I've been listening to The Obstacle Is the Way on the way to work, and one of its major themes is turning negative events into opportunities. That is, going through the negative to find the positive silver lining. With regard the the recent US election, we have a great opportunity here to improve the accuracy of our perception of the world. At least, I do, because the results of this election are entirely unexpected to me. Going off of the unofficial Hubski motto, what can be learned from this situation? This post is an attempt to explore and organize what I can observe from the election results, and what it means for the future.
We Live In a Media "Filter Bubble"
I based my perceptions of what would happen in the election based on reading my preferred news sources (FiveThirtyEight, NPR); occasionally glancing at CNN; browsing Reddit, Hacker News, and Hubski; looking at Facebook and seeing what people had to say; and talking to friends and family about the election. I trusted FiveThirtyEight most of all. Based on this information, I felt fairly certain that, despite a general distaste by my peer group for both candidates, the electorate would elect Clinton by a landslide. I was wrong. Dead wrong. And it wasn't just me. . . we were all wrong.
You may have heard about the idea of a filter bubble before. Basically it's the idea that our media sources are tailoring content to be what we would like to see (or, more disturbing, what we would like to not see). I got the idea and saw how it could be bad, but I thought that by understanding filter bubbles exist, I would be immune to their effects. But the vast difference in my supposedly informed expectations vs. the actual outcome shows me that I was mistaken. I looked at news sources that confirmed what I expected. I looked at websites that were filled with people who I could relate to and who had similar worldviews. My Facebook curated the posts that I saw. And even my Google searches were tailored to match my expectations. I knew this was a thing, but I didn't really grasp how it happened to me.
I am forced to conclude that while I looked at social media, searched Google, and looked at news sources with a certain group, there was an entirely separate group almost totally isolated from the first, that was looking at different social media, searching a different Google, and looking at different news sources. How else could I be so blindsided by popular sentiments?
Populism vs Establishment Is the New Right vs Left
It's been moving in this direction for a few years now. I predict that the trend will continue. How else can we reconcile the large amount of Bernie Sanders supporters who voted for Trump? The only thing they had in common was their populist stances. People that feel supported by the status quo vs. people that don't seems to be the new norm to me, rather than differing opinions on policy. I can guarantee many Trump supporters don't agree with a lot of his far right stances, but they voted for him anyway.
Blue Collar Workers Feel Discarded By Both Parties
This is just another aspect of the last section, with profound implications. It's why Trump won. Michael Moore, as it turns out, was right. The Rust Belt gave Trump the presidency, and they did it because he was the only candidate that was willing to do something about their plight. They felt as if he was the only one that cared. It doesn't mean they were right, and I predict they're still fucked. But Trump spoke for them when nobody else would. This is a huge lesson that we need to learn. People are hurting in our changing economy, and nobody in the status quo wants to do anything about it. I think this video sums up an aspect of the election that people like me overlooked. And the voting results prove the sentiment is legit-- that this is how people really feel.
Moralism Is Mostly a Facade
Nuff said. Clearly most people don't care anymore, if they ever did. Seems to me it was just a convenient cover to vote a certain way for different, more unsavory reasons.
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.