America....

[Allette]

Wall Street Journal's got a piece that made me immediately think of this thread.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get- ... 1478271810

[Firimei Lang]

A thought provoking piece Allette, thank you.

Personally I am shocked at why people would vote for Trump, when not voting for him in an actual sense. There are others to vote for, if you so wish. Why put that man in power, he has demonstrated over and over again how unfit he is. It saddens me to see level headed people seek to have him in power. He is immature and base. Nothing to offer the people, apart from stupid road rage type comments and vitriol.

[Allette]

Lots of us did vote for others. In the primaries.

[Firimei Lang]

Sadly it doesn't seem to have had any effect. I am just grimacing at the thought of that idiot man in charge. So many people believe his BS..its quite astonishing.

[Paj]

What If the top two contenders from both parties were allowed to run, obviously it would t work with the electoral requisite of 270, but just the mere option of having someone other than the worst of each party.

Do you think more people would have voted for Bernie Sanders or Ted Cruz rather than the current two this late in the game?

There are disenfranchised Republicans and Democrats who are voting against their party in this election. With all this late news of misdeeds, those candidates could have had a chance.

Obviously a party united is stronger and *correction has a better chance of winning* not (will win every time), but it has resulted in this fiasco.

[ecthus]

-I'm not actually as worried about Trump as I am about the people he would appoint to important positions--including but not limited to the Supreme Court--and the disaster that would ensue from the clowns in Congress being able to run wild with their stupidity. There are plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied with the government, but the solution for right wing voters was to vote in legislators who believed their job was to shut down the government rather than make the government work better. They represent the stupidest branch of anarchist theory--the libertarian anarchists.

-It's not like the Republicans had any actually good candidates, though, and this article is a good reminder of how terrible all the candidates were: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n15/eliot-wein ... ave-picked

-Critics of Trump say that he can lie without any consequences, and this seems to be true. The trouble, I think, is he can also tell the truth without any consequences. He's right that NAFTA has been a disaster, for instance.

-As the joke goes, there is no corruption in America because it's all been legalized.

[Samara]

Don't really see any excuses for voting Trump, the guy is an asshole, flat out. The fact that all the garbage he spews is actually seen as okay is concerning and when you see some of the idiots at his rallies going off on their white supremacist tangent it just becomes even scarrier. Just the fact that he has managed to get this far, and actually stand a good chance at winning with all the hatred he has spewed is alarming, won't take long for someone who has a silver tongue to funnel all that hatred into what people call "political correct" speech and maybe win the elections( going to assume he will be Republican ).

I personally understand all the resentment for how things are currently run, your lobbying system is messed up and I think it is what holds the most blame for "corrupting" your system - two party is one thing, but being able to buy people off legally seems rather..silly and undemocratic. Was it something along the lines of 80%+ who had no confidence in Congress? I highly doubt this will change with Trump, despite him being "against" the system.

Anyway best of luck to you 'Muricans, hopefully you'll help make the world a little safer and either vote democratic or not vote at all - looking at you Davor!

[Firimei Lang]

Don't really see any excuses for voting Trump, the guy is an asshole, flat out. The fact that all the garbage he spews is actually seen as okay is concerning and when you see some of the idiots at his rallies going off on their white supremacist tangent it just becomes even scarrier. Just the fact that he has managed to get this far, and actually stand a good chance at winning with all the hatred he has spewed is alarming, won't take long for someone who has a silver tongue to funnel all that hatred into what people call "political correct" speech and maybe win the elections( going to assume he will be Republican ).

I personally understand all the resentment for how things are currently run, your lobbying system is messed up and I think it is what holds the most blame for "corrupting" your system - two party is one thing, but being able to buy people off legally seems rather..silly and undemocratic. Was it something along the lines of 80%+ who had no confidence in Congress? I highly doubt this will change with Trump, despite him being "against" the system.

Anyway best of luck to you 'Muricans, hopefully you'll help make the world a little safer and either vote democratic or not vote at all - looking at you Davor!

Most assuredly one of the best posts on here.. There IS NO excuse for voting for that man. Well we all know my views on him and his ideals. The party he represents is not worth voting for anyway.

[Aira]

I disagree that there is no excuse to vote for him. It's just a difference in point of view. Some time during the election that got Obama in office, there was a thing on Dutch tv that listed the Dutch and US political spectrum on the same scale. It was quite an eye opener, but it explains things rather well.

| is center

Socialist Party - Greens - Party for Animals - Labour - | Dutch Republicans - Christian Democrats - Conservatives - Party for Freedom.

Depending on one's point of view regarding Islam, the Party for Freedom from Geert Wilders would either be squat down in the middle, or very much on the right. In the tv thing I'm referring to, it was on the right side of the spectrum, so I'm using that.

Then, they added the Democrats and US Republicans to the same spectrum:
Socialist Party - Greens - Party for Animals - Labour - | Dutch Republicans - Christian Democrats - Conservatives - Party for Freedom - Democrats - US Republicans.

Again, note that this was during the Obama election, when it seems to me the Democrats were a bit more left than they are under Hillary.

Assuming this is correct I can understand that, from a western European point of view, the US Republicans come closer to what we consider to be "extremist right" than "center". Most of the western European governments consist of coalitions with left-off-center and/or right-off-center parties. So when what comes across to us as "extremist right" starts spouting off about minorities, prosecuting one's opponent and so on... we get the heebie jeebies.

But, if you grow up in the US, it seems more like a choice between "right" and "slightly less right", so the difference may not be perceived to be as great as it seems to outsiders. From a US perspective, Europeans are probably all crazy lefties. I think that is where the disconnect and strong opinions from Europeans come from.

And yes... there are like two representatives for the Party for Animals in the Dutch parliament.

[Skittles]

I suspect that's a bit simplistic. Our two-party system means that within each party, there is be more variation than if we had a lot of parties. The Democratic party has a very wide range on the left-right scale. The Republicans have a pretty small one on the national level, though a slightly wider one on the local level. Individual Republicans have a wider belief system. For instance, many Republican voters want to protect the environment, but none who Represent them in Congress do. But it is true that the core of the Democratic party is much more center (rather than over to the left) than the Republicans, which, again, is very far the right on the national level. This may be due to the fact that the Democratic party is very diverse, while the Republican party is mostly just white dudes and a smaller number of white dudettes.