Another massively stupid aspect of the Clinton campaign...

[Fuzzy Bear]

I think it was easy to believe that all the progress the country had made on things like gay rights over the last eight years meant the country was heading full-steam towards becoming a more progressive place. I know I was feeling like "history" was happening in an irreversible way with more and more people jumping on board.

Turns out we were wrong. We didn't want to believe that these working-class whites just didn't give a damn about the rights of their even more vulnerable neighbours. All the progress of the last few years was just incidental because these people had chosen to trust Barack Obama over the corporatist establishment figure Mitt Romney. So this election was definitely a sh-tty way to learn that progress and justice are not inevitable, but... it's a valuable lesson.

Most white people don't really care about the rights of those who have been Othered. It's not that they're against social progress and equality. They're just willing to look past a pretty large degree of hatred, bigotry, and discrimination if it means they can feel like they're being "heard." I think it's awful and inexcusable, but it is what it is, and I guess it's not AS BAD as outright bigotry. But they've still enabled it.

You're lecturing working Americans about the progress they made.  Isn't that a tad pretentious?  

I doubt you work for a living.  I doubt you have a family depending on you working.  Someday that may happen for you, but I doubt it's the case now.  And, yes, that is relevant.  I was as snotty as you toward folks I regarded as Archie Bunker types in my youth when I had no idea of the pressure one takes on when they support a family.

These hard-working Americans you so disparage have (for the most part) families to support.  Even if they're divorced, they have child support.  And they have been economically screwed.  I can take you to a place in Jackson, OH, where the Meridian Automotive plant once was.  The jobs are now in Mexico and the lot now has a retail shopping center that may provide 10 jobs that could support a family, where there was once a plant where there were hundreds of such jobs.  These folks have moved on, but not to something better (for the most part).  And, yet, you want them to support the Goddess of NAFTA as opposed to someone whose trade policies might actually help THEIR situation.  

They are, by the way, well aware that the "Othered" folks have no more care for the lot of these hard working Americans than you say they have for the "Othered" folks.  The "Othered" folks don't care about the welfare of them, or their families; they care about their own welfare.  Let's not attach virtue to the "Othered" folks that don't apply.  The "Othered" folks are hardly more altruistic than the folks you disparage.

You're proof that the Clinton crowd hasn't learned a thing about the past election.

[Fuzzy Bear]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I'm getting cancer from these two paragraphs. The generalizations they contain and the amount of utter nonsense within is making it hard for me to breathe.

You'll forgive me.  Or maybe you won't.  But I'm sick and tired of the total lack of empathy for folks who have played by the rules, only to be screwed by Globalism, then be labeled as Deplorable in a general sort of way. 

The working class folks who have gotten the crap end of the Globalist stick aren't the type to play the victim.  But what they see in public policy is all the attention and concern and (most importantly) the resources going toward the folks who are willing to take the most militant victim posture.  And in Trump, they had a candidate who extended to THEM a degree of respect they hadn't experienced from the party and politicians who were living off what their grandfathers did for their grandfathers, while calling them "Deplorable".  The folks here who don't get this are folks who just flat out don't want to get this, because it would mandate greater introspection if they did.

[Fuzzy Bear]

The Campaign of Secretary Clinton made a few crucial errors:
1. Taking for granted white working class angst.
2. Assuming they had it in the bag and running a low energy campaign.
3. Choosing a bland VP choice in an election where their opposition was anything but bland.
4. Sticking more to personal attacks instead of policy positions.
5. Acting as though they had to expand the map for Pure purpose of vanity. A 2 EV win results int eh same as a 300 EV win....

I've adjusted the quote to illustrate the percentage of blame each of these points involve.

[Fuzzy Bear]

They bet that they would win so aimed for a landslide. They did not win. If they won a landslide it would have been a genius move. But their gamble failed badly.

I'm not sure this is true.  The aiming for a landslide part, that is.

Given how inefficiently their support is spread out among the states, they needed a 50 state strategy and didn't know it.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I think it was easy to believe that all the progress the country had made on things like gay rights over the last eight years meant the country was heading full-steam towards becoming a more progressive place. I know I was feeling like "history" was happening in an irreversible way with more and more people jumping on board.

Turns out we were wrong. We didn't want to believe that these working-class whites just didn't give a damn about the rights of their even more vulnerable neighbours. All the progress of the last few years was just incidental because these people had chosen to trust Barack Obama over the corporatist establishment figure Mitt Romney. So this election was definitely a sh-tty way to learn that progress and justice are not inevitable, but... it's a valuable lesson.

Most white people don't really care about the rights of those who have been Othered. It's not that they're against social progress and equality. They're just willing to look past a pretty large degree of hatred, bigotry, and discrimination if it means they can feel like they're being "heard." I think it's awful and inexcusable, but it is what it is, and I guess it's not AS BAD as outright bigotry. But they've still enabled it.

You're lecturing working Americans about the progress they made.  Isn't that a tad pretentious?  

I doubt you work for a living.  I doubt you have a family depending on you working.  Someday that may happen for you, but I doubt it's the case now.  And, yes, that is relevant.  I was as snotty as you toward folks I regarded as Archie Bunker types in my youth when I had no idea of the pressure one takes on when they support a family.

These hard-working Americans you so disparage have (for the most part) families to support.  Even if they're divorced, they have child support.  And they have been economically screwed.  I can take you to a place in Jackson, OH, where the Meridian Automotive plant once was.  The jobs are now in Mexico and the lot now has a retail shopping center that may provide 10 jobs that could support a family, where there was once a plant where there were hundreds of such jobs.  These folks have moved on, but not to something better (for the most part).  And, yet, you want them to support the Goddess of NAFTA as opposed to someone whose trade policies might actually help THEIR situation.  

They are, by the way, well aware that the "Othered" folks have no more care for the lot of these hard working Americans than you say they have for the "Othered" folks.  The "Othered" folks don't care about the welfare of them, or their families; they care about their own welfare.  Let's not attach virtue to the "Othered" folks that don't apply.  The "Othered" folks are hardly more altruistic than the folks you disparage.

You're proof that the Clinton crowd hasn't learned a thing about the past election.

Re-read my post and try again. I disparage the white working-class often, but I did not do so here. Unless you think it's disparaging to point out that they ultimately decided it was okay to vote for a bigot, even though they cast their ballots for reasons unrelated to their own degree of bigotry. And if so, I would respectfully ask what fantasy you're living in, because it's pretty clear that Donald Trump has said and done some pretty bigoted things. I would also add that this is an incredibly big concession for me to make, because it represents my attempt to at least give these voters the benefit of the doubt and concede that bigotry was not the motivating factor behind their decision to support Trump. Not everything has to be an argument, boo.

Anyhow, what I am explaining is why I think progressives did not see this loss coming and why the mistake was made. We assumed that the swing voters of the Rust Belt cared about the progress America had made with regards to social justice, and that it was the inevitable march forward to the right side of history. I'm not saying they should feel like they've seen progress personally (although the job numbers should speak for themselves). I'm saying the country did turn corners on things like gay rights. Turns out, though, that these Obama '12/Trump '16 voters didn't really give a sh-t about equal rights one way or the other. But Democrats were not really open to the possibility of the firewall falling because we thought the progressive march forward could only gain steam, not crumble away.

We were wrong, because it turns out that these people were never voting for the march forward that we thought they were voting for, even when they did vote Democrat. It was only ever about their own insecurities. Which yes—is how it seems anyone ever votes. We were naïve and took for granted the fact that different branding was needed to connect with those types (she did actually have solid policies for the white working class whether you care to admit it or not).

The election just sears a little more because of all the things they were willing to look past in Donald Trump to cater to their insecurities with their vote. And why they were willing to do so is the million-dollar, realistically unanswerable question.

Given that I am an Obama 2012 voter, perhaps there are things I would have had to look past to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

Make no mistake.  Hillary was targeting me and my family when she stated that half of Trump's supporters are "deplorables".  Why wouldn't she be referring to me and my wife?  Because we're non-racist Fundamentalist Christians?  I doubt it; the comments of the Clintonistas on e-mails show their views of Biblical Christians and conservative Catholics. 

Or maybe I'm in the half of Trump supporters that aren't "deplorable", but just idiots, misguided fools who can't find the bathroom without a keeper and need assistance in dropping the coin in the pay toilet.  As if I'm confused as to why I'm supporting Trump.  I'm told I'm voting against my own interest.  So let me ask you just how stupid I really am.

Trump advocates "school choice".  Clinton is a Public School Over All candidate.  My 11 year old ADHD son went through 5th grade in public school, doing worse each year, being subjected to progressive bullying each year.  A kid in 3rd grade beat him to a pulp, but got to stay in school the entire year.  The school gave this kid another chance.  A 5th grader who's 5-8 got into it with my son, who was 4-8 and 60 lbs max at the time; they BOTH were sent to the office.  Another kid beat him to a pulp where I had to take him to the ER; he was so traumatized he hasn't named the attacker to this day.  In each case, the public school gave me platitudes, but no protection.

Now, I have my son in a private, religious school.  I can afford this on a voucher.  These vouchers, however, are things the Clintonistas (and many of their supporters ) want to end, and their flunkies have lawsuits going to make that happen.  They (and people like you, I believe) view it as a blow against "religion" and "intolerance".  I see is as having to take a special needs kid out of a safe educational environment, where he is learning, and place him in the Blackboard Jungle 2.0 where he is neither physically nor emotionally safe.  If I have to work 3 jobs instead of 2 to keep him in his current school setting, so be it.  He only gets to be a kid once.  But I don't see how the public school system will keep him safe in 10th grade if they couldn't do it in 2nd or 3rd.

You go on about people being "othered".  The educational system that liberals have wrought in America have "othered" my son into the ground.  I'm doing what I need to do to give him as much of a chance as I can with what I've got, but Hillary Clinton doesn't give a crap about his chances in life if the remedy is not in the interest of unionized school teachers and liberal secular educators, folks who support her in droves.

This is real life.  Not theory.  Your candidate wants to make my son's life worse.  She certainly doesn't care if it gets better.  You'll forgive me if I found her pontifications about "children" to be offensive.  When you deal with this; when something like this causes you to lie awake in bed at night at age 59 and think about how many hours in the day you can work for his betterment, then you can lecture me, and folks in the WWC that you find deplorable who are often struggling with similar issues, about enlightened solutions to their plights.

Multiply me by thousands and then tell me why your "extraordinary woman" lost.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I do think part of the democratic problem is that they took progressivism too far, and the country finally said "ENOUGH!".

- They told us that we had to let people into a bathroom of a gender not their own simply because they woke up and suddenly felt like it - no transgender surgery or official paperwork required.

- They told us that partial-birth abortion was a good thing.

- They told us we had to get rid of the hyde amendment - something the country supports by a wide margin.

- They told us that freedom of religion didn't exist in the public sphere, and that we shouldn't even say "Merry Christmas!" in public.

- They legalized SSM through unelected judges.

- Hillary said that the republican party was the political enemy she was most proud of making.

- Hillary compared the pro-life movement to terrorist groups.

- They told us to simply ignore the fact that Hillary endangered the country by using a private email server

- They told us to not consider ISIS to be an Islamic organization.

- They told us that a majority of people who didn't support Hillary were deplorable individuals.

- They told us to completely ignore the fact that our border with mexico is not secure.

- They told us to value political correctness.

- And they told us to ignore the fact that our entitlement programs are about to become extinct, or only offered the solution of raising the payroll tax cap, which will pass congress on the proverbial 12th of Never.

Really, this was all part of them becoming completely tone deaf to a huge chunk of the country, especially in the family values, working class Midwest and south.

If family values mattered one iota Donald Trump would not be the President-Elect.

Encouraging folks to form and maintain marital nuclear families is the single most important step to a more stable and prosperous nation.

Too many families are something other than two-parent marital families.  In the aggregate, the two-parent intact marital family is the only type of family structure that can provide the sort of stability, security, and investment in children that maximizes the possibility of success (i. e. being a self-supporting, reasonably well-adjusted adult capable of stability in relationships) and mitigate problems that do occur.   I believe that the PERMANENCE of the Great Society programs have undermined the institution of the family by giving folks incentive to have children out of wedlock and disincentive to marry, and we are impacted by this in countless ways.  There are a lot of stories about heroic single mothers that are highlighted.  There are more stories of single mothers whose children are beyond their control that are not told because they undermine a narrative liberals are vested in.

[Fuzzy Bear]

1.) Assuming that Malia Obama is automatically more vulnerable than an aging factory worker is a significant reason you lost.

More vulnerable in what way? Is she not statistically more likely to be abused by the criminal justice system? Is she not more likely to lose out on a job because of her race? Was she not more likely to be born into poverty, into a broken family? Her dad was raised by a single mom, after all...

How is an aging factory worker more vulnerable in this society than an average African-American? Because he might lose his well paying job that he got out of high school and have to work for poverty wages? Welcome to the lives of young americans, african americans, hispanic americans, literally everyone except old white people, lol.

Malia Obama is a smart, pretty young woman with a famous last name and powerful, millionaire parents. If you think she is worse off than poor people just because she has a hypothetical 15% more likely chance of some cop being unnecessarily rude to her, then I have to disagree. In reality, people are not statistics. They are individuals subject to an infinite combination of hardships. Being the President's daughter transcends race. When you lump a bunch of different people into boxes and tell them that they are all the same as everyone else in their box, you are "other-izing" the world.

I agree with the above.

I would also point out that the aging factory worker who is being retrained is often being retrained to apply for jobs in which he will face significant age discrimination.