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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

If you conclude, wrongly, that Trump will get you a job, you are acting rationally in voting for him. A person can make a rational decision based on incomplete or incorrect information. People do it all the time.

Fair point, but what you said before and what I was reacting to was something different. Xenophobia, to use your example, is not rational.

No. A "slice" of Trump voters are solely economic. After stating that, I wrote, "And many others have, as Krugman notes in the excellent article you cited in another post, allowed anger about the economy to transform into anger at "others." This is a common psychological behavior. People need to personalize, to find a human target to blame. It allows for easier cathartic release."

I think we are now agreeing that it is something psychological induces people to support for Trump, in most cases, rather than just their economic conditions. Even people who initially supported Trump for solely economic reasons have continued to support him, even as he has done fuck all besides cut taxes for rich people and start a trade war.

I think you'll find a lot of what Krugman described: People who had economic gripes, and allowed those economic gripes to anger them to the point that they started scapegoating out of need to find someone to blame.

Let's just be clear: Everyone -- *everyone* -- has economic gripes. So having a gripe doesn't explain anything.

No. The only have a problem with inequality as narrowly defined by you. As I noted earlier, if you're making $72k and you are stuck, and others are making many multiples of what you are, you are unequal. For whatever reason, they are getting what you are not.

Yes. That is literally unequal. But every human society everywhere since the dawn of recorded history has had that kind of inequality, and what we know about prehistorical burial sites suggests that the same was true in prehistory as well. So that flavor of inequality is a background fact for the human condition, not a factor that can explain anything.

If you're stuck, you're stuck now. You're stuck in relation to the future, but you're stuck now, too. (To borrow from the structure of a favorite Mitch Hedberg joke).

Yes, but it's not a function of where you are, but how fast you're moving.

Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the French Revolution came when it did not because things in France got too miserable, but because they had started to improve, raising expectations, and then those expectations were not met. You are saying something like that, I think, except that you haven't figure out why expectations would be higher in 2016 than, say, in 2008.

As to minorities, well, they'd be crazy to vote for Trump.

Of course. Because there's an awful lot going on that is not about economics.

There are endless reasons to not vote for Trump if you're poor. Most notably, you're smart enough to have discerned he was full of shit about helping you out.

I think it's a serious mistake to believe that Trump voters are any dumber than the rest of us. Better to assume they are getting what they paid for, especially since so many of them seem to stick by him.

Obama did what he had to do by hooking up the banks. He'd have caused a worldwide depression if he took radical action against them.

Hank, look away while I criticize Obama for a bit.

The mistake was not that he saved the banks. And thank God he did, because the history I just read of the Great Depression shows how poorly that could have gone. The mistake was that he wasn't willing to go farther, to bail out homeowners as well as the banks that loaned them money, to err on the side of caution and doing less, and then to pivot to a self-defeating austerity. These were policy errors and also political errors.

Trump railed against a "system rigged for fat cats." His voters viewed him as a hand grenade aimed at "the swamp," which I don't think is just DC to them, but also includes the corporate world.

It is hard to imagine you saying this with a straight face after all that has happened since. No one has left him over this.

Agreed. But I think it's shifting, and quite quickly.

No. It is not shifting. The richer you are, the more likely you are to vote R.

I have no explanation for why Trump voters punch down except sheer stupidity and cheap, cruel catharsis.

Well, I will take a stab at an explanation. I think Trump voters are more comfortable with traditional hierarchies, and believe that people who have less status than them should be put in their place. They like Trump partly because he is a fat, rich, white guy with a sense of entitlement who picks fights with people who aren't like them.

If the center holds much longer, it will be because people in the middle will have become exhausted with extreme politics after Trump is done. But I don't see any reason for this. Newton's Third Law won't be satisfied by the mere Trump impeachment or loss in 2020. I see the Left gaining strength and demanding a return to more progressive D politics rather than Clintonian centrism.

I hope the Left realizes that the problem is not Trump. It's Trump voters. He only has political power because they support him. We all have to live with them after he's gone.

Then we agree. But you understand that to do so often precludes one from taking a side. I can't side with the people who decry the banks exclusively for 2008. Nor can I side with the people who blame profligate borrowers, or the Fed, or the govt, exclusively. The only "side" I can be on is to attack all four of those entities, and that sentiment is not politically popular.

If you only have two settings, BLAME EVERYONE EQUALLY and PICK ONE PERSON TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING, I can understand why this is hard for you.

My current preference is to read things that cause me to feel like I know very little. Giridharadas' work did that most recently. Turned a lot of my libertarian views on their ears. I know TM advises I should not read it now, but that's caused me to look forward to DiAngelo's book on racism more.

I still haven't read that. I also need to read the Carreyou book about Theranos.

I think I went up the river some time ago and haven't yet returned... or know the way back. Whatever it is, there's no way to reply except to hope in some small way, there's flattery there.

You used one of my favorite Apocalypse Now references a few weeks back. I don't think I applauded, for which I am regretful. It just struck me recently, when I watched the movie with the family. ...Now if I could only get the child to read the source text.

I have tried to read Heart of Darkness twice, and each time I have come down with the flu and haven't finished. Yes, I know it's a short book.

I think the line was about Kurtz's methods. I love that.