MatrixMan.EXE
Member
Yeah, no.
-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Donald J. Trump elected 45th President of the United States
- Thread starter Greatest Ever
- Start date
- Status
Yeah, no.
Yes, I am deeply ashamed of my fellow white women today. They threw everyone else under the bus to "save" themselves.
March of the Crabs
Member
Well that's a little aggressive...
I don't know. I can see why the allure of an anti-establishment candidate was strong, especially running against a Clinton. It's a bummer that the one you guys got happens to be a racist, sexist pig.
Dunkelgrau
Member
So Trump supporters with, let's call them "politically incorrect" opinions, have been banned or otherwise dismissed on GAF? And after all those months there are only Hillary-fans left?
I don't really know why people think that Pence running things would be better than Trump. Guy has some horrific bills under his belt.
]blacky[;223812705 said:
Gamergate threads murdered the conservative population on gaf even before the election. As an example for what got one of them banned: one guy was posting drive-by posts on why he was against transgender people using the bathroom of their gender citing "think of the children" while saying it's okay that trans people have a 50+% suicide rate with an incredibly low crime rate.
Unfortunately 50% of america voted for him mostly on that reason
Chezzymann
Member
Its the same narrative of people thinking his campaign managers would control him in the general, trump will be trump. Only difference now is that he'll be speaking off a teleprompter a lot more.
mercenar1e
Member
such far reaching implications.. Comey will most likely remain at the FBI and possibly stack the agency with Republicans.
Snowybreak
Member
They don't care, that's the problem. People dont think about ramifications of their actions when they wanna shake things up.
When the shit hits the fan they just go "oh, but I didn't cause this!"
Yes they fucking did.
Steve Youngblood
Member
Well, Trump's plan is Health Savings Accounts, kneecapping the FDA, and opening up state lines.
I'm horrified for people that need the subsidies and what this means for people with pre-existing conditions. But at the same time part of me is anxious to see whether or not this really does bring insurance premiums down in the short term. Like, you fought tooth and nail against the ACA at every turn and have blamed it for skyrocketing health care costs. But I feel like many forget that health care costs were already going up at an exorbitant rate prior to the ACA. So, for better or worse, the floor is your's. Let's see if the magic of the free market can get costs down or at the very least in check.
The most depressing thing is just that assuming that this does bring premiums down for most Americans, it only sets back the real end game (in my opinion) of single payer.
DXB-KNIGHT
Member
I just want Trump to do one thing during his presidency
Change the White House to the Gold House
Change the White House to the Gold House
I'm glad I'm not the only one that caught off guard lol.
Yup, calling out the post-truth echo chamber for what it is. It's too easy to find people who agree with you and ignore the reality around you.
elrechazado
Banned
Classy
-Plasma Reus-
Service guarantees member status
No.
Trump will first of all, destroy everything Obama has worked hard to achieve. His administration will then enact policies that will weaken America's position in the world. And this is ignoring the fact that those said policies will mean serious consequences for allies, such as the EU, and others.
off duty ninja
Member
You must be awfully young.
yanipheonu
Member
It's the eye opener.
"So lots of women are complicit in this, huh?"
Shows how important females are in feminism. Without their support, shit like this happens.
Are you 13?
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
He gave Republicans the majority of power. That's not going against the system.
That is such a smart point I find myself guilty of. And if you ask yourself how to address people with such difficult views, the usual answer is to not even bother.
Audioboxer
Member
I'll await that all happening and then I'll give you it. In the meantime America can already start preparations to get Trump out in 4 years. As can I carry on my task of cutting Scotland off from the UK. If you live in England though? You have zero chance at changing Brexit. You will literally never get back in the EU, and changing Government won't even help that.
SynthFetish
Member
Fitting.Well...
Who had chicken last night?
BFIB
Member
Once everything settles down, its going to be clear that the Dems really fucked up, what should have been an easy shot to make. You had on one side, a candidate that has had no qualms about how he feels about minorities, women, basic human rights. Then you had a candidate on the other side buried in turmoil (a lot that was overblown however), but the GOP doesn't paint the person. They paint the caricature of the person, which feeds right into the hivemind mindset of the GOP voter. Count in the "rural, white voter" (just call it it what it is), and it was a recipe for disaster. If Trump hasn't been held accountable to this point, what makes you think its going to be the same once he's President?
Goddamn Dems, you really, really fucked up here.......
Goddamn Dems, you really, really fucked up here.......
SymbiantXenos
Member
Nothing says anti establishment more than voting in a billionaire that is the establishment.
Charles Foster Kane
Rosebud
Just woke up.
It's still surreal to know this man is a president.
I hope you're proud America.
It's still surreal to know this man is a president.
I hope you're proud America.
BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
Yup. So many people around here were calling out Nate Silver and praising Sam "99% chance of HRC victory" Wang.
Sad!
Audioboxer
Member
I am quite broke today. Lack of sleep and depressed. lol.
(I know you mean a video stream or something like that, but yes, Audio is broke today).
Couldn't find the door without the self aggrandizement huh.
Officerrob
Banned
Amanda CarpenterVerified account
‏@amandacarpenter
Politico reports Trump is considering a Goldman Sachs exec as Treasury Sec
Drain that swamp Donald...
‏@amandacarpenter
Politico reports Trump is considering a Goldman Sachs exec as Treasury Sec
Drain that swamp Donald...
Why are you talking to us like USGAF voted for this nightmarish entity?
This is basically what i've been trying to say since the start.
This whole knee-jerk 'Trump voter equals racist, sexist bigot' narrative ended up galvanizing the resolve of both bases and deafened us to the real underlying issues.
In the last months, mentioning that you were voting Trump on GAF would just net you a 100 post page filled with insults coming your way.
I called one of these posts out once with a dumb knee-jerk response myself and got a two-week ban in return. It's been frustrating.
Zero attention was paid to the actual reasons for voting Trump. Guess what, it most likely wasn't a vote for racism or a vote for anti-intellectualism. It was a vote for their own interests. Be they financial, governmental, societal or what have you. They don't vote for the man Trump perse, they vote for what they think he can deliver and they are willing to look past his indescretions. People voted Trump solely for their own interests and for changing the in their eyes broken system. Small-minded as it may be, they voted on the candidate that made them feel that their voices were being heard. And Hillary completely failed to do so.
SlipperyFishes
Banned
Oh fuck this hypocracy.
lastflowers
Banned
I remember when PoliGAF spat in my face when I wanted to talk about Fukuyama's article: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-06-13/american-political-decay-or-renewal
Two years ago, I argued in these pages [1] that America was suffering from political decay. The country’s constitutional system of checks and balances, combined with partisan polarization and the rise of well-financed interest groups, had combined to yield what I labeled “vetocracy,” a situation in which it was easier to stop government from doing things than it was to use government to promote the common good. Recurrent budgetary crises, stagnating bureaucracy, and a lack of policy innovation were the hallmarks of a political system in disarray.
On the surface, the 2016 presidential election [2] seems to be bearing out this analysis. The once proud Republican Party [3] lost control of its nominating process to Donald Trump [4]’s hostile takeover and is riven with deep internal contradictions. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, the ultra-insider Hillary Clinton [5] has faced surprisingly strong competition from Bernie Sanders [6], a 74-year-old self-proclaimed democratic socialist. Whatever the issue—from immigration to financial reform to trade to stagnating incomes—large numbers of voters on both sides of the spectrum have risen up against what they see as a corrupt, self-dealing Establishment, turning to radical outsiders in the hopes of a purifying cleanse.
In fact, however, the turbulent campaign has shown that American democracy is in some ways in better working order than expected. Whatever one might think of their choices, voters have flocked to the polls in state after state and wrested control of the political narrative from organized interest groups and oligarchs. Jeb Bush, the son and brother of presidents who once seemed the inevitable Republican choice, ignominiously withdrew from the race in February after having blown through more than $130 million (together with his super PAC). Sanders, meanwhile, limiting himself to small donations and pledging to disempower the financial elite that supports his opponent, has raised even more than Bush and nipped at Clinton’s heels throughout.
The real story of this election is that after several decades, American democracy is finally responding to the rise of inequality and the economic stagnation experienced by most of the population. Social class is now back at the heart of American politics, trumping other cleavages—race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, geography—that had dominated discussion in recent elections.
The gap between the fortunes of elites and those of the rest of the public has been growing for two generations, but only now is it coming to dominate national politics. What really needs to be explained is not why populists have been able to make such gains this cycle but why it took them so long to do so. Moreover, although it is good to know that the U.S. political system is less ossified and less in thrall to monied elites than many assumed, the nostrums being hawked by the populist crusaders are nearly entirely unhelpful, and if embraced, they would stifle growth, exacerbate malaise, and make the situation worse rather than better. So now that the elites have been shocked out of their smug complacency, the time has come for them to devise more workable solutions to the problems they can no longer deny or ignore.
THE SOCIAL BASIS OF POPULISM
In recent years, it has become ever harder to deny that incomes have been stagnating for most U.S. citizens even as elites have done better than ever, generating rising inequality throughout American society. Certain basic facts, such as the enormously increased share of national wealth taken by the top one percent, and indeed the top 0.1 percent, are increasingly uncontested. What is new this political cycle is that attention has started to turn from the excesses of the oligarchy to the straitened circumstances of those left behind.
Two recent books—Charles Murray’s Coming Apart [7] and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids [8]—lay out the new social reality in painful detail. Murray and Putnam are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, one a libertarian conservative and the other a mainstream liberal, yet the data they report are virtually identical. Working-class incomes have declined over the past generation, most dramatically for white men with a high school education or less. For this group, Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again!” has real meaning. But the pathologies they suffer from go much deeper and are revealed in data on crime, drug use, and single-parent families.
Back in the 1980s, there was a broad national conversation about the emergence of an African American underclass—that is, a mass of underemployed and underskilled people whose poverty seemed self-replicating because it led to broken families that were unable to transmit the kinds of social norms and behaviors required to compete in the job market. Today, the white working class is in virtually the same position as the black underclass was back then.
During the run-up to the primary in New Hampshire—a state that is about as white and rural as any in the country—many Americans were likely surprised to learn that voters’ most important concern there was heroin addiction. In fact, opioid and methamphetamine addiction have become as epidemic in rural white communities in states such as Indiana and Kentucky as crack was in the inner city a generation ago. A recent paper by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that the death rates for white non-Hispanic middle-aged men in the United States rose between 1999 and 2013, even as they fell for virtually every other population group and in every other rich country. The causes of this increase appear to have been suicide, drugs, and alcohol—nearly half a million excess deaths over what would have been expected. And crime rates for this group have skyrocketed as well.
This increasingly bleak reality, however, scarcely registered with American elites—not least because over the same period, they themselves were doing quite well. People with at least a college education have seen their fortunes rise over the decades. Rates of divorce and single-parent families have decreased among this group, neighborhood crime has fallen steadily, cities have been reclaimed for young urbanites, and technologies such as the Internet and social media have powered social trust and new forms of community engagement. For this group, helicopter parents are a bigger problem than latchkey children.
THE FAILURE OF POLITICS
Given the enormity of the social shift that has occurred, the real question is not why the United States has populism in 2016 but why the explosion did not occur much earlier. And here there has indeed been a problem of representation in American institutions: neither political party has served the declining group well.
In recent decades, the Republican Party has been an uneasy coalition of business elites and social conservatives, the former providing money, and the latter primary votes. The business elites, represented by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, have been principled advocates of economic liberalism: free markets, free trade, and open immigration. It was Republicans who provided the votes to pass trade legislation such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the recent trade promotion authority (more commonly known as “fast track”. Their business backers clearly benefit from both the import of foreign labor, skilled and unskilled, and a global trading system that allows them to export and invest around the globe. Republicans pushed for the dismantling of the Depression-era system of bank regulation that laid the groundwork for the subprime meltdown and the resulting financial crisis of 2008. And they have been ideologically committed to cutting taxes on wealthy Americans, undermining the power of labor unions, and reducing social services that stood to benefit the less well-off.
This agenda ran directly counter to the interests of the working class. The causes of the working class’ decline are complex, having to do as much with technological change as with factors touched by public policy. And yet it is undeniable that the pro-market shift promoted by Republican elites in recent decades has exerted downward pressure on working-class incomes, both by exposing workers to more ruthless technological and global competition and by paring back various protections and social benefits left over from the New Deal. (Countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, which have done more to protect their workers, have not seen comparable increases in inequality.) It should not be surprising, therefore, that the biggest and most emotional fight this year is the one taking place within the Republican Party, as its working-class base expresses a clear preference for more nationalist economic policies.
The Democrats, for their part, have traditionally seen themselves as champions of the common man and can still count on a shrinking base of trade union members to help get out the vote. But they have also failed this constituency. Since the rise of Bill Clinton’s “third way,” elites in the Democratic Party have embraced the post-Reagan consensus on the benefits of free trade and immigration. They were complicit in the dismantling of bank regulation in the 1990s and have tried to buy off, rather than support, the labor movement over its objections to trade agreements.
But the more important problem with the Democrats is that the party has embraced identity politics as its core value. The party has won recent elections by mobilizing a coalition of population segments: women, African Americans, young urbanites, gays, and environmentalists. The one group it has completely lost touch with is the same white working class that was the bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. The white working class began voting Republican in the 1980s over cultural issues such as patriotism, gun rights, abortion, and religion. Clinton won back enough of them in the 1990s to be elected twice (with pluralities each time), but since then, they have been a more reliable constituency for the Republican Party, despite the fact that elite Republican economic policies are at odds with their economic interests. This is why, in a Quinnipiac University survey [9] released in April, 80 percent of Trump’s supporters polled said they felt that “the government has gone too far in assisting minority groups,” and 85 percent agreed that “America has lost its identity.”
The Democrats’ fixation with identity explains one of the great mysteries of contemporary American politics—why rural working-class whites, particularly in southern states with limited social services, have flocked to the banner of the Republicans even though they have been among the greatest beneficiaries of Republican-opposed programs, such as Barack Obama [10]’s Affordable Care Act [11]. One reason is their perception that Obamacare was designed to benefit people other than themselves—in part because Democrats have lost their ability to speak to such voters (in contrast to in the 1930s, when southern rural whites were key supporters of Democratic Party welfare state initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority).
DangerStepp
Member
The title of this thread is something I have never imagined on my shittiest dreams and I still cannot believe it's real... Just when I thought we couldn't get lower as a human race, America goes and proves we can go even lower. Now the whole world will suffer the consequences, especially us, Mexicans.
In fact, we already suffering the consequences. The Mexican peso went from 18 pesos to 21.50 pesos a dollar, our products will be more expensive on the upcoming days. We’re humiliated, we were called rapists by this man and apparently most of you agree with that. It's simply a nightmare. I have never been more dissapointed on a global social event in my life and I'm legit scared right now.
In fact, we already suffering the consequences. The Mexican peso went from 18 pesos to 21.50 pesos a dollar, our products will be more expensive on the upcoming days. We’re humiliated, we were called rapists by this man and apparently most of you agree with that. It's simply a nightmare. I have never been more dissapointed on a global social event in my life and I'm legit scared right now.
Regardless of anything else, a change in tactics are clearly needed
Confrontation
Member
Gonna miss that overly exaggerated fake smile.
Massive Duck. C.M.
Banned
Do you feel like a Trump vote was a smart choice?
Things to hope for:
On the flip, the slow march of Climate Change is going to either go completely unabated to be accelerated. But I don't think that was really going to change much even if Hillary won.
- Failure to repeal fillibuster, somehow. Allowing democrats to gridlock the Senate and House for 4 years, and get nothing done.
- The SCOTUS members currently alive, survive and/or do not retire for four years.
- The SCOTUS members currently sitting, all say "this shit is crazy" and lean moderate more than we'd expect of them.
- Obama pulls a magic trick and fills Scalia's seat somehow.
- Trump doesn't do any of the things he said, and actually starts fighting/in-fighting his party.
- A bunch of the eight-years worth of talking points for the Republican party get implemented (because they will) and blow up spectacularly in their faces. (It will be very interesting to see what happens when ACA is actually repealed/overturned, and many other such moves. If "get the jobs back" fails and the country spirals down hard in the first two years, I can't imagine Trump's anti-establishment or "get our jobs back" supporters are going to have much love for their candidate or party.)
On the flip, the slow march of Climate Change is going to either go completely unabated to be accelerated. But I don't think that was really going to change much even if Hillary won.
Trump's kid has been on record saying that the VP will do all the work.
Gonna miss that exceptionally capable politician.
Spiritreaver
Member
I woke up and was mind numbingly scrolling through my Twitter/FB feeds. It felt like I was looking into some alternate reality or mockumentary. Damn, feels surreal.
everyday math
Banned
At this point I'm wondering if half of white woman are brainwashed. They just voted a sexual predator for president. I don't get it.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked