Yet in my lifetime I have seen them consistently go or vote against their own interests (see Brexit which absolutely gutted British farmers which overwhelmingly voted against "evil EU rules").
Given the smaller absolute number of farmers, their vote carried less significant weight than many other blocs.
~ https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fv...
~ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671...
Face it, the UK population as a whole voted against their own interests, there's no justification to single out UK farmers as being somehow different to the UK population and more deserving of blame.
That original version was phrased as to blame farmers for the plight of Brexit, as if a small group who voted more or less in line with with the nation made any kind of difference.
Did farmers have it far worse after Brexit than the average Brit?
My understanding is the nation as a whole suffered, with the exception of well off Brits with significant off shore assests.
The only metric I can think of that was impacted was currency value on the day of the vote, but that dump was driven by predictions of economic problems that never happened so arguably those traders just took a bath due to believing the wrong people. It is anyway not necessarily bad for a country like the UK to have a lower valued currency; economists had for years been arguing it was overvalued and would be better if the currency was cheaper, so this is a bit of a wash.
All the comments being made here about people voting against their own interests start by assuming that voter's interests are exclusively trade-related, and that constitutional issues don't matter to people at all. This is clearly wrong but a required assumption for the whole against-their-own-interests claim to work. And then it goes on to conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened when it didn't.
Both of these are fatal flaws to the argument.
The only way I can see to argue there was negative impact is via very indirect paths, e.g. the voters wanted less immigration and Johnson set the thresholds in the new immigration system so low that immigration increased. But that's more accurately blamed on the Conservatives and the general ideological hangover of EU membership on the party itself, not leaving. Voters can at least do something about it now, and the rise of Reform (Britain's new top-polling party) is evidence of that effect in action.
Uh... Disagree.
> On January 11, 2024, the London Mayor's Office released the "Mayor highlights Brexit damage to London economy". The release cites the independent report by Cambridge Econometrics that London has almost 300,000 fewer jobs, and nationwide two million fewer jobs as a direct consequence of Brexit. Brexit is recognized as a key contributor to the 2023 cost-of-living crisis with the average citizen being nearly £2,000 worse off, and the average Londoner nearly £3,400 worse off, in 2023 as a result of Brexit. In addition, UK real Gross Value Added was approximately £140bn less in 2023 than it would have been had the UK remained in the Single Market.[0]
The whole page paints a picture which is far from "no measurable negative impact". While it's contrasted with some areas suffering and others benefiting, it's hard to have an overall picture that looks either good or bad, but it's far from being overly positive. And this is just on the economic topic, there's another whole hoist of topics which have negative outlooks such as security, politics (i.e. with the Ireland controversy and how difficult this situation is), etc.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit#Imm...
"[Remainers] conflate predictions with reality, by assuming that because the NGO-academic class predicted economic doom it must have actually happened"
The report you cite it isn't showing a measurable negative impact of Brexit, although you brought it up as a rebuttal to that point. It's a modeling exercise in which the authors imagine a hypothetical world up to 2035, and then pick a long series of unvalidated assumptions which causes the UK's performance to diverge massively from that of the wider EU and prior trends. None of these assumptions are plausible:
• They admit that they did a similar exercise in 2018 which was wrong.
• On page 14 they even admit that they are being deliberately pessimistic.
• They assume an annual GDP growth rate of 4.3% suddenly starting in 2026. That's US levels of growth. Both the UK and the EU only grew at 1.4% last year.
Arguments of the form "I told Excel it will be bad and therefore it's bad" are invalid, but were exactly the strategy the Remain campaign used during the referendum. In the years that followed their predictions were all falsified. Anyone can pay some consultants to write a Word document about the future that imagines whatever the customer wants. Go ahead and imagine 4.3% GDP growth appearing out of nowhere, why not? Such reports aren't independent by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly don't show that anything bad has already happened.
Unfortunately, Sadiq Khan is a manipulator who understands the psychological weaknesses of his supporters very well. So this set of imaginings about the future gets presented in the present tense, with sentences like "London’s economy alone has shrunk by more than £30 billion". It hasn't. Go look at the actual data. It has "shrunk" vs the imaginary numbers in his report, which means nothing.
Predictions are not reality. Reality is reality. And in reality, there has been no measurable negative impact of Brexit, which is why people like Sadiq Khan are forced to make numbers up.
Against their own interest.
I see this divide all the time, and I can't bear seeing this used time and time again to make the rural vs. the urban populations angry at each other, which in the end only detracts from trying to see how to make everything work together.
I wish we'd be smarter and stopped just being condescending towards the other group. The only ones actively benefitting from this divide are not well-intentioned people in my mind.
Personally, I'd love to see more investment into rural and semi-rural areas to stop rural flight (because letting run that one unchecked is the cause for the housing prices in urban areas skyrocketing).
The problem is, it's getting increasingly hard to justify spending money on these areas morally. In Germany, even over ten years ago when I worked in construction primarily in rural areas, outright nazism (like entering a bar and witnessing the bar shout the heil-salute including raising the arm) was already a thing, listening to the "Stammtisch" idiocy outright painful, and today it's even worse because this kind of opinion isn't just utter fringe any more, it's gotten political mainstream.
When we're deciding to send money to rural areas, we're effectively rewarding "going fascist". Just behave deranged enough and you'll get everyone bending over.
I think this is an inevitable consequence of population size and density. People are interested in people. The people who generate new culture -- who attract the interest of other people -- thrive in the cities. They have a bigger audience and a bigger community of fellow creatives. They find more variety. They have more to work with. So in both the city and the country people pay attention to what's happening in the city and ignore what's happening in the country. More is happening in the city and it is more interesting.
This isn't everything that makes cities tend to differ in their values and politics from the country, but it's the hotbed malign demagogues exploit to empower themselves. They tell the country, "Hey, the city people don't respect you. They have contempt for your values. Their politics are the reason for your suffering. You are the real people. They are parasites. Be mad!"
The country is primed to rise up. The city isn't. So the demagogues make the country hurt the city. Then the city is mad as well, at people who have genuinely hurt them, whereas the country was fooled into being mad at the city and striking the first blow.
It isn't necessarily the case that the people in the country are dumber. They're just the ones primed for a fight. But the con artists are working over the country people, so from the city's perspective the country people are fools.
US withdrawal from Climate Agreement, vaccine sceptic being made secretary of health, US alienating Europe, proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza, lying about who started the Ukraine war. Cutting funds to USAID. Threatening to take Greenland by force. Threatening to annex Canada. Proclaiming himself to be King. Constantly "joking" about third term.
Does any of this seem toxic to you? Would educated people support these actions?
They need to be educated in politics and economy in order to navigate all regulations and subsidies.
The critique is that too many Americans have become complacent and allowed the political system and media landscape to evolve as it has. The Democrats are also corrupt and need to be replaced, but it requires a sacrifice of wealth that people aren't willing to give, for selfish reasons.
But you will experience the consequences.
The Democrats have been allowing this for too long and are equally complacent. Nancy Pelosi doing insider trading is just the tip of the iceberg, quite literally speaking as the house speaker.
Americans should join Serbia and Turkey in their revolutions.
That was the day that I lost all respect for America and I fully agree that it was the day when the Republicans saw that you didn't need to win an election you needed to game the system.
From that point onwards is when the Red states went ham on targeted voter suppression and made a number of extremely anti-democratic moves. The current situation is at least 25 years in the making.
Maybe not the HN crowd (though that is debatable, there is no homogenous group here) but a seizable amount of the SV rulers have endorsed him.
NIH cuts, US withdrawal from Climate Agreement, vaccine sceptic being made secretary of health, US alienating Europe, proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza, lying about who started the Ukraine war. Cutting funds to USAID. Threatening to take Greenland by force. Threatening to annex Canada. Proclaiming himself to be King. Constantly "joking" about third term.
In retrospect is this what you voted for?
Which is surprising because they were bitten by his tariffs last time round. What made them think he'd do better for them this time?
Same answer as for everyone else: Fox News.
It is ironic after all of these decades of originalism being seen as a reactionary thing against minorities that the Framers put positive discrimination for (economic and geographic) minorities into the Constitution explicitly to prevent "tyranny of the majority".
The U.S.A. is full of such ironies at the moment.
Yep, as if tyranny of the minority is better. Of course Republicans think it's good because it gets them elected but this country is regressing because of the status quo.
It is disingenuous to lay the results at their feet only like the comment you're responding to suggests ; Trump did win the popular vote. The dems fumbled this one, plain and simple.
It was close, and American politics being what it is, it doesn't actually matter. Hillary Clinton did get a majority in 2016 after all, but the narrative was still that she was the worst and losing-est candidate in American political history. Every Democrat is a liar, a cheat and a communist, every Republican has a mandate from God to sweep the leftists into the sea. That's just how it works, regardless of what the numbers say.
What do you mean? In 2024, Trump indisputably won the popular vote - as in, he had more total popular votes than any other candidate (77.3 million votes compared to 75 million votes to Kamala, and nowhere remotely close for anyone else), which is what "winning a vote" means. In 2016 you're right that Hillary won the popular vote but still lost the presidency, but that's a different matter. And you're also right that he could have lost the popular vote again and still won the presidency, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether he did win or not.
Trump won 49% of the vote in 2024, compared to Hillary's 48% in 2016.
The numbers go with the story perfectly. He didn't win a majority of the popular vote, but neither did Hilary. Trump did win a bigger share than she did though.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by a margin of almost 3 million[0].
But because states vote for President in the US through the electoral college, rather than people, Trump won the election with a slight majority of electoral votes. Hillary Clinton lost not because she was unpopular (she was, even in the most conservative estimate, about as popular as Trump,) but because she didn't campaign in the correct states.
[0]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-officially-w...
You cannot say that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and say that Trump did not in 2024 unless you are disputing the official count. He had a margin of around 2.3m.
https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...
>And winning a plurality is winning the vote, in almost all electoral systems
I'd argue that there are many electoral systems that realize the potential problems this causes, and either use runoffs, or IRV/STV, to avoid it. The US (and UK...) just have very antiquated electoral processes that, especially in the US, have not benefited from the last two centuries of research on voting systems.
I was incorrect about Trump not winning the popular vote. I thought that the final vote tally had him losing by a slight margin but apparently not, so mea culpa on that.
Presidential systems with runoffs are very popular. A plurality is useless there, you win with a majority.
Keep people uneducated, dont support the poor and then act like you will solve these issues, its conservative 101
Ofcourse in Europe we learned that socialism improves the lives of the proletariat not national socialism.
So they are going for a lose/lose situation out of spiteness.
The solution is to always go for the win/win situation, even if it leads to smaller wins. It avoid building up resentment, that will always lead to a lose/lose situation.
https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...
Listening to them one could think the US is on the brink of collapse unless some 'strong leader' steps in and 'makes America great again'.
The original definition, which is where it got its lasting popularity, comes from the popular workers' movements of the 1910s and 20s: workers owning the means of production. That is basically describing an economic system in which enterprises, particularly factories, are democratically controlled by the people working in them, who would have a say in how the enterprise is run.
This notion of socialism was corrupted by Lenin and his ilk when they essentially seized the worker's revolution that tore down the Tsars of Russia and founded the USSR. However, instead of decentralized workers' councils actually owning, profiting from, and controlling the factories (and farms and other enterprises) that they worked for, the state was put in charge of all of these. Ostensibly the state represented the will of the people, so that is how this leap was justified, but of course in reality it was one of the most heinous dictatorships that the world had seen in a long time. But because worker's rights were a popular idea at thrle time, the new absolutist monarchs of the "Soviet" empire kept claiming they are "socialists", just as they claimed they are "democratic", and no one bothered to contradict them.
In the meantime, in the West of Europe, particularly Germany, the same basic workers' movements were co-opted by Hitler, here claiming that he represents the people of Germany in their interests against the bogey-men they hated, the Jewish people (and Armenians and a few others), identified as evil Capitalists that had to be combatted. So they also named their movement "socialist", while in reality having an iron grip and military-like complete top-down control of the means of production.
Finally, more actually democratic forces that were nevertheless interested in keeping the capitalist status quo came up with a series of more minor reforms that would give some more resources, better lives, and rights to workers without actually putting them in full control of the enterprise they worked for. This movement ended up calling itself social-democrat or democratic socialism. Being very much similar to the previous status quo, and keeping the wealthy in power and in control of enterprises, while also not egregiusly oppressing workers to the point of revolt, this proved to be the most enduring form of "socialism" that persisted.
But your democracy has spoken now. The first time can be waived off as an aberration. The second time you have to own it.
Now, either you're commenting reactively on HN about it, or you're doing something about it and not taking it personally.
I guess what I should have said is "contempt for people outside of the laptop class" (and yes farmers may use laptops but you get what I mean).
And contempt is one of the defining features of Trumpism/Muskism, far more than "blue collar".
While America is internally divided between rural and urban, or red and blue, or Woke and MAGA, the rest of the world is becoming united in seeing it all as just those damn Americans, and a growing threat.
The world at large has stopped caring about the petty squabbling that goes on in America, the boorishness and the melodrama.
America is the house down the street that always has shouting and screaming coming from it, someone throwing someone elses crap on the front lawn and the cops getting called to it every other week.
It is embarrassing and no one cares who started it anymore. We just want peace and quiet.
From the very woke education system in the US to the electoral success of the AfD in Germany we seem to be following the US.
Woke has not spread into Asia, but nationalism and racism were there already.
To me, that's what woke means. Lots of making demands about how people should think/see things, and calling people names like TERF if they dare question the woke "truth".
Gender IS a social construct though - but sex is not and people conflate the two. The other problem is that if something is a social construct you cannot claim it is also an absolute truth.
Race is also a social construct, which a lot of people who are woke seem to have trouble dealing with - a lot of people who accept gender self-identify seem to be unwilling to accept race self-identify.
Also, they gained about nothing and seem themselves as the victims by the end of WWII. (Yes, literally they have seen themsevelves as primary victims of what happened.)
Not our boy. Trump was elected by uneducated farmers, not by HN crowd.
Almost 78% of farmers endorsed his most recent presidential run. https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...