It's sad when my own side is just as susceptible to stupid monkey tribalism as the other side is.

I mean, that's the fucking point right? That even if they're a bunch of horrible little racist jerks who honestly deserve what they've gotten, they're still human beings and deserve a future? Because if my side is going to do nothing but scream and throw shit at the other guys for throwing a roadbump into our smooth path to a glorious future, then fuck my side too.

I know this sounds terribly pompous and condescending, but if rural America is never going to understand East Coast Elites, then it is the Elite's moral obligation to try to understand Rural America and do what is best for them.

Representative democracy bro.

It's messy, but seems to be the best thing going.

Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

-A Surprisingly Eloquent, Sentient Bulldog.

Particularly the representative type. While it's certainly vulnerable to corruption and may not always be the most fair, it's good to have a buffer between the direct will of the people and state policy and law.

Sounds pompous and condescending? It is. It's patronizing. It's the same model of thinking used by men who want to protect women from themselves by banning abortion. The difference is that women do vote for abortion, upholding their own best interests, while poor rural right wingers vote against their own interests.

You can't do it for them. They have to learn. Republicans control everything now so it will be harder than ever to blame liberals for their troubles. If they don't figure it out there is no helping them.

Did you not notice the first phrase in the sentence, oakfloorboard?

I'm sorry, but "elitist" as an insult lost all meaning during the Bush II debacle:

We needed to understand rural America so that we could manipulate them into voting the way we wanted.

... for their own good.

I'm posting this out of the depths of boiling rage.

The Democratic party, and liberals in general, fucking deserve Donald Trump. And I hope we fucking choke on him.

We're fucking arrogant, to think that our social justice issues matter more than their economic justice issues. We're dismissive, to ignore them and their needs. We're ignorant, because we can't read Mazlow's Heirarchy of Needs and apply that to society as a whole. We think this is a fucking children's bedtime story, "and they all lived happily ever after", instead of fighting a bitter and long war to hold ground and make tiny gains that is real life. And we're fucking stupid, to watch Hillary gain the nomination, and shrug our shoulders because we couldn't imagine a world where Trump was president.

I hope the cock we're about to take up the ass hurts us. I hope it breaks and scars us. I hope we remember the pain, so the next time we fucking remember that we have to earn our glorious future the fucking hard way.

Sadly, it seems unlikely. It's not a cock, it's a prickly baseball bat. At least somebody would have pleasure were it the former.

This might incur the wrath of many here but, if you never piss someone off, you never express your honest opinion.
Americans are arrogant, many, approaching most, don't have a clue as to how their country works They are so ideologically driven that they wouldn't vote for their own best interest if their own life depended on it. The culture embraces the massive over-the-top response to the simplest problems. No matter how badly the country acts, Americans of all stripes benefit from the bad behaviour. Americans feel as entitled as any rich, white, college rapist out there. It is within their own country where the senses of entitlement collide and are fractured along racial and economic lines. Americans barely take care of their own and many see every other human, animal and plant on the planet as theirs to exploit. You carry weapons to defend yourselves against your fellow citizens!! And you do this all the while spouting nonsense about stopping an overreaching federal government! Well, here it is...Trump was outvoted by a million votes; he's appointing white supremacists to his government; he's risking the health and welfare of every. living. thing on the planet. He's abrogated the moral standing of the US* and decided to get down with the pigs. That you're not invoking the 2nd Amendment en masse is a testament to your true moral character but it does make that right a total sham.

Your press was supposed to deliver the unvarnished truth; it didn't. Every single organ is partisan and biased to the point that the American people have no way of knowing the truth. Lobbying to benefit a minuscule few goes on under both parties and in secret. The free enterprise system, so beloved by you all, has set your moral compasses pointed at the self. It used to be, if it's good for my country, it's good for me...now the sentiment is reversed. And it has failed for most of you.

Words abound about loving your fellow man and hymns are sung every Sunday confirming that you are following Jesus' teaching—"Love they neighbour as thyself." But you've lost who your neighbour is, who your fellow man is. Some feminists would scream shrilly at my choice of words, never once addressing their fundamental meaning. You barely coöperate, let alone like each other. You are living a lie that you have been told so many times that it has become embedded in your psyche.

And, it really wouldn't have mattered if Hillary had won...her government would have been a slightly more urbane version of the same. Trump represents the brashness of American culture. He may not be honest as so many people think but he has shown that he speaks with few filters. "Plain speaking" is a quality that almost every American I have met respects. My British Empire circumlocutory way of speaking has irritated more than a few people, especially those from the South. Hillary has filters up the wazoo but her policies would have delivered similar results. It would have delayed the inevitable.

Individually you are fine people but as a group, you are divided and dangerous. As a group, you lack moral courage; you are fearful, self-interested, bullying and delusional, operating on the principle that it is competition and strife that improves and that to coöperate weakens the species. You have been divided and hence, conquered.

Hoist up your stones and fix it! You are an incredibly hard-working people and have accomplished fantastic things in the past when you have teamed up.

*I've argued that in spite of the US' flaws, Americans are fundamentally a moral and compassionate people who, will do the right thing when not blinded by fear or excessive self-interest.

Meeting people who won't budge halfway is how we got here. Their economic justice issues come down to their blue collar jobs no longer existing or being spread among more workers. They want to go back to the 50s, whose prosperity was for white males, and created by borrowing against the future. The time has come to pay that bill. We can't put it off forever.

Their demands ultimately are unreasonable. Those jobs aren't coming back any more than jobs manufacturing lead paint or typewriters. All we can do is offer them education to enter different fields and the opportunity to move somewhere else, or better yet, accept that not everyone will have meaningful employment in the future and not everyone needs to work to be fed and given a minimum standard of living. The problem is that they vote against both of these things. Anything that would actually help them, they vote against. They hate taxes despite being the primary beneficiaries of social programs.

They've been duped and we can't fix that by being more understanding.

From our side, we don't accept that our quality of life is impossible to spread or maintain. We are going to have to give up making new phones every 18 months because the batteries are made of rare earth elements, for instance. All the cheap goods we enjoy need to go away because they represent make-work and waste. Most of us own a bunch of crap no one actually needs but which consumes valuable resources to make and distribute.

We should accept that the economy not only won't grow, but shouldn't. It needs to shrink unless we accept a future of virtual products and a service industry. Material goods are a poor choice for growth due to limited resources.

Our entire system thrives on inequity. Rural America is pissed because they are now tasting that inequity in a way that only 'others' ever did before. And the inequity was fine when it wasn't their problem, when they benefited from it. As liberals, we're fine with equity until it requires us to sacrifice anything, and then we foolishly believe we can lift everyone to our standard of living... somehow.

I don't know how we fix this. People don't believe the sky is falling until it's actually falling. We won't lower our standard of living as prevention against being forced to lower our standard of living, we'll just wait to be forced. It has happened many times in human history and it will happen many more. Every society falls.

I don't know. I think a few people on SE kinda called this one.

That said I think the US being taken down a couple notches might be a good thing. Pax Americana has been lackluster.

Which social justice issues should the left put aside, and which economic issues does the right want elevated?
Just curious.

I think it's less like that and more like this:

Lets take immigration. The left wants amnesty, the right wants apparently concentration camps.

How do you appeal to someone who isn't that extreme while also holding your own? Here is a suggestion: offer legislation that puts real teeth into immigration enforcement, as well as punishing the people who hire illegals while making sure there is a framework for true cases of amnesty (like someone trying to avoid going back to a cartel butcher, or sending someone to a country where they don't even speak the same language as the people there.)

Then make sure this is every talking point in the media when Republicans stand against it. What, they are okay with not punishing the people undermining our economy and bringing illegal aliens into the country in the first place?

Or one better, when the right attacks you on crony capitalism, don't give them ammunition. The democrats are already the party seen to acquiesce to neo-liberal bullshit. Stop suggesting free trade deals, start distancing yourselves from party members that support them, and make sure you are constantly reminding people about government and regulatory capture brought on by Republican policies.

Thanks, but this doesn't address my question. rndmnmbr said
We're fucking arrogant, to think that our social justice issues matter more than their economic justice issues.
I hear some variant of this a lot, but I never hear which social justice issues we should attenuate to satisfy the Trump voter, and which specific economic issues they favor that we stop obstructing.

So... amnesty is not a social justice issue? That's news to me.

It'a been addressed, in the bipartisan, senate-approved comprehensive immigration bill 0f 2013, which was not even considered by the republican house of representatives.

Right, but you realize I am talking about how we lost the narrativsm battle? This needed to be our response when being called out on poor immigration standards. We needed to tie that choice to wallets, and explain that the reason illegal immigrants bring down an economy is that they are willing to work for less which brings down the value of labor... and that is because people are willing to give jobs to them if it means not having to pay an American up to a social acceptable standard of living.

But that is blunted by offering candidates that weak on trade issues, and have in public perception assisted with economic robbery via a bailout that shouldn't have happened. When that happens, we lose ground to blisteringly stupid nativists. Those same blisteringly stupid nativist who are currently pushing for a registry of fellow Americans, while trying to tie atheists as the cause of all woes in the western world.

I'm pretty sure everybody knows immigrants work for less. I don't think rndmnmbr was raging about explaining our position better.

I guess you and I read that differently. I will let them speak for themselves.

Just started reading "Strangers in their own land: anger and mourning on the American Right." by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Maybe time for another book club.

I'm down for it if you start one up.

If you start one up I'll never stop, never stop, never stop.

TLDR version;

When a child has an irrational fear, you can deal with it because they trust you and are open to possibilities. When someone doesn’t trust you and isn’t open to anything not already accepted as true in their belief system, there really isn’t much, if anything you can do. This is why I think the whole, “Democrats have to understand and find common ground with rural America,” is misguided and a complete waste of time. When a three-thousand-year-old book that was written by uneducated, pre-scientific people, subject to translation innumerable times, edited with political and economic pressures from Popes and kings, is given higher intellectual authority than facts arrived at from a rigorous, self-critical, constantly re-evaluating system that can and does correct mistakes, no amount of understanding, no amount of respect, no amount of evidence is going to change their minds, assuage their fears.

In other words, "See: Most of Kansas." It's GOP-run, lock, stock and Koch, and its voters keep putting the same economic and social disasters in office again, and again, and again.

This makes sense for most of the map. Still have the problem with the democratic strongholds flipping.

The question isn't "how do you reach out to republican voters?" The question is "how do we get back the ones who normally vote for us, and encourage the ones that vote for us to make it to the ballot box?"

You were never going to win the fly-over states or the south, trying is a waste of time.

A large part of the answer is to fight against various voter suppression tactics; one of the more blatant ones being the closure of over 800 polling places in the wake of the VRA's reversal.

I don't know if that's really a large part of the answer, but it's definitely something that needs to be addressed, on ethical grounds if nothing else. Even one suppressed voter is too many.

And it's certainly a better strategy than just yelling "YOU GUYS ARE RACIST JERKS!" on the internet.

The answer was "don't run with Hillary". Sadly, the Dems kept Bernie out who was building the kind of movement that would have toppled Trump.

If Bernie could have won, why didn't his support and his begging his supporters to vote for Hillary allow her to win? If his own supporters ignored his pleas, did they really support him? Or were they just voting against Hillary?

That's what I'd like to know. If they say that they honestly thought Trump would be better for their lot than Hillary, then I question their judgement on things like when to cross the street or to not injure themselves when using a spork.

Have you never heard of Bernie or bust? Some voters would rather watch it all burn than vote for Hillary or Trump. After he started supporting her, many of his die hard fans became disillusioned.

Then why did we lose the House and Senate? Anti-liberalism doesn't change regardless of the candidate.

Disillusionment can have many forms, this election really hurt a lot of people and likewise is not as easily interpreted as many others before it.

They were already flipped. They've been electing republicans to congress for years, to oppose the libruls..

Right, and there was a reason for that. Just like there was a reason that they flipped enmasse this year. (Hint, the last name is Clinton.)

It doesn't help anything or anyone to pretend this is not the case, or to write it off. The left literally can not win without these states. We have to stop pretending we've done no wrong and these people can't be reached. Proof of that is the fact that despite electing shitty republican congressmen, they still for the most part elected democrats for senate and president by and large until now.

And the math in these locations show they are tight. These are not beyond saving, but they will be if this continues to be the attitude being adopted.

Well, west coast liberals can choose to just leave, and may well do so.

I'd certainly enjoy watching Flyoveria's economic anxiety when they have to actually pull their own weight.

You're going to be hurting without food, water, and energy. Not to mention if the Libertopians get their way, you'll have no tax revenue, either, so good luck with all that.

There's plenty of food grown on the west coast and, you know, an ocean. Given that the Pacific Northwest is a mountainous rainforest, we're just fine on water and power too.

Nor is there much tolerance for econ 101 failures.

Literally every salmon that comes into the major waterways comes in through this area. Food isn't going to be the issue (unless we really ramp up the global warming to the point salmon are gone too.)

As for power, nuclear power is a thing which we can easily do as well as wind. Water is not an issue, believe me. We get plenty.

The real issue is if we would be ruled by the libtards or the hippies. One means no taxes, the other means no science.

I hope you don't mean Pacific salmon because if you do, I've got bad news for you.

Here's where you can school yourself on this group of fish! (Sea what I did there?)

Oh, I know they are in trouble. My concerns over global warming's effects are founded in something. The worst case scenario we can begin captive breeding and farming so long as we keep the correct conditions. That is an engineering task, and quite possible though made exceptionally harder if the water can not be reasonable said to support their habitation.

But for the time being, we still talking about billions of fish coming through our estuaries. I believe there is a decent level of fishing that is still sustainable. If we then consider the large territory of California that is farmland... that seem very like extreme liveable conditions when it comes to food.

It's especially true if we start actually protect their enviroment, which it seems this country doesn't want to due despite the obvious dangers.