2016 Postmortem

I feel better about continuing to live among my fellow Americans after reading them

https://medium.com/@jesseleburke/how-trump-won-or-how-hillary-lost-aa6dfbcd4b8b#.23sl1oh2k
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Consider — if you believe the preceding arguments about the vast majority of his voters (enough of the general pop to win) prioritizing economic security and justice over social issues, it stands to reason that the best strategy to ensure/expand the size and loyalty of that group would be to ensure that Hillary never gets their ear. So, if I (Trump) want her to stay off the topic of economic security and justice, my strategy is:
1. First position social issues as the misguided (in that they’re not thinking about us and our survival) obsession of the out-of-touch elite who care about me not at all
2. Second, ensure then that she only talks about those very elitist social issues (thereby, creating the cognitive association of her as elite and not for them).

http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/

At such moments, it is a normal response to find someone to blame, as if identifying fault could restore the lost normality, and to lash out in anger. Hate and blame are convenient ways of making meaning out of a bewildering situation. Anyone who disputes the blame narrative may receive more hostility than the opponents themselves, as in wartime when pacifists are more reviled than the enemy.

Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in this country, but to blame bigotry and sexism for voters’ repudiation of the Establishment is to deny the validity of their deep sense of betrayal and alienation. The vast majority of Trump voters were expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the system in the way most readily available to them. (See here, here, here, here) Millions of Obama voters voted for Trump (six states who went for Obama twice switched to Trump). Did they suddenly become racists in the last four years? The blame-the-racists (the fools, the yokels…) narrative generates a clear demarcation between good (us) and evil (them), but it does violence to the truth. It also obscures an important root of racism – anger displaced away from an oppressive system and its elites and onto other victims of that system. Finally, it employs the same dehumanization of the other that is the essence of racism and the precondition for war. Such is the cost of preserving a dying story. That is one reason why paroxysms of violence so often accompany a culture-defining story’s demise.

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Even if the person you face IS a misogynist or bigot, ask, “Is this who they are, really?” Ask what confluence of circumstances, social, economic, and biographical, may have brought them there. You may still not know how to engage them, but at least you will not be on the warpath automatically. We hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not know. So let’s stop making our opponents invisible behind a caricature of evil.

We’ve got to stop acting out hate. I see no less of it in the liberal media than I do in the right-wing. It is just better disguised, hiding beneath pseudo-psychological epithets and dehumanizing ideological labels. Exercising it, we create more of it. What is beneath the hate? My acupuncturist Sarah Fields wrote to me, “Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they are forced to deal with the pain beneath.”

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