I couldnt care less for the why. If you voted Trump, a third party candidate or not at all you are responsible for the coming fascism you waste of cells
Maybe if the democrats had given 50% of the populace something they considered worth turning up to vote for they wouldn’t have stayed at home.
Getting out of bed, going down the street, standing in line, spending 3 minutes casting a ballot; is that a lot to ask of people to safeguard democracy?
Let’s be more specific. That’s what you need to do in order to protect the oligarchy. The United States is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy. The bottom 90% of the population has zero impact on how they are governed. It has been this way for decades.
This always happens to oligarchies. It happened in Rome, and now it’s happened here. The Roman Senate was intransigent, fighting for generations against the most minor of reforms to help the common man. In the end, demagogues came to power promising to help the people by fiat. Of course, most of the time these emperors served only themselves, but even the few crumbs they threw to the people were more than the old oligarchy gave them.
I mean, still having a country was something to vote for for me, but you do you dawg. You’ll reap what you sow.
That’s the thing though. Most Americans feel they don’t really live in a democracy, and they’re right. Statistically, the interests of the bottom 90% of the population have zero impact on Congress. Congress’s actions only correlate with the opinions of the top 10%, and moreso the higher on the income ladder you go.
Trump is nothing new. People voted for Trump for the same reason people voted for Napoleon. A system, even a democratic one, is only useful if it produces useful results. We don’t have a democracy, we have an oligarchy.
In a system as corrupt and intransigent as ours, the only way you can actually get anything done, for good or ill, is to be someone like Trump who runs roughshod over political norms.
This kind of thing is common in history. Democracies can get so corrupt, worn down, and intractable, that eventually the people just vote in someone who will rule by fiat. The wealthy cut off every avenue of democratic change, and eventually a demogogue comes to power promising to just produce change by force.
Anyone who has studied history could have predicted Trump. Authoritarianism is the inevitable consequence of corrupt nominal ‘democracies’ that only serve the wealthy.
voted
They most certainly did give people something worth turning to. And then stopped talking about it way too soon. Most people simply didil’t know much if anything about Harri’s campaign promises. The Dems shifted from talking about worker friendly policies to go after the handful of sane GOPers. And lost.
I sincerely hope that Democrats do care.
Like it or not, MAGA can currently take that attitude. They control the SC, both chambers of Congress, and the White House. If they decide to say, “Fsck it. We’ll ignore the Demorcrats,” they’ll still have all the process in place to enact their agenda.
MAGA doesn’t need to analyze what went wrong during the election. They got everything they wanted.
For at least the next 2 years, Democrats will be able to do nothing that Republicans don’t approve of. The law says that they get to set the standards.
If Democrats want any chance of checking that power or reversing it at the next election, we are the ones who need to adapt.
There’s an “ancient Chinese saying”, “卧 薪 尝 胆”. You don’t do it because it’s fun or because you obliged to, you do it so you can win next time.
Understanding why something is broken is a crucial prerequisite for fixing it. If you don’t care why it didn’t work, then you don’t care about making it work - you only care about being angry.
But we kind already knew people being stupid was the reason. This doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the table.
Just because you refuse to learn anything from this doesn’t mean there is nothing to be learned. I, for one, have got one important actionable insight from these replies: they prioritize having a strong president more than having a president that aligns with their values.
Trump radiates strength. You may say it’s fake strength, that it’s just the aggressiveness of his narcissism, but it doesn’t matter - he is perceived as strong, and that’s his main weapon, his number one selling point. Look at his his announcements and listen to what his supporters say - the main focus is on depicting him as strong and his opponents as weak. Policies are an afterthought.
Republican voters wanting a strong Republican president is a no-brainer, but the thing that really surprised me is Democrat leaning voters (Democrat enough to vote for AOC, at least) preferring a strong Republican president because he’s strong. I find it counterintuitive - if you’re going to have to live under the opponent party’s rule, shouldn’t you prefer a weak president that would be less forceful when implementing these policies that you disagree with?
This insight does shine a new light on some well known points. For example - Biden and Harris received lots of fire for supporting Israel. This always seemed weird to me - wouldn’t Trump, if elected, support Israel so much harder? But this new insight make it all make (twisted) sense. If - or, actually, now we can say “when” - Trump as a president will support Israel it will be an act of strength because it aligns with the Republican values he represents. When Biden did it, it was against Democratic values and therefore perceived as weakness - as surrendering to pressure.
Or, more importantly - I keep seeing (mainly here on Lemmy) claims that the Democratic party lost these elections because they did not go left enough. With this new insight, I think the problem is not that they didn’t go left enough, but that they didn’t go hard enough. It doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum you are aiming to be - you should be as forceful and as assertive as possible when going there. This is something Obama had in spades. This is what the Democrats need if they want to win the next elections.
There it is. Liberals are so comfortable moving straight to fascism the moment they don’t get what they want.
Gee I wonder why your fascist centrism didn’t resonate with anyone.
Oh! I see where you misunderstood. No, Trump -the Putin worshipping, endorsed by Duterte, wannabe dictator- is the fascism that will be more unchecked than the first time he was elected. They were referring to the immediate next two years, not any hope of a come back where fascist policies like policing women’s bodies or banning lgbta+ rights will be attempted to be repealed.
They’re talking about the ones who openly worship dictators, not the liberals that currently have no control.
I had to stop reading the replies she received; the stupidity made my head hurt. My hatred for humanity is growing by leaps and bounds daily. I think I’ll be a full blown misanthrope within 2 or 3 days. It has become crystal clear that we need to pull the weeds out of the gene pool. I’m for instituting a national license program to breed. You may obtain a license if you can pass a test which consist of a common sense section and the civics section of the U.S. naturalization test. 🤨😁
Edit: For the morons that can’t tell. This was fucking sarcasm.
Yes surely the answer to government overreach is letting the government decide who can have kids.
You’re a moron.
Oh yeah, well his comment was also sarcastic, dumbass. Maybe get out a dictionary flip the pages until your well past the S section, then start back tracking until somehow you’re all the way back to the Fs, then find your way finally to the S section again and lookup the basic bitch word that is spelled ‘sarcasm’.
This comment and all others in this thread are also sarcasm btw. /ns
Well the good news is that the probability of such a program happening has gone up.
The bad news is that you are disqualified if you have all your teeth or any kind of college degree.
If you voted for trump and AOC you need to make sure you never leave home without your fucking helmet on. Fuck.
I think long COVID has impacted more Americans than we realize. Everyone out there suffering from diminished capacities thinking that the fascist sex-pest goomba is somehow more reliable than the nice black lady. I dunno about you guys, but I’ve just been seeing a whole lot of mistakes lately. On television, in News, in articles, just… everywhere.
And while a lot of it is probably people quiet quitting and not giving a fuck, I think a lot more people are suffering from the extended brain fog of long COVID than we think, and it’s affecting everything around us. Unfortunately, that includes voting practices in elections.
Eh, it’s always been a convenient myth for the republican party that Americans genuinely seem to believe they are better on “macro” even though it’s always been probably the reverse (that democrat politicians have to clean up the mess that lower taxes and deregulation generate). For at least 40 years. In some states the reverse is true, like mass/NJ/ny voting blue pres while having a pretty regular flip flop in the governor’s seat and then solidly blue house/senate.
Similarly Dems always have a worse than average spin on wars, the comment being “republicans want a massive military that does nothing, Dems want a tiny military that goes everywhere” when in reality our foreign policy doesn’t really change (except Biden actually pulled out of Afghanistan).
I think a lot of this is that Republicans used to follow what used to be the recommendations of the most prominent main-stream economists. We can judge that as foolish in hindsight, but, “let the economics experts handle the economy” is a fairly reasonable policy.
2 big things changed. Republicans push more and more policies that economists consider dumb and economists have updated their models and recommendations based on new research. Even those old free market economists were not fans of tariffs and trade wars. It’s pretty hard to find an actual economist (like with a PhD from a respected econ school) who thinks wanton deregulation is a good idea.
At the same time, Democrats still hold on to a few ideas that economists all agree are dumb. There’s tons of evidence that things like rent control and home purchase credits make housing problems worse.
Democrats tend to support better economic policies than Republicans do but they support enough bad ones that it’s easy for Republicans to argue that the old status quo is correct.
Most definitely. Whenever I mentioned that my short term memory got bad after I had covid the first time (before vaccines), many people chimed in and agreed that they have it too.
It got better after about 18 months.
The point I’m trying to make is, that people usually keep it for themselves unless they have someone that takes away the shame.
This is almost certainly a prime factor in everything now. And we’ll never know, because everybody will look at you like you’re a fucking terrorist if you so much as point out that covid never stopped being rampant.
mine isn’t a brain fog but COVID and a trump presidency made me not trust humans at all.
i no longer trust friends, family, neighbors, governments, leaders, police, doctors, businesses. none of them maintained trust during the Trump presidency and the pandemic.
but i still vote straight ticket democrat. because their platform doesn’t include NAZI-ism
The NYTimes wrote it out for me:
The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.
I think a big part of this might be the Democrats not wanting to take the populist pro-worker anti-rich stances due to campaign donations.
Because populism is always dangerous. If Democrats go all in on populism, I will stop voting. I am not going to play this game where we just volley lies back and forth like a tennis ball until someone trips and the other person scores a point.
I will always support sober technocracy. If American politics actually turns into populist tennis then all is lost.
Why did you vote to protect the rail corporation from the union strike AOC?
