What was it like for people leaning Right in 2009?

[Projammer]

All I can do is agree with opinions already posted.

The right had seen the writing on the wall and knew what was coming and therefore met it with glum resignation.

The left went into November knowing they were the chosen ones and could not lose. They had no need to worry about belittling and insulting their opponents. They were right and they had the numbers to win. The conservatives would just have to meekly accept whatever the left decided to dish out to them.

The left are ill prepared for the real world where they don’t always get what they want. As evidenced by the highly publicized tantrums. One of the most recent being the cancelled appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, the bastion of free speech.

[Orwell]

@Lemur866

Yeah, welcome outside your conservative bubble. The only reason you can’t see reality is that you’ve been spoon fed conservative media for decades.

OK, now I know you are pulling our legs. Thanks for the chuckles.

I don’t like Trump much at all, and I’m not even a conservative. But the group-think hysteria and childish tantrums is multiple times worse than anything in 2009. There’s no comparison.

Sure, the left and right both have their own bubbles, but again there is no comparison on which bubble is stronger and has a large echo-chamber.

[drewder]

Conservatives don’t go around burning down the town when they have a disappointment so it looks like they’re not as upset but they are.

[Lemur866]

Bullshit.

Yes, the reaction against Trump is much larger than the reaction against Obama.

Now, why exactly is this true? Is it because liberals are all crybabies in a bubble?

Or is it because Obama was a normal centrist candidate, and Trump is a loathsome reptile?

You even state that you don’t like Trump. And why is that? It’s because he’s a despicable human being, and will drag the country down into the gutter.

This is obvious to everyone. This is why I call it objective fact. Trump is awful, and he’s going to continue to harm America. That’s why people hate him. Is that so hard to understand? Plus the whole, you know, losing the popular vote, and then bizarrely claiming that he actually won the popular vote.

Yes, there would be upset people on social media if a Republican won. People were upset when Bush got the presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote. They were upset when he won the election in 2004, despite leading us into a disastrous war. They thought Bush was a lightweight buffoon. They didn’t like him, at all.

That’s nothing compared to the disgust normal people feel for the sub-human Trump.

And Republicans hate him too. You know it, I know it, the American people know it. The only people who like him are those who like him because they know it upsets people they hate. And if it makes liberals upset that’s worth destroying the country over. They think like Trump that anything that hurts people they don’t like must be good, since life is a zero-sum game, and since the only way for them to win is for us to lose, anytime they see us lose it feels like winning to them.

[Procrustus]

@aldiboronti

And now Trump has actually begun carrying out the actions he promised he would whilst campaigning the hysteria has increased. It’s almost as if they didnt believe he was serious, and of course he was. Whatever faults he may have, unlike most politicians the man really does mean what he says.

We were constantly reassured that we should not take Trump’s crazy talk literally. Now, everyone is saying “he’s just doing the crazy shit he promised, so what’s the problem?”

I can live with the fact he’s trying to do things I disagree with. That’s politics, and it swings both ways. I cannot, however, accept that he’s a swamp lizard who is stupid, petty, unhinged, and incompetent. He’s a disgrace to his party, his country, and his family.

[drewder]

You know you’re a liberal when you think Obama and Hillary are centrists.

[Lemur866]

Seriously dude, get out of your conservative bubble. Obama and Hillary(and Bill) are centrists, that’s simple fact. Just because the right-wing media industrial complex has been selling you the idea that Obama is a communist for the last 8 years doesn’t make it true.

Of course, someone like Trump isn’t a conservative or a liberal or a centrist. His political beliefs don’t map onto any sort of liberal-conservative axis, since he doesn’t have political beliefs.

[puddleglum]

@msmith537

I would say the “birther” movement is an example of “losing their shit”.

“Damage the country” how? By funding things like education and infrastructure, advocating equal rights for women, gays and minorities and not going to war with every third world country that yells “Death to America”?

As a registered Independent, I try to look at both sides as objectively as possible. But it’s a bit difficult for me to understand the cognitive dissonance on the Right. Because to an untrained observer like myself, it would appear that the Conservative ideology consists of a fanatical devotion to God, guns, and Corporate America.

The Birther movement was always a fringe movement. Losing elections always make some people nuts but the birthers posting on facebook is different than a million people having a temper tantrum march the day after the inauguration.
Damage the country by raising taxes, undoing welfare reform, wasting money on boondoggles, trying to strangle school choice, more onerous regulations, taxpayer money for abortions, screwing up the healthcare system even worse, taking away religious rights, repealing the first amendment. Those are some examples.
I wish that conservatives were like you said, but don’t worry I’m sure as you get older you can train yourself to be a better observer.

[Lemur866]

So Birthers were a fringe?

You guys just elected a Donald Trump as President.

That was a thing you guys did.

Or were we supposed to take Donald’s birtherism seriously but not literally?

[Shodan]

@drewder

You know you’re a liberal when you think Obama and Hillary are centrists.

And you are in a liberal bubble when you state that everybody hates Trump and he is a subhuman reptile as objective facts - shortly after he won the election.

Regards,
Shodan

[Lemur866]

Most people who voted for Trump don’t like him. He has the lowest approval ratings of any newly elected President since the invention of approval ratings. How many people voted for Trump because, although he’s a loathsome reptile, at least he’d appoint people like Gorsuch to the Supreme Court?

And, of course, he lost the popular vote. Yeah, he still became president, because as you know Bob, our system of electing the president isn’t based on the popular vote. I know Republicans like the electoral college because without it they’d have lost 6 out of the last 7 presidential elections, rather than 4 out of 7. Still, this system means that you have a President who is unusually unpopular, not even counting his unpopularity with the people who voted for him.

Anyone believe that Trump’s popularity is gonna soar in the next few months and years? Honestly, now.

Calling Trump a loathsome human being should be a pretty uncontroversial statement, even if you voted for him.

[Procrustus]

@Lemur866

Calling Trump a loathsome human being should be a pretty uncontroversial statement, even if you voted for him.

And I, for one, shall never pass on an opportunity to do so.

[Shodan]

Calling Obama a socialist should also be a pretty uncontroversial statement, even if you voted for him. After all, it is an objective fact, and everybody agrees with it. Oh wait, I am in the wrong bubble.

Regards,
Shodan

[Lemur866]

Shodan, seriously.

Obama isn’t a socialist. You know it, I know it, the American people know it. Are there people who either believe it, or claim to believe it? Yes, just like there are people who claim to believe that Obama was born in Kenya, or that Obama is a Muslim.

The bubble of people who don’t believe Obama is a socialist is the vast majority of people in America. Maybe they’re all wrong, and Obama wasted 8 years of his presidency not even trying to push socialism because he was totally a socialist. If he were a socialist he had a pretty odd way of advocating for socialism.

So what’s the “Obama not a socialist” bubble? 90% of America? 95%? Pulling numbers out of my ass here.

Yeah, sure, there are bubbles that contain a majority of people. Lots of Christians in this country who live in a Christian bubble. Lots of white people who live in a white bubble.

All I’m saying is that if your comfortable bubble of misinformation includes 90% of everyone in America, that isn’t exactly the same sort of bubble as not knowing anyone in your Greenwich Village neighborhood who voted for Nixon.

On the other hand, it is an objective fact that Trump has the lowest approval ratings of any new president since the invention of approval ratings. You might dispute the accuracy of those ratings, and claim that Trump supporters are lying to the pollsters about whether they approve of Trump or not. But they could have lied about approving of Obama or not, or Bush or not, or Clinton or not, or Bush or not, or Reagan or not.

It is simply an objective fact that lots of people, even people who voted for Trump, say that Trump is untrustworthy, that he doesn’t have the temperament to be president, that he lies all the time, and so on. Hey, maybe those people are lying, and they secretly trust Trump even while saying they don’t trust him. But the objective fact is that they say it.

It is an objective fact that Trump is unusually unpopular. It is an objective fact that Trump lies a lot more frequently than is usual for a politician. It is an objective fact that Trump is a narcissist.

Again, nothing here about whether that means you wish Hillary had won the election. You can believe all those things about Trump, and still have voted for him, and still be glad that Hillary didn’t win.

This bubble crap has got to stop, because it’s a fucking ridiculous cheap shot. It’s just asserting “no it isn’t” at the argument clinic. I guess it’s the perfect rhetorical device for the age of Trump, though.

[thelurkinghorror]

@Lemur866

So what’s the “Obama not a socialist” bubble? 90% of America? 95%? Pulling numbers out of my ass here.

As of 6 years ago, 39%.

Everybody lives in a bubble. And that’s okay, but it makes it harder to see out of it.

[drewder]

@Lemur866

Seriously dude, get out of your conservative bubble. Obama and Hillary(and Bill) are centrists, that’s simple fact. Just because the right-wing media industrial complex has been selling you the idea that Obama is a communist for the last 8 years doesn’t make it true.

Of course, someone like Trump isn’t a conservative or a liberal or a centrist. His political beliefs don’t map onto any sort of liberal-conservative axis, since he doesn’t have political beliefs.

No Hillary is to the left of America on almost every issue. cite

[Reluctant_A]

@Procrustus

I am hopeful that Trump’s election will galvanize the left, center, and rational right. And I pray that it happens before it’s too late.

It won’t. It can’t. The “left” is not capable of galvanizing in the way that the right did, because their base is to irrevocably fractured. There are, for example, too many people who self identify as “liberal” who are super invested in UHC, but don’t give a shit about marriage equality. There are too many self-identified liberals who are super invested in marriage equality, but don’t give a shit about police brutality. There are too many self-identified liberals who are super invested in police brutality, but don’t give a shit about gender equality. Too many people who are pro-choice, but anti-LGBTQ, too many people who are pro-Black, but anti-woman… and so on, and so forth.

The conservative base could be galvanized, in part, because the base could be unified under a more-or-less singular ideology. The trouble with the Democratic party styling itself as the party of inclusion and diversity is that with diversity comes diversity of thoughts, diversity of values, and diversity of motives. I don’t think that there’s a single issue, for example, that you could get liberals to rally around the way that you can get conservatives to rally around gun control. Nor could you ever successfully rally enough liberals around the idea that they’re ‘losing’ the country. Hell, you couldn’t even get enough liberals to agree that Hillary Clinton was not, in fact, “just as bad” as Donald Trump. You can galvanize conservatives by appealing to a desire to return to the “good old days,” in a way that would not be effective on liberals. “Make America Great Again” is not a slogan that could ever work with liberals, because there aren’t enough liberals who actually believe that America was really all that “Great” in the first place.

Plus, not all Democrats are actually all that liberal. A ton of black Democrats are lowkey conservative as fuck, and mainly vote Democrat because they consider the GOP to be the party of anti-Black racists. Like, they may not even have a problem with the racism, just the anti-Black racism. I know loads of black people (I’m even related to some of them) who vote blue all the way down in every election, who are pro-life, anti-Asian, anti-Mexican, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and many other shortcomings that they associate with the GOP, but they will never vote Republican.