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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

As a European, this article on cracked.com (yes, cracked.com) gave me a lot of insight into why / how Trump won.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...

It's Brexit all over again. Will the politicians in my country (NL) learn to listen to 'the other half', before their campaigns start (next spring)? Probably not.

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Trump won because people are sick of SJWs. He won because people are sick of being called racists when they're not. He won because his opponent was objectively worse. Any other democrat running against him would have probably led to different results, but the bickering between the children turned out in Trump's favor. It's ridiculous that either one ran. All we can do now is hope Trump does well. It really wouldn't be that hard to do "well"; we haven't had a good president for quite many years.

It's overall a very good opinion piece, but this little ditty didn't escape my notice:

> We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession.

"Medical problems"? I don't know much about these things, but isn't this what some would call a "microagression"?

Eh, I'm going to give the guy a pass. At least he's trying.

I think the thrust is, "we don't understand the real problem, lets call it something that we think we know about."

All in all, I think it's a pretty solid article, and hits on a lot of the rural-urban disjunctions that I've experienced, as a redneck Mainer from up near the Canadian border having to move out of 1950s-throwback-world.

According to the article, there is more to it than just hating sucial justice warriors. The fact that rural infrastructure is crumbling, jobs are lost and not returning and the fact that during 8 years with a democrat at the helm didn't change much for them. It is enough for a lot of people to seriously consider the alternative, especially if the (untrusted) establishment hates this alternative.

> The fact that rural infrastructure is crumbling

That's what I don't get. Do Trump voters think he gives a flying fuck about the state of rural infrastructure or the lives of poor people? I don't see it. Sure, the incumbent elite are feckless, tribal, irresponsible, greedy, and dishonest, but Trump is worse, obviously so.

I guess that's the problem in a two-party system. Usually you choose the better of two bad options. In this case, all the options were so bad that people just said "fuck it".

I know democrats who voted for Trump. One of the reasons is that he is planning on investing $500,000,000,000 in infrastructure, including rural infrastructure. So yes, I think economics played a large role in his win.

But I'd ask myself where is that half-a-trillion dollars going to come from, on top of the increases in military spending, the thousands-of-miles-long Mexico wall, the massively expensive roundups and deportations, and so on. Especially when taxes are apparently also going to be reduced.

And asking myself that question, I'd think his promises somewhat empty and opportunistic.

Obama pushed hard for big spending on infrastructure from the start of his first term. Not only do we need it in general, but then it also would have greatly helped push the recovery from the recession along.

Republicans in Congress were able to block it until they took control of both Houses, and then it was effectively dead.

Do they really think Trump has a better chance of getting Congress to pass a large infrastructure bill? I haven't looked into it in great detail, but from what I have seen it doesn't look like the incoming Republican House and Senate are at all inclined to be looser with the pursestrings now.

Also, Clinton's plan also called for large infrastructure spending, although only about half of what Trump's plan calls for. That makes it hard for me to understand why a Democrat who voted for Trump would cite infrastructure spending as a reason.

Do you refer to the "shovel-ready" stimulus? They burned through $830B on that, to little effect. One would hope that the next big infrastructure effort would be better focused on actual infrastructure.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023039457045793876...

And here I thought Trump won because of record low voter turnouts.

Everyone has a theory.

The current popular vote total stands at 127MM votes cast, and the Attorney General of California has already announced that they have at least 3MM absentee and provisional ballots to check, so it's expected that turnout will exceed 2012's 129MM votes cast.

Forgive me for going off-topic here but I'm curious about your reason for using MM to designate 'million'?

I think in the financial industry, particularly in the US, MM is often used to signify millions. MM is also one million in Roman numerals (1000(M) x 1000(M)).

I don't think there's any hard and fast rules globally how one specifies "millions":

https://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-abbreviation-for-mi...

Wouldn't it be 2000 in Roman numerals?

I thought that too, but there's an implied multiplier. I'm guessing it's one of those examples of borrow and abuse things.

Roman numerals use implied addition and subtraction, not multiplication.

MM may signify million in some contexts, but not in Roman numerals.

> Roman numerals use implied addition and subtraction, not multiplication.

I already agreed to that fact; whilst reluctant to invoke "appeal to authority", I know how Roman numerals work, I studied Latin and Classical Studies. I also said "I'm guessing it's one of those examples of borrow and abuse things".

> MM may signify million in some contexts

I already stated that: I think in the financial industry, particularly in the US, MM is often used to signify millions - I didn't mean everywhere, that was just one example where it's sometimes used.

From my fairly lengthy google searching the rough consensus is that MM has been hijacked from Roman numerals and that there's an implied multiplier. Whether you like it or not, it's just how it is.

Sorry if you took my post the the wrong way. While the use of it was likely inspired by Roman numerals, I read your post as indicating that it actually did mean one million in Roman numerals and wanted to be clear that it did not as I was likely not the only one to understand your post that way.

000's, MM, Bn, Tn, - how to spot a banker :) (I interned at an ibank, not criticizing)

Exactly this. I interned at a pension fund, but now refuse to work in the financial industry.

For a little context, some rough voter totals going back to 2000 (in millions):

While, certainly, there were less votes cast than the last two elections, it doesn't appear to be a record low.

Edit: Sources are Google for 2016 and Wikipedia for the rest.

Don't forget to factor in population growth (above 18 years of age) from 2000 to 2016. Is it enough of a factor to make 2016 the record low? I don't know.

low turnout is just a symptom. the cause was weak enthusiasm for a candidate that didnt emotionally resonate with the public, and had no simple, strong messsage about what she would do.

on the other hand, you had enough enthusiasm from trump's side that they more than compensated for "normal" Republican voters that hated him.

> his opponent was objectively worse

If he really continues with global warming denial and make real effects based on that idea, I'd like to see who will dare to say that to his kids. Just this single issue is enough to make the whole difference.

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-victory-climate-a0c595572299

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_H...

That's also the biggest issue that's still not clear in the confused heads of too much US citizens, and where the real action is needed.

Misinformation paid by the oil companies sadly worked. The good proof than even the side that sees other manipulations isn't immune at all.

As one thinker said: "when you look at somebody and hold your head and think how come the other side just doesn't see the facts, there's a simple answer: you're an idiot, and, by the way, the other side is too. People aren't rational. The proof: almost 50-50 opinions, even among the supposedly "smart" people, on some important subject -- how probable is that to be the reflection of the real rational state of the truthfulness of the issue in question. Effectively zero."

> objectively worse

On what objective metric(s)? Answering this properly is extremely hard.

There is one objective metric on which she definitely was worse: telling lies. And by worse I mean, he told many more of them.

That's part of it, but I wouldn't put it at more than 20-30% of the total explanation.

That article struck a chord with me. I live in a city, but I am not of a city.

The no-car, 600-square-foot-apartment, minimalist, trendy-restaurant, latest-social-justice-fashion people that surround me feel like a gang of condescending children. They wave policies with reaching consequences like foam fingers at a sports game. They are mugged and then bend themselves into a pretzel to avoid describing the attacker as black and explain the crime as a symptom of economic injustice. They pretend like Hillary doesn't have 20 years of corrupt history and an attitude that approximates the worst of European nobility.

I don't like Trump, but sometimes a giant orange middle finger is needed to break out of a rut.

Does this actually happen? It sounds like a total caricature of what someone thinks city folk are like. I mean, I spent the majority of my life in cities of different sizes and also have friends across the entire Northeast and I travel a lot. Nothing like this actually happens. My extended family are casual racists and complain a lot about Puerto Ricans. Hillary was widely unpopular with everyone I know, liberal, conservative, and moderate. I don't know a single minimalist but know a lot of people who complain they are poor while buying a bunch of junk. When my house was broken into by unknown assailants a friend of mine said "It must be niggers." Nobody really goes around talking about political policies very much, it's almost never a topic of conversation. We are generally just a bunch of normal people and none of us actually do that stuff. We have different culture and mostly different activities than rural Americans but we are not at all like you describe.

We do go to restaurants, coffee shops and bars a lot but never because it's trendy. Actually now that I think of it that wasn't big in one of the cities I lived in.

>They are mugged and then bend themselves into a pretzel to avoid describing the attacker as black

This is absurd and nobody is bending anything. People i know who got mugged said "I got mugged." I do admit i never heard "I got mugged by a black man" but probably because that information isn't entirely relevant but no bending like a pretzel. Unless you believe bending like a pretzel means "not bitching endlessly about an entire race because of the actions of on person."

My caricature is more aimed at urban 20-something hipsters I know, not anyone in a city.

My comment about mugging and race is from repeatedly watching people try to describe criminals in a politically correct way. "20s black guy in athletic gear" makes a lot of people uncomfortable to say when describing a criminal to watch for.

For a great example of pretzel bending, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfO1veFs6Ho

This is obviously a different topic, but it's a great example of how far SJW and political correctness have gone.

It does happen. This almost perfectly describes my experience living in Durham, NC (the most liberal city in NC, by most counts).

The caricature has some grounding in truth. For example, the crime reports in university news services, where those schools sit in rough areas of town, are comically vague. "Male in a hoodie and jeans"... okay then.

I don't like Trump, but sometimes a giant orange middle finger is needed to break out of a rut.

These are generally the sentiments that are comforting but do not actually make any practical sense. Policies matter, decisions that will make things worse now will in fact make things worse now.

The only people with the luxury of being able to think "it needs to get worse before it can get better" or some approximation of that are people with enough economic and social security to be unlikely to be harmed by the "getting worse". To me that is real smugness.

If the unprivileged had believed that same pablum the Democrats have been feeding them for decades, they would have voted for Clinton like they voted for Obama (in e.g. Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida), and she would have won the election. They can see the rut they're stuck in, even if others can't.

> The no-car, 600-square-foot-apartment, minimalist, trendy-restaurant, latest-social-justice-fashion people that surround me feel like a gang of condescending children.

Your complaint is about people who you feel are condescending, yet you are describing them as children?

EDIT: Since I've already been downvoted, perhaps I need to say that I'm pointing out the inherent contradiction in this statement.

I upvoted you, since I think it's a fair question :)

I may be miss reading it, but it is probably not meant to be condescending - They are noticing someone's behavior and use a commonly understood proverbial phrase or idiom to describe it. In this case "gang of condescending children" might have been better stated as "childish attitude and groupthink" as it is meant to portray them as behaving with mentality of elitism that feeds off other people around them who echo and embolden their thoughts, making it very easy for them to dismiss others and their views unilaterally instead of reasoned and compassionate objective reasoning.

This statement might also be used like this - "So when Billy and his friends came back to town from their freshman semester and humanities 101, they were all too eager, like a gang of condescending children, to argue with Billy's WW2 veteran grandpa about how wrong he was about how the world worked and how much more they knew about it."

In a way, rural America was a tech bubble. In the 19th century and earlier, factories were in the city or near water. As the interstate system made shipping cheaper, factories moved out of the cities and coastlines for cheaper land and labor.

Now container shipping has moved factories into cheaper countries altogether. But we have generations of people that have lived in these rural factory towns which now have no factory.

The issue is real and Donald Trump was the only one addressing it. It's just too bad Donald Trump was the only one addressing it.

But Trump didn't actually address it. He acknowledged the problem but didn't provide any tangible solution other than "I'm going to bring your jobs back" which is never going to happen. As you said, rural manufacturing was a buble.

He said he would renegotiate NAFTA, pull out of the TPP, and do something nebulous involving labeling China as a "currency manipulator".

Earlier in his campaign he said he was going to introduce tariffs as well, but I guess that statement didn't count since it's no longer in his "Contract with the American Voter".

These are all strategies to add economic friction to importing foreign goods.

Then he has his immigration push to block importing cheap labour from abroad.

The end result is that American manufacturing and farming done by American citizens will see some improvement but at the expense of the economy as a whole.

I'm not sure if he or his advisers really think of the manufacturing decline as a logical advance of shipping technology. When framed that way, they seem like luddites tearing down the cotton mills. But the platform is definitely not as illogical as everyone makes it seem.

> These are all strategies to add economic friction to importing foreign goods.

They also add economic friction to exporting US made goods, unless these renegotiations somehow manage to result in deals that are very one sided in favor of the US.

The US exports about $310 billion worth of goods annually to Canada, and about $240 billion to Mexico. A lot of US jobs are involved in making those goods.

For some reason I don't understand, exports almost always seem to get overlooked when politicians go on about trade.

Well, he made empty promises for votes. I don't see any way he could realistically bring those jobs back, even with raising tariffs.

I mean, if all it takes is having someone tell them "I'm a Democrat, and we're going to bring your jobs back, promise!", then liberals should start sending some random guy to all these places and saying that at town meetings and local public access channels on a weekly basis to prime and placate them early for the next election.

I wrote another comment in this thread detailing his platform. I think it's a terrible platform and may be ineffectual, but it still makes logical sense.

You don't see how getting a big company to move their industrial robots from Mexico to the US will bring back jobs?

As far as tariffs go, wouldn't raising tariffs actually encourage companies to move their factories outside the US, at least for the bigger companies?

Most of the big manufacturing companies sell their products internationally. If the US slaps big tariffs on products made in country X, presumably country X is going to return the favor with big tariffs on products made in the USA.

As long as the other countries keep their free trade agreements intact among them, so that these tariffs only end up applying to products that go to or come from the USA, then a company that builds its products in the US ends up paying tariffs on sales to every country except the US.

A company that builds its factory in one of the other countries ends up paying tariffs on ONLY sales in the US.

The US is a big market compared to most other individual countries, but if we get into a big tit-for-tat tariff situation it isn't the size of other individual country markets that matter. It is the size of the combined markets of the countries in various tariff-free associations.

Thanks for your thoughts. That is indeed why he will be unsuccessful at bringing the jobs (especially the manufacturing jobs) back into the country.

I appreciated that article, though I hated the headline and the format. I shared it a couple times and had to make apologies for both in order to ensure people would actually read it. The cracked format better serves pop-culture rants.

I found this article similarly enlightening, and a far better read.

https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-...

Ummm that article doesn't seem to notice the whole shit ton of blue in the rural northeast. Like the entirety of Vermont and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. The most populous part of Connecticut appear to be the red parts of Connecticut (looks like Bridgeport?). It's hard to tell but the red parts of New Hampshire seem to be around Portsmouth? Which isn't exactly a city in the traditional sense of the word but certainly nowhere near rural. As an aside Portsmouth drivers are seriously the most polite drivers I've ever encountered. The red part of new York is Buffalo which is the second most populous city in new York state! EDIT: now that I look closer it appears Rochester and Buffalo seem to be tiny little blue dots surrounded by red.

Does this person think the entire Northeast is a giant city?

I don't think you can discount the populations of elderly Democratic voters in these New England rural areas. People that have been voting Democrat since Kennedy or longer.

Maine tilted pretty hard, with the rural 2nd District going convincingly for Trump. However, LePage also gets a lot of support and approval from those same regions, even now, with everything he's said and done, so we may just like blowhards.

I'm not discounting anything just saying the map the author used as proof of his or her hypothesis doesn't follow for the Northeast of the US from first glance. The thing that really stuck out for me was New Hampshire and Vermont. Though it's hard to tell for sure with a tiny unlabeled map. Anyone got a bigger one?

With Vermont, it's sort of notoriously infested with hippies. I'm kind of joking there, but there's a kernel of truth to it. Out of the three rural New England states, Vermont is always the farthest left, and in places there, Bernie Sanders would be considered too much of a centrist.

I'm not sure New Hampshire really falls into anyplace reasonable on the 1D Republican-Democrat axis, except for a standard deviation one way or the other from the middle, shifting with the winds. If you add in the authoritarian/libertarian axis to make it 2D, NH is pretty far up the liberty scale. No income tax, no sales tax, extremely minimal firearms regulation, hell, you don't even have to wear a seatbelt if you don't want to. The southern parts of the state are starting to turn into commuter satellites of Boston, to some extent, but it hasn't really eroded that "Live free or die" character.

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