[techxit]

The problem is that we allowed this election to be cast as a clash between Corporate America's superego and its id. The fact that Hillary Clinton came from a middle-class Midwestern background and that, while she's absolutely terrible at optics, she's above-average for ethics and honesty among politicians... got missed. People went for raw id rather than what they perceived as the superego of a corrupt system.

I personally think that Hillary is far more liberal than she was given credit for. She's been turned into a cynical pragmatist by 20+ years of bitter experience in politics... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think her heart was in the right place all along. She'd probably twist arms and threaten careers of people on both sides of the aisle to get a public option passed, and that's the kind of ballbuster the country needs. However, she's the sort of person who does very well in 1-on-1 interactions but fails with rooms and groups. She has grace but no charisma. She let her self be painted as a duplicitous Establishment hack.

The irony is that Clinton and Trump voters both voted on the premise of their candidate being radically different from what they'd seen. Clinton voters believed that she was a liberal working within the establishment who'd bring us single-payer healthcare. Trump voters (except for the small percentage who actually are "deplorables", meaning racists and sexists and xenophobes) believed that Trump's dog-whistle rhetoric was just cynical game-playing. It bothers me that people accused Clinton of being "two-faced", while supporting a candidate in whom the best-case scenario is that he doesn't believe half the shit he says.

We also have a country where people hate the perceived cultural elite that is occasionally condescending ("flyover country") more than they hate the socioeconomic elite that is actually ruining their lives and that needs, for the good of red and blue staters, to be overthrown. Numbers may explain that. There are more of us in the 4.99% for them to hate than in the 0.01% that something actually needs to be done about (although I doubt that Trump is the solution).