What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Valmy]

I hate passive voice. Seen by...who? Zombies? Ninjas? Pirates?

Anyway twitter was perfectly designed to radicalize people into culty groups who then would go after people. Fuck Gamergate started when a twitter mob went after this female game developer for some sin she had committed. I was there man, it was nuts.

I 100% guarantee you nobody would have been ousting people for that shit if it wasn't for twitter. I know twitter wasn't designed to be a culty mob action website, but if somebody had designed a website to do that, they couldn't have done much better.

I left the website in 2014 100% because of all that nonsense.

And notice as twitter lost its influence this nonsense has gone away. College age people being mad the economy was destroyed has nothing to do with it. Besides the stupid thing was it seemed like the mobs weren't really going after people whose positions they wanted, it was whatever rando had the misfortune of attracting their wrath that day.

It's not like jobs for college grads have gotten better today.

But let's say this is true. Cancel culture wasn't some mass psychosis brought on by a social engineering perhaps inadvertently done by a destructive website, but actually rage at economic problems brought on by economic collapse. Well that is also a reason people give for the entire Trump phenomenon? Rage at economic problems?

I don't know. A few people getting cancelled on twitter (a few hundred? Thousand? Not sure) is certainly a thing that happened. But on the other hand you have millions of Republicans selecting Trump as their guy. Which is a bigger data point? Which one is more likely to be actually a mass movement that is the base of a major political party?

[Razgovory]

I hate passive voice. Seen by...who? Zombies? Ninjas? Pirates?

Anyway twitter was perfectly designed to radicalize people into culty groups who then would go after people. Fuck Gamergate started when a twitter mob went after this female game developer for some sin she had committed. I was there man, it was nuts.

I 100% guarantee you nobody would have been ousting people for that shit if it wasn't for twitter. I know twitter wasn't designed to be a culty mob action website, but if somebody had designed a website to do that, they couldn't have done much better.

I left the website in 2014 100% because of all that nonsense.

And notice as twitter lost its influence this nonsense has gone away. College age people being mad the economy was destroyed has nothing to do with it. Besides the stupid thing was it seemed like the mobs weren't really going after people whose positions they wanted, it was whatever rando had the misfortune of attracting their wrath that day.

It's not like jobs for college grads have gotten better today.

But let's say this is true. Cancel culture wasn't some mass psychosis brought on by a social engineering perhaps inadvertently done by a destructive website, but actually rage at economic problems brought on by economic collapse. Well that is also a reason people give for the entire Trump phenomenon? Rage at economic problems?

I don't know. A few people getting cancelled on twitter (a few hundred? Thousand? Not sure) is certainly a thing that happened. But on the other hand you have millions of Republicans selecting Trump as their guy. Which is a bigger data point? Which one is more likely to be actually a mass movement that is the base of a major political party?

I'm not a very good writer Valmy, sorry. "Seen by" who should be obvious.  Left-wing college educated people.  I don't think it was Twitter is the main culprit here, because this situation has happened three other times in the last 100 years.  Late 1920's and 1930's, mid-1960's to early 1970's, late 1980's and early 1990's, and about 2011-2020ish.

The rage at economic problems is rather specific, it's people who graduated college and felt they deserve a high paying respectable job.  They aren't getting the type of work they feel they are entitled too so they are angry.  So they agitate and try to find allies by attaching themselves to other causes: LGBT activism, helping minorities, environmentalism, etc.  When the job market for college educated people improves, the radicalism declines and old inequalities remain.  And so each revolution fails because the people who are pushing it, elites, just want to be well compensated elites.  "We didn't overthrow capitalism, but I got good job doing what I like and that's almost as good".

Trump may in fact be a result of this.  The extreme shift left results in the radicals being out of step with everyone else and performative politics and stances that seem peculiar to non-college educated people alienate a large portion of the electorate. As a result they elect a Nixon or a Trump.

[The Minsky Moment]

A neo-Nazi law student at the University of Florida Law School wrote a final essay for class arguing that the Constitution exists only to defend white people, that non-whites should be stripped of voting rights and forcibly expelled, and that the 14th and 15th amendments are unconstitutional (the equivalent of arguing 1+1=3 in constitutional law). He received an award for the essay as the best in class.  His professor is a sitting federal judge. The Dean of the school defended the award, saying the school can't consider viewpoints in evaluating student work, even when the viewpoint is that the Constitution should be deemed unconstitutional, and even when an essay on Originalism - a framework that is supposed to consider how late 18th century Americans understood constitutional meaning - instead adopts an interpretive framework from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist.

You don't have to hypothesize about microaggressions to see racism in America today. It is palpable and increasingly obvious and it has gotten steadily worse in just the past year. People with openly pro-Nazi views have influence with this White House.  But I am supposed to believe that the Right has not moved at all and the sole problem is that the Democrats have moved sharply to the left?  That Hakim Jefferies is a crypto-Commie?  That the GOP today is no different, no more radical or racist than the party of Bob Dole and Mitt Romney?   It's absurd.

[garbon]

A neo-Nazi law student at the University of Florida Law School wrote a final essay for class arguing that the Constitution exists only to defend white people, that non-whites should be stripped of voting rights and forcibly expelled, and that the 14th and 15th amendments are unconstitutional (the equivalent of arguing 1+1=3 in constitutional law). He received an award for the essay as the best in class.  His professor is a sitting federal judge. The Dean of the school defended the award, saying the school can't consider viewpoints in evaluating student work, even when the viewpoint is that the Constitution should be deemed unconstitutional, and even when an essay on Originalism - a framework that is supposed to consider how late 18th century Americans understood constitutional meaning - instead adopts an interpretive framework from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist.

You don't have to hypothesize about microaggressions to see racism in America today. It is palpable and increasingly obvious and it has gotten steadily worse in just the past year. People with openly pro-Nazi views have influence with this White House.  But I am supposed to believe that the Right has not moved at all and the sole problem is that the Democrats have moved sharply to the left?  That Hakim Jefferies is a crypto-Commie?  That the GOP today is no different, no more radical or racist than the party of Bob Dole and Mitt Romney?   It's absurd.

Presumably this is where their answer would be that this is only in reaction to white people being told they are the worst people ever and their history was being erased with the confederate statues coming down and military bases being renamed.

[Razgovory]

A neo-Nazi law student at the University of Florida Law School wrote a final essay for class arguing that the Constitution exists only to defend white people, that non-whites should be stripped of voting rights and forcibly expelled, and that the 14th and 15th amendments are unconstitutional (the equivalent of arguing 1+1=3 in constitutional law). He received an award for the essay as the best in class.  His professor is a sitting federal judge. The Dean of the school defended the award, saying the school can't consider viewpoints in evaluating student work, even when the viewpoint is that the Constitution should be deemed unconstitutional, and even when an essay on Originalism - a framework that is supposed to consider how late 18th century Americans understood constitutional meaning - instead adopts an interpretive framework from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist.

You don't have to hypothesize about microaggressions to see racism in America today. It is palpable and increasingly obvious and it has gotten steadily worse in just the past year. People with openly pro-Nazi views have influence with this White House.  But I am supposed to believe that the Right has not moved at all and the sole problem is that the Democrats have moved sharply to the left?  That Hakim Jefferies is a crypto-Commie?  That the GOP today is no different, no more radical or racist than the party of Bob Dole and Mitt Romney?  It's absurd.

Well, the major shift left I'm talking about took place 15 years ago, so microaggressions weren't in a response to a paper written this year.  Microaggression is about finding racism in people who aren't displaying overt racism.  I wasn't talking about the GOP, I was talking about us.  I was giving a reason why we keep losing elections, a better one, I think, than black people are too stupid to remember Trump is a racist.

[The Minsky Moment]

The vast majority of black voters went against Trump.

The other question is whether we need an explanation other than that poor white voters, despite relying on the very government programs that the GOP are gutting, are so gullible that they will vote for the party that screws them and potentially ruins their family's economic future, just to show off their contempt for urban liberals and the horrifying prospect that somewhere in the nation, a trans woman is competing in a high school women's track meet.

[Razgovory]

The vast majority of black voters went against Trump.

The other question is whether we need an explanation other than that poor white voters, despite relying on the very government programs that the GOP are gutting, are so gullible that they will vote for the party that screws them and potentially ruins their family's economic future, just to show off their contempt for urban liberals and the horrifying prospect that somewhere in the nation, a trans woman is competing in a high school women's track meet.

Trump picks up more Black voters each time he runs.   He picks up more Hispanic voters he time he runs.  I don't think it is because they forget who he is.  I think the answer to your question is in your question.  You use the word "gullible".  Maybe they vote against you because you don't respect them, that you hold them in contempt.

[Sheilbh]

Class war, basically.

In broad strokes I think you're right.

Where I differ is on the lack of empathy for poor white people. I find it much more common that poor white people hate poor middle class people, because rich white people tell poor white people the middle class white people hate them.

On the class war/culture war analysis and overlap, I think there is a lot to it. Though it's not deliberate.

There's been a lot written about it but I always think of when I was growing up, the great Glaswegian comedian Billy Connolly used to have an entire bit on this 30 years ago about how the working class don't hate the rich they hate the middle class - because they have to deal with them. They're the snooty neighbours/relatives, the curtain-twitchers, the person from HQ coming down to tell you how to do your job.

I don't think the rich tell them middle class people hate them but that the middle class' structural role (especially in the era of bullshit jobs) is to manage. They're HR, they're compliance, they're consultants coming to shut your factory. Or in one example I always remember a Blairite New Labour minister speaking in a town where the Rover car factory was shutting down telling a roomful of skilled labourers that the good news was Tesco was opening a megastore just out of time. I think supermarkets are often very good employers (and like McDonalds and the Royal Mail have a great record of shop floor to senior management), but just seems to view all manual-ish labour as interchangeable. And you think of Orwell's line on English intellectuals who would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from a poor box.

I think it's vastly overused but I think the Barbara Ehrenreich concept of a "professional managerial class" between capital and labour has a lot to it.

And I'm not fully sure it's just one way. I have some issues with it but there's a really interesting book about class and recent British politics called A Nation of Shopkeepers - and one of its arguments is that there are also basically "proletarianising graduates". People who did the higher education route, are loaded with student debt, a lower "graduate premium" than in the past, unable to afford a home in either the cities they work in or nice leafy areas they grew up in and increasingly in routine and semi-routine jobs (especially as minimum qualifications for jobs increases) that are alienating and not the sort of self-actualisation students perhaps expect. He notes that was the core of Corbyn's success for example.

I suppose the other bit on this is how AI plays in because the tech bros who pivoted on a dime with Trump's re-election clearly expect AI to be able to replace that professional-managerial class who will be reduced to as alienating, Fordified labour as everyone else.

[viper37]

Yi is going to be happy.

NATO countries will reach their 5% military spending target, under Trump's impulse.  Dead leader has prevailed.

All while not spending much more on their military than they already had planned to commit to defense the year before.  

[Valmy]

Good. Soon a vast army of drones and AI controlled death lasers will be stationed at Europe's eastern frontiers.

[crazy canuck]

Good. Soon a vast army of drones and AI controlled death lasers will be stationed at Europe's eastern frontiers.

That seems to be the Canadian PMs idea

Mr. Carney told CNN the nature of warfare is changing so rapidly that Canada doesn't "need an aircraft carrier" but instead cutting-edge warfare technology, such as drones, which are tied into satellite and aerial warfare systems. He pointed to Ukraine, where drone warfare to resist Russia's invasion has changed the battlefield

[Maladict]

Trump whisperer Rutte strikes again. Fortunately for him  he doesn't mind debasing himself to get the job done. Not sure the Royal family enjoyed it as much 

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Trump whisperer Rutte strikes again. Fortunately for him  he doesn't mind debasing himself to get the job done. Not sure the Royal family enjoyed it as much 

If he manages to keep nato alive until better times ...

[Admiral Yi]

Yi is going to be happy.

NATO countries will reach their 5% military spending target, under Trump's impulse.  Dead leader has prevailed.

All while not spending much more on their military than they already had planned to commit to defense the year before. 

When every NATO country reaches 2% I will say you promised this 10 years ago.

[The Minsky Moment]

The vast majority of black voters went against Trump.

The other question is whether we need an explanation other than that poor white voters, despite relying on the very government programs that the GOP are gutting, are so gullible that they will vote for the party that screws them and potentially ruins their family's economic future, just to show off their contempt for urban liberals and the horrifying prospect that somewhere in the nation, a trans woman is competing in a high school women's track meet.

I think the answer to your question is in your question.  You use the word "gullible".  Maybe they vote against you because you don't respect them, that you hold them in contempt.

Wow Raz you completely missed the point.  My question was entirely rhetorical - I was rejecting that entire line of reasoning.  My point is that *your* argument - which presumes that white heartland voters are voting for programs harmful to their interest simply as a means for expressing rejection of imagined coastal elites - entails precisely the assumption of gullibility you understandably find offensive.  I find it offensive as well, but I DONT AGREE with that entire narrative.