[themckman]

So, I voted for DJT (I like calling him that, for some reason). I didn't vote for him because I agreed with any of his policies (as best I can tell he never actually presented any during the course of his campaign) or because I thought he was the best representative for the people of this country. I did so for a couple of reasons:

1. I like a good underdog story. The people that support him, for a multitude of reasons, feel neglected by the ruling class in this country. Now I don't know who started all the name calling, but I personally dislike the way they're demeaned and patronized by the Democrats/Liberals as racists and deplorable. There is absolutely no respect from the left given to these people and their opinions. Yeah, there are some loud one saying some ridiculous things, but I refuse to believe that close to half the country hates people of color and wants to completely isolate us from the rest of the world by closing our borders. It just can't be true. I lived in Germany for the last year and was just stunned at how quickly the word Xenophobia was used to label anyone that disagreed with Merkel's policy regarding the refugees. If your opinions were so immediately dismissed with such a strong word, you're going to start harboring some pretty strong feelings of animosity towards those who so quickly judge.

2. I believed he was the candidate with the biggest chance of winning that would bring about the biggest amount of disruption and change. (By this account, I should have voted for Obama in 2007 instead of writing in Ron Paul. But goddamn if Ron Paul didn't seem to have the most reasonable, compassionate and "real" voice I've ever heard in politics.) This, I believe, is inline largely with why Peter Thiel was backing him. I don't know if any of that change or disruption is going to be good or bad for me or the rest of America, but things are certainly going to be interesting for the next four years. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are going to be in complete turmoil as they scramble to figure out what the hell just happened. I think we were all ready to talk about the, sort of, civil war that was about to erupt in the Republican party after this election, but we might end up talking more, initially, about the same thing happening in the Democratic party. Obviously things aren't rosy with the Republicans just because they won everything, but the Democrats really have nothing to do but try and figure out what went wrong and fix it. I, also, don't believe he can really do anything too awful that we can't recover from; I have some faith in the checks and balances laid out by the constitution that will prevent DJT, himself, from doing too much harm. Unlike the Brexit vote, a DJT presidency isn't permanent. We'll be back in four years to do it all over again.

[Delmania]

> . Yeah, there are some loud one saying some ridiculous things, but I refuse to believe that close to half the country hates people of color and wants to completely isolate us from the rest of the world by closing our borders. It just can't be true.

You've never been to the deep south, much the south, have you?

> 2. I believed he was the candidate with the biggest chance of winning that would bring about the biggest amount of disruption and change

Anyone who believes Trump can change things is delusional and has very little, if any grasp, of how power works. Obama was voted in on the promise of change, as all we got was a watered down health care bill and the ability for gays to get married. The ACA probably won't be repealed any time because the Republicans do not have complete control. He will do a few things, and non-White, nonchristian people will suffer, but by in large things will stay the same. The simple fact is that the people who get you elected are not the same people you need to work with to enact legislation.

[themckman]

> You've never been to the deep south, much the south, have you?

I have been to the south (maybe not the "deep south") but your general assumption that I don't have a great understanding of the people that reside there is accurate. I do understand that there actually are people who truly hate people of color. What I was really taking issue with is the label of bigotry being so readily applied to anyone who supports Trump. I just find it unfair.

Regarding your last point, I wasn't necessarily trying to say that the change and disruption would happen specifically within government or by way of the laws we might pass. I apologize if that wasn't entirely clear. The most obvious place, as I mentioned, where we might see some of this is within both of the major parties themselves and how they operate outside of government. The Democrats will start that process immediately as they were the biggest losers and the Republicans will put that on hold as they do have some control over government, but clearly their party isn't in great shape either.

[Delmania]

> I have been to the south (maybe not the "deep south") but your general assumption that I don't have a great understanding of the people that reside there is accurate. I do understand that there actually are people who truly hate people of color. What I was really taking issue with is the label of bigotry being so readily applied to anyone who supports Trump. I just find it unfair.

Talk is cheap, actions are what define you. If you vote for someone who wages a racist, xenophobic campaign, someone who was endorsed by KKK and has riled up white supremacist views, you implicitly support them.

[grzm]

"If you vote for someone who wages a racist, xenophobic campaign, someone who was endorsed by KKK and has riled up white supremacist views, you implicitly support them."

This cuts both ways. Voters had effectively a binary choice. Given the dismal favorability ratings of both major party candidates, I think we do everyone a disservice by assuming they subscribe to every view or position either candidate has ever taken or changed. People have different values and different priorities for the values that they do share with others. We don't get to mix and match our candidates.

Given how split the country is, we likely have a lot of things we can find agreement on. We need to work on finding our common goals so we can move forward and make progress.

Edit to add: I myself struggle with determining where to draw the line. What views and/or actions are intolerable? Are they context dependent? At what point do our associations taint us? Too much for this thread perhaps, but worth keeping in mind when working with people who don't hold exactly the same views as we do; in other words, living in the real world.

[paulddraper]

You do realize that a black man was just elected as president twice, by a respectable margin each time?

So...like the parent said, most Americans don't hate colored people. I do think most Americans are frustrated by Obamacare, haphazard foreign involvement, and bailouts.

[Delmania]

> So...like the parent said, most Americans don't hate colored people. I do think most Americans are frustrated by Obamacare, haphazard foreign involvement, and bailouts.

Yes, I've read similar sentiments. The problem is, regardless of your desire for "change", the man that was elected waged a campaign full of racism and xenophobia and was endorsed by the KKK. Voting for him is implicitly supporting those views.

[paulddraper]

Poppycock.

Barack Obama was endorsed by the Black Panthers. Was voting for him implicitly supporting black racial superiority?

[weberc2]

> You've never been to the deep south, much the south, have you?

Even still, the left has treated the center and right like klansmen for the last decade. Perhaps the left's fatal flaw was failing to distinguish between actual racists and those who simply didn't drink the identity-politics kool-aid.

[fuqted]

>non-white people will suffer

Please tell me how non-white Americans will suffer from the policies of Trump. I'd think, what with 65k Syrian refugees flooding in and flocking to places like California (where I live) and backed up by policies in to land them unskilled jobs, the minority demo would suffer much more than, for instance, some Americans having their illegal relatives deported for example.

[Delmania]

Are you familiar at all with the policies of the Republican party?

[toss1941]

Are you familiar at all with the actual results of the policies of the Democratic party?

[Delmania]

I am, which is why I vote for them.

To expand, the Republican party now endorses conversion therapy for homosexuals, voter ids (in other words, voter suppression), denies climate science and evolution, a flat tax rate, and tax cuts for the wealthy (because trickle down economics works so well!). I can continue on, but those policies don't help the poor, who are overwhelming minority.

[jansanchez]

> Obama was voted in on the promise of change, as all we got was a watered down health care bill and the ability for gays to get married.

While I agree with the general sentiment, specially since they had majorities and they couldn't get a much better health care bill, we got more than that. For instance:

- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

- Dodd-Frank

[fuqted]

I'm also a Trump supporter, and this post largely echoes my reasoning.

>I refuse to believe that close to half of this country hates people of color

It's been confirmed that many pro Obama counties have turned pro Trump this election cycle. Clearly not racists.

[csorrell]

I'm not a Trump supporter, but it has been really frustrating to watch the Buzzfeed crowd paint all Trump supporters as misogynist racists. My facebook feed has been loaded with articles about how white men failed the feminist movement and all sorts of other crap that misses the point. I thinks Trumps popularity is best explained by saying that people are sick and tired of politics as usual. It's really not because half the country hates minorities.

[laaph]

I can see how people might think of Trump supporters as misogynist racists. Some people have argued that it is taking things out of context, but every time I look the context is worst than I imagined.

He denies rape by saying the accuser is too ugly to rape. (Would he rape if she were cute?)

He seems to think that "grabbing women by the pussy" is a good thing. Most politicians I'd give a pass on an event like this - it happened a long time ago, and most politicians would disclaim such behavior (compare Clinton's response to her email server during the debates).

He accuses a judge of not being able to do his job because he is "from Mexico", even though said judge was born as an American.

He attacks (seemingly) muslims at Hillary's DNC speech - for reasons I'm not entirely certain why.

So I think that there are a few options: you are either saying Trumps sexism and racism is worth it for his other qualities, or blatantly ignoring it, or actively supporting it. To me it's not hard to see how people would come to the conclusion that people are actively supporting it, because for a lot of people that is an issue that would trump other issues (bad pun not intended but now that it's there I'm leaving it).

[jmcgough]

I'm transgender and my people are in mourning. This might seem like a game to you, but there are very real consequences that will felt by vulnerable groups of people. He's already promised to repeal LGBT protections.

[zo1]

Protections such as what?

At the base level: Laws still apply, people will go to jail if they harm you. It's not like he's going to declare open hunting season on LGBTQ people.

[jmcgough]

Protection against healthcare discrimination, housing discrimination, and bathroom use. Under Obama, I was also able to get a passport with the correct gender marker, which I wouldn't have been able to do before without being forced to have expensive surgery.

A number of these were done through executive action, and Trump has said he will overturn them in office. Yes, laws still apply. But not if they aren't laws anymore. Pence was the one who signed Indiana's controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law, and has advocated reparative therapy (brainwashing the gay out of you), which is ineffective and incredibly damaging.

[losvedir]

> winning that would bring about the biggest amount of disruption and change

This is an interesting point. I've toyed with the notion lately that maybe the American political system is "antifragile"[0]. It's plausible, at least, to me that the system as a whole is stronger when it receives major shocks that disrupt the ossified structure in there. If you have the same politicians with the same policies as normal, then you get ties between the government and industry, and handouts and a ruling elite, etc. Now I don't think Trump is all that much of an outsider or has that much chance of disruption here (I voted Johnson, partly in this hope), but it's interesting to me you raise it as a reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

[tcoppi]

I think there is probably some truth to the antifragile theory, but we should remember that the system is made up of individual people and their choices to act within that system. Too many rogue players and there is no system.

[geofft]

> I refuse to believe that close to half the country hates people of color and wants to completely isolate us from the rest of the world by closing our borders. It just can't be true.

I have to agree with the other commenter who asks if you lived in the Deep South. I grew up in Louisiana. In the early '90s, we had David Duke (whose name you may recognize from this campaign), an actual, genuine, Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, be a state senator, run a very close to successful campaign for US Senate, and run a very close to successful campaign the following year for governor. Wikipedia recounts the vote totals for the gubernatorial election:

[Edwin] Edwards received 1,057,031 votes (61.2%), while Duke's 671,009 votes represented 38.8% of the total. Duke nevertheless claimed victory, saying, "I won my constituency. I won 55% of the white vote," a statistic confirmed by exit polls.

We can argue about what "hates people of color" means, precisely, but if 40% of voters, and 55% of white voters, are willing to put a KKK Imperial Wizard in charge of the state, it's not an implausible claim. Maybe not half the country. Maybe a quarter. Maybe the majority in some states and not others. Maybe the core constituency of some but not all senators. Is that okay?

And given this country's recent history of explicit anti-black political actions by people in power (see e.g. George Wallace's "segregation forever" and Lee Atwater's candid statement of the Southern Strategy), it's hard to argue that that all evaporated since then.

> I don't know if any of that change or disruption is going to be good or bad for me or the rest of America, but things are certainly going to be interesting for the next four years.

There are a lot of people (e.g., me, presumably you) who can deal just fine with four "interesting" years. There are a lot of people who can't. My LGBT friends are freaking out, for instance, and with a vice president who believes in torturing the gay away, I don't blame them. My capable-of-being-pregnant friends are freaking out. My non-citizen friends on valid visas are freaking out.

Disruption to force change is a fine way to solve some problems, like Netflix's infrastructure being reliant on AWS not shutting down machines. But this isn't Netflix's infrastructure, this is people's lives. I know plenty of people who aren't asking whether to uproot their lives but how, and they're pretty uninterested in having an interesting four years.

[dmode]

If you think DJT will change anything you are sadly mistaken. That's not how the American government works. And American economy is deeply entrenched with the global economy, so nothing will be changed. Also, some of the things Peter Thiel mentioned are often labeled as "Big Government" spending - e.g., space, healthcare, education etc. Be sure that Trump's party is categorically against Big Govt spending. So none of that will come to fruition as well.