Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldmanjay | Hacker News Reader

Here's Nate Silver today trying to explain trump:

> America hasn’t put its demons — including racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny — behind it. White people still make up the vast majority of the electorate, particularly when considering their share of the Electoral College, and their votes usually determine the winner.

By intentionally continuing to attempt to associate support for trump with a litany of unacceptable -isms that are the guilty burden of being white (men), he exposed the attitude that people are revolting against.

View on HN

I think this is misleading. Certainly he's evidence of those things, but I don't think he won because of it.

His message appealed to people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Yes, it's pretty sad that people were willing to vote for him despite the racism, sexism, and general demeanor. Did many really vote for that, or did they vote to get out of NAFTA and introduce protectionism under the idea that they might get some of their former glory back. They hear MAGA and think back to when Detroit had the highest average income in the country. When Flint didn't have poison in the water. It's about you first, others second. It's a powerful message, one that people who don't support trump seemed to fail to recognize under all the absolutely horrible awful things constantly coming at us.

Compare that to Hillary basically saying "meh, they'll vote for me". How much extra effort would it have taken to keep those 3 states democrat.

Why do you think Hillary didn't campaign in swing states?

Arrogance?

Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been democrat in 5-6 straight elections.

So you're saying that it's perfectly normal for a non-racist person to support a candidate who openly argued for deporting huge swaths of honest workers and enforce by law racial and religious discrimination?

I'm saying that if you believe you can so trivially comprehend and dismiss the emotional state of tens of millions of people who until today you possibly didn't even want to admit exist, you're fooling yourself badly.

To add on, part of the galvanizing force that created the political block (those tens of millions) was they don't like GP's exact attitude!

People really, really, really, don't like it when you deny or trivialize their experience. I think it was the final straw that led to the Trump victory.

Whatever the emotional state, in the end they supported the candidate openly espousing racist and misogynist opinions, and is on the record saying he sexually assaults women. Maybe the people who voted for him aren't themselves racists and misogynists, but they sure as hell didn't think that stuff was important enough not to vote for him.

They didn't. He won. Deal with it.

A content-free comment.

> is on the record saying he sexually assaults women

This is a good thing to touch on, because it very handily demonstrates an area where differing opinions became a crux upon which the election turned. Trump was "on the record" joking around in a manner that, despite Clintonian assertion otherwise, is not at all uncommon, amongst men and women. It is, also despite assertion, not universally accepted that offensive words are equivalent to harmful actions. For instance, although I did not vote for Trump, I will never accept this precept as valid.

The racism and sexism are sort of victims of their own overuse. I've said, unto exhaustion, that fighting sexism with sexism and racism with racism is equivalent to fighting a fire with fuel, but political beliefs state that racism against whites and sexism against males is justified and therefore non-existent, so it gets deployed rampantly. This election is one obvious result.

> The racism and sexism are sort of victims of their own overuse.

Or possibly there's just a lot of it around.

The problem with this argument as stated is that it has a hard time accounting for the millions of Hispanic voters who voted for Trump... unless you think they are actually self-hating anti-Hispanic racists or something. (Yes, I know more hispanics voted for Clinton than for Trump, but the split was nowhere close to 100-0. It wasn't even close to the 88-12 or so that African-American voters split for Clinton.)

The Hispanic population is still overwhelmingly Catholic[0]. There will always be sway when abortion is on the table.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/upshot/even-as-hispanics-l...

Sure. And there are other reasons they might have voted for Trump too. I'm just saying that clearly people can vote for him without endorsing his position on some particular issue, even one that cuts very close to them.

The parent of my comment was saying that this was abnormal, whereas it is (sadly, perhaps?) quite common in voting.

Right, I was supporting your argument by providing one historically consistent potential reason for endorsement from that segment of the population.

One other thing: Trump got about the same fraction of the Latino vote as Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008, to within exit poll survey error. The actual cited number for him is between those for McCain and Romney. See http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/hillary-clin...

So apparently he's no more abnormal than McCain and Romney were, to those voters. Or at least they felt their other options this time were a lot worse. Or something. It's hard to draw a hard conclusion from the numbers here.

Unless we manage to create a parallel universe where the 11-15 million illegal immigrants are Canadian instead of Mexican, to test against, I don't think you can definitively state that support for enforcement of immigration law constitutes racism.

I don't think a person who's construction job was taken away by an under-the-table worker really cares what color the other person's skin is, the milk and bread he can't afford now leaves the same hole in his pantry.

Same thing for software development offshoring - is it racist for those out-of-work Disney engineers to want their jobs back?

Today we learned that racists and sexists are rebelling against ... being disliked for being racist and sexist.

Yes, I supposed we could fix that by not complaining about them being racist and sexist.

That's exactly the railing against "political correctness" that got so much attention. "Not PC" is code for "freedom to believe and say hateful things about other groups of people."

Do you truthfully believe that you can trivialize and dismiss something you seemingly don't understand and be correct at the same time? That doesn't speak well for the strength of logic underlying your opinions.

No attempt at political correctness will ever impact the freedom to believe anything at all, hateful, loving, or totally rational. That freedom is fundamental to being human. It is not granted by any organization and cannot be revoked using any known mechanism, no matter what your opinion on those thoughts.

We don't need code to believe and express that we are free to say hateful things. Even those on the left believe they are free to say hateful things about people on the right. They've simply fooled themselves into believing that feeling justified about that hate means that they aren't being hateful.

Here's a spoiler alert for being human: everyone feels that exact same justification. It is literally meaningless.

No, you've missed the lesson entirely in your zeal to appear clever and correct. That's fine, I'm sure you won't enjoy the trump presidency so the punishment is sort of built-in

Nate Silver has been wrong in everything he has predicted about Trump.

Again its not about ism although they play a part. Its about establishment vs anti-establishment. Hillary Clinton was the candidate of international finance and military complex.

It appears many people are embracing these unacceptable-isms. How is it then bad to call them our on it?

It should not be a surprise if they're embracing it if they've been tarred with it for decades.

This is a cycle.

The overt reasoning of the most prominent Southern Democratic legislators was that the civil rights focus of the greater Democratic party was the primary reason for their flight into the American Independent and Republican parties.

I assert that it is probably no longer a factor for the majority of Republican voters.

I think this is the source of the narrative, rightly or wrongly. I don't see any evidence it had anything to do with the Reagan or Bush presidencies.

In my lifetime I didn't see the uptick in overt white supremacy until President Obama took office. I think it is a combination of cyclical liberal excuses and some legitimate labelling.

It appears to be the accepted narrative, but it's the explanation coming from people who were caught completely flat-footed. What's the evidence that the narrative isn't a bunch of overwrought bullshit?

"Calling people out" is not a technique to help people grow. It's ridiculing them after applying a label from a distance.

The more people insist it was racists and sexists behind the vote, the more they miss the point. Part of the Trump vote was reacting sharply to the labeling + ridicule technique.

There are other options. Learn more about why they feel the way they do, understand them. These are (most of our) countrymen, fellow humans at the very least.

Education, understanding, compassion. Not ridicule.

Calling racism racism is NOT labeling and ridicule. It's observation, and there's a big difference. I'm not saying everyone who voted for him is racist, but a lot of them are and frankly it's absurd to say we shouldn't address racism for what it is. If calling out someone for clearly being racist is labeling then I think we need to hash out the definitions of these words.

The point that seems to missed here is that it doesn't matter if you feel or even are justified in your beliefs, because literally everyone feels justified in their beliefs too. Turning it into a name-calling contest is emotionally satisfying to an extent, but that's part of why today we have president elect trump, so is the satisfaction worth it?

Two-thirds of Republicans still believe Obama was born outside the US. What possible justification do they have for that belief? Let's stack up our beliefs and see whose match more closely with "facts."

Here is a possible source for your claim(since you didn't provide one) - http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_Nati...

The poll states that 44% of the queried republicans said "No" to the question.

I've never believed that these polls offer wisdom into the mindset of people - they're too reductive and simplistic.

Here's another from this year. http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2016/05/gop-quickly-...

13% think Obama is a Christian. 77% are not sure if he was born in the US.

I agree the "mindset of the people" is more complex than this, and such a belief about Obama may not be the main driver of their voting behavior.

But they are being truthful about saying they believe what they believe, right? They either believe it or they don't. In my eyes this kind of mass susceptibility to conspiracy theories is a huge sociological phenomenon that should be explored.

Your argument is orthogonal to my point, so I don't really have a response to it. Also I'm not sure if you're calling me out, or some set of abstract Republicans, but I'm not really here to do battle in any case, so I don't have any beliefs for the stack.

No, it was a result of desperate people willing to vote for a guy who said "I'll bring back jobs from overseas" and when asked how his response was "I'll tell companies they can't send jobs overseas.

The fact that the average American knows so little about the political process that they think the president can just tell a corporation where they have to employ people makes my head hurt. Badly.

The message of this election was: just lie to people. Even if there's no factual basis in our known reality to back up your statements, if you tell them what they want to hear they'll believe it. And that's really, really sad. I feel for the people who have lots manufacturing jobs, but the way out of that hole isn't voting for a guy who's going to remove any social safety net you previously had available...

>Education, understanding, compassion. Not ridicule.

How much did they try to understand Obama voters? Not at all. We got 8 years of racist attacks, "you lie!", and scorched earth tactics. I appreciate your invitation to be magnanimous but I'm not feeling it yet.

They didn't try at all. Unfortunately, someone has to do it. I'm still working up the strength, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com