I knew a Trump voter in the UK...she's no longer my friend.

I had a political argument with a Big Issue seller where he was quoting Alex Jones and infowars as a real source of news!  This is going to be a long four years.

I've just started glazing over anything posted by people who think infowars is news/real. There are too many other important issues at hand, like standing up to the casual racism now invading every day life. It's going to be a busy 4 years with letters to the editor & CEO's of companies with screenshots of employee statements on social media, and calling state & federal representatives. We can't let that become the new normal.

We can't let that become the new normal.

There's a real danger there. Like how 'we need to be able to talk about immigration' quickly became 'immigration is the cause of all woes'.

Assuming Bannon is the one being referred to as the {honorary} KKK member upthread, I thought a blog post by Ian Welsh sparked an interesting discussion about him.

"I can’t help trying to understand what the underlying reality actually is."

There's actually a good reason for Americans living on other countries to support Trump (and other Republicans): Democrats are the ones who imposed FATCA and support CBT the most...

replies summed up as a big No!

People vote their self-interest, or at least what they perceive it to be. (If you vote against yours for what you think will be a greater good, well done you - this being a broad 'you' for the purposes of this post.) Personally, abstaining gave me the relief that comes from not falling for an abusive suitor again; chalk one up for self-interest. I didn't see a greater good in electing Clinton, for reasons not worth going into here.

Back to the OP, Conor Friedersdorf’s conversation with a Trump voter seems germane (and I’m not someone who generally regards PC as a dirty word):
…it's almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion.  Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc. It can provoke a reaction so intense that you’re suddenly an unperson to an acquaintance or friend. There is no saying “Hey, I disagree with you,” it's just instant shunning…. Being anti-PC is not about saying “I want you to agree with me on these issues.” It's about saying, “Hey, I want to have a discussion and not get shouted down because I don't agree with what is considered to be politically correct.”

To which I would add, don’t treat the Trump voter as some sort of exotic specimen. They saw him as a solution to problems. You may think them very, very wrong, but for the most part they themselves aren’t the problem. Those who seek progressive solutions would do well to remember that for future elections.

Chief Brody raises a smile, but also points to why Clinton lost. Rule #1 with voters, as with friends, is to refrain from insulting them.


On edit: a Doh! moment: Trump did rather a lot of insulting, himself. Let's just say they engaged in strategic insulting.

Here our Hadley weighs in again:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/02/identity-politics-donald-trump-white-men

I'm with her.

But I think this commenter (krissywilson87) makes a darned good point:

"There's been a lot of quite fevered commentary about why Brexit/Trump happened and how it represents some sort of sea change in attitudes - but if you look at it rationally, it's the result of fairly bog-standard conservative political arithmetic. It's not so much that something has changed, but that things haven't. Britain and America are still full of nationalistic old people."

a blog post by Ian Welsh[/url] sparked an interesting discussion about him.

It was a good read, until:

"Trump can use tariffs to bring a lot of jobs back."

and then:

"You can cut worker’s rights at the same time"

I know Walsh is talking about something else entirely different with this piece, but those are clunkers. The talk of cutting workers' rights is sinister, and any talk of escalating the trade war with China is dangerous.

   

Here our Hadley weighs in again

I wish you wouldn't call her 'our' Hadley.   

It was a good read, until:

"Trump can use tariffs to bring a lot of jobs back."

and then:

"You can cut worker’s rights at the same time"

I know Walsh is talking about something else entirely different with this piece, but those are clunkers. The talk of cutting workers' rights is sinister, and any talk of escalating the trade war with China is dangerous.

If I thought Welsh advocated cutting workers' rights, I'd think that a clunker, too. What he said was "You can cut worker's rights at the same time [as stopping insane austerity policies], and it'll work for a while." After a possible Godwin sighting he then calls it a wasting strategy. The line about tariffs came later, for what it's worth; the subject of trade deserves its own thread, if not forum.

I wish you wouldn't call her 'our' Hadley.   

Can't say I'm with Freeman there, but being an American expat she is arguably "our".

The teeming millions discuss use of the word "our" by the British…

Well, I don't think Walsh here is speaking about any issue in particular....but about perception. The story now is not whether a bus crashed, but how it was reported, and who benefits from the way it changes perception.

I have no problems with this. One could say, and I think that a lot of people have said, that it is the real issue. The winner of the battle for perception then controls the field. 

But I think - and I think Walsh's post here is a good example - that one can seed in these almost Obiter dictum points that begin to acquire the weight of fact.

I am not convinced about Joe Factory Worker at all. First of all the numbers don't add up quite right. And that narrative seems too convenient, almost noble....I immediately picture a good old fella with a ball cap and a plaid lumberjack shirt who, gosh darnit, just wants to go to work like any American. Michael Moore always has on a ball cap and plaid shirt and he doesn't do anything without great thought. There may be truth there but it seems too easy.

Has neoliberalism  "completely f&cked a lot of people in America, the EU, Canada, Australia and elsewhere..."? To "...create a middle class in Asia..."? I don't know. But again, that's not Walsh's point.

On a personal level I don't know if the real issue is the battle for the minds of the electorate (and it seemingly must be in democracy) or this global economic shift that will occur regardless of what voters feel....or if the two aren't part of the same thing.

I demand proof that the OP herself voted...http://www.talk.uk-yankee.com/Smileys/classic/wink.gif [nofollow]

If anyone is interested (and can still stomach it) there's a full length video on YouTube of the MSNBC 'Town Hall' that Bernie Sanders did in Kenosha, WI, where he sat and talked with a panel of four Trump voters.

For me, the most interesting aspect was seeing the same cultural divide that I noticed growing up there, in the 80s, and how that's evolved into the current clusterf@&k. 

Overall, it was a bit disappointing, and not really surprising, but still worth a watch.

One thing that did stand out, with regards to the Trump voters, is that none of them actually believe he'll do any of the extreme stuff.  They don't believe he really *wants* to register or ban Muslims, for example, and even if he tried, they have complete faith that Congress and the Courts wouldn't allow it, because it's not Constitutional.
(Never mind the fact that three seconds earlier, they were complaining about how lazy, useless and corrupt Congress was.)

So, I'm not sure if we should feel relieved about this, but it is at least clear that not all of his voters actually want him to do this stuff;  they're just suffering from utter cognitive dissonance.

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That's good the voters feel that way, because he seems to have little intention of doing anything that he promised to do.  Locking up Hillary or building a wall? Not gonna happen. I just hope this disillusions the Trump voters so much that they give up on democracy and stick with Facebook. 

After election, his top priority seems to be colluding with Russia for financial gain and possibly starting a war with China.

One thing that did stand out, with regards to the Trump voters, is that none of them actually believe he'll do any of the extreme stuff.  They don't believe he really *wants* to register or ban Muslims, for example, and even if he tried, they have complete faith that Congress and the Courts wouldn't allow it, because it's not Constitutional.
(Never mind the fact that three seconds earlier, they were complaining about how lazy, useless and corrupt Congress was.)

So, I'm not sure if we should feel relieved about this, but it is at least clear that not all of his voters actually want him to do this stuff;  they're just suffering from utter cognitive dissonance.

I've seen excerpts from this, but couldn't stomach the full thing.  But in watching the excerpts, I thought that the Trump voters were to a certain degree modifying their views because they thought it would play better to the audience.  They may indeed think that some of these proposals won't get implemented, or are un-Constitutional, or they may just be saying that in order to look more reasonable in front of others.  I've seen some of my right-wing family members do this; they will tone down or modify the expression of their core views if pressed by liberals in front of a group, but those right-wing views don't really change in the long run.

I think there's certainly some of that, but not as much as you'd think.  At least, not from that particular group.

The thing to understand is that, for decades, those folks that worked for GM, or the paper mills, or other industrial jobs, always saw themselves as special.  They had more money, more vacation time, better benefits than folks in other jobs.  If you chose to go to college, you were wasting your time and money.  If you worked in another, lower-paid career, you were either a sucker, or too lazy to do 'real work'.  Minimum wage, service jobs really *were* for teenagers, or for retired folks or housewives who just wanted something part time, to earn some extra spending money and kill time.

When it all started crashing around them, and more than half the town was laid off, somebody had to be to blame.  You saw the guy in the video blame 'college educated managers,' without ever asking himself (or being asked) who sent those managers?  Who made those decisions, and why?

All they knew is that, suddenly, they were out.  They were expected to retrain, but nobody could tell them in what field, and everyone they were speaking to in State/County offices, the colleges and tech schools, new prospective employers, were the kind of people they'd looked down on for not knowing about 'real' work.  It was humiliating.

(And, it has to be said, the snobbery worked both ways.  I remember my mother grumbling about how all these 'mill rats' care about is money, but saw no shame in their ignorance, etc; we may have been relatively poor, but at least we had *standards*...)

So then, for another 20 years or so, those folks continued to struggle, along with most of the rest of the private sector, while the only group who still had any sort of guaranteed job security and benefits were public sector workers.

It was absolutely no surprise, then, that in 2010, Wisconsin elected Scott Walker, and began an all-out war on public employees, hamstringing their unions, calling them overpaid, greedy, spoiled, etc., and extending that opinion to anyone in any way involved in government or public service.

That's the context here.  That's why Wisconsin voted for Trump, and I'd be surprised if the same hasn't been true in MI, PA, etc.





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That's good the voters feel that way, because he seems to have little intention of doing anything that he promised to do.  Locking up Hillary or building a wall? Not gonna happen. I just hope this disillusions the Trump voters so much that they give up on democracy and stick with Facebook. [my bold] 

After election, his top priority seems to be colluding with Russia for financial gain and possibly starting a war with China.

I hope the opposite; that people who grow disillusioned with their candidate agitate for change in ways more productive than sharing memes on their preferred social media platform. Which is very high sounding, I know. I'll be happy enough if we can just retire the basket of deplorables.

As for Russia, I'm (mostly) with her.

I used to believe in that high sounding version of democracy as well.  I've changed my mind since learning that something like %60 of Americans believe that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring from the basement of a pizza restaurant.  Idiocracy is here.