Still here. Nate Silver&#x27;s models were some of the most generous towards Trump&#x27;s chances of winning out there.

Honestly, I&#x27;m still a fan. He, unlike most other models, gave Trump a healthy shot and cautioned repeatedly that a large polling miss was possible this year. That&#x27;s pretty much what happened.

To be fair, he was consistently significantly less favorable towards Clinton than any of the other high profile models. He even took quite a bit of flak for this in the weekend leading up to the election, but he stood his ground. While he was ultimately wrong, he was closer than mostly anyone else running a serious model.

He really did not have a handle on this election cycle at all.

Lol. A 1 in 4 chance of something is not lottery odds.Still a fan, sorry.

I would hope people on this board would understand statistics. Silver gave Trump about a 1&#x2F;3 chance of winning, and he said the outcomes could run from a Clinton blowout to a narrow Trump victory, which is what happened.If people were interpreting his &quot;33%&quot; as &quot;0%&quot;, despite all his warnings and explanations about what was possible, that&#x27;s their problem, not Silver&#x27;s.

He put Trump&#x27;s chances at near 30% leading up to the election. How can you ask for better than that? I don&#x27;t think you can argue that an upset like this would be expected to happen more than thirty percent of the time.Nate Silver&#x27;s calls for caution are looking like some of the most reasonable pre-election commentary at this point.

I&#x27;m here.I think he came out of this with his reputation enhanced: he gave Trump a 28% chance of winning the morning of the election which was vastly more than any other model.I think about polling and forecasting a lot, and I&#x27;ve concluded that the presentation of forecasts is a big problem. People often seem to conflate &quot;30% chance&quot; with &quot;30% of the vote&quot; which is clearly wrong - or something like this anyway.Silver went though the last month going &quot;25% is a big chance!!&quot; and no one really listened. I&#x27;m not sure what a better way to express it is though.

You know, sometimes, a 30% chance actually happens. That is not a small number.With that in mind, I do think this is going to necessitate another look at how much we trust and do polling.

Just to be fair, Nate Silver predicted both this and the Cubs back on May 10th in a joke:&quot;Reminder: Cubs will win the World Series and, in exchange, President Trump will be elected 8 days later.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natesilver538&#x2F;status&#x2F;730251094614528000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natesilver538&#x2F;status&#x2F;730251094614528000</a>

Where are the Nate Silver fans right now?

Who would have thought that people are reluctant to express controversial opinions in a live phone interview?

A lot of polls predicted this outcome.  They were just not taken seriously or given visibility in the media.

The thing is, the actions of those pundits worked in Trump&#x27;s favour. Clinton was seen as a political insider, any one-sided story could be seen by Trump supporters as the establishment trying to protect one of their own. I lost count of the number of YouTube videos with one-sided Trump bashing leaving people in the comments saying it made them more likely to vote for Trump.

Every pollster&#x2F;pundit quit your job now.Edit: I know, not EVERY one of them.

It depends what Thiel&#x27;s objectives are. If they are purely self serving, he might do very well out of this.

Believe it or not, there is a fairly solid scientific basis for that.

If he&#x27;s anything like that Countess that bathed in the blood of virgins to extend her life he&#x27;s picked the right industry to work in.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Elizabeth_Báthory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Elizabeth_Báthory</a>

The man who thinks that young blood (literally) is going to keep him alive? That Peter Thiel?Yes he does.

We don&#x27;t have to respect successTaken out of context, this might have been said by one of Atlas Shrugged&#x27; antagonists.

Or more foolish? We don&#x27;t have to respect success

No it isn&#x27;t.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themoneyillusion.com&#x2F;?p=32058" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themoneyillusion.com&#x2F;?p=32058</a>

I don&#x27;t know why anyone would think he is foolish. Listening to his speech at the National Press Club a few days ago it&#x27;s hard to find many things to disagree with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4</a>

They must have a very good data team to have forecasted the result so much in advance ;)

Guess Palantir can look forward to a few new juicy government contracts

Only if you value absolute, raw opportunism with little consideration of the potential consequences or externalities.

He never did. Those shouting to boycott him sure as hell did though.

Peter Thiel is not looking so foolish right now...

Unless you&#x27;re gay, a woman, or part of a minority. Then your situation is that the leader of the free world is at best openly dismissive of you, and at worst actively encourages hate towards you.

Nothing in the Bay Area perhaps. That&#x27;s not the same as the country or the world.

Only if you believe that the Supreme Court has no impact on your life, which would be... an interesting position to take really.

If it&#x27;s part of a broad-based stock market decline, not much. The risk of plummeting equity grants to Bay Area tech companies is that your employees will go to the company next door whose equity is going up like a rocket. If everybody&#x27;s miserable and poor, then they just go on inventing stuff and coming out with new software.Honestly, I think the Valley is much more fun to be in during busts than booms. All the folks who just want to get rich quick leave, and you&#x27;re left with the people who actually make things.

What happens when the value of equity grants plummets?

What about for poor people?(I&#x27;m not American, don&#x27;t live there, so I genuinely don&#x27;t know what effect the federal government might have on each state.)

It was nothing but vineyards and hippies before and it might return to that state in the not too distant future.

Bay Area as it currently is is around 40 years oldYes, some things may change

So far, those are only fluctuations affected mostly by speculation. We have to wait a few months to see the real effects.

The Bay Area&#x27;s economy is heavily affected by the US economy. Based on data so far, Trump&#x27;s election is having an effect on the US economy.

Been living in the Bay Area for 17 years. Nothing will change.

I suppose we&#x27;ll all see what he &quot;really&quot; meant by everything he has ever said during his campaign. Wall with Mexico? NATO? Putting Hillary in jail? Killing the families of ISIS members?It makes sense to put the likelihood of any of that happening at a solid zero but it&#x27;s hard to trust intuition at this point.

Sad day for the planet Earth if he abides at his promises about EPA, NOAA, Paris Agreement, etc

Particularly not compared to Hillary Clinton.

Not exactly.  He needed those states assuming he didn&#x27;t win WI, MI, PA, OH.  Which he did.  Trump blew it out the water.

Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. are traditionally Democratic states, but it&#x27;s a region Trump spent a lot of time targeting with anti-globalist messages around the decline of domestic industry.The predicted safe margin in the other direction, the narrow win, the demographic stats, the issues on the table ... it&#x27;s all highly reminiscent of how I experienced Brexit.

Michigan and Wisconsin were thought to lean Clinton and went Trump.Ohio and Pennsylvania were considered tossups.

Florida and North Carolina were considered competitive or &quot;tossup&quot; states, while several of the upper Midwestern states were considered fairly safe Democrat territories, probably because they were historically dominated by unionized manufacturing workers.  That latter assumption has proved to be very unsafe, and it&#x27;s become apparent that many of those formerly-reliable Democrat voters have switched sides, at least for this election.

Upper Midwest? Wasn&#x27;t it just a question of Florida and North Carolina?

Yes.You cannot ignore entire demographics - working class, uneducated etc - and not expect consequences. The Westminster bubble acted as if only London and the SE existed. Clinton and to be fair, most of the political establishment, have been in favour of free trade and NAFTA and ignored the consequences.

Feels like Brexit indeed. Except it won&#x27;t help anything with their jobs...

Yes he will kill the COP21 agreement. And what happens when he scuttles the Iranian nuclear deal?

At least a deep recession means lower CO2 output...

Well, we have Strache, Le Pen, Farage, Wilders, Orban, Petry,... And we sure aren&#x27;t as economically depressed as rural USA. Worse - we have unstable times ahead and people will vote for these populists even more. And even worse - a climate change denier as POTUS exactly at the worst possible time.

Wow, he was spot on, especially about the rust belt... And Trump ended up getting Florida, too.

That&#x27;s fairly close to #1 on Michael Moore&#x27;s 5 points from July (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelmoore.com&#x2F;trumpwillwin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelmoore.com&#x2F;trumpwillwin&#x2F;</a>)

&gt; (possibly) not getting involved in so many scandals beforehandI don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s any &quot;possibly&quot; involved here.While I&#x27;m no fan of Sanders, I honestly feel like he could have swept the floor with Trump solely based on the fact that he has an impeccable background and seems like a genuinely nice guy. Instead, the DNC shut out Sanders and used dirty tactics to ensure that Clinton got the nomination. That galvanized a non-negligble number of the young people in my social circle against her.

She could have won it if her platform offered hope and excitement for the future of a regular person.She offered free college education... that doesn&#x27;t work very well if you quit high school to work in a factory or if you are like me and horrible at math (I can do everything else but that).Job retraining doesn&#x27;t work very well because many people train for the same thing. One great NPR story had a person who retrained in HVAC but he said that around 100 other people in the plant trained for the same thing unless if people move they need some sort of manual labor job.People who worked in a factory are unlikely to start building websites, apps, manage databases, go into business management etc... they need another factory job or a basic income.

For the sake of you, me, and all other women out in the world, please don&#x27;t let Clinton being a woman let the first thing that comes to mind. Your reasoning after that is much more sound and argued. But reinforcing the separation of sexes can only help men. Look at Western Europe: our gender is not even considered, so please don&#x27;t let people consider it. It can only turn negative.
Keep strong, friend.

TBH I don&#x27;t think there was anything Clinton could&#x27;ve done to alter this election result, other than not being female and (possibly) not getting involved in so many scandals beforehand.  This was a widespread popular-vote miss: Clinton lost across a large number of states (PA, WI, MI, FL, NC) that she had polled ahead in, and even in ones she carried (like NH, ME, or MN) the margin of victory was much less than expected.  It seems like a large number of Americans just don&#x27;t like the vision of America that Hillary Clinton represents.

That catchphrase originated from a campaign that took place during an actual economic recession. The current overall state of the economy was not a decisive factor in this election, though perceptions or fears about it might have been.

Just wait until the economy actually gets bad. Given how the markets are reacting, that&#x27;ll be sooner than anyone expected.

It&#x27;s the economy, stupid.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;It%27s_the_economy,_stupid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;It%27s_the_economy,_stupid</a>

Florida and Pennsylvania are not generally considered the mid-west. If she carries Minnesota as projected, they would have been enough.

Clinton losing in the midwest is what the polls missed. The analysis of why and how, that&#x27;s probably going to be hot topic for a while.

In 2012 Mitt Romney lost Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Trump now won, some solidly, some barely.With no major demographic shift there, seems also fair to assume a good portion of the voting-age population in those states saw no noticeable improvement in the past 4 years.

&gt; they don&#x27;t care that he is racist and sexist,They don&#x27;t care that he got called racist and sexist.They know it&#x27;s a club regularly used to bludgeon opponents.

Brexit wasn&#x27;t called by &quot;economically depressed old Middle England&quot;. Everywhere outside of Scotland and the cities voted for it.

Simply put, rural or blue collar Americans only have one place in America where they are represented on the national level: the ballot box.All of the shocked media people live in a bubble and have no idea what it&#x27;s like to live in a working class community.

So as a European ... Clinton didn&#x27;t spend enough time in the Upper Midwest expecting to carry those states, but Trump had an actual message for them (NAFTA, etc.) while Hillary didn&#x27;t, and they don&#x27;t care that he is racist and sexist, they want their jobs back, so the election was called by a 40+ white demo in an economically depressed region just like old Middle England called Brexit. About right?

goodbye baltic states. you had a good run. im sure putin will enjoy his empire.

That&#x27;s exactly why I&#x27;m glad that Donald Trump will soon be our president. He will ensure we serve the American people before tending to the desires of other nations.

I don&#x27;t care much for america. after all they are consenting adults who voted for the best candidate they had. I am more concerned about the consequences for the rest of the world.

So many blame or give credit to Trump for winning the election.I think the real fault lies with DNC. Why were they so hell bent on having Clinton picked when Sanders excited so many young Democrats and did better in earlier polls?

The brilliance of our republic is that the government transitions without violence -- where the loser concedes to the victor without fighting a literal war of succession. Don&#x27;t let the personalities on the ballot this time around confuse you into thinking that they are the embodiment of our republic.In four years, we&#x27;ll gather and vote again, and transition peacefully again.

Go USA. I&#x27;ve got to admit it, your insane failure of democracy literally Trumps ours.

Affordable care act will likely be repealed. That will affect a good deal of us.EPA may lose funding. The world will begin feeling that in about a decade.Department of education will likely lose funding. The US will lose the STEM race to India and China. We&#x27;ll feel that in about 20 years.

My main worry is that he&#x27;ll start a disastrous war in a fit of pique. He already said he&#x27;d start a war with Iran if they made rude gestures at our sailors. If that&#x27;s what he says when he&#x27;s trying to win votes, what will he do once he&#x27;s secure in office?Clinton is more interventionist than I&#x27;d like, but at least her proposed interventions have some sort of thought and reasoning behind them, even if I may not agree with them.

Honestly, I doubt you&#x27;ll have very much to worry about. Sure a few minor but very visible things may change, but overall nothing major is going to change in four years.Much of what Trump want to do isn&#x27;t something that the US can actually afford to implement. The worst thing Trump could do is the take the US in an isolationist direction, but that&#x27;s not going to happen because it would hurt the wealthy people... like Trump.One extremely positive thing that could come of all this is that the rest of the world starts taking more responsibility, and intervene earlier in conflicts, now that the support of the US military isn&#x27;t guaranteed.

I, like many, did not see this coming and I am truly afraid for the future of the USA. We sure showed up Brexit, though.

Fair enough, bit he ran under the Rep ticket...

&gt; his partyThat&#x27;s a fairly broad statement <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Republicans_opposing_Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,_2016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Republicans_opposing...</a>

House and Senate and the Supreme Court...

Ah well, and his party has house and Senate too. I&#x27;ve been looking through his policies and I&#x27;m amazed at how he won.I&#x27;m gonna be angry about this for an hour before I give find something else to do.

I bet a lot of families will have an &quot;interesting&quot; Thanksgiving dinner.

He did it his way can&#x27;t fault the man on that!

There have to be a lot of things going bad for a major war to happen. War is probably to start out in Turkey, trying to get back a chunk of the middle east back. Russia is always ready to oppose the status quo and get back influence in Eastern Europe. They do not stand a chance against the US.Even if China sees this as an opportunity to jump to (that&#x27;s a VERY big if), the US can easily handle all three of them. The problem is going to be whether or not the US can count on its allies in Asia. Not because it needs the military support, they don&#x27;t, but because you cannot be alone vs. the world. The population will simply not support you.As it is stands now, the US can count on its allies in Asia. No matter how much they dislike the US, they fear and hate China much, much more thanks to thousands of years of history.The status quo might change but not violently, perhaps giving influence ground in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Also losing ground in future trade&#x2F;economy deals which will have a real impact on US population if it were to happen.

You lost me with that link, it&#x27;s a total non-sequitor, unless you want to explain what you meant by it.

Ah yes, the return of the Russian boogeyman.Agreements like NATO do not promote peace. It&#x27;s easy to be too aggressive when you have big friends who you can drag into your fights.As crappy as trump is IMO there is a little more hope for peace. Hillary is such a hawk conflict was all but guaranteed under her administration

&quot;Fun&quot; in the &quot;emboldens Russian aggression safe in the knowledge the US won&#x27;t back up NATO&quot; sense? I think this is a complete disaster for world peace. I genuinely wouldn&#x27;t be surprised to see Europe involved in a major war with Russia in the next 2 years. If that happens China will seize the moment too.Also having someone who thinks climate change is a lie in the White House will affect everyone. He should ask the inhabitants of Delhi whether they think climate change is a lie [1].[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;india-delhi-smog.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;india-delhi-smo...</a>

I&#x27;m guessing you don&#x27;t have children...

It&#x27;s only &quot;fun&quot; if you have the privilege to not be affected by any of it.

Brexit, then this. Life on Earth is becoming unpredictable again. A bit scary, but fun. It was way too boring.

The full results are not in, true. But enough are in to know that Trump has won.

Even Hillary privately called Trump and conceded. Not sure what you&#x27;re waiting on at this point.

The paper doesn&#x27;t confirm either, the post title is not true (yet).

It&#x27;s been basically a done deal for about two hours now. AP, CNN, NBC, etc. have all called different states at different times, but there&#x27;s really no doubt about where the rest of this is going to fall.

not blaming bezos.  and the spelling mistake was unintentional.  just trying to keep an open mind and an awareness of media bias.

The race isn&#x27;t even close.  Trump won.  Don&#x27;t blame Jeff Bezos for this.

bear in mind this paper is now owned by jeff bezos, and the actual results are still not in yetedit: bozos -&gt; bezos

40% of Alabama was opposed to interracial marriage:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ballotpedia.org&#x2F;Alabama_Interracial_Marriage,_Amendment_2_(2000)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ballotpedia.org&#x2F;Alabama_Interracial_Marriage,_Amendm...</a>Should that be outlawed too?

The problem is that in your example there are 70 % who are pro gay marriage and you cannot ignore their voice either.

What is being &quot;shove[d] down their throats&quot; because my sister fell in love with a woman and wants to make a family with that person?Stopping her from doing that is throat-shoving. Her freedom to make her life with a particular someone doesn&#x27;t harm anybody. _You_ cannot disregard _her_ feelings.

This is exactly the moral of the story. If you want to blame somebody for Trump, blame yourselves. Democracy, especially in the US is ruled by consensus. If 30% of the people are extremely opposed to something, like gay marriage, you cannot shove it down their throats. You cannot disregard their feelings and opinions. You just have to swallow it and move on. Because if you don&#x27;t, somebody will take advantage of your foolishness.

Would you like to know how a normal person gets to vote for Trump?I&#x27;m a male French, in France, and I intend to vote FN (extreme right). I have higer education, 10 years of experience in programming, including 5 in 3 different countries. I have social values, like companies should take care of the humans behind the employee, and we should give our maximum to include everyone who wants to be included. I turned my back on leftist movements because no matter how generous I was (e.g. thousands donated to charities, &gt;1200hrs of volunteering, engaged in social causes, etc), leftists always find a way to depict me as a spoiled child with rich parents, and they dismiss any good work I&#x27;ve made as a result of luck.Oh and my 8-year old cousin was raped by an Arab teenager – I still don&#x27;t know whether that&#x27;s due to probability or whether he identifies to the Arabs-against-whites cause. It did change a lot for me.So now that I&#x27;m freed from liberal shamers, I&#x27;ve decided to vote depending on only one criteria. In my whole professional experience, promotions were given to women, to the point that it was unfair to me; In my whole life women have been bitter to me. I&#x27;m pretty satisfied that there are currently hundreds of laws in favour of women which offset any inequality they can claim; The only party which proposes to keep those existing laws and not adding new ones is FN, the extreme-right French party.All in all, what you need to gain back someone like me is love. Give me luck with finding a girlfriend, give me a fair treatment at work, recognize my social engagement and the positive parts of my values, stop assuming all my rationale is just raw racism or raw machism, stop assuming I&#x27;ve just been lucky with work, and you&#x27;ll get me back among the centrist voters.But as long as it&#x27;s not possible to expose my problems without hearing generalizations and shaming, I&#x27;ll keep voting FN.

This is probably the best analysis of Trump&#x27;s victory that I&#x27;ve read so far.

I don&#x27;t think you really have your finger on the pulse of most voters.I can tell you as someone in silicon valley who sort of vaguely supports trump, that I have been essentially not permitted to talk about it. What&#x27;s the benefit to it? Why would I speak up and engage in a conversation? Any talk of Trump here isn&#x27;t actually a real debate. It&#x27;s everyone around you saying &quot;Trump supporters are racists and bigots. They are disgusting.&quot;Nobody _actually_ wants to hear any arguments from the other side. So I sit with my mouth closed. It&#x27;s better than losing my friends and having my coworkers ostracize me for my political views. Which maybe they would have the chance to change if they were willing to listen, but aren&#x27;t.I know so many people like myself. I was surprised with the result of the election, but not surprised at the fact that there was a surprise like this. Places like SV don&#x27;t know how many Trump supporters there are or even _why_ they really support him, because they&#x27;ve essentially put their hands over their eyes and their ears and spun in circles shouting &quot;Trump is racist! You are racist!&quot;

It&#x27;s more of a case that us upper-middle class liberal elites think we are shaming this segment of the population when we are calling them bigots and racists and stupid and uninformed and homophobic and hicks and white trash, because those are horrible things that we don&#x27;t want to be called.But a large part of the population don&#x27;t share that sentiment, they&#x27;re not shamed, they don&#x27;t care that you&#x27;re screaming &quot;RACIST!&quot; at the top of your lungs.And when you address their actual concerns that globalization and automation are killing their jobs, killing their communities, and killing their people with a shrug, with an &quot;I&#x27;m so sorry, move to the cities, get an education!&quot;, they&#x27;ll get angry. And political. And here we are.

To be fair, Merkel&#x27;s policies are fairly centrist compared to the usual CDU&#x2F;CSU rhetoric and ever since the WASG split the SPD has been more center than left, too.Merkel is also relatively popular with many non-CDU&#x2F;CSU voters because her policies all in all have been very moderate. She&#x27;s generally perceived as very static despite having had to deal with the economic crisis, the refugee situation and now Brexit.The rise of the AfD is largely a result of conservatives (who probably would have voted CDU&#x2F;CSU otherwise) being upset with Merkel&#x27;s handling of the refugee situation. The far left still hates her because she&#x27;s a conservative, the far right hates her because she&#x27;s too liberal. She&#x27;s in the sweet spot where her policies are just balanced enough nobody can propose any sane alternatives that don&#x27;t sound like almost exactly what she&#x27;s been doing and any criticism either sounds petty or hyperbolic.The problem for the SPD is that they alienated their leftist demographic under Schröder (leading to the rise in popularity of the Linke) and later with the coalition government aside the CDU&#x2F;CSU. Aside from traditional party loyalists they&#x27;re now directly competing with the CDU&#x2F;CSU for conservative voters.The only thing that concerns me is that the CSU is taking a lesson from the revival of the AfD (which was pretty much doomed to fail when the Euro crisis waned but was rekindled by the refugee situation) and is now spouting even more populist xenophobic rhetoric than usual. Considering how much disproportionate influence the CSU traditionally holds in the Union, this might spell trouble for the CDU internally.As an anecdote: I would never have voted for the CDU (I&#x27;ve previously voted for Linke and the Pirate Party) but unless one of the other parties surprises me with a great candidate, I would probably vote to re-elect Merkel.

No it&#x27;s not. They are merely two data points. Look at Germany.  I guarantee you Merkel is going to be reelected next year.
Okay, the AFD is going to gain some power but it is outright impossible for them to win the election. But this isn&#x27;t just about the AFD. What the experts and the media forced down the throats of the people is that there is no alternative to what&#x27;s currently going on. SPD, Grüne, Linke, FDP don&#x27;t even need to bother finding a Chancellor candidate.

If you don&#x27;t call them out it doesn&#x27;t stop them being bigots either. And with Brexit we saw just how much bigots were emboldened by the vote, thinking that it was a validation of their worldview. Hate crime in Briton went up by 60% after Brexit.It&#x27;s not that bigotry is a non-issue in these elections, it definitely is, the KKK endorsed a presidential candidate after all. The issue is that there are deeper underlying problems that are being exploited by race baiting politicians to win elections. The problem in pre-Nazi Germany, for example, was a deeply dysfunctional economy and trying to seek a scape-goat for the loss of WWI and the shame and humiliation that caused. Today the problem is largely economic inequality and a lack of economic opportunity and mobility for most people in the bottom half of the wealth distribution. Wages have stagnated while housing, college, and healthcare costs have skyrocketed. The recent recession left a huge crater in the economic histories and career developments of most folks under 30 in the form of unemployment and under-employment. Outside of the cities there hasn&#x27;t been an economic recovery in the last decade. On top of that you have the opiate epidemic. It&#x27;s gotten so severe that life expectancies for middle aged folks in middle America took a significant hit (due substantially to increases in suicide and deaths from alcoholism and drug overdose). All of that has nothing to do with gay marriage, Syrian refugees, or increased awareness of police brutality.But a lot of the people who have been disadvantaged over the last few decades have been able to be convinced by demagogues that the cause of their problems is the elite establishment (especially liberals) and to capitalize on latent feelings of racism, anti-gay sentiment, etc. Make no mistake those bigots are not the entirety of the vote, but they are enough of it to swing the election. More so, as in Britain, there is a huge section of the electorate who may not be intrinsically bigoted per se but is perfectly content to sit around and run in a pack with true bigots and to support candidates and policies that will rollback progress in racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality. Sufficiently advanced indifference to issues of racial equality is indistinguishable from bigotry.You&#x27;re right that you can&#x27;t fix this by calling everyone who voted for these things bigots, almost certainly not. But ignoring that aspect doesn&#x27;t lead to a good outcome either. It&#x27;s necessary to fix the underlying economic problems while at the same time maintaining a hard line on driving forward to improve equality, enfranchisement, etc.

Really shocks me that this wasn&#x27;t obvious to people post-Brexit. I was a remain voter who was shocked by that result but this win has been obvious to me for a long time after that.Calling leave voters racists achieved nothing and only strengthened their views. It was obvious when Trump voters appropriated the term Deplorables that personal attacks were going to fail. All you did was cause the polls to not reflect the final vote because people would say Hilary when asked but put an X next to Trump in private.

True.And let&#x27;s not forget that the GamerGate fiasco shared a lot of things in common with Brexit and Trump&#x27;s presidency in how the media covered it too. The media tried to attack people over and over while painting those it disagreed with as bigots, and it worked about as poorly then as it did with this election and Trump supporters.But no, same general pattern occurred with both Brexit and Trump, with similar results.

This event and Brexit are proof that you cannot shame people into voting how you want. Calling them bigots over and over just galvanizes them if anything.

Had the media not made such a spectacle of Trump&#x27;s candidacy early in the campaign, he never would have gotten anywhere near being the Republican nominee to begin with.  They played chicken and lost.

Both the Democrats, in large part, and the Republicans, in overwhelming part, made a sort of Faustian bargain starting in the early 1970s, embracing globalization in ways that were harmful to U.S. industries but, the implied promise went, would be in the long-term best interests of the country. Partially this was economic -- a bet on trade and comparative advantage -- and partially geopolitical, in that many of the early trade deals had the effect of countering Soviet influence (e.g. Nixon&#x27;s famous China trip in 1972). I think it&#x27;s safe to say that not everyone felt, in the decades that followed, that they benefited as a result.It&#x27;s hard not to read this election, and particularly the Republican victories in formerly manufacturing-heavy areas like the upper Midwest and Appalachia, as a repudiation of this deal. Many people aren&#x27;t impressed by either the alleged economic or geopolitical benefits of globalization, and they&#x27;re expressing that extreme discontent at the ballot box.

As others have said, this is our Brexit. The manufacturing jobs aren&#x27;t coming back. The supply chains aren&#x27;t here anymore. The labor is too expensive. The environmental concerns are too grave. They&#x27;ll now be left with even less than they had before.

What is the strategy for the blue collar workers? Getting rid of NAFTA and other agreements doesn&#x27;t solve anything. People are getting replaced with machines and no one has come up for a solution for that.If social safety nets get removed, they&#x27;ll be in a worst position.

Absolutely agree. Total failure of a campaign.

Democrats need a new strategy for middle America. Pretending the coasts and middle America are the same or can be made the same is a failure.

Very nice! I voted for him in Oregon, so my state is one of the few holding out.

I mean Trump currently does have the majority of votes.

The fact that the electoral college exists probably distorts the popular vote. People in non-swing states may not vote in the same proportions if the president were decided by popular vote. Of course, this trend could go either way.

&gt;The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population.A majority of something, but probably not the population:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;elections&#x2F;forecast&#x2F;president?action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=span-abc-region&amp;region=span-abc-region&amp;WT.nav=span-abc-region" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;elections&#x2F;forecast&#x2F;president?action=c...</a>

There probably won&#x27;t be a wall.Most likely, few of the promises &#x2F; threats of the campaign will materialize.It just might turn out that Trump will be a very moderate republican president. He just might have played a role for the last few years. A role that got him voters.Then again, he might not care at all about doing the actual job and let Pence run most of it.I still can&#x27;t believe how Americans could actually elect someone like that. I understand a protest vote, but with that candidate...I guess the majority of voters just didn&#x27;t care that he has no actual opinions, is an entitled, rich, insecure, macho, old generation &#x27;man&#x27;, and just projected their wishes for change, ignoring all of him they didn&#x27;t want to think about.Republicans hold both houses and the presidency now, though.
I guess Obama&#x27;s legacy has been wiped out today.Oh well, the world will go on.

Maybe in the future, but I don&#x27;t believe it is THE problem right now. Those jobs in China aren&#x27;t automated, it is still cheap human labor.

FiveThirtyEight linked to this paper on their live blog (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;live-blog&#x2F;2016-election-results-coverage&#x2F;?lpup=12592834#livepress-update-12592834" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;live-blog&#x2F;2016-election-results-c...</a>): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;6613" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;6613</a>. I find it hard to believe that globalisation has not had substantial effect. Probably both are quite relevant.For me, the problem is more when people think: a) the different-skinned guy down the street is causing this problem; b) voting for right wing guy can stop globalisation. Brexit showed that the people most likely to vote on immigration&#x2F;kick out foreigners basis were also those with the fewest immigrants in their region.More left-leaning people seem a bit confused about inequality&#x2F;poverty vs globalisation - inequality globally is on the way down, which is why it&#x27;s on the way up locally (you&#x27;re losing to the guy half-way around the world, some of your neighbours are not losing to their equivalents... yet).

No wall is needed... Just make it so that employers cannot legally employ those not authorized to work in the country --and fine with an amount which will deter people&#x2F;companies.At least that&#x27;s what I would do if I needed to control unauthorized workers for any place which wanted to do so.

Disagree that computerisation is this problem. It&#x27;s a problem, but it&#x27;s not what&#x27;s driven this. Why would the vote fall so strongly down racial lines if the primary problem was the elimination of lower-end jobs?(Along with one of your respondents, I also don&#x27;t think the wall or many other promises will eventuate.)

I support globalization, and agree computerization will be more disruptive (in the future). But that you, and democrats, and the establishment republicans ignore the jobs lost to globalization over the last 30 years is exactly what leads to a reactionary election and a Trump presidency.

No - for scores of Trump voters, globalization and the resultant outsourcing of factory work that they relied on was definitely a problem.It&#x27;s not A isn&#x27;t &#x2F; B is. Both globalization and automation of work are creating discontent.

That will happen in the long run but that&#x27;s not what happened the last 30 years. Secretarial jobs are certainly a casualty of computerisation. But the job losses that got Trump elected are industrial job losses, from factories that have been essentially outsourced to China. China is barely begining to computerise its production, Chinese factories are mostly competitive because of their ample and cheap manual labor.

Globalization isn&#x27;t the problem. Computerization is.Other countries are not taking &quot;our&quot; jobs. We simply don&#x27;t need those jobs anymore. Taxes on foreign labor will only do one thing: subsidize robots.We&#x27;re going to spend billions of dollars on a big wall, and I guarantee you we&#x27;re not going to have a lot more jobs after that. (The wall itself is a pretty big project though.)

NATO is a defence pact and the UN is an international forum.  Neither is a super government.

America had several massive immigration flows before NATO existed. And several racist backlashes. For example, a backlash against the slightly-less-white people from Italy in the early 1900s. There&#x27;s nothing new about the current backlash.

&gt; There is no genuine leftist alternative. It&#x27;s a choice between center-right &quot;left&quot; that&#x27;s sold out to the establishment and the far right.Lol, true that.One thing I&#x27;d like to point out is that NATO and UN existed for decades before the massive immigration flow started.

Of course culture is more than food or dance, but what&#x27;s wrong with trying those as a way to have a glimpse into the Indian culture? I don&#x27;t think anyone claimed to be expert on Indian culture after having a butter chicken. What would you propose instead?

&gt; That&#x27;s just wrong. Indian culture - and culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.Maybe now you start to see the &quot;damned if you do damned if you don&#x27;t&quot; nature of political correctness, and why it has been rejected in this election cycle with great success.

It&#x27;s not about culture, people are still fine with their culture, it&#x27;s about economics. Globalisation and corruption has caused a lot more instability for the working class. If you look at polls about what the number one issue was you&#x27;ll see it&#x27;s the economy, that&#x27;s the main thing people are concerned about.

Yo, americans aren&#x27;t the only &quot;white people&quot;.

You do realize that what the great renaissance intellectuals created, the right wing in the united stated looks down upon and scoffs at, right? They hate anything to do with art or culture unless it&#x27;s their version of Christianity.This is the same attitude of Boko Haram.The left wing doesn&#x27;t dismiss the great cultural achievements the west has created, but we try to create space for them within a nation known for accepting immigrants, rather than forcefully imposing our culture on them, which seems to have failed so brilliantly in places like France.The politicians trivialize this shit, because they pander to the voters. The left embraces other cultures because we&#x27;re sick of getting Christianity shoved down our throats.

Not sure how electing an openly racist, sexist, vengeful narcissist furthers that goal, but okay.

Speaking of India, the election of Modi further confirms the Brexit-Trump trend.

&gt; That&#x27;s just wrong. Indian culture - and culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.I think there&#x27;s a key concept missing from every discussion about culture, and that concept is that &quot;X immigrant culture&quot; is a completely different culture from &quot;X culture.&quot; Indians in India have one culture, while Indians in e.g. Britain have a related, but divergent culture.Two places this matters:• Frequently, the people of &quot;X immigrant culture&quot; care a lot about &#x27;preserving their heritage&#x27;, because it&#x27;s a constant struggle for them—while the people of &quot;X culture&quot; couldn&#x27;t give a damn, because they&#x27;re constantly steeped in their own culture and it&#x27;s not going away. &quot;Cultural appropriation&quot; is an invention almost entirely of immigrant cultures.• People &quot;exploring a culture&quot; frequently have the implicit goal of exploring the domestic-immigrant offshoot of a culture, not the native one. Because of the lack of connection and cultural touchstone organizations that immigrants face, things like dances and dishes are seen as far more relevant in immigrant cultures, similar to their role in itinerant cultures.

White guilt is a large reason why white people are afraid to assert themselves and their racial identity. You&#x27;re basically labeled a bigot if you don&#x27;t support the cause of nihilistic globalism and moral leveling.

This is the most concise explanation for what many on the left fail to grasp, and one of the many reasons why I and many are Trump supporters.We are on one hand supposed to respect and honor other cultures, but are not allowed to cultivate, maintain and respect our own (American) culture.Which is absurd for many reasons... one being it denies a very real reason for many wanting to come to our country, or fails to identify the characteristics that made western culture generally preferable to many others.I appreciate your perspective on this issue.

I&#x27;ve thought lately that the cosmopolitan outlook, which I do hold and generally enjoy, is also a rootless one. In accepting the ever-present change, respecting the multitude of outlooks, it often denies connecting with traditions in favor of a single &quot;modern, rational, progressive&quot; view that buries its internal contradictions beneath fleeting surface treasures.At the same time, it supports the imperial concept of misappropriating original traditions as a convenient fancy, a reference to the exotic, or a belittling of the other, which you give a great example of - with the pretext that this is somehow contributing to progress. Appropriation can be &quot;done right&quot; and produce great new works, but it can&#x27;t be done easily. It&#x27;s so much easier to simply loot the past without thinking.One of the books I like that considers similar thoughts at various points is Melzer&#x27;s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Philosophy. [0][0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.press.uchicago.edu&#x2F;ucp&#x2F;books&#x2F;book&#x2F;chicago&#x2F;P&#x2F;bo18692306.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.press.uchicago.edu&#x2F;ucp&#x2F;books&#x2F;book&#x2F;chicago&#x2F;P&#x2F;bo186...</a>

The thing about negating white culture is prevalent only in the US. Most Europeans are fiercely proud of their culture and nation.

You know, this is kind of inspiring. I know where my blood comes from (Sicily and WASP), and I know where I grew up and got my ideas (Berkeley), but, it&#x27;s not like I&#x27;ve really tried to turn into some kind of culture; I&#x27;ve participating in a thing that&#x27;s been made into a culture (festivals), but that&#x27;s not the same, is it?Hmm. Are there cultural world&#x27;s fairs anymore?

&gt; Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.I think most people understand that. What do you think would be an improvement? Surely not that they fail even to appreciate the dance or the dish. It&#x27;s not likely that they&#x27;ll embark on a years-long quest to understand the deeper history, religion etc. of a dozen different cultures. What, really, would you have them do? Without a suggestion, you&#x27;re just bashing.

Very well put. I&#x27;ve been extremely turned off by everything you described but couldn&#x27;t put words to it that well.

As a brown Indian dude, it seems to me that the western world is caught in some self-hating loop.It simultaneously trivializes my culture while hating its own culture.I watched Justin Trudeau dance the bhangra and people claim &quot;oh what beautiful Indian culture&quot;. I&#x27;ve seen people eat butter chicken to partake in &quot;Indian culture&quot; experiences.That&#x27;s just wrong. Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.At the same time, I see white people negate their culture altogether. It might have been built on colonialism and imperialism, but what, say, Renaissance artists pulled off is significant, very significant.Everyone needs to back off and think about this for a bit

Your points mirror my experience, but could you explain why breakdown of civic institutions (an observation I&#x27;ve also made) matters?

Immigration and gay marriage and women’s rights etc. are scapegoats. The real problems are international competition (unskilled workers in developed countries have to compete with unskilled workers in Thailand and Bangladesh and Indonesia), automation (the US has higher industrial production than ever before, but it takes much less labor), changing tax laws and easier travel&#x2F;communication&#x2F;money movement (letting rich people live far away from production and markets, and siphon their wealth into tax havens), break-down of civic institutions (labor unions, churches, public services, local newspapers, etc.).

Black Americans didn&#x27;t vote for Hillary Clinton because Bill Clinton lobbied against a minimum wage increase in Haiti? That seems a bit far fetched...

I think she couldn&#x27;t mobilize the black vote because of what the clinton foundation did to Haiti <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;what-the-clintons-did-to-haiti" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;what-the-clintons-did...</a> also they are quite pro-business and somehow it all looks quite colonial <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;the-clinton-foundations-problems-are-deeper-than" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;the-clinton-foundatio...</a>Calling your opponents deplorable also did not help.i for one welcome our new orange overlordalso twitter and youtube seem to be more important than all the old media - Trump had a big presence on twitter that is.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;election-winner-twitter&#x2F;93509896&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;election-...</a>

Trump won the popular vote as well as the EV (at the time of this comment).

The Electoral College exists for a reason, you know.BTW the estimated popular vote is between 0.7 and 1.3% in Hillary&#x27;s favor at this point , according to NYT <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;elections&#x2F;forecast&#x2F;president" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;elections&#x2F;forecast&#x2F;president</a> . Not really a big difference.

The difference between this and Brexit is that more people voted for Brexit than against it, while more people voted for Hillary than for Trump.

There&#x27;s not really a good response I can think of here which fits with the guidelines of this site aside from basically we have a lot of ignorant short-sighted voters in this country.

There was all kinds of hatred for the Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles, Chinese, etc. 70–150 years ago.Interracial marriage was illegal in the US south less than 50 years ago.The arguments against Mexicans and Muslim refugees today are nearly identical, just with the names changed.1940s Sinatra: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UpO6mpYvyqQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UpO6mpYvyqQ</a>

The US was the sum of N European cultures, mostly western, mostly northern. So assimilation wasn&#x27;t as big a leap.

&gt; Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their cultureI don&#x27;t understand that part. Isn&#x27;t US a sum of N cultures that decided to have a common culture? So why the newcomers can&#x27;t do what the predecessors did?

Two reasons -1. Potential for a 20% reduction in corporate income tax, a huge boon for small business owners.2. Repeal Obamacare and it&#x27;s obscene costs to small business.

&gt; I mean, I can understand voting for the other guy &#x27;cause you don&#x27;t have a job... but unemployment, by just about all measures, has been going down for about all of the time that Obama has been in office.The unemployment rate only includes people actively seeking work. One often-toted statistic is that men have been dropping out of the labor market completely (i.e. not looking for work at all) at higher-than-normal rates. These are quite possibly also people who were Trump voters.

&gt;The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail.No, the attempts at building an interconnected globalized world are becoming less popular. Or maybe the people who opposed that sort of thing all along are finding a voice.It&#x27;s a different thing; Interestingly, you get different answers when you vote votes than when you vote with dollars; and in this case? the dollars have teamed up with the center (or what in america is called the center-left) - and lost to the votes. (I guess I don&#x27;t really see why you think the center left (or center) has sold out to the far right. This is America, and we like our market-based solutions, but the center is capable of regulating that. I give you the ACA as exhibit A.)&gt;There is no genuine leftist alternative. It&#x27;s a choice between center-right &quot;left&quot; that&#x27;s sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn&#x27;t care about the theory of comparitive advantage.uh, so really, &#x27;left&#x27; vs &#x27;right&#x27; doesn&#x27;t work so well when describing &quot;third way&quot; nationalist movements; that&#x27;s kind of why it is the &quot;third way&quot; - I mean, not that brexit and trump are actually fascist movements, but they are similar in that they have strong nationalist and nativist aspects to them, and are less clear where they stand on the economic side of things. All &#x27;third way&#x27; movements, historically, have had some socialist and some capitalist elements; their argument is that the left&#x2F;right economic divide isn&#x27;t the primary issue; taking care of &quot;your people&quot; and protecting those people from the others is the big issue.The real divide here is between what I call &quot;the coalition of everything is fine&quot; - people like me, for whom the economy looks like it&#x27;s booming, minorities and women who see that their rights get closer to parity every year, vs... uh, what I want to call the rural poor, but this election showed that it&#x27;s more than just the rural poor. I mean, I can see what is up with the rural poor... but what about everyone else?And there&#x27;s not a lot of understanding in general; it&#x27;s not just me. I mean, I can understand voting for the other guy &#x27;cause you don&#x27;t have a job... but unemployment, by just about all measures, has been going down for about all of the time that Obama has been in office.Where is this majority of people who think that things are so bad?

Sounds great, but I thought Australia was gravely concerned about so-called &quot;boat people.&quot;

That&#x27;s interesting. The anti-immigration right in the UK hold your immigration system up as the way forward.We have a multicultural society in the UK that many are rejecting, with racial tensions at a high.The difference is that many immigrants are working class. They are scapegoated to great success with the white working class. I disagree with that - I think the real problem is meagre infrastructure investment to support new arrivals but perhaps the Aussie style system works on the other end of the spectrum: focus only on valuable people where value is how much money they would earn.

I&#x27;ve heard it&#x27;s very difficult to emigrate to Australia, is that not the case?

In my opinion Australia is one of the most monocultural countries in the world, and I have visited over 100 countries.It is a monoculture because they basically exterminated natives like they were bunnies in order for some guys to take all the territory to themselves.There is only one culture in Australia precisely because all the minorities are not significant. It is one thing to have a Muslim or two, completely different having tens of millions.Who is the owner of the land in Australia? White families. I have a friend in Australia who has so much territory he needs a plane to move around it. It is normal there.What makes Australia a great place to life is having a continent almost as big as the USA,with comparable natural resources, but with less than 13 times less population.In a similar country like China there lives 65 times more population. In fact most of China is mountains so the actual density is even higher in populated places.

Is that true about Melbourne? I mean, I believe that there are large immigrant populations, and that you have a lot of diverse restaurants. But I struggle to believe that they &quot;do great&quot; and that there is a lot of unity. I know New Zealand is a deeply racist country, and I had always heard that Australia was even worse.

Lol what are you on about. Plenty of countries have a very multicultural society, and they do great.Look at Melbourne, Australia, we have huge immigrant populations, and all the different cultures have made this an awesome place to live - E.g. I highly doubt you&#x27;d find a more diverse selection of restaurants per capita anywhere else.This election wasn&#x27;t about race. Don&#x27;t project your bigotry onto all Trump supporters.And the &#x27;world elite&#x27; is not actually the group of people that aren&#x27;t racist, it&#x27;s the middle class that isn&#x27;t racist. The &#x27;elite&#x27; and the &#x27;worker class&#x27; are actually pretty similar in how bigoted they are.

You don&#x27;t need to sacrifice them, the right wing parties that are being voted in chose to do that and are now being rewarded by the blowback.

Software development and IT jobs that moved to India and China are blue collar? Call centers?

&gt;All it&#x27;s done is benefit the elite.It&#x27;s benefitted everyone except the working class in developed countries. That&#x27;s a lot of people. The great majority, actually.

You could argue that globalization has pulled millions of chinese peasants out of poverty, and helped creating a middle class in China, which is already increasing the pressure on the regime to transition to a democracy.In any case, as some pointed out here, outsourcing to China is only the first step in the destruction of these jobs. Robotics is likely going to replace many of these jobs in the next 20y, which might bring back some industry into the West, ie more jobs but more sophisticated jobs.

Globalism shuffled jobs around the world, and trade policies can change that to a modest extent -- one&#x27;s trade policy can&#x27;t change the fact that your citizens are too expensive versus Thailand or China. Tariffs against Mexico cannot make a Shenzhen. GM is not metaphorically coming back to Detroit.US manufacturing employment is going down, and even if &#x2F; when high tech manufacturing brings production back to the US, it will be robotic production. And with every company in the world racing for machine learning, I don&#x27;t see how the future looks good for a specific generation of people in history too old to newly take up a globally competitive trade. Also, it&#x27;s been mentioned around here that driving is one of the most frequent jobs in most states in the US, and that Uber recently made a deliver of beer by automated truck. Uber and every relevant company in the world is trying to destroy a category of worker from everywhere in the world.

I agree, but want to point out that it is not just blue collar jobs being off-shored. Many white-collar jobs (software development included) are being off-shored, too.

You can&#x27;t sacrifice large swaths of the population for the so called &quot;greater&quot; good. Globalisation, as it stands now, is neo-colonialism.  It offshores blue collar jobs and concentrates white collar jobs in rich countries.  It disenfranchises blue collar workers in the west, and causes brain drain in the developing world.  All it&#x27;s done is benefit the elite.  Read progressive economists like Piketty, and combine it with visits to places like Detroit.  The current model hasn&#x27;t been working.  I don&#x27;t think Trump has all the solutions, but he diagnosed the problem better than the smug elites.  Same goes for Brexit.  This isn&#x27;t xenophobia, working class jobs are disappearing from the west.  It&#x27;s a real economic phenomena.  Maybe one day the world will be united, but its too soon.

&gt; They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.Doesn&#x27;t this describe the other side? &quot;Deplorables,&quot; &quot;ignorant ruralites,&quot; &quot;uninformed -ist -phobes&quot;? Is that attitude interested in empathy or calmly discussing things?&gt; Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happenIsn&#x27;t this exactly how Obama got elected? &quot;Hope and change&quot;, and Obama&#x27;s been practically worshipped as a savior ever since.&gt; The politics of fear wonI think fear had a lot to do with this result, but those fears are grounded in reality. One candidate acknowledged the problems that have arisen in the last decade, while the other did not. Time will tell how well he actually handles them.

I am very Anti-Trump, but I have to ask, could the same thoughts not be said by a right-winger to a leftist? It seems like neither side is listening.From what I understand, this isn&#x27;t what democracy used to be. We&#x27;ve created a divide where somebody says &quot;I&#x27;m a democrat&#x2F;republican&quot; and they look at the party for what that means.It isn&#x27;t only the system that is broken, but it is how we view it and how we view each other.This is why I agreed with Sama and not removing Thiel from YC. We have to listen to the other side and empathize so we can understand. Without that we all lose.Today, we all lost.

I think the &quot;uncertain and complex world&quot; trope is a part of the problem here.I have become very cynical over time about the way intellectuals, academics, trade negotiators, politicians and the media use&#x2F;abuse complexity to get their own way. Many times when I examine an issue I see a whole lot of people saying how complex the world is, how impossibly nuanced it is and .... the kicker .... therefore you shouldn&#x27;t attempt to figure it out or have an opinion. You should just do whatever the &quot;experts&quot; recommend even if it&#x27;s apparently unintuitive or even quite clearly against your own interests. Anyone who doesn&#x27;t obey this line is written off as ignorant, too stupid to have a vote, etc.Yet are these issues really so complicated? Often they are not. The complexity, when you take the time to tackle it, ends up being largely artificial.

&gt; But it became clear to me that the &quot;other side&quot; is not interested in being assuaged. They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.Yep. We&#x27;re all racists and xenophobes and our views have no rational basis. Please feel free to make sweeping judgments about what anyone who voted against Hillary Clinton must be thinking.Please keep up this rhetoric so we can win in 2020, too!

&gt;Instead of patronising these people it&#x27;s time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.I use to think this too, before this election. But it became clear to me that the &quot;other side&quot; is not interested in being assuaged. They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.They are interested in control. Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happen again.The politics of fear won, and I see no oppertunities to bring a divide where one side is hellbent on dynamiting every brick as it&#x27;s laid.

Whenever I hear those arguments, I have to bring up a point:There is a very good reason why big, powerful empires always have a big military, meddle and stick their noses into everyone&#x27;s affairs.Economic power doesn&#x27;t come from thin air. It has a lot to do with political power, influence and domination.Those are two sides of the same coin, they support and nurture each other.You reach limits of growth when you just trade and build up your own economy.Almost all foreign policy is dedicated to furthering self-serving goals. Often medium and long term, so not apparently visible. Often related to things the public know very little about. Just as often, completely misguided.But there&#x27;s always a reason.

It would be nice if that were true. Maybe Bernie could&#x27;ve pushed the focus back on improving the US instead of picking international fights, but Trump&#x27;s rhetoric is far more Hawkish than Obama or Clinton.

You can clearly tell the extent Trump&#x27;s isolationist attitude by having John Bolton on as an advisor. Also, the Iran deal? He promised to shred it. The Iranians might finally obtain nukes.

It&#x27;s important to realize that no voter imagines how US military actions do or don&#x27;t coordinate or synchronize with US big corp action. That kind of stuff never shows up in the political discourse. Politicians aren&#x27;t riling up Americans with talk of how military boosts economy. Nobody makes that connection on TV.From my understanding, some industries depend tightly on the military, and not bolstering your own national industries would be a mistake as all the big global players cheat with nationalistic help.People aren&#x27;t going to get more or less imperialism. From George Bush Sr, to Bill Clinton, to George Bush Jr, to Barack Obama, when has the US military + international big corp coordination ever stopped, much less shown variability between presidents? When a president is elected, is there a sweep through the US armed forces command structure? No. Is there a sweep through industry? No. Is there a sweep through the CIA? No. National bureaucracies make plans longer than 4 years, and their programs don&#x27;t stop executing in-between elections.What I&#x27;m really worried about is what happens in a winner-takes all branches of government scenario, especially when conceivably the majority of the population supports different policies. It makes sense for the ruling party to do a makeover of power, as the GOP has tended toward redistricting as a strategy, and I think that&#x27;s exactly what&#x27;s going to happen.Donald Trump cannot be an independent leader because no ruler manages bureaucracy alone. You must always listen to the bureaucracy machine because it has too many aspects that you don&#x27;t understand but is someone else&#x27;s little kingdom. And that&#x27;s why Donald Trump is nominating all Washington insiders. It&#x27;s not like Donald Trump decided, &quot;Why not try for business elites through my network, instead of classical Washington?&quot; Nope, didn&#x27;t happen.

You act as if isolationism is this new thing that Donald Trump invented.The U.S. didn&#x27;t start playing this role of World Power until it got dragged into two World Wars that were born out of nationalism and isolationism.If the U.S. retreats from its role in the world, Russia, China, and Iran will be more than happy to fill the vacuum of power.

I hear so many more educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.Not sure he&#x27;s going to achieve that much.

I hear so many educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.Not sure he&#x27;s going to achieve that much.

I feel that the US will now, finally, focus on the US. It&#x27;s time for that. Instead of their usual imperialistic attitude that involves enticing Europe to boycott Russia, taking out stability providing leaders in the middle east without much (after)thought (or the wrong kind of thought), providing weapons the the Free Syrian Army mercenaries that now fight for the better paying ISIS side (this is not stupidity, it&#x27;s rubbelization with economic motives imo). Etc. Let the US focus on the US for the next 4 years, the US has enough problems to solve within their borders. Clinton would just intensify the Syria situation, alienate Russia even further, make secret deals with Wall Street and keep things just as they are. And things are not fine as they are.Yeah yeah, I think Snowden is a hero and I hate Trump for calling him a traitor. Also his abortions views are medieval. But hey, a more balanced anti-imperialist would simply never win in the corrupt, house-of-cards like US.

It says more about the media -- in a short-sighted quest for ratings and quarterly reports -- stops doing journalism and starts being a vector for political click-bait.Even just the Halo-effect of ridiculous claims being requoted verbatim is huge, even when followed with rebuttals.

You say it very well.And much like brexit, this fiasco reveals how much of a fool the journalistic establishment has made of itself. At least we can stop debating one thing at this point, whether or not the media is somehow disconnected with reality.

Nobody dares to talk about this in the media.But I think a lot of it is just due to her being a woman. And an older one at that.Many people are not all that progressive in the US, as the campaign has clearly shown.(I know she was a candidate with plenty of flaws, but a lot of dirt that got thrown at her would never have been directed at a man in that manner).

Or, more simply, Clinton was the wrong candidate.

&gt; attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to failThe only certain conclusion I&#x27;d draw at this time is that traditional ways of manufacturing consent through broadcast media have stopped working.Don&#x27;t fret, the system will adapt.

Amusing that Sarkozy has rebranded his UNP to &quot;Les Républicains&quot;.  GOP should be flattered.

&gt; The far right candidate Le Pen is leading the pollsBut, she&#x27;s not?Alain Juppé is, an old-school right-wing politician. Le Pen is second and the third is a party that is not quite far-left but still far enough to the left for the communist party to ally with it.&gt; winning at the second round of the election is not going to be easyI don&#x27;t think this has any chance of happening. But of course, who knows...

Actually, not quite. There are a whole lot of flashpoints coming up in Europe over the next 12-18 months. It&#x27;s going to be very interesting.I wrote about this here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@octskyward&#x2F;ok-what-now-e3f64d38f7#.po6ymmn23" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@octskyward&#x2F;ok-what-now-e3f64d38f7#.po6ym...</a>Briefly, the next steps are:• The Geert Wilders trial in Netherlands. GW is the most popular politician in NL right now. He is on trial for what is essentially pure political speech, he asked a crowd if they wanted more&#x2F;fewer Moroccans (i.e. visa policy), they said fewer, he said &quot;OK we&#x27;ll sort that out&quot; or words to that effect. He is boycotting his own trial. If he is found guilty and punished, it&#x27;s hard to believe this will go down well or hurt his support. Should be resolved by end of the month.• Austria rerunning its presidential election. Last time the &quot;far right&quot; candidate Norbert Hofer lost to his Green&#x2F;left wing opponent. But there was voter fraud and the vote was so close that the amount of fraud was larger than the margin of the win, so the courts required a rerun. If Hofer wins ... well, the President of the EU Commission has said Austria would be frozen out of the EU as a punishment for voting the wrong way. Should be resolved in December.• General election in the Netherlands next year.• Election in France, as you note.• Towards the end of the year election in Germany. Very volatile politics there. Turkey is threatening to unleash a torrent of migration on Europe unless it gives Turkey what it wants, which the EU doesn&#x27;t want to do. Germany&#x27;s Trump equivalent (Frauke Petry) started losing support when the migrant crisis began slackening after the Turkey deal. If it collapses then AfD may see a resurgence in time for the election.So 2017 is gonna be an interesting time.

The Republicans have congress, which is different than Trump having congress.

After Brexit and Trump, the next milestone on this curious series is the French presidential elections in May 2017. The far right candidate Le Pen is leading the polls, but winning at the second round of the election is not going to be easy. Although, no doubt that Brexit, the Trump election, potential new terrorist attacks in France as well as the developping migrant crisis are going to give her a boost.But like Trump she is unlikely to control the parliament. The republican party will likely temper Trump through the senate. And without a majority at the French parliament, a French president is more like a queen of England, just with the nuclear red button in her hand.

I noticed the same thing about how how establishment his &quot;team&quot; is. I predict that what we&#x27;ve elected as a nation is, in fact, a fairly run of the mill establishment Republican. But I guess we&#x27;ll find out!

Trump&#x27;s campaign might be anti-establishment, the people he will be bringing in will not be.Jeff Sessions
Giuliani
Christyjust to name three of his &quot;inner circle&quot;I cross my fingers that we will get through the next 4 years without any significant events. However, I think this is really a black eye in America. I think right now at least, we&#x27;re going to be the butt of jokes for the rest of the world. Lets hope he proves us wrong, or at least the system works to contain him.

It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population. Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it&#x27;s time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.There is no genuine leftist alternative. It&#x27;s a choice between center-right &quot;left&quot; that&#x27;s sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn&#x27;t care about the theory of comparitive advantage.If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we need when we face planet scale threats like global warming.
Get out of your bubble.Hang out more on subreddits you don&#x27;t agree with.The divide is bridged one person at a time.PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK with the mods.EDIT:
His concession speech seems to indicate that he&#x27;s beginning to appreciate what he&#x27;s been entrusted with.

Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.