Alternate reality: Obama wins in 2008, but refuses to let Secretary Clinton into his cabinet. Disaster averted?

Is the problem simply that Democrats are a bit too cozy with their own?

I know. Things are very bad. Very bad for working people. This is why I get so frustrated by people who wholesale dismiss poor, rural white people as dumbass robot racists. There's a texture to these people and they're very desperate. They've had their lives and dignity taken away. And it's only getting worse. This entire election has been class struggle, the anger and tensions are palpable. But nobody wants to seriously consider that the entire economic and social model we're living with is bad. It's a bad system and needs to be changed. And it can't be anything but a painful change.

The problem is, the Democrats want Americans to be how they want them to be, because the Democrats have their own agenda they're trying to advance. The disaster is in the fact that most people are entirely alienated from the political process and their lives are getting worse.

And yet there is no indication (to my mind) that anything Trump can or will do will change any of this.

Democrats can interpret this failure as a one-off, a bad candidate, and continue to rely on minority votes to overwhelm poor rural whites, leaving them behind economically, or they can take a revolutionary approach and rebuild the party with Sanders supporters as the new base. (Probably not the second one?)

It doesn't matter. Their voice was heard. The system is well-oiled at making sure their voice would never be heard.

It's like if you modeled an explosion. Things are going to follow the path of least resistance. Trump was that path. That gave them a voice, because nothing else they care about is heard.

In this case it was more like keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.

How is this so very different than Bush 43 or Reagan? Conservatives have been depending on working class votes for some time, with the phoney promise of trickle-down economics.

Have you not been paying attention? Virtually all of the elites hate Trump. I don't think any of the people who voted Trump really know or care about policy.

And yet Trump handed the Republicans the Senate and the House, and has expressed a general disinterest in policy, and will probably defer to a default Republican policy battery of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of environmental controls, his rhetoric about creating factory jobs notwithstanding.

Yes.

Some would say that Hillary handed the Republicans the Senate and the House. Honestly, it depends on which senate/house seat race you look at.

The last time I saw so many sad people walking the streets of Seattle was when Bush won. Geesh it's like the world just ended.

I can't say I'm depressed, just a little disoriented.

That said, I do worry what might happen if Trump is resoundingly beaten in four years, and starts a war over Christmas in order to crown himself God Emperor, just to avoid admitting that he lost at big something on the national stage.

Also, I just can't get this out of my head....

Racism and sexism won, but since those are the cornerstones of American politics, the result of this election doesn't really surprise me. I'm really only worried about its obvious upcoming reflections to politics in Europe and Finland in particular, because people turn out to be absolutely dumb everywhere in the world, so this will obviously reinvigorate such movements around here (or, like in the case of Estonia and Uganda, will also be funded by their American benefactors).

And yet, I actually hope that this result might actually somehow lead into stuff like ending the sanctions against Russia (which would take away the Finnish neoliberals' number one excuse for their austerity politics). Alas.

I don't mean to misconstrue your words, but I would hesitate to call them THE cornerstones. Should it have happened that Clinton were the "racist" one (although this is a little hard to imagine, seeing that the charge of racism these days seems, more than anything, to be a filter by which liberals dismiss the economic interests of conservatives) rather than Trump, I doubt she'd have had a significantly better shot at winning, given what she represented to your average working class voter.

For some people it kinda has, though? A whole lotta people are about to lose health insurance, affordable access to STD testing and barrier contraceptives. Muslims have gotta feel less safe today than they did yesterday. LGBTs are facing a viciously anti-gay platform, and a policy setter (Pence) who has a history of following through on that stuff. And there'll basically be nothing standing in their way on any of these issues.

Like, I don't really expect you to understand why people are sad (conservatives aren't good at empathy, that's the difference between conservatives and progressives), but please believe me when I say that it is a reasonable reaction.

Yup things are going to be very bad the next four years. Hopefully the left can reconstruct itself into something less DNC-like.

Like I'm actually half-tempted to pamphleteer against liberal/conservative two-party control.

There are >300 million people in the US. Obamacare helped 20 million, but some percentage of those didn't want healthcare but were forced to buy it in order to bring premiums down for the others. However, premiums are set to jump up to 100% this year! People on obamacare were voting for trump in droves because the prices are skyrocketing. Liberals sit here and pretend to care but do you care about the healthy people who are now forced to pay over $500/month for healthcare they don't use in order to pay for the subsidies for others? Let's not pretend this is a simple issue, "trump won so a lotta people will lose healtchare" -- a lot of people were going to lose healthcare anyway because prices were skyrocketing, even after the subsidies. Let's not pretend people weren't losing their "good" plans and being forced to replace them with terrible hmo plans because they were priced out. Let's not pretend tons of people were opting to pay the $500 fine instead of the ridiculously priced plans on the government exchanges. Now instead of paying for insurance we have to pay for insurance plus the built in costs to support the federal exchange, the various state exchanges, the administration of it all, the huge bureaucracy that sprung up around it, etc.

For every class of people that feels less safe today there is another class of people that feels more safe. It would be really nice if there was a party that would protect all people equally instead of picking favorites, I agree.

The sad people in Seattle I saw were white men and women in their 20s-50s working at tech companies so it's not like it's poor people struggling to make a living. The homeless, poor, etc., were sad already, despite liberals being in power here for as long as I can remember. Having Obama in the white house didn't help them.

Brian, PPACA is not just about affordable non-group insurance. It's also prohibiting insurance company abuses like redlining, obfuscating out-of-pocket costs, lifetime limits, denying coverage for people who have ever had minor health problems, kicking people off insurance if they ever actually use it. Those provisions help everybody with US health insurance, including group. And those are the provisions that insurance companies actually want to get rid of, unlike the tax penalty which is NEVER going away.

Just because someone is white and works for a tech company doesn't mean PPACA didn't help them.

Oh no. The Democrat's strategy of paying marginal lip service to climate change by subsidizing greedy west coast VCs is going to be marginally interrupted.

If all those regulations price people out of insurance anyway, it's a net negative. My wife and daughter used to have affordable insurance through their government employers. Now the decent insurance through them is so expensive they just opt not to participate. I'm talking in the course of just a couple of years the premiums for a decent PPO plan went from double digits to something like $500/month for a single person working full time for state government. Maybe this is helping somebody but it's certainly not helping my family.

For some reason when you talk to me you try to frame everything through the lens of being white and working for a tech company. Yeah, I'm white and I work for a tech company. But I didn't grow up privileged and I didn't grow up rich. I don't have a college degree. I grew up in that poverty-stricken part of Washington you mentioned driving through in another thread. I grew up living in a mobile home. One of my friends in high school lived in a shelter made out of tarps. My parents didn't have money to send any of us to college. If obamacare isn't helping the "tech company, white" part of my family, and it isn't helping the "rural, poor" part of my family, and it isn't helping the "old, retired" part of my family, and it isn't helping the "struggling to get by millennial" part of my family, who exactly is it helping? With retired parents and 4 brothers and sisters with families of their own, running the gamut from barely scraping by to doing pretty well and from living in the poorest county in western washington to comfortably middle-class in one of the most liberal states in the USA, I really don't see how these liberal policies have helped us. Most of us are worse off because of obamacare, not better off.

I "framed it" as white people working for tech companies because YOU *****ed about white tech workers being sad about Trump winning.

By the way, while we're on the subject of conservatives having no compassion: you are being super judgy about folks whose circumstances you don't know. Those sad white 20-something tech workers might be gay. Or trans. Or Muslims. Or sick. Or an immigrant. Or friends or partners with someone who is affected. Or just compassionate for people who are, even though they aren't affected.

Did you ask? No, you just assumed that they're exactly like you, with the same attitudes and motivations as you.

And I really don't care whether you were born in a log cabin or whatever your point was. And I also don't think PPACA is a good law. But that doesn't change the fact that it actually did help a lot of vulnerable people, including some (gasp!) white professionals, so they have a right to be sad when they lose it.

Ok, so your whole point was that I was being insensitive because I said I saw a whole lot of sad people. You picked a very roundabout way of making that point. I think you read more into what I was saying than I meant when I said it.

Now that I think about it, the people in this city look just as sad when the Seahawks lose.

Liberals are not better at empathy, they are better at virtue signaling. When everyone is is trying to paint the other side's motivates as evil caricatures, that's not an example of empathy at work.

"Well I may not be perfect, but at leasst I don't virtue signal."

My point is that you are objectively wrong re: your stated assumption that white tech workers aren't affected.

Ironically, while I am not calling you insensitive (i.e. "hurting their feelings"), your assumption is exactly the kind of paternalistic and demeaning response I am talking about. Real people are affected by policies, sometimes in ways that aren't obvious to us, and it's dangerous to assume people aren't affected by policies simply because they are superficially privileged or superficially similar to us. Considering why people might be reasonably sad instead of laughing at them would make you a better citizen. You would have better reasons for what you think and would be more persuasive when talking to others.

I don't even disagree with you, dude, but instead of listening to me you automatically call me a bleeding heart. Is that supposed to accomplish something?

Virtue signalling happens on both sides, it's the corollary of social disgust response and it's typical of authoritarian attitudes. Progressives are not all Machiavellian supergeniuses any more than conservatives are all self-hating homosexuals. These kinds of people exist but are not significant proportions.

The vast majority of people support policies which are best for themselves and their communities. They fall on a continuum of policy opinions, even if those opinions are ultimately overridden by partisanship. Even the most bombastic and simpleminded person is capable of providing some reason for what they believe. Try talking to actual people instead of watching Fox/MSNBC.

I think you're still reading way too much into what I said. Also, did you care when the conservatives were sad when Obama got elected? So it's not that I was insensitive, it was that I was "super judgy." I'm failing to see how my statement had any judgement in it, really. If I had phrased it like this, would it have been more clear? Less offensive?

"I see a lot of sad people in Seattle. I think they are overreacting."

I think you have the wrong idea about my political views and it negatively impacts our conversations. I have the feeling we agree on a lot more than you think.

I suspect you're right.

And yes, I did care about the conservatives who were sad when Obama got elected. I think there were many legitimate concerns that ended up getting buried under fake controversies like the birther thing. And I suspect that the DNC had a hand in arranging that.

Predictions on the future of the Democrat Party?

I think if they would stop screwing around with gun control they could easily win pretty much every election. They need to figure out a way stem gun violence without infringing on people's rights.

I think they could win over a lot of conservatives by pledging money to try to prevent the need for abortions instead of constantly promoting them. I'm not saying ban them, or shame women, or punish women, but actually prevent them through education, contraception, and public statements that they shouldn't be used as a form of birth control. I know education and contraception are part of liberal platforms (and have been for a long time) and they are constantly blocked by conservatives. Maybe if they took the angle that these programs would be used to cut the number of abortions they would have more success.

Also, stop nominating awful people? Stop making it a contest to decide who is the least bad?

Also, it's conventional wisdom that "rich white people" are republicans but if you look at the voting trends in my area at least, it's the exact opposite. The blue areas in this map are where the richer people live. The darker the blue, the richer the area. The more red, the more rural and poorer.



I think people have seen past the ruse that the democrats are supposedly for the working person, especially with Clinton's connections to wall street.

Both parties need to stop demonizing specific groups in order to get elected, it's bull**** and bad for everybody.

Yep.





They might not have to think that hard, and the temptation will exist for them not to. Although they may react to their loss by moving to the right like Jon suggested (whether they do so intelligently, as you suggest, or recklessly, by absorbing more voodoo economics for rhetorical and campaign financing purposes), what's to say they won't simply double down and try harder to get out the vote? The media is going to have a field day with Trump, and while there appears to be a media truce at the moment, I don't see any possibility things won't degenerate rapidly. If they can paint him as a monster, and bemoan any of his attempts to undo Obama's legacy, they may just rally enough angry non-white voters.

It would be nice if instead of this dirty game they instead propose a meaningful alternative to the myth of trickle down economics and a complete ignorance of environmental externalities, along the lines of Sanders or Warren, but I think this requires too many intelligent and far sighted people than is possible in American politics.

You also have to consider the power of the bully pulpit: anything that appears to be socialist can easily be demonized by President Trump, so I predict the Democrats will be too timid to even try.

I know you aren't being serious, but the people in the blue areas mostly aren't rich. They are probably well-paid professionals, but that doesn't mean they have wealth. Professionals tend to have post-secondary educations, which by itself is enough to explain their Democratic support in this election. Wealth isn't something you can build by drawing a salary.

If you mean actual rich people, it is difficult to generalize about them. There are actually multiple types of "rich white people", although this fact isn't widely understood and the breakdown isn't well tracked, and each experiences a unique set of extrinsic forces. Physical capital rentiers tend to vote very differently than entrepreneurs, for example, even though they might be equally rich on paper.

Certainly the longer someone submits their minds to the state run education system the greater the risk of indoctrination. As far as wealth, I wonder what you consider wealth. The average household salary is adequate for most families to attain millionaire status if they're wise enough to manage their funds properly however it's virtually impossible for the average millionaire to become a billionaire. That's why I always find it odd when the class warfare fanatics lump millionaires and billionaires together and people just accept it.

Wealth means owning enough factories that your factories buy themselves more factories, while still paying for any lifestyle you choose to live, all without having to do any of the work yourself.

Subsitute stocks, bonds, farms, apartment buildings, rare cigars, etc. as appropriate.

Want a dollar figure? Rich people say $15-20 is the ceiling for lifestyle expenditures not including durable goods like houses and yachts. So the floor is $20m / (rate of return on capital - inflation rate) > $20m / (GDP growth rate - inflation rate) = $20m / (0.03 - 0.015) = $1.3 billion.

So in 2016 you're only wealthy if you're a billionaire. Sound about right to you?

Well, I would agree that you are not going to build that dollar figure by drawing a salary.

Seize the means of production class war now.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/vancouver+slaps+year+empty+homes+about/12372683/story.html

Looks like Canada is doing something good about their stupid-ass real estate market.