by voting for trump?

Obviously empathy is independent of intelligence.

You can't and couldn't have reasonably come to the conclusion that trump would have been good overall for the country.

I'm not USian so this isn't really party political, he just doesn't have respect for basic democratic processes.and that was obvious from the start

Perhaps, as a non-USian, you do not have the same sense for American interests or the same context in which to place current events, whereas these voters would have it directly in their lived experience. No doubt you find it absurd anyone could believe it, but I imagine people in many countries find it absurd what Americans believe about their politics.

> You can't and couldn't have reasonably come to the conclusion that trump would have been good overall for the country.

If you think everyone who voted for Trump was simply unintelligent and/or morally depraved, this sort of suggests that you lack the empathy to understand their position - which does not require agreeing with it. Unfortunately, I think this is a major reason behind growing partisan divides, and is a hard problem to solve.

I'm saying that it was obvious before hand that trump would be divisive.

Voting for trump over your own chosen parties representative doesn't really make objective sense.

I'm not saying there aren't 'reasonable' reasons to vote for trump, but they're more about self interest than objectively putting the whole country first. He's a 'strong' opinionated leader, people vote for that to get things done their way, not creating consensus.

If your empathy extends to voting for the other side's candidate, surely consensus would be high on your list of priorities.

I have a much longer response in mind to this but I would say in short this: having talked to many such people, they perceive an increasing bifurcation between the political/chattering class “consensus” and the popular consensus. Those classes talk a lot about “democracy” and its forms but none of their consensus positions are open to democratic oversight and policy is often decided without democratic input (and sometimes in spite of it), and this is called in a very Orwellian sense “democracy.”

The people who feel this see Chomsky’s manufactured consent as their chief opposition. They’re looking to form a truly popular and organic democratic consensus, which cannot happen overnight.

>They’re looking to form a truly popular and organic democratic consensus, which cannot happen overnight.

And how does voting trump achieve that.

Unless you conclude that the current situation is unfixable, and it should be torn down. It seems an extremely unwise gamble to make though.

Im not convinced the class consensus v popular consensus is necessarily a bad thing.

You can't expect the entire population to be well informed about all issues, our current system offloads the requirement for everyone to be knowledgeable about everything, which I would say is that gap.

And again were moving away from the empathy position.

I can generally make sense of political decisions, not as a perfect representation of the popular will, but as a combination of marrying divergent views with actual reality. That seems to be more an empathetic approach than the opposite.

This seems to be an example of making a decision (right/wrong, doesn't matter) for the wrong reasons. So while it may be empathetic, it doesn't seem to be intelligent.

I worked as a package handler for FedEx for a while and mentioned to one of the other handlers (who was ex-military) that monarchists actually existed in the US. He mentioned something to the effect that serving a King seemed like a compelling idea.

> Unless you conclude that the current situation is unfixable, and it should be torn down. It seems an extremely unwise gamble to make though.

Democratic-Republican (in the political sense, not the political party sense) institutions are strong enough in the US that I genuinely cannot see how Trump could fully tear them down, even for a temporary time during the course of his presidency. I still fear what he will do. For example, 16 of the last 21 Supreme Court justices - 76% - have been appointed by Republican presidents despite Republican presidents only serving for 58% of those years. It's necessary to go back to 1938 to balance appointed Supreme Court justices at 21 to 21 Republican to Democrat appointments, with Republicans having served only 44% of the time as president.

One thing I forgot to add is some concrete examples of the “defenders of democracy.” John Brennan, former CIA director who authorized and ordered CIA torture program, the assassination of American citizens, who said the CIA was above the law, and who spied on Congress to facilitate coverups - went on record on an NPR interview saying that they had to do whatever it took to get rid of Trump, and was lauded as a resistance hero. It makes me very uneasy to be on the same side as John Brennan. Similarly, a US general proudly announced on television that he lied to Trump about American troop presence so that they could maintain troops in the country in question. The American government is riddled with such people very clearly undermining democratic institutions, but they are ignored and lauded as heroes for opposing the enemy du jour.

> You can't expect the entire population to be well informed about all issues, our current system offloads the requirement for everyone to be knowledgeable about everything, which I would say is that gap.

Sure, this is a fundamental problem with the increasingly complex nature of modern society. But it’s also why, no matter who you vote for as an American, you get basically the same foreign policy, whether you elect Bush or Obama. Foreign policy is really not so much decided by the President, though he gets some influence, but by tens of thousands of State Department experts and to some extent the DoD and security establishment. Americans don’t get a say in whether it’s a good idea to meddle in the internal politics of every country on Earth, or whether the particular position taken in some country benefits them or not, they simply have to accept the expert view, even when it blows up in their faces and harms millions of people and leads to 9/11s or helps the arming of ISIS. There is no easy solution to this problem of expert interests gradually diverging from average American interests.

Another example might be marijuana legalization. A large supermajority of Americans support medical marijuana but it remains federally illegal. This is an area where the “expert” political class does not really care so much and does not widely support it, so nothing happens. When there is political class consensus, forms don’t even matter - legislated law is set aside in favor of executive orders, if necessary to move as quickly as possible - and if the next President tries to rescind such an executive order, he will not be allowed.

But you can’t simultaneously make the argument that “democracy is good” and “actually, we need rule by experts.” You’ve gone from saying Trump was bad because he ignored democracy to making an argument yourself about where democracy fails.

> Foreign policy is really not so much decided by the President, though he gets some influence, but by tens of thousands of State Department experts and to some extent the DoD and security establishment.

And many, many treaties approved by Congress.

The US foreign policy establishment mostly bypasses the treaty ratification process nowadays because of the embarrassments that occur when they are not ratified. The number of signed, ratified, in-force treaties is probably much smaller than you think it is.

The treaty legal process in the US was honestly not very well thought out to start with - the Congressional oversight role as practiced is treated more like a rubber stamp procedurally. And of course, they are set aside when the establishment finds them inconvenient. It’s mostly settled law the executive can unilaterally terminate or suspend treaties.

> but they're more about self interest than objectively putting the whole country first.

Parents constantly talk about doing things for their children or grandchildren's best interest without ever talking to their children or grandchildren first to check what's actually in their best interest. These blind spots exist for many people. This is an actual psychological blindspot I just can't remember the term for it.

This couldn't be a better example of partisan "blindness".

Unironically, I've found some of the most simplistic and emotional (unsolicited) takes on US politics when engaging with people abroad.

It isn't partisan.

I could write a long essay about the issues with trump, and none of it relies on specific policies or the party he belongs to.

At root, he just doesn't have democratic instincts. I'd put him far too close to Hitler or Putin in that regard.

But even if you don't want to go that far, he isn't one to build concensus. Which is the reason for my criticism. If you're going to vote for the other side's representative, surely you would value consensus.

Hitler was pretty different from Putin, Stalin, Trump, Gaddafi or even the Xis, Husseins and FDRs of the world in terms of personality.

For Hitler the vision was so compelling that he bit off more than he could chew. Hitler was an idealist. The others are temperamentally focused enough on personal power that the vision is constrained relative to that personal power, and ultimately in favor of that personal power. They can still screw up (witness Putin and to a lesser extent Trump), but they're constantly adapting to what their power indicates is possible.

Yes, ish. There's a few core traits you could apply to them all though.

I'm not saying Trump is going to murder millions of Jews.

What I am saying is that trump is about personal power at the expense of democracy. That he will do things his way, come what may.

That's also an element of why people vote for him. They want a 'strong' leader. But strong leaders don't make good democratic leaders, because democracy gets in their way.

I agree. Though there's a limit to what he actually can do in the US power structure, even with buy-in by other figures.

It's a truism in the US that if you care about the economy and defense you should vote Republican, and yet when you look at the actual actions of Republican presidential administrations you basically have to go back to Reagan economic and defense policies which were actually decent (and Reagan's most decent economic policy was reappointing Volcker who was originally appointed by Carter).

This is not to say Democrats have been all that much better, but at least they weren't cutting taxes during an expensive war of offense.

These same truisms exist about so-called strong leaders.

I'm not so confident.

I'm from the UK, on paper we have an absolutely terrible constitution. Compare that to Afghanistan when the US pulled out. But then Afghanistan folded straight away, whereas Britain has managed to stay somewhat stable for a few centuries.

My conclusion is that democracy isn't so much about the written rules as it is culture. That means you need people at the top that actually respect that culture.

I replied to someone else, but I think it serves just as well as a reply to your comment. Here's a link, because I won't copy and paste:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38321929