World War Meme
politico.com
politico.com
Wait. Sorry, I'm the crazy one. Its the memes. The dank pepe memes are what helped him win. How could Hillary have been so blind?
Of course Occam's Razor doesn't always point to the correct answer, just the simplest one.
This is the reaction of irrational people who can see no other solution other than those they come up with. In their ordered world all other opinions are those of the ignorant, the bigoted, and racist. As such they are all discounted if not ignored.
Trump won because of who he wasn't and he took down to political establishments to do so. Why wouldn't they both be mad and worse the press who for too long decided instead of being journalist that they should be part of the story. I cannot recall a time in my life where I have seen so many stories from the press reporting on the press.
So while the linked article has no real place on HN it is just indicative of a narrative being pushed by the losing side. Someone else gave it to him, we were never wrong or disliked, we were cheated. (we as in them)
I think most people accept that but it does still leave the question, 'why Trump?'
It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe.
As a Trump voter - but not a Republican - this pretty much sums it up. His SCOTUS list and the formation of his "Second Amendment Coalition" nudged me from the "he's better than Clinton" to the "maybe he'll deliver something I want" column, but there are no circumstances where I would have voted Clinton.
> It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe.
I think it would have been a slaughter in that case, instead of the squeaker it was. Trump's biggest challenge was winning over the libertarian wing of the GOP. If he were against Sanders, that part of the party would have been locked down from day one.
Sanders would have had a much better chance with moderates, independents, the anti-establishment groups, etc.
It also shows to me how broken the US election system is. We badly need something like approval voting. It's unacceptable that we ended up was two candidates who both had awful approval ratings.
Trump basically stumbled on this untapped political bounty more or less by chance, but he has smart enough to recognize its value and design a political persona that would speak directly and effectively to that group[1] The fact that there was otherwise no obvious leader around whom the Republican party could gather gave us Trump-the-candidate.
Trump-the-president was a slightly more complex matter. There was another candidate that was able and willing to tap into this new constitutency of the politically ignored: Bernie Sanders. Unlike the Republicans, there was also one obvious Democratic leader around whom the preexisting constitutencies of that party could gather. The problem with Hillary Clinton is that she is the very incarnation of political status quo; instead of picking Bernie as her vicepresident she doubled down on keep ignoring the chronically ignored. She went as far as to antagonize them, mistaking the whole of the group for a very vocal minority of them, - the racist misogynist know-nothings.
I do not need to tell you that was a huge mistake. The way the American politics work, you win by winning most battles, not by winning the biggest battles. Even if the majority of individual votes went to her, she still lost; and she lost because she decided to abandon a number of critical camps. Or rather, because by failing to notice this new political constitutency, she lost electoral votes that historically should have been Republican. She did not notice the balance of power shifting under her feet. Again, having Bernie on her team would have helped her to put a fight in most of the battlefields that Trump winned just by being the only one to show up there.
[1] I am using the term "group" loosely here. The way I see it, it is more a coallision of different disempowered groups that had little in common beyond feeling cheated by the status quo. By example, I've heard a number of women that voted for Trump were mothers and wives of the millitary, who saw Clinton's warmongering as an existential threat to their families and voted accordingly. Trump's friendly overtures towards Putin make much more sense if you frame them as subtle signaling to that particular subgroup.
So memes, then.
There are many divisions and shorthand ways of trying to describe the divide, and none are fully satisfying, but one of them is that some people are economically threatened by rapidly accelerating technology, and some are economically empowered. Another is that some people are threatened by trade, and some profit from it. And so on. The global economy is changing rapidly, the distribution of wealth is becoming more unequal, and not everybody is thriving in that context.
Talking about it in raw dollar terms in the aggregate has value, but it's one of many data points. Class resentment is a powerful force that has underpinned nearly every major political realignment in history, I'm not sure why everyone has such a hard time seeing it.
Adding a mode, median, and interquartile ranges will help tremendously in finding where the "bulk" of Trump voters lay.
If nothing else, I'm sure you know that one big outlier can skew the entire data sheet, for instance, like Peter Thiel?
If anything I'd expect this to farm karma.
It seems to me (a few years on this site on two accounts) that your opinion is most popular and the ones who don't like it are less likely to downvote (either because they can't or because they don't want to).
I don't have access to the backend though so it is just a feeling.
Edit: hehe, someone has taken the task on them to prove me right. -1 at the moment.
I can't trade in my Internet points here in Europe and I don't plan on visiting US anytime soon so I just find it funny :-)
The massive voter base is still the minority and it's easier to blame meme magic than to re-evaluate a dysfunctional system of democracy.
Yet still enough to write this article? Or is this article Fake News™?
> but there is little question they changed its tone
Correlation doesn't equal causation. What if Trump's popularity resulted in a torrent of pro-Trump memes? In general, I find it much more likely that both the memes and Trump were caused (or at least influenced) by a third factor, e.g. the incresingly hostile culture of political correctness in mainstream media.
I'm not even sure that all these "fake news", "alt right" exist. And isn't 4chan something from the past like Myspace, is there still any active users? Or there left only 2 insane anonymouses who write all the posts?
BuzzFeed News tracked down and spoke to Macedonian teenagers who created over 100 fake news sites, who readily admit it. They were pro-trump sites because pro-trump stories made the most money, not because of any political ideology.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
>"Yes, the info in the blogs is bad, false, and misleading but the rationale is that 'if it gets the people to click on it and engage, then use it,'" said a university student in Veles who started a US politics site
Garnered intense notoriety and then used that infamy to push their real journal.
The clickbait and listicles are only to keep the lights on.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=4chan,re...
4chan seems to slowly be trending down.
The giant spikes on both reddit and 4chan were when the nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence were leaked. It's kind of hilarious to put that in perspective.
Anyway, from that we can conclude that the alt right from 4chan that has been blamed is probably unlikely at least as the main community.
4Chan spiraled into depression after countless controversies that spoiled its ethos.
The political parties never publicly state that the voters disagreed with their platform, or that their platform was focused on the wrong things, or that the voters were willing to take a gamble on something new, etc. It's always the case that the voters would have chosen their party if they had run better ads, or more ads, or ads in different places, etc.
Hopeful, empty rhetoric about jobs just might have won the election for Clinton. Instead there were gaffes and silence.
Sometimes you need a shake up.
As I said I don't have numbers and I don't know what kind of effect memes actually have, as they are largely consumed by young non-voters, but it's not secret that Obama had a very active meme-team and it makes sense for Trump to have followed the strategy.
If any effect came from 4chan /pol/ it was because the mainstream validated them and tried to categorize them as a coherent whole: The Alt-Right. Anonymous self-marginalizes. It was the Hillary campaign who drew attention to Pepe the Frog and made it part of the common discourse.
And no word (yet) in this article about Russian influence on social media and political campaigns. Even though the far-right plays a clear role in that propaganda machine.
Reading that, I thought is was an innocent meme and would pave the way for free and open expression of memes. But, after reading the full story it's sad he had to get violent about it.
If we did focus only on the internet I'd suggest "forwards from grandma" on Facebook are another contributor, usually with the content coming indirectly from the above sources. But I don't really see the evidence to give any credit to these youngsters with their new-fangled pepes.
I started twigging that Trump would win by watching video journalists who visited the heartlands of america and did vox pops with random people. Their opinions about politics seemed to have no basis in any reality I recognized. A very nice chairwoman of a Republican committee said "There was no racism before Obama" for example. This wasn't some spittle-flecked ideologue, just an average old lady happily offering her opinion on politics.