World events

Good point.

If they're so angry with the elite, then how come they voted for the most elite person of all?

The elite can go and fuck right off. There's been a tendency for decades to label anyone who disagrees with any aspect of what is considered the "right way" of thinking as 'racist' and 'fascist', culminating in a growing tendency to consider every westerner alive (especially when you're white, ESPECIALLY when you're over 35) as the root of all evil, from slavery to colonialism to the weather to gender inequality to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

What would behoove the "elite" is to take a step BACK rather than forward and stop labelling and belittling those that do not fit the preconceived molds. To start moderating the social and public debate in such a way that a dissenting voice does not immediately needs to fear excision and exile.

At the end of the day you're absolutely right: this very dynamic that has driven people into Trump's arms is happening ALL OVER Europe. With so many elections in the coming months I fear greatly the tide can no longer be stemmed.
I have no idea of the impact, but I sincerely hope that at the very least it will serve as a huge eye opener to those currently in power.

May it be contained to only that.

I was going to rewrite what I wrote the day after the Brexit vote, but I don't really need to - I agree with Martijn so very strongly.

One thing I would add is that a lot of what we might call "the elite" seem to have forgotten how to win elections - I've seen it in my country's general election last year, the Brexit vote earlier this year and now in America - if all you do is stand up and say things that appeal to people who already agree with you and will vote for you regardless, and you scream insults at people likely to vote for your opponent, you are completely reliant on your core support, and that core support is rarely enough. You need a broader appeal.

That Hillary Clinton lost isn't the fault of tens of millions of evil racist bigots who would love to see all disabled people killed, immigrants deported and women chained to the kitchen, it's the fault of Hillary Clinton and her advisors. Also, I'm afraid, her supporters - my Facebook wall has been full for over a year of posts about how evil Trump is, how evil is supporters are, how the world will end if he wins and she doesn't. If instead of that, she - and they - had said "We understand your concerns, we are listening to your problems - and we believe that the best solution to those problems is that you vote for me because I will do X, Y and Z for you" rather than "YOU EVIL CUNT" (or words to that effect) - well, perhaps things would have turned out differently.

As for what the future holds - well, most of the past Republican presidents most reviled by the rest of the world are the ones who had interventionist tendencies. My biggest fear for Trump is ironically the opposite. Edmund's point about climate change is another big worry - but I have to say only the tiniest steps have been taken so far anyway so I doubt it will make all that much difference in the end. Is Trump really likely to start repealing various anti-discrimination laws and put minority groups back in previous, awful conditions? Surely not. And I doubt we'll hear of the Mexican wall ever again.

I'm very disappointed that he's won, but - to echo what I said after Brexit - I hope the other side learns the lesson and doesn't really believe the rhetoric about it being down to everyone who voted for him being a racist moron.

I suspect we're in for a very long period of power for the Conservatives in Britain (or what's left of Britain - I guess Scotland will vote to leave it at the next opportunity, which I think will be a disaster for them) and I wonder whether the same is true in America, where Obama - for all that he appeared to be a genuinely good man with genuinely good intentions - doesn't seem to me to have actually managed to enact the various changes whose promise swept him to power in that wave of hope, reflecting how difficult it is for a President with a Congress against him to actually do anything.

I think the word 'elite' is mostly construed by lowpaid, white working class people who equate a minimum of education and a marginal position in the world to be 'elite'. Basically Trump won not only in his demagogue tactics, but also based on an enormous presence of prejudice in these environments. It was a double effect -- heavy prejudice in the population augmented by heavy, easily accesible, prejudiced rhetorics.

There are obviously things that the Democrats and Clinton could have done better, but that's not where the real problem lies.

It's very sad, but there you go. As others have said, I hope the US citizens who voted for Trump will learn from their mistake when they -- in 4 years -- see that everything is going to shit.

Isn't that just the thing, though? For most of these people, everything is already shit (in their perception). They go to work, pay their taxes, do what good capitalist citizens are supposed to do, but they can still barely make ends meet - if even that. How could it get worse, for them, in their own minds?

It gets worse for them because Trump is a top-down president in practically everything he does, which leaves little room for improvement for the poorest. I cannot possibly imagine -- under any circumstance -- that Trump has the social network policies needed for these things. Their salvation would have been a Democratic governance that had support in the chamber (which Obama didn't).

But the keyword in your paragraph is 'perception'. What they perceive is a difficult situation, and a strong prejudice towards government (what they call 'elite'), which is what Trump nurtured with his simple (but vacous) rhetoric. This is something I think social scientists will research in the years to come.

People are fed up with the authoritarian leftism, so they've decided to put the horseshoe theory of politics into action. As it's always been. The pendulum ever swings. This is nothing new. The respect for critical and dispassionate thinking in politics has yet to reach its pique... demagogracy still reigns. But as a certain proper social justice warrior once said, 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.' Let's hope bad ideas have a short enough half-life for them not to cause too much damage.

The trouble with the modern interpretation of socialism, and what makes it different from its roots (and I'm only speaking about my own country now, I've no idea if this is true elsewhere) is that it seems to be formed much more on a "it's so unfair what that guy's got, let's take it away from him" type notion than a "wow, look what that guy's got, let's find a way of getting you that as well" which is surely where it came from and where it should be.

If it was that complex.

Call yourself a socialist and people will name you names like Marxist, Leninist, what the hell, do you want the Iron Curtain back?!

In his autobiography Bill Clinton said that to win in his own state (a very conservative Arkansas where he somehow managed to become governor) he had to promise some guy that he will fight the communists!

Well, that's not a type of socialism we have up here. Obviously, the rich are taxed more than those with lower incomes, but that's how it's always been and should be. The definition also depends on where you're from. A politician like Bernie Sanders would be considered right-wing within Norway's left-right scale, but considered almost 'communist' in the US.

As you've gathered, I'm a "Leftie" who believes strongly in our form of social democracy/social liberalism -- despite its occasional grievances and 'nanny state' annoyances. Which is why I think it's NOT the political direction itself that's the problem in this election, but people's prejudices and perception of it. I can perfectly understand the suffering people's need to blame something, but what they blamed in the end was actually the opposite of what would have helped them.

We certainly wouldn't call anyone earning above minimum wage 'rich' up here, but that definition probably varies even within Europe.

Personally, I earn less than minimum wage at the moment, i.e. I'm way below the Norwegian poverty line. In that way, I'm right there with the people rioting in the US. The difference is of course that we have a whole other social network in play.



Yes, I think that's part of the core issue here -- this was an election fought almost purely on semantics, and less on actual politics.

This is an eye-opener:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-t … lks-about/

Has there really been a turn in definition there? Because left-leaning has always meant (as far as I know, anyway) a more fair distribution of goods, a stronger state welfare and IMO a more solidaristic ideology, whereas the rich are usually located in a right-leaning ideology with more emphasis on the individual, the 'self-made man' and capitalist freedom. That doesn't mean that left-leaning people don't get 'rich', of course, but that the very word is more often associated with the type of policy that Trump represents (who also happens to be rich).

It's this basic oxymoron that baffles me with this election. How do the poor, working-class or unemployed people vote for a person who really represents their very opposite, and who doesn't really have their welfare in mind? I can only explain it by pure rhetorics ("more jobs", Trump says vacously, and that's all they need for comfort).

That's a very well-written article. I'm part of "rural" America. I've lived in cities of under 40,000 people for most of my life. I identify with a lot of what he wrote. I did not vote for Donald Trump. But I know a lot of people who did. And I don't know any of them who think he's a good a person. Most people didn't vote for Trump because they like him, or because they hate women, or because they're racist. Most of the rural Americans I know that voted for Trump voted for him because they're sick of politicians - all politicians from the left and the right. A line from THE DARK KNIGHT applies: "In their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand." What I think most of them don't realize is that Trump is not on their side. The only thing they have in common with him is their anger about the status quo. And once he becomes the status quo and they see how little he actually represents them, they'll abandon him. I hope so, anyway.