You've never been to the deep south, much the south, have you?

> 2. I believed he was the candidate with the biggest chance of winning that would bring about the biggest amount of disruption and change

Anyone who believes Trump can change things is delusional and has very little, if any grasp, of how power works. Obama was voted in on the promise of change, as all we got was a watered down health care bill and the ability for gays to get married. The ACA probably won't be repealed any time because the Republicans do not have complete control. He will do a few things, and non-White, nonchristian people will suffer, but by in large things will stay the same. The simple fact is that the people who get you elected are not the same people you need to work with to enact legislation.

I have been to the south (maybe not the "deep south") but your general assumption that I don't have a great understanding of the people that reside there is accurate. I do understand that there actually are people who truly hate people of color. What I was really taking issue with is the label of bigotry being so readily applied to anyone who supports Trump. I just find it unfair.

Regarding your last point, I wasn't necessarily trying to say that the change and disruption would happen specifically within government or by way of the laws we might pass. I apologize if that wasn't entirely clear. The most obvious place, as I mentioned, where we might see some of this is within both of the major parties themselves and how they operate outside of government. The Democrats will start that process immediately as they were the biggest losers and the Republicans will put that on hold as they do have some control over government, but clearly their party isn't in great shape either.

Talk is cheap, actions are what define you. If you vote for someone who wages a racist, xenophobic campaign, someone who was endorsed by KKK and has riled up white supremacist views, you implicitly support them.

This cuts both ways. Voters had effectively a binary choice. Given the dismal favorability ratings of both major party candidates, I think we do everyone a disservice by assuming they subscribe to every view or position either candidate has ever taken or changed. People have different values and different priorities for the values that they do share with others. We don't get to mix and match our candidates.

Given how split the country is, we likely have a lot of things we can find agreement on. We need to work on finding our common goals so we can move forward and make progress.

Edit to add: I myself struggle with determining where to draw the line. What views and/or actions are intolerable? Are they context dependent? At what point do our associations taint us? Too much for this thread perhaps, but worth keeping in mind when working with people who don't hold exactly the same views as we do; in other words, living in the real world.

So...like the parent said, most Americans don't hate colored people. I do think most Americans are frustrated by Obamacare, haphazard foreign involvement, and bailouts.

Yes, I've read similar sentiments. The problem is, regardless of your desire for "change", the man that was elected waged a campaign full of racism and xenophobia and was endorsed by the KKK. Voting for him is implicitly supporting those views.

Barack Obama was endorsed by the Black Panthers. Was voting for him implicitly supporting black racial superiority?

Even still, the left has treated the center and right like klansmen for the last decade. Perhaps the left's fatal flaw was failing to distinguish between actual racists and those who simply didn't drink the identity-politics kool-aid.

Please tell me how non-white Americans will suffer from the policies of Trump. I'd think, what with 65k Syrian refugees flooding in and flocking to places like California (where I live) and backed up by policies in to land them unskilled jobs, the minority demo would suffer much more than, for instance, some Americans having their illegal relatives deported for example.

To expand, the Republican party now endorses conversion therapy for homosexuals, voter ids (in other words, voter suppression), denies climate science and evolution, a flat tax rate, and tax cuts for the wealthy (because trickle down economics works so well!). I can continue on, but those policies don't help the poor, who are overwhelming minority.

While I agree with the general sentiment, specially since they had majorities and they couldn't get a much better health care bill, we got more than that. For instance:

- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

- Dodd-Frank

>I refuse to believe that close to half of this country hates people of color

It's been confirmed that many pro Obama counties have turned pro Trump this election cycle. Clearly not racists.

He denies rape by saying the accuser is too ugly to rape. (Would he rape if she were cute?)

He seems to think that "grabbing women by the pussy" is a good thing. Most politicians I'd give a pass on an event like this - it happened a long time ago, and most politicians would disclaim such behavior (compare Clinton's response to her email server during the debates).

He accuses a judge of not being able to do his job because he is "from Mexico", even though said judge was born as an American.

He attacks (seemingly) muslims at Hillary's DNC speech - for reasons I'm not entirely certain why.

So I think that there are a few options: you are either saying Trumps sexism and racism is worth it for his other qualities, or blatantly ignoring it, or actively supporting it. To me it's not hard to see how people would come to the conclusion that people are actively supporting it, because for a lot of people that is an issue that would trump other issues (bad pun not intended but now that it's there I'm leaving it).

At the base level: Laws still apply, people will go to jail if they harm you. It's not like he's going to declare open hunting season on LGBTQ people.

A number of these were done through executive action, and Trump has said he will overturn them in office. Yes, laws still apply. But not if they aren't laws anymore. Pence was the one who signed Indiana's controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law, and has advocated reparative therapy (brainwashing the gay out of you), which is ineffective and incredibly damaging.

This is an interesting point. I've toyed with the notion lately that maybe the American political system is "antifragile"[0]. It's plausible, at least, to me that the system as a whole is stronger when it receives major shocks that disrupt the ossified structure in there. If you have the same politicians with the same policies as normal, then you get ties between the government and industry, and handouts and a ruling elite, etc. Now I don't think Trump is all that much of an outsider or has that much chance of disruption here (I voted Johnson, partly in this hope), but it's interesting to me you raise it as a reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

I have to agree with the other commenter who asks if you lived in the Deep South. I grew up in Louisiana. In the early '90s, we had David Duke (whose name you may recognize from this campaign), an actual, genuine, Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, be a state senator, run a very close to successful campaign for US Senate, and run a very close to successful campaign the following year for governor. Wikipedia recounts the vote totals for the gubernatorial election:

[Edwin] Edwards received 1,057,031 votes (61.2%), while Duke's 671,009 votes represented 38.8% of the total. Duke nevertheless claimed victory, saying, "I won my constituency. I won 55% of the white vote," a statistic confirmed by exit polls.

We can argue about what "hates people of color" means, precisely, but if 40% of voters, and 55% of white voters, are willing to put a KKK Imperial Wizard in charge of the state, it's not an implausible claim. Maybe not half the country. Maybe a quarter. Maybe the majority in some states and not others. Maybe the core constituency of some but not all senators. Is that okay?

And given this country's recent history of explicit anti-black political actions by people in power (see e.g. George Wallace's "segregation forever" and Lee Atwater's candid statement of the Southern Strategy), it's hard to argue that that all evaporated since then.

> I don't know if any of that change or disruption is going to be good or bad for me or the rest of America, but things are certainly going to be interesting for the next four years.

There are a lot of people (e.g., me, presumably you) who can deal just fine with four "interesting" years. There are a lot of people who can't. My LGBT friends are freaking out, for instance, and with a vice president who believes in torturing the gay away, I don't blame them. My capable-of-being-pregnant friends are freaking out. My non-citizen friends on valid visas are freaking out.

Disruption to force change is a fine way to solve some problems, like Netflix's infrastructure being reliant on AWS not shutting down machines. But this isn't Netflix's infrastructure, this is people's lives. I know plenty of people who aren't asking whether to uproot their lives but how, and they're pretty uninterested in having an interesting four years.