[kelnos]

Out of curiosity, how do you feel now, 2.5 years in? If you knew in November 2016 what you know now, would you still have voted for him? Do you plan to vote for him in 2020? Not trying to troll or start a political flamewar here, I'm genuinely interested, especially as it's pretty rare that a HNer will "admit" to being a Trump voter.

The thing that always gets me is that even though Trump presented himself as this tear-down-the-establishment, drain-the-swamp kind of guy, it always seemed pretty likely that he'd just replace the political establishment with people in the business/finance establishment, which is essentially the same thing to many/most of the people who this platform resonated with. And, well... that's exactly what he's done, aside from the other expected outcomes of inflaming racial/gender/etc. divides; ignorantly bumbling his way through economic, trade, and foreign policy; and lying his way through every day in office. What is it about that which still lends him support? Is it still just the chaos? Because he's not actually fixing anything for most of his supporters; the elites are still just as elite as ever, and at best it's status quo, but in many cases things are worse.

Put another way: it just seems unlikely to me that all the "burn it to the ground" supporters expected or are happy with the fact that burning it all down also causes them more suffering, too; more suffering than the establishment has been hit with. And yet, here we are.

[war1025]

I normally don't admit to it, but I've become less fearful of the backlash lately.

Current plan is to vote for him in 2020. Worst case I will abstain from voting for President.

The economy is still on fire as much as it's ever been in the midwest. Can't complain there.

The trade war is unfortunate, but the alternative is to bend over and take it from China. Everyone agrees that they don't play fair. So the options are to do something about it, or to just let them keep on. My family has a manufacturing background, so all the offshoring is sort of personal.

The racial crap isn't nearly as much of an issue as the media likes to make it. It makes for good ratings, though.

---

Basically I'm hedging my bets on at worst I think the government should be robust enough not to be brought down by one bad leader. And if it is, then maybe we deserved to fall. Plus from my perspective he's not doing all that bad.

[ineedasername]

"The racial crap" appears to be crap media mongering primarily to those who haven't been on the receiving end of the fire hose (metaphorically or literally) some time in the past few decades. I'm sure it makes for good ratings, and the media makes the most of it, but that doesn't mean it's any less of an issue than portrayed.

[mistermann]

> If you knew in November 2016 what you know now, would you still have voted for him? Do you plan to vote for him in 2020?

I'll throw my hat in the ring and say yes to both questions, under the circumstances.

> ignorantly bumbling his way through economic, trade, and foreign policy

I disagree with this characterization, but can certainly understand how someone could come to this conclusion.

> Put another way: it just seems unlikely to me that all the "burn it to the ground" supporters expected or are happy with the fact that burning it all down also causes them more suffering, too; more suffering than the establishment has been hit with. And yet, here we are.

I suspect the way they evaluate the situation is dramatically different than yours. There are a handful of people who are actually looking into what's behind the seemingly paradoxical (and coordinated) behavior of a large number of people around the world rather than just wagging their finger, but unfortunately hardly anyone seems interested in what they've found.

One such person is Jonathan Haidt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/home.html

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jonathan_haidt-what-makes-...

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jonathan+haidt

Two others I'd recommend looking into are:

Mark Blyth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Blyth

http://markblyth.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGuaoARJYU0 Global Trumpism and the Future of the Global Economy

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mark+Blyth

Thomas Frank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Frank

https://www.tcfrank.com/essays.php

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Thomas+Frank+po...

[gerbilly]

Ok I understand that conservatives view morality differently¹ , and factor in a wider range of concerns², fine.

But I don't see how voting for Trump advances conservative voters any further in shifting the moral framework to one they would prefer. I see trump mostly as amoral if anything.

Or is the point, as the study suggests, to burn down the system? To dismantle morally offensive programs/legislation? Am I missing something?

1: I.e. that it's not just about how we treat each other, but also supposed to act as an organizing principle for society. 2: loyalty, respect for authority purity

[war1025]

The main thing Trump has been doing as a favor to conservatives is heavily loading the court benches with conservative justices. That will have a long-term impact.

I think the mistake liberals make when looking at Trump, is they think he must be viewed by his supporters the same way they looked at Obama.

Obama is someone they looked up to on a personal, moral level.

Trump is, as you said, amoral. He goes where the political winds and his instinct take him.

I think people would feel much more at ease at least with the whole unstable, incompetent leader thing if they bothered to read Art of the Deal (written in 1987), in which he lays out how he views the world basically word for word in line with what he said during his 2016 campaign.

He may be unorthodox, but he is consistent.

Would I want to be his friend? Probably not. But that's not the role he applied for.

[gerbilly]

Ok, thanks.

I'm not conservative, just FYI, so I find it interesting to discuss differences with thoughtful conservatives which you seem to be.

If conservatives value loyalty/respect for authority more than so called 'liberals', then aren't you afraid that the conservative agenda carried out to it's logical conclusion might descend into authoritarianism/theocracy?

(You didn't state that you held these views or preferences, but I just assumed them in the interest of getting my question out quicker. Correct me if I am wrong.)

[war1025]

I'm politically unaffiliated. When asked, I identify as a "Not-Democrat", which is mainly because I feel that the Democratic party pulled a bait-and-switch on the working class by using their "everyone go to college" meritocracy thing as a convenient segue into just backing the wealthy the same as Republicans do.

If both parties are just in favor of keeping the powerful in power, then I will personally side with the party that explicitly says so.

Regarding "logical conclusions", I think the key is that the goal isn't to carry it out to its extreme, but to counter-balance the pull from the other side. Sure it feels good to have momentum, but no one should be surprised when the tides turn back the other way for a while.

The goal is to find dynamic balances between opposing ideals. In order to do that, you need to try to pull past where you think the correct middle ground is. I think that's true for both sides.

A thought I had extending my previous Trump / Obama comparison, is that if you compare it to the David vs Goliath story, I think people viewed Obama as David. I.e. the unsuspecting hero that comes out of nowhere to save the people. Trump is more of a Goliath character. Did people expect Goliath to be nuanced and articulate and thoughtful? No. They just wanted him to be a big tough bastard that would go beat up on the enemy.

[mistermann]

Man, imagine if we could raise the caliber of the public political discussion to that demonstrated in this exchange. Heck, even HN would be a good start.

In my opinion, a big part of the problem with politics in the public sphere is that we've been conditioned (deliberately, or just naturally) to think about politics along a very small number of very specific (and non-comprehensive) dimensions, and through these dimensions reality is communicated to the public (in good faith, or not, in a competent and professional manner, or not), through various media forms. (And then most subsequent discussions take place at this level (at best), with rare outliers like this one where you respectfully discuss the deeper dimensions).

And then at election time, we force them to further crush it down into one dimension with precisely two choices (chosen via an incredibly low-dimensional and flawed nomination process): Republican or Democrat. But when they make that boolean choice, the mind is secretly operating at this much higher dimensional representation of reality (based on models that are, to varying degrees: factually incorrect or null (with auto-estimate enabled by default), and they cast their vote.

Most people "logically" think their decision (and those of others) is based upon the projected dimensional reality we live in (~Overton Window), but the actual reason underlying evaluation is way more complex, and invisible to us.

That probably makes no sense, but what I mean is very similar to the argument about "How is the internet still obsessed with Myers-Briggs" the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20887213

Myers Briggs is an attempt at "a" representation of reality. Many people reject it for obvious reasons, but then they'll sometimes turn around and insist in a different thread (with a new topic) that "Republican" or "Hillary Supporter" or "pro-rights" political stances are pretty damn accurate representations of reality, and can accurately predict behavior in a (subconscious) high-dimensional model (~mind reading).