Whose Fault is this?

Now more than 24hrs past the Trump election, and all my Bernie people are blowing up the internet with accusations blaming the DNC for pushing Hillary to the front. I'm pretty sure that is scapegoating. I seem to recall a lot of very doubtful liberals who thought Bernie was a risk, and considering the clowns the Republicans were running, were very risk averse. People played it safe and voted for the status quo candidate. Obama is the first president leaving office in a good enough position to help his successor since Reagan, the economy has been steadily improving, so why not, right? The DNC may have chosen its side, but so did the Democratic voters as a whole, and I firmly believe it was the wrong choice. Even if Hillary WON I'd probably say it was the wrong choice, just 4 years later.

We officially reached a tipping point this year, where the disconnect between Democrats and its blue collar working class was too great. The maps tell the story, where all the Dems in the big cities were happy to vote for the status quo, while the blue collar workers had clearly had enough. It reminds me of Israel and Palestine, where the status quo is comfortable for the guys in charge, but means the steady degradation of life as they know it for the subjugated. It's a bit extreme, but is that where we are now? Did the blue collar labor unions vote for someone who himself ships jobs overseas and circumvents unions, just because they don't know any better? Or were they willing to take their chances on someone who was at least making the promises they wanted to hear? If that's where they are, I don't blame the red states for going Trump any more than I blame Palestinians for fighting back against Netanyahu. I have no doubt at all that things would have been a hell of a lot worse than they are now if the conservatives had control during the recession, and I can certainly support that claim. But how disparate are the metrics we use to measure our success from the reality of towns where the median income is maybe only $30k? People living in poverty probably don't care about your positive GDP and unemployment rates.

I've been sharing this Robert Reich talk, because it's a great insight on where we were just before the election, but in it he talks about this divide, and how to cross it. He recommends starting the dialogue, but how do you even have an intelligent conversation like this? I had this conversation with my CEO, and among the responses was, "what about the 40 people Hillary killed?" And she wasn't talking about Benghazi or any less direct deaths. I had to look it up later, she meant the conspiracy theory that literally anyone who's died in the last 30 years who had any connection with Hillary was killed BY Hillary... stunning. How do you even have that conversation?

The conservative outlets have been stoking fear and racism, and reinforcing ignorance and stupidity, ushering in the post-factual era in which we apparently now live. Trump is the very pinnacle of this post-factual era. There are countless examples, my most recent favorite is not a poignant or meaningful one (of which there are many), but it is entertaining. This video is of Donald Trump's account of Obama handling a heckler at a Clinton rally, side by side with what actually happened. My first reaction was that maybe this was a fake video, and Trump was referring to a separate incident... I could find no evidence to support that. But it can't be real, right? Why even go out of your way to make up such a lie? Especially if people are actually going to "take a look" as he suggests, only to find POTUS handling a situation unbelievably generously. It just doesn't make sense... until you read the comments. Apparently Trump supporters, even when seeing the evidence side by side, eat up the lies. It could've also been played side by side with a video of Trump's response to hecklers at his own rallies, especially the one where he kicked out one of his own supporters, whom he mistook for a heckler. I see these things and wonder, "what fucking planet do I live on?"

Anyway, I digress, and will wrap this up. I think the points I was trying/failing to make were that 1) the DNC is a convenient scapegoat, 2) maybe Trump is not simply the product of ignorance and racism, but rather desperation against the status quo... and ignorance, and 3) the post-factual era probably needs to be ended before the gap can be bridged.