David Wong's still got it.
This article is moronic for one simple reason: the Supreme Court.
- Gay marriage has overwhelming support nationwide -- 55 percent to 37 percent against.
And one dipshit from Kentucky can simply push a case until it faces the Supreme Court, which will now skew heavily religious conservative with the appointment of Peter Thiel to the bench. And then it doesn't fucking matter what your state voted for, or the number of lesbian weddings I have been the officiant at, because gay marriage will be illegal, as defined by the Supreme Court. (Which the electorate has little actual power over.)
- Legal abortion is favored by 56 percent, with 41 percent opposed.
Except that Planned Parenthood is funded with state money, and that will end on January 21, 2017. And Roe v Wade should be overturned somewhere around August of next year. (The conservative right has had several test cases waiting in the wings, waiting for a conservative appointment to the Supreme Court so they can flip Roe v Wade in a matter of months.)
- The vast majority of the population supports background checks for gun buyers -- up to 90 percent in some polls.
Except for Trump, and his backers and advisers. These liberal policies are going to get lost on Paul Ryan's desk and never make it to the floor to vote. The only reason background checks would have ever made it to the floor of the House or Senate, would be as a tit-for-tat for Democratic backing of some Republican legislation. But that's no longer necessary. The Republicans have carte blanche in both houses and the White House, and never need to meet with another Democrat ever. Every Democrat is now a lame duck, and every one of their policies or plans isn't worth the paper it is written on, because it can never make it to the floor for a vote without explicit permission from Paul Ryan.
- A majority of Americans support some kind of universal health care, 58 percent to 37 percent.
Except for the people who won the presidency, who have made it their first order of business to repeal Obamacare.
- 64 percent of Americans are worried about global warming. Only 36 percent are not.
Except this new administration who has just appointed one of the most vehement climate change deniers to head the EPA. A man who has claimed that, warming temperatures might actually be a good thing, because it would "decrease the number of people moving from Michigan to Florida" for the nice warm weather.
- And -- get this -- Americans overwhelmingly agree that immigration helps the country more than it hurts, by a 59 percent to 33 percent margin.
Except this administration. (I mean, come on Wong. WTF?!?) While Trump has mysteriously eliminated the pages from his web site that claimed he would ban all Muslims from entering the country, his stance on immigration is...
Fuck this. Why am I even typing?
This article is totally moronic, and shows a basic lack of understanding of how policy gets made in the US today.
Tribalism is real and when everyone surrounding you is looking around in horror, the natural assumption is to assume the lions are coming.
My social graph leans heavily liberal (surprise surprise!) but there are holdouts. What's been interesting is watching the Trump supporters in the aftermath; there's been zero celebration and a lot of cautious "guys... guys? I mean, things just didn't go your way... why are you so upset? There are two viable choices here and the other one was preferred... why are you all panicking?"
I have a friend who writes for a big magazine who shared that four months ago she met a man who told her she was the first real-life Hillary supporter he'd ever met and he'd been living in Philly for four years. And that's why you get things like this new California secession movement.
Granted - I'm a middle-aged white male in the bluest of blue states and am more insulated from the shocks this will generate than anybody I know. My personal stakes are low and we're extremely well-hedged; based on my positioning my family actually stands to benefit greatly from North American Chaos(TM). But I'm still kind of shocked myself by how much less impactful this election feels to me personally than the 2004 rout of Kerry felt.
I suspect it's because I've been plumbing the depths of cynicism for more than a decade.
I hated GWB and everyone who voted for him, but I didn't see him as a threat to me or anyone I knew. Trump will probably cause less misery globally, because GWB set the bar for shitting on the rest of the world high, but it looks like we're going to be paying for the tantrum our neighbors threw at the voting booth ourselves so he looks like more of a personal threat to me even if I think he'll have a lower body count.
Out here in redneckistan, I am finding it more difficult to empathize with the people around me than journalists writing thinkpieces about them do.
My opinion is evolving by the hour. I know this, though - they've already disappeared the muslim ban.
I would argue that he's more open to social pressures than anyone that has ever held the office... but only time will tell.
I would further argue that it is this openness to social pressures that makes people conflate 3am tweetstorms with failures of judgement.
I just got done listening to an NPR bit about him and taxes, where after it was explained to him that his original tax plan would involve 12 trillion in tax cuts, he revised it and walked that number back to 4-6 trillion in tax cuts depending on how the wind blows. Anecdotal, but it's something else that shows he might be open to advice.
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I live in New Jersey which is a pretty blue states. A lot of IRL friends don't like Trump at all and some really do believe in the nazi theory of Trump and his supporters. While there are people in the Midwest who felt left out in the current political times before Trump. A lot of minorities who I know who have always felt left out see the Trump Election as just another big slap in the face and are feeling scared. They don't want to wait to see what Trump does. A lot of them are thinking about ways to protest this and are coming up with plans to protect each other.
I don't know why someone wouldn't fall in to the latter. You heard what the man said, You heard what his policies are. It's fascism, and he is a fascist. His voters support fascist policies.
Bernie Sanders ran as a socialist, and netted over 12,000,000 votes, according to realclearpolitics. This number is skewed downwards somewhat by the fact that he did better in caucus states.
And according to the NYT page I had open in the background, around 120,000,000 voted in the general. Probably slightly more, because I just added the D and R votes together, but, still.
Is roughly 10% of the electorate socialist? I don't think so, because I know a fair amount of Sanders supporters who are not. I only know a couple who would identify as such.
I'm one of them.
This is the same reason I don't think that all Trump supporters are fascists. Because I know a fair amount of them. A lot of them are people I have respected for years.
Life is more complex than that.
I dunno. I think if you support fascist policies, you are a fascist. If you support socialist policies, you are a socialist.
By and large, people who voted for Sanders voted in the general, though. Stein only got 1% of the vote (admittedly with lesser ballot access) , and while you might be able to make an argument that she supports socialist policies, Johnson, Clinton, and Trump are firmly capitalist.
Most of Sander's supporters have voted for someone who is socialist, and someone who is capitalist within the past year. That's a wild swing of policy support for them to make so quickly.
There are enough definitions of fascism that you could probably find one that applies, but I think the only sense that really fits is as a pejorative for authoritarian right-wingers in general.
He's certainly an oligarch, being rich enough to fund his own campaign was part of his pitch early on.
Only tangentially related I guess, but I've got an article from socialistworker in my rss reader right now drawing a parallel (not as the point of the text, just in passing) between Trump and Berlusconi.
- Thus, the White House, once dominated by old-money ruling class figures and politicians socialized in the U.S. military, will now be occupied by a rogue billionaire. Trump, despite the comparisons some have made to the Italian fascist ruler Mussolini, more closely resembles Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media magnate who used his money and populist appeals to impose himself on a corrupt, conservative political establishment.
There was a poll early in the GOP primary that correlated support for authoritarianism with support for Trump, and the correlation crossed ideologies. Fascist, oligarch, autocrat. The point is kind of moot, IMO, since taxonomy is far less important than the result.
I mostly try to avoid talking politics in real life, but your description fits pretty well with my observations. Those less active are saying it sucks but isn't the end of civilization, and those more active are literally weeping. I have a good friend who falls in the second bucket. My goal is to have a conversation with her much along the lines of this Cracked post. She's strong and active and smart and can be really good for a side she supports. She's also gay, and she can't help but feel half the country just voted anti-women and anti-gay when the reality is much more gray. Maybe the apathy toward minorities is worthy of condemnation, but ignoring the plight of a failing white middle class isn't saintworthy. Someone needs to bridge that gap, and whoever can is going to do well politically. I'd rather it be a left-leaning person than a Republican.