SOME PRETTY GOOD ADVICE FOR UPSET DEMOCRATS FROM CRACKED:
2. Half of America did not, in fact, just reveal themselves to be closet Nazis.
My family back home aren’t Nazis. Neither are their neighbors. This is the last thing many of you want to hear at the moment, and that’s fine — feel free to bookmark this and read it a few months from now. But you can see the numbers for yourself, if you go issue by issue. Shit, at least three Trump states just voted to legalize marijuana, maybe more by time you read this. This is not your grandfather’s GOP. This is something different.
The truth is, most of Trump’s voters voted for him despite the fact that he said/believes awful things, not because of it. That in no way excuses it, but I have to admit I’ve spent eight years quietly tuning out news stories about drone strikes blowing up weddings in Afghanistan. I still couldn’t point to Yemen on a map. We form blind spots for our side, because there’s something larger at stake. In their case, it’s a belief that the system is fundamentally broken and that Hillary Clinton would have been more of the same. Trump rode a wave of support from people who’ve spent the last eight years watching terrifying nightly news reports about ISIS and mass shootings and riots. They look out their front door and see painkiller addicts and closed factories. They believe that nobody in Washington gives a shit about them, mainly because that’s 100-percent correct.
That pressure was building and building all around us, and we kept ignoring it. We media types were baffled when Trump won his first primary, and then his second, and then his third. We desperately tried to figure out how the system had failed. We were bemused when he won the nomination, then when he continued to hang around in the polls, we had approximately the same reaction one would have to seeing an invisible dagger floating across the room, aimed right at our fucking face. “How is this happening?!?”
Stop being baffled. Understand why it happened. Do the opposite of panic. Work through the problem.
Related: Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch: Higher education is isolated, insular and liberal. Average voters aren’t.
The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as “educated” voters and those who are described as “working class” voters.
The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump. College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and universities. . . .
Sometimes the college-educated find themselves so unable to understand a particular working-class point of view that they will respond to those perspectives with shocking condescension. Recall that President Obama, in the midst of the 2012 election cycle, suggested that job losses were the reason working-class voters were bitterly clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” The religious themselves, meanwhile, likely do not chalk their faith up to unhappy economic prospects, and they probably find it hard to connect with politicians who seem to assume such.
Thus today’s college graduates are formed by a campus culture that leaves them unable to understand people with unfamiliar or heterodox views on guns, abortion, religion, marriage, gender and privilege. And that same culture leads such educated people to either label those with whom they disagree as bad people or reduce their stated views on these issues as actually being about something else, as in Obama’s case. Most college grads in this culture are simply never forced to engage with or seriously consider professors or texts which could provide a genuine, compelling alternative view.
For decades now, U.S. colleges and universities have quite rightly been trying to become more diverse when it comes to race and gender. But this election highlights the fact that our institutions of higher education should use similar methods to cultivate philosophical, theological and political diversity.
A bunch of InstaPundit readers who are students or faculty at various universities have been forwarding me emails about dealing with the “shock” “fear” and “dismay” that people on their campuses are supposed to be feeling. These emails generally either come from, or are copied to, the school’s “Office of Diversity and Inclusion” or some such. Yet the notion that a candidate supported by a big electoral majority is somehow beyond the pale — so much so that merely contemplating the election results is psychological trauma — is itself a slap in the face at the notion of diversity and, of course, a way of excluding the (many) students at these institutions who supported Trump from the university community. This should be a wakeup call for higher education, but I predict that the snooze button will be hit again.
