A huge problem is that a lot of poor white folks see attempts to rectify racial or other injustices as a slap in the face, because they see themselves (perhaps correctly) as among the downtrodden. It turns into a battle of comparing wounds. Is a poor white person with no health care and no job prospects living in a dying town better or worse off than an urban black kid who grew up with a broken family in a bad neighborhood surrounded by crime? Are either of these better or worse off than a gay or trans person who's been bullied and ostracized by their community, or a battered wife whose community sides with her abuser, or a woman who was raped and forced to bear the child?

It's very easy for populist demagogue con artists to pit these groups against each other or focus all these groups' anger at one third party scapegoat ("the Jews," "the rich," or some foreign enemy are popular choices) in order to gain power.

A big problem is that real solutions to these problems don't fit nicely into 140 characters. They require that people stop and take the time to understand one another and the historical forces that created their situations, empathize with one another, and find win/win solutions. Populist demagoguery, scapegoating, and totalitarian schemes do fit neatly into sound bites, so they're easier to spread especially in an era of collapsing attention spans.

I wish I’d gone around the Internet screen shotting comments from Reddit and Twitter from 2008 until 2016 so future historians could understand. A lot of this stuff got purged.

Some others I remember (paraphrasing):

“I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.”

“I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.”

“When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for this man. I don’t care what else he does. He can eat a baby on live TV.” (This was a self described former union Democrat from Michigan.)

The left almost gets it. “A riot is the voice of the disenfranchised.” They just need to understand that for many, especially in 2016, Trump was a riot. They were electing him to do harm, explicitly.

In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening.

If you don’t know US history from 2001 until 2008 you can’t understand what’s happened since.

The anger was palpable back then. The MSM swept it under the rug and replaced it with BLM.

Being anti globalism was THE left wing thing back then. Trump sounds more like Michael Moore / Noam Chomsky than anything approaching right wing. He’s classic 90s left wing, especially the taking the jobs thing, that’s Michael Moore to a T.