Donald Trump Is Elected President

But that's not what gets coverage.

I think a lot of people are. I know I am. A lot of that is due to the language people are using, especially when things get heated. Working on civil discourse, trying our best to refrain from saying things we might at other times regret not phrasing better. One of the benefits of forums is that we can take that moment before pressing submit to decide whether it's really something we want to send as written.

Are the Demnocrats a party of elites and the Republicans a populist party now?

I have to agree with the other commenter who asks if you lived in the Deep South. I grew up in Louisiana. In the early '90s, we had David Duke (whose name you may recognize from this campaign), an actual, genuine, Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, be a state senator, run a very close to successful campaign for US Senate, and run a very close to successful campaign the following year for governor. Wikipedia recounts the vote totals for the gubernatorial election:

[Edwin] Edwards received 1,057,031 votes (61.2%), while Duke's 671,009 votes represented 38.8% of the total. Duke nevertheless claimed victory, saying, "I won my constituency. I won 55% of the white vote," a statistic confirmed by exit polls.

We can argue about what "hates people of color" means, precisely, but if 40% of voters, and 55% of white voters, are willing to put a KKK Imperial Wizard in charge of the state, it's not an implausible claim. Maybe not half the country. Maybe a quarter. Maybe the majority in some states and not others. Maybe the core constituency of some but not all senators. Is that okay?

And given this country's recent history of explicit anti-black political actions by people in power (see e.g. George Wallace's "segregation forever" and Lee Atwater's candid statement of the Southern Strategy), it's hard to argue that that all evaporated since then.

> I don't know if any of that change or disruption is going to be good or bad for me or the rest of America, but things are certainly going to be interesting for the next four years.

There are a lot of people (e.g., me, presumably you) who can deal just fine with four "interesting" years. There are a lot of people who can't. My LGBT friends are freaking out, for instance, and with a vice president who believes in torturing the gay away, I don't blame them. My capable-of-being-pregnant friends are freaking out. My non-citizen friends on valid visas are freaking out.

Disruption to force change is a fine way to solve some problems, like Netflix's infrastructure being reliant on AWS not shutting down machines. But this isn't Netflix's infrastructure, this is people's lives. I know plenty of people who aren't asking whether to uproot their lives but how, and they're pretty uninterested in having an interesting four years.

Given Trump's win, looming Brexit etc., what's the way forward for a moderately-progressive-mostly-centrist like myself?

I can completely understand where a big chunk of Trump's support has come from. For a large number of people, globalisation is shit. Employment has become less stable; the gap between rich and poor appears to be growing; there is a sense of disenfranchisement with politics, and there is rampant corruption. Generally, people have every right to be totally pissed off with this situation; they essentially feel ignored by a distant 'elite' or whatever, and it seems pretty obvious that there will eventually be a reaction against that.

I certainly don't feel that Trump-ism and Brexiteer-ism is an actual solution to these problems; they do seem like relatively opportunistic populist movements that have capitalised on popular resentment. I have basically zero confidence that these movements will solve any of the problems they claim they will, and think that they will likely cause lots of damage along the way.

But the big question is – where is the credible centrist or even leftist alternative to this approach? Was it actually Sanders in the US? (I'm a little unclear on the extent of his support). In the UK, there's a leftward swing in the Labour Party, but that's complicated by a lacklustre leader. But is it actually the same sort of populist rebellion, just expressed in a different way?

I don't subscribe to old-fashioned Socialist views of the economy – but still, I'd like to see a world in which corruption is tackled; in which all people have a fair chance to succeed; in which education and healthcare are widely available regardless of wealth; in which companies are free to trade but are responsibly regulated… but I'm now deeply unsure of what the next steps are.