In a survey conducted by Pew after the election, 96 percent of those who cast votes for Trump said they were hopeful; 74 percent said they were “proud.” They were almost unanimous in their expectation that Trump will have a successful first term.
.. “Whether or not Trump can or should attempt to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs is not the big story here. He can’t,” Tim Duy, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon and a critic of Trump’s policies, wrote on his blog on Sunday:
The real story is that he continues to tap into the anger of his voters about being left behind. That will give him much more power than our criticisms will take away.
Validation of voter grievances, in and of itself, is a powerful political and psychological tool.
.. What Gold and others are less certain of is how long-lasting the beneficial effects of simple recognition will be in addressing the deep reservoir of white estrangement and hopelessness that survey data has revealed.
.. Among the poor, controlling for socio-demographic factors, blacks are by far the most optimistic cohort, and are close to three times more likely to be higher up on the optimism scale than poor whites.
.. Whites whom he studied, Assari reported, were less resilient, had higher suicide rates and reported higher levels of pain in their daily lives than blacks did.
.. An important approach to depression in the psychological and evolutionary literature has been to view it as an evolved response to “involuntary subordination,” to being displaced from dominance. This is exactly what happens when you have to accept a subordinate position on a status ladder because you lost your job and can’t find a comparable one.
.. The loser’s best choice, according to Gilbert’s research, is “aggression suppression” — acquiescence to involuntary subordination.
.. People may recognize that they have to behave submissively to reduce the tensions or threats between themselves and a more dominant and powerful other, and feel relief when they succeed, but they may still harbor desires for later revenge.
.. A loss of a job or other events that lower a person’s rank, status, or capacity to make an adequate living are the most malignant stressors that people experience. Most people internalize the event and hold themselves responsible. They are most prone to depression after such a loss.
.. The results can be psychologically excruciating:
The sense of vulnerability that people who lose rank experience is tremendous. They are often ashamed of the loss. They feel it is their fault. They fear that people will no longer be interested in them and that they will be alone. Loss of self-respect is the most fundamental of losses.
.. The obvious question is what will happen if, over time, Trump disappoints his buoyant supporters and revives their feelings of discontent and estrangement. How will they respond to continued economic marginalization and a failure on Trump’s part to produce sufficient numbers of good jobs at good pay?
.. If rising expectations are thwarted, the radical white nationalism of the alt-right holds the potential to become more broadly attractive. Disheartened voters can quickly become a caldron of resentment and discontent. They may seek out a leader who promises solutions even more sweeping and uncompromising than the ones Trump has proposed. There is no way to predict where anger will lead if the promises Trump made do not materialize, and if the numbers of those marginalized by hyper competition— by automation, offshoring, skill mismatch and the forces of globalization — continue to increase inexorably. Where will the blame fall then?
Donald Trump Promises to Usher In New ‘Industrial Revolution’ in Ohio Rally
President-elect vows sweeping changes to trade policy, national security, infrastructure, military spending and immigration
President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday said his administration would usher in a new “Industrial Revolution,” one of numerous promises he made in Cincinnati as he began a nationwide “Thank You” tour following his Nov. 8 election… During his speech, he stuck to many of his campaign promises. He said a wall would be built along the U.S.-Mexico border. He said his administration would “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. He said the Trump administration would seek plans and deals that benefited Americans first and not get duped into deals with other countries.
“There is no global anthem, no global currency,” he said. “We pledge allegiance to one flag, and that flag is the American flag.”
—He said he would rebuild urban areas that are blighted with crime, and said he would make the murder rate fall by changes to law enforcement policies.
—He said “we will finally end illegal immigration” and “dismantle the criminal cartels, and liberate our communities from the epidemic of gang violence and drugs pouring into our nation.”
—On the economy, he said “we can reverse the stagnation and usher in a period of true opportunity and growth.”
.. “People are constantly telling me and telling you to reduce our expectations,” he said. “Those people are fools. They’re fools.”
How It Happened
by the latest count she won 400,000 more votes than Trump, who got fewer votes than either Mitt Romney or John McCain.
.. Trump won Florida by one; Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 30,000 votes.
.. nearly 10 percent of millennials voted for third-party candidates
.. On the reasonable assumption that by far most of those who voted for the third-party candidates would have otherwise gone for Clinton, Gary Johnson, the odd-duck Libertarian, with 3.2 percent of the popular vote, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party, receiving just 1 percent, damaged and perhaps destroyed Clinton’s chances.
.. A CBS News exit poll found that if those who voted for Johnson or Stein had had to choose only between Clinton and Trump they would have supported Clinton by nearly two to one. It’s not a stretch to conclude that, absent the third-party candidates, Hillary Clinton would have won the election.
.. Hillary Clinton wasn’t giving people a reason to vote for her. “Stronger together” meant what?
.. Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her
.. Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her
.. The “moral” of the story may be that if you’re going to lie in the course of a public contest, lie so often that people can’t keep up with you
.. she started off being dismissive, and then sarcastic: asked in a press conference if she’d wiped her server she replied, “With a cloth?” And her explanations were often legalistic and evasive
.. she got nearly five million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012—resulted in the lowest voter turnout in twenty years
.. Trump channeled the anger at Washington institutions that particularly the working class felt had failed them, while Clinton came across as the very symbol of those institutions. Though Trump was a wealthy man, his populist message—even the baseball caps—made him seem accessible
.. The Clintons’ greed kept getting them in trouble.
.. white voters, whom Trump won almost across the board: not just among the working class, as expected, but also among college-educated voters, except for college-educated white women, whom Clinton won by a small margin. Among white men overall, Trump dominated, winning 72 percent of non-college-educated ones and 54 percent of those with a college education.
.. For many women voters, culture and class mattered more than gender.
.. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, by an innovative method he devised: look at how people voted in the 493 counties that have Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores, and in the 184 counties with Whole Foods stores. In 2012 Obama carried 75 percent of the counties that had a Whole Foods and 29 percent of the counties with a Cracker Barrel. But that spread was exceeded this year—in the other direction—with Trump winning 76 percent of counties with Cracker Barrel stores and just 22 percent of counties with Whole Foods.
.. Clinton came across to them as an creature from another, urban, world—a wealthy woman who liked big government and didn’t understand them.
.. He uses a critical word in describing how Trump wins the support of so many of his people: relatable. “People who are drawn to Trump are drawn to him because he’s a little outrageous, he’s a little relatable, and fundamentally he is angry and spiteful and critical of the things that people feel anger and spite toward,”
.. Trump did a good job instilling fear of an America overtaken by immigrants and it didn’t take much imagination to understand his dark prophecies of where, when blacks were also counted, this country was headed. Trump’s presidency won’t be a good time to be poor, especially a black person who is poor. And in Trumpland, with a president who ran a racist campaign, divisions between the races are set to deepen, as already shown in incidents of harassment and violence against minorities since the election.
.. His ideas for education play to those who don’t care for integrated schools
.. I always tell my clients, If you lose, lose big. Then you won’t chew over for the rest of your life what you should have done differently.” The close election is all the harder to shake off
.. Steve Bannon, of Breitbart News, pushes the “alt-right” theme of white supremacy and is believed to have been the guiding spirit behind Trump’s chillingly anti-Semetic final campaign ad, which charged that Clinton associated with three people who happen to be prominent Jews: George Soros (“those who control the levers of power in Washington”); Fed chairman Janet Yellen (“global special interests”); and Lloyd Blankfein (“put money into the pockets of large corporations”). It’s hard to see how it could have been more blatant. These weren’t “dog whistles,” they were dogs barking loudly.
.. Trump has led his followers to expect a lot. He promised to end Obamacare “on day one,” which will be difficult because it was passed by Congress and therefore isn’t his to eliminate.
- Iran deal
- renegotiate trade agreements to get better terms for America
- bring back jobs to the US
.. In probably our most divisive and ugliest election ever, he prevailed in part because he intuited much about the voters’ psyche and he’s an experienced entertainer.
.. He knew how to appeal to the angry and discontented, who saw in him someone who would “shake up Washington” and deliver on his campaign slogan to “Make America great again.”
.. what happens if Trump fails to deliver to his followers? Who, and what, will they turn to next?
Schools That Work
At Match, for example, only about 55 percent of students go on to graduate from a four-year college.
.. such schools as “high expectations, high support” schools. They devote more of their resources to classroom teaching and less to almost everything else. They keep students in class for more hours. They set high standards for students and try to instill confidence in them.
.. A frequent criticism of charters is that they skim off the best students, but that’s not the case in Boston. Many groups that struggle academically — boys, African-Americans, Latinos, special-education students like Alanna — are among the biggest beneficiaries. On average, notes Parag Pathak, also of M.I.T., Boston’s charters eliminate between one-third and one-half of the white-black test-score gap in a single year.
.. At Match, for example, only about 55 percent of students go on to graduate from a four-year college.