What happened.

After my last post, I decided to lie down and watch the coverage a bit.

It hit me what happened. And why. And how.


I harken back to my earlier post and this section in particular:

How could this happen? Well to answer that, and why common sense makes no sense, we need to look at who is voting for Trump, and who we are.

Who is "we"? Well I am Teddy. I'm 32, and I spend, in an average day, at least 14 hours online. I do most of my socializing online, get most of my entertainment online, and get most of my news from online sources. I am 'very' connected to the internet. I am a progressive, who is very socially tolerant. I also live in poverty.

Who are you? Well I don't know for sure, I don't have specific demographics of my readers, but I do have a guess. You are 28. You are male, and live in the Greater Toronto area. You make less than $40,000 a year, but more than $20,000 a year. You spend at least 6 hours every day online, and get the plurality of your news, socializing, and entertainment online as well. You, like me, are very socially tolerant, and are likely more left-wing than I am.

While no one specific reader will hit all those marks, my general guess is that you are not too far off from this person.

You and I have a few things in common.

1 - Due to our age, neither of us are heads of our own large families.

2 - Due to our income levels, neither of us tend to socialize with those who make many times more than we do

3 - Due to our interests (the internet) we have a very high tendency to meet others who are equally connected to the online world.

So what does all of this mean?

In short, there is a group of people who we are disconnected with. They are older, at least 40, white men, who have children, are married, are conservative, and are likely religious. They are concerned about immigration (in large part because they don't know any immigrants personally, and any they see professionally, are almost certainly in the lower part of the working class, and as such, much less likely to be fluent in english) and these are people who, when all is said and done, are less educated than 'our' group.

They are, to boil it down to (perhaps offensive and) simple terms, old men who are afraid of change.

The problem (for our group) is that there are a lot of people like this out there, and they live a life that's almost as different from ours as is possible within the same culture.

In past elections, this has not been a huge issue. These people, and their concerns, split them among the candidates. Sure they were always going to favour the right-wing candidate, but that was always taken into account. The problem, it seems, is that rather than splitting 2-3, or 3-5, they are going overwhelmingly for the same candidate. They are also bringing their friends along; social groups they are not fully in, but are connected to.

Due to their nature of being offline folk, their arguments never get to us, and ours never get to them.

These are the 'uneducated working class whites' we've heard so much about.

There is a real possibility that due to their previous candidate splitting and low turnout, that we are not properly counting them in the polls.

I've spoken from time to time on this idea of a "New Left" and "New Right". Here is one place I speak about it. Here is another.


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Edited, the proper links, (both link to the same article), the second is:
http://thenewteddy.blogspot.ca/2016/07/new-left-and-new-right-vs-old-left-and.html



Also here is a post I made in 2012 on a forum on this topic

Between 1900 and 1940 there was a great shift in what Left and Right meant for the political spectrum.
Prior to this, Left was allowing women the vote, allowing non-property owners to vote, allowing non-Christians to vote even, while Right was standing up for the powers that existed.
After this, Left was for Socialism, redistribution of wealth, giving money to the poor, larger governments with larger supports, so on and so forth.
Left and Right is changing again. The old left-right argument is over. We found a balance that works. There is a new left-right argument out there.
In the old Left, the Green Party of Canada is moderate and somewhat centrist. In the new Left, the Greens are firmly left-wing. The new Left is about a Global unity of ideology, doing for others, working for the world and the community, thinking universally, ignoring national boundaries, and so forth. The new Right is perfectly exemplified by the things Harper stands for. His stances on Kyoto, Abestos, the Environment at large, the Gun Registry, etc, are all firmly in the new right, even if they fit the old right as well.
Our system is changing. Look at Canadian elections and UK elections for example. From 1960 to 1990 both countries had instances where we only had 3 parties in the chamber. Compare this to elections in both countries from both 1930's and today, and you'll see the growth in parties and ideologies, etc. Our entire worldwide political system is changing, and that is why there is so much apparent chaos. The Tea Party VS Occupy debates are not just last vestiges of the old system; they are the founding sparks of the new system, and this will be the new left-right debate.

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The short of it is this.

110 years ago, we had a left wing and a right wing.

The Right Wing was conservative and Conservative. The Left Wing was liberal and Liberal. Big issues were things like prohibition, women's suffrage, alms for the poor, and other 'turn of the century' issues.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a new group came. The Socialists. Labour.

They wanted public ownership, abolition of poverty, and redistribution of wealth.

Many socialists were labourers, who worked in factories.

If you were an "everyday" person back in 1906, you would be baffled by this new movement. It does not fit into anything that you understand in politics. Sure it seems left-wing, but it is just odd.

Within 20 years, everything had changed.

The Liberals were gone, or, had gobbled up a lot of these crazy socialist ideas. The Conservatives were now for all those things the old Liberal party wanted, while remaining conservative in nature.

The old left and old right had been replaced by the new left and new right.


People like Justin Trudeau are on the new left. For quite some time now I've been trying to outline exactly what the new left is. For one thing, it's pro-trade, and seemingly is pro-big-business. I've understood the new left pretty well as I see it all around me in my social circle.



That's when it hit me.



Who were all these people who voted for Trump?
Who are all these folks who wanted Brexit?
Who keeps voting for the "far-right" nationalistic parties in Europe?



The New Right.