[teilo]

What you fail to comprehend is that your contemptuous attitude is the very thing that isn't working anymore. In fact, the more you crank up the rhetoric, the more you will be ignored.

If this election has taught us anything, it is that if we continually scream at and belittle adults, they will eventually ignore us. Every epithet, every word of shame-speak will then fall on deaf ears. We will find ourselves in the very position we placed them in: powerless and irrelevant.

You should be asking yourself: Why was the birther and the racial element so prominent during the Obama years? These things do not happen in a vacuum. They have a root cause, and it is not, as you might conclude, because every Trump voter is a racist, a bigot, or stupid. Think more deeply.

I might also add that by pigeon-holing the entire body who elected Trump into the category of ignorant racist bigots, you are committing the very act of stereo-typing you are decrying. You are discrediting yourself by accusing people of things they know they are not guilty of, and reinforcing your own irrelevance. If empathy is your concern, perhaps you should start with your own.

[dragonwriter]

> If this election has taught us anything, it is that if you continually scream at and belittle adults, they will eventually ignore you.

I thought it was, "if you nominate a candidate against whom a successfull multidecade smear campaign has been run, turnout among the people that are otherwise likely to vote for your party will be dangerously depressed."

Trump was supported by a smaller share of the voting public than the losing candidate in the last Presidential election (about equal to the 2008 loser, and smaller than the losers in 2000 and 2004, as well) -- with less of the eligible population voting at all than in 2012.

> Why was the birther and the racial element so prominent during the Obama years?

The racial element has been a factor in pretty much every US election ever; heck, the stark divisions over racial policy underlies some of the most notorious provisions of the original constitution. It's the single most consistent and enduring political divide in the US. It wold only be noteworthy if it hadn't bee particularly prominent with a black candidate or incumbent in the Presidency.

[pmoriarty]

"What you fail to comprehend is that your contemptuous attitude is the very thing that isn't working anymore."

You must be kidding me. What do you think Trump himself was doing? He is the epitome of an obnoxious screaming asshole, and he won! His approach clearly works.

It's a pity that the Democrats didn't have an anti-Trump on their side. Maybe he could have been the kryptonite that cost Trump the election. As it was, the old polite, wet rag politics that Clinton represented was defeated. (That's not to say that I'd want an anti-Trump as President either, or that I like screaming assholess, as long as they're on the left, but a more confrontational, "tell it like it is" style is clearly what gets media attention and is attractive to a lot of voters.)

In the future, the left needs to be more outspoken and confrontational towards the right, not more compromising and conciliatory as Obama has been, because the latter only leads towards moving the party further to the right.

Instead, the Democrats need to further differentiate themselves from the Republicans, and move further to the left. Otherwise they're going to keep being seen as Republican-lite, and few are going to get excited enough to vote for them (rather merely than voting against an even worse Republican option).

Sadly, given how the Democrats have behaved in the past, it's more likely that as a response to losing to Trump, the Democrats are just going to move even further to the right, in an effort to capture the "independent" vote (who were right-wing enough to vote for Trump this time around) instead of trying to win over the many more people who didn't even bother to vote because they were disillusioned with both the Republicans and Democrats.

[teilo]

You are making an essential error: that of false association. You are equating the behavior of a candidate, and of the candidate's most vocal supporters, with the general demeanor of the people who voted for him. If it were only the vocal or even ardent Trump supporters who voted, he would have lost. He didn't lose because the majority who voted for him were silent, in most cases brow-beaten into silence.

You are also neglecting the fact that Trump won with only 1% more of the white vote than Romney. This was not nearly enough to win. Trump won because of the minority vote. Compared to Romney he won 8% more Latino votes, 7% more black votes, 11% more Asian votes, and 1% other minorities. This statistic does much to counteract the hysterical white resurgence rhetoric. (Source: NYT Exit Polls).

[chiefalchemist]

There's a difference between uppity (over educated Elitist Left) snob and an orange NYC asshole.

[chiefalchemist]

"Think more deeply."

Ha. Did you manage to say that with a straight face? What's next? Ask a cat to bark?

To be clear. Not insulting you. I hear ya. I agree. But the request is pointless.

[TYPE_FASTER]

> If this election has taught us anything, it is that if we continually scream at and belittle adults, they will eventually ignore us.

Trump belittled everybody for years.