Those people in the upper midwest

[pbrower2a]

(11-15-2016, 04:32 PM)Odin Wrote: Scared, desperate people are easy prey for demagogues promising easy solutions, scapegoats, and a return to the "good old days". The blame falls on the Dems for not putting forward a populist message to counter Trump's BS.

But there is no all-powerful Party boss in either party deciding who can run and who must not. The alleged Establishment of the GOP would have rather had Mitt Romney, who is much less abrasive and more likely to make deals. Guess where that went? Romney did not run.

I would feel far better knowing that Mitt Romney were President-elect. Disappointed that my side lost -- but much would be safe that is in gross peril now. I might contrast Donald trump from the primaries and say "at least we did not get that".

If America goes bad next year with a President acting like the despot that his character suggests, then maybe the Republicans are as much at fault for failing to stop Donald Trump than Democrats are for having a nominee with some vulnerabilities. It would have not taken much for Hillary Clinton to have won.

In the unlikely event that the 2015 election were to be invalidated, I would accept Mitt Romney as the next President as a compromise. We get conservatism, but we also get some steadiness of character and some moral principle.

Quote:Indeed, the Dems did the exact WRONG things, putting up a candidate who is the embodiment of the establishment in an election year when the electorate was out for the establishment's blood. Praising years of economic growth that folks in Middle America are not seeing because all that new wealth is concentrated among the wealthy and middle class on the coasts, sounding completely tone-deaf in the process and reinforcing sentiments that the Dems have become the party of the "coastal elites", representing Wall Street and Silicon Valley rather than the average American. Not restraining over-the-top activist types who imply that working class whites have no right to complain about their problems because of "white privilege". Telling older blue collar workers that they just need "retraining", ignoring that older workers would still struggle to find work because of effectively ageist hiring practices, and also ignoring that many of these new jobs mean moving across the country, destroying the bonds of community these people and their families have built up over the years.

But are Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, and New Mexico "coastal"?

It would have been reasonable to offer such a solution to the health care costs of older workers with "Medicare at 50"; such would negate the biggest spur to age discrimination. Employers would find virtue in hiring older workers who have some stability and some people skills that younger workers have yet to develop.

OK, there is no such thing as 'white privilege' if one is a poor white person in rural areas. West Virginia is poor and very rural, and it has few minorities. It is not and never has been Jim Crow country. I could explain how things went wrong in West Virginia, but that involves excessive dependence upon coal for an economic base and miners for the political base of the Democratic Party while Democratic Party pols neglected the hazard that coal seams would be worked out.

Quote:In the long term some form of guaranteed minimum income is the only answer, but that requires overcoming centuries, millennia even, of cultural conditioning involving the belief that the only valid source of income is from one's own labor. In the mean time, folks here in the heartland need jobs. and folks in the big cities on the coasts need to quit treating folks out here as objects of contempt and scorn. You might not agree with their religious convictions and what you perceive as "backward" social attitudes, but they are still human beings who deserve respect.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, economic growth corresponded with improving lives for working people. Strong unions forced wages to keep pace with increases in productivity; that kept consumption high. {Don't blame imports; the material objects imported are now far less important than the services that one pays for to make those objects valuable. Ask yourself whether you have spent more on cable television than on the television sets that you have watched cable TV on. Ask yourself whether you have paid more on a cell phone than you can expect to pay for cell phone access or for your computer than for the Internet access).

We may be stuck with a larger potential workforce than there is work for it to do. Such is not overpopulation; it is progress. We might push formal education, especially liberal formal education.