| > I don't believe they had any real impact. While I certainly have some glee at seeing the Russia allegations come to light, it does seem that they probably aren't very relevant to the election result. I think the biggest reason for the DNC's failure isn't necessarily even the DNC. It's more backlash against various human rights movements that have tried to win by silencing opposing opinions. While I largely agree with the goals of the human rights movements, focusing on preventing people from saying bigoted things has not prevented people from thinking bigoted things, and in fact has closed off dialogues that could possibly allow us to change bigoted thinking. The results are that the people who think bigoted things voted for a person who said what they felt they couldn't, and it blindsided human rights movements that hadn't been listening to those people and therefore didn't know what they thought. A few examples of why I think this is: 1. The Reddit crackdown on hate speech. This was effective in making it so that the mainstream who might read Reddit doesn't have to hear hate speech any more, but anyone who thinks it produced positive political change should take a look at Voat. The bigots on Reddit didn't disappear, they went to Voat. I get it, it was tough, some of the comments on Reddit were hard to read. But now those same people are posting those same comments on Voat, and now those comments are going unchallenged by open-minded responses. 2. When I found out about the Trump stunt with families of people killed by illegal immigrants, I was in a room with a bunch of acquaintances, mostly liberal New Yorkers. The response from the people around me was that illegal immigrants kill so few people that the issue isn't statistically relevant. This struck me as a callous, utilitarian answer--it's literally saying that the grief of bereaved families doesn't matter. Trump was appealing to people's fear of violence, and the left has long-standing answers to that, such as gun control, the fact that violence is a function of poverty, etc. But the people in the room with me couldn't engage with those people's feelings because they only saw bigots on the screen. They had forgotten that bigot is also a person who fears and grieves. Notably, a few of these acquaintances were writers for a liberal media organization--people who represent what the left thinks in the public eye. |