the nature of life. Many of us try and mitigate that, because we do care about our fellow beings. But people always get hurt when people do what they need to do.
Well, as I work on local schools I can tell you that more families will be divided by the policies Trump will impose, knowing about the troubles in many countries some are likely to die over there.
I also will lose my health insurance for sure. At least I may not need it much now as I recuperated from a health condition that was close to killing me last year, but with the ACA I recuperated without having to run into bankruptcy or leaving the USA as the only affordable place would be the old country.
In the old country is my wife and it may happen that a lot more things will be put in place to prevent me from bringing her to the USA, so I will have to rush to get her before Christmas because I do not know what Trump will order, maybe I will have to send the old folks to the hospice so we can rent the room to get money to get my wife in sooner.
So what was what the subset of Trump supporters you are talking about needed to do? Oh right, dismantle the EPA and climate change treaties so then even more refugees will come to the USA in the future as a result of not controlling emissions and the higher rate of changes that include droughts and the loss of land due to the ocean rise that will cause…
Penny wise, Pound foolish. And that is also on top of the incalculable pain the number of people that will be hurt today and in the near future.
This is so interesting. Tell me more things that all liberals do.
You must meet more reasonable Trump supporters than I do if any of those responses ever got anything resembling traction.
And if they think their deity really wants several of my friends to be dead?
I don’t respect their point of view. Because their point of view deserves about as much respect as the point of view of anyone who holds a vile and dangerous opinion for bad reasons and refuses to listen to evidence. What do you do about that? Helping them achieve their goals is not an option here. Listening and being empathetic is something we keep trying and which keeps failing.
First of all: I guess liberals are not individuals.
Second of all: regardless of whether any individual who voted for Trump is a racist or sexist, they had to be willing to ignore his blatant racism and sexism to pull that fucking lever for him, and that tarnishes them.
For both our sakes I hope this is incorrect. I am hopeful this won’t happen.
As I posted elsewhere, this was part of his strategy to win the election by tapping into fear. And his strategy was successful. Now that he has won, the election rhetoric will disappear.
Today he was quite humble, respectful, Presidential.
I hesitated a bit when using his name and the word humble in the same sentence. That hasn’t happened in a long time, by anyone anywhere.
Stealing this and thank you for summing it up so well. Assuming you have the superior position does not mean you actually have the superior position, no matter how fervent your belief.
I am hopeful. This was an election where I was worried if my candidate lost, or won.
I’ve done quite a bit of thinking on this, and I feel my Fen-fen analogy holds well here, though there are others I may use that illustrate my point as well.
I have considered the needs and wants of the Trump supporter demographic. This should be easy for me, as I am smack in the middle of the demo, but I found it difficult for some reason, and I think I finally figured out why.
I am not afraid of hard work and sacrifice in return for small gains.
If you look at Clinton’s campaign, her plans, and paid close attention, you would see that she is asking us all to buckle down and work. She doesn’t say work to make america great again, that doesn’t make any sense. She says America is great, and we can make it better. So she is asking us for hard work in exchange for incremental improvement.
Trump is promising to make america great again. He doesn’t say how. He doesn’t call on the American people to sacrifice or work hard, he just says that if elected, he will do it. He will make america great again, and you can fill in with your own imagination what is great, and envision Trump taking us there, with no work or sacrifice asked for by the public.
America was not made great in the first place by people being happy and content and not putting in any work or sacrifice. No this country was made as powerful as it is by the blood sweat and tears of those who came before. There is alot of equity in that effort, and it is an equity that we need to work hard to maintain and improve.
Trump is the easy answer. He is the diet drug. No exercise or diet necessary, and the pounds fall right off. Same thing with trump as president. No hard work or sacrifice, and America will be made great again. As opposed to Hillary’s message of hard work and sacrifice, and we’ll be stronger together.
I had trouble recognizing this, as my life hasn’t really handed me anything. I grew up well enough, lower middle class, so I never needed for anything, I went to a good public school, roof over my head, food on the table, was never really concerned about whether I would have food or shelter tomorrow. But everything I wanted, whether it be a toy or a bike or a game, I had to work for. I had to do chores around the house, and around other people’s houses in order to get that latest transformer. Many times while I was raking leaves around a neighbors house, the kid that lived there would be inside, playing with the toy that I was working for.
The Trump voter is the kid in the house. The kid that was handed every toy and game he asked for, with no effort required of him. Now that the toys and games are no longer free, he is upset. Now that he doesn’t get anything he wants with no work or sacrifice on his part, he feels he is being unfairly treated. Now that he actually has is being asked to consider himself an equal to the kid raking leaves to attain the things that he is handed, he feels put out.
Trump says, I’ll bring you back your toys. I’ll give you your games. You don’t have to do anything, I’ll take care of it.
To be fair, this was the same message that Obama made, and everyone was disappointed that he over promised and under delivered. But would he have ever been elected if he had not made promises that he knew he would be unlikely to be able to keep? From what I saw of Clinton’s plan, everything in it was pretty reasonable and practical. And she gave a reasonable and practical message. A very boring, dry, reasonable and practical message that required work to understand and appreciate. A message that would require even more work to implement. I would say that a very significant number of people (I think the majority) who voted for trump did so for those reasons. Trumps message may have been unrealistic, but it was more exciting.
So, the take away from this is to over promise, delivery isn’t just optional, it is not expected.
Well the kids won so hopefully you can accept or at least acknowledge that. If you aren’t part of the solution then you’re part of the problem. Shall we work together.
Something of a quasi-parallel view to Snowboarder Bo’s very cogent contributions:
This is a post-election video commentary from the UK's Jonathan Pie, a reporter... who is, like Stephen Colbert, is actually a character. But he's not a right winger, and his commentary is persuasive. In my view.Trump’s supporters have been saying all along that they don’t expect him to actually do any of the things he talked about doing. You can find news stories from last spring, during the primaries, where people were quoted on this.
Very good post, btw.
Thank you for your kind words and for linking that video. I agree 100% with everything Mr. Pie said. He is dead on. Perfect. His tone and his content both. Excellent analysis, IMO.
I posted that link, as well, yesterday. Appears to have been ignored.
There’s a section of his analysis that is echoed in this Huffington Post piece:
When you try to quash any dialog by insulting your opponent rather than engaging him, the opponent just shuts up - and voices his opinion at the voting booth. Refreshing 538 every 2 minutes won’t yield any insight as to what’s going wrong, and you end up with Trump as President.
Your post was IMO salvaged by admitting the same thing was true of Obama, but I differ with you and don’t think it was basically different with Clinton.
Clinton ran as the status quo candidate, basically. She’d continue what Obama did or had been trying to do, basically. And everyone realized, though it obviously wasn’t an explicit plank of her platform, that like Obama in 2011-17 she’d likely face a House GOP majority at least to start. And she is a more cautious person by nature, not a showman like Trump (or Obama, in his own different way).
So she didn’t make as many or as far fetched promises as Trump, agreed. However I don’t agree her approach was about ‘everybody working for incremental change’. It was the Obama era Democratic pitch that we can have a Northern European style welfare state (or even an idealized view of one not counting more recent scale backs over there) but only the ‘rich’ will ever have to pay for it. Here’s all the additional things govt will give you (‘free’ college added on this time) and the incremental price tag to you will be…zero. In Europe people accept that everyone will pay through the nose in taxes for a generous welfare state*.
Post 16th Amendment I can vote to have more of other people’s money go to me, no constitutional limit. Or more likely to go not to me so much as other people group A who I think deserve to receive more of other people group B’s money. But let’s not kid ourselves it’s ‘hard work’ to vote for more govt benefits, even for someone else, under the assumption you won’t have to pay. And that’s been mantra-like from both Obama and Clinton, ‘more things from govt, but only X tiny% of people will pay more’.
I don’t see either major party asking for broad sacrifice. I agree Trump is more of an exaggerator, but I’d paraphrase from the statement made before the election: Trump’s harshest critics take him literally but not seriously, those less negative or positive to him take him more seriously but less literally. Now his harshest critics are forced to take Trump seriously, but IMO should re-evaluate how literally to take all his past statements, and reserve at least some judgment until they see his real actions.
*of course Europe has some progressive taxes but, generalizing, income taxes there are no more if even as progressive as in the US, and then they have big additional non-progressive taxes like big VAT’s, multi $ gas taxes, very expensive utility bills by US standards to pay for green energy mandates, etc. The US has also the non-progressive FICA tax nationally, but flat sales taxes are state/local, not directly relevant to the national political debate.
D’oh!
So sorry I missed it when you posted it.
My problem is that all those “secret” Trump voters who are whining about how Obama’s policies didn’t work for them, keep sending back those freaking Republican who’s only purpose in life seemed to be to block anything Obama suggested good, bad or indifferent. Who made parts of Obamacare purposely ineffective because, you know, fuck Obama. Somebody here made a comment about small businesses admitting that they were doing better now than they did in 2008 but not as good as they did in 2000 but don’t acknowledge the fact that 2000 was the last year Clinton was in office and the Republicans took over Congress because Clinton was the epitome of evil and things went to *shit *over eight years. We got 4 years of real Democratic control and things looked up for a little while and the Tea Party came out in force just to fuck over Obama. And again, they claimed, oh no, we’re not racist and bigots (it’s not our fault that what we say attracts racists and bigots by the boatload), we just hate the establishment…but the Republican establishment is still there, the only establishment they seem to have an issue with tends to include minorities. Somehow, what white liberals say is why this country has gone to hell in a handbasket. Those poor, ignored whites - what a tragedy! For the poor ones, heir life expectancy rates have gone down, their unemployment is terrible, Obamacare costs more - but they are still better off than blacks in the same situation. At least the blacks look at Republicans and say you are actively screwing me over, I won’t vote for you. Apparently, the Trump voters believe the evil liberal elites called me names which is why everything sucks so let me vote in this jackass who has never done anything for anybody not named “Trump” (and fucked some of those too) in the hopes something might turn out differently while still keeping those nice republican jackasses keep screwing you over and don’t even pretend they will do anything different.