Please don't leave, its lonely being one of the few progressives left. It kind of staggers the mind how this show has made such a right turn. I'm still trying to get my head around how I can share what seem like very important ideas around the nature of reality and then am left agape by the cognitive dissonance of what appear to me to be bat shit crazy political ideas.
IMO, Democrats and Republicans are as bad as one another. Think Obama was an exception? Read this Guardian article
here: remember that the Guardian is a lefty newspaper.
I myself regard myself as neither right nor left in a political sense, but note the left have their own species of batshit crazy, prime amongst which is its virtue signalling (e.g. on CAGW) and its dismissal of half the population as mentally inferior simply because the latter hold a different opinion on many issues. If it were up to the left, it would become illegal to express dissenting ideas. They've almost made it that way already by pushing political correctness, safe spaces, and general intolerance.
I agree that the reason Hillary didn't get in was in part because so many people, even Democrats, disliked her. But would anyone else have beaten Trump? I'm not so sure about that. Pretty much any other candidate would have been seen as part of the establishment that many have come to despise. A vote for Trump was a vote for a change as much as anything. If the establishment on both sides couldn't find better candidates from a nation of 300 million people, well, what does that say about the establishment? To me it says it has become complacent and ensconced in an elitist bubble that people can't relate to.
In the fullness of time, who knows: there may be a miracle and Trump may achieve something (mind you, he won't if the Democrats can possibly help it). We Brits remember this:
Was Ronald Reagan a bad president? I don't know, and won't find out by asking Democrats, who put up Hillary as a candidate despite her many failings. They're angry at half the people of their own nation for what was their own crass ignorance of, and indifference to, the public mood for change -- any change, so long as it wasn't more of the same, left or right.
The right bombs people in other countries, and so does the left. At least the right are somewhat more open and obvious about it: they're more transparent than the virtue-signalling left, which I really don't think knows what the heck it wants unless it's a self-hating society that wants to commit cultural suicide.
Is Donald Trump on the right or the left? Actually, I'm not sure; for better or worse, he may be his own man. I will be looking on with bemused interest during his presidency and hoping for the best whilst bracing for the worst. Like it or not, that's what we'll all have to do, won't we?