Electoral College voted Trump

[Deleted]

For all that fussing, seems like all the unfaithful electors have been protest votes against Clinton by Clinton electors. Not sure as of this post that a single faithless elector has actually followed through on voting against Trump.

Some of the Democratic ones seem to be faithless instead, since Sanders received one, several others abstained. I bet Clinton won't even make it to 200 in the end, lol.

[Total Crica]

You may, but millions upon millions were not satisfied with the status quo. And they made that apparent when they voted.

They won't be satisfied with something worse, either.

[zerocarbs]

It was a sentiment rather than a platform

What exactly was Hillary's platform? Bush 2.0?

most likely candidate to be able to work with the more moderate Republicans

yeah the Neo-cons

No thank you

[Elegiac]

You may, but millions upon millions were not satisfied with the status quo when they voted.

Which doesn't excuse their foolishness in attempting to wind the clock back, ultimately.

- - - Updated - - -

What exactly was Hillary's platform? Bush 2.0?

Mostly a continuation and elaboration of Obama's policies on the domestic level, and a harder line internationally.

yeah the Neo-cons

No thank you

Neo-cons aren't moderate. I'm talking about the Republicans that actually possess a sense of public duty.

You know, the ones who can actually breathe through their noses.

[Renathras]

Well I guess the US is well and truly fucked, then.

Probably for the best, the American experiment never really set an example of good government.

That depends on whether you think it's done an overall good job or not. Until 9-11, I'd argue it had a pretty good run. Over time, it was increasing in terms of personal rights and freedoms, as well as economic freedoms, and boasted the strongest economy and military in the world, and generally was a land of opportunity and all that.

...granted, I constantly tell people at least part of this is a historical oddity unlikely to happen every again (the US was the sole industrial power that WASN'T decimated by WWII, and so was in the best place to become an economic powerhouse afterwords).

Oh, I would like to ask, if you don't mind saying, the general area you live in? I'm just curious if you're from somewhere like California or somewhere like Alabama, or from another country, in which case I'm just thinking in terms of what you would see, culturally, as what is good or bad and whatnot.

Long term, I suspect the US will peeter out over time and MAY eventually go the way of the USSR and split into regional states. Some of them will probably be stronger than others, but considering there'd likely be a worldwide recession when it happens anyway, I guess it's not like the rest of the world would be much better. Then we'd get to see what a multi-polar world really looks like, which would be...interesting. Probably colder/less secure/more uncertain.

Not sure, what is it with Texas and revisionist textbooks that downplay the role of slavery in the Civil War?

Oh, it's not just Texas. If you haven't been able to tell by my posts, I'm rather well read. I'd tell you I have an MA in economics, BS in both physics and economics, and in the military having gone through its most educationally rigorous program...but either you'd ignore it or refuse to believe it (and why should you, I'm just a person posting on the internet, you have no reason to believe any of that).

...but then look at my writing style, tone, the volume of what I'm able to put out in a short time. A person CAN be well read, well educated, and still wrong, but I am both well read and well educated.

To liberals and Democrats and revisionist historians, secession and the Civil War are synonyms, and both were about slavery. But, if you actually know history, you'd know this is only partially true. 10-20 years before the Civil War, states were talking about secession. South Carolina, for one, considered it (and was where the first shots were fired what with Fort Sumpter and all). Nullification was a "soft secession" alternative back in the day as well, and has reared from time to time in more recent decades - hell, the idea of Sanctuary Cities today, including those defiant bastions of liberalism across the nation which have pledged to defy Trump on immigration, is a modern day form of nullification, albeit at the city, rather than state, level. And one being championed by Democrats.

If you ever actually read the declarations of secession from all of the states in the Civil War, you'd see that they list different reasons. While most list slavery and white supremacy (to "the negro"), those are generally not the entire list of complaints. Texas', for example, listed three things: Slavery, Federal Government imposing its will on the state, and lack of border control (specifically, the federal government was not supplying border security and there were roving bands of "banditos" from Mexico coming across the border and pillaging). Texas then went on to say that geographically and culturally they were more like the South states that were seceding than the Union/North states, and so it just made practical sense to secede as well (note that this was before the Emancipation Proclamation, so slavery was still technically legal in the United States).

While the specifics are different, the issues are strikingly similar. We have a federal government that most people believe don't represent them and push top-down policies from their far off, cushy offices in Washington D.C., detached from the wants and concerns of the people in flyover states. The US federal government has been extremely lax in border security, and Americans in border states have been killed in drug cartel violence (our media has not been reporting this, but Mexico is in chaos like some kind of distopic movie about drug cartel/warlords). And the slavery of the Civil War (a combination of property rights and "the mainstay of the economy") has been replaced with different property rights (guns for example) and a different economic mainstay (for Texas, the oil industry, which D.C. liberals would just as soon get rid of - like slavery, on a moral high ground premise, this time to combat climate change).

For small minded people - the Civil War was just about slavery and has no parallels to today.
For people that read history and understand that the ISSUES of the day change, but the underlying differences have largely not - the Civil War was about power struggles, federalism vs state power, national/physical security, and economic security against elites far away that did not represent the people of their states.

The issues themselves are super important to setting up the moral high ground narrative (ending slavery!) [which the Civil War did NOT do - slavery was still legal in the states that didn't secede that had legal slavery, which I think was just...Kentucky. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in "states in rebellion" and was Lincoln's attempt to woo them back to the Union - indeed, if slavery was the only reason for the war, all the slave states would have IMMEDIATELY REJOINED the Union after President Lincoln's proclamation because he said they could keep their slaves if they did so!]

...but the issues were and are really surface dressing, a thin veneer over the underlying issue.

Which, in the US, has ALWAYS BEEN a combination of rural vs urban and/or "common person" vs elite. (I put common person in quotes because many of those "common persons" were actually rather well off if they were in their state legislatures or governors.)

I'm aware that Texas is running high on its fuel revenue for the time being, which furnishes the luxury of being low tax, low service. The red states that have fewer social programs are -more- reliant on the federal government to pick up the slack, which again means pulling from the general tax pool which tends to be furnished by the wealthier blue states.

1) Again, Texas is hardly the only one, and you could argue the same thing about California leveraging its position as a tech center. If you weren't aware, a lot of tech companies have started relocating to Texas because of its more favorable business environment and the Texas triangle. Though Texas is the biggest example of this, it's hardly the ONLY example of California slowly losing its edge.

2) The federal government isn't "taking up the slack" in most cases. It's sending their schools the same (relative) amount of money, giving them access to the same Obamacare subsidies, etc. You could argue they have more poor people to get on welfare and the like, but the welfare standards aren't higher or paying out more to the recipients. The cost of living tends to be far lower in red states, meaning people are able to get by with less assistance. So yeah, you seem to be rather weak in your "awareness".

Oddly enough, yes. There are some disturbing parallels between the Trump movement and the attitudes of many such movements such as the Bolsheviks or the Maoists - a disdain for the establishment, a disdain for intellectuals, for elites, for cosmopolitanism, established political conventions and even established political language.

It's a fair thing to say that we might be living in the latter days of liberal democracy.

Probably not. Trump is no Hitler, nor even a Mussolini. The US is not going to suddenly go all totalitarian - we already kind of did go police state after 9-11 (though we're not as much as places in Europe - the UK just passed a rather anti-Human rights/anti-privacy police state law on its population...)

It is true that the incessant march leftward of the US may he coming to a stop, or, at least, temporarily slowing down, but that's not the end of liberal democracy, no need to go all hyperbolic. The US may be on the decline or it may just be changing. The world is slowly becoming more multipolar. The world's always been complex, but the West is finally realizing there are no easy answers anymore, and it can't just use economic, political, and military power to unilaterally get its collective way.

This is probably not the "end" of liberal democracy, and is certainly not the end of democracy (mob rule is generally enhanced by demagogues and populists), nor of republican democracy.

But I agree that we may be in a time for some changes. The world ten years from now might be very different than the one of today...but then it could be just the same. It's really hard to tell.

But I fully expect that 50 years from now, the United States will not exist as it does today. I'm not sure in what way it will change (there are a lot of possibilities, from a North American Union to a USSR-like dissolution), but it's probably not going to be like today.

[Felya]

You may, but millions upon millions were not satisfied with the status quo. And they made that apparent when they voted.

What part exactly? US being the only super power left in the world? The fact that we dictated influence? The fact that we have some of the highest living standards in the world? What exactly is wrong with America, that diving from corporatism to Plutacracy, will solve? Trump is not stopping the establishment, it's progressing it so the Trump organization and Exxon can directly apply their influence. That's not going against the grain, it's buttering your self and send your self faster to the end.

- - - Updated - - -

What exactly was Hillary's platform? Bush 2.0?

It's still up and you can go read it. Trump's platform is far more a kin to Bush, while Hillary's is to Gore. With very similar results... maybe time to look in the mirror...

yeah the Neo-cons

Yeah, the last 10 years of neocons tact to bring down Hillary, sure does make her a neocon. Might want to check that...

[nextormento]

where society is becoming increasingly urbanised and reliant on globalised infrastructure

Don't pretend that this is a natural development. It's not that we design policies to sustain urbanization, but the other way around: the policies we set in place make it so urbanization is desirable.
We not only can have a sustainable rural outdoor, but we actually must.
Cities are failing, massively, around the globe to absorb migration. With ever increasing commuting times, displacement of low and medium income households, pollution-related health problems, etc.
Problems that we, of course, address and curb down. From transit oriented development, to equity of distribution or mixed use. Along with the many other policies we need to tackle on the issue of climate change.
Cities can do a whole lot. But they too have limits. And we're rapidly experiencing them: we're failing to translate economic growth to better quality standards of living.

Placing urbanization as the one-size-fits-all solution is as close as it gets to Adam Smith tier rhetoric: cities can do a whole lot, but the issues rural folks face won't be solved through the invisible hand of urbanization.
Expecting them all to migrate only makes cities a worse place to live.

For all of the stupidity and buzz words we see thrown around urban policy, there's a tenet that always rings true: density. And density is not something that just so happens: we need to constrain surface growth through policy, and make it more desirable for the construction market to build vertically. How one goes about that constrain varies from place to place. Rural areas are often a key asset on that area. From structuring them in green belts and buffer zones that physically constrain the city, to actually making some clusters more dense and equipped thus allowing cities to grow more slowly and pack.

It's unavoidable that some smalls towns will succumb and perish. And manufacturing is but a pipe dream at this stage. But we should not celebrate or shrug off losing any of those areas, for they represent one of the few pieces that will save cities from dying of success.

On the social angle, I'll also note that othering the rural minorities is not only abhorrent and depraved, but a major failure of judgement.

[Nihilanth]

Hillary just lost 4 of the 12 votes in Washington state.

[Deleted]

Hillary just lost 4 of the 12 votes in Washington state.

That was already known to happen.

[Deathcries]

Well this is interesting.





Really puts a perspective that a small part of the country with a lot of people centrally located almost made decisions for the entire country. Scary as shit indeed.

[Deleted]

Well this is interesting.





Really puts a perspective that a small part of the country with a lot of people centrally located almost made decisions for the entire country. Scary as shit indeed.

LOL, those maps!

[Total Crica]

Well this is interesting.





Really puts a perspective that a small part of the country with a lot of people centrally located almost made decisions for the entire country. Scary as shit indeed.

I'm not following the logic of why I should be scared by that?

[Elegiac]

That depends on whether you think it's done an overall good job or not. Until 9-11, I'd argue it had a pretty good run. Over time, it was increasing in terms of personal rights and freedoms, as well as economic freedoms, and boasted the strongest economy and military in the world, and generally was a land of opportunity and all that.

...granted, I constantly tell people at least part of this is a historical oddity unlikely to happen every again (the US was the sole industrial power that WASN'T decimated by WWII, and so was in the best place to become an economic powerhouse afterwords).

Oh, I would like to ask, if you don't mind saying, the general area you live in? I'm just curious if you're from somewhere like California or somewhere like Alabama, or from another country, in which case I'm just thinking in terms of what you would see, culturally, as what is good or bad and whatnot.

Long term, I suspect the US will peeter out over time and MAY eventually go the way of the USSR and split into regional states. Some of them will probably be stronger than others, but considering there'd likely be a worldwide recession when it happens anyway, I guess it's not like the rest of the world would be much better. Then we'd get to see what a multi-polar world really looks like, which would be...interesting. Probably colder/less secure/more uncertain.

Contrary to what idle remarks I make about Calexit, ultimately I view this as something to be avoided. Humans tend to be better off in larger groupings where there is a larger pool of labor and resources to direct towards public benefit. The Interstate System is one such example, something which has cultivated massive public benefit through ease of transportation. As aggrieved as I am at the massive disparity between the rich states and the poor ones, this is less an admission that these states are always going to remain backwards and shitty and more a desire for the use of the republic's vast resources for the cultivation and development of these areas. A focus on the republic, public service, and technocracy is ultimately what is necessary to ensure that the West remains viable in the long term compared to emergent states - namely China.

I live in Washington, but I was born overseas - Australia, lived in a few countries around South East Asia since then.

Oh, it's not just Texas. If you haven't been able to tell by my posts, I'm rather well read. I'd tell you I have an MA in economics, BS in both physics and economics, and in the military having gone through its most educationally rigorous program...but either you'd ignore it or refuse to believe it (and why should you, I'm just a person posting on the internet, you have no reason to believe any of that).

...but then look at my writing style, tone, the volume of what I'm able to put out in a short time. A person CAN be well read, well educated, and still wrong, but I am both well read and well educated.

To liberals and Democrats and revisionist historians, secession and the Civil War are synonyms, and both were about slavery. But, if you actually know history, you'd know this is only partially true. 10-20 years before the Civil War, states were talking about secession. South Carolina, for one, considered it (and was where the first shots were fired what with Fort Sumpter and all). Nullification was a "soft secession" alternative back in the day as well, and has reared from time to time in more recent decades - hell, the idea of Sanctuary Cities today, including those defiant bastions of liberalism across the nation which have pledged to defy Trump on immigration, is a modern day form of nullification, albeit at the city, rather than state, level. And one being championed by Democrats.

If you ever actually read the declarations of secession from all of the states in the Civil War, you'd see that they list different reasons. While most list slavery and white supremacy (to "the negro"), those are generally not the entire list of complaints. Texas', for example, listed three things: Slavery, Federal Government imposing its will on the state, and lack of border control (specifically, the federal government was not supplying border security and there were roving bands of "banditos" from Mexico coming across the border and pillaging). Texas then went on to say that geographically and culturally they were more like the South states that were seceding than the Union/North states, and so it just made practical sense to secede as well (note that this was before the Emancipation Proclamation, so slavery was still technically legal in the United States).

While the specifics are different, the issues are strikingly similar. We have a federal government that most people believe don't represent them and push top-down policies from their far off, cushy offices in Washington D.C., detached from the wants and concerns of the people in flyover states. The US federal government has been extremely lax in border security, and Americans in border states have been killed in drug cartel violence (our media has not been reporting this, but Mexico is in chaos like some kind of distopic movie about drug cartel/warlords). And the slavery of the Civil War (a combination of property rights and "the mainstay of the economy") has been replaced with different property rights (guns for example) and a different economic mainstay (for Texas, the oil industry, which D.C. liberals would just as soon get rid of - like slavery, on a moral high ground premise, this time to combat climate change).

For small minded people - the Civil War was just about slavery and has no parallels to today.
For people that read history and understand that the ISSUES of the day change, but the underlying differences have largely not - the Civil War was about power struggles, federalism vs state power, national/physical security, and economic security against elites far away that did not represent the people of their states.

The issues themselves are super important to setting up the moral high ground narrative (ending slavery!) [which the Civil War did NOT do - slavery was still legal in the states that didn't secede that had legal slavery, which I think was just...Kentucky. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in "states in rebellion" and was Lincoln's attempt to woo them back to the Union - indeed, if slavery was the only reason for the war, all the slave states would have IMMEDIATELY REJOINED the Union after President Lincoln's proclamation because he said they could keep their slaves if they did so!

...but the issues were and are really surface dressing, a thin veneer over the underlying issue.

Which, in the US, has ALWAYS BEEN a combination of rural vs urban and/or "common person" vs elite. (I put common person in quotes because many of those "common persons" were actually rather well off if they were in their state legislatures or governors.)

Forgetting of course that the roots of the rural/urban divide between states specifically was a result of capital investment going towards agrarian (i.e. slave-driven) enterprises in the south versus industrial ones and the subsequent urbanisation that was seen in the North.

The issue I have with comparing the antebellum United States to the present one is the fact that the flashpoint and root of the problem in this case is globalisation. It would be far more apt to say this is a conflict between Hamiltonian Republicanism and Jeffersonian Democracy, which -is- an ingrained source of political conflict.

1) Again, Texas is hardly the only one, and you could argue the same thing about California leveraging its position as a tech center. If you weren't aware, a lot of tech companies have started relocating to Texas because of its more favorable business environment and the Texas triangle. Though Texas is the biggest example of this, it's hardly the ONLY example of California slowly losing its edge.

I'm aware that Texas is getting increasingly urbanised and thus blue, yes. But to call California 'failing' is disingenuous.

2) The federal government isn't "taking up the slack" in most cases. It's sending their schools the same (relative) amount of money, giving them access to the same Obamacare subsidies, etc. You could argue they have more poor people to get on welfare and the like, but the welfare standards aren't higher or paying out more to the recipients. The cost of living tends to be far lower in red states, meaning people are able to get by with less assistance. So yeah, you seem to be rather weak in your "awareness".

Not what I meant - I meant that people in the red states are far more reliant on federal assistance versus state level assistance. Moreover, the cost of living being low is symptomatic of their lack of development and thus lack of general contribution.

But hey, part of being a unified state means propping up some parts.

Probably not. Trump is no Hitler, nor even a Mussolini. The US is not going to suddenly go all totalitarian - we already kind of did go police state after 9-11 (though we're not as much as places in Europe - the UK just passed a rather anti-Human rights/anti-privacy police state law on its population...)

The US is not going to suddenly go totalitarian, no, but this merely means that the political expression of regressive, nationalist government will vary. The root philosophy behind it is pretty invariably from what we've seen in previous instances of it.

It is true that the incessant march leftward of the US may he coming to a stop, or, at least, temporarily slowing down, but that's not the end of liberal democracy, no need to go all hyperbolic. The US may be on the decline or it may just be changing. The world is slowly becoming more multipolar. The world's always been complex, but the West is finally realizing there are no easy answers anymore, and it can't just use economic, political, and military power to unilaterally get its collective way.

This is probably not the "end" of liberal democracy, and is certainly not the end of democracy (mob rule is generally enhanced by demagogues and populists), nor of republican democracy.

But I agree that we may be in a time for some changes. The world ten years from now might be very different than the one of today...but then it could be just the same. It's really hard to tell.

But I fully expect that 50 years from now, the United States will not exist as it does today. I'm not sure in what way it will change (there are a lot of possibilities, from a North American Union to a USSR-like dissolution), but it's probably not going to be like today.

I say this could be our Late Republican Period not because the populist government is going to actively undermine liberal democracy (although that is within the realm of possibility). I say this because populist governments have a tendency of aggravating the drawbacks of democratic government in the sense of its inability to cope with crises that happen over a series of electoral periods. Popular governments do not have the inertia necessary to deal with issues like, say, climate change, or trends like globalisation. The election of a populist, inexperienced, and ultimately incompetent government is likely to drive the nail further into the idea that liberal democracy is conducive to public welfare.

There's a reason a lot of developing nations are looking to China rather than the US for the model of good government, and there's a very real risk that western liberal democracy will end up the poor partner of eastern authoritarian capitalism.

[Deathcries]

I'm not following the logic of why I should be scared by that?

Because Clinton's little island of the mentally insane almost won the election.

[Total Crica]

Because Clinton's little island of the mentally insane almost won the election.

Because the sea of people who take orders from an "invisible being in the sky" being in control is not more frightening?

[Deathcries]

On an interesting note, Clinton has another historical account as losing the most electors than any other presidential candidate before her. Vote your conscious! lol

[Paranoid Android]

Trump elected President. Possibly two terrorist attacks around the world already. Weak leader!

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Because Clinton's little island of the mentally insane almost won the election.

For what it's worth, I have social anxiety disorder and (controlled) generalized anxiety disorder and I supported Trump. Mental illness doesn't have anything to do with this.

And so far, it seems Trump's going in without a hitch. There's rumors floating around that somehow some democrats decided not to vote for Hillary, I think some decided to vote for Sanders?

[Calfredd]

Because Clinton's little island of the mentally insane almost won the election.

Whereas Trump will be too busy on Twitter yelling at people because they said his hands were small.

[Xandrigity]

Thank goodness it is over!!! I hope we can all move past this and go get some ice cream togeather, I'm buying.