Regardless of whether it's wrong or not, it certainly doesn't have to be true for it to sell. Americans especially seem to love buying hot air.
Now, to address your point, ask yourself if the same class of people you claim Obama is ignoring would have been better off 50 or 100 years ago.
Trump connects with Americans on many issues that either affect regular people or make them feel disempowered...loss of jobs, national debt, corruption in Washington, illegal immigration, excessive warfare in foreign lands...it's a little silly to say he's totally full of hot air.
If you don't have a sense for the zeitgeist, you can never understand why a populist is, well...popular.
Edit: Since the parent post has been heavily edited now its author found out what an assumption (and a visa) is, I want to stress that it started off as blatantly nationalist crap claiming one can't possibly understand Trump if their website says "Athens, Greece".
There's a ton of reasons why Trump's pitch is popular. The core reason is because he's making it resonate. The driver behind that is that trump is in fact a salesman rather than a career politician. Plenty of people have made this point far better than me; one of the cleaner explanations I found is from youtuber NerdWriter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aFo_BV-UzI
Best of luck in LA!! Killem!
Right wing politicians are exploiting the population around the world by blaming migrants/refugees for all their problems.
How do countries without large immigrant (I won't even go to refugees) populations handle this? Switzerland seems to be doing fine. Japan isn't falling apart because there's nobody to cook. Most of Asia is doing fine without allowing any immigrants.
So on a strict analysis of whether immigrants are beneficial to the host population, your argument isn't made.
2. All the talk about Japan economy doing badly is nonsense. If you believe that narrative (which is totally understandable as that's the conventional wisdom), I strongly suggest you read this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-true-st...
Basically many Japan watchers (ie people who live there and know the country intimately well) subscribe to this 'alternative' view.
1. Some inconvenient Swiss immigrants aren't immigrants.
and
2. Read this article from 2012 and ignore the last 4 years of Japanese GDP. (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp)
Care to try again?
Engage in discussion people. Downvotes are for quality, not disagreement.
I cannot figure out how to get an answer to this.
I guess because the rivalry would have no meaning and no real benefits, and could lead to needless aggression. And because having conflicts with faraway people I'll never meet is bad enough; having conflicts with my neighbors is an unsettling proposition.
How permanent is that solution? If a child born on the opposite side of the street had access to good education, health care, and jobs, could they also become "intelligent, wealthy and altruistic," and if so, wouldn't it be in my best interests to help that happen? Or even for no direct benefit, wouldn't I just want to help because of that altruism you mentioned?
Conversely, if they are kept isolated from us, wouldn't it make it even harder for them to achieve that potential? If so, doesn't their enduring poverty and lack of intelligence and empathy mean that they're more likely to grow up to commit crimes on my side of the street?
"He's probably one of the most powerful & effective salespeople I have ever met in my life"
But as she mentions, good salesman skills aren't what is expected of a President's job. It's certainly a very good asset for winning votes in the election, but not what people should want to see in a leader. In a smaller scale, it looks similar to the absolute best car dealership salesman elected mayor of his town.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va5oTjuYOvc&feature=youtu.be...
Thiel's reason of "Trump is an outsider" is not enough for me.
A great example is closing the gun show "loop hole". Is it a smart thing to do? Sure, you can think that. Will it reduce gun crime? Probably not since most guns used in crime are acquired through illegal means.
But it get votes!
Trump's supporters are richer than most Americans, so it's hard to make the case that they're suffering more than others.
Source: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...
This is about ideology and race more than economics.
For instance, when we started recovering from the recession and would get good news on something like jobs or growth, the Republican message would be that the numbers were too low. The standard they held Obama to was that of boom times, ignoring that we were still recovering from the recession, and that much of the rest of the first world was still in that recession.
When health care costs would rise, the Republican message would be that it was due to Obamacare, completely ignoring that the increases were about the same or even slightly less than they had been before Obamacare. Nope...if your health care costs had been rising 5% a year for the last 10 years before Obama, and then rose 5% a year under Obamacare, the Republican message was that Obamacare made your health care costs go up 5%.
Republicans seemed to think that if they spent nearly 8 years telling people that things sucked, people would turn against Obama and the Democrats, and sweep Republicans into complete control.
Of course, that's not what happened. They successfully convinced people that things sucked, but the blame fell on all politicians, not just Obama and Democrats, making the GOP primary voters receptive to the idea of an outsider. Several of the major GOP contenders ran as outsiders (even Jeb Bush claimed to be an outsider...), but they all had extensive political careers and so Trump trumped them on the outsider thing.
Things get much worse if you're in a rural area and not willing to relocate to better your life when the local money engine dies. That Americans aren't moving as much is a known fact; that American's aren't is likely a key contributor to certain economic 'dead sea' effects IMO.
Generally, you have to look past the panic and doom of the 24/7 cable news cycle to see the bettering of the US though. It takes a bit of a long view. The key thing - and this is what Obama is trying to go for though - is that we can't pull up the ladder behind us.
Regarding the current election.
* The cable news networks are mostly a dumpster fire: Fox and CNN more than others. Written journalism has been adequate to excellent in general.
* Mr. Thiel has been known for some time to be more of a neo-reactionary type. That he supports Trump is not surprising.
* That the Republicans turn out to support the Party candidate is not surprising. It's a known characteristic of the Republicans.
* That the song and dance of a mythical 50s appeals to so many white people should also not be surprising. We've spent 40 years mythologizing it. Also, 'Make America Great' Again largely is a dogwhistle to "Make America run by White Men Again", with a helping of good old traditional isolationism to boot. It's almost a no-op slogan, everyone can read into it what they want, based upon their current grievance - so long as they are aggrieved.
One more note. I've worked good jobs, and I've worked minimum wage jobs, and I've been broke, and I've been not-broke.
My overall estimate is that in order to assure prosperity and a better life to the blue collar workers, unions have to be re-energized across the board, taxes on corporations have to go up, and marginal taxes rates on the very wealthy have to go up. Better government services from the taxes, and better pay from the unions. This will lead to a better quality of life. That's a straight liberal playbook. We can look back on the 50s, 60s and the 90s liberal playbooks and iterate on them. There are things to improve, but they got some stuff right.
There's plenty of people and regions hurting, but he's not wrong.
About 50% of the time throughout human history? We've been making constant progress for a very short time.
Widespread famine happened in Europe as recently as the late 19th century, and all it took was one or two cold summers.
He talks about our expensive college and health care systems, contrasting them with the rest of the world's, but my impression is that the most effective models currently in place are built on the opposite of free markets, so I can't tell what his solution would be.
He praises Trump for being against open markets and military interventionism. But Trump has historically been in favor of open markets (and I thought Libertarians were as well), so it doesn't seem to be a deeply-held belief. And Trump may not believe in our current wars right now, but he has given many indications that he'd be willing to use nuclear weapons against enemies who don't have them, and to encourage our allies to develop their own arsenals, so I'm not getting a sense that a more peaceful world is his priority.
Can someone please explain what I'm missing? I usually think of Libertarians as aiming for a logically consistent system, so that even when I disagree with them I can follow their reasoning. But I'm not getting Thiel at all.
If your enemies know you are willing to use Nuclear, they will not attack. If they won't attack, then there will be no war. No war = peace.
>...he has given many indications that he'd be willing to use nuclear weapons against enemies who don't have them...
He said "as a last resort." In other word, if America is about to go down, he will use Nuclear to save America as a last resort.
If your enemies have nukes, and they are willing to nuke you, and you are not willing to nuke them back, then they'll just nuke you to bits, because they know you won't nuke them back. Remember, just because America is a good country doesn't mean that North Korea is also a good country. North Korea will not think twice about nuking America if America is not willing to nuke them back.
>...encourage our allies to develop their own arsenals...
Go read the Theory of Nuclear Deterrence. Nuclear Deterrence prevents war. It encourages countries to solve their problems through other means, instead of through war.
Trump just wants peace. And he understands how to get it.
Based on what?
Most of these polls (as of today), put Trump at within a few percentage points of Clinton:
It's erroneous to extrapolate from likely voters to the population at large. Granted that the sentiment of likely voters will line up quite well with the population at large, it's just that a likely voter poll necessarily rejects people who don't give a shit. The people who don't give a shit shouldn't be counted as supporting anything.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/n...
Trump is on average closer to 40%.
BTW don't miss the ridiculous article [1] which basically says Thiel is not gay because he s not a liberal.
1. http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/10/14/peter-thiel-sh...
Which is a ridiculous and bizarre premise.
Because up until Trump it was the conservative elite who were most in favour of free markets/trade/regulations etc that have been allegedly responsible for a collapse in blue collar jobs.
Anyway the problem isn't the ignoring of the masses. It's that there has been a failure to communicate in a way they can understand. Free trade isn't responsible for the loss of their jobs and globalisation was always going to happen. The issue is that rather than help them transition to 'jobs of the future' politicians took the easy road and blamed foreigners.
By and large the people who benefit the most from free trade and immigration aren't the people who pay the price. We could have fashioned policies such that both the benefits and the pain from globalization were spread more evenly, although there would have been a cost in terms of overall growth.
This isn't a communication problem. The problem is trade policies, environmental regulations, the legal environment, and immigration policies reflect the concerns of well-educated upper-middle-class and wealthier people to the exclusion of everyone else.
> The problem is trade policies, environmental regulations, the legal environment, and immigration policies reflect the concerns of well-educated upper-middle-class and wealthier people to the exclusion of everyone else.
Welp, if you don't show up to vote, you don't get to push your policies and concerns directly. Instead you have to organize in more indirect ways.
That's an oversimplification. You have to work backwards into the Reagan era and the deregulation from the 70s before you can start really taking NAFTA into account.
If you want to throw turds at the top earners, look at the total system and don't just blame single causes. It's a very complex economic system.
Further, consider the advantages of free trade: millions (billions?) of people in China have gotten better lives.
Protectionism and mercantilism is not a great system for increasing total wealth...
NAFTA/GATT was enthusiastically passed during Bill Clinton's Presidency. And both Bush senior and junior have publicly backed Hillary Clinton in this election. The 'Liberal' refers to 'Neo-Liberal'. Both the Democratic and Republican party establishment, and most of Washington policy makers support Corporate Free trade and USA global military dominance. Neo-Liberal policy regardless of what language you use to support it has been the core of US policy for the better part of 50 years regardless of which party the President belongs to.
See Thiel's pro Trump speech from this afternoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE