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[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

It's not garbage at all. If there's a silver lining to Trump, it's the recognition our political system has collapsed.

Disagree. But we'll get to that later.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

But for Trump, we were facing a clash of dynasties: Jeb v. Hillary. How fucking stale was that? What grand new ideas were emerging from that race? Two candidates with similar platforms both invested in punting and pretending everything's great.

I'm really very sick of this bullshit. Those two candidates are not the same. Jeb would have pushed a lot of the same policy that is currently being passed by an all-Republican Congress based on pleasing the rich with massive tax cuts, reduction of government, gutting of regulation, and laws aimed at depriving gays and people of color as many rights as possible. Hillary would not.

You keep stating that things are bad and would have remained bad for people in this country like it is a product of our political system. You need to stop. Things are bad because of runaway capitalism. You are right that globalization and automation is taking a real toll. But the fact that you constantly argue that people are hurting because the two party system is so invested in maintaining the trend of reducing workforce is absolutely insanity. The government reacts to our economic realities. It doesn't set them. So if one side is desperately trying to help the country adjust and progress to help mitigate those realities and the other is trying desperately to pretend they don't exist by shutting us off from the world, protecting jobs in dying industries while failing to invest in the ones that will carry us forward, and using racism, homophobia, and xenophobia to accomplish it, you need to acknowledge that difference.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Apparently, everything was not great.

This country is cancered. And it was cancered long before Trump's emergence, which is a symptom, not a cause. Let me repeat that, so it can sink in: Trump is a symptom, not a cause. If you hear anyone calling him a cause of the problems in America, stop listening to that person. Leave the conversation. Hell, leave the room. Your IQ can only drop from exposure to that person's views.

Stop setting up stupid fucking strawmen to knock down. No one is interested in this game.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Will Trump do damage? Undoubtably.

The amount of damage this asshole has done to this country in one fucking year with the help of a willing Republican legislative body will take 30 to 50 years to undo.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

But of value eclipsing that damage is this: The national compulsion to ask, "How could he happen?" (We're having a lot of conversations about ugly shit we avoided discussing before Trump. A lot of stuff we'd have have avoided in a Jeb or Hillary administration.)

The dimmest wits on this board, and everywhere else, will answer "Why and how Trump?" with "Russia!" Or they'll avoid it entirely, claiming Trump is the disease. Or they'll carp at third party voters, thinking themselves the wise pragmatists in the room.

No. This is what you love to do: You take one piece of the puzzle out and point at it and say, "Anyone who blames this is stupid." NO ONE does this.

Everyone on this board understands that what happened in 2016 is unprecedented. The causes are many--among them, Comey acting the fool, Russia undermining our entire system, the natural, racist swing in the opposite direction from a smart, black President, idiots like you voting third party in a very close and important election, social media, Fox News garbage, bullshit Republican hit-job Hillary investigations, etc. You need to admit to yourself that people like you contributed to the problem by not voting to keep a lunatic out of office. What happened doesn't land completely on you. But you and everyone else who voted third party sure played your part.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The smart response to Trump is to ask the tough questions. What caused his emergence? How can we address what caused his emergence? How can we remove the xenophobia, racism, and delusion behind it? (I do not think we can credibly address the economic fears behind it.) And how have we possibly enabled it through social and traditional media, cultural polarization and information "siloing"?

Who is this "we" of which you speak? There is one party that is interested in institutionalizing and codifying those things. There is one party that is interested in using all of those things as motivation to get people to the voting booth. We are reaping what that party has sown for political purposes for the last 50 years.

How do we solve it? Get one party to stop feeding, cultivating, and taking advantage of it? Maybe get them to actually protect our system of democracy from foreign attacks instead of letting the President intentionally fail to act because it currently favors them?

Politics sucks. And both parties have their issues. But there is only one party willing to destroy everything we have valued about this country just so they can remain in power.

TM