The alternative was what? A corrupt rich white woman who has been involved in politics since the 1970s, who has been behind the curve of history at almost every step (saying stuff like blacks are superpredators and video games caused Columbine and not getting behind gay marriage until a couple years ago).

> The tone is that voters have been proven to be manipulable through fear to blame people of other races and nationalities for whatever economic conditions are unfavorable to them. The tone is that the truth and nuance of these issues are now irrelevant in elections.

This has always happened. Why is it that when poor minorities vote for their economic well-being it is seen as progress but when poor white people do it it's seen as racism?

> The tone is that serial bullying and abuse of women is not a disqualifier for what should be the most-respected office in the nation.

Bill Clinton.

Your concerns are heard, but they'd be a lot more believable if the person who didn't get elected was not the face of hypocrisy.

I didn't vote for Trump. I just don't think simplifying an election about the economy into something about race or bigotry is acceptable. It's dishonest.

The working class has been gutted for years because of neoconservative and neoliberal views. Surprise - the class of people most rejected who receive poor educations and don't have a window into the modern economy have some unfavorable views on some issues.

Michael Moore is the liberal source that I've seen most quoted by Trump supporters. He says the reason people voted for Trump is that they are sick of a neoliberal agenda which focuses on intervention in foreign wars and Free Trade agreements which seem to be little more than corporate protectionism. They're sick of policies which have been proven to increase wealth inequality rather than enrich lower and middle class workers. They're sick of economic uncertainty in a time of unprecedented productivity. Newspapers gloss over this and focus on racial conflict, which is a real problem that needs to be addressed, but it's not the whole story, and editorial boards which generally agree with neoliberalism are unwilling to question it with any depth.

He is so grossly unqualified for the position that it is difficult for me to understand what other reason someone would chose to vote for him.

Clinton was a poor choice for sure but Trump doesn't even pass the phone screen of the basic necessary knowledge for the position.

Edit: I should clarify that the point of my comment is not to reopen the debate about Trump as opposed to give some context as to why many people look to those specific issues as a driver of his election.

If we completely ignore basic competency, then I must conclude his rhetoric, which largely revolved around scapegoating immigrants and the people of foreign nations, played a large part in the decision.

Edit: Again, this is intended to give context as to why some, including myself, look to those issues as a driving force in the election.

It is not actually about what they report. It is all about what they don't report. Left wing and right wing propaganda are not the same. Right wing propaganda tells you what you must believe. Left wing propaganda simply leaves out the truth. Either way you have distortion but the methods are very different. NPR is not better than Fox News. Once you realize this, thou shalt be enlightened.

Let's take the case of Islam.

The working class is more religious than the middle class. The middle class mostly treat religion as a weird weekend hobby and don't really think the believers are serious. Deep down they think, these people are not being serious.

Well, I came out of a cult, do not believe in a personal God, and I can tell you these people really do believe in their thing. Belief is real, even if I disagree with it.

So when the working class look to Islam, they see religion and when the middle class look to Islam, they see politics. They simply leave out the religion itself. It is not about right and wrong, it is just that they are seeing different portions of the elephant. When a journalist is captured by ISIS he thinks he might get out alive by a ransom or prisoner trade. The working class understand he'll die because he is a kaffir. Do you see?

This explains the bifurcation between working and middle class perspectives. The worldview of the middleclass has no value at the resolution of the working class. I think George Orwell was one of the few middle class journalists who truly understood his people.

With the possible exception of Julian Assange, there are few working class journalists in the mainstream press, not even at Breitbart.

If you're honest, you have to ask yourself this question:

Which is the more likely?

That journalists were in a bubble? Or the entire working class? Look at the map of voting results by distinct. It is an ocean of red.

1. Here I am using the colloquial meaning of the word propaganda, which is ideologically biased information, usually it takes the truth but then stretches it to breaking point and beyond.

2. I do not possess a Facebook account. I don't even have a mobile phone. I don't watch Fox News in case you were curious. I hardly watch any television at all since I don't have one. Many readers of Hacker News do not have them, it's a common demographic in geek circles.

3. Class warfare is a real thing. It is not an extreme concept, it's a descriptor. Europeans like me frequently complain that Americans don't grok class or that Americans conflate 'race' with 'class'. You don't have to agree of course. Perhaps America is the one nation on the planet that didn't gradually evolve a class system as it matured ;-)

Humour aside, I do think this (gradually evolve a class system as it matured) is one of the major reasons why many American intellectuals are increasingly interested in old European ideas and books from the 18/19th centuries. Their resonance is much deeper than it used to be.

There are the Lumpers (everything is the same) and the Splitters (everything is different). If you remember the book Sophie's World (which was full of great insights into this), then it is like the genres of reductionism and holism in philosophy.

The real answer is that people's brains work differently.

If you want some consolation, it is that we cannot live without either group, Lumper or Splitter. Each group has failure modes which can be corrected by the other tribe. I am convinced that is why the left and right exist in all cultures and times. It's a very important human algorithm.

That is a reason why there's so much talk about this. It's a mistake to think that this is election was just economics. A lot of Trump's support came from very well off people after all.

Having said that I do agree with you a fair bit. For a start, "racist" is a bad term. That implies outright hatred, which in my viewpoint is very minority; "cultural anxiety" is a better phrase to me, future insecurity compounded by tribal instinct. EG: It's not "I hate Mexican people", it's "Mexican people took my jobs". Those two sentences are not equivalent.

This too is not the only reason people supported Trump either (anything from nostalgia to agreement with policies to Hillary hatred played a role). On the flip side Bernie Sanders showed that non-culturally-anxious economics played well with many Trump voters too.

But that initial data point still is troubling to me. And it's less on the people that voted for him and more on the candidate himself. Trump was able to exploit this, and in the process made current culture a lot more toxic.

And when did Trump get behind gay marriage? How is that a point against Hillary?

> saying stuff like blacks are superpredators

Thank god she never said that.

During the campaign he said that he's against the supreme court ruling since it should be decided by the state. He also said in an interview that he is for "traditional marriage".

It could be worse, except that he has a VP who is a huge opponent of LGBT rights.

Justice Kennedy, the conservative swing vote, has been supportive of restrictions on abortion but he has explicitly said that he prefers to defend the precedent Roe v Wade set. He even wrote the majority opinion in support of marriage equality. Even in controversial decisions like Citizens United where I vehemently disagree with him, I have to admit that he seems like a dedicated constitutional scholar that believes in preserving the integrity of the institution of the Supreme Court and the US constitution. His opinions are well thought out, are based on a balanced view of strict and loose interpretation of the constitution, and he takes his role as a bipartisan seriously so I think we still have a reliable firewall in the court.

But you have to ask yourself whether any other Republican candidate would have an open homosexual (Thiel) on the stage at the RNC and whether they'd be caught dead doing this:

https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/carlo-allegri-don...

WALLACE: But, Mr. Trump, let's take one issue. You say now that the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is the law of the land and that any politician who talks about wanting to amend the Constitution is just playing politics. Are you saying it's time to move on?

TRUMP: No, I'm saying this. It has been ruled up. It has been there. If I'm a, you know, if I'm elected, I would be very strong on putting certain judges on the bench that I think maybe could change things.

But they've got a long way to go. I mean at some point, we have to get back down to business. But there’s no question about it. I mean most -- and most people feel this way.

They have ruled on it. I wish that it was done by the state. I don't like the way they ruled. I disagree with the Supreme Court from the standpoint they should have given the state -- it should be a states' rights issue. And that's the way it should have been ruled on, Chris, not the way they did it.

This is a very surprising ruling. And I -- I can see changes coming down the line, frankly. But I would have much preferred that they ruled at a state level and allowed the states to make those rulings themselves.

WALLACE: But -- but just to button this up very quickly, sir, are you saying that if you become president, you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage?

TRUMP: I would strongly consider that, yes. [1]

[1] http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2016/01/31/ted-cruz-attack...

Calling violent gangs super-predators is not the same as calling blacks super-predators. Not even a bit.

  "But we also have to have an organized effort against 
  gangs," Hillary Clinton  said in a C-SPAN video clip. 
  "Just as in a previous generation we had an organized 
  effort against the mob. We need to take these people 
  on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they 
  are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the 
  kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no 
  conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they 
  ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to 
  heel."

  When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their 
  best. [...] They’re sending people that have lots of 
  problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. 
  They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re 
  rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Or, you interpret the remarks to mean that illegal Mexican immigrants are more likely to be drug-users, criminals, and rapists, with the immediate and explicit caveat that this charge does not imply to all illegal Mexican immigrants, because at least "some" of them are good people.

"But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs," Hillary Clinton said in a C-SPAN video clip. "Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel."

Bernie seemed to think so:

When Sanders was asked by debate moderator why he called out Bill Clinton out for his defense of Clinton’s use of the term "superpredator," Sanders responded, "Because it was a racist term, and everyone knew it was a racist term."

To be fair. I agree she could and should have used better phrasing. I can also understand people like Sanders for criticise her. Maybe she even was bigoted 20 years age when she said that, or maybe she still is. But you have to interpret her words extremely uncharitably to infer that.

Here we are trying to figure out if here comments about gangs could be problematic while comparing her to Trump, who said this about mexican immigrants, not just mexican gangs: "They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people!".

Beyond that: for many people, youth or juvenile crime is considered a failure by society, and lamented. Kids were neglected, went wrong, and we lost them to crime. When the issue is black youth crime however, their identity is pathologized and the perpetrators are subject to dehumanization through terms. "superpredator": these black youths aren't like Johnny shoplifting a comic book from Walgreens, they are inhuman killing machines that prey on the rest of us. "bring them to heel" this is something you make a dog do. An out of control mad dog, who needs to be corrected through force.

I don't think Clinton _meant_ it to be racist. Believe it or not I don't think Trump did either. But I'd say both of them said racist things in the sense that they both fell into patterns that denigrate and otherize minorities.

The stats said that 1 in 4 women who cross the border illegally were raped. Trump was talking about the rapists, not all Mexican. He said some Mexicans are good. Some are criminals. And some are rapists. There is nothing racist about this.

https://youtu.be/8k4nmRZx9nc?t=42

I don't have a problem with voting for or against a trade deal based on self-interest or interest in maximizing benefit for one's country.

Dehumanizing people with a different skin color who are already citizens of your country (Gonzalo Curiel, Humayun Khan) and cultivating racism and xenophobia to win power is unconscionable.

> Bill Clinton

I'd like to think that if he had faced election after the Monica Lewinsky incident, he would have lost.

It's the same thing. Both sides are engaging in this bigotry. You can't write off almost 50% of the electorate (Romney's 47% statement in 2012 and Clinton's deplorables comment) and expect anything but extremes.

Both sides are doing it.

Trump is a cancer of a person and supporting a man and the policies of a man who's openly transitioning our election system to one based on lies and racist demagoguery is simply, demonstrably deplorable. Relative to values like truth and tolerance that that we should share/ostensibly share.

Of course it was careless of Clinton to get caught saying it, but the deplorable behavior had to exist before she had a reason to comment on it.

And she didn't "get caught saying it", that was part of a prepared speech, and one she only later said she "regretted" saying, not that she was wrong about it.

You'll have to forgive me if my response to this is less than completely polite....

I don't think there was anything wrong with that part of that speech per se, though in the context of a political campaign it was absolutely a dumb thing to say, even though the sentiment was both accurate and aimed at encouraging reaching out to the other side. Someone should have known what kind of sound-bite that section of the speech was going to be cut down to and heavily reworded it so that wouldn't happen.

Even if you don't accept my analysis of the coding of her language, how can you tell me with a straight face she was "encouraging reaching out to the" irredeemables? That's very specific religious language, per Merriam Webster "not able to be saved, helped, or made better". What were they supposed to do in this/after this "reaching out"???

And whatever happened to being the President of all Americans? Even Obama shows every sign of believing that, despite his looking down his nose on us bitter clingers, treating us as "enemies" to be defeated and the like.

That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.

It seemed pretty clear to me that the "deplorables" were the side of his support that made him "not a nazi, but the first choice of nazis", ya know? Considering what trump was doing with his half-courting but no-I'm-totally-not some fairly disgusting groups and sentiments, and what she actually said in the speech isn't really out there and the qualifiers leave her comments accurate and even generous:

http://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorable...

I mean, she enumerated which part of his base she meant to put in that group, and allowed that some portion of even that part could be reached, let alone the ones who were not put in the deplorables "basket" and have legit problems with e.g. how globalization has left them rather screwed or with political corruption or who actually do want stronger borders but not because they dislike Hispanics (putting aside that she was a candidate especially unqualified to reach anyone for whom those and related things are major concerns—which is probably why someone as incredibly unelectable and also not terribly well positioned to credibly claim those sorts of positions as Trump managed to soundly beat her). As for "re-education", the language for the rest was pretty standard "these people aren't awful and have real problems and we haven't done a good enough job of telling them how we'll address those" stuff. "Re-education" is... kinda "we're gonna get herded into FEMA camps! No really, I read it on the Internet!" territory. Reading that "coding" doesn't strike me as reasonable, no.

However, though the speech wasn't inaccurate and the message was a good one to deliver to her base, it was really stupid in the context of this political race, and thinking it'd play well when cut down to a few words could speak to a certain arrogance which I wouldn't be surprised to find was very much present in Clinton and her campaign. Expecting any of the nuance of the speech, so central to its meaning, to be preserved was really, really dumb.

> That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.

Aside from Greenspan maybe not doing enough to cool off the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market to make the later crash more mild, what were the big errors made by Bill Clinton's administration that made it worse than any other typical 8-year period in recent US history? I'm struggling to think of a recent-ish president who didn't have more serious scandals and blunders than Clinton. Carter—generally ineffective; Reagan—Iran/Contra and related were pretty awful; Bush Sr. wasn't terrible but got screwed by the business cycle and a too-public pledge to stick to excessively limited tax policy, he'd be a good contender for "not worse than Clinton" I guess; W. had Iraq which was ZOMGWTF bad, and his tax cuts were probably not the right call and left a giant shadow on the budget; Obama may or may not have been able to guide or halt the Arab Spring and related events to some better outcome, but I'm leaning toward "may" and will go ahead and call that worse than any blunders of Clinton's that I can recall. I think the jury's still out on things like permanent normalization of trade with China, which was probably going to happen regardless of whether President was D or R at that time, and besides, that was near the end of his second term and not really something you'd "live through" during his presidency, as if it made one's life a struggle at that time.

What was so unusually bad about the presidency '93-'00? Seriously curious, not a rhetorical question.

[EDIT] minor grammar fixes

His murdering a hundred religious dissidents in their home for starters? Their disproportionate viciousness towards anyone who happened to be in their way, e.g. Billy Dale, or committed lèse-majesté? To get on Obama's IRS shit list you have to engage in political activism and it's a nothing personal, just your group thing, it took way way less for the Clintons. There's lots more, which I'm not going to go into, for the simple fact is that I can now relegate the Clinton Crime Family into the ash heap of history.

As for "FEMA camps" et. al., I'm talking about the pre-FEMA period (when we still pretended to care about our civilian population surviving, my mother was in fact a Civil Defense Block Mother, I still have the metal sign), when re-education was a PRC and Communist Vietnam concept starting in the mid-late '60s (Cultural Revolution).

And if you think that's all horribly irrelevant nowadays, our current President launched his political career in the home of two of the most notorious of those engaging in the Left's beloved Direct Action, who explicitly planned to liquidate the roughly 10% of of the population they guessed couldn't be re-educated.

However, I'd say that especially with your takes on current history, we just aren't living in the same reality, and should keep our discussion narrowly focused.

Or just put it in the ash heap Hillary and Bill are now in ^_^, really, at this point what difference does it make?

Yeah, sure, that's cool. Thanks for keeping things civil despite the topic, nice, interesting exchange (not being sarcastic, I'll add, since it's sometimes hard to tell on the Internet).

And, seriously, thinking about it, after today/right now! I should just steer clear of all things Clinton until the pardons are handed out, or not, and focus on the future. They've been "living rent free in my brain" for ... 24 years now !?!!?!!!!

Another reason I'm happy Trump put two political dynasties in the ash heap of history this year, add 4 to 12 years for the Bushes....

Xenophobia, prejudice, and intolerance aren't what Clinton sees as America. If those things are what you see as America, that's your right. In which case there's an irreconcilable gap between you and Clinton and you need to accept that she's going to consider you as standing outside of those values that she has always taken for granted as broadly accepted.

Be the thing you want others to see you as, or else accept the consequences of being seen a different way. Don't be surprised or complain about it.

Nazi to the Jews: Be Aryan, or face the consequences.

Trump got ~30% of the Hispanic vote, despite the Spanish media's immense negativity, despite the candidate's lukewarm campaigning in LatAm heavy communities. He also won more black votes than Romney and he won more white women than Hillary (a woman). It's hard to square what you are saying with what the results showed.

I don't think you understand. The very word "racist" has lost all effect. It is not an argument. It is not a disqualifier. It is meaningless and hollow.

If there is one thing the left should learn from this election, it is that screaming hollow epithets like racist, homophobic, misogynist, etc, are no longer sufficient to scare us, silence us, and cow us into submission.

All we're telling you is that, as those who've indeed been told that for so long, those words are dead to us.

And I'd add they're word salad to the other side when used generically in a political campaign, with about as much semantic meaningless as Blue or Green in pre-Nika riot Constantinople.

Shades of Bill Maher saying, sorry about crying wolf over our telling you the Current Year Republican presidential candidate was Literally Hitler (although he should have gone all the way back to the first example in 1948), this time we really mean it.

Circling back to your desire to re-imbue meaning to them, I don't think you'll see that in your lifetime. See, for example, the hundred year cycle of progressive -> liberal -> getting back to but not quite there yet progressive. When words and the concepts behind them get burned like this, it's really hard to recover.

And, yeah, it's much worse than the surface which we've mostly been discussing this at, the very concepts have been rendered stone cold dead.

Maybe it will indeed be really hard to recover. Then again, my determination just got reinforced.

Did I engage in introspection the first time I was called racist in this context? Yes, of course. 10th time? I don't think so.

The danger here, of course, is that having stopped outside sparked introspection after the message became perceived as a "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat worms!" one, I of course may have drifted into it.

Almost certainly a bigger factor in the US is that this has been used to divide us for political gain, and now that we've become an polity where identity rules, it's anti-survival to continue to play by the old no longer operative rules. For a degree of automatic discrimination against other identities who are in direct, existential competition with me as a white, heterosexual male is a requirement if I want me and mine to survive the next few decades.

Call it racism (except, of course, We Don't Care), call it realism, those facts on the ground have to changed before movement towards your ideals can be realized in the US.