doubleplusunlucky:

scify65:

psshaw:

diarrheaworldstarhiphop:

the racists were always there. no one was swayed by racist rhetoric or became more racist (or if they did, it’s hard to gauge. id have to wait for future studies to know for sure) so much as they ended up becoming strange bed fellows. They are proud that the conditions were perfect to push alot of people to the right either out of frustration or desperation.

heres 2012

here’s 2016

I was prepared for a hillary victory, honestly, and apparently EVERYONE ELSE besides the most diehard trump supporters.

When i saw the results from the rust belt start pouring in, i knew immediately Trump would win. it was the same pattern of upset victory I saw in Britain during brexit.

In britain, BREXIT had an upset victory from labour voting working class people in the north, who, like the rust belt, were fucked by conservatives in the 80s and ignored and left to rot until the current day by the right and a left that gave them empty gestures of solidarity, which is why they voted in their respective elections as a referendum against the elite.

And the fact that, rather dramatically, much of union households in Ohio were switching to Trump, which are traditionally guaranteed democrat votes (these are households that previously handed obama two victories, so the racism argument falls flat) considering the hostility the republican establishment holds for unions.

Ah ha, but a difference, Trump isn’t from the establishment (the political establishment, i mean, he is still a millionaire socialite media mogule) or at least he isnt perceived to be by the white working class. Espeically in the rust belt, the former heart ofmanufacturing and industry for the american empire, that drove the formation of the American middle class, where those same families and whole cities TODAY struggle day to day with the effects of globalization and trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP.

Hillary embodied the very class of politician that delivered them ruin or threatens to do so as she supports the TPP. Trump is decidedly anti-TPP, and what’s more, he enraptured the rust belt with a platform that protects american industry. So these typically inclusive, well meaning people are voting trump, not because they hate minorities, necessarily, but to revolt against a political status quo that has forgotten them and just continues to screw them. The TPP is a big deal on this.

Michael Moore states it best:

It was the traditional and reliably consistent democrat union voters and working class in the rust belt that pushed the rest of the vote into a trump victory.

Often the plight of the working class is forgotten by people in the blue states. when they jeer at the non-college degree holding white vote, they are jeering at the 77k earning family struggling to make ends meet with a blue collar job while a trade deal that would benefit the liberals on thecoast threatens to tear apart towns in the midwest. its just dressed up, functioning classism.

They have voted trump because the leadership and the followers of the mainstream left decided to take a fat shit on the working class backbone of their party support.

This is what Trump’s victory means. It’s nothing personal against you. To make things less shitty, it probably pays to pay attention to their issues rather than pretend it away as “racist hick white tears” or whatever.

I was really puzzled tonight by how many people on my dash see this election as a primarily LGBT+ issue, and this fills in a lot of the gaps in my thinking. It’s important to call out discrimination, but I think we need to start demanding more economic awareness from our left-leaning leaders. Too many voters just can’t be made to give a shit about social issues, or they consider them a side issue to putting food on the table.

There’s a lot of “fascists did this just because they’re fascists” going on right now, but so much of this election was really about a class divide, and putting the blame on the usual privileged suspects isn’t gonna stick when it comes to explaining Trump.

This lines up pretty well with a lot of the analysis I’ve been hearing for the last month or so.

I think the plight of the blue collar worker was
instrumental in delivering Trump his victory, but I don’t think it’s the whole
story. Identity politics aren’t particularly effective when the economy is in
good shape, but they provide disaffected, under-served populations with
convenient scapegoats when things aren’t working in their favor. In aggregate
the economy is in better shape than it was a few years ago, but the gains we’ve
made collectively haven’t translated to an economic rebound for the rust belt,
primarily because those factory jobs that were lost? They’re never coming back.
If manufacturing ever makes a rebound in this country, it will require fewer, higher-skill
workers, and that leaves the majority of people struggling to make things meet
in the lurch. Education is expensive and inaccessible, and the middle-aged
bread-winners struggling to make ends meet aren’t getting any more of it.  

Which is part of the problem here. People aren’t stupid,
they’re under-informed and desperate. Trump isn’t the first person to offer
economic change, but what he offered was a collection of nebulous goals hidden
under a mound of superlatives, disguised as fiscal policy. And the benefit of
offering such an undefined plan is that people can project whatever they want
into it; it’s the economic equivalent of a self-insert fantasy. Want
manufacturing jobs? You got it! Upward mobility? The resurrection of the
American Dream? They’re yours! Republicans have always relied on the votes of
lower-middle class and working class populations to carry them into office, but
have slammed the door shut on anyone not cutting them a check once in office.
Trump spoke directly to a furious, under-served segment of the
population, and offered them validation, a future, and somebody to blame.

That last bit is really essential here. The economy is
complex, and while the left can harp about economic recovery all they like, that
message doesn’t translate to people living paycheck-to-paycheck. The government
fucked them, cut them a raw deal. Maybe not in the ways they might imagine, but
it’s not much of a leap to place that blame on particular institutions (sometimes
deserving), politicians, segments of the population that can be framed as
competitors, as existential threats. Traditional republicans have always blamed
the democrats, but that’s abstract. Democrats aren’t taking your jobs, aren’t
preventing you from going to college, aren’t calling you ignorant relics of the
50’s and 60’s (although that last bit is sometimes heavily implied).  The racism and sexism of the Trump campaign was
so effective because his campaign framed the economy as a zero-sum game with clear
winners and losers, and he explicitly identified the stakeholders. Minorities
(who are taking your jobs), women (uppity, also taking your jobs), academic
elites (who threaten your culture), and foreigners (usurpers, who would not be flooding
the job market if we walled them out).

Trump framed these groups as a threat to his voting bloc’s
economic survival, to their culture, and to their status in a population that
is becoming increasingly diverse and well educated. Their loss was framed as a
win for his supporters, as if by vanquishing these groups they might reclaim a
few more crumbs of a vanishing slice of pie. So sure, yes, this was an election
won on economics, but the winning strategy hinged on first framing large
segments of the population as ‘others’ and then framing them as threats. The symbolic
subjugation of women and minorities is relevant here, because there’s no way
Trump would have mustered the support he did without specifically identifying
them as causes of economic misery and cultural decline.

And just imagine what he could do with a few well-placed
executive orders. Or rather, what Pence could do with a few well-placed orders,
once the president retires to Mar Lago to make America great again.