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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

As a Brit it has been fascinating to watch the Dems run basically exactly the same campaign Remain ran.

As an American Democrat, I'm not in the least bit embarrassed by our campaign. We ran on 8 years of growth, cutting the deficit, 5% unemployment, tripled stock market, etc. Justly proud of that.

I'm embarrassed for the country by what Republicans ran on and who they elected.

That's kinda my point. This election was yours to lose, just as it was Remain's, since it was the status quo. Genuine question, are you aware of Brexit at all? Do you feel the Dems learned any lessons from it?

As I pointed out above, the status quo is actually pretty good.

And yes, I'm aware of Brexit at all. I think that Trump learned more about Brexit than we learned about Remain, Brexit being the politics of complaint.

> As I pointed out above, the status quo is actually pretty good.

For you. And me. But we are not the majority. The majority does not benefit from automation, globalisation etc. as much as you and me.

And it doesn't matter if in absolute terms we are all better of(for which citation would be needed, specifically for the lowest income bracket), it matters that the benefits of this new age are not spread around to those bearing the costs as efficiently as necessary.

This is why people vote for brexit, trump, afd etc. And no, those don't have the answers either. But they offer convenient scapegoats and changes with "tangible" effect in favour of their voting base.

Politicians on the left and the right are united in their elitism and their own bubbles of what is "important", and they have become disconnected from their populace so much that they can't even coral them effectively any more.

There's a strong disconnect amongst the beneficiaries of globalization that the status quo is overall good -- it's probably TERRIBLE for a quarter of the people, treading water for half, and beneficial to the remainder who are in positions that leverage cultural and technological progress.

A lot of communities are absolutely gutted by rural flight and the shift of power to urban tech centers, and they're really hurting. This is a consistent theme across many Westernized nations.

"I love the poorly educated."

This wasn't about the economy at all which is pretty good. This was a demagogue preying on gullibility. Y'all just elected him, citation unnecessary.

What's the alternative? Hating them? Pretending they don't exist?

How did that work out for you?

He loves the uneducated because they're gullible. In fact, he loves them so much that he'll educate them at Trump University.

Trump University is indefensible, but do you really believe categorically that people with e.g. secondary education only are "gullible"? Who told you that?

Seems like you hate the poorly educated, and you're just attributing that to Trump.

Now only that, you're assuming that uneducated people are gullible. You're stereotyping a broad group of people without any evidence.

Trump, in my estimation, hacked his way into the White House. He recognized key vulnerabilities in the way the media handles politics and exploited them for all they're worth, putting his meagre resources where they counted, and ignoring everything else. This allowed him to remain the underdog right up until he won the election.

These vulnerabilities are going to be fixed in the next four years. There's just too much at stake for it to be otherwise.

When you say that to your own supporters what you're saying is "I know that some of you don't have as much education as you may have wanted. You're welcome here, and will be listened to."

Instead of that, the Democrats ran on "stupid people are mad because they are poor. We smart, enlightened people should make them shut up, and show them that this isn't their country anymore." i.e. "We will herd the poorly educated."

Yes, you've illustrated how demagogues work.

You've even elected one.

Yeah... um... the original article was about smugness among liberals. You might want to think about that.

You say something that doesn't even answer wojcech's point, then say "citation unnecessary"? Not very convincing.

(The point, the request for citation, was the claim that the economy is doing well for the bottom 20%. A quote from Trump does not address that question whatsoever.)

>"I love the poorly educated."

Well, Hillary Clinton and her supporters hate the poorly educated, and look where that got them.

No, "you" ran on "Trump is raaaciiist and if you support him you are too!"

(I put "you" in quotes since I'm referring to Democrats in general, not you personally.)

It's the same thing "you" ran against Bush and Romney on. It might even be true this time around, but you are the boy who cried wolf at this point.

"We" (an editorial we) ran on "Trump will do for the United States of America what he did for the United States Football League; and that he will be no better president than he was a businessman."

I don't remember anyone saying that Romney was racist. I remember many saying that he represented the very wealthy rather than the middle and poorer classes.

Here's people calling Romney racist:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/8/27/1124649/-Romney-Goes...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/07/romney-accused-...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-faces-challenge...

https://thinkprogress.org/romney-dog-whistle-obamas-philosop...

the true irony of the romney hatred is he's probably the best qualified and most moral candidate the country's ever seen.

Well if you forget Thomas Jefferson.

Romney being a racist was not a major (or even minor) theme of Obama's campaign. I don't think you can really be suggesting that alleged racism on the part of the Republican candidate was as big an issue in the previous election as in the present one (where the Republican candidate made widely publicized explicitly racist statements).

I agree that the "$republican is literally hitler", "$republican is racist", etc, is more hysterical this time around. I attribute that to Trump being blatantly on the wrong side of the culture war [1].

I'm just saying that "XXX republican is racist" has lost it's meaning due to overuse. The boy has cried "hitler" about Bush, Romney, etc, and the villagers will no longer come running.

[1] I recommend reading Moldbug's article on the topic: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes-... The tl;dr; is that while Bush and Romney were Brahmin Republicans, Trump is very clearly a Vaisya, leading to vastly more hysteria.

I think this is wrong in two respects. First, the statement has not lost its meaning but only its effect. Second, the claim that Bush and Romney were racists was not a major strand of political discourse. People talked about Republican policies rooted in racism, but that is a very different thing from having a presidential candidate who is himself, on a personal level, a racist.

Bill Maher is no genius, but even before the election he had already identified this lack of credibility, the umpteenth time some random Republican is deemed beyond the pale:

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/07/bill-maher-liberals-cried-wo...

There are always people on each side making outrageous allegations about each candidate. The question of whether Romney was a racist was not a major issue in the previous campaign.

Cutting the deficit? Which one? If you are referring to the National Debt you are grossly wrong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

Of course, if you look up in the dictionary you'll find that deficit and debt are distinct words:

  debit: something that is owed or that one is bound to pay
  to or perform for another

  deficit: the amount by which expenditures or liabilities
  exceed income or assets

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/deficit http://www.dictionary.com/browse/debt

The Federal deficit was about $1.4T when Obama started and its about $600B now. Obama has been very fiscally conservative. In particular, he put the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on normal rather than emergency funding basis.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_deficit_chart.ht...

Only tangentially related, but I'm amazed by the absolute value of the US deficit. The German federal deficit used to be around 10-20 billion € (now down to zero) and everyone was crying over how horribly high it is. (I know that Germany is smaller, but it has at least a fourth of the US population.)

Post WWII, US deficits grow under Republicans and shrink under Democrats.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-EX454_wwii10_G_...

It's a lagging indicator.

We have run massive trade deficits since Reagan. Those ultimately either have to show up as national debt or personal debt. After 35 years, we're nearly maxing out both. Germany has a trade surplus (basically doing the same thing to the rest of the EU.)

edit:

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/national-income-account...

http://www.dw.com/en/italian-pm-renzi-lashes-out-at-german-t...

you are out of your mind. the only reason the deficit is south of a trillion is interest rates are HALF what they were in 08.

2008 fed debt: ~10T

2016 fed debt: ~19T

2008 int exp: ~450M

2016 int exp: ~450M

he's spent like a lunatic, and his aca has just gotten started.

Spent like a lunatic would be his predecessor with two unfunded off the books wars, Medicare Part D, the 'Ownership' Society all paid for with tax cuts.

What could he have feasibly done otherwise?

uh, cut spending?

LOL. jesus.

Right. Given that Congress controls the purse, how?

What growth? Obama has never presided over a single year of decent growth.

Cutting the deficit? Get real--we need to cut government, not just the growth rate of government.

5% unemployment--made up numbers

Tripled stock market--yes, because of Quantitative Easing, aka money printing.

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