No, I've not become a supporter of his. Far from it. But if I look at the possible medium-term futures (post-2020) as they exist now, I can't help but notice they're much brighter than if Clinton had won the election.
I know it's unfashionable to think very far into the future, instead focusing on the suffering that GOP policies are causing now or in the very near future. Make no mistake, this is real. But there's now a lot more potential to actually make substantial fixes to our system moving forward.
The thing about the Republican party is that they managed to do quite well as the party of "no", but all of their actual policies are deeply unpopular - more so than the Dem policies they were elected in protest of.
The ACA's approval rating shot into the high 50s as the Republican bill languished at 29%. Cutting tax credits for upper-middle-income mortgages (a rare policy I agree with), adoptions, charitable giving, student loan interest, taxing grad student tuition remission, and so on, just for a corporate tax cut, is deeply unpopular as well. Most liberal social issues have solid majorities behind them by this point. Et cetera.
Losing 2016 is the only way the Dems could possibly regain control of statehouses and governor's offices before the 2018 and 2020 elections, determining who gets to gerrymander districts for the next decade. It also gives them much better odds of retaining their Senate seats in 2018 and possibly regaining the chamber in 2020. Further, the GOP president is incompetent, hampering his party's ability to cause damage while keeping it unpopular.
Imagine Obama 2011-16, but without his personal likability and cleanliness from scandals. If anything, the Dems would lose even more downballot races and keep holding nothing but the White House, causing interminable gridlock. The Democrats would be much more of a target for the frustrations of people who are losing out, and the level of tension among right-wingers in the heartland would keep climbing, risking outright organized violence, not just a spree killer here and there, and aided and abetted by even more frantic conspiracy theories at Breitbart, Infowars, etc. Now it's likely to blow over rather than blow up. The pressure is not totally gone, but greatly reduced by the Gasbag-In-Chief, who vents the pressurized hot air of that group like a safety valve via his interminable Tweetstorms.
To top everything off, the Democrats have finally figured out that their approach is deeply flawed. This much was obvious in 2010 and 2014, as they got slaughtered at every level, but having Obama there still gave them the belief that "progress [as they define it] is inevitable". They may stay stuck in their old approaches for now, out of instiitutional inertia if nothing else, but there is finally a chance that they may figure out how to be truly popular. With President Clinton II, they would continue sleepwalking toward the abyss.
The risk of true electoral authoritarian rule (e.g. Chavez, Erdogan, Orban, Putin, Duterte) remains as low as I had hoped it would be. Trump shows fondness for authoritarian rulers, but he has no ability to actually do that here. Both he and his party are way too incompetent to actually make the American state behave in that way. I read quite a bit about all of these characters after Trump's win, and what struck me is how much better they were at planning how to chip away at the democratic structures in their societies and then executing their plans. But neither Trump nor Ryan nor anyone else is showing any signs of pulling this off.
On social justice issues, we're seeing that people actually feel the need to organize and fight for them, and even to include others as allies rather than Balkanizing. Liberals I've talked to have shown a rapid gain in their understanding of intersectionality - that things like class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. are all interrelated, meaning that collaboration among many different interest groups is critical. And it's just beginning to show results.
Stunningly, we're making a major shift towards sexual harassment being truly not okay. That would never be the case if people were still trying to justify whatever Bill's latest sex scandal was and Hillary's attempts to cover it up just like in the 1990s. But a president who brags that he can "grab 'em by the pussy" is a truly effective catalyst for positive change away from that sort of behavior - within liberal ranks and not just outside them.
On immigration, Trump's ICE is deporting more people than the 2013-16 average, but we're only back to the rate that happened during Obama's first term, when nobody talked about it because the president was a well-spoken, highly competent, educated, mixed-race establishment liberal. On race relations, some white nationalist types have come out of the woodwork - only to be exposed for what they are in places like Charlottesville (take a look at the 2013 to 2017 vote swing there and in Albemarle County surrounding it to see how unpopular that event was). Jeff Sessions is as regressive and racist as they come within the GOP's top officials, but it's unlikely he'll manage to revive the Clinton I mass incarceration consensus despite his best efforts.
I still don't know about foreign policy. Clinton is a strong proponent of the 1990s liberal interventionist/"responsiblity to protect" doctrine, which seemed to work well in that decade but which has been a disaster ever since. She showed no signs of learning from the 2000s and 2010s, in which the limits to such a policy were blindingly obvious. Trump, on the other hand, is more willing to make peace with the fact that lots of the world is authoritarian, will not be liberal-democratic in the forseeable future, and that attempting to spread it anyway is a bad idea that greatly increases tensions with world powers like Russia and China. But he's highly erratic and may accidentally green-light an explosion of built-up Middle Eastern tension into outright war between Saudi (+Israeli) and Iranian blocs and jump on on the Saudi side, while Clinton would keep things more like Obama's status quo, except with a few more bombs and drone strikes.
All in all, the picture is really clear to me. As long as Ruth Bader Ginsburg keeps taking her vitamins, we're better off with Trump in office for now.
I know it's unfashionable to think very far into the future, instead focusing on the suffering that GOP policies are causing now or in the very near future. Make no mistake, this is real. But there's now a lot more potential to actually make substantial fixes to our system moving forward.
The thing about the Republican party is that they managed to do quite well as the party of "no", but all of their actual policies are deeply unpopular - more so than the Dem policies they were elected in protest of.
The ACA's approval rating shot into the high 50s as the Republican bill languished at 29%. Cutting tax credits for upper-middle-income mortgages (a rare policy I agree with), adoptions, charitable giving, student loan interest, taxing grad student tuition remission, and so on, just for a corporate tax cut, is deeply unpopular as well. Most liberal social issues have solid majorities behind them by this point. Et cetera.
Losing 2016 is the only way the Dems could possibly regain control of statehouses and governor's offices before the 2018 and 2020 elections, determining who gets to gerrymander districts for the next decade. It also gives them much better odds of retaining their Senate seats in 2018 and possibly regaining the chamber in 2020. Further, the GOP president is incompetent, hampering his party's ability to cause damage while keeping it unpopular.
Imagine Obama 2011-16, but without his personal likability and cleanliness from scandals. If anything, the Dems would lose even more downballot races and keep holding nothing but the White House, causing interminable gridlock. The Democrats would be much more of a target for the frustrations of people who are losing out, and the level of tension among right-wingers in the heartland would keep climbing, risking outright organized violence, not just a spree killer here and there, and aided and abetted by even more frantic conspiracy theories at Breitbart, Infowars, etc. Now it's likely to blow over rather than blow up. The pressure is not totally gone, but greatly reduced by the Gasbag-In-Chief, who vents the pressurized hot air of that group like a safety valve via his interminable Tweetstorms.
To top everything off, the Democrats have finally figured out that their approach is deeply flawed. This much was obvious in 2010 and 2014, as they got slaughtered at every level, but having Obama there still gave them the belief that "progress [as they define it] is inevitable". They may stay stuck in their old approaches for now, out of instiitutional inertia if nothing else, but there is finally a chance that they may figure out how to be truly popular. With President Clinton II, they would continue sleepwalking toward the abyss.
The risk of true electoral authoritarian rule (e.g. Chavez, Erdogan, Orban, Putin, Duterte) remains as low as I had hoped it would be. Trump shows fondness for authoritarian rulers, but he has no ability to actually do that here. Both he and his party are way too incompetent to actually make the American state behave in that way. I read quite a bit about all of these characters after Trump's win, and what struck me is how much better they were at planning how to chip away at the democratic structures in their societies and then executing their plans. But neither Trump nor Ryan nor anyone else is showing any signs of pulling this off.
On social justice issues, we're seeing that people actually feel the need to organize and fight for them, and even to include others as allies rather than Balkanizing. Liberals I've talked to have shown a rapid gain in their understanding of intersectionality - that things like class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. are all interrelated, meaning that collaboration among many different interest groups is critical. And it's just beginning to show results.
Stunningly, we're making a major shift towards sexual harassment being truly not okay. That would never be the case if people were still trying to justify whatever Bill's latest sex scandal was and Hillary's attempts to cover it up just like in the 1990s. But a president who brags that he can "grab 'em by the pussy" is a truly effective catalyst for positive change away from that sort of behavior - within liberal ranks and not just outside them.
On immigration, Trump's ICE is deporting more people than the 2013-16 average, but we're only back to the rate that happened during Obama's first term, when nobody talked about it because the president was a well-spoken, highly competent, educated, mixed-race establishment liberal. On race relations, some white nationalist types have come out of the woodwork - only to be exposed for what they are in places like Charlottesville (take a look at the 2013 to 2017 vote swing there and in Albemarle County surrounding it to see how unpopular that event was). Jeff Sessions is as regressive and racist as they come within the GOP's top officials, but it's unlikely he'll manage to revive the Clinton I mass incarceration consensus despite his best efforts.
I still don't know about foreign policy. Clinton is a strong proponent of the 1990s liberal interventionist/"responsiblity to protect" doctrine, which seemed to work well in that decade but which has been a disaster ever since. She showed no signs of learning from the 2000s and 2010s, in which the limits to such a policy were blindingly obvious. Trump, on the other hand, is more willing to make peace with the fact that lots of the world is authoritarian, will not be liberal-democratic in the forseeable future, and that attempting to spread it anyway is a bad idea that greatly increases tensions with world powers like Russia and China. But he's highly erratic and may accidentally green-light an explosion of built-up Middle Eastern tension into outright war between Saudi (+Israeli) and Iranian blocs and jump on on the Saudi side, while Clinton would keep things more like Obama's status quo, except with a few more bombs and drone strikes.
All in all, the picture is really clear to me. As long as Ruth Bader Ginsburg keeps taking her vitamins, we're better off with Trump in office for now.
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