[Exofunctor]

I did not vote for Trump, but I couldn't help but feel a bit of schadenfreude at the reaction of my mostly very liberal friend group to his win. For months and months, they'd been unfairly denigrating Trump supporters while simultaneously insisting that he was a joke, there was no way he would beat Clinton, etc. and somehow convincing themselves that their political ideology was synonymous with science, truth, and reason.

It was very much a form of social posturing rather than careful consideration for many of them.

Of course, instead of toning it back after the election, many have doubled down. I'm curious how that will play out for the next election.

[thehardsphere]

It will play out poorly.

The coalition on the right is full of cracks that could be exploited to split them up. Trump actually exploited one of those cracks to get himself the Republican nomination. When the left comes in to pour moral superiority all over people, it fills those cracks in like glue. People who would have otherwise split from Trump are sticking to him because the left is chopping at everything.

The smart move here is to wedge. Pick fights that split the Republicans apart from each other, and focus on that stuff instead of piddly small things whether Trump was being racist or merely inarticulate when he asked that reporter to set a meeting up with the Congressional Black Caucus.

I don't think the elected Democrats can do that though. They're under a lot of incentives to not act that way, considering that their donors and voters seem to have chosen "resistance" as what they want.

[naravara]

>he coalition on the right is full of cracks that could be exploited to split them up. Trump actually exploited one of those cracks to get himself the Republican nomination. When the left comes in to pour moral superiority all over people, it fills those cracks in like glue. People who would have otherwise split from Trump are sticking to him because the left is chopping at everything.

Your assumption is that Donald Trump forged some kind of political coalition. He didn't. The Republican Party votes in lockstep, by and large. What happened was that Hillary Clinton utterly failed to get people in key areas to the voting booth to get the numbers she needed.

The Donald fans can glue themselves together all they want, but it wasn't them who won anything. It was Democratic infighting that ceded it over to them. It's not the Republicans that need to get cracked, it's the Republicans who are pouring glue into the cracked up Democratic coalition.

[thehardsphere]

> Your assumption is that Donald Trump forged some kind of political coalition. He didn't.

You are incorrect about my assumption, but correct that Trump did not forge a coalition. The coalition existed before him and largely held its nose because members of it did not have any other options.

My assumption is that both political parties are large, standing broad coalitions of voters with differening interests that are together mainly as a consequence of the two-party system. Which means that they each contain elements that can (and occasionally do) flip party.

Trump exploited a crack in the Republican coalition that had formed over immigration, which was a wedge issue between the "pro-business" type Republicans that are "part of the establishment" and the party base. He also identified other wedges, like military adventurism. That, along with lack of a sufficiently strong opponent in the other 16 people who ran, enabled him to win the GOP primary, even though Trump has very little to no interest in "conservatism."

There were enough Republicans put off by his lack of "conservatism" (e.g. the lack of interest in the agenda of other parts of the GOP coalition) that they were willing to vote for someone else. But because the Democrats had nothing but contempt to offer those voters, they either stayed home, held their nose for Trump anyway, or voted for third party candidates like "Egg McMuffin."

Those divides in the GOP are not going to go away. Those voters are out there, waiting to be picked up by somebody. They may be as much as 20% of that party, which is enough to tip future elections towards the Democrats forever if they play their cards right. But that's going to be an opportunity that isn't going to be exploited as long as the Democrats are playing "resistance" as their strategy.

[mavelikara]

> The smart move here is to wedge. Pick fights that split the Republicans apart from each other

One of Sam's interviewees pointed it out too:

    What would convince you not to vote for him again?

    "If the Russia thing were true, I’d turn against him.  
    Why don’t y’all focus on that instead of his tweets?"
    

i.e. reframing the argument along themes that the opposition cares for (in this case, patriotism).

[Glyptodon]

Oh man, I don't like Trump at all but it's so hard to resist enjoying the schadenfreude. I think my favorite part is the "nothing to hide" people who are now afraid of the surveillance state but couldn't have cared less about it before.

I think the "science, truth, and reason" thing really resonates because it's been used to as a shortcut to presuming the "correctness" of anything vaguely left-wing in areas where things are anything but black and white.

It's true, for sure, that there are some places things are fairly black and white, like climate change. Or vaccination.

But in other areas... there's anything but a clear cut situation. Take immigration. The second Trump started to try and start arresting and deporting people my social media filled with memes asking things like "who's going to dig up potatoes for $0.45 per giant bucket filled now?" So... start deporting undocumented people and the "Left" will suddenly embrace the propriety of paying people unliveable wages citizens would never accept? Why would anybody think that we won't in the not distant future be collecting potatoes with robots?

Likewise, there seems to suddenly be this notion that pretty much anybody who shows up whenever for whatever reason should just be allowed in to stay and work in America... There's a very real conversation about how isolationist we can/should be, whether/how/what-degree we should be trying to export our human rights norms, what kinds of employment visas we should have, what their conditions should be, whether we should accept refugees, etc. I find the current refugee situation embarrassing, but at the same time I think there's been real refusal to take a holistic look at making a comprehensive and consistent policy, let alone a "scientific" or "reasoned" one. It's like one group of people started jumping off the right side of a building (nobody enters) so everyone else rushed to jump off the left (everybody enters).

I think lots of issues are like this.

[gerbilly]

>Likewise, there seems to suddenly be this notion that pretty much anybody who shows up whenever for whatever reason should just be allowed in to stay and work in America

Globalization promotes the free flow of capital, but not labour. This never seemed fair to me. It feels like a mechanism of exploitation.

Who _deserves_ to work in America more? Someone born into that country, or someone who left their whole life behind and made an long dangerous trip to get there?

[Glyptodon]

Deserve is a terrible and dangerous word.

Even the mere idea that jobs should be for the "deserving" sounds like some sort of weird cultist wet dream.

But maybe in the future we can get rid of borders and citizenship, establish a global government with a single labor market, and then allocate jobs to the "deserving" by going down a list of afflictions, awarding points for suffering, and then giving jobs to those who've suffered the most. It really sounds like a utopia.

[gerbilly]

I wasn't endorsing the concept of 'deserving' here.

It may have been a bit of a straw man, but the idea that "foreigners are stealing our jobs" has an undercurrent of entitlement to it.

[lanstin]

I think the association between "science truth and reason" and the Democrats/liberals is caused by the Republicans apparent flight from science, truth and reason.

Politics has never had much to do with reason - it's our equivalent of war; conflict by whatever means are at hand; our complex, technological and interdependent society however very much depends on science and reason. Truth has it's own way of striking back, of course.

The thing I found most interesting in the article was "we are worse off than black folks because we have no hope of things getting better."

[wwweston]

> unfairly denigrating Trump supporters

Is there a way of fairly denigrating Trump supporters?

> For months and months, they'd been unfairly denigrating Trump supporters while simultaneously insisting that he was a joke, there was no way he would beat Clinton, etc. and somehow convincing themselves that their political ideology was synonymous with science, truth, and reason.

There may be liberal voters who make that conclusion of synonymeity, but to the extent that you're lumping it in with dismayed astonishment at Trump's candidacy, you're mischaracterizing both.

The position that Trump represents a completely bonkers low point and that opposition to him was synonymous with science, truth, and reason had (and has) a much higher frequency of occurrence vs the position that "liberal" politics presents a total/good view of the world.

[lowpro]

> Is there a fair way of denigrating Trump supporters?

Yes, by realizing that he won because of his economics, not his social positions. The rust belt votes of economic issues, which allowed him to win. The poor in the area lean to whoever will help them not be poor, or at least say they'll try. Clinton embodied the status quo, Trump was change. They might not have liked him, and in fact a sizable majority do not, but realizing it was a pick of the lesser of two equals hopefully restores some sympathy for the other side, which is sorely needed today.

[gizmo]

> Yes, by realizing that he won because of his economics, not his social positions.

You're responding to a post by sama where he interviews people who voted for Trump, and his findings match what we already knew: this wasn't about economics. Why would it be when unemployment is below 5%? Just look at the answers people gave when asked "What do you like about Trump".

[lowpro]

Quoting the unemployment rate at 4.9% is disingenuous at it doesn't look at the participation rate, which has dropped 3% in the past 10 years (aka 10 million people). This unemployment rate also doesn't look at individual regions like the rust belt, which won Trump the election. There's a sizable group that did vote him in on his social positions, which is the common 40% of voters (the battle for an election isn't concerned with the 'base' which is about 80% of the voters, being 40% left and 40% right, it worries about the 20% in the middle, and those middle voters were the rust belt that swayed the election). So although you can say a many Trump voters wanted his social politics, he won because of his economics.

And I understand the selection of the narratives the author used. Like I've said, I live in a small Midwest town.

[mrkurt]

> Is there a way of fairly denigrating Trump supporters?

It depends what you want to accomplish. Do you want to persuade them to be some other kind of supporters or score points with people who already agree with you?

[eridius]

People insisting that Trump is a joke weren't wrong about that. What they were wrong about was their belief that this country wouldn't seriously elect someone so wildly incompetent and unfit to be president. The fact that Trump got elected doesn't reflect badly upon the people who said he's a joke, it reflects badly on everyone else.

[pizzetta]

Bill Maher said something along the same lines. That if people in the opposing camp decide they are going to objectify their opposition as one monolithic group of uncouth people that Democrats would lose in the next election --not sure about that, as the current admin may irk a number of Republicans as well, but it's worth noting that devolving to name calling and other denigrating aspects are not the most likely way to win people over to your point of view.

[maxerickson]

It's quite likely that all Democrats need to do to win the next presidential election is help voters register and obtain any necessary id. Ideologically, Trump and the GOP don't have any strong numerical advantage, they won the election with better tactics and a few good news cycles.

The question is more whether there is sufficient movement (it has to start now) to take quite a lot of seats in the house in 2018. Which is the first opportunity to put a further check on the administration than is provided by the Constitution and such.

[glenda]

Both sides are guilty of this and always have been. If you think name calling and teasing are counterproductive then you must realize that race/gender/sexuality based slurs are all part of that as well. Not only are they counterproductive but they are not things based on choice. It was a choice for people to vote for a specific person for president, that is not true with the issue of skin tone or sexuality.

[mLuby]

Though people don't choose their political beliefs as freely as you'd expect; upbringing, profession, region, and even genetics play a role.

[glenda]

At least not initially - and you're right that many will never reconsider the world view passed down to them or some may reconsider and decide it's the best because it's comfortable etc... But ideology is still much easier to change than sexual orientation or race regardless of who you ask. It makes complete sense to me that a group of people can't openly dismiss another and demand their respect at the same time. This is the "golden rule" and is widely regarded as a valid way to approach life by people with all sorts of political beliefs. If someone teaches you something wrong and harmful about another group of people then that is definitely a point of view that needs to be corrected for society to work.

[atomi]

Liberalism is deterministic in so far as it's required for a civil society.

Disagree all you want, but liberal concessions are the result of mass civil rights movements.

[mcphage]

> Of course, instead of toning it back after the election, many have doubled down. I'm curious how that will play out for the next election.

Given the recent trajectory of the Tea Party, I think it'll play out pretty well—if not the next election, then the one after that.

[lyschoening]

Say what you will about goody-two-shoes liberals whining about minor issues — as far as science, truth and reason go, the ideology of the current administration allows none of them. That is reason enough to double down (and hopefully prioritize fundamental values of democracy over small distractions in the fight that lays ahead).