Liberals Voting for Donald Trump

Across the board and across the aisle, those who understand politics are teaming up to prevent the economic and environmental disaster that would result from a Trump presidency, but one unexpected group of Americans are willing to throw us all under that bus: privileged young liberals.

Bernie Bros who won't listen to Bernie.

The left's version of the Tea Party.

By now we've all accepted the notion that there are some conservatives who genuinely believe that Trump will make things better simply because he is not a life-long politician. These unhappy people feel that both parties have let them down in the past, so they are willing to overlook all of Trump's many obvious failings in order to get an outsider in office. These are the people who turned out in droves for the Republican primaries and gave Trump the party nomination.

By and large, those die-hard Trump supporters are poor, white, and not well educated. Neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations improved their lots in life. When you are living from paycheck to paycheck and taking out payday loans in order to avoid eviction, you don't have time to worry about the complexities of corporate campaign donations or international relations.

I've been there, and I understand that.

You just want someone who will promise to create more jobs or, barring that, at least keep out those foreigners who are taking some of the jobs. It feels good to blame somebody else. It feels good to have a man who appears to be a success tell you that some other group (Muslims, Mexicans, Liberals, or Women) is responsible for all your problems.

When life is a day-to-day scramble, you live in fear, and when you live in fear there is comfort in an authoritarian voice promising to take care of everything. It's just too hard to consider the long-term ramifications of placing an authoritarian leader in charge of a popular democracy.

You don't want to look behind the curtain and see that great Oz is just a man, and, in this case, a deceptive and dishonest man at that.

Desperate people are willing to put all of their money on a wild card.

After all, what do they have to lose?

They are going to vote for Trump no matter what evidence they see about his unreliable character, and then just pray with all their hearts that he will somehow perform miracles.

I can almost forgive these people for saddling us with a Trump campaign.

They may be acting from emotion instead of logic, but that emotion is primarily driven by the need to put food on the family table.

Not so the young, liberal, anti-Hillary crowd.

This crowd isn't trying to pay the bills, they are just being angsty adolescents.

You didn't nominate our boy Sanders, they say, so we are going send the whole country down in flames.

Haha, that'll show you!

Maybe they've seen too many dystopian TV shows wherein a rugged band of hardy heroes survives the apocalypse only to create a new and stronger community based on true egalitarian justice.

Those who are looking at the bigger picture know that the good guys can't win this one.

No one would win from a Trump presidency, except Trump and his own offspring.

That's just the way he plays.

And afterward? Sorry, it's a great fantasy, but we would not enter into an era of goodness and light led by Bernie riding on a shiny, magic, unicorn.

A dysfunctional government creates even more poverty and more fear, and fearful people flock toward authoritarian figures.

Can you imagine a Super-Trump?

I'd rather not ...

Sanders didn't hold on for so long because he thought he could win. His policies are too progressive for him to ever have a chance of winning in the general election.

Sanders held on because he wanted to influence the party platform.

The Democratic Party now has a more progressive agenda than either party has had since the conservative backlash began in the eighties.

Sanders is responsible for that.

He understands how politics works. It's slow, sometimes glacially slow. Just having someone like Bernie come so far in the campaign shows that a lot of Americans are ready for change. They want to move away from the corporate-loving laws and tax codes that have stagnated our middle and lower classes for the last twenty years.

Logically, if you believe in Sanders' vision for a more economically fair future, you would get out and vote for Clinton.

So, why is there a small but vocal group of Sanders supporters who want to give the election to Trump by either voting third party or not voting?

Overtly, it is sore loser politics. Their guy lost, and they don't like it.

Realistically, the situation is more nuanced.

First of all, Clinton is a woman, and women are held to a different standard. Historically, her poll ratings go up when she is in office, but drop, sometimes drastically, when she says she is running for office.

In other words, people like the work she does, but they don't like it when she seeks power.

Welcome to misogyny, boys and girls: it's subtle but it's ubiquitous.

Clinton must always exercise more awareness and more constraint than her male colleagues. Even if she personally believed in exactly the same things as Sanders, Clinton couldn't voice that out loud because there are so many people just looking for a reason to hate her.

Sadly, while conservative haters force Clinton to exercise extreme self-restraint, that very restraint causes some liberals to doubt her passion for progressive causes.

Aside from misogyny, we need to remember that most of these liberal Hillary-haters are privileged. They can afford to risk having four or even eight years of terrible government because their jobs or their families offer them security.

People who are just getting by can't afford that kind of risk. It shows a real lack of empathy, a Trump-like lack of empathy, to not understand that a bad president will cause unbearable hardship for those who are already poor.

Many of these so-called Bernie bros just don't seem able to make a realistic assessment regarding the probable outcome of a Trump presidency. While they can recite every crazy conspiracy theory that has ever been written about Clinton, they haven't bothered to learn any facts about Donald Trump's history of failure in both business and interpersonal relations.

Like their brethren on the far right of the political spectrum, they are uninformed.

In the end, there are only two viable candidates.

If you think Clinton will make the better president, then you should vote for Clinton.

If you think Trump would make the better president, then you should vote for Trump. Or Jill Stein. Or no one at all.

Voting for Jill Stein or not voting may make you feel like you have made a political statement, but really you've just forfeited your right to participate in the decision.

You've also forfeited your right to complain, no matter what the outcome.