Ducay has a point here. When Trump won the Republican nomination we have to ask, how has the Republican party caused this that 16 other candidates lost? And if Trump wins the presidency then same question to the democrats. What have they done in the last 8 years to cause this? The answer is not 'because the Trump people are stupid"
Democrats put a black man in the Oval Office.
Democrats are now trying to put a woman in the Oval Office.
There are underlying issues with policy and culture and everything, but don't mistake how terrified old white men are of the idea of black people and women actually obtaining the same success and power that they have always had.
It's not necessarily that Trump people are stupid, but many of his supporters long for decades past, when they were beneficiaries of the labor movement, when the male head of a household made enough to house, feed, and clothe his family comfortably, when women were around at night to have dinner on the table wearing a dress and a smile.
They don't see the part of that past where women were trapped dealing with controlling, abusive husbands because they had children and no way to support themselves. They don't see the part of the past where blacks were systemically kept from buying property in areas other than designated ghettos. They see that picturesque America of the 50s and 60s full of soda fountains and diners and green lawns, conveniently ignoring all the awful crap that was still happening in those days.
They see that their incomes have dropped as minorities and women have gained more rights and inched closer to equality--they see that as the fault of those women and minorities. They don't grasp the concept that the Waltons of the world have bankrupted those quaint little mom-and-pop stores that they romanticize about, that corporate CEO pay has risen exponentially while their incomes have stagnated. They don't blame those men for their lot in life, no, those CEOs are rich, so clearly that money means they were successful and deserved it. No it's the fault of the blacks and the illegals and the women who should be at home and in the kitchen.
They can't grasp that Donald Trump (who contracted with their blue collar brethren in places like Atlantic City, who then left them high and dry when he destroyed that entire city's economy by declaring business bankruptcy and walking away scot-free) and his ilk are exactly the reason why their incomes have stagnated. It's easier to blame the people who are a little different--with different working parts, or with a different skin tone or a different faith--as the reason why they can't live that American Dream.
So Trump comes in with his smoke and mirrors with his dog-whistle appeals to racists and bigots, and it's easy to pull at those baser instincts.
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Plus just think about his coalition for a second. You have the evangelicals, strongly pro-Israel and anti gay rights; you have the alt-right, strongly anti-semetic and pro gay rights; and then you have the people who simply hate Hillary, who know Trump is a disaster but hate her more so they justify it. I said it way back when in the primaries, but Trump can run to the left of any position Bernie had and he'd be fine. They are just convinced he is their savior, they are very weak people who are easy to prey on because of their fear and desperation, much of it unfounded. He won the GOP nomination with a path that has been there for years. That path is probably the thing that splinters the party and makes an unelectable party even less electable. Thankfully for them they have gerrymandering so they can continue obstructing at will until people finally have enough.
I don't know.. something has changed. I don't think he would have beaten McCain or Romney taking that path, heck he was too scared to run in 2012. The Republican party over the last 4 years alone has gone to far that this path is only now available.
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Why didn't these papers step up last year to stop Trump? Has he gotten crazier? I'm just saying there are many tests that Trump has passed and somehow people keep supporting him. People lined up at the primaries and voted for him over other just as crazy and racist Republicans. Why? I agree with you that Republicans are voting blindly now.. but how he won fascinates me.
The thing that truely frightens me is not Trump, he's going to lose to Clinton, what frightens me is after Palin and Trump it's clear that a moderately smart psychopath can take over the US with an appeal to the innate racist stupidity and general sense of discontent of the average US citizen.
I don't know.. something has changed. I don't think he would have beaten McCain or Romney taking that path, heck he was too scared to run in 2012. The Republican party over the last 4 years alone has gone to far that this path is only now available.
Because the GOP has spent a decade ignoring reality and science and appealing to the uneducated, treating knowledge as an elitist disease and facts as disposable options.
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Originally Posted by GirlySports
wittynickname: That's all true, but why Trump? Why Trump over the equally extreme Cruz or Rubio?
Cruz is intensely unlikable, at least as much as Hillary Clinton, if not more so. At least Democrats can manage to rally behind her, Republicans all vocally rejected him.
Rubio was just a terrible candidate from the start. This culture of uneducated good old boys who long for the days of the 1950s aren't about to vote for a man who is soft-spoken and friendly. They want the larger than life, Jackie Gleason, "to the moon, Alice!" type of manliness that Trump espouses. Also he's Cuban, and old white dudes don't like voting for minorities.
Last edited by wittynickname; 09-29-2016 at 10:03 PM.
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The thing that truely frightens me is not Trump, he's going to lose to Clinton, what frightens me is after Palin and Trump it's clear that a moderately smart psychopath can take over the US with an appeal to the innate racist stupidity and general sense of discontent of the average US citizen.
Then the next 8 years of Hillary, she has to somehow undiscontent the average US citizen.
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The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment - someone always came to save America at the last moment - especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at -like a "B" movie.
Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren't zeros. Before fair was square. When the cavalry came straight away and all-American men were like Hemingway to the days of the wondrous "B" movie. The producer underwritten by all the millionaires necessary will be Casper "The Defensive" Weinberger - no more animated choice is available. The director will be Attila the Haig, running around frantically declaring himself in control and in charge. The ultimate realization of the inmates taking over at the asylum. The screenplay will be adapted from the book called "Voodoo Economics" by George "Papa Doc" Bush. Music by the "Village People" the very military "Macho Man."
Yep.
The 1950s is their golden era - when white men ruled, June Cleaver was in the kitchen, and civil rights wasn't a thing.
I don't know.. something has changed. I don't think he would have beaten McCain or Romney taking that path, heck he was too scared to run in 2012. The Republican party over the last 4 years alone has gone to far that this path is only now available.
Winning the primary is the easy part for anyone in the GOP, there's a multitude of fears to prey on. He just picked the two easiest ones to get ahead. Certainly he was helped by the fractured field, if he had to do five one-on-one and another three with only three person debates like Hillary did, I think he does much worse (as we saw the other night) and we probably get a brokered convention or another opponent winning. That also can't be underscored, he only started getting over 40% consistently when he already secured a big delegate lead. His bombast and perceived "manliness" is what I guess makes him different, but his core came to him from the Mexican and Muslim stuff, and that's been there for years (curbing immigration).
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If that's the case, then the republicans will have to fundamentally change their core values in order to appeal to anyone beside the increasingly fundamentalist crazy base they have.
Trump getting as far as he has shows that republicans are doing exactly that. They are moving from a conservative party, to a populist one. This general discontent that is unlikely to go anywhere in the next 4 years. Should the next republican presidential candidate be someone less racist and sexist, somewhat more intelligent, and much more well spoken while continuing to appeal to widespread populism and discontent, IMO that person is likely to run away with the vote in the next election.
You might even consider them deplorable. But keep calling them hillbillies, racists, and white trash. Then ask how that worked out for the Brexit
More than 40% of Americans are young earth creationists. Should Democrats try to cater that kind of thinking? Nearly 40% of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages 10-15 years ago. Should their beliefs have been coddled and validated simply because the people holding them had a pulse and were registered voters?
Sure Democrats might be able to get a few more votes if they lied to people in the rust belt and told them their high paid low skill jobs are coming back like Trump is, but it's simply an empty promise. Neither candidate can deliver that.
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Originally Posted by Ducay
I think it speaks to exactly what 40%+ of the populace resents where most act like it is somehow more advantageous being a career politician, with very few real successes to your name, rather than a businessman with success out the wazoo.
So the criteria for being successful in a political office is not being a politician, but a businessman? Why not have businessmen design nuclear power plants? After all, if you're a businessman, you are qualified for anything!
This idea that government would be better if run like a business is a pernicious falsehood beloved of simpletons. It's like the North American equivalent of the South American love of military juntas - instead of generals, we yearn for CEOs to run things. Hey, all Trump needs is some fake militia rank and he could be both - Colonel Trump, with a chestful of gaudy medals and a fistful of dollars!
There is, of course, no reason that a sufficiently intelligent businessman or general cannot be a good President - like Eisenhower - but believing people who spend their lives in politics are automatically worse at it than people who spend their lives doing business is so asinine it barely deserves the label "idea". Doubling down on such idiocy by thinking Trump - who has parlayed tens of millions of inherited dollars into multiple bankruptcies and (almost certainly) negative net worth - is an example of a successful and smart businessman makes it even more laughable.
I don't deny there are many angry people who perceive themselves as marginalized. Some of them are correct in that perception, but almost all of them are incorrect in the causes of that marginalization - it isn't the Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, politically correct, or socialists who are sidelining them, it is technology and the increasing efficiencies of globalization. Yet it's much easier to fight a culture war than it is to war against either of those, so demagogues will gain in popularity in lockstep with the increasing economic irrelevance of the lower-middle and working classes.
Finding a real solution to that problem is going to be the great political question of the next few decades. So far nobody has really come up with much, but what we *can* be sure of is that empty bags of air like Trump won't be involved.
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She writes there is a "deep story" which underlies the thoughts, actions, and feelings of everyone and that different groups have different deep stories. The 'deep story' which led to Trump goes as follows:
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You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.
Serious question: When is Trump going to have time to help bring jobs back to the rust belt when he's going to be on Twitter 24/7 responding to all the bait coming his way? Machado is absolutely ####ing with his head. This is a 12 year old boy at the very best, anyone who thinks there should be any legitimate analysis of Trump might be as messed in the head as he is.
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So, I asked, what did her clients see in Trump? "They see him as very strong. A blue-collar billionaire. Honest and refreshing, not having to be politically correct. They want someone that's macho, that can chew tobacco and shoot the guns—that type of manly man."
So far from the truth. He's a trust-fund baby who never wanted for anything. He's a golf playing master of the universe who has never had to face the fear or adversity of living from paycheck to paycheck. They are building a mythos around Trump just like they did with the last great con man they revered, Ronald Reagan. Image is more importance than substance.
A half-century later, the 2010 top looked much like their counterparts in 1960. But for the bottom 30 percent, family life had drastically changed. While more than 90 percent of children of blue-collar families lived with both parents in 1960, by 2010, 22 percent did not. Lower-class whites were also less likely to attend church, trust their neighbors, or say they were happy. White men worked shorter hours, and those who were unemployed tended to pass up the low-wage jobs available to them. Another study found that in 2005, men with low levels of education did two things substantially more than both their counterparts in 1985 and their better-educated contemporaries: They slept longer and watched more television.
So who exactly was responsible for this? Was it the government, who made laws that were to make it easier for industry to move around the country and take advantage of cheaper labor in some of these depressed regions, or was it the fault of the big money industrialists, guys like Trump, that found loopholes in those laws to move their businesses to other countries where labor was pennies on the dollar cheaper and they didn't have to pay taxes? It is easier to lay blame on the faceless government boogie man than against a powerful man that reminds them of their strict father who they loved so deeply, or got a whoopin' for not showing the appropriate respect (everyone loves patriarchal authoritarianism).
Trump, the King of Shame, has covertly come to the rescue. He has shamed virtually every line-cutting group in the Deep Story—women, people of color, the disabled, immigrants, refugees. But he's hardly uttered a single bad word about unemployment insurance, food stamps, or Medicaid, or what the tea party calls "big government handouts," for anyone—including blue-collar white men.
Trump is the King of Blame, and he has laid the blame for all of these people's woes on those groups. This is what these people want to hear. It is not their fault, or so they want to believe. That Trump finds another group he can blame problems on tells these people they have no responsibility for the state they find themselves. Again, this is what they want - no need - to hear just so they can continue in the twisted view of reality they have built around them.
Meanwhile, this tea party mom of a Sanders-loving son was reluctantly gearing up to vote for Donald Trump.
And another vote against her own best interest. These people get what they deserve.
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The Dallas Morning News, Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit News, New Hampshire Union Leader, Arizona Republic all haven endorsed the Republican nominee for anywhere from 50 years to more than 100, are all endorsing Clinton (or Johnson for the Detroit News).
USA Today has never endorsed anyone, but they're saying vote for anyone other than Trump.
As far as I can see no Trump doesn't have any newspaper endorsements for president.
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Serious question: When is Trump going to have time to help bring jobs back to the rust belt when he's going to be on Twitter 24/7 responding to all the bait coming his way? Machado is absolutely ####ing with his head. This is a 12 year old boy at the very best, anyone who thinks there should be any legitimate analysis of Trump might be as messed in the head as he is.
As dumb and childish as it all looks, and certainly is, there could be a rationale for this. Sex and pretty girls and calling people fat is titillating stuff. Breaking boring laws regarding charities and arcane rules about dealing with Cuba are not. He's distracting us, and doing a fine job of it. Well done Donald!
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