Election Day Open Thread
Philosofriends, care to share your thoughts, hopes, fears, predictions, ideas, stories, etc., about the election?
Want to draw attention to some election-related material by philosophers?
Have at it in the comments.
Waiting in line to vote this morning, I noticed this sign:
I love how one of the options they list for you, if you’ve forgotten your ID, is to go home and get it and then come back. Very helpful.
Also helpful was the next sign:
Happy election day, folks, and hold on tight.
Here’s an important message for anyone who hasn’t voted yet (particularly Trump voters)
http://chaospet.com/269-rigged/
I put this on up on Twitter yesterday but just in case you missed this allegory about the American experiment (portrayed by an iguana), it’s a must watch. Make sure the volume is turned on.
In an election year wherein both parties have candidates with serious deficiencies, we can only hope whoever is elected can overcome those deficiencies and govern as a true statesperson Long shot, but then, so were the Chicago Cubs. Hope springs eternal. It would be nice if we had more than a two party system and third parties and beyond could actually be taken seriously.
Let’s hope all will be well and we can avoid disaster whoever is elected. That this is the first time in my life I ever thought such, it says much about how we have failed to encourage the best and brightest to run for office. Maybe the primary system is in need of revision?
Respectfully, this just shows how out of touch liberal academia (and media prognosticators) are with the US electorate. 90% of people here think Trump is unredeemable, but he wins easily. What isnserious takeaway here in terms of self-awareness or hubris? Philosophers are smart and Americans are dumb? Or, in terms of introspection, maybe the self-congratulatory liberal narcissism is a failed project. Maybe liberal bias in academia is distortional. Let’s drop the president-elect bashing and talk about it.
It isn’t that we think Trump is unredeemable that makes us out of touch. He’s a very bad candidate. The fact that we thought he was sure to lose makes us out of touch, but no more so than anyone else being guided by the polls and analysts. What really makes us out of touch is our failure to contribute much to the public discussion about who to vote for. We philosophers talk about and argue politics endlessly, but generally only with one another and generally only with those who already largely agree with us.
He’s losing the popular vote. Hardly an ‘easy’ win. It’s extremely likely that (very slightly) more people voted for Clinton than Trump.
[trying to repost this as the first version seems to have vanished]
The lesson of this election – I’m sorry to say – is that partisans of left and right dialed to recognize that geopolitical stability and the basic norms of representative democracy are far more valuable than even deeply held views about the right policy position *within* those parameters.
That goes both for the partisans of the left who failed to recognize the significance of the lesser of two evils, and the – far more numerous – partisans of the right who put the will to power ahead of their own consciences and the fundamental virtues of small-c conservatism.
God help us all.
I predicted a Trump win from the very beginning when basically no one in the media took him seriously. I even bet a little money on it. How did I do this?
The US economy has tanked. GDP has been around 2% for ages now. However that’s with the government’s inflation numbers. These numbers say the price of a car has only risen 1% since the 70s or 80s. That’s hilariously stupid. Real GDP has been negative for years and years, probably since 2000.
Young Americans graduate college and can’t find good jobs that support a family, so they move in with their parents. Huge portions of young people now in fact live with their parents. I think about half of 25 year olds do so if I remember correctly. It’s mind blowing really.
Philosophy is a special case to be sure, but insight can be found even here. Whenever there is a job market thread, they are overwhelmingly negative. Most people post saying how they spent years pursuing philosophy, publishing in good places, and so on, only to fall flat on their faces.
The decline in manufacturing has destroyed entire US cities. Look at Detroit! Look at St. Louis! We now have as many waitresses and bartender jobs as manufacturing jobs. These jobs do not pay enough to start a family. Many people are having to work multiple low wage jobs to get by. It must be exhausting and dehumanizing!
Globalism has failed the American people. Crony capitalism has failed the American people. Normally, the people have no choice but to vote for the stooges, but Trump had enough money to bypass the normal funding process whereby people are forced to work for the failed system.
He won because the US economy is in ruins. He won because the establishment who have ruled us are so far removed from reality and care so little about the poor and impoverished that people finally ousted them.
The Democrats have only themselves to blame. If they had allowed Sanders to be nominated I suspect he’d be president, not Trump.
I’m sorry, but this is a demonstrably false narrative if you believe the exit polls. It appears that less than education and economics (Trump won a plurality among folks making more than 100K a year, Clinton those making below that. Education too wasn’t a decisive factor, although this is certainly a split with 52% of college grads going Clinton and 52% of non college grads going Trump), this was a contest over white supremacy. Trump carried majorities among both white men and white women and among no other race. (http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls)
Trump won a lower percentage of whites than Romney did. The big difference was economic rage.
It is worth adding, Trump won more of the black and Latino vote than Romney did.
I realize that feelings are holistic, but that little paragraph on philosophy makes me think that is where this is all coming from. You surely don’t think that the bad job market in philosophy is part of a secular decline (if such exists) in the US economy? And you surely don’t think that any of this, especially not the philosophy job market, is going to get any better under Trump.
I made a prediction of who would win based on economics and made a lot of money off it.
Promqueen, is this the same CNN that predicted a HIllary landslide?
Mohan, I do think the bad job market in philosophy is part of a bigger decline. I don’t think anything will get better any time soon. I’m not saying that Trump will make anything better. I’m saying why he won.
One important moral from all this is that we on the left have to be more class conscious. Working class white people (especially males) ought to be on the left out of their own best interests, but think that the left doesn’t care about them and don’t take their problems seriously. In academia, we seem to hear very little about class oppression compared to other kinds of oppression, despite the fact that class oppression is the most serious form of oppression we have in the USA. Obviously, class overlaps with others categories–a black person is more likely to be poor than a white person, for example. We shouldn’t ignore such things. But we also need to take the working class more seriously as an oppressed group in itself.
The trade deals and the related outsourcing has seriously harmed the working class. The democrats have supported these policies just like the republicans. This is why neither party won the election. I mean, yes Trump is republication but only nominally. All the establishment republican candidates lost, and the republican party didn’t like or want Trump.
My auto correct likes to change republican to republication for some reason.
While it’s true that the loss of manufacturing has hurt a good portion of the U.S. and heightened resentment in parts of the electorate, it can’t be seriously argued that the U.S. economy in general has “tanked” or is “in ruins”, unless you are using these in some technical sense. Not that this stops some media outlets from declaring economic disaster at every turn. These outlets will, of course, sound very different with regard to coming jobs reports and GDP numbers, whether those numbers change or not.
“You’re life is bad, and these people are the cause of it” – will always sell well.