Nobody read this. You're all dumbasses. Read it now.

I don't think it's useful to bring up a "filter bubble" when there were gobstopping amounts of polls that indicated a Clinton landslide. I also don't think it's useful in terms of selective information gathering when most of us live in cities, most cities went blue, and short of driving out to Redneckistan and saying "hey stranger why do you want Trump?" (and hoping to get an answer) there is no way to penetrate that veil.

Make no mistake - I spent last November hanging out with fuckin' Navy SEALs. For them, it was Bush, Fiorina or Christie and everything else was unthinkable. Those trump voters? That basket of deplorables? They have a subreddit. Go engage them. I dare you.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: with no Fairness Doctrine, with the collapse of the public education system, with skyrocketing college tuition, with an all-volunteer army and with public broadcasting being gutted, we've created an electorate that sees what it wants to see, hears what it wants to hear and can easily believe that any rich bloviator can run the country better than the people they've elected so far because there is no possible way to connect with them in a way that isn't the Kick Me In The Balls channel.

My wife was crying last night because she felt she could have done more. I pointed out that she had a Democrating governor, senator, representative, mayor, treasurer and supreme court justice and she lived in a state with legal marijuana, the highest minimum wage in the United States (and we just voted it higher), a repudiation of Citizens United and gun protections while living in a county that approved mass transit and voted to limit gerrymandering. Short of hopping a plane to Oklahoma who, exactly, could she have reached out to? And why would they have listened to a liberal woman from FUCKING SEATTLE?

Piketty basically argued that the center cannot hold. Who would have thought that Bernie Fucking Sanders could have been such a threat to a Clinton? The populism vs establishment divide has long been a key issue; I think our collective miscalculation was in presuming that the populists would need someone coherent to rally behind in order to threaten the establishment.

Well then.

I think Occupy Wall Street crumbled because it was a movement of intelligent, college-educated liberals that were willing to evaluate solutions on their merits. I think Trump won because he represents a movement of the exact opposite of that.

on post: So, What Can Be Learned?
by kleinbl00 2732 days ago   ·   link