What is your take and opinion on 2016 presidental election?

What is your take and opinion on 2016 presidental election?

How did it affect to the US of A and its future

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It accelerated the contradictions.

changed absolutely nothing. the U.S. government was sold to big corporations a long ass time ago. these elections change nothing and are a charade, exemplified by the fact that every president now has the same economic and foreign policy.

It was real change. Not in a political sense. It was a nihilistic wail of the generations of people who the american dream no longer exists for, who know nothing will ever actually change but that the last thing the establishment wanted was a wwe hall of famer to be president. His continued existence as president causes them a psychic pain.
I think zizek even says that trump winning is a symbol of the old system cracking.
How cathartic was it when he won?
The neoliberals thought they would be in power forever after obama, that it was a new age of never ending democratic dominance. The intense and obnoxious liberal identity politics of the obama years finally punched in the nose. The liberal cultural stagnation under obama giving way to a chaos of trump which revives the post cold war left from their coma.

Trumps reign really isn't any different from Obama's. If anything I'm now slightly better off since I no longer have to pay a fine for the privilege of not being able to afford healthcare. I think the reaction to Trump is starting to move the country towards a more socdem path but the Neoliberals in the Democrats are doing everything they can to prevent that.

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*takes a deep breath*

The principal divide in American politics is between two competing – but co-dependent – factions of elites who do not debate how much of the surplus should be redistributed, but which industry sectors should be advantaged.

Let me back up for a minute and explain why, and what this had to do with 2016 and where we might go next.

From the New Deal to the mid-1980s or so, the U.S. had a largely closed national economy with full employment, steadily rising wages, and business-labor compacts in which firms agreed to raise wages, encourage lifetime employment and provided benefits as long as labor didn't strike. This resolved the crisis of the 1930s and kept capitalism going as capital made concessions to labor, and the primary political question in American politics was about how much of the surplus should be redistributed. The Democrats were in favor of more, the Republicans in favor of less, but the debates of the day revolved around this question.

However, this blew up in the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s this issue was largely resolved – the "neoliberal" shift – in the favor of capital: trade barriers went down and American capitalists gained access to the world's cheap labor supply. Inflation went to practically zero, but so did wages for American workers, and corporate profits went up. To maintain effective demand, the U.S. deregulated the financial industry which enabled demand to continue through cheap credit. A lot of this credit (i.e. debt) ended up in the housing market, with people using their houses as piggy banks to pay for their consumption. This of course contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

The composition of the political parties also changed along urban and rural lines, with the suburbs and exurban areas becoming the battlefield for control over the government. The parties' bases in urban and rural areas reflect the industries which the parties came to represent.

Remember that the modern American economy is a "value chain" in which goods come out of the ground and are turned into marketable commodities, which are more valuable than the original goods that went into making them. As the goods pass through each step of the chain, more value is added. The Democratic Party today primarily represents the industries higher up on the value chain – and these industries are primarily located in cities.

Urban industries include most of the service sector, from technological development, public relations, finance, journalism, accounting, education, legal services, human resources, NGOs, government / civil service bureaucrats, etc. that are essential to the functioning of upper stages of the value chain. All of these industries coordinate to manage, market and *service* the flow of commodities. The rural economy is for the most part rooted in industries lower down this chain, and includes manufacturing, agriculture, and extractive industries such as coal, oil and gas, land developers, construction – and the management strata of these industries.

This explains why there are these social/cultural conflicts, as they are a reflection of these industries' material bases. Global industries tend to have a more socially liberal outlook, because these industries operate globally; so it's in their interest to tolerate outsiders. "Rooted" industries in the rural economy are more actually reactionary, as their wealth is often tied up in ownership of land, family inheritances, and particular physical places. Coal miners in West Virginia cannot move without starting over from scratch, because they are digging coal out of the mountains in a particular place. These industries also face greater risks on the global marketplace than the urban sectors, which contributes to a protectionist outlook and suspicion of outsiders. They tend to vote for Republicans. The urban sectors tend to vote for Democrats.

So the solutions being offered are basically about favoring these different industries and blaming the Other, not redistributing the surplus as such. The Democrats say the solution is "innovation," being more open and tolerant, and technological development – with the fault being placed on backwards "deplorables" who won't get the bright idea to abandon their land, families and rooted communities for the cities. The Republicans say we should exclude people "not like us" (including immigrants) while shielding our primary-sector industries from global shocks, with the blame being placed on "cosmopolitans" plotting to undermine their way of life. Both parties also get sections of "their" respective proletariats (at least the ones who actually vote) to vote for them out of fear of the Other.

Next post… where I think this might go.

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(me)
So where does this go?

Hell if I know.

We might just be stuck in this for the foreseeable future, with the Democrats retaking power in 2020 or 2024 with a new arch-technocratic president like Beto O'Rourke. They won't exclude people "not like us," but they also won't solve any of the fundamental economic and political problems because their solutions – like Obama – are focused on "innovative" delivery of services rather than combating unjust structures of power and wealth. Instead of universal higher education, we have "education reform" such as charter schools. Instead of guaranteeing everyone a job, we have "job training" for the workers in West Virginia displaced by our technocratic economic policies. Drone warfare is another version of this. We are still at war and bombing other countries from Somalia to Yemen and Afghanistan, but we're not suffering losses (at least enough to matter). You're still poor and work a shitty job, but it's a shitty skilled job!

The only conceivable way out would be a neo-FDR or neo-New Deal style shift in the Democrats to someone like Bernie Sanders. In a way, Bernie is a nationalist like the protectionist right wing in a lot of ways, although there are some differences: Bernie and the left-wing nationalists are not hostile to immigrants or "SJWs" but don't have as many issues with Trump's protectionist economic policies. The left-wing nationalists also don't tend to revert to the cultural prejudices of their material base to explain what is wrong with America, as technocratic Democrats and nationalist Republicans do. What they offer instead is to solve these cultural problems through divvying up the national surplus in the form of universal higher education, wage increases, a Green New Deal to build wind farms all over the country, and nationalize healthcare as much as possible.

The fact that this does pose a challenge to capital – although it does not offer to eliminate the capital-owning class – is why the Bernie-style left-wing nationalists (including AOC) are opposed but not suppressed. If they did pose a threat beyond wanting to revert to an FDR-style economy (which capital did tolerate back then), then they would be violently suppressed and eliminated, if necessary. Instead, there are other measures that capital is taking. Bernie was allowed to run, but was ratfucked out of the nomination in 2016, and there will be various measures to try to co-opt this movement and steer it into something that doesn't pose a threat to the existing system. This again would be someone like Beto O'Rourke or Kamala Harris running on a fake "Medicare for All" platform.

And heaping doses of idpol.

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A wolf vs a wolf in a sheep's clothing. Nothing important.

The problem is that the capitalists running the world today are significantly dumber than the people they inherited their wealth from. They probably don't even realize that the money they make can only persist on a non-contradictory Keynesian capitalist economy. I fear this time, upon the 2020 crash they will form some kind of Pinochet or Hitler like reaction rather than assessing contradictory economic incongruities and will ultimately inadvertently decimate this country.

*the capitalists running America

Exellent analysis, particularly of the different sectors of support for Republicans and Democrats. Saved.

FDR had to kick the American capitalist class kicking and screaming into the New Deal; if it was up to them, they would have implemented Merkel-tier austerity after their laissez-faire policies continued to fail (as they did before FDR took office). They didn't "rationally assess" that Keynsianism was correct until it had already become institutionalized.

Additionally, it should be noted that both American and European porkies were thoroughly willing to back fascist/autocratic solutions to their problems back in the day. See: Hitler-loving businessmen like Henry Ford, the Business Plot scandal, the UK and France funding Mussolini during WW1, support from Krupp/Porsche/other German military-industrial giants for Hitler, etc.

Yes, but the military didn’t care about the relocation of civilian Industry, which Trump is tariffing.

I think it's just time for everyone to stop fucking talking about this

Stop trying to make 2016 second impact, stop helping to make 2016 second impact

jesus fucking christ what more can be said that hasn't been said. Shit thread, shit op, shit nation, please stop

I have a feeling if a guy like beto wins he is going to end up as the american macron

politically it doesnt matter
i enjoyed seeing liberals panic quite a lot, very satisfying.

This. It put a stake through the heart of 90s era liberalism which freaked all the political fail children in the DNC out something awful.

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They were in all likelihood operating within the traditional Anglo-American liberal tradition in which we'll all get along if we have free trade, free markets, and democracy, so "engagement" with China (read: trade) is desirable, it is in their view simply historical necessity that economic development will lead to the aforementioned things developing. Now China, not living within this tradition, could really care less about free trade, free markets or democracy and simply operate within a paradigm where the Party rules China and is responsible for making decisions that will promote development in China, usually by offering Chinese market access for American industrial know-how, which American corporations gladly offered because it would make their stock prices go up next quarter. Thanks to this America has largely built up its principal rival, which we have already seen happen with the USSR, and since it looks like the response to the Chinese challenge will be to relocate industry to Mexico instead, we will doubtless witness this again later this century. This really speaks to the insanity of British Liberalism and its descendants.

wow god damn this sure was a surprise to people with two brain cells to rub together

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I feel like I'm taking crazy pills for not seeing any big difference in how America runs. Why is the media establishment and SNS extended mind so unearthly triggered? He's just a generic Republican.

Trump has far worse aesthetics and generally shits up the news cycles with dumb drama. that is basically it.

Because he's a generic Republican who doesn't know who to talk the talk. Instead of using innuendos that give them plausible deniability he just tells people what (little) he's thinking. He's actually being transparent relative to Obama, and giving away a lot of the deception. His arrogance and incompetence at repartee is a lighting rod for attention and he's highlighting all kinds of problems with the system for the average American (where this kind of thing was absent before). Trump is the epitome of "Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.."

Obama is what America pretends to be and was vetted by the political system prior to running. Trump is what America actually is and has a shit ton of weird quirks (as we are now finidng out) which make him an unreliable ruler for the American empire.

Trump is a 100% american character.
A lot of Europeans like to joke that americans have no culture. But that is part of the con. Because american culture is basically being a fucking carny tricking pigeons walking down the fairway to lose all their money

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There isn't, the civil service runs America. Donors buy Congress, Congress passes laws, the Judiciary decides what the law means and the civil service decides how it will actually be enforced. The civil service composition has not changed, and I don't think the Court would allow Donald Trump to actually mass-fire government employees.

He's not part of the "in" crowd, so to speak. That, and he's advocated against "free trade" and high immigration levels, and liberals are highly committed to both. Since progressive liberals are operating on Whig history, this is obviously an unacceptable deviation. This makes Blumpf effectively a heretic spreading errors to the Congregation, who must be punished.

America's been going through one long political crisis since the 2000 election, if not sooner. The establishment has adapted to the new status quo of permanent crisis by stepping up the slick propaganda campaigns, which began in earnest in 2008 by plucking Obama from obscurity and casting him as an apolitical, post-racial savior during the financial crash. Not even permanent war, foreclosure epidemics, and a sluggish economy could significantly damage his popularity. Trump is just the mirror image of Obama; easily hate-able where Obama was easily likable. Behind all the media hysteria about Trump's unfitness for office the establishment is quietly satisfied by Trump taking the heat off them.

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I think this is very likely.

Really smart post.

Also this.

Aaaaand this.

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As long as you don't call it Communism you can literally get the Rural Poor to go and go full Mao on the Cities.

In the USA Communism = Government controls all and people associate the Government with being owned by Corporations.

I'm not convinced by this. The tendency of urban areas to be more liberal than rural ones is a very old phenomenon. And the Overton window may have shifted far to the right in terms of redistribution but the Dems are still associated with trade unionism.and higher government spending. There remains a traditional economic basis for the two-party system (which would seem to contradict the idea of the Dems as the party of the higher-value industries) and increasingly a racial one too.

Not true. It was low for one year in 1986 at 1.1% and went back up, along with the general trend of the 80's, near 4%. From the time Reagan entered office to when he left in 88 he halved it from 8% to 4%. Since 2010, we've only gotten *3%* Inflation once in 2011 with exactly that number.

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There is a saying from the English Civil War about that. The Rural supported the Jacobites while the Urban supported the Republicans.

One of the best threads in a while.
Beautiful analysis and not much shitposting. I agree with most of this thread.

bingo

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Who cares? It is all over anyway we are all done piggy will always win it is all don we are dead I will kill myself goodbye old friends we should all mass suicide it is over we have to give up

There's a lot of good analysis in this thread.

Adding onto it, and from the perspective of someone who actually voted for Trump during the 2016 election, I would say that we see a curious kind of zeal coming from the respective voters of both Trump and Obama–they undoubtedly both established their own cults of personality which helped lend Obama to being above criticism and any criticism of Trump to be ignored by their respective bases. There's an odd kind of signal and counter-signal, one that I suspect is based in the failure of both of these populist candidates, wherein the more obvious it becomes that their terms as president isn't transformative, the more tyrannical and rabid their fans become–for Obama this led to the rise of the liberal IdPol we all know and love, and in Trump's case we see a renewal of nationalist sentiment combined with a growing white identity politics.

Overall it reflect, I think, growing dissatisfaction with the established political order as others have said, but no real benefit to anti-capitalism. Instead it seems people are turning towards cult-like leaders to "save" them rather than any analysis of what's going on. In the case of the latter, I'm of course biased against SJWs so I can't help but find fault with them in both burning out young idealists and potential socialists–however it's not entirely their fault, the radical left hasn't done enough to educate people.

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Kino posts.

It was the most expensive circus ever with just about zero actual effect on anything, aside from changing the mindsets of people towards greater acceptance of authoritarianism. The whole point of the debacle was to play a gigantic joke on Burgers, and the Burgers went along with the joke (Trump's margin of victory was decided literally by people who just voted Trump for the lulz, not that elections really matter because as user mentioned the civil service and judiciary hold most of the real power, Congress doing as much as humanly possible to do nothing since the things they want at the moment would be both massively unpopular and disastrous if implemented.)

Trump is not anything new. We did this shit before with Reagan, complete with the elevation of some of the scummiest criminals imaginable to the executive. If there was anything to mark a turning point, it's to gauge just how much shit Burgers will eat, and the answer is more than the rulers dreamed. The willingness to go along with this farce could be a signal to step up the horribleness and amplify culture war horseshit, but that's still part of a long-term trend.

2020 at this point is probably the return of Obama-style neoliberal technocrats, except even more arrogant and boneheaded than last time. Both of the political parties are stuffed with incompetents who don't know what they're doing; anyone with a modicum of political talent got purged to make way for Jeb and Hillary, let alone anyone with a coherent vision that is different from "please let's try not to fuck this up, k?"

I don't think there's going to be another economic collapse on the scale of 2008 for a while. If there is going to be any major disruption at all, it's probably coming after 2020. The current strategy is to just do everything possible to not fuck up what they built in 2008, and to keep the shell game going for some time into the future. So long as wealth continues to inflate at the top, they can control the tap of wealth flowing downward such that the depression takes effect gradually but consistently, and keep grinding people through the gig economy and welfare payments for several more years. I think the end of the '20s is where you're going to start seeing dramatic changes, or a general war (which seems to be what they're building up towards, even if everyone knows what an absolutely horrible idea it is).