First they came for the Iranians

Pardon the generalization here, but I know a lot of "non-college people" who support things like Trump and Brexit and would like to offer up an interpretation as to what many of them are thinking. Bear in mind they skew a bit older as well so they've seen a lot change.

If you're a college educated person and/or a tech person and you live in a big coastal city the past few decades have probably been pretty great, these cities have boomed, there are all these new industries that have sprung up, they've produced great jobs, you are smart and you work hard, same as the people around you, and everyone has gotten more conscious about big picture issues like the environment, gender equality and multiculturalism.

If you are non college educated, you don't live in one of these booming cities (or you live in a shitty part of town), and you haven't gotten involved in the new economy the picture may be very different. A lot of people in this category have witnessed the decimation of the manufacturing base and the communities around it. They've watched meth sweep over the country and ruin lives. They've dealt firsthand with the ramifications of teen pregnancies, broken homes, perpetual joblessness. All problems which affect "non college" people much more than they affect those with college degrees and stable white collar jobs.

So a lot of these people have seen the world get worse, not better. Their focus is on stability in their personal lives and it's getting harder. When you take that as a given and you start talking about issues of morality and idealism they might even get offended - what makes you so great that you spend your time worrying about this stuff instead of the practical concerns of keeping your job, covering rent and food, and staying away from shit that'll ruin your life (booze, drugs, bad people, whatever)?

They have no idea what to do other than vote for someone who at least sounds like them and sounds like he wants to help. That definitely wasn't Hillary. It wasn't Obama or McCain or Romney either but when Trump came on the scene they perked up and they went to the polls. And in fairness if he ends up doing stuff like building oil pipelines and cutting funding to the EPA, then he's creating jobs they can do and giving the finger to the comfortable asshole academics who've never had to worry about these problems.

They are not morally deaf IMO. They just have more immediate problems to worry about in their lives (or perhaps did at some point and still maintain those attitudes).

The difficult but clear solution in my eyes is to help them get what they deserve as fellow citizens, and which "college people" have, which is jobs, safe neighborhoods, and stable lives.

First, there is no real way to measure "the will of the majority" except through votes cast and, to a lesser extent, through polls. The majority of votes were cast for Clinton, not Trump. That's a clear fact. The polls are also clear that Trump had lower approval ratings than past presidents, and his disapproval ratings were far higher than any other president when they came into office. This is also a fact.

We can, of course, argue with who Trump represents, because depending on who we are, his words and his actions are going to be interpreted differently. My interpretation is that he represents straight white men. More specifically, wealthy straight, white, men.

New York and California make up over 18% of the population. Those citizens are absolutely just as important as citizens of any other state when it comes to discussing the popular vote. While Trump might have won the popular vote in 30 states, that does nothing to diminish the fact that Clinton won the popular vote by close to 2.8 million votes.

While I'll admit that some of what I said can be considered opinion, the other parts of what I said are VERY clearly supported by fact.

Including Iran on that list baffled me, too.

You have options, lots of it. Look to Canada and Holland. They have fine programs too.

"I would genuinely enjoy someone explaining how dismissing the right-wing as sexist is any different than dismissing all of feminism as sexist because there exist sexist feminists."

You just said OP is demonstrating othering and slander and then you expect intellectual honesty? And then you get ferociously downvoted? I think you're better off spending time with the following writer than expecting a serious response to your question.

"Conservatives have made incredible hay out of the perception that liberals sneer at people who don’t live in coastal enclaves. These arguments accept that frame even as they dispute its conclusions, which is not a good argumentative strategy. Additionally, many of these tweets have replies sneering at “rednecks.” Why are you doing that? What is the political value? Aren’t you trying to win elections precisely in the places where these statements would appear most insulting? This is the unfortunate reality: neither the Electoral College nor the Senate are going anywhere anytime soon. They are facts of life. You can refuse to do what’s necessary to win back power in a country structurally designed to make red states disproportionately powerful while Republicans set about implementing an agenda. Or you can develop a strategic political discourse that demonstrates a sensible attitude towards how you frame your appeals. I get it: these aren’t campaign slogans or TV ads for Democrats. But the communal rhetoric of an ideology matters. The day-to-day messaging of the members of a political party matters. What exactly is the political advantage that you think you’re getting from talking like this?"

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/01/10/ok-lets-get-constructive...

"His point is pretty simple: as political segregation increases, with people from dramatically different political camps less and less likely to interact, the really bitter political arguments are intra-group, not inter-group. That is, the battles that are most personal and toxic stop being Democrat-Republican but left-liberal, alt-trad, insurgents-establishment.

Alexander names a few indicative examples. Online atheism is a really good one, with battles within atheists of different dispositions being far more frequent and ugly than those between atheists and believers, precisely because the latter groups interact so rarely. Primary season 2016 was the ur-example. The actual presidential campaign was ugly in many ways. But the Sanders vs. Clinton and alt-right vs. establishment GOP fights were more personal, more tiring, more toxic. The perpetual tendency of Clinton partisans to say that Sanders supporters are “just as bad” as the alt-right – a Nazi-influenced far right extremist group, mind you – exemplifies this tendency. Fargroups are further away politically than neargroups, but they don’t live in our shared social and professional spaces while neargroups do, and so they don’t inspire quite the same kind of personal animus."

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/01/11/i-know-my-own-group-by-d...