It's not ok to use HN for regional flamewar here, or political flamewar. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this again, we'd be grateful.
Blue states filled with people who claim to be liberal generally support restrictive zoning and housing policies that make housing impossible for the poor and lower middle class to afford. Looking around the country it's generally "blue" areas that have the least affordable housing with very few exceptions.
Hypocrisy is pretty universal. Most people vote based on superficial affinity signaling, not any understanding of actual policies or their implications. The present political situation is what you get when people vote based on who they'd like to have a beer with, not whose ideas they support (or even understand).
Whataboutism is sometimes a good way to point out rank hypocrisy.
I didn't vote for Trump and won't, but I totally understand why he won. He won largely by taking traditionally Democratic counties in the Midwest who are fed up with having their jobs sent to totalitarian countries in one-sided trade deals for the benefit of huge corporations. He also won because people look at the coastal "blue" cities and see unaffordable enclaves of the super-rich, not some kind of egalitarian paradise.
They also hear it in the rhetoric. The worst example was Hillary's "deplorables" comment. Yes I know that she meant Nazis, but a ton of people heard "poor and working class." I also must point out that while the Nazi types are noisy there are not really that many of them. Trump could not have won on their support, but he did win with the support of a ton of disenfranchised poor and working class voters.
Note that many of these people hate conventional Republicans as much as they hate Democrats. Trump was viewed as the outsider "fuck you" candidate, basically as a walking Molotov cocktail to toss into DC. "I hope he does as much damage as possible" is one quote I heard from a friend who lives in Ohio. I also read a lot of comments framing the election as Trump vs. Bush/Clinton, seeing Bush and Clinton as interchangeable "establishment" names.
BTW I take whatever opportunity I can to call out NIMBYism. My favorite quip: Texas is more liberal than California because in Texas a poor person can afford a home.
In Lafayette (LA), there was a gas station right off I-10 that put up a huge sign after she said that that said “The Deplorables”. That’s when I knew she was in deep shit. That and her “I believe in Science!” line at the DNC and Trump’s “I’ll make every dream you ever dreamed come true” ads. Although even I laughed at the online ones about Hillary and the emails with Pac-Man
A poor person can't afford a home in either Texas or California. Not unless you cherry pick living in the middle of nowhere, in which case both states are perfectly affordable.
And if you get sick or injured in Texas, well, I hope you have good health insurance from your job.
Maybe not outright poor, but compare home prices vs. median income in most of Dallas (excluding the most expensive neighborhoods) vs almost anywhere in LA or SF.
Ninja edit since I can't reply: no, they are not even comparable:
Just wow. Try finding that anywhere in SF, LA, OC, or SD. I see a lot of decent homes under $200k. I don't mean trailers.
My point is about optics as much as reality. A lot of people look at San Francisco to see what liberalism is going to do since that city has a reputation (right or wrong) as being a kind of capital city for the Democratic left. When they look they see a city with massive wealth divides where nobody but the rich can afford a reasonable home and there are drug addicts on every street corner. They think "wow, so this is the future that liberalism is going to give us."
I'm not sure this is totally wrong either. I wouldn't want the country run by the head-up-the-arse crowd that runs San Francisco any more than I want it run by the current bunch of clowns occupying the executive branch.
If you think Austin or Dallas isn't going to go through that same reality then you would be ignorant of how things are playing out.
I live in Texas. Dallas and Austin are no different and home prices are already soaring off the backs of tech companies moving down here and the local government being unable to build infrastructure or support a growing population. This has nothing to do with 'liberalism' and everything to do with cities in America built on top of bad city design, terrible infrastructure, gentrification and unsustainable growth.
American city designers love the von Neumann bottleneck! They see two problems. Jobs and homes. They solve them independently and then connect them with a central bus. The end result is that everyone has to cross the central bus to get from one to the other.
> Sure, and yet somehow they are consistently voting in people who want to dismantle both.
I think they vote Republican mostly because of social wedge issues (and to a lesser extent, the appeal of tax cuts and associated propaganda).
I come from a farm state. They used to elect a lot of Democrats to federal office, until relatively recently. Remember Tom Daschle? I'm personally convinced that a party that's credibly socially conservative but fiscally liberal would clean up in those states.
> I doubt you can name a single Republican politician who has run and been elected on this platform.
A whole lot of Republican politicians since around 2000 (including George W. Bush) have run for and been elected to federal office on an overt platform of dismantling both the revenue and benefit payment sides of Social Security.
Sure, the soundbite has been “saving social security”, but the concrete policy of dismantling that lies behind the soundbite hasn't been secret, it's been explicit and public, widely covered, and defended by candidates on debates, etc. The people voting for them either support it, don't think it's an important issue, or aren't paying any attention. They might be duped on what they'll get out of it, but the substance of the policy hasn't been concealed.
RE: Medicare Part D, that's a pretty controversial topic. In the political air of the time, passing something like that was an absolute necessity. Bush/Republicans got it passed in a way that (a) involved big benefits for big pharma (e.g., no ability of government to negotiate drug prices) and (b) failing to pay for it in budget, thus hugely increasing deficits and national debt.
George W Bush pushed through Medicare Part D, which was essentially an entirely new social program, fist proposed by Bill Clinton.
You're right that they do want to undermine these programs (they certainly talk about it), but they've proven consistently happy to toss aside their beliefs and values to win elections.
These are both mainstream politicians. Perry was a governor of Texas, a plausible Presidential candidate, and is now DoE Secretary. Gingrich was and is quite active politically.
You're arguing in bad faith, and I will not engage any more.
This is a classic example of actions vs words. I don't care what Republicans campaign on, I care what they do once they are elected, and they have gone after these programs more than once.
You are assuming my political leanings. I'm more conservative than you think.
I'm only stating what I observe in regards to states like Kentucky and Mississippi. The people continue voting in representatives that say one thing, then work on doing the opposite.
